The Warriors by Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown, 1864-1948
The Warriors by Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown, 1864-1948
The Warriors by Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown, 1864-1948
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Language: English
THE WARRIORS
AUTHOR OF
PREFACE
This work was begun nearly five years ago. Since then, the whole face of
American history has changed. We have had the Spanish-American War, and
the opening-up of our new possessions. In this period of time Gladstone,
Li Hung Chang, and Queen Victoria have died; there has also occurred the
assassination of the Empress of Austria and of President McKinley. There
has been the Chinese persecution, the destruction of Galveston by storm
and of Martinique by volcanic action. Wireless telegraphy has been
discovered, and the source of the spread of certain fevers. In this time
have been carried on gigantic engineering undertakings,--the
Trans-Siberian Railroad, the Trans-Balkan Railroad, the rebuilding of
New York. We have also looked upon the consolidation of vast forces of
steel, iron, sugar, shipping, and other trusts. We have witnessed an
extraordinary growth of universities, libraries, and higher
schools,--the widespread increase of commerce, the prosperity of
business, the rise in the price of food, and the great coal-strike of
1902. Perhaps never before in the world's history have there been
crowded into five years such dramatic occurrences on the world-stage,
nor such large opportunities for the individual man or woman.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. CHORDS OF AWAKENING:
THE HIGHER CONQUEST
II. PRELUDE:
THE CALL OF JESUS
III. PROCESSIONAL:
THE CHURCH OF GOD
[CUTLER]
REGINALD HEBER
The universe is not awry. Fate and man are not altogether at odds. Yet
there is a perpetual combat going on between man and nature, and between
the power of character and the tyranny of circumstance, death, and sin.
The great soul is tossed into the midst of the strife, the longing, and
the aspirations of the world. He rises Victor who is triumphant in some
great experience of the race.
The first energy is combative: the Warrior is the primitive hero. There
are natures to whom mere combat is a joy. Strife is the atmosphere in
which they find their finest physical and spiritual development. In the
early times, there must have been those who stood apart from their
tribesmen in contests of pure athletic skill,--in running, jumping,
leaping, wrestling, in laying on thew and thigh with arm, hand, and
curled fist in sheer delight of action, and of the display of strength.
As foes arose, these athletes of the tribe or clan would be the first to
rush forth to slay the wild beast, to brave the sea and storm, or to
wreak vengeance on assailing tribes. Their valor was their insignia.
Their prowess ranked them. Their exultation was in their freedom
and strength.
Such men did not ask a life of ease. Like Tortulf the Forester, they
learned "how to strike the foe, to sleep on the bare ground, to bear
hunger and toil, summer's heat and winter's frost,--how to fear nothing
but ill-fame." They courted danger, and asked only to stand as Victors
at the last.
Hence we read of old-world warriors,--of Gog and Magog and the Kings of
Bashan; of the sons of Anak; of Hercules, with his lion-skin and club;
of Be�wulf, who, dragging the sea-monster from her lair, plunged beneath
the drift of sea-foam and the flame of dragon-breath, and met the clutch
of dragon-teeth. We read of Turpin, Oliver, and Roland,--the
sweepers-off of twenty heads at a single blow; of Arthur, who slew
Ritho, whose mantle was furred with the beards of kings; of Theodoric
and Charlemagne, and of Richard of the Lion-heart.
There are also Victors in the great Quests of the world,--the Argonauts,
Helena in search of the Holy Rood, the Knights of the Holy Grail, the
Pilgrim Fathers. There are the Victors in the intellectual wrestlings of
the world,--the thinkers, poets, sages; the Victors in great sorrows,
who conquer the savage pain of heart and desolation of spirit which
arise from heroic human grief,--Oedipus and Antigone, Iphigenia,
Perseus, Prometheus, King Lear, Samson Agonistes, Job, and David in his
penitential psalm. And there are the Victors in the yet deeper strivings
of the soul--in its inner battles and spiritual conquests--Milton's
Adam, Paracelsus, Dante, the soul in _The Palace of Art_, Abt Vogler,
Isaiah, Teufelsdr�ckh, Paul. To read of such men and women is to be
thrilled by the Titanic possibilities of the soul of man!
The world has come into other and greater battle-days. This is an era of
great spiritual conflicts, and of great triumphs. To-day faith calls the
soul of man to arms. It is a clarion to awake, to put on strength, and
to go forth to Holy War. If there were no fighting work in the Christian
life, much of the intense energy and interest of the race would be
unaroused. There are apathetic natures who do not want to undertake the
difficult,--sluggish souls who would rather not stir from their present
position. And there are cowards who run to cover. But there is
in all strong natures the primitive combative instinct,--the
let-us-see-which-is-the-stronger, which delights in contests, which is
undismayed by opposition, and which grows firmer through the warfare
of the soul.
There are two forms of conquest to which the soul of man is called--the
inner and the outer. The inner is the conquest of the evil within his
own nature; the outer is the struggle against the evil forces of the
world--the constructive task of building up, under warring conditions,
the spiritual kingdom of God.
The real world is far more subtle than we as yet understand. When we
dive down into the deep, sky and air and houses disappear. We enter a
new world--the under-world of water, and things that glide and swim; of
sea-grasses and currents; of flowing waves that lap about the body with
a cool chill; of palpitating color, that, at great depths, becomes a
sort of darkness; of sea-beds of shell and sand, and bits of scattered
wreckage; of ooze and tangled sea-plants, dusky shapes, and
fan-like fins.
What is the Self that abides in each man? Is it not the consciousness of
existence, together with a consciousness of the power of choice? Our
individuality lies in the fact that we can decide, choose, and rule
among the various contestant impulses of our souls. Herein is the
possibility of victory and also the possibility of defeat.
Looking inward, we find that Self began when man began. We inherit our
dispositions from Adam, as well as from our parents and a long ancestral
line. When the first men and women were created, forces were set in
action which have resulted in this Me that to-day thinks and wills and
loves. Heredity includes savagery and culture, health and disease,
empire and serfdom, hope and despair. Each man can say: "In me rise
impulses that ran riot in the veins of Anak, that belonged to Libyan
slaves and to the Ptolemaic line. I am Aryan and Semite, Roman and
Teuton: alike I have known the galley and the palm-set court of kings.
Under a thousand shifting generations, there was rising the combination
that I to-day am. In me culminates, for my life's day, human history
until now."
We are too much afraid of customs and traditions. We are put into our
times, not that the times may mould us, but that we may mould the times!
Ways? Customs? They exist to be changed! The _tempora_ and the _mores_
should be plastic to our touch. The times are never level with our best.
Our souls are higher than the _Zeitgeist_. Why should we cringe before
an inferior essence or command? But society seals our lips: we walk
about with frozen tongues.
Each asks himself at some time: How shall I become one of the Victors of
the race? Is it in me? Mankind is weighted by every previous sin. Where
am I free? How am I free? Can I do as I choose? Or are there bourns of
conduct beyond which I can never go? Am I foreordained to sin? Do the
stars in their courses lay limitations on free will?
There are in man two forces working: a human longing after God, and, in
response, God inly working in the soul. The Victor is he who, in his own
life, unites these two things: a great longing after the god-like, which
makes him yearn for virtue,--and the divine power within him, through
which and by which he is triumphant over time and death and sin.
Whatever our trials, sorrows, or temptations, joy and courage are ever
meant to be in the ascendant; life, however it may break in storms upon
us, is not meant to beat down our souls. Unless we are triumphant, we
are not wholly useful or well trained. Will and heart together work
for victory.
[VOX DILECTI]
But among all these many voices, there is one which is most inspiring
and supreme. When the _Vorspiel_ to _Parsifal_ breaks upon the ear it is
as if all other music were inadequate and incomplete--as if a voice
called from the confines of eternity, in the infinite spaces where no
time is, and rolled onward to the far-off ages when time shall be no
more. Even so, high and clear above the voices of the world, deeper and
tenderer than any other word or tone, comes the voice of Jesus to the
soul of man.
Look, if you will, upon the World of Souls, many-tiered and vast,
stretching from day's end to day's end,--a world of hunger and of anger,
of toiling and of striving, of clamor and of triumph,--a dim, upheaving
mass, which from century to century wakes, and breathes, and sleeps
again! Years roll on, tides flow, but there is no cessation of the march
of years, and no whisper of a natural change. Is it not a strange thing
that one voice, and only one, should have really won the hearing of the
race? What is this voice of Jesus, so enduring, matchless, and supreme?
What does it promise, for the help or hope of man?
There are some who say that Jesus has held the attention and allegiance
of the race by an appeal to the religious instinct; that all men
naturally seek God, and long to know Him. But if we try to define the
religious instinct, we shall find it a hard task. What might be called a
religious instinct leads to human sacrifice upon the Aztec altar;
directs the Hindu to cast the new-born child in the stream, the friend
to sacrifice his best friend to a pagan deity.
There are others who say that Christ appeals to the gentler instincts of
man,--to his unselfishness, his meekness and compassion. Yet some of the
most admirable Christians have been ambitious and aggressive. Others
say, He appeals to our need of help. But self-reliance is a Christian
trait. Others say, He appeals to our sense of sin--our need of pardon.
But many a Christian goes through life like a happy child, scarcely
conscious at any time of deep guilt, and never overwhelmed by intense
conviction or despair.
The truth seems to be that Christ appeals to our whole selves. He calls
us by an attraction which is unique. In the universe there exists a
force which we must recognize--though we do not yet in the least
understand it--which is gradually drawing the race Christward. The law
of spiritual gravitation is, that by all the changing impulses of our
nature we are drawn upward unto Him. Spohr's lovely anthem voices this
cry of the soul:
1. Jesus calls us by the mystery of life. There are hours of silence and
meditation when the great thought _I am_ beats in upon the soul. But
what am I? Whence came I? A heap of atoms in some strange human
semblance--is that all? And so many other heaps of atoms have already
been, and passed away! Blown hither and thither--where? The universe
reels with change. Star-dust and earth-dust are alike in ceaseless
whirl. Little it profits to build the spire, the sea-wall, the dome, the
bridge, the myriad-roofed town. A new era shall dawn upon them, and they
shall fall away.
Not only that, but each man who lives to-day has less possible material
dominion than he had who preceded him. Only so many square feet of
earth, and now there are more to walk upon them! The ground we tread was
once trodden by the feet of those long dead. I am taking up their room,
and in due time I must myself depart, that there may be footway for
those who are to come after me. Only the under-sod is really mine--the
little earth-barrow to which I go.
Over against this vague and changing self, there stands out the figure
of the changeless Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. In
Him we find the environment of all our lives, and the sum of all
our dreams.
Christ comes into the world and says: Over-fatigue is abnormal. There
is not enough work in the universe to tire every one all out. There is
just enough for each one to do happily, and to do well. I am come as the
great industrial organizer. My mission is not to take away toil, but to
redistribute it. My industrial plan is the largest of history--it is
also the most simple. I look down over the world, as a master upon his
men. My work is not to found an earthly kingdom, as some have thought;
it is not primarily to set up industrial establishments, or syndicates,
or ways of transport and trade. My work is to build up in the universe a
spiritual kingdom of energy, power, and progress. To this kingdom all
material things are accessory. In My hand are all abilities, as well as
all knowledge. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without My notice. Not
a lily blooms without My delight. Not a brick is laid, not a stone is
set, not an axe is swung, except beneath My eye. I provide for My own.
To each man I assign his work, his task. If he takes upon him only what
I give him to do, he will never be under-paid, or over-tired.
If each heart and soul responded to the call of Jesus, there would be a
new heaven and a new earth--a Utopia such as More never dreamed of, nor
Plato, nor Bellamy, nor Campanella in his _City of the Sun_. Each hand
would be at its own work; each eye would be upon its own task; each foot
would be in the right path. All the fear, the weariness, the squalor,
and the unrest of life would be done away. The life of each man would be
a life of contentment, and of economic advance.
Sin lifts bars against success: the root of failure lies in irreligion.
Pride, conceit, disobedience, malice, evil-speaking, covetousness,
idolatry, vice, oppression, injustice, and lack of truth and honor fight
more strongly against one's career than any other foe. No sin is without
its lash; no experience of evil but has its rebound. To expect a higher
moral insight in middle age because of a larger experience of sin in
youth, is as reasonable as to look for sanity of judgment in middle age
because in youth a man had fits!
Even so, looking out upon our own spirits, do we not some day rouse to
the distortion and deformity of sin? Do we wish to retain these
grimacing phases of ourselves? Do we not yearn eagerly for the dignity
and beauty of high virtue? Do we not long for the graces and perfections
which make up a radiant and happy life? If we could be born again, would
we not be born a more spiritual being?
It is to this new birth that Jesus calls our souls. All around the babe,
hid in its mother's womb, there lies a world of which it has neither
sight nor knowledge. The fact that the babe is ignorant does not change
the fact that the world is there. So about our souls there lies the
invisible world of God, which, until born of the Spirit, we do not see
or understand. It is a world in which God is everywhere; in which there
is no First Cause, except God; in which there is no will, except the
will of God; in which there is no true and perfect love, except from
God; no truth, except revealed by God; no power, except from Him.
Conversion is the outlook over a world which is arranged, not for our
own glory, but for the good of God's creatures; in which what we do is
necessary, fundamental, permanent--not because we ourselves have done it
well, nor, in truth, because we have done it at all--but because what we
have done is a part of the universe which God is building. We change
from a self-centre to a God-centre; from the thought of whether the
world applauds to whether God approves; from the thought of keeping our
own life to the thought of preserving our own integrity; from isolation
from all other souls to a sympathy with them, an understanding of their
needs, and a desire to help their lives. It is a turning from a delight
in sin, or an indifference to sin, or merely a moral aversion to it, to
a deep-rooted hatred of every thought and act of sin, to penitence, and
to an earnest desire to pattern after God.
