“Now, look here, John,” said she at length, “I’ve been watching you pretty closely and I think you’re equal to a considerable mental effort—in one way, it may be easier for you, just because you’ve not seen a bit of it—anyhow, you’ve got to face it—
“Our world has changed in these thirty years, more than the change between what it used to be and what people used to imagine about Heaven. Here is the first thing you’ve got to do—mentally. You must understand, clearly, in your human consciousness, that the objection and distaste you feel is only in your personal consciousness. Everything is better; there is far more comfort, pleasure, peace of mind; a richer, swifter growth, a higher happier life in every way; and yet, you won’t like it because your—” she seemed to hesitate for a word, now and then; as one trying to translate, “reactions are all tuned to earlier conditions. If you can understand this and see over your own personal—attitudes it will not be long before a real convincing sense of joy, of life, will follow the intellectual perception that things are better.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Let me chew on that a little.”
“As if,” I presently suggested, “as if I’d left a home that was poor and dirty and crowded, with a pair of quarrelsome inefficient parents—drunken and abusive, maybe, and a lot of horrid, wrangling, selfish, little brothers and sisters—and woke up one fine morning in a great clean beautiful house—richly furnished—full of a lot of angels—who were total strangers?”
“Exactly!” she cried. “Hurrah for you, Johnnie, you couldn’t have defined it better.”
“I don’t like it,” said I. “I’d rather have my old home and my own family than all the princely palaces and amiable angels you could dream of in a hundred years.”
“Mother had an old storybook by a New England author,” Nellie quietly remarked, “where somebody said, ‘You can’t always have your “druthers” ’—she used to quote it to me when I was little and complained that things were not as I wanted them. John, dear, please remember that the new people in the new world find it ‘like home’ and love it far better than we used to. It’ll be queer to you, but it’s a pleasant commonplace to them. We have found out at last that it is natural to be happy.”
She was silent and I was silent; till I asked her “What’s the name of your new religion?”
“It hasn’t any,” she answered.
“Hasn’t any? What do they call it? the believers, I mean?”
“They call it ‘living’ and ‘life’—that’s all.”
“Hm! and what’s their specialty?”
Nellie gave a funny little laugh, part sad, part tender, part amused.
“I had no idea it would be so hard to tell you things,” she said. “You’ll have to just see for yourself, I guess.”
“Do go on, Nellie. I’ll be good. You were going to tell me, in a nutshell, what had happened—please do.”
“The thing that has happened,” said she, slowly, “is just this. The world has come alive. We are doing in a pleasant, practical way, all the things which we could have done, at any time before—only we never thought so. The real change is this: we have changed our minds. This happened very soon after you left. Ah! that was a time! To think that you should have missed it!” She gave my hand another sympathetic squeeze and went on. “After that it was only a question of time, of how soon we could do things. And we’ve been doing them ever since, faster and faster.”
This seemed rather flat and disappointing.
“I don’t see that you make out anything wonderful—so far. A new religion which seems to consist only in behaving better; and a gradual improvement of social conditions—all that was going on when I left.”
Nellie regarded me with a considering eye. “I see how you interpret it,” she said, “behaving better in our early days was a small personal affair; either a pathetically inadequate failure to do what one could not, or a Pharisaic, self-righteous success in doing what one could. All personal—personal!”
“Good behavior has to be a personal affair, hasn’t it?” I mildly protested.
“Not by any means!” said Nellie with decision. “That was precisely what kept us so small and bad, so miserably confined and discouraged. Like a lot of well-meaning soldiers imagining that their evolutions were ‘a personal affair’—or an orchestra plaintively protesting that if each man played a correct tune of his own choosing, the result would be perfect! Dear! Dear! No, Sir,” she continued with some fierceness, “that’s just where we changed our minds! Humanity has come alive, I tell you and we have reason to be proud of our race!”
She held her head high, there was a glad triumphant look in her eyes—not in the least religious. Said she:
“You’ll see results. That will make it clearer to you than anything I can say. But if I may remark that we have no longer the fear of death—much less of damnation, and no such thing as ‘sin’; that the only kind of prison left is called a quarantine—that punishment is unknown but preventive means are of a drastic and sweeping nature such as we never dared think of before—that there is no such thing in the civilized world as poverty—no labor problem—no color problem—no sex problem—almost no disease—very little accident—practically no fires—that the world is rapidly being reforested—the soil improved; the output growing in quantity and quality; that no one needs to work over two hours a day and most people work four—that we have no graft—no adulteration of goods—no
