Chapter VIII.

The Lord Answered Job Out Of A Whirlwind.

Mr. Southard was perfectly confident in his expectation of being able to convince Miss Hamilton of her mistake. He knew her well enough to be sure that she would fearlessly acknowledge her error as soon as it should be made plain to her; and he did not doubt that the power to produce that conviction on her mind would be given him.

He would not allow that first twinge of wounded personal pride and dignity of office, with which he had seen how light she held his authority in matters of religion, to stand in the way of his endeavors. The first dignity of his office was to perform its duties. Exacting respect was secondary.

Mr. Southard had one confident: his journal. The day the books were left on his table he wrote in it: "Tonight I am to read Milner's _End of Controversy_. O my God! may I read it by the light of thy Gospel! May a ray of heavenly truth fall on each page, expose its hidden falsehood, and teach me how best to prove that falsehood to this stray lamb who has been lured from thy fold into the den of the wolf."

Two or three days passed, the book was read, and read again; but the refutation was not ready. Mr. Southard was too honest and too manly to think that personal abuse was a proper answer to theological argument. He remembered that when St. Michael set his foot upon the neck of Satan, and chained him to the rock, he did not use infernal weapons, or walk in loathsome ways; but his sword was tempered in heaven, and there was no mire upon his sandals.

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"When I fight for the Lord," the minister said, "I will use the weapons of the Lord."

He laid aside the first book, and took another. Again a few days, and yet he was not prepared to undermine his adversary.

"I am astonished at the ingenuity and subtlety of these writers," was the record he made in those days. "All the resources of minds richly dowered by nature, highly cultivated by education, and inspired by some strange infatuation for what they call the church, have been brought to bear upon this question of polemics. How skilfully they mingle truth with falsehood! What beautiful, what touching, what sublime sentiments they drop in places where one would not go save so lured! It reminds me of my boyish days, when the scarlet blossom of a cardinal-flower would entice me down steep banks, and into dangerous waters, or some bloomy patch of ripe berries would draw my feet into a treacherous swamp. I begin to perceive the attraction which the Roman Church exercises on the unwary."

It will be perceived that Mr. Southard had the rare courtesy not to use the word "Romish." He was so much a gentleman that he could not call nicknames, not even in theological controversy.

But as his days of study lengthened into weeks, a change came over him. The obstacles in his way made him nervous, feverish, and, it must be owned, rather ill-tempered. His political opposition to Mr. Lewis was expressed with unusual asperity. He was very haughty with Miss Hamilton. He entirely absented himself from luncheon, and he sometimes dined out, rather than sit beside that smiling papist who was doubtless triumphing over him in her heart, taking his silence for defeat. He groaned as he heard her light step pass his door every morning on her way to early mass. That step was his _réveil_. Should he, the Gospel watchman, sleep while the foe was awake and at work?

"Why cannot truth inspire as much ardor as error awakens?" he wrote one morning. "Why cannot we bring back the old days of faith, when God was to man a power, and not a name; when the tables of the law were stone to the touch; when he who made flood, and fire, and death was more terrible than flood, fire, or death? The author of _Ecce Homo_ is right; no virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic. A cold religion is a worthless religion. O Lord! have mercy on Zion; for it is time to have mercy on it."

But, angry as he was with her every morning, when Mr. Southard met Margaret coming in again from mass, her face smiling, her cheeks red from the cold, he could but forgive her. It is hard to frown on a bright face, happiness looks so much like goodness.

Mr. Granger took notice of these early walks, Mr. Lewis alternately scowled upon and laughed at them. Mrs. Lewis and Aurelia exclaimed, How dared she go out alone before light!

The wicked people, if there were any, were all asleep, Miss Hamilton said, sitting down to breakfast with a most unromantic appetite, and a general preponderance of rose-color and sparkle in her countenance. At six o'clock on winter mornings no one was abroad but papists and policemen. It was the safest hour of the twenty-four.

