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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75631 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+                               WHITHER?
+
+
+
+
+                               WHITHER?
+
+
+
+
+                          BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+                       HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+                     The Riverside Press Cambridge
+                                 1915
+
+
+
+
+           COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
+
+
+             COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+
+                          ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+
+                         _Published May 1915_
+
+
+
+
+                               WHITHER?
+
+
+
+
+                               WHITHER?
+
+
+
+
+                                   I
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+                                  II
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+
+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.
+
+It is a materialism stupid, unfounded, turning its back upon the
+earlier idealisms of poet, philosopher, religious believer, not so
+much because of reasoning processes as because of a sudden shifting
+of attention. Wonderful things may be observed under the microscope,
+wonderful things through the telescope; wonderful things are day by
+day invented. Is it likely that there is anything beyond all this? To
+recent generations, as to that progressive dog, the reflection in the
+water seemed for the moment, as is often the case, more real than the
+reflected object; hence this tragedy of loss.
+
+The human mind has been suddenly diverted by a loud noise outside; a
+sudden change of tension results. Where one looks quickly, all heads
+are turned. It is a noise of motor-boats, aeroplanes, engines of all
+kinds; a sight of airships, flying like birds; of submarines, diving
+like fish; of moving pictures with their endless panorama. Mankind
+is childishly diverted; the hearing of the ears, the seeing of the
+eyes,--it is enough. The skepticisms of the seventeenth and eighteenth
+centuries tried to reason out their origins, to explain upon what
+they were based; not so here. This is the most unthinking of systems,
+not troubling to give a rational account of itself. Thought is out of
+fashion: nowadays we observe! Through this preponderance of observation
+over thought in this great period, the human mind has greatly suffered
+in surety of process, in logic, in differentiation of mental processes.
+The exercise of pure reason has become almost obsolete; the idea that
+thought can be exercised apart from sense, from study of phenomena,
+is all but forgotten. Whether or not we assume that matter is the
+origin and the end of all things, the world of to-day thinks in terms
+of matter; is content to live and breathe and have its being in matter;
+hopes, aspires, and prays, if it hope, aspire, and pray at all, in
+terms of matter.
+
+Our very vocabulary is degraded; the most far-reaching symbols of our
+language come seldom into use, or appear with diminished meaning.
+Follow, for instance, the course of the word “infinite” through the
+antics of contemporary literature. Our phraseology has become carnal;
+our vital terms are terms of physical life. Nowhere is the limitation
+of contemporary thought more apparent than in these instruments of
+speech. One must read again Wordsworth, Shelley, Carlyle, Ruskin,
+Arnold, Meredith, to meet great words, now little employed, that make
+you realize the utmost reach of life; in so doing, one pauses in
+dismay, realizing how full contemporary speech is of lesser terms, how
+few employ the greater words that tell the inner life of the soul.
+
+All forms of idealism have suffered during the past century of
+progress, more through being ignored than through being refuted; there
+still are thinkers who consider Kant, with his demonstration of the
+universe mind-made, a wiser teacher than any who have followed him,
+yet these have few disciples. Of the two old hypotheses, that this is
+a world of spirit, that it is a world of matter, the latter has been
+the predominant choice of our time. That choice has been reinforced
+by the impact of a wonderful physical and material development, while
+there has been no corresponding gain in the spiritual and the purely
+intellectual; for many years the best of the fine young energy of
+the race has busied itself, either in investigation or in invention,
+with the world of matter. We hear endlessly of the great advance of
+our time, of the surety of its knowledge, the doing away with baseless
+old idealisms. What, after all, has been achieved? The origin of human
+thought, the destination of the human thinker, are as profound a secret
+as before this unparalleled progress. Science, which has been the great
+intellectual adventure of the last century,--to what has it led us?
+Only again to that edge of the unknown, where we confront the infinite.
+It has not gained by one hair’s breadth upon the encompassing mystery
+of our lives.
+
+
+
+
+                                   V
+
+
+THE special form of idealism held by our forefathers, the Christian
+faith, with its great central tenets of God, immortality, the
+necessity of right-doing in the light of these faiths, has suffered
+with the other forms of idealism during the last decades. Those who,
+intentionally or unintentionally, have attacked, many of those who have
+defended, have alike done it injury. Of our intellectual vanguard,
+some have denied, some have ignored, some have been wisely patient
+and silent, awaiting the adjustment of new wisdom to old. As for the
+first,--surely those who hold sense-observation to be the basis of all
+knowledge should take no such vast leap into the dark as that involved
+in denial of these old beliefs. It is when certain of these new
+thinkers slip beyond their own self-defined province, and philosophize
+in ways contradicting their own premises, that one fails to follow
+them; when, grown bold with their conquest of physical nature, they
+make a vast leap from observation of phenomena into metaphysical
+statement, without consciousness of what they are doing, that one
+listens with profound distrust. Doubtless we have all known one or two,
+ready to make assertions dogmatic beyond the dogmatism of old theology,
+founded upon nothing but the assumption that they, who can truly
+observe facts in the physical world, could assert nothing but fact. I
+respect them when they observe; I tremble when they begin to generalize.
