But "Elsie Venner" and
Holmes's second novel, "The Guardian Angel," are, to use Lowell's
expression on a different subject:
"As full of wit, gumption and good Yankee sense,
As there are mosses on an old stone fence."
In the autumn of 1865 some Harvard students, radically inclined, obtained
possession of a religious society in the college called the Christian
Union, revolutionized it and changed its name to the Liberal Fraternity.
They then invited Emerson, Henry James, Sr., Doctor Holmes, and Colonel
Higginson to deliver lectures in Cambridge under their auspices. This was
a pretty bold stroke, but Holmes evidently liked it. He said to the
committee that waited upon him: "What is your rank and file? How deep do
you go down into the class?" He also promised to lecture, and that he did
not was more the fault of the students than his own. He was by no means a
radical in religious matters, but he hated small sectarian differences--
the substitution of dogma for true religious feeling. In his poem at the
grand Harvard celebration in 1886 he made a special point of this
principle:
"For nothing burns with such amazing speed
As the dry sticks of a religious creed."
Creeds are necessary, however, and an enlightened education teaches us
not to value them above their true worth.
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