"My good angel and I just go about our business, and nobody molests us," she said with a spice of mischief; for the mention of anything peculiarly Catholic usually had the effect of producing a blank silence, and a general elongation of visage.

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"But such a magnificent spectacle as I saw this morning! I came home round the Common. The sleet-storm of last evening had left all the trees crusted with ice to the very tips of their twigs, and set an ice-mitre on every individual arrow-head of the iron fence. There were the ghosts of all the bishops from Peter down. There wasn't any sky, but only a vast crystalline distance. I took my stand on the Beacon and Charles street corner. Every other person who was so happy as to be out looked also. Then the sun came up. Park street steeple caught fire at the ball, and flamed all the way down. There was a glimmer on the topmost twigs, then the trees all over the Common were in an instant transfigured into flashing diamonds. The malls were enough to put your eyes out--nothing but glitter from end to end. It was a grand display for the frost-people. The trees will talk about it all next summer."

The winter slipped away; and Mr. Southard had not fulfilled his promise to Miss Hamilton. Neither had he relinquished his studies. Shut up with his books hour after hour and day after day, in silence and solitude, he scarcely knew how the world fared without. For him the war had suddenly dwindled. Through long and weary vigils that wore his face thin and his eyes hollow, he studied, and thought, and prayed, not the humble petition of one who places himself before God, and passively awaits an inspiration, but the impassioned and fiery petition of one who will not doubt the justice of his cause, and will not be denied. Then, leaning from the window to cool his heated eyes and head in the fresh early dawning, a peace that was half exhaustion would settle upon him. Sleep came pitifully in those hours, and pressed on the throbbing brain too much expanded by thought, and for a little while soothed the tormented heart.

His journal bore traces of the conflict.

"I will resist the seduction! This is my time of trial; but I will conquer! In the name of God, I will yet confound the doctors of the Roman Church. O God! who didst nerve the arm of David against Goliath, strengthen thou me!"

At every step he was baffled. Catching at what appeared a mere theological weed, thinking to fling it out of his way, he found it rooted like an oak. Approaching dogmas with the expectation of cutting them down like men of straw, he was confronted by mailed giants.

He found himself among crowds and clouds of Catholic saints--shadows, he called them--that would fly from his path when he should hold up the torch of truth. But, looking in that light, he saw steadfast eyes, and shining foreheads, and palm-branches that brushed his shrinking, empty hands. And out from among them, with a look of gentle humility that smote him like a blow, and with a tremulous radiance gathering about her pure forehead, came one whom he had frowned upon, and striven to discrown. What was she saying? "All nations shall call me blessed!" Not great, not glorious, not even lovely, but _blessed_!

"Well--she--was blessed," admitted the minister.

The next moment he started out of his chair, muttered some kind of exorcism, caught his hat, and went out for a walk. Though it was mid-April, a north wind was blowing thank heaven for that! Nothing murky about the north wind. {445} It would soon blow away all these pestilential vapors that came up from the sun-steeped lowlands of his soul; pagan places where, though his iconoclastic will had again and again gone about breaking images, no sooner did it rest than there they were again, Bacchus, and Hebe, and Diana, and the rest. Or from yet more dangerous because more deceptive regions, wide, bright solitudes of the soul, arid and dazzling, where the unobstructed sky seemed to lean upon the earth--the region of mirages, of New Jerusalems, that shone and crumbled--of sacred-seeming streams that fled from thirsty lips--of cool shadows that never were reached.

In one of these impetuous walks, Mr. Southard came across an old minister, and went into his study with him, and told him something of his difficulties. He was too well aware of his own excitement to venture on a full explanation. Moreover, there was something soothing and silencing in the look of this man, in his tranquil, rather sad expression, his noble face, and snowy hair.

The old doctor leaned back in his chair, and calmly listened while his younger brother spoke, smiling indulgently now and then at some vivid turn of expression, some flash of the eyes, some impatient gesture.