+
+It is indeed a crowning irony when one is called upon to believe, in
+the name of discoveries in the world of phenomena, that faith in God
+and in immortality is untenable. Because it is possible to see with the
+aided eye organisms unsuspected before our day,--this does not prove
+that the immemorial spiritual instincts of humanity have no foundation.
+The assumption that the great hopes of mankind cannot be true because
+they cannot be detected under microscope or through telescope, has
+floated in the air, darkening wise counsel, has assumed an authority
+never won; the present is full of unnecessary renunciations and
+unproved denials. In the intoxication of new discovery regarding the
+laws of organic growth, the leap from belief in unseen realities to
+doubt or to denial has been too swift and too absolute. Probably, in
+a great majority of cases, thought, intellectual process, has had
+little to do with the change. Humanity has lost hope without knowing
+why; the air has been thick with doubt and fear. Hearing a great noise
+in the dark, aware of attack, many have rushed away, leaving great
+treasure, while the enemy was still far from taking the stronghold.
+This new poverty of life which we call Progress is thus, in many cases,
+the misfortune, but not the fault, of those who, unable to think for
+themselves, take for granted that the most insistent voice must be the
+right voice.
+
+How greatly the defenders of the faith, in much of the warfare, have
+missed the issue! The time that has been lost, the good territory
+yielded in contesting the literal interpretation of Genesis, may well
+fill us with shame. If the story of the serpent of Eden must slip from
+dogma to myth, must faith in the unseen realities therefore go? If our
+forefathers were wrong in linking the large faith of their spiritual
+lives indissolubly with the story of Adam and that of Jonah, we must
+discriminate where they failed to discriminate, remembering in all
+humility that with their smaller knowledge of external things went a
+far profounder knowledge than ours of things spiritual. We must keep
+the greater; the less is not to us the sacrifice it was to them; let it
+go!
+
+If we ask, why this close linking with myth, who can answer? We
+know only that the human soul develops slowly; shade by shade the
+truth grows clear. We, who have learned something of the incredible
+slowness of physical development, can afford to have patience with the
+spiritual, but we cannot afford to let slip back anything that the soul
+has achieved, proved, made its own. In the long quarrels over the husk,
+the kernel has too often slipped out of sight; essentials have gone
+with unessentials. We can no longer in good faith teach the young that
+the misfortune of our present predicament may be traced to eating an
+apple; but those of us who are unable to step to the marching music of
+our time may, in impassioned good faith, until modern thinkers make a
+better case against us than they have yet made, teach the young that
+the great realities of life are of mind and soul, not body; that growth
+and change are necessary, fundamental, vital, the very condition of
+life; that it is for them to remove reverently whatever outer veil may
+have obscured their forefathers’ great light of faith; but that doom is
+upon them if they lose the light.
+
+Doubtless the greatest wrong done the Christian faith by its defenders
+was the attempt to reduce it to a mere matter of reasoning. The
+pity of it is that, at a time when the whole fabric of Christianity
+was shaken and the whole spiritual life was at stake, theologians
+should so have emphasized fact, clinging to a dead literalness of
+interpretation! Through the long decades of the nineteenth century,
+trying to meet the geologists upon their own ground, they were very
+properly worsted. Why borrow, and use weakly, weapons which belong
+to a different warfare, knowledge? Sense-perception, playing a large
+part, and rightly, in science, is neither starting-point nor goal here,
+nor is historical fact. Proofs of a real religion are not limited
+to repetition of fact. When they imitated the scientists, in their
+demand for external evidence, and imitated them badly, the inevitable
+happened. More and more their own great world of spiritual aspiration
+and endeavor was ignored by those whose high privilege it was to make
+known the vitalizing power of the faith they held, its subtle answer
+to the soul’s deepest need. The doom of a faith is its loss of inner
+sources of vitality, its “materialization in fact,” and perhaps the
+Church has been rightly punished for forgetting that its weapons should
+be primarily weapons of the spirit, its world the world of divine
+endeavor. This is no time to haggle over theology; the object is not to
+save the church, but to save alive the souls of men.
+
+Myth could go; dogma itself could go; Christianity would still be.
