Chapter 1 of 3 · 3954 words · ~20 min read

Part 1

WHITHER?

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1915

_Published May 1915_

WHITHER?

IN a final division of household possessions of my ancestors, a quaint gray chest has brought me a heritage of unexpected value in packages of letters, written many years ago, and tossed carelessly here with mouse-eaten diplomas and articles of ancient wear. As I read, deciphering oftentimes with difficulty the old-fashioned handwriting on the yellowing paper, I pause to marvel. What fullness of life is here! What richness! What greatness!

There are letters from a mother to a little daughter at school in the city; letters from an aged father who has been visiting his clergyman son; glad letters, written to bring joy at marriages; solemn, and yet joyous letters, written to console in death. Doubtless they are akin to hundreds of others still resting in the corners of boxes and old desks, and to others innumerable which have perished, recording the experience of a generation, two generations ago. Written out of narrower lives, so far as mere worldly circumstances go, than those with which I come in contact to-day, they reveal a far deeper life, a profounder hope and faith, a recognition of wider horizons than most of our contemporary world knows. Here is a knowledge of spirit as the one great reality; of divine meanings everywhere; a sense of the greatness of the issue in life as a warfare waged in the name of the soul; faith in the undying character of righteousness, in the endlessness of human hope. Words are here traced which take away one’s breath, in the grandeur of their denial of that which seems, in the splendor of assurance: “My sister Mary to-day entered upon eternal life--”

It is not primarily theology upon which they dwell: dogma plays a lesser part here than I should have supposed. It is upon the inner sources of hope and consolation, the life-giving power of faith, faith drawn often from hard experience, faced in the light of a great hope. Here is a real sense of the swift flitting of things earthly, and the great promise therein; here is a constant dwelling upon the Master, the face of the Master, the vision of perfectness. Those writers repeat lovingly his words, thus bringing one another courage in sharp anguish of grief and at beds of illness; and the thought of sacrifice is ever in their minds, of outer loss that is great inner gain. One is aware of certain immovable tenets of hard theology, but I note that these have small part in their thought, their feeling, in the way in which faith vitalizes their daily lives.

Letters that I am privileged to see to-day are as different as if they were written by a different race; chance articles in newspapers and journals, intended to appeal to the contemporary public, reinforce the impression in regard to our present absorptions, our present limitations. These later letters are no less full of human tenderness, and possibly they are more outspoken in regard to it, but they bespeak an inner poverty, a contrasting narrowness of life. Their largeness, if wide horizons are suggested, is external, geographical,--the largeness of travel abroad, by land or sea, of motor-trips there or at home. They are full of restlessness, desire for change, rushing hither and yon. Their great concern is with material things: diet, dress, details of operations, fluctuations in stocks. There is much about reform, suffrage, the fighting of Tammany, measures for the physical betterment of factory boys and girls. There are many wrongs to right, for the most part centring in the body; but, in spite of my sympathy with each distinct measure and my strenuous efforts to help forward some of them, I feel great sense of lack. The horizon is near and attainable; the sky comes down like a brass bowl over our heads; I stifle in this world of nostrums, of remedies, of external cures for moral evils. This superficial material optimism which ignores the deepest need, the deepest answer, fails to suffice. One is aware of a lessening life, a drying of the very sources of vitality; the old sense of illimitable destiny, of greatness, of the challenge of eternity, is gone.

A kind of materialistic Epicureanism dominates our modern world; robbed of Eternity, we mean to make Time pay to the uttermost,--hence this nervous excitement, this feverish activity. Has any question been more absorbing during the last decades than the question how much space could be covered, on earth or in air, in a minute of time? Back of our hurry lies something deeper than the mere desire to excel in this or that sport, this or that means of rapid transit, this or that business enterprise or philanthropy. It is an unconfessed manifestation of our immense sense of loss; a morbid outpouring of that energy which might work healthily and to great ends if the old hope were there of endless destiny. We have but a few minutes in which to rob the house of life; let us seize all the articles in sight; death, the householder, is even now waiting to take us into custody. We want as much as we can get; we want all, and we foolishly think that hurrying feet and twitching muscles can win it. We will crowd all into the swift, flitting minutes, though Life should break in the process.

