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LAME AND LOVELY
BY THE SAME A UTHOR
HUMAN CONFESSIONS
GOD AND DEMOCRACY
BUSINESS AND KINGDOM COME
LAME AND LOVELY
ESSAYS ON RELIGION FOR
MODERN MINDS
BY
FRANK CRANE
Author of
"Human Confessions" etc.
CHICAGO
FORBES & COMPANY
1912
vi\
Copyright, 1912 by
Forbes and Company
W A6 *
£C!.A816685
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
Religion and the Modern Mind
THE human race is incurably religious.
We are more religious to-day than were
the Puritans, the Crusaders, or the mediaeval
ascetic orders.
To see this we must understand what religion is.
Religion is nothing more nor less than life, in itsT) itfwiL
purest, most elemental form.
Jesus, the greatest of religious teachers, never
used the word religion : he spoke always of life^r^1
It was the fortune, or misfortune, of the cult of
Jesus to be taken up by the Latin world.
, The genius of the Roman was organization.
So the Roman world organized the Company of
Jesus into the Church, patterned on Caesar's em-
pire; and the teaching of Jesus it organized into a
body of theology.
It is interesting to speculate what the Christ
Company on earth might have been, if it had re-
7
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
mained fluid, free, a spiritual leaven of open-eyed
souls.
What if they had remained simply the spirit-
ually elect, putting away the lust of conquest,
either temporal or otherwise, refusing all endow-
ments of money, erecting no temples, refusing all-
aid from the powers of this world, sticking stub-
bornly to the programme of Jesus and Paul ?
It is useless to inquire. Such was not the
plan of destiny, which has its own strange, slow
ways.
Perhaps organization, institutionalism, and dog-
ma, with their blinding quick success, are the
kind of things the world can never understand ex-
cept by living through them. Humanity had to
have them, as a boy has to have the measles.
The opening of the Twentieth Century is
marked by a change in the expression of ethical
feeling.
The dynamic of Jesus is manifesting itself in
terms of democracy, the removal of ancient priv-
ileges, the general rise in importance of the com-
mon people.
Socialism spreads in Germany, republicanism
bursts out in Portugal, the House of Lords is
clipped of its power in England, even China is in
8
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
a ferment of democracy. Government every-
where is feeling the sun-rays of Jesus' influence.
In business more and more the principles of
justice, and the claims of " one of the least of
these/' characterize modern life.
In literature the tendency is to study the com-
mon lot, to reveal its divinity and dignity, as well
as to put the best literature within the reach of the
multitude.
In art humanity is recognized in Millet and
Israels, while only saints and kings were thought
worth while by Rafael and Michelangelo.
The great discovery of modern times is The
People' r "Vl
All this is precisely the spirit of Jesus. The
Puritan, monkish endeavor to attain individual
holiness, and to develop the sensation of religious
ecstasy, apart from the world, was a half-Jewish,
half-heathen idea, into which the genial, out-of-
doors and social Jesus never fit.
With him religious emotion meant nothing aside
from its altruistic vent. .
Thinkers to-day, who have any sort of vision,
are ceasing to confound Christianity with the
Church. That was the mistake of most of the so- .
called " infidels " from Voltaire to Ingersoll.
fy*ji L U Jv*j • ^U^L ?L^ JUL m* fy^4^
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
Grant that Christianity and any one or more
organizations or theological schemes are identical,
and at once Christianity is indefensible.
It is only when we conceive Christianity to be
a larger thing, a vast spiritual leavening, a kinetic
spirit, of which the various churches are but one
expression, but which in its entirety means apply-
ing the wisdom and feeling of Jesus to govern-
ment, business, work, amusement, and all life, that
we grasp the significance of Christ.
The Church, as John the Baptist, must say,
facing him, " He must increase, and I must de-
crease."
The past deserves our reverence. It had its
noble souls, its heroic ideas.
The past is the mother of the present. Out of
the womb of its purpose the present has come with
great travail. And one should respect one's
mother.
But the past also must be criticised and judged,
or we make no advance. We are to perceive and
shun its mistakes, as every good son pleases his
mother best in profiting by her experience.
To imitate the past in evil as well as good, for
fear of being irreverent, is to live in slavery.
10
THE AUTHORS FOREWORD
Blind ancestor-worship means Chinese stagna-
tion.
With all respect, therefore, while we appreciate
that vision of God which our forefathers had, rep-
resented in such spiritual splendor as that of
Francis of Assisi, yet for our own and for our chil-
dren's sakes we must condemn their religion as
nine parts heathenism and one part Christly.
Through the murky air of monarchical ideas the
pure ray of Jesus' democracy hardly pierced.
The spiritual energy of this day takes a differ-
ent direction from that which it took in the days
before the dawn of democracy. We build no
more cathedrals and monasteries; we build hos-
pitals and public schools.
We go no more on Crusades to rescue the tomb
of the Saviour from the unbelievers; we march
against life insurance companies and railway com-
bines for the sake of " the little ones " with whom
the Saviour identified himself.
It is a fad to admire mediaeval faith, as we ad-
mire mediaeval stained-glass and picturesque cas-
tles. Carlyle and Chesterton both raise their
voices to sing the glory of the " religious ages."
But the sole advantage of those times over ours
II
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
is their perspective. It is " distance lends enchant-
ment to the view." Study them, come close to
them, and you will find that the religion of Dante's
day, as Symonds said of its civilization, was
founded on a dung-heap.
Their theology was based upon intellectual dis-
honesty. Their pious emotions were saturated
with cruelty. Their faiths were the war-cries of
party spirit. The religious wars in which they
constantly engaged were infernal caricatures of
that pure spiritual conquest Jesus set before him.
The flavor of the religion of the past is incense.
The flavor of modern religious life is soap.
We are no more applying the gospel to the sur-
face of the open sore of the world: we are treat-
ing the cause. We do not display our love for
mankind by largess to the picturesque beggars by
the church door; we are patiently endeavoring to
rearrange our business system and governmental
system so that all may have a chance to work at
living wages, and begging cease.
To-day we also, " for Christ's sake," are widen-
ing our parks, seeking to curb the irresponsible
power of money, rescuing little children from
stunting labor and putting them in free schools,
giving women justice and equality instead of tyr-
12
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
anny garlanded with sensuous poetry, going to
live in settlements in the slums instead of building
missions there, cleaning up Havana and Panama
instead of marching against yellow fever with a
crucifix, circulating literature and establishing edu-
cation among the masses to enable them to govern
themselves instead of training a few to govern
them.
Never before in the history of the world were
the fundamental principles of Jesus more appealed
to. Never before have men so defied ancient and
established fraud. Never has humanity seemed
more worth while. Never have classes, castes,
traditions and all vested humbuggery been so un-
safe.
Daily newspapers let the dread light of ex-
posure through courts and camps. Demos has a
thousand eyes. Kings and presidents, old fam-
ilies and millionaires, must show cause before the
fifteen cent magazines and the one cent dailies.
The rats and bats that for ages have fattened on
human weakness and ignorance are greatly dis-
turbed.
And what this age needs is to realize that this is
Christianity!
This is precisely what Jesus meant!
13
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
We are actually doing, unconsciously, and all
the better so, the very business of Christ.
For we read that when the young Nazarene
came to his home town and entered the syna-
gogue, the book of the prophet Isaiah was handed
him, and when he had opened the book, he found
the place where it was written :
" The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because
he hath anointed me to preach the good news to
the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-
hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and
recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them
that are bruised." And he added, as he closed
the book : " This day is this scripture fulfilled in
your ears."
Hundreds of earnest souls are doing this Christ-
work who are under the dominance of the tradi-
tional notion that Christ is only to be found
in some provincial, narrow organization. They
need to realize that they, too, are of the Christ
Company. They need to sing the ancient can-
ticle :
Doubtless, O God, thou art our Father,
Though Abraham be ignorant of us,
And Israel acknowledge us not.
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
It is they who form the real, invisible Church.
That Church is inherently unorganizable. To
organize means to go in for money, influence and
other forms of power over men aside from pure
character, spiritual, personal influence.
You cannot organize religion any more than
you can organize poetry.
No money ever helped Jesus' work in the world,
no authority ever furthered it ; just as no money or
authority can hinder it.
The Church of Jesus is not " a mighty army."
The whole military analogy stinks of cheap suc-
cess.
All " campaigns," all efforts to raise money, to
multiply church members, and otherwise to ad-
vance the cause of Jesus, as we would advance the
cause of some candidate for President, displays a
blindness to Jesus' very nature and oft-repeated
notions.
For, if you ask him, he tells you that his
triumph is like a seed growing secretly, a lump of
leaven, the coming of the wind; and he will tell
you to beware of money, to refuse the seats of
high authority.
Against the mighty organization of the Roman
empire he set his personality alone. It was
15
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
enough. The golden thrones have been tumbled
down; the thunder of the legions is forever still;
but the personality of the wise and gentle Son of
Man is the most powerful force in humanity now,
two thousand years after.
Why can we not understand this? Religion is
adjectival: it is not a noun. It is the quality of
our work; it is not some special work. It is the
tune of all deeds; it is no particular set of deeds.
The essays in this book are not to church mem-
bers. They are to human beings.
They were not spoken in any temple ; they were
first printed in a newspaper.
In provincial days the church bell rang, and the
neighbors gathered in the meeting house, which
thus was the symbol of communal righteousness
and aspiration.
To-day the ends of the earth are neighbors, by
the printed page. The new congregation gathers
about the newspaper, for better or for worse.
I am inclined to fancy that if Jesus were to come
to-day he would come into the columns of the
daily paper, and speak there, amidst the cries of
advertisers, the contention of politics, the antics of
the joke-makers, the parade of business; for there
he would find that same common people that once
16
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
" heard him gladly " in the streets of Jerusalem
and the by-ways of Galilee. For his message is
not of the temple, but of the street.
In the name and spirit of Jesus therefore I send
these little preachments to the common folks, to all
those who for one reason or another are groping,
in the hope that something herein may make again
clear and dear to them those evergreen spiritual
truths and emotions which are the chief beauty of
souls.
The River of God runs through the streets of
the city.
For a Chicago newspaper I once wrote, concern-
ing Jane Addams of Hull House :
44 There is a river the streams whereof
Make glad the City of God."
I went through death to find this thing
And all through heaven I trod.
Now heaven's a wide and wonderful place,
But the people are much as we,
So I came back home in sorrow and thirst,
And there one said to me:
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THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
" O fool, you have traveled far to find
What youVe crossed over time and again ;
For the River of God is in Halsted Street
And is running black with men."
"Then maybe Chicago's the City of God? "
Said I. " Perhaps/' said he;
" For to find that City you need no wings
To fly, but eyes to see.
" And low in the rushes the river sings,
And sweet is its spirit lure,
For it waters the joys of loving and living
That grow in the hearts of the poor."
So I took me a place in the City slums
Where the River runs night and day,
And there I sit 'neath the Tree of Life
And teach the children to play.
And ever I soil my hands in the River,
But ever it cleans my soul;
As I draw from the deep with the Silver Cord,
And I fill the Golden Bowl.
18
CONTENTS
PAGE
The Author's Foreword — Religion and the Modern
Mind 7
Lame and Lovely 21
The Universal Creed 26
Friendship 31
Preparation 35
The Insight of Love 39
Man Is a Spirit 43
The Waste in Hate 47
The Escape From Self 51
The Love of Woman . . 55
The Mother of Evil 59
Money . 63
Points of Social Decay 67
Redemption by Self-Respect . . 71
The Simplicity of Masters 75
The Reserves 79
Fermenting Thoughts 83
Religious Value of a Sense of Humor 87
The Difference Between Good and Bad ...... 91
Childlikeness and Childishness 95
Prayer 101
The Sin of Sensitiveness 105
They All Do It 109
The Practical Uses of Death 113
19
CONTENTS
PAGE
Otherworldliness 117
The Sermon of the Clock 121
On Going to Church 127
The Eye of the Soul 132
Loving God 136
Thei Uses of Confession 141
The Heart of Fatalism .146
A Preachment to Preachers 151
Beyond the Grave 155
Yoke Joy 160
The Soul Laocoon 165
The Center of Things 170
The Three Sphinxes by the Road ....... 175
The House on the Rock . . 179
The Declaration of Independence ....... 183
Salvation by Responsibility 187
Love the Test of Life 191
The Teeth and Claws of Altruism 195
Imitation in Religion . . .199
Do the Meek Make Good? 203
Widening . 207
Jesus Out of Doors 211
20
LAME AND LOVELY
And in the archives of heaven I had grace to
read, how that once the angel Nadir, being exiled
from his place by mortal passion, upspringing on
the wings of parental love, appeared for a brief
instant in his station, and, depositing a wondrous
birth, straightway disappeared. And this charge
was the selfsame babe who goeth lame and lovely.
— Charles Lamb.
AT first thought we seem to be drawn toward
one another by our excellences, but a little re-
flection will convince us that our truest attraction
lies in our defects.
Man's u lower nature " has come in for hard
knocks by nearly all moralists, but it is none the
less the cement of our sociality.
As humanity is now constructed, it is hard to see
how there could be any love, any family life, or
anything at all, in life or literature, except the
drabs and grays, were it not for the much berated
animalities.
21
LAME AND LOVELY
We speak of " the communion of saints," but is
there not also a communion of sinners — are we
not bound together by our lapses?
I do not write this in praise of immorality. I
am no " devil's advocate." Over and over again,
whoever speaks of moral laws at all must sound
the warning that what he says must not be carried
too far; that, no matter what his truth, it is but
half the truth; the other half abiding in the com-
mon sense, balance, and judgment of the reader's
mind.
And truly this unity in fault may be pushed to
the extreme indicated by Hawthorne in his " Mar-
ble Faun," where he speaks of the brotherhood of
crime, and how all murderers, for instance, from
them that slew Caesar by Pompey's pillar to the
last blood-guilty wretch named in to-day's paper,
have joined invisible hands in spiritual kinship.
But the truth of which I speak is to be taken
with care and niceness. Using thus due discrimi-
nation, we can get good out of the fact that prac-
tically all loveliness is lame.
Love does not leap toward perfection ; it clings
to imperfections. No class is so universally loved
as babies, who are most incomplete. It is their
helplessness that appeals; and all our affection
22
LAME AND LOVELY
rushes forth in response. So also a mother will
love a crippled child more than a sound one.
Have you never observed how a little weakness
in a hero brings him near? That story telling of
Lincoln, which was the main accusation against
him his enemies made, endeared him to the peo-
ple. And not a little of his hold upon our tender-
ness is due, I believe, to his most unprepossessing
of faces.
Washington never made a neater stroke to con-
quer " the hearts of his countrymen " than when
he lost his temper that time in battle, and said
things that are expurgated from school histories.
Whoever construes this as a recommendation of
evil misses the point. For the point, the moral
bearing, is this: That no person should lose heart
and hope because of his mistakes. Slips, errors,
and sins have the quality of lovely lameness only
in those who struggle against them and fall be-
cause of their humanity. Not to struggle, but to
turn and love and follow evil for its own sake, is
not human at all ; it is devilish.
To err is human, but not wholly. What 19
really human is to err and hate it ; to sin and loathe
ourselves for it, to slip and to be ashamed of our
slipping.
23
LAME AND LOVELY
And it is in this battling, this Alp-climbing, that
characterizes the human soul, that its loveliness in-
heres. We admire those who are on the heights;
we love those who are scrambling up, with torn
hands, bleeding knees, doubting hearts, spent
breath, full of fears — but climbing, climbing !
John has a light-giving saying: " Herein is
love; not that we loved God, but that He loved
us." Love is always from the higher to the lower,
from the more to the less perfect. So the Christ
was called " the Friend of Sinners."
Any soul that has genuine greatness, the kind of
holiness that springs from grandeur of soul in-
stead of from refined egoism, will ever be smitten
with love toward the weak and passion cursed, and
not with disgust. It is the mark of Jesus' majesty
that he was drawn so mightily to our foolish and
vice-shot humanity. Contempt has no place in a
soul that loves.
How vain, then, our fears that our dead, who
have been long in the pure perfection of heaven,
may despise us! Directly the contrary! for the
nobler they grow, by the side of him who loved
the weak and wicked with so miraculous a passion,
under his tutelage who put the sign of the cross
upon the divine stooping to our lowliness, the
24
LAME AND LOVELY
nobler they become, I say, and the more they
learn of the inward mystery of love, the more they
stoop to kiss our blind eyes and to bathe our
twisted wills and lusts with their tears.
11 Lame, lame ! " cry out all the heavenly host
as they see this toiling band of mortals painfully
writhing up the slopes of light, " lame — and
lovely!"
25
THE UNIVERSAL CREED
Chi non stima la vita, non la merita. — He who
does not value life, does not deserve it. — Leon-
ardo da Vinci.
Men should be judged, not by their tint of skin,
The Gods they serve, the vintage that they
drink,
Nor by the way they fight, or love, or sin,
But by the quality of thought they think.
— Lawrence Hope.
IN the one universal church to which all good
men belong, composed of those of all faiths
who honestly live up to the best they know,
whether Christian or pagan, Jew or Gentile, Cath-
olic or Protestant, there is a certain fundamental
creed. This, the greatest common divisor of all
creeds, may be thus stated :
i. The good man sees, acknowledges, and be-
lieves in, first of all, the difference between right
and wrong. When the word ought disappears
from one's vocabulary he may be sure of moral
26
THE UNIVERSAL CREED
decay. The one man abominable to any decent
society is the man who thinks nothing matters.
We can tolerate one, even, who doubts there is a
God; but if one believes there is no line between
right and wrong, then, as Dr. Johnson said, " let
us count our spoons when he leaves."
2. The good man believes that happiness will
come to him, permanently, and as a law, only as he
practices doing right. Joy, peace, and Miss are
not to be cozened nor juggled from God or nature,
but are the sure portion of them that persistently
do what they think right. Doing right, of course,
does not always bring money or fame or other ex-
ternal desired things, but it brings peace and poise
to the soul, as surely as three times five make fif-
teen. There are no more exceptions to this rule
than to a law of physics or of geometry. The
cosmic accuracy runs in spiritual as well as in ma-
terial things.
3. The good man's duty (in which he finds hap-
piness) is first of all to develop his personality.
God made him for a purpose ; his joy will consist
in finding and fulfilling that purpose. He is not
to be some one else, not to copy; but, using all mas-
ters, to become more and more himself.
4. It is his duty to be strong. He can be of use
27
LAME AND LOVELY
to others only as he has force in himself. He,
therefore, shuns all things that tend to weaken his
arm, his brain, or his heart.
5. His duty is to be clean. This item of the
creed is oldest and newest; oldest, in that cleans-
ings were a part of every early religion, the com-
mands of Moses, for instance, abounding in lustral
rites; newest, in that the one lesson of modern
science is the power and safety of the antiseptic
life. The devil's name, as far as bodily health
and mental clearness and spiritual vigor is con-
cerned, is dirt. Dirt is the one enemy to be hated
with all one's soul and to be fought unto one's last
breath.
6. His duty is to be brave. The basic sin of
all sins is cowardice. The higher the realm of
life in which we move the more dangerous is any
kind of fear. And the most deadly of all fears
is the fear of the truth, or the fear for the truth.
Any man or institution that fights to preserve him-
self or itself, for the sake of " expediency," that
is to say, for fear the truth might do harm, any
man or institution, in the words of Zangwill, that
proposes to live and die in " an autocosm without
facts," is doomed.
7. His duty is to love. Although, according
28
THE UNIVERSAL CREED
to the foregoing points in the creed, he is to de-
velop self and be clean, brave, and strong, yet he
is to find his motive for all this and the end for
which he does all this, outside and not inside of
himself. It is at this point that he rises, like an
aeroplane leaving the runway on the ground and
soaring aloft; here the man leaves the company
and similitude of all other creatures. In his
power to be actuated by unselfish motives he be-
comes as a god compared to the beasts. He lives
for his wife, his children, his friends, his country,
his race; so, in widening waves his radio-dynamic
flows. The good man, therefore, hates no living
creature. He despises no human being. In him
is a centrifugal power outflowing to inundate the
universe.
8. From this love arise all graces and virtues
as naturally as peaches grow from peach trees.
Loving all he cannot soil a soul, nor wrong a fel-
low being, nor hurt wantonly, nor usurp, nor push
for precedence, nor be unkind, nor in any way drift
into the low, poison life of egoism.
9. His one aim, last of all, is to serve. Strong
in himself, fearless and loving, he arises at length
to the platform where stands he who was called
14 the first born among many brethren." He is
29
LAME AND LOVELY
the Master's companion and also can put away all
cheap success, all luxuries of greed and dominance,
and repeat his Master's words : " Let him who
would be greatest among you be servant of all.
I, too, come not to be ministered unto, but to
minister." Over his grave may be inscribed what
Anthony said of Brutus:
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, " This was a man ! "
30
FRIENDSHIP
/ call you not servants, but friends. — Jesus.
WHEN a man says friendship I think he
utters the deepest word in human speech.
It ranks even a little higher than love, being a sort
of unselfed love, love with the itch and hunger
extracted.
We do not love our friends ; we like them. We
love our children, wife and parents, and kinsfolk.
We like apples and custard pie and a cozy fire and
a good bed and slippers — and our friend.
Like goes farther in than love. Like is a voice
from the subconscious self, a cry from the inward
and unknown me. It lies behind the will, beneath
the judgment, in the far darkness of our secret
soul.
It does not say that a wife cannot be also a
friend; but she rarely is; she is usually an enemy,
to whom we are most passionately attached. And
if she be a friend, then that friendship has grown
up from other sources, and is of a different texture
31
LAME AND LOVELY
and quality from the sex motives which make mar-
riages. Not many women would tolerate com-
radeship from a husband. Perhaps this is as it
should be, and nature needs fiercer fires for her
necessary results.
Still rarer is friendship between parent and
child. It is an amazing thing I have noticed here,
how warm, intelligent and cultured father and son
both strive for friendship and cannot attain it.
Sometimes they succeed, but so rarely that it may
be called a phenomenon.
Whence, then, come friends? And who are
they? And how can one make them? All an-
swers to these pathetic questions seem to me to be
unsatisfactory, partial, insufficient, and by the way.
