Читать книгу The Story of a Working Man's Life - Francis Mason - Страница 8

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MY father was very diligent in teaching me to speak the truth. As soon as I had learned what a lie was, I had learned to regard it as one of the meanest and most dishonorable of all things, and never throughout my whole life have I knowingly told an untruth. He kindly kept me out of temptation by saying, when any difficulty occurred, "Tell the truth, and you shall not be punished." I did tell the truth, and he believed me, and that strengthened me in persisting in the truth. I have seen children greatly grieved when they told the truth and were not believed. It did them a great injury, because they had no character left to sustain, and discouraged them in being scrupulous about the truth.

In the same way stealing was made so abhorrent that I was never on any occasion tempted to steal. And whenever I find children pilfering or telling falsehoods, I always attach great blame to the parents, because I know that parental education alone, without any religious principle, is sufficient to prevent these flagrant breaches of the moral code.

If the children of the poor steal an apple or an orange, they are given to the police, who mark them down as "little thieves," and they become notorious at once. They are entered as children taught to steal, and their sins are not only charged upon them individually, but also against the whole class to which they belong. They are poor, and, therefore, they are thieves. That is the logic served out for the poor. But in the circle in which I have moved, I have known quite as many children of the rich pilfer as the children of the poor, and many more tell falsehoods. They go to the shops or the bazars with their mothers and steal, and bring home what they have stolen. When discovered, the owners laugh, the mothers tell the story as something very funny, and all the world says: They are rich, and, therefore, it is all a joke. That is the logic cooked up for the rich.

Religious people sometimes undervalue mere education in morals, but it is exceedingly valuable as far it goes, and infinitely better than nothing. When I left home, at nineteen years of age, I had no bad habits; neither had I a particle of religion. My good qualities were all negative. I did not tell falsehoods; I did not use profane language; I did not drink; I did not gamble; all very good, but I might have united all these things, and yet have been a Mohammedan or a Buddhist. There is nothing peculiarly Christian in these negative qualities; they require no special Divine influence to originate them; they do not lift a man above the moral stratum of heathenism.

I believed in one God, and so do Mohammedans, but there was no emotion in my belief. It is not mere intellectual faith in God and Christ that makes a Christian, but loving them. I believed there was a God in heaven, just as I believed there was a king in London; but I had no love for either the one or the other. If I happened to observe the laws of either, it was not because I had any personal regard for them, but because I had been educated to observe them. I had regard to the commands of my parents, not to the commands of God or the king.

When I left my father's house and went into the world, I realized the importance of the petition in our Lord's prayer—"Lead us not into temptation." The feebleness of mere education before temptation then became manifest. Of all bad habits, there is the least temptation to use profanity or bad language, yet when I fell into society where its use was common, I soon found myself going with the multitude.

My father had been very strict in requiring me to attend some place of worship twice every Sabbath, and when I went abroad he charged me to keep up the habit. This attendance at meeting had always been very distasteful to me, and when the pressure of his presence was removed, it required very little temptation for me to neglect it altogether; and after I left home, I did not enter a church or a meeting-house for more than two years.

This shows that though a good moral education is of great value when kept out of temptation, it is not worth much in the face of temptation; because there is no living principle within to resist it. Had my good habits been the result of a religious principle implanted in the heart, they would have gone with me, and abided by me; but a mere formal Christian education is nothing but Christianity with Christ left out.

My father bestowed great labor on me to prevent me from imbibing superstitious notions. He taught me early never to be afraid in the dark; and whenever I heard strange sounds, or saw strange sights, not to run away from them, but to go towards them, and try to discover whence they proceeded.

The superstitions of the middle ages held no slight power over the minds of the working classes at the close of the last century and the beginning of the present. My grandfather Hay, my mother's father, was originally from Northumberland. In his early years he had commenced the study of medicine, and always remembered Latin enough to read medical prescriptions. This made him an oracle in the circle in which he moved. He was also skilled in astrology, and although he practiced it only for himself and family, yet he was a strong believer in the system.

