Part 8

=Faithful in Little Things.=--The pupil said: "I had a friend, who died lately at the age of sixty. According to my view, he has in his own way realised the type of a good citizen and a good man. He was a tradesman, and had passed through a youth of hardship, being from six in the morning till ten at night in the shop, the doors of which were open even in winter. Under his first master he quickly discovered that dishonest tricks did not pay. Therefore he became rigidly honest, studied the details of his trade, made rapid progress, kept sober and wide-awake. Accordingly he soon became his own master, and wealth came of itself. He married and had children, who turned out excellently in consequence of their father's example. Now, this man lived his whole life according to the teaching he had received in school and church. He did his duty, honoured father and mother, obeyed law and authority, never criticised those who managed the government of the country, which he did not profess to understand. He took no notice of selfish agitations, did not worry himself about the riddle of the universe, and warned his children not to be eager after novelties. He also possessed positive virtues; he was merciful and helpful, faithful and modest.

"When his sons began to study, he did not attempt to vie with them in learning. But when they attacked his childlike faith, he defended it like a man. He never ventured to occupy a public post, for he knew his limits. He never sought for distinctions, nor did he obtain any. Well, what name do the larvæ of the snake-worm give such a blameless, good, faithful man? They call him 'a servile rascal.' Is that just?"

The teacher answered: "No! it is flagrantly unjust! But there are other types of character, which are also laudable."

"Yes, indeed, but that does not lessen the value of his life; he was faithful in small things."

=The Unpracticalness of Husk-eating.=--The teacher said: "Young people say, 'What do we want with the wisdom of age? We want to learn for ourselves.' I generally answer, 'Yes, learn for yourselves--from us! What good-fortune to be able to inherit the rich experiences of others, and not to make these expensive, dirty experiments for oneself! If the young commenced where we left off, the world and humanity would progress with giant strides. Instead of this everyone begins afresh, that is, in the moral sphere. When it is a question of making a new incandescent lamp, we do not begin with a machine for generating electricity, but continue from the latest discovery of our predecessors.

"I have also asked myself whether it is necessary first to be burnt in order to dread the fire. I have never seen my children go to the oven and lay hold of the red dampers to see whether they would be burnt. They let themselves be warned, and therefore escaped the painful experience. I have asked myself whether one must first feed with the swine before one can appreciate the food of the household, and whether the Prodigal Son is a necessary transitionary type. But to all these stupid and impertinent questions life has given a negative answer.

"Swedenborg says that all sin and wickedness leave traces behind them, but that these are not apparent in the human face till old age. Subsequently, in the disrobing-room on the other side, they look as if they had been thrown through a magnifying-glass on a white screen. I once looked into an attic-room; the curtain was drawn aside, and an old man put out his head in order to look at the sun. When he saw me he hid his face immediately.

"That was a face!... God protect us!"

=A Youthful Dream for Seven Shillings.=--The teacher said: "There are people who carry about with them a measuring-rule for everything. They demand exactness and order; they love perfection in all things. They are called discontented, carping, pedantic. But it is unfair to blame them. If one is content with the mediocre, one will at last only get the worst. Men give only as little as they can, and the whole of life is defective. Conscientious men are not happy, for they cannot lower their demands; they appear to simpletons who have not learnt, that nothing is what it gives itself out to be, that nothing answers the expectations we formed of it. One is inclined to ask whether such men bring with them at birth recollections of a place or a condition where ideal perfection existed. When I was seven years old, I often remained standing fascinated before a music-dealer's shop window, and contemplated a hunter's horn which was hung up there. There was something charming in the proportions of these curved lines. This brass tube tapered off beautifully from the great width of its bell-mouth to its narrowed mouthpiece. In the gloomy street it made me hear nature's music in woods and fields; I loved the instrument. But when a boy told me that it cost thirty shillings, I wondered whether life would ever fulfil my desire, for in order to buy it I would have to go for two and a half years without breakfast. Finally I got to be thirty years old, and had some money to spare for the first time in my life. I bought the hunting-horn; it cost only seven shillings; the boy had told a lie. But the instrument had only three notes. When I got tired of my prize it was consigned to the attic.

"It was, at any rate, the fulfilment of a youthful dream!"

=Envy Nobody!=--The teacher said: "Envy nobody! As a child I was boarded out in the country in mean surroundings. I lived in a kind of shanty, ate from an earthenware plate, sat on a wooden stool. But there was a castle in the neighbourhood, a real castle, with portraits of kings in the entrance-hall, the ancestors of the young count who lived there. One Sunday we were allowed to go, first into the castle, then into the garden. That was paradise! We could bathe, and were allowed to pick the cherries, blood-black, gold-yellow, fire-red. The count looked on, but ate nothing; he had had enough. Then we left, and the gate of paradise was shut behind us.