+Milestones in the path of the human spirit, dogmas have done great
+service, but none have been great enough to express the potential
+greatness of the spiritual life of the human race. Greatly have they
+helped; at times they have greatly hindered. Seemingly necessary
+bulwarks in time of stress and siege, the human soul has lived on
+after their demolishing; the human spirit is greater than they. Modern
+warfare has demonstrated that great forts and intrenchments are
+useless; that does not mean that there is to be no fighting. Faiths,
+beliefs, patriotisms are still there, but the fighting is to be in the
+open, a matter of life and death, the issue an issue of vitality.
+
+
+
+
+                                  VI
+
+
+WE have our choice; both propositions have been made: we are all body,
+wholly involved in a mechanical scheme of things, or we are partly
+free, recognizing within us faculties not wholly subordinated to the
+rigid physical law of necessity, free to choose, to struggle toward
+high aims, to succeed in part, in part, perhaps, fail. Pending proof
+to the contrary, let us assume that our wills have a certain freedom.
+It is at least better “strategy and tactics” in the battle of life
+than the reverse. In the absence of a microscopic test to determine
+the matter, it may be well to demonstrate the existence of the power
+by using it, making decisive choice of the finer hypothesis, and
+asserting our right to do so. Perhaps the trouble has come not wholly
+from the activity of the materialists, but partly from the failure of
+the idealists to stand by their guns. The folly of perpetual defensive
+on the part of the idealist has been abundantly demonstrated in late
+years; it is for him to take the offensive, to claim and hold his
+own, ceasing to be shame-faced, explanatory, apologetic! Whatever
+special form our denial of the supremacy of matter may take, whether
+philosophic or religious, of Plato and Kant, or of Christ, we should
+band together against this tyranny that threatens the inner life of the
+race, and affirm the supremacy of spirit.
+
+Consider our forefathers’ faith in the light of a working hypothesis,
+if you will. It is an age of hypotheses; science is ceaselessly busy
+with them. Its finest achievements have followed great imaginative
+conceptions, some of which have been verified by observed fact, some of
+which have been disproved, some of which, neither proved nor disproved,
+are still looked upon as a firm basis of knowledge.
+
+The odd thing is that, in science, a whole fundamental assumption may
+go without interfering with the validity of the information based
+thereon; disproving one hypothesis, science goes serenely on. They
+taught me in my college days the indivisible atom quite as dogmatically
+as, earlier, I had been taught the literal reality of the story of Eve
+and the serpent. The fact that the atomic theory is now questioned, if
+not overthrown, in no way invalidates the truths of chemistry, while
+the passing of the serpent has, in some strange fashion, meant for many
+people the passing of the Christian faith. It has, in reality, nothing
+to do with the central tenets of the Christian faith, which are: that
+the universe is a universe of spirit, controlled by a great spiritual
+force, for great ends; that, for the guidance of stumbling humanity,
+the great spiritual force took human form; that mere human beings,
+keeping mind and soul intent upon that great example, may work out
+through love and sacrifice immortal meanings in their lives. Has any
+better working hypothesis ever been suggested to humankind?
+
+Science says, “Here are certain phenomena which we can explain in no
+other way”; and gives its splendid guess. Why deny to our spiritual
+life a method freely used in science, the assumption of an hypothesis
+that most nearly explains observed facts, with the hope of proving it
+true as knowledge grows more profound? Why may we not say, “Here are
+certain persistent hopes, inner needs, longings, which we can explain
+only on the assumption that the universe is a universe of spirit”?
+These beliefs have been associated with the age-long growth of the
+race, and are perhaps the very condition of its mental and spiritual
+development. These facts of the inner life are as truly facts as are
+those of the outer world, though scientific absorption in matter has
+made mankind forget this. It is strange that a generation so fond of
+emphasizing fact should have ignored or even denied the most important
+facts of all, and so have brought about a crushing limitation to our
+endeavor. Not only in the external world are facts to be found: the
+hope, the faith, the long aspiration of the race, those persistent
+convictions of enlarging destiny which have played so great a part
+in human growth,--shall these be of no account? When such immense
+importance is attached to every phase of physical growth in the past,
+how can we deny the wealth of spiritual experience without being false
+to the very laws of thought?
+
+So we ask, not what happened to our remotest forbears in the Garden
+of Eden, but what has happened to our nearer forefathers, whose needs
+were akin to our own, that will help our human existence. To what have
+they gallantly held? To what have they come back? To what did they
+inevitably turn in cruel times of suffering? What are the hopes they
+could not forget, slow century by century of trial, disappointment,
+aspiration, agony? Persistent faith in unending life, in which should
+come the crowning of the spiritual endeavor of this; indomitable
+belief in righteousness, in distinction between right and wrong; God,
+a divine wisdom working through all the show of things,--such was their
+faith. Our forefathers tried and proved it and found it good, living
+difficult lives and dying hard deaths full of a sense of conquest, of
+triumph. Their working hypothesis has yet to be surpassed.