Other modes of fortune-telling were believed in. I have heard mother say that their house was robbed of a considerable sum of money on one occasion, and that my grandfather went to a famous "wise man," living some fifty miles distant, to report the theft and seek advice, just as people in these matter-of-fact days go to the police office. The "wise man," for a consideration, undertook to unveil the thief. He had an assistant in a little boy, who looked into a mirror and related what he saw. He described a woman coming from a neighboring house and going into my grandfather's, returning with a bundle in her hands. The dress and features of the woman were so accurately described that my grandfather recognized her as one of his neighbors; so when he returned home he taxed her with the theft, and she restored the money.

Some years ago, the public were mystified by reading, in Lane's description of Egypt, an account of an Arab fortune-teller who pursued precisely the same course, not aware that similar "wise men" might be found much nearer home if looked for.

My mathematical teacher in Hull had a son in command of a ship, who came home sick while I was at school. I found that whenever the doctor left him medicine to take, both father and son pored over a horoscope they had cast, to find out whether the medicine would benefit him or not, and the best time for taking it. Yet the old man was not known to be an astrologer. He kept it secret, because the fact would have injured his credit with the intelligent public.

Nor has the trade of fortune-telling ceased to be remunerative even in enlightened Massachusetts and among Americans. When I lived in Randolph, I heard of an old woman in a neighboring town who practiced fortune-telling with great success, and many went from Randolph to have their fortunes told. So I one night went along with a party for amusement, and found she rested her art on cards. She closeted each one alone, and when my turn came, after various shuffles and cuts with the cards, she made many general statements concerning my future, which might be made to mean anything or nothing, and then ventured to tell me of a love affair in which she said I was engaged, and to predict its results, all of which was false from beginning to end. This I did not fail to show up to my associates, and yet their faith in the old woman was unshaken. Several replied: "She told me many things that were true." My father believed nothing in any system of foretelling future events, or in communications from the spirit world, and I grew up as strong an unbeliever in them as he was, which shows the power of intelligent parental instruction.

Belief in witchcraft and the persecution of witches were not uncommon in England in my early days. Stories of persons being bewitched were constantly related over the kitchen fire; poor old women in the neighborhood were often named as witches; and I recollect, when out one night in Leeds with a number of boys, I had a hard task to prevent them throwing stones through the windows of a poor old woman who lived in a cellar, reputed a witch, and whose dwelling they dared not pass unless on the run, lest she should bewitch them.

The popular belief was that witches had sold themselves to Satan for a consideration, and at the end of an appointed time agreed on by both parties, he came and carried them off. When very young, I recollect a story was told me in all sincerity, that when the time had arrived for a certain witch to be carried away, she sat down to read the Bible, and when the candle was nearly burned out, Satan appeared and reminded her of her engagement. She asked him to wait till the bit of candle was burned out, and he consented. Then quick as lightning she shut up the bit of candle in the Bible, blowing it out at the same time, and as the devil dare not touch a Bible, her soul was saved!

Faith in the existence of ghosts, too, was very prevalent among the uneducated classes in those days, but my father taught me it was groundless, and I never had fear of the spirits of the dead, which my play-fellows usually had. I often crossed graveyards alone at night, when the boys with me would go around by the streets for the fear of ghosts.

Nor is this faith yet without believers even in the United States. In St. Louis, I knew a young man and his wife, both New Yorkers, who lived in a house which they said was haunted by the ghost of a negro who had been cruelly murdered there by his master, a Frenchman. Unaccountable noises and cries, they said, were heard there every night. I proposed to go and sleep there, and did so with a companion, as great an unbeliever as myself. We slept in the house undisturbed all night and heard nothing; but this did not prevent the occupants from leaving it.

We sometimes hear of people being "naturally superstitious" but there is no such thing. Men are educated into the belief of superstition as much as they are educated into the belief of history or the multiplication table. Still, as it was at the beginning, people had rather believe the devil than God. Mysterious knowledge has more attractions than positive knowledge, and the old-fashioned faith in ghosts being about worn out, it has been vamped up, and brought out in the new phase of "spiritualism." So true it is, that "Man is a gaping monster that loves to be deceived."