Part 4
The new church, in short, will be primarily a clearing-house of service, to which men will go not to save their souls but to save their world. It will be a spiritual centre, so to speak, of all service-activities; a place for comparing notes, for learning of each other, for the heartening of one another in their worthful tasks. The leader of such a church will be a man not only deeply interested in and in touch with the agencies and activities of human betterment, but versed likewise in the fundamental sciences that make for a finer direction and control of life. His theology will be not an occult research of supernatural relationships and powers, but physics and chemistry, biology and sociology, ethics and philosophy—all the fundamental approaches, in short, to the problem of human self-realization.
III
Yet splendid as such religious life may be conceded to be, it will apparently lack one of the primary consolations of the older belief, the assurance, namely, that the fundamental government of the world is just and good. “God’s in his heaven; all’s right with the world.” If, as we have been urging, God is not in his heaven, it may indeed, for all we know to the contrary, be all wrong with the world. A few years ago we were very much perturbed by certain conclusions reached by the accredited masters of science. The universe was running down, they said, and would end a lifeless, frozen mass. The thought of an ever-living God was then a comfort against such ominous prophecy. If God lives, it follows that all things of value will live, that the world cannot go to ultimate ruin.
That old prophecy, however, of a frozen and lifeless world no longer has honor in our land. Recent discoveries of new types of energy, a more penetrating analysis both of the mathematics and mechanics of the situation, show the prophecy to have been made on wholly insufficient and insecure grounds. The old dogmatic materialism has had to give way to a critical and open-minded evolutionism which tends more and more to regard the cosmic process as one of expanding power, in which the values for which we deeply care—conscious life, purposive direction, science, art, morality—appear to have a place of growing security and effectiveness. And yet the evolutionism of the day, unlike the older religious thought, finds no cosmic certainty upon which it may utterly bank. The universe, with all the high values that have been achieved, _may_ indeed go to ruin. There is no absolute guarantee for the future. All that modern evolutionism can say to us is that looking over such history of the world as is accessible, and analyzing the processes there found, it seems highly probable that the line of the future will be a line of advance, an advance from relative disorganization to organization, from a large degree of mechanical indifference to increasing organic solidarity and integration, from antagonisms and conflicts to mutuality and coöperation. But it is only probable. There is no God who holds the destiny in his hands and makes it certain of accomplishment.
In view of this uncertainty as to the world’s government and outcome, it may be asked whether the new type of religion will not be weaker in moral and spiritual vigor than the old. Do not vigor and initiative spring from hope and sure confidence in the fundamental rightness of the world? In answer to this one has but to ask the question: in what type of situation does the human character grow strong and heroic,—that in which there is no doubt of the happy outcome, in which the individual plays his part, assured that nothing can happen wrongly; or that in which the outcome is uncertain, in which the individual realizes that he must fight his way, knowing not whether victory or defeat will greet him, but assured only that whatever happens, he must fight and fight to the end? Is it unfair to say that the old religion with its confident, childlike resting on God (“He loves the burthen”) developed a type of character that was not, in the mass, conspicuously heroic? “God knows best”; “It will all come out right”; “Thy will be done”—these are not expressions of fighting men; they are expressions of men who resign themselves to the ruling of powers greater than themselves. A civilization characterized by such an attitude will not be one strenuously alive to eliminate the sorry evils of life. But the men who believe that the issue of the universe is in doubt, that there is no powerful God to lead the hosts to victory, will, if they have the stuff of men in them, strike out their manliest to help whatever good there is in the world to win its way against the forces of evil. A civilization of such men will be a tough-fibred civilization, strenuous to fight, grimly ready, like the Old Guard, to die but never surrender.
There is, in short, something subtly weakening about the optimism of the traditional religions. Like the historic soothing syrup, with its unadvertised opiate, it soothes the distress not by curing the disease but by temporarily paralyzing the function. “To trust God nor be afraid” means in most cases—not all—to settle back from a too anxious concern about the evils of the world. “God will take care of his own!” How different is this from the attitude: “The task is ours and the whole world’s and we must see it through!”