THE question why we, who are the heirs of all the ages, should be so much worse off than our ancestors in that which means essential life might well give us pause. In all external matters we seem to have made great gain. We are carried about more swiftly; our houses have far superior plumbing; the goods we purchase are delivered more promptly, and existence has in every way become far more convenient and easy. Is not this the age of progress? Progress--it is a word constantly on men’s lips; have earlier ages ever heard such a din of talk about progress? It would appear as if our forefathers had little claim to be called happy, having lived before the time of great modern inventions and discoveries; yet, with this sheaf of old records in my hands, and many memories at work, I am forced to admit that the comparison works the other way. Here, in these fading papers, is a sense of significance in living, of illimitable destiny, that makes me ask why we are thus stripped, robbed, disinherited. Why is it that we seem to have inherited all of life except the point? The willful poverty of our spiritual lives contrasts strangely with their quiet sense of great possessions.

After all, are frenzied motion and progress synonymous? Any kitten chasing its own tail might, if we were really observant, disprove for us much of our modern claim of great gain. Would any age of real progress talk so much about progress, and so loudly count its achievements? Is not much of this done to hide the inner sense of loss and lack? Perhaps it is from a far-off country childhood that I derive a persistent belief, not obscured by all the noise and dust and glamour of our time, that real growth is silent. For many and many a day I have heard this glowing talk of progress, of widening intellectual horizons, and for many a day have watched the growing wistfulness of human faces. The more thoughtful become increasingly sad, while the number of the merely stolid increases apace, as do the restless ones, with their apparent longing for distraction and change. Unfinished faces, unsatisfied faces, are familiar to us all. They lack the high record of experience greatly taken; expression that denotes profound inner life. To-day we are so comfortable, so enlightened, and, with our widening philanthropy, so estimable, that we surely ought to be happy! Yet we see few satisfied faces, such as we can remember from long ago, full of inner content,--faces “on which the dove of peace sat brooding,”--and we pause to ask what our boasted progress has to offer by way of compensation for the great loss that has come through the seeming gain of these later years?

The whole emphasis of life has changed since those days; its focus has shifted. The meanings of existence were to our ancestors inner meanings; now, passionate clutching at externals betrays a different aim. They show themselves capable of fault and error in these recorded experiences of old days, yet they are lightened and lifted by a great power; they touch ever the divine. Their contrasted reading of the significance of life shows most emphatically in this: they thought and felt in terms of the spirit. The modern world thinks and lives and speaks in terms of the body, not of mind and soul. The soul, that secret of personality, conceived as a part of one not wholly caught in the mechanical chain of things and capable of choice, was their great concern. To them a little child was something sacred, immortal, whose endless destiny commanded of those to whom it was entrusted, alertness, watchfulness, lest its feet should go astray from the narrow path that led to the heavenly hills. Words spoken near the cradle where the new-born baby lay, turned the spot to holy ground.

To those of us who are most advanced to-day, a little child is a little animal; few are left who, in its presence, think of sacredness any more than in the presence of a little pig. There is the utmost alertness in meeting its physical needs; there is, if possible, a trained nurse to bring scientific knowledge to its requirements, to keep loving fingers away; but the ideas that encircle it concern for the most part its body. Meanwhile, the most progressive thought of the age is busy with the question whether its standard cannot be raised to that of choice animal stock; whether the infant human being may not be bred, as colt or calf of approved ancestry is bred, by choice of the physically fit. This represents the furthest vision of the future; this is the goal against which the imagination of the present dreams.

III

IT is an era of the flesh and its needs, its possibilities,--of unawareness, for the most part, of any aspects deeper than the physical. Many of us can remember the day when we were taught that we had immortal souls, to whose safeguarding thought and care and profound endeavor must go. The chief question was, “Is it right or wrong?” The chief question to-day is, “Is it sterilized?” Life, which used to be a brave flight between heaven and hell, has come to be a long and anxious tip-toeing between the microbe and the antiseptic. It is not that I object to antiseptics, but that I object to the amount of good brain-space they have come to occupy, to the exclusion of more important matters.

The modern world has a new and elaborate dogma of the body, but conviction (if it exist) in regard to the soul is tentative and wary. For many a past year the faith has been taught, the belief has been growing, that physically fit of necessity means mentally fit, that physical power is the measure of a man’s efficiency. The one glory of our college life lies in its sports, and education of mind is more and more giving way to education of muscle. The only ideal of perfection now in evidence is an ideal of physical perfection; for this no sacrifice is too great, no case too onerous. Images of perfect bodily development are kept before the young,--the Apollo, with beauty of sinew and muscle; but the face of the Christ is growing ever more and more dim before their eyes, and is more and more apologetically presented, if presented at all.