+
+The old teaching--whether or not we share the exact shade of
+intellectual interpretation of ultimate mystery--brought a better
+sense of relative values than we have now, and a far greater chance of
+progress. Faith in soul is a better working programme than faith in
+body. Working forward, however eugenically, toward the Perfect Brute
+is a poor hope at best. There can be no growth without the boundless,
+the illimitable, ahead, and the great hopes, undisproved, still shine
+before us. Life must be made great in its scope, its demand, if it
+is to achieve greatly. It is a sorry thing to have the guiding forces
+mere shallow intellectual forces,--mere intellectualism is always
+shallow,--to reduce the whole of the hope and the wonder and the
+terror of life to the seeing of the eye, the hearing of the ear, the
+mere logical deduction, while the larger nature sleeps abashed. A
+sound hypothesis must cope with all the facts involved; our working
+hypothesis of life must reckon with the deepest striving of our nature,
+its furthest longing, its most imaginative reach. There has been
+great waste of unused powers in these later decades of our period of
+progress. Half only, and the lesser half, of the human being has been
+called into activity; the better part of the human faculties have been
+among the “unemployed.”
+
+Is it not time for the sleepers to waken, rub their eyes, and say,
+“There is a greater in us than you have let us recognize. This attempt
+to solve the problems of human nature while leaving the best of human
+nature out of account has shown its inadequacy. The materialistic
+interpretation of the universe with its attendant cult of the body
+is a _cul-de-sac_. Life, personality, are full of larger needs
+and larger powers than the present trend of thought permits us to
+recognize; and life must know the diviner hunger, the deeper thirst,
+if it is to win significance.” This progress, which ignores the higher
+aspiration, the profounder stirring of the nature,--shall we be
+therewith content?
+
+    Through hope, through faith, through love’s
+        transcendant dower
+    We feel that we are greater than we know,
+
+wrote a poet-philosopher who dared trust his soul as leader. In this
+mathematical and scientific age there is a dread of feeling, of
+impulse; a fear of this greater self that hopes and fears and prays.
+We recognize the great part that feeling and impulse play in the
+evolution of the world of living creatures; yet man, in trying to
+solve the riddle of his destiny, is forever searching for some narrow
+rationalistic explanation which will shut these large factors out.
+There is great distrust of intuition, of the imaginative faculty,
+when dealing with the inner life; yet imagination, intuition, hold
+an important place in the study of the outer world; the greatest
+discoveries in science are, no less than the great achievements of
+creative art, the result of imaginative grasp of the unrealized. If
+intuition, daring conjecture, afford such signal service in winning
+knowledge of the world of matter, why should we, who wish to believe
+something deeper than that world can ever teach us, be deprived of
+the use of our larger faculties? Feeling, emotion, play a large part,
+perhaps the best part, in our sum of human wisdom; passion is a fine
+instrument of discovery,--spiritual passion, of spiritual truth. Of
+the utmost help these can give us we have utmost need, as we have of
+imagination, the divining power, that seer into the inner realities of
+things, and of “the will as vision.”
+
+
+
+
+                                  VII
+
+
+IT is partly because of the largeness of its scope for activity of the
+entire man, the fullness of its appeal to the whole human being, that
+Christianity surpasses other idealisms as a working basis of life,
+proves itself the flower of them all. Sharing with others a purely
+idealistic theory, faith in the spiritual nature of the universe, it
+brings home that faith in ways unknown to other systems, makes it
+human, a matter of the hearth, of daily life. It is an idealism which
+is within the reach of the humblest intelligence; in its humanness,
+its simplicity, its nearness to the least, it may almost be said to be
+the only working idealism of all time. The vision of the Perfect Man
+appeals to the larger self; feeling is stirred by it, passion touched,
+and imagination, that power through which alone creative work is done,
+forever shapes fairer and fairer conceptions. No other idealism has
+the compelling power which brings the whole nature into play; so many
+elements to quicken the will and release hidden stores of energy. In
+all creative work, mere reasoning process lags behind; life, with its
+high spiritual possibilities, is creative work. It is for us to fashion
+it in accordance with our clearest vision of perfection; we have need
+of the largest hope that we can muster, the loftiest aim. For shaping
+life to great ends, for employment of all the faculties in the service
+of a great idealism, impulse, intuition, will, there is nothing that
+can match the Christian faith in the greatness of its simplicity.
+
+The old, old needs of life are always with us, the necessity of
+consolation in grief and loss, of hope enough to keep us trudging along
+our path. Perhaps not even in its swift response to these great needs
+of the human being comes the profoundest proof of its supremacy. From
+the point of view of potential evolution, from the greatness and depth
+of its challenge, we know its greatness. Christianity, with the sting
+of its challenge for eternity, suggests enough of progress to satisfy
+the human soul once started on its way. What deeper appeal has ever
+come than the thought of endless destiny, bringing the awful necessity
+of living in the light of it?
