The Professor at the Breakfast Table | Page 7

first step of the stairs
that lead to the New Jerusalem. Is n't that high enough?
It is,--I said.--The great end of being is to harmonize man with the
order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be
so still. But who shall tune the pitch-pipe? Quis cus-(On the whole, as
this quotation was not entirely new, and, being in a foreign language,
might not be familiar to all the boarders, I thought I would not finish
it.)
--Go to the Bible!--said a sharp voice from a sharp-faced, sharp- eyed,
sharp-elbowed, strenuous-looking woman in a black dress, appearing as
if it began as a piece of mourning and perpetuated itself as a bit of
economy.
You speak well, Madam,--I said;--yet there is room for a gloss or
commentary on what you say. "He who would bring back the wealth of
the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies." What you bring

away from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it.-
Benjamin Franklin! Be so good as to step up to my chamber and bring
me down the small uncovered pamphlet of twenty pages which you
will find lying under the "Cruden's Concordance." [The boy took a
large bite, which left a very perfect crescent in the slice of bread-and-
butter he held, and departed on his errand, with the portable fraction of
his breakfast to sustain him on the way.]
--Here it is. "Go to the Bible. A Dissertation, etc., etc. By J. J. Flournoy.
Athens, Georgia, 1858."
Mr. Flournoy, Madam, has obeyed the precept which you have
judiciously delivered. You may be interested, Madam, to know what
are the conclusions at which Mr. J. J. Flournoy of Athens, Georgia, has
arrived. You shall hear, Madam. He has gone to the Bible, and he has
come back from the Bible, bringing a remedy for existing social evils,
which, if it is the real specific, as it professes to be, is of great interest
to humanity, and to the female part of humanity in particular. It is what
he calls TRIGAMY, Madam, or the marrying of three wives, so that
"good old men" may be solaced at once by the companionship of the
wisdom of maturity, and of those less perfected but hardly less
engaging qualities which are found at an earlier period of life. He has
followed your precept, Madam; I hope you accept his conclusions.
The female boarder in black attire looked so puzzled, and, in fact, "all
abroad," after the delivery of this "counter" of mine, that I left her to
recover her wits, and went on with the conversation, which I was
beginning to get pretty well in hand.
But in the mean time I kept my eye on the female boarder to see what
effect I had produced. First, she was a little stunned at having her
argument knocked over. Secondly, she was a little shocked at the
tremendous character of the triple matrimonial suggestion. Thirdly. --I
don't like to say what I thought. Something seemed to have pleased her
fancy. Whether it was, that, if trigamy should come into fashion, there
would be three times as many chances to enjoy the luxury of saying,
"No!" is more than I, can tell you. I may as well mention that B. F.
came to me after breakfast to borrow the pamphlet for "a lady,"--one of
the boarders, he said,--looking as if he had a secret he wished to be
relieved of.
--I continued.--If a human soul is necessarily to be trained up in the

faith of those from whom it inherits its body, why, there is the end of
all reason. If, sooner or later, every soul is to look for truth with its own
eyes, the first thing is to recognize that no presumption in favor of any
particular belief arises from the fact of our inheriting it. Otherwise you
would not give the Mahometan a fair chance to become a convert to a
better religion.
The second thing would be to depolarize every fixed religious idea in
the mind by changing the word which stands for it.
--I don't know what you mean by "depolarizing" an idea,--said the
divinity-student.
I will tell you,--I said.---When a given symbol which represents a
thought has lain for a certain length of time in the mind, it undergoes a
change like that which rest in a certain position gives to iron. It
becomes magnetic in its relations,--it is traversed by strange forces
which did not belong to it. The word, and consequently the idea it
represents, is polarized.
The religious currency of mankind, in thought, in speech, and in print,
consists entirely of polarized words. Borrow one of these from another
language and religion, and you will find it