The High Calling Part 15

"You say again that you don't see what is the use of being good, and you ask if it pays to be religious, citing the example of the fast set in Burrton, who, you say, seem to be pretty happy, and free from anxiety about others, etc. Walter, do you know that is the most terrible thing that can be said about a human creature? That he is satisfied like an animal with an animal's appet.i.te and pa.s.sions, and careless of any one else or of the world's moral needs? The flies that buzz over a battle field have the same indifference for the agony and struggle going on under them. And would you even now while under the depression you describe, really care to risk your life by becoming like the men in the fast set? Don't you know that they are sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind?

"The main facts of life always remain the same. We may learn more about the facts, but we can't change the real nature and needs of mankind by any belief or absence of belief. Even if there were no G.o.d and no future and no miracles and no Jesus of history, sin would be sin and its harvest the same; goodness and right and virtue would always be the same and their harvest the same. But men can not live without G.o.d without living in hopeless despair. Walter, what did Christ come into the world for, if not to do for us the very things we really needed and were dying to get? He revealed G.o.d to us. Made the future plain. Showed man his duty to his neighbour. Brought light and life and joy into the world.

The Christmas season we have enjoyed together ought to show you (and it will when this cloud has gone from your heart) that the world owes more to Jesus Christ than to any other being. The best conditions in the world are found where Christ has been most honoured and his teachings best obeyed. The wrongs of the world are being righted in his name. And the kingdom of G.o.d is taking the place of the kingdoms of physical might.

"All this, your father and mother believe, could not be true if Jesus were a mere man. It is the presence of the divine and superhuman, not supernatural, but superhuman, which has made all this redemption of the world possible.

"Walter, trust in G.o.d. Believe in Christ. Pray. Seek the light. Keep doing right. Get to work for others. All the inventions in creation are not worth anything if your own soul has no motive power and no track to run on. Religion is as natural as eating and drinking. Prayer is as natural as sleep or work. And I believe with all my might that my feelings are as trustworthy as my reason when both are exercised in a healthy, happy way.

"I haven't any fear for you. It is too bad you can not get help from some of the teachers in the school. There must be something wrong with the management of an educational inst.i.tution when the teachers know everything except the moral needs of the students.

"Can't your friend, Bauer, help you? You say you have never talked with him. Try it. From one or two talks I had with him while he was with us I gained the impression that he was deeply religious. Affectionately, your father,

"PAUL DOUGLAS."

Both of these letters reached Walter about the same time and he read and reread them and received vast help from them, more than he himself knew at the time. But he could not throw off the feeling of depression and fear that seemed to haunt his spirit. He longed to talk the thing over with someone and the day after his father's letter came, he resolved to take Bauer into his confidence. He had never talked with him on any serious questions except when Bauer had confided in him about his home troubles, and the occasions were rare and only occurred at times when Bauer was so tortured with lonesomeness that he could not endure it any longer and fled to Walter as he did that night in the shop, when he first appealed to him for his friendship.

They had gone up to Walter's room together; and had just finished a discussion over Bauer's incubator and the arrangement for the thermostat when Walter said suddenly:

"Felix, I can't talk this stuff any longer. I want to take up something else, if you don't mind. Of course, you've noticed I've not been up to the mark lately, haven't you?"

"Yes." Bauer blushed as he said it. He had noted Walter's condition, but if truth be told his own state of hopeless feeling towards Helen had absorbed him to such an extent that he had not paid the attention to Walter's feelings that he otherwise might. No one quite so egotistic as your hopeless lover. The world of Bauer revolved around the star of Helen, and the rest of the universe, including Walter, was for the time being not counted as there. With Walter's trouble now made more apparent to him, Bauer's mind at once waked up and stood ready alert to listen to him.

"I might as well confess that Dr. Powers's address two weeks ago knocked the props out from under me. What he said cut under me like a great engine that destroyed my faith."

"You mean your faith in G.o.d?" asked Bauer in a tone almost of horror.

"Well, no, not that exactly. I don't think anyone could reason me out of a belief in a G.o.d. But when Dr. Powers got through I felt as if all the G.o.d he believed in was a kind of electrical force, a little bigger unit of amperes. A sort of international ampere, so to speak, but not much more."

