Part 11
Yet in spite of his will there were plenty of things that Christ himself could not do, as, for instance, change the world at once, or change it at all except through the slow process of personal influence. He could not heal people who had no faith, or get followers except by going into the highways and hedges after them. And his whole life is as valuable in showing what cannot be done, as in showing what can be done. If you love your fellow-men and wish to benefit them, you will find that the ways in which it is possible to do this are not many. You can do harm in many ways, good only in one.
The world is full of people who want to do good, and men are constantly re-discovering Christ. This intelligence, superior to our own, possesses and utilizes us. There is always more danger of his influence being perverted than of its dying out; for as men begin to discover the scope and horizon of his thought they are tempted to becloud it with commentary. They wish to say what he meant, whereas he has said it himself. We think to explain something whose value is that it explains us. If we understood him, very likely we should say nothing.
The mistake Christians make is that they strive to follow Christ as a gnat follows a candle. No man ought to follow Christ in this way. A man ought to follow truth, and when he does this, he will find that, as he gropes his way through life, most of the light that falls on the path in front of him, and moves as he moves, comes from the mind of Christ. But if one is to learn from that mind one must take it as a lens through which to view truth; not as truth itself. We do not look at a lens, but through it.
There are moments in each of our lives when all the things that Christ said seem clear, sensible, relevant. The use of his sayings is to remind us of these moments and carry us back into them. The danger of his sayings is lest we rely upon them as final truth. They are no more truth than the chemical equivalents for food are food, or than certain symbols of dynamics are the power of Niagara. At those moments when the real Niagara is upon us we must keep our minds bent on how to do good to our fellow-men; not the partial good of material benevolence, but the highest good we know. The thoughts and habits we thus form and work out, painfully plotting over them, revising, renewing, remodeling them, become our personal church. This is our own religion, this is our clue to truth, this is the avenue through which we may pass back to truth and possess it. No other cord will hold except the one a man has woven himself. No other key will serve except the one a man has forged himself.
Christ was able to hold a prism perfectly still in his hand so as to dissolve a ray of light into its elements. Every time he speaks, he splits open humanity, as a man might crack a nut and show the kernel. The force of human feeling behind these sayings can be measured only by their accomplishments. They have been re-arranging and overturning human society ever since. By this most unlikely means of quiet demonstration in word and deed, did he unlock this gigantic power. The bare fragments of his talk open the sluices of our minds; they overwhelm and re-create. That was his method. The truth which he conveyed with such metaphysical accuracy lives now in the living. Very likely we cannot express it in dogmas, for such intellect as it takes to utter a dogma is not in us. But we need have no fear for our power of expressing it. It is enough for us to see truth; for if we see it, everything we do will express it.
CLIMATE.
The influence of the planets, of deities good and bad, of spells and incantations--of fatal or beneficial forces suddenly unlocked and, as it were, let loose upon innocent men--as though one had walked into a trap--all these myths and symbols were invented in past ages, by discerning, deep-seeing men to express the impotence which they saw about them, to express the fact that all men are walking in their dreams and their dreams control them. What we see is illusion: what we say is illusion. The reality is behind all; and we neither see it, nor say it, but only feel it.
So also of those mysterious planes of identity which lie between soul and soul, forming a continuous country and habitable world, between men apparently sundered from one another by every human condition--sundered by age, sex, epoch, language, occupation, religion--and yet undergoing the same experience, valuing the same idea, twinned by the fact that across time and space something in them is identical. Some wheel in each of them is being turned by the same power at the same rate, and makes these creatures cognate. They are one thing; they are portions of a continuous, indestructible reality which conditions them both.
The experience comes to almost everyone at some time or moment in his life, that he is nothing in himself, but only a part of something else. It is a consciousness of the process of life, a consciousness of what is happening. Whether through the touch of sickness or through intense concentration, or through absolute abstraction, most men have felt the prick of this thought, though the leisure and the impulse to record it have been denied to them.
