The Contributors' Club

I AM little of a bibliomaniac, yet there is—or perhaps I should say was — a singular edition of the Scriptures, which I would give much to see : any curious collector would count himself fortunate could he add it to his treasures, since in comparison a Bishop’s Bible or a Breeches Bible would be no rarity. But alas! I fear that tins prize must be foregone,—numbered in the Catalogue of Things Lost, never to rejoice the book - hunting virtuoso; though it is barely possible that it may yet be exhumed from the dust of some old attic, where it has been keeping the company of the missing title-deed or other truant document of more than common interest. But I hasten to relate all that has been preserved to the present generation of the history of this obscure yet fame-worthy edition, which, it must be premised, consisted of but one copy. This copy, originally an ordinary King James version, through a mighty labor of revision bestowed upon it bad come to be called, from the name of the reviser, “Old Dickerman’s Bible.” The oral chronicle by me consulted witnesses that Old Dickckerman followed the calling of a Iantier ; whether successful or unsuccessful in that occupation, the tradition does not state. Probably his record upon that point, could it be produced, would not bear the closest scrutiny ; his was undoubtedly a case of the candle hid under a bushel, —of talents that gained no usance. Had circumstances permitted him to make the most of his natural gifts, it is more than likely that he would have specially distinguished himself in the domain of theological research and criticism. As it was, unaided by the advantages which scholarship would have afforded, remote from philological esprit de corps, he perhaps anticipated the utmost to be accomplished in the field of biblical inquiry and expurgation. Tradition represents that his reputation for piety, among those who best knew him, was very great, his conversance with the Scriptures most remarkable. I wish it might be known at what stage of his investigations he began to exercise that cool judicial faculty which rendered him the most dispassionate of scriptural critics. Exact history permits me to say that it at length became a fixed habit with him to have pen and ink at hand, when he read, and that as often as he found anything in holy writ which he judged to be apocryphal he would run his pen through the offending passage, at the same time thus tersely expressing himself: “ Don’t believe that; won’t have that in my Bible!” It seems a pity that there should remain no Index Expurgatory to show what portions of Scripture suffered under his unsparing stylus. Suppose that he left marginal notes explaining his objections to the passages expunged, — by how much is the loss of the curious book-hunter aggravated ! I suspect that every added year, every new reading, only increased the sum of the erasures in Old Dickerman’s Bible. With my mind’s eye, let me glance through its pages : here a text black with the ink of recent condemnation; there a verse long ago slashed out, the ink grown very pale, as though conscious that it had served the purpose of the sacrilegious. I look carefully to see if there be any token, any form of stet in the margin, to indicate that the reviser sometimes revised his judgments, and received back into favor a passage once condemned; but I am bound to confess that I do not find any such revisions. I cannot ascertain that his rejection of parts interfered in the least with his accepting the Scriptures as a whole. It is a mysterious paradox, but I believe that general faith persisted in his soul, though specific doubt may have left its mark upon every page of the book. Best of all, there is reason for thinking that no reference to good works was ever molested by this expurgator; surely, it would have transpired in his conduct, if any such texts as the Golden Rule or the Beatitudes had been canceled in Old Dickerman’s Bible.

— Since I became convinced, a long time ago, that the equator would not prove a physical barrier to the traveler who might wish to pass from one hemisphere to the other, and that the north pole was not a visible and tangible projection of the earth’s axis, convertible into a flagstaff, should triumphant discovery ever arrive there, — since I discarded these and such like geographical illusions, I have been chary of putting my trust in any sort of “ imaginary lines.” I have heard much said with regard to turning-points: travelers of undoubted .veracity have shown me their charts, and I have been surprised to see how many right-angled turns they must have made in the course of their pilgrimage. Also, when they relate the casualties and rescues which have happened upon their route, I am forced to acknowledge that mine has been singularly safe,—safe even to monotony; its direction changing by such gentle curves that the alteration was apparent only at long intervals, and then merely by some difference in the slant of the shadows across my path, or by the obvious shifting in position of some star chosen as directive of the journey.

