"You will not; you will not. It is all mocking mystery, and no more than the aggregated generations of the past can you find any solution."
Cornelia shook her head, and leaned back in her chair.
"Philosophy promises one," replied Beulah resolutely.
"Philosophy! Take care! That hidden rock stranded me. Listen to me.
Philosophy, or, what is nowadays its synonym, metaphysical systems, are worse than useless. They will make you doubt your own individual existence, if that be possible. I am older than you; I am a sample of the efficacy of such systems. Oh, the so-called philosophers of this century and the last are crowned heads of humb.u.g.g.e.ry! Adepts in the famous art of"
""Wrapping nonsense round, With pomp and darkness, till it seems profound.""
"They mock earnest, enquiring minds with their refined, infinitesimal, homeopathic "developments" of deity; metaphysical wolves in Socratic cloaks. Oh, they have much to answer for! "Spring of philosophy!" ha! ha! They have made a frog pond of it, in which to launch their flimsy, painted toy barks. Have done with them, Beulah, or you will be miserably duped."
"Have you lost faith in Emerson and Theodore Parker?" asked Beulah.
"Yes; lost faith in everything and everybody, except Mrs. Asbury.
Emerson"s atheistic fatalism is enough to unhinge human reason; he is a great and, I believe, an honest thinker, and of his genius I have the profoundest admiration. An intellectual t.i.tan, he wages a desperate war with received creeds, and, rising on the ruins of systems, struggles to scale the battlements of truth. As for Parker, a careful perusal of his works was enough to disgust me. But no more of this, Beulah--so long as you have found nothing to rest upon. I had hoped much from your earnest search; but since it has been futile, let the subject drop. Give me that gla.s.s of medicine. Dr.
Hartwell was here just before you came. He is morose and haggard; what ails him?"
"I really don"t know. I have not seen him for several months--not since August, I believe."
"So I supposed, as I questioned him about you; and he seemed ignorant of your movements. Beulah, does not life look dreary and tedious when you antic.i.p.ate years of labor and care? Teaching is not child"s sport. Are you not already weary in spirit?"
"No, I am not weary; neither does life seem joyless. I know that I shall have to labor for a support; but necessity always supplies strength. I have many, very many sources of happiness, and look forward, hopefully, to a life of usefulness."
"Do you intend to teach all your days? Are you going to wear out your life over primers and slates?"
"Perhaps so. I know not how else I shall more easily earn a subsistence."
"I trust you will marry, and be exempted from that dull, tedious routine," said Cornelia, watching her countenance.
Beulah made a gesture of impatience.
"That is a mode of exemption so extremely remote that I never consider it. I do not find teaching so disagreeable as you imagine, and dare say at fifty (if I live that long) I shall still be in a schoolroom. Remember the trite line:"
""I dreamed, and thought that life was beauty I woke, and found that life was duty""
"Labor, mental and physical, is the heritage of humanity, and happiness is inseparably bound up with the discharge of duty. It is a divine decree that all should work, and a compliance with that decree insures a proper development of the moral, intellectual, and physical nature."
"You are brave, Beulah, and have more of hope in your nature than I.
For twenty-three years I have been a petted child; but life has given me little enjoyment. Often have I asked, Why was I created?
for what am I destined? I have been like a gilded bubble, tossed about by every breath! Oh, Beulah! often, in the desolation of my heart, I have recalled that grim pa.s.sage of Pollok"s, and that that verily I was that
""Atom which G.o.d Had made superfluously, and needed not To build creation with, but back again To nothing threw, and left it in the void, With everlasting sense, that once it was!""
"My life has not been useful, it has been but joyless, and clouded with the shadow of death from my childhood."
Her voice was broken, and tears trickled over her emaciated face.
She put up her thin hand and brushed them away, as if ashamed of her emotion.
"Sometimes I think if I could only live, and be strong, I would make myself useful in the world--would try to be less selfish and exacting, but all regrets are vain, and the indulged child of luxury must take her place in the pale realms of death along with the poverty-stricken and laboring. Beulah, I was in pain last night, and could not sleep, and for hours I seemed to hear the words of that horrible vision: "And he saw how world after world shook off its glimmering souls upon the sea of Death, as a water-bubble scatters swimming lights on the waves." Oh! my mind is clouded and my heart hopeless, it is dismal to stand alone as I do, and confront the final issue, without belief in anything. Sometimes, when the paroxysms are severe and prolonged, I grow impatient of the tedious delay, and would spring, open-armed, to meet Death, the deliverer."
