Section 21

With men of the two other orders of the Rosicrucians, the Alchemists and the Immortals, I possess large ac- quaintance. The first are the money-changers; among 0 1 8* 209
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these being at the lowest point of the scale the venial politician, and at the other the sturdy farmer who sees in his waving corn never anything but the price of its grains. The immortals find free representation among the professionals. Medicine holds a multi- tude; workers with crucibles and alembics not yet ar- rived at inductions led to by the hypostases.
The way from mine to the Illuminate's house is down a short and well-kept lane, the entrances of the two places so almost directly facing that in the fall and winter when the leaves are fallen it is no difficult matter to signal across the intervening distance invita- tion for a stroll, an invitation which, whether of the winter or the summer time, is commonly sure of a mutually acceptable response.
Considering my friend, I find familiar definition for an Illuminate in "^ man who lives in the light of Apprehension^ He is in every way above a wheaten loaf, although, by reason of having begun life as a member of the alchemical class and continued it for many years as an immortal, some wealth, which is the common meaning of these two manners of living, has been brought out of the former condition.
In town the coat worn was of broadcloth; it was necessary to consider, in the wearing, storm and dust. "Toggery" is his word for the kind of dress in which he now goes about. Memory contrasts, much to a present credit, the broadcloth and the toggery. Here is never hesitation in pushing through a mass of bram- bles or fording the creek. Here is never a day that has too much of rain or too much of snow in it ; dust is matter of microscopical interest.
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My friend is a man holding so much in himself that without difficulty I find in him almost anything of which I stand in need : equally well does he fix a worn water-spigot or turn a telescope on Mars. Only the day before yesterday, walking with him through a strip of wood that borders one side of the village, mj sur- gery might have been supplied for a full week at the simple cost of stooping. — Alas ! so much that is see- able remaining unseen ! One of my unspoken names for my friend is " Emmetrope," — this in the sense that he sees so large meaning in things showing nothing to eyes in general. A leaf plucked from any of the many bushes of his garden he opens and turns to the extent of a volume. — *' So much at hand," says my friend to me without opening his lips. ** So little at hand," repeat I, when in the garden ; I telling I what a different thing a garden is to him who knows botany and to him who does not know it.
To-day, just returned from a trip to a distant part of the country, I am invited, in a call on my friend, to a seat in '^ Boffin's bower." This bower is home-made, consisting of four unpainted posts supporting a grape- vine designed to shade a rustic seat, and as well an aquarium about two feet by four constructed out of bricks and cement upon the ground. Boffin's bower is my friend's pulpit. To-day his text was the aphis. *' To tell a gardener," said he, "that the devil goeth about like an eating aphis, is to get an idea into his head possessed of a much more practical significance than that which he would obtain from being told that the devil goeth about like a roaring lion." The text is a sermon in itself. Lions in the localities of the gardens
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are neither of trouble nor inconvenience, met with, as they are, only behind the bars of a menagerie-cage. An aphis, on the contrary, is one of millions. The growth of a summer is destroyed by him in the hours of a day. Watch and pray, the latter word meaning work, is the necessity when he is about. "Apropos," said my friend, "the cats have got at my frogs." (The tank is the home of his batrachians.) The inci- dent aroused thoughts on the part of both of us as to the seeming mercilessness of Providence. " Seeming is the word," said my friend j "this not being the case, God would be devil. My happy frogs, whose croaks are music, singing me nightly to sleep, are left without protection either as to wit or eyes as defence is against cats." "And the cats," I suggested, " are without the shadow of a chance against the shot-gun of a boy." "True, true," was the rejoinder; *'and the boy has no better show, outside the doctor, against diphtheria or scarlet fever than the cats have against his gun." " Your faith is not extensive,' ' I queried, " as to a special Providence always about with open eyes and ears?" "Granted," he said, "as to the open eyes and ears; the heart is of stone." "Meaning by this," I pro- posed, "that little attention is given to what is seen or heard ?" " Meaning," he replied, " that to talk of special Providence as special Providence is commonly understood in the way of enjoining dependence on it is not a whit more sensible than entreating a cat to show mercy to a bull-frog." " It would be better," I suggested, " to teach the frog, if that be possible, to sun himself mid-stream on a log, out of understanding that a cat would not wet its paws to get at him ?" " It
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would be best," he replied, "if it were not for the big bird overhead, watching its chance for a supper." "The frog might stay at the bottom of his ditch," I suggested. "If it were not," he rejoined, "for the eel concealed in the mud."
