Part 2

Secondly, then, once formulæ are made, another subtle trick of the mind enters into function. Man’s sovereign faculty of pretense works upon them. He persuades himself that these little rites and short-cuts are not really made by himself, but that they are sacred. Man’s capacity for pretense, I dare say, has been the only thing that has kept him going in a rough, bruising world. He has found, throughout history, that the percolation of certain fictions into affairs made order and government more easy. Indeed the number of generally accepted fictions in currency is not such a bad test of civilization: the more such harmless pretenses, the pleasanter life is. The divine right of kings was one great fiction that had a long serial career and gradually tapered off. Oliver Cromwell “Garred kings ken they had a lith in their necks”; the Prince of Wales’s horses seem to have suggested the same thing. That adorable old shrew, Thomas Hobbes, whose wise and racy survey of human foibles might almost have made any subsequent palaver unnecessary, had people patience to read “Leviathan” nowadays, is copious in instance of men’s love of standing “in awe of their own imaginations.” We are all quick to believe anything, he remarks, from teachers who can “with gentleness and dexterity take hold of our fear and ignorance.” Whereas any truth, no matter how rationally arrived at, that counters our passion and interest, we naturally reject. “I doubt not but,” says the darling old cynic, “if it had been a thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry, suppressed.”

Master Hobbes is very jolly, too, on a matter that has interested every thoughtful observer since civilization began--that religion is always heartily favoured by prosperous people. Obviously; for it is a stabilizing force. I was greatly struck, approaching Pittsburgh on the train, passing through a black, cindered region where life must lack many of its most harmless pleasures, to notice the astounding number of churches. These, surely, are not there without some sound social reason. There are three prime consolations known to man in the difficulty of his life, God, love, and money. Of any two of these you may deprive him without hearing much grumble, provided he has plenty of the third. But if he lacks all three, there is sure to be trouble.

I have often noticed, in burning a pile of dead leaves, that the mass that seems burned through will, if turned over with the rake, burst into fresh flame. Down under the mound, smothered by weight and closeness, were many fragments that needed only air and freedom to burst into golden blaze. Perhaps it is so with any industrial society. To turn it top to bottom now and then would liberate brilliant human combustions that now lie choked. It is a dangerous doctrine, but so are all doctrines that are any fun. It is a thoroughly Christian doctrine, too.

Before we leave the topic of human relish in pretense, let’s mention one very innocent and amusing example. One of the gay hilarities of existence is the way the current social pretenses shift and vary and move in recurring orbits. The négligé of one period becomes the _haut ton_ of the next. A few years ago, during a very severe winter, it became the mode for young women to go trapesing about in galoshes which were left floppingly unbuckled. What, then, do we see? A year or so later galoshes are put on the market, very cunningly devised with drooping webbed tops to _look_ as though they were carelessly left undone. These at once became, particularly in rustic high schools, excellently _de rigueur_. It was a daintily accurate exposition of our human taste for illusion.

And the third fundamental characteristic that I am thinking of is our universal liability to habit. This is too familiar for comment. Take merely one instance which has pleasing analogies. Suppose you go to a small haberdasher to buy a pair of socks. In payment, you give him a five-dollar gold piece. As he makes change, he is obscurely troubled. He will ask if you haven’t a bill instead. He doesn’t relish that coin, because he isn’t used to it. Yet, if I understand correctly, gold is the only genuine money there is; all the other stuff is merely money by convention. And how beautifully valid in regard to truth as well. Half-truths to which men are accustomed are so much easier to pass than the golden mintage they rarely encounter! What was it Mr. Don Marquis has remarked: “If you make people think they think, they’ll love you. If you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”

§4

Certainly these three coercive factors, and many others, too, bear strangely upon all our attempts to think. The beauty and the happiness of religion, perhaps, lie in the fact that it has little to do with thinking. As far as any man knows, up to now, the universe is insoluble; and the mind, ardent particle, rather resents insolubility. It resents the solemn circling of the Dipper, seen from the front porch every clear night. Filling itself with slow darkness, gently tilting and draining again, it too cruelly reminds us of the orderly immensities of space. And religion may very well be considered a form of art and of anesthetic to soften the onset of that insolvency. It is reason’s petition in bankruptcy, “to drown the memory of that insolence.” If it makes us happy, we need inquire no further; for happiness is what all pursue. Perhaps, indeed, we are but memoranda in the note-book of the cosmic Author, jottings of some story that flashed into His mind one day, but which He did not trouble to write. So we are hunting, hunting endlessly for the rest of the plot. Or we are surf-bathers in an ocean where one step carries us beyond our depth. Accept any figure of speech that appeals to you. No work of art or literature yet, so far as I know, has given an adequate presentment of the glory and agony and mirth and excitement of being alive. Suppose some visitor from another planet dropped in for an evening and could communicate his inquisition. We wanted to give him just one book that would offer a picture, trustworthy, frank, recognizable, of the life we have known--man’s long campaign with nature, with other men, with woman, with himself. Some suggest “Candide,” but I find that great book too pitiless. Some, Browne’s “Religio Medici,” but is it not too witty? We might, in a hasty ransack of the shelves, linger momently upon Boswell or Walt Whitman or Shakespere’s Sonnets or “Moby Dick”; or upon the Book of Common Prayer or a photograph of Gozzoli’s “Viaggio dei Re Magi.” But not even these would duly serve. It would have to be an anthology, I fear; perhaps Robert Bridges’s “Spirit of Man,” though it should really have a stouter infusion of the seventeenth century, when God-intoxicated and Eros-maddened poets like John Donne and Andrew Marvell uttered their ecstatic and magnanimous despair.