"Fifty years later I saw the portrait of the young count, and heard his history. He looked unhappy and despairing, as though he were weary of everything. He had passed through the bitterest experiences of life, including poverty for a time. His affairs came into liquidation, and he had to spend ten years abroad in an hotel, his expenses being defrayed by his creditors. He also had his wife with him, who, as she thought, had married into paradise, in order to be immediately driven out of it again. The man had been nothing and had done nothing; all he could do was to wait for his meals. He had possessed horses and a yacht; he had gambled and borrowed money; he had eaten truffles and drunk wine; but when he was forty had to give it up, for his nose grew red and he had gout in his great toe. I will not speak of his domestic miseries.

"Now he sits in his castle, rich as Crœsus, but lonely, and educates his housekeeper's children, which are his, but which cannot bear his name. His evening meal consists of gruel, and he goes to bed at half-past nine. He dares not use his wine-cellar, for then his great toe aches. His solitary comparative pleasure is to be able to walk, in order to eat his gruel and be able to sleep. Envy nobody!"

=The Galley-slaves of Ambition.=--The teacher said: "Balzac speaks in one place of the galley-slaves of ambition, and describes their condition very much as Swedenborg describes certain of his hells, or as Homer depicts Tantalus, Ixion, and the Danaides. They are ceaselessly haunted by their passion to be superior to others; to be seen and heard before all others. The malice and love of power which this involves are necessarily punished. When the ambitious man cannot be the first and only one he becomes ill. Voltaire had to go to bed when a prince travelled past his house without visiting him. If one of such people's letters remains unanswered they think it is a sign that their credit has sunk, and they worry about the reason of it till they grow how hypochondriacal. If they read in the paper such and such important people were present when the king landed, and their names are omitted, the world is darkened for them. That is to say, it is not enough for them that they should be praised and called the greatest; they suffer pains like death when others are eulogised. They feel perpetual fear lest they should be set aside and their juniors get ahead of them. In that they resemble a great criminal who expects to be detected. The portrait of an ambitious man has a great resemblance to that of a galley-slave. Imperiousness, hatred, fear--especially fear--are depicted in his face.

"Balzac, on the other hand, was impelled by the noble ambition to make discoveries, and to do good work in which he took pleasure. But his own life was hidden. Unknown and misunderstood in his own Paris, which he had discovered, he saw petty chroniclers obtain the first prizes without being made ill by it. And when, at the age of fifty-one, he had succeeded in making a home for himself, into which he was about to bring his first and only wife, he died on the day of the publication of the banns. A fine death after a life of renunciation!"

=Hard to Disentangle.=--The teacher said: "With age, as is well known, one arrives at a different view of life than one had formerly. Then, on account of its wealth and variety, life is almost immeasurable, and above all, very difficult to disentangle.

"At the age of forty I came home after an absence of many years. On my arrival I received a dunning letter from an antiquarian bookseller. Curiously enough, without my being able to explain why, this debt caused me no further uneasiness of conscience. But then a friend came and advised me to settle the matter, as the bookseller was spreading an evil report about me. I went and paid the trifling account, but the bookseller looked so uneasy and strange, was so polite and grateful, that I began to reflect about him. When I came home I remembered this: twenty years previously I had entrusted him with an antique work of art to sell. After I had visited the man several times in his shop and the article had not been sold, I felt ashamed to go any more, began to think of something else, and forgot the matter. His present thankfulness showed that he had not forgotten it; we were then quits, if he did not still owe me something.

"Now I felt ashamed on his account, and determined not to mention the matter. But then it occurred to me that I owed his predecessor a sum of money for books. I went again, found him showing the same uneasy manner as before, and asked for his predecessor's address. He was in America. I asked whether he had relatives here in the town. He had none. I went home and thought to myself, 'Then we must drop that matter also.' In this way, in old age, one must alternate pay and let go; now as a debtor, now as creditor. But who strikes the balance of accounts? The goddess of justice, and she is neither deaf nor blind."

