Page:Why I am an infidel.pdf/19



So it becomes necessary for me (since I have talked with Burbank many times on many subjects) to tell more about him as a man and as a thinker in order that the hysterical clamor that rent the air may not be accepted for more than its face value.

Burbank studied life at its fountain head—in the marvelous little buds and shoots and leaves that burgeon forth each spring to fill us anew with the awe for nature. He was a naturalist, no less than Thoreau. Nature was his teacher and he recognized her as a symbolism of that mysterious power which he was willing to have called God but which suited him as well if it was called merely Force. He saw nature, with Goethe, as the living, visible garment of that same mysterious power—God or Force, and faith in nature won him the eminent place he occupied in the world.

Why, then, did he lack faith in the accepted doctrines of religion? Why did he see all religions on a tottering foundation? Because religions are based on a promise of immortality, and a threat of divine punishment for sin—two things to which this nature man could not reconcile himself.

For the hope of immortality, he believed, is the refuge of cowards, and he could appropriately quote the Bible itself in pointing out that the commonly accepted faith is merely the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen but for which puny man, striv-