Ludwig Feuerbach says a wonderful thing about baptism. I have it marked. He says, “Water is the purest, clearest of liquids; in virtue of this its natural character it is the image of the spotless nature of the Divine Spirit. In short, water has a significance in itself, as water; it is on account of its natural quality that it is consecrated and selected as the vehicle of the Holy Spirit. So far there lies at the foundation of Baptism a beautiful, profound natural significance.” Feuerbachy is a famous atheist, but he is about as good on the joyful aspects of religion as anybody, and he loves the world. Of course he thinks religion could just stand out of the way and let joy exist pure and undisguised. That is his one error, and it is significant. But he is marvelous on the subject of joy, and also on its religious expressions.
Boughton takes a very dim view of him, because he unsettled the faith of many people, but I take issue as much with those people as with Feuerbach. It seems t o m e some people just go around looking to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so. My brother Edward gave his book to me, The Essence of Christianity, thinking to shock me out of my uncritical piety, as I knew at the time. I had to read it in secret, or so I believed. I put it in a biscuit tin and hid it in a tree. You can imagine, reading it in those circumstances gave it a great interest for me. And I was very much in awe of Edward, who had studied at a university in Germany.
I realize I haven’t even mentioned Edward, though he has been very important to me. As he is still, God rest his soul. I feel in some ways as if I hardly knew him, and in others as if I have been talking to him my whole life. He thought he would do me a favor, taking a bit of the Middle West out of me. That was the favor Europe had done for him. But here I am, having lived to the end the life he warned me against, and pretty well content with it, too, all in all. Still, I know I am touchy on the subject of parochialism.
Edward studied at Gottingen. He was a remarkable man.
He was older than me by almost ten years, so I didn’t really know him very well while we were children. There were two sisters and a brother between us, all carried off by diphtheria in less than two months. He knew them and I, of course, did not, so that was another great difference. Though it was rarely spoken of, I was always aware that there had been a crowded, cheerful life the three of them remembered well and I could not really imagine. In any case, Edward left home at sixteen to go to college. He finished at nineteen with a degree in ancient languages and went straight off to Europe. None of us saw him again for years. There weren’t even many letters.
Then he came home with a walking stick and a huge mustache. Herr Doktor. He must have been about twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He had published a slender book in German, a monograph of some kind on Feuerbach. He was smart as could be, and my father was a little in awe of him, too, as he had been since Edward was a small boy, I think. My parents told me stories about how he read everything he could put his hands on, memorized a whole book of Longfellow, copied maps of Europe and Asia and learned all the cities and rivers. Of course they thought they were bringing up a little Samuel — so did everyone — so they all kept him supplied with books and paints and a magnifying glass and whatever else came to mind or to hand. My mother sometimes regretted out loud that they hadn’t really required him to do much in the way of chores, and she certainly didn’t make the same mistake with me. But a child as wonderful as he was is not a thing you see often, and the belief was general that he would be a great preacher. So the congregation took up collections to put him in college and then to send him to Germany. And he came back an atheist. That’s what he always claimed to be, at any rate. He took a position at the state college in Lawrence teaching German literature and philosophy, and stayed there till he died. He married a German girl from Indianapolis and they had six little towheaded children, all of them well into middle age by now. He was a few hundred miles away all those years and I hardly ever saw him. He did send back contributions to the church to repay them for helping him. A check dated January 1 came every year he lived. He was a good man.
He and my father had words when he came back, once at the dinner table that first evening when my father asked him to say grace. Edward cleared his throat and replied, “I am afraid I could not do that in good conscience, sir,” and the color drained out of my father’s face. I knew there had been letters I was not given to read, and there had been somber words between my parents. So this was
