Ethical addresses

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ETHICAL ADDRESSES

AND

ETHICAL RECORD

THIRTEENTH SERIES

Philadelphia

Ethical Addresses, 1415 Locust Street

1906.

Contents

Adler, Felix, Closing Address at the Tenth Convention of

Ethical Societies 55

" " Impending Changes 177

" " Moral Conditions in American Life in the

Light of Recent Revelations 189

Self-Help in Affliction 203

" " The Independence of Morality and Wlhat it

Implies 25

The Punishment of Children 65

Elliott, John Lovejoy. Preparation for Membership in the

Ethical Societies 51

The Hope for the City ■. . 233

" " " The Reaction of the Public Against

Moral Evils 172

MuzzEY, David Saville. Authority and Ethics 247

" " " Inspiration and Ethics 217

The Ethics of Epithets 115

The Radicalism of the Ethical

Movement 33

Salter^ William M. A Moral "Credo" 16

" " Midwinter Joy loi

Schmidt, Nathaniel. The Persecution of the Jews 131

The Religion of the Unchurched 263

Sheldon, Walter L. What the Ethical Idealist Has to

Fight For 67

Spencer, Mrs. Anna Garlin. Massacre and Liberty in Rus-
sia 161

The Ethical Movement as an
Experiment Station in Edu-
cation 46

iii

IV CONTENTS

Spiller, Gustav. International Ethical Union: Report for

1905 203

" " Suggestions for the Coming International

Ethical Congress 151

Sprague^ Leslie Willis. Religious Conformity 58

The Moral Significance of Re-
cent Events 166

The Needs Which the Ethical

Movement Comes to Serve 40

Wtt:sTON, S. Burns. The Progress of the Ethical Movement i

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PROGRESS OF THE ETHICAL
MOVEMENT.*

By S. Burns Weston.

In May, 1876, the year when our National Centennial
was being celebrated, what is distinctively known as the
Ethical Culture Movement began.f In the single span of
a generation it has developed into a world-wide movement,
not through any forced propaganda efforts, but solely by
an inward necessity and a natural and healthy process of
growth.

When we organized our Ethical Society here in Phila-
delphia, twenty years ago, there existed only the original
Society for Ethical Culture in New York, and its first off-
spring in Chicago. For seven years previous to the or-
ganization of the Chicago Society the parent society,
through its leader, has been proclaiming a message
which, like a seed, was sown broadcast by the winds of
the spirit, and took root, first in Chicago, Philadelphia,
and St. Louis, and afterwards in London, Berlin, Vienna,
and Tokio; and in other cities of other lands.

Though in a true sense we speak of the Ethical Move-
ment as having begun hardly a generation ago, in another
sense its beginnings reach as far back in history as the

* Introductory address at the Convention of Ethical Societies
in connection with Twentieth Anniversary of the Philadelphia
Society for Ethical Culture, Sunday, May 14, 1905.

t The address given by Professor Adler at the meeting called to
organize the first Society for Ethical Culture, on May 15, 1876,
will be reprinted in another number of Ethical Addresses, as it
has been out of print for some time.

2 PROGRESS OF THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT.

moral aspirations of man. In this larger sense, we claim
as belonging to the same cause as ours not only such
ethical thinkers as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Immanual
Kant in modern times, but the moral leaders of the Ref-
ormation, and the great preachers of the Middle Ages and
of the early Church — such as Chrysostom, the golden-
tongued, whose lips were touched as with a divine fire
when delivering his powerful sermons on the moral con-
dition of the times — and not only them, but the Founder
and early apostles of Christianity as well, and farther back
still, the prophets of ancient Israel and the moral phi-
losophers and teachers of ancient Greece, who were all
advocates of the same moral cause that the Ethical Move-
ment is advocating to-day. We do not claim that the
ethical spirit itself is new. We know that it has been
manifesting itself through the ages. And yet we know
also that the ways of the spirit are manifold and have
varied greatly ; that the institutions and ceremonies which
have grown out of it have differed widely. Spirit without
form is void. It must incarnate itself to be a real living
thing to living men and women, and these incarnations are
the measure by which its intrinsic character and value are
judged in any given age. All outward manifestations of
the spirit have their natural process of growth and decay.
They arise, serve their usefulness, and pass away, and the
spirit clothes itself anew. Thus it happens that in the
progressive unfoldment of man's ethical and spiritual life,
new movements and new institutions — new expressions of
the spirit — have again and again become necessary.

The Ethical Culture Movement arose out of such a
demand. The time had come when, in order to satisfy
the needs of rational thought, and to guide and nourish
the higher promptings of practical endeavor, a different
type of religious organization was required than had hith-

PROGRESS OF THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT. 3

erto existed : one that would not only allow perfect free-
dom of thought on theological matters, but that would lay
supreme emphasis on ethical principles and ideals as the
safe guide for conduct and the equally safe basis for one*s
faith. The Societies for Ethical Culture have attempted
to meet this need; and every year of growth and expan-
sion has made it clearer that they have a great mission
before them in firmly establishing and widely proclaiming
their rational and democratic faith — the religion of ethics.

While the Ethical Movement imposes no doctrinal
creed, while it allows different speculations, different
beliefs and hopes in regard to the ultimate nature and
government of the universe and the final destiny of man-
kind, it teaches with no uncertain emphasis that righteous-
ness is demanded here and now, whether we are to live
only for a limited time or eternally. It says that whether
there be a personal God and a future life or not, the in-
centive and duty to live justly and to walk humbly with
our fellow-men are as strong and binding on our moral
and spiritual nature, as essential to our higher well-being,
as the taking of food is to our physical system, and that to
say or to act otherwise is to blaspheme against the moral
nature, the moral divinity, if you please to call it so, that
is implanted in each one of us.

But the fuller and deeper meaning of the Ethical Move-
ment I leave to those who are to follow me to unfold. I
wish to point out very briefly on this occasion some of
the signs of the progress of this movement.

First, there is a growing clearness of understanding
of the cause we are enlisted in, and a widening recognition
of its value. I have already referred to the fact that the
Ethical Movement has gained, in less than three decades,
recognition and acceptance in various countries. The
proof of this is not only the Ethical Societies that have

4 PROGRESS OF THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT.

been organized in those countries, but the numerous per-
sonal testimonies that have come through a wide cor-
respondence.

Another cause for deep satisfaction is the fact that this
movement appeals to young men, and has begun to enter
the universities. The fact that more young men have
joined our Philadelphia Society during the past year than
in any previous year, is to me an auspicious and encour-
aging sign.

But, it may be asked, does the Ethical Movement suffi-
ciently appeal to the emotional side? does it satisfy the
more spiritual nature of women? An answer to this is
that in all the Ethical Societies women have taken an
active and prominent part, and have been among the most
earnest workers we have had. Of great significance in
this respect is the fact that an earnest woman has recently
become one of our ethical leaders and lecturers.

Still another great gain is the establishment, in con-
nection with nearly all our Ethical Societies, of Sunday-
schools, which serve, as it were, as a Church or Ethical
Society for the young.

I might go on to speak of progress in other directions,
particularly of the great educational work of the New
York Society, which has had such a marked influence
throughout the country, of the splendid work done among
wage-earners in St. Louis, of the permanent foundation
being laid for social neighborhood work among the poor
in Chicago, of the work of the English Ethical Societies
in behalf of unsectarian moral instruction, of the readi-
ness with which university professors and even clergymen
of the advanced school of thought speak on our platform
and at our various weekday meetings, or otherwise co-
operate in our work, and of the widespread circulation of
our literature.

PROGRESS OF THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT. 5

But I will only say in conclusion that the occasion of
the tenth convention of the American Ethical Societies
and the twentieth anniversary of our own Society is one
for profound gratitude at what has been accomplished,
for serious resolve in regard to the work before us, and
for earnest hope as to the future. We rejoice to-day,
especially, that the founder of the Ethical Movement is
still in the full prime of his mental and moral vigor. May
his inspiring leadership be vouchsafed to us for many
years to come! We rejoice not only that the ranks of
the ethical leaders who were organized into a fraternity
over twenty years ago remain unbroken by death, but
that new leaders have come forward to pledge their
strength, their enthusiasm, and their lives to the noble
cause this movement represents.

WHAT THE ETHICAL IDEALIST HAS
TO FIGHT FOR*

By Walter L. Sheldon
Lecturer of the Society for Ethical Culture of St. Louis.

Twenty years ago this last winter, Mr. Weston and
myself were at work in New York, serving our appren-
ticeship in the cause of an Ethical Movement. In the
spring of that year, he came to this city and laid the
foundations of this Society. Twelve months later, I went
out in the same cause to a field in St. Louis.

As we come together again in public conference after
this lapse of time, the question confronts us : What is the
outlook? In answer to this each one of us must speak
according to his own personal experience.

The standpoint upheld by me then had not come to me
out of my own thinking, but had been suggested to me by
the teachings of another. It had met a response in my
temperament, and seemed to answer the hunger of my
religious consciousness for a religion to live by and work
for. I liked it because it was something practical, with its
watchword, "Deed, not Creed." I liked it because it gave
me my intellectual freedom and yet gave me the elements
of a religion.

My feeling had been that the one chief stumbling block
in the way of spiritual progress lay in the dogmas, the "T
believes," of the conventional church. Once set the mind

*An address before the Convention of Ethical Societies at
the Twentieth Anniversary of the Philadelphia Society for Eth-
ical Culture, May 14, 1905.

6

WHAT ETHICAL IDEALIST HAS TO FIGHT FOR. J

of man free from such shackles and lead people to think
in that other direction, — and, as it looked to me then, the
religious millenium would begin to draw nigh.

So it was, in my young and fervent enthusiasm, that the
redemption of the human race seemed already in sight.
There was a message with which to go forth and to con-
quer. I may even have thought that it was something new
and have looked upon myself as the bearer of a new
gospel. It was as a fledgling that I went forth and lifted
my voice, untrained and untried in the school of life,
wearing for the most part the garments of another and
using forms of language that were not my own. My
faith lay supremely in human reasoning and in the
achievements of science. Theology had failed me in my
need and left my soul unsatisfied in its yearnings.

Now, in middle life, after a long period of quiet, un-
eventful, public service in a distant section of the country,
and for a cause so dear to my heart, I am here with my
colleagues from the other Ethical Societies to speak at
your twentieth anniversary — this time with a religious
faith made over in the depths of my own consciousness,
kneaded and shaped in the pain and struggle of personal
experiences with myself and the world. It is no longer
for me the teaching of another, but a religion essentially
my own. What may be said by me to-day, or what I now
believe in, is what life and my own consciousness have
been disclosing to me, — however it may agree or disagree
with the convictions of others.

I ask myself the solemn question: has the faith to
which my adherence had been given, been winning its
way? Is ethical religion on a triumphal march over the
world? Do I see the signs of spiritual advance for the
human race? Shall my voice be raised in notes of cheer

8 WHAT ETHICAL IDEALIST HAS TO FIGHT FOR.

and encouragement over the outlook to-day? Does it
seem as if my brother men on two hemispheres were any
nearer the goal of my dreams ? Is my heart still buoyant
with the hopes of my youth and is the kingdom of ethical
idealism nearer in sight?

And, for my part, to all this it must be answered : No.
As I see it, the world is much farther away than it was
twenty years ago, from all that is dearest and highest and
most precious to me. The cause I believe in — in the
larger sense — has lost ground and been on the wane since
my hand was one of those to take up its standard. My
words refer, of course, not to the special Ethical Societies
with which my life has outwardly been connected, but to
that invisible ethical movement for which thousands of
us may have been working, though of many creeds or
many churches. Spiritually, as it seems to me, the human
race is on a lower level than it was two decades ago, and
the decline has been appallingly rapid. The ethical mil-
lenium looks a good deal further off to me than it did
then. To-day I am face to face with facts and not the-
ories. What has been going on during this interval has
not made me jubilant with hope for the speedy regener-
ation of the world.

It is doubtful whether in all history the human race has
ever reached quite as low a level of groveling materialism
as it has reached at this precise moment. The conditions
were bad enough twenty years ago; but they are worse
to-day. There have been other periods, when special
classes of men have fallen low in their ideals. In our age
it is no longer a matter of class, for the whole human race
would seem more or less infected.

You will understand that it is not of political or com-
mercial corruption that I am thinking. In this respect

WHAT ETHICAL IDEALIST HAS TO FIGHT FOR. 9

the pendulum has already begun to swing on its backward
curve and there is light ahead. But these manifestations
are all on the surface. The root of the evil lies far deeper.
The earth has opened up its riches as it has never done
before and may never do again. The change has come
suddenly, almost as it were in a night. At the beginning
of the twentieth century the race of man has waked up to
find itself possessed of hoards of treasure such as even
the Aladdin of earlier times never dreamed of. And the
temptation has been too great for the soul to withstand.

The human race has become convinced at heart that
satisfaction is to be had out of *'the world and the things
of the world." It is determined to feed its senses with all
that is to be had out of this life and the next one too.
Mephistopheles is playing a deep game and his stake is
high. Each class is exasperated that the other classes will
not practice ethics and have ideals, while it continues to
practice the pursuit it likes and to get what it pleases.
Men are virtuous enough on behalf of their neighbors ; —
but this is not a method which will make the world
ethical in a day, or even in a year.

We are aware that on the surface some of the signs are
otherwise. Never before have men expended so much for
the externals of religion. We count the sums as we do
the wealth of our millionaires. One would suppose the
Almighty himself took pleasure in round figures when
disbursed in his service. So, too, we worship in much bet-
ter form than people did two decades previous. The
senses are less shocked in our effort to show piety. What
is more, atheism is on the decline and "Ingersolism" is
a thing of the past. Men have been getting back their
God, — but have they been getting back the soulf At this
point I hesitate. My response again would be : No.

lO WHAT ETHICAL IDEALIST HAS TO FIGHT FOR.

Can it be that conventional religion has also become
infected ? Men have been softening and paring away the
sternness and severity of the old teaching. And why? I
ask. They have been giving up the belief in hell. Is it
because this is ethically objectionable, or rather because
it was an uncomfortable doctrine to believe in? Is it
possible that the law of economics holds here as well, that
supply adjusts itself to the demand? If men will have an
easy-going religion, somebody will supply it. And to-day,
seemingly, people are getting the thing they are asking for.
They want a comfortable religion, a soothing religion, one
that shall make them feel safe in this world and safe for
the next — a religion that shall give them a sense of after-
dinner comfort for body and soul alike.

The creeds are on the wane and it is a waste of effort
to attack them. But the soul of man has not been set free.
There was a flaw in my theory somewhere. We have
been getting art, a sensuous art, in the guise of religion,
and an irrational mysticism in the place of creeds. This
is not ethical religion. It is not the teaching of the stem
old Isaiah with his "Thus saith the Lord," nor is it the
burden of the message of the "meek and lowly Jesus."

Be all this as it may, the human race is determined to
try its chances and play the game. All the teaching and
preaching in the world cannot stop it. The pendulum
must swing to the end of the arc. Mankind has never
before had the opportunity to get a full taste of the earth's
riches, — eat them, drink them, wear them, parade in them,
murder with them, glut itself with them. We can only
learn from experience. The present generation must pay
the death penalty with the rope around its neck, whereby
future generations may take home the lesson and find their
soul.

WHAT ETHICAL IDEALIST HAS TO FIGHT FOR. II

If it is true that it takes three generations to make a
gentleman, it may take twice that number to make a man.
Not until the trial has been made will men admit their
mistake. Not until the cry goes up from one end of the
earth to the other, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," — not
until then may we begin to look for the real spiritual re-
vival.

One sees a good deal deeper after twenty years of
active service in a cause. Ethical religion has another
meaning for me now. The abolition of creeds will not of
itself set men on the new pathway or lead to man's spirit-
ual regeneration. Talking about good deeds will not
necessarily make men hunger after righteousness. I have
grown a little tired of the word practical. There may be
as much of formalism and conventionality, of make-
believe and subterfuge in a religion of deeds as in a re-
ligion of creeds.

So, too, I have grown a trifle weary of the picture of the
"little old red school-house" and all it is supposed to
imply. It has turned out money-making Yankees by the
myriads. But about the men it has turned out I am the
least bit dubious. Can it be that there was too much of
the "practical" about that old red school-house? Here,
too, was a flaw in my theories. Perhaps I may have
wanted too much of the practical in religion. It may be
that honesty does not make up the whole of ethical piety.

Behind the deed as well as behind the creed there must
go a faith of man in himself, in his own spiritual nature.
Without this, his honesty and rectitude are only me-
chanical, like the good behavior of the dog which growls
at his feet. It has its value, but it is not religion. When,
however, in the presence of the whole animal kingdom,
in the presence of the dust he treads on, yes, in the pres-

12 WHAT ETHICAL IDEALIST HAS TO FIGHT FOR.

ence of the whole physical universe, he can say and feel,
"1 am better than thou," — at that moment he stands on
another plane and his conduct acquires a meaning it did
not have before.

The richest gift of the religious consciousness has not
been the faith in a God, nor the hope of heaven, nor the
decrees of conscience, but rather the belief in soul, — yours
and mine, soul anywhere and everywhere. It took the
human race a hundred thousand years and more, to grow
up to this conception. All the burden of all teaching of all
religion of all time has centered in that one query : What
shall a man give in exchange for his soul? At the pres-
ent moment the human race is bartering its spiritual
nature for simple dirt.

It is the soul of man we are called upon to rescue, what-
ever our creed may be or distrust of creed, whether our
religion be that of an Ethical Society or of the established
Church, whether we are atheists, agnostics, theists, Jew
or Christian. It is not the God-belief, the Christ-belief,
the belief in heaven which is menaced to-day, but just this
faith in the human soul, in the worth of man's spiritual
nature. I may be tolerant of many creeds or many sys-
tems of philosophy, but for one attitude I have no tolera-
tion, and that is the thing called materialism. Toward
this my feeling is one of disgust and loathing, and I mean
to fight it till I die. The horror of it on my part lies
deeper than any intellectual disapproval.

Materialism has subsided as a distinct system of phi-
losophy only to reappear in a more insidious guise. It has
clothed itself in the language of art, of religion, yes, even
of science. It is eating at the very vitals of our civili-
zation.

And so it is that I give my answer as to the direction in

WHAT ETHICAL IDEALIST HAS TO FIGHT FOR. 1 3

which every earnest religious teacher is called upon to
throw the emphasis of his efforts. He must put up a new
fight for the human soul. A bread-and-butter religion of
simple philanthropy will not do. There is something
worse than starving or aching bodies. There is something
higher even than feeding the hungry or clothing the
naked. If we do anything for men's bodies, its ultimate
purpose is that we may reach the spiritual nature and
build up the soul.

If we are mere animals of a larger growth, I do not
care much for our common brotherhood. A soup-kitchen
religion in itself does not appeal to me. My animal kin-
ship with my fellows does not stir me very much. But if
there is a kinship in a kingdom of souls — as I feel there
is — then it is another matter. It is for this we are to
labor, for this we are to work.

But in making this appeal I am not pleading for that
crude "monism" which calls everything soul and deals
with everything as if it were physical matter. Nor are
we thinking of that precarious something to be rescued
by beating tom-toms at the street corners. No, we mean
that whole spiritual scaffolding on the inside which each
one is conscious of, while no other eye sees it. This is
far more real to us than the cells of the brain which the
physiologist may be probing in the name of psychology.

I have not surrendered my belief in my spiritual free-
dom and will not do it at the bidding of scholars who put
more faith in physical law than they do in themselves.
It is this inner subjective spiritual scaffolding with its
own measure of values, which is the real me, the real man.

Yet for the vast majority of the world to-day it is the
outside thing, the thing of dirt, to which faith clings and
for which the appetite yearns — those apples of Sodom

14 WHAT ETHICAL IDEALIST HAS TO FIGHT FOR.

which are at first sweet to the taste but leave behind them
the taste of ashes.

I have no use for the monism which unctuously leaves
everything to be worked out by physical law. The atti-
tude for labor in a spiritual kingdom is a fighting attitude.
In the ethical kingdom it is dualism and not monism that
prevails. We have our freedom to earn, to acquire ; and
it is going to be hard work clear to the end.

Will my attitude here seem that of pessimism? For
those who deal in salves and nostrums, yes. Happily for
the world those be things of human invention, and as far
as we can see, the Almighty does not deal in them. A com-
forting and comfortable assurance in the satisfactoriness
of things as they are, does not become the true religious
teacher. His attitude should be stem and relentless. His
visions of the kingdom of righteousness are always in the
future as he goads men on toward these ideals.

At the end of these twenty years have I turned pessim-
ist and is the only outcome of my faith a negation ? No,
no ; a thousand times, no. I have been getting my bear-
ings, that is all. Now I want to begin, for now I have a
gospel of my own. It is a gospel as old as the hills.
There is nothing new in it, for it is the kernel of all relig-
ion. But it is new to me because it has been borne in upon
me through my spiritual experience.

I still hold to my ethical religion. But it has acquired
an inwardness it did not have for me two decades ago.
The deed like the creed must have its roots in the living
soul.

My mind and heart are still ready to bend all convic-
tions to the laws of human reason. What is absolutely
irrational cannot be true. And yet to-day I am not quite
so sure about the theories of science as I was when a

WHAT ETHICAL IDEALIST HAS TO FIGHT FOR. 1 5

fledgling, nor have I quite as much confidence in the all-
wisdom of the men of science. It has struck me that even
they can err, that even they can have their prejudices and
their fixed ideas. I have come to believe that we may feel
our way toward certain truths which the mind of man
cannot altogether grasp or explain. I am strong in hope
still, but it lies deeper now. My expectation is, in some
form to fight on till I die.

We fight for a kingdom of spiritual forces and the
battle may go on for eternity. It is for each man to do
his part, until for him the heavens shall be rolled to-
gether as a scroll, the dust of earth sink into its own
nothingness and his work on earth is done.

A MORAL -CREDO."*

By William M. Salter
Lecturer of the Society for Ethical Culture of Chicago.

A "creed" has come popularly to mean a set of beliefs
binding on others. A "credo" is a personal confession.
I take the liberty of making one this morning.

This is a scientific age and undoubtedly the first effect
of scientific ways of thinking is to make the world seem
gray and cold. It loses the vivacity, the color and charm
that it had when spirits and gods and angels and perhaps
demons mingled in it — interfering and directing. And
yet the new conception has one decided advantage. It
makes the world intelligible. We see how things come
about. We can put our hand on the causes. We do not
grope in mystery and darkness. From such and such con-
ditions or causes we know such and such results come —
have and will. For example, when an epidemic of dis-
ease arises, we do not grope after some offended deity
and seek to win him over by sacrifice and prayer, but we
search out the circumstances and conditions in the midst
of which the epidemic arose, and by changing them we
banish it — perhaps prevent it from ever recurring. There
is a kind of sober cheer in getting on to firm ground of
this sort. Indeed, I think the time has come for ceasing
to lament the fading of the faith in which our fathers
were nurtured. A world of order and law is really a

* An address before the Convention of Ethical Societies at the
Twentieth Anniversary of the Society for Ethical Culture of
Philadelphia, May 14, 1905.

16

A MORAL ' CREDO. I7

better world to live in than the old world — even if not
so picturesque ; it is one in which we can more truly feel
at home. And the real God (if I may say my mind) is the
ground and stay of the life of this cosmos, not a special
being aside or apart from it — the God of the popular the-
ology is a myth, as much so as Zeus or Wodin ; the real
God is the orderly universe itself taken on its inner, spirit-
ual side.

This scientific conception that there is an intelligible law
of things is the first article of my "credo." This con-
ception gives us a basis of ethics. The world being an
orderly system of conditions and results, there must be
an orderly system of conditions and results in human life.
The life and happiness of men and communities do not
come at random any more than anything else; there are
certain ways of reaching them — discoverable ways,
natural ways, fixed ways; we cannot change them, we
cannot substitute other ways for them — they are as much
independent of our will as any laws of nature are. Mere
bodily health has fixed conditions — and these can be
studied as objectively as the laws of the successful work-
ing of a machine. The life of man as a whole, the life of
society of which any individual life is a fragment, are
also subject to law. There are certain things we must
do individually, certain things communities must do col-
lectively, if the race is to live and prosper. These things
are the objective basis of duty. Duty is the human part
of that intelligible law of things which I have said marks
the universe as a whole. Whatever helps man, whatever
elevates him, whatever lifts him to a fuller, larger life —
that is right. Whatever retards, cramps, fetters or un-
does him — that is wrong.

Here is the basis of the distinction below, real right
and the mere customs, conventions and laws of society.

l8 A MORAL "credo."

Real right is harmony with the natural order — it is what
really serves man ; while the customs and laws of society
sometimes reflect simply the interests of one set of men
who seek to enforce their will on others. The sentiment
for real right is what we call conscience, or the social
sense — the instinct for what is good for the whole. The
sentiment or instinct is not everything — knowledge must
come to its assistance, material power must come to its
assistance; it must put itself into effect in all manner of
social usages and positive laws and institutions, it must
interpenetrate and mold and remold all our life, physical,
economic, political; and yet the sentiment is the basis —
it is the living spring, ever urging man to turn knowledge
and power to righteous account. And so I add to my
"credo" a second article — that morality or right is the in-
telligible law of human things ; not the only, but the pri-
mal law. By so much as the sentiment of the whole lives
in us, by so much fellow-feeling as there is among us —
so much truth, loyalty, solidarity, justice — by so much is
society in the way of life, in the way of advancing
strength. And by so much as men are selfish, each going
his own way, without succor for the weak, without fidel-
ity, love, and justice, by so much is society in the way of
disintegration, of decay and death. A society may have a
favorable material environment and this will not save it;
it may have armies and navies and they will not save it ; it
may possess men of genius, of light and leading, and they
will not save it ; it may even for a time have a veneer of
good customs and institutions — and they will not save it.
And all this, not because somebody on high is wrathy
with it and bent on destroying it, but because it has not
obeyed the essential conditions of life, because, to use fa-
miliar language, its members are like "lost sheep, follow-
ing the devices and desires of their own hearts," instead

A MORAL CREDO. I9

of heeding nature's law. "In righteousness is Hfe and in
the way thereof there is no death" — it is an old and ever-
lasting truth.

But not only is righteousness the law of life — men have
the power to obey the law, and this is my third article of
faith. We must distinguish between power and will. A
man hugs his comfortable bed of a morning — it seems
as if he can't get up. But he can get up as easily as not,
if he has a mind to — the trouble is with his "mind to," not
with his ability or power. It is so with many a moral
task. If you will to, you can speak the truth even when
it costs something. If you will to, you can give your
money to a poor man or to a righteous cause, as easily
as keep it for cigars, theatres, new books, or reinvestment.
Sometimes, there is undoubtedly lack of power. Bad
habits become organized in us. Even when we will we
cannot throw them off at once. Paul's exclamation often
comes home to us : "The good that I would I do not, but
the evil which I would not, that I do." And yet there is
always some power — and with good will it may grow to
more and more. I do not say we are omnipotent — on the
other hand I dare not set any limits to the power we may
attain, if we diligently cultivate what we have. This is
only saying that we must make a business, a religion, of
our moral culture. Still further, there is no question that
at some time we have more power and more sense of
power than at others. It is the mystery of moods. We
all know how at times we are ready for anything, to do
anything — and at other times are low in our minds, spirit-
less, and dead. As Matthew Arnold puts it:

"We cannot kindle when we will

The fire which in the heart resides;
The spirit bloweth and is still,
In mystery our soul abides."

20 A MORAL CREDO.

Here is a solid bit of truth that underlies the orthodox
doctrine of grace. These elevated moods, these moods in
which strength and power seem to dwell in us, are attrib-
uted to the special working of a Supernatural Hand.
But because we may be sceptical of the metaphysical ex-
planation, we need not deny or ignore the obvious spirit-
ual or psychological fact. Doubtless these moods are
subject to subtle laws that we shall some day discover,
just as we are already discovering the laws that regulate
the winds, so that we say no longer (as was formerly
said) that they blow as they will and we cannot tell
whence they come or whither they go; but even while we
are more or less in the dark, the reality of these better
moods and their beneficence cannot be questioned — and
a scientific and ethical religion, as well as any other, may
count on their cooperation in diminishing the arduous-
ness of moral struggle, in lifting man by a sort of grace
to higher levels. We cannot, indeed, command the ele-
vated mood, but may we not woo it? May we not at
least make ourselves receptive? As we open our lungs
to take a deeper breath, so may we not open our souls
and invite the airs of heaven to enter in? And so, in one
way and another, — by action and by being acted upon, —
I believe man can rise into the way of life — I be-
lieve that nature gives the race no duties, however
high and ideal, that, given time enough, it cannot rise to
fulfill.

And now let me add that I believe in the peace and
blessedness that come to men and communities when they
do put themselves into the way of life. It is true that
we have little experience of this peace and blessedness,
it is true that the world has little experience of it, but this
need not blind us to the fact that the essential tendency of
such obedience as I have in mind is to give us an unspeak-

A MORAL CREDO. 21

able sense of rest and joy. Have you ever passed a day
free from faults of temper, from impatience, from anger,
from evil-speaking — a day in which you had only
thoughts of love and gentleness toward those around you ?
How serenely the hours went, how even and happy was
your work, what quiet joy was in your heart as the day
came to its close! Perhaps you don't often have such
days, but if you have only one in a hundred, you know
the connection of cause and effect, you know the law and
the tendency. Well, this is but an instance. To whatever
extent you do the right thing, you have a sense of rest
and quietness. It may be in the midst of some public ex-
citement— no matter ; if you have spoken a true word, if
you have stood loyally to your conscience, a certain peace
comes over you. Let others foam and rave, you have no
need to. It is equally true of the life of a community — •
the tendency of laws that conform to natural right is to
give ease and quiet; everybody so far feels at rest — even
the grasping and the bad feel in time that the general
good is better than their good — for they too have a social
nature and only in this way is it satisfied. There is so
little peace or happiness among men, so little order and
quiet in society, because men and nations are studying all
sorts of other things than the true natural conditions of
life and progress. Each man and each people wants
money, wants power, wants to shine in the eyes of others,
to see and be seen and have his (or its) part in the pomp
and pride and vanity of life — and the great, deep things
that make for human welfare and happiness they neglect.

"Riches we wish to get,

Yet remain spendthrifts still;
We would have health, and yet
Still use our bodies ill;
Bafflers of our own prayers, from youth to life's last scenes.

22 A MORAL CREDO.

"We would have inward peace,

Yet will not look within;
We would have misery cease.
Yet will not cease from sin;
We want all pleasant ends, but will use no harsh means;

"We do not what we ought,

What we ought not, we do,
And lean upon the thought
That chance will bring us through;
But our own acts, for good or ill, are mightier powers."

No, happiness and peace come only in one way, but in
that way they do abundantly come. It is a poor, ignorant
idea, though so common among people to-day who are
trying to live without religion, that laws and rules are a
restriction on happiness and liberty. Obedience to
natural law is liberty — and we only get a sense of freedom
and of power when we have rendered it.

"They live by law, not like the fool,

But like the bard, who freely sings
In strictest bonds of rhyme and rule,
And finds in them not bonds, but wings."

The fifth article of my "credo" is suggested by a re-
flection of Marcus Aurelius. "This hasteth to be," he
says ; "that other to have been ; of that which now cometh
to be, even now somewhat hath been extinguished. And
wilt thou make thy treasure of any one of these things?
It were as if one set his love upon the swallow, as it
passeth out of sight through the air!" How can we
escape this sense of futility? What is there that will
stay with us while life lasts? What is there that may
become a part of us, that cannot be taken from us through
all the vicissitudes, the disappointments, and even the
calamities of our passing days ? I know of but one thing
— it is the good will, the heart that cleaves to the right.

A MORAL CREDO. 23

After all, it is for a man to be a man — that is all. It is
for me to own the law of my being — that being which is
unintelligible apart from humanity, that law which is the
law of humanity — to find it out and never wander from it.
Circumstances may hinder me from doing all I would do ;
but the motive, the principle may be eternal in the heart.
Things without us we may not be able to control ; things
even in human life we may not be able to control — we can-
not control death. Our friends must die, we must die —
we should not love them too well, we should not love our
own life too well. What we can control is our own hearts
— what we can do is to bring our hearts into line and
loving allegiance with the laws on which human welfare
depends. It is, to take a very undignified illustration, like
playing a game of whist. Chance has its part in success,
but what the real whist-player wants to do is to follow the
rules of the game. What the real man wants to do is to
act his part as a man. A tornado may sweep him off
the face of the earth — that is no matter. An earthquake
may swallow him up — no matter. It is for him to do his
part, and for the forces of nature to do theirs — at least
till human wit knows how to control them. To find out
the true human path and then to walk right on in it — that
is rest and blessedness, and it is the meaning of human life.
Bear lightly, friend, on the aims that most men
cherish, but this aim — let your full soul go into
it. Our days are an education and the race is only
gradually learning, but this is the final lesson. We know
not the goal of things, the consummation, the glory to
which the universe tends, but this is the way to it — the
deep, eternal way.

Let me sum up my "credo" :

I believe that in the world there is an intelligible law
of things.

24 A MORAL CREDO.

I believe that morality is the intelligible law of human
life — that is, the central law.

I believe that men can more and more obey this law.

I believe in the rest that this obedience gives — the rest,
the quiet joy, the blessedness.

I believe in our days on earth as an education, and that
they have at last their meaning when the lesson of obedi-
ence has been learned.

THE INDEPENDENCE OF MORALITY,
AND WHAT IT IMPLIES.*

By Felix Adler

Lecturer of the Society for Ethical Culture of New York.

After the high strains to which we have Hstened, I shall
ask you to bear with me if I attempt in informal speech
a task of definition — an attempted contribution to clear-
ness in respect to the distinctive aims of our Ethical
Society ; and I shall ask you particularly (with a view to
the understanding of the points I wish to present), to
have in mind the question whether it is consistent for
anyone to be at the same time a member of an Ethical
Culture Society and of a Christian Church.

It has been said, and abundantly repeated, that the ethi-
cal spirit has existed among mankind in all ages. No one
is so presumptuous as to suggest that the vast hosts of
our predecessors in time have been devoid of the ethical
spirit, or that the Ethical Movement is intended to be an
innovation in the sense of first presenting to mankind the
claims of the ethical life. Again, it has been said that the
tendency and tenor of the Christian Church is deeply
righteous. And 4gain, it has been said that there is a wider
ethical movement in our day, that there are many forces at
work seeking to bring about that solidarity and that
friendly feeling and that moral enthusiasm of which we
have heard this morning.

With these three statements in view, some of us may

♦Address given at the Convention of the Ethical Societies in
connection with the Twentieth Anniversary of the Society for
Ethical Culture of Philadelphia, Sunday, May 14, 1905.

25

26 THE INDEPENDENCE OF MORALITY

become a trifle confused, and ask — What then is the dis-
tinctive aim of these Ethical Societies ? The independence
of morality is the distinctive feature, as I understand it,
of our Ethical Movement.

And if I go back, friends, to my own experience — I will
not say of twenty-nine years ago, when the first Ethical
Society was founded in our city of New York, but of
thirty-four years ago — to the time when, in my student
days, it first became clear to me that I could not be a minis-
ter of the old religion, and that I must make another
choice, I realize that the idea of an Ethical Movement
which presented itself to me was that of something new ;
and new, not in the sense that novelty might have appealed
to ambitious youth, not in the sense of attempting to found
a new religion ; but new in the sense in which one who is
sick unto death, and who has tried the old physicians and
has had no help from them, hears of a new physician and
trusts himself to him ; new in the sense in which a ship-
wrecked crew, their ship foundering and sinking in the
wide sea, lay hold on a life boat which is still whole and
capable of carrying them to safety — new in that sense.
And on the word new in that sense I, for one, must insist.
And the distinctiveness, the newness, is involved in the
title of my remarks — the independence of morality; and
I wish to speak of that, very briefly, under four heads.

First then, morality, to my view, is independent in the
sense in which dependent means also subordinate. That
is one meaning of the word. If you are dependent on an-
other, you are so far subordinate to him. If you are de-
pendent on a banker for credit, you are to that extent sub-
ordinate to him — subordinate to and dependent upon
rules and conditions which he exacts. If you are depend-
ent as a servant upon a master, an employee upon an em-
ployer, you are subordinate. The independence of the

AND WHAT IT IMPLIES. 2/

moral end means that it is not subordinate to any other
human end, but that it is sovereign and supreme above all
other human ends. It is not subordinate to the intellectual
end, to the scientific end, nor to the aesthetic end; it is
certainly not subordinate to the end of material well-be-
ing. "Moral, yes," says the merchant, "so far as is con-
sistent with the procuring of wealth ;" "Moral, yes," says
Aristotle, "so far as is consistent w4th the attainment of
complete science;" "Moral, yes," said the men of the
Renaissance, "so far as is consistent with the artistic idea
of a beautiful existence;" "Moral, yes," said the Church,
"in so far as it is consistent with the acceptance and pro-
paganda of our theological creeds." Even where the idea
of righteousness has been nobly set forth there has ever
been in the religious teaching of the past another non-eth-
ical factor superordinated above it.

Now the idea that we can go through life without giv-
ing theological ends the first place in our allegiance ; that
we have found something else supremely important on
its own account ; that apart from the blessings it bestows
upon society, righteousness is sovereign, supreme, that is
one of the meanings connected with the word independ-
ent in morality.

There are two attitudes in this matter and I beg you to
observe the difference. You may have your philosophical
and your religious creed, and you may hold that morality
is dependent on your philosophy or your creed ; and some
one else may hold that morality is dependent on his creed
or philosophy, but he and you may agree to let alone, to
ignore for the time being, these creeds and philosophies,
as you cannot agree upon them. You will pursue in com-
mon the thing you and he believe to be important, yet not
so imporant as that which is the principal thing for each
of you. That is the one position, but that is not the posi-

28 THE INDEPENDENCE OF MORALITY

tion implied in the word independent. The independence
of morality implies a new conception ; not that we merely
agree to disagree with respect to our philosophical and
religious opinions, but that we agree to superordinate
the moral aim of life above our religious opinions, that
we alter the relative rank of creed and moral life.

The second implication of the word independent is, in-
dependent so far as the attainment of the moral end is
concerned. In the orthodox Christian Church, in every
Christian church that has thus far put forth a body of
doctrine, there is assumed a position of moral pessimism
with respect to the ability of man to conform to the moral
law. This moral pessimism is the corner-stone of the
doctrinal system of every Christian church, the conviction
that man is insufficient to achieve his moral salvation, that
something must happen in the supernatural world, the
outpouring of supernatural grace, for instance, in order
to set into play those moral forces in man which without
the miraculous happening in the supernatural world could
not operate. When we assert the independence of moral-
ity, we assert, in my view, that man, so far as concerns
the effort to achieve the moral end, is not dependent on
any happenings in the supernatural world to set in play
the operation of the moral forces within him.

Now it is true that there are many persons who belong
to the Christian churches and who are at the same time
hospitable to the ideas I have just stated. The truth is
that the question should not be asked whether it is con-
sistent for such persons to belong also to an Ethical So-
ciety. That question obscures the issue. The primary
question to be put is whether it is consistent for such per-
sons to remain within the Christian Church at all, whether
they join an Ethical Society or not. Is it consistent for
them to be where they are disbelieving in that doctrinal

AND WHAT IT IMPLIES. 29

system ? Is it consistent for them to remain in a position
in which their intellect and their emotions are in conflict ?
Their connection with the Christian Church is perhaps a
matter of sentiment. They still feel the need of the old
emotional satisfactions, but they forget that these emo-
tional satisfactions are like fringes on a garment. Can
they consistently accept the emotional satisfactions with-
out accepting the doctrinal system to which these emo-
tional satisfactions are attached? I press the question
whether they can consistently do so ? I am perfectly aware
that human progress is not along the lines of logical con-
sistency. On the contrary, the first step in human progress
is generally that those who move forward allow for a
time two inconsistent positions to remain in their minds
side by side, not realizing the inconsistency until they
have been ripened by time. It was in this manner that the
early Christians, the brother of Jesus among the rest, re-
tained their loyalty to the synagogue, believing it possible
to be members of the Christian Church and the Jewish
synagogue at one and the same time, and it required sev-
eral generations to make perfectly clear the inconsistency
of that position. But I for my part should not press the
inconsistency upon anyone. We open our doors to who-
ever will come. We cannot be inquisitive ; but if the ques-
tion is put to me — Is it consistent? I cannot help saying
that it is plainly inconsistent to belong to two institutions,
one of which affirms that character, morality, is dependent
on creed, that character and morality and righteousness
cannot be achieved without the creed, while the other af-
firms that character is independent of creed.

My third point is that morality is independent spirit-
ually, in the sense that the deliverance of our moral nature
is not dependent on authority. Matthew Arnold has
rendered a great service in his book "Literature and

30 THE INDEPENDENCE OF MORALITY

Dogma," in pointing out that the definition of what is
right and wrong is to be discovered, to be found, in ex-
perience. Matthew Arnold was not the first to make this
statement. Kant anticipated him by a hundred years, and
others have anticipated him, but for those who wish to
acquaint themselves with this thought, there can be no
better method of doing so than to read carefully Matthew
Arnold's book on Literature and Dogma, and what he
there says about the road of experience by which we arrive
at the distinction between right and wrong. Of course,
when we say experience, we throw open the door to the
greatest diversity of opinion, because experience seems to
show that there have been many conflicting moral stand-
ards in dififerent ages and peoples. But here a distinction
will come to our aid, which is of vital importance — the
distinction between the expert and the non-expert in
moral matters. We must be guided and controlled by the
expert. Now the expert is one, primarily, who is partic-
ularly interested, who gives his time and attention to a
particular set of problems, and who, being interested, and
giving his time and attention to this particular set of
problems, masters details in a way in which the unexpert,
who does not attend particularly to this class of problems,
will not master them. Among the nations of antiquity the
Romans were interested in law, the Greeks in philosophy
and art, the Hindoos in abstract speculation, the Persians
in poetry and partially, but not wholly, in ethics. Of all
the nations of antiquity, the Hebrews alone were expert
in the sense which I have defined. They were especially
and supremely interested in the problems of conduct ; they
attended to them more than others, they mastered the de-
tails of them, and hence the experience of the Hebrews
has had authority which the experience of no other people
has had. At the same time we are not limited to the de-

AND WHAT IT IMPLIES. 3I

liverances of the Hebrews, because there is a second con-
dition to the vaHdity of moral opinion, and that is, in addi-
tion to the interest and the attention, also the width and
breadth of experience, and in that the Hebrews hardly ex-
celled. Their experience was narrow, and our experience
in modern times is greatly beyond theirs in range and in
extension. It may therefore be said that we must combine
the supreme interest in conduct exhibited by the Hebrews
with the breadth of view and the hospitality to the differ-
ent problems of different nations and social classes which
is characteristic of the modern man. We should not suf-
fer ourselves to be confused by the diversity of moral
standards and opinions. This diversity is in large meas-
ure due to the subordination of the moral end to the in-
tellectual, artistic or material ends.

Now the last point is in some sense the most important.
Morality is independent in the sense that the moral end is
not subordinate to other ends — it is supreme, not depend-
ent— in the sense that we must not wait for the happen-
ings in the supernatural world to set in play the moral
forces within us ; independent in the sense that the specific
evidence of what is right and wrong is to be expected
from the right kind of experience, and not from revela-
tion ; and, finally, independent in the sense that no person-
ality has yet appeared, no religious teacher has yet ap-
peared who has so far expressed the moral ideal that we
are to be in a position toward him exclusively of followers.
This applies, in my opinion, even to Jesus, great master as
he was, master worthy of our deep reverence. He too, in
my opinion, plainly shows in his teachings the limitations
of the age to which he belonged. And the moral life, the
moral end, opens to us boundless vistas of progress, prog-
ress not only in the practice of morality, but also prog-
ress in insight, in the understanding of the moral ideal.

32 THE INDEPENDENCE OF MORALITY

Therefore I cannot conceive of anyone being consistently
a member of a Christian church who discards the doctrinal
system, who does not acknowledge Jesus as the Master,
the Teacher, who regards him merely as one of the
teachers, perhaps the greatest who has yet appeared, yet
as only one of the teachers of the world. As to one who
is still a Christian in the sense of acknowledging Jesus as
the Master, I cannot conceive of such a person as being
also a member of an Ethical Society, the distinctive fea-
ture of which is independence, in the sense of non-depend-
ence upon any single master. It may indeed be said by
some that Jesus has expressed a moral ideal which for a
long time to come will suffice the human race, even if in
the future we may expect some genius to arise like him, or
even surpassing him; new ideas, like new stars, perhaps
will some day shine in our horizon, still for a long time he
has expressed the moral truths by which the race must
live. Yet that view tends to turn the face backwards, and
creates a disposition rather to rest in the insight of the
past than to look forward with an expectant eye toward
the new truth which is to come. The new stars will not
shine unless we expect their coming.

These are the four cardinal interpretations of the idea
of independence which I have thought it might be well on
this occasion to submit for your consideration. To me
they seem to constitute a new departure.

THE RADICALISM OF THE ETHICAL
MOVEMENT.*

By David Saville Muzzey.

That the Ethical Movement is a radical movement is
probably conceded by all, friends and foes alike; but just
what the radicalism of the Ethical Movement means —
what its motive, its basal principle, its constructive ideal —
is perhaps clear to comparatively few people. To many
people the radicalism of the Ethical Movement has a
purely negative significance; it is a denial of religion,
a protest against prayer and praise, a crusade against
creeds, a sneer at spirituality; to others still it is a cold,
proud philosophy of self -congratulation that we are not
like other men "miserable sinners" ; while to others it is
a beautiful but futile scheme of self-delusion. It uses
fair words like virtue and love, but ignores the heavenly
power which is the fount of virtue and the Heavenly
Father who is the king of love. And so the radicalism
of the Ethical Movement is interpreted as proud rebellion
and self-deception by its enemies, and it perhaps receives
as unworthy interpretation at the hands of many of its
friends. I should like, as my contribution to these exer-
cises, to suggest an interpretation of the radicalism of
the Ethical Movement diametrically opposed to these
views just sketched.

* An address at the Tenth Convention of Ethical Societies and
Twentieth Anniversary of the Society for Ethical Culture of
Philadelphia, Sunday evening, May 14, 1903.

33

34 THE RADICALISM OF

Radicalism etymologically is the doctrine of going to
the roots of things. It is a question of search for basic
truths. It probes. It does not accept truth, it discovers
it; it does not give its assent to doctrines before it has
examined them, just as a savings bank will not lend
money upon security whose title has not been thoroughly
examined at first hand. Whatever, then, the radicalism
of our movement finds rooted in hypocrisy, error, ignor-
ance, or selfishness it condemns, no matter how flourish-
ing the tree that may have grown from those roots.
Whatever it finds rooted in love, honesty, industry, liberty,
and truth it commends and cherishes, no matter whether
the struggling plant may have but just risen above the
ground to be choked by the weeds of vice.

From the beginning of the world's history two views
of the radical — as a reformer and subverter, as a conserver
and destroyer — have been set over against each other.
The staunch conservative has said, **You go to the roots
of things to cut, so that the flower may fade and the fruit
wither"; but true radicalism says, "I go to the roots of
things to prune, so that the flower may be fragrant and
the fruit ripe and sweet." So from Amos to Socrates,
from the Gracchi to Mohammed, from Martin Luther to
Count Tolstoy, tens have claimed the radical as a seer,
while thousands have cursed him as a seducer.

The measurement of progress for us is not that men
have ceased to murder their fellow-men for the opinions
they hold, but the fact that slowly and surely, and perhaps
not slowly, the number of those is increasing who are
willing and able to believe that every moment in the
world's history is as epochal as that date four centuries
or nineteen centuries ago, which so many have been taught
to believe marked the full measure of spiritual truth.
When that day shall have come, when men shall have

THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT. 35

come to feel that every point is pivotal in history, that
every act is dramatic; when their eyes shall be opened,
and their ears quick to receive the fresh inspiration ; when
devotion shall have replaced devotions, and dogmatism
shall have been eliminated from our faith ; when
what is holy shall have replaced what is sanctified, and
what is hallowed be replaced by what is truly holy, then
the work of radicalism will be done. But that day is
still far off. Until that time, what encouragement is
there for us who have espoused this creed of radicalism ?
Much, everyway.

In the first place, there is a sense of largeness, or genu-
ine liberality, in the radical position. Although we are
ourselves not accepted as brothers by those who demand
a certain intellectual creedal statement, nevertheless we
accept all men as brothers, and we see in the exclusiveness
of the creedal devotee not hostility, not perversity, not
conscious folly, but only a regrettable misconception of
that true religion of humanity which must in the end
replace what is temporary and local. It is our privilege
as radicals to search all stages in the history of the world
without any constant pledge to find therein a justification
of the doctrines of Amos or Isaiah, or Gamaliel, or St.
Paul, or John Calvin. It is ours to see that the oracles
of established religion have often been accepted in lieu
of calm judgment, that the dictum of the Bible has often
replaced meditation on human destiny and human duty,
that the church has often been an ark of refuge, an
asylum for souls that have been too timid to work through
that doubt which comes out at last into light. The insti-
tutions of orthodoxy have ever been isles of safety in
the sea of human history, and the great majority of
voyagers have clung very closely to those shores, while
the few Columbuses of the spirit have put out into the

36 THE RADICALISM OF

Open sea, trusting to the compass of a clear conviction
within their own breast. Theirs has been the pure, large
air of ocean ; theirs has been, in the midst of anxiety and
trackless void, that splendid sense of star-girt immensity
which ocean gives ; theirs has been no hurry over a landing
place, no discordant clamor that they should moor their
spiritual bark to this firm dogma or that, but rather the
calm, sure faith that though

"beyond the bourne of time and space
The flood may bear (us) far,
(We) hope to meet our Captain face to face
When (we) have crossed the bar."

Nothing else than this broad conception of religion can
be truly human in its scope. I have had some experience
in pulpits. I have read and heard read very often that
invitation of the Apocalypse, "Whosoever will let him
come," but I have found but one society in which that
motto of the Catholic Church is put into literal practice,
and it is the Society for Ethical Culture. Other institu-
tions say, "Whosoever will believe this creed may come,"
"Whosoever will accept this book of discipline may come,"
"Whosoever will confess this name may come," but the
Society for Ethical Culture alone says, "Whosoever will
come may come."

In the second place, this radicalism which we espouse
leads to a large sense of freedom. Having gotten rid
happily of the chains of our creeds, we are able to work
out our life unimpeded. Our reasoning is in general in-
ductive, not deductive. We have a soul to create as well
as a soul to save ; we have a process to consummate, and
not merely a theory to prove. In the tale of "Pilgrim's
Progress," Christian, when he arrives at the gate Beauti-
ful, in sight of the Delectable Mountains, feels the burden

THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT. 37

roll from his back ; so, when we come to the gate Beautiful
at the threshold of that lovely land of lives made beautiful
by the desire to be holy, the burden of dogmas, which
we thought was a sacred burden, rolls from us. Author-
ity, finality, avenging Deity, all vanish, and we heed not
the fall of the pack, because there is a response in us to
the music of that Easter anthem which Goethe has re-
corded for us in his "Faust" : —

"Thou has destroyed it, the beautiful world,
In thine own bosom build it anew."

So great zeal should be ours. We work no longer as
retainers but as freemen. We are independent, and think
not of requital and recognition at the hands of the Great
King. No man can serve an ideal that is not his own,
or work heartily for a belief that is not his own. I can
no more serve your ideal than live by the bread you put
into your mouth, no more become strong by believing
your faith than by watching your gymnastic exercises.
Our great Lowell was wrong when he said : —

" 'Tis only heaven is given away,
'Tis only God can be had for the asking."

It is just God and heaven, perfection and spiritual har-
mony, that cannot be had for the asking, and that are
not given away. They are blessings that must be toiled
for, in season and out of season. They are set as a prize
on a high place for us to press forward to. In this doc-
trine of radicalism I see the only incentive to winning
that prize. For, starting from the simple theorem that
no Holy Spirit is going to save us the labor of separating
right from wrong, we have a duty set for all time and
eternity.

