Chapter 5
The next rule is social: the direction of personal energy that shall leave a distinct impress on other lives. It is long before we realize that for each exertion we are responsible; that what we do is held against us in strict account, not only by fate, which builds our destiny for us out of our own deeds, but by every other person with whom we come in contact. Our fellows check off daily against us so much vitality, so much magnanimity, so much idleness, cruelty, spite, goodness, selfishness, meanness, or loving-kindness. Life holds a record of our every deed, and from no least responsibility can we make our escape. We are the prisoners of events which we ourselves have brought about.
The discipline of ethics, of home-training, of the Church, and of religious teaching is addressed fundamentally to this social consciousness of ours, this responsibility which we cannot evade. To bear rule aright is to go forth into the world to build up, in authority, talent, and influence, the kingdom of God.
1. There is the agricultural phase of social rule. A man tills a farm. It has upon it trees, streams, woodland, and meadow-land. He may rule--to what end? If he rules it for his own personal ends--merely to fill his granaries, and lay up gold--he rules it for miserliness, with a sort of thrift that is as passing in inheritance as the flying April rain.
Or he may say: I will keep my land in trust for God. I will hold rain and frost, heat and cold, storm and sun, in fee simple for the race. My grain shall pass out into the world's mart, sent forth with love and prayer. Such a farmer is the incarnation of moral grandeur. Let men laugh, if they will, at his overalls and plough, his wide-brimmed hat, his simple manners, and his homely, racy speech. His feet are by the furrow, but his heart is in heaven, and his treasure is there also. Says the author of _Nine Acres on the Hillside_, "The agriculturist walks side by side with the Creator."
There is a fine integrity which lies in land. There is a resolution which is concerned with crops. There is a wisdom born of wind and weather. There is a power which comes from the constant revival of life in seed and fruit and flower. This man is King of God's Acres. Let him not despise his kingdom, and may the succession not depart from his house!
2. There is a rule which is industrial. A man is sent into the world to wield a hammer, a saw, and run an engine. If his rule over his hammer is weak, if he does not know how to use it well, if its blow is uncertain and its result unskilled, then he passes from the line of kings, and is subject, instead of in authority, in his own domain. He is captive to a piece of steel or wood. So with every tool of trade. Each man who conquers his tool is a ruler--is in control of elements of human happiness and good. The roof-mender, the furnace-builder, the cloth-weaver, the yarn-spinner, the steel-worker, the miller--do not these all keep the race warmed, and clad, and fed?
3. The next rule is commercial. Trade itself is neither menial nor demeaning. Rightly used, it is a high form of control. People have things to buy and things to sell. The maker is handicapped. He cannot travel elsewhere to dispose of what he has. The buyer is ignorant. He does not know where to go, or cannot go, at first-hand, for the shoes, the hat, the reaper, the bricks, the lumber, the stationery which he must use. There appears upon the scene the man of observation, of investigation, of capital, of shrewdness, of resources. With one hand he gathers the products of the Pacific and of the South Seas. With the other, he takes the output of the Atlantic seaboard, the Gulf States, the Mississippi valley, the northern lakes and hills. He sets up an establishment, he puts forth runners, advertisements, and show-windows. He stocks shelves, decks counters, and employs clerks, packers, salesmen, cash-boys, buyers, and department heads. The man who wants to buy, buys from a man across the sea and yet is served in his own town.
The man of commercial power is a man of world-wide rule. He may lay up in banks a fortune which he intends to try to spend upon himself; or he may say: I am accountable for the pocket-books of the world. I am in authority over them. I open a market, or close it. I buy, dispense, and disperse human labor. I create wants, and I satisfy them. I will establish honest laws of trade. What I do shall be rated as commercial law. What I say shall be quoted as a way of equity and probity. That man is a King of Trade. His throne is set upon hills and seas. His subjects are all men with needs, and all men with products of the land, the coasts, the sea, or brain, or skill. This is the lawful King of Trade. He represents God's mart of exchange. Primarily, goods are not bought and sold in the market. They are first transferred in that man's brain.
4. Another rule is of concerted works: the rule of the Engineer. Back of every advance in our country, in facilities of trade and transportation, or of public health and safety, stands the man who thought it out. Take, for instance, the development of the "Great American Desert." Who projected its irrigation, by which areas have been redeemed from barrenness and waste? Who planned the economic use of the Niagara Falls? Who built the Brooklyn Bridge? Who projected the vast waterway from Chicago to the Gulf? Who first thought of a cable across the depths of seas? Who bridged the Firth of Forth, the Ganges, the Mississippi? Who projected the gray docks of Montreal? the Simplon Tunnel? Who wound the iron rails across the Alleghanies, the Rockies, the Sierras? Who drew the wall that has encircled China for a thousand years? Who projected the Suez Canal? the Trans-Siberian Railway? Who sunk the mines of Eldorado? Who designed the Esplanade at Hamburg? the stone banks of the Seine? the waterways of Venice? the aqueducts of Rome? the Appian Way? the military roads of Chili and Peru? the Subway in New York?