IV
But from another point of view there was an element of power in the older religion which seems at first blush to be utterly lacking in the type of new religion we are describing. A prominent world-evangelist of the Young Men’s Christian Association was recently lecturing to the college students of New York City on the ethical and religious life. It was significant to note that most of his talk to students concerned itself with temptations and that the invariable outcome of each talk was that the one infallible means of meeting temptation was to realize God’s presence in one’s life, to companion with God, to feel him near and watchful, ever sympathetic, ever ready with divine help. Students do indeed get power from that kind of belief. They feel themselves before an all-seeing eye, a hand is on their shoulder, a voice is in their ear; and when the difficult moment comes they are not alone. How utterly uncompanioned, how lonely, on the other hand, must be the student who knows no beneficent, all-seeing, and all-caring Father. When his difficult moment comes he stands in desolate isolation. Victory or defeat then must hang upon his own puny strength and wavering determination. It is a favorite argument with Roman Catholics that the belief in God is the one surest guard against the sexual irregularity of young men. Remove God, the one strong bulwark, from their lives, and the flood of their passions will sweep them to their destruction.
Such considerations as these must indeed give one pause; yet I feel assured that they need not hold us long. How does a man get strength for right living? He begins—in his childhood as in the childhood of the race—by getting it through fear. The child is told, upon pain of punishment, not to do certain things. There will come a time when it will know why it ought not to do these things; but in its first months and, in a degree, through its early years, it refrains from doing them simply by reason of the pressure of the superior power of its parents. Later it refrains through unconscious imitation and affection. It lives in the light and love of its parents; and it consciously and unconsciously shapes its life after the pattern of their lives. When difficulties press, the child flees to the mother or the father for comfort and advice. Those are delicious days, of warm trust and joy and loving security. The child nestles up against the stronger power of those it loves. But the child grows to manhood and womanhood. Whence then does it get its strength for right living? The fear of the infant days, the imitation and affection of childhood and youth are now transformed into a new attitude,—an understanding of the reason in the right and the unreason in the wrong. There are many factors and influences that now take the place of parent power and affection: the love and admiration of one’s group, the customs of one’s people, the stimulus of great persons. But the essential power now is the power of _insight_—of so understanding the forces and principles of life that one’s whole self is surrendered in deep reverence and service to the things that ought to be. Assuredly, no character is mature until it has reached this last stage. There is indeed something beautiful about the boy who in the midst of temptation goes to his father and talks it all out with him; who clings to the father’s hand to lead him safely through the dangerous ways. But the boy is only on the way to moral and spiritual maturity; he is not yet morally and spiritually mature.
The doctrine that the great evangelist and the evangelical churches in general preach is a doctrine admirably adapted to a condition of moral and spiritual immaturity; it is a doctrine, in short, for little boys and girls; it is not a doctrine for morally and spiritually mature men and women. I doubt even, in fact, whether it is a doctrine for college youths and maidens; for I note in my own relations with college men and women that there is among them the growing consciousness of right for right’s sake, a growing cleanness and earnestness of life; and this is so, I take it, not because they believe such conduct and attitude to be commanded or because they are aware of a heavenly Father who watches, but because their eyes have been opened to see the truth and the truth has made them free.
I believe that the problem of how to teach a young man to meet temptation is a deeply serious problem. But I believe small good will come of falling back upon the old easy expedient of half-frightening, half-cajoling the young man into submission by reminding him of the all-watching eye and the all-considering heart of the great Father. That way is so easy that it is really unfair to the victims. It is like hypnotizing a man into morality. The way of the new religion is the harder but more lasting, more self-respecting way of developing the whole moral self of the boy and the youth and the man,—beginning far back in childhood and unremittingly, understandingly continuing the training, until when the child becomes the youth and the youth the man, righteousness is the firm, sweet habit of his life. We human beings have an inveterate love of shirking our tasks. We neglect the essential moral culture of the infant and the child; we let the moments and the days slip by in the life of the youth without putting any hard thought upon his training in self-control, in courage, in moral insight; and then suddenly, when signs of danger begin to show in the young man, we grow panic-stricken and implore him to call on God to save him. The fact is that the task was ours and we shirked it. Ours was the responsibility; and we had no right to put it off on a miracle-working Deity.
“When half-gods go,” says Emerson, “the gods arrive.” When once we give up this easy way of moral and religious hypnosis; when once we believe that God, the watchful policeman of the universe, no longer exists, we shall solemnly and seriously take up the task we have so long cast upon a deity’s shoulders—_our_ task of shaping and directing and making strong the moral possibilities of the children we bring into the world. From the old consolation, in short, of divine protection, we shall awake to a new loyalty to our fundamental moral obligations.
It is significant in this connection to note that the farther we go back in the history of religion, the more the moral reference of situations is secondary and the supernatural reference primary. The ten commandments, for example, were first of all a divine behest, and only secondarily a series of laws founded on the essential requirements of human well-being. But as we come nearer to our own day, the moral quality of situations tends more and more to usurp the primacy of the old supernatural reference. The limit of such evolution is the disappearance altogether of the supernatural, the evaluation, ultimately, of all situations and activities in terms of their inherent good or bad for the life of humanity and the world.