And so finally we have in this creed of radicalism what

38 THE RADICALISM OF

I hardly know better than to call a great cosmic comfort,
the conviction, to wit, that the stars in their courses are
fighting for our cause. To the radical, I believe that a
review of the last century is very pleasant meditation. He
sees the world moving to meet him. Though it be a mighty
faith that he has to exercise to see it, he sees in every de-
partment progress toward his ideal. In science he no
longer studies a botany which believes that the Great
Spirit descends every spring-time to glue the buds and
leaves on the branches of the trees, or that angels fly
around the skies bearing the planets in their palms.
History has ceased to be the handmaid of religious dogma,
and has become the great rationalist, the great right
seeker, inquiring of every institution and doctrine and
divinity where its origin, whence its charter, what its vv^orth
for present mankind. We have searched back into the sects
and the great religions of the world until we have found
them in their feeble beginnings, and discovered a religion
of antiquity that reaches so far back into the dim distance
that by the side of it the age of Abraham is modern
history. So to whatever page of history we turn, we find
this cosmic comfort that the stars in their courses have
been fighting for us.

In Ethical Radicalism then, I find not a creed of ob-
struction, not a proud philosophy, not a vain, mysterious,
mystic effusion of spirit which ends in nothing, but a great
sense of liberality and genuine zeal, and the sense of
challenge to greater effort in the faith that is pledged to
search the roots of every doctrine that has blessed our
race and every doctrine that has cursed our race.

Plato, in his beautiful dialogue, the "Symposium," gives
us this definition of love: ''Every man, though he have
no music in his soul, becomes a poet when touched by
love." I hail, in the touch of true radicalism, something

THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT. 39

like this inspiration, something Hke the coal from the
altar that will make the stammering eloquent, and the
weak strong when laid on the lips of men ; and I hail that
same uplift of spirit in the man who, in spite of all miscon-
ceptions and misinterpretation, doubt or patronage, at the
cost of all anguish of soul, or the still more bitter anguish
of paining the soul that loves it, courageously becomes
and remains radical.

L

40 THE NEEDS WHICH THE

THE^NEEDS WHICH THE ETHICAL
MOVEMENT COMES TO SERVE.*

By Leslie Willis Sprague.

For one who has spent more years in the world than
months in connection with the Ethical Culture Movement,
it will be more modest to speak of the world's need of
ethical culture than of the capacity of ethical culture to
satisfy that need. I would put the emphasis, then, upon
the need in our modern world of that which ethical culture,
perhaps, may satisfy.

No earnest student of our American life can have failed
to perceive that one of the great needs of our growing
and ofttimes threatened democracy is the need of a larger
fraternity. We are a people composed of peoples, a nation
that has drawn its life-blood from the nations. In spite
of our democratic principles, we are composed of classes,
and classes that are divided one from another by lines
and barriers that seem almost insurmountable; and yet,
if we are to be a nation, a common people, there is need
of closer contact and more intimate fellowship between
all these different incongruous elements which make up
our common humanity. The tendencies of our civiliza-
tion, it would seem to a careful observer, are away from,
rather than towards, this fraternity. The lines between
classes are being drawn more closely, whether distin-
guished by financial or social or intellectual standards.

* An address at Tenth Convention of Ethical Societies and
Twentieth Anniversary of the Society for Ethical Culture of
Philadelphia, Sunday evening, May 14, 1905.

ETHICAL MOVEMENT COMES TO SERVE. 4I

There is need in every community in the United States
for some common meeting place, which shall bring to-
gether people of different thoughts, interests, and degrees
of culture, occupying places far apart in the economic
and industrial life. The w^orld has many needs, but I
can only mention some of them, and try to discover, if I
can, the adaptability of the Ethical Society to meet them.
First of all, then, I mention the need of a common meet-
ing-place, in the interests of a greater fraternity.

It is one of the illusions of most people that if we only
lived up to the light we have, our civilization would be
well and we would prosper therein ; but the fact remains
that we have not the light which we need for our guidance
in the great problems of social and industrial life. Of
speculations on ethics we have enough, from the stand-
point of Christian and Hebrew and evolutionary or scien-
tific thought. We have ethics from the Orient, various
kinds of systems ; but the fact yet remains that we have
not the ethical illumination, the guidance which we need
in solving the stem problems of our increasingly stern
civilization. One instance of this may be seen in the
recent discussion, which has gone on inside the Christian
bodies, concerning the use of tainted money for educa-
tional and religious purposes. I do not wish to discuss
that question, but merely to point out the fact that there
is no canon of judgment, no standard which will insure
fundamental agreement among equally earnest people who
take the same theological position. Dr. Gladden and
Dr. Bradford, for example, men of the same fellowship,
stand at the antipodes on this question.

There may be ethical principle enough to guide us in
the problem of international relationship. But the ques-
tion of the ethics of war is not met by any deposits of the
ethical life, which have come down to us from the past.

42 THE NEEDS WHICH THE

You will hear those who argue in behalf of war as a
means for the promotion of the cause of Christ. They
say in effect, "We have tried to preach the gospel to the
heathen, but it does not work ; we will now see if we can
shoot religion into them."

Turn to the important question of business life. We
have ethics in abundance that would seem to regulate the
business interests of men and women. Economists will
tell you that the purpose of business is to supply a demand.
I have heard a man who stands eminent in the business
world declare that the principle of business, as carried on,
is not based upon that economic dictum, but that the
purpose of business is to create and promote a demand,
that is, to make a demand for that which may or may not
be serviceable.

We have ethics and various ethical systems, but equally
devout people will take two or more sides on ethical ques-
tions, the solution of which should guide the business
man in the conduct of his life. This will illustrate the
need, in the midst of our civilization, for ethical illumina-
tion, for guidance, and for those fundamental ethical
principles by which the individual is to relate his life
organically with other individuals.

I want to speak of another need in our civilization,
coming more and more to be realised by those who are
conscious of the needs of their own personal lives, and
that is the need of some kind of ethical self-expression.
We have many more good enthusiasms than we know how
to make use of. We are better in our private moments
than in our public pursuits; we have aspirations and
ideals for which there seems to be no occasion in the
course of our daily routine. Even though we have these
ideals and impulses, they are very vague, because they
have never been put into effort, into the task which needs-

ETHICAL MOVEMENT COMES TO SERVE. 43

to be done. The world more and more wins us away from
our ideals, and prostrates our higher conceptions of the
spiritual nature of man. There is need of some organiza-
tion that shall help us to put into practical, effective work
the higher aspirations which we feel. There is abundant
opportunity for humanitarian self-expression ; many causes
and interests are calling to us all the time. But purely
humanitarian interest, to relieve physical sufferings and
distress, is not the only need. We realize that by helping
others we may likewise help ourselves ; that we may thus
spiritualize and fulfil the higher interests of our own
natures.

Another need of our civilization is that of religious
training and development. I am aware that there are
now a great many churches. I have frequently said that
there were too many, — that it would be better if they were
larger and more consolidated. Yet the fact remains that
there are a great many people who have no religious asso-
ciations or affiliations. It was stated at a recent Congress
in Brooklyn that in the city of New York alone there are
one million people without religious connections of any
kind. A religious census of Newark, N. J., taken two
years ago, as officially announced by the chairman, him-
self a minister of an orthodox church, revealed the fact
that 50 per cent, of the population has not even a Sun-
day-school connection with any church. People are thor-
oughly satisfied, intellectually and morally, with the ideas
and ideals of their own acceptance or of their inheritance ;
yet they need an opportunity to get a different point of
view. It is certainly true that there are great numbers in
every community without guidance, companionship and
co-operation in the interests of the spiritual life.

Does the Ethical Society endeavor to realize and fulfil
these needs ? I take it from my short acquaintance with

44 THE NEEDS WHICH THE

the Ethical Movement, that it does represent, first of all,
this movement towards fraternity, and that it does give a
common meeting place for people of all degrees of culture,
or of social and religious views.

I take it that the first degree, so to speak, may be called
the degree of fraternity (and there are those who take this
degree and do not pass further) which seeks to relate
one's self in ethical interest with people of different
views and aspirations and antecedents. The second degree
of Ethical Culture — if I interpret rightly the organization
— to which perhaps most of those joining in this work are
sufficiently initiated already, is intellectual effort. The
third degree, into which some of us have been initiated,
may be described as the humanitarian degree, for the want
of a better word, — the gathering of people in this
broader fraternity for the interest of social service — not
simply the relief of the suffering, of those physically dis-
tressed, but the effort to guide and direct others on their
way to fulfilment, and the endeavor to serve the interests
of the growing civilization of which the individual is a
part. The fourth degree of Ethical Culture, to which some
already have been initiated, and for which others are
still waiting, is an appreciation of the religious significance
of ethical ideals, which opens up to the individual a
vista into the unseen and eternal realm, which interprets
the significance of life through the majesty of the
moral law, which may ground a man in his cosmic rela-
tionship, and open to him the mysterious significance of
his own life.

Whether or not the Ethical Societies already in existence
and to be formed shall satisfy these needs, will depend
upon the way in which they meet their opportunities. That
those now in existence have met these needs for many
people in some measure week after week and year after

ETHICAL MOVEMENT COMES TO SERVE. 45

year, cannot be doubted by those who know what this
Society — as well as the others — has accomplished. The
question for us is whether they shall continue to respond
to this great need, and to fulfil the want. Certainly the
need is apparent. It is the hope of some of us in the Eth-
ical Movement that it will be the means of an ethical
awakening of the citizenship of these United States, for
the fulfilment of their own best life, for the discovery of
thoss inspirations, those challenges, those high aspirations
which spiritualize our poor human existence, and which
make men worthy of their source, and worthy heirs of
earth.

As I have come recently into this movement, after long
and earnest study, I can but give you my word of greet-
ing, and hope that your Society after its twenty years
of service, and other societies after an effort during fewer
or more years, shall go on to fulfil their true mission, and
to satisfy these and similar great needs in the life of our
country, of which we are at times perhaps despondent, but
for which, we must, if we are loyal, cherish the highest
hope.

4.6 THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT AS AN

THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT AS AN

EXPERIMENT STATION IN

EDUCATION.*

By Anna Garlin Spencer.

To many students the most interesting period of Ameri-
can history is the transcendental epoch in New England,
the American renaissance, that blossoming of world-phi-
losophy and poetical idealism on the gnarled roots of
Puritan life. Among the noble men and women who
made that epoch prolific in reforms was one you will re-
member who consecrated his service to the building up of
the American common school. We are to-day so proud
of our educational system that it seems almost incredible
when we read of the persecution, lies, abuse, burning in
effigy — the fruit of centuries of misunderstanding of the
ideal and purpose of education — which greeted Horace
Mann in his work. When one asked him, "How is it that
you have power to do such great things for your country,
at such great sacrifice, when you are so misunder-
stood and misinterpreted?" Horace Mann, with that
superb lift of the head which showed his courage
and his hope, replied, "I am sustained by my deep
conviction of the improvability of the human race
— the infinite improvability." That was the new thought
in the new education. It was easy for the despots of

* Address at the Tenth Convention of Ethical Societies and
Twentieth Anniversary of the Society for Ethical Culture of
Philadelphia, Sunday evening, May 14, 1905.

EXPERIMENT STATION IN EDUCATION. 47

the middle ages to develop a perfect method of instruc-
tion because the purpose and content of their educational
ideal were fixed. They could give their whole force to
developing a system by which to quickly and surely mould
the coming generation according to the standard, the
ideal, the conception, the belief, the comprehension of
the preceding generation. When, however, the keynote
of the improvability of the whole human race was struck,
it meant a new purpose and content of education, and con-
sequently some confusion as to method. It is so much
more difficult a thing to develop a human being so that
he may make of his life the best possible, the best he can
conceive, than to shape human beings according to an
accepted model. As a portrait painter first puts in a few
structural lines to paint a face, so the system sketched in
a broad way by Horace Mann, Dr. Samuel Howe and
Miss Peabody was but the beginning. Now we are face
to face with these tremendous problems of education
which grow out of the definite, absolute need, of which
we are now more or less consciously convinced, the abso-
lute need of growing a race of developed human beings,
who can be free yet reverently bound to law; who can
know what personal initiative is and have the liberty to
follow out the leadings of their own natures, and yet
shall be so centered and poised, so chastened on every side
by the influences that make for the highest and truest life,
that they can be free spiritually ; human beings who can
know and obey the law of their being.

For education in this large sense we have to increase
its inherited content. There are so many more things
that we must learn in order to be cultured now than of
old, there are so many more impressions that we must
daily and hourly receive from the increasing complexity
of life, and these are brought so increasingly near to each

48 THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT AS AN

individual by our modern closeness of living, that our
educational process is difficult. For this reason the thing
we hear most, in confused and confusing tone, is dis-
cussion of methods, and curricula, and schedules of hours
and things to learn. These all take into account a world
of people who, in the old order of life, were never counted
in as needing any education. Below the confusion of this
superficial talk there is the deep problem of education
itself : How can we make spiritual freemen, how can we
make personal lives so great, so noble, so strong, so dis-
ciplined, that all these increased opportunities may be
hallowed, in the finest sense, to the highest use ? As the
days go on we reach partial solutions, accepting here and
there every trifling progress through individual experi-
ments. Below all this must be the endeavor, in all the
things that are yet to do, to make social life better, in-
dustrial life better, political life better ; to make this world
a better place to live in, and the forces that surround each
individual more conducive to the higher life of that indi-
vidual. The thing that presses upon us is how to grow
better people, how to make finer, nobler, stronger person-
alities. It is the old problem, the personal problem of the
individual life that has been the heart of religion since
time began ; this that has made every high soul hold the
right dearer than all the world beside. And now our
difficulty is that all the world of mankind is coming to
be counted as individuals, not alone a select few, but all
this under-world that used to be buried out of sight.
Everyone has to be regarded, to be helped in some way
or other to find his life. If his life is low and miserable,
we have to think how to make the tenement in which he
lives sanitary, or beautiful even; how to flood him with
the best literature ; how to do everything which may make
him able to live like a human being. He will not so live

EXPERIMENT STATION IN EDUCATION. 49

unless the soul in him is moved. The poet says "it takes
a soul to move a body even to a cleaner stye." It is out
of better human beings, those more conscious of the great
opportunities of their lives, more sensitive to the spiritual
currents that run through the universe, that we must
build better economies, better states, better homes, finer
schools, nobler churches. It is out of this same old stuff
— the individual human life, sublime in its purpose, chas-
tened and disciplined as to its conduct, ennobled by an
ever-present ideal, which sees that ideal ever "waiting
to invite it as it climbs" — it is out of this same old indi-
vidual personal life that we must build a better world.

I am of those who would try to make this world an
easier place in which to be good and noble and cultured,
but I remember, and I wish to use my last minute to
remind you, that whatever good things you may offer
to a human life, it can take only that which it has learned
to desire. This is why we are eager to have a movement
that is devoted to trying to find out the way in which,
with the new aspects of scientific thought and human re-
lationships, we may translate into newer terms the same
old gospel of religion, "Be ye perfect," live the life that
opens to you as a personality fearlessly and of purpose.

For more than the years this society counts in its cele-
bration to-day, for more than these years I personally
have had an intense interest in the Ethical Culture Move-
ment ; because it shows a consciousness of its real purpose
and of its social end ; because it has a distinction of method
and a great freedom of educational experimentation.
This movement more than any other one that I know of
in this country or abroad, has been trying to solve this
problem of education in the larger sense ; to demonstrate
that the infinite improvability of the human race may be
not only accepted as a sacred belief, but worked out in

50 THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT

realization, if only we can learn to translate every in-
herited sacred word in terms of the newest revelation of
the divine.

It is for this that we are struggling, not for some small
end that is met in our fraternal feeling, or our own home-
like gathering of a few. We feel that the time has laid
upon the serious-minded of our race this most terrible
obligation and glorious opportunity, to make a new vehicle
and medium for the old religious spirit, and somehow
translate in modern terms this new universe which science
has brought before our eyes, in the old spirit of sacred
consecration and high development of the personal life.

We would help consciously, devoutly, and effectively
in this task.

PREPARATION FOR MEMBERSHIP $1

PREPARATION FOR MEMBERSHIP IN
THE ETHICAL SOCIETIES*

By John Lovejoy Elliott.

After having listened to speakers who have dis-
cussed some of the larger questions, it may be hard
to listen to a pedagogue, one who speaks not of aims but
of methods. What I have to say is in the nature of
bearing witness, giving to you personal experience.

It seems to me that there are two ways in which great
moral changes may be brought about ; two ways in which
the very finest qualities of human nature may be called
forth, the one accidental, the other, sure.

We have all seen some man or woman rise nobly to
meet a difficult situation in life. Sometimes, when a
man or woman is cast down, is suddenly placed in a
position of great responsibility, unlooked for powers
show themselves. This is what we may call the acci-
dental conversion or development. The other way is by
the slow but surer method of systematic training and
discipline. We know all too well that we cannot trust
ourselves or others un-weaponed to meet great emer-
gencies. Can we find a system of training and discipline
which shall fit human beings for life in this world? It
seems to me that the methods of ethical training, for that
is but another term for preparation in life, is far behind
many other forms of education and discipline. For in-

* An address before the Convention of Ethical Societies at the
Twentieth Anniversary of the Society for Ethical Culture of
Philadelphia, Sunday evening, May 14, 1905.

$2 PREPARATION FOR MEMBERSHIP

stance, consider the work required of a young man before
he can become a doctor or physician. It is hardly possi-
ble for a student to take the necessary work to fit himself
in the way which is required of him, and to be through
this training before he is twenty eight or thirty years of
age. Compare the work which a doctor must do in high-
school, university, medical school, training in the hospital,
and usually some years abroad before he is equipped to
become a physician, with the preparation for life which
the child receives in Sunday-school. The doctor works
under carefully trained teachers and scientists, the other
under amateurs and those who are not sure of their
aims and methods; the one extending over a period of
fifteen or twenty years, while, if we keep a boy or girl
in Sunday-school for five or six years we think we have
done well.

We of the Ethical Culture Society, although something
has been done in moral instruction, are, nevertheless, far
behind in our work. We have been content to imitate
more or less the Sunday-schools and training institutions
of the orthodox faiths, or, at best, we have tried to adopt
the methods of the better day-school teaching. Person-
ally, I doubt if the methods of either or both of these insti-
tutions— the orthodox Sunday-school or the day-school —
can give us what we want ; and the combinations which we
sometimes find in our Sunday-schools even are ridiculous.
I cannot help questioning whether making a clay map of
Jerusalem will very deeply affect the spiritual life of the
child. We must go deeper. I would say that there were
three ways in which we could work in addition to what
we are already doing.

First. We must try to get the methods of moral train-
ing into the home. It is practically hopeless for the
Sunday-school or the Ethical Culture School to affect

IN THE ETHICAL SOCIETIES. 53

the nature of the child if it is not working in harmony
with those at home. The real life of the child is lived at
home and not in the school — love, obedience, family re-
lations, which are the first ethical lessons, are peculiarly
home duties and virtues. We must try to construct some-
thing that will take the place of family worship ; we must
learn that ethical teaching without the aid of the parents
can accomplish almost nothing; unless there is discussion
in the home of questions brought out in the Sunday-school;
unless there are more family meetings for home readings
and for services, the ethical training of little children can
be of but little value. What we need as much as any-
thing in moral instruction, is to help the parents with
this more formal ethical teaching in the homes.

Secondly. There is self-discipline. We have done but
little as yet for the young people in the art of self-
discipline, of self-training, teaching them that they must
have times for quiet, times for reading, times for self-
communion.

Thirdly. We must endeavor to create the spirit of fra-
ternity ; we must create among the children and younger
people, small groups that will be to them fraternities.
Perhaps the strongest influence that there is on any of
us for good, is that of a fine public spirit. Usually we
teach our children that they must be leaders, we hold up
to them the martyr and the hero, and individual excel-
lence, of course, there must be; but as yet we have not
fully developed, perhaps not yet fully understood, the
power of public or group spirit.

When all is said and done, we must all of us, admit
that we imitate more or less those by whom we are sur-
rounded. We are deeply concerned about what other
people think of us. We are helped and sustained more
than we imagine by the good opinion of our friends. We

54 PREPARATION FOR MEMBERSHIP

must create small societies where the atmosphere will be
pure, the members of which will help each other. A
most important element in ethical training is its fraternal
side. So far, we have been working too much on the
individual and not enough on the group.

If names meant anything I would have the name of the
Sunday-school changed, calling it by some term which
would put in the foreground not instruction, not alone
the thought of individual excellence, but which would
indicate that which seems to me the most important
factor, the factor of public opinion within the group.

CLOSING ADDRESS BY PROF. ADLER

AT THE TENTH CONVENTION OF

ETHICAL SOCIETIES.

You have been very good, in following these meetings
of our Ethical Societies. To-night is the last, and in bid-
ding you good-bye, and in closing our Tenth Conference,
I wish only once more to strike the note which it seems to
me will best help us, and will best explain us to those who
wish to know about us. We are not here merely to criti-
cise. We are not anti-religious, or anti-Christian, or anti-
theistic, or aw ^z-any thing. We know that a great many
changes are taking place in the world. Mr. Sprague has
referred to the falling off in church attendance. You may
have read Dr. Dawson's figures, to wit, that four or five
millions of our people, more or less, either are entirely
disconnected from any church, or are lax in their con-
nections. Things have changed in this country with
enormous rapidity. Ours is a country in which things
ripen with great swiftness. And so this great evolution
of religion is assuming proportions which I think persons
still living in the old religious associations hardly realize.
They feel themselves to be occupying the strongholds of
public opinion, and so far as the respect of the community
is concerned, and seeming public acquiescence, it is certain
they do. But underneath their feet and around them the
whole American world is changing. Yet it is not this
public change that has brought us together, or has been
for us the incentive. If I may speak for others, and as-
sume that my own case is typical of theirs, it is rather a
personal need. What care you or I in our inner life about

55

56 CLOSING ADDRESS.

any church — anything that is consecrated — provided it
does not serve our purpose? Here we are, face to face
with this great world. What will serve us ? If the creeds
and rituals of the Church serve our purpose, well and
good. But religion stands for a terribly real need. We
have our trials, our disappointments, our bereavements;
we have our doubts. We look at the course of history,
and see that often the wrong triumphs. We want, in this
short life of ours, through the rift of the darkness a
glimpse upon the eternal things. We want the eternal
things just as much as the Christian wants them. But
we want them in such a way as really to serve our pur-
pose. We cannot go back to myths. We cannot accept
as the support of life something that is unreal or irra-
tional to us. We need help. We want to get somewhere
and somehow beyond the finite a grip on the eternal.
And this has been the inspiration and the incentive of the
Ethical Movement, at least as far as I can interpret it.

During these last two days there has been a discussion
as to whether it would be possible for a person who is a
member of a Christian church, also to be a member of the
Ethical Culture Society. Let me endeavor to formulate
in a word the thought that I have been trying to express.
The distinction between the dogmatic position in religion
and the Ethical Society's position is this : that every dog
matic church asserts that creed ranks first, and righteous-
ness is dependent upon acceptance of creed; while the
position of the Ethical Society is that the moral life is
the supreme thing, and that creeds are serviceable and
acceptable only in so far as they promote the moral life.
I desire to summarize my thought in reference to that as
briefly as possible. If there be an earnest, sincere person
who says "Yes, I did relinquish the dogmatic view of
religion; but I find that the acceptance of the Christian

CLOSING ADDRESS. 57

teaching, putting it in competition with any other teach-
ing, is really most conducive to the moral life. Can I
then honestly be a member of an Ethical Culture So-
ciety ?" I would say to him, yes, provided you are ready
to modify your creed, in case some higher type of ethical
life can be presented to you. If, recognizing that the type
of life presented is higher, you are ready then to dispense
with or modify your creed — if it is in such fashion that
you hold your creed, then you are indeed a member of an
Ethical Culture Society if you desire to be. For we ex-
clude no one. We do not discourage religious belief or
philosophical belief; we insist on the importance of it,
but hold it to be subservient and subordinate to the life,
to the things that help us in living. Does the belief in
the doctrine of atonement help you, make you a better
man, promote the highest type of ethical life? That is
the test. Not so much whether the documents on which
it rests were divinely revealed. These are matters of
minor interest. Does the creed promote the kind of life
which you yourself, as a moral being, recognize to be the
best and highest?

I think conventions have their uses. I do not like the
word "convention." The word savors of the political
jargon. Such meetings between neighboring Societies
have their uses. They make us pause and consider the
very things that habitually we take for granted; they
bring us into contact with one another ; they raise us to a
high platform from which to overlook our past, and look
ahead. In this sense I think our Tenth Convention, the
tenth meeting of the Ethical Culture Societies, here on
this glad occasion of your Twentieth Anniversary, has
been fruitful and satisfying.

ETHICAL RECORD.

RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY.

By Leslie Willis Sprague
Associate Leader of the Society for Ethical Culture of New York,

The creeds of all churches, while rigorously main-
tained, are held more and more loosely by both clergy and
laity. This is evident to anyone who reads the religious
press of the day, or the books of representative writers
of the various religious bodies. While a formalistic ten-
dency is to be noted among most Protestant Christian
bodies, it is also fair to conclude, from the many sig^s to
be observed, that all forms are more and more meaning-
less to those who observe them. The very thought of
prayer and worship is undergoing a complete transforma-
tion, which in no small way already saps the sources of
sincerity in the heart of the worshipper.

The church in all of its phases is an institution with
forms, dogmas and traditions; and for the end of the
higher life of humanity. That which constitutes the or-
ganization of the church, and that which constitutes its
purpose may be said in these days to be in conflict. Some
there may be who are indiflferent to the purpose, finding
their interest only in the organization; but many there
are who accept, perhaps with silent protest, the organiza-
tion of the church for the sake of what they regard as the
object to be served by and through the church. In many

58

RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY. 59

rural communities the church is the only association of
people for the ends of culture, moral striving and social
betterment. In the cities, the work of the churches has
so broadened into social and benevolent lines that many
who are familiar with its undertakings easily think that
much would be missed, even of the little that is now
accomplished, were the church to become extinct. It is
this consciousness which attracts some, at least, and holds
many others, both ministers and laymen, to the work of
the church. These people tacitly accept or profess creeds
which they do not believe, and perform rites which for
them are only partly significant, all for the sake of the
service which the church seems to render to the practical,
moral interests of individuals and of the community.

The time has been when leaders of the various religious
bodies were ardent in defence of the ancient standards,
and when they would condemn, and seek to drive from
their fellowship any who did not frankly and fully accept
the dogmas and forms of the church. The time was also
when the voices of radical leaders were loud in con-
demnation of what they called the insincerity and
duplicity of any who even nominally professed what they
did not believe, and performed rites the expressions of
which their reasons and consciences could not accept.
That time has, however, largely passed, and in place of
such condemnation from both orthodox and radical lead-
ers, the present witnesses a quiet acquiescence in the
increasing indifference to the established beliefs and time-
honored interpretations of religious forms.

The utterance of the bishops of the Protestant Episco-
pal Church, delivered in Boston, in October, 1904, is
significant in this connection. The pastoral letter of the
bishops, while evidently addressed primarily to the clergy
of that communion, purposely enunciates a principle

6o ETHICAL RECORD

which is applied to all members of that body. The letter
says, "If one finds, whatever his office or place in the
church, that he has lost his hold upon her fundamental
verities, then, in the name of common honesty, let him be
silent or withdraw."

That which is most significant in this utterance is the
alternative proposed, that of silence or withdrawal. The
bishops' approval seems to rest upon those who, if their
opinions do not coincide with the standards of the
church, simply keep them to themselves.

In an interesting article, in the Outlook of September,
1905, the Rev. Dr. Crapsey, discussing "Honor Among
Clergymen," vigorously dissents from this demand of the
bishops, and reaches the conclusion that the clergyman,
so long as he holds what Dr. Crapsey regards as the
"fundamental verities," namely, the basic truths given by
Jesus himself "in the two great commandments of the
law, in the Lord's Prayer, and in the five laws of
righteousness as we find them written in the Sermon on
the Mount (Matthew V: 21-48)," may freely utter his
honest thought, and leave his church to decide whether
he shall have place in it or not.

An editorial in the Outlook, of the same issue, com-
ments upon Dr. Crapsey's article, and while differing
with his interpretation of the fundamental verities —
holding that they are to be found in the Parable of the
Prodigal Son — yet agrees that it is the duty of the clergy-
man "to preach the truth as he sees it, and to leave those
who differ with him to determine whether the difference
is so great that they are no longer willing that he should
remain a recognized teacher in their fellowship."

If these utterances may be regarded as indicative of the
present state of Christian bodies, they reveal the* fact that
the council of conservatism is, "Keep silent or withdraw

RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY. 6l

from the church" ; while the progressive council declares,
"Stay in the church until you are expelled."

A most perplexing and most serious problem, which
thousands and hundreds of thousands are to-day facing,
is not, however, to be thus easily dismissed. The council
of silence, "in the name of common honesty," sounds
rather strange, as though common honesty required a
man to appear to profess what he does not believe ! And
the council to stay within the religious fellowship until
one is expelled, clearly overlooks the very obligations
which every clergyman and church member accepts upon
entering into such relationship. The question will not be
satisfactorily settled until some reorganization of the
church is effected, until those within it who do not accept
its teachings shall not be committed to its creed, and so
placed in a false light. So long as there remains the wide
disparity between the institution and the purpose of the
church — the institution fixed and final, the purpose
changeable and progressive — there will be many who
must face the problem in their own lives.

While such a condition as at present exists shall con-
tinue, however, there are ways in which the most honest
and most earnest man may employ himself, and find fel-
lowship as helpful as any fellowship may be. He need
not join a church, and he need not remain a member of
a church the creed or teaching of which he does not fully
accept, and the forms of which do not rightly express his
spirit. Nay, "in the name of common honesty," he
ought not to join or remain a member of a church against
whose fundamental verities — to be interpreted by the
church and not by him — he is in revolt. But it will still
be possible for him, in communities where the church
represents the only associated endeavors in behalf of
morality and the public good, to find abundant oppor-

62 ETHICAL RECORD

tunity to employ himself in such of its work as commends
itself to his interest and support. Even in the larger com-
munities, the church will usually gladly welcome the co-
operation of those whose sympathy is with its practical
efforts, while not accepting its basis of organization.

In practically all communities, however, there are other
agencies than the church which seek to conserve the
moral interests of individuals and of the community. The
man who dissents from creed, teaching and rite, will find
no such barrier in his way when he seeks to enter these
other forms of activity.

And were all such cooperative effort impossible, a man
would still be able to do what his talents and means per-
mitted, for the general good, even were he to work alone.
There is too little private effort in this age of organiza-
tion. Institutions have supplanted private benevolence,
private culture, almost private virtue, to no small extent;
and what is now needed more than almost anything else
is the effort of men and women, in all the reaches of their
personal contact, for moral awakening and growth.

What is thus true of the private individual, the layman,
is equally true of the minister of religion. For him the
problem is magnified by the fact that the church is his life
work and his means of support. But for him as for all
there are interests higher than vocation and support — in-
terests of the moral life. To him especially the demands
of "common honesty" are that he shall not stultify him-
self, that he shall not appear in a false light, that he shall
not surrender what is most sacred in his personality, even
for the work he would fain do. Those who commend such
a course forget that the end can never justify the means,
and prove indifferent to that which is most important in
any life, the original, unique content of every spirit, a fact
which no organization has a right to ignore, and which no

RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY. 63

man has a right to forget or despise. For the minister
there are other vocations and for him there are manifold
opportunities to serve those ends which he may regard so
highly as to be willing to deny his best manhood for their
sake.

In the consideration of this problem, the final word
upon which has not yet and will not soon be said, the fol-
lowing principles may well be kept in mind :

The end does not justify the means.

A man's well wrought convictions are his sacred pos-
session, more sacred far than any historic standard of
belief.

Vows may not be disregarded, at least while one occu-
pies the position and enjoys the privileges which they
have secured to him.

The greatest purposes which the church at its best
seeks to serve may all be served with or without her
agency by those who, because they dissent from her
standards and practices, remain without her precincts, or
remove themselves from her fellowship.

ETHICAL LECTURES, ETC.

By William M. Salter

Five Cents a Copy unless otherwUe stated

(Those marked * one cent extra by mail.)

Morality — ^What Does it Mean?

The Highest Rule of Life.

"Ethical Agnoticism."

The Next Step in Christianity.

"Ethics or Religion?"

The Venezuelan Question.

Bad Wealth, and How it is Sometimes Got.

The Cause of Ethics.

The Justice of the Single Tax.

A New Nation and a New Duty.

The New Militarism.

The First Thing in Life.

The Great Side of Walt Whitman.

Ethical Culture : Its Message to Jew, Christian and Unbelierer.

The Ethical Elements in Socialism and Individualism.

The Lack of Joy in the Modern Life and the Need of Festivals.

"Thy Commandment is Exceeding Broad" ; or the Scope of
Morality.

Children's Questions : How Shall We Answer Them ?

Non-Christian Teachers and Jesus: Whom Shall We Follow?

Morality as a Religion.

Society and its Children : The Problem of Child Labor.

"Everyman" ; or the Higher Possibilities of the Drama.

The Negro Problem : Is the Nation Going Backward ?
♦The Gospel for an Age of Doubt.
♦Judaism and Ethical Culture.
♦Woman in Recent Fiction.
♦Freedom of Thought and of Speech.
♦Moral Forces in Dealing with the Labor QuestioiL
♦The Duty Liberals Owe to Their Children.
♦Objections to the Ethical Movement Considered.
♦What Does the Ethical Society Stand for?
♦Imperialism.

♦England in 1776, America in 1899.
♦Ethics and Philosophy.
♦What is the Moral Life?

The Eight Hour Question. 10 cents.

Reforms About Which Good Men Might Agree. 10 cents.

America's Compact with Despotism in Russia. 10 cents.

Channin^ as a Social Reformer. 10 cents.
The Social Ideal. 10 cents.

Why Unitarianism Does not Satisfy Us. 10 cents.
The Basis of the Ethical Movement. 10 cents.

A Clue to the Meaning of Life. 10 cents.

ETHICAL ADDRESSES, 1415 Locust St., Philadelphia, Pa.

THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN*

By Felix Adler.

I HAVE remarked in a previous discourse that we should
act as the physicians of our enemies and seek to cure
them of their wrong doing. How much more, then,
should this attitude be taken towards those whom we
love — towards our children, if we find their characters
marred by serious faults.

In discussing the subject of punishment I do not for a
moment think of covering the innumerable problems
which it suggests. Many books have been written on this
subject ; prolonged study and the experience of a life time
are barely sufficient for a mastery of its details. I shall
content myself with suggesting a few simple rules
and principles, and shall consider my object gained if I
induce my hearers to enter upon a closer investigation of
the delicate and manifold questions involved.

The first general rule to which I would refer is never
to administer punishment in anger. A saying of Socrates
deserves to be carefully borne in mind. Turning one day
upon his insolent servant, Speucippus, who had subjected
him to great annoyance, he exclaimed: "I should beat
you now, sirrah, were I not so angry with you." The

* Three lectures given before the Society for Ethical Culture
of New York, in February, 1886. Reprinted by request from
Ethical Addresses for April and May, 1898, which have been out
of print for some time.

65

(i^ THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN.

practice of most men is the very opposite ; they beat and
punish because they are angry. But it is clear that we
cannot trust ourselves to correct another while we are en-
raged. The intensity of our anger is proportional to the
degree of annoyance which we have experienced, but it
happens quite frequently that a great annoyance may be
caused by a slight fault, just as, conversely, the greatest
fault may cause us only slight annoyance, or may even
contribute to our pleasure. We should administer serious
punishment where the fault is serious, and slight punish-
ment where the fault is slight. But, as I have just said, a
slight fault may sometimes cause serious annoyance, just
as a slight spark thrown into a powder magazine may
cause an explosion. And we do often resemble a powder
magazine, being filled with suppressed inflammable irrita-
tions, so that a trivial naughtiness on the part of a child
may cause a most absurd explosion. But is it the child's
fault that we are in this irascible condition? To show
how a slight fault may sometimes cause a most serious
annoyance, let me remind you of the story of Vedius
Pollio, the Roman. He was one day entertaining the Em-
peror Augustus at dinner. During the banquet a slave
who was carrying one of the crystal goblets by which
his master set great store, in his excitement suffered the
goblet to fall from his hand so that it broke into a thous-
and pieces on the floor. Pollio was so infuriated that he
ordered the slave to be bound and thrown into a neighbor-
ing fish-pond, to be devoured by the lampreys. The
Emperor interfered to save the slave's life, but Pollio
was too much enraged to defer even to the Emperor's
wish. Thereupon Augustus ordered that every crystal
goblet in the house should be broken in his presence,
that the slave should be set free, and that the obnoxious
fish-pond should be closed. The breaking of a goblet or

THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN. 6/

vase is a good instance of how a slight fault, a mere in-
advertency, may cause serious damage and great chagrin.
In the same way an unseasonable word, loud conversa-
tion, a bit of pardonable mischief which we should over-
look under ordinary circumstances, may throw us into a
fury when we are out of sorts. When we have urgent
business and are kept waiting, we are apt, unless we keep
a curb on our tempers, to break forth into violent com-
plaints, which indeed are quite proportional to the amount
of annoyance we experience, but not necessarily to the
fault of the person who occasions it. Our business is to
cure faults, and in order to accomplish this end, the pun-
ishment should be meted out in due proportion to the
fault. Instead of following this principle, the great ma-
jority of men when they punish are not like reasonable
beings, selecting right means towards a true end, but like
hot springs which boil over because they cannot contain
themselves. We ought never to punish in anger. No one
can trust himself when in that state; an angry man is
always liable to overshoot the mark; we must wait until
our angry feeling has had time to cool. Do I then advise
that we administer punishment in cold blood? No, we
ought to correct the faults of others with a certain
moral warmth expressed in our words and manner, a
warmth which is produced by our reprehension of the
fault, not by the annoyance which it causes us. This, then,
is the first rule : never punish in anger.

The second rule is that in correcting a child we should
be careful to distinguish between the child and its fault;
we should not allow the shadow of the fault to darken the
whole nature of the child. We should treat the fault as
something accidental which can be removed. Vulgar per-
sons, when a child has told a falsehood, say: "you liar."
They identify the child with the fault of lying, and there-

68 THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN.

by imply that this vice is engrained in its nature. They
do not say or imply : *'You have told a falsehood, but you
will surely not do so again; hereafter you will tell the
truth ;" they say : "You are a liar ; i. e., lying has become
part and parcel of your nature." In the same way when
a child has proved itself incapable of mastering a certain
task, the thoughtless parent or teacher may exclaim im-
patiently : "You are a dunce," that is to say, "You are a
hopeless case; nothing but stupidity is to be expected of
you." All opprobrious epithets of this sort are to be most
scrupulously avoided. Even to the worst offender one
should say, "You have acted thus in one case, perhaps
in many cases, but you can act otherwise; the evil has
not eaten into the core of your nature. There is still a
sound part in you; there is good at the bottom of your
soul, and if you will only assert your better nature you
can do well." We are bound to show confidence in the
transgressor. Our confidence may be disappointed a hun-
dred times, but it must never be wholly destroyed, for it
is the crutch on which the weak lean in their feeble efforts
to walk. Now, such language as : "You are a dunce,
you are a liar," is, to be sure, used only by the vulgar ; but
many parents who would not use such words imply as
much by their attitude toward their child; they indicate
by their manner: "Well, nothing good is to be expected
of you." This attitude of the parents is born of selfish-
ness; the child has disappointed their expectations, and
the disappointment instead of making them more ten-
der toward the child makes them impatient. But this is
not the attitude of the physician whose business it is to
cure evil. We must give the child to understand that
we still have hope of its amendment; the slightest im-
provement should be welcomed with an expression of
satisfaction. We should never attach absolute blame to a

t

THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN. 69

child, never overwhelm it with a general condemnation.
And in like manner we should never give absolute praise,
never injure a child by unlimited approbation. The
words, "excellent, perfect," which are sometimes used in
school reports, are inexcusable. I have seen the object of
education thwarted in the case of particularly promising
pupils by such unqualified admiration. No human being
is perfect, and to tell a child that he is perfect, is to en-
courage a superficial way of looking upon life, and to
pamper his conceit. The right attitude is to say or to im-
ply by our manner: "You have done well thus far; go on
as you have begun and try hereafter to do still better."
Such words as these fall like sunshine into the soul,
warming and fructifying every good seed. On the other
hand, to tell a child that he is perfect induces him to re-
lax his effort, for having reached the summit he may be
excused from further exertion. We should correct faults
in such a way as to imply that not everything is lost. And
we should praise merit in such a way as to imply that not
everything is yet achieved, that, on the contrary, the goal
is still far, far in the distance. Everything, as I have
said, depends upon the attitude of the parent or instructor.
Those who possess educational tact, a very rare and
precious quality, adopt the right attitude by a sort of in-
stinct. But those who do not possess it naturally can ac-
quire it, at least, to a certain degree, by reflecting upon
the underlying principles of punishment.

The third rule is not to lecture children. One feels
tempted to say to some parents : "You do not succeed as
well as you might in the training of your children be-
cause you talk too much. The less you say the more ef-
fective will your discipline be. Let your measures speak
for you." When punishment is necessary let it come upon
the child like the action of a natural law — calm, unswerv-

70 THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN.

ing, inevitable. Do not attempt to give reasons or to
argue with the child concerning the punishment you are
about to inflict. If the child is in danger of thinking your
punishment unjust, it may be expedient to explain the
reasons of your action, but do so after the punishment has
been inflicted. There are parents who are perpetually
scolding their children. The fact that they scold so much
is proof of their educational helplessness. They do not
know what measures of discipline to apply, hence they
scold. Often their scolding is due to momentary passion,
and the child intuitively detects that this is so. If the par-
ent is in ill humor, a mischievous prank, a naughty word,
an act of disobedience sometimes puts him into a towering
passion; at other times the same offence, or even worse
offences, are passed over with meaningless "don't do it
again." The child perceives this vacillation, and learns
to look upon a scolding as a mere passing shower, hiding
its head under shelter until the storm has blown over.
Other parents are given to delivering lengthy homilies to
their children, and then often express surprise that all their
sound doctrine, all their beautiful sermons, have no effect
whatever. If they would pause to consider for a moment
they could easily see why their lectures have no effect,
why they pass "in at one ear and out at the other." Their
lectures on right and wrong are generally too abstract
for the child's comprehension, and often do not touch
its case at all. Moreover, the iteration of the same ding
dong has the effect of blunting the child's apprehension.
A stern rebuke is occasionally necessary and does good,
but it should be short, clear, incisive, A moralizing talk
with an older child sometimes does good. The parent
should not, however, indulge in generalities, but, look-
ing over the record of the child for the past weeks or
months, should pick out the definite points in which it

THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN. 7I

has transgressed, thus holding up a picture of the child's
life to its own eyes to reinforce the memory of its faults
and stimulate its conscience. In general it may be said
that the less the parent talks about moral delinquencies
the better. On this rule of parsimony in respect to words
particular stress is to be laid.

The next rule is quite as important as the preceding
ones. It is that of undeviating consistency. Were not the
subject altogether too painful, it would be amusing to
observe how weak mothers — and weak fathers, too — con-
stantly eat their own words. "How often have I told you
not to do this thing, but now you have done it again."
"Well, what is to follow ?" secretly asks the child. "The
next time you do it I shall surely punish you." The next
time the story repeats itself; and so it is always "the
next time." Very often foolish threats are made, which
the parents know they cannot and will not carry out ; and
do you suppose that the children do not know as well as
you that the threat you have been uttering is an idle one ?
We should be extremely careful in deciding what to de-
mand of a child. Our demands should be determined by
a scrupulous regard for the child's own good, but when
the word has gone forth, especially in the case of young
children, we should insist on unquestioning obedience.
Our will must be recognized by the child as its law; it
must not suspect that we are governed by passion or
caprice. There are those that protest that this is too stem
a method, that gentle treatment, persuasion and love
ought to suffice to induce the child to obey. Love and
persuasion do suffice in many cases, but they do not
answer in all, and besides I hold it to be important that
the child should sometimes be brought face to face with a
law which is superior to the law of its own will, and should
be compelled to bend to the higher law, as expressed in

"^2 THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN.

its parent's wishes, merely because it is a higher law.
And so far from believing this to be a cruel method, I
believe that the opposite method of always wheedling and
coaxing children into obedience is really cruel. Many a
time later on in life its self-love wll beat in vain against
the immutable barriers of law, and if the child has not
learned to yield to rightful authority in youth, the ne-
cessity of doing so later on will only be the more bitterly
felt. The child should sometimes be compelled to yield
to the parent's authority simply because the parental
authority expresses a higher law than that of its own will.
And this leads me to speak incidentally of a subject
which is nearly allied to the one we are now discussing.

It is a well known trick of the nursery to divert the
child from some object which it is not to have by quickly
directing its attention to another object. If a child cries
for the moon, amuse it with the light of a candle; if it
insists upon handling a fragile vase, attract its attention
to the doll ; if it demands a knife with which it might in-
jure itself, call in the rattle to the rescue. And this
method is quite proper for baby children, but it is often
continued to a much later age with harmful results. As
soon as the self-consciousness of the child is fairly de-
veloped, that is, about the third year, this method should
no longer be employed. It is important that the will
power of the young be strengthened. Now the more the
will is accustomed to fasten upon the objects of desire the
stronger does it become, while, by rapidly introducing
new objects the will is distracted and a certain shiftless-
ness is induced, the will being made to glide from one ob-
ject to another without fixing itself definitely upon any
one. It is far better to allow a child to develop a will of
its own, but to make it understand that it must at times
yield this will to he will of the parent, than thus to distract

THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN. 73

its attention. If it wants a knife which it ought not to
have, make it understand firmly, though never harshly,
that it cannot have what it wants, that it must yield its
wish to the parent's wish. Nor is it at all necessary every
time to give the reasons why. The fact that the parent
commands is a sufficient reason.

The rules thus far mentioned are, that we shall not pun-
ish in anger, that we shall not identify the child with its
fault, that we shall be sparing with admonitions and let
positive discipline speak for itself, and that, while de-
manding nothing which is unreasonable, we should insist
on implicit obedience.

There is one question that touches the general subject of
punishment and reward which is in some sense the most
important and vital of all the questions we are consider-
ing. It throws a bright light or a deep shadow on the
whole theory of life, according to the point of view we
take. I allude to the question whether the pleasures of
the senses should be treated as a reward for the per-
formance of duty. A parent says to his child : "You have
been good to-day; you have studied your lessons; your
deportment has been satisfactory : I will reward you by
giving you sweetmeats, or by taking you on a holiday
into the country." But what connection can there pos-
sibly be between the performance of duty and the physical
pleasure enjoyed in eating sweetmeats? Is not the con-
nection a purely arbitrary one ? Does it not depend upon
the notion that there is no intrinsic satisfaction in a moral
act? We ought to see that it is radically wrong to make
such enjoyments the reward of virtue; we ought to have
the courage to make application of our better theories to
the education of our children, if we would develop in
them the germs of a nobler, freer manhood and woman-
hood. I admit, indeed, that a child is not yet sufficiently
developed to stand on its own feet morally, and that its

74 THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN.

virtuous inclinations need to be supported and assisted;
but we can give it this assistance by means of our appro-
bation or disapprobation.

To be in disgrace with its parents ought to be for a
child the heaviest penalty. To have their favor should be
its highest reward. But simply because a child is most
easily taken on the side of its animal instincts, are we to
appeal to it on that side? Should it not be our aim to
raise the young child above the mere desire for physical
gratification, to prevent it from attaching too much im-
portance to such pleasures. The conduct of many par-
ents, however, I fear, tends to foster artificially that lower
nature in their offspring which it should rather be their
aim to repress. By their method of bestowing extraneous
rewards, parents contribute to pervert the character of
their children in earliest infancy, giving it a wrong direc-
tion from the start.

But, it may be objected, is there not a wholesome
truth contained in St. Paul's saying that "he who will not
work, neither shall he eat?" Is not our conscience of-
fended when we see a person enjoying the pleasures of
life who will perform none of its more serious duties?
And should we not all agree that, in a certain sense,
virtue entitles one to pleasure, and the absence of virtue
ought to preclude one from pleasure ? To meet this point
let us dwell for a moment on the following considerations.
Man is endowed with a variety of faculties, and a dif-
ferent type of pleasure or satisfaction arises from the ex-
ercise of each. Pleasure, in general, may be defined as
the feeling which results from successful e-xercise of any
of our faculties — physical, mental or moral. A successful
rider takes pleasure in horsemanship, an athlete in the lift-
ing of weights. The greater an artist's mastery over his
art the greater the pleasure he derives from it. The more

THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN. 75

complex and difficult the problems which a scholar is able
to resolve, the more delight does he find in study. And
the same is true of the moral nature The more a man suc-
ceeds in harmonizing his inner life, and in helping to
make the principles of social harmony prevail in the
world about him, the more satisfaction will he derive from
the exercise of virtue. But the main fact which we are
bound to remember is that it is impossible to pay for the
exercise of anyone faculty by the pleasure derived from the
exercise of another; that each faculty is legitimately paid
only in its own coin. If you ask a horseman, who has just
returned from an exhilarating ride, what compensation he
expects to receive for the exercise he has taken, he will
probably look at you in blank amazement, with grave mis-
givings as to your sanity. If you ask a scientist what re-
ward he expects to receive for the pursuit of knowledge,
he will answer you, if he is an expert in the use of his in-
tellect, that he expects no ulterior reward of any kind;
that not positive knowledge to much as the sense of
growth in the attainment of knowledge is the highest re-
ward which he can imagine. And the same answer you
will get from a person who is expert in the use of his
moral faculty — namely, that not virtue so much as growth
in virtue, not the results achieved by the exercise of the
faculty, but the successful exercise itself is the supreme
compensation. I have used the word "expert" in all
these cases, and precisely "there's the rub." The reason
why many persons cannot get themselves to believe that
the exercise of the mental and moral faculties is a
sufficient reward is because they are not expert, because
they have not penetrated far enough along the lines of
knowledge and virtue to obtain the satisfactions of them.
But the same applies to the tyro in any pursuit. A rider
who has not yet acquired a firm seat in the saddle will

76 THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN.

hardly derive much pleasure from horseback exercise.
An awkward, clumsy dancer, who cannot keep step, will
get no pleasure from dancing. There is no help for the
tyro, no matter in what direction he aims at excellence,
except to go on trying until he becomes expert.

I have said that each faculty is sovereign in its own
sphere, that each provides its proper satisfactions within
itself and does not borrow them from the domain of any
of the others. Nevertheless, we are constrained to admit
the important truth that is contained in the saying of St.
Paul. And this truth, it seems to me, may be formulated
in the words that, while physical pleasure is not the re-
ward of virtue, virtue ought to be regarded as the condi-
tion sine qua non of the enjoyment of physical pleasures
— at least, so far as the distribution of such pleasures is
within the power of the educator or of society. And this
proposition depends on the difference in rank that sub-
sists between our faculties, of which some are superior
and others inferior, the moral and intellectual faculties
rightfully occupying the top of the scale. We inwardly
rebel when we see the indolent and self-indulgent living
in luxury and affluence. And this not because the en-
joyments which such persons command are the proper
compensations of virtue, or because physical pain would
be the proper punishment of their moral faults, but be-
cause we demand that the lower faculties shall not be ex-
ercised at the expense and to the neglect of the higher,
that the legitimate rank and order of our faculties shall
not be subverted. And, applying this idea to the case of
children, I think it would be perfectly proper to deny a
child that has failed to study its lessons or has given other
occasion for serious displeasure the privilege of going on
a holiday to the country or enjoying its favorite sports.
Everything, however, will depend — as so much in edu-

THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN. "JJ

cation does depend — on the manner; in this instance on
what we imply in our denial, rather than on what we ex-
pressly state. The denial, it seems to me, should be made
on the ground that there is a proper order in which the
faculties are to be exercised ; that the higher, the mental,
faculties, should be exercised first, and that he who will
not aim at the higher satisfactions, neither shall he, so
far as we can prevent, enjoy the lower. On the other
hand, by making physical pleasures — sports, games, and
the like — the reward of study, we exalt these satisfactions
so as to make them seem the higher, so as to make the sat-
isfactions of knowledge appear of lesser value compared
with the satisfactions of the senses.

In an ideal community every one of our faculties
would be brought into play in turn, without our ever be-
ing tempted to regard the pleasures of the one as com-
pensation for the exercise of the other. The human soul
has often been compared to an instrument with many
strings. Perhaps it may not be amiss to compare it to an
orchestra. In this orchestra the violins represent the in-
tellectual faculties. They lead the rest. Then there are
the flute-notes of love, the trumpet tones of ambition, the
rattling drums and cymbals of the passions and appetites.
Each of these instruments is to come in its proper
place, while the moral plan of life is the musical composi-
tion which they all assist in rendering. What we should
try to banish is the vicious idea of extraneous reward,
the notion that man is an animal whose object in life is
to eat and drink, to possess gold and fine garments, and
to gratify every lower desire, and that he can be brought
to labor only on condition that he may obtain such pleas-
ures. What we should impress instead is the notion that
labor itself is satisfying — manual labor, mental labor,
moral labor — and that the more difficult the labor, the
higher the compensating satisfactions.

