The First Trail
MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS

The First Trail
MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS

To-night I am in a little cabin in the heart of a great wilderness. Outside it is dark. I can hear the wind sighing in the thick spruce tops. I hear the laughter of a stream out of which I took my supper of trout. The People of the Night are awake, for a little while ago I heard a wolf howl, and, not far away, in an old stub, lives an owl that hoots at the light in my window. I think it’s going to storm. There is a heaviness in the air, and, in the drowse of it, the sweetness of distant rain.

I am strangely contented as I start the writing of this strangest of all the things I have written. I had never thought to give voice to the things that I am about to put on paper; yet have I dreamed that every soul in the world might know of them. But the task has seemed too great for me, and I have kept them within myself, expecting them to live and die there.

I am contented on this black night, with its promise of storm, for many reasons—though I am in the heart of a peopleless forest fifteen hundred miles from my city home. In the first place, I have built, with my own hands, this cabin that shelters me. My palms are still blistered by the helve of the ax. I am the architect of the fireplace of stone and mud in which a small fire burns for cheer, though it is late spring, with summer in the breath of the forests. I have made the chair in which I sit and the table on which I write, and the builder of a marble palace could take no greater pleasure in his achievement than have I.

I am contented because, just now, I have the strange conviction that, in this wild and peopleless place, I am very close to that which many peoples have sought through many ages and have not found.

In the distance, I can hear thunder, and a flash of lightning illumines my window. A cry of a loon comes with the flash. It is strange; it is weird—and wonderful. And also, in a way, it has just occurred to me that it is a fitting kind of night to begin that which I have been asked to write. For this night, for a short space, will be like the great world at large—a world that is rocking in the throes of a mighty tumult—a tumult of unrest, of discontent, of mad strivings, of despair, and lack of faith—a world that is rushing blindfold into unknown things, that is seeking rest and peace, yet can never find them.

It is, I repeat, a strange night to begin the writing of that which I have been asked to write, and yet I do not think that I would have the night changed. It seems to picture to me more vividly the unrest of the world fifteen hundred miles away—and fifteen thousand miles away. I seem to see with clearer vision what has happened during the past two years—the mad questing of a thousand million people for a spiritual thing which they cannot find. I see, from this vantage-point of the deep forest, a world torn by five hundred schisms and religions, and I see not one religion that fills the soul with faith and confidence. I see the multitudes of the earth reaching up their arms and crying for the Great Mystery of life to be solved. Questions that are racking the earth come to me in the whisperings of the approaching storm. Can the ghosts of the dead return? Can the spirits of the departed commune with the living? Is the world on the edge of an inundation of spiritualism? Does the salvation of humanity lie there—or there—or there? What shall I believe? What can I believe?

The rain is beginning to beat on the roof of my cabin and, in number, the drops of the rain remind me of the millions and the tens of millions of restless men and women who are reading avidly, in the pages of magazines and books, the “experiences” of those who are giving voice to new creeds and new beliefs or reviving old ones long lost in the dust of forgotten ages.

Ghosts have been revived; spirits are on the move again. New generations are drinking in with wonder and suspense the whole bagful of tricks worn out ten thousand generations ago. To-morrow it may be the revival of witchcraft. And the next day new prophets may arise and new religions take the place of the old. For so travel the minds of men; and so they have traveled for hundreds of thousands of years before Christ was born and Christianity was known; and so they will go on seeking until God is found in a form so simple and intimate that all humanity will at last understand.

The storm has broken. It is like a deluge over the cabin. The thunder and crash of it is in the spruce tops—and such is the dreadfulness of the tumult and the aloneness of the place that I am in, that I would cease where I am did I think that anything I am about to say might be sacrilege. But when a mind gives expression to that which it holds as truth, there cannot be sacrilege.

I have been asked to put on paper something of that religion which I have discovered for myself in nature. There are many who will laugh; there are many who will disbelieve, for it will be impossible for me to make myself entirely clear in such a matter as this. For I have found what, to me, is God; and I cannot expect to startle the world, even if I desired to do so, for what I have found has been found in a very simple way—without bringing spirits back from the dead, or hearing voices out of tombs, or gathering faith through the inspiration of mediums.

I have found the heart of nature. I believe that its doors have opened to me, and that I have learned much of its language. Through adventure and bloodshed I have come to a great understanding; and understanding has brought me health and faith and a joy in life. And because these things will do the world no harm, and may do some good, I am undertaking to write the story of a great and inclusive God whom men and women and little children should be made to know, but to whom, unfortunately, the swift pace of the times has made most of us strangers.

