God's Country; The Trail to Happiness

It makes one wonder, for instance, why man is so jealous of himself. The Supreme Power is immeasurable, he tells himself. It has no such a thing as limitation. Heaven, no matter in what form he may conceive it, is utterly boundless. Yet he is jealous of it. He does not want to concede that any other life will form a part of it but that of his own breed. He has tried, through unnumbered centuries, to fool himself into the belief that he is the one and only thing in all creation upon which the Ruling Power of the universe has its guardian eye. He has tried to make himself believe that he is the one toad in the huge puddle of life. He has not conceded that an all-powerful but tender God might love flowers and birds and trees and many other living things as well as he loves man. And as I sit here under my spruce trees again, it seems to me that, just because he has been so near-sighted, man has not yet found a faith which is all-comforting and of which he is utterly sure.

I seem to see a very clear reason for this. In this age, though still fettered by his egoism, man is not utterly blind to his own deformities. As “civilization” progresses, he sees more and more what a monster he has been in the past, and what a monster in many ways he is to-day. He sees his breed committing every crime known to the ages, from petty larceny to world-slaughters that devastate nations. He sees everywhere the strong taking advantage of the weak. He sees millions go hungry and cold that a few may profit. In great convention-halls, he sees the “statesmen” that rule the destiny of a mighty nation cutting capers and acting generally like a lot of silly little children. He sees every man in a great game fighting to see who can accumulate the most dollars, no matter at what cost to the others. He sees sickening and disgusting fads come and go. He looks on a world-brothel of iniquity, of discontent, of avarice and greed and butchery among men. Nowhere does he see the stability, the dignity, and the mighty forces of good that should walk hand in hand with “the chosen of God.”

He is beginning to see himself, at last, as a contemptible specimen of life – in spite of his brain and his inventions.

He is beginning to understand that the most perfect airship his brain will ever conceive cannot take him to heaven.

He is beginning to realize that there is a thing greater than brain, greater than mechanical progress.

And as he comes to understand more and more how imperfect a thing he is, the more unstable his faith becomes; and the sacrilegious thought comes to him, unconsciously but with terrific force: “If I am the chosen handiwork of God, then I can have no very great faith in the judgment and workmanship of God.”

And as the suspicion grows upon him that he may not be the “one and only” child of God, he cries out wildly in these modern days for evidence. He tries to bring spirits back from the dead that they may offer him some proof. He quests vainly for “revelations” that may satisfy him. He says with his mouth, “Yes; I believe absolutely in God,” yet, in his heart, he knows that he is half lying, – because of fear of what his neighbor will think if he speaks the truth. He wants to believe there is a God. He wants to know there is a God. Yet he is afraid.

And, personally, I am glad that the time has come when he is afraid. I think it is the real beginning of his salvation and the dropping-away of his egoism. To-day he is beginning to see all life as he did not see it yesterday. And to-morrow his eyes will be wide open.

That is my faith. I believe that God is greater than humanity has ever conceived him to be. I think he is “a common sort of fellow,” and I write these words with all the holy reverence of which the soul is capable. I do not mean to imply that I think he is in my form, or in any particular form. But he is Life. And it is his intention and his desire that every living thing that is worthy of life be a part of him. I am almost Indian in this faith. I can hear the buoyant, cheering call of Life in a waterfall. The inspiration of it comes into my own body from out of a whispering tree, from a bush glowing with bloom, from a flower, from the song of a bird, from the rain itself. I find great peace and contentment in my faith that this God is everywhere, and that we may meet him face to face fifty times a day if we throw off the hard shell of our egoism, and realize that all nature is God – and that we, as men and women and children, are a part of that all-embracing nature.

Even now the sun is filtering through the tree-branches upon this partly written page. I look at it, and I see again the inconceivable greatness of the Supreme Power, and my own microscopic littleness. For we of the earth have thought that the earth is great, and that we, having inherited the earth, are of all things greatest. Yet is that sun which warms and lights my page as I write – more than a million times as large as the earth – more than eight hundred thousand miles from one end of its diameter to the other. And the still more stupendous fact is that this sun is itself only a small bit of mechanism in the mighty forces of infinity, for there are a hundred million other suns in space, each lighting and warming its own worlds – innumerable worlds – each peopled with its own type of flesh and blood, and each possessing, perhaps, its own peculiar forms of “civilization” and its own savagery.

Just that great, and vast, and all-embracing is the handiwork of that vital force which rules all infinity – and to which we have given the name of God.