78 THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN.

II

In my last address I endeavored to combat the notion
that physical pleasure should be offered as a reward for
virtue, and physical pain inflicted as a punishment for
moral faults. To-day we are in a position to apply this
conclusion to some special questions which it is proposed
to take up for consideration. The first of these relates to
corporal punishment.

It was in that period of history which is so justly
called the dark ages that the lurid doctrine of hell as a
place for the eternal bodily torture of the wicked haunted
men's minds, and the same medieval period witnessed
the most horrible examples of corporal punishment in
the schools and in the homes. This was no mere coin-
cidence. As the manners of the people are so will their
religion be. Savage parents who treat their children in
a cruel, passionate way naturally entertain the idea of a
god who treats his human children in the same way. If
we wish to purify the religious beliefs of men, we must
first ameliorate their daily life. There was once a school-
master who boasted that during his long and interesting
career he had inflicted corporal punishment more than a
million times. In modern days the tide of public opinion
has set strongly against corporal punishment. It is being
abolished in many of our public institutions, and the
majority of cultivated parents have a decided feeling
against availing themselves of this method of discipline.
But the mere sentiment against it is not sufiicient. ■ Is
the opposition to it the result possibly of that increased
sensitiveness to pain which we observe in the modem man,
of the indisposition to inflict or to witness suffering?
Then some stern teacher might tell us that to inflict suf-
fering is sometimes necessary, that it is a sign of weak-

1

THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN. 79

ness to shrink from it, that as the surgeon must sometimes
apply the knife in order to affect a radical cure, so the
conscientious parent should sometimes inflict physical pain
in order to eradicate grievous faults. The stern teacher
might warn us against "sparing the rod and spoiling the
child." We must not, therefore, base our opposition to
corporal punishment merely on sentimental grounds. And
there is no need for doing so, for there are sound princi-
ples on which the argument may be made to rest. Cor-
poral punishment does not merely conflict with our ten-
derer sympathies, it thwarts and defeats the purpose of
moral reformation. In the first place it brutalizes the
child ; secondly, in many cases it breaks the child's spirit,
making it a moral coward ; and thirdly, it tends to weaken
the sense of shame, on which the hope of moral improve-
ment depends.

Corporal punishment brutalizes the child. A brute we
may be justified in beating, though of course never in a
cruel, merciless way. A lazy beast of burden may be
stirred up to work ; an obstinate mule must feel the touch
of the whip. Corporal punishment implies that a rational
human being is on the level of an animal.^ Its underlying
thought is : you can be controlled only through your an-
imal instincts; you can be moved only by an appeal to
your bodily feelings. It is a practical denial of that higher
nature which exists in every human being, and this is a
degrading view of human character. A child which is
accustomed to be treated like an animal is apt to behave

^ It is an open question whether light corporal punishment
should not occasionally be permitted in the case of very young
children who have not yet arrived at the age of reason. In this
case, at all events, there is no danger that the permission will be
abused. No one would think of seriously hurting a very young
child.

80 THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN.

like an animal. Thus corporal punishment instead of
moralizing serves to demoralize the character.

In the next place corporal punishment often breaks
the spirit of a child. Have you ever observed how some
children that have been often whipped will whine and
beg off when the angry parent is about to take out the
rattan : "Oh, I will never do it again ; oh, let me off this
time." What an abject sight it is — a child fawning and
entreating and groveling like a dog. And must not the
parent, too, feel humiliated in such a situation ! Courage
is one of the noblest of the manly virtues. We should
train our children to bear unavoidable pain without flinch-
ing, but sensitive natures can only be slowly accustomed
to endure suffering, and chastisement, when it is fre-
quent and severe, results in making a sensitive child more
and more cowardly, more and more afraid of the blows.
In such cases it is the parents themselves, by their barbar-
ous discipline, who stamp the ugly vice of cowardice upon
their children.

Even more disastrous is the third effect of corporal
punishment, that of blunting the sense of shame. Some
children quail before a blow, but others, of a more ob-
stinate disposition, assume an attitude of dogged indiffer-
ence. They hold out the hand, they take the stinging
blows, they utter no cry, they never wince; they will not
let the teacher or father triumph over them to that extent ;
they walk off in stolid indifference. Now a blow is an in-
vasion of personal liberty. Every one who receives a blow
feels a natural impulse to resent it. But boys who are
compelled by those in authority over them to submit
often to such humiliation are liable to lose the finer feel-
ing for what is humiliating. They become, as the pop-
ular phrase puts it, ''hardened." Their sense of shame is

THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN. 8l

deadened. But sensitiveness to shame is that quality of
our nature on which, above all others, moral progress
depends. The stigma of public disgrace is one of the
most potent safe-guards of virtue. The world cries
"shame" upon the thief, and the dread of the disgrace
which is implied in being called a thief acts as one of the
strongest preventives upon those whom hunger and pov-
erty might tempt to steal. The world cries ''shame"
upon the law-breaker in general, but those who in their
youth are accustomed to be put to shame by corporal pun-
ishment are likely to become obtuse to other forms of dis-
grace as well. The same criticism applies to those means
of publicly disgracing children which have been in vogue
so long — the fool's cap, the awkward squad, the bad boy's
bench, and the like. When a child finds itself frequently
exposed to ignominy it becomes indifferent to ignominy,
and thus the door is opened for the entrance of the worst
vices. There is one excellence, indeed, which I perceive in
corporal punishment : it is an excellent means of breeding
criminals. Parents who inflict frequent corporal punish-
ment, I make bold to say, are helping to prepare their
children for a life of crime ; they put them on a level with
the brute, break their spirit and weaken their sense of
shame.

The second special question which we have to consider
relates to the mark system. As this system is applied to
hundreds of thousands of school children, the question
whether that influence is good or evil concerns us
closely. I am of the opinion that it is evil. The true aim
of every school should be to lead the pupils to pursue
knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and to preserve a
correct deportment in order to gain the approbation of
conscience and of the teacher whose judgment represents
the verdict of conscience. I object to the mark system be-

82 THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN.

cause it introduces a kind of outward payment for prog-
ress in study and good conduct. The marks which the
pupil receives stand for the dollars and cents which the
man will receive later on for his work. So much school
work performed, so many marks in return. But a child
should be taught to study for the pleasure which study
gives, and for the improvement of the mind which is its
happy result. I know of a school where the forfeiture of
twelve marks was made the penalty for a certain misde-
meanor. One day a pupil being detected in a forbidden act,
turned to the teacher and said: *T agree to the forfeit,
you can strike off my twelve marks," and then went on
openly transgressing the rule, as if he had paid out so
many shillings for an enjoyment which he was deter-
mined to have ; as if the outward forfeit could atone for
the anti-moral spirit by which the act was inspired. But
how is it possible by any external system of marks to
change the anti-moral spirit of an offender? I object fur-
thermore to the marking system because the discrimina-
tions to which it leads can never be really just. One boy
receives an average of ninety-seven and one-half per
cent., and another of ninety-five. The one who receives
ninety-seven and one-half thinks himself superior to, and
is ranked as the superior of the one who has received only
ninety-five. But is it possible to rate mental and moral
differences between children in this arithmetical fashion?
And above all I object to this system because it appeals to
a low spirit of competition among the young in order
to incite them to study. "Ambition is avarice on stilts,"
as Landor puts it. Of course it is better to try to outshine
others in what is excellent than in what is vicious ; but if
the object be that of outshining others at all, of gaining
superiority over others, no matter how high the faculties
may be which are called into exercise, the motive is im-

THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN. 83

pure and ought to be condemned. There is a general im-
pression abroad that men are not yet good enough to make
it practicable to appeal to their better nature. But it is for-
gotten that by constantly appealing to the baser impulses
we give these undue prominence, and starve out and
weaken the nobler instincts. Whatever the truth may be
in regard to later life, it seems to me culpable to foster
this sort of competition in young children. Now the
mark spirit does foster such a spirit in our schools. It
teaches the pupils to work for distinction rather than
for the solid satisfaction of growth in intelligence and
mental power. Doubtless where the method of instruc-
tion is mechanical, where the atmosphere of the class-room
is dull and lifeless, and the tasks are uninteresting, it
is necessary to use artificial means in order to keep the
pupils to their work; it is necessary to give them the
sweet waters of flattered self-esteem in order to induce
them to swallow the dry as dust contents of a barren
school learning. But is it not possible to have schools
in which every subject taught shall be made interesting
to the scholars, in which the ways of knowledge shall be-
come the ways of pleasantness, in which there shall be suf-
ficient variety in the program of lessons to keep the minds
of the pupils constantly fresh and vigorous, in vv^hich the
pupils shall not be rewarded by being dismissed at an
earlier hour than usual from the school, but in which pos-
sibly they shall consider it reward to be allowed to re-
main longer than usual? And, indeed, requests of this
sort are often made in schools of the better kind, and in
such schools there is no need of an artificial mark system,
no need to stimulate the unwholesome ambition of the
pupils, no need to bribe them to perform their tasks.
Rather do such pupils look with affection upon their
school; and the daily task itself is a delight and a suffi-

84 THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN.

cient reward. I do not, of course, oppose the giving
of reports to children. Such expressions as "good,"
"fair," and "poor," which formulate the teacher's opinion
of the pupil from time to time, are indispensable, inas-
much as they acquaint the parents and the pupil himself
with the instructor's general approval or disapprobation.
I only oppose the numerical calculation of merit and de-
merit, and the vulgar method of determining the pupil's
rank in the class according to percentages. Under that
method the pupils, having pursued knowledge only as a
means to the end of satisfying their pride and vanity,
relax their efforts when they have gained this ambitious
aim. They cease to take any deeper interest in the pursuit
of knowledge the moment they have achieved their pur-
pose. The notorious failure of the system, despite all
its artificial stimulants, to create lasting attachment and
devotion to intellectual pursuits condemns the whole idea
of marks, to my mind, beyond appeal.

We pass next to the method for correcting the faults
of children which has been proposed by Herbert Spencer
in his collected essays on Education. These essays have
attracted great attention, as anything would be sure to do
which comes from so distinguished a source. I have heard
people who are ardent admirers of Spencer say: "We
base the education of our children entirely on Mr. Spen-
cer's book." All the more necessary is it to examine
whether the recommendations of his book will wholly bear
criticism. I cannot help feeling that if Mr. Spencer had
been more thoroughly at home in the best educational
literature of Germany he would not have presented to us
an old method as if it were new, and would not have
described that which is at best but a second or third rate
help in moral education as the central principle of it all,
the keynote of the whole theory of the moral training of
the young.

THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN. 85

The method which he advises us to adopt is that of visit-
ing upon the child the natural penalties of its transgres-
sion, of causing it to experience the inevitable conse-
quences of evil acts in order that it may avoid evil, of
building up the moral nature of the child by leading it to
observe the outward results of its acts. Mr. Spencer
points out that when a child puts its finger into the flame,
or when it incautiously touches a hot stove, it is burned ;
*'a burnt child shuns the fire." When a child carelessly
handles a sharp knife it is apt to cut its fingers. This is a
salutary lesson; it will be more careful thereafter; this
is the method of nature, viz., of teaching by experience.
And this is a kind of cure-all which he offers for general
application. He does indeed, admit at the close of his
essay, that, in certain cases where the evil consequences
are out of all proportion to the fault, some other method
than that of experience must be adopted. But in general
he recommends the method of nature, as he calls it. For
instance, a child in the nursery has littered the floor with
its toys, and after finishing its play refuses to put them
away. When next the child asks for its toy box the reply
of its mother should be: ''The last time you had your
toys you left them lying on the floor and Jane had to
pick them up. Jane is too busy to pick up every time the
things you leave about, and I cannot do it myself, so that
as you will not put away your toys when you have done
with them I cannot let you have them." This is obviously
a natural consequence and must be so recognized by the
child. Or a little girl, Constance by name, is scarcely
ever ready in time for the daily walk. The governess and
the other children are almost invariably compelled to
wait. In the world the penalty of being behind time is
the loss of some advantage that one would otherwise have
gained. The train is gone, or the steamboat is just leaving

86 THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN.

its moorings, or the good seats in the concert room are
filled; and every one may see that it is the prospective
deprivation entailed by being late which prevents people
from being unpunctual. Should not this prospective
deprivation control the child's conduct also? If Con-
stance is not ready at the appointed time the natural result
should be that she is left behind and loses her walk. Or
again, a boy is in the habit of recklessly soiling and
tearing his clothes. He should be compelled to clean them
and to mend the tear as well as he can. And if having
no decent clothes to go in, the boy is ever prevented from
joining the rest of the family on a holiday excursion and
the like, it is manifest that he will keenly feel the punish-
ment and perceive that his own carelessness is the cause
of it. But I think it can easily be made clear that this
method of moral discipline should be an exceptional and
not a general one, and that there are not a few but many
occasions when it becomes simply impossible to visit upon
children the natural penalties of their transgressions. In
these cases the evil consequences are too great or too re-
mote for us to allow the child to learn from experience.
A boy is leaning too far out of the window ; shall we let
him take the natural penalty of his folly? The natural
penalty would be to fall and break his neck. Or a child
is about to rush from a heated room into the cold street
with insufficient covering; shall we let the child take the
natural penalty of its heedlessness ? The natural penalty
might be an attack of pneumonia. Or again, in certain
parts of the country it is imprudent to be out on the water
after night-fall owing to the danger of malaria. A boy
who is fond of rowing insists upon going out in his boat
after dark ; shall we allow him to learn by experience the
evil consequences of his act and gain wisdom by suffering
the natural penalty? The natural penalty might be

THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN. 87

that he would come home in a violent fever. To show
how much mischief the application of the Spencerian
method might work, let me mention a case which came
under my observation. A certain teacher had been study-
ing Herbert Spencer and was much impressed with his
ideas. One wet, rainy day a number of children came to
school without overshoes. The teacher had often told
them that they must wear their overshoes when it rained ;
having neglected to do so their feet were wet. Now came
the application of the natural penalty theory. Instead of
keeping the children near the fire while their shoes were
being dried in the kitchen, they were allowed to run about
in their stocking feet in the large school hall in order to
fix in their minds the idea that as they had made their
shoes unfit to wear they must now go without them. This
was in truth moral discipline with a vengeance. It is in
many instances impossible to let the natural penalties of
their transgressions fall upon children; it would be dan-
gerous to health, to life and limb, and also to character,
to do so. Pray, understand me well ; I do not deny that
the method of natural penalties is capable of being applied
to advantage in the moral training of children. Namely,
as the German philosopher Herbart pointed out many
years ago, it can be used as a means of building up the
confidence of children in the authority of their parents and
educators. The father says to his child: "You must not
touch the stove or you will be burned." The child dis-
obeys his command and is burned. "Did I not warn you ?"
says the father, "do you not see that I was right? Here-
after believe my words and do not wait to test them in
your experience." The comparatively few cases in which
the child may without injury be made to experience the
consequences of his acts should be utilized to strengthen
its belief in the wisdom and goodness of its parents so that

88 THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN.

in an infinitely greater number of cases their authority
will act upon the mind of the child almost as powerfully
as the actual experience of the evil consequences would
act. Mr. Spencer himself admits, as I have said, that
there are what he calls extreme cases to which the system
he recommends does not apply. In these he falls back
upon parental displeasure as the proper penalty. But par-
ental displeasure, according to his view, is an indirect
and not a direct penalty, and to use his own words : "the
error which we have been combating is that of substitut-
ing parental displeasure for the penalties which nature
has established." Yet he himself in regard to the graver
offenses does substitute parental displeasure, and thus
abandons his own position. There is, moreover, a second
ground on which I would rest my criticism. The art of
the educator sometimes consists in deliberately warding
off the natural penalties, though the child knows what
they are and perhaps expects to pay them. So far is the
method of Spencer from bearing the test of application
that the very opposite of what he recommends is right
in some of the most important instances. Take the case
of lying, for instance. The natural penalty for telling
a falsehood is not to be believed the next time, but the
real secret of moral redemption consists in not inflicting
this penalty. We emphasize our belief in the offender
despite the fact that he has told a falsehood, we show
that we expect him never to tell a falsehood again, we
seek to drive the spirit of untruthfulness out of him —
by believing in him we strengthen him to overcome
temptation. And so in many other instances we rescue,
we redeem, by not inflicting the natural penalty.

The task of moral education is laid upon us. It is not
a task that can be learned by reading a few scattered es-
says; it is often a heavy burden and involves a con-

TPIE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN. 89

slant responsibility. I know it is not right always to make
parents responsible for the faults which appear in their
children. I am well aware that the worst fruit sometimes
comes from the best stock, and that black sheep are some-
times to be found in the best families. But I cannot
help thinking that if these black sheep were taken charge
of in the right way in early childhood the results might
turn out differently than they often do. The picture of
Jesus on which the early church loved to dwell is the
picture of the good shepherd who follows after the lamb
who has strayed from the fold, and brings it back and
carries it tenderly in his arms. I think if parents were
more faithful shepherds, and cared for their wayward
children with deeper solicitude and tenderness, they might
often succeed in winning them back. But even apart
from these exceptional cases the task of training children
morally is one of immense gravity and difficulty. And
how are most parents prepared for the discharge of this
task? Why, they are not at all prepared. They rely
merely upon impulse, and upon traditions which are often
altogether wrong and harmful. They do as they have
seen other fathers and mothers do, and thus the same
mistakes are perpetuated from generation to generation.
Such parents, if they were asked to repair a clock, would
say : "No, we must first learn about the mechanism of a
clock before we undertake to repair it." But the delicate
and coniplex mechanism of a child's soul they undertake
to repair without any adequate knowledge of the springs
by which it is moved, or of the system of adjustments
by which it is enabled to perform its highest work. They
thrust their crude hands into the mechanism and often
damage or break it altogether. I do not pretend for a
moment that education is as yet a perfect science ; I know
it is not. I do not pretend that it can give us a great deal

90 THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN.

of light; but such light as it can give we ought to be all
the more anxious to obtain on account of the prevailing
darkness. The time will doubtless come when the science
of education will be acknowledged to be, in some sense,
the greatest of all the sciences; when, among the bene-
factors of the race, the great statesmen, the great in-
ventors, and even the great reformers will not be ranked
as high as the great educators.

Ill

In order that a parent shall properly influence a child's
character, it is necessary for him to know what that
character is, and what the nature is of each fault with
which he is dealing. I feel almost like asking pardon for
saying anything so self-evident. It seems like saying that
a physician who is called to a sick-bed, before beginning
to prescribe, should know the nature of the disease for
which he is prescribing, should not prescribe for one dis-
ease when he is dealing with another. I do not know
enough about physicians to say whether such mistakes
ever happen among them; but that such egregious mis-
takes do occur among parents all the time, I am sure.
There are many parents who never stop to ask before
they punish — that is, before they prescribe their moral
remedies — what the nature of the disease is with which
their child is afflicted. They never take the trouble to
make a diagnosis of the case in order to treat it correctly.
There is perhaps not one parent in a thousand who has a
clear idea of the character of his child, or to whom it
even so much as occurs that he ought to have a clear con-
ception of that character, a map of it, a chart of it, laid
out, as it were, in his mind. The trouble is that attention
is not usually called to this important matter, and I pro-
pose to make it the special subject of this address.

I

THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN. 9I

I am prepared at the outset for the objection that the
case against parents has been overstated. There are par-
ents who freely acknowledge : ''My child is obstinate ; I
know it has an obstinate character." Others say: **My
child, alas, is untruthful;" others again: '*My child is in-
dolent." But these symptoms are far too indeterminate
to base upon them a correct reformatory treatment. Such
symptoms may be due to a variety of causes, and not until
we have discovered the underlying cause in any given
case can we be sure that we are following the right
method. Take the case, for instance, of obstinacy : a
child is told to do a certain thing and it refuses. Now,
here is a dilemma. How shall we act? There are those
who say : in such cases a child must be chastised until it
does what it is told. A gentleman who was present here
last Sunday had the kindness to send me during the week
a copy of John Wesley's sermons, and in this volume,
under the head of "Obedience to Parents," I read the fol-
lowing words : "Break your child's will in order that it
may not perish. Break its will as soon as it can speak
plainly — or even before it can speak at all. At any rate,
as soon as a child is a year old it should be forced to do as
it is told, even if you have to whip it ten times running;
break its will in order that its soul may live." But by fol-
lowing this line of treatment we may obtain a result the
very opposite of that which we intended. Obstinacy in
many cases is due to sensitiveness. There are some chil-
dren as sensitive to impressions as is that well-known
flower which closes its quivering leaves at the slightest
touch. These sensitive children retreat into themselves
at the first sign of unfriendliness or aggression from
without. The reason why such a child does not obey its
father's command is not, perhaps, because it is unwilling
to do as it is told, but because of the stem face, the im-

92 THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN.

patient gesture, the raised voice with which the parent
accompanies the command, and which jars upon the
child's feelings. If such a parent, incensed at the child's
disobedience, becomes still more severe, raises his voice
still more, he will only make matters worse. The child will
shrink from him still more and continue its passive resist-
ance. In this manner obstinacy, which was at first only a
passing spell, may become a fixed trait in the child's
character. To be sure, we should not, on the other hand,
treat these sensitive children only with caresses. In this
way we encourage their sensitiveness, whereas we should
regard it as a weakness that requires to be gradually but
steadily overcome. The middle way seems the best. Let
the parent exact obedience from the child by gentle firm-
ness, by a firmness in which there shall be no trace of
passion, no heightened feeling, and with a gentleness
which, gentle as it may be, shall be at the same time
unyielding. But while obstinacy is sometimes due to soft-
ness of nature, it is at other times due to the opposite —
to hardness of nature, and according to the case we should
vary our treatment There are persons who having once
made up their mind to do a thing cannot be moved from
their resolution by any amount of persuasion. These
hard natures, these concentrated wills, are bound to have
their way, no matter whom they injure, no matter what
stands in the way. Such persons — and we notice the be-
ginnings of this trait in children — need to be taught to
respect the rights of others. Their wills should occasion-
ally be allowed to collide with the wills of others, in order
that they may discover that there are other wills limiting
theirs, and may learn the necessary lesson of submission.
In yet other cases obstinacy is due to stupidity. Per-
sons of weak intelligence are apt to be suspicious. Not
understanding the motives of others, they distrust them ;

THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN. 93.

unwilling to follow the guidance of others, they cling with
a sort of desperation to their own purpose. These cases
may be treated by removing the cause of suspicion, by
patiently explaining one's motives where it is possible to
do so, by awakening confidence.

Again, let us take the fault of untruthfulness. One
cannot sufficiently commend the watchfulness of those
parents who take alarm at the slightest sign of falsehood
in a child. A lie should always put us on our guard. The
arch fiend is justly called "the father of lies." The habit
of falsehood, when it has become settled, is the sure inlet
to worse vices. At the same time not all falsehoods are
equally culpable or equally indicative of evil tendency,
and we should have a care to discriminate the different
causes of falsehood in the young child, in order that we
may pursue the proper treatment. Sometimes falsehood
is due to redundant imagination, especially in young
children who have not yet learned to distinguish between
fact and fancy. In such cases we may restrain the child's
imagination by directing its attention to the world of
fact, by trying to interest it in natural history and the
like. We should especially set the example of strict ac-
curacy ourselves in all our statements, no matter how un-
important they may be. For instance, if we narrate cer-
tain occurrences in the presence of the child, we should
be careful to observe the exact order in which the events
occurred, and if we have made a mistake we should take
pains to correct ourselves, though the order of occurrence
is really immaterial. Precisely because it is immaterial
we show by this means how much we value accuracy even
in little things. Then, again, falsehood is often due to the
desire for gain. Or it may be due to fear. The child is
afraid of the severity of the parent's discipline. In that
case we are to blame ; we must relax our discipline. We

94 THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN.

have no business to tempt the child into falsehood. Again,
untruthfulness is often due to mistaken sympathy, as we
see in the case of pupils in school, who will tell a false-
hood to shield a fellow pupil. In the worst cases falsehood
is inspired by malice. It may be said that the proper
positive treatment for this fault is to set the example of
the strictest truthfulness ourselves, to avoid the little
falsehoods which we sometimes allow ourselves without
compunction, to show our disgust at a lie, to fill the child
with a sense of the baseness of lying, and above all to find
out the direct cause which has tempted the child in any
given case. As a rule falsehood is only a means to an
end ; children do not tell untruths because they like to tell
them, but because they have some ulterior end in view.
Find out what that ulterior end is, and instead of directing
your attention only to the lie, penetrate to the motive
that has led the child into falsehood, and try to divert
it from the bad end. Thus you may extract the cause
of its wrong doing.

Thirdly, let us consider the fault of laziness. Laziness
is sometimes due to physical causes. Nothing may be
necessary but a change of diet, exercise in the fresh air,
etc., to cure the evil. Sometimes it is the sign of a certain
slow growth of the mind. There are fruits in the garden
of the gods that ripen slowly, and these fruits are often
not the least precious or the least beautiful when they
finally have matured. Sir Isaac Newton's mind was one
of these slowly ripening fruits. In school he was re-
garded as a dullard and his teachers had small hopes of
him. Laziness, like other faults of character, sometimes
disappears in the process of growth. Just as at a certain
period in the life of a youth or maiden new faculties
seem to develop, new passions arise, a new life begins to
stir in the heart, so at a certain period qualities with

THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN. 95

which we had long been familiar, disappear of themselves.
We have very little light upon this subject, but the fact
that a great transformation of character sometimes does
take place in children without any perceptible cause is
quite certain, and it may be offered as a comforting re-
flection to those parents who are over-anxious on account
of the faults they detect in their children. But again, on
the other hand, laziness or untruthfulness or obstinacy
may be a black streak, coming to the surface out of the
nethermost strata of moral depravity, and taken in con-
nection with other traits may justify the most serious
apprehension, and should then be a signal for immediate
measures of the most stringent sort.

I am thus led to the second branch of my subject. I
have tried to meet the objection of the parent who says:
^'I know the character of my child; I know my child is
obstinate," by replying, if you only know that your child
is obstinate you know very little ; you need to know what
are the causes of his obstinacy, and vary your treatment
accordingly. Or if anyone says : "My child is untruthful,"
I reply, you need to find out what the cause is of this un-
truthfulness and vary your treatment accordingly. Or
again, in the case which we have just considered, I have
pointed out that laziness in a child may have no serious
meaning whatever or may give just cause for the most
serious alarm, according to the group of characteristic
traits of which it is one. On this point I wish to lay stress.
If you desire to obtain a correct impression of a human
face you do not look at the eye by itself, then at the nose,
then fix your attention on the cheeks and the chin and the
brow, but you regard all these features together and view
them in their relations to one another. Or let us recur to
the simile of the physician. What would you think of the
doctor who should judge the nature of a disease by some

96 THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN.

one symptom which happened to obtrude itself, or should
treat each symptom as it appears separately, without en-
deavoring to reach the occult cause which has given rise
to the symptoms, of which they are all but the outward
manifestation. And yet that is precisely the incredible
mistake which every one of us, I venture to say, is apt to
make in the treatment of children's characters. We judge
of them by some one trait, as obstinacy, which happens to
obtrude itself on our attention, and we prescribe for each
symptom as it arises ; we treat obstinacy by itself, and un-
truthfulness and indolence separately, without endeavor-
ing to get at the underlying cause of all these symptoms.
The point I desire to make is that in the education of our
children it is necessary not only to study individual traits,
but each trait in connection with the group to which it he-
longs. Take for an illustration the case last mentioned —
that of laziness.

There is a well-known type group or group of charac-
teristic traits, of which laziness is one. The chief com-
ponents of this group are the following: The sense of
shame is wanting, that is one trait. The will is under the
control of random impulses, good impulses mingle helter-
skelter with bad. There is an indisposition on the part of
such a child to* prolonged exertion in any direction, even
in the direction of pleasure. That is perhaps the most dan-
gerous trait of all. If you try to deal, as people actually
do, with each of these traits separately, you will fail. If
you try to influence the sense of shame, you will meet with
no response; if you disgrace such a child, you will make
it worse; if you whip it, you will harden it. If you at-
tempt to overcome indolence by the promise of rewards,
that will be useless. The child forgets promised rewards
just as quickly as it forgets threatened punishment. This
forgetfulness, this lack of coherency in its ideas, is partic-

THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN. 97

ularly characteristic. The ideas of such a child are im-
perfectly connected. The ties between causes and their
effects are feeble. The contents of the child's mind are in
a state of unstable equilibrium. There is no point of fix-
ity in its mental realm. And the cure for such a condition
is to establish fixity in the thoughts, to induce habits of in-
dustry and application by steady, unrelaxing discipline, and
especially by means of manual training. The immense
value of mechanical labor as a means of moral improve-
ment has been appreciated until now only to a very imper-
fect extent. Mechanical labor wisely directed secures
mental fixity because it concentrates the child's attention
for days and often for weeks upon a single task. Mechan-
ical labor stimulates moral pride by enabling the pupil to
produce articles of value and giving him in this way the
sense of achievement. Mechanical labor also overcomes
indolence by compelling settled habits of industry, where-
by the random impulses of the will are brought under
control.

The type group which we have just considered is one
of the most clearly marked and easily recognized. It is a
type which we often meet with among the so-called
criminal classes, where its characteristic features can be
seen in exaggerated proportions. Without attempting to
analyze any additional types (a task of great delicacy
and difficulty), the truth that the underlying fault of
character is often unlike the symptoms which appear most
conspicuously on the surface may be further illustrated by
the following example. I have known of a person who
made himself obnoxious to his friends by his overbearing
manners and apparent arrogance. Casual observers con-
demned him on account of what they believed to be his
overweening self-confidence, and expressed the opinion
that his self-conceit ought to be broken down. But the

98 THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN.

real trouble with him -was not that he was too self-confi-
dent, but that he had not self-confidence enough. His
self-confidence needed to be built up. He was overbear-
ing in society because he did not trust himself, because
he was always afraid of not being able to hold his own,
and hence he exaggerated on the other side. Those who
take such a person to be in reality what he seems to be
will never be able to influence him. And if we find such
a trait in a child, and simply treat it as if it were arrogant,
we shall miss the mark entirely. We must find the under-
lying principle of the character the occult cause of which
the surface symptoms are the effects.

Our knowledge of the great type groups is as yet ex-
tremely meager. Psychology has yet to do its work in
this direction, and books on education give us but little
help. But there are certain means by which the task of
investigation may possibly be assisted. One means
is the study of the plays of Shakespeare. That master
mind has created certain types of character which repay
the closest analysis. The study of the best biographies
is a second means. The study of the moral characteristics
of the primitive races — a study which has been begun by
Herbert Spencer in his work on "Descriptive Sociology,"
and by Waitz in his '^Anthropologie der Naturvolker" —
is perhaps another means; and honest introspection,
when it shall have become the rule among intelligent per-
sons, instead of being the exception, will probably be the
best means.

I am afraid that some of my hearers, from having been
over-confident as educators in the beginning, may now
have become over-timid ; from having said to themselves :
''Why, of course we know the characteristics of our
children," may now, since the difficulties of studying
character have been explained, be disposed to exclaim in

THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN. 99

a kind of despair : "Who can ever understand the charac-
ter of a single human being?" A perfect understanding of
any human being is indeed impossible. We do not per-
fectly know even those who are nearest and dearest to us.
But there are means of reaching at least approximate re-
sults, so far as children are concerned, and a few of these
permit me to briefly summarize.

Try to win the confidence of the child so that it may dis-
close its inner life to you. Children accept the benefac-
tions of their parents as unthinkingly as they breathe
the air around them. Show them that your care and un-
tiring devotion must be deserved, not taken as a matter of
course. In this way you will deepen their attachment and
lead them to willingly open their hearts to you. At the
same time enter into the lesser concerns of their life. Be
their comrades, their counselors ; stoop to them, let them
cling to you. Observe your children when they are at
play, for it is then that they throw off their reserve and
show themselves as they are. Some children, for instance,
will not join a game unless they can be leaders; is not
that a sign of character? Some children will take an
unfair advantage at play, and justify themselves by say-
ing : "It is only in play." Some are persistent in a game
while others tire of any game after a little while. Others
are sticklers for a strict observance of the rules. Observe
how your sons or daughters are regarded by their com-
panions; children are often wonderfully quick to detect
one another's faults. Try to find out what the favorite
pursuits and studies of your child are, by what it is re-
pelled, by what attracted, and to what it is indifferent.
Above all, keep a record of your child's development. Do
not shun the labor involved in this. You know very well
that nothing worth having can be obtained without labor.
Yet most parents are unwilling to give sufficient time and

100 THE PUNISHMENT OF CHILDREN.

attention to the education of their children. Keep a
record of the most significant words and acts of the child.
Thus after a while you may have a picture of the child's
inward condition before you, an assemblage of character-
istic traits, and by comparing one trait with another, you
may find the clue to a deeper understanding of its nature.

What I have said about children applies equally to our-
selves. I started out by saying that not one parent in a
thousand knows his child's character. I conclude by say-
ing that not one man or woman in a thousand knows his
or her own character. We go through life cherishing an
unreal conception of ourselves which is often inspired
by vanity. I am well aware that it is difficult to know
one's self, but there are helps in this direction also. We
can look over our own past record, we can honestly exam-
ine how we have acted in the leading crises of our lives, we
can summon our own characteristic traits before our
minds — the things that we like to dwell upon, and the
things which we would gladly blot out of our memories
if we could — and by comparing this trait with that, we
may discover the springs by which we have been moved.
It is difficult to attain self-knowledge, but it is imperative
that we should try to attain it. The aim of our existence
is to improve our characters, and clearly we cannot im-
prove them unless we know them.

I have undertaken to grapple with a most difficult
subject, but I shall have accomplished the purpose which
I had in mind if I have awakened in you a deeper de-
sire to ask yourselves : first, what is the character of my
child; second, what is my own character? The most
serious business of our lives is to try to find the answers
to these two questions.

MIDWINTER JOY.*

By William M. Salter.

There seem to be two kinds of feeling about Christ-
mas. Christian people think that it is a purely Christian
festival — a commemoration indeed of the birthday of the
founder of the Christian system — and that those who are
not Christians, those called "unbelievers," for instance,
and Jews, have no right to celebrate it. They look on
the observance of it by any others than themselves as a
proof after all of how powerful Christianity is in the
world — since people more or less conform to it, though
they do not believe it; they think that the tree and the
lights and the presents are but an echo of the joy that
Jesus, so many hundred years ago, was born into the
world. Christmas is the birthday of Jesus, just as Feb-
ruary 22d is Washington's birthday.

And then on the other hand are those Liberals and
Jews, who think it a mark of sincerity not to pay any at-
tention to Christmas. If people like ourselves do it, they
call it a concession. To the Liberal it seems at best a
weakness; to the Jew it seems almost a wrong — since it
is paying honor to a religion that has persecuted, and
still persecutes, his people, and argues a kind of unfaith-
fulness and disloyalty to his race.

And yet about the only thing specifically Christian
about Christmas is the name. The name is Christian,
even Catholic — it means the Christ Mass — and, if we are

*A lecture given before the Society for Ethical Culture of
Chicago, December 23d, 1900.

lOI

102 MIDWINTER JOY.

to be strict and literal, Protestants cannot celebrate it any
more than Liberals. The Puritans, we know, forbade the
celebration of it, and in Massachusetts in 1659 ^ven put
a fine on those who were found observing it. But the
thing itself is an old heathen custom. Not one of its
characteristic and still popular features is of Christian
origin. It is a mingled heritage from old Rome and from
the Germans. It would no doubt have come down to us
if Christianity had never existed. The only difference
would be that the church services in honor of the birth
of Jesus would not be held. But the presents, the lighted
tree, and the general lightheartedness and joy would be
with us all the same.

As I have said before, Christmas, like every other fes-
tival which takes hold of the popular heart, is a nature fes-
tival. It rests on the fact that the sun, after starting
on his southward journey and sinking lower and lower
on the horizon every day, at last stops this downward
course — and after a brief interval, begins to climb again,
and each day climbs higher and higher as he makes his
pathway across the heavens. On this fact the life of the
earth and the life of man depends. Without it, no spring,
no summer, no harvest — but only cold and death would
be in store for man. This is the basis of the joy of this
midwinter time. The festive sentiment, in varying form,
was so fixed in people's minds that the church had to ac-
cept it and seek to give it a Christian coloring. It put the
birthday of Jesus at this time, though every Christian
scholar admits that no one knows when Jesus was bom,
though the most varied dates were assigned by early
Christian authorities, and though one of the early popes
frankly admitted that the twenty-fifth of December com-
memorated rather the return of the sun than the birth of

MIDWINTER JOY. IO3

Christ. The solid fact is the natural fact, and just as
men recognized it before Christianity existed, why should
they not recognize it now though they do not believe in
Christianity — and recognizing it, why should they not
rejoice and be glad ?

As a matter of fact, the real Christmas now is not
Christian, save in name. The real Christmas is not in the
formal church services, but in the countless homes of
the people — in the homes of thousands who never go to
church, wherever the brightly-lighted Christmas tree
casts its radiance, wherever songs and carols are sung,
wherever loving presents are given, or even on the street,
when men salute one another with a "Merry Christmas !"
It would not be in me to ask any Liberal or Jew to
adopt any specifically Christian rite — I would not have
any one compromise in his principles or his loyalties in
the slightest ; but I would have everyone, Gentile or Jew,
not fear to come out on human ground and cherish the
sentiments and practices of what I might call natural
religion; yes, what I wish to bring out and dwell upon
to-day is the natural fact on which this old midwinter
festival is based, and to show its analogy with other
facts of experience, that it is indeed of a piece with life
as a whole. The only objection which we can reasonably
make to this festival is, it appears to me, to the name
"Christmas;" and I, accordingly, shall try to speak of
"Midwinter Festival" hereafter. At the same time it
must be remembered that this is partly a verbal matter,
that custom is very far from keeping the literal signifi-
cance of words always in mind — nobody thinks now that
Christmas means a "Christ Mass" — and hence if I happen
to use the common colloquial term for the midwinter fes-
tival, I hope and trust that no one will take offence.

I04 MIDWINTER JOY.

The particular charm about this festival is, that it
takes place when nature's face is cold and cheerless.
The leaves have fallen from the trees, the earth looks
brown and bare, or perhaps is covered with snow and
ice, the ground is no longer soft beneath our feet, and the
air is no longer mild, but instead a sort of rigidity and
harshness and inhospitableness settles down upon the
outer world. It is as if nature were aging, as if she had
exhausted herself, as if she were shrinking and fading.
This of itself breeds serious, if not melancholy thoughts.
Somehow the end of all things is brought before our
minds.

"Fading like a fading ember,
Last of all the shrunk December.
Him regarding, men remember,
Life and joy must pass away."

Of itself it is not a time of rejoicing, but rather of
mourning. And yet in the face of all, there occurs, to-
ward the close of the month, the brightest, joyfulest
festival of the year. We see and feel the wintry chill,
yet something takes place which makes us disregard and
triumph over it. The sun, which has been sinking, sink-
ing to the southward, and so stripping the earth of
warmth and life and beauty, sinks, we see at last, no
more. The winter, indeed, continues, outwardly nature
is the same, yet looking forward we know that the power
of the cold is broken, that it will yield to spring and sum-
mer in due time. Our joy then has this peculiar quality,
that it is in the midst of a time that on its surface would
make us sad, that it is mixed with thought and faith,
that it is a kind of triumph over what is immediately
around us. Very different is the spontaneous joy of a

1

MIDWINTER JOY. IO5

fair summer day, when we simply yield to the influences
about us and drink in the sweet sounds and scents and
sights that nature herself provides on every hand. That
is a joy of the senses. This, in no small measure, is a
joy of the spirit. It is like that of a captive who makes
light of his prison walls, not because they are not there,
but because he is assured he is to be freed from them.
We do not see, and yet we believe. Life and warmth are
far away, yet we know the power that will bring them.
As if to emphasize the contrast, this midwinter festivity
is always in the dark or the dusk, it would mean little in
the daytime — it is against the background of the dark, with
its gloom and chill, that the lights which symbolize our
joy stand out with their warm radiance. No matter how
cold without, or how the winds blow, the festive joy is
all the same. It is the contrast with all that is forbidding
without, I might almost say the reaction against it, the
brightness in the midst of the darkness, that makes the
charm, the glory of this chief festival of the year.

Let us linger a little over the primitive, natural sig-
nificance of the day — and then later consider some of its
spiritual suggestions.

It is possible that some of us with the artificial train-
ing which we have had in the past, object to the simple
naturalistic origin which is thus given to the midwinter
festival, and still more to the simple, physical origin
that is thus assigned to all the light and warmth and
beauty of the world. At least it seems like taking from us
a beautiful illusion to say that man and all living creatures
are dependent on the sun, when we had thought that they
were created and sustained by an unseen hand. It seems
very like materialism. And yet when we face the real
fact — the fact which all our science bears witness to — we

I06 MIDWINTER JOY.

for the first time are able to do justice to that strange,
worshipful feeling toward nature which the fathers of
the race had, and which we, under the influence of the
technical, theological training to which we have been
long subject, have practically lost. We no longer see any-
thing wonderful or mysterious about the sun — our sense
of wonder and mystery all goes to that supernatural
being we call God. Matter of any kind, hot or cold,
here on the earth or up in the sky, big or little, has become
commonplace in our eyes. We measure it, we weigh it,
we think we know it altogether, we place it far beneath
us. And yet this matter we look down upon is that by
which we live. Our food is matter, and not only is it the
sustenance of our bodies — it is the sustenance and life of
our minds. How much thinking can we have without
our daily bread? How can we aspire or resolve or do
save as we take these elements from the world without
us and incorporate them in our living structure? The
air we breathe is matter. The light of heaven, the heat
of the sun, yes, the great burning globe itself, but for
which the earth would be a wintry waste — all are matter
or the motion of matter. The fact is, matter is not merel}-
what it seems, but vastly more. We are obliged to revise
our notions of it. Science itself is making us revise our
notions of it. Gradually the old theological idea of it as
something inert, dead, soulless and lifeless is being dis-
sipated. Tyndall was one of the pioneers of the new
view when he declared that he discerned "in that matter
which we, in our ignorance of its latent powers, and not-
withstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have
hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and po-
tency of all terrestrial life." And just to the extent
that this view is taken, and matter is seen to have poten-

MIDWINTER JOY. IO7

cies beyond what on the surface appear, it becomes
mystical, and our feehng toward it approximates that
of the fathers of the race, to whom it was never "mere
matter," but full of life and energy and power — indeed,
the sun was a living being in their eyes, and in view of
the life it begets in us and awakes anew and afresh
each year in the world, this seems far nearer the truth
than the view that is commonly taken. "All things are
full of gods," said one of the earliest Greek thinkers, and
in different language modern science is saying much the
same. Why fear then to recognize our dependence
on the sun; why hesitate to look up and bless it, why
fail to praise it — it must be more than fire and smoke,
for our life is more than fire and smoke, and yet our life
and all earthly life entirely depend on it.

No one will say that this is banishing divinity from
the world — it is rather giving divinity to the world, in-
stead of viewing it as a sort of sole occupant of impos-
sible, empty spaces beyond. The real God is the world
viewed as alive, instinct with order and law and full of
blessing. This God is in the sun, or rather it is the sun,
viewed on the side of its magic, hidden potencies — and
it is this divine sun, this living sun, this age-in and age-
out benefactor of man and friend to all the earth, that
we remember with honor, following in the steps of a
long and unbroken line of fathers and forefathers of the
race, in the midwinter festival to-day. It is the same
sun the ancient Romans did obeisance to, the same that
the Teutons and the Celts honored in their Yule-tide
before they ever heard of Christ; it is the constant
sun, the sun whom the clouds may hide but cannot de-
stroy, who does not change though the earth may change,,
and whose ever-enduring power is symbolized to us ini
the one kind of tree on earth which keeps ever green.

I08 MIDWINTER JOY.

Such are reflections that come to me in considering
the midwinter festival, and that mingle with and
heighten my joy. The lights, and the greetings and the
presents are cheerful, but something like this is the old-
time historical basis of the joy, and this wider outlook,
this deeper insight, perhaps becomes men and women
when they participate in it. It is sometimes said that
this is a children's festival. I do not so regard it. It is
and always has been a religious festival — one which has
its happy and beautiful side for children and which I
wish that every child might have a taste of, and yet which
should give joy and an uplift of the spirit to every adult
who can stop to think about life and the conditions of life
at all. To become conscious of those mighty powers
through whose beneficence he lives, and to inwardly bless
them would be, I should suppose, a privilege for man.
And in these shortest days of the year, these days when if
we judged by the senses alone we might think these
powers to be fading or under an eclipse, it is a specially
happy privilege to victoriously realize that they are
still strong and supreme and to utter forth songs of
thanksgiving and praise.

Yet this midwinter occasion, if intelligently appre-
ciated, is not without its spiritual suggestions. It means
at bottom, to take it broadly and spiritually, that in the
straits of life there is always a resource. As in the mid-
winter darkness there is light and a spring of joy, so in
every situation of life that seems at first sight dark and
dreary, there is a way out, and happiness ahead. This is
but saying — but expressing the faith — that in the moral
world as in the natural, the resources of nature are
great, that unless we are ourselves at fault fate does not
often shut the door of hope upon us. I might illustrate

MIDWINTER JOY. IO9

this in many ways — from our private life, from our social
life, from our religious life. I do not forget that the
individual must suffer for his own misdeeds, yes, his mis-
takes— yet aside from this, how rarely is a man pre-
vented from doing in the future better than he has in
the past! The world is sometimes hard on those who
will not progress, but when a man is ready to advance
(I do not mean merely to get more, but to do more)
how much room there is for him ! Many a time when
we are in a tight place, it is our inertia, our lack of
enterprise that keeps us there — and if we could but gird
up our loins and dare, a way would open to us. It is true
that honor and truth may sometimes keep us from ad-
vancing in a worldly way, and we may then be in a situa-
tion that is darkness indeed — darkness, that is, until we
come to see that honor and truth are to be preferred
above all else, and that even privation with them is bet-
ter than abundance without them; for when we see this,
light has already risen for us, and the only question is
whether we have the courage and nobility to follow it. I
cannot deny too, that what men would ordinarily call a
still greater darkness may come over us — we may see
and feel life itself slipping away from us, and there may
be no hope, no chance of rescue from any mortal hand;
all, all, may be dark, we may say — until, indeed, we
come to see that as there is a good way of living, so there
is a good way of dying, until we learn to yield and to
submit and to be thankful, and to lose all bitterness,
and then this way may seem a very way of light, and we
may be peaceful and even happy in following it. By no
means, would I say that there is always a way out of
our darkness that we would like — I only say that there is
a way out and that we may learn to like it — yes, be en-
tirely happy in it.

no MIDWINTER JOY.

And it is so with the powers of a society, a commun-
ity. It takes a great deal to doom a people. It took more
than slavery, wrong and curse that it was, to doom Amer-
ica. It will take more than our tragic blunder in the
Philippines to shut the door of hope on us in the future.
The gods are patient and long-suffering and give ample
room for repentance and tears; or if they punish us, as
they did in our Civil War, they do not necessarily destroy
us. Sometimes we think that a nation becomes effete, so
corrupted is it by wealth and privilege on the one side,
and by wanton injustice on the other — this might have
been thought of the France of the ancient regime, with
its tremendous and unrighteous inequalities; and then
comes as in France in 1789, an upheaval, an agitation of
consciences, a conflict, and the people are all alive. Dr.
Channing exclaimed, with this instance in mind, we can
never say our nature is exhausted — there is infinity of re-
source in the human soul. Fate is liberal, and there is
rarely a darkness so great that there is not a better and
a worse way for any people. If we have unprincipled
competition in our industrial life, we can check it; if we
have trusts and monopolies, we can make them serve the
public good; if we have vicious systems of taxation, we
can change them ; if we have defects in our laws, we can
mend them; there is no reason why a people should not
live on and progress forever — for there is no necessity of
death in their case as in the case of an individual. In
dark times of the nation's life, let us never think that
this is the end — let us believe the way is open for
brighter, happier days.

And this hopeful spirit of the midwinter time applies
equally to the realm of religion. Many a man in these
days has found himself conducted by his studies into a

I

MIDWINTER JOY. Ill

period of religious darkness and gloom. If he only had
not read and studied he could still be happy in his child-
hood's faith. But alas ! he has eaten of the tree of knowl-
edge and its fruit is bitter. He cannot think of God or
heaven, or of the Bible or Jesus, or of anything as he did
— and at first he is sick at heart and forlorn. And then
comes a period of adjustment. He knows that it is bet-
ter to be truthful with himself than to deceive himself,
and he sticks to his chosen course. He sees that there is
much truth left, and perhaps he soon discovers that there
is truth that he had not known before. Duty broadens
when he discovers its natural foundation, and the world
is more wonderful rather than less, as he follows the
teachings of science concerning it. It is as great as
ever to work for human advancement and he acquires a
seriousness and an earnestness in dealing with human
interests that would not have been possible had he kept
the old view that earthly things are not after all of the
greatest account. Many a man, I believe, has found that
he grew humanly better — or at least ought to have been —
as he gave up the old faith for the new, and that in the
long run he became a happier man, too. It was only
temporarily a sacrifice, it was really a gain. And so I
make bold to say to any one, who finds himself in the
dark religiously. Be not afraid! There is more before
you than you have left behind. I have a faith — and it
is a growing one — that a religion based on science and
duty is going to be a grander religion than any the world
has known. By letting go the false or the fanciful, we
first come to really appreciate the true. I believe there
are possibilities of beauty even, of satisfying the senti-
ments beyond any that have existed in connection with
the religions that have long dominated our part of the

112 MIDWINTER JOY.

world. A new poetry will arise, is arising — a new sacred
ritual. Let me give but one illustration of a poem —
not the happiest or the best, possibly, but one that shows
in the simplest, most direct manner how a truth of
science, a revolutionary truth, may blend with beauty and
even seem more beautiful than the old fairy-like idea it
replaces. They are lines addressed "To a Water-Lily":

"O, star on the breast of the river,

O, marvel of bloom and grace,
Did you fall straight down from Heaven,

Out of the sweetest place?
You are white as the thought of an angel,

Your heart is steeped in the sun,
Did you grow in the Golden City,

My pure and shining one?"
"Nay, nay, I 'fell' not out of Heaven,

None 'gave' me my saintly white;
It slowly grew from the blackness

Down in the dreary night,
From the ooze of the silent river

I won my glory and grace.
White souls 'fall' not, O, my poet.

They rise to the sweetest place."

And for an instance of the joyous, worshipful attitude
to the universe which the new religion may take, let me
give these lines from Whitman :

"Ilustrious, every one !

Illustrious what we name space — sphere of unnumber'd spirits ;
Illustrious the mystery of motion, in all beings, even the tiniest

insect ;
Illustrious the attribute of speech — the senses — the body ;
Illustrious the passing light! Illustrious the pale reflection of

the moon in the western sky!
Illustrious whatever I see, or hear, or touch, to the last !"

MIDWINTER JOY. II3

And also this in Whitman's "Hymn to Death" :

"Prais'd be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious;
And for love, sweet love — But praise ! O, praise and praise,
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death."

And if I might venture to suggest a litany or rather
a chant for the future religion, I would suggest such
words as these which I take or rather adapt from the
sacred book of the Parisees — so simple and frank do
they seem to me to be, so fresh in feeling, and so noble
in scope :

"All waters, the fountains, and those flowing down in streams.

Praise we.
All trees, the growing, adorned with tops.

Praise we.
All living creatures, those which live under the water, and those
which fly through the air, and all beasts and cattle,

Praise we.
All lights, showing man the way.

Praise we.
All stars, the moon, and the sun,

Praise we.
The whole earth

Praise we.
The whole heavens

Praise we.
All is good in its place and season.

We bless all and rejoice that we live in a world so
vast (great)."

