The Stark Munro Letters VIII - The Parade, Bradfield, 6th April, 1882

Arthur Conan Doyle (0:00)

CHAPTER VIII of THE STARK MUNRO LETTERS This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org. Recording by Truman Thames.

THE STARK MUNRO LETTERS by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle CHAPTER VIII THE PARADE BRADFIELD 6th of April, 1882 I am writing this, my dear Bertie, at a little table which has been fitted up in the window of my bedroom. Everyone in the house is asleep except myself, and all the noise of the city is hushed. Yet my own brain is singularly active, and I feel that I am better employed in sitting up and writing to you than in tossing about upon my bed. I am often accused of being sleepy in the daytime, but every now and then nature gets level by making me abnormally wakeful at night.

Are you conscious of the restful influence which the stars exert? To me, they are the most soothing things in nature. I am proud to say that I don't know the name of one of them. The glamour and romance would pass away from them if they were all classified and ticketed in one's brain. But when a man is hot and flurried, and full of his own little ruffled dignities and infinitesimal misfortunes, then a star bath is the finest thing in the world. They are so big, and so serene, and so lovely. They tell me that the interplanetary spaces are full of the debris of shattered asteroids, so perhaps even among them there are such things as disease and death. Yet just to look at them must remind a man of what a bacillus of a thing he is. The whole human race like some sprinkling of impalpable powder upon the surface of one of the most insignificant flywheels of a monstrous machine. But there's order in it, Bertie, there's order. And where there is order, there must be mind. And where there is mind, there must be sense of justice. I don't allow that there can be any doubt as to the existence of that central mind, or as to the possession by it of certain attributes. The stars help me to realize these.

It is strange, when one looks upon them, to think that the Churches are still squabbling down here over such questions as whether the Almighty is gratified by our emptying a teen spoon full of water over our baby's heads, or by our waiting a few years and then plunging them bodily into a tank. It would be comic if it were not so tragic.

This train of thought is the after-swell from an argument with Cullingworth this evening. He holds that the human race is deteriorating mentally and morally. He calls out at the grossness which confounds the Creator with a young Jewish philosopher. I tried to show him that this is no proof of degeneration, since the Jewish philosopher at least represented a moral idea, and was therefore on an infinitely higher plane than the sensual divinities of the ancients. His own views of the Creator seem to me to be a more evident degeneration. He declares that looking round at nature, he can see nothing but ruthlessness and brutality.

Either the Creator is not all-powerful, or else he is not all-good, says he. Either he can stop these atrocities and won't, in which case he is not all-good. Or else he would stop them but can't, in which case he is not all-powerful.

It was a difficult dilemma for a man who professes to stick to reason to get out of. Of course, if you plead faith, you can always slip out of anything. I was forced to get behind a corner of that buckler with which you have so often turned my own thrusts. I said that the dilemma arose from our taking it for granted that that which seemed evil really was evil. It lies with you to prove that it isn't, said he. We may hope that it isn't, said I. Wait until someone tells you that you have cancer of the peloric and of the stomach, said he. And he shouted it out again every time I tried to renew the argument. But in all soberness, I really do think, Bertie, that very much what seems to be saddest in life might be very different if we could focus it properly. I tried to give you my ideas about this in the case of drink and immorality, but physically I fancy that it applies more obviously than it does morally. All the physical evils of life seem to culminate in death, and yet death, as I have seen it, has not been a painful or terrible process. In many cases a man dies without having incurred nearly as much pain during the whole of his fatal illness as would have arisen from a Whitlow or an absence of the jaw.