Gravity, stress, strain, weight, tension, sag, cohesion,--a few mathematical formulas, and a knowledge of the primary laws of physics,--upon such principles as these, the world is rapidly changing form and use.
The Engineer, in a strange and subtle way, stands near to God. His work is done hand-in-hand with God. He takes the forces of nature and the laws of the material world, and bends them to the needs and use of man. Sky and sea or desert may be about him. He knows the arctic cold, the tropic heat; the forest and the plain; the mountain and the marsh; the brook and river; the peak and the precipice; the glacier and the tempest in their course. Out of the very elements he is daily building new paths for man to tread. Soon he, too, must pass; laid after death, it may be, beside some mighty water that his handiwork has spanned.
In loneliness and silence does he not often think, I wonder, of the God with whom he deals? It is God who provides the river and the sea; God who through endless ages has piled stone on stone, crust on crust, and has crumpled the strata of the earth as tissue in His hand. It is God who has bound every mote to the earth-centre; who has sent magnetic currents coursing through the globe, and has made tides and sea-changes, and the trade-winds to blow. It is the God of the Gulf Stream, the Caribbean Sea, the God of the Appalachians, the God of the Himalayas, the God of the Cordilleras, of the Amazon, the Yukon, the Yang-tse-Kiang with which he really deals.
The endless ages pass and go, but God abides. Little, daring man lifts here and there a hand to mould the world which God has made--pricks the earth for gold or silver, iron or coal--but GOD is everywhere immanent and shines through every hour of change. Hence the March of Engineers is the march of men whom God has trained; in a special sense His master-workmen, craftsmen whom He loves. It is theirs to say, We are the Kings of Works: the Master-builders of the Most High!
5. There are Kings of Academic Thought, men who lead in professions and in collegiate careers. The wise man is the true aristocrat. His court may not be in a palace, but within its precincts are received and entertained the leaders of the race. To be provost, to be college president or university professor, is to be seated on an intellectual throne.
The problem of academic rule is not to attract a large number of students, to put up imposing buildings, to have endowments, and fill chairs with learned specialists; to grant many degrees, and to keep the hum of a teaching staff and of a student body alive in the ears of a community, marking the college group by flags and colors, cap and gown, processions and occasions. These things are right, but are mainly accessory. We have not all of a university when we have men and buildings, money, students, brains. Back of a university there lies its foundation-idea, that of academic control.
What is academic rule? It is rule over the pride of man. A college is a place whose chief power is to inculcate humility by the means of true learning; to establish intellectual honor and integrity by searching out the ways of God in nature, science, and philosophy, and in letters and in art.
It is the primary work of a university to make men humble. The Freshman is not teachable. The Sophomore is an intellectual upstart. But by the time a man has been beaten and conquered by the great ideals of the world, which have pierced his bones and humbled his conceit--by the time the race-passions and the race-sorrows have crept across his spirit, by the time that he has been confronted with the achievements of Homer, Empedocles, Hippocrates, Michelangelo, Socrates, Buddha, Plato, Emerson, Gladstone, Bismarck, Lincoln, and Carlyle--his self-exaltation drops from him like a garment. He--who knows how to construe a few pages of the classics, who knows how to demonstrate a few mathematical problems, scan a few verses, recite a few odes, carry on a few scientific experiments, undertake a small research--how shall he compete with these rulers of the thought of men?
Then it is that the real rule of a university--its spirit of humility, and of reverence for antiquity--begins. The true university man, born and bred in the century, not in the years, in the race halls, not those alone in his Alma Mater, is neither a scoffer nor an atheist, nor a critic, sceptic, or cynic. He is a man of simple and exalted faith. God, who hath brought such great things to pass in science, nature, and art, in human character, in the destiny of nations, and the history of humble men and women, is a God before whom there must be awe and reverence, and not a flippant scouting of the ancient ideals. Man, who is so tried by temptation and scourging of the spirit, is a creature to be loved, appreciated, understood; not a being to whom shall be shown arrogance, aloofness, and pride. The university that makes snobs of its graduates has not yet entered into its kingdom of control.
A university also holds rule over truth. Absolute truth is in God's hand. But the university has class-rooms and libraries, apparatus and laboratories, which are intended for the discovery and furtherance of truth. The university is not a place to cry out for big salaries. The salaries should be living salaries. The seeker after truth should not be left without enough money for heat and shelter, for bread and meat, rest and summer-change; for the coming of children and their education. But truth may lodge without shame in an humble dwelling and may be greatly furthered without an elaborate bill of fare.