Friends, I can hardly think of a happier expression
of that natural religion which I have sought to commend
and on which our midwinter festival is founded, than
this. We need not fear that joy, religious joy, will die
out of the world, so long as such words can be sincerely

114 MIDWINTER JOY.

used. Theologies may crumble, but while men can look
out on the universe and accept it in a tone like that, re-
ligion will remain. I do not lament the loss of the old
faith — so may not you ! I have still before me this goodly
universe, stretching out beyond my utmost ken, and
with its fathomless deeps of power — and so have you. I
have still the path of duty for my feet to tread in —
and so have you. In dark days, I may take comfort in
the light that is to come — and so may you. I can still in
spirit join in the midwinter festival — and so, I trust, can
you. I trust you all can. Gentile and Jew. I speak as
I do, not that I love Jesus less, not that I would exclude
the mention of his name, or due honor to him, but that I
love what is older and greater and grander than Jesus,
more. We are all children of the same mother — let us
be brethren to one another and keep holy day together.

THE ETHICS OF EPITHETS.*

By David Saville Muzzey.

I SURMISE that it would be hard to find a fault more uni-
versally or justly chargeable upon us members of the great
human family than the fault of calling each other names.
By that I do not mean the childish habit of vindictive and
abusive repartee, which at first thought we may associate
with the phrase "calling each other names." I mean the
almost unconscious yielding to the subtler temptation to
label people with conventional tags, and then to judge ac-
cording to the tag, without bothering too much to know
the person. We scarcely, even in our sober moments of
self-examination and self-discipline, realize how infested
we are with this insidious habit. For so many genera-
tions, nay, for so many centuries, certain abstract doctrines
(theological, political, social) have so absolutely ruled
the world, that humanity has been divided by them into
categories and castes, sects and parties, like the genera of
the botanist or the families of the zoologist. Despite such
glorious eras of promise as the wonderful thirteenth cen-
tury, the age of the Protestant Reformation, and the un-
sullied prelude of the French Revolution, it was not till the
days which our fathers can remember that the thick walls
separating class from class and creed from creed began
to totter. That marvelous inspiration to a new concep-
tion of the universe which we call the doctrine of evolu-
tion, had not to do primarily with the question as to

*A lecture given before the Society for Ethical Culture of
Philadelphia.

lis

Il6 THE ETHICS OF EPITHETS.

whether men had descended from apes. The doctrine of
evolution is a principle which penetrates every nook and
comer of science, and readjusts all relations of life. It
sees the earth and the world in a process of becoming ; it
beholds the spirit of man as an unfolding moral force ; and
it scrutinizes all the institutions, beliefs, theories, cate-
gories, philosophies of the world as tentative expressions
of man's development at certain epochs of time under cer-
tain exterior conditions. Consequently, evolution is not
only a theory of science ; it is also a discipline of history,
a method of philosophy, a school of politics, a program of
education, a principle of ethics, a religious inspiration.

The manifold problems which vex society to-day are
reducible, I believe, to this one statement in terms of the
doctrine of evolution, namely : That men are coming to
face institutions, customs, traditions, as symbols of prog-
ress projected from the human spirit and objectified in his-
tory, rather than as self-existing extra-human, supra-
mundane realities descending from heaven upon an abject
spirit and binding it in the name of divinity. In other
words, the centre of gravity of men's spiritual life is shift-
ing from compulsion to comprehension, from fear to rea-
son. The mystery and awe of creation is still with us, to
be sure, and will be so long as a green blade shoots up to
greet the vernal sun, so long as the human heart leaps
with the pulsing of love. But irrational or cruel theories
which in the past have pretended to explain this myster-
ious creation and probe this wonderful heart of man are
now being quietly laid aside as inadequate, uncon-
vincing, unreal. We are ceasing to imitate Satan and his
imps in one respect, at any rate : we no longer "believe and
tremble." We are breaking away from the benumbing
tyranny of the Middle Ages in state, society, and church.

THE ETHICS OF EPITHETS. II 7

We are clearing up that misty Platonic doctrine, which
teaches that we grope and wander here on earth amid
shadows whose archetypal realities are in a heaven above.

What else does the progressive democracy of the nine-
teenth century mean but that the theory of the inherent
right of men born of certain blood (and generally a very
badly tainted blood, too) to rule their fellows by divine
sanction has lost its hold and has become rather ridiculous
than august in the eyes of disinterested, thoughtful citizens?
With all our admiration for sturdy and stable England,
did not the anachronistic enthusiasm which accompanied
the coronation of her present king rather provoke a smile
in us ? What does the increasing desertion of long-sanc-
tioned theological tenets signify, but that tradition has
ceased to be our master for the enforcement of truth and
become our guide in the search for it? And what does
the present agitation in the industrial world mean, with all
its painful incidents — painful from the ethical as well as
from the commercial point of view — what else than that
the great gangs of men, by the work of whose hands
the necessities and luxuries of our complex modern life are
made possible, are being themselves permeated (perhaps
largely unconsciously to themselves) with the principle
which is at the bottom of our evolutionary theory, namely :
the principle of differentiation and individualization ; that
they are evolving, in other words, from machines to men,
and in the capacity of men are beginning to ask the few
who possess hundreds of times as much money as anybody
can earn, by what right they justify the appropriation of
the vast wealth which the many produce ?

We have got about four centuries beyond the feudal
system in theory. The peasant of the fifteenth century
bowed to social oppression as the ordination of a divine

k

Il8 THE ETHICS OF EPITHETS.

Caesar and endured religious tyranny as the revelation of
a divine Christ. But to-day, no ! That mighty inspira-
tion which has revolutionized the study of science to such
degree that it may almost be said to have inaugurated the
study of science, has also taken hold on the political, social,
educational, religious, industrial world. And when it shall
have come to its mature expression, it will have worked a
revolution beside which the French Revolution and the
English Revolution, the Reformation, the Renaissance,
and even the rise of Christianity itself, will dwindle into
insignificance.

But what has all this disquisition on the evolutionary
theory to do with the modest subject of calling each other
names? Much, every way! For the very glory of the
evolutionary theory is that it ramifies into every remotest
nook and corner of life and conditions all our acts, even to
the words we utter so lightly and the names we repeat so
glibly. For if we realize that we are the responsible peo-
ple of the earth, not pawns on the chess-board of fate; if
we realize that in us and through us the spirit of truth is
travailing to its expression, then we shall shake off the
torpor of fatalism which pervades our religious and civic
life, and awake to the fact that our most important con-
cern is not to get rich nor to get talked about ; but to shape
our will, our judgments, our affections in such wise that
they will give coherency and dignity to our lives. That is
to say, we shall grow; we shall have to grow — for the one
unpardonable sin in the eyes of an evolutionist is stunted
growth, stagnation. And we shall realize then that faith-
fulness in conforming our will, our judgment, and our
affections to the truth as our intimate soul reveals it to us
has scarcely a subtler or more persistent enemy than the
habit of repeating unconsidered epithets.

THE ETHICS OF EPITHETS. IIQ

St. Paul is a teacher whose system of dogma we can by
no means find satisfactory to-day. His problems are not
our problems ; his modes of thought are not our modes of
thought. But, nevertheless, St. Paul was a wonderfully
keen student of men. He analyzed human nature in a
masterly way, shaming its base passions and appealing in
words of everlasting encouragement to its noblest impulses
and aspirations. In one of those short, pregnant sen-
tences which flash on the reader like an inspiration, St.
Paul gives the formula for the ethical life in terms of the
doctrine of evolution : "When I became a man I put away
childish things."

It is my purpose this morning to suggest how the care-
less or malicious use of epithets is a trait characteristic of
immaturity in a person or in an era, and how, as such, it
is a detriment to growth and a bar to the progress of truth.
It is pitiable to see a man of mature years with the body
of a child, grey hairs and deep-set eyes over the shrunken
atrophied limbs. We call that an awful deformity. How
much greater the deformity when the soul of the man is
still cramped in the narrow mold of the prejudices and
violences of childhood ! The body is laid away in a few
years at most, and in the grave there is no beauty or come-
liness— but the soul, we trust, lives on in a larger life —
and how necessary that it comes to that larger life itself
enlarged and enlarging!

Now, one count against the childish indulgence in epi-
thets is that it is unscientific. The habit of disposing of a
man by clapping him into a social, religious, or political
pigeon-hole, with the label "infidel" or "socialist," as if
that disposed of the man, is most detrimental to an un-
biased search for truth. The temptation to indulge in
this habit is strong and subtle. There seems to be a sense

120 THE ETHICS OF EPITHETS.

of relief in the pert brevity of such phrases as **0, he is a
hypocrite," or "He is a populist." Perhaps we are con-
scious of gaining a reputation for wise discrimination in
the eyes of the person with whom we are talking. Per-
haps at the same time we are excusing ourselves inwardly,
by the same impatient remark, from honestly reflecting
whether, and how, and why we ourselves differ from the
person so hastily rated. Add to this that ninety-nine per
cent, of such statements are made not only not in the pres-
ence of the victim of them, but not even in the company of
those who are likely to dissent — and the futility of epi-
thets as an aid to the valuation of character becomes ap-
parent.

If anybody doubts the intimate connection between un-
scientific methods of thought and abundant epithets of
abuse, let him read a few polemical treatises out of
almost any century up to the last — a passage of arms be-
tween orthodox fathers and heresiarchs in the early
Church, or a phase of the interminable strife between Em-
peror and Pope in the Middle Ages, or Martin Luther's
interchange of incivilities with Bishop Eck and King
Henry the Eighth, or the frenzied campaign of the Eng-
lish Bishops against Darwinism. Everywhere violent de-
nunciation, abandonment of the subject in question for in-
sulting personalities, dismal puns on an opponent's name,
heavy witticisms to stir prejudice. One would say that
success in the controversy lay in the administration of the
completest mud-bath to one's adversary. Beecher used
to give this counsel to young ministers : "When you are
stuck for something to say in the pulpit, shout." The
publicist of the Middle ages could have laid down this
rule : When your argument halts, curse your opponent !

We know in our generation how unscientific all that is.

THE ETHICS OF EPITHETS. 121

We have abandoned it in our dignified polemics, swinging
perhaps to the opposite extreme of studied urbanity in
handling the ''distinguished scholar" or the "honorable
gentleman" whose views we are seeking to overthrow. We
realize how such an altered attitude engenders calm, sweet
reasonableness, and a scientific spirit in our intellectual
life. If any proof is needed to show that the use of epi-
thet and invective is a survival of a lower stage of intellec-
tual life, it is abundantly furnished by the fact that such
use abounds most where reason is most absent — where ap-
peal is made to popular prejudices, as in electioneering
speeches, for example, or tirades against religious innova-
tors. But though we have largely abandoned the abuse
of epithets in our dignified polemic, the temptation still
lurks in our private judgments. And here by its unsci-
entific nature it is constantly threatening and hemming
in our spiritual evolution.

This unscientific attitude of mind which substitutes epi-
thets for investigation vitiates our ethics in two conspicu-
ous particulars. In the first place, it tacitly assumes that
the question at debate is closed, so blocking all further
progress; and in the second place, it reacts on the mind
which cherishes it, making that mind more stubborn and
narrow.

For the illustration of the first of these evils, we need
only to open at any page in the history of science. The
laborious way to larger truths has lain over a road clogged
and choked with popular prejudices, like fallen rotting
trunks of forest trees. These prejudices have been
nourished chiefly by the ingrained habit of repeating cer-
tain epithets, inherited shibboleths, as our war-cries.
Truth has been defined in rigid terms ; political truth, for
example, in the doctrine of absolute sovereignty by the

122 THE ETHICS OF EPITHETS.

grace of God; scientific truth in the opening chapters of
the Book of Genesis ; religious truth in the daring assump-
tions of Calvinism — and it has taken centuries of time and
the sacrifice of rivers of blood for the more adequate hy-
pothesis of science and the more humane interpretation of
religion to make their way against this accumulated mass
of popular prejudice. The one indispensable condition of
progress is open-mindedness. We must be willing to be
convinced by every better theory and every proven fact,
no matter how dear to our fancied security in final truth.
Unstable equilibrium is the normal condition of the sane
intellect. Now, the appeal to prejudice by the use of dis-
crediting or aspersive epithets, by its assumption that truth
is already wholly discovered in any line of human investi-
gation, is directly opposed to the process of evolution, by
which alone our knowledge is being extended and our
sympathies are being deepened and enriched. For the old
categories which have ruled our world so long are losing
their force. Mysterious formulae, taboos, sacred records,
and the like, shall no longer shut off vast realms of knowl-
edge from the inquiry of the human spirit and awe men in-
to blind submission by threats of torture here or hereafter.
The world of the spirit, like the world of space, so long
thought measurable by our petty mythologies and theol-
ogies, has opened into the boundless universe of Newton
and Laplace. So that those religious and social concep-
tions of man which a few centuries ago were universal, are
now hardly less pitiable and grotesque than the cosmical
theory of the Indian Traveler, whose world was a box and
heaven its cover, with the planets running like marbles in
fixed grooves.

Moreover, the habit of indulging in epithets to settle
questions which ought to be thought out with calm reason,

I

THE ETHICS OF EPITHETS. I23

besides contributing to the impediment of scientific prog-
ress, also returns to plague the inventor. Like the missile
from the boomerang, an unconsidered epithet comes back
upon the man who launched it, and judges him. If it is
an epithet of envy, it makes him more envious ; if of big-
otry, the more bigoted ; if of passion, the more incensed.
Every time we indulge those unredeemed qualities of our
nature by hasty judgments on out fellow men, we fortify
ourselves in ignorance and prejudice. Just as the repeti-
tion of a story tends to confirm us in the belief of it, so
does the loud insistence of our point of view in a contro-
versy tend to blind us until we can see only that narrow
section of a subject which we are willing to endorse. So
gradually the horizon of a man who calls names grows
narrower and narrower until his power of judgment is
checked, then cramped, then choked — like that sea-animal
which when attacked builds in upon itself with its own
shell until it crushes out its own life. I firmly believe that
nine-tenths of our jealousy and crabbedness, our ridicu-
lous class hatreds, our private quarrels and our public
grievances, are due simply to our being incapacitated,
through the long indulgence of prejudices, for putting
ourselves in another's place and looking at things through
another's eyes. There is a story of an American sailor
who was strolling one day in a cemetery at Hong Kong
and saw a Chinaman putting a bowl of rice on a new
grave. The American asked the Chinaman, with a care-
less sneer : "When do you expect your friend to come up
out of the earth and eat the rice, John?" "When your
friend comes up to smell the flowers you put on his grave,""
replied the Chinaman.

We cannot afiford, for our own sakes, to be shut in from
large sympathies by the prejudices of our own little party,

124 THE ETHICS OF EPITHETS.

sect, or circle. By doing so we close the doors of progress
on ourselves; for, as Mr. Emerson has said in his Essay-
on History, the progress of the intellect (and it is true of
all progress, even to material progress) consists in the
clearer vision of causes which overlook surface differ-
ences. The indulgence in epithets, on the other hand,
tends to emphasize and deepen surface differences, obscur-
ing our vision of the great underlying causes which are
working the evolution of man.

But, serious as this indictment of the rashness of epi-
thets is, on the score of its unscientific character, a still
more serious charge from the point of view of ethics is
that the habit is uncharitable. Certain words, from the
long tyranny of triumphant theories and creeds, have ac-
quired an odium quite unjustified by their true and inno-
cent definition. For concrete illustration, let me dwell fof
a moment upon a few religious terms which are passed
from mouth to mouth in very glib fashion, even at an
afternoon tea. The words "heretic," skeptic," "agnostic,"
are generally terminal words. When a man is called by
one of the names his case is finished, and with a gasp of
pity or shudder of disgust he is consigned to the class
of the deluded or the dangerous. He is stigmatized by
the name ; that is, a mark is put upon him. The word is
used not as a help to the sympathetic understanding of
his position, but as a term of reproach. But when we
come to inquire what these words actually mean, we may
be surprised to see that they ought by right to be consid-
ered a compliment rather than a stigma. A heretic is a
man who chooses for himself. In religion he is a man
who chooses for himself what doctrines he will accept as
true. Since the Holy Roman Catholic Church early in
its development decreed that a man should have no power

THE ETHICS OF EPITHETS. I25

of choice as to what doctrines he should accept, the word
''heretic" became for the church a term synonymous with
rebel — an awful term of condemnation. But surely we
are in duty bound to exercise our wisest choice in the most
vital matter of religious belief, whether we come to agree
with the orthodox doctrine or not; and consequently
the term "heretic," understood in its true and primary
meaning, is a compliment, not a reproach. Skeptic is a
closely allied word. A skeptic is a man who examines.
Of course examination ought to precede choice. But the
Holy Church forbade examination of its dogmas as pre-
sumptions, except the examination by advocates pledged to
their defence. Hence skeptic became and has remained
a byword of shame. Agnostic is a new word, a term in-
vented by Mr. Huxley to denote his own attitude toward
dogmatic assertions. By it he meant (as he himself ex-
plains) a man who refused either through the violence of
compulsion or by the temptation of conformity, to say
that he knew certain things to be true when he had no
valid evidence to substantiate their truth. The word is a
plea for the suspension of judgment until more evidence
is in ; and it ought certainly to be considered commendable
and not disgraceful in a man that he is unwilling to affirm
the truth of anything that claims to be a fact except on
sufficient evidence.

Thus we see that such formidable epithets as ''heretic,"
"skeptic," and "agnostic" are quite free from murderous
content after all, and that to use these epithets with the
connotation of blame or derision (as the words are almost
always used) is not only unjust but also unkind. Time
was, and not many centuries ago, when a man suffered
the penalty of death for manifesting these commendable
traits of religious independence. The spirit of humanity

126 THE ETHICS OF EPITHETS.

has so far prevailed that to-day he suffers only odium. The
time will come in the inexorable onward march of en-
lightenment and brotherhood, when they will be reckoned
unto him for a crown of virtues.

As in the domain of religion, from which I have chosen
my examples, so it is in all the departments of our life.
Accidents of birth, locality, early environment, later asso-
ciates, business routine, the recurrence of social duties, the
unremitting application to the rather restricted topic of
our profession — all tend to confirm habits of mental ex-
clusiveness. Exclusiveness by its continuance deadens
sympathy, and a lack of sympathy in its turn, begets an
intolerant spirit. With all the boasted complexity of our
modern life, the conditions to success have become so ex-
acting that we are shut up in our little subdivided special-
ties even more closely than in the days of the journeyman
and the apprentice. At the same time, we have lost the
modest reticence of the journeyman and apprentice which
bade the shoemaker stick to his last. Nowadays boys and
girls in their teens are ready with their judgment on sub-
jects which deep thinkers con a lifetime, and the off-hand
opinion of a prosperous business man on some question
first brought to his attention by the interview of a news-
paper reporter is quite likely to carry more weight with
the public than the judgment of some competent but ob-
scure student of the question. All this precocity of opin-
ion and undigested judgment strengthens the separating
walls of sects and parties, making us more and more un-
fair to our neighbors and, what is worse, more willing to
be unfair. Individuality is a sacred right, like life itself,
not to be invaded by the indiscriminate herding of men
under broad categories. We never have all the facts need-
ful, anyway, to rate a man spiritually, even though we were

THE ETHICS OF EPITHETS. 12/

perfect in charity and sympathy. The German proverb
wisely says, "To understand all is to forgive all." And
our American poet has expressed the same spirit of uni-
versal sympathy in the simple lines :

"If every man's internal care
Were written on his brow,
How many would our pity share
Who raise our envy now."

It is a lack of penetration, of imagination, in us which
leads to this uncharity of epithets. Here, as in the scien-
tific aspect of the matter, the habit is a serious bar to hu-
man development, and utterly out of keeping with the
evolutionary conception of life, which calls, above all else,
for elasticity of judgment. And here, too, again, as in the
scientific field, the habit is disastrous in its reflex action
upon the man who practices it. For just as the epithet
when used to silence fair argument returns upon the user
as a deliberalizing influence, fortifying him in ignorance
and bigotry, narrowing his intellectual horizon, diminish-
ing his philosophical vision, so does the epithet used as an
uncharitable stigma return upon the user, making him
more unsympathetic and unlovely. This is a truth that
minds of coarser grain never appreciate. For them injury
is an objective thing entirely; something brought upon
them by somebody else. But the man of finer grain knows
that the worst injury is that which he brings upon himself.
By allowing passion or prejudice to dominate his soul, or
by admitting the demon of anger into his heart, by cherish-
ing petty resentments and dwelling on narrow ideas, he
makes his life unlovely — a thing which no worst enemy
outside him has power to do.

That's the evil for whose correction Mr. Emerson bids
us go out into open nature, and see how peace and large-

128 THE ETHICS OF EPITHETS.

ness shed their eternal blessing on ns there. He tells us
how Nature receives us when we come out of the hot room
where high words have passed, and the fields and woods
rebuke us with their calm : "So hot, my little sir !" How
foolish our epithets sound out there in the open! How
truly one touch of nature makes us kin ! How the little
surface diflferences of creed and politics and race are lost
sight of in the fundamental sympathies of humanity!
How, as we rise to the nobler heights of mental and moral
aspiration, the artificial barriers which seemed insur-
mountable to us, sink into the dead level of insignificance.
To the toddling child the board fence at the back of the
garden seems to reach to heaven. The boy climbs it, the
grown man overlooks it, and from yonder hill or steeple
it makes but a line on the ground that one might' step over.
No, we cannot, for our own sake, afford to indulge in
epithets of intolerance. They are the mark of a small
soul, the refuge of a conceited soul, the public proclama-
tion of our own spiritual poverty !

What, then, some one may say, are we to have no opin-
ions of our own ? Is it a delusion to embrace a cause and
stand for it valiantly? Must we forever be hampered in
our enthusiasm of conviction by the consideration that
others who differ from us may have right on their side,
too ? By no means ! Breadth of view and tolerance of
spirit have their counterfeits, like every other valuable
quality. Indifference, intellectual laziness, and timidity
have often masqueraded in the habits of benign tolerance.
But the warning against the ready use of epithets is so far
from being a call to sacrifice our principles and opinions,
that it is actually a call to establish them. It says not that
we are not to hold opinions, but that no opinion is worth
holding that cannot be held calmly against every argument

THE ETHICS OF EPITHETS. 1 29

that is brought against it, and with complete charity for
all who differ with it. It does not forbid us to have opin-
ions of our own ; it only bids us to be sure that the opin-
ions are our own, and not merely our pastor's or our em-
ployer's or our favorite poet's or our intimate friend's.

Abandoning the epithet does not weaken our position ;
it clarifies our vision. "The consciousness," says Mr.
Morley, "of having reflected seriously and conclusively on
the important question, whether social or spiritual, aug-
ments dignity, while it does not lessen humility. In this
sense taking thought can and does add a cubit to our
stature. For a commanding grasp of principles, whether
they are public or not, is at the very root of coherency of
character." Hasty judgment, on the other hand, coupled
with the hasty, intolerant word, is the greatest foe to dig-
nity and coherency of character.

Nor, again, does this doctrine of self-denial in the use of
epithets mean to disguise the fact that there are names
corresponding to things that are to be fearlessly used as
the proper occasion demands. There are offences which
do not admit of palliation, abuses which cry aloud for cor-
rection. The man who rises in wrath and slays his
brother is a murderer; he who signs a valuable paper
with another's name is a forger; he who betrays the trust
of widows and orphans is a scoundrel. There can be no
mincing of words here. And it is no scholastic quibble
that insists on a difference in essence between such hideous
facts as murder, deceit, impurity, covetousness on the one
hand and the imputed faults of theological dissent, politi-
cal opinion, and social idiosyncrasies on the other. Let
our horizon widen, our culture deepen, our knowledge in-
crease to the farthest bounds, right remains right and
wrong, wrong — and beside the moral issue of right and

130 THE ETHICS OF EPITHETS.

wrong, the thou shalt not and the thou shalt, there is not,
as Carlyle has declared, another issue of first-rate import-
ance in our Hfe. In passing judgment on the great moral
issues, it is neither schooled sectarianism nor petty preju-
dice nor uncharitable criticism that speaks in us — but
rather that sense of eternal justice vouchsafed to us by our
ethical intuitions and increasingly confirmed in both our
philosophy and experience.

The evolution of our intellectual and spiritual life, pro-
gressing in this age by such rapid strides, and already in
every field of inquiry discrediting so many theories which
but a little while ago seemed eternally fixed, can have but
one goal. That goal is the liberalizing, the rationalizing,
the unifying of spiritual life, until the petty, the insignifi-
cant, the artificial, with all their narrowness of conception
and bitterness of profession, have passed forever away.
Prejudice and uncharitableness are not likely to die out in
our generation, or perhaps in our new century. Yet it is
our high duty and inestimable privilege to take care that
prejudice and uncharitableness die out in our own souls.
And we shall find no greater help to their extinction in us
than checking the ever-ready epithet that rises to our lips,
and asking before we speak it : Is it well-considered ? Is
it honest ? Is it necessary ? Is it kind ?

I

THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.*

By Nathaniel Schmidt.

Professor of Semitic Languages and Literatures in Cornell Uni-
versity.

It is with mingled feelings of joy and sorrow, pride and
shame, sympathy and abhorrence, that we are watching in
these days the birth of a new order of things in Russia. A
few years ago our hearts were wrung with grief as tidings
came of the sad fate of Finland. With one fell blow the
Czar of all the Russias had crushed to earth a noble, en-
lightened and most loyal people; with one stroke of his
pen he had blotted out their time-honored rights and liber-
ties. To-day Finland is again free ; her autonomy has been
restored; and she rejoices in the prospect of a more per-
fect form of self-government than she had before. It is
seldom that history has witnessed so swift a retribution, so
prompt a reversal of fortunes, so speedy a return of lost
liberty.

When at the end of the eighteenth century the modern
world was ushered in with the cry of "Liberty, Equality,
and Fraternity," Poland, after a long and proud history,
was cut to pieces and divided between Russia, Austria
and Germany. From the insurrections of 1831, 1846 and
1864 she reaped only a more and more complete suppres-
sion of the privileges at first left to her by Russia. It is
not likely that the new regime will bring her autonomy.
The House of Hapsburg and the House of Hohenzollern
fear too much the effect of an autonomous Poland on
their own slices of the unfortunate country. But, unless

*An address given before the Society for Ethical Culture of
Philadelphia, Sunday, November 19th, 1905.

132 THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.

a systematic attempt be made to stamp out all liberalism
by a skillful play upon racial and religious prejudices,
there is every reason to hope that Poland, too, may find
her most legitimate aspirations realized in the redemp-
tion of Russia.

Armenia also looks for a return of her former inde-
pendence. She has suffered long and waited for the com-
ing of a better day. But neither Turkey nor Persia, hold-
ing large shares of the old kingdom, would relish an
autonomous Armenia just beyond their borders. They
may not be able to exercise any pressure themselves ; but
there are other powers that have good reason to fear any
disturbance of the status quo in Anatolia. Yet if the
struggle for democracy is successful in Russia, Armenia
will share in the blessings of a larger liberty. In the Cau-
casus, the Georgians have long been restive under Rus-
sian rule. They, no doubt, are less prepared to appre-
ciate the advantages of modem political institutions than
the Finns, the Poles and the Armenians ; but, like all
mountaineers, they are lovers of liberty, and might profit
more from a connection with the empire, with a just
representation in its parliament, than by a return to their
old tribal organization.

Autocracy has fallen. This is an accomplished fact.
Whatever may happen — and the horizon is dark with
heavy clouds — ^Russia will never again be ruled by the will
of one man. Constitutional, representative, popular gov-
ernment is taking its place. In this we rejoice. Even if
the change should involve the peaceful retirement of the
reigning dynasty, there can be no cause for regret in this
circumstance. Nicholas II has certainly shown no more
fitness for the office of chief magistrate than Louis XVI.
It is difficult for a believer in democracy to understand the
tender solicitude for the Romanoffs on the part of many of

THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS. I33

our own countrymen. Whenever they find a people
struggling for freedom and trying to overthrow despotism
and oppression, they affect to see only the symptoms of
danger, confess lack of confidence in the principle of uni-
versal suffrage, and talk oracularly of unfitness for self-
government, while their fathers regarded it as a self-evi-
dent truth that governments should derive their powers
from the consent of the governed.

We sympathize with the just demands that are made for
self-government, for a full and unhampered expression of
the people's will, for security of person and equality before
the law. Let the pendulum swing as far as it can ! There
are reactionary forces enough in Russia to hold it back.
The radical party is at present contending for no rights
and privileges that are not dear to ourselves. They ask
for the right of habeas corpus, for freedom of speech, of
press, and of assembly. In these liberties we find our
safeguards. They protest against taxation without re-
presentation and against government without the con-
sent of the governed. Our republic owes its existence
to such a protest. They believe in the expediency of
universal suffrage. So do we. Are they charged with
being more or less openly republicans ? Ours is a repub-
lican form of government and we are proud of it. Are
they accused of being opposed to the union of state and
church and the compulsory support of religion? With
us the state has no religion, supports none, suppresses
none.

We are proud of the men who have in a measure suc-
ceeded in redeeming Russia from an intolerable despotism.
They are not the men in power. The emperor has re-
cently been thanked by the pope for the gracious mani-
festo by which he has conferred liberty upon his people.
This manifesto was wrung from his unwilling hands.

134 THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.

Count Witte has been praised as a benefactor. But he is
not a man of convictions, and has no sympathy with the
demands for justice and hberty. He is a clever politician
who has the merit of seeing which way the wind is blowing
and the necessary skill to trim the sails of the ship of state
to catch the breeze. But well may we be proud of the stu-
dents of Russia and of her workingmen. With what a
noble enthusiasm the students at the Russian universities
have laid down their youthful lives upon the altar of liber-
ty ! How they have read, and reflected, and dreamed, and
discussed ! How zealously they have labored, how cruelly
they have suffered, how bravely they have died, that
Russia might be free ! They have been driven into exile,
they have been thrown into dungeons, they have been
marched off to the mines of Siberia. Yet they have al-
ways been on hand. When a comrade fell, another took
his place. At Odessa, they stood in serried ranks as a
league of defence about the unarmed Jews until the last
man was hewn down by the ruthless Cossacks. All honor
to the martyrs ! They have not died in vain.

Beside the students, the workingmen have been the chief
actors in the drama. They have sought to gain their ends
with peaceful means. They made their protest quietly,
though with tremendous earnestness ; they waited for ex-
ecutive action patiently, though with great solicitude.
Before their passive resistance, their ceaseless agitation,
their determined pressure, the reactionary forces were
obliged to yield. But they would not grant what is es-
sential to the life of a self-governing state. Then the
workingmen chose for their weapon the strike. The
wheels of industry stopped ; all communication ceased ; the
scanty supplies of the poor dwindled; society was
threatened with starvation. It seemed expedient that St.
Petersburg should have a "dead day" rather than that the

THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS. 1 35

progress of a people toward democracy should be checked.
And lamentable as it is, the strike is better than the guillo-
tine. It is a threat rather than a blow; it involves eco-
nomic loss, but not destruction of life and property. The
Russian revolutionists had been able to select a more
humane method of civil war than the French revolution-
ists. They seemed successful ; and those of us who feared
the worst, when the blood of the Slav should be stirred,
breathed more easily.

Then the bureaucracy and the hierarchy played their
last card, resorted to their lowest, meanest, most dis-
reputable trick, to avert the threatening eclipse of their
power. Our joy was dimmed, our pride turned to shame,
our sympathy was in danger of being swallowed up by
disgust. The world was shocked by the accounts of the
most horrible atrocities perpetrated against the Jews in
Odessa and in eighty- four other towns in the Russian em-
pire. Ten thousand Jews had been massacred in the city
on the Black Sea, ten thousand Jews in other places. In-
fants had been torn from their mothers' breasts and
dashed against the stones ; children had been cut to pieces
in the schools; women had been horribly mutilated, and
old men tortured to death. It was enough to turn the
milk of human kindness sour. At first the actors behind
the scenes were not observed. The Russian people stood
discredited. The savage heart of the Slav had shown it-
self. How could these mobs be entrusted with liberty?
What kind of citizens would these brutalized hordes
make? Was not any form of despotism that would hold
them in check good enough for them, and greatly to be
preferred to hazardous experiments in self-government?
The subtle, diabolical scheme had succeeded.

Gradually the truth dawns upon us that the crusade
against the Jews was quite as much directed against

136 THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.

socialists and liberals of every stripe. By exciting
the passions of orthodox Christians the necessary moral
support was obtained, while a drunken militia and a reck-
less constabulary only needed a tip to join in the raids
upon the enemies of society. There is good reason to be-
lieve that the reactionaries in state and church actually
planned an extermination of heretics of every brand com-
pared with which St. Bartholomew's night would sink into
insignificance. It is too early to predict how far this hor-
rible policy can be carried out. The deeds already done
are dark enough to cast the shadow of doom over mitre
and crown.

This wider purpose, however, cannot obscure the fact
that the means for accomplishing it was the hatred of the
Jew. The occasion for shedding the blood of thousands
who were not Jews was the raising of the ghost of Anti-
Semitism. The infinite pathos of these recent occurrences
in Russia comes from the fact that they but summon up be-
fore us the age-long persecution of the Jews, they are but
the latest repetition of what, through the Christian cen-
turies, has been characteristic of the treatment of this peo-
ple. It is this which makes us pause,

Antiochus Epiphanes is generally regarded as the first
persecutor of the Jews for religious reasons. He dese-
crated the temple of Yahwe in Jerusalem; he offered a
swine on its altar to Zeus Olympius ; he put to death some
Jews who refused to sacrifice to the Greek gods. But he
seems to have cherished no racial hostility. He conferred
many favors on those Jews who welcomed Hellenic civil-
ization. Of a diflferent character was the persecution of
Jews in Alexandria under Caligula. It was directed
against a large and influential part of the population of
this metropolis, speaking the Greek language and per-
meated with Greek thought. The motives that swayed

I

THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS. 17,7

Apion and his party seem to have been political and econo-
mic rather than religious. That Caligula himself smiled
upon the Jew-baiters, while he refused to give a hearing to
Philo, the aged philosopher, was probably due to wounded
pride, as the Jews failed to accord him divine honors.
The cruelties to which the Jews were exposed toward the
end of Hadrian's reign were the natural result of a re-
bellion which brought defeat to the legions of Rome in
fifty-two battles and made the authority of Rome of no
effect for more than two years. From Hadrian to Con-
stantine the Jew had peace. When Rome became Chris-
tian, his sufferings began in real earnest.

Constantius deemed it a duty to persecute Jews, Arians
and other heretics ; and in the Byzantine empire this con-
tinued to be the policy. The Frank was orthodox, and the
Jew was ill-treated, as was the Arian. Wherever ortho-
dox Christianity was established as the religion of the
state, the Jew was persecuted, expelled, or forbidden to
enter. In one respect the coming of Islam improved his
lot. He found a welcome in the great Muslim centres of
life and learning, in Toledo and Cordova, in Morocco and
Kairowan, in Fostat and Baghdad. From these he ven-
tured forth to scatter precious seeds, and rendered yeoman
service as an intellectual broker. On the other hand, the
conquests of Islam brought grief to the Jews by the reac-
tion they called forth. Wherever the Crusader went,
with his pledge to rescue the tomb of Christ from the
hands of the infidel, hatred of the Jew followed in his
wake. In the centuries during which Europe suffered from
the fitful fever of religious enthusiasm for the possession
of the holy places, unspeakable indignities were heaped
upon those who were still held responsible for the death of
man's Redeemer.

The renaissance brought little relief. If the Jew was

138 THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.

forbidden to own land in the days when the soil was laid
under cultivation, he was prevented from entering the
guilds and plying a trade in the period when industry be-
gan to develop. He was forced to live i.. a Ghetto ; he was
obliged to become a peddler. He was successful as a
money-maker. For the Talmud taught him not to despise
small bargains, and to keep accounts. He drew wealth
from his persecutors by usury. For Deuteronomy taught
him that he might not charge interest on loans to his
brothers, but that he might take usury from the stranger.
When money was wanted from him, he was fawned
upon. But when the debts to him became too heavy, they
were cancelled. If he protested, he was beaten ; if he in-
sisted upon his rights, he was expelled and his property
confiscated. When his presence was inconvenient, false
charges against him were set in circulation. He needed
Christian blood in his religious services ; a Christian child
must be slaughtered in order duly to celebrate the Pass-
over. Woe unto him, if an epidemic broke out. Then his
blood was often called for to appease the angry deity.
From land to land he was driven. He had no abiding
place. Every door was shut against him. Even Spain
ceased to he a haven of rest to him, when the Moor was
driven back to Africa.

The dominant forces in the reformation period were hos-
tile to the Jew. He was still persecuted by the Lutheran
and Calvinistic churches. The Anabaptists were friendly.
Their leading thinkers voiced the most exalted sentiments
of religir ts toleration. They urged liberty of conscience,
of speech, and of worship within a state taking no cogni-
zance of religious differences, and especially deprecated the
spirit of animosity to Jews and Turks. But they were
drowned in deep waters or burned at the stake, and the
Protestant communities were prevented by the compulsory

k

THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS. I39

support of a certain type of religion and the baneful con-
ception of a Christian state from learning the most ele-
mentary principles of reHgious liberty.

It should be recorded, however, that Holland and Hun-
gary, Denmark and Sweden, England and America have
treated the Jew with greater justice and fairness than the
other nations, have given him opportunities to live his own
life, and taken the lead in according him the rights and
privileges of citizenship. In these countries legislative
action on his behalf has been in response to popular senti-
ment. Enlightened despots, like Peter of Russia and
Joseph II of Austria, by their favors gave a strong im-
petus to the development of Jewish life in their lands.
But their personal attitude was far in advance of the dis-
position of their subjects, and reforms that do not rest
upon the will and convictions of the many have in them no
promise of stability.

The rationalism of the eighteenth century ushered in a
new era in the history of this people. It is easy to decry
as superficial this mighty revolt of human reason against
the dogmas, cult, and spirit of orthodox Christianity. It
may have been lacking in historic sense ; but it was rich in
common sense. And it rendered a most useful service to
humanity by sweeping away a host of superstitions and
prejudices, hoary with age, and laying bare the simple
principles of justice too long obscured by them. Where
that tendency of thought known as deism or rationalism,
Aufklaerung or eclaircissement, affected social life, a new
attitude toward the Jew was noticeable. When Lessing
looked for a nobler type of manhood, embodying the catho-
lic spirit of the age, the figure of Moses Mendelsohn rose
before his mind to furnish the features of his Nathan, the
Wise.

The nineteenth century saw many fetters fall, many un-

140 THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.

just laws repealed, many prejudices pass away. Toward
the end of this century, however, there was a new out-
burst of Anti-Semitism. As though the demon of race
hatred knew that his time was short, he hastened to pour
out everywhere the vials of his wrath. In Germany and
Austria, the populace was incited to attacks upon the
Jews in the name of Christianity and Teutonism. In
France, the Dreyfus scandal revealed the bitter feeling
against this people and the disreputable means to
which religious fanaticism and an imbecile esprit de corps
will stoop. In Rumania, invidious laws were passed, re-
stricting the rights of the Jews in the use of the schools,
the holding of property, the exercise of the franchise. In
Russia, outbursts of violence, added to cumbersome legal
restrictions, forced 800,000 Jews to go into exile ; and the
ill-treatment of this people culminated in the horrors of
Kishineff and the atrocities of Odessa.

Even in countries where this feeling finds no expres-
sion in deeds of violence, a social ostracism is often prac-
ticed which cannot but be deeply felt. There is an unwill-
ingness to show the ordinary courtesies of life to the Jew,
to fraternize with him, to welcome him in the home, to
greet him at social gatherings, to invite him to clubs, to
stay in the same hotel with him, to eat and drink with
him. There is a tendency to snub him, to discount his
good qualities, to exaggerate his foibles, to impugn his
motives when his conduct is irreproachable, to ridicule his
peculiarities and make merry over his sensitiveness, to
drive him out of society and reproach him for his exclu-
siveness.

When we ask what the chief causes are of this persecu-
tion of the Jews, it is impossible to avoid the impression
that the first and foremost, at the present time, as in the
past, is religious intolerance. The Jew rejects the deity of

THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS. I4I

Jesus. To him Jesus is only a man. He regards the wor-
ship of the prophet of Nazareth as idolatry. As a rule,
he holds Jesus himself responsible for this idolatrous wor-
ship of his person, assuming that he gave himself out to
be a god appearing in human flesh. He cannot easily for-
get what countless sufferings this deified prophet has
brought upon his people through the centuries.

On the other hand, the orthodox Christian looks upon
Jesus as "very God." With reverence and gratitude he
reflects upon the infinite love of God in condescending to
be born of a virgin and live upon the earth as a man.
With awe and indignation he thinks of the insult offered
to the Divine Majesty, the pain given to the compassionate
heart of God, by the persistent unbelief and wilful refusal
of the Jews to acknowledge the incarnate Son of God, the
second person of the Trinity, as their true Messiah and
crown him Lord of all. He expects him to return upon the
clouds of heaven to wreak vengeance on his enemies, ac-
cording to the sure prophetic word. But how can he him-
self afford to act as though he were indifferent to the treat-
ment of his divine Saviour? In the countries where the
Jew is exposed to the severest forms of persecution it is
still the common belief of Christians that failure of crops,
epidemics, and other afflictions, are signs of divine dis-
pleasure for sins left unpunished by the community. It
is essential for the public welfare that the guilty parties be
found and punishment meted out to them in order that
the wrath of God may be appeased. Under such condi-
tions, the presence in a community of a large number of
men who are regarded as living in open revolt against the
Almighty by denying and blaspheming his divine Son is
more than sufficient to cause intense fear and anxiety to
get rid of the offenders.

It is serious enough, if the general prosperity is en-

142 THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.

dangered by Arians, Socinians, Unitarians, and other
Christian heretics. The case of the Jew is aggravated by
the fact that through him the Lord of glory was put to
death. When the true Messiah appeared, he was mur-
dered by the Jews. It is constantly repeated by Catholics
and Protestants alike that the exile from their land and the
fearful sufferings to which they have been exposed are the
divine punishments meted out to the Jews for the murder
of the Christ. Apologists never tire of pointing to the
continued existence and wretched fate of this people as an
evidence of the divine origin of Christianity, Providence
plainly indicating the rejection of the chosen race because
it was guilty of deicide.

The orthodox Christian sees evidences of divine wrath
resting on this people, not only in its external cir-
cumstances, but also in its continued slavery to the tradi-
tions of the fathers, its inability to free itself from the
tyranny of the law, its insistence upon the letter that kill-
eth, its obstinate love of ceremonies and institutions, such
as circumcision, sabbath-keeping, and distinctions be-
tween clean and unclean meats. A veil seems to him to
hang before the face of the Jew preventing him from see-
ing in his own Scriptures the real meaning of those Mes-
sianic prophecies that have all been fulfilled in Christ.

This orthodox Christian conception of the Jew has
broken down so completely under the influence of modem
thought that it is only with difficulty we can enter into its
inner life and appreciate its natural and inevitable effects.
When one has an opportunity, however, to watch the
thousands upon thousands of pilgrims who annually come
to the sacred sites in Palestine, to see their sincere and un-
sophisticated faith, their blind obedience to their spiritual
guides, their utter devotion to the interests of the church,
and to observe the manifest horror with which they look

THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS. 143

Upon the people they regard as under the curse of heaven,
it is easy to understand how the millions they represent
can be stirred most profoundly by prejudices that would
not move the religiously indifferent masses in our West-
em nations. But even here it may be seen how powerful
the religious motive is. Little children are taught in the
Sunday school that the Jews killed Christ, and they have
their hearts stirred to animosity against their innocent
Jewish playmates. It is rare that the Christian pulpit, in
its frequently repeated and minute descriptions of the
tragical fate of the Nazarene, has the fairness or insight
to discriminate between the conservative religious leaders
who were responsible for his death and the mass of his
people at the time and in subsequent ages.

These disgraceful religious prejudices are never com-
pletely banished until a new and corrected estimate of
Jesus takes the place of the conception presented by the
ecumenical creeds. It is not enough to recognize, as
thoughtful men generally do to-day, that Jesus was a man,
born of human parents, subject to the limitations of his
birth, his ancestry, environment and age, moving within
the boundaries set by nature's laws, and passing away, as
every son of man, upon the road that sees no traveller re-
turn. The peculiarity of his genius, the radical character
of his message, the worth of his principles, the dignity and
beauty of his life, his repudiation of all lordship, and his
freedom from all messianic ambitions, should be appre-
ciated. That Jesus should have ended his life upon a cross
of shame will then appear in the highest degree lament-
able, not because he was something else than a man, but
because he was so great and good a man. From this point
of view it will be seen that the responsibility for the
heinous crime is not to be charged against the Jewish
people as such, but against that obscurantist army

144 THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS. 1

arrayed against the light whose ranks are filled in
every age by men of every race. Whether the pro-
phet of Nazareth was condemned at a regular session of
the Sanhedrin or not, whether Sadducees or Pharisees
were more culpable in the matter, whether he was cruci-
fied by Roman soldiers or Jewish officials, are questions of
a wholly subordinate historic interest. Suppose that he
was actually sentenced to death by the highest court on a
false charge at a somewhat irregular session, that Phari-
sees as well as Sadducees were implicated in this judicial
murder, and that Caiaphas did not scruple any more than
Alexander Jannaeus to crucify an offender after the
Roman procurator had given his permission. Where is
the people that has not persecuted its radicals, and put to
death men who came to them with new and unpopular
truths? Where is the nation whose prophets have not
known the fellowship of his sufferings ? How many have
been hanged, or drowned, or burned to death, in the
name of Christ, for no other crime than that they have
been in advance of their age, finding new paths of knowl-
edge, struggling for recognition of higher ideals ? Should
Christians be persecuted to-day for the judicial murders
that must be laid at the door of the Church?

If orthodox Christians can see in orthodox Judaism
nothing else than antiquated ritual observances and de-
basing bondage to the letter of the law, they prove them-
selves sadly incapable of perceiving the real ethical value
of the long training in obedience to the law, and equally
blind to the manifest tendencies of their own creedalism
and sacramentalism. It is indeed greatly desirable that
formalism of every type should yield to rational views and
true spirituality. But these signs of the maturing life of
man do not come by blows and incivilities, by massacre
of infants and torture at the stake. They are produced

THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS. 145

by study and reflection, by inner discipline and cultiva-
tion of the moral sense. The religious attitude of the
Jew, whether orthodox or reformed, does not in the
slightest measure justify the ill-treatment to which he has
been exposed.

Another cause for the persecution of the Jew is racial
prejudice. He belongs in Asia. He is essentially an
Oriental. With all his power of adaptation, there remains
in him something that is foreign, in thought, in sentiment,
in life. He is clannish. His interest is centered on his
own people. He cares for none but the children of
Israel. He pushes his own men to the front, and seeks to
give them the centre of the stage. He wedges his way into
every place. He claims everything for Israel. So it is
said. And there is a measure of truth in these charges.
But if the Jew preservco, through a long ancestry and con-
stant relations with his brethren in the East, a strain of
Oriental thought and feeling, this is a gain, and not a loss,
to Occidental life. We have as much to learn from the
East as the East has to learn from us, and the natural
mediators perform a most useful service. If the Jew is
clannish, who made him so? Who drove him into the
Ghetto to live by himself ? Who forced him into the street,
and shut every door he would enter? Who cast him
bleeding by the wayside? Who passed by on the other
side without noticing his sores? If the Jew is self-centred,
who made him so? Should he be censured for binding
up his own wounds? Is not this adding insult to injury?

But he really is not as clannish as his enemies maintain.
On the contrary, it may be questioned whether any nation
in antiquity had a larger and more generous interest in the
other nations of the earth than Israel, and whether any
people to-day is more easily moved to enthusiasm for hu-
manity. The prophet of the exile who first seems to have

146 THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.

conceived of Israel as a chosen people also maintained that
it was chosen for service, to be a blessing to all the na-
tions of the earth. It was a great Jewish prophet who
proclaimed the coming of the kingdom of heaven to earth
as a reign of righteousness, mercy and truth. The might-
iest movement in modem times for bettering the condi-
tions of man's life on earth, regardless of race, nation, and
religion, a movement inspiring millions with the hope of a
nobler social order, was fathered by two prophets of Jew-
ish blood, Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle.

Sometimes there is in Israel a reaction against particu-
larism so violent that it carries men to positions almost
unheard of in other nations. In coarser natures this re-
action shows itself in a curious dread of being known as
belonging to the peculiar people, an irrational desire to
root up and destroy everything Jewish, a mad participation
in calumny and slander of the race, and actual hostility to
their own kith and kin. The Jew himself becomes a Jew-
baiter of the most pronounced type. In prophetic souls
it leads to such a close identification with a just and merci-
ful god, such a passionate devotion to the truth, such an
ardent enthusiasm for the welfare of humanity, that the
passing of cult and creed, temple and monarchy, law and
covenant, church and state, are viewed with calm resigna-
tion, if not with eager desire. In view of such personali-
ties as Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah, the authors
of Job and of Jonah, Jesus and Paul, Ibn Gabirol and
Abulafia, d' Acosta and Spinoza, Heine and Lassalle,the
charge of clannishness seems absurd. Nor should it be
forgotten, because of their faithful care of the poor and
needy among their own people, how constantly and gen-
erously Jewish philanthropists have responded to calls for
relief of suffering or support of benevolent work, regard-
less of race or religion.

THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS. 1 47

Still another cause for the persecution of the Jew is
economic friction, envy and resentment. The Jew is a
successful trader. He lends and does not borrow. He
practices usury. He holds the mortgages, and pockets as
interest most of the proceeds of the poor man's toil.
He makes money fast, and loves to display his wealth.
He flaunts before the eyes of his rivals the evidences
of his economic superiority. So it is said. And
there is some truth in these indignant comments. The
extraordinary capacity of the Jew for money-
getting is not to be denied. But if he is more suc-
cessful behind the counter than behind the plow or the
loom, it is pertinent to ask, Who made him a peddler?
Who drove him away from tilling the soil, and forbade
him to work at a trade, and forced him to make money his
tool and his weapon? Who robbed him of his interest?
Who stole his capital ? Who cancelled the debts that men
owed him ? When all other avenues of life were closed to
him, is he to be censured for becoming familiar with the
one that was left open ?

The qualities that have given him the economic strength
men envy are in the main such that he need not be
ashamed of them. They are thrift and sobriety, caution
and watchfulness, industry and persistence like that of the
rocks. The Jew, as a rule, is an honest trader. He has
learned his craft well and understands the conditions of
true success. He has taken a prominent part in the mod-
ern organization of commerce and industry ; he is conspic-
uous by his absence among the leaders of crazy finance and
the promoters of fraudulent schemes. It is not Jewish but
Christian names that have been made a by-word and a
hissing by the recent disclosures of disreputable practices
in the business world.

When men, in new and favorable surroundings, rise in

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148 THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.

a generation from abject poverty to competence and even
affluence, it is not to be expected that they will at once ac-
quire the quiet dignity, the gentle manner, and the refined
tastes that, as a rule, are the result of careful nurture, for
a longer period of time, in comfortable circumstances. It
may well be admitted that many Jews in our large cities
who have been fortunate enough to escape from grinding
poverty and been able to accumulate money have not had
time to learn how to use their wealth, are fond of luxury
and vulgar in their tastes. But it certainly is not for us in
the New World to throw stones on that account. One of
the charges most frequently made against us as a people
by critics across the sea is that we know how to make
money but not how to use it. Nor is it worth the while
denying that a certain fondness for gay plumage, a some-
what absurd pompousness, an unmistakable vulgarity of
taste, a ridiculous snobbishness, and a pathetic confidence
in the "Almighty Dollar," are too characteristic of our
mushroom aristocracy of wealth. It is also a noticeable
fact that when the hope of progress takes the place of sul-
len resignation or dull despair, there is often a bending of
all energies to the acquisition of the coveted good, an ap-
parent centering of all affections on the medium of social
redemption. The new opportunity leads to temporary for-
getfulness of the higher things of life. Let us hope, how-
ever, that we shall outgrow these defects, as we outgrow
the distempers of our childhood, never to be afflicted by
them again. One thing is certain : Whether the qualities
that have given the Jew his economic strength are such as
should be deplored and avoided, or such as should be ad-
mired and emulated, there is not the slightest excuse in any
of them for either social ostracism or more violent forms
of persecution.

