THE LATTER DAYS

I have often wondered what becomes of us here in this life. For what we were in the beginning does pass away, and we become the millstone around our own neck. No matter how good we try to be or how bad we actually are, we barely keep up appearances. It is not time that changes us, but our own desires, ambitions and the fierce struggle we make to get what we want. The body breaks under the strain, our faculties begin to wabble like shooting stars, even if they leave a trail of light behind them. We lose our grip, let go and stand aside, but not satisfied. No matter how wise we have been, we grow simple. No matter how rich, we become mendicants searching the faces of youth for a little praise or recognition, ready to accept any flattery, however obvious, disposed to keep our noses and let out that long plaint of weariness and disillusionment peculiar to our condition.

Many years ago there was a distinguished Methodist preacher in Tennessee. He rose so high in the ranks of his brethren that we called him a divine, and he had some kind of double-D title conferred upon him. He was a good man and did valiant service for his Lord and for the Church. At last his strength began to fail. Some power of the Presence went out of him as it always does when the magnetism of personality dies down in a preacher. His sermons lengthened intolerably, which is the final symptom a minister in our Church shows before the bishop and presiding elders superannuate him. No congregation wants the Word drooled to it even by a saint. So this old man was retired on his niggardly little pension and went to live with his married daughter.

One day I met him on the street, pushing a baby carriage with his youngest grandchild in it. He wore his pastoral clothes, stiff collar, and white bow tie. His linen was as white as the apron of a neat nursemaid. But what a look in his eye, an expression of tears! Isaiah demoted! Nothing humanly unkind had happened to him. His daughter had probably taken this method of airing the baby and getting her father to take exercise at the same time. But when you have preached salvation with power from the pulpit for fifty years, it is worse than a fall from grace to be reduced to pushing a baby carriage.

I halted to wish him good-morning and to admire the baby. He did not care much for this morning, and let the baby go for a moment; he wished to say something to me.

‘If you knew what old age really is, you would pray for death while you are young!’ he quavered.

I tried to comfort him, but he was too terribly wise to be comforted.

‘You know,’ he went on, ‘I am not supposed to be of sound mind. So they give me little tasks like this to keep me occupied,’ regarding the infant ruefully.

‘When you have been ordained and preached the gospel for many years, and moved men by the spirit, it’s a terrible experience to be set aside as of no further consequence. I may act a little queer; you do when misfortune and defeat overtake you in your old age. But if I behaved as senselessly as a lot of young men do, I’d be hailed before a lunacy commission!’

And this was twenty years ago, when nobody thought of summoning an alienist to determine the mental responsibility of a youth who had run amuck and committed a crime.

As I grow older and feel the changes that wisdom and experience make in me, and learn to sit down more to husband my failing strength and to keep silent longer when younger people are exploiting the foolishness of their wits, I often think of that old man toddling feebly behind the baby carriage, shorn of all his earthly glories save the insignia of his long pastoral coat tails, despised because his mind had passed the spring and summer seasons of animal wit and aggressiveness, but pathetically wise.

I am determined to avoid his fate by taking thought now while my will is strong, and I have fairly good business sense, and still reign supreme in my own estimation to be spoofed or cajoled by the flattery of being merely humored. I am already old enough to fix a measuring eye upon any younger person who undertakes to pacify me with the mere assurance that such-and-such a thing is all right; nothing is going to break; everything is greased and the clutch is working properly. I have known myself to get out of the car and find something wrong and ready to break, and much of it not greased, and the clutch needing to be relined.

This sort of enterprise does not enhance your reputation for sweetness and light among young people, but we must simply keep up our courage and stand the gaff. If you are a woman, and have passed the age of control by your merely feminine charms, the only thing left is to exercise sufficient authority to put the fear of God in these youngsters and sit tight. My grandfather was not so far wrong when he was dying and ordered us who were about to supersede him in living out of the room! That was the last act of authority performed by a gallant gentleman who showed a proper contempt for sniveling youth.

I do not know how it happens, but as we grow older our friends and relatives become miraculously younger. We seem to survive too many of those companions with whom we started in life and passed our achieving years. As our infirmities increase, they wax stronger, and we become no more than a memory sitting in the chimney corner. However generous and considerate they are of your feeling and comfort, you have lost your standing among them. The consequences are inevitable. You cannot hold your hand with them. With the best intentions, they are ready to take up your burdens and manage your affairs, which is really a tender way of taking your life away from you and leaving you in your old age without the means of supporting your own vanities and self-respect.