5. Jesus calls us by our latent gifts and powers. Which of us has ever
exhausted his possibilities? Which of us is all that he might be?
For not all energy is material. With each birth there comes a new force
into the world, and its influence never dies. The body is born of ages
past, of the material stores of centuries; but the soul, in its living,
thinking, working power, is a new phase of energy added to the energy
of the race.
This thought gives us a new zest for life. There is an appetite which is
of the soul. It is this wish for growth, for the development of our
powers, for a larger life for ourselves and for those who shall
come after us.
The chief thing toward which we are moving is, I believe, the
Enthronement of the Christ. Christ has always been, in the hearts of the
few, enthroned and enshrined. Even in the dark years of mediaeval
superstition and unrest, there were the cloistered ones who maintained
traditions of faith and did works of mercy, as there were knightly ones
who upheld the ministry of chivalry, and followed, though afar, the
tender shining of the Holy Grail. But now all the signs point to a great
and general recognition of the Christ--Christ to be lifted high on the
hands of the nations, to His throne above the stars!
Empires have risen, and empires have decayed; dynasties have been
buried, and long lines of kings, wrapping stately robes about them, have
lain down to die. Thrones have been overturned, armies and navies have
been mustered and scattered, land and sea have been peopled and made
desolate, as the thronging tribes and races have lived their little life
and passed away. Babylon and Assyria, India and Arabia, Egypt and
Persia, Rome and Greece,--each of these has had its lands and conquests,
its song and story, its wars and tumults, its wrath and praise. Under
all the tides of conquest and endeavor but one fact shines supreme: the
steady progress of the Cross.
Yes, the whole world is being subtly and powerfully drawn to the worship
of the Christ. Never before was there so deep, genuine, and widespread a
Revival of Religion. It has not come heralded with great outcries, with
flame and wind, and revolution and upheaval; it has come as the great
changes that are most permanent come, in stillness and strength.
Throughout the world there is being turned to the service of religion
the highest training, the most intellectual power. Wars are being
wrought for freedom; the Church and the university are joining hands;
the rich and the poor are drawing near together for mutual help and
understanding; industry is growing to be, not only a crude force, brutal
and disregarding, but a high ministry to human needs; the home is
becoming more and more the guardian of faith and the shrine of peace;
business houses are taking upon them a religious significance; commerce
and trade are perceiving ethical duties. Armies are marching in the
name of Jehovah, and a great poet has this one message: "Lest
we forget!"
[AURELIA]
The subject that is being carefully considered by many thinking men and
women to-day is this: the place and prospects of the Christian Church.
All about us we hear the cry that the Church is declining, and may
eventually pass away; that it does not gain new members in proportion to
its need, nor hold the attention and allegiance of those already
enrolled. Are these things true? If so, how may better things be brought
to pass? To share in the civilization that has come from nineteen
hundred years of the work of the Church, and to be unwilling to lift a
pound's weight of the present burden, in order to pass on to others our
precious heritage, is certainly a selfish and unworthy course. It is
better to ask, What is my work in the upbuilding of the Church? What can
I do to further the Royal Progress of the Church of God?
The Church--and by this word I here mean the organized body of both
clergymen and laymen--is meant to be the supreme spiritual leader of the
world. It is meant to possess vigor, decision, insight, hope, and
intellectual power. But before it can accomplish its high and holy work,
a great reconstruction must begin. To help in this reconstruction, to
aid in vivifying, co�rdinating, and ruling the varied processes of
organized religion, is your work and mine.
1. The Church must rouse to a sense of its noble duties and exalted
powers. We underrate the Church. We are looking elsewhere for our
highest ideals, instead of claiming from the Church that spiritual
guidance and inspiration which should be its right to give. One of the
things that is a monumental astonishment to me, is that when we need
supplication, intercession, prayer for the averting of great personal or
national calamity, we flee to the Church, but we seldom think of the
Church when we need brains!
The Church should lead, and not follow, the great dreams of the world.
In the midst of our new national life we are sending all over the
country for the best-trained help and thought in every department of
government influence and control. Our problems of the day are
pre�minently spiritual ones. Colonial control is not a question of
material ascendancy--it is a rule over the minds, hearts, and ideals of
men. Its moral significance is patent. We are called upon, not only to
import provisions, clothing, and household and industrial goods into our
new possessions; we are called upon to develop a higher sense of honor,
truth, honesty, and every-day morality. Scholars, working-men, business
men, farmers, and merchants are being consulted in regard to different
phases of our national advance, and every idea which their insight and
experience furnish is seized upon. But who is consulting the Church in
these concerns, except in reference to mere technical points? Who is
looking to the intellectual, moral, and spiritual standards of the
Church for guidance? We are to-day ruled spiritually, as well as
intellectually, by laymen, and in a way which is quite outside the
organized work of the Church.
This united spirit should prevail, not only through the smaller bodies,
but between the Roman Catholic and Protestant communions. There has been
a distinct division between these two bodies, much mutual suspicion,
jealousy, and antagonism: it is only quite lately that Protestant and
Catholic leaders have been willing to work amicably together for great
common causes.
3. The Church needs stronger and more gifted leaders. In every business
or intellectual enterprise to-day, there is an effort to place at the
head of each organization the most powerful and resourceful man whose
services can be obtained. Nothing in this age works, or is expected to
work, without the leadership of brains. A primary step, in a
far-reaching ecclesiastical policy, is to endeavor to draw into both
ministry and membership the most active and intellectual class. All
earnest souls can work, but not all can work equally effectively.
Particularly in the ministry, north, south, east, and west, men are
needed who are really _men_. This does not necessarily mean the men with
the longest string of academic degrees, the men who can write the best
poems or make the best speeches on public occasions; it means the
thinking men who are brave, talented, spiritual, and warm-hearted.
In the Report of one of the missionary Boards, I have recently read the
following stirring words. They refer to the work of missionaries in the
far north, one of whom has lately travelled a thousand miles over the
snow in a dog-sled: "He who follows that mining crowd must be more than
the minister, who would do well for towns in the west or elsewhere in
Alaska. He must be a man who, when night overtakes him, will be thankful
if he can find a bunk and a plate in a miner's cabin; he must travel
much, and therefore cannot be cumbered with extra trappings--must dress
as the miners do, and accept their food and fare. He must be no less in
earnest in his search for souls than they in search for gold. He must be
so 'furnished' that, without recourse to books or study-table, he can
minister acceptably to men who under the guise of a miner's garb hide
the social and mental culture of life in Eastern colleges and
professional days."
It is far from that land of frost and snow to the beautiful island of
Porto Rico, washed by tropical seas, through the streets of whose
capital there passes every day the carriage of the Governor, with its
white-covered upholstery and its livery of white. But I add this word:
The missionary sent to Porto Rico, be he Catholic or Protestant, must be
a man who can stand among statesmen and society men and women, as well
as one who can live and work among the humblest folk who lodge in
leaf-thatched huts along the roadside or far on lonely hills.
Representative men of ability, health, culture, and courage are being
chosen to carry on governmental work: it is idle to send provincial men
to the Church. What is locally true of the Church in Porto Rico is
fundamentally true all over the world, at home and abroad. Each
ministerial post to-day requires an imperial man. Not every post
requires the same sort of man, either in regard to general heredity or
education. Men are needed of the Peter-type, of the John-type, of the
Paul-type; it suffices that, they be men of unusual power, and well
fitted to their individual work.
4. The Church needs a better system for the proper placing of men. No
phase of the world's work can be carried on merely and simply because a
man is pious. In every phase of life, there is a constant shifting of
men according to temperament, ability, and general influence and power.
In the Church we must have a quick and decisive recognition of a man's
ability, and he must be set where that talent can work easily and
effectively. Churches are not all alike. There are no two alike. When we
think of it, what a ghoulish business "candidating" is! No scheme for
the right placing of men can be devised which does not place a great
deal of power in the hand of a few leading men. This power may be
abused, but ought not to be, if it were really looked upon as under
divine direction and inspiration. Cannot a great leader be inspired to
the choice of a man, as well as a great author to the choice of a word,
a rhyme? Comparatively few men thoroughly understand how to rate other
men, and to these few men, as in all other great enterprises, must be
given the power and authority to select and adjust. By this I do not
mean that a set of ecclesiastics will alone be adequate. Ecclesiastical
vision, like all other highly specialized vision, is partial, and does
not always see quite straight. There should also be called into play the
business ability and discernment of men of large business interests or
administrative gifts. Sooner or later the various religious
organizations will have to meet, in some better way than any thus far
formulated, this growing need.
Ministers must study more. If they are freed from many tasks now put
upon them, it is not unreasonable to ask that this time be put on more
careful thinking. Too many a minister of to-day is, intellectually,
something of a flibbertigibbet. His sermons do not take hold, because
they have not the roots to take hold with. How many ministers possess,
for instance, a scholarly knowledge of human nature or of the deeper
aspects of redemption? Yet these things he ought to know. There is a
large amount of intensely interesting, though spiritually undigested,
material for a minister in a book like William James's _Varieties of
Religious Experience_.
7. Greater care must be taken of the rural church. Any one interested in
a great ecclesiastical polity must surely recognize the ultimate
possibilities of our rural regions. Here are growing up the leading men
and women of to-morrow. Ideals and inspirations set upon their hearts
will bear fruit a thousand-fold. Hence there should be a definite
arrangement by which a certain portion of the preaching time of the
really able preachers shall be placed each year in some small and remote
place. Several scattered country churches might unite for these
services. Let such a man also make helpful suggestions for neighborhood
social and intellectual life. While he is in the village, let the
country pastor go to town, browse in libraries, art-collections, hear
music, and get a general quickening of interest and inspiration. Let
each compare notes with the other. They will both gain by this
interchange.
SECOND: ADHERENCE
By the question, Why join the Church?--I do not mean alone, Why add my
name to a church-roll? I mean, Why give myself, my powers, my education,
my love, my loyalty, to advance the progress of the Church?
1. The Church embodies the spiritual dreams of the world. Man does not
live by bread alone; he lives by imagination, and by religious powers.
In the Church of God, the spiritual imagination of man reached its
highest field of energy, and has brought forth its most triumphant
works. The great art of the world has centred about the Christian
Church--its architecture and much of its noblest speech. Imagine a world
in which every work which was inspired by the Church, or by the concepts
of religion embodied in it, should be left out. What would we then lack?
We would lack the greatest works of Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian,
Francesca, Botticelli, Murillo; we would not see the cathedrals of
Milan, Strasburg, or Cologne; we would never read the poems of Caedmon,
Milton, or Dante. The hamlet would be without a spire; philanthropy
would be almost unknown; there would be neither night-watch nor
morning-watch of united prayer. We should have no processional of
millions churchward on the Lord's Day, no hymns to stir our souls to joy
and praise, no anthems or oratorios, no ministers, no ecclesiastical
courts and assemblies, no church conventions, no church-schools,
religious societies, nor religious press. All these works and
institutions proclaim the glory of belief, and hand down the religious
traditions and the spiritual aspirations of the generations of men.
Shall we let others share in the mystery and triumph while we stand
apart, silent, unapproving, and alone?
The dreams of the Church are high and holy. There is the dream of
Freedom, of the Freedom of the Soul. It is an inspiring thought this,
the essential democracy of the race. We do not find intellectual
equality of souls. We see each man or woman differently circumstanced,
differently gifted, differently trained. Yet each may say, I am
spiritually free! To me also is given the opportunity of development, of
majesty of character, of high service. The soul is the thrall of none;
nothing can bind it to spiritual serfdom.
Next, there is the dream of Allegiance. Some one has well said: "Wouldst
thou live a great life? Ally thyself with a great cause." Allegiance is
devotion of the whole of ourselves to a leader, a cause. We can no more
go through the world without allying ourselves to something than we can
go through it and live nowhere. If the object of our allegiance be a
high one, if the ideal be a grand one, our lives are in a constant
process of development toward that height, that grandeur. Each act of
faith becomes an impetus to progress. We are daily enriched by the
experience of mere obedience. To obey and follow are acts in the
universal process.
If, on the other hand, we ally ourselves to that which is lower than
ourselves, by the very act we are dragged down. No one can remain upon
even his own level, who is in obedience and devotion to that which is
below him. Allegiance to a Higher is one of the trumpet-calls of the
world. It has been the rally of all armies, of all legions, of all
crusades. The great commander is, by his very position, a grouper of
other men, the ruler of their thoughts, their deeds, their dreams. His
power to call and to sway is beyond his own ideas of it. How otherwise
could it be that out of one century one heart calls to another--out of
one age, proceeds the answer to the cry of ages gone?
There is one sorrow which God never calls us to--the sorrow of a wasted
life. By redemption, the Church reveals not only a saving from
rebellion, unbelief, and crime, but redemption from sloth, from
indifference, from lack of purpose, and from low aims. Redemption looms
up as the great economic force of Time--that which inspires and
preserves our powers, directs our energies, creates opportunity, brings
to pass our most high and holy desires, and fills life with satisfying
and abiding things.
Beauty, harmony, and affection are the natural laws of the moral world.
There is no despair where there has been no disobedience. _Christus
Salvator_ stands out before the world in majesty and power. Virtue is
enthroned in a universe which is beneficent.
The dream of Fellowship. The Church is the great social body. We can
never live our best life in the world, and stand outside the Church.