And that brings us to another cusp in this only too risible indent upon the infinite. Religion is an attempt, a noble attempt, to suggest in human terms more-than-human realities. The seat of Peter has always lain beyond the Alps. The church, like the poet, is an ambassador from abroad; from the strangest of countries, that lying within our own bosoms. And what is the virtue of an ambassador? Surely, tact. The one thing that makes ambassadors useless or dangerous is too great a zest to blurt out truths that many of us know, but have agreed not to emphasize. He thinks in the language of his homeland; he must speak--though always, we trust, with winningly foreign accent--the tongue to which he is accredited. The ambassador knows, better than any other, that truth is condiment, not diet. It is rough manners to shove truth at people when they are not expecting it. There is always charming significance in popular phrases. “The dreadful truth” is such a one. Truth is always dreaded, not so much because it is gruesome or tragic, but because it is so often absurd.

The church, then, comes before us as envoy from the world of spirit to the world of flesh; and here is the anomaly, that only too probably these worlds have small interest in common. So is our envoy but demi-potentiary. In medieval time the problem was simple; flesh and spirit were assumed to be deadly enemies one of the other. But nowadays we lean toward a casuistry far more perplexed; that body is soul’s noblest ally, that whatever makes flesh satiate and merry is so much gain for soul. Blithe, ruddy doctrine! Yet, sadly enough, it is even possible that truth is neither Trojan nor avoirdupois. Flesh and spirit sometimes look terribly incommensurable. Saint Paul did not fully plumb the real tragedy of the situation. The most bitter wisdom of the human voice is the very opposite of Paul’s cry. Transpose it so: _Video deteriora proboque, meliora sequor._

Body and soul, tied together back to back, see different realms of sky. And the innermost capsule of mind, that very I of very I, though wretchedly at the mercy of pains and lusts, is yet also oddly detached. Sitting in the dentist’s chair, the innermost self says: “Here we are. This is terrible. Now he is going to hurt me. Is it the essential me he is going to hurt, or is it just the make-believe me?” But when the pang comes, then truly for an instant all me’s whatsoever coalesce into one indignant craven whole. Yet even in that horrid shudder I think we are obscurely aware that it is not our essence that surrenders. That volatile quiddity has retreated in disgust, loath to attend the deplorable scene. He is as cheerfully regardless of body as is the tenant of a house he has merely rented, and for rather less than value. He is, perhaps, not unlike the fire on the hearth, the brightness and warm centre of the home, yet caring nought for your cherished odds and ends. What’s Hecuba to him? Given a chance, that same domestic ember would devour the whole building; and is no different, in essence, from the roaring streamers that once ran wild in Baltimore and San Francisco.

I knew a lovely and thoughtful woman who, with a few other adepts, used to do graceful figure-skating on the far side of a college skating-pond. There, in a quiet little cove of clear ice, apart from the crowd and the rhythmic, hollow undersong of the whole vibrating lake, this little group swung and twirled. I can see her small slender figure, her bright cheek, the lovely float and spread of her skirt as she curved and poised in that steely waltzing. College students and wild hockey berserks and miscellaneous small fry scuttled and careered about; now and then a rubber puck would skim across the ice, and like a pack of hounds the barbarian rout would sweep upon that tranquil shore of the pond. For a moment the pensive skaters would be blotted out by swirling movement--clattering sticks, ringing skates, noisy shouts. Then the rabble would whirl away. The fancy skaters would be seen again; and that lonely figure, swinging, leaning in airy curves, aware of it all with thoughtful eyes a little sparked with annoyance, aloof from the turmoil, yet not unkindly so.

Not otherwise, perhaps, our hidden capsule of identity is a solitary skater. The wild rush of emotions, desires, passions, timidities, comes tearing across the pond; lonely Diana is hidden, even shouldered off her lagoon of clear crystal. But then they go racketing away. The pirouette begins again, and the soul is happy with her own concerns.