Yet this worship of the body, with its elaborate ritual of observances, its priests, its solemn rites; its great festivals wherein spellbound spectators, fifty thousand, a hundred thousand strong, in huge amphitheatres witness contests of physical strength; this monotheistic devotion, made up of fears for the flesh, and hope for the flesh, lacks much of a true religion.

I have often of late wished that some one wise enough in knowledge of things Latin would write the history and the inner development of a young Roman Progressive in the early stages of the Roman decadence. What feeling of growth and gain would be there to record! What assurance of outdistancing his crude forefathers! What sense of widening horizons, and of sudden freedom in laying aside old scruples! The point of time chosen should be that at which the word _Salus_, salvation, began to be interpreted as physical salvation, and the persistent concern with bodily life marked the beginnings of decay.

The one saving grace of our time perhaps lies in its generous philanthropic and social effort. We are more sensitive to our neighbor’s needs than we used to be, but we have a most limited conception of our neighbor’s needs, and, with all our quickened sympathy, we do our neighbor injustice in failing to recognize his deepest necessity. Grown so pitiful of hunger, why do we fail to realize the spiritual starvation of these years? We devise all sorts of machinery for ameliorating his physical condition, for getting him more pay, securing him better dramatic spectacles; we teach him that his house should be plumbed, his children’s food sterilized; but for him and for his benefactors wider vision would mean great gain. We are feeding the lesser hunger; that is well, but it is not enough; we are arming him to meet the lesser foe. Does he, too, feel a sense of inner loss and lack in it all? All that America has to offer may be a poor exchange for the mystic faith brought with him from the fatherland. At least we should beware lest harm come to our neighbor through our manifold preoccupations with the needs of the body, through the contagion of an ideal of material comfort as the greatest earthly good; for even perfect physical well-being has its limitations as a solution of the problem of existence. The destiny of man--once terror and splendor attended the word; it was once a spiritual mystery, connoting endless endeavor, endless opportunity. Now the highest dream of high destiny is the porcelain bathtub, or some safe shelter behind a wire screen, beyond the attack of germs.

One wonders, moreover, why so much applied Christianity to-day fails to recognize itself as Christianity, and is disassociated from the faith in spiritual verities which brought it into being. Now and then one hears a philanthropic scientist claim that the new efforts to aid humanity originated with beneficent science, or an economist that the move toward betterment is the result of economic thought, both ignoring the great force which has kept alive through ages the impulse toward love of one’s brother; both mistaking new methods for ancient motive power and unaware of their own relation to it. Yet back of this recent effort is the impetus of long years of definite religious teaching, with its potency in quickening the will,--to be reinforced perhaps, but never replaced, by the teaching of practical efficiency. Will this effort to succor continue, as that diviner pity, that healing done in the name of the Father, slips more and more from men’s minds? Will this present sense that one’s neighbor should have similar clothing and similar “modern conveniences” to one’s own prove a lasting basis of human brotherhood? The love of one’s fellow man must be fed from deeper springs.

We have need of profounder faith, and of more poignant fear than this age knows. I am not sure that all the physical benefits that could be imagined or enumerated for ourselves or for others could make up for the supreme loss in this shifting the attention, altering the whole emphasis of life in the innumerable ways in which the physical now obtains over the mental and spiritual. We look longingly back to our forefathers, who lived primarily in the spirit, with constant sense of spirit-values, not in the flesh and that hoped-for immortality of the flesh,--or the nearest approximation to it,--that haunts our world to-day. In our great outer prosperity and inner poverty, our immense acquisition of external knowledge, and incalculable loss of deeper realities, our morality shifting its great concern from the welfare of the soul to that of the body, we find no symbol so fitting as the old fable of the dog and his shadow in the brook. Dropping his bone to grasp the shadow of the bone, he went hungry away.

