第4章

--Here it is."Go to the Bible.A Dissertation, ,etc., etc.By J.

J.Flournoy.Athens, Georgia, 1858."

Mr.Flournoy, Madam, has obeyed the precept which you have judiciously delivered.You may be interested, Madam, to know what are the conclusions at which Mr.J.J.Flournoy of Athens, Georgia, has arrived.You shall hear, Madam.He has gone to the Bible, and he has come back from the Bible, bringing a remedy for existing social evils, which, if it is the real specific, as it professes to be, is of great interest to humanity, and to the female part of humanity in particular.It is what he calls TRIGAMY, Madam, or the marrying of three wives, so that "good old men" may be solaced at once by the companionship of the wisdom of maturity, and of those less perfected but hardly less engaging qualities which are found at an earlier period of life.He has followed your precept, Madam; Ihope you accept his conclusions.

The female boarder in black attire looked so puzzled, and, in fact, "all abroad," after the delivery of this "counter" of mine, that Ileft her to recover her wits, and went on with the conversation, which I was beginning to get pretty well in hand.

But in the mean time I kept my eye on the female boarder to see what effect I had produced.First, she was a little stunned at having her argument knocked over.Secondly, she was a little shocked at the tremendous character of the triple matrimonial suggestion.Thirdly.

--I don't like to say what I thought.Something seemed to have pleased her fancy.Whether it was, that, if trigamy should come into fashion, there would be three times as many chances to enjoy the luxury of saying, "No!" is more than I, can tell you.I may as well mention that B.F.came to me after breakfast to borrow the pamphlet for "a lady,"--one of the boarders, he said,--looking as if he had a secret he wished to be relieved of.

--I continued.--If a human soul is necessarily to be trained up in the faith of those from whom it inherits its body, why, there is the end of all reason.If, sooner or later, every soul is to look for truth with its own eyes, the first thing is to recognize that no presumption in favor of any particular belief arises from the fact of our inheriting it.Otherwise you would not give the Mahometan a fair chance to become a convert to a better religion.

The second thing would be to depolarize every fixed religious idea in the mind by changing the word which stands for it.

--I don't know what you mean by "depolarizing" an idea,--said the divinity-student.

I will tell you,--I said.---When a given symbol which represents a thought has lain for a certain length of time in the mind, it undergoes a change like that which rest in a certain position gives to iron.It becomes magnetic in its relations,--it is traversed by strange forces which did not belong to it.The word, and consequently the idea it represents, is polarized.

The religious currency of mankind, in thought, in speech, and in print, consists entirely of polarized words.Borrow one of these from another language and religion, and you will find it leaves all its magnetism behind it.Take that famous word, O'm, of the Hindoo mythology.Even a priest cannot pronounce it without sin; and a holy Pundit would shut his ears and run away from you in horror, if you should say it aloud.What do you care for O'm? If you wanted to get the Pundit to look at his religion fairly, you must first depolarize this and all similar words for him.The argument for and against new translations of the Bible really turns on this.Skepticism is afraid to trust its truths in depolarized words, and so cries out against a new translation.I think, myself, if every idea our Book contains could be shelled out of its old symbol and put into a new, clean, unmagnetic word, we should have some chance of reading it as philosophers, or wisdom-lovers, ought to read it,--which we do not and cannot now any more than a Hindoo can read the "Gayatri" as a fair man and lover of truth should do.When society has once fairly dissolved the New Testament, which it never has done yet, it will perhaps crystallize it over again in new forms of language.

I did n't know you was a settled minister over this parish,--said the young fellow near me.

A sermon by a lay-preacher may be worth listening--I replied, calmly.

--It gives the parallax of thought and feeling as they appear to the observers from two very different points of view.If you wish to get the distance of a heavenly body, you know that you must take two observations from remote points of the earth's orbit,--in midsummer and midwinter, for instance.To get the parallax of heavenly truths, you must take an observation from the position of the laity as well as of the clergy.Teachers and students of theology get a certain look, certain conventional tones of voice, a clerical gait, a professional neckcloth, and habits of mind as professional as their externals.They are scholarly men and read Bacon, and know well enough what the "idols of the tribe" are.Of course they have their false gods, as all men that follow one exclusive calling are prone to do.--The clergy have played the part of the flywheel in our modern civilization.They have never suffered it to stop.They have often carried on its movement, when other moving powers failed, by the momentum stored in their vast body.Sometimes, too, they have kept it back by their vis inertia, when its wheels were like to grind the bones of some old canonized error into fertilizers for the soil that yields the bread of life.But the mainspring of the world's onward religious movement is not in them, nor in any one body of men, let me tell you.It is the people that makes the clergy, and not the clergy that makes the people.Of course, the profession reacts on its source with variable energy.--But there never was a guild of dealers or a company of craftsmen that did not need sharp looking after.