When European cattle are taken to Egypt, their forms begin to change in one or two generations. Their backs and horns seem to be imitating the cattle in the bas-reliefs of the rock tombs, which were carved twenty-five centuries before Christ. So too, when American parents settle in Rome, their children resemble Romans. It is not merely in the expression of the face, or in the cut of the hair. It is in the bones of the forehead and in the way the hair grows out of the skin that these youngsters resemble the modern inhabitants of ancient Rome. Professor Boaz has found by measurement that the skulls of children born in America to foreign parents assume the American type. There is something in the air here, or under the earth, that is at work upon the immigrant child even before it is born. On the ship they are remodeled, and in the womb they are shaped by the power that fashions the skull to such dimensions as it is provided we shall wear to-day in America. If you should steer the ship toward New Zealand or Japan, the form of the infant’s cranium would vary and be modified accordingly. The force that accompanied the ship would arrive with you, and be present at your landing. The child would grow up in some sort of unthinkable relation to the continent or island on which it landed. It would be as one of the children of that land--nearer to them perhaps than to its parents. We may call this influence climate, but if we do so we must be sure to remember that perhaps the influence is really due to soil, to electrical, magnetic, or even to sidereal influences. As the influence is impalpable and tremendous, so it is unknown and perhaps cannot be known.
I see the immigrant land and toil and push his fortunes. I see the professor, with his calipers and his microscope, measuring the immigrant’s brain. And above the professor, bending over him as he looks into his microscope, I see the formative power modeling the professor’s skull as he measures the skull of the immigrant--assigning him what he shall see in it, apportioning to him what he shall believe and tell other men about it--leading him on, yes, leading him as a child is led by a butterfly. And all this vision of mine ranks itself as a thing that has happened long ago, and is always happening. It is a part of universal experience. I that suffer it am but feeling what man has always felt, and shall feel forever--the power of God behind his own illusion, modeling his thoughts--letting its influence be shut off by his opacity, or else flash through him to its own ends in directions which he cannot comprehend.
THE INFLUENCE OF SCHOOLS.
We are obliged to approach any church school through our own personal religious sentiments. We do all of us approach it in this way. Any religious institution is a tiny sample of the great question; and whatever we say of it is a little voice in the great chorus of humanity. We cannot isolate our subject: it is a part of the great subject, religion. We have no achromatic lens through which to view life. All that we see is colored by our own past, and surely, for any man to believe that in describing his youth or his school-days he can clear his mind of error, would be the greatest error and delusion of all. It seems safer, then, in dealing with such a tremulous matter, to lay it out as simply as one may, leaving others to be the judge of its value.
Some years ago I had a long illness; and during those periods of mental fixity which illness brings with it, my mind used to dwell in strange places. It would pause over some spot in the world--some room or field that I had seen, however casually, in former years--and would refuse to move on. It would choose its exact position so that the perspective of the place should be accurately seen, and there it would rest. Sometimes for days at a time it would remain as carefully placed as a camera, giving no reason for its choice, yet deriving some mysterious assistance from the scene. The places were always empty--never a person in them. There was, for example, a particular nook by a country roadside--a barred gate with elm trees bending above it and a meadow beyond--which I had passed by on the way to a child’s funeral some years before. This place opened itself up out of the picture-book of my memory, and for some weeks I lived within its influence--for there was no question that life streamed out of it to me.
Under these circumstances it was natural enough that I should sometimes have found myself back as St. Paul’s School, in Concord, New Hampshire, and should have wandered once more in the dreamland of boyhood. Indeed, during many months of convalescence, I lived in my imagination at St. Paul’s, always alone with the place, suffering it to move itself through me and present the most forgotten aspects, angles, and bits of scenery with silent, friendly precision. Immense sadness everywhere; immense power.
Now my connection with the school had been very short and quite unsatisfactory. I was sent there as a very small boy, remained less than three years, and then went home sick. I had, in fact, an acute attack of pneumonia which carried away with it a nervous breakdown from which I had been suffering; and it was several years before my health became fully re-established. In consequence of this experience my views about the school were thereafter quite gloomy. I regarded the place as a religious forcing-house, a very dangerous sort of place for any boy to go, especially if he were inclined by nature toward religion. I habitually abused the school, and I even took the trouble to go back there and have a quarrel with Dr. Coit about something he had said or done which seemed to me to deserve the reprobation of all just men. I poured over him a few vitriolic letters; and I still believe that the right was on my side in the matter, though perhaps I was wrong to assume the rôle of the Angel of Retribution.
It was at a date about twenty years after my leaving the school, and at the age of forty-odd, and through the medium of another and very severe illness, that my nature began to take up again the threads of St. Paul’s School influence, and to receive the ideas which Dr. Coit had been striving to convey, though in forms that would have been incomprehensible to himself. The school had somehow been carrying on its work within me through all these years.