The rules of the wise will not work. We do not
make friends by being noble and good; friendship
does not arise from similarity of tastes ; and other-
wise one can, in actual experience, drive a coach
and four through all and any of the prescriptions
of the proverbial philosophers.
The fact is that the secret springs of friendship
are wholly mysterious. Searching for them we
must report like the Louisiana sheriff reported on
the back of a writ " duces tecum " which he had
been given to serve upon a negro who had escaped
32
FRIENDSHIP
into the swamp : " Non comattibus, up stumpum,
in swampo." As I look over my friends I find
I like them as a dog likes his master. So I con-
clude that this emotion must originate in some
Newfoundland or St. Bernard region of my na-
ture, and is probably one of those instincts not yet
eliminated by evolution, something I share with
dogs.
For all that I honor it as the best thing I am
conscious of. I am prouder of liking my friends
than of any other of my small bunch of virtues.
When I think of Bill and Lige and Al and Ralph
and Newt I get a kind of warmth about the cockles
of my heart no other contemplation can produce.
And the bitterest hurts I have ever felt are
those made by the disloyalty of others whom I
thought friends and trusted. Nothing is so salt
and nauseous to the soul as the taste of Judas in
the mouth of memory.
And it seems to me — for this, after all, is a
sermon — that religion, rightly taken, is rather a
friendship for God than a love to God; and that
we would better translate all the Bible's admoni-
tions to love God by the paraphrase to be friends
with God.
To love God has a conventional sound; but to
33
LAME AND LOVELY
be a friend of God — that is a searching and
swordlike word. It means to like Him; not to
avoid Him; to seek His presence; to be at home
with Him; to be cheered, consoled, quieted by the
thought of Him.
Speaking for myself, I can say that I never came
into this comfortable relationship until I had swept
away all I had ever been taught, dared to presume
upon the debt God had incurred toward me by
making me, and took my rightful place as His son
at His table.
It does not require any assumption of holiness
or sinlessness to do this ; it only needs to presume
upon the vast noble-mindedness, kindness, and for-
bearing wisdom of such a heart as Jesus reveals
to us. It requires a tremendous burst of moral
courage to believe God likes the kind of man I
am; but I do believe it; and the result is the great-
est ethical dynamic of my life — the friendship of
God.
34
PREPARATION
Before an artist can do anything the instrument
must be tuned. — Henry Drummond.
ONE way to open a locked door is to fall at it
and scratch, kick, and shove! A better
way is to get the key.
In other words, pluck and force and will power
are all right in their place, but they are far from
being the only secret of success. They are down-
right silly without — preparation.
Knowing how is half the battle. Practice and
study count. Skill and efficiency mean a long time
getting ready. We are familiar enough with this
truth in ordinary matters. We send boys to
school and prentices to the shop, and would-be
stenographers to night school. For we recognize
that the untrained man these days has to get off
the earth, there's no room for him. But we often
fail to carry this primitive common sense over into
the more serious concerns. We forget that one
also has to learn — how to live. One cannot go
35
LAME AND LOVELY
at it tooth and nail. It is not to be stormed,
forced, and stampeded. It takes science, training,
and practice.
The learning how is hard, always ; but essential.
The only things one can do without practice are
over-eating, over-drinking, laziness, bad temper,
selfishness, and general meanness, also uselessness.
But the good things come hard. Take humility,
rarest and noblest of virtues. The only road to
humility is by being humiliated, which hurts.
The only way to patience is by self-restraint un-
der irritation. If there is nothing to gnaw and
worry and heckle us, then we never learn that beau-
tiful art of patience. The only path to belief,
that is, to the only kind of belief that is of any use
to character, is through doubt. Faith is a product
that is ground out of the mill of dismay, confusion,
despair and struggle. Intellectual assent is cheap.
The confidence that is a triumph of the soul over
pessimism and fatuous reasonings is worth some-
thing.
The only means toward rest is work. It is to
tired bones the bed tastes sweet. The soul can
never enjoy letting go that has never hung on.
Real placidity is the product of strenuosity.
So also the preparation for knowledge is love.
36
PREPARATION
Truth is not a lump of something a man may go
and pick up. Truth is not any thing at all. It is
relation, a quality, a shine, an odor. It is not per-
ceived by the intellect; it is perceived by the heart;
the intellect merely criticises and classifies it. The
secret of Edison's discoveries, and of Koch's, and
of Marconi's, is love. Only love can see. It has
the X-ray eye. And this is true in business, or
science, or literature, or art, quite as much as in
religion. Brains can amass truths and pigeonhole
them and arrange them; only passion of some sort
can find them out where they are hidden.
Sorrow, disappointment, heartbreak, bereave-
ment, all such things are the anterooms of great-
ness. There is a state into which a man can grow
where he resembles an ordinary man about as much
as a fine thoroughbred horse resembles a broken-
down hack horse, or as a big American beauty
rose resembles a dusty weed. Nobleness of char-
acter, grandeur of soul, sweetness of spirit, no one
can get these without being prepared.
Some of us have the ignorant notion that we
could be noble if we cared to make the effort.
We are like the man who, when asked if he could
play the violin, said he didn't know — he'd never
tried.
37
LAME AND LOVELY
What a deal of getting ready to live is needed !
A man never really learns how to live till he's
ready to die. And if with most of us, all of us,
life is a mighty getting ready, then it is a getting
ready for — what?
It is this tremendous question that unlocks the
door of death and gives us our surest hope of the
life beyond.
38
THE INSIGHT OF LOVE
Faithfulness to us in our faults is a certain sign
of fidelity in a friend. — J. G. Holland.
T OVE has been called blind. That is because
JL/ it will not and cannot see faults.
So men have despised love and boasted of intel-
lect, which, they say, can discern the truth better.
And herein men simply display their ignorance
and show that they do not know what truth is nor
what knowing is.
For a living truth, or the truth about a living
thing, was never yet perceived by any brain*
I Mind can see dead truths, such as that two and
two make four, or that here is a book and there
is a man, and all such things that have to do
merely with material and inanimate propositions;
L but truths that grow in the human spirit are only
Visible to the eye of love.
t Whoever loves, sees; and whoever sees, sees
jonly things lovely. For the soul of a human being
39
LAME AND LOVELY
I is essentially beautiful, and only the love ray can
/ reveal it.
This is proved by the fact that wherever we find
love in its purest and intensest form you find al-
ways that it has this glorifying effect. In three in-
stances you will find love at its best.
First, in the love of a mother for her young
child. This affection cannot see evil. The
mother kisses the crippled feet, yearns over the
weak will, and sees beneath all naughtiness to a
substratum of charm that is invisible to you and
me.
Second, in the first love of a man and a maid.
Here Puck has squeezed upon their eyes the juice
of that same flower he used to make the fairy
queen love the clown with an ass's head. No mat-
ter how gross or common to our unlit eyes the girl
may be, her lover thinks her an angel. So this sex
love, when raised to its spiritual potency, is the
most wonderful of all discoveries. To the infat-
uated lover she has no faults ; they are but eccen-
tricities of divinity no one but he understands.
He would not change her in any least way, lest
she should cease to be she, and so be less a miracle.
This is not folly, nor blindness. It is insight.
For any one of us is precisely so beautiful and
40
THE INSIGHT OF LOVE
glorious and majestic, if any one could be found
who would love us enough to detect it.
For awhile, at least, it is given to us, in the
passion of youth, to see another soul as angels see
souls. There never yet was love enough in this
world. God send more! And to any lover we
may speak those words of Wordsworth :
Thou blest philosopher who yet dost keep
Thy heritage ; thou eye amongst the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted forever by the eternal Mind!
The third instance is God's love for the human
soul. The revelation of this, the emphasis he
placed upon this, is Jesus' chief contribution to the
happiness of the race. For, singularly enough, the
reverse of all the creeds, is truer than the creeds.
God's faith in me is more saturated with redemp-
tive potency than my faith in Him. The thought
that infinite goodness can and does love me is the
flame that lights my love to Him ; as it is written :
" The spirit of a man is the candle of the Lord."
What the world needs is trust, or rather to be
trusted. Slowly and through painful years and
centuries of intellectual stupidity we are to learn
that children are to be made better by believing in
41
LAME AND LOVELY
them and appreciating them rather than by flog-
ging and scolding; that criminals can only be cured
by trusting them, never by punishing them; that
nations are best conquered by disarmament and
defenseless confidence, more certainly than by
armies; and that sinful men are to be won to
worship and morality by revealing to them through
love their own dignity as God's beloved, rather
than by threats and curses ; that while Sinai and the
white thunders of the law drive men to despair,
Calvary and the revelation of divine love lift
them to nobleness.
\ Love is not blind. Love is the only thing that
I sees.
42
MAN IS A SPIRIT
My little spirit, see,
Sits in a foggy cloud and stays for me.
— Macbeth.
The final goal of all true culture is the liberation
of man from the " sensual gravitation >f which
every one experiences in himself. Essentially as
a creature of the senses man begins his course in
this world, essentially as a creature of the spirit he
should finish it here, and, as we hope, continue it
in another world under more favorable conditions.
— Carl Hilty.
**y^lOD is a spirit," said the Master, but for
VJF that matter man is a spirit also. We are
all " spooks." The Bible says that no man hath
seen God at any time, neither hath any man at any
time ever seen a man. We are kin mysteries to
Deity.
Carlyle relates how old Dr. Samuel Johnson,
the grand mogul of English literature, used to go
poking about strange places in Cock Lane looking
43
LAME AND LOVELY
for ghosts when all the while the streets were full
of them, had he but known it; he jostled them
daily in the thoroughfare, and the good doctor was
himself a wraith, in a substantial envelope to be
sure.
Because you have seen my clothes and face and
hands is no proof you have sttn me. I have never
even found myself.
The first and most pregnant of truths is that
we are essentially spirits, and we come into the
better quality of living only as we recognize this
fact and cultivate our spiritual nature. " To be
carnally minded is death," said St. Paul, " but to
be spiritually minded is life."
We enter the world as little animals; we ought
to go out of it great spirits. An old man should
be more beautiful than a baby, for the baby is
but a charming animal, while the old man may be
a lofty, wondrous, fascinating soul. That this is
not the rule and that we dread old age shows that
we have not yet learned what it is to live, nor real-
ized the value of character.
To live, in the fullest sense of the word, is to
find our aims and enjoyments in the spiritual
plane. But spirituality must not be too narrowly
defined. It does not mean an absorption in reli-
44
MAN IS A SPIRIT
gious emotions. That is only one phase of it and
too often overemphasized.
Whatever sets our pleasures over from the body
to the mind, from the flesh to the spirit, belongs
to our spiritual assets and helps give life poise and
permanence and the quality of immortality.
The American people do not yet fully appre-
ciate the moral and civic value of the arts. We
regard music and painting as mere amusements,
good for those who happen to like that sort of
thing. They rank a little higher than baseball.
But we are mistaken. They belong to the assets
of civilization. They assist in redeeming a nation
from brutishness, from the rule of coarse lust,
greed, luxury, and bloodthirstiness. They are a
part of the " kingdom of heaven."
The love of nature, the power to get satisfac-
tion out of the contemplation of the blue mystery
of the lake, the splendid spectacle of the night sky
and the stars, the loveliness of leaf, and tree and
flower, the imposing majesty of mountains, the
calm of rivers, and the moods of the great ocean
are also distinct aids in bringing our lives up out
of the slough of mere bodily desires.
Not that the body's appetites are wicked.
They are good. God made them. But He also
45
LAME AND LOVELY
made hogs. They are simply low. They are
good only as they are kept in their place. And
more and more, as life unfolds, they should fall
away. And they will if you control them and dis-
cipline them. All their fiery forces will pass over
into soul power just as the rotting mold sends its
filthy juices into the plant stem to rise and become
white lily petals bearing fragrance.
Thus beginning as animals we work our way
up to our inherited privilege as spiritual beings in
the wide, beautiful, and healthful sense of the
word. By cultivating the mind, by science, by art,
by music, by the love of nature, by intercourse with
high-minded persons, we ascend out of the dirt
into the sunlight of life.
Nothing is so valuable to assist us in this as an
intelligent appreciation and reverence for God.
We ought to recognize His spirit in His universe
just as we recognize a man's spirit in his body.
Out of a rational, sensible religion, communion
with God and with good people we get what we
find nowhere else, a constant nourishment for
truth, love, honor, self-control, hope, and optimism
in our hearts.
46
THE WASTE IN HATE
But I say unto you, love your enemies. — Jesus.
ONE of the most luminous observations upon
hatred is that of Baudelaire: " Hatred is
a precious liquor, a poison dearer than that of the
Borgias, because it is made of our blood, our
health, our sleep, and two-thirds of our love."
The main point to know about hate is that it
does not pay. It is pure waste. It exhausts our
vital forces and gives us nothing in return.
Baudelaire well calls it poison. For of all pas^
sions that lodge in the soul it has the most septic,
heady, and yeasty quality. If we really hate a
man, we ought to hate him too much to hate him.
That is, we should not be willing to give him
the pleasure of making us unhappy; and we can
surely cause him more discomfort, if he bears us
genuine ill will, by letting him see that he cannot
disturb our peace.
Why should I let my enemy rob me of my
sleep? Why, for his sake, should I indulge in
47
LAME AND LOVELY
thoughts that are to me as black coffee at bedtime
and give me a " white night "? I shall put aside
all feeling about him, even if it takes as much
moral effort as a drunkard needs to refuse his
liquor.
The word of Emerson, speaking of Lincoln, is
to me the ideal of manhood, freed by its very
greatness from the self-torture of resentment:
41 His heart was as large as the world, yet it had
no room in it for the memory of a wrong."
More practical, more mundane, perhaps, but
not less forceful, was the remark of the late Paul
Morton, who answered, when asked if he did not
like to " get even " with any one who had done
him wrong: " I haven't time. I am too busy."
A friend was once swindled out of $5,000 by a
rascal whom he had trusted. To the surprise of
every one, he made no effort to prosecute the man.
One of his friends asked him why it was that he
did not take steps to get justice.
" Well," said he, " it's this way: If I should
go to law I could possibly regain my money and
punish the fellow ; but it would take me about two
years to get the case through all the courts, and in
the meantime a world of hard feelings and feuds
would be created. Now, I figure that I can make
48
THE WASTE IN HATE
that five thousand, and more, by strictly attending
to my business for those two years, and feel a
whole lot better." This, I take it, is as good
philosophy as was ever uttered in Greece.
To get rid of hate and its spendthrift results
upon us, we must live upon the heights. It is all a
question of the plane upon which our daily think-
ing and feeling take place. To bear grudges, to
harbor bitter animosities, to wish evil to any man,
to look and hope for disaster to any creature, is to
dwell in the lowlands, in the miasmatic swamps of
life, and to breathe febrile and malarious vapors.
If we can, by a moral effort, pull ourselves up
to the mesa, the highlands, where move such
figures as Antoninus and Lincoln and Jesus; if we
can rise thus to the point where we can feed our
enemy if he hunger and give him drink if he thirst,
we have the double satisfaction of triumphing over
him, which is pleasant, and over ourselves, which
is an infinitely greater pleasure.
Dr. Holmes calls argument the " hydrostatic
paradox of fools " — that is, as water rises to the
same level in a small tube as in a large reservoir
with which it is connected, so to argue with a fool
is to put him on your level. " And," he adds,
" the fools know it! "
49
LAME AND LOVELY
So anger and hate and all such heat against
wrongdoers might be called " the hydrostatic para-
dox of malice/' for to fall into bad blood against
the man who has done us evil is to descend to his
plane and to share with him his devil's brew of
malignity.
Hate is destructive. Love is creative. Every
angry feeling tears down something in us. Every
emotion of love hardens our life fiber. In all an-
imal life love is the creative instinct and hate seeks
annihilation. Nowhere does the pure wisdom of
Jesus shine more refulgently than where he says
(and he practiced it) : " Love your enemies."
50
THE ESCAPE FROM SELF
Speak to the children of Israel, saying, Appoint
out for you cities of refuge. — Joshua, xx, 2.
Every individual soul has a history very similar
to that of society. — Carducci.
AMONG the ancient Jews they had cities of
refuge. The rash murderer, not with mal-
ice aforethought, might flee to any one of these
and be safe from the wrath of the avenging kin.
They were a wise people who thus had prevision
and made provision for their own weakness.
For a man's intelligence may be better gauged
by his knowledge of his own shortcomings than by
his consciousness of his own strength. And the
one person against whose folly and enmity one
needs most to guard is one's self.
I have therefore my own cities of refuge,
whither I flee to escape my implacable enemy —
myself. For this eminently respectable me, that
I dress up in as good clothes as I can buy and
would have all people think to be sober, high-
51
LAME AND LOVELY
minded, self-controlled, and good — yea, that I
have even at times set up in pulpits and on plat-
forms and made preach and lecture to honest folk,
telling them what they ought to do, is a fellow I
should hate to have you know too well.
As there were three cities of refuge in Jewry,
so I will give but three of mine, though there are
others.
First and foremost is work. I work not be-
cause I like it, for I would rather spend money
than earn it and I could loaf as thoroughly as the
next man; nor because I need to make a living,
for any one can knock off work and be a parasite ;
some one will always look out for the lazy as well
as for the sick; but because I am afraid not to
work.
In work I respect myself and am at peace with
the infinite without me and within me. When at
work I am Dr. Jekyll. I would not dare to start
out merely to live a life of ease; I would be afraid
of Mr. Hyde. Work is simply the salvation of
the soul, not possibly in an evangelical sense but
at least in common sense, because it saves me not
from theological horrors I know nothing about,
but from myself, which is a horror that " comes
home to men's business and bosoms."
52
THE ESCAPE FROM SELF
Crime in society is largely the product of lei-
sure. Most of the ordinary moral lesions could
be cured by sawing wood.
The second city of refuge is called order. I
find that if I do not compel myself to system and
regular hours I get nothing done at all. If I
worked only when I felt like it you could put it in
your eye. The greatest humbug loose is inspira-
tion. Perhaps this should be qualified thus : occa-
sional inspiration is a humbug.
For the divine afflatus is a stream that runs in,
grooves, as indeed all emotions, to be strong and
dependable, must be trained to come at certain
hours. The heart has its habits. The world's
best work, noblest poetry, and divinest prophecy
have come through men who were pounding away
so many hours a day.
Of course, out-of-the-way hints and whispers
come at odd moments to souls, and man is not a
treadmill; but one who depends upon feeling like
it to do his work soon ceases to feel like it, he is
weakening his will power.
By system you not only accomplish so much
more but you get a peculiar poise and a blissful
sort of contentment with yourself, the same sensa-
tion you get from seeing a swept and tidy room.
53
LAME AND LOVELY
An unordered day is like a cluttered desk or a
frowzy woman.
The third city of refuge is called wife* Any
man would be ashamed to tell how many vile and
blackguard thoughts have made at him only to be
warded off by this heart wall ; how sometimes her
presence and the touch of her hand give peace and
avert a panic, as if an army with banners had
moved to the succor of a beleaguered city.
A good bachelor must be either a strong and
noble man or a bloodless paste. Most of us are
neither one nor the other; we are simply human,
and a human man needs a wife as a locomotive
needs an engineer, to prevent a wreck, as well as
to make him go.
These cities of refuge and these arts and ways
of saving one's self from one's self may throw
some light, perhaps, upon the reason why there is
inserted into the Lord's Prayer the petition :
11 Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us
from evil ! "
54
THE LOVE OF WOMAN
Amor sementa in noi d'ogni virtute. — Love im-
plants within us every virtue. — Dante.
U Amour est un feu auquel s'epurent les plus
nobles sentiments. — Love is a fire by which are
purified our noblest emotions. — Balzac.
THE universal opinion of mankind places the
love to God as the chief motive force in
morals.
Right next to this in importance and in power
comes the supreme love of one man and one
woman.
It may have its roots in the desires of the body,
as a lily has its roots in the mold, but its flower
and spiritual consummation is farthest removed
from earthliness and has the finest ethical flavor.
It is amazing how many saints and councils and
ecclesiastic polemics have regarded the love of
woman in some way akin to evil. While religion-
ists fulminated against the danger of soft smiles
and laughing eyes to the soul, down in Provence
55
LAME AND LOVELY
the troubadours were founding a better theology,
which crept over the Alps and touched one Dante,
who perhaps more than any other genius has
rescued woman from the slough of sense and made
her man's spiritual guide. The substance of his
gospel was that it is woman whose soul awakens
the soul of man to his kinship with God.
Michelangelo, in his sonnet to Vittoria Colonna,
expressed it :
For O! how good that God must be
Who made so good a thing as thee!
The ancient Jews had their " court of women "
in their temples, and the Mohammedans deny
them souls ; so also the hermits and holy anchorites
prayed to be delivered from them.
If our civilization of to-day is better, and at
least it is kinder and more humane; if we have
penetrated into the core of all religion and found
it to consist of no more nor less than emotional
altruism (altruism with dynamic), the prime cause
of our advantage is that women have assumed the
spiritual leadership of the age.
In our churches it is " the court of men " that
fringes the rear of the meeting; with us, contrary
to Islam, we sometimes doubt if men have souls.
56
THE LOVE OF WOMAN
I say if a man has become so entangled with insti-
tutional theology that he cannot tell whether or
not he dare claim he loves God, let him love his
wife. If that is not loving deity, it is the next
thing to it.
I speak soberly. I refer to ethical power.
Sincere, loyal love between one man and one
< woman is to my mind a hundred times purer than
that purity supposed to bloom in the unmated. A
good wife is a better cure for unworthy thoughts
Vthan fasting and flagellation.
j And equally good is a supreme exclusive affec-
tion in the woman soul. To utterly love one man,
I to choose him and cling to him " for better or for
I worse," is not to be called conducive to religion:
\ it must be called religion itself.
This human love, romantic affection, which
sin in the best way sin can be ousted, by what Chal-
mers called " the expulsive force of a new emo-
tion." It stops moral lesion by the most potent
of moral antiseptics, love itself. It heals the
diseases of the soul, not by the crude methods of
bleeding and blistering, incantations and amulets,
but by the rational scientific principle of " assisting
nature to throw off the poison."
