After twenty years

Front matter

MIDDLETON

Class Book

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Preface

vividness to compensate for the lack of solidarity which must appear.

To my friends I wish to say, Read it critically, and see if you do not discover at least some fragment of yourself in the pattern. Our conception of life is a component thing, reflecting something of every person we have known, and holding out certain ideals which transcend all personality.

If, therefore, the reader has been my friend or my enemy, he will find himself mixed up to a certain greater or less extent in the character colors which I have tried to work into the pattern.

I make my appeal especially to young people, who have the problems of life all unsolved before them, and trust that I may shed some light upon those shaded sections of the pathway of life where we grope in the darkness and apprehend blindly.

I have attempted to make my climax come in the dissertation on religion and philosophy, in which I have tried to steer clear of all tradition and of conventional forms, and to look at the momentous problems involved purely from the rational viewpoint.

I do not mean by this that there is nothing in tradition, but that I chose to put forth an entirely different line of argument for the proof of Deity and the hope of immortality.

iv

PREFACE

If there is anything which I have said unwittingly, which might be offensive to any of my readers, I beg them to read the text again and see if it is not the other fellow aimed at. We often take things to ourselves which were never intended for us at all. In advance I humbly crave the pardon of anybody who might find occasion for offense, because nothing is meant to cast any reflection on any living person.

I commend myself to the charity of my readers, trusting that they will pardon my weak points and find some satisfaction in the viewpoint of life which has come to me after much thought and reflection.

I am indebted very much to my esteemed friend Prof. John Henry Evans for suggestions as to arrangement of materials, and for many corrections of syntax and form which he has made. The editing has been entirely under his direction.

To my many friends : I thank you all for the contributions you have unwittingly made in conversation and in the display of all those little nameless courtesies of life which are hereby acknowledged with due appreciation.

G. W. M.

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Contents

I. The Petals of the Daisy 1

II. The Village Butterfly 12

III. The Man Who Never Had a Chance. . 21

Chapter I The Petals Of The Daisy

AM in the mood of memories today. The great record of the past has opened its pages before me. Recollection is throwing its pictures upon the mental screen, and bringing out some with a clearness that transcends all the rest.

It is a strange thing how the incidents of life fix themselves in our memory as permanent assets or deficits. Some things that seemed to loom so big that they occupied our whole attention and were for the time being the only things in the world are now blotted out completely from the page and come back to us from the tradition of others as alien experiences, which we look upon as disinterested spectators and do not recognize as a part, at one time a most important part, of our own biography.

Then there are other things so trivial, so devoid 1 of interest or value to us now that we would gladly discard them as rubbish, but they cling to us and will not be cast out.

The casket of memory has a wonderful and varied stock of fragments of things — of stories half told, of comedies, of tragedies, of pages gilded with romance and painted with the colors of the morning, of sheets blotted and marred by crime, and black and grimy with the record of life's mistakes, and life's mischances. It has fragments of shafts of envy that were hurled at our unoffending heads. It has tokens of love and respect that brought gladness and faith into our life, and gave us courage to fight on, and to keep up the struggle. It has pictures of faces that have faded out of our life in the long distant past. It has trinkets and locks of hair that hark back to the land of the departed.

And how well its contents are preserved from the ravages of time ! The flowers which came to me as the messenger of a friend's esteem were beautiful to behold as they reflected the colors of the rainbow from their gorgeous petals and filled the air with their scented breath. Ephemeral delights ! In a few brief hours they were all withered and their message of sentiment completely blotted out. But in the casket of memory they are imperishable. They shine with all the lustre of their pristine days, and glisten with the morning dew as when they first unfolded their mysterious forms, and opened their gaudy faces to greet the awakening sun.

As the memory pictures are thrown one by one upon the screen, I select from among the number, perhaps the most vivid, at any rate the most interesting in its far-reaching outgrowth of the score and more of years that have touched its component parts as with a magician's wand and transformed some of them into gold dust and some of them into rust, and some of them into black spots that mar and deface the screen.

