A Man's World. Edwards Albert

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СКАЧАТЬ were fiction. Nowadays, the tirades of Paine hold for me no more than historic interest. The final appeal in matters of religion is not to pure reason. The sanction for "faith" escapes the formalism of logic. But at eighteen the "Appeal to Reason" seemed unanswerable to me.

      I began to lose sleep. As the spring advanced, I found my room too small for my thoughts and I fell into the habit of slipping down the fire-escape and walking through the night. There was an old mill-race near the school and I used to pace up and down the dyke for hours. Just as with egg-stealing something pushed me into this and I worried very little about what would happen if I were found out.

      After many nights of meditation I put my conclusions down on paper. I have kept the soiled and wrinkled sheet, written over in a scragly boyish hand, ever since. First of all there were the two propositions "There is a God," "There is no God." If there is a God, He might be either a personal Jehovah, such as the Father believed in, or an impersonal Deity like that of the theists. These were all the possibilities I could think of. And in regard to these propositions, I wrote the following:

      "I cannot find any proof of a personal God. It would take strong evidence to make me believe in such a cruel being. How could an all-powerful God, who cared, leave His children in ignorance? There are many grown-up men who think they know what the Bible means. They have burned each other at the stake—Catholics and Protestants—they would kill each other still, if there were not laws against it. A personal God would not let his followers fight about his meaning. He would speak clearly. If he could and did not, he would be a scoundrel. I would hate such a God. But there are no good arguments for a personal God.

      "An impersonal God would be no better than no God. He would not care about men. Such a God could not give us any law. Every person would have to find out for himself what was right.

      "If there is no God, it is the same as if there was an impersonal God.

      "Therefore man has no divine rule about what is good and bad. He must find out for himself. This experiment must be the aim of life—to find out what is good. I think that the best way to live would be so that the biggest number of people would be glad you did live."

      Such was my credo at eighteen. It has changed very little. I do not believe—in many things. My philosophy is still negative. And life seems to me now, as it did then, an experiment in ethics.

      My midnight walks by the mill-race were brought to an abrupt end. My speculations were interrupted by the doctor's heavy hand falling on my shoulder.

      "What are you doing out of bed at this hour? Smoking?"

      I was utterly confused, seeing no outlet but disgrace. My very fright saved me. I could not collect my wits to lie.

      "Thinking about God," I said.

      The doctor let out a long whistle and sat down beside me.

      "Was that what gave you brain fever?"

      "Yes."

      "Well—tell me about it."

      No good thing which has come to me since can compare with what the doctor did for me that night. For the first time in my life an adult talked with me seriously, let me talk. Grown-ups had talked to and at me without end. I had been told what I ought to believe. He was the first to ask me what I believed. It was perhaps the great love for him, which sprang up in my heart that night, which has made me in later life especially interested in such as he.

      I began at the beginning, and when I got to "Salvation" Milton, he interrupted me.

      "We're smashing rules so badly to-night, we might as well do more. I'm going to smoke. Want a cigar?"

      I did not smoke in those days. But the offer of that cigar, his treating me like an adult and equal, gave me a new pride in life, gave me courage to go through with my story, to tell about Oliver and Mary, to tell him of my credo. He sat there smoking silently and heard me through.

      "What do you think?" I asked at last, "Do you believe in God?"

      "I don't know. I never happened to meet him in any laboratory. It sounds to me like a fairy story."

      "Then you're an atheist," I said eagerly.

      "No. A skeptic." And he explained the difference.

      "How do you know what's good and what's bad?"

      "I don't know," he replied. "I only know that some things are comfortable and some aren't. It is uncomfortable to have people think you are a liar, especially so when you happen to be telling the truth. It is uncomfortable to be caught stealing. But I know some thieves who are uncaught and who seem quite comfortable. Above all it's uncomfortable to know you are a failure."

      His voice trailed off wearily. It was several minutes before he began again.

      "I couldn't tell you what's right and what's wrong—even if I knew. You don't believe in God, why should you believe in me? If you don't believe the Bible you mustn't believe any book. No—that's not what I mean. A lot of the Bible is true. Some of it we don't believe, you and I. So with the other books—part true, part false. Don't trust all of any book or any man."

      "How can I know which part to believe?"

      "You'd be the wisest man in all the world, my boy, if you knew that," he laughed.

      Then after a long silence, he spoke in a cold hard voice.

      "Listen to me. I'm not a good man to trust. I'm a failure."

      He told me the pitiful story of his life, told it in an even, impersonal tone as though it were the history of someone else. He had studied in Germany, had come back to New York, a brilliant surgeon, the head of a large hospital.

      "I was close to the top. There wasn't a man anywhere near my age above me. Then the smash. It was a woman. You can't tell what's right and wrong in these things. Don't blame that cousin of yours or the girl. If anybody ought to know it's a doctor. I didn't. It's the hardest problem there is in ethics. The theological seminaries don't help. It's stupid just to tell men to keep away from it—sooner or later they don't. And nobody can tell them what's right. You wouldn't understand my case if I told you about it. It finished me. I began to drink. Watch out for the drink. That's sure to be uncomfortable. I was a drunkard—on the bottom. At last I heard about her again. She was coming down fast—towards the bottom. Well, I knew what the bottom was like—and I did not want her to know."

      He smoked his cigar furiously for a moment before he went on. He had crawled out and sobered up. This school work and the village practice gave him enough to keep her in a private hospital. She had consumption.

      "And sometime—before very long," he ended, "she will die and—well—I can go back to Forgetting-Land."

      Of course I did not understand half what it meant. How I racked my heart for some word of comfort! I wanted to ask him to stay in the school and help other boys as he was helping me. But I could not find phrases. At last his cigar burned out and he snapped the stub into the mill-race. There was a sharp hiss, which sounded like a protest, before it sank under the water. He jumped up.

      "You ought to be in bed. A youngster needs sleep. Don't worry your head about God. It's more important for you to make the baseball team. Run along."

      I had only gone a few steps when he called me back.

      "You СКАЧАТЬ