57
LAME AND LOVELY
It goes to the seat of life and empowers there.
It stimulates the white corpuscles of the spirit to
devour and destroy all deadly microbes and dan-
gerous bacilli.
It is significant that all through the middle ages
men worshiped a woman with a baby in her arms.
It is still significant that the most vigorous reli-
gious movement in this opening of the Twentieth
Century is headed by a woman.
The dying Bunsen said to his wife, as she
stooped to kiss him : " In thy face have I seen
the eternal! "
58
THE MOTHER OF EVIL
The Mother of Evil is not Joy, but the Lack of
Joy. — Friedrich Nietzsche.
/ am come that your joy may be full. — Jesus.
BY a curious twist in the morbid nature of man
the sunny gospel of Jesus Christ has often
been construed into a shadow of gloom.
No one had a firmer hold on life, a sounder
taste of its pleasure, a richer appreciation of the
higher possibilities for joy concealed in existence
than Jesus.
Unfortunately, he was an oriental, and by
some strange will of destiny his cult first spread
among occidentals. All his picturesque imagery,
his poetry, his delicate, piercing shafts of intui-
tional perception, were hardened into doctrines
and syllogisms, and his social truth, intended to
permeate " like a lump of leaven," became a rigid
organization.
We may have gained something — who shall
say? — but we certainly have lost much. When
59
LAME AND LOVELY
you pluck your lily to pieces, scatter its odorous
petals on the ground, and transect with a sharp
knife its swelling seed-sac, you may have added to
your knowledge of systematic botany, but you have
lost your lily ; its grace, color, fragrance, and fruit-
fulness — and the flower was created for those*
And we may be sure there was some charm of
life, some fullness of deep joy, that played like a
felt radiance about his eyes and smile, that so
drew to him the " multitudes," for the common
people follow only what smacks of life. Most
of all does our age lack in the realization of his
warm humanity.
He came, he said, that our joy might be full.
There is the cure of sin. It remained for
Nietzsche, the declared enemy of our faith, to see
it most clearly. " It is not joy, but the lack of
joy, that is the mother of evil."
There never was a mortal sin that did not
spring from an empty heart. What are all
blasphemies but brutish, twisted prayers for
inward peace? What are drunkenness and all
fleshly naughtiness but the struggling of souls to
fill themselves at the swine's trough of sensuality?
What are cruelties and injustice and oppression
but the attempt to stay the appetite for joy with
60
THE MOTHER OF EVIL
poison and bitter passions ? And, taking the whole
range of human wickedness, murder, envy, hate,
lust, theft, unkindness, and money-madness, do
they not seem to be the cries and grimaces and
wild gestures of starving gods locked out of the
banquet hall of truth, beating with bruised hands
against the door ?
Whoever, therefore, plants one pure pleasure in
the garden of men, and teaches us how to eat
thereof and not sicken, has helped to stay the open
wound of human sin. We are beginning, these
last days, to perceive that the way to make the
world as good as possible is to make it as happy
as possible, and not as miserable as possible.
Economists are commencing to understand that
what makes slums is dark, wretched lives; what
makes drunkenness and the social evil is emptiness.
Our new gospel is unconsciously the old one and
the true one. We are trying to make the people's
joy full, to save the people from vice and death.
So in Jesus' name we may not be building lofty
cathedrals, as they did in another age, but we are
laying out parks, setting apart playgrounds for
children, rearing a mighty public school system to
shatter ignorance, promoting science to woo the
truth, building hospitals for the sick, and asylums
61
LAME AND LOVELY
for the insane, and blind, and deaf and dumb, and
feeble minded, transforming prison hells into sane
reformatories.
We are extending art and learning and music
and the drama and all civilizing pleasures more
and more toward the common man, establishing
libraries and making the best literature cheap and
popular — all in the name of the Son of Man, to
shunt the vast river of human joy that for cen-
turies ran only into the pools of the elect, into the
broad lowlands of the people.
To this end all philanthropists, labor unions,
socialist movements, democracies, scientists, and
schools, march along different roads.
Law, repression, punishment, didactic warnings,
and prohibitions, these do not cure crime ; they do
but " heal the hurt of the daughter of my people
slightly, crying, peace, peace, when there is no
peace." Whoever will cure us, let him " come
that our joy may be full."
62
MONEY
Quel bien lui en revient-il? — What good does
he get of it? — Bossuet.
SINCE the dawn of preaching we preachers
have been threatening^rich men with our right
fist — and extending to them our left palm. It is
hardly to be wondered at that we find difficulty in
being taken seriously.
And our advice has been so confusing that we
have not had much effect. For now we exhort
the youth to all the virtues, giving as an induce-
ment the assurance that thus they will be enabled
to get on; and again we turn to those that have
gotten on and warn them of the danger of riches.
It might well be asked, if riches be dangerous, why
acquire them; and if virtues lead to riches, are they
really worth cultivating?
It may be well, therefore, to set down a few
common-sense facts in regard to riches and the re-
lation of them to the moral values.
In the first place, money is simply the token or
63
LAME AND LOVELY
sign of our common human wants. It means
power, power over others, power to make our per-
sonality felt. No wonder we want it.
Again it means liberty. Poverty is a curse. It
ties the hands. It binds the mind. It narrows
the soul. One who has to sweat ten hours a day
for bread has no time nor strength left to develop
the higher part of himself.
Money means also a full life. We can gratify
our cravings, whether they be for beer or art, for
Paris gowns or Wagner music. With money we
have a chance to grow; without it we are stunted.
Money, therefore, is simply concentrated — we
might say canned — human value.
It naturally follows that it is good or bad, never
of itself, but only as giving opportunity to its pos-
sessor. Here, then, we have the moral gist of the
whole matter : money is simply — opportunity.
It unlocks the door and bids the cramped and
chafing passion go and do its will. It liberates de-
sire. Hence it simply emphasizes a man. If he
is good he can now be better, having more scope;
if bad he can, and probably will, be worse. If idle
and useless, he becomes a living fountain of idle-
ness and uselessness, poisoning others.
So, money is like any other gift; a9 beauty,
64
MONEY
which adds power to the person; or genius, which
multiplies the efficiency of the mind and hand; or
position, for kingship magnifies a common man to
heroic proportions, in his influence on other men.
Now, the sole relation of morals to power of
any kind is this: that the moral sense adds to
power — responsibility.
The root of any genuine moral feeling is al-
truism. Given any desire, it becomes moral as it
takes a direction toward the welfare of other peo-
ple: it is immoral exactly in proportion as it dis-
regards others and looks only to self.
Wicked people, therefore, are those who live,
think, and do for self alone ; and that whether poor
or rich. Whoever says, " I would like to be rich,
for I could do so much good with my money,"
should examine himself and ask what good he is
doing with the little he has. It is all a matter of
relation. If one is not helpful and liberal on $40
a month, he would not be so on $4,000 a month.
In the ultimate realm of morals there are no
commandments ; there is only one test — do I live
for myself or for others ; am I altruistic or egocen-
tric?
The dawdling smart set, flitting from bridge to
matinee, from theater to bedizened restaurant,
65
LAME AND LOVELY
from the club to the horse race, are wicked ; but no
wickeder than the bitter poor who want to lead
such a life, and who curse their lot because their
selfishness is bound and chained.
To the real man, therefore, riches means noth-
ing at all, as to his character; it simply means an
opening to give vent to his character. And a
clear-eyed soul, that sees and realizes what re-
sponsibility means, is never eager for power and
opportunity. It is easier to be good in moderate
means than in riches for the principal reason that
it is easier to bear a small than a great load of
responsibility. " It is hard for a rich man to enter
the kingdom of heaven," just because a rich man
to be moral must be great. And, unfortunately,
great souls are scarce among great fortunes.
The greatness of Jesus was not in his wisdom,
magnetism, nor ethical perception, but in the fact
that he was utterly altruistic; that is, he used all
his powers not to advance himself but to help
others. His tormentors unwittingly told the truth,
and stated unknowingly his very secret, when, as
he hung on the cross, they wagged their heads at
him and cried :
" He saved others; himself he cannot save ! "
66
POINTS OF SOCIAL DECAY
You are the salt of the earth. Put yourselves
at the decaying points of social life and stop the
putrefaction. — Maltbie Babcock.
EVERY man that has in him the health of
sound principles, owes a duty to the mass of
men of which he is a part.
All genuine conviction is militant. A sincere
belief always wants to " go out and compel them
to come in." It is essential to any honest faith
that it desires to draw all others to it.
Truth is at heart intolerant; knowing itself,
with a fierce certainty, to be unspeakably better
than error.
In most things we know ourselves ignorant,
children facing mysteries; so in most things we
should be tolerant and liberal. But in the few
things that we know through and through it be-
hooves us to be hard as nails. On a question of the
trinity or the miracles let us argue calmly — and
endlessly; but on a question of decency versus
67
LAME AND LOVELY
indecency, or cruelty versus kindness, it is a word
and a blow.
Hence, it is for every modern soul, who feels
the strong truths of civilization coursing through
his thought, to stand for them, against all comers.
He who has the truth is salt. Error is putrefac-
tion. Where wrong prevails in the social organ-
ism, let the man of salt thrust himself, as his duty
to the universe.
Certain main points of decay may be mentioned;
certain places where error is flagrant, fragrant,
and stifling. First, it is the duty of every child
of light to shine out against the ancient world
fraud and inherited curse of militarism. Where-
ever the harpy — head of war — lust shows itself
he ought to take a shot at it.
For war is the most monstrous putrefying
agency on earth to-day, and that includes all mil-
itary preparedness. Whoever believes in truth
and justice should do what he can, in his small cor-
ner, to bring about the parliament of man, the
federation of the world.
Again, every man of salt and health should do
his utmost to break down caste wherever he finds
it. Whatever system or organization or custom
impedes the free rise and scope of the individual
68
POINTS OF SOCIAL DECAY
is a rotting point. All select classes, aristocracies,
plutocracies, bureaucracies, and whatever schemes
there may be for controlling the people or the
wealth or labor of the people by a set of persons
who are chosen by any other than the people, and
who are not directly responsible to the people, are
germ centers of tyranny, and eventually always of
injustice and cruelty.
All that devious thing we call graft is also a
breeding spot of social disease. In whatever
mask it appears, however polished, honored, and
disguised, wherever one sees the fatal symptom of
public office for personal gain he ought to de-
nounce and oppose it. It may lurk in intricate
tariffs, or sit smug in wigged courts, or blow like a
sperm whale in dignified senates, or pervade as an
invisible spirit the circles of business; but no mat-
ter where, how, or why it is, it is rotten.
In the nearer affairs of life we may safely lay
down the rule that whatever threatens the integ-
rity and happiness of the home life, where one
man, one woman, and their children are gathered
in the family, the oldest and best institution on
earth, is foul. Whatever makes a good woman
blush is septic. Whatever tends to make little
children unhappy is poison. Whatever gospel
69
LAME AND LOVELY
takes the nerve out of men and discourages them,
in its general effect is unjustifiable and depraved.
Also, whatever or whoever loves and clings to a
lie, to anything that he knows to be untrue, is
pregnant with trouble and obliquity.
The only healthful, pure, sound, stanch self-
cleaning, and exceedingly good and green growing
thing under heaven or in heaven, among men or
among angels, is — the truth.
70
REDEMPTION BY SELF-RESPECT
// is hard for a man to respect himself when
he is denied respect by all around him. — W. E.
Channing.
THE foundation of character is self-respect
The citadel of virtue is a proper pride.
Out of self-contempt flow bitterness, suspicion,
yielding to sensualities, and the acceptance of low
standards. Self-respect is not egotism, but resem-
bles it about as a good apple resembles a decayed
one. Self-respect is sound, sweet, and healthy.
Egotism is morbid and sore to the touch. Self-
respect is tough ; egotism is tender.
Call a child low, and bad, and lazy and you
make him so. All accusation, and scolding, and
punishment is unpedagogic. It never did any
good. To punish a child by beating simply proves
to him one thing, to-wit: that you are a bigger
brute than he. The whole business of breaking
the will, taking down the pride, humiliating and
subduing people, is utterly immoral, and that
whether applied to children or to grown people.
71
LAME AND LOVELY
No human being was ever morally helped in his
weakness or morally cured of his perversion by
any other means save one — that is, by apprecia-
tion. It is that which reaches down into the soul
and raises the prostrate will ; that and nothing else.
Love is the only creative, healing force. Hate
and all the arts and actions of hate are vicious.
Anger and condemnation are devastating always.
Hence our whole prison system is ignorant and the
most fruitful manufactory of criminals we have.
Prisons are holdovers from the dark ages. They
are vile, stupid, and poison fountains in society.
Any warden of the penitentiary will tell you con-
victs are not reformed in his institution; they are
punished.
That means their self-respect is broken down
by all the ingenuity of devilishness society will al-
low, and the self-despising wrecks are turned loose
again on the people. Any system of justice that
starts from the principle that a criminal is to
be punished is unscientific, unintelligent, and im-
moral. Punishment simply means vengeance.
To send a criminal to the horror of the peniten-
tiary is of the same grade as kicking a horse in the
stomach because he shies or balks.
A criminal is such usually because he has lost his
72
REDEMPTION BY SELF-RESPECT
self-respect. And the prison ought to be a place
where he can regain it. It ought to be a school
for weak wills, a training house where human na-
ture could learn a little dignity. It is refreshing
to note that attempts are being made in this direc-
tion in some states with most encouraging results.
The worst blot on our civilization is that we
have made so little progress in the cure of the
socially unsound. Our theology is practically past
condemning souls to eternal punishment; but our
actual sociological practice can still find no use to
make of a depraved man but to vent our hate on
him by sending him for from one year to a life-
time to a hell on earth. Society still has got no
further along than to strike back when it is struck.
But it ought to be the glory of organized justice
to be free from this bestial heat for revenge and
to do with the lawbreaker precisely what is for the
best interests of the community at large. And
those interests never demand that he be taken and
hardened into a professional pervert, but that he
be healed and set right.
That we do not know how to do this is igno-
rance and pardonable; but that we don't try nor
want to know how is disgraceful and unpardon-
able.
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LAME AND LOVELY
Jesus was right. Tolstoi was right. They
were not crazy nor Utopian. They were in line
with sound common sense and with the known
truths of psychology. God help us! We apply
modern science to transportation, and cooking, and
lighting, and to all forms of business and comfort,
but not to the cure of fallen self-respect, exactly
where it needs most to be applied.
We have left off flogging children and have be-
gun to study them. Let us leave off brutalizing
and stunting men and women and begin to study
how to help them.
74
THE SIMPLICITY OF MASTERS
La philosophic nest que le retour conscient et
reflechi aux donnees de Vintuition. — M. Berg-
SON.
THIS sentence of M. Bergson, professor in the
College de France and one of the most ad-
vanced and thorough of modern philosophers, has
been called by Edouard Schure " simple, conclu-
sive, and immense, containing the whole future,'5
and may be freely translated : " Philosophy is
only the discovery by the conscious, reflective mind
of what we already know by intuition."
Here, then, is the circle of wisdom, the return
of truth upon itself; for all the deep, vast, eternal
laws of life are woven into the very texture of the
soul, and the old man, after years of search and
wandering, comes back to the little child. Emer-
son said that " when God has a point to carry with
the race he plants his arguments in the instincts,"
and Jesus' exclamation was to the same effect:
44 1 thank thee, O Father, that Thou hast hidden
75
LAME AND LOVELY
these things from the wise and prudent, and hast
revealed them unto babes I "
It is only among the partly wise that we are fed
with involved and profound sayings; when we
reach the masters, Epictetus or Socrates or Jesus,
they talk to us in the language of the street and
their sentences are homespun and childlike.
The fakirs are complex. Those who know but
little and would seem to know much are mysteri-
ous. The masters baffle us by their plainness.
The lights are turned low in the fortune teller's
booth; Jesus taught on the hillside in the sun.
The road to wisdom leads through and beyond all
night shades of dim temples and sacred woods,
into the dawn. The real truth is clear as the
morning.
We shall come to poise and peace, therefore, as
we learn to perceive and to follow the few great
intuitions, and these we find best in children. In-
stead of trying to teach children, that is, drilling
into them our stupid conventionalities and cow-
ardly moral compromises, we ought to let
them teach us; we should sit at their feet and
observe their unconscious revelation of God's
secrets.
Properly studied, children will teach us the
76
THE SIMPLICITY OF MASTERS
three great arts of life — the art of joy, the art
of faith, and the art of reverence.
From them we may learn, if we be humble
minded and teachable, the art of joy, which con-
sists in living like birds and flowers. The child
is not afraid to be happy; he throws himself head
first into what pleasure he finds, which is plainly
the purpose of nature.
It is the philosophy and religion of grown-ups
that set so much value upon misery. Of course,
we can twist this truth into an excuse for sin and
folly; the purer and truer the law of God the more
dangerous it is in the hands of ignorance and per-
version.
From children we learn the art of faith, which
is merely the conviction that the universe and its
forces are friendly. The child instinctively be-
lieves that all people are well disposed toward
him ; he has to be taught the adult facts of hatred
and enmity and malice. The whole progress of
the race is through fear and wars and distrust unto
the millennium, which is confidence in the universal
friendliness of men.
Through dark theologies and harsh political
theories we are working our way to the ultimate
child truth that to believe in one another and not
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LAME AND LOVELY
to be afraid of neighbors or antipodes, and not
even of the spirits of the air nor of the Great Spirit
himself, is the ultimate solution of the problems
both of government and of religion.
And we learn from children the art of rever-
ence. That feeling of awe and wonder, inborn
in the normal child, is the one secret of greatness
in grown persons if they can retain it. From this
emotion comes all poetry, all majesty of spirit, all
grandeur of character. It is likewise the subtle
cause of all morality, as well as of all the courtesies
and decencies of life.
Can we wonder that Jesus, when the disciples
were disputing among themselves who should be
the greatest among them, took a little child and
when he had set him in their midst said that, " Ex-
cept ye be converted and become as little children
ye shall not see the kingdom of God."
For the important affair is not getting into the
kingdom, but seeing it, knowing what it is, realiz-
ing and recognizing it. And we see the kingdom
in proportion as we " discover by the conscious
and reflective mind what we already know by in-
tuition."
78
THE RESERVES
Si succiderit, de genu pugnat. — // he stumbles,
he fights on his knees. (Motto for Will Moore9 s
tombstone.)
We have only to set the one annoying circum-
stance over against our whole relation to life to dis-
cover its insignificant proportions. — J. Brierly.
IN Mrs. Burnett's charming play, " The Dawn
of a To-morrow," a millionaire, disgusted
with life and bent on suicide, wandering through
a slum district of London, meets a street waif, a
girl named Glad, who perceives his intent and
turns him from it by her naive philosophy, not
knowing him to be a " swell " and thinking him
but one of the underworld like herself, she advises
him to " think of something else," whenever the
suicidal obsession grips him.
"The Gospel of Something Else," as we may
term it, is amazingly practical and fruitful in im-
mediate, definite good results. There is always
something else. The one distressing thing that
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LAME AND LOVELY
threatens us may be dodged, not always literally,
but always spiritually. We can get a man's body
into a corner, but the mind cannot be cornered.
The most effectual resources are those within
the soul. The great soul is the one with uncon-
querable resources. The thing that strikes us in
Socrates is that Athenian spite, prison, and hem-
lock somehow do not touch the man, he is smiling
within him superior to his enemies all the time.
The Bhagavad Ghita speaks of those " inner
treasures of the mind, on which depending one
is not moved by the severest pain." Amiel says,
" Rentrer dans l'ordre, se soumettre, et faire ce
qu'on peut." [Get into step with the universe
and do what you can.] Even death, that seems
final to most men, is despised when it approaches
Nathan Hale, for he brings to his rescue the over-
powering odds of patriotism and is happy, regret-
ting only that he has but one life to give for his
country. We hear no shrieks and panic fears
from General Wolfe as he dies before Quebec; as
they assure him that the enemy flees he cries,
" Then I die happy."
The moral grandeur of Jesus appears in this
connection. Truly he has " meat to eat that his
disciples know not of." He sets this small life
80
THE RESERVES
over against eternity: " Rejoice when men perse-
cute you, for great is your reward in heaven."
He escapes the harassment of the petty by
refuge in the vast: " Take no thought what ye
shall eat and drink : seek first the kingdom of God
and his righteousness, and all these things shall be
added to you." He even submerged death with
the flood of his inward glory, for he " endured
the cross, despising the shame, for the joy that was
set before him."
How much more effective we should be, how
much steadier our hand, and accurate our judg-
ment, if we would learn this secret! The most
important thing in the world to me is the weather
in my soul. Let it be sunshine there and calm
day and the odor of hidden flowers and I can front
anything. No matter how terrible the trial to
come, I have half won already if I can meet it
serenely. And no matter what prize and joy may
be given me, I have half spoiled it if I take it with
a troubled and muddy soul.
Let us set down then in our books that we are
absolutely unconquerable. Nothing shall break
us. For it is only the one special thing that is my
enemy: the universe is my friend.
While I have eyes, no one ugly thing shall dis-
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LAME AND LOVELY
tress me, for the earth and sky are crowded with
beauty; while I have ears, no single sound shall
irritate me, for the world harmonies cease not,
and:
There's not a star that thou beholdest
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young eyed cherubim.
While I have a heart no treachery nor coldness
on the part of any one I love shall utterly cast me
down, for there is true love somewhere, and for
me, and if I find it not on this planet, still my
world is wider and none can rob me of the hope of
some day meeting again those I have loved long
since and lost awhile.
Our little earth is clasped by the majestic sky,
our small planet is surrounded by an innumerable
company of worlds, my insignificant body is one of
a billion similar bodies now extant, my whole self
and all my concerns are as a drop of rain falling
into the Atlantic.
I take refuge in the infinite. O mine enemy,
you cannot find me ! I have hidden in the infinite.
In peace I sing the words of Mrs. Browning:
And I smiled to think God's goodness
Flowed around our incompleteness,
Round our restlessness His rest.
82
FERMENTING THOUGHTS
O, that way madness lies; let me shun that!
— King Lear.
The Greeks were right when they made Apollo
the god of both imagination and sanity; for he was
both the patron of poetry and the patron of heal-
ing.— G. K. Chesterton.
