You speak of the dross of ignorance, whereas my memory dwells on those precious jewels, which it was my happy fortune, formerly, to witness, among the treasured glories of the Old World.”
“Old World!” retorted the trapper, “that is the miserable cry of all the half-starved miscreants that have come into this blessed land, since the days of my boyhood!
They tell you of the Old World; as if the Lord had not the power and the will to create the universe in a day, or as if he had not bestowed his gifts with an equal hand, though not with an equal mind, or equal wisdom, have they been received and used.
Were they to say a worn out, and an abused, and a sacrilegious world, they might not be so far from the truth!”
Doctor Battius, who found it quite as arduous a task to maintain any of his favourite positions with so irregular an antagonist, as he would have found it difficult to keep his feet within the hug of a western wrestler, hemmed aloud, and profited by the new opening the trapper had made, to shift the grounds of the discussion—
“By Old and New World, my excellent associate,” he said, “it is not to be understood that the hills, and the valleys, the rocks and the rivers of our own moiety of the earth do not, physically speaking, bear a date as ancient as the spot on which the bricks of Babylon are found; it merely signifies that its moral existence is not co-equal with its physical, or geological formation.”
“Anan!” said the old man, looking up enquiringly into the face of the philosopher.
“Merely that it has not been so long known in morals, as the other countries of Christendom.”
“So much the better, so much the better.
I am no great admirator of your old morals, as you call them, for I have ever found, and I have liv’d long as it were in the very heart of natur’, that your old morals are none of the best.
Mankind twist and turn the rules of the Lord, to suit their own wickedness, when their devilish cunning has had too much time to trifle with His commands.”
“Nay, venerable hunter, still am I not comprehended.
By morals I do not mean the limited and literal signification of the term, such as is conveyed in its synonyme, morality, but the practices of men, as connected with their daily intercourse, their institutions, and their laws.”
“And such I call barefaced and downright wantonness and waste,” interrupted his sturdy disputant.
“Well, be it so,” returned the Doctor, abandoning the explanation in despair. “Perhaps I have conceded too much,” he then instantly added, fancying that he still saw the glimmerings of an argument through another chink in the discourse. “Perhaps I have conceded too much, in saying that this hemisphere is literally as old in its formation, as that which embraces the venerable quarters of Europe, Asia, and Africa.”
“It is easy to say a pine is not so tall as an alder, but it would be hard to prove.
Can you give a reason for such a belief?”
“The reasons are numerous and powerful,” returned the Doctor, delighted by this encouraging opening. “Look into the plains of Egypt and Arabia; their sandy deserts teem with the monuments of their antiquity; and then we have also recorded documents of their glory; doubling the proofs of their former greatness, now that they lie stripped of their fertility; while we look in vain for similar evidences that man has ever reached the summit of civilisation on this continent, or search, without our reward, for the path by which he has made the downward journey to his present condition of second childhood.”
“And what see you in all this?” demanded the trapper, who, though a little confused by the terms of his companion, seized the thread of his ideas.
“A demonstration of my problem, that nature did not make so vast a region to lie an uninhabited waste so many ages.
This is merely the moral view of the subject; as to the more exact and geological—”
“Your morals are exact enough for me,” returned the old man, “for I think I see in them the very pride of folly.
I am but little gifted in the fables of what you call the Old World, seeing that my time has been mainly passed looking natur’ steadily in the face, and in reasoning on what I’ve seen, rather than on what I’ve heard in traditions.
But I have never shut my ears to the words of the good book, and many is the long winter evening that I have passed in the wigwams of the Delawares, listening to the good Moravians, as they dealt forth the history and doctrines of the elder times, to the people of the Lenape!
It was pleasant to hearken to such wisdom after a weary hunt!
Right pleasant did I find it, and often have I talked the matter over with the Great Serpent of the Delawares, in the more peaceful hours of our out-lyings, whether it might be on the trail of a war-party of the Mingoes, or on the watch for a York deer.
I remember to have heard it, then and there, said, that the Blessed Land was once fertile as the bottoms of the Mississippi, and groaning with its stores of grain and fruits; but that the judgment has since fallen upon it, and that it is now more remarkable for its barrenness than any qualities to boast of.”
“It is true; but Egypt—nay much of Africa furnishes still more striking proofs of this exhaustion of nature.”
“Tell me,” interrupted the old man, “is it a certain truth that buildings are still standing in that land of Pharaoh, which may be likened, in their stature, to the hills of the ‘arth?”
“It is as true as that nature never refuses to bestow her incisores on the animals, mammalia; genus, homo—”
“It is very marvellous! and it proves how great He must be, when His miserable creatur’s can accomplish such wonders!
Many men must have been needed to finish such an edifice; ay, and men gifted with strength and skill too!
Does the land abound with such a race to this hour?”
“Far from it.
Most of the country is a desert, and but for a mighty river all would be so.”
“Yes; rivers are rare gifts to such as till the ground, as any one may see who journeys far atween the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi.
But how do you account for these changes on the face of the ‘arth itself, and for this downfall of nations, you men of the schools?”
“It is to be ascribed to moral cau—”
“You’re right—it is their morals; their wickedness and their pride, and chiefly their waste that has done it all!
Now listen to what the experience of an old man teaches him.
I have lived long, as these grey hairs and wrinkled hands will show, even though my tongue should fail in the wisdom of my years.
And I have seen much of the folly of man; for his natur’ is the same, be he born in the wilderness, or be he born in the towns.
To my weak judgment it hath ever seemed that his gifts are not equal to his wishes.
That he would mount into the heavens, with all his deformities about him, if he only knew the road, no one will gainsay, that witnesses his bitter strivings upon ‘arth.
If his power is not equal to his will, it is because the wisdom of the Lord hath set bounds to his evil workings.”
“It is much too certain that certain facts will warrant a theory, which teaches the natural depravity of the genus; but if science could be fairly brought to bear on a whole species at once, for instance, education might eradicate the evil principle.”
“That, for your education!
The time has been when I have thought it possible to make a companion of a beast.
Many are the cubs, and many are the speckled fawns that I have reared with these old hands, until I have even fancied them rational and altered beings—but what did it amount to? the bear would bite, and the deer would run, notwithstanding my wicked conceit in fancying I could change a temper that the Lord himself had seen fit to bestow.
Now if man is so blinded in his folly as to go on, ages on ages, doing harm chiefly to himself, there is the same reason to think that he has wrought his evil here as in the countries you call so old.