In the Heart of a Fool

“And the fool said in his heart, there is no God!” And this fable teaches, if it teaches anything, that the fool was indeed a fool. Now do not think that his folly lay chiefly in glutting his life with drab material things, with wives and concubines, with worldly power and glory. That was but a small part of his folly. For that concerned himself. That turned upon his own little destiny. The vast folly of the fool came with his blindness. He could not see the beautiful miracle of progress that God has been working in this America of ours during these splendid fifty years that have closed a great epoch.

And what a miracle it was! Here lay a continent–rich, crass, material, beckoning humanity to fall down and worship the god of gross and palpable realities. And, on the other hand, here stood the American spirit–the eternal love of freedom, which had brought men across the seas, had bid them fight kings and principalities and powers, had forced them into the wilderness by the hundreds of thousands to make of it “the homestead of the free”; the spirit that had called them by the millions to wage a terrible civil war for a great ideal.

This spirit met the god of things as they are, and for a generation grappled in a mighty struggle.

And men said: The old America is dead; America is money mad; America is a charnel house of greed. Millions and millions of men from all over the earth came to her shores. And the world said: They have brought only their greed with them. And still the struggle went on. The continent was taken; man abolished the wilderness. A new civilization rose. And because it was strong, the world said it was not of the old America, but of a new, soft, wicked order, which wist not that God had departed from it.

Then the new epoch dawned; clear and strong came the call to Americans to go forth and fight in the Great War–not for themselves, not for their own glory, nor their own safety, but for the soul of the world. And the old spirit of America rose and responded. The long inward struggle, seen only by the wise, only by those who knew how God’s truth conquers in this earth, working beneath the surface, deep in the heart of things, the long inward struggle of the spirit of America for its own was won.

So it came to pass that the richness of the continent was poured out for an ideal, that the genius of those who had seemed to be serving only Mammon was devoted passionately to a principle, and that the blood of those who came in seeming greed to America was shed gloriously in the high emprise which called America to this new world crusade. Moses in the burning bush speaking with God, Saul on the road to Damascus, never came closer to the force outside ourselves which makes for righteousness,–the force that has guided humanity upward through the ages,–than America has come in this hour of her high resolve. And yet for fifty years she has come into this holy ground steadily, and unswervingly; indeed, for a hundred years, for three hundred years from Plymouth Rock to the red fields of France, America has come a long and perilous way–yet always sure, and never faltering.

To have lived in the generation now passing, to have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord in the hearts of the people, to have watched the steady triumph in our American life of the spirit of justice, of fellowship over the spirit of greed, to have seen the Holy Ghost rise in the life of a whole nation, was a blessed privilege. And if this tale has reflected from the shallow paper hearts of those phantoms flitting through its pages some glimpse of their joy in their pilgrimage, the story has played its part. If the fable of Grant Adams’s triumphant failure does not dramatize in some way the victory of the American spirit–the Puritan conscience–in our generation, then, alas, this parable has fallen short of its aim. But most of all, if the story has not shown how sad a thing it is to sit in the seat of the scornful, and to deny the reality of God’s purpose in this world, even though it is denied in pomp and power and pride, then indeed this narrative has failed. For in all this world one finds no other place so dreary and so desolate as it is in the heart of a fool.

THE END

notes

1

The reader may be interested in seeing one of Mary Adams’s clippings with a note attached. Here is one concerning Mrs. John Kollander. The clipping from the Harvey Tribune of June, 1871, reads:

“Mrs. Rhoda Byrd Kollander arrived to-day from Elyria, Ohio. It is her first visit to Harvey and she was greeted by her husband, Hon. John Kollander, Register of Deeds of Greeley County, with a handsome new home in Elm Street.”

Then under it is this note:

“Of all the women of the Elyria settlers, Rhoda Kollander would not come with us and face the hardships of pioneer life; but she made John come out, get an office and build her a cabin before she would come. Rhoda will not be happy as an angel unless they have rocking chairs in Heaven.”

2

Let us read Mary Adams’s clipping and note on the arrival of young Thomas Van Dorn in Harvey. The clipping which is from the local page of the paper reads:

“Thomas Van Dorn, son of the late General Nicholas Van Dorn of Schenectady, New York, has located in Harvey for the practice of law and his advertising card appears elsewhere. Mr. Van Dorn is a Yale man and a law graduate of that school as well as an alumnus of the college. As a youth with his father young Thomas stopped in Harvey the day the town was founded. He was a member of the hunting party organized by Wild Bill which under General Van Dorn’s patronage escorted the Russian Grand Duke Alexis over this part of the state after buffalo and wild game. Mr. Thomas Van Dorn remembers the visit well, and old settlers will recall the fact that Daniel Sands that day sold for $100 in gold to the General the plot now known as Van Dorn’s addition to Harvey. Mr. Thomas Van Dorn still has the deed to the plot and will soon put the lots on the market. He was a pleasant caller at the Tribune office this week. Come again, say we.”

And upon a paper whereon the clipping is pasted is this in Mary Adams’s hand:

“The famous Van Dorn baby! How the years have flown since the scandal of his mother’s elopement and his father’s duel with Sir Charles shook two continents. What an old rake the General was. And the boy’s mother after two other marriages and a sad period on the variety stage died alone in penury! And Amos says that the General was so insolent to his men in the war, that he dared not go into action with them for fear they would shoot him in the back. Yet the boy is as lovely and gentle a creature as one could ask to meet. This is as it should be.”