Youth is a game of blindman’s buff, a romp and struggle in which we hold on fiercely and shout loudly, but know less as to whom we are holding or who is holding us than we shall ever know again. As we grow older we get true glimpses of things far away; and recognize at a distance what we could never understand so long as we were at close quarters with it. Middle age draws some curtains down, but lifts others; and of all the new visions that come when youth is past, there is none more thrilling than that new vision of the familiar past which shows us what unsuspected powers were at play within us. This experience is necessary and useful to us; and only thus can we come to understand the incredible subtlety of human influence.
Not long ago there was a St. Paul’s School dinner at which two hundred and fifty men met to hear speeches in praise of their school and of its influence. Among other proceedings there was a speech by one (not an alumnus) who was a prospective headmaster of the school. Now this speech was a religious appeal, and ended by a sort of burst of feeling, only a word or two long, to the effect that the world was “God’s World.” I cannot tell what it was that startled me in the reception of the speech by the audience; but I think it was the unexpected sincerity of the applause. It seemed as if all these men had been waiting all their lives to hear this thing said, and now gave a great triumphant, unconscious sigh and roar of relief to hear someone say it. I glanced critically about the room. The diners looked like any other set of diners. Why should they be so much moved by the mention of the works of God?--For they were not applauding the school, they were applauding the Creation. I looked and pondered, and presently I remembered that most of the men at the dinner had lived under the personal influence of Dr. Coit during their early and sensitive years. The fibres of their being had been searched and softened by contact with a nature whose depth made up for its every other deficiency.
“I myself,” I reflected, “am one of them. Perhaps my experience with the place is more typical than I had supposed. Perhaps each of these men was offered something at St. Paul’s School which he could not receive at the time, and therefore rejected, but which in later life he found again for himself in a new form, and thereafter accepted as part of his intimate nature.”
Inasmuch as the whole nature of St. Paul’s School resulted from the manner of its formation, we may begin by a glance at its early days. The inception of the place was as unheralded as any event could well be. Dr. Coit, being a man with a mission and a message, retired in 1856 to a farm in New Hampshire, and opened a school, having four or five pupils to start with. He would neither appeal to the public for funds nor advertise for scholars.[E] The school was, at first, a mere extension of his family circle and of himself; and as it grew, it remained a mere extension of himself. Persons became attached to this family circle one by one; and, whether they were boys or masters or servants, they thus, one by one, became members of a sort of invisible and visible church, or brotherhood--a society of the sanctuary. No opposing or critical influence could enter that circle. It rejected criticism as the jet of a fountain rejects a dried leaf. The whole system at St. Paul’s was really no system at all, but only the unconscious working out of one man’s nature in the formation of a school community. Perhaps the important part of any school is always no more than that.
[E] The land and funds were, during the early years, supplied by Dr. George C. Shattuck, of Boston, who had, I believe, long harbored the idea of founding a school, and who gave his county house and farm to the purpose.
Dr. Coit was a tall man in a long black coat; and, as he moved and walked about the paths and corridors, he remained always within an invisible tower of isolation, so that you could not be sure that his feet rested on quite the same ground as your own. Half the time he was in an abstraction, but this did not prevent him from seeing and observing everything and everybody, especially the individualities of boys, about whom he acquired a preternatural astuteness. He lived within that solitude which a great purpose and constant prayer sometimes cast about a man. There was a chasm between him and the rest of mankind which could not be bridged by trivial intercourse. Neither he nor the rest of mankind were at fault for the difference in tension between them. He was so charged with moral passion that many people could not receive the delivery of it.
I was never able to establish a relation with him, either as a boy of thirteen or subsequently. His low, vibrant voice, and his hand laid gently upon one’s shoulder caused such a strong physical, moral, and galvanic appeal to my sensibilities that I invariably burst into tears. I think I never got through an interview with him without weeping. The appeal which his nature made was the appeal of enormous human feeling, penned up in a narrow language, restricted by a narrow experience. This temperamental isolation was, of course, intensified by his becoming a school-master. How strongly the influence of such a man must have affected the little family circle of the early school may be imagined. He lived habitually in a state of such vivid religious feeling that his face was ablaze with zeal; and he settled down to teach school in a farmhouse, knowing all the while, seeing with his mind’s eye all the while, the future of the enterprise. We can imagine the fervor of the tiny community, and the awe in which it must have stood toward the great man.