=The Art of Settling Accounts.=--The teacher continued: "It really looks as though we could not go hence till everything is settled, great and small alike. Recently there died an early friend of mine, who, at an important juncture, had helped me with a hundred kronas.[1] I had at first regarded it as a loan. But he never dunned me, and during the forty years which have since elapsed he was gradually transformed in my memory into a benefactor, and all was well. When at last he died a millionaire, I did not wish to trouble his executors with the trifle, but sent a wreath to the funeral with a sigh of gratitude and many kindly thoughts. Was that the end? No! Shortly afterwards I felt a kind of inward admonition to resume relations with a bookbinder whom I had ceased to employ on account of his carelessness. He came and was glad to get work again; he was greatly pleased, and declared that I had appeared just in time to deliver him. When I understood his difficulties, for he had a family, I was willing to give him fifty kronas in advance, but as I had no change I gave him a hundred, though reluctantly. I saw how his back straightened itself, and his confidence in life reawoke. He went--and never returned. I was angry at first, because he had treated me like a fool, and I dunned him with letters. But then the memory of my departed friend recurred; various thoughts wove themselves together in my mind--the pleasure of calling him a scamp, the fifty-krona note which had turned into a hundred-krona note, the scamp's need, and the part I had played as deliverer. In my own mind I gave him a discharge, and became quite quiet."

[Footnote 1: A krona = 1s. 3d.]

=Growing Old Gracefully.=--The teacher continued: "When one becomes old, one wonders at first how men have, as it were, permission to do one an injustice. If one complains, one finds no sympathy. Even our friends take the part of those who injure us. But when we have discovered the secret of it, we take it all quietly. One is cheated in ordinary business, and says to oneself, 'This is in requital for that.' Our children prove ungrateful and difficult to manage, exactly like we were. Young people are insolent and pert towards us, and we see our former selves reflected in them. Servants do their work badly, and perpetrate petty thefts; we must put up with it, when we think of our own work scamped on various occasions. Friends are faithless, just as we have been ourselves. By practice one comes at last so far, that one asks for no more, demands no more, and is no longer angry. I then always think of David when Shimei cast stones at him and cursed him, and Abishai wanted to strike off the calumniator's head. David declined to take vengeance, saying, 'Let him curse, for the Lord hath bidden him.' When the same king, because of his sins, had to choose between famine, pestilence, or raids of the enemy, he prayed 'to fall into the hands of God, and not into the hands of man.'

"He understood how to grow old gracefully, and to make up his accounts. So he departed praising God, 'Who proveth the heart and loveth uprightness.'"

=The Eight Wild Beasts.=--The teacher said: "You know yourself that when one awakes from somnambulism, one finds the world quite mad. Then one loses all hope and all confidence, and believes we are delivered into the power of the Devil. Once during such a moment of awakening, I read the works of the Adventists, and the idea struck me that they were right. They ground their belief on the Revelation of St. John, and say as follows: 'We live in the last era during which the eight wild beasts rule the earth. Of Christianity no trace is to be found: power, wealth, industry, art, science, literature, are in the hands of the pagans. The state-craft of the wild beasts is lying and force, alternating with the most insidious hypocrisy. They preach peace, distribute peace-prizes, build peace-palaces, but are always seeking war in order to be able to rob and tyrannise. If their subordinates believe them, and preach peace themselves, they are thrown into prison. But, says St. John, nations will come from the East and destroy the godless who have rejected Christ. The last battle is to be at Megiddo in Syria. But since all this takes place under God's control, the wild beasts are protected in order to carry out their work of execution. The number of the last wild beast, 666, is not yet interpreted, for it is not yet come. The eight wild beasts you can find in a book, which is called _A de G_;[1] of the people of the East you read every morning in your paper. It looks almost as though it were true. The pietists believe it, and keep their lamps burning.'"

=Deaf and Blind.=--The teacher continued: "Under the rule of the wild beast men have become demoralised. They reject every idea of a retributive justice. If anyone points to an instance of it, he is suppressed. If a blasphemer loses his tongue, they call it 'Actinomyces,' nothing more. And the obstinacy of the unrepentant revolts against heaven itself: 'It is so far to heaven; what do we know about it? We are ants; no God troubles himself about us.' If something good happens to a man, he attributes it to his own power; if something evil, he calls it 'bad-luck.' Science explains earthquakes by algebra, and if it wants to be very learned, by seismology. The quantity of crime and wickedness which _must_ exist is fixed by statistics. And yet heaven is so near. God's invisible servants are around us, in the streets and in our rooms. We do not see them, but those who have eyes, and only they, behold their operations. The world is like a vast institute for the deaf and blind, in which the unfortunates are told by their teachers that they are the only ones who can see and hear. The theosophists say that we are already living two lives--a conscious one on the earth, and an unconscious one above. But most men seem to have broken off communication with the higher plane, and therefore they cannot comprehend what is from above, but have discovered that there is no higher and no lower in the universe."

[Footnote 1: Not explained in original footnote.]

=Recollections.=--The pupil said: "Often has my experience confirmed this saying of the theosophists, that, as well as here, we live also on a higher plane from whence we receive our inspirations, ideas, and intuitions. After such visitations (do they take place by night?) I do not flourish down here, but find everything perverse, defective, absurd. I once conceived the strange idea that I have my true home somewhere else, and that a vague recollection has made me give my present home an arrangement similar to that of my real one.