HAVE you ever noticed how thoughts feel in-
side your mind? Some are satisfying as
bread, some fiery as pepper, some refreshing as
water, some heady as wine, and some — and these
are they I am going to treat of — lie in the mind's
stomach heavy as lead, painful, nauseating, and
making one sick of life.
These last are thoughts that ferment and do not
digest. I once ate a ham sandwich at a railway
lunch counter. I found no relief until the physi-
cians had made use of a stomach pump, and I did
not recover from the effects for a month. There
are certain thoughts that act precisely the same
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LAME AND LOVELY
way within the brain; they cause " mental gas-
tritis."
In the mind's cellar everything must be kept
sweet and clean, if we do not want to breed spirit-
ual fevers. As soon as an idea begins to " work "
and spoil and sour, out with it ! It does not pay
to go about this bright world with something
yeasting and seething in our souls.
It is the very best of foods that spoil the most
quickly, such as cream, beefsteak, and butter.
The cream, beefsteak, and butter of the soul are
love, religion, and laughter.
So it is these things we must watch most care-
fully. Love, the very milk of life, is worth all
that poets have written and fond and foolish heads
have dreamed of it. But if love thoughts are go-
ing to " keep " and not play havoc within us, we
must air our hearts often and keep them clean and
be on the watch for the insistent microbe that
dearly loves to multiply in a love " culture."
Love made Dante divine, but of Othello it
made a crazy fool. Cared for intelligently and
kept clean, love will give you a heavenly peace
and glow — there's nothing like it; but if it be-
comes unclean and begins to spoil, you will know
what eternal punishment is. Whether, therefore,
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FERMENTING THOUGHTS
love shall be a radiant shekinah or a driving ruin
in the brain is largely a sanitary question.
Laughter is good. It may not save our souls,
but it often saves our lives. It prevents insanity.
But it is like butter. It must be fresh; likewise
clean; also spread not too thickly over the bread
of serious business.
No one can eat solid butter, unless he be an
Eskimo; and no one, outside a madhouse, can
laugh all the time. Some of the saddest people I
have known have been those whose only business
was to find something to amuse them.
And religion. This is man's greatest passion
and privilege; hence, also his greatest danger.
Sometimes it is a blessing, and sometimes it seems
quite the opposite. It will inspire a Francis of
Assisi to amaze the world with his love, a William
Booth to lead an altruistic army into the slums, and
a Father Damien to consecrate his life to the lep-
ers; and it will strengthen men's moral sinews,
cheer their hearts, brighten their faces, and cause
them to be a sun ray to their fellows and to tri-
umph over death.
And again, sad to say, it seems to make others
morose and dark-souled, narrow and bigoted, con-
tentious, and even cruel. As was said of liberty,
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LAME AND LOVELY
, so it may be said of religion, " What crimes have
been committed in thy name ! "
Whatever may be your faith — and every man,
even so-called infidels, have a belief of some kind
— I wish to make one suggestion : Keep it sweet !
Rest assured that if your belief makes you crabbed
and pugnacious, or critical, or morose, then it is
bad. No matter what your creed is it ought to
bring forth the one flower that makes any creed
worth while, and that is amiability.
Clean up or cast out every fermenting thought,
whether uncleanliness or distrust, the memory of
a wrong or the apprehension of disaster. Feed
your mind on clean, sweet, wholesome thoughts.
Above all, do not indulge in self-pity, most horri-
ble of all mental toadstools !
" Keep thy heart," said the wise man, " with all
diligence, for out of it are the issues of life I "
86
RELIGIOUS VALUE OF A SENSE OF
HUMOR
Humor has all along been the candid friend of
religion. It has done more to hasten the disintegra-
tion of narrow religious conventions than all the
German commentators together. Humor is a re-
ligious force in that it discounts fictitious values and
minimizes the -petty rivalries of existence.
— Richard Le Gallienne.
"T T 7HO can reply to a sneer? " asked a the-
VV ologian. The answer is plain; who-
ever cannot resist a sneer had better look to his
position. For the most searching, merciless, and
effective thing in the world is humor.
11 The tragic poet rolls the thunder that fright-
ens," says Landor; " the comic wields the lightning
that kills."
There seems to be something in laughter that
is directly opposed to the reverence and awe of re-
ligion. But for that reason wit has all along been
for piety a most necessary, if bitter, physic.
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LAME AND LOVELY
The higher moods of the soul have always a
tendency to grow unhealthy. It is but a step from
the sweet ripe to rotten; and spiritual ecstasy has
more than once, in the world's sad history, run
into refined sensuousness, also into the worst of
tyrannies and cruelties. And what an argument
or a scripture text could never reach has been trans-
fixed by a smile. The walls of many a spiritual
Jericho-folly that have withstood laws, arms, and
reasons, have tumbled at the sound of laughter.
But the best quality in humor, for individual
use by the saint, is its inherent sanity. People deep
in love do not laugh much because they are quite
crazy. Egoism, in its overdevelopment, when it
becomes a besetting sense of dignity, when it makes
one feel he is a great and misunderstood man,
laughs little, because that also is a form of insanity.
The religious bigot is most monstrously serious,
for the same reason.
When we say a sense of humor has religious
value we do not imply that it is a divine or heav-
enly thing, for it is not. But it is something fully
as necessary; it is most human. And what re-
ligion needs as much as heavenliness is humanness.
When one looks abroad in this comfortable
world and sees the infinite amount of play and un-
SENSE OF HUMOR
mixed fun which its Creator has written into it
he can hardly resist the logical conclusion that God •
is not so utterly sober as we have been led to be-
lieve. "Who," asks Dr. Holmes, "taught the
kitten to play with its tail, and the canary to perk
its head from side to side while singing? " It can
hardly be irreverent to conceive of Him who
planted such capering instincts in all young things,
in romping poodles and leaping lambs, in birds and
insects and children; it cannot be a sin to think
of Him who ordered this, and made the blithe
morning and all morning feelings, as being jocund,
and having somewhere in His mighty mind a strain
of mirth.
Humor, of course, is not always right. Every-
thing human has its perversions. There is a dev-
il's glee, there is the snicker of the gross and fleshy,
and there is that goatlike inanity that would caper
on its mother's grave to raise a grin. But let
such things have their day. Our deepest rever-
ences do not hear them, our real purity cannot see
them.
The humor of a kindly heart, the friendly wit
that is the bubbling over of a full humanity, the
surgical smile that lances our too sickly sentiments,
the sunny laugh that with its genial broadness re-
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LAME AND LOVELY
bukes our narrow thought, the disinfectant raillery
that purges our egotisms, these are all friends of
man and true him to life and destiny.
If it be, as Carlyle says, that in the center of
worship is sorrow, it is no less true that all about its
edges is a fringe of humor.
He is our friend who makes us weep for our
sins, and he is not our enemy who makes our fol-
lies ridiculous.
90
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOOD
AND BAD
Hast thou reflected, O serious reader, Advanced
Liberal or other, that the one end, essence, and use
of all religion, past, present, and to come, is to re-
mind us of this only, of the quite infinite difference
between a good man and a bad? — Thomas Car-
LYLE.
WITH microscopic vision, Carlyle has here
seen the rock bottom on which rest not
only all religion, but all ethics, morals, and de-
cencies.
The thoroughly bad man is not the one who,
like Lucifer says, " Evil, be thou my good! " He
is the one who denies the distinction. Goethe's
Mephistopheles was a better Bad Man than Mil-
ton's Lucifer; for Milton's hero of darkness sulked
and raged and rebelled; Goethe's smiled. The
highest impiety is not a blasphemy; it is a smile.
The wickedest people are not they who cele-
brate the black mass and dance in witches' sab-
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LAME AND LOVELY
baths, are not the Ingersolls speech-making against
theology, nor the Nietzsches couching a lance
against morality itself; all these are as orthodox
as the narrowest saints. In fact, when a man sets
out to demolish Christianity he really joins the most
absurd corruption of it he can find, by assuming
that the peculiar distorted sect he selects is true
Christianity. Hence all the so-called militant " in-
fidels " are really the friends of our faith, since
they help to purge it of its diseases.
But our real foe is Gallio, who " cares for none
of these things." Morality and immorality do
not concern him. He will not discuss the place
for the line between good and evil. He has
rubbed out the line.
The rebel and the king's troops both believe in
the same flag; one is for and the other against
it. So the deserter and the good soldier both
have the same standard, which one runs from and
the other toward. But it is the same flag.
Even so, the thieves and drunkards and wicked
women, and all the soiled and vagabond crew we
are wont to look upon as the opponents of the
good and pious, are not they with whom religion's
danger lies. In fact, they are not far from the
kingdom. Did not Jesus say that the slum peo-
92
GOOD AND BAD
pies would enter into the kingdom before the Phar-
isees ?
The actual danger to religion is found among
the so-called " emancipated." Those who hold
that white is the same as black if you have the
right point of view, those to whom nothing mat-
ters, those who have made of science a means to
rob the soul of its power to blush, and have re-
duced conscience and its motions to atavism and
molecular gyrations, these are " our friends, the
enemy." A shallow wading in science is likely to
bring on such a moral anemia.
Bacon tells us that a little knowledge bends men
to atheism, but deeper goings bring them about to
religion. And Tennyson warns his too sciolistic
age:
Hold thou the Good, define it well
For fear divine philosophy
Should go beyond the mark and be
Procuress to the lords of hell.
If there is any one thing that the wisdom of
all humanity, east and west, has beaten out of
the mixture and confusion of human hearts and
events, if there is any one pure, golden truth upon
which a man may leave his life and risk his destiny,
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LAME AND LOVELY
it is that the word " Ought " has a meaning, that
in the sense of right and wrong is hidden the fun-
damental truth about God and the hereafter.
Out of all the whirl of arguing sects, the specu-
lation of philosophers, the doctrines and counter
doctrines of divines, this one solid and wholly un-
shakable bit of rock emerges as the one fit thing a
soul can afford to build his house upon, to-wit : that
right is right and to live by and to die for, and
wrong is wrong and to be hated and fought with
all one's mortal might.
That is religion ; the rest is trimmings.
94
CHILDLIKENESS AND CHILDISHNESS
When I was a child I spoke, acted, and thought
as a child, but when I became a man I put away
childish things. — Saint Paul.
Verily I say unto you, except ye be changed, and
become as little children, ye shall not enter into
the kingdom of heaven. Little children, of such
is the kingdom of heaven. — Jesus.
An ancient proverb warns us that we should not
expect to find old heads on young shoulders; to
which it may be added that we seldom meet with
that unnatural combination but we feel a strong
desire to knock them of; merely from an inherent
love we have of seeing things in their right place.
— Chx^rles Dickens.
I ONCE had a silly book, compiled by some
rabid bibliophobiac, and entitled " The Con-
tradictions of the Bible, " in which were arranged
in parallel columns those texts which seemed to
contradict each other, each sentence being set op-
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LAME AND LOVELY
posite its negative. The whole work was based
upon the error that a contradiction is equivalent
to a lie. The truth, however, is quite the contrary.
Contradictions are the favorite method of wise
teachers; they are numerous in Socrates and in
Bacon.
Emerson said that " consistency is the hobgoblin
of little minds, adored by little statesmen, and
philosophers, and divines." And I have known
but two classes of people who were absolutely con-
sistent — idiots and dead men.
The fact is that when you find a contradiction
in a wise man or in a wise book, you will usually
find midway between the two clashing statements
one of the choicest morsels of truth, and one which
could not have been expressed half so well in any
other way. For often when a truth cannot be
directly come at by a positive declaration, it can be,
as it were, pointed at by two counteracting asser-
tions.
In the quotation above, the apostle indicates
that when one grows up he should cease to be like
a child; while the Master declares that except we
turn and become like a child we are lost. And the
confusion of this is but seeming, for it may be
loosed and made into common sense by two words
96
CHILDLIKENESS AND CHILDISHNESS
that are in our mouths every day — to-wit : the
words childlike and childish.
To be childlike, says Jesus, is to be great I
have seen some great men in my time, and have
tried to learn something of their secret; and I have
never known one who was not simple, approach-
able, and with a child heart. Great speech is
always plain, lucid, and direct. Great art is least
ornate. Great emotions are downright. Where-
as pettiness of all kinds is sophisticated, smart,
adorned, perfumed, and jeweled, or wants to be.
Childishness is another matter. About nine-
tenths of what we call sin is mere childishness,
undeveloped morality, arrested ethical growth, a
persistent child longing for gingerbread and gew-
gaws, an inability to appreciate the future, and a
readiness to sacrifice the future always for the
present.
Note some of the childish things which we are
to put away. First of all is crying, the most char-
acteristic of all child faults. Analyzed carefully,
crying is found to consist in this: the gaining of
what we desire by the use of our disagreeableness.
It is the weapon of weakness. In adults we call
it complaining, or pouting, or sulking. How
many a woman gets her way by " the tyranny of
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LAME AND LOVELY
tears " ! And how many a man rules his house by
sheer surliness ! Such are but grown up " bawl
babies." It is almost worse than wickedness; it is
meanness, and utterly despicable. Pardonable in
a child of six, it is unpardonable in a big,
bewhiskered hulk of forty-six.
Another trait of childishness is the desire to
" show off." Vanity, and love of notice, and the
hunger for admiration is cunning enough in little
Mable in short dresses and baby curls, but when
Mable becomes Mrs. Q. K. Philander Jones, age
thirty-five, and is president of the Ladies' Aid, and
the mother of four children, and the wife of the
leading grocer, it becomes her mightily to " put
away childish things," and especially the desire to
preen and prance, and occupy the spotlight. Mod-
esty and a modicum of humility ought to come with
maturity.
A child, too, is naturally egoistic in his instincts.
Every child seems to be a born predestinarian. I
have had children at my own table, and I know
that each seemed to believe, as his inborn creed,
that he alone was predestined from the foundation
of the world to have the largest piece of pie and
the choicest portion of chicken. When we grow
up this egocentric trait also is to be put away. A
98
CHILDLIKENESS AND CHILDISHNESS
man ought to learn, with years, that " there are
others."
But that element of the child view which, if
retained, works most havoc in us is, as I have
hinted, the lack of power to visualize and realize
the future. When a baby wants a thing he wants
it now. The one thing he cannot do with grace is
to wait. The present, the actual, hems him in
and dominates him. With years ought to come
that strongest increment of spiritual power, the
ability to see the unseen; that is, to see how our
acts will affect others, how the future. The
greater a man is, and the manlier, the more he
weighs these invisible motives and is governed by
them.
For what is all defiling greed, and theft, and
treachery, and sensuality, and spite, and fraud, but
a reaching forth of sightless and infantine desire,
ignorant and heedless of the unseen thunder and
lightning of the moral world? And what are
heroes but they who in one form or another, in
quiet domestic sacrifice, or in business integrity, or
in patriotism, or in religious devotion, have " en-
dured the cross and despised the present shame
for the joy that was set before them " ?
Children are sweet, almost divine, even, in their
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LAME AND LOVELY
innocent little shortcomings ; but it is because they
are children. The wisdom concealed in the two
contradicting texts given above consists in the truth
that there is, in grown persons, a vast difference
between childlikeness and childishness.
100
PRAYER
Lord, what a change within us one short hour
Spent in thy presence will prevail to make!
Why, therefore, should we do ourselves this
wrong,
Or others, that we are not always strong?
— Richard Chenevix Trench.
THE gist of the prayer is not asking, but com-
munion. So the test of prayer is not the
getting of what we ask, but the sense of the pres-
ence of Him of whom we have asked it.
Therefore, all " remarkable answers to prayer/'
all instances where the thing sought came to sur-
prise the seeker, and all faith founded upon such
arguments, contain an element of peril to the
thoughtful and well-balanced mind.
For the intelligent believer in God must always
conceive of the universe as under the control of
one all-wise will, who knows vastly better what
ought to be done than we ; and the last thing such
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LAME AND LOVELY
a believer would wish is that this all-wise will
should be set aside, or influenced in the least by
his ignorant will.
The first of all prayers, therefore, and the one
prayer which contains the seed of all other prayers
is : " Thy will be done."
This does not all imply that we are to ask God
for no favors, such as rain or good crops, health
or good fortune. In fact, nothing is too small
or insignificant to ask God for, if it is significant
enough for me to want.
Why, then, ask Him for anything, when He
already knows best, and our only wish is that He
do as He pleases?
Right here many have become helplessly puz-
zled and have given up praying. But the solution
is a simple one.
It is best understood by an illustration. God is
to us as we are to our little children. We do
not give them all they request, but we wish them
none the less to keep .confiding in us their wishes.
In other words we should feel very bad if, because
we after all are going to do as we think best for
them, they should be piqued and never speak to us
again.
The thing we want of our children is precisely
1 02
PRAYER
communion with them. We want their confidence,
friendship, presence and prattle.
So the thing God wants with us, and that we
need from Him, is the mutual presence, conscious-
ness, and friendship between us.
The asking for things is simply one phase of this
communion. The refusal of them, as well as the
granting of others of them, is a part of our educa-
tion ; even as the instances wherein we decline our
children's requests is a part of their training and
reveals to them in time our nature.
Prayer, therefore, is simply an attempt to feel
God. It is the opening of the heart to let in the
infinite. It is the union of a man's highest will
and consciousness with his loftiest conception of
goodness, nobleness, and beauty.
Any man who leaves off praying is doing him-
self a distinct harm. There is no possible excuse
for it. If he has fallen out with his church, or
with all churches; if he is incapable of accepting
recognized creeds; if he doubts the sincerity and
believes in the delusion of many of those who
claim sanctity; all these are no reasons why he
himself, in his own way and in his own heart,
should not seek to know and feel the infinite.
The presence of immense and age-long institu-
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LAME AND LOVELY
tions who are supposed to be the guardians of all
the truth about God, renders it difficult to think
originally and simply on the subject. But who-
ever will have the courage in his own manner and
according to his own light to try to cultivate a
sense of God and to come into personal relations
with the infinite will and heart that is above and in
all things, will find his life lightened, ennobled,
and given great strength and poise.
And the more a man feels that he is what is
called a " sinner," the more he is conscious of
having done what he should not, and of coming
short of his own notions of rectitude and purity
and an ideal life, the more he needs to cultivate
in his secret moments the feeling that he can talk
it over with the invisible Spirit. It is exactly the
man who is conscious of his unworthiness that the
spirit of God most easily enters. It will repay
any man to keep up what Jeremy Taylor called
44 the practice of the presence of God."
It may not imply that he join this church or that,
nor subscribe to this or that creed, but it will mean
for him a sweeter, richer, solider, kinder, and
happier life.
104
THE SIN OF SENSITIVENESS
Blessed are the poor in spirit. — Jesus.
The thirst for applause, if the last infirmity of
noble minds, is also the first infirmity of weak ones.
— Ruskin.
IF we examine sensitiveness under the micro-
scope we shall find it to be no more nor less
than a variety of egotism. The sensitive nature
is simply one that is too much occupied with self.
That way madness lies, ever.
I suppose no more exquisite torture has been
devised by the evil one, at least in this world, than
the endowing of a highly organized, keenly per-
ceptive person with a too large self-consciousness.
In Galsworthy's " Fraternity " such a character
is drawn with wonderful accuracy by that master,
in Bianca Dallison. Here are a few of his
touches : " It was Bianca's fortune to be gifted to
excess with that quality which, of all others, most
obscures the real significance of human issues.
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LAME AND LOVELY
44 Her pride had kept her back from her hus-
band, till she felt herself a failure, and her pride
had so revolted at this that it led the way to utter
estrangement. Her pride even prevented him
from really knowing what had spoiled their lives
— her ungovernable itch to be appreciated. This
was the tragedy of a woman who wanted to be
loved slowly killing in the man the power of loving
her."
Of all the unlit and tortuous places in this world
the human heart is darkest and farthest past find-
ing out; and the heart of an intelligent, cultured
egoist with delicately strung feeling is worst of all.
The only remedy is the persistent effort toward
disinterestedness.
We approach peace only as we leave ourselves
and come to humanity. No self-forgetful person
is ever sensitive. No self-forgetful person is
habitually unhappy.
This sin of sensitiveness — and we ought to
face it as a distinct sin, a thing never to be boasted,
always to be ashamed of — takes many forms.
Some of them are of that most dangerous kind, the
kind that resembles virtues.
For instance, self-examination. There is a sort
of luxury in probing one's own heart and handling
1 06
THE SIN OF SENSITIVENESS
our faults, like the pleasure of pressing upon a
sore tooth.
Conscience may descend to be a species of moral
indigestion. Copybook philosophy and teachers
of moral platitudes commend this self-scrutiny.
But as a rule it is vicious. As with our bodies so
with our spirits, the healthiest are those that are
the least tampered with and worried over. The
noblest soul is the one that is unconscious either
of nobility or ignobility. The righteousness that
knows itself and the sin that knows itself are akin
— both bad.
Another and common form of this protean soul
disease is self-depreciation. Wordsworth hits it
off:
There is a luxury in self-dispraise;
And inward self-disparagement affords
To meditative spleen a grateful feast.
I wonder if the housewife knows how uncom-
fortable she makes the guest feel when she pre-
ludes her dinner with apologies? And does the
young lady know what an egregious, conceited
minx she seems to all simple and normal souls when
she will not begin to play the piano or to sing until
she has rehearsed her limitations ?
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LAME AND LOVELY
And there be those women who are forever
slandering their own appearance, and men forever
decrying their own ability. This is not humility.
The one blazing beauty of humility, genuine, is
that it forgets itself, that the one being it will
neither blame nor praise is self.
And worst of all phases of sensitiveness, per-
haps, is self-pity. Worst, because of it is born a
deal of plain wickedness. The man who is sorry
for himself is not far from smashing law and con-
science for his own dear sake! Of all slops into
which a manly man or a womanly woman ought
not fall the maudlin kindness for one's own poor
soul is the most disgusting.
I am sure if we stop to reflect that the whole
troop of degenerates, the murderers and thieves,
and sneaks and unclean, are uniformly sorry for
themselves, we should hesitate about allowing our-
selves to drift into such company.
Sensitiveness, and all egoisms, are not forms of
self-respect; they are the opposite of self-respect.