There is something vital in personal contact, and in social affiliation.
It strengthens the best and otherwise most complete work. The Christian
Church is a body of allies, whose work is the upbuilding of the kingdom
of God. We do not realize how great a bond this is. We have our own
church centre, our own denomination, our own local interests. But by and
by a great occasion arises--a revival which sweeps the country, a
reunion of two long-divided parties, an Ecumenical Council, a Chinese
persecution--and suddenly there arises before the mind's eye a glimpse
of that Church which girdles the world, whose emissaries are in every
country, whose voices speak in every tongue. We perceive that
everywhere are
Many an ideal state has been thought out, in which fellowship should be
the root of social progress. But in what state is the proffered
fellowship like that of the communion of saints? Each has his share of
work and dreams; each has his endowment of talent and of opportunity;
each has his aspirations and supreme hope. The joys of one are the joys
of all. The sorrows of one are the sorrows of all. The triumphs of one
are the triumphs of all. The World-burden is the task set to be removed.
The World-upbuilding in love, joy, peace, and truth is the final
endeavor. This community of interest is the strongest coalition the
world has yet known.
There are those who say, I prefer to worship by myself! One might as
well say, I prefer to fight in battle by myself! There is a time for
personal worship, and there is a time for social worship. Alone, the
heart meets God. Alone, its prayers for individual needs and longings
are offered up. Alone, it asks for blessings on the individual life and
work. But the personal life is only a fragmentary part of the life
universal. Above the ages rings an Over-song of praise. From shrines and
cathedrals, from chapels, churches, tents, and caves, there arises, day
after day, this incense of united prayer, from a vast and
heaven-uplifted throng! Each of us would say, Canopied under
world-skies, I, too, would join this chorus of adoring love!
The path to the church is worn by the feet of generations. Thither the
aged go up, and thither the laughing, romping children. Weary men and
women bear their burdens thither; triumphant souls bring shining faces
and uplifted brows; love and dreams cluster round the church, and the
life of the soul, silent and hidden, is subtly acted upon by persuasions
and convictions that rule the heart amid the fiercest storms and
temptations of the world. The church is a sanctuary and shield; it is an
emblem of strength and peace. Three angels stand before its altar: Life,
Love, Death! Hither is brought the babe for the christening, hither
comes the wedding procession, and here are laid, with farewell tears,
the quiet dead. Day by day within that church, as one grows to manhood
and womanhood, one enters into race-experiences, and feels, however
vaguely, that the Holy Spirit abides within them all.
3. The Church affords the best outlet for moral activity. Where shall we
put our moral powers? In what work shall they centre? From what point
shall they diverge? Scattered action is irresolute; it is the
centripetal powers that count.
The Church stands ready to engage, to the full, the moral powers of man.
It can rightly distribute the spiritual vitality of the world. It rouses
the moral emotions and affections, and gives scope for contrition,
adoration, and thanksgiving,--the Trisagion of the heart.
In the press and stir of life we sometimes forget that the highest
emotions of which we are capable are those of joy, praise, and prayer.
Joy is a heavenward uplift of life--deep happiness of spirit. Praise is
an appreciation of the greatness and mercy of the Infinite. Worship is
the outpouring of the whole nature, an ascription of blessing, glory,
honor, and power and majesty to God. It flows from the religious
imagination, and is the supreme offering of the intellectual as well as
of the emotional life.
Take the work of Missions alone: Has there ever before been a body which
attempted to bring the whole world into its fellowship, to make known
everywhere its ideals, and to share with all living a spiritual
inheritance? "The Evangelization of the World by this Generation" is
one of the most sublime thoughts which has come to the race.
This weak spot in the Church, which business men mock at, or fret at,
exactly reveals the work that is waiting for business men to do.
Business to-day takes intellectual grasp and insight--promptness,
energy, enterprise, and common-sense. These qualities are needed at once
in the conduct of the Church.
What work awaits the university man or woman? It is to help free the
Church from traditions and superstitions which scholarship cannot
uphold. It is to throw fresh vigor and intellectual vitality into the
services of the Church. It is to build up a hymnology which shall be
noble and poetic in expression; it is to contribute a great religious
literature to the world. It is the work of educated men and women to add
their insight, their zeal for truth, their scholarship, their training
and ideals to the Christian community: to sweep thought and practice out
of ancient ruts, to clarify the spiritual vision of the world, and to
present new aspects of truth and new goals of human endeavor! Let
Research join hands with Prayer.
A third class which the Church needs to-day is that of the working-man.
The hand of the working-man is the hand that has really moulded history.
Working-men lead a brave and self-sacrificing life. From their toil come
the necessaries and many of the comforts of the race. The man of labor
knows the root-problems of the industrial world. While all his industry
and skill, all his courage, heroism, and strong-armed life are so
largely alienated from the Church, the Church is deprived of one of the
fundamental sources of inspiration and growth. The tree of progress can
never grow, except it has labor-roots. It is absolutely essential for
the health of the Church that every form of human energy be represented.
Suppose that by some great revival a very large number of working men
and women could suddenly be added to the membership of the Church. What
would happen? Would there not be at once a return to more simplicity of
life? There are two currents at work always in society--emulation and
sympathy. Rightly used, each is for the social good. If all classes of
men and women worked side by side in the Church, many great social
differences would become adjusted.
5. It holds sway over the fortunes of the home. Where, outside of the
Church, will you find the ideal conception of marriage, and the really
united and happy home? The Church makes for domestic happiness, because
it goes straight to the roots of life and plants happiness where
happiness alone can grow. More and more the Church is lifting the
standards of a noble, proud, pure, and rejoicing married life. Its ideal
of human love is sacred, because founded on the deeper love of the soul
in God. The Church is drawing hosts of young people under the shelter of
its teaching, and is placing before men and women ideals which cannot
fail to make their mark upon the social standards of the times. It
stands for purity, for patience, for tenderness, for the love of little
children, for united education and endeavor, for mutual hopes and
dreams, for large public service.
These, you say, are the reasons why one's allegiance should be given to
the Christian Church. Let us now look back over the processional as it
marches across the dim years. Saints, martyrs, confessors, evangelists,
and singing children have joined its historic train. Is there any other
processional in the world's history which, numbering such millions and
millions, began with only one? When the Christ enters the arena of
history, He comes as one to lead myriad deep-lived souls! Next, there
follow twelve. They, two by two, take up the marching line. Think of
their deeds and influence, of their inspiring power! What would have
been the record of those obscure fishermen of Galilee and of their
simple friends, had they refused to ally themselves with the leader who
called for their allegiance and their obedient love?
ISAAC WATTS
It is deeply impressive, the way in which one man, born not above
myriads of his fellows, begins to rise until by and by he stands head
and shoulders above his generation! What is the inner vitality which
presses him upward? What is this hidden difference in men by which one
remains in the by-eddies of life, and another sweeps out on the crest of
the rising tide of history?
Dominion is an inherent right of the soul. In all our hearts, did we but
listen and understand, there are adumbrations of kingly ancestors, and
the latent stirrings of kingly powers.
Kingship involves ascendancy and authority. Both are truly gained, not
by chicanery, but by personal force. There is a natural gift of
leadership, which is strengthened by endurance, perseverance, and
ceaseless hard work.
Kingship involves an iron will. An iron will does not imply necessarily
ugliness of temper, obstinacy, or pig-headedness. It is simply a
straight-forward, dauntless, and invincible way of doing things. What I
say, you must do, is back of all successful leadership, whether in the
home or in the world-arena. The man who is master of the obedience of
his child, or of his fellows, is master of their fate. We are all at the
mercy of the strong-willed.
What Christianity has not emphasized in the past, but what it must now
begin to emphasize, is the reality of dominion--its value, and its
relation to the kingdom of God. For centuries, religion has too often
been thought of, too often spoken of, as if it were the last resource of
the heart, A brilliant young professor of psychology not long ago
referred to religion as something to flee to, by those who were
disappointed in love! We have spoken so much of "giving up," that the
Christian life has wrongly seemed to mean the giving-up of one's
individuality, interests, powers. As well might we expert the deep sea
to give up its rolling tides, or the air to give up its four winds, as
to expect the heart of man to part with its human hopes!
The power of a king is the power of control. All about us are moving the
great forces of the universe--physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual.
What we can do with them is a test of our power. Life is in many ways a
majestic trial of one's power to command.
Three men buy adjoining tracts of land. One man mines coal upon his
acres. He amasses wealth and influence because he is in control of the
Carboniferous age and the human need of light and heat. The second man
tills his ground and raises wheat and corn. He is in command of living
nature--of the rotation of seasons, of wind, frost, rain; he uses them
to provide food for those that hunger and must be fed. The third man
lies under the trees. He digs no mine. He plants and reaps no corn and
grain. He simply lies under the trees, gazes into the sky and dreams.
Men call him idle, but he is not so. One day he writes a book. It lives
a thousand years. His control is over the spirit of man. He has entered
into its hopes and sorrows, its aspirations and its dreams.
The grandmother arrives on the scene. When baby cries, she plants the
little one firmly in its crib, turns down the light, pats and soothes
the tiny restless hands that fight the air, watches, waits. From the
crib come whimpers, angry cries, yells, sobs, baby snarls and sniffles
that die away in a sleepy infant growl. Silence, sleep, repose, and the
building of life and nerve and muscle in the quiet and the darkness. The
baby has been put in harmony with the laws of nature--the invigoration
of fresh air, sleep, stillness--and the little one wakens and grows like
a fresh, sweet rose. The mother, looking on, learns of the ways of
God with men.
The next rule is personal: the direction of one's own energy in the way
of one's own will. The child moves his hands, his feet; he turns his
rattle up and down, and shakes it about. He discovers that he can pull
things toward him and push them away; that he can reach things that are
higher than his head. He begins to creep. He touches things that are the
other side of the world from him, that is, across the room. He plucks
fibres from the rug or carpet; swallows straws, buttons, and little
strings. He pounds, and sets up vibrations of pleasant noise; he clashes
ten-pins, he blows his whistle, squeezes his rubber horse and man,
rattles the newspaper, flings about his bottle and his blocks. He feels
himself a self-directing power, and at times asserts this power against
the will of those who would make him do what he does not want to do. The
love of rule is in him, and he lays his little hands on power.
Education determines whether this power shall be for good or for evil.
We cannot take away power from any child--he shall move the affairs of
nations--but we can direct this love of power, or crush it; strengthen
it, or weaken it; turn it toward the highest help of man, or deflect it
to tyranny, cruelty, and crime.
The next rule is social: the direction of personal energy that shall
leave a distinct impress on other lives. It is long before we realize
that for each exertion we are responsible; that what we do is held
against us in strict account, not only by fate, which builds our destiny
for us out of our own deeds, but by every other person with whom we come
in contact. Our fellows check off daily against us so much vitality, so
much magnanimity, so much idleness, cruelty, spite, goodness,
selfishness, meanness, or loving-kindness. Life holds a record of our
every deed, and from no least responsibility can we make our escape. We
are the prisoners of events which we ourselves have brought about.
Or he may say: I will keep my land in trust for God. I will hold rain
and frost, heat and cold, storm and sun, in fee simple for the race. My
grain shall pass out into the world's mart, sent forth with love and
prayer. Such a farmer is the incarnation of moral grandeur. Let men
laugh, if they will, at his overalls and plough, his wide-brimmed hat,
his simple manners, and his homely, racy speech. His feet are by the
furrow, but his heart is in heaven, and his treasure is there also. Says
the author of _Nine Acres on the Hillside_, "The agriculturist walks
side by side with the Creator."
The Engineer, in a strange and subtle way, stands near to God. His work
is done hand-in-hand with God. He takes the forces of nature and the
laws of the material world, and bends them to the needs and use of man.
Sky and sea or desert may be about him. He knows the arctic cold, the
tropic heat; the forest and the plain; the mountain and the marsh; the
brook and river; the peak and the precipice; the glacier and the tempest
in their course. Out of the very elements he is daily building new paths
for man to tread. Soon he, too, must pass; laid after death, it may be,
beside some mighty water that his handiwork has spanned.
In loneliness and silence does he not often think, I wonder, of the God
with whom he deals? It is God who provides the river and the sea; God
who through endless ages has piled stone on stone, crust on crust, and
has crumpled the strata of the earth as tissue in His hand. It is God
who has bound every mote to the earth-centre; who has sent magnetic
currents coursing through the globe, and has made tides and sea-changes,
and the trade-winds to blow. It is the God of the Gulf Stream, the
Caribbean Sea, the God of the Appalachians, the God of the Himalayas,
the God of the Cordilleras, of the Amazon, the Yukon, the Yang-tse-Kiang
with which he really deals.
The endless ages pass and go, but God abides. Little, daring man lifts
here and there a hand to mould the world which God has made--pricks the
earth for gold or silver, iron or coal--but GOD is everywhere immanent
and shines through every hour of change. Hence the March of Engineers is
the march of men whom God has trained; in a special sense His
master-workmen, craftsmen whom He loves. It is theirs to say, We are the
Kings of Works: the Master-builders of the Most High!
5. There are Kings of Academic Thought, men who lead in professions and
in collegiate careers. The wise man is the true aristocrat. His court
may not be in a palace, but within its precincts are received and
entertained the leaders of the race. To be provost, to be college
president or university professor, is to be seated on an
intellectual throne.
