Outdoor
Rustic People Have Not Many Ideas, But Such As They Have Are Hardy
Plants, And Thrive Flourishingly In Persecution.
One who has grown a
long while in the sweat of laborious noons, and under the stars at night,
a frequenter of hills and forests, an old honest countryman, has, in the
end, a sense of communion with the powers of the universe, and amicable
relations towards his God.
Like my mountain Plymouth Brother, he knows
the Lord. His religion does not repose upon a choice of logic; it is the
poetry of the man's experience, the philosophy of the history of his
life. God, like a great power, like a great shining sun, has appeared to
this simple fellow in the course of years, and become the ground and
essence of his least reflections; and you may change creeds and dogmas by
authority, or proclaim a new religion with the sound of trumpets, if you
will; but here is a man who has his own thoughts, and will stubbornly
adhere to them in good and evil. He is a Catholic, a Protestant, or a
Plymouth Brother, in the same indefeasible sense that a man is not a
woman, or a woman not a man. For he could not vary from his faith,
unless he could eradicate all memory of the past, and, in a strict and
not a conventional meaning, change his mind.
THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
I was now drawing near to Cassagnas, a cluster of black roofs upon the
hillside, in this wild valley, among chestnut gardens, and looked upon in
the clear air by many rocky peaks.
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