And here I emphasize again that great truth which nature has impressed upon me – that, just so long as man considers himself the one and only chosen part of God, and therefore next to him in greatness, just that long will his egoism and self-conceit blind him to the greatness and glory of the real truth, and to the glory of the faith which might be his. I believe that Christ was a great teacher, that he was a great student of his times, and incorporated into his teachings all that was highest and best in the teachings of other great men who had lived and died before him. And I have always regretted that Christ was unfortunate to have for his historians a set of men who were unequal to their task, many of them narrow-minded, moved by “visions” and superstitions instead of fact, men who believed in all the miracles of the imagination from conversing with angels to stopping the sun, – men utterly incapable of writing down calmly and truthfully those mighty teachings of Christ which, had they been written as they were spoken, would have meant so much for the world to-day. For I believe, in my own heart, that Christ was the greatest lover of nature that history knows of to the present day. I believe that in the many years of his “disappearance,” Christ was not only studying the teachings of the past, but that, close to the breast of nature, he was learning the splendid truths of life – all life – which were afterward the very heart and soul of his messages to mankind.

I believe that Christ, could he return to earth to-day, would say: “My biographers have given you a wrong impression of me, and they have misquoted me. What my soul was called upon to teach nineteen hundred years ago, they have clothed in the raiment of superstition, of misunderstanding, and of impossible miracle. For I am a man, even as thee and thine. But I have found the true faith. And that faith, as I told them then, depends utterly upon the dropping of the scales of self from man’s eyes, and his understanding of all life. For that I gladly died.”

The greatest regret I have is that Christ, as a man, did not foresee more clearly the tremendous influence his teachings were to exert upon humanity through the ages. Had he guessed this, he would have written down with his own hand those teachings which were so carelessly left to the mercy of superstitious – frequently fanatical – and at nearly all times incapable biographers. For Christ, of all men that ever lived, was undoubtedly one of the best and the most humble. His teachings came straight from his heart. He did not intend that they should be smothered in hyperbole, metaphor, and rhetorical embroidery until no two living men could agree absolutely upon their meaning. I believe that he spoke simply and directly, for only in that way could he have reached the hearts of the masses. And I believe that the greatest of all his lessons was the lesson of humility. As a man, he had dropped his egoism, had submitted himself to the Master of all life, and in that submission he had found the truth, and the glory of a great faith. The misfortune of the humanity to follow in after-ages was that the world of Jesus Christ was small – so small that by word of mouth he could reach from end to end of it. Had he dreamed that there were still undiscovered worlds so great that in comparison his own was but a handful of dirt out of a wagon-load, I am convinced within myself that the world to-day would not be struggling to understand a faith written in parables and riddles, for Christ would have set his own hand to the task which others so poorly accomplished.

With such a priceless inheritance in the form of Christ’s own handiwork, I am equally sure that humanity would no longer have an excuse for its egoism, or be ashamed of that humility which is necessary to the understanding of life, and essential to the possession of a deep and abiding faith.

I have, at times, heard intelligent people express amazement that I should dare to place human life on an equal level with all other life, that I should so “blaspheme the Creator” as to say that the life in a two-legged animal who can talk is the same as that in a flower or a plant or a tree or some other animal which cannot talk. I have sometimes allowed myself to point out the innumerable advantages possessed over man by many living things which have no language, as we know language. I could fill a dozen volumes with word-pictures of the thousands and tens of thousands of advantages which living things outside of man possess over man, and which, if man could achieve, would be stupendous miracles. But man, collectively, is blinded by his egoism to the marvelous attainments of all life that does not walk and talk as he walks and talks. When confronted by the incontrovertible wonder and apparent miracle of other life as compared with his own I have nearly always found that men and women fall back, as a last resort, on the absurd and shallow argument: “But this other life you speak of has only instinct. It cannot talk; it cannot reason, and therefore it is impossible for it to have a soul.”

Once a beautiful young matron said to me, “There is much in your creed that is inspiring and beautiful, but it reaches a point where it is inconceivable, for you must concede that a human being is the most perfect of all created things.”

I gave her an exquisite rose which I had plucked from my garden only a few minutes before.

“There are, outside of men and women and children, innumerable things more perfectly created than this flower,” I said. “Are you, in your youth and beauty, as perfect as that rose?”

And yet I know that such arguments as these, innumerable though they might be, cannot prevail until men and women bring themselves face to face with nature itself, filled with a willingness and a yearning to understand. They point out the pests of life – the serpent, the deadly insects, the plants that scar and poison; yet they cannot see themselves as perhaps the deadliest and the most relentless of all pests. For it is one of the mysterious laws of Creation that every living thing – flower, and tree, and beast, and man – has a pest born unto it; and unto these pests other pests are born, until at last, – when the thing is analyzed, – a pest is a pest only in so far as its enemy, and not its friends, judge it to be a pest. If the world to-day were eliminated of human pests as each individual in the world might judge for himself, how many of us would be left alive to-morrow?

