“A demonstration of my problem, that nature did not make so vast a region to lie an uninhabited waste so many ages. This is merely the moral view of the subject; as to the more exact and geological—”
“Your morals are exact enough for me,” returned the old man, “for I think I see in them the very pride of folly. I am but little gifted in the fables of what you call the Old World, seeing that my time has been mainly passed looking natur’ steadily in the face, and in reasoning on what I’ve seen, rather than on what I’ve heard in traditions. But I have never shut my ears to the words of the good book, and many is the long winter evening that I have passed in the wigwams of the Delawares, listening to the good Moravians, as they dealt forth the history and doctrines of the elder times, to the people of the Lenape! It was pleasant to hearken to such wisdom after a weary hunt! Right pleasant did I find it, and often have I talked the matter over with the Great Serpent of the Delawares, in the more peaceful hours of our out-lyings, whether it might be on the trail of a war-party of the Mingoes, or on the watch for a York deer. I remember to have heard it, then and there, said, that the Blessed Land was once fertile as the bottoms of the Mississippi, and groaning with its stores of grain and fruits; but that the judgment has since fallen upon it, and that it is now more remarkable for its barrenness than any qualities to boast of.”
“It is true; but Egypt—nay much of Africa furnishes still more striking proofs of this exhaustion of nature.”
“Tell me,” interrupted the old man, “is it a certain truth that buildings are still standing in that land of Pharaoh, which may be likened, in their stature, to the hills of the ’arth?”
“It is as true as that nature never refuses to bestow her incisores on the animals, mammalia; genus, homo—”
“It is very marvellous! and it proves how great He must be, when his miserable creatur’s can accomplish such wonders! Many men must have been needed to finish such an edifice; ay, and men gifted with strength and skill too! Does the land abound with such a race to this hour?”
“Far from it. Most of the country is a desert, and but for a mighty river all would be so.”
“Yes; rivers are rare gifts to such as till the ground, as any one may see who journeys far atween the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi. But how do you account for these changes on the face of the ’arth itself, and for this downfall of nations, you men of the schools?”
“It is to be ascribed to moral cau—”
“You’re right—it is their morals; their wickedness and their pride, and chiefly their waste that has done it all! Now listen to what the experience of an old man teaches him. I have lived long, as these grey hairs and wrinkled hands will show, even though my tongue should fail in the wisdom of my years. And I have seen much of the folly of man; for his natur’ is the same, be he born in the wilderness, or be he born in the towns. To my weak judgment it hath ever seemed that his gifts are not equal to his wishes. That he would mount into the heavens, with all his deformities about him, if he only knew the road, no one will gainsay, that witnesses his bitter strivings upon ’arth. If his power is not equal to his will, it is because the wisdom of the Lord hath set bounds to his evil workings.”
“It is much too certain that certain facts will warrant a theory, which teaches the natural depravity of the genus; but if science could be fairly brought to bear on a whole species at once, for instance, education might eradicate the evil principle.”
“That, for your education! The time has been when I have thought it possible to make a companion of a beast. Many are the cubs, and many are the speckled fawns that I have reared with these old hands, until I have even fancied them rational and altered beings— but what did it amount to? the bear would bite, and the deer would run, notwithstanding my wicked conceit in fancying I could change a temper that the Lord himself had seen fit to bestow. Now if man is so blinded in his folly as to go on, ages on