And that is the last of Jamie, till the early morning brings him trudging up stairs, all curled and shining, to "hear Baddy say 'Boo!'"
Total depravity, in Jamie's presence, is a doctrine hard to be understood. Honestly speaking, he does not appear to have any more depravity than is good for him,—just enough to make him piquant, to give him a relish. He is healthy and hearty all day long. He eats no luncheon and takes no nap, is desperately hungry thrice a day and sleeps all night, going to bed at dark after a solitary stale supper of bread and butter, more especially bread; and he is good and happy. Laying aside the revelations of the Bible and of Doctors of Divinity, I should say that his nature is honest, simple, healthful, pure, and good. He shows no love for wrong, no inclination towards evil rather than good. He is affectionate, just, generous, and truthful. He just lives on his sincere, loving, fun-loving, playful, yet earnest life, from day to day, a pure and perfect example, to my eye, of what God meant children to be. I cannot see how he should be very different from what he is, even if he were in heaven, or if Adam had never sinned. There is so fearful an amount of, and so decided a bent towards, wickedness in the world, that it seems as if nothing less than an inborn aptitude for wickedness can account for it; yet, in spite of all theories and probabilities, here is Jamie, right under my own eye, developing a far stronger tendency to love, kindness, sympathy, and all the innocent and benevolent qualities, than to their opposites. The wrong that he does do seems to be more from fun and frolic, from sheer exuberance of animal spirits and intensity of devotion to mirth, than anything else. He seems to be utterly devoid of malice, cruelty, revenge, or any evil motive. Even selfishness, which I take to be the fruitful mother of evil, is held in abeyance, is subordinate to other and nobler qualities. Candy is dearer to him than he knows how to express; yet he scrupulously lays a piece on the mantel for an absent friend; and though he has it in full view, and climbs up to it, and in the extremity of his longing has been known, I think, to chip off the least little bit with his sharp mouse-teeth, yet he endures to the end and delivers up the candy with an eagerness hardly surpassed by that with which he originally received it. Can self-denial go farther?
It seems to me that the reason of Jamie's gentleness and cheerfulness and goodness is, that he is comfortable and happy. The animal is in fine condition, and the spirit is therefore well served; consequently, both go on together with little friction. And I cannot but suspect that a great deal of human depravity comes from human misery. The destruction of the poor is his poverty. Little sickly, fretful, crying babies, heirs of worn nerves, fierce tempers, sad hearts, sordid tastes, half-tended or over-tended, fed on poison by the hand of love, nay, sucking poison from the breasts of love, trained to insubordination, abused by kindness, abused by cruelty,—that is the human nature from which largely we generalize, and no wonder the inference is total depravity. But human nature, distorted, defiled, degraded by centuries of misdealing, is scarcely human nature. Let us discover it before we define it. Let us remove accretions of long-standing moral and physical disease, before we pronounce sentence against the human nature. If it ever becomes an established and universally recognized principle, as fixed and unquestionable as the right and wrong of theft and murder, that it is a sin against God, a crime against the State, an outrage upon the helpless victim of their ignorance or wickedness, for an unhealthy man or woman to become the parent of a child, I think our creeds would presently undergo modification. Disease seems to me a more fertile source of evil than depravity; at least it is a more tangible source. We must have a race of healthy children, before we know what are the true characteristics of the human race. A child suffering from scrofula gives but a feeble, even a false representation of the grace, beauty, and sweetness of childhood. Pain, sickness, lassitude, deformity, a suffering life, a lingering death, are among the woful fruits of this dire disease, and it is acknowledged to be hereditary. Is not, then, every person afflicted with any hereditary disease debarred as by a fiat of the Almighty from becoming a parent? Every principle of honor forbids it. The popular stolidity and blindness on these subjects are astonishing. A young woman whose sisters have all died of consumption, and who herself exhibits unmistakable consumptive tendencies, is married, lives to bear three children in quick succession, and dies of consumption. Her friends mourn her and the sad separation from her bereaved little ones, but console themselves with the reflection that these little ones have prolonged her life. But for her marriage, she would have died years before. Of the three children born of this remedial marriage, two die in early girlhood of consumption. One left, a puny infant, languishes into a puny maturity. Even as a remedy, what is this worth? To die in her youth, to leave her suffering body in the dust and go quickly to God, with no responsibility beyond herself, or to pine through six years, enduring thrice, besides all her inherited debility, the pain and peril, the weariness and terror of child-bearing, to be at last torn violently and prematurely away from these beloved little ones,—which is the disease, and which the remedy? And when we look farther on at the helpless little innocents, doomed to be the recipients of disease, early deprived of a mother's care, for which there is no substitute, dragging a load of weakness and pain, and forced down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death before years shall have blunted the point of its terrors, or religion robbed them of their sting,—it is only not atrocious because so unwittingly wrought.