* * * * *
The old loyalty, in short, was the loyalty of loving children; the new loyalty is the loyalty of strong-charactered men and women. Has the time come for moral and spiritual maturity? To some of us there is no longer an alternative. “When I was a child I spake as a child; I understood as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” In the light of spiritual maturity, the god of magic, the god of miraculous power, the god of loving protection, the god of all-seeing care—the Parent God—must give way to the God that is the very inner ideal life of ourselves, our own deep and abiding possibilities of being; the God _in us_ that stimulates us to what is highest in value and power.
THE PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
_August 18, 1914_
MY FELLOW COUNTRYMEN:
I suppose that every thoughtful man in America has asked himself during the last troubled weeks what influence the European war may exert upon the United States; and I take the liberty of addressing a few words to you in order to point out that it is entirely within our own choice what its effects upon us will be, and to urge very earnestly upon you the sort of speech and conduct which will best safeguard the nation against distress and disaster.
The effect of the war upon the United States will depend upon what American citizens say and do. Every man who really loves America will act and speak in the true spirit of neutrality, which is the spirit of impartiality and fairness and friendliness to all concerned.
The spirit of the nation in this critical matter will be determined largely by what individuals and society and those gathered in public meetings do and say; upon what newspapers and magazines contain; upon what our ministers utter in their pulpits, and men proclaim as their opinions on the streets.
The people of the United States are drawn from many nations and chiefly from the nations now at war. It is natural and inevitable that there should be the utmost variety of sympathy with regard to the issues and circumstances of the conflict. Some will wish one nation, others another, to succeed in the momentous struggle.
It will be easy to excite passion and difficult to allay it. Those responsible for exciting it will assume a heavy responsibility; responsibility for no less a thing than that the people of the United States, whose love of their country, and whose loyalty to its government should unite them as Americans, all bound in honor and affection to think first of her and her interests, may be divided into camps of hostile opinions, hot against each other, involved in the war itself in impulse and opinion, if not in action.
Such diversions among us would be fatal to our peace of mind and might seriously stand in the way of the proper performance of our duty as the one great nation at peace, the one people holding itself ready to play a part of impartial mediation and speak the counsels of peace and accommodation, not as a partisan, but as a friend.
I venture, therefore, my fellow countrymen, to speak a solemn word of warning to you against that deepest, most subtle, most essential breach of neutrality which may spring out of partisanship, out of passionately taking sides.
The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men’s souls. We must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another. My thought is of America. I am speaking, I feel sure, the earnest wish and purpose of every thoughtful American that this great country of ours, which is, of course, the first in our thoughts and in our hearts, should show herself in this time of peculiar trial a nation fit beyond others to exhibit the fine poise of undisturbed judgment, the dignity of self-control, the efficiency of dispassionate action; a nation that neither sits in judgment upon others nor is disturbed in her own counsels, and which keeps herself fit and free to do what is honest and disinterested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world.
Shall we not resolve to put upon ourselves the restraint which will bring to our people the happiness and the great lasting influence for peace we covet for them?
WOODROW WILSON
ATAVISM
KARL REMER
The city had withstood its besiegers for a long time. The guns on the mountain had poured down shot, the guns on the north and on the south had battered the old walls. The walls had crumbled and fallen. The walls were old and they had been considered picturesque for so long that it was as if they had forgotten the sturdy virtues of their youth.
Through the breaches came the soldiers. Tribesmen they seemed of the old days of the Grand Khan.
The soldiers were thinking. They were not accustomed to thought. Was it true, ran their thoughts, that their leader had promised that there would be no looting? He had promised, this they knew, that there would be no looting after he entered the city. What was the meaning of that “he”? Did it mean the army or did it mean the general? Did it mean the soldiers? There was the rumor that the general could not leave his present quarters for three days. Rain, or snow, or ice, or drought prevented. What was the meaning of that? Did it mean three days of fine, bloody looting?
The soldiers entered the city. Like the tribesmen of the Grand Khan they poured in. Through one gate, through two gates, through three gates they came. It was a sullen business and silently did they press forward. They had not made up their minds about those three days. They were not sure about the general. Perhaps he was playing one of his grim jokes. Was he, perhaps, already within the city? He had promised before many that there would be no looting. The foreigner, the Jesus-religion man in black clothes, had stood beside him. It was hard to tell, where foreigners were concerned, how much to believe. Foreigners were an unusual sort of people. Most of them did not look dangerous, but any one of them might have power. It was one of the inexplicable things about foreigners that one could never tell the amount of power a foreigner had by the amount he used. To have power and not use it, to have rice and not eat it—strange men these foreigners.