"Is it not unaccountable," continued my friend, " that a doctrine like this of special Providence, which is so exactly the opposite of fact as it exists, and as well so contrary to the dignity and good of man, can continue in the face of the God's practical denial of it on every side?"
"I am reminded," I replied, " of an incident occur- ring long ago, where I let a house and garden to an im- poverished preacher with view to helping him along by boarding out the rent. It happened that I had bough*- the garden of a millionaire bank president, who him- self, using wheelbarrow and spade, had produced such richness that slightest tillage of the ground met with response not unjustly to be likened to the famous draught of fishes where a net was put down at the right time and place. Before the tenant came I had ploughed and planted the garden, and it was turned over to him with the single requirement existing of keeping down weeds. That season my garden was a dead failure. Crisp radishes, always before so plentiful, were not found on the morning plates. There were no refreshing salads for dinner. Berries were wanting as absolutely as if the vines had taken up root and de- camped. Even the tomato, that most persistent and overwhelming of vegetables, showed but an infrequent specimen. In short, there was nothing, — nothing but weeds. My tenant would not hoe, but he made up for
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the shortcoming by invocations and supplications to Providence, with which he favored the sitters about the table. Words were his antitheses to weeds.
" One day, utterly weary of the man's shiftlessness, I asked if the intention of the prayers was to wheedle the God into going to the barn for the hoe, as with lack of use of that instrument lay our default as to the things prayed for. The reply was a look absolutely vacant as to understanding. Not discouraged, I went on to say that as the garden had given overflowingly to the bank president, who, so far as I knew, never prayed, and the same to me, whose prayers were prayers in the sense alone of thank-offerings for the abundant bless- ings found at command of a hoe, a conclusion forced itself that the God was against him.
** The preacher awakened to the situation. * Against me, his servant ?' he asked, with the largest of interro- gation-marks.
"* Against something, certainly,' I replied, * since whereas formerly there were plenty of vegetables there are now none.'
'* The word was taken up by a farmer who happened to be a diner at the table that day, and whose opinion of the preacher's educated sense was not exalted. * You don't have,' he said, * if you don't hoe: the something is with the hoe, I guess.'
" * Do you mean,' asked the preacher, * to imply that asking God for blessings is unprofitable ?'
"*Not exactly that,' responded the farmer; *but my own prayers I keep for night, not wasting time on getting out of bed in the morning, having found out long ago that half an hour with a hoe while the dew is
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on the ground is quite equal to a couple of hours after the sun is up.'
*'*And you trust in the arm of flesh?' asked the preacher.
** * In that and the hoe,' said the farmer, * for I find that if I don't get up and go at it no weeding gets done. I find, too, something else,' he said, *and here my prayers come in. A radish-seed and a trifle of ground properly put together bring a radish. The thing is the same as to everything about my farm. Nothing lacks or lags. The matter seems to be for each thing to do its part : the seed to do its part, the ground to do its part, rain to do its part, sun to do its part, me to do my part. Seeing this as I am about the fields all day, I am so overwhelmed by the expressions of the good- ness and presence of Providence that by the time night comes I have got beyond words. What ! expect seed and ground and rain and sun to do their part, and I loaf. No, no ! I don't come to that.'
*' * What do you mean by loafing?' asked the preacher, with an expression that implied dissatisfaction with the drift of the talk.
'* * To speak plainly and not mince the thing,* said the farmer, ' I mean praying over short commons.'
** The preacher was indignant, and expressed the indignation by rolling his eyes upward. What he said was, * He letteth the tares grow up with the wheat.'
" * He does, indeed,' said the farmer j * but for my- self, I don't save up for him the trouble of separating the two at harvest-time.'
** *Be careful,' said the preacher, ' that you are not saving up damnation for the harvest-time.'
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" * What !* replied the farmer, his face flushed with disgust or anger, as the case may have been, * damna- tion for understanding and obeying God as to his laws? damnation for not whining like a boy instead of work- ing like a man ? damnation for not begging when plenty needs alone the reaching out of a hand ? All right; let me be d ' "
There was just here quick interruption of the recital, as I was giving it to my Rosicrucian friend, by a woman who came rushing into the bower begging the doctor for God's sake to come quick to her child, who had eaten belladonna berries.
" Go back home, good woman," said the doctor in the quietest tone of voice, " and mix up and give your child a teaspoonful of mustard in a goblet of warm water. I will follow in good time."
