Chapter IX: Part 9

A great man once said in his haste that no woman under thirty knew anything worth mentioning, her life being ruled by emotion, not intellect. The great man was then forty; at fifty he pushed the limit along ten years. At thirty feeling is apt to cool a little, and the woman has times when she really thinks. Between forty and fifty is her harvest-time, and if she ever realizes cosmic consciousness it is then.

Anne Hutchinson was rounding her fortieth milestone when she conceived a great and sublime truth. It took possession of her being and seemed to sway her entire life. This truth was called "Covenant of Grace." Its antithesis is "Covenant of Works."

All theological dogmas, at the base, have in them a germ of truth. The danger lies in making words concrete and building a structure upon grammar.

Covenant of Grace and Covenant of Works are both true, but the first is sublimely true, while the second is true relatively. Both phrases come from Saint Paul, who was the very prince of theological quibblers. Covenant of Grace means that if you have the grace of God in your heart, your life will justify itself; that is, if you are filled with the spirit of good, inspired by right intent, and possess a firm faith that you are the child of God, and God has actually entered into a covenant with you to bless, benefit and protect you here and hereafter. Also, that under these conditions you can really do no sin. You may make mistakes, but this divine covenant that is yours transforms even your lapses, blemishes, blunders, errors and sins into blessings, so that in the end only the good is yours.

When you have gotten your mind and soul into right relationship with God or the Divine Spirit, you do not have to seek, strive, struggle, or painstakingly select and decide as to your actions. God's spirit acting through you makes you immune from harm and wrong. Your mind being right, your actions must of necessity be right, because an act is but a thought in motion.

So, enter into the Covenant of Grace--make a bargain with God that you will keep your being free from wrong thought--lie low in His hand. Let His spirit play through you, relax, cease wrestling for a blessing, and realize that you already have it. Then for you all of the harassing details of life become simplified. What you shall say, what you shall do, how you shall dress, what the particular actions of the day shall be--all are as naught. Life becomes automatic, divinely so, and regulates itself if you but have the Covenant of Grace.

The opposite view is the Covenant of Works. That is, you make an agreement with God that you will obey His will; that you will control and guard your "work," or actions; that your conduct will be correct. Conduct then becomes the vital thing, not thought. By a "work" was meant a deed, and you got God's assurance in your heart of salvation through the propriety of your acts. Turner painted painstakingly before he acquired the broad and general sweep. Washington, Franklin and Lincoln, all in youth, compiled lists of good actions and bad ones.

People in this stage set down lists of things which they should not do, and also lists of things they should do. Young people usually make lists of things they want to do, but must not. This stage compares with the stage of realism in art. You must be realistic before you become impressionistic. They want God's favor, they wish Him to smile upon them, and so they are feverishly intent on doing only the things of which He approves. Likewise they are fearful of doing the things of which He disapproves.

Moses made a list of seven things the children of Israel must not do, and three things they must do; and these we call the Ten Commandments.

The question of Covenant of Grace or Covenant of Works is a very old one, and it is not settled yet. It goes forever with a certain type of mind. Our criminal laws punish for the act--magistrates consider the deed. And it is only a few years ago since a judge in America focused the world's attention upon himself by refusing to punish delinquent children brought before him for their deeds. He organized the Juvenile Court, the sole intent of which is not to punish for the act, but to go back of this and find out why this child committed the act, and then remove the cause. And in doing this Judge Lindsey had to become a lawbreaker himself, for he often violated his oath of office by refusing to enforce the law where a specific punishment was provided for a specific offense.

The entire and sole offense of Anne Hutchinson was her emphasis of a Covenant of Grace. She had first gotten the idea from the Reverend John Cotton; but it had enlarged in her mind until it took possession of her nature, perhaps to the exclusion of some other good things. All of her exhortations to the women on shipboard were: Don't be anxious; don't be fearful; don't worry about the cares of your household or the conduct of your husband or children. Don't be anxious about your own conduct. Just dedicate your lives to God, and in consideration of the dedication His grace or spirit will fill your hearts, so that all of your actions will be right and proper and without sin.

Of course, this plea was met with specific questions, such as, if works are immaterial and grace is all, then what shall I do in this case, also that and the other? And how about teaching the catechism and memorizing the Ten Commandments? Must not we say prayers, and attend divine worship, and pay tithes, and obey magistrates?

Little minds always find endless food for argument and disputation, right here. To leave the question to Nature and let actions adjust themselves, they will never do. They want direct orders covering all the exigencies of life. To meet this demand the Torah of the Jews was devised, telling how to kill chickens, how to remove the feathers, how to pass a stranger in an alley, how to cook, eat, pray, sleep, sing, and cut one's hair.

Thus we get such peculiar laws as that it is a sin for a Jew to make a fire at certain hours, to trim his beard, or for a Chinaman to clip his cue. All barbaric people devise codes covering the minutiae of conduct. With the Hopi Indians the maidens dress their hair in one way and the married women in another, and if a married woman clothes herself like a maiden, she is regarded as past redemption, and is killed. One of the Ten Commandments, that against making graven images, was founded on the fallacy that sculpture and idolatry were one and the same thing. The Puritans believed that the arts of sculpture and painting were both idolatrous. Some believed also that instrumental music was the work of the devil. While a few believed that wind-instruments, like the organ, were proper and right, yet stringed instruments were harmful and tended to lascivious pleasings. Now there are churches that use the pipe-organ, but allow the use of a piano only in the lecture-room, or guildhouse. The United Presbyterians disunited from the main body by abjuring all music but that of the human voice, and then they split as to the propriety of using a tuning-fork.