Never again can you show how much better judgment you have than they have in matters of management and economy! You may be permitted to hold your dear old yellow deeds, though frequently in a weary moment you also surrender them; but they have come into real possession of your property and they are inclined to use it recklessly, according to this speeding, spending new world they are making for themselves, while you become the helpless pensioner upon your own hard-earned bounties.

Nothing like that shall happen to me. I have observed young people very carefully. They are really the pensioners upon our wisdom and reared upon our earnings. If every man and woman past sixty should suddenly die, there would be one grand wake of a funeral, then this world would rock upon its foundations and go to pieces. I give youth thirty days to destroy the whole thing. What I mean is that we are very important the older we grow, and for conscience’ sake should endeavor to live as long as possible in full possession of our powers and affairs.

I have sometimes considered passing my last days writing a book of gospels for the aged, designed to stimulate their courage and sense of self-importance. I have observed that we begin to lose them when we lose the purely physical attributes of strength and animation. This is that period when the mind clears and can be used most effectively according wisdom and experience, instead of those emotions which inevitably affect our actions and judgments during our younger years.

The time comes when these friends and these relatives who have grown up long after we grew up will gather around you out of respect, affection, and politeness; but you are a short circuit. There will be such a divergence in your point of view from their points of view that no common ground of conversation or comradeship remains. They will be sitting up with you off and on in this manner as if you were the dear dead body of an ancestor, although you may be getting your breath as usual and looking straight through those innocent young things, too polite to read aloud what you see going on inside of them.

The thing to do then is not to retire to your own room like a sundown old cat, or like a pathetically forgiving old woman, but to exile them. Send them back to sink or swim in the world they have made for themselves, and keep yours. Live and die under your own roof, even if you do it alone. I have a suspicion that it is a lonely passage, even if everybody is present.

I willed the world to these young powers and princes ten years ago when I came to this valley. They can have it. I am willing any time to spare them a few words of advice about how to conduct it, and I like to step around in it once in so often to see how things are going. But I reserve this small one, laid off like a garden between these hills and fitted to me as a fine old tune is fitted to the simple words of a good old hymn.

Once you begin to fumble according to your own light with a denominational idea of God or to mix politics with your religion, your light goes out and you find yourself being tried for heresy or in some brotherhood which denies the divinity of Jesus, whereas if you had your own right mind toward the Lord you would know that any brotherhood which denies Jesus is apt to be a vindictive corporation organized against all men who do not belong to that union. We are not brothers except according to the way and the life of the great Galilean. I myself cannot pretend to be more than the disgusted stepbrother of all modernists in the Church and of red radicals in general.

But after all we spend most of our centuries maneuvering in the right direction. It is only now and then that a demoniacal cat-fit starts somewhere, as in Russia at the present time. The hysteria spreads as demoniacal dancing did in the middle centuries, but it dies down. The whole thing comes from some monstrous mob ignorance of the spirit. The individual Russian still believes in his God, but the evil forces of stronger minds are exploiting him.

The thing that grieves is the casualties among the innocent along the way.

Here is a poor old bishop who has written a book in which he denies a personal deity and doubts there ever existed such a historical character as Jesus Christ. On the cover of his book is the emblem of Soviet Russia, the hammer and the sickle. Beneath that is the red star, emblem of the workers’ party in America, and the first sentence of the book is a quotation from Karl Marx, ‘Religion is the opium of the people.’ I am touched by that old man’s predicament as I am sometimes at the sight of an old Confederate soldier who had a brave record, but who has lost his wits and goes about decorated with cheap pewter and brass medals; only this poor soul has got them published on the cover of his book instead of being pinned upon his breast.

I have noticed a certain thing especially about brilliant men. They retain the use of their faculties long after they lose their judgment. If one of them remains in business too long after the prime of life, he is apt to slip up and make an investment which costs him the whole of a hard-earned fortune. If he is a thinker and an authority upon some obtuse subject, he is apt to lose his grip, take a header and show up among the spiritists, as in the case of Sir Oliver Lodge, who appears to have retained his thinking powers long after he lost the sense to use them.