In the third moon of the year 1276, Bayan, the conquering lieutenant of
Genghis Khan, captured Hangchow, received the jade rings of the Sungs,
and was taken out to the bank of the river Tsientang to see the spirit
of Tsze-s� pass by in the great bore of Hangchow--that tidal wave which
annually rolls in, and, dashing itself against the sea-wall of Hangchow,
rushes far up the river, bringing, for eighteen miles inland, a tide of
fresh, deep-sea splendor, and thrilling all who see or hear.
In the life of nations there are times and tides. Against the tide-wall
of history, beaten by many a storm, and battered by many a thundering
wave, there is about to sweep the incoming wave of a new life for the
race: there is about to pass a greater than the spirit of Tsze-s�,--even
the Spirit of God!
The day of the true statesman is here; the day of the demagogue is done!
The rule of the orator is over the ideals and hopes of men. The
demagogue prostitutes this power. His rule is over the passions,
prejudices, and resentments of men. He cries aloud in the market-place,
and rogues and ward-heelers, and evil-minded politicians, group
themselves around him. He waves his sceptre over the vulgar and the
rascals of the town.
The vital problem of municipal reform is not the shattering of the ring,
the overturning of the boss, the gagging of a few loud tongues. It is
the problem of the training of better bosses; the education of men and
women in social control; their enlightenment, from childhood up, in
civic duties, in national affairs, and the conduct of civil power.
Thereupon oratory turns to its higher ends. Through statesman, preacher,
and political teacher, it cries aloud of righteousness. I look for the
time when the typical politician shall be an honorable man; when to be
"in the ring" of municipal or national control shall mean to be an
integral and orderly part of the administration of God's great world;
when city life shall be purified; and when international law shall be
the interpretation of the will of the Almighty for the rule of nations.
We have honest doctors, lawyers, tradesmen; shall we not have an honest
politician and an upright ward-boss?
Public service is a god-like service! Our Presidents shall more and more
be chosen, not alone for ideas, experience, or for party affiliations:
the President shall be chosen because he is a moral hero! Something has
stirred in the heart of the American people, which shall not soon be
stilled: a spiritual outlook upon political preferment. In the White
House we long to have the great spiritual exemplars of our race. Not
alone in church shall we offer up a "Prayer before Election." The time
is coming when each true ballot-slip shall be a prayer.
Within the next fifty years shall be determined some of the greatest
questions of history. Among them shall be questions of industrial
adjustment and development, and of social progress. We must have in our
Cabinet not only the representatives of War and State, of Finance,
Trade, Labor, and Agriculture; but also of Education and of Social
Health. This is not a dream. You and I may live to see the results of
this religious awakening: it is elemental and epochal.
God leads us on. Said Lincoln: "I have been driven many times to my
knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My
own wisdom, and that of all about me, seemed insufficient for that day."
Like a vast Hand stretched against the sky of Time is the Hand of God--a
Hand writing, in these wondrous days, a destiny for generations yet to
be! Rising with us are all God-fearing nations--the Teutonic, Slav, and
Latin peoples. Sitting yet in darkness, and massed against us, crouch
sullenly the immemorial hordes of Asia, the wild blacks of the African
swamps and jungles, and the dwellers of Polynesian seas. Occident and
Orient, the world's battalions are forming for new encounters and new
dismays. Never since the strong-limbed Goths changed the face of Europe
has there been a period of such tense anticipation, nor so great a
possibility of volcanic change. We are entering an historic period of
reconstruction, when new maps of the world will be drawn. The sceptre is
passing into new hands: to-day the throne of civilization is being
arched above the seaway which joins London and New York. To-morrow, it
may be builded above Pacific tides, where our own shores look westward
to the ports of Asiatic Russia. For, rising on the world-horizon, are
these two World-empires, Russia and the United States. The dictators of
these two countries will soon become the dictators of the human race.
They are brave and virile nations, with untold reserves of power! As
these two giants gird themselves for World-dominion, who but God shall
gird the armor on, direct the onward course of change?
Much of the ancient wealth and beauty shall be done away. In a few
generations the shrines of thirty centuries will be no more. Fane and
temple and pagoda will disappear; carvings, images, and Sikh-guarded
courts. Long lines of yellow-robed priests will chant their last
processional hymn to Buddha, and the smoking incense to waning gods
shall be quenched forever. Where Tao rites were celebrated, silence
shall fall; where fakir and dervish tortured and immolated their lives,
happy children shall play. Instead of the lotos of the Ganges and the
Nile, there shall bloom the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Vale.
But as the empires of Buddha and Muhammad fall, a new Empire shall
prevail!
[LYONS]
Each man's life is proved by some Sword of Assay. The test of a man's
call to the ministry is his power to seize the Sword of the Spirit:
wield the spiritual forces of the world, insight, conviction,
persuasion, truth. To do this successfully at least five things appear
to be necessary: a sterling education, marked ability in writing and in
public speaking, a noble manner, a voice capable of majestic
modulations, and a deep and tender heart. These phrases sound very
simple, but perhaps they mean more than at first appears. Have we not
all met some one, in our lifetime, whose acquaintance with us seemed to
have no preliminaries?--some one who never bothered to say anything at
all to us, until one day he said something that leaped and tingled
through our very being? This is the power that a minister ought to have
with every soul with whom he comes in contact: his word should quickly
touch a vital spot. No one to-day cares much for mere oratory, literary
discussion, polemics, or cursory exegesis; "marked ability in writing
and in public speaking" means that grip on reality which makes people
quiver, repent, believe, adore!
Sincerity is the basis of such power. At heart we worship the man who
will not lie; who will not use conventions or formulas in which he does
not believe; who does not give us a second-hand view of either life or
God; who does not play with our conscience because it is not politic to
be too direct; who does not juggle with our doubts, nor ignore our hopes
and powers; who also frankly acknowledges that he, too, is a man.
The old way will not do. Sweeping changes, in these last days, have come
over the commercial, academic, and social world. We do not go back to
the hand-loom, the hand-sickle, the hand-press. What is true of these
aspects of life is true of the spiritual training. It must be larger,
freer, grander, than before. Time was when a theologian, it was
thought, must be separated from the world--an ascetic working in the dim
half-light of the old library, or scriptorium, or hall. To-day, he must
gain much of his training from the great life of the world--learn how to
meet men and occasions, and be prepared to deal with modern forces and
energies with courage, knowledge, and decision.
We read of the earnest Thomas Goodwin: his favorite authors were such as
Augustine, Calvin, Musculus, Zanchius, Paraeus, Walaeus, Gomarus, and
Amesius. What Doctor of Theology takes the last six of these to bed with
him to-day?
Our theological courses are too dry. Look carefully over the catalogues
of thirty or forty of our own seminaries, and notice the curious, almost
monastic, impression which they make. Then realize that the men who
pursue these abstruse and mediaeval subjects are the men who go out into
churches where the chief topics of thought and conversation are crops,
stocks, politics, clothes, servants, babies! There is a grim humor in
the thing, which seems to have escaped those who have drawn up the
curriculum.
What should be breathed into a man in the seminary, is not the mere
facts of ecclesiastical history, but the warm pulsating currents of
human life; the profound significance of the founding and the progress
of the Church; a deep psychological understanding of human desires,
motives, joys, ambitions, griefs; the relentlessness of sin; the help
and glory of Redemption; the quickening of the Christ; the vigor and the
tenderness of faith. Coincident with these must be a growth in depth and
dignity of life. No one likes to take spiritual instruction from men who
are themselves crude, foolish, sentimental, or conceited. Many social
snags on which young ministers are sure to run, are simply the rudiments
of social conduct, as practised by the world. Noble manners are one's
personal actions as influenced and guided by the great behavior of the
race. Under the impulse of ideals, much that is untoward or superficial
in one's bearing will disappear. It is impossible to think as noble men
and women have thought--to dream, love, and work as they have dreamed,
loved, and wrought--and not have pass into one's mien the high
excellence of such lives.
The first education is spiritual. Until mind and heart are swept by the
spirit of God, chastened, purified, ennobled, and inspired, vain is all
the learning of the schools! To this end, there should be a more deeply
spiritual atmosphere in our seminaries, less of the mere academic
impulse. In every age, there are men just to come in contact with whom
is a benediction and a help for years. Such a man was Mark Hopkins, Noah
Porter, James McCosh. Such the leading men in every seminary should be.
Man thirsts for God. No one is wholly indifferent to the Spirit. I fear
that some ministers do not know--and never will know--the heart-hunger
of the world. When they rise to speak, there is always some one present
whose breath is hushed with longing to hear spoken some real word of
truth, or strength, or comfort. If he receive but chaff!--
Theology is not a dry thing, and ought not be made so. It is quick with
the life of the race. Each dogma is a mile-stone of human progress. It
is the sifted and garnered wisdom of the centuries, concerning God, and
His ways with men. Each student should feel, not that a system is being
driven into him, as piles are driven into the stream, but that he is
being put in philosophic contact with the thought of the race on the
great topic of Religion, with liberty himself to experiment, think, and
add to the store.
The minister must learn what society really is, and how the far still
forces of time act and react upon each other, producing group-actions,
institutions, customs, ways. There are social fossils as well as
physical ones. Sociology is not a system of fads and reforms. It is the
scientific study of society, of its constitution, development,
institutions, and growth. He must also breathe largely of the great
governmental life of the race--understand the primary principles of
politics and administration. He should have some knowledge of commercial
interests, of the formulas, incentives, and right principles of trade.
In art, the religious spirit broods over the great work of the world. In
Angelo, Francesca, Veronese, Botticelli, Titian, Raphael, Tintoretto,
and Correggio, the brush of the painter has set forth the adoration of
the Church of God.
Finally, above all else is the spiritual study and interpretation of the
Word of God. A minister may be fearless of the investigations of
scientific criticism. Every truth is important to him, but not all
truths are vital. When a man such as Caspar Rene Gregory speaks,
something of the holy mystery and inspiration of biblical research, as
well as a scientific result, is presented, and one gains a new
conception of what it really means to study and to understand the
Word of God.
Under all is the life of ceaseless and prevailing prayer. By the life of
prayer, many mean merely a way of learning to make public petitions, an
objective appeal to God. The true life of prayer is as simple, as
unteachable, and as vital as the life of a child with its mother--the
little lips daily learning new ways of approach to its mother's heart,
and new words to make its wants and interests and sorrows known.
Prayer is the true World-Power. Just as there are vast stretches in the
world where the foot of man has never trod, so there are unmeasured
regions whereon prayer has never been. The more we pray, the more
illimitable appears this spiritual realm. And all about us in the
universe are also great hidden forces: nothing will lay hold of them
but prayer.
Each prayer enlarges the soul. The measure of our praying is the measure
of our growth. No man has reached his full possibilities of achievement
who has not completed the circuit of his possible prayers. Power is
proportionate to prayer.
And last of all, there is the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. What it
is, who may say? But that it is real, who can doubt? To read the lives
of Wesley, Whitefield, Finney, Moody, is to feel a strange, deep thrill.
They are men who spake, and men listened; who called, and men came to
God. Others, alas, so often call, and there is no response. They cannot
make headway through the indifference, the sloth, the materialism, and
the inherent vulgarity of the world.
The life itself is arduous. After all is said, it is not quite the same
task to examine and classify either protoplasm or the most highly
organized forms of nature, that it is to analyze and understand the
mysterious workings of the heart, the intricacies of conscience and
conduct, the possibilities of spiritual development or of moral
downfall, and the many questionings, agonies, and ecstasies of the soul
of man. And they are to be studied and understood with the definite and
positive aim of the absolute reconstruction of the world-bound spirit--a
change of its motives, purposes, affections, ideals. More than this,
there must be at the heart of the more thoughtful minister a philosophic
basis for the reconstruction of society itself.
Youth is not an adequate preparation for this task: a man must live and
grow. To deal with such themes and occasions, there must appear in the
world lives of such vigor that they can command; of such charm, that
they can attract; of such wisdom, that they can guide and comfort; of
such vitality, that they can inspire. And hence there rises before the
mind's eye a figure that is both knightly and kingly--a man earnest in
the redress of wrong, and who yet holds a subtle authority over the
forces that make for wrong; a man burdened with the cares and sorrows of
many others, and yet conducting his own life with serenity, enthusiasm,
dignity, and hope; a man to whose keen yet tender gaze a life-history
is revealed by a word or tone, but whose own eyes receive their light
from God. A prophet and a father, a priest and a counsellor, a brother,
friend, and judge, a sacrifice and an inspiration should he be who, in
reverence and love, brings before a waiting congregation the very
Word of Life!
SECOND: OF SPIRITUAL RULE
1. The primary rule is over conscience. The man who sways a conscience
sways a human life. The man who sways a nation's conscience controls
that nation's life. To rule conscience, a man must himself be
unprejudiced and well informed. He must strive, not to keep up an
unhealthy excitement which shall make conscience introspective and
morbid, but to preserve a sane moral outlook, to encourage freedom of
thought and judgment, and to develop a normal conscience which reacts
promptly against wrong. Conscience measures our inner recoil from evil.
The power of a preacher is in direct proportion to the energy with which
he reveals sin in the heart of man, and wakes his whole nature against
its insidious power.
The evangelist warns. He speaks of sin, death, hell, and the judgment
to come. It is for these things that he is sent to testify. These are
not the catch-words of a new sort of Fear King who uses oral terrors to
affright the soul of man. Heaven and hell are not a new sort of
ghost-land: retribution is not a larger way of tribal revenge.
No. The latest facts of science present this universe as not only
progressive, but as retributive. There is a rebound of evil which makes
for pain. Each broken law exacts a penalty. Each deed of sin is a
forerunner of personal and of social disaster. The generation that sins
shall be cut off, while the stock of the righteous grows strong from
age to age.