And yet all of his austerity, all of his closely confined, ebullient vitality was no more than a love of men. Down to his last days Dr. Coit never took his solitary drives about the countryside without stopping to bestow upon his poorer neighbors small offerings of food from his own table. It was done furtively and almost as an indulgence of those warm personal feelings toward all humanity, of which his mission denied him the expression. Behind his towering zeal there was a suffering, benevolent, and humble person.
Dr. Coit had, as it were, no secular side to his human intercourse, and the social side of St. Paul’s School was, in consequence, always a little stiff and ecclesiastical. On the other hand, his romantic and spontaneous feelings were permitted the outlet of secular literature, both ancient and modern; and he inspired his school with a love of letters. You were somehow made welcome to the joys of reading. The old-fashioned family education and atmosphere of a gentleman’s home qualified the boarding-school book-shelf. An interest in cultivation often goes with high-pitched, ecclesiastical natures; witness the outburst of literature in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and all that profound thought which makes that epoch in some ways outshine the Renaissance. Not only did Dr. Coit enjoy romantic literature, but he was himself like some character in mediæval romance--like Arthur, or Merlin; and the power of his personality was so great that whenever I am at St. Paul’s, I still feel as if the old Doctor were, somehow, not far away. I should hardly be surprised to see him step out from behind a clump of bushes on the margin of the stream, or to come across his rapt figure, on the athletic field, standing as I have seen him stand to watch the games, shading his eyes with his hand.
Dr. Coit was one of those saints who come into the world determined to found something: they are predestinate founders. They make and occupy the thing they found, repelling all the world beside, fleeing from all the world except this; and they generally become tyrants within the boundaries of their own creation. The tyrant founder-saint is a well-known figure in the Middle Ages; St. Bernard is a typical example; and Dr. Coit would have been more readily understood in any previous age of the world than he was in his own. He was in himself a piece of the Middle Ages, and to have known him is to have come in contact with all the piety, the romanticism, the mystery, the beauty, the depth and power of human emotion which flamed over Europe in Mediæval times, and which have been temporarily forgotten. To-day these provinces of human existence are abandoned to the art critic, to the moralist, and to the sentimental writer--to the very classes of persons who are the least likely to understand them. If we except the German philosophic historian, I suppose that no person in the world is so cut off by nature from an understanding of St. Francis or of Thomas Aquinas as is the modern æsthetic person, who cultivates a sympathetic interest in religion. The only hope of understanding the Middle Ages is through a living personal belief in Christianity.
It is only for convenience that I refer to the Middle Ages in order to explain Dr. Coit. His right to exist as a modern is incontestible: he was as modern as anyone else. He merely belonged to a type which, for the time being, has become rare. To us to-day, the tyrant founder-saint of the Middle Ages appears like a person not wholly a Christian. Judged by the standards of the New Testament, these men seem to be only half converted, or three-quarters converted, to Christianity, the rest of them remaining Tartar. The non-converted fraction of them makes them autocrats who trust no one but themselves, men of unfaith who rely on bolts and bars, on ordinances and arrangements.
At the worst, these enthusiasts are schemers, unscrupulous, crafty, and cruel. At the best they are merely opinionated, arbitrary, and lonely men. Their weakness is seen only in the fact that they have a slightly blind side, a side on which walk the favorites and hypocrites who have been formed in the shadow of their tyranny. The same parasites which grow upon autocracy in the great world seem often to appear in the miniature kingdom of a school.
That Christianity should have given rise to this peculiar kind of tyrant has often thrown me into wonderment. It seems as if any formulation of spiritual truth, uttered by a higher intelligence, were apt to act as an astringent upon the lower intelligence. The bread of life poisons many men. The formula means more than the neophyte is able to understand; and this overplus of meaning stimulates him to fierceness. The phenomenon may be observed on a small scale by anyone who will contrast the teachings of Froebel with the methods often found in kindergartens. Each mind in the world is capable of a different degree of abstraction; and when a mind is stretched to its widest and you give it still something more, you arouse passion. At any rate, the fact remains that Christ’s gentlest words have, as he predicted, become fire and sword in the world, and that through this fire and sword truth spreads. Men like Dr. Coit, for all their fury and for all their narrowness, leave peace in their wake, and bequeath to their followers not only gentleness, but breadth of view. Their unselfishness--their powerlessness to be other than they are--touches the heart of the world. Christ has been in their dungeons all the while.