The Jew has taken a large and honorable part in every

THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS. I49

movement characteristic of our modem world. He has
made valuable contributions in every field he has entered,
in commerce and industry, in statecraft and political life,
in science and art, in ethics and religion. There is little
profit in comparing the great men of one race with those
of another with a view to deciding their rank, in laying
claims and counterclaims for positions of honor. Suffice
it that where some important work was to be done, some
service of a high order was needed, the man for the occa-
sion was as likely to come from this people as from any
other; that considering its size and circumstances it has
produced a surprising number of rarely gifted individuals ;
that the average of intelligence and character is very high ;
and that its presence in any national life is at once an
earnest of progress and liberality and a guarantee of
needful conservatism. The presence of a large Jewish
element in the Social Democracy is significant. It indi-
cates that the sense of social injustice is as keen in the
modern Jew as it was in his forebears, and that the pro-
phetic dream of a better society has as great a fascination
to him as of yore. It is also a surety of the peaceful char-
acter of socialistic propaganda. The Jew is opposed to
every war. He lives on both sides of every boundary line.
His presence in our republic is invaluable. He helps to
keep us true to our peaceful mission in the world. He can
be depended upon whenever our institutions are in peril
by sectarian encroachments. Whether orthodox or re-
formed, he will assist in preserving the secular character
of our public schools, and in preventing public funds from
being turned to denominational uses. In the struggle of
the people for its rights against the self-elected stewards
of its wealth, his sense for righteousness, resourcefulness,
and tenacity of purpose cannot but be of greatest service.
At any time he is entitled to say to his Christian fellow-

k

150 THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.

worker : "I, too, have had my share in bringing about the
things in which you glory ; I, too, have borne the heat and
burden of the day; and I have labored under circum-
stances that made my service harder than yours."

In the name of justice we protest from this platform
against the persecution of the Jew. We denounce as out
of harmony with the principles that should govern our
conduct every expression of religious intolerance, every
manifestation of racial prejudice, and every form of
economic envy or class hatred. In the name of outraged
humanity we protest against the indignities heaped upon
the Jewish people, the atrocious treatment which has been
accorded to it. In the name of social ideals which should
be dear to all, and many of which have been born in
the minds of the prophets of Israel, we ask all men to re-
member the bonds of a universal brotherhood.

SUGGESTIONS FOR THE COMING INTER-
NATIONAL ETHICAL CONGRESS.

Plans are being formed to hold an International Ethi-
cal Congress in London next summer, which will be ten
years after the first Congress, that gave birth to the In-
ternational Ethical Union, was held in Zurich. Delegates
from many parts of the world will for the second time
meet to discuss questions of common interest and to plan
common work. Among the important matters it is pro-
posed to bring before the Congress, are the drafting of a
constitution for the International Ethical Union so as to
provide efficient international machinery, the re-affirma-
tion or revision of the Manifesto, and the large problem of
the mission of the International Secretariat including
active propaganda on a considerable scale. Several other
valuable suggestions have been put forward, such as the
provision in Universities of a separate Ethical Chair, the
emphasis of the ethical factor in the history lessons, and
the making philosophy compulsory, as in France, for all
College students. To these suggestions I should like to
add two further proposals which intimately concern the
Ethical Movement. The first proposal will probably be
received sympathetically and possibly may be accepted.
The second one, perhaps because of its novelty, may as yet
command only passing attention. We will treat the two
proposals separately. The first one relates to

The Ethical Movement and Moral Instruction.

Of the interest which the whole Ethical Movement has

shown for Moral Instruction, it would be waste of time to

say much. Twenty years ago, in 1886, Mr. Salter spoke

of "The Duty Liberals Owe their Children," and already

151

152 SUGGESTIONS FOR THE COMING

hinted at the system of moral instruction which has gen-
erally found favor in the American Ethical Societies.
Six years later Professor Felix Adler published his book
on "The Moral Instruction of Children," and since that
time not only articles and pamphlets by various writers,
but a series of volumes by Mr. Sheldon, have been pub-
lished on the subject. Simultaneously actual moral in-
struction became everywhere an acknowledged and lead-
ing activity of an Ethical Society, and an Ethical Sunday
school an important feature of such a Society. In Eng-
land the Moral Instruction Movement began with the in-
stitution of Sunday schools connected with Ethical So-
cieties, and led eventually to the formation of the Moral
Instruction League which is now one of the most impor-
tant educational factors in the country, many thousands of
public schools having adopted its Graduated Syllabus of
Moral Instruction and many thousands more being now on
the point of adopting it. In Germany the interest in the
topic has always been keen, and not only of late years
have leaflets, pamphlets and books been published on the
subject, but quite recently a Secular and Moral Instruction
League has been founded by the German Society for
Ethical Culture. In Switzerland the Lausanne Society,
inspired by Professor Forel, has taken much active inter-
est in the problem, and Dr. Fr. W. Foerster, the late
Secretary of the International Ethical Union, who has
been for some years teaching in Zurich, published two
years ago a monumental work on Moral Instruction of
which some 10,000 copies have been sold.

The interest in moral instruction has been almost spon-
taneous everywhere, a mere hint sufficing for the bringing
forward of the question. Yet this very spontaneity has
perhaps prevented moral instruction from coming as much
into the foreground as it might otherwise have done. The

INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL CONGRESS. 1 53

spontaneity has been valuable in encouraging originality ;
but it has hindered the several countries from profiting by
one another's experiences. There is also lacking that stim-
ulation which would arise from a full knowledge of what
is being done in different Ethical centres. Much remains
here to be accomplished, and it is to be hoped that the In-
ternational Secretariat will prepare for the coming Con-
gress a ''Report on Moral Instruction" in English, Ger-
man and French which will succinctly and yet exhaus-
tively deal with what has been accomplished in the matter.
The International Moral Instruction Movement should
profit by such a report, for we not only want good moral
instruction, but the best possible.

Yet given intelligent interest in the subject and in the
various moral instruction methods in use, there still re-
mains something important to be done. We ought to ad-
vance a further step. The movement in general and every
individual Ethical Society in particular should make
moral instruction a plank in the ethical platform, and pro-
mote its objects locally and nationally, as well as within
the homes of members, by the institution of Sunday
schools and Ethical Classes. Every new member should
be made aware of his responsibility in this matter, and
Societies should feel that an Ethical Society, however poor
it may be, is the fittest place for experiments in moral in-
struction to be undertaken, and the source from which the
most valuable suggestions as to subject matter and
method are to be expected. Poor and few as are the Eng-
lish Ethical Sunday Schools, it is they who have communi-
cated the substance of the Graduated Syllabus of Moral
Instruction and have inspired the Moral Instruction
League. We want an enormous extension of the
Ethical Sunday School Movement, and plenty of delib-
erate experiments in which to test the various methods.

154 SUGGESTIONS FOR THE COMING

Every Ethical Sunday School should be an experiment
station in moral instruction, and should be aware of the
experiments carried on by all the other teaching centres.
In this way the Ethical Movement may not only succeed
in getting moral instruction introduced into all primary
and secondary schools and colleges ; but, what is of crucial
importance, in popularizing a system which is sound both
as to subject matter and as to method. Let us not for-
get that morality, like every school subject, may be taught
badly.

I would, therefore, suggest as a topic for the Interna-
tional Ethical Congress in London, the question of the
international organization of moral instruction. Let every
individual Ethical Society the world over be known to take
a vital interest in this important problem.

The second suggestion, that of dealing internationally
with the problem of

The Ethical Movement and Educatiofij
is not so easily disposed of.

The general ground on which one may be pardoned for
urging that the problem of education should be co6rdi-j
nated with that of moral instruction in the Ethical Move-
ment and be given, therefore, a conspicuous place, is of
character that will probably appeal to many of us. Edu-
cation in itself is a priceless good, especially when the
school is guided by moral ends ; but as such it cannot be
the special concern of Ethical Societies any more than of
other non-educational bodies. There are, however, more
strictly ethical aspects to the problem of Education which
tend to justify the new attitude and which we must, there-
fore, enlarge on.

The most obvious connection between the Ethical Move-
ment and education lies in the region of democratic gov-
ernment of the people, by the people, and whatever the

INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL CONGRESS. 1 55

political views of members of Ethical Societies, this con-
nection remains unchanged. If the people possess no
character and no judgment, how are they to escape being
misled by ambitious demagogues on the one hand, and
scheming politicians who wish to exploit them on the
other? How are they to avoid following men whose in-
tentions are good enough, but whose judgment is that of
idle dreamers ? How are they to be prevented from break-
ing out into panic, from making unreasonable demands,
from behaving like children who are incapable of dispens-
ing with guidance at every step? In other words, how
without judgment and character, are they to play the part
of the good and efficient citizen ?

Now the Ethical Society labors to induce all men to
become good and efficient citizens ; yet how is it to com-
pass its end without the help of a general and excellent
system of Education? Surely, in these modern days we
can no longer contend that a man has judgment if he has
character, or that the good man instinctively knows the
right. Accordingly, if we wish to save the people from
themselves and from ignorant or scheming leaders, we
must insist on a high education for all, an education which
will form character, strengthen the judgment, and give
every man an idea of his place and duty in nature and so-
ciety. Short of denying our ethical mission or raising a
cry of despair, we are bound to recognize that the Ethical
Movement must, as a body, demand, and incessantly
reiterate the demand for a thorough education for all,
women included. Not otherwise may we hope, as we do
hope, to moralize municipal, national and world politics
and to promote a lofty tone not only in a few select homes
but in whole communities. Education, like economics, is
not everything ; but it is an indispensable factor in general
moral advance.

156 SUGGESTIONS FOR THE COMING

A thorough system of education will solve many other
difficulties besides political ones. If the generality of men
were well educated, the nature of most of our daily papers
would fundamentally change. They would no longer deal
in sensations, they would no longer spread false reports,
they would no longer be a standing danger to interna-
tional concord, and they would no longer be superficial.
On the contrary, they would serve high purposes, since
otherwise the public patronage would be withdrawn. So,
too, with the trashy literature — ^the Storyettes, Short
Stories, Novelettes, half-penny shockers — which is now
devoured in enormous quantities because the low educa-
tion of the majority of the people does not fit them for
anything better. The yellow press and the red novel could
not subsist in an educated society. On the contrary, as
one can see the beginnings of the process already to-day,
first-class papers, first-class books, and international amity,
would be encouraged, and the consequent ethical benefit
would be incalculable.

Nor would the influence stop at this point. Heavy
drinking would be severely checked; gambling and bet-
ting would decline; mere interest in comfort and luxury
would diminish; sensuality would not be nourished; and
this because a manifold interest of a desirable kind would
deprive these propensities of the congenial soil of mental
and physical idleness in which they flourish. On the other
hand, art and recreation of a socially healthy character
would be loved and sought.

There would also be a reaction on the individuals. The
working classes would be far more efficient in their avoca-
tions ; they would refuse to support an autocratic militar-
ism ; they would demand leisure for family and other
duties ; they would not work in ill-ventilated factories ; and
they would resent imperious treatment by their industrial

INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL CONGRESS. 1 57

rulers. The whole of industry would accordingly be ra-
tionalized and moralized, and no worker would any longer
dread unemployment, illness, accidents, old age, or be un-
able to support himself and his family. Only give char-
acter and judgment to the masses and everything would
necessarily change for the better. We should have a race
of self -relying men who freely cooperate for the purpose
of achieving ideal ends. Manifestly, economic revolt is
only one way of fighting injustice and establishing the
City of Light.

Of course, much, almost everything, depends on the
kind of education supplied. If, for instance, as to-day in
England, a mechanical education of a few years in the
primary school should be followed, as is beginning to be
the practice, by some years in a secondary school or poly-
technic where commercial and manufacturing ideals are
dominant, very little would be gained. Even if a Uni-
versity education were added on commercial lines, which
seems to be the new ideal, the democracy would scarcely
be fit for the moral task. At the utmost such an education
would prove to the masses that it is the wrong sort of
education and that quite a different kind is needed to sat-
isfy moral demands.

As ethicists we must, I believe, insist on at least three
definite features. The education must tend to form a
strong ethical character; it must create the power to judge
correctly and quickly ; and it must give the pupil a toler-
able conception of his place in society and nature. Only
the last point need be elaborated. On reflection everybody
will admit that he who is to be a director in a nation's
affairs ought to have a broad basis of knowledge and not
be absorbed in the present moment. He ought to know
the story of man and society from the chipped stone im-
plement and the isolated primitive tribe to the machine

158 SUGGESTIONS FOR THE COMING

age and modern civilization with its intercommunicating
countries, and he should be made to feel that we are but
"at the cockcrow of civilization" and that strenuous per-
sonal and social lives are still as needful as ever. Secondly,
a man to be self-reliant and self-respecting, must know his
place in the Universe, and thus the stories of astronomy, of
geology and of the evolution of life, should become famil-
iar to the children as they grow older. These are the three
definite features without which education can achieve but
little in the reformation of man and society. If one point
may be added, on the side of method, it is that in an age of
cheap books one of the highest aims of the school must be
to make the children love reading the best authors, so
that they might voluntarily continue their education be-
yond school age. With a good education to start with, a
love of what is best in literature, art and science implanted
in their breasts, and cheap classics to help, we are likely to
gain the results which we are eager to obtain.

At present education is as yet scarcely born. Methods
and subject matter have been generally decided on, at
least in general practice, by casual experience and by a
non-democratic and often anti-democratic ideal ; but once
the true significance of education is grasped, many things
will be altered. Pedantry will be abolished and with it
very much that is superfluous in almost every school sub-
ject ; spelling will be phonetic ; the metric or some duodeci-
mal system will be taught everywhere; grammar will be
revolutionized; authors will write in some international
language so that exchange of thought shall be simplified ;
and the child will be trained to observe, to experiment, to
generalize, and to deduce truths, according to the proce-
dure in scientific investigation. The interest in the Army
and Navy will be replaced by that of the School, and to re-
form the school will be one of the principal objects of na-

INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL CONGRESS. 1 59

tional assemblies. One hundred million pounds a year, as
now in England with the Army and Navy, will be ac-
cordingly cheerfully voted for educational purposes, see-
ing especially the productive character of the expenditure.

All, except those who do not believe in the mass of the
people ever being capable of possessing character, judg-
ment, and a knowledge of man's place in nature and
society, must agree on emphasizing education. Here the
theologian and the non-theologian, the individualist and
the socialist, the radical and the conservative may unite, for
none can doubt the advantage of the people as a whole be-
ing well educated. Only he who wishes to exploit the peo-
ple, can conceivably object to a system of universal educa-
tion. If to these arguments be added, that our only choice
is between an unintelligent and an intelligent ruling
democracy, and if we allow, as we must, that democracy
is rapidly proving its capacity for developing, it is indu-
bitable that all advanced and ethical sections of thinkers
and workers — social reformers of all types included —
should devote very considerable attention to the education
of the people.

If I have been successful in making a strong case for
the absolute and crying need from a moral point of view
of a far higher education than the people receive at pre-
sent, then my suggestion will not seem unreasonable, i. e.,
that every individiial Ethical Society and all the national
ethical organizations as well as the International Ethical
Union should deal sympathetically and systematically with
the educational problem. The Societies should accord-
ingly assist the cause of education from their platforms ;
they should, as organizations, promote efficient education ;
they should encourage public libraries, reading rooms, and
general lecturing of a high type ; they should publish lists
of cheap editions of the Classics, including scientific

l60 INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL CONGRESS.

works ; they should guide the self-education of their mem-
bers; and they should forward educational ends through
their national and international organizations.

A perfect humanity must mean a highly cultured de-
mocracy, and on a perfecting of humanity the Ethical
Movement is bent. Through education — ^moral, scientific
and philosophical — lies the road to social salvation.

GusTAV Spiller,
Secretary International Ethical Union.

36b Albert Bridge Road, London, S. W.

MASSACRE AND LIBERTY IN RUSSIA*

By Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer.

The topic assigned me in this retrospect of the year is
"Massacre and Liberty in Russia." When we speak the
word "Russia" we think of that vast empire comprising
nearly one-sixth of the habitable earth and nearly one-
tenth of the population of the world. We think of its
awful contrast of luxury and famine, one-third of its land
belonging to the Czar, the richest sovereign in his own
name in the world; one-third held by the nobility and
landed proprietors, and only one-third left for its nine-
tenths of people, the agricultural class and the wage-
earners. We think of its polyglot population, at least
nine distinct races, one-half of them of white stock and
one-half of yellow stock. We think of it to-day, and
rightly, as compared with even fifty years ago, as a retro-
grade nation. The buried germs of constitutional gov-
erment in its ancient Zemstvos now struggling for a new
life. Still more suggestive, its ancient communal village
organization in which, as a hint, for some happier future,
we do believe, is shown the genius of the Russian people
for fraternal associations for social ends.

When we say the words "massacre in Russia" what do
we think of ? We think first of the awful slaughter of the
Jews, the wellnigh incredible survival of middle-age sup-
erstition and gross cruelty. We think of that pathetic
massacre on the 226. of last January, slaughter of hope-

*An address before the Society for Ethical Culture of New
York, Sunday, December 31, 1905.

161

1 62 MASSACRE AND LIBERTY IN RUSSIA.

less, unarmed men and women and children, marching
with a priest at the head, to beg pity of the "Little
Father" in whom they still believed ; and we think of what
the headlines of the newspapers bring us every morning ;
the indiscriminate rage of slaughter, class against class,
in which neither side recognizes truly friend or foe, inno-
cent or guilty, but only seeks to express the strong upris-
ing of a blind rage against oppression and outrage.

But these things, my friends, awful as they are, are not
the most awful massacre which Russia is suffering from.

The spiritual massacre, the unique, selective, systematic
crime of slaughter by the Russian government, by which,
for more than a generation every noble, brave, enlight-
ened, reformatory, progressive spirit, man or woman, in
Russia has been silenced or destroyed by the government.
That is the most awful massacre, the supreme crime of
the Russian government. I know not its like in any re-
cent history.

One of the latest stories is of the pathetic, the cruel
death of a gentlewoman, wife of a noble, standing by her
own order, doubtless, believing in her Czar, and her
church, doubtless, but pitiful and tender, full of charity
and sympathy for the poor about her. She took care of
one hundred destitute and orphaned children. She tended
them, nursed them, taught them out of her loving heart,
but that did not save her. When the peasants rose, they
killed her, and set fire to her castle, the scene of her char-
ity. What does that mean ?

Let me, in the brief moment I have, picture to you for
answer, another woman and her fate. More than twenty
years ago, Sophie Bardino was summoned before the
judges at St. Petersburg, charged, with forty-nine other
men and women, with the political crime of teaching the
peasants unauthorized by the church. She was a well-

MASSACRE AND LIBERTY IN RUSSIA. 163

born girl, highly cultured, graduated at the schools of
Moscow and Zurich. She took for the protection of her
youth the name of the widow Bardino. She went into a
factory in one of the most forlorn villages of Russia. She
labored among women who were working fourteen
and fifteen hours of the twenty-four, and earning seven-
teen cents a day. She persuaded these women to stop ruin-
ing themselves by the strong drink which they took instead
of food, and taught them many things in the evening
hours. They learned to feel for her a deep affection.
For three years she taught these people, and in three
years made such a change in that village that the
Bureaucracy was suspicious. For thirty years or more, it
has been the object of most suspicion to the Russian gov-
ernment when people stopped drinking and began to
think.

They arrested this girl. They brought her before the
tribunal, with the other men and women arrested for the
same crime, that of trying to teach the debased, the ignor-
ant peasantry. By common consent she was made the
spokesman of the party. Asked what she would say in
her defense, she made the most wonderful and eloquent
plea I have ever read. I heard it twenty-two years ago
from the lips of the first Russian political refugee with
whom I made acquaintance, and I shall never forget it. In
the little time I have, I cannot read you that speech, but
I have brought you some sentences from it, which bring in
that word "liberty" and explain the revolution in Russia.

Rising, with a face pallid from prison torture, but with
an eye undimmed and a voice untrembling (as I was told
by one present) save from deep emotion, she faced her ac-
cusers, and these are some of the words she said:

"Gentlemen, who are my judges, I shall not deny that I
have labored as a propagandist in the factory, but I can-

164 MASSACRE AND LIBERTY IN RUSSIA.

not call myself guilty, for I have done no harm to the com-
munity, nor tried to do any. We are accused of destroy-
ing the foundations of society;" — and then she makes a
wonderful argument opposing that charge. Closing she
says, "Are these social conditions moral which divide the
citizens into two parties in one of which is nothing but
pleasure, while in the other the laborers are dying of
hunger? Nor will I confess that we have disturbed the
tranquility of society, for no individual efforts can over-
throw any form of society which does not carry in its own
bosom the seeds of destruction. I know too, any govern-
ment that exercises despotic power, oppresses the citizens,
takes the side of the few against the many, is marching
to its ruin. I deny that I have tried to stir up a revolt. I
believe that it is only by peaceable propagandism that
Russia can be fittingly prepared for the revolution that I
know is sure to come. I ask no pity of you, gentlemen, I
do not need it, for my conscience does not accuse me.
Keep on prosecuting us, let loose your police and your
soldiers upon us so long as they obey you, but remember
the lessons of history, which teach that the bloodiest re-
pression is powerless against the regenerating current
that sweeps away the government that is worn out. I am
sure that our nation, which has slept for ages, will in the
end awake. Prosecute us then, ye judges and hang-
men ! Massacre and exile us so long as you have phys-
ical force on your side ! It is moral force that is opposed
to you, and that shall in the end do away with all violence.
The force of progress, the ideas of liberty and equality,
are working for us, and they cannot be pierced by your
bayonets. Gentlemen, I have no more to say. Proceed
with your sentence."

I have brought you this little extract from this great
speech of a prophet-martyr of national reform in Russia,

MASSACRE AND LIBERTY IN RUSSIA. 1 6$

to show why Russian progress toward liberty lacks fitting
leadership to-day.

The death of the gentlewoman in the castle at the hands
of infuriated peasants whom she had tried to help is ex-
plained by the sentence of this youthful prophetess, this
wise, devoted, would-be helper in the saving of her race,
who suffered two years in prison and nine years of hard
labor in the mines of Siberia.

I was told by one who knew this woman, that so noble
was her bearing, and so lovely her sympathetic ministra-
tion, that when a brutal Cossack attempted to insult her
on the way to Siberia, the woman to whom she was
chained, a woman of the street, debased and foul-mouthed,
nearly sacrificed her life to protect her innocent sister.

It is because of this unique crime of Russia, this mas-
sacre of her best, and wisest, her most self-sacrificing and
enlightened, by a selective, systematic process of extermi-
nation, that this bloody revolution has come in that un-
happy land. Do not be deceived. We may hear again
from Russia the ominous words, "All quiet in Warsaw,
all quiet in Moscow, all quiet in St. Petersburg, all still
along the Baltic." Yet is it true that the government
that "is worn out" and has filled its cup of crime to the
brim, will be swept away by the "regenerating current" of
which that martyr-prophetess spoke, and let us not doubt
the issue. Above all, let us free Americans not be so base
and ignoble as to fail to give the sympathy of our hearts
and whatever else we have to give to these, the righteous
remnant in Russia, no matter what excesses and awful
horrors may usher in the dawn of the coming day of lib-
erty in Russia.

THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF RECENT
EVENTS.*

By Mr. Leslie Willis Sprague.

While our attention of late has been greatly absorbed in
interests far from home, and while we have dwelt as world
citizens, even upon our own soil, yet we have been called
again and again from the thought of the "yellow peril" of
the East, and from terrors in Russia, to consider dangers
and problems in the United States ; and it is my task, in
few words, to speak of some of the recent issues in the
United States and of their moral significance.

Our problems, in this country, have been unlike the
problems of the Orient, or of Russia, unlike the problems
even of England in a way, in that they have been primar-
ily, as I interpret them, problems arising from prosperity.

There has been a comparative peace between labor and
capital. There has been no great problem of the unem-
ployed, for there has been abundant labor for all. The
methods of philanthropy and relief have gone upon their
usual course without any unusual appeal for particular
occasions. There has been an hitherto almost unknown
prosperity in all the ways of industry, in the mines and
forests, upon the farms, and in the mills, which have been
running at their utmost pace. Prices have been high, and
every industry has flourished. The nation has been at
peace with the world, and her position among the nations
is best accredited by the Peace of Portsmouth, which pre-
sents America as a peace-loving power.

*An address before the Society for Ethical Culture of New
York, Sunday, December 31, 1905.
166

MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF RECENT EVENTS. 167

It is out of this prosperity and seeming industrial peace
that the American issues have come of late. It is in pros-
perity, in plenty and not in want, that the interpretation
of the problems of American life must be sought. Car-
lyle long ago bemoaned the fact that in England people
had been so busy gaining wealth, that they had forgotten
to divide it justly; and what Carlyle saw in the middle of
the nineteenth century in England, is becoming more and
more apparent to the people of the world, and was never
more significantly true than in our own country at the
present time. But our problem has not been the problem
Carlyle suggested, that of the redistribution of wealth;
but rather how to conserve wealth to the interests of all
the people; and if we will look at the various interests
that have aroused popular agitation, and stimulated the
public conscience, we shall find that they all hang upon a
single thread, that of the danger of the way in which great
fortunes, and the massing of great fortunes in great cor-
porations threaten the interests of the people of America ,

I have not time, nor is there need, to rehearse the var-
ious recent agitations, but I may mention briefly a few of
the more significant, in order to discover what I believe
to be the principle running through all of them. The first
in point of time, although not in importance, is that peo-
ple have approached the methods of business life under
the topic of what is considered "Tainted Money." The
significant fact of this agitation is to be seen in that some
of our greatest teachers and leaders of the people have
come to raise the question whether interests with religious,
educational and philanthropic ends can wisely accept do-
nations from those whose methods in the business world
are, at least, questionable, without being themselves com-
promised by this acceptance.

There has been little practical issue from the agitation

l68 MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF RECENT EVENTS.

concerning tainted money, and in fact no very clear prin-
ciples have been discovered through the agitation, but we
may note as the imderlying factor in this discussion, an
awakening, on the part of a few at least, to question the
methods by which great fortunes are being built up, and
again, of the methods by which vast fortunes are used.
The question is raised whether the interests of humanity
are wisely served by the use of these methods.

Following close upon the issue of tainted money, and in
fact, co-operating with it, came the discussion of what has
been termed "Frenzied Finance." A self-confessed fren-
zied financier undertook to reveal to the public the meth-
ods pursued by great corporations in crushing out the
interests of individuals, and of lesser corporations. Again
there have been no significant results, not even a declara-
tion of principles by which great corporations are to be
directed. But the attention of the American people has
been called to a great danger, and there has come the be-
ginning of a consideration of the vast interests involved
in the organization of great corporations.

More significant than either of these themes, and
fraught with greater results, is the recent insurance inves-
tigation, with the appalling revelation, before by some sus-
pected, that men who stood the highest in the world of
financial management, receiving the unquestioning honors
of all people, have not only used for private ends their
positions of power and influence, but have deliberately
converted to their own private use vast sums of money
set apart for widows and orphans ; and have turned to the
use of their families and pensioners, funds belonging to
others ; and still more have used these trusted funds for the
influencing of legislation, and to make contributions to
political campaigns, to the degradation of American cit-
izenship. But the significant result of this investigation

MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF RECENT EVENTS. 169

is the beginning of the re-organization of these insurance
companies, and endeavor on the part of the better ele-
ment in them to assert themselves and to control these in-
terests. Perhaps the most significant word has come from
a man who has taken the responsibility of one of the
larger insurance companies, in a statement to the policy-
holders, that henceforth the purpose of that particular
society shall be, not to be the greatest insurance com-
pany, but to be the best, thus calling a halt upon the ten-
dency in our American life to accentuate bigness, even
at the cost of greatness. What the results during the
coming years may be, remains to be discovered; but the
most significant aspect of these agitations is the way in
which the public attention has been called anew to the re-
sponsibilities of those who represent the interests of great
wealth, and to the obligation that the great corporation
owes to the community in which it thrives.

These agitations have certainly centered in the financial
interest. I turn now to another recent awakening to dis-
cover the moral significance of recent political move-
ments. I think we shall see that even the political in-
terest has its centre in the problem of prosperity, that the
political awakening has had its centre in the financial prob-
lem involved in prosperity. The political awakening goes
back a decade and more. First there came a realizing
sense of the degradation of American cities, the realiza-
tion that our American cities were about the worst gov-
erned parts of the civilized world. Dr. Andrew D.
White long ago declared that nowhere in the civilized
world, except perhaps in Constantinople, could such ap-
palling depths of political degradation be found as in
the cities of the United States. And, realizing the degra-
dations, some of the leaders turned to consider the
causes which they found in the alignment of parties and

170 MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF RECENT EVENTS.

in partisan appropriation of spoils. To check this source
of corruption civil service reform was instituted, and
the holding of office made more a matter of worthiness and
efficiency. But it was soon discovered that this was not
enough, that there was a danger in the relationship of
national and municipal politics, the interests of the city
being secondary to the interests of state and national cam-
paigns ; and so there came a movement to separate muni-
cipal from national politics, carried out in some of the
cities by the appointment of a different time for the hold-
ing of national and local elections. But it is beginning to
be realized that these methods, previously tried, are not
sufficiently effective, that instead of governments by par-
ties, we have governments by a few within the party,
called the "ring," and not so much by the ring as by the
man who is at the centre of the ring, whom we call the
"boss." And so there has come a movement throughout
the United States, particularly in the great cities, in op-
position to bossism. It has come to be realized that the
government of our American cities is not a government
by parties, nor even the government by one political force
against another; but the suspicion, at least, has grown,
from consideration of ample evidence, that whatever the
party in power, there is an alliance of party bosses with
each other, and with the corporations whose interests be-
come their own. It is this situation that explains the up-
rising in 1905 against the bosses, with instances of which
we are familiar in connection with Philadelphia, Boston,
New York, and other cities, large and small, throughout
the land.

This political awakening itself seems to be in large
part due to an interest in the financial well-being of the
community, to the feeling on the part of citizens that what
they pay in taxes does not go to legitimate ends of public
improvements, but to the purse of those who rob the city.

MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF RECENT EVENTS. I7I

Our citizenship has been measured, in part at least, by the
standard of the purse, and it is against the threatened dan-
ger to the financial well-being of citizens and of the com-
munity, that we have been aroused.

If I interpret rightly the significance of these events, it
is that we have become sensitive to our financial rights,
and that we have asserted ourselves for their maintenance.
In all these discussions the moral interest has been but lit-
tle considered. In the discussion of the insurance inves-
tigation much has been said about the need that the money
set apart for widows and orphans should be forthcoming.
There has been slight accentuation of the moral degra-
dation implied in the breach of financial trusts. We have
not as a people cried out against the wrong, only against
the financial danger. We have not held up the lofty ideal
of American citizenship, but we have concerned ourselves
with the financial danger involved in political corruption.
In other words, while there has been a gratifying appeal
to the American people on their own behalf, while there
has been an appeal, which in the very nature of it must
arouse the energies of the community, that appeal has
been based upon the desire for financial well-being.

Tlie task that remains for the future is that of seeing the
present agitations in the light of moral well-being, until
at last we shall regard the violation of a moral principle
as more dangerous to our interests than the violation of
a financial trust ; and regard a wrong done to a commun-
it3^ as more threatening to moral welfare than to finan-
cial interests. In other words, to realize the demands of
the moral life upon all people, and to realize that financial
well-being, even, is involved in the issues of the moral law.
The task awaiting the coming years is to re-awaken the
public to the sense of moral obligation, and to stimulate
it to the fulfillment of the moral ends of social as of per-
sonal life.

THE REACTION OF THE PUBLIC
AGAINST MORAL EVILS.*

By Dr. John Lovejoy Elliott.

To one who watches as he comes and goes among the
people of the city, more especially among those who are
known as the working people, those who live in the tene-
ment houses, it has seemed sometimes as though that
spirit which puts an individual privilege before a public
duty was all powerful. We call it the spirit of graft, and
that spirit has been strong everywhere, but particularly is
it likely to take hold of those who have not had the ad-
vantage of a large and full education. Instincts, the
untrained mind, and the daily newspaper are their chief
guides, the newspaper influences everyone, but it is the
all in all to those who have read nothing else. Then they
have their choice of the newspapers and that which appeals
to them is that which amuses, that which excites the evil
as well as the good in them; and the spirit of graft that
has been breathed into the very life of the working man,
is a thing that is so heart-sickening that it is utterly impos-
sible to put it into words. They are dependent, too, on
their leaders. The crowd, the public, originates no new
movement. They are dependent on the strong individual,
and the greedy hand of the small man and the weak man
has so often been extended, trying to reach that which
the hand of the strong man takes.

In a sense, I think, a moral revolt has come and it is like
a very breath from heaven. The public seems stirred.

* An Address before the Society for Ethical Culture of New
York, Sunday, December 31, 1905.
172

\

PUBLIC REACTION AGAINST MORAL EVILS. 1 73

Long, very long has it been since any great num-
ber of men, any state or city has put forth its full
power — a class here, a few there, but the full might
of public opinion for a long time has not been roused. We
who are grateful for it now ask, how long will it last?
What will be the outcome? Will it simply be the means
of creating some little social scheme, some mere pretense,
some patent method of social reform? Will it play into
the hands of the "Isomist ?" or, as so many are inclined to
think, will it merely die out, leaving as a sole record a
few besmirched names and a few memories that will bring
out the cynical smiles in the future? Will it all die out
and leave no real effect ?

It may be readily said that this present resentment and
stir in public opinion will find expression in laws. Yes, but
we know very well how easily laws are made and broken
in this country. We are too familiar with the sight of
law breaking, from the man going into the side door of a
saloon on Sunday all the way up to the man who breaks
the inter-state commerce law. Through and through we
are used to the sight of law breakers in all classes. The
foreign papers say of us that from our highest executive
down, no law stands in the way, when we have set
our heart on anything, be it power or be it wealth. We
have no notion nor any strong faith in the sacredness of
law.

But, it may be said, that there have been convictions of
evildoers. Yes, it is true that there have been convictions,
and we are grateful for them, and we have been taught by
them, and have been benefited by them. Certain men
have gone to jail, and we are glad of it. Indeed, here
in New York, it seems to me that there is almost a mob
spirit of resentment. We are familiar, to our shame and
infinite injury, with the mob spirit, the lynching, by those
who pretend to be enforcing the right. And we have a

174 PUBLIC REACTION AGAINST MORAL EVILS.

little of that mob spirit among us now ; whereas just a few
months ago it would have been almost impossible to have
gotten certain convictions, to-day it would go hard with
almost any man who was brought up before twelve citizens
of New York City to be tried on the accusation of having
been false to a trust. The public is irritated, it is glad to
hear of conviction, and the juries are only too ready to
•convict a man now as they were too slow before.

Laws will do us good. The convictions will do us good,
but it seems to me that one, if he listens, hears a better
note. It has been struck very clearly by Mr. Washington
Gladden, in his new book; and one hears it, too, among the
social workers, putting aside so much of the cant and fad-
ism, nevertheless in our social training schools and serious
attempts at social work, one finds a new and important
element. The same thing is found again, in the lives of
some men who have gone into politics, who are office
holders and among those who are only voters, and that
note is this, the emphasis on the duty rather than on the
mere rights.

In this countr}' we are very prone to assert our rights.
"The right," says the Declaration of Independence, "to
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ;" and the Amer-
icans think very largely that their democracy is a means
of asserting their right, and that idea of the right is the
thing that has been emphasized from the date of the De-
claration of Independence down. It is emphasized in our
laws, in the legislative chambers, everywhere one hears
that note, "It is my right to be the equal of every other
man that is in the world." That note of rights has been
sounded most strongly.

And now we find that this is not enough. The idea that
a man has a right to vote leads behind it by the hand the
right to do as he pleases with his vote. If he has a right

PUBLIC REACTION AGAINST MORAL EVILS. 1 75

to vote, he has a right not to vote and sit home. If he has
a right to that vote, many men think it justifiable to sell it
and do just as they please. He has a right to run for an
office, and he has the right to use that office for a spoil. If
we take it from the side of the duty of voting, of holding
office, it gives an entirely different attitude. If one has a
duty, he has a duty to someone, the duty tov^ards the state
is the real thing to be regarded, v^hen we consider our
public privileges and franchises. And I think, more and
more clearly in the life of those who are working in the
social cause, in the words and the acts of those who are
voting, and those who are doing public work, one hears
this thought, that it is my duty to do these things. It is
my obligation, not simply my privilege.

When we as a people so recognize that we not only have
inalienable rights but inalienable duties, then dawns our
true democracy, then we will understand really what the
American democracy is, but not until we recognize our
inalienable duty as well as emphasize our inalienable right
will that time come. That is the difference between true
and false democracy, and the two elements are struggling
for ascendency to-day.

And when we recognize these duties, then comes another
great thing, and that is a sense of the sacredness and the
holiness of our land and our government. There are
many who affect — there are many who have a real con-
tempt for the crowd, for the majority, yet it is the public
whose voice is sovereign and we believe that that sov-
ereignty has been well placed, and yet it is so slightingly
treated. It seems to me that the spirit that produced the
Bible is in this thing. The Bible was produced because
men believed that there was something infinitely precious,
sacred and holy in the affairs of men. That has been too
much lacking with us, and yet deep in our hearts we know

176 PUBLIC REACTION AGAINST MORAL EVILS.

that the sovereign power in this land is a sacred power;
deeply and truly we know that ; yet it is only through the
recognition of our duties towards that power that we can
learn to appreciate it. I believe that one hears
it and sees it, and feels that sacredness more truly each
year, and with that feeling we may greet, not only the
New Year, but the new time with gladness and with
hope, daring to believe that sometime the voice of the peo-
ple will be the voice of God.

IMPENDING CHANGES.*

By Prof. Felix Adler.

The vista of the future is shut out by a curtain, which
the forward-reaching mind of man in vain endeavors to
penetrate. Our anticipations of future events are for the
most part pictures which fancy paints on the curtain,
which amuse the eye as long as the curtain is down, but
give no inkHng of the scenes which shall surprise our
sight when the heavy drapery is lifted. And so far as
our private affairs are concerned, this ignorance is per-
haps an unmitigated blessing. "Who can live with ever-
lasting burnings ?" says the Bible. Who but the few heroic
souls could live with their own future, if the prospect of
it were disclosed? Certain happy turns of fortune, un-
expected by us at the present moment would indeed be
revealed. Promotions, gratified ambitions, new friend-
ships, suprises of love, children or children's children
born to us ; the gates of opportunity open that now seem
shut! But coupled with these, what grim attendants,
what loss, what disappointments, what remote afflictions,
what obscure and perplexed sorrows ; and at the end, un-
avoidable by any of us — Pallida Mors — Pale Death! —
under forms of suffering and physical decay which — ^how
many of us would care to picture ! Let the curtain, then,
so far as our private fates are concerned, remain unlifted,
and let us continue to amuse ourselves if we will by paint-
ing pictures of fancy on the curtain.

But as to the larger affairs of mankind, this is not so ;
there is an inextinguishable desire to look even a little way

* An Address before the Society for Ethical Culture of New
York, Sunday, December 31, 1905.

177

1/8 IMPENDING CHANGES.

ahead. And this has its positive use, in so far as it enables
us to shape our course for ourselves and for those whom
we can influence. The question is often put : What course
is likely to be taken by civilization during the decades that
lie before us ? And by the course of civilization and the
progress of civilization, is generally understood the course
and progress on its material side, the multiplication of in-
ventions and discoveries which will store the arsenals of
mankind with new implements of power, power to subject
nature to man's uses and to increase the commodities and
conveniences of life. Speculation on these topics is rife,
and expectation is keyed up to an intense pitch. Already
an eminent physician has declared, that the total amount
of pain alleviated or prevented by modern methods of
dealing with disease exceeds the pain suffered ; and bright
hopes are held out that the medical profession will score
still other and more signal victories, that the cure of such
terrible maladies as phthisis and cancer and the like will
be achieved, and even that human life may be prolonged
beyond its present term. Experts who consecrate their
strength to the study of the physical forces, dazzle us
with brilliant promise of what electricity as a substitute
for steam may be expected to accomplish in the near
future. The task of replacing human muscle by machin-
ery will be pushed more and more vigorously, we are told,
until beneficent labor-saving devices will relieve the
masses of the load of drudgery that has been placed upon
them. And the solution of the question of poverty, to
which the brain of reformers and philanthropists has thus
far been unequal, is expected to come in some measure
as a by-product of scientific and mechanical inventions.
There are visions also of new modes of locomotion.
Goethe's passionate longing to soar through the air like a
bird may be fulfilled by the airship. There are even ten-

i

IMPENDING CHANGES. 179

tative but obstinate beliefs in some quarters that a bridge
of communication may be built between our own and
other planets — the planet Mars, for instance — so that in
time, Tennyson's dream of ''the ParHament of Man," may
be enlarged to embrace the denizens of other planets than
our own, and we may come to speak of a Parliament of
the Solar System. Of these dreams or speculations I
have little here to say. Some of them may prove to be
auspicious precursors of future blessings, shadows cast
beforehand of good things to come. Others may be no
better than unsubstantial and baseless figments of the hu-
man brain.

But what I am here concerned with, is the progress of
civilization not on the side of invention and scientific dis-
covery, but on the moral side, and to warn against the
disastrous mistake that the two necessarily go together.
Mr. James Bryce in an essay on "Marriage and Divorce,"
after referring to the astonishing advancement of the
physical sciences and the industrial arts during the past
hundred years, concludes his remarks by pointing to the
ominous fact, that pari passu with this astounding de-
velopment we are witnessing in all so-called civilized coun-
tries a portentious increase of three social diseases : insan-
ity, suicide, and divorce. There are other indications
to show that moral relaxation and even retrogres-
sion is quite compatible with material advancement. And
the question for us to consider is, what is Hkely to be the
course of civilization on its moral side, and what the signs
are — if any there be — that indicate the course of the
world's moral development in the approaching lustrums.

Is war likely to cease, or at least to become less fre-
quent? Some weeks ago, when the American and British
war-ships were anchored in the Hudson River, I visited
one of these modern battle machines. How shapely it

l80 IMPENDING CHANGES.

seemed, how white and inviting, how perfect in all its ap-
pointments ; how innocently it lay in its watery berth, how
attractive in its holiday attire ! And yet I could not help
thinking, as I allowed my imagination to play on the use
that might some day be made of these terrible engines of
destruction, what an anomaly it all is, and what a fearful
indictment against the thing which we smoothly call civ-
ilization. As a matter of fact, the progress of science
itself has created these new modes of rending human flesh
and, despite the tribunal at the Hague, the rule of the mul-
titude and the frightful celerity with which the passions
of the multitude find expression, lend but a slight color
to the hope that these battle-ships will soon be cast upon
the scrap heap.

Is woman likely to make good in civilized countries the
position of equality with man which she is everywhere
claiming? And, if so, are the precious ideals of gentle-
ness and moral suasion for which womanhood has stood
in the past to be combined with the new ideals, and to be
carried over, an assured possession, into the coming
age ? Are the poor at last to inherit the earth ? Are the
weak to be protected, to be respected ; or is exploitation by
the strong will to go on, as in the centuries that have pre-
ceded ?

To these questions who would undertake to give a con-
fident answer? Prediction indeed is the part of fanatics
or fools, of those whose assurance is based on inveterate
prepossession, of those who fail to perceive the infinite
variety of conditions on which the issue of future events
depends. But there are certain changes in the moral world
which one can clearly foresee, because they are already
upon us, and which are impending only in the sense
that causes already operative must unfold further. The
great problem with regard to these is not one of prophecy,

IMPENDING CHANGES. l8l

but of active interference on our part, so that by
our own resolute and determined efforts we may turn
them in the right direction. Of these impending changes,
which indeed are already upon us, there are three to
which I wish to call attention.

The first of these changes is, that ideals are everywhere
shuffling off their mortal coil, and are left in a state com-
parable to that of a soul without a body. Not that ideals
have as yet lost their power, but they have lost their bod-
ies. Will the world be able to get on with only these dis-
embodied powers ? Will the powers retain their dynamic
force under such circumstances? Nobody, for instance
would be justified in saying that the belief in a trium-
phant goodness in the world is less in the area it covers,
in the intensity with which it is held, than in former
times. But the idea of that goodness in things is in
many minds no longer conceived to be incarnated in an
individual being, to whom one can address supplications
and properly sing praise, with whom one can have inter-
course— in fine, a being like man, however inexpressibly
greater than man. Can men retain their grasp of the
ideal after they have lost hold of this human symbol of
it? Will not the roses wither when the vase that held
them is shattered? To which, of course, the answer is,
that if the roses of faith are cut flowers, they will wither
without the vase ; but that if they are living flowers, they
need no vase but only soil — and the soil, the human heart,
remains.

And the same change is true in the State. What a god-
like Jehovah is in relation to the eternal tendency toward
the good in the world, namely, a visible incarnation, that
the king is or has been with relation to the ideal of the
State. The king in his person represented the majesty,
the sovereignty, the empire, the dominion of the larger

l82 IMPENDING CHANGES.

body politic whereof we are members, its super-eminent
claim upon us, its august title to obedience. The king
on his throne, in his purple robes, crowned amid the pomp
and ceremony of his court, is the idea of the State per-
sonified, visible to men. The idea still remains, but the
personification has disappeared or is disappearing. Will
the world be able to get on without the prop and support
of the images that embody the idea, and give it a palpable
nearness? Mankind have always been idolators, in the
sense that they worship the higher things of life in the
guise of images. Are they ready to lift their eyes to the
high heaven where the unincorporated Deity dwells?
That is the great question which the future will -have to
settle.

On the other hand, the change is already upon us. It
is not we who have brought about the fading of kingship
in religion and politics. The world wakes up — or at
least a great part of it — and finds that its old worships,
its old royalties in heaven and earth have disappeared, and
at the same time the awful dread comes upon us that the
world has lost the old before it is yet ready for the new.
As a matter of fact, though the ideals are still powerful,
it cannot be denied that respect for the superior claims of
the body politic is diminishing, and the conviction of the
eternal power that makes for righteousness is failing in
the minds of many. The idea of God as it was held, the
idea of king as it obtained, are but embodiments of ideas
which are true beyond and without these incarnations.
But is the world prepared to grasp the truth without the
help of the embodiments?

There are two ways of apprehending an ideal and con-
vincing one's self that it is a real thing. The one is by the
outer sense, the other by the inner sense. The one is by
seeing the idea illustrated outside of ourselves, the other

IMPENDING CHANGES. 1 83

is by realizing it through our own experience. For in-
stance, if you wish to convince yourself that self-sacri-
fice is not an idea but a real force, a thing capable of being
^actualized, you may get this conviction by contemplating
le image of Christ — the type of self-sacrifice ; or you may
^et the conviction by being yourself a servant and minis-
;r, and suppressing your selfish inclinations. The latter
tis the only way that remains to us, if we have lost the be-
[lief in the embodiment. It is the way of to-day, the way
:of realization through actual inner experience; and hence
we speak of the religion of deed as the religion that will
imost help us, however other forms of religion may help
[others.

The second great change that is upon us is the ten-
dency to apply the notion of equality, to an extent that
[has never in the world's history been attempted before.
We have had the doctrine of equality applied to citizen-
ship in the form of universal suffrage. We have had the
same doctrine applied to the relations of the sexes. The
tendency is at present for women to become more and
more like men, as far as possible to ignore even the fun-
damental differences of the sexes. In education, in voca-
tion, even in dress the likeness is emphasized. We have
had the doctrine of equality applied to the social classes.
The equal distribution of wealth, the complete reduction
of society to a level, is the dream of some social re-
formers. And now we are witnessing the attempt to ap-
ply the same idea to nations. There was in ancient times
a certain genial host, named Procrustes. He was very
glad to entertain strangers, but he had the eccentricity to
compel them all to sleep in the same bed, and to fit them
to this bed. If they happened to be too short, he stretched
their limbs until they had attained to the right dimen-
sions. If they happened to be too long, he cut off their

184 IMPENDING CHANGES.

limbs to make them fit. The spirit of Procrustes is
abroad in the present age, and what is called Western
civilization is the bed. The example of Japan has per-
suaded many of the correctness of this procedure. In
four decades Japan has put on what is called Western civi-
ization, and has even outstripped nations of the West in
military and scientific achievements. At the same time,
there are grave fears that the beautiful art of Japan will
suffer, in consequence of the ruthless manner in which
Western ideas have been introduced; that the tender
pieties which mark the home life of the Japanese will suf-
fer and that above all, industrialism and individualism
(already in the cruel exploitation of child labor Japan has
attained an unenviable eminence) will set its pernicious
mark on the Japanese character. The nation, like the
individual, owes something to its past traditions, its
idosyncrasies, its temperament, its genius. It cannot
put off its genius like a worn-out garment and invest
itself with the genius of another nation, without pay-
ing the penalties. It cannot lie in the bed of Procrustes
without suffering mutilation. In the same manner, the
children of the Philippine Islands are now being com-
pelled to learn the English language, a language alien
to them and unconfined to their antecedents, and in
other ways are being pressed into the American mould.
In the same way we are witnessing on a frightfully
enormous scale the attempt to extemporize a republic
among the Russian people, the great majority of whom
are still at heart monarchial, an attempt to transplant
bodily into the dominions of the Czar ideals which have
elsewhere had their growth, and whose worth is due to
their answering the requirements of a totally different
environment.

For my own part I am convinved that the doctrine of

IMPENDING CHANGES. 185

equality is being pushed too far. What will be the out-
come of the attempt to extend it to every nation and every
people ? Will there be a reaction ; will there, as a result,
spring up a recognition of the ethical value of contempor-
ary inequality ? Will the direction of men's thoughts "
change? Will the tyranny of the Procrustean idea be
lifted from the modern mind? This is one of the ques-
tions concerning which I should like to be informed. At
least we can work in the right direction, whether we can
change the course of events or not.

And one other change of which I should like to speak
is coming to pass among the Western people themselves,
the nations of Europe and America, who consider them-
selves to be in the van of civilization. That is the in-
coming of the multitude, the accession to power and in-
fluence of the masses. I am thoroughly democratic in
sympathy, and do not believe that the tide can be turned,
or that any attempt should be made to turn it. At the
same time, it is idle to disguise the fact that the first effect
of the accession of the masses to influence has been pro-
ductive of much evil. The state of journalism at the
present day is one evidence. The newspapers, as a rule
are graded down to the tastes and the intellectual stand-
ards of the masses. The "yellow journals" so-called, do
but reflect the color of the minds of their readers — the
love of sensation and exciting news — outrageous over-
statements, appeal side by side in the columns of the same
newspapers to the better and the worst side of human
nature. The state of the theatres is another evidence. So
also is the condition of politics. And so also is the spread
of materialistic views of life. There has always been cor-
ruption, there has always been greed, often more acute
in its manifestations than at present; but never has the
number of persons affected by the prevailing worship of

1 86 IMPENDING CHANGES.

external things been so great, because never before have
the masses been admitted as they are to-day to a share in
the competitive struggle.

Under these circumstances, what is chiefly needed is not
retrogression to old conditions, which is both undesir-
able and impracticable, but a manful attempt to face the
new situation and meet its specific needs. And the specific
need of the age, with the accession of the multitude to in-
fluence, is a new type of leadership, to repress their follies,
check their passions, guide the flood into the channels of
safety and of true progress. We have no real leaders;
that is the radical cause of evils which afflict us. The
vast incoherent masses are left to their own instincts, im-
pulse and guidance. The political leaders are distrusted,
partly because they are selfish, partly because they are
venal. Social leadership is in the hands of the wealthy,
whose reign is confined to the world of fashion and man-
ners, and who are both unwilling and incompetent to be
leaders in the world of ideas.

It is to the educated class that we must look for leader-
ship, to those whose life is favorable to reflection. It
is the more developed that must have pity on the less de-
veloped, and take the reins. Thus, for instance, in regard
to the moral evils disclosed by the recent legislative in-
vestigation into the business of insurance, it is not enough
to reprobate the crimes that have been committed, or to
put into the pillory the men who have offended. It is
above all things necessary to extract and to place in clear
relief the positive moral rule that should prevail in fiduc-
iary relations ; the rule that no one may enter into transac-
tions with himself, no matter how blameless his intention.
This rule must serve as a standard, pledging those who
express it, and imposing itself by the authority of its own
rightfulness to others. And so in regard to the spread of

I

IMPENDING CHANGES. 187

divorce, it is not enough to condemn the guilty, or to de-
plore the excesses and the affronts on the moral sense of
the community. It is necessary to bring into clear relief
the rule that the social order depends on the expectation
of permanency in the marriage relation, and that whatever
laws or practices are incompatible with and tend to en-
feeble the expectation of permanency are morally wrong.

And it is not enough that individuals should say these
things in the press and on the platform. That there may
be a change for the better, the educated classes must
speak with the gathered force that belongs to collective
utterance. Literary societies should pass resolutions on
these subjects, should speak out publicly and call what is
wrong, wrong. Medical societies and associations of law-
yers should speak out. Above all, churches and ethical
societies should express themselves as societies.

