Yesterday I saw a woman sitting far back in the shadows of the church wearing such a look of sadness that she frightened me. It was not goodness but sorrow that had spiritualised her face. And to me she seemed a wan prisoner looking through the windows of her cell, despairing, like one who already knows his death sentence. "What if after all I am mistaken," I thought, "and there really is occasion for such grief as that!" I could think of nothing but that white mystery of sorrow piercing the gloom with mournful eyes. And when at last the "penitents" came crowding the altar with quaking cowardly knees, I fell upon mine and prayed: "Dear Lord, I am Thine, I will be good! Only take not from me the joy of living here in the green valleys of this present world!" Was such a prayer more selfish than the sobbing petitions of the penitents there about the church-rail, asking for heavenly peace? I have peace already, the ancient peace of the forests as sweet as the breath of God. I ask for no more.
You see, dear "Spirit of gloom," that I have sent you all my little scriptures in return for your "malignant mutterings." My God is a pastoral Divinity, while yours is a terrible Mystery, hidden behind systems of philosophy, vanishing before Eastern mysticism into an insensate Nirvana, revealing ways of escape too awful to contemplate. I could not survive the thoughts of such a God for my own. I am _His_ heathen. By the way, did you ever think what an unmanageable estate that is--"And I will give you the heathen for your inheritance"?
What mental blindness led me to give you such a book? What demon of perversity tempted you to send me such a review of Miss Addams's Hull-House heresies? You know my abhorrence of our "kind-hearted materialism" (so you call it), yet you calmly write me a long panegyric on this last outbreak of humanitarian unrighteousness--unrighteousness, I say, vaunting materialism, undisciplined feminism, everything that denotes moral deliquescence. Of course I see the good, even the wise, things that are in the book, but why didn't you expose the serpent that lurks under the flowers?
As a matter of fact, what is good in the book is old, what is bad is new. Do you suppose that this love of humanity which has practically grown into the religion of men,--do you suppose that this was not known to the world before? The necessity of union and social adhesion was seen clearly enough in the Middle Ages. The notion that morality, in its lower working at least, is dependent on a man's relation to the community, was the basis of Aristotle's Ethics, who made of it a catchword with his _politikon zôon_ (your father will translate it for you as "a political animal"). The "social compunction" is as ancient as the heart of man. How could we live peacefully in the world without it? Literature has reflected its existence in a thousand different ways. Here and there it will be found touched with that sense of universal pity which we look upon as a peculiar mark of its present manifestation. In that most perfect of all Latin passages does not Virgil call his countryman blessed because he is not tortured by beholding the poverty of the city--