The Baptists have always played the organ, but the cornet as an instrument to be used in leading congregational singing has caused much dispute and contention. And while the cornet is allowed by many, the violin is still tabu absolutely in certain districts. All this is "Covenant of Works": be careful concerning what you do--have a sleepless and vigilant eye for conduct--look to your deeds!

Anne Hutchinson cut the Gordian knot of law at a stroke, by saying, "Get the grace of God in your hearts, and it is really no difference what you do, or do not do." Now this is a very old idea. The elect few who get their heads into a certain mental stratum have always come to a belief in the truth of the Covenant of Grace.

When Jesus plucked the ears of corn on the Sabbath day he violated Jewish law, and showed them then and at various other times that he had small respect for laws governing conduct.

Persons who take this view are regarded as anarchists. They are looked upon as enemies of the State; consequently they are dangerous persons, and must be gotten rid of. Their guilt is always founded on an inference: they do not believe in this, hence surely they are guilty of that.

During the Civil War it was assumed by a large contingent that if you believed in equal rights for the colored man you were desirous of having your daughter marry a "nigger."

Many good men assume that if you believe in giving the right of suffrage to women, you want your wife to run for the office of constable. There are those who assume that men who do not go to church play cards; those who play cards chew tobacco; those who chew tobacco drink whisky; those who drink whisky beat their wives; therefore all men should go to church.

All of Anne Hutchinson's troubles came from inferences; these inferences were the work of the clergy.

* * * * *

Those first Colonists lived practically communal lives, as pioneers usually do. In their labors they worked together and for one another. If a house was to be built, there was a "bee" and everybody got busy. When a shipload of emigrants arrived, the entire town welcomed them at the waterside. The Hutchinsons were especially welcome, coming as the near and dear personal friends of John Cotton. Mrs. Hutchinson and several of her children were housed with the Cotton family, until they could build a home of their own.

Mrs. Hutchinson was regarded as an especially valuable arrival, for she had rare skill in medicine and a devotion in nursing the sick that caused her to be looked upon with awe. With children she was especially fortunate. Hers was the healing touch, for she had the welling mother-heart, the heart of infinite love; and the cures she worked by simply holding the stricken child in her arms and breathing upon it were thought to be miraculous.

With pioneers, children are at a premium. Puritans regarded the death of a child as a visitation of the wrath of God; it filled the whole settlement with terror. So naturally, any one who could stay the hand of death was regarded as divinely endowed. Also, they were regarded by some with suspicion, for these people believed there were two sources of power, God and Satan.

Anne Hutchinson smiled at this, and told the people that sickness was a result of wrong living or accident, and was not a manifestation of the wrath of God at all, and the cure was simply worked by getting in harmony with the laws of Nature.

Here, unwittingly, Mrs. Hutchinson was treading on very thin theological ice. She was contradicting the clergy. She thought Nature and God were one--they knew otherwise. But her days were so filled with the care of the sick who besieged her house, that she was forced in self-protection to give the people strong meat.

There were times when the weather was bad, and the whole settlement would sink into melancholia. These people were on the bleak hillside, facing the sea. Back of them, hedging them close, was the forest, dim, dark and mysterious. In this wood were bears, wolves, panthers, which in Winter, lured by the smell of food, would occasionally enter the village to the great danger of life. At nightfall the settlers would go inside, bar the windows and doors, and look to their matchlocks, which in emergency might be needed.

Now and again came Indians, proud and painted, and paraded through the village threateningly, and innocently helped themselves to whatsoever they saw which they needed. Mrs. Hutchinson's power of healing had gone abroad among these red men, and now and again an Indian mother would stop at her door with a stricken papoose, and such were never turned away.

The houses were small, ill-ventilated, overcrowded, and the singing, praying and exhortation were not favorable to the welfare of the sick, nervous or tired. The long severe Winter was a cause of dread and apprehension. This was weather to which English people were not used, and they had not grown accustomed to battle with the snow and ice. Instead of facing it, they went into their houses to protect themselves against it. So there was much idle time, when only prayer and praise for a God of wrath filled the hours. Not a family was free from disease, not a house but that upon the doorposts were marks of blood.

The word "psychology" had never been heard by Mrs. Hutchinson, but the thing itself she knew. She sought to relieve the people of gloom, to stop introspection and self-analyzation. They quarreled, strife was imminent; and when, with the dread of Winter, came the added fear of a Pequot uprising, the whole place was treading the border-land of insanity. It is doubtful whether Anne Hutchinson knew that insanity was infectious, and that whole families, communities, can become possessed of hallucinations--that towns can go mad, and nations have a disease.

