Charles M. Sheldon
The High Calling
CHAPTER IX
WALTER DOUGLAS was not what would be called ordinarily a religious young man. That is, he was not pious, in the sense that he was a lover of prayer meetings and church gatherings. He was a member of the Congregational church at Milton and had joined it from the Sunday School when he was twelve years old, growing up in the church like any average boy whose father and mother were members. He had a tremendous respect for his father's and mother's religious life and example and would probably have been willing to die for their faith if not for his own. For the rest, he had grown up in the home atmosphere, which from his childhood had been deeply reverent towards the Bible and the superhuman element.
The effect on his mind, now, of the address he had just heard, was very much the same as if someone far above him in education and age had attacked his father and mother, bringing forward a great array of argument and proof to show that they were unworthy of his love and confidence. Walter's mind could not have been more disturbed by such an attempt than it actually was by what had been said that evening, undermining his lifelong confidence in Christ as a divine being, and the superhuman and miraculous as part of his own life.
He was stunned by it and at first his only desire was to be alone. As the night wore on, this desire gave way to a longing for counsel from someone who could answer his questions and relieve his mind of the terrible uncertainty which had invaded it. And it was at least a strange comment on the teaching force in the Burrton school that Walter at this crisis could not think of anyone to whom he cared to go with a religious doubt. There were plenty of men at Burrton occupying responsible places as professors or instructors who knew plenty of mathematics and physics and electricity and engineering and science. But not one that Walter could think of who knew or cared about a student's moral or religious character. The president was a keen, wide-awake, sharp man of affairs, but as Walter thought of him he shrank from the idea of going to him with a real heart trouble or with a genuine mental difficulty. He would as soon have thought of telling his personal griefs or sorrows into a phonograph. And yet President Davis of Burrton was a church member, a highly educated gentleman, a great money getter from rich men, and had the reputation in the educational world of being a success as such school presidents go. He could extract half a million for Burrton from some great pirate of industry, but he did not know how to extract a poisonous doubt from a tortured mind like Walter's, or, better yet, instill the balm of healing faith into a spirit that had for the time being lost its God and its heaven. Great thing, our boasted education is, isn't it! How many of our cultured, highly developed university men are all head and no heart! And yet in the history of this old world who would dare say that in the long run it does not need more heart than head, or at least an equal division of each, for its comfort, its happiness and its real progress?
Walter, going over the list of possible men who might help him now, thought of the pastor of the Congregational church in Burrton. This man was a strong, earnest pastor, a tireless worker and an interesting preacher. But here again Walter had no one to blame but himself that he did not feel well enough acquainted with this man to go to him with his personal religious questions. He had been to the church several times and he always liked the Rev. James Harris, but like so many students who are attendants and workers in their own churches, Walter on coming to Burrton had found it easy to lapse into lazy Sunday morning habits. After he had a late breakfast and read the Sunday morning Daily Megaphone, it was generally too late to go to the Sunday School and it was easier on stormy Sundays to curl up on a lounge and read a novel, or on pleasant Sundays to stroll out to the lake two miles away and get an appetite for a big dinner. Then an afternoon of sleep or visiting or walking out used up the rest of the day for him. One of the topics he had avoided with his mother on his recent visit home had been his Sunday program, and he recalled even now the earnest wish she had expressed that he would get to work in the Sunday School when he went back to Burrton. No, he had been so indifferent to all church matters while a student that he could not bring himself to go to the minister, he was too much a stranger to him, and this was a matter that seemed to call for a friend.
"Oh, I wish mother was here!" he exclaimed out loud.
And then because he felt so hungry for comfort and so eager to relieve his mind of its burden, he went over to his writing desk, and wrote a long letter to his mother.
When he finished, it was after one o'clock and he went to bed and slept as if exhausted, but to his dismay when he awoke, his depression and fear were there to greet him and he found himself waiting for his mother's answer almost as if her letter were a reprieve from a sentence of death.
A part of this letter will reveal Walter's excited and even chaotic feeling.
"The bottom seems to be dropped right out of everything, mother. Of what use is it to try to do right when there isn't any likelihood of a future and no personal God and no Redeemer, and no standard for conduct? The doctor said we could not depend upon Christ's own statements about his own resurrection. How then can we trust Him for any statement He made about Himself? The fellows here in Burrton who have money to spend and do about as they please, the fast set that drinks and carouses and gambles and gives the chorus girls wine suppers seems to be pretty happy. They don't worry over the matter of sin or moral responsibility or going to church or getting serious over the condition of the heathen or the wrongs of the world, or the 'high calling' you are so fond of calling my attention to. And why should I be any different from them? Mother, does it pay to be religious? It seems to me religious people are always sober, dull people, always talking reform and disagreeable things and never having much fun. But I want you to help me, mother, no one else can, if you can't. I don't seem to be able to pray any. Why should I pray, if there isn't any super-human, nothing but a force somewhere? I am just groping in the dark and it's awful dark. And I don't know a soul here to help me any. Bauer—well—I never said a word to him on religious matters. I don't know whether he is a Catholic or what he is. And I don't know any minister in Burrton well enough to go to him. And the teachers here don't care about the students' religious life, or if they do I never saw any signs of it, at least not enough to show where to go now.
"Mother, I can't tell you how I feel over all this. But I'm just about down and out. If what Dr. Powers said is true, it seems to me we are living in an awful world. It isn't the world you and father believe in or you taught me to believe in, and I can't understand it. Oh, mother, help me, won't you, if you can! WALTER."
Now his letter reached Mrs. Douglas on the anniversary of her marriage. She was planning as she always did to make the day bright for Paul, had invited her brothers, Walter and Louis, and was going to make it a great family gathering.
