XI
Dr. Borderson, it seemed, held the chair in Ethics at the university. I knew a Borderson once and was very fond of him. Poor Frank! If he was alive he would have more likely reached a prison or a hospital than a professorship. Yet he was brilliant enough. We were great friends in college, and before; let me see—thirty-five years ago. But he was expelled for improper conduct, and went from bad to worse. The last I had heard of him was in a criminal case—but he had run away and disappeared. I well remembered the grief and shame it was to me at the time to see such a promising young life ruined and lost so early.
Thinking of this, I was shown into the study of the great teacher of ethics, and as I shook hands I met the keen brown eyes of—Frank Borderson. He had both my hands and shook them warmly.
“Well, John! It is good to see you again. How well you look; how little you have changed! It’s a good world you’ve come back to, isn’t it?”
“You are the most astonishing thing I’ve seen so far,” I replied. “Do you really mean it? Are you—a professor of ethics?”
“When I used to be a godforsaken rascal, eh? Yes, it’s really so. I’ve taught ethics for twenty years, and gradually pushed along to this position. And I was a good deal farther off than Tibet, old man.”
I was tremendously glad to see him. It was more like a touch of the old life than anything I had yet found—except Nellie, of course. We spoke for some time of those years of boyhood; of the good times we had had together; of our common friends.
He kept me to dinner; introduced me to his wife, a woman with a rather sad, sweet face, which seemed to bear marks of deep experience; and we settled down for an evening’s talk.
“I think you have come to the right person, John; not only because of my special studies, but because of my special line of growth. If I can tell you what changed me, so quickly and so wholly, you won’t be much puzzled about the others, eh?”
I fully agreed with him. The boy I knew was clever enough to dismiss all theology, to juggle with philosophy and pick ethics to pieces; but his best friends had been reluctantly compelled to admit that he had “no moral character.” He had, to my knowledge, committed a number of unquestionable “sins,” and by hearsay I knew of vices and crimes that followed. And he was Dr. Borderson!
“I’ll take myself as a sample, Whitman fashion,” said he. “There I was when you knew me—conceited, ignorant, clever, self-indulgent, weak, sensual, dishonest. After I was turned out of college I broke a good many laws and nearly all the commandments. What was worse, in one way, was that my ‘wages’ were being paid me in disease—abominable disease. Also I had two drug habits—alchohol and cocaine. Will you take me as a sample?”
I looked at him. He had not the perfect health I saw so much of in the younger people; but he seemed in no way an invalid, much less a drug victim. His eyes were clear and bright, his complexion good, his hand steady, his manner assured and calm.
“Frank,” said I, “you beat anything I’ve seen yet. You stand absolutely to my mind as an illustration of ‘before taking’ and ‘after taking.’ Now in the name of reason tell me what it was you took!”
“I took a new grip on life—that’s the whole answer. But you want to know the steps, and I’ll tell you. The new stage of ethical perception we are in now—or, as you would probably say, this new religion—presents itself to me in this way:
“The business of the universe about us consists in the transmission of energy. Some of it is temporarily and partially arrested in material compositions; some is more actively expressed in vegetable and animal form; this stage of expression we call life. We ourselves, the human animals, were specially adapted for high efficiency in storing and transmitting this energy; and so were able to enter into a combination still more efficient; that is, into social relations. Humanity, man in social relation, is the best expression of the energy that we know. This energy is what the human mind has been conscious of ever since it was conscious at all; and calls God. The relation between this God and this humanity is in reality a very simple one. In common with all other life forms, the human being must express itself in normal functioning. Because of its special faculty of consciousness, this human engine can feel, see, think, about the power within it; and can use it more fully and wisely. All it has to learn is the right expression of its degree of life-force, of social energy.” He beamed at me. “I think it’s about all there, John.”
“You may be a very good professor of ethics for these new-made minds, but you don’t reach the old kind—not a little bit. To my mind you haven’t said anything—yet.”
He seemed a little disappointed, but took it mildly. “Perhaps I am a little out of touch. Wait a moment—let me go back and try to take up the old attitude.”
He leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. I saw an expression of pain slowly grow and deepen on his face; and suddenly realized what he was doing.
“Oh, never mind, Frank; don’t do it; don’t try. I’ll catch on somehow.”
He seemed not to hear me; but dropped his face in his hands. When he raised it was clear again. “Now I can make things clearer perhaps,” he said. “We had in our minds thirty years ago a strange hodgepodge of old and new ideas. What was called God was still largely patterned after the old tribal deity of the Hebrews. Our ideas of ‘sin’ were still