It is the picture of a group of happy children playing in a meadow in a summer morning long, long ago. The sun is pouring its golden glory over the eastern hills, and the birds are filling the air with liquid melody. Dew drops are hanging like polished diamonds from every green leaf and from every gorgeous petal.

How like a scene from the land of fairies was this glorious morning landscape, as the children gamboled and played !

Once only in life can we shake off the dross of the world, and feel the true relationship between heaven and earth ! But when the gates that have been left ajar are closed behind us, and we go out of the land of the spirit into the domain of material things, the dream of heaven is left behind. Sometimes its echoes reverberate from the land of slumber, and break in upon our night visions and sometimes in day dreams the message comes again. But it is capricious, and its beautiful melody is drowned in the discordant noises of the world. When we have known the satiety of the temporal life and perceived the gossamer texture of the mundane web, what would we not give for a look through the pearly gates which were open to us when our young life still lingered on the threshold? But we must be content to walk by faith and not by actual knowledge, until the veil shall have been raised again and the haze lifted that has rested all these years over our comprehension.

This happy group of children are playing the old game of fortune with the wild daisies from the meadow. They are plucking the petals one by one, and repeating the old familiar rhyme, "A rich man, a poor man, a beggar man, a thief," etc., with the idea that the name corresponding to the last petal should indicate the station in life that Fate has in store for them.

How natural it was in those unreasoning days to 4 connect things as cause and effect that have no bearing upon one another! Because this tangible thing that has a material basis is true, this other intangible thing of the mental or spiritual basis must be true also, even though there is nothing in the circumstance or the constitution of things to correlate them. Even the mature mind does not wholly divest itself of this fallacious method of reasoning. It is the old proposition of proving that three is greater than ten by turning a stick into a serpent.

When we look over the record of that great struggle of humanity for knowledge of Deity and destiny which began with the dawn of consciousness, we are amazed to find how very much of the time and energy of the world have been expended to establish the correlation of sequence in events and things which in their nature are entirely distinct and separate.

The eagerness of the child for knowledge of the future — for some token from the land of possibilities, for some foretaste of the satisfaction of conquest or dominion, — is but the same thing as the eagerness of the adult mind, perceiving the evanesence of worldly things, for some foretaste of the more enduring things of his spiritual inheritance. And as the child consults the necromancer, the phrenologist, the Gypsy fortune-teller, and even the daisy's petals for an answer to his eager question, "What is my lot to be?" so the adult mind all through the world's history has been wont to consult the spiritual necromancer, and to accept as gospel truth the evasive answer which too often has taken advantage of his childish credulity.

It is a lie, a falsehood ! The story of the daisy's petals is not true, as the future pages of this little book are to show.

The eternal chancellors of God are Cause and Effect. These only are the factors that are to determine our destiny. You may ask the sphinx of the future by way of his high priest the necromancer to reveal to you, the unwritten chapters of your life, and the only true answer that you will get back is the answer that shall come of your own life's effort. When God gave you your free agency and entrusted you with the responsibility of your own destiny, He did not intend to prop you up at every turn by Providential intervention, to correct your errors and commend you at once for your virtues. Freedom of will was given you that you might develop character. No man ever grows in power only as he develops initiative. God gives you the opportunity, but he will not thrust advantage upon you.

So when men and women are seeking to bolster themselves up by some extraneous force which is not a part of their own constitution, they are trying to shirk the responsibility that God has placed upon them.

One of the most interesting studies in the world is to watch the careers of those who have been the friends of our childhood, to see how they acquitted themselves when they got out of the play world and were confronted with the really serious problems of life. How interesting and profitable to turn the kaleidoscope of time round by decades to see the new arrangement that has come ! If we could have but looked into the future when we stood at the threshold of life where everything was tinted with rainbow colors, and every boy and girl seemed to have their future fixed by the circumstances in which we found them, what a paradoxical thing the next score of years would have presented to us ! In our childish imagination we gave first rank to the dandy who dressed well and danced well and walked with a swagger. How many dandies we have seen go the way of the world and seek their level at the lowest stratum of the social scale, and how many uncouth boys from the country farm have we seen work their way to the very first rank of society and stand pre-eminent as professional men, as financiers, as educators !