W hat is the turning-point ? In common acceptation, it is the event or the influence which, with no warning given, suddenly draws or drives our life in a new direction, and but for which we should still pursue the old road. Do not we lose sight of the possibility that the change would have taken place without the aid of external force ? The turning-points, I would say, are in our temperament and moral habitudes. If we search narrowly the conversation, incidents, and our own thoughts of the day past, we can usually find the data of our night dreams ; in the same way, looking back of what we count in our experience as a critical juncture, a great determining occurrence, we often see that desire, conviction, and purpose were steadily ripening towards the conclusion seemingly reached by us suddenly. Our readiness is all ; a dozen supreme occasions pass without affecting our equanimity ; the thirteenth comes and bears us along with it, not because it is greater than the occasions that went before, but because it is the one that our sly genius has for a long time been signaling and inviting.

Yet the belief in turning-points must brace and cheer many a faint heart. This new year, — may it not be the annus mirabilis which shall change immeasurably for the better ourselves and our fortunes ? We somehow trust, notwithstanding we may have been inert, irresolute, and feeble in the past, that we shall reverse all this when our destiny culmiuates under the new influence. Much more to the point it would be if, instead of relying upon the miracles of a Wonderful Year, we vested our faith in Wonderful Every Day : if we expect to meet angels upon our future road, it will be much to our credit, meanwhile, to take in hand our own regeneration, not leaving all to be done by angelic agency.

The good preacher who told me that his conversion was accomplished “ in just fifteen seconds ” impressed me as being a violent believer in the doctrine of turning-points. I cannot yet understand the system of spiritual chronometry that could determine to such nicety the time occupied by an experience of this character. I wonder not less at the faith of Musaphilus, who has been assured that only excess of culture — predominance of intellect over heart — interferes with the fruition of his bardic hopes. Should Musaphilus fall in love (so says his counselor), the chances are that he will be able to prove his right to the title of poet! I wait to see if the blind miracle-worker will be able to meet triumphantly this trial test of Love’s all-powerfulness.

None should say that there may not be for the soul, as it is claimed there are for the body, climacteric dates: but for the soul these are not to be computed by any arithmetic jugglery, any multiplying of seven into the odd numbers ; here the carefulest calculations are liable to contain error. The great changes are most secret, being slow and gentle in their operations. I pass from the groves of deciduous trees to the evergreen wood : I look again and again up through the branches, yet I cannot tell you

— Every autumn I observe, with speculative interest, the great amount of spurious mast which the oak-tree discharges along with its natural fruitage. Itseems not unlikely that, if acountcould he made, the numbers of this spurious mast would be found to exceed those of the acorns. Inside of one of these mock nuts, round in shape and of the size of a pea, a kernel not vegetable is found : this is the sleeping-chamber of a lazy white grub, — suggestive type of the earthling, buried in fat content in its own little terrestrial ball. A strange servitude is this of the oak to the cynips, or gall-fly, in thus contributing of his substance to the housing and nourishment of his enemy’s offspring; The mischievous sylph selects sometimes the vein of a leaf, sometimes a stem, which she stings, depositing a minute egg in the wounded tissues. As soon, at least, as the egg hatches, the gall begins to form about the larva, simulating a fruity thriftiness, remaining green through the summer, but assuming at length the russet of autumn. The innocent acorn Nature puts to bed as early as possible, that it may make a healthy, wealthy, and wise beginning on a spring morning ; but the cradle that holds the gall-fly’s child she carelessly rocks above ground all winter. I should suppose that more than one hunger-bitten forager, fourfooted or feathered, would resort to a larder so convenient and so well stocked with plump tidbits.

When I visit my old favorite oak in spring, I notice that the nut-galls are emulating the acorns In emancipating their imprisoned germs of life. Most of the former are already empty, their brown-papery tissues riddled like firecrackers whose use is past. In some few the grub is still enjoying a sluggard’s slumber ; others show a later stage of metamorphosis, — the: small bronze and blue-green fly, with its wings folded about it, like a queen in the tomb of the Pharaohs. Sometimes, when I open the gall, the inmate is already mobile, and flies away as soon as light and air reach it. For the moment, the incident has a symbolical significance : I fancy myself an enchanter, — the reviver of a smouldering spark of vital fire. Perhaps it was Psyche herself whom I wafted to the enjoyment of ethereal pleasures.

— There are in this world both sinners and saints; there are also men and women who are crosses between the admirable and the detestable types of character ; and others, again, of a certain average moral make, — natures that tend to move in straight middle lines, without decided bias toward the right or the left.