What language, then, is our ambassador to utter, dealing with two worlds appallingly incongruous? Is it strange if, like the rest of us, he falls back upon prudential and cheery approximations? That witty writer Stella Benson mentions in one of her novels (“The Poor Man”) a character who “knew too well the difficulties and dangers of being alive to despise those who sought for safety in tremulous platitudes.”

§5

Speaking of ambassadors there was one in the sixteenth century who told the following story:

At Constantinople I saw an Old Man, who, after he had taken a Cup of Wine in his Hand to Drink, us’d first to make a hideous Noise; I asked his Friends, Why he did so? They answered me, that, by this Outcry, he did, as it were, warn his Soul to retire to some secret Corner of his Body, or else, wholly to Emigrate, and pass out of it, that it might not be guilty of that Sin which he was about to Commit, nor be defiled with the Wine that he was about to guzzle down.

This humorous ancient was not unlike the modern newspaper man. The hideous noise of the press, its conscience-annulling haste, its sense of power and almost uncontradictable certainty,[A] are what he employs to warn his soul, his reason, not to look over his shoulder while he is at work. The fact is that the whole ingenious mechanism of a newspaper is so automatically conjointed and revolves so rapidly that by sheer fury and speed of movement it takes on a kind of synthetic life of its own. It could well be imagined thundering round and round of its own accord in a great jovial, shouting stupor. A leading editorial, tearing passions to tatters, could arise by spontaneous combustion, exhaling itself somehow from the general uproar and joy. Virgin birth would be no miracle in a newspaper office: I have seen, and myself committed, editorial matter whose parent had never been approached by any siring intelligence.

Or, in the case of the reporter, painfully trained in a generous human skepticism, enforced student of the way people behave and the way things happen, alert to discern the overtones of irony and pathos in the event, you might expect him to be the least credulous of beings. If so, the general flavour of the press little represents him. He acquiesces, consciously or unconsciously, in the fact that in all but a few really intelligent journals the news columns are edited down to the level of the proprietor’s intelligence, or what the active managers imagine to be the proprietor’s taste. Not in facts, but in the tone adopted in setting out those facts. An Index Expurgatorius is issued for office guidance, lists made of words and phrases not to be mentioned in news stories. The more essentially vulgar a paper is, the more cautious it will be not to use words the managing editor believes dirty. “Obscene,” for example, is deleted, and the truly disgusting word “spicy” is substituted. And the reporter himself having acquiesced, it is not unnatural that the readers of the paper do also. The great majority of them, tippling their customary sheet day after day with the regularity of dram-fiends, are so indurated to the grotesque psychology of the more popular news columns that to find a paper habitually speaking recognizable moderate sense would afflict them with a warmth of indecency and dismay. The daily journals give them the same pleasure that the serial parts of Dickens’s novels gave the early Victorians eighty and ninety years ago. So we have the agreeable paradox that these papers we see all round us, roaring their naïvetés and scandals, are written and compiled by those who are, as individuals, studious, serene, and gently acetic skeptics.

It is an entertaining thought. If it is true, I believe it is due to what I think of as the carburetor-adjustment of the human mind, a delicate, unconscious, and continuous process. It pleases me to imagine that in the intellect there is a valve that regulates the mixture of truth and convention that we utter, just as gasolene and heated air are mixed and vaporized in the carburetor of an engine. Whenever we meet any one, or at any rate any stranger, we are likely to be on our guard. We have our own little private reservoir of sincerity, but we don’t intend to draw on it too largely until we know we are safe. There are some people, as you must have noticed, to whom it is almost impossible to say a word of what you really believe. Accordingly, automatically and almost unconsciously, we make a mental adjustment of our “mixture.” We admit into it just as much truth as we believe the other is likely to relish, or willing to receive. But we may have made a bad guess. The conversation begins to back-fire. That means the mixture is too “lean.” Very well; pull out the choke, enrich it with more candour, all goes delightfully. Too “rich” a mixture, however, is, every mechanician knows, as bad as too “lean.” The mind gets crusted with carbon--unassimilated truth. The analogy seems to me highly applicable, even down to the infusion of what used to be called, in a bygone slang, “hot air.” Through this needle-valve, for the most part unconsciously, we regulate our mental ignition.

All this, as you shall see presently, has its just bearing on our topic of religion. We need, but are little likely to get, a new “Areopagitica” to liberate our press from its cheery bondage of vulgarity and slip-slop thinking. The newspaper man who has pride in his honourable tradition may well feel grim to see the things he has sweat for trafficked across counters like bundles of merchandise; yes, and to see the transaction applauded by eminent statesmen and divines who feel the need of a front-page quote. A little pride is desirable now and then; yes, in God’s name, a little pride, gentlemen. We who have lived, as best we could, for the decency of letters; who have vigiled with Chaucer and taken wine with Descartes and changed opinion with Doctor Johnson, are we to be hired to and fro by the genial hucksters who know the art of print chiefly as a rapid factory for gaily tinted palaver?