And always, when I have listened to the age-old arguments prompted by man’s egoism and self-glorification, I love to return to the peace and the comfort of nature, whether that nature be in the form of a deep forest, a clover field, an orchard, or the little back plot of a crowded city home. And if I am where there is no cool earth to stand my feet upon, I find my peace and rest in the printed pages which describe that nature-world of mine. From the most beautifully written volumes to the honest pages and unembellished fact of farm-journals, I have, times without number, found enthralling interest, consolation, and the strength and courage of the cool and glorious earth itself. Nature’s Bible is not hard to find. It is everywhere, living, breathing, printed – the one universal and ever-present Book of Life.

Whenever I think of the commonest of human arguments: “But this other life you speak of has only instinct. It cannot talk; it cannot reason, and therefore it is impossible for it to have a soul,” my mind always travels back to a certain incident in my experience as a refutation. I could, had I the space, answer that argument with a hundred compelling facts; I might answer it from the point of the flower, the vine, the tree, the grass that carpets the earth, but I always think first of the particular tragedy I am going to describe, because of the chief human actor in it, and because this actor was, in my humble estimation, one of the most physically perfect of her species.

I will not give her name. She is the daughter of one of the best known men in the nation, and one of the foremost scientists of the world; and should she happen to read these lines, I hope that she will see, with a new vision and a new understanding, that “triumph” of years ago.

I think she was about twenty when my outfit happened to join trails with her father’s in the far north. She will remember that early afternoon when we camped together close to the Cochrane, in the Reindeer Lake country.

I believe that I am quite reasonably sure of myself when I say that she was the most beautiful woman I had seen up to that time or have seen since. It is simply because of her perfection that she has always appealed as having furnished to me one of the most dramatic object-lessons of my experience. She was athrill with life. She worshiped her father. She loved the sun, the sky, the wind, the trees, the whole world. Life seemed to have given her everything that it possessed – the rare coloring of the most beautiful flower under her feet, a form that was divine, hair and eyes that no artist could paint, and, I think, one of the sweetest voices I have ever heard. She is, I have heard, beloved in her own environment. She is a worker for human betterment, and spends much of her time in actual work with the poor. Not long ago she was responsible for the building of a home for unfortunate little children.

That day in camp there was a sudden excitement. Three of the Indians had driven a cow moose, a yearling, and a bull into a small cover. It was a splendid chance for the girl. I can see her eyes glowing with the fires of excitement now, as she caught up her rifle and hurried with her father and brother and the Indians to the refuge-place of the family of moose. She was placed at the head of an open space, and the moose were driven out. First came the yearling calf, then the mother, and after them came the old bull. The girl’s lovely face, as I looked at it, was flushed. It seemed as though I might hear the excited beating of her heart as she waited, quivering with the desire to kill.

She fired first at the calf, and then at the mother – and from that moment all that was big and beautiful and noble in life seemed to leave her own body and enter that of the old bull moose. For the first shot had struck the calf, laming it so that it could run but slowly, with the mother urging it on from behind. Not once in the moments that followed did the mother run ahead of her calf. And then I beheld a thing that I believe to be as noble as anything that man has ever done in all the ages. Believe, if you will, that the magnificent old bull had no reason. Believe, if you cannot sacrifice your egoism, that he did not think. Do not give him the credit of possessing a heart or a soul or feelings, if that sacrifice of egoism hurts you. But consider what happened.

The old bull ran alongside the cow, alongside the calf, and then, by reason or instinct, he knew what had happened. He did not forge ahead. He did not race for safety, but deliberately he dropped behind, turned himself broadside, and stopped, making of his own splendid body a barrier in the path of the bullets.

I heard the girl’s rifle cracking. Twice I saw the bull flinch, and I knew that he was struck. Then I heard her cry out, almost frantically, that her last shot was gone. In the same instant, her brother ran up from the cover and thrust his own rifle into her hands.

“Give it to him, sis!” he cried. “Give it to him!”

The big bull had turned. He staggered a bit as he ran, but in a hundred feet he had overtaken the cow and the calf. The calf was going still more slowly, and in my desire to see the cow and the bull break away, I shouted.

Almost simultaneously with the sound of my voice, the bull stopped again. He placed himself broadside, at perhaps a three-quarter angle, so that, by turning his head slightly, he was looking back at us. He was directly between the cow and the calf, and the girl’s bullets continued to rip into him. I remember that I cried out in protest, but she did not sense my words. Every fiber of her being was strung to the thrilling achievement of that crime. She was deaf and blind to the nobility of the great-hearted beast who, in my eyes, was deliberately sacrificing his life. The flaming lust to kill had driven all other things out of her heart and soul. Her father had run up, and brother and father cried out in triumph when the old bull sagged suddenly in the middle and almost fell to his knees. Four times he had been struck when again he went on.