And bodily health is only one of the possessions which every child has a right to claim from its parents. Not merely health, but dispositions, traits, lie within human control far beyond the extent of common recognition. We say that character is formed at fourteen or sixteen, and that training should begin in infancy; but sometimes it seems to me, that, when the child is born, the work is done. All the rest is supplementary and subordinate. Subsequent effort has, indeed, much effect, but it cannot change quality. It may modify, but it cannot make anew. After neglect or ignorance may blight fair promise, but no after wisdom can bring bloom for blight. There are many by-laws whose workings we do not understand; but the great, general law is so plain, that wayfaring folk, though fools, need not err therein. Every one sees the unbridled passions of the father or mother raging in the child. Gentleness is born of gentleness, insanity of insanity, truth of truth. Careful and prayerful training may mitigate the innate evil; but how much better that the young life should have sprung to light from seas of love and purity and peace! Through God's mercy, the harsh temper, the miserly craving, the fretful discontent may be repressed and soothed; but it is always up-hill work, and never in this world wholly successful. Why be utterly careless in forming, to make conscious life a toilsome and thankless task of reforming? Since there is a time, and there comes no second, when the human being is under human control,—since the tiny infant, once born, is a separate individual, is for all its remaining existence an independent human being, why not bring power to bear where form is amenable to power? Only let all the influences of that sovereign time be heavenly,—and whatever may be true of total depravity, Christ has made such a thing possible,—and there remains no longer the bitter toil of thwarting, but only the pleasant work of cultivating Nature.
It is idle, and worse than idle, to call in question the Providence of God for disaster caused solely by the improvidence of man. The origin of evil may be hidden in the unfathomable obscurity of a distant, undreamed-of past, beyond the scope of mortal vision; but by far the greater part of the evil that we see—which is the only evil for which we are responsible—is the result of palpable violation of Divine laws. Humanity here is as powerful as Divinity. The age of miracles is past. God does not interfere to contravene His own laws. His part in man's creation He long ago defined, and delegated all the rest to the souls that He had made. Man is as able as God to check the destructive tide. And it is mere shuffling and shirking and beating the wind, for a people to pray God to mitigate the ill which they continually and unhesitatingly perpetuate and multiply.
The great mistake made by the believers in total depravity is in counting the blood of the covenant of little worth. We admit that in Adam all die; but we are slow to believe that in Christ all can be made alive. We abuse the doctrine. We make it a sort of scapegoat for short-coming. But Christ has made Adamic depravity of no account. He came not alone to pardon sin, but to save people from sinning. Father-love, mother-love, and Christ-love are so mighty that together they can defy Satan, and, in his despite, the soul shall be born into the kingdom of heaven without first passing through the kingdom of hell. And in this way only, I think, will the kingdom of this world become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.
"Now, Jamie, having set the world right,—you and I, for which the world will be deeply grateful,—let us see what you are about, for you have been suspiciously still lately. What doing, Jamie?"
"Hay-puh!" says Jamie, very red, eager, and absorbed, with no intermission of labor.
"Making hasty pudding! Oh, yes! I know what that means. Only taking all the chips and shavings out of the wood-box in the closet and carrying them half across the room by the eminently safe conveyance of his two fat hands, and emptying them into my box of paper, and stirring all together with a curling-stick. That's nothing. Keep on, Jamie, and amuse yourself; but let us hear your geography lesson.