+
+Not long since, I read in some journal an article in which a writer
+speaks wistfully of our lost hope in immortality, but adds that we do
+not so greatly mind, and that our children will mind still less. If
+this faith is indeed gone, what has happened to rob us of so great a
+hope, once entertained? How the demonstration of organic processes in
+the physical world, which has been the great achievement of our time,
+can be assumed to reach to that which is beyond sense is hard to say;
+it would need eternity to disprove the belief, as it needs eternity
+to prove it. When you try with finite means to define the infinite
+you make trouble for yourself, and perhaps rob the young of inherited
+hopes. If our children do not mind, it will show a phase of degeneracy
+in them, of willful shutting off of light and life already attained. We
+shall count them craven if they let go any high ideal once conceived,
+for that means inevitable retrogression; this should be held as the
+unforgotten and unforgettable hope of the race. What mortal, when the
+splendor of such a thought had dawned on him, could let it go? The
+endless possibility, the infinite opportunity for growth, the challenge
+for eternity,--who dare take it, and order his life in accordance with
+it?
+
+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
+
+
+
+
+                         =The Riverside Press=
+                       CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
+                               U . S . A
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75631 ***
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+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75631 ***</div>
+
+<figure class="figcenter" id="cover" style="width: 1000px;">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="1000" height="1530" alt="Whither, a religious and philosophal essay.">
+</figure>
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="nindc"><span class="large">WHITHER?</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<figure class="figcenter" id="titlepage" style="width: 1200px;">
+  <img src="images/titlepage.jpg" width="1200" height="1941" alt="Title page of the book Whiter written by an unknown author.">
+</figure>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h1>WHITHER?</h1>
+
+
+<figure class="figcenter" id="logo" style="width: 356px;">
+  <img src="images/logo.jpg" width="356" height="465" alt="decorative">
+</figure>
+
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2">BOSTON AND NEW YORK<br>
+HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY<br>
+The Riverside Press Cambridge<br>
+1915</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2 space-below2">
+<span class="allsmcap">COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2 space-below2">
+<span class="allsmcap">COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2 space-below2">
+<span class="allsmcap">ALL RIGHTS RESERVED</span></p>
+
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2 space-below2">
+<i>Published May 1915</i></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</span></p>
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="WHITHER">WHITHER?</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="WHITHER_2">WHITHER?</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="I">I</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</span>
+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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</span>
+denial of that which seems, in the splendor of assurance: “My sister
+Mary to-day entered upon eternal life—”</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</span>
+small part in their thought, their feeling, in the way in which faith
+vitalizes their daily lives.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</span></p>
+
+<p>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;
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="II">II</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</span>
+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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</span>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="III">III</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span>
+<i>Salus</i>, salvation, began to be interpreted as physical salvation,
+and the persistent concern with bodily life marked the beginnings of
+decay.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</span>
+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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span>
+destiny is the porcelain bathtub, or some safe shelter behind a wire
+screen, beyond the attack of germs.</p>
+
+<p>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,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span>
+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,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</span></p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span>
+the very heart of the spiritual evolution of our forefathers?</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span>
+which we must build, if we are to build truly. Here is treasure too
+great to throw away so lightly.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="IV">IV</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>It is a materialism stupid, unfounded, turning its back upon the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span>
+earlier idealisms of poet, philosopher, religious believer, not so
+much because of reasoning processes as because of a sudden shifting
+of attention. Wonderful things may be observed under the microscope,
+wonderful things through the telescope; wonderful things are day by
+day invented. Is it likely that there is anything beyond all this? To
+recent generations, as to that progressive dog, the reflection in the
+water seemed for the moment, as is often the case, more real than the
+reflected object; hence this tragedy of loss.</p>
+
+<p>The human mind has been suddenly diverted by a loud noise outside; a
+sudden change of tension results. Where one looks quickly, all heads
+are turned. It is a noise of motor-boats, aeroplanes, engines of all
+kinds; a sight of airships, flying like birds; of submarines, diving
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</span>
+like fish; of moving pictures with their endless panorama. Mankind
+is childishly diverted; the hearing of the ears, the seeing of the
+eyes,—it is enough. The skepticisms of the seventeenth and eighteenth
+centuries tried to reason out their origins, to explain upon what
+they were based; not so here. This is the most unthinking of systems,
+not troubling to give a rational account of itself. Thought is out of
+fashion: nowadays we observe! Through this preponderance of observation
+over thought in this great period, the human mind has greatly suffered
+in surety of process, in logic, in differentiation of mental processes.