And here our own Ethical Society has an opportunity
and a duty. We too, have not spoken collectively on
these great subjects of the moral life. If anyone asks
you what the Ethical Society stands for, you will reply
that it stands for the conviction that the moral end of
life is the highest end; that morality is independent of
creed and theory. But apart from these general affirma-
tions, decisive and of capital importance as they unques-
tionably are, if anyone asks what are the specific moral
precepts for which we stand, you may point to the
printed pamphlets which contain the utterances of the
platform speakers. But these are private and personal
expressions of opinion, having no binding force except
for him who makes them. There is needed beyond these
personal utterances something collective, the binding and
pledging of ourselves at least in regard to the great moral
issues that are to-day of paramount import, concerning
which the need of distinct affirmation, so that the standard

1 88 IMPENDING CHANGES.

may be fixed for those who waver, is urgent. I trust
that some progress in this connection may be made during
the coming year, that the Trustees of the Society and the
Membership of the Society in special meetings that might
be called for the purpose, may take the initial steps to-
ward securing a practical agreement on some of the
great moral issues which the platform already stands for,
but which the force of the society in its collective capa-
city shall support and commit itself to.

These are some of the things which have occupied my
mind — New Year's speculations and New Year's hopes.
It is not so much the particular thoughts themselves as the
opening of the outlook that I care for. It is well that we
should raise our eyes to the hills to discern "whence our
help cometh." And not only raise our eyes, but rise our-
selves to the hilltops and take in the prospect. It is well
in any case, that we should transcend from time to time
the thought of our private affairs that is constantly press-
ing upon us ; of our business plans and anxieties ; of our
domestic burdens, even the tender and inescapable ones
which the love of others offers our hearts and minds.
Yes, even these it is well for us at times to transcend, to
sink out of sight; and just to think and feel as if we were
the human race itself personified ; as if the future of man-
kind were the one concern that is near and vital to us ; to
throb with the life of our race, and feel the spirit that ani-
mates it cleanse and uplift our own. That, it seems to me,
is the most fit preparation for the New Year's Eve, a
worthy consecration of the change of time. For as
Goethe somewhere puts it: "time is my furrow, time is
my field" — a field and furrow in which we can sow the
seeds of eternal thought and eternal purpose.

MORAL CONDITIONS IN AMERICAN

LIFE, IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT

REVELATIONS.*

By Felix Adler.

During the past summer some very painful revelations
have occurred. Some of those persons who have occu-
pied "the seats of the mighty" in this community, have
been thrust down from their height, and have been piti-
fully humbled. Others have come off with less blemished
reputations, but will never again raise their heads so high.

We may not gloat over the downfall of the eminent,
nor take pleasure in the overthrow of reputations. Rather,
I say that we are all humiliated, and as a community dis-
graced, when those whom we have respected are put into
the public pillory. The investigation is not yet at an end,
and we do not know to what further depths we may have to
descend. But this much is evident : the evils which have
been brought into view are but the symptoms of a disease
which runs deep into American life. It is not the par-
ticular individuals who have suffered in esteem and repu-
tation, but the disease and its pro found underlying causes,
that we are bound to consider. And we are to consider,
furthermore, to what extent each one of us is contributing
or has contributed to this condition.

In regard to the recent insurance revelations, I am par-
ticularly impressed by two facts. First, by the fact that
the peculiarly sacred character of the fund, as being the
fund of widows and orphans, the savings which a man
lays aside in order to make provision for those who come

* An Address before the Society for Ethical Culture of New York.

i8q

IQO MORAL CONDITIONS IN AMERICAN LIFE.

after him — I say that the peculiarly sacred character of
the fund did not keep it inviolable.

And then, also, there is something else which, in a
sense, is even more ominous than outright crime. Crime
is doing that which is forbidden when one knows that it
is forbidden — sinning against the light. But more alarm-
ing even is the moral obfuscation, the sophistication of
the moral judgment, the obscuration of the ordinary moral
perceptions, which have been revealed in this investigation.
As it is written, "If the light in you becomes darkness,
how great is that darkness?" One cannot rightly profit
by a fund of which he is trustee. That is elementary;
that is of the essence of the fiduciary relation. And yet
men prominent in financial circles seem to have been
quite in the dark as to this A, B, C of morals. One
cannot be buyer and seller in the same person — cannot deal
with himself in a dual capacity. A Secretary of the United
States Treasury, for instance, in case a new treasury build-
ing is to be erected, may not at the same time be the con-
tractor to put up that building ; he may not as Secretary of
the Treasury, deal with himself as contractor, no matter
how honestly in his capacity as contractor, he intends to
deal with himself in his character as Secretary. And
why not ? Because it is a general principle in morals that
any conduct which, though in particular cases it may admit
of honesty, is yet of a kind to involve a violent temptation
to dishonesty, shall be prohibited. The Secretary of the
Treasury may be an honest contractor, but in such a situa-
tion self-interest and the public interest entrusted to him
are almost certain to conflict ; the temptation to dishonesty
is violent, and human nature being as it is, that sort of
conduct is rightly regarded with moral reprobation.

Again in regard to contributions to political funds, we
find the same amazing sophistication of the moral judg-

MORAL CONDITIONS IN AMERICAN LIFE. I9I

ment. A man who stood high in the community publicly
admits that he has contributed many thousands of dollars
from the funds of the corporation with which he is con-
nected, for political campaign purposes — and he assumes
that the public at large will condone or even approve such
action. Here, too, we are dealing with elementary matters
in morals, with the moral A, B, C. To appropriate the
funds of a corporation, of which I am a member, without
my consent or knowledge, in order to promote the success
at the polls of a political party to which I am opposed, is
plainly to rob me of my citizenship, to arbitrarily curtail
and neutralize the effect of my opinions on th^ conduct of
public affairs. But aside from this, it is acting in con-
travention to the general rule which I have just enunciated,
— namely, that any conduct which exposes the doer to
violent temptation to dishonesty, is reprehensible. For even
assuming the contributions to be dictated by honest
motives (unfortunately we have reason to suspect and
more than suspect the existence and influence of very im-
proper motives), even assuming the president of this great
insurance society to have been honestly convinced that a
financial peril had arisen, which required that the funds
of the policy-holders should go to the support of the party
that was engaged in warding off that peril, nevertheless,
his action was wholly unjustifiable. The temptations that
spring from partisan bias, like those that spring from self-
interest, are violent in character ; and though in a particu-
lar case a man may act honestly despite partisan bias, yet
as a general rule partisan bias turns the scale, and there-
fore no action in which the door is opened to the influences
of partisan bias should be sanctioned.

And, finally, we have the most lamentable plea of all :
that it is necessary to corrupt legislatures in self-defence ;
that political blackmailers must be conciliated; that the

192 MORAL CONDITIONS IN AMERICAN LIFE.

head of a corporation, who is charged with the responsi-
bility of protecting the interests of his corporation, cannot
afford to wait until the community is reformed politically
and the blackmailers are driven from power, but must,
when they waylay him, conform to their demand. But the
two parties to the transaction create and sustain each
other; the corporations engaged in questionable business
or using questionable methods sustain the political ban-
ditti, and conversely. It seems to me indubitable that the
great corporations could throw their case into the court of
public opinion and defy the attacks of the political black-
mailer, if they could enter the court of public opinion with
clean hands, if their own records were unsmirched. It
is because they cannot afford to appear in the court of
public opinion that they are compelled to give way. There
are also, it is true, instances of perfectly legitimate busi-
ness, suffering annoyance, inconvenience and injury, from
the petty persecutions of corrupt officials. But I cannot
admit that the annoyance or the inconvenience or the in-
jury constitute a sufficient reason for paying the tribute.
It is for the most part cowardice that makes men pay it.
If the honest men engaged in legitimate business, who are
exposed to these persecutions, were manfully to withstand
them, they would soon raise a storm in the community that
would sweep the whole bad system out of existence. And,
in fine, no one has a right to pay a bribe. Any one who
pays a bribe is assisting in spreading corruption. Even
if inconvenience and loss are for a time unavoidable they
must be endured. For since when is it true that moral
duty is obligatory only when duty can be performed with-
out inconvenience and loss ?

But, to turn from the consideration of the symptoms toj
that of the disease itself, I wish to say that what is wron|
with us is our ideal of wealth. In this country there he

MORAL CONDITIONS IN AMERICAN LIFE. I93

come to be entertained an ideal realized only by the few.
It is estimated that there are, perhaps, between two and
three thousand millionaires in the United States. Among
these are a few multi-millionaires. The ideal, realized only
by the few, is however entertained by the many, and it is
this wrong ideal that poisons the fountains of our public
and commercial life.

When I say "ideal," there ar some who may think that
I am indulging in theoretical speculations, which are very
remote from the practical concerns of men. Of ideals,
people say, we can properly speak, when we discuss re-
ligion or art, but there is no connection between ideals and
business. That is a great mistake. There is not a busi-
ness man who has not his ideal. Everybody has ideals.
Ideals are the moving forces in the world. What is an
ideal? The word "ideal" means an imaginary picture in
the mind of what is desirable. And according to our
ideals will be our conduct. We all have imaginary pict-
ures in our minds of what is desirable, and they prod us
on. Ideals may be fine or gross, but, in every case, an
ideal is a picture in the mind of what we should like to be
or to have. The main evil in American life is that our
ideals need correcting, especially the ideal of unlimited
wealth. Suppose I could become an American Croesus,
like those whose names are in every newspaper, should I
desire to be such a Croesus? Not until I have answered
that question in the negative have I ceased to contribute
to the disease, the symptoms of which are revealed to us
in the insurance investigation.

We hear on all side to-day, from social reformers and
from the spokesmen of the working classes, protests
against the inequalities of wealth. There is no lack of
declamation and protestation against the wrong that a few
should have these hundreds of millions, and that the many

194 MORAL CONDITIONS IN AMERICAN LIFE.

should be relatively deprived of goods; the complaint is
that the many have not what the few have. But suppose
it were possible for all to be as wealthy as the wealthiest
now are, would such a state of things be desirable ? Not
until we can see that that ideal is vicious, and that that
dream is sordid, shall we cease to contribute to the Ameri-
can disease. The fallacy is to suppose that those who
have these fabulous fortunes have attained the life that
is best worth while.

Now what reason have I for saying that that is a mis-
take, and that we should correct our ideal of unlimited
wealth ? First, one cannot get the great wealth as a rule
without paying too great a price for it. There is a certain
road that leads to the golden land, but one must pass
through a toll-gate, and the keeper exacts his toll which one
must pay ; one must do certain things which it would be
far better not to do. There may be exceptions, but I think
the impression is justified, that as a rule, the great for-
tunes are not accumulated without grievous wrong-doing,
violence, oppression, unfair advantage-taking in some
form.

We can all see that in extreme cases we should not care
to pay the price of wealth. Suppose it were put to you
that you could inherit a great fortune if you would commit
a murder, and that you could be assured that the crime
would never become known, you would not surely be
willing to have the wealth with that condition annexed to
it, to be forever after haunted by the sense of the crime
you had committed. The wealth might seem very desir-
able indeed, but you would not take it coupled with that
condition. The same is true in a lesser degree of other
crimes. In a large proportion of all great fortunes, I
fear, there is coupled with the wealth the remembrance of
a price paid for it, and for paying which a man must hate

MORAL CONDITIONS IN AMERICAN LIFE. I95

himself. Then it is a thousand times better not to pay that
price, not to sign that pact.

In the Bible it is said that Satan took Jesus to the top
of a high mountain and showed him all the wealth of the
world, and said, "This will I give to you if you will fall
down and worship me." That does not mean that Satan
wanted him to fall down on his knees and assume the atti-
tude of worship. He wanted him to worship him prac-
tically, by doing the things which the devil does. So one
can have wealth if one is willing to do devilish things. I
am far from saying that this is true of all wealth — that
would be an extravagant statement; but I am afraid it
is true of most of those fabulous fortunes which seem so
dazzling.

Then again when we consider the state of mind of the
wealth-getter — I am now thinking especially of the Ameri-
can type of wealth-getter, the man who is continually
seeking to get more and more — it does not appear admir-
able or enviable. The desire for wealth becomes for him
a kind of mania ; he is in the grip of a passion which gives
him no rest; he is the victim of an obsession; he does
not truly enjoy life; he has no leisure; his mind moves in
a single groove ; he is afflicted with what the Greeks called
Pleonexia, the desire always to get more and more.
Avarice is like the grave. The Bible says of the grave
that its jaws are always wide open — that it always cries
for more, more. It does not seem to me that the man who
is afflicted by this disease is enviable. Certain faculties
in him are over-developed, but the nobler faculties tend to
be atrophied. Especially is this the case with respect to
disinterestedness.

The habit of mind developed by the pursuit of riches
is the calculating habit, the question always in mind is,
What is there in it for me ? How much can I gain ? The

196 MORAL CONDITIONS IN AMERICAN LIFE.

reference is always selfish. Now it is a curious fact that
we cannot exercise any of our noblest faculties unless we
are unselfish. It is generally believed that morality and
unselfishness are indistinguishable. It is not so commonly
perceived that science and art, the satisfaction of our in-
tellectual and our artistic nature, equally depend upon our
ability to maintain the disinterested attitude. Disinter-
estedness is essential to our living the higher life, not only
in morals, but in science and in art. The habit of the
wealth-getter is such as to make it difficult for him to take
this disinterested attitude of mind ; and therefore it makes
it difficult for him to really enjoy the best things in life,
to really obtain the satisfactions not only of the moral life
but of the intellectual and artistic life on its highest level.
The true man of science is self-effacing. He labors not
for pecuniary reward or personal glory; his high aim is
to advance truth; he sinks himself in the objective pursuit
of truth ; his whole life is spent in the effort to increase the
fund of knowledge. As soon as any personal considera-
tion enters in, as soon as he descends so as to coin his
discoveries into gold, to make that an end, or to win repu-
tation, he pays the penalty. He may be an ingenious in-
ventor, but he will not be a first-rate man of science. The
eager haste to get riches, or to achieve a reputation,
will often tempt him to publish his fancied results pre-
maturely, tempt him perhaps even to falsify the results;
he is likely to become more or less of a charlatan. It is
not possible to be a scientist in the highest sense and to
be selfish. There is something about science that requires
complete devotion and consecration. The same is equally
true of art. The great artists have been noted for utter
self-denial, for disdain of wealth, contempt for mere pop-
ular favors; their one desire being just to win the elu-
sive thing, beauty ; to see it and embody it.

MORAL CONDITIONS IN AMERICAN LIFE. I97

We have examples of the most bountiful provision for
the advancement of science, on the part of men whose
whole lives have been spent in getting riches. The wealth-
getter can promote science — thus much grace is granted
to him — but he is not likely to take the scientific attitude
himself ; he cannot obtain the satisfactions which are open
to the man of science himself. The humblest teacher in
a university, founded by him, has the advantage of him
there. He can hang in his gallery the most precious
masterpieces of art, but in the understanding and appre-
ciating of those masterpieces the humblest visitor to whom
he allows access to his gallery may have the advantage
of him. He can pour out his money like water in public
benefactions, but often the taint of self-reference does not
seem to be quite absent even from these benefactions, and
the humblest charity worker in the slums who gives not
money but himself is apt to be more beloved than the
wealthiest benefactor.

Then there is the social antagonism excited by the
fabulous fortunes. Those who possess them feel very
keenly the hostility of the public. They wince under the
constant hostile attacks of the press and of public plat-
forms. Now it is one of the great boons of life to have
the goodwill of our fellows, and it seems that wealth does
not secure it. The benefactions of the very rich are cata-
logued, and they mount up into the hundreds of millions.
The sums spent for universities, for libraries, for technical
schools, for the most useful objects, are almost incredibly
large. And these benefactions are received with a certain
praise and formal recognition, and those who give them
are flattered. Plots are laid to secure their interest in this
or that public cause, but what they do not seem to get is
the public goodwill. It is the goodwill, the love, that is
wanting. The Bible says that a man may offer up all that

198 MORAL CONDITIONS IN AMERICAN LIFE.

his house contains in exchange for love, but that he can-
not buy it. Love is the spontaneous echo in one heart of
kindness in another heart. In this respect, despite all
their benefactions, our American Croesuses have on the
whole failed. Some little kindergartner working among
the poor, some sick nurse spending herself in personal
service, gains in return for her service more heart-warm
love than the men who pour out the millions. There
have been but few millionaires around whose bier the
people have wept. I would rather have those precious
tears than all the wealth of the Croesuses.

I have spoken of the false ideal of unlimited riches.
What then shall we say about wealth ? Is there any way
of marking the limit? Is it not in the nature of wealth
itself to lead to boundless accumulation? We must draw
a distinction between money and wealth. When we
think of money, we are led to extend our possessions
boundlessly. There is nothing in the nature of money
to check the pursuit of it. The more money you make,
the more you want, because money is itself not wealth,
but merely the token of it, the counter which you can
exchange for wealth; and because it is merely a medium
of exchange, there is no suggestion of limitation in it.
As soon, however, as one thinks of wealth, there is the
suggestion of limitation ; because wealth, properly defined,
is that which serves as a means to the attainment of
human ends. Everything is wealth which as an external
means subserves the attainment of human ends. In the
very notion of wealth there is implied a subserviency to
the ends of life, and there is implied, therefore, a moral
limitation ;. because when one has secured the proper ends
of life, he does not require additional means ; he acquires
only so much of the means as is essential to the attain-
ment of the ends.

MORAL CONDITIONS IN AMERICAN LIFE. I99

There is no objection to the accumulation of weahh,
provided it be accumulated as a means. The most ideal
person in the world, the prophet, the seer, must have
wealth. Some of the bravest effort in the world has
been put into the struggle for wealth, especially on the
part of the breadwinners of families among the poorer
classes. But how to keep that which is a means in its
place, so that it shall remain means, and not run away
with us as if it were the end — that is the great question.

The answer seems to me to be, to think always of the
real ends. To set up money-making itself as an end is
the greatest curse. A physican's business is to cure the
sick, and incidentally he gains his fee. His main object
is not the fee, but to cure the sick. The main object of
a preacher, or teacher, is to teach. He requires a salary,
and cannot live without it ; but he is not working for the
salary. With the artist or the writer it is the same. But
when it comes to the business man, he often so far de-
means himself, so degrades his calling, as to declare *T,
the merchant, as distinguished from the doctor, the
teacher, or the artist, labor only to make money. I am
in business to make money." But has not the merchant
a service to render to the community as well as the doctor ?
Like the physician and the preacher and the artist, the
end that the merchant should have in view is to render
his service, to build up a first-rate business, to render a
perfectly fair equivalent; if a manufacturer, to produce
excellent wares, to organize his business in the best possi-
ble way, to make his relations to his subalterns as human
as possible. Of course he needs wealth, so does the
doctor, but that is no reason why he should make that
the end of his life as a business man. "The laborer is
worthy of his hire," and what is more, the laborer is sure
to get his hire. A person who is efficient, who does ex-

200 MORAL CONDITIONS IN AMERICAN LIFE.

cellently well the thing which it his business to do —
whether it be brick-laying or teaching or curing the sick,
or manufacturing or conducting a commercial enterprise
— is sure of his hire. The wealth that he needs runs after
him, flings itself at his feet. There is such a demand for
efficiency that the efficient man is certain to find hands
stretcher out, doors open to him on every side.

So the only cure that I can see is a change in the inner
view ; not allowing ourselves to take a mean, sordid view
of our life, not allowing ourself to think that the main
part of the day is to be spent in the business of money-
making, but to keep prominently before us the ends which
are proper for us to realize. Then we shall think of
wealth as the means. We are really in business or in the
professions, first to do very effectively and very com-
pletely the thing that we undertake to do, whatever it be.
I think this the foundation upon which all Hfe should
be built. I do not care so much for beneficence and
philanthropy as for thorough-going efficiency. A man's
character, and a woman's too, depends on that; it is the
basis of everything. Honest, efficient performance is
the first end. You cannot serve society better than by
laying bricks honestly if you are a bricklayer; or by
building up a perfect organization of your business if you
are a business man ; or if you are teaching, or engaged in
art work, by doing thoroughly the thing you are about.
Giving to the poor, taking care of the needy — that is most
important and most commendable, but so far as its value
to society is concerned, it does not begin to equal the
moral value of efficient service.

Other ends of life for which we exist are the support
of those who depend upon us, the education of our chil-
dren, providing moderately for that pleasure and recrea-
tion which is essential to maintaining the vigor of life,

i

MORAL CONDITIONS IN AMERICAN LIFE. 20I

and laying by for a rainy day. Then why should we say
that we exist or work to make money? We are not
really as base as we represent ourselves to be. Money-
making is the incident; we are all capable of respond-
ing to those other larger ends. If wealth comes to us
in excess of our needs, then there are public uses to which
we can and should devote it.

This is the thirtieth year of the Society for Ethical
Culture. For nearly thirty years I have been laboring in
this community, and I will not admit that I have been
laboring for an irridescent dream, or for something too
subtle to be useful. I want to teach ethical ideals. To
have an ethical ideal primarily means that we shall not
sell ourselves for something that is cheaper than we
are. For the sake of adding to our possessions, we
shall not lower ourselves. I have had nearly thirty
years of this public work, and in view of the insurance
revelations, the materialism around us, the excessive
luxury that is spreading everywhere, the lack of sim-
plicity, the lack of self-recollection, the haste, the excite-
ment, the feverishness of life to-day, I sometimes ask
myself, is it of any use? Is it not all vanity of vanities,
this teaching, this preaching? One stands by the side of
the river of life, and there is the current, rushing, seeth-
ing. What can one do by preaching to change it? I
think there is bound to come a change, that our pace is so
fast that we cannot keep it up. I think for one thing that
the people who are hurt, those who are sacrificed to un-
scrupulous greed, are not in the long run likely to remain
passive, and that there is going to come a counter-move
from their side, and that the more they become intelligent
about the causes of their troubles, the more there will be
protestation and counter-action. The preacher can at
least help to modify such movements and keep them sane ;

202 MORAL CONDITIONS IN AMERICAN LIFE.

he may help to moderate the force of the counter-move-
ment that is coming.

And then the example of the disastrous effect on the
character of the wealth-getter, which is written so large
in these recent revelations, ought to produce a change. It
ought at least to produce a shock, and lead the wealthy
to consider whither they are drifting. Perhaps the
preacher can help to point these morals and enforce these
lessens on both sides. At any rate, I am quite sure that
there never was a greater need for ethical ideals than
there is now.

I

INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL UNION.

REPORT FOR I905.

The smooth working of an International Ethical Union
is not an easy matter, and it is no less difficult to excite
interest in what is accomplished at a far distance.
Everything, however, is being done to make the Union
useful. The Secretary is in constant correspondence with
the Secretaries of the various national organizations, and
in England the Council of the English Union has elected
a permanent Committee to keep in touch with the Inter-
national Union. Possibly the example of England may in
time be universally followed, and thus an uninterrupted
interest be insured in the international work on the part
of the national executives, and through them on the part
of the individual Societies and their members. This
general aim was doubtless promoted by the publication of
the last Annual Report in Ethics, Ethical Addresses, Bul-
letin, Ethische Kultur, and Mitteilungen of the Vienna
Society, the three latter periodicals being supplied to all
the members of the French, German, and Austrian So-
cieties. With the same end in view, arrangements were
made for exchanges between the above periodicals, and
also for the supply to those periodicals of reports and lit-
erature from the various centres. Though up to the
present the editors have not made use of the material sup-
plied to them, there is reason to believe that in time in-
ternational news will be a standing feature in the Ethical
Press. Further to encourage this, there will be prepared
brief monthly reports for insertion in the periodicals men-
tioned.

The Secretary has been fortunate enough to gather and

203

204 INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL UNION.

to exchange information by paying two visits to Berlin,
where he met the German Ethical Executive; by attend-
ing the German Ethical Society's Congress in Jena, and
encouraging the formation of a German Moral Instruc-
tion League; by spending some days, at Professor Felix
Adler's request, discussing international matters with him
in Germany last summer; and by an interview in Paris
with Professor Paul Desjardins, and afterwards with Pro-
fessor Leon Brunschvicg at Ostend.

Propaganda work has not been neglected. The Secre-
tary offered the International Freethought Congress,
which met in Paris in September last, a paper on ''The
Relation of the Ethical Movement to the Freethought
Movement," which was accepted and widely advertised,
and it honored the Secretary, who attended the Congress,
by electing him as one of two Assesseurs at an important
meeting.

The main obstacle to propaganda has been the utter
want of any literature, and to meet this a series of
twelve leaflets has been compiled and written : ( i ) Con-
stitution, (2) An Ethical Society: How to Form and
Conduct One, (3) List of Societies, (4) Ethical Lit-
erature, (5) Principles of Ethical Societies, (6) Inter-
national Manifesto, (7) The Story of the Ethical Move-
ment, (8) To Sympathizers, (9) Moral Instruction in
Schools, (10) Who is Ethical? (11) The Ethical Move-
ment Defined, (12) The Aims of the Ethical Society.
So soon as the most needed of these leaflets are printed,
Friends in India, Egypt, Russia, and many other parts
of the world, may be relied upon to spread our ideas and
establish Societies. Professor Wilhelm Foerster has al-
ready kindly offered to see to the translation of these
leaflets into German, and it is hoped that they will be
translated into French.

INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL UNION. 205

Other literature has also been in preparation, and
awaits publication. A short volume, dealing with the
main problems of life viewed from the Ethical stand-
point, has been written by the Secretary. To supplement
the paper contributed to the International Freethought
Congress, another has been prepared on the attitude of
the Ethical Movement towards religion. Additional
pamphlets will deal with Moral Instruction, Labor,
Economics, Politics, and like subjects. These pamphlets,
which seek to reflect the prevailing Ethical thought,
should be as useful within the International Union as for
propaganda purposes. With a Movement as widespread
as ours, a common understanding needs to be cultivated.

Want of space necessitates the crowding out of many
international matters, as, for instance, the establishment
of an International Ethical Library. We conclude this
portion of the report by urging that, just as a national or-
ganization is the very breath of life of the individual So-
cieties in a country, so an international organization is ab-
solutely essential and indispensable if the Movement is
not to risk splitting up into innumerable sects and to cease
to propagate its views. A national Union unifies,
strengthens, and starts Societies; an international Union
has the same object, and, since its scope is wider, its im-
portance seems the greater.

AMERICA.

New York. — Apart from the ordinary work of the So-
ciety during 1905, two closely-related facts challenge
special attention. One is the attempt to found new So-
cieties and gain non-resident members in places where
there is no Ethical Society, and the other is the large
output of literature. From a circular issued we learn
that "frequent invitations have been received to establish

206 INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL UNION.

Ethical Societies in other towns and cities ; but these op-
portunities have been hitherto decHned, the purpose be-
ing to develop in a few centres the ideas underlying the
Movement before undertaking a wider extension, in or-
der that depth and strength, rather than superficial magni-
tude, might be obtained. Certain results of this quiet
development have now, however, been secured, and the
time seems to have come when a larger extension may be
attempted without fear of injuring the finer intent of the
Movement." The response is said to be already gratify-
ing. A Students' Ethical Society has been started at
Harvard University, and members of other universities
are reported to be interested in the Harvard experiment.
Mr. Leslie Willis Sprague has just concluded a course
of propaganda lectures in Brooklyn, and a Society has
been formed in that city. News comes of the likelihood of
Ethical Societies being established in other centres. In
this connection it is important to bear in mind that in the
New York Society there are over half-a-dozen trained
men and women capable of taking over the leadership of a
Society.

The literature published can only be referred to in a
general way. At the beginning of the new year the New
York Society issued a Year Book for the first time. It
consists of a volume of some ninety pages, the size of the
volume alone indicating the varied and important activ-
ities undertaken by the Society. Three Ethical leaflets
have been published : A Naming Service, The Functions
of an Ethical Sunday School, and an Ethical Funeral
Service. Ten Ethical pamphlets have appeared, all but
a few within last year: The Basis and Obligations of
Ethical Fellowship, What the Ethical Culture School
Stands For, The Aims of the Ethical Society, The Origin
and Growth of the Ethical Movement, Concerning the

INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL UNION. 207

Simple Life, A New Statement of the Aims of the
Ethical Culture Societies, The Mission of the Ethical
Movement to the Sceptic, The Function of the Festival in
School Life, Immortality, Child-Labor and its Evils. And
in addition to this, volumes by Professor Adler have been
published : The Religion of Duty, the Essentials of
Spirituality, Marriage and Divorce, The Moral Instruc-
tion of Children (new issue), Life and Destiny (new
issue). Creed and Deed (new issue).

The New York Society has about i,ooo members.

Chicago. — The Chicago Society succeeded early last
year in raising the full 25,000 dollars for their Henry
Booth House, which is to be the centre for the social
work of the Society. Before Mr. Salter left, last Novem-
ber, for a year's travel abroad, he had the pleasure of
dedicating the building, which was then almost com-
pleted. Henry Booth House is situated in a very poor
neighborhood, in one of the most crowded tenement-
house districts of Chicago, and many eyes are anxiously
looking to see the work begin on the larger scale made
possible by the possession of a commodiotts building.

Mr. Salter has published a small volume entitled Moral
Aspiration and Song. It consists of several parts — "For
Private Meditation," "Preludes (for Sunday meetings),"
"Responsive Readings," "Songs," and "Closing Words."
The number of songs amounts to thirty-six. It is inter-
esting to hear that the Chicago Society is the only Ameri-
can Ethical Society that sings regularly at its Sunday
meetings.

The Chicago Society has about 200 members.

Philadelphia. — In May last the Society celebrated its
twentieth anniversary, and, to mark and benefit by the oc-
casion, the tenth Convention of the American Ethical So-

208 INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL UNION.

cieties was held at the same time and place. To ensure
success the Ethical Societies closed their sessions earlier,
and thus members and all the leaders were enabled to at-
tend. Among the speakers were Professor Adler, Mr.
Salter, Mr. Burns Weston, and Mr. Sheldon, who are the
recognized leaders of the New York, Chicago, Philadel-
phia, and St. Louis Societies respectively; as also Mrs.
Spencer, Mr. Percival Chubb, Dr. Elliott, Mr. Muzzey,
and Mr. Sprague. Among the weighty pronouncements,
those by Professor Adler on the independence of ethics
attracted much attention. He thus defined the ethical posi-
tion : "The independence of morality is the distinctive
feature, as I understand it, of our Ethical Movement."
"The independence of the moral end means that it is not
subordinate to any other human end, but that it is sover-
eign and supreme above all other human ends." "Man,
so far as concerns the effort to achieve the moral ends, is
not dependent on any happenings in the supernatural
world to set in play the operation of the moral forces
within him." "Morality is independent spiritually, in
the sense that the deliverance of our moral nature is not
dependent on authority." Finally, morality is "independ-
ent in the sense that no personality has yet appeared, no
religious teacher has yet appeared, who has so far ex-
pressed the moral ideal that we are to be in a position
toward him exclusively of followers." According to
Professor Adler, "it is plainly inconsistent to belong to
two institutions, one of which affirms that character,
morality, is dependent on creed — that character and
morality and righteousness cannot be achieved without
the creed — while the other affirms that character is inde-
pendent of creed."

The increase in the membership of the Philadelphia
Society during the past year has been greater than in

INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL UNION. 20g

any previous year; and the attendance at the Sunday
morning lectures has been larger than ever before.

The Society's Sunday school consisted in January,
1905, of 138 scholars, who were taught in fifteen classes.

During the past year the Society secured larger and
more central headquarters — which are also the editorial
and publication office of the International Journal of Ethics
and Ethical Addresses.

St. Louis. — "During Mr. Chubb's recent visit to St.
Louis" (Spring of 1905), the New York Society's News-
Letter says, "he found the affairs of the Ethical Society
there in a very prosperous condition. Mr. Sheldon is
bringing the season's work to a close with the feeling that
it is the most successful year's work in the history of the
Society." The report of the Society for the session 1904-5
shows 310 names of persons who make an annual contri-
bution to the expenses of the Society. In the Sunday
school there was an average attendance of about seventy
pupils, with an enrollment of about one hundred during
the season.

In addition to the Sunday lectures and Sunday school,
the following activities are referred to in the annual re-
port : Literature Sections, Men's Philosophy Class, Na-
ture Study Section, Greek Ethics Club, Colored People's
Self-Improvement Federation, and Wage-Earners' Club.

ENGLAND.

The progress of the Movement proceeds apace, and it is
only the want of funds and lecturers which retards the
formation of many Societies. The English Union con-
sists at present of twenty-seven Societies, and several new
Societies have come into existence during the last few
months. Owing 10 the increase in the English Union's

2IO INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL UNION.

work, a General Secretary has been added to the staff, and
an appeal for £6,ocx) for ten years has been drawn up.

Two noteworthy volumes have been recently published
through the English Union. The first involved an under-
taking of considerable magnitude — the publication of a
musical edition of The Ethical Hymn-Book, which con-
tains 327 songs and canticles. The second volume re-
ferred to was a sixpenny edition of Mr. Salter's well-
known book. Ethical Religion, which is now likely to be
read by many thousands of inquirers. Some 20,000
leaflets have been reprinted, and some 20,000 back num-
bers of Ethics have been distributed.

The total number of members in English Ethical So-
cieties at the beginning of 1905 was about 2,500, of which
1,774 belonged to Societies in the Union, and the re-
mainder to South Place Ethical Society, Ethical Religion
Society, and a few Societies recently started.

The Moral Instruction League has been making re-
markable headway during the year. Through its in-
fluence moral instruction is given in more than 3,000 pub-
lic schools to about i;000,ooo children, and Education Au-
thorities all over the country are considering the scheme of
instruction put forward by the League. The Introduction
to the Education Code and Suggestions, drawn up by the
Board of Education, and also the Prefatory Memorandum
to the Regulations for the Training of Teachers (ipo^),
show distinct traces, even according to the Times, of the
influence of the League. To check the League's advance
a memorial was sent to all education authorities, signed
by the two archbishops, eight bishops, and many eminent
men, in favor of Christian moral instruction ; but with no
sensible effect. The League is now communicating with
all the head teachers and all the Training Colleges in the
land, and there is an intention to approach the new Gov-

INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL UNION. 211

ernment, and to press on it the need of introducing Moral
Instruction as a regular subject into all public schools.

GERMANY.

The German Moral Instruction League is now not only
an accomplished fact, but a fact of some importance.
Though established only a few months ago, it can boast
already of 300 members. Among these are 15 professors,
54 teachers, 17 physicians, 10 editors, 14 lawyers, and 22
civil engineers. Two teachers' organizations and two
Free Thought Societies have also joined. As signs of the
times may be noted the insistent demand for Moral In-
struction in the place of theological teaching by the teach-
ers of Bremen, the decision of the Congress of the Ger-
man Free Religious Societies in favor of secular educa-
tion including moral instruction, and the sale of over
10,000 copies of Dr. Foerster's Moral Instruction book,
Jugendlehre, sl volume of 700 pages.

The First Public Reading Room in Germany, instituted
by the Berlin Ethical Society in a poor quarter of Berlin,
has published its tenth annual report. The number of vis-
itors during 1904 was 95,127, the room being open on week-
days from 12 to 3 and from 6 to 10 and on Sundays from
10.30 to I and from 5 to 10. The First Public Reading
Room, which receives now an annual grant of 4,000 marks
from the Berlin municipality, has fortunately not been in-
stituted in vain, for at present it is one of a large number
of public reading rooms, of which that established by the
Frankfort Society is one of the most flourishing, receiving
a grant of 10,000 marks from the municipality.

The Berlin Society's Information Bureau (for those in
need) is one of the most respected institutions of Berlin.
To give a notion of the extent of its activities, it may be

212 INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL UNION.

mentioned that in the last quarter of 1904, 1,253 applica-
tions had to be dealt with. Some fifteen officials and some
seventy helpers are engaged in the delicate and difficult
task of effectively helping the needy. The quality of the
work done is beyond praise. The Secretary of the Inter-
national Ethical Union had the pleasure of lengthy inter-
views with the Chairman, Dr. Albert Levy, and through
his courtesy he had the privilege of making a study of a
number of the cases investigated and dealt with by the
Bureau.

The German Society for Ethical Culture much deplores
the early death of one of its most respected workers, Jus-
tizrat Hermann Stem.

AUSTRIA.

Hopes are running high in the Vienna Ethical Society.
Latterly the opening of branches at Graz, Linz, Troppau,
and other places, has been discussed, and there is every
reason to believe that the Austrian Ethical Movement is
determined not to lag behind. However, the difficulties
put in the way b> the public authorities are usually so
great that a rapid spread of the Movement is unlikely.
Even the Vienna Society, like the German Societies, are
only tolerated.

The determination to spread the Movement argues in
this case superabundance of energy, for the Vienna So-
ciety has been very active during the past year. It has re-
started both its Social Group and its Literary Group, and
in both groups practical work has been discussed and
initiated in a practical manner. A few years of such well-
directed activity, and the Vienna Society should become a
power in the Austrian capital. Moral Instruction has
also, at last, reached Austria, and it is to be hoped that its
principles will not be long in claiming general attention.

INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL UNION. 213

The Vienna Ethical Society consists now of some 220
members, the one at Qualisch of some forty.

FRANCE.

In the April number of the Bulletin, in the preface to
the International Ethical Union's Report, there appears a
remarkable official statement of the meaning of the Ethical
Movement as understood by the Union de Paris. ''We are
bound together by a common principle : to establish a dis-
cipline of life in conformity with reason and outside all
theology; to illuminate that discipline by free and open
discussion; to animate it with love; to render it effective
and progressive by mutual support; to teach it methodi-
cally; and to realize it in customs and in laws, and even,
if justice require it, by a revolution."

The Union pour V Action Morale consisted of the writers
and the readers of the Bulletin, and was not a Society in
the strict sense. The Union has now been transformed
into an organization, and will henceforth be called Union
pour la Verite. The Bulletin has ceased to be published,
and the publications will be, as heretofore, Petit Bulletin
pour nos enfants and Litres Entretiens, then Corres-
pondence, which will regularly appear, and non-periodical
publications. The Union, in its prospectus, calls itself a
Society for mutual philosophical and civic education, and
the object is defined as follows : —

(a) To maintain among its members, by means of training the
judgment and character, the perpetual openness of mind which
the search for truth and the struggle for justice demands,
(b) To encourage openly, by personal example and propaganda,
the active love of truth and right, and to help to introduce the
critical method into every-day life.

The Union started in November a fresh series of discus-

214 INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL UNION.

sions. These will centre round the problem of Interna-
tionalism. Many of the ablest French scholars are taking
part in the elucidation of this burning question. The
previous course, on "The Separation of Church and State,"
had an appreciable influence in the final shaping of the
Bill on the subject in the French Chamber.

SWITZERLAND.

The Swiss Society for Ethical Culture in Zurich is still
in existence, and there is some prospect of its being re-
vived. When the Society started in 1896 it met with
considerable success, and only incidental causes led to the
suspension of its activities. In a free country, such as
Switzerland, there ought to be an Ethical Society with
many branches.

The Society at Lausanne, the Ligue pour V Action
Morale, is justifying its existence by much good work,
even though it has to encounter serious opposition and
stolid indifference. At the beginning of 1905 Professor
Forel delivered a lecture containing a vigorous plea for an
improved system of education which was printed in La
Petite Lutte. Professor Forel and his Society have
shown considerable interest in the forthcoming Interna-
tional Ethical Congress, and it would be most desirable if
the Society could send a small delegation.

ITALY.

Professor Levi-Morenos is still in full sympathy with
the Ethical Movement, and will attend the Congress if he
can possibly arrange it. Unfortunately, no news has yet
reached us of the re-organization of the Italian Ethical
Movement. Professor Levi-Morenos is to be congratu-

INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL UNION. 21$

lated on obtaining from the Italian Parliament the grant of
an old man-of-war, which he will transform into a float-
ing asylum for the orphans of poor Italian fishermen.

INDIA.

In Bombay there has existed for some years a Stu-
dents' Brotherhood, whose aims appear to be identical
with ours. In the last report of this Brotherhood we
read that similar organizations have been recently started
in Bandra and Lucknow. The spirit of ethical pros-
elytism is abroad.

An Ethical Society is reported to exist at Lahore.

An influential member of the Indian Civil Service, who
was one of the founders of the Bombay Students' Brother-
hood, is ready to assist in propaganda work so soon as
Ethical literature can be put at his disposal.

JAPAN.

A member of the Tokyo Ethical Society, according to
the New York News Letter, has reported that the Tokyo
Society was organized eight years ago. It aims to pro-
mote ethical culture, to build up a strong and refined per-
sonality without regard to doctrinal distinction, religious
belief, or moral theory. In the beginning of the Asso-
ciation, its influence, no doubt, was limited to a small cir-
cle, which met together to discuss ethical questions. It
gradually grew, however, to a strong body. Public lec-
tures and discussions on ethical thought and life are held
once a month in Tokyo and a monthly magazine of some
hundred pages or more is being published.

2l6 INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL UNION.

TRANSVAAL AND NEW ZEALAND.

An Ethical Society exists in Johannesburg and one in
Auckland. Details of recent events are wanting.

GUSTAV S FILLER,

Secretary.
19, Buckingham Street, Strand, London, W. C, Eng-
land.

SELF-HELP IN AFFLICTION.*

By Felix Adler.

On descending into a very deep well, even at high noon,
one either sees the stars in the clear fimiament, or, if the
sky be overcast, looks upward into obscure night. Such a
well is affliction. They say that Truth sits at the bottom
of a well. Fortunate for us if Truth sits at the bottom of
this particular well.

The subject which I treat this morning is replete with
pathos, and yet I would not treat it in a gloomy vein;
rather in such fashion that all the embodied joys of earth
might be present and not have their lustre dimmed, that
happy lovers might be present, and not feel that a shadow
had been cast upon their bliss. For somehow we must
relate our joys to our sorrows, not pass alternately from
one to the other without connecting them. The world is
a scene of happiness and unhappiness in strange associa-
tion. Joy and sorrow keep house together, and must be
so joined that each shall be glorified by contact with the
other — joy exalted by kissing the lips of sorrow, and sor-
row transfigured by gathering upon its face the reflex of
the world's joy. I cannot follow this thought out in its
detail. I can speak only of one aspect of affliction to-day ;
but the principal conclusions as to the way we should act
in times of trial apply equally to the way we should act in
times of joy. The application of the principles I leave to
my thoughtful hearers.

The author of the phrase "tainted money," has said that

*An address given before the Societies for Ethical Culture of
New York and Philadelphia.

203

204 SELF-HELP IN AFFLICTION.

what the world chiefly needs to-day is the conviction that
the spiritual things are the real things, that unseen things
are more real than the seen. I agree with his statement, but
there immediately suggests itself to my mind the further
thought that there are two principal ways of laying hold of
the unseen realities — of what we call the spiritual realities
of life. One way is with the help of a mental picture —
mounting a ladder, so to speak, like that golden ladder of
Jacob's dream, and seeing in imagination God at the top of
it. This has been the way of the religions of the past.
The mental picture, however hesitatingly drawn, with
whatever misgiving and reserve, due to the consciousness
of dealing not with a finite but with an Infinite Being,
whose nature is inscrutable and unsearchable, nevertheless
stands to the majority of persons as the embodiment of the
idea of God. The picture, if one studies it, turns out to be
an exalted image of man. Some hold it more grossly,
others in a more refined way. Some really think that
there is a human-like form behind the clouds, inhabiting
eternity; others take it as a symbol which we cannot dis-
pense with, a necessary but inadequate reminder of that
Power in things which words cannot describe. But
whether taken finely or grossly, the picture is that of a
man. The forms which it has taken on have been various.
Sometimes it takes the shape of a great commander, halt-
ing, as it were, on an eminence, and surveying from afar
the dim world armies, the great hosts of good and evil, as
they shock upon each other; the commander guiding the
advance, checking the retreat, hurling column on column
to destruction, according to a plan clear to his own mind,
though unknown to those who are in the midst of the fight.
Sometimes it has been the figure of a pilot, guiding a ves-
sel on the high seas, as in Tennyson's well-known lines :

SELF-HELP IN AFFLICTION. 205

"For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar."

But most often the picture has been the intimate and
homely one of a human father. And this mind picture has
been and still is of immense service in time of trouble.

But there is another way of laying hold of the spiritual
realities of life, and that is by coming into communion with
them, by experiencing them as a power which pushes us on
along certain paths, a power mightier than ourselves, so
irresistibly imposed upon us that we have not time even to
look back to see what manner of power it is, or what man-
ner of a face it wears, if it have a face; and this is the
method of coming into contact with the ultimate, the un-
seen reality, that wish to apply to-day to the problem of
affliction.

Some persons are half followers of the old method and
half followers of the new. They have not clarified their
thinking. But there is the greatest difference whether we
take hold of the unseen through the help of the imagina-
tion, or realize the unseen reality in our experience, as a
power urging us along certain paths, which we call moral
paths; and the ethical consequences are different, especi-
ally when one is oppressed with trouble, when the heart is
wrung by affliction. A great many people have lost the
old way and have not come into the new way, and so re-
ceive no help at all. They simply drift. They are con-
tent to leave the principal questions of life unsettled while
they devote themselves to minor interests.

There are three appalling evils connected with affliction.
The first is the actual pain and suffering ; the second is the
shadow which it tends to throw over the universe, even
to the darkness of utter night, the doubts, the loss of faith

206 SELF-HELP IN AFFLICTION.

which it engenders; and the third is the prostration, the
sense of impotence, which affliction produces. Aeschylus
in his "Prometheus" speaks of three Graiae hags, more
hideous than Macbeth's witches, embodiments of all that
is most undesirable and hostile to mankind. I have just
mentioned the three graiae of affliction — the pain, the
doubt and the prostration.

Now, as regards the first two, the picture idea of God
has been most helpful. It does not make the pain any less,
but it helps people to bear it. It does not resolve the
doubt, or solve the riddle of the world, but it induces peo-
ple to be willing to live on without the solution. This
service of the picture idea of God depends upon three at-
tributes which are united in the conception of God — omnis-
cience, omnipotence and love. These three attributes must
be held together, or the picture idea of God loses its force.
As soon as you omit one — omniscience, omnipotence or
love — the idea ceases to be of any value. Faith must rivet
together these three attributes beyond any warrant which
the facts furnish.

A man is about to undergo a hazardous operation, and he
must bear the pain because the nature of the case is such
that anaesthetics cannot be employed. He must trust
himself absolutely to the surgeon. If he has the least sus-
picion that the surgeon does not know his business, or that,
although he knows the science, he is not skillful, or
(though the surgeon knows his science and is skillful) a
dark suspicion crosses his mind, as it does sometimes the
minds of poor patients in a hospital, that he is unkind, and
cares little what becomes of the sufferer, his situation is
most pitiable. But if he believes that the surgeon is wise
and skillful and humane, then he will give himself confi-
dently into his hands, and if he is a brave man he will bear
with fortitude the unavoidable suffering. This is the

SELF-HELP IN AFFLICTION. 207

way in which the believer of the old type trusts himself in
the hands of God, the great surgeon, when he cuts into the
human heart with the sharp knife of affliction.

But this trust depends upon the belief that the three
qualities are united in God. Let anyone question whether
God is omniscient, omnipotent or kind, and the old belief
ceases to be of use. For instance, one says, If he is God,
why does he hurt me so? The answer is that he does it
for a good end. But if one says again. If he can do any-
thing he chooses, why can he not accompHsh the good end
without hurting me so ? and the answer is that we do not
know. If there arises the doubt that he may not be able
to do all he wishes — which John Stuart Mill expresses in
his three essays on religion — that God may be kind enough
and wise enough, but not strong enough, to do what he will,
then there is not much help in such a God. Or perhaps
the darker suspicion enters in : He may be omnipotent, and
he may be omniscient, but perhaps he is not really very
kind. In the Bible we read that Nathan the prophet came
to David and rebuked him for his sin in a parable : There
were two neighbors, the one was rich, and had flocks and
herds without number; the other was poor and had only
one ewe lamb. The rich man coveted this single posses-
sion of his poor neighbor, and took away his ewe
lamb. And God severely rebuked David because he had
acted this way. But if we think of God after the
human analogy, has not he himself acted in this way?
Has he not often taken from father and mother the one
ewe lamb ? I do not say that that argument is valid, but
that is the way the mind actually reasons under the pres-
sure of grief. The human analogy has the advantage of
presenting to the mind the Power of this universe in a
definite way, as friendly and congenial, like a kind human
parent. On the other hand, it has the disadvantage that

208 SELF-HELP IN AFFLICTION.

the course of events does not always bear out the analogy,
at least as far as we can see. The course of things does
not seem to be ordered by a being who is kind like a human
father. To save the goodness in the conception of God
that has come down from the past, it is necessary to say
that he is good, not after the human fashion, but in some
greater way. But then the human analogy on which we
have rested breaks down under an internal contradiction.

And so the second of the Graiae enters in in the guise of
scepticism and dark doubt. Worse than the hurt of pain
is the thwarting of high purpose. We feel that we are
called upon to work for certain ends, to put our whole
hearts into the service, and then we see that the course of
things often thwarts our highest purposes.. A moral
leader is taken away, a man like Lincoln, at a time when he
could ill be spared. If there is a moral purpose in the
world, why was the man removed who was best able,
according to our human judgment, to accomplish the mor-
ally desirable end. Again, as parents we spend ourselves
on the education of our own children, and sometimes when
we have brought them to the very threshold of manhood
and womanhood, to the point where our labor may begin
to bear fruit, disease disables, death removes them. It is
not only the suffering produced by loss, but the apparent
frustration of moral purpose that causes the perplexity and
obscures the spirit. We are commanded to erect an edi-
fice, a temple of the good, and when we have raised the
walls a little above the ground, so that we feel encouraged
to hope, there comes a cyclone from somewhere, which
sweeps down upon the scene of our labor, and lays the
walls of our temple in the dust. At such times it is hard to
put away the thought that the Power that is back of the
cyclone is just as blind as the cyclone itself. So that just as
we must say of the Goodness in things, if we are to hold

SELF-HELP IN AFFLICTION. 20g

fast to it, that it is of another kind than human goodness,
far transcending it, so we are pressed to say that the pur-
pose in things is other than a human purpose, transcends
it, with a wisdom and world-wide aim of which what we
call human morality is but a flickering and feeble reflex.

But there is also the third appalling evil besides the pain
and the doubt, namely, the sense of impotency, the sense of
being utterly broken, a kind of blight or palsy that over-
spreads the faculties. And in this respect the picture idea
of God of the past has been perhaps least efficacious.
The old method of comfort was a sedative method.
Where it succeeded best, it created an attitude of quies-
cence, a passive attitude of the mind. The alternative way
of apprehending the idea of God of which I now wish to
speak, has the effect of taking us out of the attitude of qui-
esence and awakening us to action. To think of God as
power immediately puts one into a different frame of mind,
and the value of not leaving the mind quiescent under
affliction, but of starting it into action, is that action is the
best cure for suffering. In affliction, power may seize a
man and lift him up from the ground where he is lying
prone. It commands then : Do something ; do not merely
accept the fate that smites you ! When you are plunged into
the sea of affliction, do not float, do not wait for arms to
be extended from above to draw you out of the waves;
spread forth your own arms, and swim !

But if the point of view that I am here considering is to
be helpful to anyone, there is one thing that must be re-
membered : We must be willing to suffer a change, to be-
come different from what we have been. Unless we pass
through trouble, realizing that its efficacy must be meas-
ured by a change in us, my thought will not be of
any service. As long as we insist on remaining what we
were before the trouble came upon us, we are open only for

210 SELF-HELP IN AFFLICTION.

the old kind of comfort ; or, if we cannot go back to the
old, we must do without comfort wholly. The hardest
thing for people to learn is that they must be changed.
They wish to remain just as they are, to maintain the
status quo ante, whereas the secret of the help that affliction
affords is that it can change those who suffer, make them
different from what they were. The other method of com-
fort, as it has touched the mass of men (not as it has
touched the rare and exceptional souls, because these in all
ages seem to have moved much on the same level), prac-
tically said to the believer: You have certain claims, cer-
tain aims, retain them. All these claims and aims of yours
will be satisfied. The only spiritual change for the mass
of believers is the cultivation of enough self-control and
humility to make them willing to wait. The only spiritual
virtue inculcated into the mass of believers is patience.
They are told that in the other world there shall be no
more suffering, care or trouble. Dear ones will be re-
united; justice shall be rendered; individual hopes will be
realized — only they must wait! The point of view for
which I am pleading is diametrically opposed to this. The
compensation is not in the future, does not need to be
waited for, but is immediate, and consists in the change
that is going to be wrought in you, namely, your being
able to relinquish your individual aims and claims instead
of insisting upon their gratification. That change is the
compensation.