It is of these grave omens that the Man of God must speak. He dare not
be tongue-tied by custom or by fear. He must proclaim hell in the ears
of all mankind. For wherever hell may be, and we do not yet know, and
whatever hell may be, and we cannot even imagine, Hell _is_; and the
soul of man must be kept mindful of these great things.
The evangelist comforts and consoles. The heart of man is wayward and
goes oft astray. No one can be belabored into righteousness. The true
lover of souls allows for the hereditary weaknesses of man, for his
infirmities of will and temper, for his excuses, wanderings, and tears,
and presents to him Jesus, in whose sight no one is too wretched to be
received, too wicked to be forgiven.
The evangelist must come close, in sympathy and counsel, to the personal
and individual life of those whom he would help. Perhaps the best way to
emphasize this point would be to insert here words written by a woman
who has been thinking on this subject.
She says: "I have never had a pastor. It is the one good thing lacking
in my life. I have grown up among ministers, and have had many friends
among them--some of them have cared for me. But there has never been one
among them all who stood in an attitude of spiritual authority and
helpfulness to my life. We church-going and Christian men and women of
the educated class are almost wholly let alone; apparently no one takes
thought for our souls. We are not in the least infallible; we come face
to face with fierce temptations; we have heart-breaking sorrows; we are
burdened with anxiety and perplexity. But we are left to grope as blind
sheep; there is no one to point out the path to us, however dimly; no
one to say, at any crucial moment of our lives, Walk here!
Or again, he may have had a worried and troubled week, full of personal
anxiety and sorrow. He has not had full time to study--he feels quite
unprepared, and enters the pulpit with a halting step, and a choking
fear of failure at his heart.
Hence the evangelist of to-day is more than a man who can popularly
address a public audience, and by tales and tears arouse a weeping
commotion. The evangelist is a man of intellect and prayer, who can
preach the gospel to a scientific age, and to a thinking coterie--a
coterie of college men and mechanics, of society women and
servant-girls, of poets and of mine-diggers, of convicts and of
reformers. To-day calls for the utmost intellectual resources of the
teacher of the truth, for a great imagination, great style, great
sympathy with men, large learning, and unceasing prayer!
The tenets of a sect are the theological arrangement of belief which for
the present seems best; it is the systematic arrangement of facts so far
examined, determined, and classified. But no system of theology can be
final. Thought is moving on. Experience is progressive. Providence is
continually revealing. The race is a creed-builder, as well as a builder
of pyramids, cathedrals, and triumphal arches.
Who are the men who have built up doctrine? Men speak as if doctrine
were an ecclesiastical toy--to be shaken by priest or prelate, as one
shakes a rattle, for noise, for play! A doctrine is not a toy; it is the
crystallized belief of earnest, thoughtful, and godly men--belief which
has passed into a church tradition, and is now received as an act
of faith.
Doctrine does not save from hell, but it does save from many a snare
that besets the feet of man. It is a steadier of life, a strengthener of
hope, a stalwart aid to a practical, devout, and duty-doing life. A
catechism is a system of doctrine expressed in its simplest form.
Therefore, for the intellectual and moral training of the Church, let us
have sound doctrine in the pulpit, and the catechism in the home and
Sabbath-school.
Not every man has Europe or Asia in his backyard, nor a lifetime of
leisure for research, for special learning, on the moot questions of
church-scholarship. Progress consists in each man's doing his best to
advance the interests of the kingdom of God in his own special sphere.
From others he must take something for granted. The ear of the Church
ought always to be open to the sayings of the specialist. A Church
should grant liberty of research, of thought, of speech--to a degree.
It is true that the conditions of work are more trying than they have
usually been. A man goes out from the seminary. He has had a good
education, followed by perhaps a year or two abroad, and some practical
experience in sociological work. He has plans, ideas, ideals, a vigorous
and whole-souled personality, a frank and generous heart.
What does he find? He soon discovers that the battle is not always to
the strong, the educated, or the well-bred. Too often he is at the mercy
of rich men who can scarcely put together a grammatical sentence; of
poorer men who are, in church affairs, unscrupulous politicians; of
women who carp and gossip; and of all sorts of men and women who desire
to rule, criticise, hinder, and distrain. They, too, are the very people
who, in the ears of God and of the community, have vowed to love him and
to uphold his work! The more intellectual and spiritual he is, the more
he is troubled and distressed.
Many churches, too, are in a chronic state of internal war. As for
these rising church difficulties--try to put out a burning bunch of
fire-crackers with one finger, and you have the sort of task he has in
hand. While one point of explosion is being firmly suppressed, other
crackers are spitting and going off. Whichever way he turns, and
whatever he does, something pops angrily, and a new blaze begins! And
this business, incredibly petty as it is, blocks the progress of the
Christian faith. Men and women of education and refinement, of a wide
outlook and noble thoughts and deeds, are more and more unwilling to
place themselves on the church-roll; a minister sometimes finds himself
in the anomalous position of having the more cultured, congenial, and
philanthropic people of the community quite outside any church
organization.
All these things mean, not that a minister must grow discouraged, but
that he must set his teeth, and with pluck and endurance rise strong and
masterful and say, This shall not be! Let him not listen to the barking
and baying: let him hearken to the great primal voices of man and
nature. Love lies deeper than discord. The constructive forces of
humanity are stronger than the disintegrative. The right
attraction binds.
There are some men who by the sheer force of their personality subdue
their church difficulties. They hold the captious in awe. By a sort of
magnetic persuasion and lively sense of humor they soothe this one and
that, win the regard of the outlying community, attach many new members
to the organization, and build up, out of discordant and erstwhile
discontented elements, a harmonious and active church. This is the man
for these martial times! If there are born leaders in every other
department of the world's work, men who quietly but firmly assert their
authority and supremacy in the tasks in which they hold, by free
election or legitimate appointment, a place at the head--it ought to be
so in the Church of God! I long to see arise in the ministry _a race
of iron!_
There are other difficulties, seldom spoken of, of which one must write
frankly, though with the keenest sympathy, if one is to look deeply into
the modern church problem. First: Is a minister's environment favorable
to his best personal development? Does he not miss much from the lack of
the world's hearty give-and-take? He gets criticism, but not of a just
or all-round kind. Small things may be pecked at, trifles may be made
mountains of by the disgruntled, but where does he get a clear-sighted,
whole-hearted estimate of himself and his work? Who tells him of his
real virtues, his real faults? Among all his friends, who is there, man
or woman, who is brave enough to be true?
Other men are soon shaken into place. Their personal traits continually
undergo a process of chiselling and adjustment. They are told
uncomfortable things how quickly! At the club, in the university, in
the market, the ploughing-field, the counting-room, they rub up against
each other, and no mercy is shown by man to man until primary signs of
crudeness are worn off. Let a conceited professor get in a college
chair! Watch a hundred students begin their delightful and salutary
process of "taking him down" by the sort of mirth in which college boys
excel! Their unkindness is not right, but the result is, they never
molest a man who is merely eccentric.
Watch a scientific association jump with all fours upon a man who has
just read a paper before their body! How unsparingly they analyze and
criticise! He has to meet questions, opposition, comments, shafts of wit
and envy, jovial teasing and correction. He goes out from the meeting
with a keener love of truth and exactness, and a less exalted idea of
his own powers. Watch the rivalry and sparring that go on in any
business. Men meet men who attack them; they fight and overcome them, or
are themselves overcome.
He is also socially made too much of, being one of the very few men
available for golf and afternoon teas, suppers, picnics, tennis,
charity-bazaars. Other men are frankly too busy for much of these
things, except for healthful recreation; and not infrequently one finds
stray ministers absolutely the only men at some function to which men
have been invited.
I should think that a real Man in the ministry would get so very tired
of women! They tell him all their complaints and difficulties, from
headaches, servants, and unruly children, to their sentimental
experiences and their spiritual problems. Men tell him almost nothing.
Watch any group of men talking, as the minister comes in. A moment
before they were eager, alert, argumentative. Now they are polite or
mildly bored. He is not of their world. Some assert that he is not even
of their sex! Hence the lips of men are too often sealed to the
minister. He must find some way not only to meet them as brother to
brother, but he must capture their inmost hearts. The shy confidence of
an honorable man once won, his friendship never fails.
Let him hold himself firmly aloof both from nonsense and from enervating
praise. Let him dream of great themes, and work for great things! Let
him rely on more quiet friends who watch loyally, hope, encourage,
inspire. By and by the scales drop from his eyes; he sees himself, not
as one who has already achieved, but as one to whom the radiant gates of
life are opening, so that he, too, can one day speak to human souls as
the masters have done! He discovers that out of the heart's depths is
great work born! This is a memorable day, both for this man and for his
church. From that hour he has vision and power.
But if we consider the responsibilities which are now being laid upon
different classes of people, and carried by them, I think that we must
acknowledge that the statesman is looming up as the most influential and
upbuilding man to-day. He is the one who is adjusting the new
world-powers and the new world-relations, over-seeing the development of
our country, and planning for its laws and commerce. Close to him comes
the physician, who is laying his hand on world-plagues, and is studying
the conditions and the forms of disease, with a view to striking disease
at its root. The hand of the doctor is laid upon consumption, malaria,
yellow fever, diphtheria, typhoid fever, and bubonic plague, and the
advance in medical research is marvellous.
The lawyer and the capitalist are together adjusting the industrial
relations of the country. We have trusts, syndicates, and
corporation-problems handled with a firm intellectual grasp and a wide
outlook over human affairs.
Suppose that New York City should suddenly be invaded by the bubonic
plague or yellow fever. Would any one be to blame? Certainly! Such an
outcry would go up as would echo across the country. Where were the
quarantine officers? Where was the port physician? Where were the
specialists who attend to sanitation and disinfection?
All the ministers under heaven cannot take sin out of the world, nor
uproot sin altogether from the heart of man: the plague conies in at
birth. Neither can all the doctors living remove disease, so that no one
will get sick or die. But just as the doctor can, by study, by training,
by counsel, by practice, and by the direction of wise law-making,
protect the health interests of his country or community, so the
minister should stand, yet more largely than to-day, as a break-water
between the world and the tides of sin! He should not only be able to
keep alive in a country an atmosphere of prayer, devotion, and unselfish
service--he should, by God's help, make piety the general estate of the
land; he should not only be intellectually able to show the great
advantage of the upright Christian life, he should straight-way lead
all classes into that life; he should be able to lay a hand on the moral
maladies of mankind, personal and national, and prescribe effectual
remedies; take lame, halt, sinning souls, and by God's grace and Spirit,
lift not only individuals, but whole communities, to a more
spiritual plane.
This is a Titanic intellectual task, as well as a spiritual one. When a
doctor wishes to keep plague out of America, he goes to Asia, to see
what plague is! He takes microscopes, instruments, and drugs; he buries
himself in a laboratory, and gives his whole mind to the problem, until
one day he can come forth and tell how to heal and help. More than this,
he risks his life. For every great discovery in medical practice,
doctors and nurses have died martyrs to their faithful work.
There are a few men living who seem to hold, for the whole world, the
temporal balance. They control mines and shipping, banks and trade. Who,
to-day, holds the spiritual destiny of the world in his hand? I long to
see men appear upon whom the eyes of the world shall be fastened, in
recognition of their spiritual preeminence, as they are now fastened on
these industrial giants.
Rise! Let some man, earnest and endowed, look forward into the future,
and with the courage that comes from inborn power, assert himself among
the nations! Allay, O World-Evangelist, not only neighborhood disputes,
but international dissensions; project a creed that shall be profound
and universal; sweep sects together, unite energy and endeavor, baptize
with fire, bring repentance, quicken the race-conscience, uplift the
World-Hope! Erect and elemental, hold CHRIST before the race!
THOMAS WISTAR
Such a gift God has given us in our power to think. What a mysterious
and deep-hid gift it is! Nerves and sensations, a few convolutions in
the brain, acts of attention and observation, certain reactions
following certain stimuli: the result, a world of worlds spread out
before us; unlimited intellectual possibilities within our grasp!
Thinking is the power to take up life where the race has left off
attainment, and to lead the race one step farther on, by a new concept
or idea. It is a curious thing, this little turn in the brain, a
thought. We cannot see it, or touch it, or handle it. Yet we can give
it, one to another, or one man to the race. It has an infinite leverage.
One great thought moves millions onward. Plant the word _steam_, and
globe-transport changes. Plant _electricity_, and a hundred new
industries spring up. Plant _liberty_, tyrants fall. Plant _love_,
chaotic angers disappear.
The work of sages has been to rule the thinking of the race. They
receive the inspired ideas and spend their lives in teaching them to
others: in setting up intellectual vibrations throughout the world.
Nothing teases the soul like the thought of the unfinished, the
imperfect, the incomplete. And yet, when we have thought and planned a
really great and abiding work, whether we ever finish it or not--for
many things in life may intervene between conception and completion--to
have thought of it is to have had in our lives a pleasure that can never
die. For one blessed hour or year we have been lifted to the thoughts of
God and have entered into the great original Design. Hence it is that
the life of the real Thinker, however broken or disturbed, is at heart a
life of serenity and joy. What matters a conflagration, a
disappointment, to him whose thoughts are set upon the race?
Thinking is a form of vital growth. We all wish for growth. Is there any
one who wishes to stay always just where he is to-day? To be always what
he is this morning? The tree grows, the flower grows, the ideals of the
race grow--shall not I?
We are born to a destiny which has no limit of grandeur save the limit
of the thought of God, The wish for growth is the wish to enter into the
spiritual ideals of the universe,--to become one with its advancement,
one with its decrees.