But this we know, she challenged the eight ministers who were there in the Colony by calling meetings of women only, and teaching a gospel which was at variance with what the eight learned men upheld. Her theme was the Covenant of Grace. Get His spirit in your hearts and you will not have to trouble about details. All your anxious care about your children, your fear of disease, and horror at thought of death, will disappear. This fear is what causes your sickness.

"You think some of your acts have been displeasing to God, and therefore you suffer; but I say, if you but have the Grace of God in your souls, and have transcendent minds, you can never displease Him."

It will be seen that this is the pure Emersonian faith which has not only been applied to life in general, but to the arts. Anne Hutchinson was the mother of New England Transcendentalism. Self-consciousness is fatal to the art of expression; he who fixes his thought on the movements of his hands and feet is sure to get tangled up in them; good digestion does not require the attention of the party most interested; and he who devotes all of the time to his spiritual estate will soon have the whole property in chancery. Man is not a finality-- he is not the thing--the play's the thing: life is the play and the play is life. Man is only one of the properties. Look out, not in; up, not down, and lend a hand. And these things form the modern application of the philosophy of Anne Hutchinson.

The ministers got together in secret session and decided that Anne Hutchinson must be subdued. She was a usurper upon their preserve, a trespasser and an interloper. Fear was the rock upon which they split. And I am not sure but that fear is the only rock in life's channel. Mrs. Hutchinson had told them that sermons, prayers and hymns were mere "works," and that a person could do all that they demanded and still be a thief and a rogue at heart, and that this close attention to conduct meant eventual hypocrisy. On the other hand, if your mental attitude was right, your conduct would be right.

"Even though it is wrong?" asked the Reverend Mr. Wilson.

And Anne Hutchinson replied, "Aye, verily."

"Then you say that you can commit no sin?"

"If my heart is right, I can not sin."

"Is your heart right?"

"I am trying to make it so."

"Then you can commit any act you wish?"

"Whatever I wish to do will be right, if my heart is right."

"But suppose, now--" and here these clergymen asked questions which no gentleman ever asks a lady.

These men had a fine faculty for misunderstanding, misinterpreting, and misrepresenting other people's thoughts.

John Cotton tried to pour oil on the troubled waters by explaining that the idea of a Covenant of Grace was general, and to make it specific was unjust and unreasonable. Then they turned on Cotton and said, "So, you are one of them?"

Anne Hutchinson was ordered not to speak in public.

She still held meetings at her own house, and claimed she had the right to ask her friends to her home and there to talk to them.

She it was who instituted the Boston Thursday Lecture, which was taken up by John Cotton and carried by an apostolic succession to the crowning days of its success, when Adirondack Murray reigned supreme. Mrs. Hutchinson spoke to all the women the house would hold. The Colony was divided into two parts: those who believed in a Covenant of Grace and those who held to a Covenant of Works.

John Cotton seemed to be the only clergyman of the eight who realized that both sides were right. Anne Hutchinson quoted him, told what he had said in England, as well as here--and then John Cotton had to defend himself. He did it by criticizing her, and then by accusing her of taking his words too literally. He feared the mob.

The breach widened--he denounced her. Winthrop was against her, and Cotton saw defeat for himself if he longer stood by her. She was a good woman, but she must be suppressed for the good of the Colony. With the consent of Cotton, and Wilson, his colleague, these two men, being joint ministers to the Boston church, made formal charges of heresy against her.

Sir Henry Vane, a youth of twenty-four, noble both by birth and by nature, was elected Governor of the Colony. He sided with Mrs. Hutchinson, and sought to bring commonsense to bear and stem the tide of fanaticism. They turned on him, and his downfall was identical with hers, although he was to return to England and make his own way to success: to love Peg Woffington and elbow his way to place and power, and also to London Tower, and lay his head upon the block in the interests of human rights.

Mrs. Hutchinson was tried by an ecclesiastic court and found guilty. In the trial, which covered several months, Mrs. Hutchinson defended herself at great length and with much skill; but what the clergymen demanded was an absolute retraction, and a promise that she would no longer usurp their special function of giving public instruction.

All this time the Colony was rent by schism. Up at Salem was a Baptist preacher by the name of Roger Williams, who was much in sympathy with Mrs. Hutchinson, personally, although not adopting all of her ideas. He thought that in view of the great usefulness of Mrs. Hutchinson as a nurse and neighbor, she should be allowed to speak when she chose and say what she wished, "because if it be a lie, it will die; and if it be truth, we ought to know it." Roger Williams would have done well to have kept a civil tongue in his head. There was a rod in pickle for him, too, and his words were duly noted and recorded by witnesses.

Then there was Mary Dyer, wife of William Dyer, who came to Boston in Sixteen Hundred Thirty-five, when the Hutchinson trouble was beginning to brew. Mary Dyer is described by John Winthrop as "a comely person of ready tongue, somewhat given to frivolity." But the years were to subdue her. She became much attached to Mrs. Hutchinson, and whenever Mrs. Hutchinson spoke in public Mrs. Dyer was always near at hand to lend her support. In the journal of Winthrop there are various references to Mrs. Dyer. The man was interested in her, but one of these references reflects most seriously on the mental processes of this excellent man. When the charges of heresy were brought against Mrs. Hutchinson, Mrs. Dyer stood by her boldly, and was threatened by the clergymen with similar proceedings. Winthrop says Mrs. Dyer was so wrought upon by the excitement that she was taken with premature childbirth. She was attended by Mrs. Hutchinson, and the child, "being not human," was despatched. This horrible story was related throughout the Colony, and both women were regarded as being in league with the devil. School-children used to run and hide when they saw Mrs. Dyer coming. A little later the Reverend Cotton Mather was to cite the case of Mary Dyer as precedent for his pet belief in witchcraft.

