Part 10
Put a Chinaman into your hospital and he will be cared for. You may lie awake at night drawing up reasons for doing something different with this disgusting Chinaman--who, somehow, is in the world and is thrown into your care, your hospital, your thought--but the machinery of your own being is so constructed that if you take any other course with him than that which you take with your own people, your institution will instantly lose its meaning; you would not have the face to beg money for its continuance in the following year. The logic of this, which, if you like, is the logic of self-protection under the illusion of self-sacrifice, is the logic which is at the bottom of all human progress. I dislike to express this idea in its meanest form; but I know there are some professors of political economy here, and I wish to be understood. The utility of hospitals is not to cure the sick. It is to teach mercy. The veneration for hospitals is not accorded to them because they cure the sick, but because they stand for love, and responsibility.
The appeal of physical suffering makes the strongest attack on our common humanity. Even zealots and sectaries are touched. The practice and custom of this kind of mercy have therefore become established, while other kinds of mercy which require more imagination are still in their infancy. But at the bottom of every fight for principle you will find the same sentiment of mercy. If you take a slate and pencil and follow out the precise reasons and consequences of the thing, you will always find that a practical and effective love for mankind is working out a practical self-sacrifice. The average man cannot do the sum, he does not follow the reasoning, but he knows the answer. The deed strikes into his soul with a mathematical impact, and he responds like a tuning-fork when its note is struck.
Everyone knows that self-sacrifice is a virtue. The child takes his nourishment from the tale of heroism as naturally as he takes milk. He feels that the deed was done for his sake. He adopts it: it is his own. The nations have always stolen their myths from one another, and claimed each other’s heroes. It has required all the world’s heroes to make the world’s ear sensitive to new statements, illustrations and applications of the logic of progress. Yet their work has been so well done that all of us respond to the old truths in however new a form. Not France alone but all modern society owes a debt of gratitude to Zola for his rescue of Dreyfus. The whole world would have been degraded and set back, the whole world made less decent and habitable, but for those few Frenchmen who took their stand against corruption.
Now the future of civil society upon the earth depends upon the application to international politics of this familiar idea, which we see prefigured in our mythology, and monumentalized in our hospitals--the principle that what is done for one is done for all. When you say a thing is “right,” you appeal to mankind. What you mean is that everyone is at stake. Your attack upon wrong amounts to saying that some one has been left out in the calculation. Both at home and abroad you are always pleading for mercy, and the plea gains such a wide response that some tyranny begins to totter, and its engines are turned upon you to get you to stop. This outcry against you is the measure of your effectiveness. If you imitate Zola and attack some nuisance in this town to-morrow, you will bring on every symptom and have every experience of the Dreyfus affair. The cost is the same, for cold looks are worse than imprisonment. The emancipation of the reformer is the same, for if a man can resist the influences of his townsfolk, if he can cut free from the tyranny of neighborhood gossip, the world has no terrors for him; there is no second inquisition. The public influence is the same, for every citizen of that town can thereafter look a town officer in the face with more self-respect. But not to townsmen, nor to neighboring towns, nor to Parisians is this force confined. It goes out in all directions, continuously. The man is in communication with the world. This impulse of communication with all men is at the bottom of every ambition. The injustice, cruelty, oppression in the world are all different forms of the same non-conductor, that prevents utterances, that stops messages, that strikes dumb the speaker and deafens the listener. You will find that it makes no difference whether the non-conductor be a selfish oligarchy, a military autocracy, or a commercial ring. The voice of humanity is stifled by corruption: and corruption is only an evil because it stifles men.
Try to raise a voice that shall be heard from here to Albany and watch what it is that comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend of your father’s offering you a place in his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if any of you young gentlemen have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations and a close enemy of most men who wish you well.
And what will you get in return? Well, if I must for the benefit of the economist, charge you with some selfish gain, I will say that you get the satisfaction of having been heard, and that this is the whole possible scope of human ambition.
When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say. If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that you cannot proclaim. Refuse to accept anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech, no matter what other power you lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners. As for your own private character it will be preserved by such a course. Crime you cannot commit, for crime gags you. Collusion with any abuse gags you. As a practical matter a mere failure to speak out upon occasions where no opinion is asked or expected of you, and when the utterance of an uncalled-for suspicion is odious, will often hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. It will bind and gag you and lay you dumb and in shackles like the veriest serf in Russia. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don’t be gagged.