It was our inexperience that illuded us. If we could have been endowed with our present knowledge of life, we could have put a proper value upon them. From the arc that appeared we could have caluculated the whole circle. For the underlying principles of success or failure are as precise, and the deductions that can be drawn from them as accurate, as the principles of geometry.

As we look back over the vista of the years, the first startling fact that confronts us is the number of our friends who have been gathered in by the grim reaper. As children we watched the sparks of burning soot on the back of the chimney and imagined they were contending armies in deadly conflict. Each instant, in the twinkling of an eye, a soldier went to his doom, and the ranks were filled by others eager for the fight. The iron hand of Fate has dealt just so with our friends.

The inventory of our friends of twenty years ago presents some wonderful transformations. Some have lived a life of resistance and placed themselves counter to the world and the people of the world, and when fortune knocked at their door they have sternly refused to admit her. Some have adapted themselves readily into the circumstances in which they found themselves, and prospered in the things of the world and flourished in friendship. It is a great relief to meet one such, who has faith in himself and believes in the eternal fitness of things. Some have drifted from their spiritual moorings and foundered on the rocks of modern speculation. Of the controversy in their minds which ended in the shipwreck of their faith, there is more to be said in the pages of this book. Some have acquitted themselves as men and women of character and taken definite stands on every issue that confronted them. Some have moved along the lines of least resistance and responded to one single impelling motive, their unrestrained desire. Like rudderless ships they have been subject to the caprice of all the winds, with no chart nor compass to guide them. Some have grown thin and nervous ; some have grown fat and contented.

I am standing at the end of twenty years that have swept over the group of boys and girls who were my schoolmates and playmates. The years have flown so swiftly by that one gasps to think of the changes they have wrought. When I see how the etching process of the years has marked deep furrows in the forehead of my friends, and sifted the frosts of early autumn among the golden tresses, I become aware of the fact that I am subjected to the same process, and must change as they are changing, and as all the world is changing around us. For life and the world and the universe are all unstable things, transforming themselves each year, each decade, each century into new unprecedented forms, developing, evolving, receding. We know that we are in a great process that must have some beneficent ending, we know there must be some goal toward which all things are converging ; but we are like the mote upon the sunbeam, we can see neither the source nor the terminus of the light that illuminates us. For God has seen fit to safeguard His secrets by covering them up with mysteries unfathomable. We must content ourselves for the time being with the knowledge that life is, and trust the explanation of it to that future time which we see by the eye of faith, when the mists shall have rolled away, and the great plan that correlates life and death and the world and the universe shall stand revealed. We must act on the presumption that there is such a plan, for any other hypothesis would be inconsistent with reason.

And now to my task of following the life story of the group of happy children we saw playing upon the meadow. I shall call the roll only as I wish each one to appear on the stage of action. I shall avoid the dialogue form of narrative because it has been so universally used that I imagine a rest from it may meet the approval of my readers.

Chapter II

I SELECT at random a little girl whom for convenience we shall call Harriet. She is one of nature's favorites. She has golden locks and blue eyes and a smile that captivates every one who comes within the range of its' irresistible charm. She was much patronized and petted. It seemed to her that she was born with the queenly prerogative and that all people were born to be her obedient subjects. She measured the world by her little sphere of action, and she did not comprehend that with all her charms she was only an untutored child of the village and that her glory would vanish in an instant if she were dislodged from her primitive setting.

How kind it is of Mother Nature to surround our blissful self-satisfaction with a Chinese wall of ignorance to prevent us from learning the insignificant role the best of us are to play in the great drama of life!

Our little Harriet grew with the ebb and flow of 12 the seasons, and began to feel the emotions and dream the dreams of budding womanhood. The peach bloom of her native heath had incorporated its gorgeous coloring into the pigment of her cheeks, and the sunbeams had entangled themselves among her golden tresses. Grace of motion and music of voice came with the womanly development. Nature poured out her bounties unstinted over the head of this untutored child and made her the pride of the village, the coveted object of many a masculine desire.