I fear that I am going to shock many people, and so I am of a mind to get the shock over with and come to the meat of what I have to say. But I shall start with something which those who read this must concede—that everyone in the world seems to be looking for something which will bring him more comfort and more happiness from life. That, I think, is the reason the Catholic Church is the only Church which is growing to any extent. It is growing because it is the only Church which is holding out its arms as a mother and giving a human being a breast upon which to lay his head when he is in trouble. Yet I am not a Catholic. Neither am I a Protestant. I do not belong to the High, Low, Broad, or Free Church. I do not confess to Romanism, Popery, or Protestantism any more than I do to Mohammedanism, Calvinism, or the doctrines of the Latter-Day Saints. I am not a sectarian any more than I am a Shaker or a Restitutionist. I do not believe that one necessarily goes to hell because he does not accept Christ as the Son of God. I believe that Christ was a good man and a great teacher of his times, just as there have been other good men and great teachers in their times. I can look upon the Mussulman at prayer, or the Parsee at his devotion, or the Eskimo calling upon his unseen spirits with the same feeling of brotherhood and understanding that I can see a congregation of Baptists or Methodists singing their praise to the God on high. I do not pity or condemn the African savage and the Indian of the Great Barrens because they see their God through another vision than that of the Christian. There were many roads that led to old Rome. And there are many roads, no matter how twisted and dark they seem to us, that lead to the better after-life.

I wish that some mighty power would rise that could show to man how little and how insignificant he is. Only therein, I think, could the thorns and brambles be taken out of that path to peace and contentment which he would like to find, and would find if he were not blinded by his own importance. He is the supreme egoist and monopolist. His conceit and self-sufficiency are at times almost blasphemous. He is the human peacock, puffed up, inflated, flushed in the conviction that everything in the universe was made for him. He looks down in supercilious lordship on all other life in creation. He goes out and murders millions of his kind with his scientific inventions; yet he calls a tiger bad and a pest because the tiger occasionally kills the two-legged thing that hunts it. If he kills a man illegally, it is called murder, and he is hanged and goes to hell. If his government tells him it is proper to kill a thousand men, he kills them, and is called a hero—and a chosen place is kept waiting for him in heaven. His conceit blinds him to fact. He thinks our little earth was the chosen creation of the Supreme Power—forgetting that the earth is but a fly-speck compared with the other worlds in space. He thinks that Christ was born a long time ago, and that time began with our own knowledge of history—when, as a matter of fact, he has no reason for disbelieving that man lived and died hundreds of thousands of years ago, and that countless religions have come and gone in the eons of the past. He does not stop to reason that, in number, he is as a drop in the ocean compared with other beating hearts on earth.

To me, every heart that beats is a spark from the breath of God. I believe that the warm and beating heart in the breast of a singing robin is as precious to the Creator of things as the heart of a man counting money. I believe that a vital spark exists in every blade of grass and in every leaf of the trees. It is the great law of existence that life must destroy in order to live, and when destruction is inevitable and necessary, it ceases to be a misdemeanor. But to let live, when it is not necessary to destroy, is a beautiful thing to consider.

Before men find a satisfying faith and peace, they must come to see their own littleness. They must discover that they are not alone in a partnership with God, but that all manifestation of life, whether in tree or flower or flesh and blood, is a spark loaned for a space by that Supreme Power toward which we all, in our individual ways, are groping. There is one teacher very close to us, as close to the poor as to the rich, to show us this littleness and make us understand. That teacher is nature—and, in my understanding of things, all nature is rest and peace. I believe that nature is the Great Doctor, and, if given the chance, can cure more ills and fill more empty souls than all the physicians and preachers of the earth. I have had people say to me that my creed is a beautiful one for a person as fortunately situated as myself, but that it is impossible for the great multitudes to go out and find nature as I have found it. To these people, I say that one need not make a two-thousand-mile trip along the Arctic coast and live with the Eskimo to find nature. After all, it is our nerves that kill us in the long run, our over-restless minds, our worrying, questing brains. And nature whispers its great peace to these things even in the rustling leaves of a corn field—if one will only get acquainted with that nature. And my desire—my ambition—the great goal I wish to achieve in my writings is to take my readers with me into the heart of this nature. I love it, and I feel that they must love it—if I can only get the two acquainted.

“Fine line of talk for a man whose home is filled from cellar to garret with mounted heads and furs,” I hear some of my good friends say.

Quite true, too. It is hard for one to confess oneself a murderer, and it is still harder to explain one’s regeneration. Yet, to be genuine, I must at least make the confession, though it is less the fact of murder than the fact of regeneration that I have the inclination to emphasize, now that I have the opportunity. There was a time when I took pride in the wideness and diversity of my killings. I was a destroyer of life. Now I am only glad that these killings ultimately brought me to a discovery which is the finest thing I have to contemplate through the rest of my existence.