The choice of Hercules was made when Hercules was a lad. It cannot be made late in life. It will perhaps come for each one of you within the next eighteen months. I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. “In a few years,” reasons one of them, “I shall have gained a standing, and then I will use my power for good.” Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought. His ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. The great occasion that was to have let him loose on society was some little occasion that nobody saw, some moment in which he decided to obtain a standing. The great battle of a lifetime has been fought and lost over a silent scruple. But for this, the man might, within a few years, have spoken to the nation with the voice of an archangel. What was he waiting for? Did he think that the laws of nature were to be changed for him? Did he think that a “notice of trial” would be served on him? Or that some spirit would stand at his elbow and say, “Now’s your time?” The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time. And the compensation for beginning at once is that your voice carries at once. You do not need a standing. It would not help you. Within less time than you can see it, you will have been heard. The air is filled with sounding-boards and the echoes are flying. It is ten to one that you have but to lift your voice to be heard in California, and that from where you stand. A bold plunge will teach you that the visions of the unity of human nature which the poets have sung, were not the fictions of their imagination, but a record of what they saw. Deal with the world, and you will discover their reality. Speak to the world, and you will hear their echo.
Social and business prominence look like advantages, and so they are if you want money. But if you want moral influence you may bless God you have not got them. They are the payment with which the world subsidizes men to keep quiet, and there is no subtilty or cunning by which you can get them without paying in silence. This is the great law of humanity, that has existed since history began, and will last while man lasts--evil, selfishness, and silence are one thing.
The world is learning, largely through American experience that freedom in the form of government is no guarantee against abuse, tyranny, cruelty, and greed. The old sufferings, the old passions are in full blast among us. What, then, are the advantages of self-government? The chief advantage is that self-government enables a man in his youth, in his own town, within the radius of his first public interests, to fight the important battle of his life while his powers are at their strongest, and the powers of oppression are at their weakest. If a man acquires the power of speech here, if he says what he means now, if he makes his point and dominates his surroundings at once, his voice will, as a matter of fact, be heard instantly in a very wide radius. And so he walks up into a new sphere and begins to accomplish greater things. He does this through the very force of his insistence on the importance of small things. The reason for his graduation is not far to seek. A man cannot reach the hearts of his townsfolks, without using the whole apparatus of the world of thought. He cannot tell or act the truth in his own town without enlisting every power for truth, and setting in vibration the cords that knit that town into the world’s history. He is forced to find and strike the same note which he would use on some great occasion when speaking for all mankind. A man who has won a town-fight is a veteran, and our country to-day is full of these young men. To-morrow their force will show in national politics, and in that moment the fate of the Malay, the food of the Russian prisoner, the civilization of South Africa, and the future of Japan will be seen to have been in issue. These world problems are now being settled in the contest over the town-pump in a western village. I think it likely that the next thirty years will reveal the recuperative power of American institutions. One of you young men may easily become a reform President, and be carried into office and held in office by the force of that private opinion which is now being sown broadcast throughout the country by just such men as yourselves. You will concede the utility of such a President. Yet it would not be the man but the masses behind him that did his work.
Democracy thus lets character loose upon society and shows us that in the realm of natural law there is nothing either small or great: and this is the chief value of democracy. In America the young man meets the struggle between good and evil in the easiest form in which it was ever laid before men. The cruelties of interest and of custom have with us no artificial assistance from caste, creed, race prejudice. Our frame of government is drawn in close accordance with the laws of nature. By our documents we are dedicated to mankind; and hence it is that we can so easily feel the pulse of the world and lay our hand on the living organism of humanity.
THE DOCTRINE OF NON-RESISTANCE.[D]
[D] This was an address which I delivered before the International Metaphysical League eight or nine years ago.
A dogma is a phrase that condenses much thought. It is a short way of stating a great truth, and is supposed to recall that truth to the mind. Like a talisman it is to be repeated. Open sesame--and some great mystery of life is unlocked.
