Читать книгу Doctor Hudson's Secret Journal - Lloyd C. Douglas - Страница 11

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You see, my friend, I am trying to be honest with you about all this. It is a dangerous subject to talk about, and surely no man dares be dogmatic when he expresses an opinion on it.

In the laboratory, many an experiment that is utterly bewildering to the layman is clear enough to the chemist. If you pour water into sulphuric acid the effect is far different than if you had poured sulphuric acid into water—a startling phenomenon that baffles the uninformed, though the chemist knows the secret.

But this thing that we have been talking about—you may experiment with it as long as you like, and not know much more about it than when you began. In this field, nobody is an expert; everyone is a layman. And when any man sets out to prove, by his own experience, that we are all in the grip of spiritual forces, he will demonstrate nothing but his mental untidiness.

Doubtless there are plenty of real accidents which shouldn't have happened; involve no hidden purpose; hold no possibilities for good. Almost anybody could compile a few cases in which painful events opened a way to happiness—if not to greatness. I know a woman who broke her leg and wrote a highly successful novel while she was convalescing, but I have seen many women with broken legs who did not write novels or discover any other opportunity to make capital of their enforced leisure. I once amputated an infected arm that had got into trouble with a rusty fish-hook. The fellow was a loafer, with no interest in anything but fish and fishing. It was all he could talk about. We had him with us for weeks, and to entertain him we ransacked the libraries for books about fish. He went out, at length, and found a good job in a government fish-hatchery; and, to the amazement of everybody, distinguished himself as an expert in the disabilities of salmon, or something like that. But I have cared for many a loafer who never amounted to anything afterward.

You can't afford to be doctrinal when you consider accidents as the work of Providence. One man accidentally burns some rubber on the kitchen stove and discovers vulcanization; another fellow has much the same sort of accident and merely sets the house on fire. One man accidentally spills some camphor into a pan of collodion and gets celluloid; another man accidentally upsets a bottle of something into a pan of something else, and goes out through the skylight. One redoubtable reformer gets tossed into jail, and whiles away the time by writing Pilgrim's Progress. Another equally good and zealous martyr goes to jail and merely gets lousy.

But the ways of Providence are well worth thinking about, if one can do it in a spirit of inquiry rather than with a determination to organize a cult and enlist disciples. This thing will not stand the strain of being woven into a creed: I am sure of that.