There are three steps by which this change is
accomplished. I shall speak of these steps in suc-
cession, and the point of view that I am de-
scribing I may characterize (to show its contrast
with the traditional view) as "the social point of
view." Throughout the world to-day, in politics, eco-
nomics, industries, there is a movement away from the in-

SELF-HELP IN AFFLICTION. 211

dividual point of view to the social. In religion it has not
yet been adequately expressed, but I am trying here to ex-
press it with regard to the problem of affliction. The
first step consists in not looking upon our trouble as pecu-
liar to ourselves. We are all disposed to do that. We
say, Why am I afflicted? Why am I sick? Why is my
child taken ? Why am I ruined ? That is the individual-
istic point of view. The first step in the social point of
view consists in realizing that one's own trouble is a part
of mankind's trouble, that one's burden is a part of the
burden of humanity, that one's grief is part of the world's
grief. Each one is only bearing his share. One of our
modern scientists has indulged in the conjecture that there
is a world-organism, of which the stars and suns are mem-
bers, to which the world stands related as a cell to the body.
Whether this be true or not, we are related in that fashion
to humanity. We have our individual existence; we are
centres of independent life; and yet we are also cells of
humanity. We must train our minds to look upon our-
selves in that way.

When we consider man, how he has made his pilgrimage
upon this globe during the past fifty or one hundred thou-
sand years, what sort of a creature he has been, prophet,
[enthusiast, poet, or again, madman, savage, buffoon, when
I we consider what he has endured, the whips of nature that
have been laid upon him, the torrents of fire that have been
rained down upon him, the torments worse than the nine
circles of Dante's hell through which he has been made to
pass ; and when we compare the beginning with the end,
^the cave man with the civilized man, we cannot refuse our
admiration to this courageous creature — man; we cannot
[jielp admitting from the coolest point of view of dispas-
sionate observation, that there has been progress, and
progress bought by suffering. When we hold to the so^

212 SELF-HELP IN AFFLICTION.

cial point of view we cannot help admitting that the suffer-
ing of the past has been of use, and when we look about us
in the present, we also cannot help remarking that there
are burden bearers all around us, we cannot help seeing
trouble like our own, often very much greater than our
own, in places where we might never have expected it,
where outwardly all seems serene and happy. And if we
have any generosity in us, we shall be led to say, If every-
body is bearing trouble, and if so many whom I had
thought supremely happy are really very much worse off
than I am, at least I will be a good comrade. I will bear
my share without wincing.

Oh, the selfishness of ordinary grief ! How people see
only themselves, and are ever harping upon their own
woes — what they have to suffer, what a cruel fate is
theirs — as if they ought to be the exception, as if there
ought to be nothing to mar their sunshine! Of course,
society is a masquerade, and it is well that it should be.
We do not care to wear our hearts upon our sleeves or
our troubles on our faces. But he whose eye has once
been anointed by the magic of the social way of looking at
things will penetrate easily behind the mask; he will see
the hidden wounds that are bleeding inwardly, he will hear
the stifled sobs. Not that pain plus pain, others' plus
mine, subtracts from mine ; but the general lot will make
me willing to bear my load, to pay my share of the toll
which nature exacts from humanity for the privilege of
passing along the road of progress.

The second step in realizing the social point of view is
even more important, and leads us to a higher plane. It
consists in not only seeing ourselves associated with others
when we are in trouble, but in fulfilling a social law, and
by this I mean doing the things that ought to be done in
an objective way.

SELF-HELP IN AFFLICTION. 213

I can give no better illustration of what I mean than the
example of President Harper's behavior during the months
preceding his death. A man of vigorous vitality, endowed
with an unparalleled appetite for work, whose every hour
was crowded with achievement, at the pinnacle of his
power, at forty-nine years of age, he suddenly gets notice
that his lease on life has expired. And how does he act ?
He does not repine, as there might be excuse for doing.
He does not dwell on the fact that presently all that is mor-
tal of him will be dissolved into dust. He does not say,
Why any longer should I take interest in what goes on on
this earth ? In a few weeks I shall be out of it all. On the
contrary, he acts as if he were to live on forever. What is
going to happen after he has passed away is of immense in-
terest to him, and he spends his remaining time and
strength in working for his university. From time to
time he looks at the clock to see how many minutes for
work remain, then more eagerly, but still quietly, he spends
what is left of strength in doing the things he ought to do
before leaving the scene. He acts in this way, not from
what is called pluck, which one finds even among ruffians ;
but because he realizes what it means to fulfil a social
law, to act as if his individual existence mattered only in so
far as it identified itself and coalesced with those great
public interests in which the individual finds the highest
expression of his present, the premonition of his future,
life. And because he acted in this way, a cry of admira-
tion escaped the lips of all who heard the story of his last
days. And even those who dissented from his policy and
methods while living were struck with a sense of awe at
the manner of his dying.

And in all cases there is ever something that is socially
demanded, something which it is right to do, and to fix
our eyes on what is right to do will make us public beings
instead of lonely, isolated, individual beings.

214 SELF-HELP IN AFFLICTION.

Is it the wife that is dying? We have had amongst
us a beautiful and ever memorable example of behavior
under such circumstances. There is something to be done,
something socially commanded, to cheer the melancholy
hours of the patient, to cherish each grain of strength,
to lessen the effect of the darkening twilight of the
house upon the children, to save them from the breath
of death; to make the last communings between husband
and wife strong and sweet. There is something to be done
to meet the situation, to prepare the way for the new turn
without wincing, without thinking of the suffering which
must come. Is it the case of perversity, rebellion or
discord among the members of your own household, again
there is something to be done, efforts a thousand times re-
peated to correct, sentinels to be set at the points exposed
to temptation, the demons to be subdued in others and in
ourselves. We shrink because we wince from the pain
involved. But the ethical attitude will help us to treat the
pain as negligible, at least as capable of being traversed
and transcended. Should you enter a room and behold
your child in imminent danger, its clothing on fire, you
would rush in without a moment's hesitation and tear the
burning garments from its body, and only after all was
over would you realize that your own fingers had been
burned in the attempt to save it. Thus, in every affliction,
in every trouble, if we fix our eyes on what is to be done,
we shall not be even conscious of the pain involved in do-
ing it.

This is the social point of view with respect to affliction,
letting the power that works in things drive us forward on
this moral path, or what I have called the path of social
action — identification of ourselves with the burden-
bearers of the past and present, and fulfilling the social
law.

SELF-HELP IN AFFLICTION. 21 5

And lastly, especially for those who are bereaved, there
is one other step, and that is, not to wait for the hereafter
for reunion with the dear departed, but to give them a
present continued existence in the mind, to keep up an
ideal companionship with them, to dwell especially on
those qualities that were excellent in them, thus making
them a good influence in our lives. We cannot associate
with the dead, we cannot give and take, but only take ; yet
what we take is priceless. And this thought of such com-
panionship is not fantastic; many men and women have
found it to be real and helpful. Many have been turned
from baser lives by the determination to be true and loyal
to their holy dead. Many have felt that they must not
derogate from their better selves because in their imagina-
tion the eye of a father or mother or friend, or perhaps the
eye of some innocent, pure child seemed resting upon them,
reproaching, rebuking, encouraging, cheering, mutely
appealing. Many have become better men and women
because they have felt that their whole life must be offered
at the shrine of those who are with them no longer in the
flesh, but all the more close to them in the inner communion
of the heart.

There are these three steps, and they cannot be taken
without effort. Comfort for affliction does not fall into our
laps as a boon. It must be won. But to him who makes
the effort there will come at the last a great peace in the as-
surance that this world is not a world of chance, nor yet a
world of evil; but that the tendency of things is good.
Nor need this assurance rest on the belief that there is a
Commander-in-Chief, a Father, a Pilot, who is steering
and ruling things ; but the consciousness suffices that how-
ever the world is steered (we know not how), the tendency
toward good is real — real because it is revealed in our own
experience so strongly and convincingly. And if this

2l6 SELF-HELP IN AFFLICTION.

mood becomes permanent, we shall gain the attitude of
mind of which Emerson speaks so wisely in his little poem :

"Every day brings a ship,

Every ship brings a word ;

Well for them who have no fear,

Looking seaward, well assured

That the word the vessel brings

Is the word they want to hear."
The word that the vessel may bring us to-morrow may
be loss of worldly goods, or sudden partings, or tribulation
in a thousand of its varied guises ; but, no matter what the
cargo of the ship, no matter what the word which it trans-
mits to us, it is none the less the word we want to hear,
because it is for the best, and we know this to be so, be-
cause we ourselves can turn it to account for our truest
best, here and now in this brief span of time.

INSPIRATION AND ETHICS.*

By David Saville Muzzey.

Perhaps it would be impossible to find two terms
■vaguer than those which form the title of my address —
\inspiration and ethics. We all know perfectly well what
[an inspiration is ; even into the lives of dullest routine and
habitual acceptance of an uninspired program, some mo-
^ments of inspiration inevitably come — some lifting of the
[heavy horizon, some opening into a wide vista, through a
sympathetic passage in a book or the light on the face of a
friend. We know, too, what ethics means ; for conscience,
[though it may be seared and scotched, is the hardest part
[of man to kill. But we hardly can define inspiration and
ethics satisfactorily. So haltingly does language follow
thought, that even the poets, for whom nature has opened
the treasure house of parable and on whose lips persuasion
sits, have agonized to find the winged word which should
J truly communicate to their waiting brothers the meaning
of their visions.

Yet it is good for us to talk of these spiritual concerns
of life, however stumblingly and inadequately. Our delib-
eration together on them may now and then result in some
new adjustment of desire and duty which shall be as ep-
ochal in a life as the bursting in of spring upon winter. We
are so sober and constant in our attention to schedules,
prices, tariffs, fashions, menus, statutes, theories, and
tenses, while all the time we know that all these things,
while they may increase our bank account, or flatter our
senses, or widen our knowledge, do not necessarily con-

*A lecture given before the Philadelphia Ethical Society.

217

2l8 INSPIRATION AND ETHICS.

tribute one iota to the cultivation or the stimulation in us
of that soul-completing, that soul-saving, for which alone
— unless men be the joke of some omnipotent Aristophanes
of heaven— we exist. We long, with some inextinguish-
able desire implanted in the human breast to know of
destiny. In spite of all the foolish prophesies which have
deluded men in past ages, in spite of the naive com-
pleteness of programs of judgment days and the horrible
tortures of mind that have been passed through in fear of
eternal torture of soul and body in hell — men have still
clung with deathless longing to the hope to hear of their
destiny. And no wonder ! For without this hope, the keen-
est prudence of successful finance, the sharpest spur to
scholarly fame, are but the intensifying to the last degree
of the satisfaction which the ox takes in his well-filled crib
or the sleek, thin-ankled racer in his promenade before the
applauding grandstand.

We need no apology, then for broaching spiritual
themes; we brook no reproaching summons to return to
the practical. These themes are the practical; the only
truly practical ones of our life.

It is in the confidence of this truth that I ask you, this
morning, to examine with me some aspects of inspira-
tion and ethics ; to inquire, if we can, what these very real
terms mean for us ; to discuss whether there be an inspira-
tion of ethics, or an ethics of inspiration ; or whether in-
spiration and ethics be antagonistic and mutually exclusive
ideas.

To begin with some attempts at definition : Inspiration,
meaning literally a "breathing into," is used in at least
three very distinct senses, which have an ascending degree
of dignity. It means simply a happy or an opportune
thought, and in this sense is equivalent to a bit of mental
luck. Hunting for a lost paper, we have "an inspiration,"

INSPIRATION AND ETHICS. 2ig

and remember the pigeonhole into which we tucked the
document. Planning a luncheon, the hostess has "an in-
spiration," and produces something new and tasty in the
salad course. In a higher sense, we use the word inspira-
ition to denote some mental or moral refreshment, some
[aesthetic stimulus. Caruso's Faust, last evening at the
[opera, was an inspiration, we say, though we do not prob-
ably earnestly mean that it is going to affect our lives at
ill. The spirit that a beautiful piece of music or an ab-
sorbing book has "breathed into" us is generally one of
fexultation and recurrent pleasurable memory. It exhausts
itself in its own emotion. Finally, there is a third and
lighest kind of inspiration, which comes upon one like the
happy thought, but it comes to affect deeply and perma-
nently the psychical life. Such is the inspiration of the
love of husband and wife, the inspiration of a great social
call clearly heard and nobly responded to, the inspiration of
a passage from a world prophet or a line from a world
poet which sets the whole soul vibrating with the thrill of
permanent assent. There is no escaping these inspirations,
no having done with them, once we are grown to the spir-
itual stature to receive them. It is, of course, of this
third and highest kind of inspiration that I am speaking
to-day.

And now, how shall we define ethics? The word itself,
in the original Greek, with its Latin translation, morals,
means only custom, usage, disposition. But ethics means
much more than this colorless definition to us. It does
not describe customs, it regulates them ; it does not denote
usages, it dictates them; it is not any disposition, but a
certain constant disposition.

The word ethics has been rendered hard to realize
clearly, because in the first place, it has been used histor-
ically to define different schools or theories of moral con-

220 INSPIRATION AND ETHICS.

duct, and psychologically to define one's personal convic-
tion of the right moral conduct. For example, when we
speak of the "Hedonistic ethics," that theory which re-
ferred the worth of every moral action to its resulting
measure of pain or pleasure; or the "Kantian ethics,"
which was the doctrine of the grounds on which and the
ends for which the moral law was binding, we are using
the word in its historical or descriptive sense merely. We
may, and probably do, firmly believe that the "Hedon-
istic ethics" are not ethical at all. What is ethics for us
in this latter sense is our own conviction, not a descriptive
term, but a nominative one. And even in this latter sense,
we must be careful to distinguish ethics from other nomi-
native terms. Professor Palmer, of Harvard, in his
Noble Lectures for 1899, on "The Field of Ethics," has
done this latter task with great delicacy and suggestive-
ness. Ethics deals with the possible, the desirable, the
things which will happen when human conditions are made
favorable for them, as over against the sciences which deal
with the actual, the determined, the things which happen
when physical conditions are favorable for them. But law
and aesthetics and religion also deal with the desirable, the
possible, the humanly conditioned. How shall we dis-
tinguish ethics from these? Well, ethics differs from law
in that it values the acts of the individual not solely in re-
lation to his fellows (i. e., in their expression), but also in
their intrinsic character, their effect on the doer as well.
And, again, ethics differs from aesthetics in that it is con-
cerned not solely with the intrinsic worth of things, their
appeal to the appreciation of the individual, their purely
emotional quality, but also has its external importance, the
strong influence of the act. So ethics stands as the golden
mean between the extreme objectivity of the law and the
extreme subjectivity of aesthetics. Contrasted with re-

INSPIRATION AND ETHICS. 221

ligion, ethics may perhaps be called the close-range view
of duty and destiny while religion is the long-range view :
religion is ethics "sub specie aeternitatis ;" ethics is relig-
ion "sub specie temporis." With this question of ethics
and religion we shall have more to do presently. For the
rest, the distinctions of Professor Palmer seem to me re-
markably helpful in defining ethics in its normative or
binding sense, by contrasting ethics with law, aesthetics,
and religion. To hazard a positive definition : Ethics is
the reasoned conviction of what it is right to do. Having,
then, as best we could defined inspiration as a vision com-
ing to us to affect deeply and permanently one's psychical
life, and ethics as the reasoned conviction of what it is
right to do, let us proceed to consider some of the rela-
tions between inspiration and ethics.

First, all worthy ideas and embodiments of inspiration
have been increasingly controlled by ethics. We need only
examine the history of any of the world's mythologies or
religions to prove the truth of this. There is as absolute
a necessity laid upon these beliefs and institutions if they
are to endure to purge themselves progressively of old
error, to reshape themselves according to men's better
spiritual promptings, to take on humane and reasoned
aspect, as there is for the individual soul to pass through
ever-widening spheres of ethical realization if it is not to
stagnate in dull decency, or, under the slavery of sense,
"reel back into the breast." Mythologies and religions live
only so long as they have the sanction of ethics. The gods
of Homer are not very admirable beings; they lie and
cheat, they wrangle and wanton. They are the creations
of an inspiration of fear. The motive in the human mind
which called them into being was one of awe before the
great powers of nature, of craving for protection from the
lightning and the flood. Power was the thing the ancient

2.22 INSPIRATION AND ETHICS.

god must have; power far above the puny strength of
mortals. To his omnipotence were pardoned his moral
failings, his craft, his cruelty, his caprice, his prurience.
But when the ethical sense of the Greeks was developed
through their contact with each other and with other peo-
ples, then their great thinkers grew ashamed of the arbi-
trary, law-loosed gods of Homer. They measured the
divinities themselves against an ethical standard, and
judged them as fearlessly as the Prophets of Israel judged
the false gods of Moab and Ammon. "When the gods do
wrong," cries Euripides, "they are no gods."

Or take the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture.
How completely has it become moralized with the moral
growth of the world. There has been a progressive
abandonment of features that are inhuman or irrational in
the doctrine of scriptural inspiration ; the inspired part has
been reduced to the inspiring part ; and even the center and
source of the Christian inspiration, the person of Jesus,
is becoming more and more an ethical type offered us for
appreciation and less and less a theological tenet offered us
for subscription. No institution can permanently resist
remodelling after the plan of the highest ethical sense of
the age. Such resistance would mean voluntary starv-
ation, suicide. The God-intoxicated Spinoza nearly two
centuries and a half ago, expressed this truth with wonder-
ful prophetic vision in his theological-political tractate. It
was on the occasion of a conditional grant of free speech
by the State. "Free speech saving the honor of the
State !" cries Spinoza ; "the day will come when there can
be no such thing as the honor of the State without free
speech," when what you grant now as a concession, O ye
magistrates, will be your own salvation ! Inspirations of
the past which have established and objectified themselves
in institutions, can maintain themselves on one condition

INSPIRATION AND ETHICS. 223

only : that is, by becoming increasingly moral, by submit-
ting to restandardizing. The power which produced them
was an imminent, compelling need in human nature. No
less compelling and imminent is the need of to-day which
finds these unworthy or insufficient.

But, besides being subject to the control of ethics, all
worthy ideas and embodiments of inspiration have also
made their appeal directly to the ethical sense and aimed at
the accomplishment of ethical ends. Show me a religion
that does not seek first of all to make men and women bet-
ter, and I will show you a vain repetition of ceremony
which cumbers the ground and already is writing its own
destruction or radical reconstruction. Such were the pagan
religion of the later Roman Empire and the papacy of the
fourteenth century, Matthew Arnold said that conduct is
three fourths of life — but why not four fourths? If
conduct means the expression in our life of the ideals
which we win from our labored creed, our symbolic cere-
mony, or our spiritual contemplation, I see no other end
but conduct in religion — for certainly there is no article of
creed, no ceremony, no rapture of a pin's worth that does
not reach some expression in life.

If, then, ethics is both the vital factor in the endurance
of inspirations and the final object of all institutions, relig-
ions, ceremonies, philosophies founded thereon, ought it
not to receive its due recognition as the consummation of
human life? How can a controlling motive be subject to
the forms it calls into existence or the end be subordinate
to the means? And yet ethics has generally been treated
only as an appendix to philosophy and a corollary of re-
ligion— not as the primal inspiration itself. And those
who have stood for the independence, the primacy, the in-
spiration of ethics have been charged with confusing a de-
rived nature of the spiritual life with the source of spiritual

224 INSPIRATION AND ETHICS.

life itself. A few weeks ago, for example, I read an ad-
dress of the President of Princeton College to a body of
young men, in which he insisted that ethics or moraHty, is
but a by-product of religion. But have there not been
many, many immoral acts (as persecutions, enmities, self-
justifications, casuistries), proceeding as by-products from
this same religion? Where is the criterion of religions
outside of ethics? What makes religion lovely in one
man and odious in another, if not just the ethical spirit of
man himself? I firmly believe that the exact opposite of
President Wilson's statement is true — that religion is and
always has been a by-product of ethics. Beneath every
church you will find a character — * 'other foundation can
no man lay."

This exalted view of ethics is not widely accepted. Eth-
ics is generally allowed to be an accomplishment, but not
an inspiration. And arguments with which we are all
familiar are brought against the inspirational primacy of
ethics.

It is said that ethics is shallow as compared with relig-
ion; that it has no sufficient sense of sin; no consuming
desire for redemption from this lost world ; that it turns
into optimistic speculation what ought to be a life and
death wrestle for salvation. So Professor Shaw, of the
University of New York, in a recent article on "Religion
and Morality," says that religion provides a goal for
human life, a destiny, and with this possession faith passes
far beyond the realm of morality; while ethics, when it
attempts to supply an object for man's activity, that end is
either purely subjective or narrowly objective in its nature
. . . nothing more than some immediate object is pre-
sented, and thus great achievement is made impossible.
. . . For this reason, religion can only look with distrust
upon any system which, like the ethical scheme, works out

INSPIRATION AND ETHICS. 225

its method with such ease and complacency !" That such an
idea of ethics is fairly current makes it no less astonishing.
An ethical scheme working out its methods with ease and
complacency ! The only ethical program I know anything
about, either from my own convictions, or from the writ-
ten and spoken words of ethical philosophers, is one of
endlessly toilsome endeavor, in which every step of on-
ward progress is purchased at the price of present spirit-
ual travail. So far from its being true that only immedi-
ate objects are presented to the ethical apprehension, no
single action can be ethical which does not form a link in
a reasoned whole of life. And as for the sort of faith
which "passes far beyond the realm of morality," the his-
tory of ultra-moral religion, with its mysticisms and fan-
aticisms, its supernatural predictions and judgment day
programs, is little calculated to waken enthusiasm in sober
breasts. This charge of the shallowness of ethics, of ease
and complacency in ethical theories, of the narrowness of
an ethical horizon, betrays an utter misconception of what
ethics really is, and could be made only from that unfor-
tunate standpoint which regards ethics as an enemy or a
rival of religion. Ethics, the reasoned conviction of what
it is right to do, rests on insights as profound as human
nature itself, and the noble soul is awed no less by the
realization of what divine powers within it lie than by the
fictions of a hundred of symbols. And so far as the stim-
ulation of the sense of sin is concerned, if that be of such
importance as the theologians say, not even St. Paul him-
self has pointed out the depths of human need more forc-
ibly than Cleanthes, Zeno, and Seneca.

A second criticism urged against the inspiration of ethics
is that it lacks humility, that it makes the human mind
with its casuistry and logic the measure of all truth, that it
is promethean, seeking to force to immediate settlement in

226 INSPIRATION AND ETHICS.

syllogisms the mystic-emotional truths which are man's
real inspiration. This criticism also rests, I think, on a
misunderstanding of the true nature of ethics, or, rather,
on a confusion of its obvious processes with its deep under-
lying springs of action. Ethics does concern itself con-
stantly and soberly with casuistry, with comparing the de-
gree of righteousness of various actions or cases. It does
this because it believes that no power from outside is go-
ing to intervene to save a man the moral effort of distin-
guishing right from wrong. But to conclude from this
activity of ethics that it has no great constructive purpose
beyond this comparing, analyzing, weighing of acts and
motives, is to advance the preposterous theory that all
moral machinery acts for the sole end of seeing its own
"wheels go round." No class of men in the world, I dare
assert, would be more ready than the advocates of the
final value of ethics to condemn the assertion that the
individual reason, by ardent excogitation and constant
casuistry could discover moral truth or induce whole-
some inspiration. The word of the old philosopher that
"man is the measure of all things," does not win our as-
sent, either in the sense that this individual or that is alone
the measure of all things, or that this part of man or that
part alone is the measure of all things. We know per-
fectly well that morality does not belong exclusively or
even chiefly to the realm of logic. As many of our best
experiences came to us in that higher realm of mental
realization which Maeterlinck calls the "mystic reason,"
so they are established and perpetrated only in that delicate
atmosphere of psychical life which is a compound of wide
sympathies, honest reasoning, intellectual receptivity,
faith in noble intuitions, responsibility for their nurture,
and unquenchable hope in their final triumph. But this is
exactly what we understand by ethics — for all this enters

INSPIRATION AND ETHICS. 22/

inevitably into the reasoned conviction of what it is right
to do, and is of value only as it helps to form that convic-
tion.

In the third place, the critics of the finality of ethics deny
to it inspirational power on the ground of its lack of imag-
inative quality; its despite of the symbol. Ethics lives in
the thin air of the actual, they say ; it is absorbed in the im-
mediate ; it has no power in itself to create an ideal toward
which to work, but must work as a helping factor toward
the ideal created by a religion with certain symbols. In
a word they deny to ethics the power of vision and grant
it only the subordinate, derived grace of cooperating with
a higher motive in the pursuit of that vision. This ob-
jection again seems to me to rest on an entirely inadequate
conception of the true nature of ethics. Ethics does
despise some symbols, to be sure, else it would not be eth-
ics. But so far from its destroying or denying symbolism
as such, it is the very thing that perpetuates symbolism.
For by its progressive judgment and condemnation of the
inadequate, unprofitable, misleading symbol it saves men
on the one hand from bondage to superstition, and on the
other hand preserves historic idealism from constant dis-
credit. What else but the ethical sense preserves an ideal
through all its unworthy stagnation in partial symbols?
Or, to be concrete, what else but a slowly gaining ethical
sense has changed such an idea as heaven from Tertullian's
fortified pleasure park, over whose walls the exclusive set
within exult at the torments of their excluded brothers
without, to the modem Christian conception of a state of
mind at peace with God and alive to duty ? Must I have
more symbol of imagination than the world of truly related
brothers which ethics lays hold upon in order to claim my
dearest endeavor, or to fulfil my highest destiny ? I yield
to no orthodox Mohammedan in my desire to see the

228 INSPIRATION AND ETHICS.

struggle to preserve faithfulness to an ideal consummated
in a lasting, luscious victory in which I may share — but
must I for that reason have a heaven of horrors and tables
laden with tempting fruits and wines ? No Roman Cath-
olic is more anxious than I to be established and cheered in
the spiritual life by communion with the souls of just men
made perfect in all ages — but does that necessarily imply a
wax candle burned in front of a plaster statue of the Vir-
gin Mary, or forms of petition printed in a Book of Hours ?
The bluest Presbyterian cannot long more than I to know
that there is a primal and indefeasible power of right and
justice behind the seeming welter of wrong and injustice
to which the selfish passions of men have reduced our pres-
ent world — but must I then trick this power out with at-
tributes of arbitrary injustice, purposes of predestination
and pretention, which shame even the average human
sense of morals to-day. Does the champion of scriptural
infallibility, who wrestles with the task of proving Leviti-
cus useful or the Apocalypse reasonable, prove by that fact
that he is more enamored of all that has been divinely
virtuous in the world, than the man to whose willing mind
and heart these scriptures have nothing uplifting to say?
No, it is not true that ethics repudiates symbolism and lives
in the thin air of logic. It purifies symbolism by repudi-
ating imperfect symbols, and itself creates, by virtue of its
inspirational power, the grandest symbol ever dreamed of
— the commonwealth of love.

A final criticism of ethics as a sufficient inspiration to
which I would call your attention for a moment, is that it
sacrifices that continuity of tradition, that connection with
the religious institutions of the past, which makes the
very soul of inspiration. It is dangerous to break with
history at any point, lest we find ourselves in darkness. I
listened the other day to a man who is called brilliant.

INSPIRATION AND ETHICS. 229

telling how he would rather cling to the Episcopalian faith
(which he professed), even though he knew that there
were errors in it, than to sever connection with so long-
established a communion, counting so many saints and
scholars, credited with so many works of mercy and right-
eousness. And I thought such an argument was desper-
ately weak and cowardly : weak because it supposed that
one must deliberately hold to an error for the sake of keep-
ing the good which has gone with it; and cowardly, be-
cause he confessed he renounced his divine birthright of
being saint and scholar himself, by tolerating a single claim
of creed that confused his ethics or sparing a single pre-
mise or conclusion that offended his logic. The past is
for our instruction, not our enslavement. We are far bet-
ter able ourselves to make a creed than the Westminster
Fathers or the framers of the Thirty-nine Articles — and it
is not modesty, but cowardice, that denies it. For denying
that means to adopt the faithless creed that humanity is
retrogressive, not progressive. I see but two eventual at-
titudes of mind toward the question of the continuity of
religious traditions. One of these attitudes gives tradition
some inherent authority, binding upon us by virtue of an
inspiration beyond our reach to revise or criticise — and
ends inevitably in subjection of spirit. It is fundament-
ally pessimistic. The other attitude gives religious tradi-
tion only evolutionary authority, subject to the constant re-
vision of the present ethical sense and judgment — and ends
inevitably in the establishment of free spirits. It is funda-
mentally optimistic. Such interruption of the continuity of
religious tradition as this latter attitude brings, is like the
interruption of scientific tradition when astronomy was
substituted for astrology, or medicine for incantations.
Was scientific inspiration lost because men broke with
the tradition of an independent fiery principle in matter

230 INSPIRATION AND ETHICS.

called phlogiston? or did science feel itself bound with a
gingerly cowardice to go on explaining how in an allegor-
ical sense it might be true that the earth was stationar}-
after men had become convinced that it was moving ? Why
this assumption that religious traditions, of an age contem-
poraneous with crude science and crude ethics, are so pure
and inviolable? Does history confirm it for the unpreju-
diced reader, or reason for the devoted thinker? Truly,
as Schiller said, "age lends a hallowing halo." But it
is none the less our business to "prove all things and hold
fast that which is good." Could the invitation be ad-
dressed to any other sense in man than his ethical sense?

Ethics is not the foe of spiritual continuity, any more
than it is the foe of true symbolism, depth of insight, or
humility of judgment. Here again it is, on the contrary, the
very life condition of spiritual continuity, for it says, by its
primal virtue of inspiration, all that is good shall live; all
that is not useful shall be done away, because it plagues
and hinders and confuses the issue of the truly good.

I do not know whether I have made out a case in your
minds for the primacy of ethical judgments, for the inspira-
tional character of ethics ; but it seems as clear to my mind
as the sun in the heavens at noonday. Ethics has no
quarrel with religion — so long as religion is ethical. What
ethics clashes with is not inspiration, but the lack of inspi-
ration in religion — fixed dogmas of the past which make
demands on our credulity, interfere with normal will acti-
vities and confuse moral issues. What it objects to is not
faith, but faith in hearsays, which, as Carlyle said truly,
"makes real communion impossible." It says to every
generation. Do you now come to that conclusion through
your own faith, or are you supporting a conclusion reached
by your father's faith? What it objects to is the kind of
inspiration which can be voted by a church council. The

INSPIRATION AND ETHICS. 23 1

Athenians met yearly and by show of hands elected ten
men whom they called "generals." ''Fortunate people !"
cried Alexander of Macedon, in biting pleasantry, "I have
found but one general in all my life — Parmenio."

Ethics does not either wish to reduce human life to tart
logic, and "in solid occupation of all reason's summits" af-
fect to despise the man whose intuitions and emotions are
precious ; but it does maintain that every tradition admitted
in direct violation of reason is but a leaven of confu-
sion in our moral life. Ethics is not the foe of symbolism,
until symbolism becomes ridiculous. It heartily recom-
mends us to' hitch our wagon to a star. But when some
ecclesiastical metaphysician comes along and wishes to
prove to us that the star is a donkey engine, and insists on
explaining to us the wheels and cogs, we smile and turn
our backs on the brave mechanician — and earn the repu-
tation perhaps of scoffers. It does not object to the effort
to understand truths beyond the province of the syllogism,
but it insists that no truth is really understood until it be-
comes impossible not to shape our lives in accordance
with it.

ETHICAL ADDRESSES

Vol. XII. No. 1. (September, 1904)

I. IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? William Tames

II. ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT

III. A NAMING SERVICE. By Percival Chubb

Vol. Xn. No. 2. (October, 1904)

I. A MODERN SCIENTIST'S ANSWER TO THE QUES-

TIONS: WHENCE AND WHITHER? Felix Abler

II. THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH AND THE ETHICAL SOCIE-

TIES. Zona Vallance
HI. A NEW STATEMENT OF THE AIM OF THE ETHICAL
CULTURE SOCIETIES. Felix Abler

Vol. XIL No. 3. (November, 1904)

I. ETHICS IN THE SCHOOLS

II. THE BIBLE IN THE SCHOOLS. William M. Salter

Vol. XIL No. 4. (December, 1904)

I. WHAT IT MEANS TO WORK FOR A CAUSE

Walter I Sheldon

II. THE MISSION OF THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT TO THE

SCEPTIC. Percival Chubb

III. THE FUNCTIONS OF AN ETHICAL SUNDAY-SCHOOL

John Lovejoy Elliott

Vol. XII. No. 5. (January, 1905)

I. THE ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS OUTLOOK

James H. Leuba, Dickinson S. Miller, Morris Jastrow, Jr.

II. THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN VARIOUS COUNTRIES

Gustav Spiller

Vol. XII. No. 6. (February, 1905)

I. SHALL OSTRACISM BE USED BY RELIGIOUS SOCIE-

TIES IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST PUBLIC INIQ-
UITY? Felix Abler.

II. MORAL BARBARISM. Percival Chubb.

Vol. XII. No. 7. (March, 1905)

I. Heine: A SOLDIER IN THE LIBERATION WAR OF

HUMANITY. William M. Salter.

II. THE FUNCTION OF THE FESTIVAL IN SCHOOL LIFE.

Percival Chubb.

III. AN ETHICAL FUNERAL SERVICE. Percival Chubb.

Vol XII. Nos. 8, 9, 10. (April, May, and June, 1905)
MORAL ASPIRATION AND SONG. Edited by William M.
Salter.

Single Number, lo Cents — Yearly, $i,oo
ETHICAL ADDRESSES, 1415 Locust St., Philadelphia, Pa.

THE HOPE FOR THE CITY.*

By John Love joy Elliott.

Grim and forbidding lies the great desert in the
western part of America, beginning on the southern
boundary of New Mexico and Arizona, and stretching
north through the various States and Territories until it
reaches the border of Canada. It is a beautiful place
from an artistic standpoint, but it is a hard place from
the standpoint of anyone who must live there. The sun-
rises and the sunsets and the stars are glorious, but for
all that touches the life of a man, there is no harder mas-
ter in the world than this huge, American desert. It is
so great in extent, so enormous in its length and breadth
that economists have reckoned that if ever that part of
the world should be reclaimed that fifty millions of men
could live there in comfort as human beings should live.
No wonder that the eyes of the Government have been
turned with interest recently to that enormous tract,
and that they are attempting to build great reser-
voirs to save the flood waters of the spring. They are
trying to dam the rivers that now flow in such narrow
courses, and spread them over thousands of acres. In
other places individual settlers are digging artesian wells,
and as one of those wells goes down, the settler, who may
have risked his all in that undertaking is painfully inter-
ested in the result. If he succeeds, after going down per-

*An address given before the Society for Ethical Culture of
Philadelphia, Sunday, April 15, 1906.

233

234 THE HOPE OF THE CITY.

haps a thousand feet below the surface of the earth he
may get a first, second or third flow that will bring in
great quantities the water from the earth that will trans-
form his hard and barren land into a farm. But it means
more to him than that ; it means that the hard, dry earth
is transformed by the water into crops, into houses,
homes, schools and comfort. There is one very inter-
esting thing, and one profound lesson to be learned from
these attempts at irrigation, and it is this — the desert
must be made to transform itself. No settler, however
hardworking, would be able to bring enough water in a
bucket to irrigate his tract of land. He has to change
the position and condition of things that are already
there, and he has to do it in a certain way. He must
have a great deal of faith, and he has to proceed after a
very scientific method. He has to dig deep or go far for
his water supply. No matter how hard he worked, no
matter how industriously he ran or walked, if he de-
pended on the amount of water that he could bring in a
pail he would starve to death on his dry and barren
homestead. The art of man must reclaim that great tract
of land by the transformation of the things that are there
— not by what is brought there from the outside. And
as you look over those enormous tracts of land, and
dream, like Faust, of the time that may be, when that
great wilderness is transformed into a place for homes,
one of the most beautiful of all visions that can come
will be in your mind as you picture that vast desert,
touched by human life, by human genius and happiness
and hope and progress.

In our great cities there are certain deserts. If you go
to Blackwell's Island, you will find there a desert which

THE HOPE OF THE CITY. 235

is more dreary, and in many ways more awful than any

other desert can possibly be. You go into the hospitals

ind there you find men and women who are incurable,

^ho never will be any better, who so long as they live

lUst suffer and be sick and burdened with diseased

>odies — hundreds of them. You go into the next institu-

ion, and there are those who are the criminals — moral

ieserts — and you look into the faces of the men and

romen and recognize the dreariness and uselessness of

their lives. Go on a little further and you come to the

home for the aged. Those who are spending the last of

their lives piled into wards, perhaps a hundred or

more blind men or blind women in one ward, lying in

beds as close to each other as graves. And you leave

Blackwell's Island with the sense of a human desert in

your mind.

Or, go to see the breadlines, where at 12 o'clock at
night bread is given out to those who are hungry enough
to sit up so that they may get a little stale bread. You
behold lines of hundreds of tramps, filthy, vile to the
touch, and you are impressed by the utter wastedness of
all that they have lived. They are mostly old men —
there are one or two young men, once in a while a wo-
man, but as a rule old men almost ready to die — and you
think of the years and years of their lives, and as you
see them there before you in an unkempt ragged condi-
tion— dirty, wretched, filthy, the outcome of those years
of human existence that they have spent — you get a sense
of the desert.

Again, you walk through the places of the city where
vice flourishes. They are not at all bad places to look at
from a physical standpoint perhaps, but they are dreary

236 THE HOPE OF THE CITY.

enough if you see what is behind those walls. You go
along the street, and you see children, little girls just as
good and sweet and innocent as those that you have left
at home this morning, and you recognize that they are
as pure as children always are. "You cannot dissolve a
pearl in mud," says Hugo; but you know that the time
will come when out from the door of these houses will
come the filthy bloody hand of vice, and claim these chil-
dren for its own. Then you see what is worse than the
wilderness.

You go through the places where the majority of the
inhabitants of New York live, and from the stench and
the darkness and the narrowness and the crampedness
you see a desert of homes. Most of the men and women
who live there are good people, not particularly educated
or refined perhaps, but in character sound and whole, and
you perceive in just the material conditions in which
they live — the physical desert that surrounds most of the
people who live in that city.

When one walks out on the street, he meets the charity-
worker and the settlement- worker, and the district-
nurse and the health-inspector, each running w^th
his little bucket of water to irrigate the social
desert. I would be very much misrepresenting
these workers if I led you to underrate the value of what
they do. It is the very water of life that they are carry-
ing: medicine that will cure the sick, cheer, help, com-
fort that will steady the mind that is slipping into de-
spondency. It is hard to overestimate the value of what
is done for the individual person or the individual fam-
ily in this way — it is the water of life though it comes
in drops. When you compare the new tenement houses

THE HOPE OF THE CITY. 237

of New York City with the old; when you recognize
that since 1886 the death rate from consumption has been
lessened forty per cent, you recognize that an immense
amount of work has actually been done. But when you

Iiompare the amount of work that has been done with the
imount that there is yet to do one says to the optimist:
'Yes, Mr. Optimist, you say that we only need to go on
luilding more schools, forming more charity organiza-
ions, more social centers and settlements, more country
homes, then everything will come out all right." People
love to use that expression: "The world is getting bet-
ter every day, and things are going to come out all right."
I must confess that I am not one of those who beHeve
that these activities only need to be increased in quantity,
and things will eventually come out all right.

Unless we can change the direction and kind of work
that we are doing I do not believe that we will come out
all right. And my thought in that matter is this, that
charity as it is done to-day is a class movement pure and
simple, and in so far as a class movement can it has done
good. But I am enough of a democrat to believe that
class movements alone will never be entirely effective.
It has got to be something that goes a good deal deeper
and is infinitely more important than any merely class
enterprise can possibly be.

Then when I see the effect of. charitable work on the
person who does the work, and on the person for whom
the work is done I am not satisfied. Take the persons
who have been helped by the charitable organization,
and those who have done charitable work or lived in
settlements for a long time, and do they in their natures
really change — are they socialized?

238 THE HOPE OF THE CITY.

I got a lesson from a group of boys whom I was trying
to interest in history. I wanted to show them that they
wanted not only to be individuals, but something more,
and I took the worst of all social persons I could think
of, Nero, and I described at length how this man had
murdered his mother. I went into details as to the hor-
rible way he had burned Rome etc.; and after I had
gotten through the whole description of this man, I said
to one of the boys, "My son, what do you think of him?"
Well, he had not been very much interested, he had
not gotten the point that I was trying to make. He was
embarrassed and I was, and I said, ''Well, now, what do
you think of this man as a citizen?" "Well," he said,
"He never done nothing to me." And that, to a certain
extent, is the attitude which we all have.

There is a great lack of a clear point of view among
social workers. You find a mental restlessness very
markedly among the best social workers. They feel
an intense need of something to pin their faith to. It
makes a tremendous difference — this lack of faith. Some
are driven to nervous wreck and discouragement; it
drives others to take up some ism, — socialism, singletax-
ism, or what not — because we human beings are made so
that we must have something to pin our faith to. If we
cannot see the final goal, if we cannot see our way out,
then at least we must have some road, some kind of work
which we believe will lead us out of the wilderness.

Now I have to confess that so far I am with the great
majority of people in this country in the matter of my
faith in the eventual outcome. I assume that most peo-
ple in America feel that when things get bad enough in
this country, the public spirit and public will will always

THE HOPE OF THE CITY. 239

be able to save us, that when things are bad enough in
New York, or Philadelphia or wherever it may be, when
things are' so bad that they cannot go on public spirit
will act with force and power and for good. Kipling de-
scribes the American as perhaps no one else has ever de-
scribed us in his poem ''An American." He says how
careless we are, how little respect we have for law. But
he ends by expressing the belief that the "I" of the
American spirit will save us at the last.

"But while reproof around him rings,

He turns a keen untroubled face
Home, to the instant need of things.

"Lo, imperturbable he rules,

Unkempt, disreputable, vast —
And, in the teeth of all the schools,

I — I shall save him at the last."

Lincoln, who understood us better than anyone else in
the world, said : "The American Government is founded
on public sentiment: whoever can change that sen-
timent can change the Government just so much."
We all believe that the sovereignty should rest where it
does, but we have to admit that this sovereign acts very
strangely indeed; that in New York, at least, a news-
paper can hound the public spirit of the people until they
are crazy for a war with Spain, the cause of which they
neither know nor care. We must admit that lynch law^ —
also an expression of public sentiment — can drive men
into worse acts than beasts perform. Sometimes the pub-
lic spirit appears in the shape of a fiend, and sometimes
in the shape of an angel. It is well to remember what
the public spirit meant in 1787 when that spirit tri-
umphed over all the petty, all the mean, all the selfish

240 THE HOPE OF THE CITY.

and local interests, and made our Constitution and our
Nation. What heights more than a hundred years ago
were reached! And then think to what depths again it
can sink. One wonders how it is possible for anything
in the world to be capable of such great differences and
changes.

It seems to me as though the private interests of the
world were always giving a sort of chloroform to the
good public spirit that is in us. You know how it is
with yourself. You know how you and I go about our
work from day to day, thinking a great part of the time
of this or that particular thing that touches us, this in-
crease of salary, or that piece of work, and a great many
of us forget, it may be for years at a time, the really im-
portant things — the things that touch us and our neigh-
bors and city and nation. One would expect politics to
be a natural form of expression for the public spirit, but
that too is disappointing. While elections come often
enough to suit most of us, they are not frequent enough to
hold and keep alive that public interest that is in us on the
eve of an election. We need something else. What do
you do with the person who is suffering from chloro-
form? The thing to do is to get him into motion, make
him walk and act. It is the same in regard to the public
conscience and will. They must be put into motion.

There are certain kinds of social work being done that
bode a great deal of good for the future. I will simply
take the question of the settlement movement. Not that
that is the most important. It is not, but it is the one in
which I am particularly interested and the one
on which I can speak better than on any of the
others, and I will endeavor to show the way in

THE HOPE OF THE CITY. 24I

which it seems to me that that kind of work is going to
bring about some things which are of infinite importance
to us. Miss Jane Addams says that a settlement is a
center of interpretation, where the Hfe of the poor is in-
terpreted to the rich, and the Hfe of the well-to-do is in-
terpreted to the poor. It helps to give you an under-
standing of another class than your own. But infinitely
more than that, when you begin to understand another
class than that in which you were brought up, you be-
gin to understand your own class better and yourself bet-
ter. If you come to know another class better and to
work with them, then there begins to be born in you the
social person. That is a term which is used a great deal,
and it has a profound meaning. There is no term in me-
chanics, or science, or political economy, which means so
much as this — this new self — the social self.

I was taught in college that ethics was a dead science,
and that in it as in any other complete science, you could
compare that man's and this man's theory of ethics, and
find faults in both ; and when you had done that the mat-
ter was at an end. Whatever may be true in the intellec-
tual realm, we enter a new world in our social life, ic
recognizing the closeness of men and what one life and
class means to another. That kind of thing is like run-
ning an irrigation well that brings into use tremendous
quantities of intellectual and spiritual power to irrigate
the social desert. That which should appal us most is the
desert in our own lives — there is so much that is dreary,
flat, stale and unprofitable in our existence, so much that
is unsatisfactory, so much that we are ashamed of, so
much that we are sorry for. When we begin to get a
new way of looking at ourselves in relation to others, a

242 THE HOPE OF THE CITY.

new power in each of us to affect and to be affected, and
to influence the action of classes, then there begins to be
born a new kind of existence for us — a new life. The
best powers of the world, I believe, have not by any
manner of means begun to be touched. We are inter-
ested in Marconi's work in mechanics, and in a thousand
different material fields, and it is all good; but infinitely
more important for us, vastly more interesting and allur-
ing, are the new discoveries in ethics — the new methods
and ways of living.

Now in neighborhood work — in settlement work if you
like — there are beginning to be felt certain great influ-
ences, certain spiritual powers that never have been used
before. I once saw a kindergarten started for the poor.
The children were brought in off the streets ; and a
Mothers' Club was also begun. The mothers became so
interested in their neighbors' children, that they said "we
will engage a kindergarten teacher of our own." They
gave a ball, took up collections, saved their pennies,
and engaged a kindergarten teacher for the children of
the tenement houses. Men and women who were more
well-to-do were co-workers in this work. Such co-opera-
tion is a new type of thing. When the children enter the
public schools, the mothers become immensely interested
in the schools. But there begins the difficulty. We have
no place, no opportunity, for people to express them-
selves in regard to the public school. We have such a
representative form of government, and we are so little
truly democratic. I would like to see our city govern-
ment changed so that people in each locality could ex-
press themselves. The mother's life and that of her
young child are almost one. The child goes to school,

THE HOPE OF THE CITY. 243

and then their Ufe begins to separate. If you interest
the mother in education while you are educating the
child, you develop a great social force, and it is just as
possible to do this as it is to teach the average person the
multiplication table. The mothers are always the best
citizens, but they have no power yet. I do not care in
what community it is the mothers are more interested in
the public welfare than anybody else. But they have no
chance; they are not in any way organized in the work
of the district. I can point to many examples to show
you that the first people to be touched by a fine social
spirit are the mothers. We could organize our school
systems in the cities into entirely different and vastly
more important organizations than they are, if we simply
used the spiritual and intellectual and natural forces that
are there in those districts.

I suppose you think me quixotic when I say that I do
not believe that charity work will be effectively done until
the poor are brought into organic co-operation. Wa
think we are charitable, but I doubt if any of us have ever
given our shoes to another man or woman when we
Vv'anted them ourselves. I doubt if we have ever brought
whole families into our houses and given them beds, or
have even given away the food that we and our children
were hungry for. And yet the poor are doing that all
the time. Get as much money as you can from the rich,
organize the well-to-do classes as much as you can, but
you will never in the world be able to relieve the suffer-
ing of the city until that greatest of all charitable in-
stincts, the charity of the poor for the poor, asserts itself
and then you will have the question of relief solved. I
believe in charity organizations, but we have not yet be-

244 1"H^ HOPE OF THE CITY.

gun to touch the greatest field. When the great charit-
able instincts of the poor are organized, then we will have
a real force.

Then there is the question of vice. The property inter-
ests of the country are absolutely iron clad. When a
man owns a house he can do pretty nearly anything with
It. He may use it for vile purposes and make it the most
degrading place you can think of. But there is a power
stronger than the law and that is public spirit. That is
the power that can root out the evil from a neighborhood.
When you give the men and women, the fathers and the
mothers of the district, the power to express themselves
in some kind of effective way, the evil things cannot ex-
ist. The power of public spirit is strong enough, and it
is the only power strong enough to root out evil from
a neighborhood. I have seen it done over and over again.
If that sentiment is once organized — that power on which
government really rests — it can root out vice. I have
never seen a district yet where the mothers and fathers
wanted an evil thing to exist in their midst — never yet.
And so I feel that we who are in social and political work
are just like the people who came first to settle in the new
prairie, and who always picked out the worst land.
They thought that if they went out on the prairie they
would freeze to death. But later they were forced out on
the prairie, and there they found the best and richest
lands. And so in our social work; we do not at first
utilize the best of the social field. Only later we learn
where it is. And just as in the material desert, so the
human desert has got to reclaim itself. You have got
to use the forces that are there. You have got to
use your brain and character to sink v/ells into the com-

THE HOPE OF THE CITY. 245

munity. You must tap the spiritual and mental forces
in the human beings that are there; and that, and that
alone, will save that district.

I saw a scene which illustrates what I mean in a little,
cheap theatre the other day. Usually the shows are not
very interesting, but once a fortnight there is an ama-
teur night. The people of the neighborhood, everyone
who can sing or dance, gets up and contests for a prize —
$2 or a gold watch, and the proprietor prefers that you
take the watch. It is not an edifying contest. The
prize is awarded by the audience. The one who has the
greatest amount of applause is the one who receives the
prize. The man who has the most things thrown at him
from the gallery is the one who leaves the quickest. It
is not a particularly pleasant picture. I was there a
short time ago in rather a disgusted mood, and then sud-
denly for some reason I began to feel better and I rec-
ognized that from some place a very sweet sound was
coming to my ears. It grew louder and stronger and
deeper, and then I sawi that the singer on the stage had
come to the chorus of a popular song, and the people
were all joining in. And that note that was struck by
this great audience, where each one did not try to force
his voice above that of other people but was trying to
keep it beneath, was inexpressibly sweet and melodious:
and I heard in it the music of the future. It seemed
to me that like the amateurs social workers are sometimes
ridiculous and pathetic, but once in a while we say a
word and sing a song the people like and understand,
and then from those for whom we are working comes a
note so deep and sweet that we recognize in it the life
of the future.

246 THE HOPE OF THE CITY.

It is possible to stimulate in the masses a power that in
sweetness and in strength is infinitely greater than any
individual social worker can have. How shall we learn
to speak that word or sound that note ? By making that
stimulation the object of our striking. And so as I go
about the slums of the city, disgusted, sick sometimes,
those notes of the future's music come yet again to me,
and they stimulate in my mind the dream of the City of
the Future, Then I say over to myself the old words
about the Golden City, where :

"Only righteous men and women

Dwell within its gleaming wall,
Wrong is banished from its borders,

Justice reigns supreme o'er all."

And then I know that you and I and all social workers
are

" — builders of that city,
All our joys and all our groans
Help to rear its shining ramparts,
All our lives are building stones.

And the work that we have builded,
Oft with bleeding hands and tears.

And in error and in anguish,
Will not perish with the years.

It will last and shine transfigured

In the final reign of Right,
It will merge into the splendors

Of the City of the Light."

AUTHORITY AND ETHICS.*

By David Saville Muzzey.

Last Sunday morning, speaking on the subject In-
Vspiration and Ethics, I tried to show that ethics, as the
reasoned conviction of what it is right to do has been his-
[torically the controlHng element and the final aim of all
worthy embodiments of inspiration, and is intrinsically
the source of the highest inspiration mankind has ever
^conceived — the commonwealth of free related spirits;
toat ethics, instead of being the anti-religious, destruc-
tive force that many of its superficial critics judge it to
)e, is, in respect to its deep searchings of the human soul,
its inexorable demands on human conduct, its enlistment
if every fine activity of human consciousness, its purify-
[ing, clarifying criticism of every human tradition and
jymbol, the most vivifying and constructive element of
mr life; that ethics is, in a word, when rightly under-
stood, a faith, an inspiration, a religion.
Tb-day I wish to approach the subject from a rather
lore personal point of view, and to inquire what is, for
IS who profess this religion of ethics, the nature of our
)bligation to it and the charter of its claim to our obedi-
mce. In other words. Wherein lies its authority? Is
there an authority of ethics, or an ethics of authority, or
ire authority and ethics mutually exclusive or even an-
igonistic terms?