A dogma is like a key to a map, a thread to a labyrinth. It is all that some man has brought back from a spiritual exaltation in which he has had a vision of how the world is made; and he repeats it and teaches it as a digest of his vision, a short and handy summary and elixir by which he, and as he thinks anyone else, can go back into his exaltation and see the truth. To him the words seem universally true--true at all times and in any aspect. Indeed, all experience, all thought, all conduct seem to him to be made up of mere illustrations, proofs, and reminiscences of the dogma.
It is probable that all the dogmas were originally shots at the same truth, nets cast over the same truth, digests of the same vision. There is no other way of accounting for their power. If the doctrine of the Trinity signified no more than what I can see in it, it would never have been regarded as important. Unless the words “Salvation by Grace” had at one time stood for the most powerful conviction of the most holy minds, we should never have heard the phrase. Our nearest way to come at the meaning of such things is to guess that the dogmas are the dress our own thought might have worn, had we lived in times when they arose. We must translate our best selves back into the past in order to understand the phrases.
Of course, these dogmas, like our own dogmas, are no sooner uttered than they change. Somebody traduces them, or expounds them, or founds a sect or a prosecution upon them. Then comes a new vision and a new digest. And so the controversy goes rolling down through the centuries, changing its forms but not its substance. And it has rolled down to us, and we are asking the question, “What is truth?” as eagerly, as sincerely, and as patiently as we may.
Truth is a state of mind. All of us have known it and have known the loss of it. We enter it unconsciously; we pass out of it before we are aware. It comes and goes like a searchlight from an unknown source. At one moment we see all things clearly, at the next we are fighting a fog. At one moment we are as weak as rags, at the next we are in contact with some explaining power that courses through us, making us feel like electrical conductors, or the agents of universal will. In the language of Christ these latter feelings are moments of “faith”; and faith is one of the very few words which he used a great many times in just the same sense, as a name for a certain kind of experience. He did not define the word, but he seems to have given it a specific meaning.
The state of mind in which Christ lived is the truth he taught. How he reached that state of mind we do not know; how he maintained it, and what it is, he spent the last two years of his life in expressing. Whatever he was saying or doing, he was always conveying the same truth--the whole of it. It was never twice alike and yet it was always the same; even when he spoke very few words, as to Pilate “Thou sayest it,” or to Peter “Feed my sheep”; or when he said nothing, but wrote on the ground. He not only expressed this truth because he could not help expressing it, but because he wished and strove to express it. His teaching, his parables, his sayings showed that he spared no pains to think of illustrations and suggestions; he used every device of speech to make his thought carry.
Take his directest words: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”; “Love your enemies.” One might call these things descriptions of his own state of mind. Or take his philosophical remarks. They are not merely statements as to what truth is; but hints as to how it must be sought, how the state of mind can be entered into and in what it consists. “Whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.” “That which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.” Or more prosaically still. “If any man shall do his will, he shall know of the doctrine.” To this class belongs the expression “Resist not evil.”
The parables are little anecdotes which serve to remind the hearer of his own moments of tenderness and self-sacrifice. The Lost Sheep, the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the Repentant Sinner, are illustrations of Christ’s way of feeling toward human nature. They are less powerful than his words and acts, because no constructed thing has the power of a real thing. The reply of the Greek woman who besought Christ to cure her daughter, “Yes, Lord, yet the dogs under the table eat of the children’s crumbs,” is one of the most affecting things in the New Testament. It is more powerful than the tale of the Prodigal Son. But you will see that if the Prodigal’s father had been a real father, and the Greek mother had been a personage in a parable, the power would have been the other way.
And so it is that Christ’s most powerful means of conveying his thought was neither by his preaching nor by his parables; but by what he himself said and did incidentally. This expressed his doctrine because his state of feeling was his doctrine. The things Christ did by himself and the words he said to himself, these things are Christianity--his washing the disciples’ feet, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” his crucifixion.
I have recalled all these sayings and acts of Christ almost at random. They seem to me to be equivalent one to another as a thousand is equivalent to a thousand. They are all messages sent out by the same man in the same state of feeling. If he had lived longer, there would have been more of them. If you should summarize them all into a philosophy and then reduce that philosophy to a phrase, you would have another dogma.
