Whatever She Told Me
About Our Relations With The Supreme Being I Believed Implicitly, Just
As I Believed Everything Else
She told me, and as I believed that two
and two make four and that the world is round in
Spite of its flat
appearance; also that it is travelling through space and revolving
round the sun instead of standing still, with the sun going round it.
as one would imagine. But apart from the fact that the powers above
would save me in the end from extinction, which was a great
consolation, these teachings did not touch my heart as it was touched
and thrilled by something nearer, more intimate, in nature, not only
in moonlit trees or in a flower or serpent, but, in certain exquisite
moments and moods and in certain aspects of nature, in "every grass"
and in all things, animate and inanimate.
It is not my wish to create the impression that I am a peculiar person
in this matter; on the contrary, it is my belief that the animistic
instinct, if a mental faculty can be so called, exists and persists in
many persons, and that I differ from others only in looking steadily
at it and taking it for what it is, also in exhibiting it to the
reader naked and without a fig-leaf expressed, to use a Baconian
phrase. When the religious Cowper confesses in the opening lines of
his address to the famous Yardley oak, that the sense of awe and
reverence it inspired in him would have made him bow himself down and
worship it but for the happy fact that his mind was illumined with the
knowledge of the truth, he is but saying what many feel without in
most cases recognizing the emotion for what it is - the sense of the
supernatural in nature. And if they have grown up, as was the case
with Cowper, with the image of an implacable anthropomorphic deity in
their minds, a being who is ever jealously watching them to note which
way their wandering thoughts are tending, they rigorously repress the
instinctive feeling as a temptation of the evil one, or as a lawless
thought born of their own inherent sinfulness. Nevertheless it is not
uncommon to meet with instances of persons who appear able to
reconcile their faith in revealed religion with their animistic
emotion. I will give an instance. One of the most treasured memories
of an old lady friend of mine, recently deceased, was of her visits,
some sixty years or more ago, to a great country-house where she met
many of the distinguished people of that time, and of her host, who
was then old, the head of an ancient and distinguished family, and of
his reverential feeling for his trees. His greatest pleasure was to
sit out of doors of an evening in sight of the grand old trees in his
park, and before going in he would walk round to visit them, one by
one, and resting his hand on the bark he would whisper a goodnight.
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