The same divine forces underlie the growth of
both, but leaf and flower and fruit must follow the law of race, of soil,
of climate. Whether the questions which assail my young friend have
risen in my reader's mind or not, he knows perfectly well that nobody can
keep such questions from springing up in every young mind of any force or
honesty. As for the excellent little wretches who grow up in what they
are taught, with never a scruple or a query, Protestant or Catholic, Jew
or Mormon, Mahometan or Buddhist, they signify nothing in the
intellectual life of the race. If the world had been wholly peopled with
such half-vitalized mental negatives, there never would have been a creed
like that of Christendom.
I entirely agree with the spirit of the verses I have looked over, in
this point at least, that a true man's allegiance is given to that which
is highest in his own nature. He reverences truth, he loves kindness, he
respects justice. The two first qualities he understands well enough.
But the last, justice, at least as between the Infinite and the finite,
has been so utterly dehumanized, disintegrated, decomposed, and
diabolized in passing through the minds of the half-civilized banditti
who have peopled and unpeopled the world for some scores of generations,
that it has become a mere algebraic x, and has no fixed value whatever as
a human conception.
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