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Adventures in Philosophy |
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by Henry Ward Beecher
It is a shiftless trick to lie about stories and groceries, arguing with men that you have no time, in a new country, for nice farming, for making good fences for smooth meadows without a stump, for draining wet patches which disfigure fine fields; to raise your own frogs in your own yard; to permit, year after year, a dirty, stinking, mantled puddle to stand before your fence in the street; to plant orchards, and allow your cattle to eat the trees up, and when gnawed down, to save your money by trying to nurse the stubs into good trees, instead of getting fresh ones from the nursery; to allow an orchard to have blank spaces, where trees have died; and when the living trees begin to bear, to wake up, and put young whips in the vacant spots. It is a filthy trick to use tobacco at all; and it puts an end to all our affected squeamishness at the Chinese taste in eating rats, cats, and bird's nests. It is a vile economy to lay up for remastication a half-chewed cud; to pocket a half-smoked cigar; and finally to bedrench one's self with tobacco juice; to so besmoke one's clothes that a man can be scented as far off as a whaleship can be smelt at sea. It is a vile trick to borrow a choice book; to read it with unwashed hands, that have been used in the charcoal-bin; and finally to return it daubed on every leaf with nose-blood spots, tobacco-spatter, and dirty finger-marks. It is an unthrifty trick to bring in eggs from the barn in one's coat pocket, and then to sit down upon them. It is a filthy trick to borrow of or lend for others' use a tooth-brush or a toothpick; to pick one's teeth at table with a fork or a jackknife; to put your hat upon the dinner-table among the dishes; to spit generously into the fire, or at it, while the hearth is covered with food set to warm -- for sometimes a man hits what he don't aim at. It is an unmannerly trick to neglect the scraper outside the door, but to be scrupulous in cleaning your feet, after you get inside, on the carpet, rug, or andiron; to bring your drenched umbrella into the entry, where a black puddle may leave to the housewife melancholy evidence that you have been there. It is a soul-trying trick for a neat dairy-woman to see her "man" watering the horse out of her milk-bucket; or filtering horse medicine through her milk-strainer; or feeding his hogs with her water-pail; or, after barn-work, to set the well-bucket outside the curb, and wash his hands out of it. There is something peculiarly impressive to me in the old New England custom of announcing a death. In a village of a few hundred inhabitants all are known each to each. There are no strangers. The village church, the Sabbath-school, and the district-school have been channels of intercommunication; so that one is acquainted not only with the persons, but, too often, with the affairs -- domestic, social, and secular -- of every dweller in the town. A thousand die in the city every month, and there is no void apparent. The vast population speedily closes over the emptied space. The hearts that were grouped about the deceased doubtless suffer alike in the country and in the city. But, outside of the special grief, there is a moment's sadness, a dash of sympathy, and then life closes over the grief, as waters fill the void made when a bucketful is drawn out of the ocean. There goes a city funeral! Well, I wonder who it is that is journeying so quietly to his last home. He was not of my house, nor of my circle; his life was not a thread woven with mine; I did not see him before, I shall not miss him now. We did not greet at the church; we did not vote at the town meeting; we had not gone together upon sleigh-rides, skatings, huskings, fishings, trainings, or elections. Therefore it is that men of might die daily about us, and we have no sense of it, any more than we perceive it when a neighbor extinguishes his lamp. It was upon the very day that we arrived in Woodstock, upon this broad and high hill-top, in the afternoon, as we were sitting in ransomed bliss rejoicing in the boundless hemisphere above, and in the beautiful sweep of hills feathered with woods, and cultivated fields ruffled with fences; and full, here and there, of pictures of trees, single or in rounded groups; it was as we sat thus -- the children, three families of them, scattered out, racing and shouting upon the village-green before us -- that the church-bell swung round merrily, as if preluding, or clearing its throat for some message. It is five o'clock: What can that bell be ringing for? Is there a meeting? Perhaps a "preparatory lecture." It stops. Then one deep stroke is given, and all is still. Every one stops. Some one is dead. Another solemn stroke goes vibrating through the crystal air, and calls scores more to the doors. Who can be dead? Another solitary peal wafts its message tremulously along the air; and that long gradually dying vibration of a country bell -- never heard amid the