Mrs. Hutchinson was found guilty and expelled from the church. She was then again tried by the General Court, wherein all of her judges in the Ecclesiastic Court also sat. After a long, laborious and insulting trial, with no one but herself to raise a voice in her defense, pitted against the eight clergymen, she ably defended her cause and actually put them all to rout--an unforgivable thing, and an error in judgment on her part.

There is much literature surrounding the case, and one of the ministers, Thomas Welde, wrote a pamphlet explaining his part in it, quite forgetful of the fact that explanations never explain. The more one reads of Welde, the greater is his admiration for Mrs. Hutchinson. Governor Hutchinson of Massachusetts, the great-grandson of Anne Hutchinson, edited the journal of Winthrop, and gives a remarkably unprejudiced account of the sufferings of his great maternal ancestor.

Being banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Mrs. Hutchinson found refuge in Rhode Island, where she was welcomed by Roger Williams, the first person, I believe, who lifted up his voice for free speech in America. Mrs. Hutchinson was followed by her own family and eighteen persons from Boston who sympathized with her. Included in the party was Mary Dyer.

At Providence, Mrs. Hutchinson drew around her a goodly number of people, including Quakers and Baptists, who listened to her discourses with interest.

The ministers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony evidently felt that they had made a mistake, for they got together and delegated three of their number to go down to Providence and acquaint the renegades with the news that if they would recant all belief in a Covenant of Grace, they could return. Mrs. Hutchinson met the delegates with dignity and kindness. The conference lasted for two days, and the committee returned reporting the matter hopeless.

There were several desertions from Boston by those who sympathized with Mrs. Hutchinson, and some of those people Mrs. Hutchinson prevailed upon to go back. There were threats that the Massachusetts people were coming down to capture them all by force. This so preyed upon the Hutchinsons, who had suffered severely, that they packed their now scanty goods upon a raft, and with improvised sails headed for the Dutch settlement of Manhattan.

They were kindly received and given title to a tract of land on Long Island, near Hell Gate. There, in a little clearing, on the water's edge, they began to build a house. Ere the roof was on they were attacked by Indians, who evidently mistook them for Dutch, and all were massacred.

So died Anne Hutchinson.

* * * * *

Anne Hutchinson was mourned by Mary Dyer as a sister, and she preached a funeral sermon at Providence in eulogy of her. Mrs. Dyer also went back to Boston and made an address in praise of Anne Hutchinson on Boston Common, to the great scandal of the community. Mrs. Dyer had now become a Quaker, principally because Quakers had no paid priesthood and allowed women who heard the Voice to preach.

Mary Dyer heard the Voice and preached. Her attention was called to the law, which in Boston provided that Quakers and Jews should have their ears cut off and their tongues bored.

She continued to preach, and was banished.

She came back, and was found standing in front of the jail talking through the bars to two Quakers, Robinson and Stevenson, who were confined there awaiting sentence. She had brought them food, and was exhorting them to be of good-cheer. She was locked up, and asked to recant. She acknowledged she was a Quaker, and not in sympathy with magistracy.

She was sentenced by Governor Endicott, on her own confession, with having a contempt for authority, and ordered to be hanged. The day came and she was led forth, walking hand in hand with her two guilty Quaker brothers.

The scaffold was on Boston Common, on the little hill about where the band-stand is at the present day.

Mrs. Dyer stood and watched them hang her friends, one at a time. As they were swung off into space she called to them to hold fast to the truth, "for Christ is with us!" Whenever she spoke or sang, the drums that were standing in front and back of her were ordered to beat, so as to drown her voice.

After the bodies of her friends had dangled half an hour they were cut down.

It was then her turn. She ascended the scaffold, refusing the help of the Reverend Mr. Wilson. He followed her and bound his handkerchief over her eyes, a guard in the meantime tying her hands and feet with rawhide.

"Do you renounce the Quakers?" "Never, praise God, His son Jesus Christ, and Anne Hutchinson, His handmaiden--we live by truth!".

"A reprieve! a reprieve!!" some one shouted. And it was so--Governor Endicott had ordered that this woman be banished, not hanged, unless she again came back to Boston. It was all an arranged trick to frighten the woman thoroughly.

Wilson removed the handkerchief from her eyes. They unbound her feet, and the thongs that held her hands were loosed. She looked down below at the bodies of Robinson and Stevenson lying dead on the grass. She asked that the sentence upon her be carried out. But not so: she was led by guards fifteen miles out into the forest and there liberated.

In a few months she was back in Boston, to see her two grown-up sons, and also to bear witness to the "Inner Light."

Being brought before Governor Endicott, she was asked, "Are you the same Mary Dyer that was here before?"

"I am the same Mary Dyer."

"Do you know you are under sentence of death?"