"But, doctor, doctor!" cried the woman, "for God's sake, the child is poisoned !"
" I will come right away," said my friend.
Walking towards the woman's house, the doctor said to me, " The God hears, and comes right away."
"The woman would not understand this last," I hinted.
" In turn," said my friend, " we are not, as doctors, mindful of it as it becomes our office to be. What is a doctor but an almoner of the God ? being the mercy of the God as he represents this mercy. The lauda- num here carried is the certain salvation of the poi- soned child."
"True," I said, "the doctor is here instrument of response by reason of a medicine furnished him by Providence."
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"Understanding of the medicine, to intervene,** suggested ray friend, ** that the antidote shall not prove worse than the poison."
** No doctor being at hand," I replied, *' or a doctor not knowing to the degree of antidotal significance between laudanum and belladonna, occasion would quickly exist in the present instance to arraign Provi- dence as to a dispensation beyond finding out."
"The mother consoled on the funereal occasion," suggested my friend, " with the significance of a special mercy which Providence has gone out of his way to confer on her in taking the child up into heaven as in- ducement for her to follow."
"The whole thing lying with belladonna berries or too much laudanum?" I queried.
" With what else?" asked the doctor.
" How perfect the law !" I acquiesced. " Providence never deaf but as a human ear refuses to hear, but as a hand refuses to stretch itself out, or as looking into things and finding out about them are denied their meaning."
"Ears," soliloquized my friend, taking up uncon- sciously my thought, " that have come to understand- ing of the language of entreaty, and hands that know how to do what is required to be done."
"This, necessarily," I responded. "The child is to be restored to the mother's arms by reason of the God's prescience that provided against such emergen- cies before child or mother was born."
" Exactly," said the doctor : " the belladonna bush on one side of a piece of ground, and the opium plant on the other."
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** To-night," I said, " as the mother cuddles the child safely to her breast her voice will go out in reverent prayer to the God for the preservation of her babe : there will be no thought of the doctor."
"And why should there be thought of the doctor?*' asked he. **Is the doctor anything but a carrier? Did a doctor create the opium plant ? Does a doctor knit the broken limb whose fragments he lays in appo- sition ? The mother has her child by reason of the opium plant. Her reverence should indeed go out to him who put the virtue of a present salvation in the plant."
**The unthinking," I suggested, "would not un- likely fault the existence of belladonna."
"Unthinking indeed," responded the doctor, "for had the poisoning here been of opium it would have required the belladonna to antagonize it."
" Truly great and wonderful are the works of God," I quoted.
"So great and wonderful," responded my friend, "that induction demonstrates the absence of a single weak or imperfect factor in the whole of the Universal."
"But the way to salvation," I suggested, "is after its manner as the way to getting belladonna berries out of a stomach is after its manner."
"For ourselves," said the Rosicrucian, "we have no occasion to consider either."
The short distance between the bower and the woman's house had been passed over during the few moments of conversation. The door stood open, and we entered. **The God is within," said the doctor, as the door closed.
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A very little while sufficed for the administration of the antidote. **Out of ignorance of law," continued the doctor, as coming out of the house he walked part way home with me, **the gracious God gets credited with the maiignancy of Satan. You are right as to the unthinking. Had a funeral occurred by reason of our mutual absence from home, the sermon would have had as its text * The ways of Providence are beyond finding ouii whereas the mysterious way was nothing more than a stomach that needed to be relieved of a few bella- donna berries."
** *Lead us not into temptation,' " I suggested, *'is akin with the belladonna and opium. I should as soon think of the God scattering about the poisons bella- donna and opium with view to trapping children and unwary adults, as associate with his unspeakable gran- deur and mercy idea of a leader into temptation."
"The thing," said the doctor, '* savors too much of the absurd to command attention. There is igno- rance as to translation of a passage, or there was an ear that did not hear very well."
" Change of a few letters in the light of the hypos- taseSy^ I said, '*is found to afford absolute correction: ■ — leave, instead of lead ; leave us not in temptation. Temptation is of matter, Salvation is of Soul. Such lesson cannot be too frequently scanned. Turning toward or turning from, is being led into temptation or being not left in temptation ; the difference is great. Self is holder of an only ear that replies to prayer to be helped in temptation as in other trouble, self as to the individual or as to a fellow individual. Providence is stone-deaf taken out of his manner. This manner is