+The exercise of pure reason has become almost obsolete; the idea that
+thought can be exercised apart from sense, from study of phenomena,
+is all but forgotten. Whether or not we assume that matter is the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span>
+origin and the end of all things, the world of to-day thinks in terms
+of matter; is content to live and breathe and have its being in matter;
+hopes, aspires, and prays, if it hope, aspire, and pray at all, in
+terms of matter.</p>
+
+<p>Our very vocabulary is degraded; the most far-reaching symbols of our
+language come seldom into use, or appear with diminished meaning.
+Follow, for instance, the course of the word “infinite” through the
+antics of contemporary literature. Our phraseology has become carnal;
+our vital terms are terms of physical life. Nowhere is the limitation
+of contemporary thought more apparent than in these instruments of
+speech. One must read again Wordsworth, Shelley, Carlyle, Ruskin,
+Arnold, Meredith, to meet great words, now little employed, that make
+you realize the utmost reach of life; in so doing, one pauses in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span>
+dismay, realizing how full contemporary speech is of lesser terms, how
+few employ the greater words that tell the inner life of the soul.</p>
+
+<p>All forms of idealism have suffered during the past century of
+progress, more through being ignored than through being refuted; there
+still are thinkers who consider Kant, with his demonstration of the
+universe mind-made, a wiser teacher than any who have followed him,
+yet these have few disciples. Of the two old hypotheses, that this is
+a world of spirit, that it is a world of matter, the latter has been
+the predominant choice of our time. That choice has been reinforced
+by the impact of a wonderful physical and material development, while
+there has been no corresponding gain in the spiritual and the purely
+intellectual; for many years the best of the fine young energy of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span>
+the race has busied itself, either in investigation or in invention,
+with the world of matter. We hear endlessly of the great advance of
+our time, of the surety of its knowledge, the doing away with baseless
+old idealisms. What, after all, has been achieved? The origin of human
+thought, the destination of the human thinker, are as profound a secret
+as before this unparalleled progress. Science, which has been the great
+intellectual adventure of the last century,—to what has it led us?
+Only again to that edge of the unknown, where we confront the infinite.
+It has not gained by one hair’s breadth upon the encompassing mystery
+of our lives.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="V">V</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>THE special form of idealism held by our forefathers, the Christian
+faith, with its great central tenets of God, immortality, the
+necessity of right-doing in the light of these faiths, has suffered
+with the other forms of idealism during the last decades. Those who,
+intentionally or unintentionally, have attacked, many of those who have
+defended, have alike done it injury. Of our intellectual vanguard,
+some have denied, some have ignored, some have been wisely patient
+and silent, awaiting the adjustment of new wisdom to old. As for the
+first,—surely those who hold sense-observation to be the basis of all
+knowledge should take no such vast leap into the dark as that involved
+in denial of these old beliefs. It is when certain of these new
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span>
+thinkers slip beyond their own self-defined province, and philosophize
+in ways contradicting their own premises, that one fails to follow
+them; when, grown bold with their conquest of physical nature, they
+make a vast leap from observation of phenomena into metaphysical
+statement, without consciousness of what they are doing, that one
+listens with profound distrust. Doubtless we have all known one or two,
+ready to make assertions dogmatic beyond the dogmatism of old theology,
+founded upon nothing but the assumption that they, who can truly
+observe facts in the physical world, could assert nothing but fact. I
+respect them when they observe; I tremble when they begin to generalize.</p>
+
+<p>It is indeed a crowning irony when one is called upon to believe, in
+the name of discoveries in the world of phenomena, that faith in God
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span>
+and in immortality is untenable. Because it is possible to see with the
+aided eye organisms unsuspected before our day,—this does not prove
+that the immemorial spiritual instincts of humanity have no foundation.
+The assumption that the great hopes of mankind cannot be true because
+they cannot be detected under microscope or through telescope, has
+floated in the air, darkening wise counsel, has assumed an authority
+never won; the present is full of unnecessary renunciations and
+unproved denials. In the intoxication of new discovery regarding the
+laws of organic growth, the leap from belief in unseen realities to
+doubt or to denial has been too swift and too absolute. Probably, in
+a great majority of cases, thought, intellectual process, has had
+little to do with the change. Humanity has lost hope without knowing
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span>
+why; the air has been thick with doubt and fear. Hearing a great noise
+in the dark, aware of attack, many have rushed away, leaving great
+treasure, while the enemy was still far from taking the stronghold.