"I do, and I came back to remind you of the unrighteousness of your laws, and to warn you to repent!"

"Are you still a Quaker?"

"I am still reproachfully so called."

"Tomorrow at nine o'clock I order that you shall be hanged."

"This sounds like something you said before!"

"Lead her away--away, I say!"

At nine the next morning a vast crowd covered the Common, the shops and stores being closed, by order, for a holiday.

Mr. Wilson again attended the culprit. "Mary Dyer, Mary Dyer!" he called in a loud voice as they stood together on the scaffold. "Mary Dyer, repent, oh, repent, and renounce your heresies!"

And Mary Dyer answered, "Nay, man; I am not now to repent, knowing nothing to repent of!"

"Shall I have the men of God pray for you?"

She looked about curiously, half-smiled, and said, "I see none here."

"Will you have the people pray for you?"

"Yes; I want all the people to pray for me!"

Again the light was shut out from her eyes, this time forever. Her hands were bound behind her with thongs that cut into her wrists, her feet were tied. She reeled, and the Reverend Mr. Wilson kindly supported her. The noose was adjusted.

"Let us all pray!" said the Reverend Mr. Wilson. So they hanged Mary Dyer in the morning.

JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU

When the service of the public ceases to be the principal concern of
the citizens, and they would rather discharge it by their purses
than their persons, the State is already far on the way to ruin.
When they should march to fight, they pay troops to fight for them
and stay at home; when they should go to council, they send deputies
and remain away; thus, in consequence of their indolence and wealth,
they in the end employ soldiers to enslave their country, and
representatives to sell it. So soon as a citizen says, What are
State Affairs to me? the State may be given up for lost.
--_Rousseau_

Who is the great man?

Listen, and I will tell you: He is great who feeds other minds. He is great who inspires others to think for themselves. He is great who tells you the things you already know, but which you did not know you knew until he told you. He is great who shocks you, irritates you, affronts you, so that you are jostled out of your wonted ways, pulled out of your mental ruts, lifted out of the mire of the commonplace.

That writer is great whom you alternately love and hate. That writer is great whom you can not forget.

Certainly, yes, the man in his private life may be proud, irritable, rude, crude, coarse, faulty, absurd, ignorant, immoral--grant it all, and yes be great. He is not great on account of these things, but in spite of them. The seeming inconsistencies and inequalities of his nature may contribute to his strength, as the mountains and valleys, the rocks and woods, make up the picturesqueness of the landscape.

He is great to whom writers, poets, painters, philosophers, preachers, and scientists go, each to fill his own little tin cup, dipper, calabash, vase, stein, pitcher, amphora, bucket, tub, barrel or cask. These men may hate him, refute him, despise him, reject him, insult him, as they probably will if they are much indebted to him; yet if he stirs the molecules in their minds to a point where they create caloric, he has benefited them and therefore he is a great man.

Jean Jacques Rousseau was a great man. We are still reading him--still talking about him--still trying to clap label upon him--still hunting for a pigeonhole in which to place him.

If a man were wholly crude, rude, ignorant and coarse, and if he did nothing but shock and irritate us, we would quickly cast him aside. But in addition to shocking us the great man fascinates us by his insight, his subtlety, his imagination, his sympathy, his tenderness, his love. Behind the act he sees the cause, and so he excuses and forgives. Knowing the present he is able to forecast the future, for he, of all men, knows that effect follows cause. He does what we dare not and says what we would like to if we had the mind. So in one sense the man is our vicarious self--"I am that man." His very faultiness brings him near. His blunders make him to us akin.

* * * * *

To answer the arguments of Jean Jacques by references to his private life were easy and obvious. He did not apologize for his life, and perhaps we would do well to follow his example.

The fact that with his own hands he carried five of his offspring to foundling asylums as they came into the world does not alter or change the fact that he was also the author of "Emile," in which book, let it be remembered, the idea of substituting natural for pedantic methods in the training and developing of the physical, mental and moral faculties of the growing child first found expression.

The book furnished Froebel with the fund of ideas for his experiments with children which resulted in the Kindergarten, an institution that has profoundly influenced the educational methods of every enlightened country in the world.

Without a doubt this man who abandoned his own children became one of the great instructors of the age.

But a fair understanding of the situation demands that we should realize that things for which we blame him most occured before he was thirty-eight years old. And the writings of his that really influenced humanity were not written until after he was thirty-eight. To confound the reasoning of the mature man, by pointing to what he did at twenty-two, is, I submit, irrelevant, immaterial, inconsequent, unrelated and uncalled for. When a critic has nothing to say of a man's work, but calls attention to the errors of the author's youth, he is running short of material.

That Rousseau revised his mode of living and reformed his reasoning in his later years, viewing his early life with bitter regret, should be put forward to his credit and not be used for his condemnation. The facts, however, are all that his harshest critics state. But fact and truth are often totally different things. Untruth enters when we reason wrongly from our facts.

We have been told by both the friends and the enemies of Rousseau that to him the French Revolution traces a direct lineage. For this his friends give him credit, and his enemies blame. The truth is, that revolutions are things that require long time and many factors to evolve. A revolution is the culmination of a long train of evils. Rousseau saw the evils and called attention to them, but he did not exactly cause them--bless me! His little love-affairs with elderly ladies, and grateful, should not be confused with the atrocious cruelties and inhumanities that existed in France and had existed for a hundred years and more.