They are self-defiling, self-condemning, self-de-
stroying.
The only religious, sensible thing to do with
this precious me is to forget him.
108
THEY ALL DO IT
Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that
leadeth to eternal life, and few there be that find
it. — Jesus.
/ believe that, although none other follows the
doctrine of Jesus, and I alone am left to practise
it, I cannot refuse to obey it, and that it will give
me in this world the greatest possible sum of hap-
piness.— Tolstoi.
LET us, at least for the moment, consider this
shattering statement of Jesus, not as describ-
ing the difficulty of getting into heaven when we
die, but getting into any sort of success, efficiency,
and poise of soul while we live. Look at it once,
not as a day-of-judgment decree, but as a simple
law of our human nature.
That law is that whoever gauges and models
himself after other people is on the road to de-
terioration and eventually ruin ; that all real moral
advancement and true success is solitary and along
" the lone trail."
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LAME AND LOVELY
Men go to the devil in crowds. One goes
because the rest are going. The boy gets drunk
because he does not like to refuse " the fellows."
The politician steals because he hears they all do
it.
In fact, the devil's other name is " They-all-do-
it." A girl becomes bad usually trying to keep
step. Almost all vice is social; almost all right-
eousness that is of any account is purely personal.
The real gist of any kind of genuine salvation,
Jew or Gentile, Catholic or Protestant, is that a
man has formed a partnership of two, himself and
God, against the universe and all that dwell there-
in. Saving one's soul is, in its last essence, a sort
of a declaration of independence, a sworn alle-
giance to one's own inner, individual convictions
and ideals and renunciation of all outside authority.
This makes plain why the Bible tells us to be-
ware of the world. The world means the mob —
other people. The prince of this world is one of
the names Jesus gives Satan. He is " Mr. They-
all-do-it." *
When the devil was cast out of the Gadarene
swine he confessed his name was Legion. God is
one ; the devil is the many.
The truth of this appears in ordinary business.
no
THEY ALL DO IT
The kind of clerk that is hardest to find is the one
who simply does what he ought to do. Says Kip-
ling:
Creation's cry goes up
From age to cheated age,
Give us the men who do the work
For which they get the wage !
It is a pity, but true as gospel, that the average
servant is inefficient, the average mother incom-
petent, the average business man incapable, the
average actor a poor one, and the average preacher
a bore.
In fact, the average of any class of men is below
the average, so to speak. The world's work is
carried on by makeshifts. If any man will train
himself properly and correctly perform the duties
of his calling, whatever it is, he will find that
people call him a remarkable person, unusual ! ex-
traordinary !
If you want to amount to anything, follow the
gleam, satisfy yourself and not others, go in for
your own self-respect and not the admiration of
the crowd. The curse of many a youth is that
he has been content to do as well as those about
him.
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LAME AND LOVELY
You have heard possibly many a sermon on
"What shall I do to be saved?" Here is one
on " What shall I do to be ruined? " and it is a
short one: Do nothing! Follow the crowd.
Aim for the average.
" For wide is the gate and broad is the way
that leadeth to destruction, and many there be that
walk therein."
112
THE PRACTICAL USES OF DEATH
// is expedient for you that I go away. — Jesus.
The neighborhood of the tomb enlarges the
mind. The proximity of death sharpens the per-
ception of truth. — Victor Hugo.
""QRAGMATISM," says Papini, one of the
XT Italian exponents of this new-old philos-
ophy, " lies in the midst of our theories, like the
corridor in a hotel."
Which means that, in whatever sectarian or
partisan chamber you live, you must come down
to pragmatism if you want to go anywhere.
In other words, we do not need so much to
explain and to theorize over the facts and mys-
teries of life as we need to know what to do with
them. The greatest question about anything is
not " Why is it? " but " What will you do with
it?"
And right here is where death commends itself
to the highest ideals and sweetest instincts of man-
kind, Its function is to be the revealer of what
"3
LAME AND LOVELY
is worth while in life. Quite apart from the con-
ventional religious teachings about the hereafter,
the fact of the irrevocable separation involved in
death, the coming of its dread, silent footstep into
the house, casts certain clear, sharp lights upon all
human values.
There is this in the atmosphere of death:
Reality at last stands revealed. Whatever be the
future beyond the grave, when we stand by the
cold silence of one whom we knew in the warmth
of love, we can have but one supreme wish —
that our dealings with the lost and gone had
been more unselfish, more forbearing, more loyal,
nobler.
You may have fumed and fretted with your
child in the heyday of earthly events, but when
you come to fold the stiff fingers for the last time
over the little breast you ask yourself how much
your worry and fret and petulance were worth.
In this garden of death bloom the rarest flowers
of life. Here are humility and gentleness, for-
giveness and forbearance, sympathy and goodness,
reverence and awe.
Why, if no one ever died, if the human herd
lived on and life had its rude way forever un-
checked, we should grow hard and merciless and
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PRACTICAL USES OF DEATH
cruel, our vices instead of being but poison flowers
would become sturdy upas trees, and all the gentler
elements of character would take their flight like
frightened fairies from a midday wood.
Death, after all, is not harsh and monstrous.
He is the sweetest, loveliest prophet of nobility.
We touch the infinite mystery at two points,
birth and death. And it is the little babies and
the dying men that continually link us to those
higher qualities of soul which pertain to the better
kind of life.
But the greatest lesson of all which death has
for us is the truth about love. Here where the
coffin stands there can be no doubt any more that
love is " the greatest thing in the world." Here
the last wretched excuse we made ourselves
for our impatience and fretfulness disappears
ashamed.
Here there is no longer any doubt that it is
better to give than to receive. Here our mis-
erable pride and egotism shrivels and expires like
an accursed Mr. Hyde.
And here we see things. Here the greed for
wealth and luxury and power stands unmasked in
all its salt, leprous reality. In the calcium light
of death we know, we know through and through
"5
LAME AND LOVELY
our souls, that love was best. We need no minister
to read: "Though I speak with the tongues of
men and of angels, and though I have all knowl-
edge, and though I bestow all my goods to feed
the poor, and though I give my body to be burned
and have not love, it profiteth me nothing."
There is a pocket in the shroud. But it only
holds a handful of love. This then is the practical
use of death. It solves no speculative problems,
it tells us nothing about the mysteries beyond, but
death does show "clear as the sun, fair as the
moon, and terrible as an army with banners " that
honor and truth, virtue and humbleness of mind,
loyalty and purity — and love are the things worth
while.
116
OTHERWORLDLINESS
What the writer, the teacher, the pastor, the
philosopher, has to do is to defend humanity in
man. — Amiel's JOURNAL.
SAID Jesus once : " Ye are not of the world,
even as I am not of the world." And men
have forgotten the second in striving to realize
the first part of his saying. That is to say, in
reaching for otherworldliness they have over-
looked the manner and pattern of it, the life of
the Master himself.
There has always been a deep conviction that
the man of religious conviction ought in some way
to be different from ordinary men. This is a
sound and true feeling, but in what bizarre and
amazing shapes it has been worked out ! To mark
the difference between a God's man and a world
man one will wear a yellow robe and live on
begged rice, another will shave his head, another
wears a uniform and a poke bonnet, another wears
a broad hat and drab garments, another uses no
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LAME AND LOVELY
buttons but hooks and eyes in their stead, another
sings no songs but David's Psalms, another will
use only Latin in worship, some shout and leap
and some sink into ascetic silence, and thus in a
thousand ways our poor humanity has tried to be
" not of this world " so as to secure the approval
of God,
And when we brush aside all this mixed and
marbled history of human headiness and return to
the Master's words, how simple they are and how
absurd seem our vagaries! For he says that it
is " even as I am not of the world " that we are
to gauge and set our pace.
And how was his unworldliness ? Did it con-
sist in strange apparel, or a pious tone of voice,
or ascetic withdrawal from his fellows? Not in
any of these outward things. For he dressed as
far as we know precisely as other carpenters
dressed; he mingled freely with sinners, in fact,
preferred their society to that of the saints of his
day, and in all of the points where we in our folly
have tried to be unlike the world he was exactly
like the world.
His unlikeness to the common run of folks lay
wholly in his spirit.
In the midst of a society where the leading
118
O THERTVORLDLINESS
religionists (the Pharisees) were proud, he was
humble.
While about him was a sea of selfishness, he
was unselfish.
When the world, harsh, cruel, and merciless in
its conventional slavery, would have cast stones at
the fallen woman he said: "Neither do I con-
demn thee. Go and sin no more."
All around him the world was wrestling, biting,
elbowing, goring, snarling for so-called success —
that is, for prominence and power; he shunned
prominence and refused power.
The world was mad to rule, to dominate; he
was " servant of all."
They sought to get the service of others by
means of money; he sought only to serve others,
and needed no money.
The world believed goodness wa9 a matter of
conformity to certain conventions; he showed
how goodness was in the liberation of the in-
dividual soul from all rule and its unity with God.
The world was then occupied (and still is oc-
cupied) in getting; men get on, get rich, get
famous, get drunk, get educated, and get religion.
He was busy giving, he got nothing; he gave
sympathy, gave health, gave bread, gave truth,
119
LAME AND LOVELY
gave himself and his blood. Hence, while the
great getters have been swept into forgotten
graves, upon him, the greatest giver, have been
placed all crowns.
The world put its trust in force, hate, terror,
money, armies, and dignities; he staked his all
on love and service.
Hence, to this day, he remains the most mar-
velously misunderstood figure in history. The
thing that calls itself Christian civilization is nine-
tenths pagan. Even those organizations that as-
sume to be his body are often how alien from his
spirit !
120
THE SERMON OF THE CLOCK
Yes; when you put on this hat and turn this
diamond button a little, from right to left — here}
like this, see? — it presses a bump on your head,
which no one knows about, and which opens your
eyes — it is magic, you know — and you see the
Reality of Things, the Soul of Bread, for instance,
or of Wine, or of Pepper. — Maeterlinck;
The Blue Bird.
Tick tock, tick tock,
This is the sermon of the clock.
ONCE there was a very unhappy man. The
cause of his unhappiness makes no matter.
It is never of any use to ask why one is miserable ;
the point is, how can he escape his gloom and
become happy? In his dumb wretchedness he sat
down one day and stared at the clock. If you will
look at anything sympathetically enough and let
your soul listen you will hear some of the secrets
of nature. The way to learn nothing is to talk,
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LAME AND LOVELY
and read, and gabble, and do so continually. Be
still and things will speak to you.
Tick tock, tick tock,
Listen to wisdom, said the clock.
Furthermore, the clock said: You are a fool.
This is always the first thing a human being ought
to grasp. Wisdom abides in the things that are;
folly and woe abide in the things that ought to be
and the things that might have been. Hence only
men are wicked and unhappy. Clocks, trees, rab-
bits, and fishes take the world as it is; men are
always trying to change it and wishing it had been
different. That is why flowers smile and women
weep.
Tick tock, tick tock,
What do you think of that? said the clock.
Happiness abides somewhere hidden in what is,
the clock went on to say. The trouble with you
humans is that you are ever seeking for it in what
is not Of course, you cannot find it; for, in the
first place, it is not there ; and, in the second place,
if it were there you could not get it because there
is no such place.
God is, of course. He is happy. It is only the
122
THE SERMON OF THE CLOCK
kind of God that is not, that is angry and vengeful
and anxious to make people suffer.
All His universe is set for joy. The sky is glad,
and the little streams giggle all day, and birds sing
for love, and fishes wriggle for fun, and even a
piece of wood is glad it is a piece of wood, and
milk and bread and honey and fire are all quite
comfortable bodies.
Tick tock, tick tock,
This world is a pretty good world, said the clock.
People have either too much brains or too little.
If you consider the idiots you find them usually
merry. They laugh at nothing at all and play
with their fingers, as kittens play with their tails.
And then if you consider the sage you find him
also happy, because he has come close to the heart
of what is, which is that thing we call truth ; and
so he does not fret any more, for he is drinking
at the hidden stream of joy that flows through the
universe, through the sun and sand, and through
little children and the blessed dead.
Tick tock, tick tock,
Cabbages are happier than kings, said the clock.
Yes, yes, continued the clock, happiness is the
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LAME AND LOVELY
peculiar juice of the isness of things, and not of the
oughtness. And then, look at me ! What am I
doing? Why, ticking, of course. It is my busi-
ness to tick. Now, I have to make four ticks a
second, or 240 ticks a minute, or 14,440 an hour,
or 345>6oo a day, and to think of a week makes
my head reel; and a year amounts to many mil-
lions, where numbers cease to have any meaning
and are just trills.
If I were a fool man I should be everlastingly
counting up how much I had to do in a week or a
year, and I should simply give one tremendous
whizz with my works and quit in despair. Being
a sensible clock, however, I remember that while
I have several million ticks to do per year, I have
just as many seconds to do them in, and do not
have to work per year at all. I make one tick at
a time, never bother about those I made or am
to make, and everything goes off nicely.
Tick tock, tick tock,
For every Tick there's a Now, said the clock.
And you people are just as happy and content
as we clocks, if you only knew it.
Most everybody is happy. Our unhappiness
is borrowed; borrowed from the past in shape of
124
THE SERMON OF THE CLOCK
remorse or regret, and from the future in the shape
of apprehension. The present is always tolerable.
You drag up from the pit of the past your sins and
follies and mistakes, and load them on the poor
little Now, and when you are not doing that you
are reaching forward to the future and imagin-
ing things disagreeable that are going to happen
and piling them upon the back of poor little
Now.
As a matter of fact, the past is not yours. It
is God's. It belongs to the universe. It has been
dissolved into the eternities, as a drop of water is
lost in the sea. It is beyond your control. Let
it go. All you need take from it is a little wisdom
to help you to use your own. And the future is
not yours. That is also God's.
" Every bud has but once to bloom," says a
philosopher, " and every flower but one hour of
perfect beauty.
" Each star passes but once at night the meridian
above our heads, and burns there but an instant.
So each feeling has its floral moment in the heart,
each thought in the mind's sky its zenithal instant.''
Let us watch the punctual universe. All things
are but one huge clock.
Your heart has its beats. Earth has its seasons.
125
LAME AND LOVELY
Generations of men come and go as the hours upon
my face. Everything has its moment. You have
yours. It is — now!
For every creature except man, heaven is now.
126
ON GOING TO CHURCH
Vous qui pleurez, venez a ce Dieu, car il pleure.
Vous qui soufrez, venez a lui, car il guerit.
Vous qui tremblez, venez a lui} car il sourit.
Vous qui passez, venez a lui, car il demeure! —
You that weep, come to this God, for he weeps.
You that suffer, come to him, for he heals.
You that tremble, come to him, for he smiles.
You that pass, come to him, for he abides.
— Victor Hugo; Lines Written Beneath a
Crucifix.
GOING to church is getting to be more and
more out of the fashion.
I am convinced that it is a mistake and that we
are missing much that is fine and worth while.
Though I share a good deal of the acerbity and
irritation against the historic institution, yet it does
not blind me to the immense human value and real
serviceableness and lovableness of it.
Hence, though far from following all the im-
plications and connotations implied in being a
127
LAME AND LOVELY
churchgoer, I go just the same. For I do not
wish the inference of other folks' minds, or their
gratuitous assumptions, to deprive me of a sterling
privilege. Let me here set down some of my
reasons.
First, let us define the word. By church I do
not here refer to any one sect. What is in mind
is that wider institution, of which each denomi-
nation is a part, which is made up of human beings
associated together for the worship of God. That
is to say the society for the promotion of the re-
ligious feeling. This includes Jew, Catholic, and
Protestant.
I am not ignorant of the mistakes of this organi-
zation, even of its crimes. I know that religious l
n J-
/ ,'
institutions have persecuted, been cruel and narrow, ;
and have often opposed science and political prog- j^
ress. Neither have I any excuse or apology for
these things: they were and are wrong and wicked.
But it is not excuse nor apology to observe what is
the truth, that in every instance these evils arose
plainly from the human weakness, ignorance, and
perversity of the men, and never can be traced to
the influence of the religious feeling itself.
The gold of divine love is necessarily alloyed
with human imperfection; and the things com-
128
.,,.,.
ON GOING TO CHURCH
plained of came every time from the alloy and
not from the gold.
Laying aside its frailties, therefore, with the use
of a little common sense and sympathy, we note
first of all that the church is the oldest organi-
zation on earth. It antedates masonry; no family
tree has roots so deep; no existing dynasty is so
venerable. It is a comfort to get hold of some-
thing that has stood through the centuries. In my
little meeting house I claim membership and unity
with that church whose altar fires Moses built in
the wilderness, whose services were held in the
catacombs of Rome in the reign of Nero, whose
lofty cathedrals grace Milan and Cologne, and
whose weekly gatherings still take place in every
city and hamlet of the world, whether in Jewish
synagogue, Catholic church, or Protestant chapel.
It all means God, one way or another ; it always
has meant God. I am drawn to this antiquity,
this persistence, this triumph over time. There's
a deep thrill in the heart of man in response to
Bishop Cox's hymn:
Oh, where are kings and empires now
Of old that went and came?
But, Lord, thy church is praying yet,
A thousand years the same.
129
LAME AND LOVELY
Speaking of the sins of the church, too, it might
not be out of place to remark that it has always
been the religious feeling itself that has pointed
out these sins and demanded and secured reform.
The church carries in herself her own cure.
Another, and most human reason, for church-
going, is that churchgoers as a rule are the best
kind of people. I speak of averages.
Of course there are bad people in and good
people out. But I speak of averages when I say
that .the clean-minded, honest, straight, kindly,
generous, and loyal folk gravitate churchward.
The mass, at least, of the unclean, wicked, criminal,
false, treacherous, and cruel folk drift from the
church away.
On the whole, therefore, I go to church because
there I find " my kind of folks " ; the kind I want
to know, to have for my friends and to be my com-
panions and furnish atmosphere for my children.
This is not a low motive nor sordid, but high and
pure.
Of creed I say nothing, because this writing is
not about joining the church, but about going to
church. To go, and there to worship, does not
necessarily imply that one intellectually assents to
the theory of the universe set forth by the preacher.
130
ON GOING TO CHURCH
I go to church to develop my religious feeling,
not to acquire facts. Most important of all rea-
sons for churchgoing, however, is that it is the
most practical way of keeping alive and efficient
one's idea and feeling of God.
I do not like to have any dark corners walled
off in my soul where I am afraid to look. I refuse
to allow any dogmatist or organization to make
me afraid of God. I want to be familiar with the
thought of Deity and not ever to turn from it with
a shudder or a shrug, as men turn from a fear or
from a hopeless puzzle. Now, we may talk as we
please about finding God in trees and books, in
poetry and in our meditations, but human nature
is human nature, and unless we give regular ex-
pression to an emotion or conviction it will die of
inanition.
The race is some thousands of years old and is
some wiser than you or I, and the experience of
the race is that stated times of worship alone keep
alive the disposition to worship. Moses knew
what he was doing when he inserted among the
commandments the order to devote every seventh
day to the religious feeling. On the whole, there-
fore, I am sure any right-minded person will be
helped by regular attendance at church.
I3i
THE EYE OF THE SOUL
// thine eye he single thy whole body shall be
full of light. — Jesus.
What a man aspires to is the creative cause in
his life, what he forever is to be. — Edward
Howard Griggs.
THE expression, " the single eye," is some-
times used with a ludicrous misunderstanding
of the word as found in our King James version
of the New Testament, where it is employed in its
obsolete sense of " whole " or " healthy."
Well-meaning people have expressed their wish
to have " an eye single to God's glory," or to their
duty, in which the idea is that of looking at one
thing and not at two. The phrase in our Bible,
however, simply refers to the advantages of having
a good eye over having a bad or diseased eye.
The eye may be taken as the most practical and
serviceable of all our organs. It puts us most in
communication with the outside world. By it
132
THE EYE OF THE SOUL
through one lens we range the ultimate stars; and,
through another, we perceive the infinitesimal
forms and motions of the cell world. What the
eye is to the body the instincts are to the soul.
As all the things we learn by reason are small
in their sum compared to the myriad things we
learn through the glance; so the wisdom, virtue,
commandments, creeds, and counsel we gather by
instruction in the spirit, are small compared to that
higher, quicker, more perfect, and more infallible
wisdom we obtain by the direct sensing of our
spiritual eye of feeling and appreciation.
If you want a book in a room upstairs and if
you tell me to go and find it with my eyes shut,
what numberless and minute directions you must
give ! I must take so many steps to the right and
as many to the left, and guide myself by the hands
passed along this and that object, and the like!
Whereas, if you tell me to go with my eyes open
and bring you the blue book lying on your dresser
by the pin tray, I can find it a hundred times more
easily and infallibly.
It is precisely the same in making one's moral
way through life. A few sound instincts and clear
ideals are better than reams of rules. No system
of ethics, saturated with wisdom of antiquity, and
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LAME AND LOVELY
approved by all the philosophers of earth, is of
much practical use to a morally blind man.
The business of living a pure, true, and right
life is, therefore, after all, a simple one, and not
complex. Follow your deepest longings, heed
your inner repulsions. Keep sound and sane and
follow your nose.
There is more purity in the instinctive shrinking
of a simple maid than in all the infinite maneuvers
of propriety. There is more worship in the child's
wonder at the thunder and admiration before the
flaming sunset than in all the formulas of heathen
ceremonies or Christian ascriptions. There is
more true repentance in the misery of an honest
man at telling a lie or doing any mean action than
in the longest litanies.
It is not only human to err, it is just as human
to feel sorry that we have erred. The nobler,
finer instincts and ideals of life are as innate as
original sin. Every man knows them.
It is when we cease obeying them instantly and
begin arguing with them, that we fall into the
sloughs of moral confusion.
And what Jesus came to do for us was not
to guide us from without, but from within; not to
give us objective, external laws to guide us, but to
134
THE EYE OF THE SOUL
awaken in us a lambent, guiding principle. He
came " to open the eyes of the blind." His dy-
namic is not implicit obedience, but " perfect love."
This explains all that mystical-sounding lan-
guage of the New Testament that speaks of
41 Christ formed within," " I in you and you in
me," " if any man will open the door I will come
in and sup with him," and so forth. All of which
means that Jesus' aim is to be an inspiration of the
individual moral forces, an enkindling of personal
perceptive powers, the awakening of the soul to
its normal moral functioning.