But do not the secular look upon growth as a sort of chase--a chase for
more learning, more money, a bigger business, a higher degree, a better
position, a brilliant marriage,--a struggle for wealth, renown, acclaim?
These things are not in themselves growth, nor its real index. Growth is
not a form of avarice. Growth is a vital state of being. Growth is the
assimilation of experience. Growth is development in the line of eternal
purpose. Growth is the combination of our souls with the things that
are, in such a way as to make a perpetual progress toward the things
that are to be.
We lose much because we lose avidity out of our lives, the eagerness to
grasp what spiritually belongs to us,--to share the universal
enthusiasm, the universal hope. Day by day the world wheels about
us--sunset and moonrise, wind, hail, frost, snow, vapor, care, anxiety,
temptation, trial, joy, fear. Whatever touches the sense or the soul is
something by which, rightly used, we may grow. There is nothing we need
fear to take into our lives, if it receives the right assimilation. Each
experience is meant to be a vital accession. We narrow our lives and
enfeeble our powers when we try to reject any of these things, or
unlawfully escape them, or are yet indifferent to them. Prejudice,
cowardice, and apathy are death.
Experience is what the race has been through. Each of us has his
personal variant of this common life. Thought is the power by which we
make it available for our own better living, and the future life of
the race.
To the early man, there existed earth, air, water, fire, heat, cold,
tempest, and the growth of living things. He lived, ate, fought, but his
thoughts were primitive and personal. Have _I_ had enough dinner? he
asked, not, Is the race fed?
By and by some one arose who began to consider things in the abstract,
and to relate them to his neighbor, and formulate conclusions about
them. He was the first real Thinker, Then air-philosophy and
element-philosophy grew up--beast-worship, animalism, fire-worship, and
the rudiments of simple scientific learning, as, for instance, when men
found that they could make a tool to cut, a spike to sew.
Since then, what the sage has done is to teach men to see, read, write,
think, count, and to work; to love ideals, to love mankind and relate
his work to human progress.
Man's first primer was near at hand. When he wished to write, he made a
picture with a stick, a stone, on a leaf, or traced his idea in the mud.
When he wanted to count, he kept tally on his fingers, or with pebbles
from the beach or brook. When he wished to communicate an idea orally,
it was with glances, shrugs, gestures, and imitative sounds. Once, in a
game of Twenty Questions, this was the question set to guess: Who first
used the prehistoric root expressing a verb of action? Who, indeed?
Out of that leaf-writing, and bark-etching, and later rune, have grown
the printed writings of mankind. Homer, Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare
are the lineal descendants of the man who made holes in a leaf, or lines
on a wave-washed sand. Out of the finger-counting have grown up
book-keeping, geometry, mathematical astronomy and a knowledge of the
higher curves. Out of the prehistoric shrugs and sounds and grimaces we
have oral speech--much of it worthless, and not all of it yet wholly
intelligible. We are still continually being understood to say what we
never meant to say: we are forever putting our private interpretation on
the words of other men. Even yet, we are all too stupid. In our
dreariest moments does there not come to us sometimes a voice which
cries: Up, awake! Cease blinking, and begin to see!
We get out of a word just what we put into it, plus the individuality of
the man who uses it. Some men read into noble words only their own
silliness, vulgarity, prejudice, or preconceived ideas. Another man
reads with his heart open for new impressions, new insight, new fancies
and ideals.
Words have not only their inherent meaning; they have their allied
meanings. A word may mean one thing by itself. It may mean quite another
thing when another word stands beside it; even marks of punctuation give
words a curiously different sound and shade. Literature is a mastery,
not only of the moods of men, but of the moods of words. Corot takes a
stream, some grass and trees, a flitting patch of sky. By means of a few
strokes of his brush, he manages to present that tree, sky, stream, in a
way which suggests the pastoral experience of the ages. Where did that
misty veil come from? the trembling lights and shadows, the half-heard
sounds and silence of the woods, the changing cloud, the dim reflection,
the atmosphere of mystery and peace?
So each man goes to the dictionary. He takes a word here, a word there,
common words that everybody knows. He puts them together: the result is
a presentation of the life of man, and lays hold of his inmost spirit.
To write, the soul chooses, and God stands ever by to help. That is why
great work always impresses us as inspired. God did it. It is God who
whispers the deathless thought and phrase: the subtler collocations
are divine.
Take the word _star_. To the child it means a bright point that glitters
and twinkles in the sky, and sets him saying an old nursery rhyme. To
the youth or maiden it suggests love, romance, a summer eve, or a frosty
walk under the friendly winter sky. To the rhetorician it suggests a
figure of speech--the star of hope. To the mariner it suggests guidance
and the homeward port. To the astronomer it means the world in which he
lives. His life is centred in that star. To the poet it means all these
things and many more. For the poet is the one who, in his own heart,
holds all the meanings that words hold for the race. Read again the
lines just quoted, and think of Wordsworth's outlook on the star!
The dictionary definition of a word can seldom be the real one, nor does
it reveal the deeper sense it has. It blazes a path for the
understanding, but individual thought must follow. Take the words _time,
friendship, work, play, heroism_. It took Carlyle to define Time for us.
Emerson has defined Friendship. Let the lights and shadows of the
thought of Carlyle and Emerson play upon these words, they are at once
removed from mechanical definition, and we dimly perceive that each word
is larger than the outreach of the thought of man. Another generation
than ours shall define and refine them. In heaven, in some other aeon,
we shall find out what they really mean!
What is true of a word, and what we make of it, is true of every phase
of learning. The black-board is not all. Learning is not tied to it, or
to any one person, demonstration, interpretation, event, or epoch. No
wise man can keep his learning to himself, and yet he cannot, though he
teach a thousand years, transmit his deeper learning to another. The
atmosphere, the casual information, the spiritual magnetism of a great
man, will teach better than the text-books, the lecture courses, and
the formal resources of academic halls. Thus Mark Hopkins is in himself
a university, given a boy on the other end of the log on which he sits.
Ah, no! We never really know. Every fact recedes from us, as might an
ebbing wave, and leaves us stranded upon an unhorizoned beach, more
despairing than before. Education does not solve the problems of
life--it deepens the mystery. What, then, may the sage know? Are there
no sages? And have we all been misinformed?
A sage is one who knows what, in his position of life, is most necessary
for him to know. The larger sage, the great Sage, is the one who knows
what is necessary for the race to know.
The sea-sage was the one who could toss upon the swan-road without fear.
He knew the strength of oak and ash; the swing of oar, the curve of
prow, the dash of wave, and the curling breaker's sweep. He knew the
maelstroms and the aegir that swept into northern fiords; the thunder
and wind and tempest; the coves, safe harbors and retreats. To-day, the
sea-sage rules the fishing-boat, the ocean liner, the coastwise
steamers, and the lake-lines of the world.
The fishing-sage knows the ways and haunts of fish. He is wise in the
salmon, the perch, the trout, the tarpon, and the muscalonge. He says.
To-day the bass will bite on dobsons, but to-morrow we must have frogs.
No sagacity is universal, but the love of sagacity may be. The man who
starts out to implant a new way of education has a noble task before
him, but is it a final one, or even a more than tolerably practical one?
Is there such a thing as a place for Truth at wholesale, even in an
academy or college? Can a man receive an education outside of himself?
He may be played upon by grammars and by loci-paper, by electrical
machines, and parsing tables and Grecian accents, by the names of noted
authors and statesmen, and the thrill of historic battles and decisions.
He may be placed under a rain of ethical and philosophic ideas, and may
be forced to put on a System of Thought, as men put on a mackintosh. But
his true education is what he makes of these things. If he hears of
Theodoric with a yawn, we say--the college-folk--He must be imbecile.
No, not imbecile! he may become a successful toreador, or snake-charmer,
which things are out of our line! And a man may be an upright citizen, a
good husband, and a sincerely religious man, who has never heard of
Francesca, nor Fra Angelico, nor named the name of Botticelli!
The moment we set bounds to wisdom, we find that we have shut something
out. Wisdom is the free, active life of a growing and attaching soul.
We must not only attach information to ourselves, we must assimilate it.
Else we are like a crab which should drag about Descartes, or as an
ocean sucker which should hug a copy of Thucydides.
Conduct is the _pons asinorum_ of life. Wise men somehow cross it,
though stumblingly, and with tears. Fools, usurers, oppressors, and
spendthrifts of life are left gaping and wrangling on the hellward side.
Thinkers have always been climbing up on each other's shoulders to look
over into the Beyond. What they have seen, they have told. Some men
climb so high into the ethereal places of the Ideal, that they do not
get down again. They are the impractical men. An impractical man is not
necessarily the educated man; he is the man at the top of some
intellectual fence, who wishes to come down, but has absent-mindedly
forgotten that he has legs. The legs are not absent, but his wit is. So
with the impractical man in every sphere. Education has not really
removed his common-sense, as some say, his power to connect passing
events with their causes, and to act reasonably; but it has set his
thought on some other thought for the time being, and the dinner-bell,
we will say, does not detach him from his inquiry. His necktie rides up!
He goes out into the street without a hat! Let him alone till he proves
the worth of what he is about. The practical man, who hears the
dinner-bell and prides himself upon this fact, may not hear sounds
far-off and clear, that ring in the impractical man's ear, and that may
sometime tell him how to make a better dinner-bell, or provide a better
dinner--a great social philosophy--for the race!
The really impractical man is not he who reaches out to the intellectual
and ideal aspects of life; it is he who lives as if this life were all.
There are women who make pets of their clothes, as men make pets of
horse or dog. They have just time enough in life to dress themselves up.
Looking back over their years, they can only say, I have had clothes! In
the same number of years, with no greater advantages or opportunities,
other women have become the queenly women of the race. Some women are
girt with centuries, instead of gold or gems. Whenever they appear, the
event becomes historic; what they do adds new lustre to life.
We are all prodigals. We throw away time and strength, and years, and
gold, and then weep that we are ignorant, and embeggared at the last.
Who shall teach us wisdom, and in what manner may we be wise?
What say the sages of the vast possibilities of the race? With one voice
they say: Be brave! Do not cower, shrink, or whine. Throw out upon the
world a free fearlessness of thought and word and deed. Courage,
freedom, heroism, faith, exactness, honor, justice, and mercy--these
traits have been handed down as the traditional learning of the heart
of man.
Another ideal is Progress. We are moving, not toward the bottom, but
toward the top of possibility. We reject annihilation, because then
there is nothing left. And there must always be something
left--progress--a bigger something, a better something. Should
annihilation be the truth of things, and all the race mortal, then some
day there would be a Last Man. And after the Last Man, what? He would
die, and then all that any of the other stars could view of the vast
panorama of our earthly generations would be an unburied corpse, with
not even a vulture hovering to pick it to freshness in the air!
A Last Man? No. Instead, the seers have shown us a great multitude in a
heavenly country, praising God, and singing forth His Name forever.
Immortality broods over the great thought of the race. All great minds
look upward to it: it is the final consummation of our dreams.
Hence, wisdom has not yet been arrived at: we are still on the run. This
twentieth century will find new problems, new queries, new cranks, and
new dismays!
When we look down into the physical universe, the primary thing that we
find there is gravitation. When we look into the moral universe, the
primary thing that we find there is also gravitation--a sinking to a
Lower. This is sin--a contrariness of things--which makes the world an
evil place to live in, instead of a good; which wrecks character and
states, eats the hearts out of cultures and civilizations, destroys
strong races, leaves a stain upon even the youngest child, and which is
constantly drawing the race downward, instead of upward.
Sin, sin, sin! Everywhere the fact glares upon us, and cannot be hid, or
put away. Sin is not an intellectual toy, for philosophers to play with
or define as "a limitation of being." Sin is a reality, for men to
feel, recoil from, and of which one must repent.
Through stormy sorrows and perpetual desolations comes the race to God.
Zion is the Whole of things--the encompassment of space, and time, and
endless years,--an environment of immortality and peace.
Virtue leads the race to Joy, and there is no byway to this height. The
final aspect of the universe is joy. Joy is elemental--a vast vibration
that sweeps through centuries as years! A day in His courts is as a
thousand, and a thousand years are as one day, because they thrill with
an immortal and imperishable emotion. The seraphim and cherubim,
Sandalphon and Azrael, are angels of enduring joy. Joy is the soul's
share of the life of God.
Thus when the world has breathed to us the holy name of Christ, it has
told us the highest that it knows. The March of Sages is toward a
Redeemer! The banner of Wisdom is furled about the Cross!
[AMSTERDAM]
There are traders and traders--the just and the unjust--the man of honor
and the rogue. We set values on thoughts and on transactions, on
merchandise and on philanthropies, on ideas and on accounts; and there
is a constant distribution of the affairs, as well as of the worldly
goods of men.
To-day, each man demands more of the earth's products than ever before.
He reaches out a hand for comforts and luxuries, as well as for
necessities. He grasps not only the produces of his own and his
neighbor's field and vineyard, but demands what lies across continents
and seas. Instead of the ship, the camel, and the ass, we now have the
ocean freighter or liner, and the flying train of cars: new forces, oil,
steam, electricity, and water-power, do the carrying work of man. And
hence trade has become Trade, and each trader is involved in the
comfort, success, and prosperity of many others. A single commercial
transaction to-day involves the lives of hundreds of thousands, competes
for their toil and life-blood, carries the decision of their destiny.