A wise man of the East was once eating his dinner of dried figs, and at the same time explaining to an admiring group the beauty and healthfulness of a purely vegetable diet.

"Look at your figs through this," said a scientist present, handing the man a microscope. The pundit looked and saw his precious figs were covered with crawling microbes.

He handed the microscope back and said, "Friend, keep your glass--the bugs no longer exist."

Jean Jacques handed the peasantry of France a reading-glass; Voltaire did as much for the nobility.

* * * * *

Jean Jacques Rousseau was born in Switzerland, which land, as all folks know, has produced her full quota and more of reformers. The father of Jean Jacques, quite naturally, was a watchmaker, with mainspring ill-adjusted and dial askew, according to the report of the son, who claimed to be full-jeweled, but was not perfectly adjusted to position and temperature. Jean Jacques tells us that his first misfortune was his birth, and this cost his mother her life. He was adopted by Time and Chance and fed by Fate. When the lad was ten the father fled from Geneva to escape the penalty of a foolish brawl, and never again saw the son who was to rescue the family-name from oblivion.

Kinsmen of the mother gave the boy into the hands of a retired clergyman who levied polite blackmail on his former constituents by asking them to place children, their own and others, in his hands that they might be taught the way of life--and that the clergyman might live, which, according to Whistlerian philosophy, was unnecessary.

That the boy was clever, shrewd, quick to learn, secretive as castaway children ever are, can well be understood. He became a secretary, an engineer, a valet, a waiter, working life's gamut backward, thus proving that in human service there is no high nor low degree, only this: he, at this time, knew nothing about human service--he was fighting for existence.

Knowledge comes through desire, but where desire comes from no man can say. It surely is not a matter of will.

Jean Jacques had a hunger for knowledge, and this, some wise men say, is the precious legacy of mother to son. He wanted to know!

And it was this desire that shaped his career.

He asked questions of priests all day long, because he was filled with the fallacy that priests knew the secrets of the unknowable and were on friendly terms with God.

To escape importunity a priest sent him to Madame De Warens. Now Madame was a widow, rich and volatile, filled with a holy religious zeal. Where religion begins and sex ends no man can say--the books are silent and revelation is dumb. Indeed, there be those who are so bold as to say that art, love and religion are one.

Leaving this to the specialists, let us simply say that the love of learning landed Jean Jacques, aged seventeen, poetic and philosophic vagabond, into the precious care of Madame De Warens, who kept a religious retreat for novitiates intent on the ideal life.

The religion of Mohammed made converts in numbers like unto the sands of the desert, because they were promised a Paradise peopled by dark- eyed houris. Orthodoxy got its hold by a promise of rest, idleness and freedom from responsibility. The heaven into which Jean Jacques slipped was a combination of all that Allah, Gabriel and the seductive dreams of Moody, Sankey and such could provide. Science founded on truth can never be popular until mankind further evolves, since it offers nothing better than toil and difficulty, and after each achievement increased work as a reward for work. This condition stands no show when compared with a heaven that gives harps that never require tuning, robes that need not be laundered, and mansions that demand no plumbing.

Jean Jacques lived an ideal existence; he was the guest, pupil, servant and lover of the Religious Lady who kept the Religious Retreat. Also, he was immune from responsibility. But Paradise has one serious objection--the serpent. This time the serpent was jealousy. Whenever the Religious Lady had guests of quality, the snake sank its fangs deep into the quivering flesh of her valet-lover. Thus does the Law of Compensation never rest.

"What is your favorite book?" asked Ralph Waldo Emerson of George Eliot.

And the answer was, "Rousseau's 'Confessions.'"

And Emerson's counter-confession was, "So is it mine."

Elizabeth Barrett Browning nibbled at the same cheese. But the belief now is that Rousseau's "Confessions" is largely constructive truth, as differentiated from fact, and constructive truth is the thing which might have happened, but did not. Rousseau's "Confessions" is a psychological study of hopes, desires, aspirations and hesitations, flavored with regrets. All literature is confession--vicarious confession. The gentle reader has the joy of doing the thing, and escaping the penalty.

* * * * *

Rousseu's first literary effort to attract attention was written in his thirty-ninth year. It was merely an exercise penned with intent to show that so-called civilization had really polluted mankind and done more harm than good.

The essay was a subtle indictment of the times, with the French Government in mind, all from the standpoint of a Swiss. And it convinced at least one man--the author--of the truth of its allegations.

At this time there were in France more than a hundred offenses punishable with death. In the coronation oath of the King was a clause promising that he would exterminate all heretics. Just how this was to be done, the King left to experts. The "lettre de cachet," or secret arrest, was in full swing and very popular among princes and church officials high in authority. Any suspected man could be removed from family and friends as though the earth had swallowed him. He went out to drive, or to walk, or to work, and was seen no more. Search was vain and inquiry useless--aye, worse, it might involve the inquirer. The writ of habeas corpus was as yet a barren hypothesis.

Common people had no rights: they were merely granted privileges, one of which was the privilege to live until the order went out that the man should die.