"Do you mean that you can't say 'Our Father' any more?"

Walter was silent half a minute. When he looked up at Bauer his face was haggard.

"I haven't prayed any since that address. What is the use of prayer if G.o.d is a machine?"

"But if G.o.d is a machine, who made the machine?"

Walter stared. Bauer went on.

"And if G.o.d is only high power electricity or force, who made the high power or force? One machine can't make another. And a machine that really thinks and plans, is not a machine but a Being."

Walter did not answer. He was brooding. Finally he said: "Do you really believe in miracles and the superhuman and the resurrection and future and--and a Personal Redeemer and all that?"

"Do I?" Bauer did a thing Walter had never seen him do before. He got up and began to walk the floor.

"If I didn't believe in a personal G.o.d who loves me and in a Personal Redeemer who saves me and in a future life which is going to develop me, I might as well be just an animal and be done with it. What advantage have we over the animals if there is nothing to it but flesh and blood and eating and drinking and dying?

"But I simply take my stand on what Jesus did and said and was. I don't go back on that to try to philosophise much, though I can give answers all day long for my religious faith. I wouldn't give anything for it if I couldn't reason it out. I've been through all the books--Kant and Hegle and Straus and Feuerbach and Schopenhauer and Schleiermacher and no end. My father was steeped in all the old world philosophies. I don't think they ever helped him any. At least not to make a better man of him. Why, Walter, do you know your father and mother are the products of Christian faith, and there isn't anything finer in all the world. Where would you go to find a human being who was nearer the perfection of all n.o.ble, unselfish, beautiful traits of character than your mother, who is the product of a simple Christian faith?

"My father and mother have always sneered at simple faith. They are sceptics. What has their scepticism ever done for them? To-day they are both------" Bauer choked, and after a long pause, during which Walter looked at him sympathetically, he said quietly:

"I had to have something different from their G.o.dless scheme of life or I believe I would have gone mad. And, thank the Father, I found it. If I hadn't I'd been worse than the fastest of the fast set here. I wouldn't have stopped short of the vilest. I would have been a crowned head of beastliness. And nothing saved me from it but Jesus Christ. Could a man have done that? Could anyone have done it who didn't believe in a future and a spiritual life?"

Bauer came back to his chair and sat down. Walter seemed much impressed by what he "said and the way he said it. At last he remarked thoughtfully:

"You never told me anything of this before. I never understood you felt so, or had such a faith."

"No, I've kept my light under a bushel. But man's religion is the most sacred thing about him. Why don't we talk more about it? I don't know unless with me it's been an excess of sensitiveness."

"I understand and thank you, Felix," said Walter after another long silence.

During the days that followed he had many more talks with Bauer, all of which did him vast good. Bauer, once he had opened the door of his soul, threw away all reserve and invited Walter into the very holy of holies.

They also had plenty of argument. But Walter was no match for the German student, who in his long hours of solitary existence, had managed to do an astonishing quant.i.ty of reading and posted himself on all sorts of difficult subjects with the German habit of exactness and thoroughness in matters of detail, so that he soon had Walter hopelessly beaten when it came to debate over religion and its office.

Finally Walter began slowly to regain his buoyancy and before the spring vacation he had found a standing place for his faith and a reason for his religion, so much so that he said to Bauer one Sunday evening after they had come up to the room after hearing Mr. Harris at the church: "Felix, I almost believe I could be a preacher. I believe I almost have a message."

Bauer was immensely pleased.

"You are going to come out all right. You couldn't help it with such a mother."

And yet, strange as it may seem, at that very moment Walter's mother was pa.s.sing through a crisis that was testing her Christian faith even more severely than Walter's had been tested. There could be no doubt at all but that Esther's pure and steadfast soul would win the victory; but oh, the heartache of sorrowing motherhood! Will it ever cease?

Louis Douglas had been for several months a source of anxiety to both Paul and Esther. As winter wore on he complained more and more of school. One evening he broke out in such a torrent of appeal to his father to let him give up his studies that Paul compelled himself to think of the boy as his first duty and reproaching himself that he had paid little heed to him on account of political matters, he listened to Louis that evening and in a pause of his flood of words asked the boy to come into the library and have it out seriously.