As large eras open, the ethical ideals become higher. We are beginning
to inquire, as never before, into the basis of trade, the place of the
trader, the right conduct of this vast problem of Distribution upon
which hinges so much of human life and fate. All things look, not only
to the integration of trade, but to its exaltation.
The sceptre held by Tyre and Venice is passing into our own hands. But
trade, to-day, is a matter of the imagination, as well as of the
stock-book. 11 needs a great imagination to handle the present-day
problems of business and finance. The prosperity of a nation depends
largely on the intelligence, integrity, and magnanimity of its business
men. To be narrow-minded in business, is not only intellectual
astigmatism, it is poor commercial policy. To make use of present
opportunities to control present advantages needs a great education and
a large human experience. It is the man of insight, of sympathy, of
economic ideals, who will lastingly control our national prosperity and
advance our industrial wealth.
With all this demand, the business man still stands largely in a class
by himself, a class apart from the great leaders of the world. He is not
yet received into the spiritual circles of the race. He goes about the
world, sits on boards and committees, fills directorships and
trusteeships, pays pew-rent, and runs towns. But when the spiritual
conclaves of the world take place, when the things of life and death are
inquired into, when words are said of the higher conduct of the life of
man, if he draw near inquiringly or unguardedly to the sacred place,
scholar and poet, priest, saint, and proud hand-worker alike rise up and
say, Go away.
Why must he go away? What has he done, that he must be waved down? If we
discover why he must go away, we shall discover the meaning of that
great caste-line which has long been drawn, and ought no longer to be
drawn, between trade and letters, trade and the Church, trade and
social prestige.
The reason he must go away is this: He has never ruled the higher
history of man; he does not yet quite belong to the ideal-makers of the
race. Understand, I am not now speaking of the new business man, the
exceptional one, upright, cultured, altruistic, whom you and I may know;
I am speaking of a broad class-line, a class distinction.
It is a strange concept that would bar the business man from the ideal;
that would limit his life to an account-book, a ledger, a roll of
stocks, rents, and possessions, instead of granting him the freedom of
the universe, the privilege of ministering to the race. Singularly
enough, the business class is the last class that Christianity has set
free. Slaves have been given liberty; women, social companionship and
intellectual equality; manual labor has been lifted to dignity and
honor. But to break the shackles of the man of trade is the work of our
era, or of an era yet to come. Thousands of young men are daily stepping
into counting-houses, or behind sales-counters, or into independent
stores, who will never lift their eyes from their goods and
account-books, nor rise above the linen, hardware, groceries, or
house-fixtures which they sell. Such a situation is suicidal of national
prosperity, and blocks the high hopes of the world.
Endowed with natural business talent, the young man who goes out into
the world with such preparation as this knows a great deal more than
just how to make money; he knows how to make it honorably and how to
spend it, in his business, family, and social life, for the public good;
he has in him the making of a statesman and a philanthropist, as well as
a man of wealth.
Two things take one into the inner circle of the ideal-makers of the
race--imagination and sympathy. Ideals cannot be bought with gold. The
ideal is always founded on integrity, progress, and common-sense. It is
pre�minently practical, as well: the thing that inevitably must be, now
or hereafter, however men laugh it to scorn to-day.
One concept is: Trade is something which belongs to me. It is that part
of the world's exchange which I can get under my personal control. It
is the balance between human industries and human needs which I hold
for my part of the world, and which others are continually trying to
wrest from me, and which I must keep by all means, fair or foul.
Competition is the battle of the strongest, the quickest, the meanest! I
must know tricks. I must get in with people, get hold of some sort of
pull, learn to dissemble, to flatter, manipulate, hedge, dodge. Success
is a matter of being sly. Anything is allowable which comes out ahead,
which adds to the dollar-pile, or which makes the loudest
advertising noise!
To buy at the least, and sell at the most, regardless of the conditions
under which least and most are attained--the man who enters life with
this idea of trade in his mind might just as well be born a shark and
live to prey. Every free dollar in the world will tease and fret him,
until he sees it on its way to his own pocket. If this is all there is
in trade, the noble-minded will let it alone: it gives no human outlook.
It not only undermines personal character, it is the root of national
ignominy and dishonor.
Trade is a just exchange of what one man has for what another man needs.
It may take place individually between man and man, in which transaction
a horse, an ox, or a tool may change hands. Or one man may assume a
responsibility for a number of people, and say: I will give this whole
town shoes, in return for which you may give me a house, market-produce,
clothing, and an education for my children. The thing will come out
even, if you and I are honest. Or a climate, a civilization, may give to
another that which the other lacks. We send school-books and machinery
to China; she sends us tea, matting, and bamboo. The whole right theory
of trade is a give-and-take between men and nations, based on a just
price, and with a deep law of Value, not yet wholly formulated,
underlying each transaction.
Take the case of a specially helpful and paying book. The author
receives a royalty, and has an income. The publisher receives his
profits, and makes a living. The public gains inspiration and ideals.
Who is loser? This is sheer business, yet it means loving service for
all concerned.
The Law of Equity is the final law of trade. But in whose hands is
equity? Who appraises value? Who sets price? In whose hand is the final
price of the necessaries of life--wheat, rice, sugar, soap, cotton,
wool, coal, milk, iron, lumber, ice? The man who puts a price on an
article, as buyer or seller, enters an arena which is not only
commercial--it is judicial and ethical: he declares for what amount a
man's life-blood shall be used.
Some one says: Do you realize that you are making a moral laughing-stock
of much of our system of trade? that you are setting an axe to that
system, more cutting than the axe of any Socialist, Nihilist, or
Anarchist in the world? Oh, no. I have simply set myself to answer the
question: How can the business man stand among the ideal-makers of the
world, so that he shall no more, in spiritual assemblies, be told to
go away?
Money is a makeshift of the race. God is the only real appraiser, and we
never get back a money-value for our soul's toil. Whether we pass
wampum, or nickels, or taels, or bank-checks, we are not yet paid for
our trade.
The higher value of money is its spiritual capacity. Not what it will
bring me is primarily important, but what I can buy with it for the
race. Sometimes the question comes over me: What am I trading for money?
My time? My energy? My ideals? Part of my soul is passing from me: do
dollars ever repay? Hence it comes about that all money transactions are
fragmentary and symbolic.
We trade position and influence. The evil of the spoils system is not
that one gets something for something,--it is that one gets something
for something less, or for nothing. Whatever we have to give may be
rightly given; the wrong comes when we give it to the idle or unworthy.
When we trade political preferment for high merit, both the
office-holders and the country are gainers by the exchange.
Marriage is the great mart of exchange. Here the possessions of one sex
are set up against those of the other. Everywhere marriage is spoken of
as a good or a bad "bargain." Each man shall say: "Sweetheart, in Myself
I offer you the treasures of manhood. I give strength, courage,
magnanimity, action, protection, and the indomitable will." Each wife
should say: "Dear, in me are all gentleness, courtesy, beauty, grace,
patience, mercy, and hope. I, too, am brave, but my courage is of the
heart. I, too, am strong-willed, but my will is deep-set in love." As
years go on, there comes a time when Love says: "Between us now there is
neither mine nor thine. The universe is ours together!"
Human love is not all. There is yet a higher impulse. The most
business-like question that ever touches the heart of man is this: For
what shall I trade my soul? We hold our souls high: we perceive that
eternity itself is not too much to ask. And hence the highest barter is
that of the earthly for the spiritual; of the temporal for the unseen
and eternal. We say, Give me God, give me heaven, give me divine and
sacrificial Love, and I will give my heart. And thus the last
transaction is between God and the soul. Godliness is great Gain, and to
exchange earth for heaven is a satisfying and unregretted Trade.
[ARMAGEDON]
The great man can begin anywhere, or with any task. He says, If I am
going into the giant-business, I may as well begin now! Born and bred in
the forest, he lays hand to his axe, and looking up at some tall oak,
cries out, I will begin here! With the first stroke of the axe, success
is not less sure than in his last endeavor. Success of the right kind is
a scientific achievement.
The line has not yet been drawn, and I doubt whether it ever can be
drawn, between productive and non-productive labor. There is a cleavage
of tasks, however, which may be approximately expressed, as work that is
done for support, for daily bread, and work which is done because
certain faculties of mind and heart and soul demand expression,
development, and scope. We all have powers which are willing to be set
in action primarily for self-preservation--for personal, material, and
transitory ends. We are also endowed with faculties which react,
primarily, in behalf of universal aims, though that may not debar them
from also bringing an advantage to ourselves. In proportion as we are
talented, magnanimous, and high-minded, we delight in spending a part of
our lives in working for the race.
Thus Thoreau, when he, "by surveying, carpentry and day-labor of various
other kinds," had earned $13.34, was doing income-work, the work by
which he had to live. For the same purpose, he worked at raising
potatoes, green corn, and peas. When he wrote _Walden_, he did a kind of
work which also in time brought him an income. But he did not write
_Walden_ for food or money; he wrote it primarily because he liked to
write, and for the benefit of mankind.
In order to be contented and happy, each normal adult human being must
have at least the chance of doing these two kinds of work. Unless he or
she can do income-work, he or she is not economically independent;
unless he can do universal work, he is not socially and
spiritually free.
Much of the present-day discontent is owing to the fact that these two
kinds of work are not represented, as they should be, in every
working-life.
The problem in regard to the working-man is not how to pet him, nor to
patronize him, but how to educate him and inspire him! He is not a
parasite to be fed by the capitalist, nor is the capitalist a parasite
upon the working-power of the working-man. Both are men. The problem is,
How shall the capitalist lead the noblest, most public-spirited, and
helpful life in relation to those in his employ? How shall the
working-man lay hold on the best that life can give? How shall he find a
work which he is competent to do, and likes to do, and may be supported
by doing--and at the same time have a chance to grow; to enter into the
large, free culture-life of the world?
Is it not also the source of the discontent to-day, among almost all
classes of women, except the most highly educated and efficient? Women
say--our modern daughters, wives, and mothers: "In the home, we do
income-work for which we do not receive income. When strangers do this
work, they are paid, and we are not." In addition, many a woman is so
bound down by daily tasks, that her whole soul cries out, and we hear of
the high rate of insanity among farmers' wives, of nervous prostration
of the housewives in our towns, and become accustomed to such
expressions as "the death of a woman on a Kansas farm."
This discontent takes many restless forms. It leads daughters, who ought
to be at home, out into morally dangerous but income-earning work; it
takes wives out into all manner of clubs, without regard to the fact: as
to whether the particular club, in its atmosphere and influence, is good
or bad; it brings discouragement, disorder, and unrest into the home,
dissatisfaction with house-duties and home-tasks, and is sapping our
life where it should be best and strongest--in the home--taking out of
it youth, spirit, enthusiasm, inspiration, and content.
The three questions asked in regard to each worker are: 1. What work
can he do? 2. Of what quality? 3. In what time? The difference between
industry and idleness is that work is one thing which no one may
honorably escape. Since it must be done, the problem of life is not how
to escape work, but how to find the right work, and how best to do it,
and most swiftly, when the choice is made.
"These are they who build thy houses, weave thy raiment,
win thy wheat,
Smooth the rugged, fill the barren, turn the bitter into
sweet,
All for thee this day--and ever. What reward for them
is meet?
Till the host comes marching on._"
WILLIAM MORRIS
SECOND
The trade of toil for money has led to many problems and discussions.
To-day the trenchant question: "What More than Wages?" is a matter of
eager talk. Is this a living-wage?--Just enough warmth, not to freeze.
Just enough clothing to be decent. Just enough food to go through the
day without actual hunger. Just enough shelter to keep out the wind and
rain and snow. Just enough education to learn to read and write
and count.
No. As the theory of bodily freedom demands for each man life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness, so the highest theory of to-day lays down
demands of economic freedom beyond the mere fad of possible existence.
Dr. Patten has formulated certain "economic rights" of man. Each
employer must say: Before I settle back with a serene belief that I have
given my men a living-wage, let me ask: Have they sun? air? sanitary
surroundings and conditions? medical care? leisure? education? a chance
to grow? Have they enough money for ordinary occasions, and a little to
give away? No man or woman has a living-wage, who has no money to
give away.
Education and comfort add to the value of the employed. The cook who has
a rocking-chair, a cook-book, and a housekeeping magazine in her kitchen
will do more work, and better work, other things being equal, than the
cook who has none. The workman who lives in a clean, sunny, well-aired
place, where he can found a home, and bring up healthy children, will do
more work, and better work, than the workman who lives in a damp, dark,
ill-ventilated tenement, and who goes to his day's work with a heart
sullen and broken because of avoidable illness and sorrow in his poor
little home. Five thousand employees who have a night-school,
luncheon-rooms, little houses and gardens, a savings-bank, and a library
of books and pictures are worth more than those who are given no such
advantages of happiness, growth, and content. The Railroad Young Men's
Christian Associations are said to be a good economic investment, as
well as an uplifting moral influence.
But the capitalist, however just or generous, cannot do for a man what
he cannot or will not do for himself. Too many workers imagine that a
living-wage is to be given to each man, no matter how he behaves or
works. This is a false assumption. Underlying all human effort, there
runs a final law, that of Compensation: _What I earn, I shall some day
have_. This is a very different proposition from this: _What I do not
earn, I want to have_! For every stroke of human toil, the universe
assigns a right reward--a reward, not of money only, but of peace of
heart, joy, and the possibilities of helpfulness. But when the work done
has not been done faithfully, or well, or honestly, or in the right
spirit, the reward is lessened to that exact degree. To the end of time,
the idle and the lazy must, if they are dependent on their own
exertions, be ill housed and fed. If a man wastes, or his wife does, he
must not complain that his income will not support him. If he lets
opportunities of sustenance and advancement go by, the capitalist is not
to be held to account.
