The Warriors - Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
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?
We say that divorce and Sabbath-breaking are sweeping over our
country--gambling, social drinking, and many other ills; a sensational
press, a corrupt politics, a materialistic greed.
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.
Moral evil must be studied in an energetic and intellectual way. The
variations of humanity from righteousness must be deeply understood.
Look at Booker T. Washington, or at Jacob A. Riis! What daring, what
indefatigable toil, what insight, patience, and swerveless hope have
been put into their task! Edison is said to have spent six months
hissing S into his phonograph to make it repeat that letter, and many
days he worked seventeen hours a day. Have many ministers ever bent
themselves in this way to solve a special moral problem--that of, say, a
disobedient child in the congregation? Have they spent six months, hours
and hours a day, to make the law of God, the word Obedience, ring in
that child's ears? Spiritual guidance is definitely and positively a
scientific task. The mastery of one fact may lead to the correlation of
a psychic law. When a minister can help a soul to overcome temptation,
and a parent to bring up a child, he is in touch with two final human
problems. As he gradually enlarges his careful and illuminating work,
his church becomes in time a body of spiritually well-educated
communicants, thoroughly grounded in doctrinal, ethical, and social
ideals, well taught in public and in private duties. It is not
self-centred or wholly denominational in spirit, but recognizes itself
to be a part of a catholic body of believers, reaches out with friendly
cooeperation to near-by churches, extends its missionary efforts to
other neighborhoods or lands, and partakes of a world-life, a
world-love!
Ruling religious thinkers should also, by and by, become leaders of
national thought and life. Great public questions should be open to
their judgment and appeal; they should be moral arbiters, and spiritual
guides in national crises. By a word they should be able to rouse the
prayers of the country, and by a word to still widespread anger and
uprising. If accredited spiritual leaders cannot help, who can?
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!
IV. THE WORLD-MARCH: OF SAGES
[ADESTE FIDELES]
_Our Father in Heaven,
Creator of all,
O source of all wisdom,
On Thee we would call!
Thou only canst teach us,
And show us our need,
And give to Thy children
True knowledge indeed.
But vain our instruction,
And blind we must be,
Unless with our learning
Be knowledge of Thee.
Then pour forth Thy Spirit
And open our eyes,
And fill with the knowledge
That only makes wise.
From pride and presumption,
O Lord, keep us free,
And make our hearts humble,
And loyal to Thee,
That living or dying,
In Thee we may rest,
And prove to the scornful
Thy statutes are best._
THOMAS WISTAR
If we should be told that at birth a strange and wonderful gift had
been bestowed upon us, one such that by means of it, in after life, we
could accomplish almost anything we wished, how we should guard it! With
what delight we would make it work, to see what it would do! We should
never be tired of such a toy, because every day it would reveal new
possibilities of power and delight.
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!
What is thinking? Thinking is an attempt to express infinite thoughts,
affections, relations, and events, in finite terms. The child strings
buttons. The philosopher strings God, angels, devils, brutes, men, and
their appurtenances and deeds. Hence no real thought will quite go into
words. Out beyond the word hangs the infinite remainder of our idea. The
search for a vocabulary is the search for a clearer articulation
of ideas.
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.
If we refuse to learn to think, we refuse to do our share of the world's
work. We are like a horse that balks and will not pull. While we sulk
the universe is at a standstill.
Spelling and arithmetic, history, etymology, and geography, are not
tasks set over school-children by a hard taskmaster, who keeps them from
sunshine and out-of-door play. They are catch-words of the universe.
They are the implements by which each brain is to be trained to do great
work for the one in whom it lives. What every earnest soul asks is not
gold, fame, or pleasure. It is: Let me not die till I have brought
millions farther on.
We cannot deliberately make thoughts. Thought is like life itself:
science has not found a formula which will produce it. But just as
marriage produces new lives, though we cannot say how, so study and
meditation produce thoughts. Something new appears: a concept which was
not with the race before.
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.
Some day, I hope Sargent will paint a March of Sages, as gloriously as
he has painted the panels of the Prophets. Then we shall gaze upon the
train of heavy-browed, noble-eyed, wise, gentle-mannered men, who have
been the enduring teachers of the race,--thinkers, leaders, seers.