Confessions were wrung from men and women by the use of the rack, twistings, blows, indignities, an exact description of which could not be printed. These details were left to priests, sanctimonious men who did their work with pious zeal and therefore were not accountable. Church and State were wedded. To doubt Scripture was to be in league against the State. Heresy and treason were one. To laugh at a priest might be death. To fail to attend mass and pay was to run a risk.

Lords and bishops held vast estates and paid no taxes. Grain was not allowed to flow from parish to parish, but was held in check by prohibitive tariffs. The King, himself, speculated in breadstuffs and banked on famine, for royalty was exempt from all tariff law. Thus was food made a monopoly. To petition was construed as an insult to the crown and was treated accordingly.

Most estates held serfs who were not allowed to leave the premises of their lord on penalty of death--they belonged to the land.

Officers in the army had the right to beat their soldiers, and if the soldier raised a hand to protect himself, he could be legally killed.

All skilled labor was in the hands of the guilds. These guilds got their charters from the crown. They fixed prices, regulated the number of apprentices, and decided who should work and who should not. To work at an art without a license from the guild was punishable by fine and imprisonment; to repeat the offense was death. Citizens could neither sell their labor nor buy the labor of their neighbors or families, without permission. The guild was master, and the guild got its authority by dividing profits with a corrupt court. Thus a few laborers received very high wages, but for the many there was no work. The guild made common cause with the priest and the peer. The collection of taxes was farmed out to the "farmers-general," who kept half they got. When the yearly contract was signed, the Secretary of State was given a present called "The Bottle of Wine," by the successful bidders. This present was in cash and varied anywhere from fifty to a hundred thousand francs. Where the custom began, no one knew; but it ended with Turgot, who turned in to the government treasury a perquisite that had been made him of seventy thousand francs, and issued an order that no official should accept a present of money from a government contractor.

Needless to say, Turgot was regarded as an unsafe person, and his official career was cut short.

Thomas E. Watson, in his most interesting book, "The Story of France," says:

The Catholic church was a huge religious monopoly. Its hierarchy was
entrenched in a power before which the king himself was a secondary
potentate. Then followed those consequences which have always
followed when too much power is granted to any set of men. The
Catholic church absorbed much of the wealth of the land. The higher
priesthood became an aristocracy, imitating in every respect the
feudal aristocracy, which was rich, idle and licentious. Just as the
State regarded the subject from the standpoint of taxpayer only;
just as the State imposed upon the common people all the burdens of
government while denying them the benefits; so the nobility of the
Catholic church lived sumptuously, lazily, licentiously--shirking
their duties, forgetting the responsibilities of their sacred
calling, neglecting the flock committed to their care, allowing
ignorance and superstition to take full possession of the minds of
the common people.

In the records of the human race there can be found no evidence more damming to absolutism and the union of Church and State than is to be found in the degraded, besotted condition of the common people of France immediately proceeding the French Revolution.

All France was orthodox. The masses believed. With boundless credulity they knelt at the foot of the priest.

Yet what had the priest done for them? Had he introduced books among them? No. Liberal ideas? No. Schools? No. Information upon such matters as concerned their material welfare? No. Had the Church ever pleaded the peasant's case at the bar of public opinion? No. Ever besought the king to lighten the weight of his heavy hand? No. Ever protested against feudal wrongs? No. Ever shown the least desire that the condition of the masses should be improved? No.

Royalist writers dwell scornfully upon the ignorance, brutality and prejudice of the lower orders in France at the time of the Revolution --let them write ever so scornfully, the lower they degrade the peasant, the higher mounts the evidence and the indignation against those who had been his keepers!

This government of France had been absolute. The State and the Church, the king and the priest, had had entire control. The people had no voice, no vote, no power. They had never been consulted. The entire responsibility had been assumed by the monarch and his privileged few --and here was the result. Theirs was the tree, theirs the fruit. "Whatsoever a man sow, that also shall he reap"; and the crimes, the ignorance, the brutality, the poverty, the misery of the masses of the French people in Seventeen Hundred Eighty-nine, stands as a permanent judgment of condemnation against the ruling classes, who were responsible for the material, mental and spiritual condition of a people who had so long been under their absolute control.

* * * * *

Rousseau, the subtly silent, the handsome, the bewitchingly melancholic, lived his subterranean life until he was forty-two. Then he was dogged out of Paris by the police, and soon after appeared in his native Geneva after an absence of twenty-five years. He was accompanied by his wife Therese, her mother, and his dog Duke.

This mating between Jean Jacques and Therese was a happy one. She could neither read nor write, nor did she care to. Yet she had an idolatrous regard for her liege, and every evening he read aloud to her and to his mother-in-law what he had written during the day. At every pause in the reading, the old lady, without understanding a word of it, would interject, "This is very fine!" And Therese would skilfully transform a yawn into a sigh of delight, roll her eyes in a transport of joy, and say nothing.

This was just what was required, and all that was required, save a chronic quarrel with influential friends, to keep Rousseau in good literary fighting form.

"A wife who is in competition with her husband, or who has just enough mind to detect his faults, is the extinguisher of genius," said Goethe, who lived up to his blue china and referred to his wife as a convenient loaf of brown bread, which he declared was much more nourishing than cake, having tried both.