The boy's letter smote her heart as nothing in all his experience had ever troubled her. She managed to get through the evening without betraying her feeling, but when her brothers had gone home, and Helen and Louis had retired, she showed the letter to Paul.
He read it and then looked up at Esther.
"You are the one to help him through this," he said. "You are the only person who can do it right now. But you are tired with all the events of the day. Hadn't you better wait until to-morrow?"
"No," Esther said positively. "He is waiting. When a soul is drifting down like his, it is a case of rescue."
"Dear," said Paul, quietly, "I don't have any fears for him. He has too good a mother to make a wreck of his religion."
"He is my son," said Esther proudly. "I would not be worthy of the name mother if I did not have confidence in the eternal things of redemption. I will write him tonight. But you must add to my letter, Paul. He needs us both."
"I will," said Paul, gravely. He was more disturbed over the letter from Walter than he cared to acknowledge to Esther, but he managed to conceal his feelings for her sake. Esther went up to her little corner room, where she had a sewing table and a writing desk. When she had shut herself in there she spread Walter's letter out before the Lord.
That meant that her simple mother faith said to God, "Oh, my Father, I need wisdom now to write this letter. My boy, my first born son is in need of Thee. But he has turned to his mother for help. Show me how to say the right thing. For I can not do it without thy help."
And then without any hesitation or fear of the final result, Esther wrote to Walter. It was a sacred letter, but a part of it belongs to this narrative.
"You must not forget, boy," Esther went on after cheerfully reminding him that he was not the only person in the world to have such an experience; "you must not forget that religion is a universal thing, and that it is a cry of the heart for God. It is not a matter to figure out like mathematics, but it is an answer to the real longing of the soul for a divine life in the world.
"You must not forget, either, that your faith does not depend on what someone else says, but upon the actual needs of your own life. You know that you need God. You know that you are wretched now because you are afraid God has been taken away. Isn't that a sign to you that your simple faith as you have been taught it here at home is a real and necessary thing? What Dr. Powers said (and you must remember you may not have understood his full meaning), what he said has not changed the everlasting facts of sin and moral responsibility and the facts of the plain right and wrong of the world. And when it comes to the resurrection and a future life—all we can do is to take Christ's word for it. He knows more about it than Dr. Powers knows. Your mother is no theologian and no great scholar, but when it comes to taking Dr. Powers's word as against Jesus's own statements about himself, I don't hesitate, and you ought not to. Jesus is the way and the truth and the life. Just trust him. It is what thousands of souls bigger than yours have done and they have found the light as you will. We are praying for you, father and I. Father can give you better reasons than I can, perhaps, because he knows more, but listen to me, boy, to your mother, whose heart goes out to you at this time. You don't have to answer all the hard questions of religion all at once. Some of them can bide for an answer. But, oh, plant your feet down on the rock, Christ Jesus! Abide with him and your soul will not be lost. He will not let you go wrong. He came to give you abundant life. The love of God is greater than all other things. Trust simply and don't be afraid. Get to work in the Sunday school and church. Doubt can not live in the atmosphere of doing God's will every moment. Perhaps one reason you have been so overthrown is because you have neglected your church and religious duties since you left home. Pray; trust; act; live for others; listen for God's voice; be true to the high calling. It is the only real and living way for you. And the prayers of your mother go out to God for you now and always. Walter, you are God's child before you are mine. Go to him at once and ask his help as you have asked mine. May He bless you as I can not. Lovingly and prayerfully,
"MOTHER."
Mrs. Douglas was so eager to get her letter off that she did not wait for Paul's added word. But two days later Paul wrote quite at length, in much the same fashion, taking up one or two points Esther had not touched.
"You say in your letter to your mother that you feel the bottom has dropped out of everything. Why? Because a stranger to you who has some reputation as a public speaker has made some statements which destroy your faith in religion.
"Do you think that is a very sensible thing for you to do—to let a man you have never seen before come along and in one address take from you the faith of years? Would you let a man you didn't know destroy your faith in your mother so quickly? Would you simply take his word for it, because he said so?
"You must remember, Walter, that some of the finest theologians and scholars in the world believe in and teach the miracles and a personal God and a personal divine Christ and a personal resurrection. I don't mean old fashioned scholars, but men who are up to date, who rank with the best in the thinking world. If Dr. Powers does not believe in the resurrection there are other men, better scholars than he is, who do. You have no right to let one man's statements be final for you.
"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 appetite and passions, 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 God 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 God 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 God 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 God 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 God. 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 institution 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 God?" 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 God. But when Dr. Powers got through I felt as if all the God 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
God is a machine?"
"But if God is a machine, who made the machine?"
Walter stared. Bauer went on.
"And if God 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 God 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 noble, 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 Godless 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 quantity 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 passing 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 anticipated 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 advertisements, 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 reassuring.
"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?"
"Well, most of them. They criticise me and make fun of me. Miss Barrows showed what I wrote about tuberculosis to every other teacher in the school."
"Go on," said Paul, after a pause.
"I can't get the English. I don't understand the long definitions. I am not cut out for a scholar."
"Have you tried?"
"Yes, I have. But the harder I try, the worse it is."
"What lessons are you carrying?"
"English, algebra, physics, manual training, German and chemistry."
"Tell me now," said Paul good-naturedly, "which one of all these studies you hate the least."
Louis laughed. "I don't like any studies."
"But which one would you choose first if you couldn't help yourself?"
"Manual training."
"What do you do in that?"
"Oh, I plane and saw and glue up boards and make things."
"What things?"
Louis hesitated. "You'll laugh."
"No, I won't." Paul felt more like crying than laughing as Louis eyed him doubtfully.
"Great God!" he felt like saying to himself. "Here I have been so busy with everybody else's affairs that my own son is afraid of me."
"Well, I finished a writing desk the other day. I was going to give it to mother for her birthday. I brought it home last night."
