Part 3

Again, this is the greatest of all idealisms in that it sets for the human being the hardest and the highest of all human tasks, self-sacrifice. The wonder of it, that across the old physical law of survival of the fittest by brute means, supreme, unchecked, unhindered two thousand years ago, could have crept the gleam of a higher law, strangely contradicting it,--the survival of that which is fittest in the individual, perhaps at the expense of the body. The greatest marvel in all the world’s history is that Christ could have been; that the very idea of soul, of human development transcending the physical in utter self-sacrifice, could have come into existence is proof enough of the divine. That teaching, so clear, so unmistakable, has been blurred and forgotten, as nation and individual have succumbed to the lesser law, but it still is there. Christianity left behind? It is millions of years ahead, so far ahead that it is still dim before our vision.

Must æons pass before the human race will begin to realize how great was that message, how divine, how far it reached into depths which nothing else had touched, how high, how all but unattainable its service? Is there no chance for this Christianity, with its stern teaching of sacrifice, of eternal endeavor, for this faith, never tried with sufficient freedom from the trammels of dogma, with the deepest challenge, the highest possibility that has come before the race?

Since no life can be worth living without faith in power transcending nature’s manifestations of physical force; without some ideal of human conduct, of right and wrong, rising above the needs of “biological man”; without a sense of further scope, of wider opportunity than the mere span of human existence allows; since our forefathers held these high beliefs and lived more greatly than we; since no man has disproved them; since the very effort to disprove is a contradiction of the laws of thought, carrying processes of reason into depths of life profounder than reason; since we have powers, capabilities of emotion, divination of higher meanings; since we know aspiration, hope, love, let us use these greater powers and let them build our greater world. The choice is ours; why choose the less, and fling away the greater?

The only genuine progress for us is progress in the inner life. We know the greater meaning, the higher significance, not in the mere way in which the facts of the physical world are known, but in a far higher way. By that uncertainty, full of challenge, which is the condition of real growth, rousing the creative will, it is ours to make great our lives in accordance with the loftiest hope the race has known.

VIII

MUCH of what I have been saying was written before this war began. In the great hush that has fallen upon the nations, is it not well for us to stop and ask anew whither our progress has been tending? What words have those who have been taught to live and breathe and think in terms of matter, wherewith to voice this awful stirring of the soul? People cry out that the Dark Ages will come again through this fearful slaughter, this waste of resources intellectual and material. Have not the Dark Ages been with us for decades? For mankind, more and more stripped of the deeper faith, the larger hope, more and more cut off from the finer part of his own nature, what darker ages can there be than these shadowed by the dreary positivism, undiscussed and undefined, but merely assumed, of our day? Many a thinker must see, in this present awful crisis, not an isolated phenomenon, not a mere political event for which a train of political causes had been laid, but also one of the natural results of our ways of thinking, of our kind of progress. The growth of material over spiritual conceptions in the last fifty years is appalling; to such an end the Gospel of the Perfect Brute legitimately leads. We may believe ourselves through this struggle untouched, apart, and watch with wonder and surprise, but the same forces are at work with us, and potent. This terrible, crashing exposure is something to make us, who are not in the thick of the battle, stop and think.

We are shuddering at a German nation Nietzscheized, brutalized, as we conceive, through a brutal ideal; but are the Germans so far removed? Have they not simply adopted, a little more vigorously, a little more frankly than we, a doctrine which is becoming the moving force in all countries, replacing Christianity? Are they not simply the most progressive of all nations? Since the theory of evolution was demonstrated, the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, which should be taught as the mere working of a physical law, has come to be taught as ethics, and an odd confusion of thought has come about. How insidiously the idea of the biological necessity is coming to be considered the whole necessity of man, we are only now faintly realizing; the need of spiritual struggle, of spur to that instinct which may save man from much that had seemed biological necessity, is becoming more and more dim. It is one thing to recognize warfare in the physical world, the strife that attended the evolution of man; it is another thing to exalt this to a code of conduct and deliberately teach it. A conscious lowering of nature to the first primitive impulse, a deliberate going backward, is a very different matter from following these impulses in the slow process of growth. If a higher thought comes along your line of vision, woe betide you if you choose the lower! Doubtless dragons and prehistoric monsters would have behaved differently if they had got better ideas into their heads; we shall not be acquitted by posterity if, after a finer ideal has been suggested, we go back to writhing and biting in the slime.