The soldiers poured into the city. Like the tribesmen of the Grand Khan they came; but not like the tribesmen of the Grand Khan. The loot and the fun were before them, yet they restrained themselves.
The soldiers were yellow and clad in yellow, and they poured through the gates as the yellow Yangtsze pours between its banks. Silver and silks were before them, but the hand was withheld from the knife and a sullen silence was around them.
Some one began it. There came a curse and an answer, a taunt and a gunshot. So it began.
Here was a shop boarded, bolted, and locked. A crowd of soldiers gathered before it. They demanded that the shop be opened. No reply came from within. The demand was repeated and emphasized with a blow of a rifle butt against the boards. Still there was no reply. More gun butts fell upon the boards and they began to creak and snap. A scared man within began to dicker for life, property, and family. He paid and paid high—for nothing. The shop was broken open. Stripped and wounded, the man was sent down the street. His goods became the playthings of the soldiers. His wife lay above, outraged and stabbed. His daughter was in the hands of other tormentors. At the command of the soldiers, his son began carrying his father’s goods and piling them as the soldiers directed. There was a look of death upon the boy’s face; he was sick and weary. The soldiers demanded more silver. The boy knew there was no more. He knew that his father had paid it all to save the family. He was so sadly sure he would not look. The soldiers cut him down and went their way.
There was a ricksha coolie who had sunk frightened against a wall in a side street. He had hidden his family, but he, himself, had come forth from hiding in the hope of much work and large pay. With quaking knees he had pulled loads of loot for the soldiers. At last the horror had overcome him and here he cowered against a wall. He was called but he could not move. He knew that he could not pass down the bloody streets again. The call was repeated and still he did not move. They shot him as he lay and took his ricksha from him. That street also, a little street and a quiet one, had its spreading mark of red.
A poor barber lay trembling upon his bamboo bed. He had no family and few friends. Why had he not run away? He lay thinking and thinking but he could think of no good reason. As he lay thus they came upon his shop. Down came the boards. He paid them all his savings, a pitifully small sum, and they demanded his wife and children. They killed him because he had neither the one nor the other. “For,” said they, “no honest man is without a family.”
There was a girl of eighteen whom the soldiers seized. Guile or temporary insanity prompted her to play her part as if with pleasure. She smiled on them and shrugged her shoulders most coquettishly. She bandied jokes with them and made advances. A petty officer accepted her advances and, later, had her beaten to death. The soldiers approved. “These people must be taught,” said they, “that modesty is a woman’s duty.”
For two days the riot continued. For two nights there was no sleep but the sleep of death. The moans of the women, the groans of the men, fire and fresh alarms made sleep a thing that seemed years away. The city was red and the blood flowed. Loot and the lives of men, silver and the bodies of women, these things did the victors take as is old custom in China. Then came the third day and the general.
The foreigner in black clothes, the man of the religion of Jesus, had lived through these two days and two nights. “One can never tell,” said the soldiers, “what power these foreigners have.” “That is the foreigner’s house,” said the soldiers, “let it alone.”
The foreigner had lived through the two days and the two nights, but he had not slept. He had been thinking of the promise of the general. “There will be no looting after I enter the city”—these were the general’s words and the man who had spoken them had not yet entered. As a joke the speech was not bad, but too much blood and no sleep spoils the taste for jokes.
The general entered with an important noise of trumpets. Where he rode the looting stopped. He seemed weary, however, and did not ride far. The smoke of the many fires may have hurt his eyes. The day may have been too hot. In any case the general seemed discreetly weary and discreetly blind.
The man of the religion of Jesus came to the general. His words were to the point. “Is this the way you keep promises?” he asked.
The general did not like directness and he did not care to argue. “There is no looting,” he said, and with a smile he pointed down the street.
“There is looting everywhere except before your eyes.”
“There is none,” said the general. It was characteristic of him to add, “What there is must be stopped.”
“By whom?” asked the foreigner.
“Take one hundred men,” said the general, “go up and down in the city. If you see looting or outrage, cut off the guilty man’s head. As for myself, I have seen none.”
The foreigner hesitated, but thoughts came to him of the last two days. If he did nothing, who would act? Opportunity seemed to him duty. So in despair and rage he agreed and at the head of his hundred he set out.