noises of the air in a city -- swelling and falling, swelling and falling; aerial waves, voices of invisible spirits communing with each other as they bear aloft the ransomed one! But now its warning voice is given. All are listening. Ten sharp, distinct strokes, and a pause. Some one is ten years old of earth's age. No; ten more follow; twenty years is it? Ten more tell us that it is an adult. Ten more, and ten more, and twice ten again, and one final stroke, count the age of seventy-one. Seventy-one years! Were they long, weary, sorrowful years? Was it a venerable sire, weary of waiting for the silver cord to be loosed? Seventy-one years! Shall I see as many? And if I do, the hill-top is already turned, and I am going down upon the farther side. How long to look forward to! How short to look back upon! Age and youth look upon life from opposite ends of the telescope: It is exceedingly long; it is exceedingly short! To one who muses this, the very strokes of the bell seem to emblem life. Each is like a year, and all of them roll away as in a moment, and are gone. It is plain that Mary was imbued with the spirit of the Hebrew Scriptures. Not only was the history of her people familiar to her, but her language at the annunciation shows that the poetry of the Old Testament had filled her soul. She was fitted to receive her people's history in its most romantic and spiritual aspects. They were God's peculiar people. Their history unrolled before her as a series of wonderful providences. The path glowed with divine manifestations. Miracles blossomed out of every natural law. But to her there were no "laws of nature." Such ideas had not yet been born. "The earth was the Lord's." All its phenomena were direct manifestations of his will. Clouds and storms came on errands from God. Light and darkness were the shining or the hiding of his face. Calamities were punishments; harvests were divine gifts; famines were immediate divine penalties. To us, God acts through instruments; to the Hebrew, he acted immediately by his will. "He spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast." To such a one as Mary there would be no incredulity fit as to the reality of this angelic manifestation. Her only surprise would be that she should be chosen for a renewal of those divine interpositions in behalf of her people of which their history was so full. The very reason which would lead us to suspect a miracle in our day, gave it credibility in other days. It is simply a question of adaptation. A miracle, as a blind appeal to the moral sense, without use of the reason, was adapted to the earlier periods of human life. Its usefulness ceases when the moral sense is so developed that it can find its own way through the ministration of the reason. A miracle is a substitute for moral demonstration, and is peculiarly adapted to the early conditions of mankind. Of all miracles, there was none more sacred, more congruous, and grateful to a Hebrew than an angelic visitation. A devout Jew, in looking back, saw angels flying thick between the heavenly throne and the throne of his fathers. The greatest events of national history had been made illustrious by their presence. Their work began with the primitive pair. They had come at evening to Abraham's tent. They had waited upon Jacob's footsteps. They had communed with Moses, with the judges, with priests and magistrates, with prophets and holy men. All the way down from the beginning of history the pious Jew saw the shining foot-steps of these heavenly messengers. Nor had the faith died out in the long interval through which their visits had been withheld. Mary could not, therefore, be surprised at the coming of angels, but only that they should come to her. It may seem strange that Zacharias should be struck dumb for doubting the heavenly messenger, while Mary went unrebuked. But it is plain that there was a wide difference in the nature of the relative experiences. To Zacharias was promised an event external to himself, not involving his own sensibility. But to a woman's heart there can be no other announcement possible that shall so stir every feeling and sensibility of the soul as the promise and prospect of her first child. Motherhood is the very center of womanhood. The first awakening in her soul of the reality that she bears a double life -- herself within herself -- brings a sweet bewilderment of wonder and joy. The more sure her faith of the fact, the more tremulous must her soul become. Such an announcement can never mean to a father's what it does to a mother's heart. And it is one of the exquisite shades of subtle truth, and of beauty as well, that the angel who rebuked Zacharias for doubt, saw nothing in the trembling hesitancy of Mary, inconsistent with a childish faith. If the heart swells with the hope of a new life in the common lot of mortals, with what profound feeling must Mary have pondered the angel's promise to her son:
Excerpted from various writings of Henry Ward Beecher |
Lectures and Orations, by Henry Ward Beecher
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