The university men of the times are the establishers of a kind of righteousness that is not always found in books. Their individual value, as they go out into the world, is to set right values on social customs and decrees; to establish the law of freedom in the home; to lead men and women out of the thraldom of ignorance, vulgarity, hearsay, and "style," into simplicity of living and a sane scale of household expense. The university leader of the future is the man who shall set laws over household accounts and who shall rule over such simple things as what best to eat and buy. He shall be an economist of the larger sort, providing for the spiritual necessities of men and their moral conduct, rather than for their balls, card-parties, and social side-shows, including church entertainments and philanthropic dances and bazaars. He shall pave the way to a larger view of wealth, influence, and reform; endue man with a keener sense of his own responsibilities, make him a creature of larger desires and of more aspiring wants.
In particular, he shall pass down from generation to generation the high and noble learning of the past; he shall keep alive the flower of courtesy and charity; he shall tell the dreams of past sages, and interpret them; he shall review the thronging nations; and he shall so imbue the mind with a love of truth, of ideals, of excellence, of honor, that a new race shall go out into a larger and a nobler world. And then a better day shall dawn for men.
6. The Kings of State. Says Milton, in his sonnet on Cromwell:
"_Yet much remains To conquer still; Peace hath her victories No less renowned than War: new foes arise, Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains. Help us to save free conscience from the paw Of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their maw_."
In the third moon of the year 1276, Bayan, the conquering lieutenant of Genghis Khan, captured Hangchow, received the jade rings of the Sungs, and was taken out to the bank of the river Tsientang to see the spirit of Tsze-sü pass by in the great bore of Hangchow--that tidal wave which annually rolls in, and, dashing itself against the sea-wall of Hangchow, rushes far up the river, bringing, for eighteen miles inland, a tide of fresh, deep-sea splendor, and thrilling all who see or hear.
In the life of nations there are times and tides. Against the tide-wall of history, beaten by many a storm, and battered by many a thundering wave, there is about to sweep the incoming wave of a new life for the race: there is about to pass a greater than the spirit of Tsze-sü,--even the Spirit of God!
"_We are living,-we are dwelling, In a grand and awful time, Age on age to ages telling, To be living is sublime_!"
We are moving out into a period of great statesmen, and of great political standards and ideals. The days before us are days which will make the Elizabethan era pale in history. Upon the head of our nation are set responsibilities such as have never before rested on any one man.
The day of the true statesman is here; the day of the demagogue is done! The rule of the orator is over the ideals and hopes of men. The demagogue prostitutes this power. His rule is over the passions, prejudices, and resentments of men. He cries aloud in the market-place, and rogues and ward-heelers, and evil-minded politicians, group themselves around him. He waves his sceptre over the vulgar and the rascals of the town.
The vital problem of municipal reform is not the shattering of the ring, the overturning of the boss, the gagging of a few loud tongues. It is the problem of the training of better bosses; the education of men and women in social control; their enlightenment, from childhood up, in civic duties, in national affairs, and the conduct of civil power. Thereupon oratory turns to its higher ends. Through statesman, preacher, and political teacher, it cries aloud of righteousness. I look for the time when the typical politician shall be an honorable man; when to be "in the ring" of municipal or national control shall mean to be an integral and orderly part of the administration of God's great world; when city life shall be purified; and when international law shall be the interpretation of the will of the Almighty for the rule of nations. We have honest doctors, lawyers, tradesmen; shall we not have an honest politician and an upright ward-boss?
Public service is a god-like service! Our Presidents shall more and more be chosen, not alone for ideas, experience, or for party affiliations: the President shall be chosen because he is a moral hero! Something has stirred in the heart of the American people, which shall not soon be stilled: a spiritual outlook upon political preferment. In the White House we long to have the great spiritual exemplars of our race. Not alone in church shall we offer up a "Prayer before Election." The time is coming when each true ballot-slip shall be a prayer.
Within the next fifty years shall be determined some of the greatest questions of history. Among them shall be questions of industrial adjustment and development, and of social progress. We must have in our Cabinet not only the representatives of War and State, of Finance, Trade, Labor, and Agriculture; but also of Education and of Social Health. This is not a dream. You and I may live to see the results of this religious awakening: it is elemental and epochal.
Back of all individual dominion there is rising a yet higher dominion--the dominion of the English-speaking race. We, having been called by the providence of God to stand at the head of the march of progress, may well ask ourselves concerning our imperial powers. The line of progress for a nation is to allow no spiritual ideal to stagnate or to retrograde. The spiritual aspiration of a nation always dominates what is called the Social Mind. We grow toward what we worship. It is ours to plant the dominion of civilization in foreign lands, and to supplant a waning culture by a richer, truer, and nobler way of life. The first thought of each of us, entering these new lands, whether merchant, soldier, educator, or missionary, should be to hold Christ aloft, that all tribes may come to His light, and kings to the brightness of His rising.