Confucius, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, the mediaeval
philosophers, the Egyptian, Persian, and Arabian thinkers, Roger Bacon,
Thomas Aquinas, Eckhart, William of Occam, Bede, Thomas a Kempis,
Francis Bacon, Kant, John Stuart Mill, Spencer,--with what dignity the
processional moves down the years! The sum of human knowledge is vast;
but how much more vast seem the achievements of each of these men, when
we realize how few his years, and how many the obstacles and impediments
of his all too short career! There is ever a pathos in the life of
the wise.
By thinking, we pass from the gossip of the neighborhood into the
conversation of the years. We do not know what Alcibiades said to his
man-servant about the care of his clothes, baths, perfumes,--nor what
his man-servant retailed to other retainers of the eccentricities and
vanities of his master. But we know what Pericles and Plato said to the
race. Here is the advantage of a thinking mind--that at any moment one
may enter into eternal subjects of thought, and have converse with those
who of all times have been the most profound.
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!
Language is electric. Words have a curious power within themselves. They
rain upon the heart with the soft memories of centuries of old
associations, or thoughts of love, vigils, and patience. They have a
power of suggestion which goes beyond all that we may dream. Just as a
man shows in himself traces of a long-dead ancestry, so words have the
power to revive emotions of past generations and the experiences of
former years. The man of letters, the Thinker, strews a handful of
words into the air, breathes a little song. The words spring up and
bring forth fruit. Their seed is human progress and a larger life for
men. Think, for instance, who first flung the word _freedom_ into
space!--_gravitation, evolution, atom, soul!_ There is no power like the
power of a word: a word like _liberty_ can dethrone kings.
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.
"_Our birth is but a deep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home!_"
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!
Thus knowledge is not permanent. It reels. It proceeds, it changes, it
is iridescent with new significance from day to day.
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.
It is the relativity of knowledge that dances before the eye, that
bewilders, eludes, evades. Group-systems and electives seem like a
makeshift for the real thing. We cannot tie a fact to a pupil, because
to the tail of the fact is tied history itself. Until a pupil gets a
glimpse of that relation, that dependence of which we have just heard,
with all that has yet happened in connection with it, he is not yet
quite master of his fact. He recites glibly the date of Thermopylae, and
does not know that all Greece is trailing behind his desk. When, after
subsequent research, he knows something of Greece, he discovers Greece
to be dovetailed into Rome and Egypt, and they lay hold upon the plain
of Shinar and Eden, and the immemorial, prehistoric years.
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.
It is a wrong idea of wisdom, that we must necessarily know what some
one else knows. Wisdom is single-track for each man. There are in the
world those who know how to build aqueducts, and to bake _charlotte
russe_, and to sew trousers. Aqueducts and tailor work may be alike out
of my individual and personal knowledge, yet I may not necessarily be an
ignorant man. The primitive hunter stood in the forest. For him to be a
hunting-sage, was to know the weather, traps, weapons, the times, and
the lairs and ways of beasts. He knew lions and monkeys, the coiled
serpent and the serpent that hissed by the ruined wall; the ways of the
wolf, the jackal, and the kite; the manners of the bear and the black
panther in the jungle-wilds. Kipling is the brother of that early man:
he is a forest-sage, and would have held his own in other times.
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.
Education is the taking to one's self, so far as one may in a lifetime,
all that the race has learned through these six thousand years.
Education is not a thing of books alone, or schools; it is a process of
intellectual assimilation of what is about us, or what we put about
ourselves. At every step we have a choice. This is the real difference
between students at the same school or university. One puts away Greek,
and the other lays up football and college societies. A third gets all
three, being a little more swift and alert. One stows away
insubordination--another, order and obedience. One does quiet, original
work of reading and research; the other stows away schemes for getting
through recitations and examinations. No two students ever come out of
the same school, college, or shop with the same education. Their
training may have been measurably alike, but the result is immeasurably
unlike. Education, in the last analysis, is getting the highest
intellectual value out of one's environment and opportunities. There is
a cow-boy philosopher, a kitchen-philosopher, as truly as there is a
philosopher of the academic halls.
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!