Why does wo dim
Eyes full of brightness,
Why does time rob
Steps of their lightness,
Bowing the proud form with beauty once clad?115
These questions were more than subjects for idle verse. They lurked in the subterranean corridors of consciousness. They gnawed in the dark at liver and spine and nerves. At times they dragged at one’s limbs and weighed on one’s heart like iron. Was an unquestioning resignation man’s only recourse in the face of fate, even though body and mind rebelled at the injustice?
“Fate,” she wrote in 1848, “has always denied me an opportunity to fulfill my nature.”116 Abigail Baker had shrunk from the implications of the word fate, and her daughter would quote and requote the gloomy lines:
And circumstance, that unspiritual God
And miscreator, makes and helps along
Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,
Whose touch turns hope to dust—the dust we all
have trod.117
Here circumstance or fate plays the part of Satan, marring God’s creation, frustrating God’s will. How, then, could it be equated with God’s will and accepted with meek resignation? Mark Baker’s theology did make the equation, and there was logic in this if God was omnipotent and circumstance was bound by an iron chain of causality. In that case Satan became God’s hired assassin, allowed to do His dirty work for some ineffable and inscrutable purpose of His own.
But if God’s goodness was to be saved in any terms that would make sense to suffering humanity, He must somehow be absolved from ● ● ●