Elderly ministers were always pleased with Mr. Southard, who would ask advice and instruction of them with a docility that was almost childlike. Such respect was very pleasant to those who seemed to have fallen upon evil days, who saw the prestige of the ministry departing, to whom boys had ceased to take off their caps, to whom even women did not look up as of yore.

"My dear brother," said the doctor gently when the other had ceased speaking, "you have made a mistake in attempting this work. I tell you frankly, we can never argue down the Catholic Church. All the old theologians know that, and avoid the contest. For perfect consistency with itself, and for wonderful complexity yet harmony of structure, the world has not seen, and will not again see its equal. It is the masterwork of the arch-enemy."

"So much the more reason why we should attack it with all our might!" exclaimed the other.

"No," replied the doctor, "That does not follow. There are dangers which must be shunned, not met; and this is one. As with wine, so with Romanism, 'touch not, taste not, handle not!'"

"That might be said to the laity," Mr. Southard persisted. "But for us who teach theology, we ought to search, we ought to examine. It is essential that we know the weapons of our adversary in order to destroy them."

"Truth has many phases, and so has belief," was the quiet reply. "We begin by believing that the doctrines we hold are the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and that everything else is unmitigated falsehood. But after a while, according to the degree of candor of which we are capable, we begin to admit that every religion on earth has something reasonable to say for itself. There is a grain of good in Mohammedanism, in Brahminism, in Buddhism. We are now credibly assured that the old story of people throwing themselves under the wheels of Juggernaut is a myth. Hindu converts say that there were sometimes accidents at these religious celebrations, on account of the crowd, as we have accidents on the fourth of July; but that Juggernaut was a beneficent deity who took no pleasure in human pain, and whose attributes were a dim reflection of Christianity. {446} I used to tell that story in perfect good faith whenever a collection was wanted for the missionaries. I don't tell it now. At last we learn to choose what seems to us best, to present its advantages to others, but not to insist that all shall agree with us under pain of eternal loss. When I hear a man crying out violently against the purely religious opinions of others, I always set him down as a man of narrow heart and narrower head. The principal reason for my well-known hostility to Catholicism is a political one.

"The fact is, brother, God's light falling on the mind of man, is like sunlight falling on a prism. It is no longer the pure white, but is shattered into colors which each one catches according to his humor. We ministers are not like Moses coming from the mountain with the whole law in his two hands, and a dazzling face to testify for him that he had been with God, he alone. I wish we were, brother! I wish we were!"

"But faith," exclaimed the other, "is there no faith?"

"We believe in the essentials; and they are few."

"How shall we prove them?"

"As the Catholic Church proves them. She holds the whole truth tangled in the midst of her errors, like a fly in a spider's web."

Mr. Southard sat a moment, looking steadily, almost sternly, at his companion.

"Then you and I have no mission," he said. "We are not divinely called."

"Whithersoever a man goes, there is he called," said the doctor, sighing faintly. "We among the rest. We have a mission, too, and a noble one. We make people keep the Sabbath, which, without us, would fall into disuse; we remind them of their duties; we check immorality; we keep before the eyes of worldlings the fact that there is another world than this. In short, we spend our breath in keeping alive the sacred fire on the desecrated altar of the human soul. Is that nothing?"

In speaking, the doctor lifted his head, and drew up his stately form. His voice trembled with feeling, and his eyes were full of indignant tears. His look was proud, almost defiant; yet seemed directed less against his companion, than combating some voice in his own soul. All the enthusiastic dreams of his youth, though they had long since been subdued, as he thought, by common sense and necessity, stirred in their graves at sound of the imperious questioning, at sight of the clear, searching eyes of this young visionary who fancied that in the troubled spirit of man the full orb of truth was to be reflected unblurred.

"In short," Mr. Southard said, rising to go, "you believe that the spirit of evil can propose a problem which the Holy Spirit cannot solve."

"Not so!" was the reply; "but the spirit of evil may propose a problem which the Holy Spirit may not choose to solve for us till the end of time."