Beulah was deeply moved, and answered, with a faltering voice and trembling lip:
"I wish I could comfort and cheer you; but I cannot--I cannot! If the hand of disease placed me to-day on the brink beside you, I should be as hopeless as you. Oh, Cornelia! it makes my heart ache to look at you now, and I would give my life to be able to stand where you do, with a calm trust in the G.o.d of Israel; but--"
"Then be warned by my example. In many respects we resemble each other; our pursuits have been similar. Beulah, do not follow me to the end! Take my word for it, all is dark and grim."
She sank back, too much exhausted to continue the conversation, and Beulah rose to go.
"Can"t you stay with me?" said the feeble girl.
"No; my companionship is no benefit to you now. If I could help you I would not leave you at all."
She pressed her lips to the forehead furrowed by suffering, and hastened away.
It was dusk when she reached home, and, pa.s.sing the dining room, where the tea table awaited her arrival, she sought her own apartment. A cheerful fire blazed in welcome; but just now all things were somber to her vision, and she threw herself into a chair and covered her face with her hands. Like a haunting specter, Cornelia"s haggard countenance pursued her, and a dull foreboding pointed to a coming season when she, too, would quit earth in hopeless uncertainty. She thought of her guardian and his skeptical misanthropy. He had explored every by-path of speculation, and after years of study and investigation had given up in despair, and settled down into a refined pantheism. Could she hope to succeed better? Was her intellect so vastly superior to those who for thousands of years had puzzled by midnight lamps over these identical questions of origin and destiny? What was the speculation of all ages, from Thales to Comte, to the dying girl she had just left? Poor Beulah! For the first time her courage forsook her, and bitter tears gushed over her white cheeks. There was no stony bitterness in her face, but an unlifting shadow that mutely revealed the unnumbered hours of strife and desolation which were slowly bowing that brave heart to the dust. She shuddered, as now, in self- communion, she felt that atheism, grim and murderous, stood at the entrance of her soul, and threw its benumbing shadow into the inmost recesses. Unbelief hung its murky vapors about her heart, curtaining it from the sunshine of G.o.d"s smile. It was not difficult to trace her gradual progress if so she might term her unsatisfactory journey. Rejecting literal revelation, she was perplexed to draw the exact line of demarcation between myths and realities; then followed doubts as to the necessity, and finally as to the probability and possibility, of an external, verbal revelation. A revealed code or system was antagonistic to the doctrines of rationalism; her own consciousness must furnish the necessary data. But how far was "individualism" allowable? And here the hydra of speculation reared its horrid head; if consciousness alone furnished truth, it was but true for her, true according to the formation of her mind, but not absolutely true. Admit the supremacy of the individual reason, and she could not deny "that the individual mind is the generating principle of all human knowledge; that the soul of man is like the silkworm, which weaves its universe out of its own being; that the whole ma.s.s of knowledge to which we can ever attain lies potentially within us from the beginning; that all truth is nothing more than a self-development."
She became entangled in the finely spun webs of ontology, and knew not what she believed. Her guardian"s words rang in her ears like a knell. "You must accept either utter skepticism, or absolute, consistent pantheism."
A volume which she had been reading the night before lay on the table, and she opened it at the following pa.s.sage:
"Every being is sufficient to itself; that is, every being is, in and by itself, infinite: has its G.o.d, its highest conceivable being, in itself. The object of any subject is nothing else than the subject"s own nature taken objectively. Such as are a man"s thoughts and dispositions, such is his G.o.d! Consciousness of G.o.d is self- consciousness; by his G.o.d, you know the man, and by the man, his G.o.d: the two are identical! Religion is merely the consciousness which a man has of his own, not limited, but infinite, nature; it is an early form of self-knowledge. G.o.d is the objective nature of the understanding."
Thus much Feuerbach offered her. She put down the book and leaned her head wearily on her hands. A light touch on her arm caused her to glance up, and Mrs. Williams" anxious face looked down at her.
"What is the matter with you, Beulah? Are you sick?"
"No; I am as well as usual." She hastily averted her head.
"But something troubles you, child!"
"Yes; a great many things trouble me; but I am used to troubles, you know, and can cope with them unaided."
"Won"t you tell me what they are, Beulah?"
"You cannot help me, or I would. One cause of sorrow, however, is the approaching death of a friend whom I shall miss and mourn.
Cornelia Graham cannot live much longer. I saw her this evening, and found that she has become sadly altered."
"She is young to die," said the matron, with a sigh.
"Yes; only twenty-three."
"Perhaps her death will be the means of reclaiming my poor boy."
Beulah shook her head, and Mrs. Williams added:
"She has lived only for this world and its pleasures. Is she afraid of the world to come? Can she die peacefully?"