+This new poverty of life which we call Progress is thus, in many cases,
+the misfortune, but not the fault, of those who, unable to think for
+themselves, take for granted that the most insistent voice must be the
+right voice.</p>
+
+<p>How greatly the defenders of the faith, in much of the warfare, have
+missed the issue! The time that has been lost, the good territory
+yielded in contesting the literal interpretation of Genesis, may well
+fill us with shame. If the story of the serpent of Eden must slip from
+dogma to myth, must faith in the unseen realities therefore go? If our
+forefathers were wrong in linking the large faith of their spiritual
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span>
+lives indissolubly with the story of Adam and that of Jonah, we must
+discriminate where they failed to discriminate, remembering in all
+humility that with their smaller knowledge of external things went a
+far profounder knowledge than ours of things spiritual. We must keep
+the greater; the less is not to us the sacrifice it was to them; let it
+go!</p>
+
+<p>If we ask, why this close linking with myth, who can answer? We
+know only that the human soul develops slowly; shade by shade the
+truth grows clear. We, who have learned something of the incredible
+slowness of physical development, can afford to have patience with the
+spiritual, but we cannot afford to let slip back anything that the soul
+has achieved, proved, made its own. In the long quarrels over the husk,
+the kernel has too often slipped out of sight; essentials have gone
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span>
+with unessentials. We can no longer in good faith teach the young that
+the misfortune of our present predicament may be traced to eating an
+apple; but those of us who are unable to step to the marching music of
+our time may, in impassioned good faith, until modern thinkers make a
+better case against us than they have yet made, teach the young that
+the great realities of life are of mind and soul, not body; that growth
+and change are necessary, fundamental, vital, the very condition of
+life; that it is for them to remove reverently whatever outer veil may
+have obscured their forefathers’ great light of faith; but that doom is
+upon them if they lose the light.</p>
+
+<p>Doubtless the greatest wrong done the Christian faith by its defenders
+was the attempt to reduce it to a mere matter of reasoning. The
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span>
+pity of it is that, at a time when the whole fabric of Christianity
+was shaken and the whole spiritual life was at stake, theologians
+should so have emphasized fact, clinging to a dead literalness of
+interpretation! Through the long decades of the nineteenth century,
+trying to meet the geologists upon their own ground, they were very
+properly worsted. Why borrow, and use weakly, weapons which belong
+to a different warfare, knowledge? Sense-perception, playing a large
+part, and rightly, in science, is neither starting-point nor goal here,
+nor is historical fact. Proofs of a real religion are not limited
+to repetition of fact. When they imitated the scientists, in their
+demand for external evidence, and imitated them badly, the inevitable
+happened. More and more their own great world of spiritual aspiration
+and endeavor was ignored by those whose high privilege it was to make
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span>
+known the vitalizing power of the faith they held, its subtle answer
+to the soul’s deepest need. The doom of a faith is its loss of inner
+sources of vitality, its “materialization in fact,” and perhaps the
+Church has been rightly punished for forgetting that its weapons should
+be primarily weapons of the spirit, its world the world of divine
+endeavor. This is no time to haggle over theology; the object is not to
+save the church, but to save alive the souls of men.</p>
+
+<p>Myth could go; dogma itself could go; Christianity would still be.
+Milestones in the path of the human spirit, dogmas have done great
+service, but none have been great enough to express the potential
+greatness of the spiritual life of the human race. Greatly have they
+helped; at times they have greatly hindered. Seemingly necessary
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span>
+bulwarks in time of stress and siege, the human soul has lived on
+after their demolishing; the human spirit is greater than they. Modern
+warfare has demonstrated that great forts and intrenchments are
+useless; that does not mean that there is to be no fighting. Faiths,
+beliefs, patriotisms are still there, but the fighting is to be in the
+open, a matter of life and death, the issue an issue of vitality.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="VI">VI</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>WE have our choice; both propositions have been made: we are all body,
+wholly involved in a mechanical scheme of things, or we are partly
+free, recognizing within us faculties not wholly subordinated to the
+rigid physical law of necessity, free to choose, to struggle toward
+high aims, to succeed in part, in part, perhaps, fail. Pending proof
+to the contrary, let us assume that our wills have a certain freedom.