No man, no teacher, not even Christ himself,
can guide a man, so as to develop his manhood
as well as keep him from harm, except such teacher
or Christ enter into a man, by his personal influ-
ence, and strengthen and clear " the eye of the
soul."
*35
LOVING GOD
Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God.* — Jesus.
Nulla sine Deo mens bona est. — No mind is
good without God. — Seneca.
PERHAPS of all words in human speech none
is more elastic than love. It means as many
different things as there are minds. It is the one
word which when a man speaks means no more
nor less than his personality. It is the gist, sub-
stance, and quintessence of what he is; more, of
what he longs to be ; for
The thing we long for, that we are
For one transcendent moment.
When you say, therefore, that you love a man,
a woman, a child, or God, we cannot have much
idea of what you mean until we know you. Pious
folk express their most exalted ideal, the feeling
of their union with God, and even describe the
nature of deity itself by this word; while vicious
and perverted creatures use precisely the same
136
LOVING GOD
word to express their lowest form of selfishness.
Love is thus self-revealing. Our truest formula
of belief consists not in what our minds assent to
and our reason acknowledges, but rather in what
our desires are drawn to. A soul sometimes de-
ceives itself in what it says, for our words are
themselves but thought forms borrowed from
others; and in what it does, for few of one's acts
carry with them one's utter approval; but no soul
is ever deceived in what it likes.
Let us analyze, as far as we can, this thing called
love, using the term in its highest sense, and mean-
ing the emotion that beautifies the family, pre-
serves friendship, and appropriates God.
First of all it is a distinct emotion. It comes,
as we say, from the heart, and not from the intel-
lect or the will. As near as we can define it, it is
that pleasurable feeling aroused in us by the pres-
ence of the beloved object in our thoughts.
It is well not to drift away from this common-
sense basis. No intellectual process, no speech nor
act, can be called love, unless it be heated from our
subconscious self by this strange fire. We love a
man or a book or a flower, only as the thought of
the object in question gives us pleasure, and stirs
this emotion.
137
LAME AND LOVELY
Those who talk of loving God, therefore, when
there is no inward joy, no stir of the feeling in
some ardent measure, are clearly mistaken. They
may obey God, or approve of Him, or fear Him,
but they do not love Him except He makes in them
some spot of gladness.
Is it not absurd then, it may be inquired, to com-
mand us to love God? Can love be forced by the
will? If it cannot, and it certainly cannot, as it
lies beneath the will and moves before the will,
why should Jesus put as the supreme " duty " of
man the love of God ?
The answer to this plain and substantial objec-
tion is this: that the command to love anything
essentially good and beautiful is no more nor less
than a command to learn to know it.
We are justified in commanding any human be-
ing to love, for instance, Shakespeare's or Ra-
phael's works, because by common consent such
art ought to and does appeal to a normal, healthy
taste.
So we ought to love the beauties of nature, and
deeds of heroism, self-sacrifice, and the like, and
little children. The obligation here consists in
our being human; whoever does not like such
things steps aside from the human race, he is
138
LOVING GOD
perverted, and is a subject for the alienist and not
for the moralist
God, no matter what our religion may be, so
long as it is civilized, stands for the perfection of
human character. In Him are all those excel-
lencies every right-minded person wants to possess.
Naturally, therefore, simply to conceive of such a
being must awaken in us love to Him.
If the thought of God is distasteful to us, we
either have a false and distorted notion of what
God is, or our tastes are perverted and our backs
turned upon what we know to be really worth
while.
The command to love God is a command to
know God, to think of Him, to come into the in-
fluence of His personality. Once we see God we
can no more help glowing in love to Him than we
can help the glow in our hearts when we see a
perfect rose, a gorgeous sunset, a kind deed, or an
innocent child.
The curse of sensualism, of selfishness, of hate,
of greed, and of all flesh-centered or ego-centered
passions is that they stop up the eye of the soul.
" Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see
God."
Lowness, pessimism, and all bitter and base
139
LAME AND LOVELY
thinking not only prevent us from seeing God, but
also from seeing anything else that is worth seeing.
Bound in such meshes we cannot see a woman as
her spirit should be looked on, nor a man for what
he really is, nor any of the moral loveliness of the
universe.
I do not ask that your idea of God be the same
as mine, for perhaps both of us are far from the
truth, but it is right to demand of any man that he
have some notion or mental image of the highest,
truest, noblest things in life; whatever your God
may be He ought to be no less than that; and you
are missing the meaning of life if you don't love
Him.
140
THE USES OF CONFESSION
Sincerite, comme le feu, purifie tout ce qu'elle
embrasse. — Sincerity, like fire, purifies everything
it embraces. — Maeterlinck.
One can have my confession without having my
heart; when one has my heart, he needs no con-
fession of mine; all is open to him.
— La Bruyere.
WHEN the whole world has tried a truth and
found it good it compresses it into a prov-
erb. One of these compressed tablets of ever-
lasting truth is: Confession is good for the soul.
To confess a sin or a mistake, a weakness or
a fault, in some way separates it from our souls
and, as Maeterlinck says, purifies it as by fire,
sterilizes its dangerous germs.
So to open a heart is to cure it. Only our
concealed, disavowed, or unconscious sins eat into
the soul and attack the life principle.
This is true in our relations with each other.
141
LAME AND LOVELY
The little child that goes frankly to his mother
and admits his disobedience is taken quickly into
the arms of love. Man and wife who live in a
continual white clarity of mutual confession have
an unbreakable peace, a love bastioned and secure
against all attack.
In society it is not the known but the unknown
vice that is dangerous. Every exposed fraud,
every aired scandal, every known scoundrel is a
red flag of warning to the young and innocent. It
is the prosperous, devious, and secret wrongdoing
that spreads its cancerous roots wide and sinks
them deep into the body politic.
Newspapers are a sort of public confessional.
What is known is half cured. No one hates the
organ of publicity as much as the corrupter of
public virtue, the agent of private fraud, who
needs darkness for his success.
Confession is impossible between man and man
unless there be some sort of moral stature in the
one confessed to greater than in the one who
confesses.
To a soul nobler than myself I can speak freely
of my cowardices, my falseness, my lapses. As
I talk to him even my envy and littleness, my
egotism, vanity, disloyalty, and selfishness, I know
142
THE USES OF CONFESSION
not how, seem to lose their septic and dangerous
quality and to become objects of curious interest.
What a relief, what sweet joy, to find a friend
from whom you have been estranged, perhaps by
some fault of yours, and to lay bare your weakness
and wrong in plain, surgical strokes. In some
mysterious way, out of your very evil there springs
a tenderness, a strength of mutual affection which
was unknown before. What would lovers be with-
out lovers' quarrels and the making up ?
It is precisely this psychological quality that
characterizes our relation to the infinite — to
God, under whatsoever form we conceive Him.
Whether it be the prostration before the ancient
altar of sacrifice, whereon burns the lamb of atone-
ment, or the whispered outpourings of a troubled
heart through the wicker of the confessional, or
the prayers and groans at the Methodist mourners'
bench, or the Salvation Army's penitent form, the
principle is the same. The soul is unveiling itself.
Just to say, to admit, to avow what we are, in
the face of infinite goodness, floods the life with
a cleansing stream. It is for this reason that all
religions have placed confession, in one form or
another, as the central point of their ritual.
For confession is, at its core, sincerity. It is
143
LAME AND LOVELY
only in sincerity that the soul can breathe deep
breaths, that life is free and joyous. To live in
conscious deception with those we love is to walk
with feet entangled with strands. We are ever
on the watch. There is no peace, no utter relax-
ation. Those men and women whose private
moral code admits the doing of things unconfess-
able live a fevered and restless existence.
The first thing is peace with the infinite. Even
if a man belongs to no church at all, if the impli-
cations of institutional religion repel him, let him
in certain quiet moments call up his soul and lay
bare his deepest self to his own ideal of God; let
him admit himself, avow and confess himself, and
he will carry from his silent interview a lighter
heart than he has known.
Nothing is more foolish than dodging the idea
of God and evading His presence in the thought.
I would that all unchurched men might lay aside
their prejudices, the various ideas about God which
they have been taught, and all notions of their own
fitness or unfitness, and open their mind's door and
invite in whatever they believe God to be, and
then and there strip themselves of all subterfuge,
of all supposed goodness and supposed badness,
and be once sincere with the infinite — fearlessly,
144
THE USES OF CONFESSION
confidently sincere, as a child before his father, as
a creature before him that made him, as a being
of half lights, mysteries, and shadows before the
sun.
Whoever commences to live a white, honest life
in the face of his inner ideal, will begin to be honest
with himself. And whoever is downright and
square with himself is the only one who can pos-
sibly be loyal to his friends.
To thine own self be true,
And it must follow2 as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
14 And hereby," says John the beloved, " we
know that we are of the truth and shall assure our
hearts before him. For if our hearts condemn us
not, then have we confidence toward God."
145
THE HEART OF FATALISM
That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by
the prophet. — Matthew.
There are many truths that seem repugnant and
contrary one to the other, yet which subsist to-
gether in admirable agreement. The source of
most religious errors is the exclusion of one or the
other of these truths. — Pascal.
ONE of the most striking and suggestive say-
ings of the gospel is the naive explanation
Matthew gives of this and that act of Jesus, " that
it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the
prophet." It is a luminous expression, masterful,
dramatic.
One sees a life moving according to programme
laid out ages ago; a personal career which rises
from a petty thing of chance and becomes a part
of unfolding destiny, a cog in the great wheel of
time; it is fatalism, but only the sweet juice of
fatalism, with the bitter rind thrown away.
Every doctrine has some good and some bad in
146
THE HEART OF FATALISM
it. Any statement of truth, followed to an ex-
treme exclusion of all other truths, becomes un-
reason.
And there is a vast deal of truth and comfort
in the old creed of predestination. There is a
sense of rest comes to the mind with a realization
of the sovereign and all-compelling will of God.
Always, of course, provided one believes, as we
might say, in moderation, and does not push his
faith to the point of paralysis.
For, while predestination is true, it is not the
whole truth, for no truth can be wholly crowded
into a statement — nothing but life can perfectly
inclose or express truth. It is not the word made
printer's ink; it is the word made flesh, which is
complete, well rounded, and safe to follow.
The source of dissipation in life is the feeling
that one is the creature and puppet of chance.
Hence spring our mad follies, our profligate
wastes, our toxic pleasures and septic negligence.
If it's all luck, then let us eat, drink and be merry,
for to-morrow we die.
When one speaks of destiny, one ordinarily
refers to one event only in life — to-wit: death.
But the end of life is not the only part that
is scheduled. It is all according to programme.
*47
LAME AND LOVELY
We are born each on his appointed day, as much
as Jesus himself came not until " the fullness of
time." And every man's life is a plan of God,
as Bushnell puts it. The varied structure of our
days is made after some plan drawn upon the
divine trestle board. There are blue prints and
specifications in heaven for each soul's growth.
A conviction like this must give one poise. It
corrects the dangerous extremes of despair and
overconfidence. It takes away worry. It re-
moves our nervous sense of haste. " He that
believeth shall not make haste." It spreads a
summer calm throughout our thoughts. It clears
the brain and steadies the hand. The spirit of
man becomes a candle of the Lord.
In some form this sense of programme. is dis-
cernible in every great man. It is the essence of
heroism. Napoleon called it his star. Socrates
spoke of his daimon, who whispered him advice.
Caesar bade the frightened boatmen have no fear,
for Caesar was on board, and his fortunes.
The remarkable courage of the Japanese springs
from their perfect acceptance of fate. And what-
ever force there is in Islam is traceable to the same
source.
When we exclaim that we cannot accept fatalism
148
THE HEART OF FATALISM
we are guilty of our western fault, which is —
logic. Carrying fatalism to its logical extreme,
it is a deadening thing, and produces only a stoic
stolidity. But why carry it to an extreme ?
The art we western people need to learn is to
extract the feeling, the flavor, the life element,
out of a dogma, and not run it down to its pitiless
logical end. For, as I have said, there is not a
solitary credo, whether in Christianity, positivism,
rationalism, or in any other religion or philosophy
which does not become eventually false and salt
and bitter, if treated with pure reason alone.
It is only in the temperamental mixture and
blend of all the great truths that we gain wisdom
and peace.
Let me feel, therefore, that this day is marked
out for me ; that the past, good and bad, is inevit-
able [even if it was not], and is now dissolved into
the ocean waters of the infinite purpose; that the
future is moving toward me as fixedly as the past
is receding; that all reform and right work, all
truth and goodness and noble action are almighty;
their failure is only seeming; they have in them-
selves the very toughness and conquering inde-
structibility of God himself; that every mean deed
and impure thought and cruel gratification and
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LAME AND LOVELY
unworthy self-indulgence must meet its purifying
pain and whitening grief some time, somewhere;
that the stars are my friends and the three fates
are motherly souls ; that whatever power made the
lily and clothes it, created the sparrow and marks
its fall, has also a place and programme for me ; in
fine, let me, in my little corner also, go about my
Father's business, even as the Great Teacher, with-
out fear or haste or heat, moving as planets move,
doing what I may do " that it might be fulfilled
which was spoken by the prophet."
150
A PREACHMENT TO PREACHERS
My dear brother: You are indeed out of your
flace y for you are reasoning when you ought to be
praying. — Yours truly, John Wesley.
FROM the layman in the pews this silent appeal
rises to the minister in the pulpit : he that hath
ears to hear let him hear !
What we want from you, sir, is but one thing —
yourself.
If you preach Christ, it does us no good, unless
you preach him in terms of your own personal life.
The historic Christ and the doctrinal and tabulated
Christ we, as well as you, can get from books.
We want no words from you except those that
are red with your blood.
We do not want the Word, but the Word made
Flesh.
We do not want you to arouse our emotions ; we
want to see you gripped by your own.
We do not want argument; we do not want
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LAME AND LOVELY
anything proved to us ; for where you lay one doubt
you raise twenty.
We do not want information; all its sources are
open to us as well as to you. We do not want
science, history, or philosophy; we want of you
what we want of the one great neighbor — heart.
Please go through your sermon, before you
bring it to us, and cut out every platitude, every
fine-sounding phrase, everything that you will say
just because you think your church requires it, or
because it is your duty to say it. Give us only
what you cannot help saying.
We ask you to compete with novels and stories
in one thing — human interest.
We ask you to compete with poets in just one
thing — vision.
We ask you to compete with men of science in
just one thing — absolute honesty.
We ask you to compete with those who make us
bad in just one thing — in that you like us.
We do not need your guidance; we need your
confession — that shall most truly guide us.
Do not berate us; we know how bad we are.
Do not dictate to us; for the soul leaps to truth
and not authority. Do not urge us ; for souls that
can see need no urging. Simply show us one who
152
A PREACHMENT TO PREACHERS
is in the clutch of some reality; then we shall be
shamed and smitten, reborn and set on the right
way.
Do not entertain us. You cannot compete with
the actor. Strip your soul naked to us and show
us what no man can simulate — life in its pure
motion.
Speak low. The things you should have to
say are secrets. Every man's religion is utterly
modest; it is his most shrinking and sensitive vital
spot.
Remember that we are interested in the ultimate
things — love, life, God and death. Whenever
you mention one of these things we are anxious to
hear if you have any light. Remember that the
spirit of this age is not as the spirit of former ages.
Learn these words of Griggs: " Our interest
everywhere these days is in the distinctively per-
sonal. If one can tell openly and clearly the story
of his own life, there are many who will find deep
interest in this. Literature is becoming more and
more autobiographical. It all means the deepen-
ing consciousness of the absolute significance of
the human soul."
It is not doctrines any more we want. It is not
theorems and saving formulas. We want doc-
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LAME AND LOVELY
trines incarnated, theorems shining through souls,
formulas that are the aureoles of experience.
Holy church has become a trysting place for our
souls with yours.
We do not want to believe ; we want to see.
We do not want gold any more, but the gold
mine; not money, but the bank and mint; not the
law, but the lawgiver; not the botany of Christ,
but the rose of Christ; not the sermon, but the
human being behind it. We, too, " seek not
yours, but you ! "
BEYOND THE GRAVE
// in this life only we have hope in Christ we
are of all men most miserable. — Saint Paul.
THE idea of immortality is one that is most
tenaciously clung to by our sentiments and
most conclusively rejected by materialistic reason-
ing.
There is danger that the mind of the average
intelligent person, trained to the strict honesty and
self-control of modern scientific methods, will put
aside the sweet persuasion as belonging to the
myths and guesses of former ages of ignorance.
Let us, therefore, state succinctly the grounds upon
which an enlightened, strictly truthful intelligence
bases such a belief.
And, first, the whole matter must be recognized
as lying outside of and beyond the realm of ac-
curate knowledge.
It has no kinship with botany, mathematics,
chemistry, or any of the other exact sciences. It
lies rather in that region which every cultured
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LAME AND LOVELY
scientist to-day acknowledges to exist, where the
overtones of truth play, where are the deep mys-
teries of the personality, the subliminal instincts,
and the finer esthetic perceptions.
These things, of course, are just as real,
though not so well defined, as the exact sciences,
and have quite as much, if not more, to do with
life.
All materialistic proofs of a future life, there-
fore, such as psychic research and spiritualistic
performances, may be set aside as hardly consistent
with intellectual self-respect.
The profoundest argument perhaps is the one
emphasized by Emerson, who says that " when
God has a point to carry with the race he plants
his arguments in the instincts." The fact that the
conviction that personality will outlast death is
as old as humanity, has never been absent from
human experience, and is practically acknowledged
universally to-day, has great force. So persistent
a phenomenon of human consciousness goes a long
way toward proving that it corresponds to a fact.
Science, as John Fiske points out, has nothing
more to do with the matter than to weigh this
fact. Science does not prove immortality impos-
sible. He says : " In the course of evolution
156
BEYOND THE GRAVE
there is no more philosophical difficulty in man's
acquiring immortal life than in his acquiring the
erect posture and articulate speech."
The most convincing proof of our continued
existence, however, to thoughtful persons is the
fact that, without this, life loses its moral signifi-
cance. The next world is inextricably bound up
with our ethical sense. And that not merely by
tradition, but by a profound reason, which has been
truly felt, though fantastically stated, by men since
the beginning of time.
The point is that moral motives are too long to
fit this earthly short career. All the higher, more
humanizing, subtler, and more altruistic sentiments
are too cramped for room. They cannot fitly
play inside a space of thirty-three years or so.
Brutal, bestial, sensual, and all destructive
emotions reap a quick harvest. Their reward is in
their hand. The selfish man gets what he goes
after. He makes his money, he sates his lust, he
fills the measure of his pride, and, as with the
beasts, death comes mercifully with the decay of
his powers, so that his term is in a way rational.
But the rewards of virtue are long and slow.
The increment of goodness seems a cosmic process
that needs not days but centuries. Honesty is
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LAME AND LOVELY
not the best policy always, within a period of a
year nor of a lifetime; we feel it to be the best
policy always only when it can get a chance to
outlive all opposition.
Even so loyalty, purity, nobility, and all the
diviner traits of men only have chance to stand
erect when they can pierce through death. The
world would miss its proudest instances of manly
strength and womanly beauty if there should be
taken away all cases where men and women went
smiling to death for a principle.
Hence, to remove from men the feeling that
another life supplements this would cut the nerve
of moral emotion ; it would remove the halo from
our flesh; it would rub out our tint of divinity; it
would eliminate all that far-reaching heroism of
souls that leads them to commit themselves utterly
to noble aims.
Efface heaven, and the result is psychologically
sure — there would be left for us but the slough of
the senses more or less refined, and instead of
" enduring the cross and despising the shame for
the joys set before us," we should adopt the advice
of Propertius:
" Dum licet inter nos igitur laetamur amantes;
non satis est ullo tempore longus amor. — Let us
i58
BEYOND THE GRAVE
enjoy pleasure while we can; pleasure is never long
enough."
The world would be poor without its Nathan
Hale, and Wiclif, and Savonarola, and Bruno, and
Paul, and Socrates, and Jesus, all of whom had
moral contents that spilled over death.
The best reason for keeping heaven is because
it is needed.
159
YOKE JOY
And establish thou the work of our hands upon
us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it!
— Moses.
Wind and Wave and Sun, how regenerative
these elder brothers are! — William Sharp.
NATURE forgets nothing.
She not only produces with inexhaustible
fecundity but she keeps on producing the same
kind of things.
Like the witches in " Macbeth," she sings:
" I'll do, and I'll do, and Til do," and she does the
third time what she did first. We emphasize the
fact that no two blades of grass are exactly alike,
and no two waves, and no two faces; but the most
striking factor in the case, after all, is that all grass
blades are on the same pattern, and all waves and
faces.
Yesterday the sun rose in the east and set in the
west; to-morrow and forever it will repeat the
same performance. Rain ascends from the ocean,
1 60
YOKE JOY
journeys on cloud ships to the mountains, is con-
densed and rolls down in rivers to the sea once
more, a huge, endlessly turning water wheel.
Beavers build the same kind of dams to-day
they built in the four rivers of Eden, and hens lay
the same sort of eggs that Eve boiled for Adam's
breakfast. Bees make honey in the same shaped
cells and of the same sweetness and by the same
process their ancestors used for the honey Samson
found in the lion's carcass and turned into a riddle.
Nature produces a new thing only by infinitely
repeating the old with minutest variations. It
took her eons and centuries to create a human
arm, for instance, having practiced for a tremen-
dous space of time on the foreleg of the quad-
ruped, the wing of the bird, and the flipper of the
sea creature. And how many millions of experi-
ments with sensitive skin dots before she could
bring forth an eye to feel light or an ear to ex-
perience sound !
Atoms and molecules, as well as the people of
New England, are characterized by doing just as
they always have done. Otherwise there would
be no such thing as science.
The reason why coal ignites at a certain tem-
perature, why oxygen and hydrogen leap together
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LAME AND LOVELY
under certain conditions and separate under cer-
tain other circumstances, is precisely the same rea-
son why the ladies' aid society at Worcester,
Mass., always serves cold ham and hot coffee and
beans at the church supper, and why waiters wear
dress suits — " they always have."