The legislature was in session and Douglas was overwhelmed with committee work, with shaping up bills, and winning converts to his ideas of reform. He had antic.i.p.ated opposition and difficulties of various sorts, but the actual thing that confronted him was so much greater than he had supposed possible that he almost let go at one time, in disgust, and vowed he would never enter politics again. Next day he was back in the game to stay. But from the beginning to the end of the legislative session he was blocked in nearly every effort he made for clean, honest reform of old, corrupt and selfish party devices. In his soul he knew, and those who knew him knew, that he was heart and soul for the good of the people. The measures he wanted put into law had no possible self-seeking in them. He was clean and upright in every detail of his private and public life, yet he faced every day facts like these:

The other paper in Milton contained columns of abuse, of misrepresentation and of downright charges of self-seeking against him.

Man after man in the party that had asked him to run for Senator came to him to beg him to desist from his fight on corporations that broke the laws and charged the people prohibitive prices for the necessities of life. Party worshippers like the Hon. Mr. Maxwell besieged the committee room pleading for harmony, meaning by "harmony," a slavish compromise with the greed and influence of money and power that might help the party if they were let alone. Letters flooded him from all parts of the state begging him or threatening him to leave well alone. Some of the very men who had during the election campaign promised to stay with him and help push his bills, lied outright, broke their promises and called him a deserter and a party traitor. Old friends who had stood by him for years, left him and in some cases became his bitterest enemies. Bill after bill framed with only one great-hearted purpose to benefit all the people went through the grinding process of detraction, of vilification, of amendment and final defeat. A little handful of members rallied around him. But the greed forces of the entire state were on the other side. The selfish corporations, the highwaymen of commerce, the whiskey powers fighting for their lives to maintain the license system of the state, the gang of thugs that lived on the gambling house and the barter in human blood in the sale of virtue and the degradation of boys and girls, all fought him. The newspapers that print liquor and other questionable advertis.e.m.e.nts, the microscopic men who made a living by appointment to little political dirty jobs, the horde of hungry office seekers who didn't know "America" from the latest vaudeville rag-time, the plunderers of the treasury who live without any visible means of support except what they boldly stole from contracts on public works, the princely robbers who are the crowned heads of special privilege, whose wives and daughters figure in the society columns as leaders in those useful callings of bridge whist and select receptions, the great and ignorant mob of pygmies who never had the capacity for a political idea bigger than their own diminutive measurement, the newspaper and magazine hacks who live on abuse of everybody who has a high ideal, all joined in the whoop and chase after Douglas of the fourth district, branded him as a fakir, an idiot, a senseless dreamer, an egotist, a demagogue, a party traitor, a knocker, and every other objectionable kind of disturber of the peace, meaning by "peace," the peace of those who are let alone by reformers to rob the state, degrade politics, enthrone injustice, keep the party in power and reelect themselves.

And this is the kind of thing the preacher urges his high-spirited young men to confront if they go into public careers. Do you think American politics could be made more attractive to the strong men of this nation if some of the abuse and personal sewer methods were eliminated? Do you think all this gutter spattering is necessary to reach conclusions and arrive at a final better condition for the nation's life? Do you think that even if discussion and defence of opinion are necessary in the settlement of great public affairs, it is also in order to question a man's purity of purpose, his patriotism and his personal devotion to a great ideal?

Paul's whole nature was stirred by what he was going through and his absorption in the matters nearest his heart was so complete that it was with no ordinary shock he came to realise that his own son was in a critical condition. As a father he reproached himself for neglecting the boy under the plea of trying to reform the state. And when he began to question Louis that night he rapidly noted the lad's physical condition and took account of his manner which, the more he studied it, was not at all rea.s.suring.

"Tell me, now, Louis, what you want. Begin at the beginning and hide nothing."

Louis looked sullenly at his father.

"You haven't time to listen to me. You never have."

"Yes, I have. I'll take it." Paul felt more self-reproach every minute he eyed Louis. And as he looked at him he could not help thinking of how much the boy resembled in many ways Esther's brother Louis, who used to give him such concern.

"Well, father, I want to quit High School. I don't like it. I hate it."

"Why? Tell me honestly now. I can't help you unless you give me the real facts."

"I don't like the teachers. They nag me. I hate them."

"Hate them? You mean all of your teachers?"