From my experience in big-game hunting, I knew that he was done for. Yet, even in these moments when he was dying, the glorious soul of him was unafraid. Three hundred yards away he stopped and turned again, giving the cow and the calf a last chance to reach the timber. The girl fired her last shots, and missed. Then the bull swung after the cow and the calf and disappeared in the cover. But, as he went, there came back to us a terrible, deep-chested cough, and my heart gave up its hope. It told me the heroic old bull was shot through the lungs. I did not hurry after the girl and her father and brother as they ran over the blood-stained trail. I continued to hear the coughing for a few moments. Then it was silent. When I came up to them, just inside the timber, the three were standing in triumph close to the dead body of the bull. Hardly more than twenty paces from it was the yearling calf, dying, but not quite dead. The brother had ended it with a revolver-shot.

And then I looked at the creature who had committed this double murder. Many times I had done this same crime, but with me, crude and rough, with all the inborn savagery of man, killing had not seemed quite so horrible. And standing there, a little later, – red-lipped, her face aflame, her eyes glowing, exquisite in her beauty, – the girl had her picture taken in triumph as she stood with one booted little foot on the neck of her victim.

When I hear of the vaunted human soul, and when men and women tell me there is no soul but the soul of a human, my mind goes back to that day. I might tell of a hundred other instances that are convincing unto myself, but that one stands out with unforgettable vividness.

I am sure, for instance, that the soul of a flower once saved my life. This is not unusual, or even remarkable, for the souls of flowers have saved unnumbered lives, as well as giving cheer and courage to countless millions; and when we die it is still the Soul of the Flower that watches over us in our resting-places. No place in the world do flowers live more beautifully than in our gardens of the dead, cheering us when we come with our grief to the place of our lost ones, giving us courage to go on. Take the Soul of the Flower away from us, and the world would be hard and bleak to live in.

To me, the soul is synonymous with life. I do not disassociate the two. When we breathe our last, our life – our soul – is gone. The two, I believe, are one. When we pluck a flower we destroy neither, but when we tear it up by the roots so that it dies, then has its soul, or its life, gone the same way as that of man who dies. I have spent many wonderful hours in those gardens of the dead which every city, hamlet, and countryside must have. To me, there are only beauty and the glory of God in a cemetery. It seems to me that there, if never before, one must come to understand the brotherhood of all life. It seems to me that the very stillness and peace of a resting-place of the dead softly whisper to us the great secret which those who are lying there have at last discovered – that life is the same, that its only difference is in form and manifestation. I seem to feel that I have come into the one place where there are only charity and faith and good will, and I have always the thought – which to me gives courage and hope – that this is why the flowers and the trees are so beautiful and so comforting there. I have stood in other cemeteries which, to the passing eye, have been barren and ugly, where man has lent but very feebly a helping hand, but even there, if I looked a little closer, I have found the Soul of the Flower, the same peace, the same tranquillity, perhaps even greater courage to inspire one to “keep on.”

I have a case in point, so convincing to myself that all the preaching in the world could not change my sentiment in the matter. I happened, at this particular time, to be traveling alone in the Northland, and when a certain accident befell me, the nearest help I knew of was at a half-breed’s cabin between twenty and thirty miles away. Thirty miles is not a very great matter in a country of paved roads and level paths, but it is a far distance in a country of dense forest and swamp, without trails or guide-posts – and especially when one is badly crippled. Like the most amateurish tenderfoot, I took a chance along the face of a cliff near a small waterfall, slipped, fell, and came tumbling down a matter of thirty feet with a sixty-pound pack and my rifle on top of me. In the fall, my foot received a terrific blow, probably on a projecting ledge of rock.

The man who has faced many situations is usually the man who is cautious, and though I had just committed an inexcusable error in my carelessness, I now lost no time in putting up my small silk tent while I could still drag myself about. It was well I did so. For ten days thereafter, I was not able to rest a pound of weight upon my injured foot.

With the music and refreshing coolness of the waterfall less than a hundred feet from my tent door, and the creek itself not more than a quarter of that distance, I was most fortunately situated under the circumstances. The first morning after my fall found me almost helpless. Every move I made gave me excruciating pain. My entire foot and ankle, and my leg halfway to the knee, were swollen to twice their normal size. This first day I dragged myself to a sapling, cut it as I lay on my side, and made me a rough crutch of it. The second day, my entire lower limb was swollen until it had lost all semblance to form, and was so badly discolored that a cold and terrible dread began to grow in me. I had only thirty cartridges. I fired ten that first day, in the futile hope that some wandering adventurer might have drifted within the sound of my rifle. Occasionally I hallooed. Night of the second day found me in the beginning of a fever, and, at a cost of physical agony, I prepared myself for the worst – placed my possessions within the reach of my hands, and dragged myself up from the creek with a small pail of water.