Why this swift renunciation of that which has made for profounder life in our ancestors, and the loud cry of Progress as the treasure slips away? There is no age which has known in theory so much regarding orderly development in human affairs, the growth of the present from the past, and no age which has shown so little sense of the deeper meaning of these laws. The human race has never talked so much of continuity, and never, perhaps, has it made so sharp a turn. Modern science has taught us much concerning organic growth, cause, and effect as dominating the physical world; evolutionary theory is the basis of our study of language, of literature, of all human institutions. Clearly and unmistakably comes the teaching of our time that, in all aspects of life, the present is rooted in the past, indissolubly united in unbroken chain; but, curiously enough, whereas the law has been grasped in connection with matters material, matters intellectual, matters æsthetic, in matters spiritual there is a sudden halt or break. We prattle learnedly of evolution, but we have little conception of it in that which should be the deepest concern of life, the development of the soul. Nature, we are told, admits no gaps, yet it would seem that the great modern majority turns abruptly from the faith which has sustained human life from generation to generation, ignoring, as no age before has done, the best in the past. In so doing, does it not repudiate the law upon which our understanding of everything else is based? Distrusting in the study of physical life any theory not based upon ideas of growth, sequence, old custom, in matters spiritual we demand the fresh, the untried; not for reverence of that which has been attained, but because we find an idea startling and original, do we welcome it.

When Bergson assures us that an element of will is to be reckoned with in all growth, is it because we have drifted so near enslavement to a purely mechanical system of thought that we hail this as new doctrine and therefore acceptable? If it were whispered abroad that the idea is of unimaginable antiquity, that it has been at the basis of every ethical system ever founded, would his large audiences dwindle? If the idea of God, of immortality, could be advertised among the novelties, instead of among the long inheritances, who would refuse to believe? Belief in the universe as essentially spiritual, God-created; belief in the deathlessness of the human soul, belief in right-doing in the light of these great faiths, have been associated with the age-long growth of the race; can we ignore, or lightly cast aside, that which has been at the very heart of the spiritual evolution of our forefathers?

It is not merely in matters of religious faith that we find this sudden break with the past; the ignorance shown by many modern leaders of the glory of our literature; their pride in this disregard of “the best that has been thought and said in the world”; their assumption that which antedates contemporary discovery is worthless, is full of menace. A great thinker of a hundred years ago, I was recently told, is “a back number,” and therefore valueless. Again comes that puzzling thought of continuity, the necessity of recognizing all the stages of growth. Why the enormous importance of every step in the physical past, this slight regard for the mental development? The race-experience, or the best of it, is recorded in our literature; here again are the foundations upon which we must build, if we are to build truly. Here is treasure too great to throw away so lightly.

BACK of all this absorption in physical and material welfare lies, of course, the preponderating intellectual influence of the century just past, with its passionate pursuit of truth through matter. No one wishes to decry the services of science to our knowledge of the physical world; the great discoveries in the theoretical field, the great inventions in the applied. It is one of the profoundest ironies of human existence that our blessings and our curses come subtly intertwined; we mortals forget that one seldom comes without the other, and are prone to take as pure blessing that which is new. The measure of curse in our latest great achievements may be greater than we dream, although it is difficult for people to believe, in the sweep of a great movement, that it can mean anything but pure progress in a straight line. Yet we move ever by zigzags, this extreme and that. When will the race ever learn the art of mental equilibrium, of steady advance, employing all the human faculties, instead of exploiting a few?

The many subtle wrongs done the human spirit by this complete surrender to the world of matter, it would be difficult to enumerate. I recall the emphatic assertion of one of the new thinkers, arguing with one who held in all sincerity the old, simple faith: “The only subject worth study is man, man considered from a biological point of view.” The initial genesis, the growth, the inevitable end, the physical actions and reactions,--that is man from the biological point of view. In the presence of people who hold this belief I feel as if an extinguisher were coming down, slowly smothering my very flame of life. You doubtless recall that iron chamber of Spanish Inquisition times, so fashioned that it closed in, day by day, a few inches upon the unfortunate inmate? So life to-day, for unnumbered people, grows narrower, threatening extinction. That earlier victim had no choice; one can but marvel at the modern folk, who themselves turn the key that shuts them in, and are content with their lessening world.

The voices of those who claim that mind is a secretion of matter, of those who find the way to truth through matter only, though not representing the wisest in our intellectual vanguard, have been heard above the others, and humanity is prone to follow where the loud voices call. Whether it is the fault of the leaders, or of the forlorn camp-followers who trail after the victorious army, picking up and misusing scraps of information; whether it is the fault of passive on-lookers, ready to believe anything that is told by anybody,--be it professional utterance or popular inferences therefrom, in many cases unwarranted,--certain it is that we have spent the greater part of our lives in the shadow of the crass materialism which is one of the by-products of the machinery, intellectual and other, of the period just drawing to a close. It is a doctrine which fits absolutely the great and sudden influx of wealth during the last decades, pandering to the same tendencies, the same blindnesses, a twofold materialism of theory and practice.