It would not surprise me if H. G. Wells turned out to be a religious fanatic in his last days. These people suffer some kind of reverse in mind. They go off on tangents. So this innocent old bishop with the ascetic countenance and a noble Christian life behind him lost the rudder of his faculties, and is now being exploited by those arch madmen, the communists. He has apparently reached the mimetic stage of senility, got his metaphors mixed, and is trying to impersonate both the grand old bishop and the grand old communist so magnificently interpreted in the first chapters of ‘Les Miserables.’

Old men are sometimes subject to great vanities of the soul without any wisdom. How else does one of them get the idea of calling himself the Episcopus Bolsheviscum et Infidelium? Instead of being tried for heresy, he should be rescued, put away in a quiet, comfortable place and allowed to fan himself out according to his illusions. He is obviously a good old man who has been tricked and flattered by designing men and their still more designing propaganda. Somebody has reversed the lever of his mind, else his training in spiritual consciousness would have insured him against being upset by discovering traces of our Scriptures in mythology and every heathen religion and philosophy. These pagans, the very barbarians and savages, naturally borrow, plagiarize and take the truth as we do, frequently veiled in tradition. We all have the same God and must feel the stirrings of His image in us. If this man had been in his right senses, does any one believe that the study of astronomy could have possibly upset his strictly Christian faith? Can what we know or suspect about a purely physical universe affect the everlasting fact that our spirit does bear witness to the truth of such Scriptures as the Ten Commandments, the twenty-third Psalm and the Sermon on the Mount?

Words are dangerous things. They lead to heresy trials now, and they formerly led many martyrs to the stake. I suppose the good Bishop still believes in Providence, but here he is in his old age trying to liquidate his God into natural law. Somebody has stolen that many pages of his mind or he would know there never was a law without a lawmaker.

‘Banish gods from the skies and capitalists from the earth!’ he cries.

Well, that has been done in Russia. Religion certainly is the opium of the people there. Never has the world seen such a politically pious people. They sleep, indeed, but what uneasy slumber is this that filches all a man has and degrades him by his very sacrifices! Imagine living under a government which permits its people to prosper for a few years, in order that it may step in and confiscate their wealth and thus reduce them once more to the direst poverty of a national ideal where the only capitalist is this rogue of a government and the only god is the pickled body of an arch-fiend who even in death imposed his monstrous will upon them.

My feeling is that every man is entitled to his own God, which is the same God no man can escape. And heaven deliver me from living in a country where there are no capitalists! My idea would be to live in one where everybody would be in neighborly reach of one. But at that I am this close kin to the bishop in the perversity of my mind; I should like to see all communists and radicals banished from this country before they pollute the minds of the ignorant, irresponsible, and unwary, who are the real poor we have always with us, even if some of them are learned and rich.

My tides are falling. I have no longer the mortal power to believe everything and hope everything. I must leave hopes now for those who need them more than I do.

When you are passing into the afternoon of your years it is wise to break the habit you used to have of planning for the future, because your future is behind you, as some Smart Aleck has said. It is sensible to economize in hopes, because they are depleting when you no longer have the power to achieve them. I have planted all my trees years ago. Presently I shall be obliged to sit beneath their shade and fold my hands. Even then I know I shall not be contented with just peace. I shall be looking and wishing for a little happiness.

When you are about to matriculate into old age you speculate a good deal about how you will feel then. I am thinking it would be a grand thing to live long enough to grow simple and full of faith and the artless happiness I had as a child. Old people do sometimes; they come again into that eager, snooping curiosity the very young have. They go about wondering and getting themselves happily deceived as we keep terrors and anxieties from little children. It is a sweet and blessed state.

Heaven preserve me from becoming a grand old woman and being obliged to keep my dignity and mind sitting up overwhelming others to the last! I should hate to pass out as one of my grandfathers did. He was very old, but he retained to the end an outrageously overbearing use of his faculties. All of us who were his meeker posterity had gathered respectfully about his bedside, not tearful, because he was intolerant of tears and we dared not weep. Presently he swept the whole bowed company with one glittering gray glance and commanded us to leave him alone.

‘I will not be stared out of countenance at the very last!’ he gasped.

So he died with all of us hidden behind the bed peeping at him.

I want some one to hold my hand then, and to hear many kind voices soothing me and praising me as if I had been a dear good old child for a long time. I want to be reduced to that innocency of the ‘such as’ when I go hence, and maybe trailing some fragment of the same cloud of glory with which I came from God who was my home.