It may be that exception will be taken to the firstpart of the above statement on the ground of a doubt as to the existence of saints on the earth, at least in modern days. I myself am firmly convinced that they are to be found here and there, though I must say that the term “ saint” is only one of convenience, and that those whom I have in mind have little in common with that oldfashioned character whose mystical piety (and unpleasant personal habits) are celebrated in ecclesiastical legend and tradition. Saints may be hard to find, but no one will be illogical enough to maintain that they do not really exist because he individually has not chanced to meet with one. The nineteenth-century saint has not the least desire to occupy the top of a pillar beside Simeon Stylites, nor is he ambitious of glorifying himself by voluntary martyrdom or other notable act of religious self devotion. The persons I mean may be recognized by a singular unconsciousness of self, a simplicity of nature, that are a marvel and delight to the observer who has marked the rarity of these qualities in human character. Their goodness is the most interesting thing about them. They may be without distinguishing gifts of person or intellect; they do or say nothing remarkable, —are often, indeed, very little given to talk of any sort; but they are beyond all things lovable. Something of happy serenity in their countenance, of mild and equable cheerfulness in their tones and manner of speech, gives us a feeling that they have always lived at the centre of things, so to speak, and that their days have revolved in heaven-appointed orbits along lines of righteousness and peace. They have been " born good,” as the saying goes, account for it how we may by happy fortuity of natural descent and fostering circumstance.

Granted, then, the existence of saints ; that of sinners no one is disposed to deny. Are not some of the most interesting people we know a curious combination of opposing moral traits? The result of the mingling of good and evil in men is perhaps most commonly the production of a moderate sort of virtue, of characters that neither rise very high nor sink very low in the scale of being, — people whom we are sometimes tempted to dismiss, as Mr. Lowell does in his poem of Miles Standish, as those whom “nature forms merely to fill the street with.” The poet was somewhat excited, however, when he made use of that contemptuous phrase. But in the moral cross-breed the opposing instincts do not neutralize each other. The combination does not issue in a new chemical compound, though it may be that after long years one side of the double nature rises over and subjects the other. These persons are sometimes a puzzle to themselves. They are likely to start out with a fine appreciation of the more heroically generous elements they are conscious of in themselves ; the knowledge of the ignoble elements comes later, as a disagreeable surprise, and their presence as factors of the moral constitution are not admitted till after prolonged skepticism with regard to them. In the end the hero-sinner may come to an honest understanding of himself, much more thorough than any outside observer is likely to arrive at. For it goes without saying that this complex nature will reveal himself under different aspects to different friends, through a more or less conscious adaptation of himself to the moods of thought and feeling encountered in others. The contradictoriness of nature in such a man or woman may be shown in small things or in great, He will be, perhaps, indolent and at the same time capable of enthusiastic effort; careless, yet an admirer of order and harmony ; tender and warm of heart, yet quickly resentful and intolerant. The conflict of internal forces sometimes arises between inborn qualities which are not only radically opposed, but of equal strength ; and sometimes it comes from the fact that the will power is disproportiotied to the powers of imagination, and from emotion being more acute and strong than steadily persistent. What ideals of pure and generous action a person of this make is able to conceive, and how genuine are the desire and the endeavor to attain them ! That the noble passion truly dwells with him is proved by the fact that at times he does indeed rise above the ordinary level of virtuous human action to the height of his own moral imagination. And yet how seldom is achieved this actualization of the ideal! He would be noble, not seem so merely ; he loves truth and does not ask for undeserved praise, and still he finds it hard to be estimated only by his outward acts, when conscious that they represent him but inadequately. What other means has the world of judging him ? Such a man may even feel — and feel justly — that he could more readily and safely undertake to die, once for all, for his friend or for his race than he could engage never to fail toward his fellows in patience and tenderness through the twenty or thirty years of his life to come. The latter is what he will be called to do, he is well aware ; yet foreseeing his own failure, has he not the right to derive some consolation from the fact that he has the will, if not the opportunity, for the single self-sacrificing deed ? Others may well doubt his capacity for it who have never known such strenuous impulse in themselves, but who, on the other hand, are found equal to the smaller demands of life which he so frequently fails to meet. Nevertheless, he may know himself better than he is known of them.