I am a plain American citizen, with no direct connection with this war, as innocent of having anything to do with starting it as the Kaiser is claimed by his upholders to be; yet I feel a sense of guilt. I am ashamed to look the young in the face; it seems to me that, in some way, we older folk have betrayed them in letting humanity come to such a pass; in tampering with the ways of thought and of belief which have let this thing be. This deification of biological man has not as yet gone with us so far as exalting the gospel of warfare; we cry out, when we see the logical outcome of ideas taught with such fervor through the last decades, against the German evangel of the mailed fist.

Yet England too has her theorists teaching the biological necessity of war, that the fundamental laws which govern human conduct are the laws of brute force, the survival of the fittest in death struggle. America has been too profoundly influenced by Germany in educational matters, has sat too submissively at her feet, to escape. Accepting so many of the minor premises of her teaching, will not the major ultimately follow as a matter of course?

It is Germany that has carried furthest this materialistic modernism, has perfected it. The word Germany has been a name to conjure with in swift denial if one but ventured to suggest the possibility of a spiritual interpretation of life. High intellectual achievement has been that of the Germany of these later years, but not the highest; she has kept the mailed fist upon the spiritual aspirations of mankind, and has made a treaty, on her own terms, with the human soul, with what loss of territory! We have not yet accepted the whole of this new evangel; we have doubts, mental reserves. Neither have we, in our period of enlightenment, made gain in developing those forces of mind and soul that would enable us to refute it.

Man, from a purely biological point of view, indulging in the biological necessity of war in the year of our Lord 1915, is a sorry spectacle, but perhaps it is, as Mr. Shandy said, “no year of our Lord at all,” so progressive are we. Now that we make our swift leap backward many thousand years, we pause to wonder whether this means only a quickened pace in a direction already chosen. Of the achievements of the mailed fist the Neanderthaler man, barring a difference of weapons, would have been capable. How shall we escape this progress which is utter retrogression?

This overwhelming catastrophe has brought the issues squarely before us. It is well that the forces we have to fight have come into the open; we know at last the world we live in. We are face to face, with a distinctness never before presented, with two great principles: the law of brute force, of the survival of the fittest, made into a code of conduct; the law of Christianity, with its possibility of higher development, finer progress than brute force dreamed,--the growth of the greater through sacrifice of the less; soul-achievement at the expense of flesh. In this great hour of need shall we let the shallow intellectualism of much recent thought dominate, or shall we boldly choose that faith in which the best of human life, from its first dim stirring to triumphant self-sacrifice, is summed up? One way lies inevitable slipping backward; the other way lies progress in inner life too great for word or present vision.

These are crucial moments; how great the crisis none may understand. Many an idealist, lost in the more than forty years of materialism of our time, is praying that out of the horror of the present may come better things: a deeper sense of the deepest needs of life; a knowledge that neither material comfort, nor physical health, nor materialistic thought can wholly satisfy; a hunger and thirst for which only the spiritual can suffice. Suffering bears strange fruit, and the suffering of the present days and of the days to come is incalculable. Even the mental anguish of mere watchers of the strife may help reveal to the modern world as profound need of faith.

One thing is evident in all this awful crash: men still are brave; never before, perhaps, have they fought against such great odds. The splendor of their courage dims our eyes. Shall the fighters in the world of spirit, “fighters in the noblest fight,” be less brave in defending in the face of odds, perhaps never so great before, these inner truths, deeper than dogma, deeper than theology, deeper than life itself, the immemorial heritage of the race,--longing unutterable for righteousness, for faith in the spiritual, for enlarging and unending life?

THE END

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