Friends told me that they might all get to decaying in that time; but I doubted it and went my own way.
That was my first experience in dentistry. Physically, I mean, though not pecuniarily. I had paid plenty of dental bills, but had not made one before. When my six-year limit was up, I went to the doctor again, and he found, sure enough, that my harvest was fine and large and ripe for the sickle. I had to put the thing off, for a while, as I was just leaving for the summer; but as soon as I got a chance I hunted up a dentist.
Last night I read in the Atlantic a passage from one of Rev. Dr. Van Dyke’s books, and I cut it out, with a vaguely defined notion that I might need it sometime or other, by and by. I like Van Dyke, and I greatly admire his literary style—this notwithstanding the drawback that a good deal of his literary product is of a religious sort. He is about 35 years old, he is a Presbyterian, he is a clergyman, he is a member of the faculty of Princeton University. Still, I like him and admire him, notwithstanding.
This forenoon I was lounging along Fifth avenue, and I stopped opposite the Roman Catholic cathedral to contemplate the crowd massed in front of the edifice. It is a grand Catholic day—a grand Catholic week, in fact. There’s a cardinal here with a message from the Pope, there are sixty bishops on hand, and there is to be great doings. A hand touched my shoulder—it was Van Dyke’s! We hadn’t met for a year. He nodded toward the multitude, and said:
“What do you think of it? Doesn’t it warm your heart? They are ignorant and poor, but they have faith, they have belief, and it uplifts them, it makes them free. They have feelings, they have views, convictions, and they live under a flag where they have no master, and where they have the right and the privilege of doing their own thinking, and of acting according to their preference, unmolested. What do you think of it?”
“I think you have misinterpreted some of the details. You think that these people think. You know better. They don’t think; they get all their ostensible thinkings at second hand; they get their feelings at second hand; they get their faith, their beliefs, their convictions at second hand. They are in no sense free. They are like you and me and like all the rest of the human race—slaves. Slaves of custom, slaves of circumstance, environment, association. This crowd is the human race in little. It is no trouble to love the human race, and we do love it, for it is a child, and one can’t help loving a child; but the minute we set out to admire the race we do as you have done—select and admire qualities which it doesn’t possess.”
And so on and so on; we argued and argued, and arrived where we began: he clung to his reverence for the race as the grandest of the Creator’s inventions, and I clung to my conviction that it was not an invention to be really proud of. We had settled nothing. We were quiet for a while, and loafed peaceably along down the street. Then he took up the matter again. He reminded me that there were certain undeniably fine and beautiful qualities in our human nature. To wit, that we are brave, and hate cowardly acts; that we are loyal and true, and hate treachery and deceit; that we are just and fair and honorable, and hate injustice and unfairness; that we pity the weak, and protect them from wrong and harm; that we magnanimously stand between the oppressor and the oppressed, and between the man of cruel disposition and his friendless victim.
I asked him if he was acquainted with this person.
He said he was—hundreds of him; that, broadly speaking, he had been describing a Christian; that a Christian, at his best, was just such a person as he had been portraying.
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