In his tight place, beset by doubts just as acute as those of the young theologian, our newspaper man ratiocinates upon the quaint processes of mind. He broods on the haphazard, interest-tainted, and fallible nature of most mortal opinion. He studies the relativity of truth and the proliferation of rumour. He notes how every event is like a stone cast into a pond; it ejaculates concentric vibrations, widening loops of hearsay. Varying layers or rings of truth are available for different classes of bystanders, or bythinkers. How well he knows the queer fact that you can say, unrebuked, in a weekly what would never pass in a daily! You can say still more in a monthly; in a quarterly review almost all the beans can be decanted. And in a book, quite often you can print your surmises in full. Of course, to tell exactly what happens, as Pepys did, it is best to be dead. (How odd is the saying, “Dead men tell no tales.” Why, they tell the best tales of all.) It does sometimes seem as though the more immediate readers there are for any bit of print, the less candour can be rationed out for each.[B]

So every human being stands at the centre of a little eddy or whirl of testimony. If one could make a map or editor’s projection of him considered as a news item--it would be as complicated as an ocean chart with festoons of barographs and isotherms, curves and twists and arrows indicating set of currents, prevailing winds, soundings. On such a chart, we would denote here a cyclone of scandal, there a hot monsoon of misappreciation, yonder a steady trade-wind of generous sympathy. In an ocean so various we should find our victim leading a thousand different phantom lives in the opinion of others. If you begin to think about this sort of thing, the asylum waits; for truly, confronted by the alternating delights and possibilities of life, the mind is not unlike that chameleon that went mad when tethered on a Paisley shawl.

The newspaper man, then, begins to feel perhaps that it is necessary for him to undertake the burden of fidelity to human realities--that burden that is often so lightly shrugged off by bishops. Looking at things in the large, or trying to, he strongly suspects that formal religion, as we have known it, is dying; lovelier and greater poetries are pushing in. (There are thousands of years still to come, you know.) The highest honour that he can pay to sacred matters is to regard them as so thrillingly actual that they can be accepted into the great general body of human life. To regard them, indeed, as news, as the word Gospel itself suggests. It would seem fairly obvious that the miracles and parables of the New Testament, like the various creeds themselves, were intended as vivid and stunning apologues. To batter them down to the level of facts seems to degrade them, as it would be degrading to reject Keats’s sonnet because there are no peaks in the isthmus of Darien, and because it wasn’t Cortes. The newspaper man prefers to take his stand with Tolstoy, who said, in that thrilling book “A Confession”: “I wish to understand in such a way that everything that is inexplicable shall present itself to me as _necessarily_ inexplicable.” He prefers that when there is an available and mortally recognizable way of understanding things, they should so be understood. Take, for example, the story of the miracle at Cana. To a man trained to observe the delightful ways in which testimony arises and is transmitted, how does that story explain itself? Here is a wedding party, at which appears the amazing stranger. He seems a man more fascinating, more charming, more utterly delightful, than any that those country folk have ever encountered. They are all very merry, the toasts go round, the wine runs short. But the ruler of the feast, turning to the stranger, says, prettily enough, I think, “With _you_ here, water is as good as wine.” Some one else takes it up, echoing the sentiment, seeking to add to it. “Right!” he cries. “Our friend here makes the water into wine. Here’s to you!” And with friendly applause the gathering ratifies the compliment. One of the servants overhears, and carries the incident into the kitchen. How quickly it grows and passes down the village street! “They’ve got some one in there who’s turning water into wine!” Can it be denied that this is the way that human events are reported?

Let us take an example of a miracle-germ in our own time. When Horace Traubel, faithful and simple-minded disciple of Walt Whitman, died in September, 1919, his body was taken to the Community Church, at Park Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, New York, for the funeral service. But when the body reached the church, the little company of mourners could not enter; the building had suddenly caught fire. Imagine this episode handed down through generations of simple people by word of mouth. The intimate disciple of a great poet, both of them impatient of the genteel religions, is borne dead to a sacred edifice. It bursts into flame. Would that not be taken as some authentic Pentecost, and at the very least as a proof of Walt’s divinity? Yet we know well enough that the event was no miracle, but rather what Hobbes called “an extraordinary felicity.”

There is one more Biblical passage I should like to refer to, one that has often been considered a knotty saying. It is the parable of the talents and the unprofitable servant. I like to conceive Deity in the guise of that hard master who wanted his own with usury. “Well,” I can imagine God saying to the newly dead, “what did you think of that world I gave you?” “Not so bad, on the whole,” replies the embarrassed soul. “What!” cries God. “Simpleton, do you mean to say you took it as you found it, accepted it, swallowed it down without question? Depart from me, unprofitable servant! You were supposed to remould it nearer to your heart’s desire, to create out of my materials a new world of your own.”