And, again, as in the consideration of inspiration and
[ethics, I would call your attention first of all to some

''A lecture given before the Philadelphia Ethical Society.

247

248 AUTHORITY AND ETHICS.

definitions. Authority is of various sorts. There is a
scientific authority, absolute and irrefragible, purely ob-
jective. It appeals wholly to our intellect, and asks the
consent of the intellect alone. It needs no persuasion,
no moral pressure, no spiritual awakening to convince us
of its truths. They appear as soon as our mind grasps
them, and they appear with indisputable, axiomatic force.
For example, the truth of geometry that the sum of the
three angles of any triangle equals 180 degrees, needs
only to have its simple demonstration seen to be immedi-
ately and forever binding on us. No mood of exaltation
or depression, no season of doubt or time of trial, ever
make that truth look diflferent to us. So nature's laws
act with irresistible authority alike upon the just and
the unjust. They pitilessly crush out the life of the
saint or the sinner alike who in ignorance or rebellion
runs counter to them. Of this objective authority of
science I am not speaking to-day.

There is a second kind of authority which enforces,
not truths of science through simple appeal to the intel-
lect, but truths of judgment through appeal to the more
complex quality of the consent of the will. Such au-
thority is the authority of experts. We believe that what
Mr. Edison says about electric batteries, or what George
Morrison says about steel bridges is true, because these
men have spent years in successful investigation of such
subjects.. We trust the opinions of an Elihu Root in law
or a Dr. Janeway in medicine as authoritative because we
have proof in many instances of the skill of these men.
But, after all, this authority of judgment is something
that we appeal to only occasionally. It is of inestimable
advantage at certain critical moments of our lives, but not

AUTHORITY AND ETHICS. 249

a steady moulding, preserving influence in our whole
lives.

It is just this third kind of authority that I wish to dis-
cuss this morning — the constant, pervasive, integrating
[force which lies behind all our thought and action, and
[compels us to hold to our course through sunshine and
storm; which provides us with a purpose, a world- view
that makes life worth the living; which kindles in us a
[fire of devotion intense enough to temper to fineness the
[good metal in us and to consume away the dross. This
Is the authority of the moral law in our minds and mem-
)ers. By it we first became distinct, responsible, con-
'sistent beings — in a word, personalities.

It is of the utmost importance that we inquire into the

[nature of this authority by which — unless we are moral

feather-balls, tossed by every breath of opinion and whiff

[of desire — our lives are dominated and regulated. How

[sordid and material the standards of life are for the great

majority; how completely does living exhaust itself in

[effort to increase both the capacity for and the means of

'satisfaction of physical comforts and pleasures ! So that

hwe have even consecrated to this lowest use of life the very

[word "life" itself. We speak of "making a living" when

fwe mean earning enough money for the satisfaction of

[material needs and desires. But that is not really "mak-

fing a living" — a life. There's many a millionaire to-day

that hasn't begun really and truly to "make a living"!

,Many a man that can manage a large corporation but

tcannot govern his own spirit! Many a man whose phy-

■sical self is admitted to companionship with titles and

decorations, but whose spiritual self has not begim to

^qualify for communion with the real nobility of the

250 AUTHORITY AND ETHICS.

world — its poets and its prophets, its scholars and its sa-
viors. Only by virtue of a great obedience, only through
submission to a compelling and indispensable moral au-
thority do we realize the highest quality of life.

Let us trace briefly the advent of moral authority into
our consciousness. There comes a day (perhaps it comes
with an awful jar of sudden realization, perhaps as the
maturing of a slow and even mental development) when
we awake from the absolute world-view of childhood to
the relative world-view of manhood and womanhood.
With the lapse of only a few years the significance of that
day is often obscured; but could we get back to it in
vivid imagination we should realize how acute its spirit-
ual agony and how epochal its spiritual adjustments
were. Till that day everything had been fixed, inevitable,
unalterable. Our parents in the flesh seemed as imper-
ishable as George Washington or Robinson Crusoe in the
ideal; our house, perhaps a modest frame dwelling,
seemed as immovable as the eternal hill behind it. At
school, at home we were fed with mental and spiritual
food whose wholesomeness we did not question, of whose
nourishing quality we formed no opinion. If the taste
was bitter now and then, we called it our misfortune but
we took our medicine. Then came the fateful day when
the infallibility of parent, teacher and text-book fell to
the ground. We became, as the old legend of Genesis
has it, like gods, knowing good and evil. Constraint was
laid upon us to find rules of choice in a bewildering com-
plex of opinions and clamoring authorities. We were
confronted with a duty which, unless we failed through
weariness or cowardice, was to be henceforth a constant
duty throughout life. We suddenly felt the call to vin-

AUTHORITY AND ETHICS. 25 1

dicate our manhood and womanhood by discovering
through patient study and proving through consistent
conduct the reasonableness of the faith that was in us.

Two factors are present in the process by which a
soul, newly awakened from the absolute to the relative
attitude toward life, finds itself: an inward, subjective
factor, and an outward objective factor. The inward
factor is the complexion which the soul has received from
the circumstances of birth, of early training, of environ-
ment, of the choice of a business or professional career,
of the selection of friends and intimates. Over the cir-
cumstances of one's birth and one's training during the
most impressionable years of life one has no control
whatever. The fact that one is born in America, not in
central Africa; in a republic, not in an absolute mon-
archy ; of refined parents, not of sodden criminals ; and a
hundred other similar considerations, condition one's life
through all changes of fortune or choices of conviction.

Thirteen years ago I visited the mosque of Santa
Sophia in Constantinople on the occasion of the most sa-
cred feast of the Mohammedan calendar, the Night of
Power — the night at the close of the month of fasting,
when the spirit of Allah descends into the souls chastened
by a long mortification of the flesh — the Mohammedan
Pentecost. Standing shoulder to shoulder on the marble
floor of the splendid temple, once dedicated (to Holy
Wisdom) by the great Justinian, were ten thousand pious

I worshipers of the god of the prophet; and when the
priests' sharp sing-song cry rang through the immense
dome, these ranks of worshipers bent forward like a field
of corn struck by a strong wind and bowed their fore-

252 AUTHORITY AND ETHICS.

in the long dim gallery above. As I stood in that gal-
lery with a few other ''infidels" and "dogs of Christians,"
watching the marvelous sight below, it seemed as if I
had suddenly become aware of the myriad forms of wor-
ship of the myriads of generations of men, and I real-
ized with an awful reality that while every influence of
birth, race, early training, mental and moral develop-
ment made it impossible that I should become the kind
of worshiper I saw on the floor below, that single scene
also made it impossible that I should continue to be the
kind of worshiper that I had been till that night.

So to the inward factor of the influence of birth, train-
ing, and environment is added the outward factor of his-
toric institutions. When we first realize the relative
value of human judgments in the problems of spiritual
truth, we are confronted with a number of historic
faiths, symbols, systems, all claiming to be authorities
for us — all clamoring for our consent. Here it is a
church which claims to be authoritative because it has
preserved an apostolic bishopric or because it practices
baptism by immersion ; here it is a book which claims to
be authoritative because its contents have been superna-
turally revealed; here it is a doctrine which claims to be
authoritative because it has been endorsed by ecclesias-
tical councils, or a system because it has been accepted
by our fathers, or a ceremony, because it has been prac-
ticed for a millennium. It is small wonder if the soul
stands aghast before the babel of claims, like a passen-
ger just landed on a strange railroad platform and sur-
rounded by a circle of soliciting cab-men.

Now it is not the criticism of the value or the truth of
these historic authorities in themselves that is my pur-

AUTHORITY AND ETHICS. 253

pose to-day, but rather a study of our attitude toward
them: to determine, if we can, whether that attitude is
the ethical one or not. The motive which determines a
man's attitude toward these historic authorities may be,
in the first place, fear. Overwhelmed by the great mys-
tery of life and destiny which breaks upon his spiritual
vision, he may fling himself upon a great millennial in-
stitution like the church, because it has a definite answer
ready to his despairing cry for assurance of a life be-
yond the grave. He bows before Caesar. Absolutism
satisfies him, because it relieves him of the responsibility
of deciding for himself. He accepts his religion ready-
made, for he does not dare to trust himself to make his
religion. The languages of the dominion of dogma sanc-
tify in his sight the authority of the institution as the
generations of Hapsburgs, or Romanoffs sanctify in the
eyes of millions of subjects the authority of royalty. He
may know that such authority is supported only by phy-
sical force, and that history has again and again convicted
it of cruelty, of persecution, of tryranny — that under its
baneful workings innocent men have been thrust into
Bastilles, and the scaffold erected under the shadow of
the high altar. Yet just because it is absolute this au-
thority of fear claims the allegiance of millions upon mil-
lions. Nowhere is it analyzed with greater power and
insight than in the great dramatists of ancient Greece, and
especially in their mighty leader Aeschylus, "It is good,"
he says in the "Eumenides," "that fear should sit as the
guardian of the soul, forcing it into wisdom — good that
men should carry a threatening shadow in their hearts
under the full sunshine: else how should they learn to
revere the right."

254 AUTHORITY AND ETHICS.

Again, the response of the awakened mind to the vari-
ous authorities which are clamoring for recognition ma)'
be prompted by a dread of loneHness, an unwilHngness
to go out alone whither conviction would lead. There is
a type of mind that craves above all else to belong to a
large party of believers. What many agree to is true
just because many have agreed. The majority as it
grows approaches infallibility. The dogmas and systems
are truest which can show the greatest cloud of witnesses.
The consensus gentium is a most comforting and warm-
ing phrase. The triple argument of the mediaeval church
in support of its faith, viz., that it is received always, ev-
erywhere, by everybody, becomes a cogent one. It is not
the power of the institution so much as its pervasiveness,
not its majesty so much as its majority that attracts this
class to bow to its authority.

A third sort of response to the objective authorities
which claim a man's allegiance may be the result of in-
decision or mental laziness. The mental and moral in-
ertia of men is simply stupendous. The readiness with
which nine out of ten follow the path of least mental and
moral resistance makes the real moral leader or the real
independent thinker one of the rarest products of society.
Although we all know on a moment's reflection that the
standards of comfort, knowledge and even common de-
cency which we enjoy to-day could never have been
reached had the disposition which finds them satisfying
been universal, we still find it most easy to yield to the
temptation of believing that a greater necessity for im-
provement in these things was laid upon our grandfathers
than is laid upon us. We would not have stoned the
prophets ! we say, and lo ! the stone is in our hand. For

AUTHORITY AND ETHICS. 255

not choosing to improve is choosing to stagnate. And
suffering authorities . which have not been proven and
tried, to control our own spiritual life is only to give an-
other turn to the rope that binds them on the backs of our
descendants.

A fourth disposition, finally, with which we may meet
the established objective authorities of creed, church,
philosophy, and code is one of excessive modesty. This
disposition, because of its resemblance to a fair and
manly modesty, is often regarded as a virtue, whereas it
is in reality a most grievous fault. Excessive modesty
in meeting the claims of authority is simply the surren-
der of one's birthright, and an insult to such mental and
moral discrimination as one possesses. For example, a
young man, reaching the crisis of spiritual awareness in
his life, meets the problem: Is this or this article of my
traditional faith true? His historical study, his moral
prompting, his philosophical opinion, all combine to dis-
credit the authority of the article. Still he accepts that
authority, proclaims it, teaches it. And his plea is some-
thing like this : I do not quite think that true, but I am
young, I see many men of sanctity and learning who do
apparently think it true. Who am I that I should set up
my opinion against theirs? I will call it true, and per-
haps later my thought will be clearer and more convinc-
ing. So the young man commences his deeper compre-
hension of truth in a lie. He takes his first step toward
mental clarity by justifying mental confusion — and he
will as soon reach the larger truth he longs for in that
road as he would reach the aurora borealis starting south-
ward from Philadelphia. No, there is a modesty, of
course, befitting the young man in his expression of

256 AUTHORITY AND ETHICS.

mental and moral convictions, but that modesty never,
never calls upon him to deny his conviction or to stifle it.

This enumeration of the various attitudes of mind
toward established objective authorities is not at all ex-
haustive, but it is full enough to suggest to you the eth-
ical problem involved. Neither is it true, probably, that
any one of these attitudes alone fairly denotes the state
of mind of the person who accepts the authority weakly.
A combination of fear and false modesty, of laziness and
loneliness, of any or all of these things may be the cause
But all of these attitudes alike are a direct affront upon
the ethical consciousness. They all offer a narcotic in-
stead of a stimulus to the ethical sense; they hush the
judgment instead of educating it; they smother con-
science instead of refining it ; they discourage search, and
cut the Gordian knot whose patient untying is the only
exercise that can give moral skill and suppleness to our
handling of ethical problems. Yet I fear that the vast
majority of those who give their allegiance to objective
authorities of institutions, systems, and creeds would
have to confess to being actuated largely by the motives
just discussed.

From this criticism of unethical motives for the accept-
ance of authorities, I should like now to turn to the posi-
tive aspect of the topic and ask what are the marks of an
authority which is both the product of and the surety
for our highest ethical realization, what is the nature of
the authority which lays hold on us with irresistible
power, not on which we have to lay hold with apologetic
half-truths.

All real authority, in the first place, must be experi-
mental, evolved from our own moral experience and not

AUTHORITY AND ETHICS. 257

imposed in the name of another's. This is not at all to
maintain that we are all independent of each other, and
that there is no such thing as the transmission of au-
thority. Just as most of our knowledge comes from the
testimony of others, so much of what is authority for us
comes from the experience of others. Only there is this
difference between the real, controling, permanent au-
thority of our life and the occasional authority of judg-
ment touched on earlier in my lecture. Whereas the
authority of Mr. Edison on electric batteries or of Dr.
Janeway on lung troubles is valid even for those people
who do not know even the elements of the science of elec-
tricity or the processes of respiration, the authority of
another over me in the spiritual realm can only be through
my full conscious participation in his experience — through
what Auguste Sabatier has finely called "a powerful
moral contagion." We remake, in other words, and do
not simply acknowledge the authority we get from an-
other. Just as soon as conscience wakes to the grasp of
a moral problem just as soon as we realize that an en-
largement of personality is the only solution for a moral
problem, then we see clearly) the need for an intimate
personal conviction as the only norm of conduct. Then
other people's convictions, inherited standards, past au-
thorities appear to us only fragmentary and partial. There
is no moral cement by which these fragments of objec-
tive authority can be patched together into a perfect
whole, any more than the fragments of a broken vase can
be patched together into a perfect whole. They have to
go into the fire, the fusing fire of experience, to come out
entirely recast, reshapen. Authority is a new thing for
every human soul, not new in its elements (which his-

258 AUTHORITY AND ETHICS.

tcry must largely furnish) but new in its effectiveness.
For us, as responsible moral agents to recognize an au-
thority means simply to be aware of the profound affin-
ity existing between that authority and our conscience, to
feel that our obligation to obey that authority is our
emancipation from error, to be convinced that to resist
that authority would be to give the lie to our better na-
ture.

Furthermore, besides being experimental in character
real authority must also be social in its aim. I cannot
imagine a single compulsion to act well or to refrain
from acting ill apart from my relation to a social order.
Apart from that relation I should simply cease to be a
moral being. Imagine, for example, a Dreyfus in his
narrow pen on Devil's Island, only without either the
memory of cruel social relations to brood over or*, the
hope of the resumption of better social relations to look
forward to. Is there anything there to which authority
could appeal? So the whole intensely individualistic
theology of our many generations of ancestors seems to
me to invoke an authority which is artificial though aw-
ful. Humanity was broken up, by that theology, into
billions of sinful units, each with the identical moral prob-
lem— namely, to get reconciled, through a certain con-
fession and ceremony, to God; to make his own peace
with heaven. So far did this individualizing process go
that even little children under ten years old had the quick
minds and tender emotions, which should have been
trained to enrich their knowledge and appreciation of the
society into which they were growing, turned aside to the
contemplation of Calvin's God and the authority of his
majesty. To save one's self out of the world, not to

AUTHORITY AND ETHICS. 259

save the world through one's self, was the ideal of that
system. The authority which it exerted was an authority
of fear — and fear is the most anti-social element that
enters into the soul of man. Fear blasts communion, par-
alyzes efforts of cooperation, and petrifies the springs of
sympathy. Therefore any authority which appeals to
that element in our nature is only the encouragement of
an unethical disposition — and hence false.

Again, true and binding authority must be a growing,
developing thing, and not a fixed doctrine, theory, or
practice. It is born of our experience, and as our ex-
perience deepens and widens it becomes constantly both
mora adequate and more demanding. Just as we out-
grow the habits of our physical childhood, so we must
outgrow the authorities of our moral childhood. It is as
foolish to think of a fixed objective authority for all
grades of moral life as it would be to maintain a diet of
gruel through all the years of the physical life. I, as a
moral agent seeking for a clearer and clearer conception
of my duty, am subject to an authority of which the brut-
ish criminal, kept behind iron bars and under the rod
of the jailer, cannot have the least idea; and my neigh-
bor in turn, who has travelled far beyond me on the path
of self-realization in social service, is privileged to live
under a refined and refining moral authority in which I
have not yet qualified myself to share. It is the best
spirits that know the most of real authority. The fear-
ful authority which the base and brutish tremble before is
unworthy to be considered by the free man. Everything
that threatens, bullies, forces, or frightens us into a be-
lief or a course of action in the end degrades our soul;
all that persuades, wins, draws us is in the process en-

200 AUTHORITY AND ETHICS.

nobling and saving. It is the distinguishing mark of the
first kind of authority to be fixed. The authority which
rests on force hates the word progress, whether it be the
poHtical authority of the Czar and his Grand Dukes, or
the rehgious authority of an infaUible revelation. It has
ever called new ideas "error and revolt," and visited men
of fresh inspiration with persecutions. It has aban-
doned the field of history (which testifies to progress) for
that of dogma. It has elaborated a transcendent philoso-
phy which securely prosecutes its artificial metaphysics
above the troubled atmosphere of actual facts. It has
marked with cruel jealousy every advance of mankind
in scientific knowledge, has branded inquiry as sinful,
and stigmatized wholesome doubt (the most salutary
mental quality that we possess) as odious moral guilt.
It is but a travesty on real authority, which finds its
whole dignity and activity in the encouragement of men
to enlarge their mental and spiritual vision by every fact
of science and every experience of free-thought —

"To shake
The torpor of assurance from our creed,
Reintroduce the doubt discarded, bring
That formidable danger back, we drove
Long ago to the distance and the dark."

And lastly, real authority must be an educative, liber-
ating force in our lives. Human history is a succession
of emancipations. Our remote ancestors, little differenti-
ated from the beasts, struggled against red beak and claw
to preserve their lives in, the midst of wild associates.
The cave-dwellers and tree-dwellers, the hunting and
fishing tribes of antiquity wrested a precarious living

AUTHORITY AND ETHICS. 261

from their environment. In the classic age of Greece
and Rome the conquest of nature had proceeded far, but
society was still under bondage to the tyrant and the cap-
tain. The Middle Ages marked a progressive emancipa-
tion from the tyrant in the growth of the European na-
tions, in trade, in the upspringing of the towns and the
beginnings of modern economic theories, but still they
languished under the intellectual tyranny of the ortho-
doxies of Aristotle, the Bible, and the church fathers.
The Renaissance and Reformation came to free Europe
from intellectual and spiritual bondage, but there fol-
lowed a period of political bondage with its theories of
the divine right of kings, and the privilege of blood. The
great battle of the nineteenth century for political dem-
ocracy will be followed in the twentieth century by a still
greater battle for industrial freedom; and still the spirit
of man waits and will wait for the end of that emanci-
pation begun in the jungle and the cave. The trend, so
far as we can hope, of all this painful process is the per-
fection of human personalities in a society of harmon-
ious though diverse interests. All that serves this pro-
cess is authoritative for us, because it is educative; all
that hinders this process, though it were sanctified by the
ceremonial of a thousand years, is a useless encumbrance
on society. Therefore our question to early authority in
institution, belief, or practice that claims our assent, must
be. Can it serve, does it serve to-day the cause of hu-

Iman emancipation ? Or is it only a remnant of an obso-
lete stage of civilization, and an outgrown philosophy of
life? Does it fit the minds of the twentieth century in
America, or only those of the fifteenth century in Rome
or the first century in Judea ? Is it bringing good nour-
i

262 AUTHORITY AND ETHICS.

ishment to the intelligence and morals of mankind or only
adroitly flattering their senses by the beauty of ritual,
hypnotizing their imagination by the predictions of eter-
nity? We must never accept blindly, never reject blindly,
but always interpret authorities — for our spiritual, that is
our ethical life, consists in progressing through inter-
pretation after interpretation, towards a consistent, har-
monious, complete personality.

The true authority seeks no higher office than that of
educator and liberator of the human spirit. The false
authority seeks to be the tyrant and the jailor of the hu-
man spirit. You may distinguish the true from the false
by the determination of the latter to maintain itself at
any cost — even by the scaffold and the stake. True au-
thority, like every good educator, labors not to perpetu-
ate itself, but to render itself useless. For where under-
standing has come instruction has done its work.

Words of our language often contain a picture whose
lines have long' since faded in common usage, but are
brought out again sharp and clear and suggestive by the
restoring acid of the philologist. "Authority" is such
a word. It is from a Latin verb augeo meaning to "in-
crease" or "enlarge." That which increases our knowl-
edge, that which increases our hope, that which increases
our faith, our noble aspirations, our devotion to duty,
our peace of mind, our depth of sympathy, our hold on
life, our control over passion, our love of beauty, our
thirst for perfection — whether it be a book, a belief, an
institution, a service, a hero or a martyr — that is author-
ity for us, and all else is immaterial.

THE RELIGION OF THE UN-
CHURCHED.*

By Nathaniel Schmidt.

Christianity is the form of religion that has struck
the deepest roots in the Hfe of Europe and America.
For more than eighteen centuries the Christian church
has exercised a powerful influence on our Western civili-
zation. Other forces have been at work, and their im-
portance should not be underestimated. It would be pal-
pably unjust to give to one institution alone the credit for
all the progress made by our branch of humanity since it
left barbarism behind. But the unbiased historian will
always recognize that the church has been the prime fac-
tor in this development. Even though organized move-
ments of dissent have appeared as the most significant
manifestations of the church's life, these have themselves
been informed by the spirit characteristic of the founder
of Christianity, and the work achieved by the progres-
sive elements within the church should, in all fairness, be
given as much consideration as the strenuous efforts to
prevent even such changes as are implied in a healthy
growth.

Since the fourth century of our era the church has had
the financial assistance of the state. Jesus himself was
opposed to the compulsory support of religion. He criti-

*Given before the Philadelphia Ethical Society, Sunday, March
1 8, 1906.

263

264 THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHhD.

cised the temple-tax, prescribed in the law, on the ground
that, if even earthly kings do not exact tribute of their
own sons, the Heavenly Father can still less be regarded
as disposed to compel his children to pay taxes for re-
ligious purposes. The church has, as a rule, taken a dif-
ferent attitude. It has been willing in many lands to be
wholly maintained as a state-institution, and even where,
as in our own country, the principle of separation of state
and church has been in a large measure recognized, it
continues to claim financial aid by compulsory taxation of
all citizens in the form of exemption of church-property.

Of more importance is the moral support of the state.
The strong arm of civil authority, for the protection of
all lawful rights and liberties against evil-doers, has been
lent to the church for the suppression of false doctrines
and wrongly performed ceremonies. Armies, constabu-
laries, jails, gibbets, and stakes have been offered and ac-
cepted for the conversion or punishment of heretics and
schismatics. Dissenters have been debarred from the
best positions in the state, and only grudgingly accorded
their rights as citizens. Even where the state no longer
officially recognizes any form of religion, long custom
still makes church membership a badge of social respecta-
bility, forces invidious Sunday legislation, and seeks to
reinstate sectarian teaching in the public schools. The
conservative elements in society naturally give their pow-
erful support to the church as a bulwark against radical-
ism, a guardian of existing institutions, a defender of
vested interests, and a teacher of obedience to authority.

In view of these circumstances it is a fact challenging
attention and serious consideration that a great part, pos-
sibly a majority, of the people in Western Europe and

THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHED. 265

America is in reality outside the pale of the Christian
church. It is not generally realized how large the num-
ber is of those who may be said to be unchurched. The
fact that there are three million socialist voters in Ger-
many indicates that there are from fifteen to twenty mil-
lions, belonging chiefly to what is known as the laboring
class, who grow up and live in an atmosphere indifferent
or positively hostile to the Christian church. But the un-
churched are not confined to any class or political party.
They are found everywhere, in the professions as well as
in the trades, among the rich and the poor, the learned and
the ignorant, the well-disposed and the ill-behaved. The
situation is not essentially different in France, and is rap-
idly taking on the same character in Italy and Belgium.
In Holland, traditions of religious toleration, and in the
Scandinavian countries, a certain religious mysticism,
have to some extent retarded, without being able to pre-
vent, the same inevitable process. The defection in Eng-
land on the part of the masses is at the present time very
marked ; and in our own country statistics show that only
half of the population is connected, even loosely, with any
religious denomination. It should be observed, however,
that with us the attitude of the unchurched is one of in-
difference and distrust rather than of direct opposition to
the church. But the estrangement is unmistakable.

What are the reasons for this alienation ? It cannot be
accounted for by the fact that only a fraction of the
population can be accommodated in the buildings erected
for worship and instruction. For a greater demand would
create ampler facilities; and the general attendance does
not indicate that the supply is to a marked degree insuffi-
cient. There are apparently multitudes who might oc-

2^6 THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHED.

cupy pews in our churches, but who for some reason do
not avail themselves of the opportunity.

It is fair that we should consider most carefully the
reasons usually given by the church itself for its failure
to reach the millions of men and women whose religious
condition concerns us at this time. In the first place, the
love of money is assigned as a cause. The pursuit of
wealth occupies the minds of the rich, the struggle for
bread absorbs the thought of the poor. Men are unwill-
ing to make sacrifices of time and means for the sake of
religion. They will not give up one day in seven; they
dislike the collection plate. They have accustomed them-
selves to an expensive mode of living, and have become
lovers of ease and luxury ; or they are filled with envy of
the rich and an all-consuming desire to rise from poverty
to affluence. In either case, they prefer the worship of
Mammon, with the temporal and tangible rewards it
promises, to the service of God, with its stern demands of
self-renunciation. Avarice and greed hold men aloof
from the church of the poor Nazarene.

Another cause indicated by the church is the love of
pleasure. Men and women seem possessed with a pas-
sion for amusement. Their highest ambition often ap-
pears to be to pass their lives in a continual round of
entertainments, in eating and drinking, card-playing, sing-
ing, dancing, theatre-going, and merry-making of every
sort. Such a devotion to pleasure often undermines the
foundations of character and leads to a life of reckless
frivolity and dissipation. It invariably weakens moral
fibre and renders tasteless and undesirable the life of so-
briety and unselfish consecration enjoined by the church.

Still another cause that has been assigned is impa-

THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHED. 267

tience of moral restraints. Men are unwilling to submit
to wholesome discipline, to take upon themselves cove-
nants limiting their own liberty for the welfare of others,
to accept the counsel and guidance of their elders and the
friendly admonition of their brothers. Wise in their own
conceit, they reject with wanton haste the accumulated
wisdom of the past, the results of age-long experience,
and are prone not only to think but to act as they please,
regardless of those social conventions to which the church
has given a sacred character.

There is an element of truth in these contentions.
Thousands of men and women no doubt keep aloof from
the church because they are selfish and do not wish to sac-
rifice of their abundance or of their hard-earned sub-
stance, because they love their ease and are loath to give
up any part of their leisure, because they are consumed
by a morbid craving for amusements and have no vital
interest in spiritual things, or because they have thrown
off all moral restraints and dislike to associate with peo-
ple whose lives are governed by strict rules of conduct.

But these are not the chief causes of the prevalent and
constantly increasing estrangement of men from the
Christian church. In fact, it is not apparent that the teach-
ing of the church on the subject of wealth at the present
time alienates or offends those who are most eager and
successful in laying up for themselves treasures on the
earth, or appeals to and attracts the poor who once
flocked around the prophet of Nazareth to hear the good
tidings of a better social order. In most branches of the
church participation in so-called worldly amusements is
not a barrier against membership, and the providing of
entertainment for the young is given quite as much con-

268 THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHED.

sideration as the providing of moral and religious instruc-
tion. A strict discipline is no longer characteristic of
church-life. Where severer forms of discipline are still
in vogue, the objection to them is, as a rule, not inspired
by a dislike of moral restraints but by a conviction that
many of the things condemned and punished are not in
themselves wrong, as in the case of dancing, card-playing,
theatre-going, reading of heretical books, or voicing un-
popular views. The public opinion within the church
counts as a bar to fellowship habitual drunkenness and
sexual immorality, but does not condemn in a similar
manner avarice and greed, dishonesty and lack of intel-
lectual integrity. While the church stands for a certain
standard of private morality, and there is every reason to
rejoice in its maintenance of this standard, it cannot
be affirmed that the present tendency away from it is
caused by the indifference of thoughtless men, and the
hostility of wicked men, to an institution laboring with
deep interest and earnest zeal to make justice, mercy and
truth prevail in all human relations.

The development of science, philosophy, art, and social
idealism, and the attitude of the church toward these great
factors in our modern civilization, seem to be the main
reasons for the growth of so large a body of the un-
churched. Science deals directly with the facts of nature
and of human life. It gathers, compares, classifies and
interprets these facts as links in a chain of development.
Its object is not the defense of a theory or a system, but
the acquisition of certain and systematized knowledge.
It does not know beforehand whither research will lead it ;
it does not care whether the results of investigation con-
firm or overthrow established theories. It seeks noth-

THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHED. 269

ing but the truth ; it never supposes that it has found the
whole truth. It is eager to know its own errors that they
may be eHminated. MilHons of men have confidence in
the methods of science, and can conceive of no advance in
knowledge except through their perfectionment and faith-
ful application.

The church, on the other hand, assumes the finality of
the Christian religion, and maintains that "the faith once
for all delivered to the saints" can not be altered or im-
proved, though its contents may be unfolded and variously
applied. This follows of necessity from its conception
of the personality of Jesus. As a result it has been glad
to avail itself of vast erudition and carefully trained fa-
culties when devoted to the defense of doctrines whose
truth has been unquestioningly assumed, but has never
been able to welcome a scientific investigation that took
nothing for granted and used all possible means of as-
certaining the truth, regardless of tradition and author-
ity. It opposes to-day the scientific study of the Bible as
strenuously as it once opposed the scientific study of the
stars in the heavens, the fossils in the earth's crust, and
the origin of the human species. It continues to demand
belief in incomprehensible formulas and impossible mir-
acles, and to offer salvation through prayers, profes-
sions, and sacraments rather than through knowledge,
example, and moral endeavor. So marked is the contrast
between the mental attitude created by the assumption
that the final goal beyond which no further advance in
knowledge is possible has been reached in the past, in a
person, a book, or a creed, and that produced by the
spirit of scientific research, that, if a man would min-
ister as a servant of the church to the spiritual needs of

270 THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHED.

his fellowmen, the multitude of the unchurched, more or
less conscious of this difference, almost inevitably are
seized with a doubt as to his integrity or his intelligence.
This is the pathos of many a noble life; this is the chief
cause for the divided sympathy of men outside the church
with heretics in the pulpit or before an ecclesiastical court.
Philosophy deals with the nature of ultimate reality,
the grounds of knowledge, the motives of action. It is
based on the conclusions of scientific investigation; it
rests on the observation and scientific interpretation of
facts. The philosophy embodied in the Scriptures and
the Christian creeds reposes on the estimate of the uni-
verse current in antiquity, on a science now abandoned
because its generalizations were made from inadequate
observation of the facts. The philosophy of to-day is not
indifferent to any phase of human thought. It derives
strength and nourishment from every fruitful source. It
is neither Pagan nor Christian. To it this most impor-
tant contrast in the religious history of man has lost its
significance in a higher synthesis. The church may avail
itself of Aristotelian logic or even evolutionary philos-
ophy for apologetic purposes. But those to whom the
appeal is made are no longer interested in seeing how
cleverly the veil of mystery that hangs before the face of
nature may be made into a cloak behind which miracles
discredited by reason may conceal themselves, or how
ingeniously old formulas may be vested with new mean-
ings never dreamed of by their framers. The vast
problems of existence agitate the minds of men more
deeply, and in wider circles, than is sometimes supposed.
Thoughtful men, whether they are conversant with tech-
nical terms and systems or not, are anxious to work

THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHED. 2/1

themselves through the perplexing questions to a satis-
factory view of the world, and they find it conducive to
clearness to have the expression fit the thought as closely
as possible. They look out upon the world in a different
manner from their fathers, they seek for its inner reality
by different methods, they naturally voice their experi-
ence in different language, and the sense of a fundamental
spiritual difference keeps them without the pale of the
church.

Art commands a strong interest. Emancipated from
conventional designs, it has learned to seek its subjects in
a wider field, has become more secular in character.
Through the engraver, the photographer, and the print-
ing-press, the reproduction and multiplication of master-
pieces have become possible. In music, the modern man
expresses more fully than in any other way the yearnings
of his heart, the aspirations of his soul, the things that stir
the depths of his nature, the experiences that are too rich
for words. The drama has become one of the necessaries
of life. On the stage the grandeur of human nature is
portrayed, its foibles mirrored, its mighty passions shown
in motion, its tragedies depicted, its types of character
presented, its happier play with circumstance and fate de-
scribed, its humorous side set forth. To some extent the
church has been able to avail itself of the plastic arts, of
music and the drama. But the world of thought reflected
in the music and the dramatic art of the present age as-
sumes from day to day a more foreign aspect to the view
of those who have remained upon the standpoint of the
church. There are important moral questions with which
the stage deals far more earnestly and trenchantly than the
pulpit. The artist whose chief aim is to hold the mirror

2^2 THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHED.

up to nature has a solemn message to deliver, while the
priest ordained to teach has neither oracle to give nor
courage to inquire. Hence, sober-minded men give time
and money for the chance of stimulus to earnest thought,
while shrines where serious thought is not invited stand
empty and deserted.

Profound as is the influence of science, philosophy and
art, it is possible that social idealism holds the inter-
est of men to-day in a still stronger grasp. There has
been a tremendous change within the last generation in
men's attitude to social questions. Millions of men and
women no longer believe that present conditions must of
necessity be maintained, that institutions hoary with age
must live forever, that chattel-slavery and war, industrial
feudalism and proletariat, slums and epidemics, sex-
bondage and child-labor cannot be abolished. A feeling
of hope is characteristic of the masses of the unchurched.
It is a larger hope than ever swelled the heart of man
since the days when Christianity was young, and strangely
different. Then it was the expectation of a deliverer
from on high, a heavenly Jerusalem, and an eternal life
that filled with radiant joy the poor, oppressed, and per-
secuted. Now it is the sense of growing strength to
break the bonds of tyrannous conditions and make this
earthly life for man and woman, old and young, less
hampered in its growth, less bitter in its experiences, more
healthy, profitable, free, rich, dignified, and peaceful.
From the hands of Jove frail mortals wrest the thunder-
bolt, and far from being crushed by the weight of such
unwonted responsibility, they cheerfully set about to
make for themselves a new earth. They have abolished
slavery in spite of Plato's approval of this institution, and

THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHED. 273

its apostolic recognition ; and they now demand the aboli-
tion of war, a more equitable distribution of wealth, uni-
versal education, prevention of disease, political rights
and economic freedom for woman. A feeling of despair
or resignation in the presence of great social evils has
given place to a sense of the possibility and duty of cor-
recting them.

The attitude of the church toward this mighty moral
movement has, in the main, been one of indifference, if
not of hostility. The great abolitionists whose names our
nation now delights to honor were without the church or
were driven out, the chief defenders of the shameful traf-
fic in human flesh whose names it is charitable to forget
spoke from Christian pulpits. The church prays for the
success of arms, excuses the atrocities of war, and raises
no protest against the constant increase of armies and
navies ; while the Social Democracy is the greatest peace
organization in the world. In the social revolution
we are passing through the church cannot lead ; it has no
great message to utter, no ideal with which to fire men's
hearts ; it sees not the distress of their souls ; it hears not
the cr}^ of the little ones ; it offers them stones for bread.

There are indeed in all branches of the church strong
personalities, moved by the spirit of the age, and main-
taining their integrity in spiritual isolation; and on the
borders of Christendom small bodies, scarcely fellow-
shiped by the church at large, moving resolutely and un-
trammeled by tradition whither their ideal leads. But the
great historic institution owns them not, feels uneasy by
their presence, is relieved when they are outside. It will
change, no doubt, grow tolerant of present heresies, re-
spectful of some things now spurned, more hospitable

274 THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHED.

also to new truths and new demands of justice. But it is
handicapped by a heavy load of creeds and cultic per-
formances, traditions hoary with age and tendencies too
strong to overcome. Therefore the ranks of the un-
churched increase.

What is the religious condition of the masses that can-
not be reached by the church ? They are often character-
ized by churchmen as without any religion, and seldom
think it worth while to resent this judgment. Occasion-
ally, raids are made upon them that they may "get re-
ligion." Such revivals sometimes are productive of good
results, where the genuine moral enthusiasm of a leader
succeeds in arousing slumbering consciences and inspires
men with a desire to lead a better life. Often action and
reaction are equally deplorable, a morbid sensation setting
a false standard of religious experience, and the impulse
to moral self-improvement being stifled by an artificial
scheme of sacrificial magic and imputed merits. The as-
sumption that those without the church are devoid of a re-
ligious life seems to depend on a defective definition of re-
ligion. It would appear to be necessary so to define re-
ligion as to cover by the definition all those phenomena
of man's life that in any age and people have been of a re-
ligious character, and not merely the peculiarities of some
tribe, or sect, or period.

This consideration apparently requires that we should
understand religion to be the consciousness of some power
manifest in nature, determining man's destiny, and the or-
dering of his life in harmony with its demands. In that
case, the man who looks into the face of nature, with a
deep sense of its mystery, a genuine appreciation of its
beauty, a desire to know its inmost truth, a consciousness

THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHED. 275

of universal law, a feeling of obligation to order his own
life in accordance with it, and a longing to shape human
society into harmony with its demands, should certainly
be regarded as having a religious life, and the great move-
ments characteristic of modern civilization that may
have alienated him from the church must be considered
as manifestations of the spirit of reHgion.

But the religious life of the unchurched unquestionably
suffers from the effects of too much isolation, too violent
reaction, too little systematic training. A lack of spiritual
nurture, of guidance and direction, of stimulating fel-
lowship, and of well arranged ethical instruction for the
young, prevents a healthy development. There is need of
the inspiration that comes from being brought frequently
into contact with great ideas, lofty ideals, and worthy
examples. Men grow when their horizons widen, their
minds pursue expanding thoughts, their hearts respond
to generous sentiments, their wills are moved and
strengthened by the sight of noble deeds. The dead are
more powerful than the living ; they are most helpful when
through living interpreters they make an intelligent ap-
peal for loyalty to duty and regard for truth. Nature re-
veals her secrets to the seer's eye ; her message, unheeded
by the crowd, is caught by the prophet's ear and pro-
claimed by his consecrated lips. This prophetic media-
tion is necessary and beneficent. It is perverted, how-
ever, when the prophet is allowed to become a dictator,
when finality is ascribed to his interpretation of life, and
absolute perfection to his realization of the ideal. The in-
terpreters must themselves be interpreted, with discrimi-
nation as well as sympathy, reverently and yet critically.

The atmosphere of the church is not favorable to the

2^6 THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHED.

development of the spiritual freedom which this requires.
A worshiper seeking special favors at the hands of the
god in whose power he feels himself to be is not likely to
subject the character of this god to a very searching scru-
tiny. His god-idea remains in some respects behind his
ordinary ethical standards, while in other respects it is in
advance of his ordinary moral conduct, but his practical
relation, emphasized in creed and cult, forbids a recogni-
tion of this fact, and tends to conceal it from his own
consciousness. Even if the words of the great prophet of
Nazareth had come down to us in their original form, and
contemporaneous records had preserved to us the immedi-
ate impression of his spirit and manner of life, it would
be wrong to him and to ourselves to accept any idea of
his that should not have the approval of our own judg-
ment or to follow His leadership in any direction whither
our own conscience should not lead us. Our loyalty
should not be that of a slave to his master, or of a disciple
to his only teacher, but that of a free man to one of the
great spiritual leaders of the human race from whom it is
a privilege to learn. The demand for unconditional sur-
render of thought and will to "the Christ" does not even
imply acceptance of the great moral ideas that seem to
have been proclaimed by the historical Jesus, but recogni-
tion of a fictitious personality whose teachings possess far
less moral value, and whose estimate of himself and his
relations to men, besides having no basis in historic re-
ality, is apt to prevent the natural relations which men
should sustain to the great teachers of mankind in every
age and land, and to the great facts of nature that call for
direct interpretation. There can be no doubt, however,
that the regularity with which the Christ-idea is held up

I

THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHED. 2'J'J

before the mind of the worshiper is a source of inspira-
tion.

The masses of the unchurched are in need of regularly
recurring opportunities to gain stimulus for the inner life.
Having drifted away from the church, they too often
stand alone, with none to help them with their prob-
lems and their burdens. Though perhaps unconscious of
the fact themselves, they resent the unnatural isolation,
become bitter in spirit, harsh in their criticisms, negative
in their conclusions. Rightly rebelling against obsolete
beliefs and superstitious practices, they are not seldom ut-
terly unable to discriminate between the soul of truth and
its perishable embodiment, between the insincerity that
will not see the new truth, the stupidity that cannot see
it, and the conservatism that will not commit itself until
it has correlated the new discovery with the truth that hid
in the old error. This lack of judgment, found at times in
minds of generous proportions, causes them to show a la-
mentable degree of unfairness in dealing with religious
matters. Every prophet is to them an impostor, every
priest a hypocrite, every Bible a net-work of falsehood,
every system of religion a cleverly devised scheme for
holding men in ignorance and subjection. They remain
strangers to that true historic understanding which, with
a clearer perception of the factors that have been at work
in the past, gives a fairer estimate and a more hopeful
outlook. Though a single powerful utterance may give
an impulse in the right direction that shall be felt for life,
the proper spiritual attitude is more likely to be the re-
sult of long training, directed by the freqiiently repeated
messages of thoughtful men.

Men need to have the moral aspects of the great ques-

278 THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHED.

tions of life brought to their attention again and again.
These questions concern them as individuals, as members
of families, and as citizens. It is not always easy to de-
termine what is the right course of action. To a church-
man it may be sufficient that it is in harmony with the offi-
cially recognized standards and the assumed teaching of
the Scriptures, but he who cannot acknowledge these au~
thorities must seek for principles that seem to him of gen-
eral validity, or be guided in each case by expediency. The
Christian pulpit puts its emphasis upon certain Biblical
precepts affecting private morality, affirming their suffi-
ciency for all times, while, as a rule, it maintains an atti-
tude of indifference on the questions of public morality
that most deeply agitate the majority of the unchurched.
The assumption that the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures
can finally settle even the more important questions of
private morality is obviously without foundation. The an-
cient law-books of the Hebrews recognized polygamy,
concubinage, and divorce. Jesus apparently condemned
divorce, and counseled celibacy. Whether he allowed di-
vorce for any cause, is subject to grave doubt. At any
rate, it is absurd to make the happiness of thousands of
men and women in every generation dependent upon a
moot point in textual criticism. These and similar prob-
lems must be settled on other grounds, and there should
be faithful guidance in the development of a high type of
private morality among those who are without the
church.

Equally important in their own way are the questions
of public morality. The mightiest organization with dis-
tinctly moral aims outside of the church is without a ques-
tion the Social Democracy. Among its great ideas are

THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHK.D. 2/9

the abolition of war through disarmament and interna-
tional arbitration, universal education of all grades at
public expense, emancipation of woman, and an equitable
distribution of wealth. These ideas arouse enthusiasm.
They set high aims for propaganda and political action.
They send men forth as pilgrims in search of a better
land, and fill them with the assurance of things not seen.
They are inspiring. No religious life can prosper in the
future that has not felt their power.

But the serious limitations of the sociaHstic movement
must not be overlooked. It fails to recognize the im-
portance of the family life; it does not see the educative
value of the principle of private property ; it puts the em-
phasis on rights rather than on duties, on the extension
of privilege rather than on the quality of work; it neg-
lects the ethical training that is necessary for life under
any regime, and is inclined to adjourn its moral excellen-
ces until the downfall of private capitalism. While de-
precating war between nations, it instigates war between
classes that fundamentally have the same interests, and
rather than checking the growth of envy, distrust, re-
sentment, and hatred, is often guilty of fostering these
evil sentiments in order to hasten the collapse of present
conditions. It asks, not wisely, of what use it is to try to
improve the moral quality of men's lives while political
and economic conditions are what they are? The over-
weening confidence in the power of institutional reforms
alone to change for the better the characters of men is
as deplorable as the naive assumption that a widespread
cultivation of certain domestic virtues will of necessity
lead to a desirable ordering of the public life. Careful
indoctrination in the respective duties of slave and mas-

280 THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHED.

ter, and a conscientious development of the spirit and at-
titude of a slave and the sense of the responsibilities of
ownership proper in a master, will not effect the abolition
of slavery, or protect the innocent and helpless against the
abuse of irresponsible power. Only the conviction that no
man has the right to own his fellowman, and deter-
mined agitation to abolish the iniquitous institution, can
accomplish this result. But neither are the best fruits of
individual improvement reached, or the surest guaran-
tees obtained of a profitable life in common, if, in achiev-
ing the desired reform, a growing class-hatred is allowed
to lead to repudiation of claims long recognized and sanc-
tioned by usage, unconcern about intellectual and moral
conditions, educational needs, and future consequences,
disregard for the fairer and kindlier methods of settle-
ment, and ultimate resort to the horrors of fratricidal war.

One of the greatest needs of the unchurched to-day is
that the splendid enthusiasm for the bettering of the con-
ditions of man's life on earth, which through the socialist
propaganda has taken such a hold upon them, shall not
be spoiled by the demon of class-hatred, but be purified,
directed, and made effective by the spirit of good will
toward all men and practical endeavor for the realization
of high ideals in the individual and social life of the pres-
ent day.

In addition to the inspiration and guidance which the
religious condition of the unchurched calls for, there is
the need of fellowship. There are many who, though they
have lost interest in the religious views and practices of
the church, retain their membership because the church
provides a centre for various social activities, a means
of becoming acquainted and keeping in touch with men.

THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHED 281

Outside of the church, this need is met by a great variety
of clubs and fraternal organizations. Freemasonry may
be mentioned as the chief representative of the latter.
The Roman Catholic Church is right in feeling a menace
to its power in this organization. To large bodies of men
Masonry has become a religion, a substitute for the
church. While the women may still be held by the con-
fessional, this subtle enemy weans the men away with a
rival cult. These clubs and brotherhoods satisfy one
phase of the craving for fellowship. What they lack is
the community of great and stirring ideas, of spiritual im-
pulses and ideals, so characteristic of early Christianity
and of modern socialism. In order that the religious life of
the unchurched may develop harmoniously, it seems de-
sirable that there should be large opportunities for social
contact and fellowship between those to whom truth,
goodness, justice, gentleness, and beauty are vital things,
and to whom common aims and aspirations and a similar
outlook upon life would give added worth and pleasure to
social intercourse.

Possibly the deepest need, however, is that of systematic
moral training for the young. The public schools cannot
supply such instruction. If they should undertake to
teach morals without the customary connection with re-
ligious ideas, there would be just opposition on the part
of those who find the sanction of morality in a divine
revelation. If, on the other hand, they should attempt to
present the ethical content of religion, there would be
a serious question, whether, under present circumstances,
this could be done with the necessary discrimination, or
simply lead to the introduction of sectarian teaching, in
either case causing offence to many. The methods of re-

282 THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHED.

ligious instruction in our American Sunday-schools have
unquestionably been much improved in the last genera-
tion. More attention is being paid to Palestinian geogra-
phy and history, and this is not without its value. The
more important questions of Biblical criticism are still
evaded, with the result that, for the most part, the pupils
gain little or no conception of the historical place, con-
tent and character of the books of the Bible. There is
practically no attempt made to teach the young how to
distinguish between truth and error in any given Biblical
passage, how to choose the good and reject the evil, how
to estimate relative worth and to compare Biblical ideas
with those found elsewhere. At best instruction is limited
to the Bible. The child fares still worse when this field
is left for the ecumenic or sectional creeds. The ob-
ject is very rarely to teach, by precept and example, self-
reliance and moral endeavor, but rather to persuade the
boy and the girl, while they are still immature, to commit
themselves to a theory of life that promises salvation by
obedience to external authority, by imputation of the
merits of Christ or saints, by sacrifice and sacrament,
prayer and profession. As the indispensable condition of
all true moral growth is the freedom of conscience to ap-
prove or else to condemn, or the establishment of the au-
thority of the judge within, the effects of the doctrine that
even what seems most wrong must be right when taught
in the Bible can never be wholesome. The chief interests
being what they are, it seems vain to look to the church
for Sunday-schools providing a well-considered and care-
fully arranged system of ethical training for the young.
Yet the children of the unchurched have even less at-
tention paid to their necessitites in this respect, and are

THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHED. 283

in reality in a very sad plight. The adult may develop
his religious life by eager search for truth, by quiet con-
templation, by heroic struggle for the right, by good lit-
erature, lectures, representations of art, by helpful con-
tact with his fellows in politics and social activities. But
there are milHons of little ones in homes over which the
church has no influence growing up without the careful
moral assistance their tender natures crave, without being
rooted and grounded in moral principles by rule and il-
lustration, inspiring example and direct appeal to con-
science, will and heart. Who cares for them? They
are taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, calculus,
Greek, law, and medicine may be, all with great care, ac-
cording to approved methods, by competent teachers. But
who fires their hearts with enthusiasm for the moral and
religious heroes of mankind ? Who fills their minds with
admiration for justice, faithfulness, and goodness; for
noble deeds, and graceful words, and penetrating
thoughts ; for self-respect, and self-forgetfulness, and self-
control? Who cultivates in them a sense of reverence
for truth and for the patient seekers after truth ; a sense of
the mystery of nature, and of gratitude to those who have
dared to draw aside the curtain and pass into the deep
recesses of the shrine; a sense of the sacredness of life,
and of a binding obligation to fulfil its law? Who takes
things old and new out of the treasures of man's spiritual
life to point to them the path of duty and to draw their
little feet into it ? Who interprets to them, as their intel-
lectual powers grow, in simple language, and with clear
insight, the ceaseless efforts man has made to understand
himself and his environment, the enduring substance of
the hopes he has cherished, the dreams he has dreamed,

284 THE RELIGION OF THE UNCHURCHED.

the illusions he has entertained, and the slow advance
from age to age in grasp of truth and perfectionment of
character? Who leads them on from step to step, from
grade to grade, with steady aim toward a goal, afar off,
yet foreseen, when the young man or woman shall be
ready for life's work, with well trained moral faculties as
well as with goodly stores of useful knowledge, prepared
to achieve, to bear, to serve, and to appreciate ? The ob-
vious answer is too disheartening to utter. The number
of children involved is so vast, the work to be done for
them is so exacting, the knowledge and experience de-
manded in carrying it out so comprehensive, the harvest
so great, and the laborers so very few. Yet the duty
must be met. The future of the race depends upon it.

It is bootless to- speculate upon the outward forms the
religion of the unchurched may once assume, what festi-
vals it will celebrate, what songs it will sing, what scrip-
tures it will indite, what symbols it will use, what tem-
ples it will build. The time seems to be at hand when it
should gather strength, through unity of forces and pro-
per organization, for the large tasks that lie before it.
The inspiration that comes from a more rational estimate
of the universe and a higher conception of the possibili-
ties and destiny of human development, and the precious
ties of fellowship that might bind together kindred minds
pursuing the same great aims in life, should be suffi-
cient for the vast work of education that is demanded.
There is room beside the old historic religions for the new
religion that has its roots in the universal instincts under-
lying all, but seeks to press closer to the truth of things,
to free itself more resolutely from hampering traditions,
and to fashion humanity into fuller harmony with the law
of the spirit of life.

i;

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