The reason I called this lecture Non-resistance instead of using some more general religious title, is that I happened to be led into re-examining the meaning of Christ’s sayings through his phrase “Resist not evil; but overcome evil with good.” It came about in the course of many struggles over practical reforms. I had not the smallest religious or theoretical bias in entering the field of politics. Here were certain actual cruelties, injurious things done by particular men, in plain sight. They ought to be stopped.
The question is how to do it. First you go to the wrongdoers and beg them to stop, and they will not stop. Then to the officials in authority over them, with the same result. “Remove these officials” is now your conclusion, and you go and join the party that keeps them in power; for you intend to induce that party to change them. You now engage in infinitely long, exhausting struggles with the elements of wickedness, which seem to be the real cause and support of those injuries which you are trying to stop. You make no headway; you find you are wasting force; you are fighting at a disadvantage; all your energies are exhausted in antagonism. It occurs to you to join the other party, and induce that party to advocate a positive good, whereby the people may be appealed to and the iniquities voted down. But your trouble here begins afresh, for it seems as hard to induce the “outs” to make a square attack on the evil as it is to get the “ins” to desist from doing the evil. Your struggle, your antagonism, your waste of energy continues. At last you leave the outs and form a new party, a reform party of your own. Merciful heavens! neither will this new party attack wickedness. Your mind, your thought, your time is still taken up in resisting the influences which your old enemies are bringing to bear upon your new friends.
I had got as far as this in the experience and had come to see plainly that there was somewhere a mistake in my method. It was a mistake to try to induce others to act. The thing to do was to act myself, alone and directly, without waiting for help. I should thus at least be able to do what I knew to be right; and perhaps this was the strongest appeal I could make to anyone. The thing to do was to run independent candidates and ask the public to support good men. Then there occurred to me the phrase, “Resist not evil,” and the phrase seemed to explain the experience.
What had I been doing all these years but wrangling over evil? I had a system that pitted me in a ring against certain agencies of corruption and led to unending antagonism. The phrase not only explained what was wrong with the whole system, but what was wrong with every human contact that occurred under it. The more you thought of it, the truer it seemed. It was not merely true of politics, it was true of all human intercourse. The politics of New York bore the same sort of relation to this truth that a kodak does to the laws of optics. Our politics were a mere illustration of it. The phrase seemed to explain everything either wrong or mistaken that I had ever done in my life. To meet selfishness with selfishness, anger with anger, irritation with irritation, that was the harm. But the saying was not exhausted yet. The phrase passed over into physiology and showed how to cure a cramp in a muscle or stop a headache. It was true as religion, true as pathology, and true as to everything between them. I felt as a modern mathematician might feel, who should find inscribed in an Egyptian temple a mathematical formula which not only included all he knew, but showed that all he knew was a mere stumbling comment on the ancient science.
What mind was it that walked the earth and put the sum of wisdom into three words? By what process was it done? The impersonal precision and calm of the statement give it the quality of geometry, and yet it expresses nothing but human feeling. I suppose that Christ arrived at the remark by simple introspection. The impulse which he felt in himself to oppose evil with evil--he puts his finger on that impulse as the crucial danger. There is in the phrase an extreme care, as if he were explaining a mechanism. He seems to be saying “If you wish to open the door, you must lift the latch before you pull the handle. If you wish to do good, you must resist evil with good, not with evil.”
It is the same with his other sayings. They are almost dry, they are so accurate. “Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart”; the analysis of emotion could hardly be carried farther. “How hard it is for them that trust in riches to enter into the Kingdom of God”; here is neither exaggeration nor epigram. “Thy faith hath made thee whole”; a statement of fact. “Knock and it shall be opened unto you”; this is the summary of Christ’s whole life down to the time his teaching began. He had knocked and it had been opened to him. He had wished to make men better, and inasmuch as he wished it harder than anyone else before or since has wished it, he got farther than anyone toward an understanding of how to do it. The effectiveness of his thought has been due to its coherence. He was able to draw the sky together over any subject till all the light fell on one point. Then he said what he saw. Every question was shown to break up into the same crystals if subjected to the same pressure. Nor does his influence upon the world present any anomaly. It is entirely due to ordinary causes. Every man’s influence depends upon the depth of his will; for this determines his power of concentration. The controlled force that could contract Christ’s own mind to so small a focus, brings down to the same focus other minds of less coherence than his. This is will; this is leadership; this is power.