But while we cannot suspend our judgment on the question until we know how the critics and scholars have settled it, we must do justice, before passing on, to the single-mindedness, the reverence, the resolute desire for the truth before all things, wherever the search for it may land them which characterizes many of those who are no longer of our faith, and are engaged in this inquiry, or have set it aside as hopeless, and are working at other tasks. The great advance of natural science within the last few years, and the devotion with which many of our ablest and best men are throwing themselves into this study, are clearing the air in all the higher branches of human thought and making possible a nation, and in the end a world, of truthful men—that blessedest result of all the strange conflicts and problems of the age, which the wisest men have foreseen in their most hopeful moods. In this grand movement even those who are nominally, and believe themselves to be really, against us, are for us: all at least who are truthful and patient workers. For them, too, the spirit of all truth, and patience, and wisdom is leading; and their strivings and victories—aye, and their backslidings and reverses—are making clearer day by day that revelation of the kingdom of God in nature, through which it would seem that our generation, and those which are to follow us, will be led back again to that higher revelation of the kingdom of God in man.
The ideal American, as he has been painted for us of late, is a man who has shaken off the yoke of definite creeds, while retaining their moral essence, and finds the highest sanctions needed for the conduct of human life in experience tempered by common sense. Franklin, for instance, is generally supposed to have reached this ideal by anticipation, and there is a half-truth in the supposition. But whoever will study this great master of practical life will acknowledge that it is only superficially true, and that if he never lifts us above the earth or beyond the dominion of experience and common sense, he retained himself a strong hold on the invisible which underlies it, and would have been the first to acknowledge that it was this which enabled him to control the accidents of birth, education, and position, and to earn the eternal gratitude and reverence of the great nation over whose birth he watched so wisely, and whose character he did so much to form.
CXII.
“From one thing to another,” said Tom, “they got to cathedrals, and one of them called St. Paul’s ‘a disgrace to a Christian city.’ I couldn’t stand that, you know. I was always bred to respect St. Paul’s; weren’t you?”
“My education in that line was neglected,” said Hardy, gravely. “And so you took up the cudgels for St. Paul’s?”
“Yes, I plumped out that St. Paul’s was the finest cathedral in England. You’d have thought I had said that lying was one of the cardinal virtues—one or two just treated me to a sort of pitying sneer, but my neighbors were down upon me with a vengeance. I stuck to my text though, and they drove me into saying I liked the Ratcliffe more than any building in Oxford; which I don’t believe I do, now I come to think of it. So when they couldn’t get me to budge for their talk, they took to telling me that everybody who knew anything about church architecture was against me—of course meaning that I knew nothing about it—for the matter of that, I don’t mean to say that I do.” Tom paused; it had suddenly occurred to him that there might be some reason in the rough handling he had got.
“But what did you say to the authorities?” said Hardy, who was greatly amused.