There is a deep, a profound meaning in this language of nature interpreted in fine femininity, be it the endowment of the peasant or of the princess. When the hour of its glory has come, the rose opens its gorgeous face to the morning sun, and freights the breeze with its scented breath. It invokes the occult chemistry of nature to extract from the dull clod of earth ambrosial nectars for the bee and fragrance for the passing stranger. It borrows the most gorgeous colors to adorn itself. It looks with derision at the artist and the sculptor in their vain attempts to imitate its perfect contour, as it sways with the breezes of the spring time.

And all this because it has a message to deliver, 13 a divine function to fulfill. It must purchase the aid of the insect to send its love message to its kindred rose upon another stem. It must put the supreme effort of its life into this love story, that others of its kind may live, that its name and generation may be perpetuated, and that its delight may not vanish from the earth, but that it may augment as the generations come and go.

And this is the language of nature to you, my maiden friend. This is the meaning of the peach blossom upon your cheek, of the golden glory that adorns your head. This is the divine motion that is stirring within you. It is your privilege, it is your prerogative, it is your bounden duty to claim your birthright, to borrow the colors of the autumn forest to adorn yourself, to invoke the Muses for their aid, to appropriate all that art has got to embellish nature, that your love message may be directed to one worthy to receive it, that the greatest of all your contributions to the world may not be of an inferior kind, that your generation may be a unit in an ascending scale of intellect and soul, that the social and intellectual arc which you have subtended may be widened and expanded by those who are to follow you.

And now we find our charming little Harriet 14 standing at the threshold of womanhood, with all the emotions and instincts of that wondrous epoch vibrating within her. Little does she know the meaning of that hidden language of nature, which speaks in eloquent words from the rosy cheek, from the graceful contour of her form. What wonder if she is sometimes proud and disdainful ! The homage of the country swain seems naturally to her, in her meagre experience, to be an indicator of the estimate the world has put upon her. She seems to reign as a queen with all her willing subjects at her feet ready to do homage.

The most autocratic, aristocratic person on the face of the earth is the belle of a country town, as the young man who has experienced her disdain can well attest. But we can pardon that vanity when we get the perspective of the years, and the larger outlook on life that comes with our widening circle of acquaintance. We can see now, as she also can see, how the glory of the country belle would vanish in a moment if she were transplanted from her rural setting into the polished life and be estimated by the fine social requirements of her sisters of the city.

Make the most then of your hour of glory, my little disdainful friend. You are like a butterfly upon the wing, but one day the gorgeous many-colored wings you are disporting will be withered and useless, and you will come down to the level of other mortals, perhaps to crawl as a dull grub, with nothing but the memory of your superlative hour to console you ! We will pardon your pride, and think charitably of your disdain. Perhaps you did better than any other mortal would have done under the same circumstances.

The suitors of our little Harriet are all the swains of the village, and she is permitted to take her choice, for any one of them would count himself most lucky to receive the least indication that his advances were approved. Which shall it be? God help her to decide that question, which has held in its answer the happiness or the misery of so many untold thousands of souls. It is ordinarily a game of blind man's buff, in which we grope in the dark and apprehend without seeing. It is a lottery in which are many blanks and only a few real prizes.

Which of all these young men are to be winners in the game of life, and which are destined to recede and go down to ignominious defeat? The pages of this little book, I hope, will be an aid to all those who are hanging uncertain on this momentous problem. That old scripture which says the last shall be first and the first shall be last is wonderfully true of life. But how is the girl emerging from her 'teens to analyze the method of life of each individual suitor and choose the winner from among the group?

This matter of the choice of a life's companion is one that is looked upon with altogether too much levity. The preliminary negotiations which lead up to this most serious step in life are regarded too often as a joke. When a young man begins to call on a young lady he thus furnishes for his friends and for her friends a capital occasion for jesting. The social circle to which they belong look upon it with lightness, and lose no occasion to make them the subject of such witticisms as they can invent.

