A
Parable of Spring
Once upon a time there was an enchanted forest. It had been stripped of all verdure, it was wild and
forbidding. The trees, tossed by the bitter winter wind that never ceased,
struck one another with a sound as of breaking swords. When at last, after a
long series of freezing nights and sunless days that seemed like nights, all
living things trembled with the first call of spring, the trees became afraid
of the sap that began to move within them. And the solitary and bitter spirit
that had its dwelling within the hard bark of each of them said very low, with
a shudder that came up from the deepest roots: "Have a care! If thou art
the first to risk yielding to the wooing of the new season, if thou art the
first to turn thy lance-like buds into blossoms and leaves, their delicate
raiment will be torn by the rough blows of the trees that have been slower to
put forth leaves and flowers."
And the proud and melancholy spirit
that was shut up within the great Druidical oak spoke to its tree with peculiar
insistence: "And wilt thou, too, seek to join the universal love-feast,
thou whose noble branches have been broken by the storm?"
Thus, in the enchanted forest, mutual
distrust drove back the sap, and pro- longed the death-like winter even after
the call of spring.
What happened at last? By what
mysterious influence was the grim charm broken? Did some tree find the courage
to act alone, like those April poplars that break into a shower of verdure, and
give from afar the signal for a renewal of all life? Or did a warmer and more
life- giving beam start the sap moving in all the trees at once? For lo! in a
single day the whole forest burst forth into a magnificent flowering of joy and
peace.
— Jean
Léon Jaurès (1859-1914)
New Arts and
Lost Instincts
The civilized man has built a coach,
but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so
much support of muscle. He has got a fine Geneva watch, but he has lost the
skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so
being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not
know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows
as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his
mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the
insurance office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question
whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some
energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms some vigor of
wild virtue.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Freedom in Religion
In religion, more than in politics, I seek for freedom. The State may,
with more reason, demand conformity. It cannot exist without a certain amount
of conformity. And the requisition presses mostly, too, upon the outward life.
I might live, all my life, under a
despotism, and never, perhaps, be
obliged to say, that I believed what I did
not believe; or to lose my life, or property, or reputation, if I did
not. But religion is a thought, a feeling, a communion with the Infinite, a
stretching onward to immortality; and nothing is so painful to it as any fetter or chain. To have pontiff, or prelate, or presbytery, or creed,
stand before me and say — "thus far;
no farther, at your peril!" — I could bear any thing better than
that. And I had rather take the worst possible church organization with
freedom, than the best possible — if such a thing could be — without it.
— Orville Dewey (died March 21, 1882)
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