Just outside Geneva, at Les Delices, Voltaire had built his private theater, where he used to invite the favored children of Calvin to witness the drama. Voltaire being a playwright and without prejudice in the matter, had even suggested a municipal theater for Geneva. This brought forth from Jean Jacques a scorching pamphlet on the seductive deviltry of the drama, wherein it was pointed out that the downfall of every nation that had gone by the boards had begun its slide to Avernus in its love of the play. In this essay Rousseau expressed the view of orthodox Geneva, where the traditions of Calvin still survived. "The theater stands for luxury, idleness, sensuality and all that is feverish and base; private theaters are private bagnios," wrote Rousseau. Probably Rousseau, when he began to write, did not care anything about the matter one way or the other. But Voltaire had neglected to invite him to a "first night," and now he was getting even. As he wrote he convinced himself.

"He is like an oven that is too hot," said Voltaire; "it burns everything that is put into it." Then when Voltaire found that Rousseau's pamphlet was really making a splash in the sea of books, he got mad and called Rousseau a "dog of Diogenes," "that Punchinello of letters," the "fanfaron of ink," and other choice epithets.

Every knock being a boost, then as now, Rousseau found himself lifted into the domain of successful authorship. His income was less than a hundred pounds a year (Voltaire's was two or three thousand pounds). but he had all he needed, and things were coming his way.

Voltaire represented the nobility--Rousseau stood for the people. And Geneva being but a big village--twenty-four thousand inhabitants--the battle of the giants was watched by the neighbors with interest.

Rousseau was a member of the Protestant Church; Voltaire called himself a Catholic--so little do labels count.

Voltaire lived in a palace and rode in a coach with outriders; Rousseau trudged on foot alone. Solitary, he would take his piece of dry bread and grape-leaf full of cherries, and wander to the woods or on the mountain-side, stopping and sitting on a boulder to write on his ever-faithful pad when the thought came. "I have to walk ten miles to get a thousand words," he said.

In Geneva at this time lived Diderot and D'Alembert, literary refugees, busy at that first encyclopedia. They ran a kind of literary clearing-house, and gave piecework to everybody who could write and had two ideas to jingle against each other. Both Rousseau and Voltaire, whenever they were in the mood, wrote for the encyclopedia. Finally Voltaire started a dictionary of his own.

Geneva at this time must have been a very attractive place in which to live. There were men there who wrote like geniuses and quarreled like children. Father Taylor said that if Emerson were sent to hell, he would start emigration in that direction. The refugees from France made Geneva popular, and all the bickering added spice to existence and made exile tolerable.

Rousseau persistently flocked alone and made much dole because his friends forsook him. Then when they went to see him he complained because they would not leave him alone. Diderot accused him of insincerity because he changed the name of his dog from "Duke" to "Turk," for fear of offending Madame d'Epinay, who gave him a cottage rent-free. "He is a dwarf, mounted on stilts," said Baron Grimm.

And all the time Jean Jacques wandered on the mountain-side, ate his brown bread and cherries, talked to himself and wrote, and got back home in the twilight to present the day's catch of ideas to Therese and the fat mother-in-law, who at the right time always said, "This is very fine!" And Rousseau, full-jeweled, but unreliable as a horologe, loved them both, second only to his dog, Turk, who lay at his feet and occasionally pounded his tail on the floor to prove that he was still awake and that the sentiments were his, and that he agreed with the old lady--"This is very fine!" The quarrels of Jean Jacques with all three were only a quarrel with himself.

* * * * *

Having entertained Voltaire for a year, Frederick the Great shot this winged arrow, "If I had a province to punish, I would give it to a philosopher to govern."

Rousseau is flowery and often over-sentimental. But it can be assumed that he himself always knew what he meant. Yet he has given rise to much loose thinking. His references to the "Book of Nature," for instance, were worked overtime by zealous converts. It will be recalled how Chief Justice Marshall paralyzed a poetic attorney in mid-flight, who referred to the "Book of Nature," by looking over his glasses and saying, "One moment, please, while I take down the page and paragraph of that passage in the volume to which counsel has just kindly referred us."

It is the penalty of all original thinking that it inspires fools to unseemliness as well as wise men to action.

Napoleon Bonaparte said, "Had there been no Rousseau, there would have been no Revolution."

And George Sand said, "To blame the 'Social Contract' for the Revolution is like blaming the Gospels for the massacre of Saint Bartholomew."

George Sand is literary, but wrong, since Marat, Mirabeau, Robespierre, got their arguments directly from Rousseau, and no one I have ever heard made an appeal to Scripture as a defense for murdering thirty thousand men, women and children. Mirabeau quotes this from Rousseau in self-defense: "No true believer can be a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law inflicted death on an atheist, I should begin to put it into execution by burning the first man who should accuse or persecute another."

Jefferson and Franklin both read the "Social Contract" in the original French, and quoted from it in giving reasons why it was not only right, but the duty, of the Colonies to separate from Great Britain. Rousseau fired the heart and inspired the brain of Thomas Paine to write the pamphlet, "Common-sense," which, more than any other one influence, brought about the American Revolution.