In the forest the willow drops its arms, the oak
extends them straight out, and the poplar holds
them up, because they have the habit. Every-
thing is old, old, old; even our hunger for some-
thing new — the Greeks had it.
Now, if nature is such a slave to habit, it must
follow that habit is a good thing. Nature is sat-
urated with joy; nature everlastingly repeats;
hence if we would attain joy, let us seek it in rep-
etition. That is a perfectly good syllogism.
And it works out excellently well in practice.
Most of our pleasure comes from the acts we per-
form over and over again; as breakfast, dinner,
and supper; sleep and daily work, the Saturday
holiday and the Sunday rest. To get religious en-
joyment firmly fixed in us Jehovah prescribed
every seventh day for it.
In proportion as a pleasure is healthful, normal
and permanent, it is found in grooves. Oppo-
sitely, as we become unhealthy and perverted we
162
YOKE JOY
seek happiness principally in strange and unusual
sources. Not that there is no pleasure in what is
new, only it is not dependable. To expect con-
tentment from novelty is to be glad occasionally,
and miserable generally; while to train one's self
to get the zest and fun of life from its ordinary
course, is to enter into partnership with great
Nature's self.
The old distinction between happiness and joy is
in point. Happiness just " happens"; that is,
comes now and then, and by chance; joy, however,
is in the nature of things; it is the condition of
spirit arising from being in harmony with the
universe.
No class of people will you find more wretched
than those whose pleasure consists in novelty, such
as gamblers, the " smart set," and all who are con-
tinually buying new gowns, new automobiles, new
houses and new wives.
They have fun, but it is in rare oases dotting
desert wastes. All aristocracies and plutocracies
who have no work to make them happy, float as a
green scum upon the vast, sweet, healthy pool of
humanity; they are an exanthematous excretion
upon the surface of the huge, sound body of the
race, which is made up of children and letter
163
LAME AND LOVELY
carriers, bricklayers and scientists, typewriter girls
and grocers, tinkers, tailors and candlestick mak-
ers.
How carefully wrong we have all been trained!
Success we imagine to consist in escaping from
those who work for a living to sit among those
who work only when they please.
Quite the contrary, the contented portion of the
earth's population consists of those who work
when the bell rings, whether they feel like it or
not. For they have heard the voice of Nature,
who cries, saying:
" Take my yoke upon you and learn of me,
and ye shall find rest for your souls."
Nature's peace is yoke peace. It lies within
the usual. The devil's peace, whose end is ashes,
is alcohol-jewelry- fame-novelty peace.
164
THE SOUL LAOCOON
The Laocoon of Virgil! . . . I know of one
more terrible. It is the one smothered and de-
voured by serpents issued from his own heart. —
— Catulle Mendes.
The prosperity of fools shall destroy them. —
— Solomon.
MODERN life is engaged in a tremendous
effort to " look pleasant." Literature of
the day is inundated with streams of advice, ur-
ging us all to cheer up. Those philosophers are
the fashion who tell us that nothing matters much
so long as we chew our food well and don't worry.
And the most successful of present day propagan-
dists are they who reveal to us that there is no hell,
no devil, no wrong, no dark, and no pain. Mean-
while hearts continue to break, homes to be ship-
wrecked, mouths to be full of the ashes of excess,
fortunes to be lost, quarrels to develop, and chil-
dren to have the gripes.
The great fact, eternal as the race, is tragedy.
i65
LAME AND LOVELY
Not for nothing the great creative minds, from
iEschylus to Shakespeare, hold up to us the pol-
ished mirror of their verse and show us often the
divine human face stone smitten with a Medusa
look and snake haired with horrors*
And the secret of triumph lies in knowing how
to adjust one's self to the fact of sorrow. All
sorts of cure-alls have been hawked down the
streets of time.
One cult says of woe, laugh at it ; another, inflict
such penitential torments on yourself that you
outdo it; another, face it stolidly; another, deny it,
notwithstanding the facts; another, join our insti-
tution, which will insure you against it, if not in
this world, in the next; and so on. But the wise of
all ages have discerned the healing truth about it,
which is that all real trouble as well as all real
peace is from one's own heart, and in one's own
inner court is the real arena of triumph or of
defeat.
There is not a single tragedy in history, as
Maeterlinck points out, in his " Wisdom and Des-
tiny," where fatality really reigns. External fa-
talities there do seem to be, such as sickness,
accident, the deeds of the wicked, and the death
of them we love; but such a thing as an internal
166
THE SOUL LAOCOON
fatality does not exist. The hero always tri-
umphs ; at least in that forum where alone triumph
or defeat has any meaning — that is, within his
own heart.
Success and failure in life, then, are in no sense
dependent upon anything but myself, and neither
are they in any least degree the sport of chance;
they come by laws as sure in their operation as the
laws that move the sun. In other words, every
wretched man is a Laocoon tangled and crushed
by the serpents issued from his own self.
Among these serpents the most common are the
bodily appetites that have been allowed to stran-
gle the will. To change the comparison, it is as
if a man drives his sledge over the snows of des-
tiny, guiding strong wolves, which pull him for-
ward so long as he drives them, but turn and rend
him when he loses control.
Foremost comes alcohol, which has paralyzed
how many a noble will, and burned to the ground
how many a spirit's dwelling it might have
cheered! There is no drunkard that is not a
spiritual suicide. And the first point in the re-
demption of an alcoholic pervert is that he real-
izes that, as no one made him drink except
himself, so no one can cure him, except himself.
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LAME AND LOVELY
Alcoholism is never hopeless; one can always
quit.
It is the spiritual condition of an impotent will
that is hopeless.
Worse than this, however, and worse than any-
thing, is the perversion of the creative instinct.
The feeling that attracts man to woman is the
most sacred and strong of all the desires of the
body. When this passion ceases to be a mastered
force, at once warming and sanctifying life, and
becomes a python, torturing and crushing its vic-
tim, there ensues the bitterest death in life. The
most appalling of all ruins is the ruin of love.
We might also speak of greed, of ambition, of
idleness, of envy, of hate, of egotism, of pride,
and the hundred and one other snakes that are
nested in the human heart, hatched in the warmth
of self-satisfied ignorance and increased at length
to the size of tragedy.
The cure and banishment of all such things is
found in love and wisdom; love fixed on no less
object than utter perfection — God. For to love
God is to let into one's life the forces of the in-
finite. Love means admiration and self-giving.
To admire and to give one's self up to such an
ideal as is presented to us in Jesus, is to admit into
168
THE SOUL LAO COON
our hearts the most antiseptic of all emotions, to
receive into our wills the most tonic of all spiritual
potencies.
And wisdom. That is, first of all, teachable-
ness, the recognition of our ignorance. It means
the openness to truth, and the closure against all
such fraudulent imitations of truth and alleged
substitutes for truth, as superstition, custom, and
authority.
Reason, enlighted by wisdom, the knowledge
and practice of the laws of the universe; and the
heart, lit up by love, the invigoration streaming in
from God and from good men and women ; these
are they that shall rescue the Laocoon soul from
its own serpent brood.
169
THE CENTER OF THINGS
I HAVE discovered the center of the universe.
It is very wonderful and comforting, I am
the center of the universe. In a minute this morn-
ing this flashed on me, and the puzzle of the ages
was solved.
No more dispute as to whether the earth goes
round the sun, or the sun round the earth, or both
round the constellation of Hercules, for the whole
cosmos revolves about me. I am the axis.
When Proctor Knott extolled Duluth as the
spot where the horizon comes down at equal dis-
tance in every direction, he spoke the sober truth.
I write these lines on a ship a thousand miles at
sea ; all around is water and sky ; and right in the
exact geographical center of everything am I and
my ship. Come to think of it, this has always
been the case, all my life.
My father and mother existed for the purpose
of bringing me into the world. The old Third
Ward schoolhouse in Springfield, Illinois, was
170
THE CENTER OF THINGS
built that I might attend there, and (it has since
been torn down) learn to spell; indeed, the entire
educational system came into being in order that I
might go to that school.
Emperors die in China, and kings are upset in
Portugal; earthquakes shake Sicily and panics
Wall Street, and all simply that the news thereof
may be laid before me at the breakfast table.
The big and the little dippers whirl about the
polestar, Antares winks, and Venus glows, and
Halley's comet comes and goes — for me.
And in all this there is no egotism. For in say-
ing I am the center of the cosmos I do not at all
imply that you also are not the center of the
cosmos. In fact, you are; everybody is. There
are as many centers as there are conscious beings.
The mistake we have made all along is in suppos-
ing there can be but one center. If you look
through a window pane covered with rain drops or
frost crystals at a point of light, you will notice
that any way you move your head the light always
remains the center of innumerable concentric rings
formed by the glistening reflections. It is even so
in life, as you move the center moves.
There are as many worlds as there are crea-
tures. As Zangwill says: " The scent world of
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LAME AND LOVELY
dogs, the eye world of birds, the uncanny touch
world of bats, the earth world of worms, the water
world of fishes, the gyroscopic world of dancing
mice, the flesh world of parasites, the microscopic
world of microbes, intersect one another inextrica-
bly and with an infinite interlacing, yet each is a
symmetric sphere of being, a rounded whole, and
to its denizens the sole and self-sufficient cosmos."
The account of creation as given in the Penta-
teuch is, therefore, psychologically and essentially
correct; God did make the sun to give man light
by day, and the moon and stars to shine on him
by night, as far as man is concerned.
If the Bible had been written for angels it might
have stated the case differently. When the peni-
tent at the mourner's bench is told that he will
never find peace until he believes that the Son of
God came to save him personally, he is told the
plain truth; the meaning of which is that he is to
move in from the suburbs into the center of crea-
tion.
For it is only when a soul feels the stars rise and
fall about him orderly, angels and devils tugging
at him, and all creation recognizing his geocentric
supremacy, that he gets poise and ceases to be
eccentric. Eccentric means, having the point
172
THE CENTER OF THINGS
about which a wheel revolves at one side of the
center.
There are so many discontented, unhappy peo-
ple in the world, simply because there are so many
eccentric, lopsided, bumpy, flat-wheeled, irregular
souls. Move in! Move in! Occupy your due
place in the spotlight of destiny! Worms do it,
why not you ?
Philosophers have ridiculed this homocentric
theory. Goethe turned from it in disgust. Pope
wrote caustically:
While man exclaims, " See all things for my use! "
" See man for mine! " replies the pampered goose.
But the instinct of humanity is wiser than the
wisdom of the learned. Homer breathed truth
when he represented the gods fighting for and
against Troy. The Old Testament is right when
it shows Jehovah actively interested in the chosen
people. Every people is a chosen people, and
there is no God but our own peculiar Jah or
Elohim.
And Jesus was most right and true of all when
he had us appropriate, each one of us, the spe-
cial care of the Father of All. There is no Prov-
idence that is of any mortal use to me but Special
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LAME AND LOVELY
Providence ; if it is only general it had as well not
be at all. It is precisely because He clothes the
lilies of the field that He will also clothe you, O
ye of little faith. Because He notes the sparrow
He will note you.
You have an inalienable right to your centricity.
Occupy it. You cannot believe in God unless you
believe He is yours* The only real God is my
God.
174
THE THREE SPHINXES BY THE ROAD
Nobility is not acquired by birth, but by life,
often by death. — Plutarch.
*' TV /TEN," says Pascal, " unable to find any
1.VJL cure for death, misery and ignorance,
have the notion that, to render themselves happy,
they must not think of these things/*
The real test of a wise man is suggested by th%
paragraph. For a wise man is precisely one who
has definitely settled his attitude toward, first,
death ; second, failure ; and third, the unknown.
No matter how much knowledge is in a man's
head, how much skill in his hands, and how much
purpose and force in his heart, he is still a fool
unless he has met and arranged with the three
great facts.
Not that any man can understand one or all of
these three mysteries. It is safe to say no man
understands them. Since the beginning of human
time they have sat like sphinxes by the roadside of
every man's life.
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LAME AND LOVELY
But one can do better than understand, one can
adjust one's self to them.
After all, in anything, the truest wisdom is not
knowledge, but adjustment.
We do not know what electricity is, but we can
adjust ourselves to it, we can use it, make it work,
and cause it to serve us in the telegraphic wire in-
stead of killing us in the lightning. So also we
do not know what gravitation is, nor chemical
affinity, nor life; but we can employ these mys-
teries to our advantage.
The last three mysteries of life, which men in
general cannot use, and by which they are baffled
and downcast, are those I have mentioned. To
adjust ourselves to them implies the highest de-
gree of intelligence and of moral power.
First, death. Death is as natural as life. It
is a certainty. How many people have settled
with it? Sad to say, to most persons death comes
as an awful calamity, a blow in the dark, an event
that upsets all calculations and defeats all the aims
of life.
A wise man is one who is always as ready to die
as to live; his books are in order, his business ar-
ranged, and his thoughts are so set that death may
come at any moment. No man who is not so
176
THE THREE SPHINXES BY THE ROAD
has a right to call himself happy or intelligent.
Second, failure or sickness. In whatever a man
proposes, he ought to make definite plans what he
will do in case he fails.
Any fool can manage to get along with good
health; only a wise man knows how to be ill.
Any general can succeed if he invariably is vic-
torious; the great general is the one who knows
what to do when defeated.
Third, ignorance. What one does not know is
infinite, compared with what one knows. The
supreme test of character is one's relation to the
unknown.
Out of the unknown come the plagues of life;
for the unknown is the lair of the greatest enemy
of life — fear.
Out of the unknown issue fear of God, of
spirits, of nature, of the dark, of fate, of disease.
Properly adjusted to the unknown we have re-
ligion, instead of superstition; our lives are made
moral and brave and free, instead of base and
cowardly and enslaved.
The clear, scientific, religious mind sees clearly
the difference between the things it can and cannot
know; the untrained, low mind blurs the line be-
tween known and unknown. This is the chief
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LAME AND LOVELY
distinction between the intelligent and the unintel-
ligent thinker.
Whoever, therefore, will have peace, poise and
wisdom let him make definite arrangement with
the three sphinxes — death, failure and the un-
known.
i78
THE HOUSE ON THE ROCK
For their rock is not as our Rock. — Moses.
THE history of mankind is the record of a
huge experiment in getting together.
Without organization we get none of the finer
elements of life, such as orchestras and steam
heat, cities, street cars, dictionaries and police.
Pure individualism means barbarism. Each
man dwells in his own cave with the woman he
has taken.
The struggle upward on the part of the race
is merely a struggle to crush out those elements
that prevent cooperation.
Pride, lust, money-love, power-love and all
forms of primal egoism disintegrate society, pre-
vent unity, split all pacts of mutual help and are
thus agents of savagery.
They minister to primitive egoism, but they de-
stroy the higher, finer and more permanent ego-
ism; that is to say, while they seem to increase
a man, yet in reality they eat him up. They make
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LAME AND LOVELY
him small, they narrow his nature, provincialize
his ideas and push him back toward the brute.
They are not forces of evolution, but of dissolu-
tion.
Now, therefore, almost all attempts at getting
together, all efforts at organizing into states,
churches, armies, cults, unions, and the like, have
appealed to these primeval passions, which in their
nature can never give solidity to bodies of men.
The cementing passions are curious. For they
seem at first glance to be anti-individualistic; to
make for loss to me and gain to others. Really,
when we come to try them out they increase and
strengthen me. They are as a matter of fact,
powerfully egoistic, only that quality is concealed
in them; it takes time, faith, vision and spiritual
regeneration to see it.
For instance, take love-of-men, of men souls
themselves, instead of the love of power over
them. That seems to mean for me to annihilate
self for others. Also take joy-in-work, and devo-
tion-to-ideal, and delight-in-service. All of these
seem to strike at self. We rebel against them
with the instinct of self-defense.
It is only when we reach a certain point of
ripeness in experience, of maturity in wisdom and
180
THE HOUSE ON THE ROCK
of power in spiritual insight, that we see through
the shell to the kernel.
It is then we perceive the actual truth of the
saying that " he that saveth his life shall lose it,
and he that loseth his life shall find it."
For we learn by and by that only as we put
away the cruder egoisms of lust, money-love,
pride, the desire to be master, the hate of service
and so on, do we come to a sweeter, wider, nobler
egoism; we come indeed to some sort of true ap-
preciation of our own souls and of their worth
to us and the world.
Only through altruism, only by the path of
altruism, do we reach a sound individualism.
In the highest realm of character altruism
and egoism mean the same thing. They blend.
They make the full harmony, the white light of
souls.
All those institutions, therefore, that are founded
upon the sands of crude egoisms must perish.
The state that means mere defense, the church
that stands for rescuing the elect " as brands from
the burning," the schools whose aim is to make
scholars and gentlemen apart from the vulgar
crowd, the business world which has for a motive
to make me rich and independent and separate
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LAME AND LOVELY
from my fellows, are on rotting piers and will go
down in time.
Jesus was right. Human society must be
built on the abiding altruistic motives; only so
shall " the gates of hell not prevail against it."
Nietzsche was shortsighted and superficial,
Tolstoi was right. Disarmament is right.
Only as we dare to trust the altruistic laws, only
as we fearlessly build our institutions on them,
only as we have a practical, bold faith in the
cosmic energy of love and trust, and an unshakable
belief that men will respond to it, in spite of what
they say, only so can we permanently get together
and build our houses upon the rock.
182
THE DECLARATION OF
INDEPENDENCE
The only true courage is against fate.
— Lady Somery.
THE Declaration of Independence by the
nation is not of much importance unless each
citizen of the nation issues and abides by his own
personal declaration of independence.
Join me, therefore, in this my declaration:
I deny that there is any such thing as chance
or luck. I affirm that the universe is managed
by an intelligent person. I can see only a little
way, but as far as I do see all is law; that is just
ground for believing that all is law everywhere.
I say a Person manages the universe, because my
experience furnishes me no grounds for conceiv-
ing of an intelligence apart from personality.
I deny that God is ever under any circum-
stances my enemy. I affirm He is always my
friend.
I deny that there is any caprice in the moral
183
LAME AND LOVELY
or spiritual world. I affirm the cosmic accuracy
of the laws that govern souls.
I deny that there is so much as one grain of
truth in premonitions.
I deny that fear ever does any good. I affirm
that the sensation of fear is always poison, to
be resisted with all my might. Whatever comes,
I shall meet it better unafraid.
I deny that heredity has done anything to me
or to any person which we cannot turn to our
good. I affirm that the original heredity is that
I am a son of God, and that this inherited good
spirit, if we can realize it, is stronger than any
bad blood.
I deny that environment is stronger than I,
I affirm that I can make any possible environment
serve my success.
I deny that happiness is a worthy aim of life.
I affirm that I am put here to become great, not to
be happy.
I deny that any soul that is heroic is ever in
its depths unhappy. I affirm that joy is the in-
variable accompaniment of fearlessness, truth
and loyalty.
I deny that any habit, instinct or taste is
stronger than I. I affirm that I can change these,
184
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
and that the changing of them is all there is to
culture and progress.
I deny that money has ever either aided or
impeded the power of truth and of good in the
world. I affirm that the only spiritual dynamic
is personality.
I affirm that religion is nothing except the
personal influence of God, and that progress is
nothing except the personal influence of good
people.
I deny that I am "a worm of the dust." I
affirm that I am as important as the rest of the
universe.
I deny that death ends all. I affirm that my
personality shall live on after the dissolution of
my body. I affirm that the belief that the hu-
man soul ceases to exist at death is the most
profoundly immoral of all beliefs.
I affirm that this world was made for lovers;
that whoso misses love misses life; that loyal love
is tougher than all hates, envies and malice, and
will eventually overcome them.
I deny that " as I have made my bed I must
lie in it." I affirm that " if I have made my bed
wrong, please God, I will make it again."
I deny that opportunity knocks at every man's
i85
LAME AND LOVELY
door but once. I affirm that every day is an op-
portunity.
I deny that it is worth while to seek to be rich,
to be famous, or to occupy great place. These
things are gambling chances.
I affirm that the one thing worth seeking is that
work which seems play. Only in doing that work
is a human being sound, sane and content.
I deny any authority whatever over my mind.
I affirm that I am absolutely bound to do what
seems right to me.
I affirm that my personal well-being is best pro-
moted by striving for the well-being of others.
I can prove none of these things. They are
axiomatic to me. There is nothing more self-
evident by which to prove them.
186
SALVATION BY RESPONSIBILITY
He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and
he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.
— The Preacher.
FIRST, what is salvation?
It may mean several things; it has been
used to mean making sure of the entrance of
one's soul into heaven.
Of that meaning I have nothing here to say.
I use the word in another sense, the modern sense
of making one's character strong, so that one is
master of one's passions, freed from fear, and
happily adjusted to the universe. In other words,
one is sure of one's self, and a source of strength
and joy to others.
This kind of salvation, however it may be with
any other kind, never is attained except by one
thing — Responsibility.
A saved arm is an arm that is muscular and
skillful, a saved leg is one you can run and kick
with, a saved mind is one that thinks clearly.
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LAME AND LOVELY
Each of these is saved by peril, burden and effort.
Protecting, coddling, and shielding them, only
makes them flabby and weak.
This is the law of life. The woman that is
most really saved is the woman who bears and
rears a large family of children. They mean
burden, anxiety, labor, self-giving, often agony,
always responsibility. And those are the things
that save a woman; save her from being petty,
dissatisfied, useless and bad.
The noblest women I ever knew have been
those who have launched young lives. The most
magnificent soul that can be grown on this earth
is a mother.
We all want to " help " boys. Yet that which
makes a boy great is that which hinders him.
Many a promising lad needs only to be kicked
out, battered, discouraged, and opposed, to make
a man of him.
Not that we should abuse boys. We shall help
them. But this old world, and nature, and des-
tiny, intend to haze him, to attack him, and to
roll him in the mud.
And if that rough treatment arouses him to
fight and win, he will be saved. Our safeguard-
ing does not save.
188
SALVATION BY RESPONSIBILITY
Girls, it is commonly supposed, are to be
screened, protected. A girl, however, that has
always been carefully kept from all temptations
and responsibility, may be a very sweet, nice girl,
but she will not be a great woman.