There are two chief kinds of economic difficulties. One is the problem
of the capitalist: How much ought I to pay? The second is that of the
working-man: How much service must I render? How much ought I to be
paid? Of the second kind, nearly every phase of it begins right here,
that men and women demand for labor something which they have not
earned. They do careless, indifferent, shiftless, reckless work, and
then demand a living-wage. The capitalist is not inclined to raise his
scale of prices, knowing that he has built up his business by prudence,
sagacity, and tireless application--the very qualities which his
dissatisfied employees lack.
What we make of our lives through wages depends upon ourselves. For
instance, a man gives each of five boys twenty-five cents for sweeping
snow off his sidewalks. One boy tosses pennies, and loses his quarter by
gambling. One boy buys cigarettes, and sends his money up in smoke. One
boy buys newspapers, and sells them at a profit which buys him his
dinner. A fourth boy buys seeds, plants them, and raises a tiny garden
which keeps him in beans for a whole season, The fifth boy buys a book
which starts him on the career of an educated man: he becomes an
inventor and a man of means. The man who paid out the twenty-five cents
to each boy is in no way responsible for the success or failure of their
investment of this quarter. He is responsible only for the fact that he
did or did not pay a fair price for the work.
God, the great Paymaster, gives to each of us the one talent, the two
talents, or the ten talents, of endowment and opportunity: after that,
we are left to our own devices!
There are four things which every employee should constantly bear in
mind, if he wishes to advance,--skill, business opportunity, loyalty,
and control. Until a man has mastered what he has to do, he cannot be
expected to be accounted a serious factor in the economic world. The
moment he achieves skill in what he has to do--and this is a question of
thoroughness, accuracy, and speed--he has achieved power, a possibility
of dictation in the matter of hours and wages.
The next point is business opportunity. Two men, of exactly the same
opportunities and endowments, take up the same task. One man idles and
is surpassed by the other, or he does only what he is told to do,
without further thought. The other performs his set task, but at the
same time he is examining into the principles of his engine, or into the
conduct of the factory or business. In a few years he is the foreman, or
an inventor, or a partner, with independent capital of his own. Again,
there is a blind way of doing skilled work, or of merely doing it
without noticing where it is most needed, or how the market is going for
this special kind of work. The one who has his eyes open reads, notes
the state of the market, adds to his skill the power of counsel, and can
gradually take a larger responsibility upon him, which will advance the
economic value of his time, as well as the work. There is a constant
flux in the labor-world, which is the result largely, not of special
opportunity, but of worth, application, and concentrated thought.
The fourth point is control. Does it not strike wonder to think how some
men have under them, either in their industrial plant, or in their
railway systems, or in their syndicate-work, anywhere from a few hundred
to ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand men? How do they maintain
discipline, either themselves, or through their subordinates? This
problem of control is a serious one in business. Every angry threat,
every sullen hour, each case of insubordination, every strike, every
widespread dissatisfaction, means economic waste. It means expense both
of time and money to send for Pinkertons to keep order and preserve
discipline. The man who adds to his technical skill, and his knowledge
of the market, the power of control adds great force and value to his
work. Higher yet is executive force, the power to adjust
responsibilities and duties in such a way as to get back a high economic
return in the way of service. But above all, there is that force of
character which impresses itself on a company, on a decade, on a
generation--so that some names are handed down in business from
generation to generation, all men knowing that from father to son, and
again to his son, there will pass down that certain integrity, nobility,
steadfastness of purpose, fidelity, and honor which give credit
throughout the business world, and which promise health and happiness
for those who are happy to be in their employ.
Before a man complains of his wages, then, let him ask himself: Have I
mastered my work? Am I loyal? Am I capable of larger responsibilities,
and of wider control?
THIRD
WILLIAM MORRIS says: "_It is right and necessary that all men should
have work to do which shall be worth doing, and be of itself pleasant to
do: and which should be done under such conditions as would make it
neither over-wearisome, nor over-anxious._"
A fine story is told that long ago, when the cholera once broke out in
Philadelphia, the hospitals fell into a fearful state. One day, a plain,
quiet little man stepped into the chief hospital, looked about a moment,
and set to work. No task was too dirty or disagreeable for him; no
detail was too disgusting. He did anything he saw to be done,--called in
additional doctors, organized the nurses, and himself waited on patients
night and day. He soon had the hospital in good shape again. When the
crisis passed, and every one began to demand, Who is this man?--they
were told: It is Stephen Girard. The work was not pleasant, but the
spirit was kind, and the heart delighted in its self-appointed toil.
Work in general, however, that has worth has several elements. First, It
must be individual. It must be joyfully done: there must enter into work
the vitality of a happy spirit. It must be spontaneous. This is why
machine-work can never be thoroughly beautiful: it lacks the spontaneity
of life. The hand never makes two things alike. With the mood, the
weather, the occasion, there are little touches added which a machine
cannot give. Life always varies and thinks of new effects.
When we try to realize what work is, when it is merely an amount of toil
prodded out of man or woman by a hard taskmaster, we have only to look
back to the bondage of Israel in Egypt, or to the time of Scylla, when
there were thirteen million slaves in Italy alone: slaves whose set
tasks were of over two hundred and fifty kinds; who worked on the
road-building, on public works, and in rowing in the galleys of the
slave-propelled ships. In Carthage agriculture was for a time largely
carried on by slave-labor. How different is this slave-labor from the
craft-work of mediaeval times, when, under the protection of the guilds,
manual labor became exalted to an artistic rank, and the workers at the
loom, the metal-workers, the wood-carvers, the tapestry-weavers, and the
workers in pottery and glass produced objects whose beauty has never
been either equalled or surpassed. Andrea del Sarto and Benvenuto
Cellini were workers, and their work remains.
Again, good work is born of affection. Love teaches more art than all
the schools. What we love, we instinctively beautify. The artist
beautifies the material on which he works. He loves his task, and from
his love there begins a gradual shaping of the ideal. The product gains
a touch of beauty. The needlework of Egypt and Byzantium, the laces of
Venice and of Spain, are historic. It is said of Queen Isabella, that
she was one of the best needleworkers of her age; that "her _motifs_
were the great events of the time."
The worker should have change of work. Nature never intended that a man
should do one thing all his life. This is in harmony neither with man's
infinite capacity, nor with her inexhaustible variety. Change is
cultural, and a man's work Should, from time to time, engross every
working-power he has.
As one passes down the long college corridors, the eyes fall upon palm
and statue, upon frieze and fresco, and the carbon copies of immortal
paintings. Everywhere there are the inspirations of sculpture and
architecture, of music, literature, and art. Beauty is in and about the
place in which one thinks and works. This is the undying charm of
Oxford--the gathering traditions of centuries, the gleaming spires, the
age-worn walls and buttresses, the clinging vine, the tremulous light
and shadow on the ancient halls, the sculpture of porch and clerestory,
and the light that falls through richly tinted windows.
This beauty should not be monopolized by any one class. About the places
where we work, we should have, as far as possible, something of the
beauty of the world. We should have wide, shaded streets and parks, even
in great cities; towers and pinnacles; sky-lines of vigor, grace, and
massive strength. Cannot department stores be artistically fashioned and
built? Cannot market-houses have arches and arabesques? May not even the
Bourse have something about it suggestive of great art? Cannot our
streets have curves and storied cross-ways? Cannot porters and draymen
have somewhat to arouse and satisfy aesthetic instincts? Cannot our
day-laborers be granted vision?
Why should we have the Gothic cathedral, with its exquisite traceries
and carvings, pillars and reredos and screen, for men to pray in, one or
two hours a week, and the hideous, grime-covered, foul-smelling,
overheated factories, in which men and women spend their working-lives?
This is what Christianity must do: it must implant joy and beauty, as
well as honesty and fidelity, in the way, place, and thought of work!
When religion, education, art, and brotherly affection have joined hands
in a charmed circle, we shall have new ideas of working-places, as well
as of praying-places, and of living-places! It is not enough that a
factory should be situated, as the best factories now are, in the open
country, with sunshine and fresh air. The blockhouse parallelograms and
squares should be replaced by something that has intrinsic beauty and
the haunting completeness of memory and association, so that the place
where a man works shall no more be to him a nightmare, but the
atmosphere and inspiration of his dreams!
And those we love shall work beside us! Here is another thought: Shall
all association in work be arbitrary? Is there not a more human way than
the chain-gang way? Could not friends work more together, so that one's
daily work should be, not a time of separation from all we love most,
but a time of intellectual sympathy and helpfulness, of companionship
and true-hearted loyalty? This, and many other good things, it is not
too much to hope for. Truly, as Morris writes, "_The Day is Coming_."
"_Nay, what save the lovely city, and the little house on the
hill,
And the wastes and the woodland beauty, and the happy
fields we till_;
"_Far all these shall be ours and all men's, nor shall any
lack a share
Of the toil and the gain of living in the days when the
world grows fair_."
FOURTH
Good workers are trained in the home, the school, the shop, the wider
world. Every home is an industrial establishment. In it go on the
industrial processes of cooking, cleaning, sewing, washing; the care of
silver, glass, linen, and household stores; the activities of buying
food and clothing; the moral responsibilities of teaching and training
servants and children. If any healthy member of the home is excused from
at least some form of active work, he will inevitably be a shirker when
he grows up. Cannot almost all the problems of human training be run
down to this: How to teach a child to work? If he can work, he can be
happy; but if he does not want to work, he shall never be happy. No
work, no joy, is the universal dictum.
This is the great hardship of the children of great wealth: they are not
taught to work. To avoid this difficulty, in two very wealthy families
that I know, the boys were even obliged to darn their own stockings and
mend their own clothes. One young hopeful once tore his clothes
a-fishing, and mended his trousers with a scarlet flannel patch! Some
mothers do not allow their little girls to go to school until their beds
are made up and their rooms in order. Other equally wise parents have
tools in the house, and allow the boys to do all the repair work, the
daughters all the family mending, or to care for the linen; the boys to
put in electric fixtures and bells, and keep the batteries in order.
Queen Margherita of Italy, Queen Elizabeth of Roumania, Queen Alexandra
of England, and the Empress Augusta of Germany are all women who have
been from their childhood acquainted with simple and practical household
tasks. This principle is a right one and underlies much after-success.
Each child should, first of all, have a mastery of home-tasks. Then,
whether on the prairie or in the palace, he is free and independent.
What makes the differences in the social privileges given to one class
of workers above another? In reality, we are all workers. No one ought
to live, if in health, who does not work. But for some forms of work,
men and women receive an income, and nothing more. For other work, men
and women may or may not receive a large personal income, but their work
is recognized, they are a part of the best social circles, and when they
die, a city or a nation grieves.
What social recognition can be given to servants who lie, steal, who
shirk every duty that can be shirked, and who are both incompetent and
unfaithful? The here-and-there one faithful helper receives her meed of
appreciation and affection. The whole aspect of household work will
change when honor-work is given: when home-helpers come up to us, from
the truthful and honor-loving class.
Teachers' work will not be rightly done until certain advantages are
given to teachers that are now largely withheld. Teachers need more
society, more hours of play, freer opportunity of marriage. Instead of
being tied up to exercise-books and roll-books, in their home-hours,
they should have a chance to spend their time on the golf-links, at
afternoon teas, in visiting and in entertaining friends. Take away
society from any man or woman, and you take away the possibility of a
growing, happy, and helpful life. We need friends just as we need air.
Teachers need admiration and affection, just as much as the society
girl does.
This would not necessarily change the curriculum of our colleges in any
way; it would change the spirit and atmosphere of some of them at once.
Instead of the spirit being: "My mind is just as good as a man's. What a
man can study, I can learn! What a man can do, I can do!"--the spirit
would be this: "I am going out into a woman's life, and it is my
business now to take to myself all the wisdom, counsel, experience, and
inspiration of past ages, that I may be the very grandest woman that
history has yet seen! I will be a land-mark in time: I will be a pivot
in history around which the earth shall turn. Because of my life, women
to the end of time shall be able to live a truer, freer, better life!"
With this thought in mind, all the academic subjects would still pass
into her mind and life, but they would be much more naturally set and
their value would be greatly enhanced. Then we would not have the
too-ambitious woman stepping out of college, or the restless and
discontented one. We would have the large-minded, earnest, noble,
public-spirited one, who would go out into the world as a fine type of
woman, to live a woman's life and do a woman's work. Married or
unmarried, she would still have a woman's interests, a woman's
influence, a woman's charm.
3. Personal income and its use. What we buy marks our own individuality,
as well as what we do. The woman whose father or husband adjusts her
expenses and expenditures cannot by any possibility be the kind of woman
that the one is who chooses her own things, and spends her money
absolutely to suit herself. When a man buys cigars or fishing-tackle,
his wife may prefer to buy oratorios and golf-clubs.
When a mother steps out into life in this large way, makes education and
training tributary to her mother-life, and does not stop growing
intellectually or spiritually,--her charm as a woman increases, instead
of diminishes, every year of her married life. Her looks mark her
everywhere as a supremely happy woman, and she goes out into the world
marked with that strange, deep, grand impress of motherhood and
womanhood, which has always made the true woman not only a
working-mother, but a love-crowned queen!
These and many other thoughts flit over one's mind in looking at any
phase of work, or any piece of work. In the right choice of work lies
the fullest use of one's capacities; in the right conditions of work
lies the freest play of one's energies; in the right spirit of work lies
the way of one's lasting happiness, and the foretaste of eternal joys.
THE END
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