"In my present abode there was a room which, after certain storms that lasted for two years, was so devastated that it looked as if devils had haunted it. Then a sum of money came into my hands unexpectedly. The next morning I awoke with the distinct determination to repair and furnish the room. I went at once to the upholsterer, and knew so exactly what furniture and curtains I wanted, that when I saw the material it looked to me familiar and welcome. A workman came, proved honest, worked quietly like a spirit, and in a few days the room was ready. When I entered it, I was seized with a sort of ecstatic shiver as though I had already seen this room once before under happy circumstances. And now when I enter the room alone, I see it resembles something which I do not remember, but which waits for me. I seem to know that _there_ I am waited for by my only true wife, by my children, friends and relations, and that this incompleteness I see is only a poor copy drawn from a dim recollection. Think, if it only were so!"

=Children Are Wonder-Children.=--The teacher answered: "What you say accords with Plato's theory of recollection. He believes that all which a child learns is recovered from some previous knowledge. During my long experience it has often happened to me to meet people who, the first time I saw them, seemed like old acquaintances. It seems, too, that the woman we love appears congenial to us, made for us, sent in our way. But most of all is this the case with our children. All children are, in spite of idle talk, wonder-children--till they have learnt to talk. Little children often say things which astound one. They understand all that we say even when we hide it from them. They seem to be thought-readers, divine our most secret purposes, and rebuke us beforehand. 'Don't do that,' said my two-year-old child before my plan was half formed. 'What?' I asked. The child did not answer, but smiled roguishly and half embarrassed, as though it wished to say, 'You know yourself already.' When the child had learnt to be silent, it pushed with its foot against the chair when the parents' talk bordered on impropriety. Often it spoke like an elder person who understands things better than others. At three years old it pronounced this opinion on the nurse, 'Hannah is very nice, but she does not understand how to treat children.' When her mother was sad, it said, 'Sit down here and don't be sad; I will tell you a story.' I will only add--there was no mimicry about it, as the ape-king would be inclined to believe. What was it then?"

=Men-resembling Men.=--The teacher said: "It seems as though some errors were necessary and unavoidable. They appear as a kind of infectious virus. A generation is inoculated with it, carries the germ till it has sprouted, and then there is an end of it. Views of the world and man come up, are disseminated, evaporated, and disappear. But those who have been inoculated with them believe they are their own views, because they have assimilated them with their personality. Often the error ends in a compromise with a new view. Thus Darwinism made it seem probable that men derived their origin from animals. Then came the theosophists with the opinion that our souls are in process of transmigration from one human body to another. Thence comes this excessive feeling of discomfort, this longing for deliverance, this sensation of constraint, the pain of existence, the sighing of the creature. Those who do not feel this uneasiness, but flourish here, are probably at home here. Their inexplicable sympathy for animals and their disbelief in the immortality of the soul points to a connection with the lower forms of existence of which they are conscious, and which we cannot deny. The doctrine that we are created after God's image involves no contradiction, for the spirit is from God; but there is no word which frightens these anthropomorphists so much as the word 'spirit.' Yes, there is one, and that is the word 'spirits,' which makes the fleshy part of them shudder."

=Christ Is Risen.=--The teacher said: "After we have had Christianity as a civilising agency for nineteen hundred years, people begin to discuss it. Is this the opportune time to ask whether Christ has existed and whether the documents of Christianity are genuine? It reminds one of the author who wrote a book to prove that Napoleon never existed. It is as if we were now to discover that Cæsar's _Commentaries_ are false, and that he never conquered Gaul, or as if we discussed whether the discovery of America had been useful. Ibsen's partisans have denied that Columbus discovered America; they say it was Leif Erikssen (perhaps we shall soon hear it was his wife).

"However, Christ returned again at the end of the last century, and was received by all. The pagans depicted him as the poor school-teacher; the anarchists celebrated him as the type of suffering humanity; the symbolists did homage to him as Christus Consolator; the socialists preached his gospel to the obscure, the weary, and heavy-laden. He was to be seen every-where--in the quarters of the French general staff and in the espionage office; in Lourdes and in Rome; on Mont Martre and in Moscow. His churches and convents were purified; his miracles explained by occultists, spiritists, hypnotists; science progressed and confirmed the prophecies. Finally we saw at the congress of religions in Chicago in 1897 that all peoples and religions of the world bent their knees when Christ's especial prayer, the Lord's Prayer, was recited. Then the believers gave each other the brotherly kiss and greeting, 'Christ is risen!'"