Some of the purest souls I ever knew were Sal-
vation Army lassies, who grappled with vice and
uncleanness daily.
One of the noblest souls I ever knew was a
vaudeville actress, who began life as a waif, strug-
gled up single-handed, and kept herself unspotted.
One way to save a soul is to pack it in cotton
and keep it in a glass globe. Another way is to
render it antiseptic and send it forth into an un-
toward world.
What modern souls want is not to be secure.
They want to be great.
Any theology can tell you what to do to be se-
cure; if you care for that.
But there is only one way to be great, to have
strength that can be depended upon in a crisis,
to have the kind of happiness that cannot be
bowled over by calamity, to have the kind of
faith that doubts strengthen and do not disturb,
and to have the kind of purity that comes from
wisdom and not from ignorance; and that way is
189
LAME AND LOVELY
to accept responsibilities, grapple them, and bear
them nobly.
Then you are safe as a fearless warrior is safe.
The other way you are safe as a man in a
cyclone cellar is safe.
190
LOVE THE TEST OF LIFE
Love is the best of moralists. — Bacon.
LOVE is the test of life. It tries every soul.
And it finds so much dross in us that it is a
wonder it stays with us at all.
When love comes it demands nobleness. It
sounds the trumpet for every high thought and
feeling in us to rally.
It smites every base thing in us. It refuses to
live in peace with meanness, selfishness or sor-
didness of any kind.
That is why so few people are capable of a
great love. They are not worthy of it. To be
sure, all of us have some of the tricks and imita-
tions of love; for love is so good a thing that if
we cannot have it we must have a pewter dupli-
cate of it. When men cannot see God they make
idols.
So we all have sex attraction. We treasure
up flatteries and fair words, kisses and gifts and
compliments: and these trinkets, ear-rings and
191
LAME AND LOVELY
shifts of love are the only things many of us un-
derstand.
But love itself is as shattering as God. Love
is a revealer. It is a revelation. It is blinding
vision.
/ For, have you not seen how, when a youth falls
in love, his first persuasion is of his utter unworthi-
ness? He is not fit to touch her glove. Every
little vileness of his p#st rises to scorn him. He
is crushed under a vast humiliation. That she will
smile on him is a miracle; and he is ashamed,
feeling that if she but knew him through and
1 through she would flee.
Marriage is so often a failure because they two
try to keep love without greatness of soul. The
only happy, contented marriages among petty
souls are those of indifference and convenience.
To love, and not to be noble, means tragedy.
Love wars with egotism. No egotist can love.
For love is the very soul of altruism. It means
self-sinking, self-forgetfulness, self-obliteration.
It passes over and sees a self worthy of honor
only in the person of the beloved.
Love cannot dwell with pride. Its pith and
marrow is humility. Any preening and perking
up of self it abhors. It will not claim its own
19?
LOVE THE TEST OF LIFE
rights. Its joy is surrender, and not conquest. It
is great in meekness, after the manner of true
greatness. It always " takes upon itself the form
of a servant, and learns obedience." It refuses
thrones. It washes feet.
Love gives, gives, gives. It never can give
enough. Its climax of happiness is when it can
give life itself. Its triumph is crucifixion.
Love transfigures. It renders the beloved ob-
ject beautiful. Love does not spring from
beauty; a thing is beautiful because it is loved.
So we see why love means such misery. It is
a divine fire among earthly stubble. It comes to
us; we leap to it; for it is the most glorious of
all things; and then we discover its fatal require-
ment. Alas! we must be good, and we must be
great. We fail. We go broken to our graves,
hoping for a life beyond, where we may measure
up to love.
That is, most of us do this. Some put away
great love entirely. They choose littleness, be-
cause it is comfortable. They settle down to
pleasant lives; cultured swine, intellectual cattle,
more or less brainy beasts.
Still, though many strive with it and are
wrecked, and others give it up, love goes on, al-
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LAME AND LOVELY
mighty, inborn in every new child, inherent in
humanity. It is our redemption and our torment.
It is eternal. For it is God. God flowing, burst-
ing up, heaving in tidal waves in the souls of men.
Suppressed here, it rises yonder. Silenced in
one place its vocal harmonies break out in a hun-
dred new places. Love almighty is God almighty.
It is that breath which God breathed into the nos-
trils of the dust He had fashioned, and man be-
came a living soul.
Heaven and Hell are but love's flame and
shadow reflected upon the infinite.
194
THE TEETH AND CLAWS OF AL-
TRUISM
Behind the idea of justice always lurks the idea
of force. — De Tocqueville.
AS civilization becomes more and more com-
plex, justice must become more and more
fundamental. Among simple people, in antique
and ignorant eras", security was possible by force.
The mediaeval baron lived safe in his castle at
home and in his harness in the field by the mere
process of keeping the common people cowed.
His walls and his soldiers were his sure support
and defense. He alone had the power to destroy.
He could hurt his people and hang or chop them;
they could not touch him.
Times have changed. The invention of high
explosives has rendered all walls obsolete. Even
guards, armies and police are insufficient nowa-
days to protect a king. Bombs are cheap, and
a dollar buys a revolver good enough to slay
an emperor. The machinery of destruction is in
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LAME AND LOVELY
the hands of the proletariat. The power to hurt
has passed from duke and doge over to the
cobbler and the plasterer.
Every assassination of a royal person contains
this lesson. There is safety no more in high
places, except as there is justice in low places.
" Be wise now therefore, O ye kings, and be
instructed, ye judges of the earth. Kiss the peo-
ple, lest they be angry and ye perish from the
way when their wrath is kindled but a little."
The rise of democracy has been accompanied
with the growth of the terrific power of private
vengeance. The other edge of democracy, its cut-
ting edge, is the power of " one of the least of
these, my brethren," to kill. Along with the doc-
trines of altruism and universal brotherhood comes
the manufacture of fulminates, dynamite, nitro-
glycerin and all the black brothers of the out-
raged.
And there is no refuge from this menace ex-
cept justice. And not occasional justice, such as
of courts and arbitration boards and special com-
mittees, but bottom justice which reaches to the
basic equities, which indeed must utterly reor-
ganize the social arrangement.
Every man must have a fair chance. No child
196
TEETH AND CLAWS OF ALTRUISM
shall under any circumstances have an unearned
preference over another. Bringing one child into
the world in the slums and feeding him on refuse,
alcohol and lust, and bringing another child into
the world in luxury and feeding him on milk and
honey and love; this injustice must cease. All
privilege, caste, every species of unfairness must
stop.
So preaches the mild Jesus. So runs the gentle
gospel.
But behind the flowers and perfume of this
appeal of goodness is an iron horror, a thing with
teeth and claws and fire-heart that says the same
thing.
Let us be fair and just and love our neighbor
and we will feel better. Quite so. But there is
a hell side as well as a heaven side to every true
preachment. Let us abide in unfairness, injustice
and selfishness, and out of the pit of wrong and
darkness by the side of which we feast shall come
fire balls and cyanic vapors. *
Wherever there is injustice there is danger.
Wherever there is wrong there is concealed hell
fire. Every oppression means an explosion. Ev-
ery graft and connivance of roguery means, some
time, somewhere, agony and heartbreak.
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LAME AND LOVELY
" Wherefore hear the word of the Lord, ye
sorrowful men that rule this people.
" Because ye have said, We have made a cov^
enant with death and with hell are we at agree-
ment; therefore thus saith the Lord:
" ' Behold, judgment will I lay to the line, and
righteousness to the plummet; and the hail shall
sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters
shall overflow your hiding place. And your cov-
enant with death shall be disannulled, and your
agreement with death shall not stand/ "
198
IMITATION IN RELIGION
The customs of a people are their motive
power. — Duclos.
THERE is nothing more imitative than our
religious experience; nothing that seems to
ourselves more profoundly original; nothing in
which we follow more closely the footsteps of
others.
By this I do not mean to imply that our re-
ligious feelings are not genuine. Quite the con-
trary. We can be as sincere in a suggested
emotion as in a spontaneous emotion.
I believe in the religious feeling. I believe it
to be the highest functioning of the human in-
telligence. But I am of those who labor to free
it from ignorance, irrationality and base alloy, and
to get it properly set in its true psychological
place. Religion is not the private property of
the church; it belongs to mankind; it doubtless
exists in the house of God, but it is also in the
outdoors of God, and there's a lot more outdoor
199
LAME AND LOVELY
space in the universe than there ever will be house
room. I sympathize with and love all honest re-
ligious feeling.
But most of the feelings of any kind which we
think our very own are imitative. The lover feels
about as he has heard and read that others feel;
the instinct is his own, its form is mimicked. We
get angry at those things at which a man is sup-
posed to get angry. A young Albanian private
in the Turkish army the other day was executed
for stabbing his captain, who had slapped his face.
His defense was that his people always killed
those who slapped their faces. He was willing to
die to keep step with a racial impulse.
We eat and drink under the dictates of tastes
which are copied. When we go to Marseilles
we eat bouillabaisse, at Strasbourg we eat pate de
foie gras, at Budapest we eat goulash, at Naples
we eat macaroni, in Germany we eat limburger
cheese and sauerkraut, down South we eat hot
biscuit, and in Boston we eat beans; and in each
instance good livers can throw themselves into a
genuine imitative craving and relish for the spe-
cific dish of the locality. The most accomplished
gourmets are those with the most adaptable pal-
ates.
200
I : H
IMITATION IN RELIGION
We build our houses to suit certain notions of
personal comfort which we have inherited from
our people or absorbed from our environments.
When we travel we consult Baedeker or follow
the suggestions of friends in selecting the places
where we are to let our enthusiasm loose.
So, looking back, I can see how all my early
religious experiences were run into molds ready-
made for me by my surroundings. I was not sat-
isfied until I had all the forms of emotion others
said they had. When I awoke to this fact I was
at first inclined to doubt the genuineness of my
feelings, but more mature reflection brought me
about to see that, while the manners and shapes
of my sentiments were copied, the core and gist
of them was truly my own, the moving of a deep,
entirely individual and personal instinct witftin
me.
Does not this explain some peculiar religious
phenomena? For instance, the permanence of
religious institutions, the fixity of creeds, the long
life of churches, generation after generation
growing up and passing through the same forms
of faith ?
Does it not explain, also, the remarkable
spread, the epidemic nature of new religions, how
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LAME AND LOVELY
they seem to catch and go like fire, increasing in
arithmetical progression?
And does it not explain, also, the slow progress
of trying to apply rational, scientific methods to
religious thought? It requires the constant effort
of reformers, prophets, saints and heroes to keep
religion from hardening into empty form, or run-
ning away into a travestied sentimentality, and to
keep it near to the individual, genuine truth.
Religion is eternal, because it is human. All
churches are true, in a way. The Jew, the Cath-
olic, the Protestant, the Christian Scientist, each
is trying out, in the long experiment of years,
some particular phase of the truth. Each doubt-
less will have a part in forming that sweet and
reasonable religion, that rational, intelligent, per-
fect attitude toward the infinite which our chil-
dren's children shall count not the least among
the treasures we have wrought for them with
our highest effort — the religion of to-morrow.
202
DO THE MEEK MAKE GOOD?
Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the
earth. — Jesus.
A GENTLEMAN writes that a magazine has
offered a framed motto, " Blessed Are the
Meek," to any meek person who has made good.
He wants me to answer this.
One cannot answer a joke, much less a covert
sneer. But if any cares to think clearly about
meekness I can point the way.
The question is, what does it mean to make
good? If it means to get on, then meekness is
silly. If it means to become great, then meekness
is the only way.
If to make good means to have some feudal
master of dollars notice you, promote you or en-
dow you by his royal will or pleasure ; if it means
to win in the gamble of business; if it means cur-
rying favor with the vested interests until you
are made leading citizen of the village or judge
of the court; if it means scheming, fawning and
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LAME AND LOVELY
handshaking until you are elected governor of the
state or bishop of the church; if it means spending
millions in printer's ink and upon billboards until
you make the multitude buy your brand of hats
or soups or pianos; if it means what is commonly
meant by success, to-wit, prominence, notoriety
or wealth, then the meek do not make good.
But if by making good is meant to become
strong, sane and sure in soul, wise and clear in
mind, sweet and wholesome in character, with
your own life full of peace and poise, and with
your whole influence a help and inspiration to
those who know you, then nobody ever does make
good save the meek.
Jesus said, " the meek shall inherit the earth."
To understand that you have to know what meek-
ness is. It is not timidity, cowardice, servility
and such tempers. It is — Humility.
And what is humility? It is the wish to be
great and the dread of being called great. It is
the wish to help and the dread of thanks. It is
the love of service and the distaste for rule. It
is trying to be good and blushing when caught
at it. It is loyalty to truth and reality, and hate
of sham and seeming.
In all the real things of life it is only the meek
204
DO THE MEEK MAKE GOOD?
who inherit. In love it is the meek who sit upon
thrones and it is the proud who bow down to
them; in art it is the meek alone who have eyes to
see the shy secrets of nature and the grace to fitly
interpret them; in science it is the meek alone
who have the subtle instinct for truth; in good-
ness it is only the meek who have that rare flower
of unconscious purity, and in life's sterner affairs,
before the furies of sickness, failure, calumny and
death, it is only the meek who stand calm and
ready, while the braggarts tremble, whine or flee.
Who of us, in his serious hour, would not
rather be found worthy to stand beside old Soc-
rates, poisoned like a rat in a hole, and Jesus,
hung up to die between two thieves, and Lincoln,
shot down like a dog, than to be brother to the last
devious money lord or political baron who has
schemed and bludgeoned his way to the kingship
of these times?
To furnish the cheapest kind of prize to all
the meek who make good would bankrupt a mil-
lionaire. For all over the world, among simple
folk, " unwept, unhonored and unsung," each
faithful in his small corner, are myriads of brave,
helpful souls, who suppose themselves to be noth-
ing, who would be amazed if told there is any-
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LAME AND LOVELY
thing noble about them, yet who are facing life's
responsibilities bravely and death's terrors un-
afraid and the unknown to-morrow with cheer
and strong hearts. No prize of men or maga-
zines can reach them, for they hide ; but they wear
unseen the crown of wild olive, for all that, and
unto them shall be given the morning star.
They are like God; for, have you never no-
ticed? God is so shy and humble and hidden that
the humbugs don't believe He exists ! God never
seems to make good, until the centuries have their
say.
206
WIDENING
Rien ne ressemble moins a Vhomme qu'un
homme — Nothing less resembles mankind than
a man. — Balzac.
I KNOW a woman who is a perpetual child.
She retains all the childish strong love of
them that love her and hate of them that hate her.
And she makes no bones of it. She never tries to
dye her likes and dislikes with color of justifica-
tion, but is frank, open and above board slap-me-
and-I'll-slap-you, and kiss-me-and-I'll-kiss-you.
And I don't know but she gets along about as
well as those of us who try to be just and fair in
our emotions.
For I have walked about in the mess of men
and the ways of women some years and have ob-
served, and my conclusion is that when all's said
and done most of our instincts are downright
primitive.
A soul wriggles a good deal, like a wobbly
arrow, but as a rule it speeds from the bow of
207
LAME AND LOVELY
the cradle to the target of the grave in just about
the trajectory which the hand that shot it de-
signed it to take.
In plain prose, we are born with a bunch of
tendencies and our days are spent in working them
out.
We keep imitating and imitating other people
whom we admire, but it is only a business of try-
ing on successive suits till we find one that fits
us. For we never permanently come under the
influence of any one who is not just spiritually
adapted to our own self.
So we say such a poet, author, actor, man or
woman, " finds " us. Which simply means that
such person helps us express our self.
We like a certain preacher, for instance.
Why? Because he says what we think. We read
a certain author with pleasure because he helps
us give form to convictions we already have. So
Lord Bacon shrewdly said he wrote a book to tell
men what they had always known.
The soul is a narcissus that loves only those
other souls which are as pools on which it can see
the reflections of itself.
As life deepens we find in ourselves more and
more of the multiplicity of humanity. And so we
208
WIDENING
love more and more kinds of men and different
traits of men.
It is herein that the sage differs from the petty-
soul. He has come into a broad sympathy with
humanity because he has become more widely hu-
man. He sees that in himself are all crimes and
all sanctities.
Hence with the saint on his knees, drunk with
ideal holiness, the wise man is not shocked nor
has any contempt, but he says amen to any whitest
prayer, and with the drunkard, the thief and the
murderer he has no bitter words of abhorrence,
because in his own soul he has felt these swift
shadows and poison, desperate darkness of them,
and he wants to put his hand on the wretch's hand
and say, in pity and humbleness — My brother !
So it is a straight way from the direct and
childish soul that slaps back and kisses back, up
to the serene character of the great soul that loves
all and forgives all.
It is all a matter of more humanity, more life,
more inner resources, more wealth of personal
development.
A great man is like a wide sea and laves the
shore of all continents and kinds of men. He
loves all because he is akin to all.
209
LAME AND LOVELY
Jesus said to the woman taken in adultery:
" Neither do I condemn thee " ; to the thief on
the cross: " This day shalt thou be with me in
Paradise"; to God, speaking of his murderers:
" Father, forgive them, for they know not what
they do."
The difference is one of degree. The little
soul sees itself only here and there among men.
The great soul (which we call divine) sees itself
in all mankind.
The child and the savage love their benefac-
tors; intellectual people love their kind; saints
love the brethren; sinners love their sort; the
Jah of the Hebrews loved the chosen people; the
God of the middle ages loved the elect; Jesus
loved the world.
210
JESUS OUT OF DOORS
The same day went Jesus out of the house, and
sat by the seaside. — Matthew.
WE can never understand Jesus until we get
him away from the Temple.
It is when he steps from the altar and goes with
us to the home, the workshop and the seaside, that
we perceive his supreme significance to life.
And he is so much more splendid when we
take him out of formulas of salvation, and walk
with him along the ways of days.
The modern man, growing less and less sensi-
tive to the appeal of ritual and authority, finds,
like the two upon the road to Emmaus, that his
heart burns within him, as he talks with Jesus out
of doors.
Jesus out of doors, free from the stuffy air and
stuffier ideas of the " meeting house "; Jesus, not
a wooden part of a wooden scheme, but a luminous,
warm Teacher; Jesus, unwrapped from the spicy
grave-clothes of heathen rites, and treading with
211
LAME AND LOVELY
us the meadows of modern thought, with eternal
springtime in his look; Jesus, descending from
the incense-swathed niche and the light of candles,
into the open of life and literature; Jesus, with
his scepter of authority laid by, ruling now by the
inspiration of his word ; Jesus, with the " many
crowns" of kingship removed, crowns he never
wanted, but which the ignorant enthusiasm of a
king-infested age forced upon him, thrice as un-
welcome to the real grandeur of his soul as the
Crown of Thorns; Jesus, coming among us with
the genuine greatness of his character, and
stripped of the artificial greatness of thrones,
dignities, and robes, great in vision and wisdom
and love, and relieved of soul-killing superstition ;
this Jesus is one whose leadership rests not upon
his birth, nor prophecies, nor miracles, nor the
conclusions of logic, nor the authority of Church
and State, nor Tradition; but, with a fair field and
no favor, by sheer virtue of his dominant person-
ality and ideas, easily outstrips all competitors in
the race for mastery.
What a joy to him it must be to know that he
has ceased to be a battle-cry for the fierce passions
of war, is ceasing to be the bone of contention
between sects, and is coming to be the symbol of
212
JESUS OUT OF DOORS
individual nobleness and social brotherliness every-
where !
The clash of theological discussion has died
away; people have lost interest in the mighty
themes that once rent nations; religious bigotry,
and its shadow, irreligious bigotry, have practi-
cally disappeared; vast libraries of religious dis-
pute and speculation molder away, read no more ;
ancient institutions are crumbling, upheld only by
enormous endowments; yet in all this downfall
and decay we see no diminution of the real mastery
of Jesus over the thought of mankind.
Only to him can the altruist appeal as to one
having those far dreams of perfect beauty for the
race. In him only, of all masters, the working-
man finds those ideals of dynamic power and seed
persistence that insure the downfall of all tyran-
nies. He alone stands in the ultimate ways of
all political economy. What God may be we
cannot tell, but up to this day no figure but that of
Jesus stands between us and our loftiest, sweetest
conception of God, " like an angel in the sun."
And of all the world's great teachers he alone
remains with us in the mist and dark of death, and
whispers: " It is I. Be not afraid! "
In endowed pulpits doubtless they are still dron-
213
LAME AND LOVELY
ing upon the themes of Trinitarianism and Uni-
tarianism ; but the modern mind cares not whether
he was human, divine, or myth. It asks, What is
he ? not What was he ?
Because the question to-day is, What does he,
or any man, or God, mean to my character ? We
have lost interest in salvation beyond the grave.
Now, as in the New Testament, it is a scarcely
mentioned topic.
We are interested in life here, power and depth
of life, that " eternal quality " of life, without
which any " eternal duration " would be as insuf-
ferable in Angelico's Heaven as in Orcagna's Hell.
And for purposes of character-making, inspi-
ration, wisdom, purity, holiness and nobility, we
need the Ideal Jesus. So long as the Ideal is
here we care not by what avenues it comes. It
came through the New Testament. It might have
come through Goethe, Plutarch or Victor Hugo,
only it did not. The point is that to the modern
mind it is the fact of Jesus, his teachings, his
life-story, the mental picture of him and his
fecundating thoughts, and not the vehicle through
which this fact has come to us, that is important.
214
JESUS OUT OF DOORS
The little Christ that lay on Mary's breast,
The babe the mediaeval mind caressed,
Is not my Jesus ; mine's a new-born hope
That builds each morn within my life its nest.
The Christ that once in ancient Galilee
Strewed golden parables beside the sea,
Is not my Lord ; he vaster walks to-day
The avenues of souls, and talks with me.
That Christ between two thieves there on the hill
Is not the Son of God we helped to kill ;
In slum and prison, nailed twixt law and lust,
Hangs the dim horror of our common will.
There was no Christ, I say ! That thorn-set brow
Was not, but is, eternally and now !
Up through the hate of centuries he bears
The unwilling world to love, we know not how.
215
BY THE AUTHOR OF THIS BOOK
HUMAN CONFESSIONS
BY
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