But to the young people themselves, who stand breathless on the threshold of this new phase of life, it is the one great event, which overshadows all the other affairs of their life. If we buy merchandise and discover that we have made a mistake, we can in time repair our fortune; and often the experience gained is a more valuable asset in our life than the commodity would have been. But woe be to the man or the woman who makes a bad bargain in the matrimonial market. It were better that a millstone were tied around their neck and that they were cast into the sea. Every day we see matrimonial barks foundering on the shoals of circumstance, because the partners to the venture were not properly matched. If we had some means of testing the condition affinity as we test the electric potential of certain objects with the galvanometer, our mating for life would be a more simple problem. In this matter we are ruled too much by emotion and not enough by reason. The one objection to young marriages is that the choice is made before judgment has developed sufficiently to weigh the consequences.

It is only fair to say on the other hand that the plasticity of youth may enable people to mold their temperament into harmony, and whether by intuition or by chance or by Providence, young marriages often turn out to be satisfactory.

To young people who aim at education, or training for a profession, marriage should be postponed until the preparatory work is consummated, so that they begin life as producers, and not as dead weights retarding their own progress. How often do we see young people subjecting themselves to all kinds of privations and hardships in their college work, and destroying all the romance and poetry of their early married life in the struggle, when they could have avoided it by postponing the wedding day until after the college work was completed !

The prevalent modern idea which represents the other extreme of the proposition, that young people should not get married until they can afford to live in high style and indulge themselves in all the luxuries of well-to-do people, I believe to be equally wrong. If they are ready to enter the lists as producers, independent of other people, they can afford to make the struggle together, and the training that results from the self-denial they are obliged to exercise will be a great asset in their lives in the after years.

To each individual the plan of his life is the most serious thing that confronts him. We are largely the sculptors of our own character. We ought at least to try to put as much brains into the serious problems that pertain to our happiness for all time as we would in decisions that have commercial value for their issue. We ought to develop the philosophy of living, and in all our social arrangements be governed by reason and not by passion. And when we approach the problem of the choice of a life's companion we should be sure that we have weighed carefully all the consequences, and acted up to the very best judgment we are capable of.

And this was the problem before our winsome little Harriet as she stood at the end of her 'teens, and indulged in the gossamer dreams of maidenhood. Without much careful consideration, I fear, she faced the hazard of fate and made her choice, and cast her lot for better or for worse with one whom for convenience we will call Henry, as we review his outlook on life and follow his conclusions to their ultimate consequences.

Chapter III The Man Who Never Had A Chance

LIKE many other young men of his kind Henry was wont to attach much importance to his personal appearance, and after the crude method of his native town, he dressed the best and danced the best of the boys in his circle. He believed that education is a thing limited by nature to certain types of people, and as he did not belong to that particular class, books could be of no value to him. It was his opinion that each individual in this world is born to a certain station in life, and that if one is educated out of his station he will be discontented and unhappy. He rather prided himself on being ignorant of the lore of books and sometimes boasted about it.

Having no regular profession or trade he was obliged to seek employment at one thing and another, as opportunities presented themselves, and often the earnings of one job were all consumed before he got another.

Any young lady in choosing her life's companion, who thinks that happiness is going to abide in homes of poverty will find herself in general mistaken. 21

When the wolf comes in at the door, the angel of love goes out at the chimney. There is much practical sense in the question propounded by the young woman of the lower class of England, when a young man comes wooing, "How many shillings a week does he have?" No young man is a fit subject for the matrimonial market the product of whose toil is not sufficient to keep the wife and the children who are to depend on him from being paupers.

Our poor Henry drifted along from one thing to another. Each year found him more circumscribed than the one before. His life was like a spiral each circle of which diminishes in circumference regularly toward a vanishing point. He became pessimistic, and railed against fate. He blamed everybody but himself for the hard luck which seemed always to be his lot.

Whenever you see a man with a hard luck story, you can always find the explanation of his condition in the method of his life. But these hard luck fellows can never see the fault in themselves. They will blame everything and everybody, but never think of blaming themselves. They think the world is in a conspiracy against them. With covetous eyes they look at the possessions of other people and attribute all kinds of unholy motives and methods to the one 22 who succeeds. They always think they never had a chance in the world ; that fate is deliberately holding them down ; that society is organized for the express purpose of thwarting and defeating them.

So our Henry joined the rank of the pessimists, and got much satisfaction out of telling how this and that prominent man had gone the way of iniquity.