God leads us on. Said Lincoln: "I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom, and that of all about me, seemed insufficient for that day." Like a vast Hand stretched against the sky of Time is the Hand of God--a Hand writing, in these wondrous days, a destiny for generations yet to be! Rising with us are all God-fearing nations--the Teutonic, Slav, and Latin peoples. Sitting yet in darkness, and massed against us, crouch sullenly the immemorial hordes of Asia, the wild blacks of the African swamps and jungles, and the dwellers of Polynesian seas. Occident and Orient, the world's battalions are forming for new encounters and new dismays. Never since the strong-limbed Goths changed the face of Europe has there been a period of such tense anticipation, nor so great a possibility of volcanic change. We are entering an historic period of reconstruction, when new maps of the world will be drawn. The sceptre is passing into new hands: to-day the throne of civilization is being arched above the seaway which joins London and New York. To-morrow, it may be builded above Pacific tides, where our own shores look westward to the ports of Asiatic Russia. For, rising on the world-horizon, are these two World-empires, Russia and the United States. The dictators of these two countries will soon become the dictators of the human race. They are brave and virile nations, with untold reserves of power! As these two giants gird themselves for World-dominion, who but God shall gird the armor on, direct the onward course of change?
Much of the ancient wealth and beauty shall be done away. In a few generations the shrines of thirty centuries will be no more. Fane and temple and pagoda will disappear; carvings, images, and Sikh-guarded courts. Long lines of yellow-robed priests will chant their last processional hymn to Buddha, and the smoking incense to waning gods shall be quenched forever. Where Tao rites were celebrated, silence shall fall; where fakir and dervish tortured and immolated their lives, happy children shall play. Instead of the lotos of the Ganges and the Nile, there shall bloom the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Vale.
But as the empires of Buddha and Muhammad fall, a new Empire shall prevail!
"_Kings shall bow down before Him, And gold and incense bring; All nations shall adore Him, His praise all people sing. To Him shall prayer unceasing And dally vows ascend; His kingdom still increasing, A kingdom without end_."
IV. THE WORLD-MARCH: OF PRELATES AND EVANGELISTS
[LYONS]
_O Majesty throned, O Lord of all Light, Shine down on our spirits and scatter the night; As Adam received his life-impulse from Thee, Endued with all fulness, we quickened would be_
_Let all that we know--love, learning, and power-- Melt down in Thy Presence, and flame in this hour; Anoint us and bless us and lift our desire And grant us to speak as with tongues touched with fire_!
_Life flows as a dream--its pleasures are dear: The world is about us--temptation is near; Oh, guide us, and shew us the pathway to God The feet of the prophets aforetime have trod_!
_The bells cease their chime,--the hosts enter in: May many be purged of their sloth and their sin! Cheer Thou the despondent, the weary, the sad, Rouse all to rejoicing, that all may be glad_.
_And when life is o'er, and each must depart In quaking and silence,--abide with each heart; The songs of Thy saints then caught up to the skies, As waves of great waters shall thunderous rise_!
ANNA ROBERTSON BROWN LINDSAY
In Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_ there is the legend of the Sword of Assay. In the church against the high altar was a great stone, four-square, like unto a marble stone. In the midst of it was an anvil of steel, a foot high, and therein stood a naked sword by the point. About the sword there were letters written, saying, "Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is righteous king born of all England." Many assayed to pull the sword forth, but all failed, until the young Arthur came, and, taking the sword by the handle, lightly and fiercely pulled it out of the stone! By this token he was lord of the land.
Each man's life is proved by some Sword of Assay. The test of a man's call to the ministry is his power to seize the Sword of the Spirit: wield the spiritual forces of the world, insight, conviction, persuasion, truth. To do this successfully at least five things appear to be necessary: a sterling education, marked ability in writing and in public speaking, a noble manner, a voice capable of majestic modulations, and a deep and tender heart. These phrases sound very simple, but perhaps they mean more than at first appears. Have we not all met some one, in our lifetime, whose acquaintance with us seemed to have no preliminaries?--some one who never bothered to say anything at all to us, until one day he said something that leaped and tingled through our very being? This is the power that a minister ought to have with every soul with whom he comes in contact: his word should quickly touch a vital spot. No one to-day cares much for mere oratory, literary discussion, polemics, or cursory exegesis; "marked ability in writing and in public speaking" means that grip on reality which makes people quiver, repent, believe, adore!
Sincerity is the basis of such power. At heart we worship the man who will not lie; who will not use conventions or formulas in which he does not believe; who does not give us a second-hand view of either life or God; who does not play with our conscience because it is not politic to be too direct; who does not juggle with our doubts, nor ignore our hopes and powers; who also frankly acknowledges that he, too, is a man.