+It is at least better “strategy and tactics” in the battle of life
+than the reverse. In the absence of a microscopic test to determine
+the matter, it may be well to demonstrate the existence of the power
+by using it, making decisive choice of the finer hypothesis, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span>
+asserting our right to do so. Perhaps the trouble has come not wholly
+from the activity of the materialists, but partly from the failure of
+the idealists to stand by their guns. The folly of perpetual defensive
+on the part of the idealist has been abundantly demonstrated in late
+years; it is for him to take the offensive, to claim and hold his
+own, ceasing to be shame-faced, explanatory, apologetic! Whatever
+special form our denial of the supremacy of matter may take, whether
+philosophic or religious, of Plato and Kant, or of Christ, we should
+band together against this tyranny that threatens the inner life of the
+race, and affirm the supremacy of spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Consider our forefathers’ faith in the light of a working hypothesis,
+if you will. It is an age of hypotheses; science is ceaselessly busy
+with them. Its finest achievements have followed great imaginative
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span>
+conceptions, some of which have been verified by observed fact, some of
+which have been disproved, some of which, neither proved nor disproved,
+are still looked upon as a firm basis of knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>The odd thing is that, in science, a whole fundamental assumption may
+go without interfering with the validity of the information based
+thereon; disproving one hypothesis, science goes serenely on. They
+taught me in my college days the indivisible atom quite as dogmatically
+as, earlier, I had been taught the literal reality of the story of Eve
+and the serpent. The fact that the atomic theory is now questioned, if
+not overthrown, in no way invalidates the truths of chemistry, while
+the passing of the serpent has, in some strange fashion, meant for many
+people the passing of the Christian faith. It has, in reality, nothing
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</span>
+to do with the central tenets of the Christian faith, which are: that
+the universe is a universe of spirit, controlled by a great spiritual
+force, for great ends; that, for the guidance of stumbling humanity,
+the great spiritual force took human form; that mere human beings,
+keeping mind and soul intent upon that great example, may work out
+through love and sacrifice immortal meanings in their lives. Has any
+better working hypothesis ever been suggested to humankind?</p>
+
+<p>Science says, “Here are certain phenomena which we can explain in no
+other way”; and gives its splendid guess. Why deny to our spiritual
+life a method freely used in science, the assumption of an hypothesis
+that most nearly explains observed facts, with the hope of proving it
+true as knowledge grows more profound? Why may we not say, “Here are
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span>
+certain persistent hopes, inner needs, longings, which we can explain
+only on the assumption that the universe is a universe of spirit”?
+These beliefs have been associated with the age-long growth of the
+race, and are perhaps the very condition of its mental and spiritual
+development. These facts of the inner life are as truly facts as are
+those of the outer world, though scientific absorption in matter has
+made mankind forget this. It is strange that a generation so fond of
+emphasizing fact should have ignored or even denied the most important
+facts of all, and so have brought about a crushing limitation to our
+endeavor. Not only in the external world are facts to be found: the
+hope, the faith, the long aspiration of the race, those persistent
+convictions of enlarging destiny which have played so great a part
+in human growth,—shall these be of no account? When such immense
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</span>
+importance is attached to every phase of physical growth in the past,
+how can we deny the wealth of spiritual experience without being false
+to the very laws of thought?</p>
+
+<p>So we ask, not what happened to our remotest forbears in the Garden
+of Eden, but what has happened to our nearer forefathers, whose needs
+were akin to our own, that will help our human existence. To what have
+they gallantly held? To what have they come back? To what did they
+inevitably turn in cruel times of suffering? What are the hopes they
+could not forget, slow century by century of trial, disappointment,
+aspiration, agony? Persistent faith in unending life, in which should
+come the crowning of the spiritual endeavor of this; indomitable
+belief in righteousness, in distinction between right and wrong; God,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span>
+a divine wisdom working through all the show of things,—such was their
+faith. Our forefathers tried and proved it and found it good, living
+difficult lives and dying hard deaths full of a sense of conquest, of
+triumph. Their working hypothesis has yet to be surpassed.</p>
+
+<p>The old teaching—whether or not we share the exact shade of
+intellectual interpretation of ultimate mystery—brought a better
+sense of relative values than we have now, and a far greater chance of
+progress. Faith in soul is a better working programme than faith in
+body. Working forward, however eugenically, toward the Perfect Brute
+is a poor hope at best. There can be no growth without the boundless,
+the illimitable, ahead, and the great hopes, undisproved, still shine
+before us. Life must be made great in its scope, its demand, if it
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span>
+is to achieve greatly. It is a sorry thing to have the guiding forces
+mere shallow intellectual forces,—mere intellectualism is always
+shallow,—to reduce the whole of the hope and the wonder and the
+terror of life to the seeing of the eye, the hearing of the ear, the
+mere logical deduction, while the larger nature sleeps abashed. A
+sound hypothesis must cope with all the facts involved; our working
+hypothesis of life must reckon with the deepest striving of our nature,
+its furthest longing, its most imaginative reach. There has been
+great waste of unused powers in these later decades of our period of
+progress. Half only, and the lesser half, of the human being has been
+called into activity; the better part of the human faculties have been
+among the “unemployed.”</p>
+
+<p>Is it not time for the sleepers to waken, rub their eyes, and say,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span>
+“There is a greater in us than you have let us recognize. This attempt
+to solve the problems of human nature while leaving the best of human
+nature out of account has shown its inadequacy. The materialistic
+interpretation of the universe with its attendant cult of the body
+is a <i>cul-de-sac</i>. Life, personality, are full of larger needs
+and larger powers than the present trend of thought permits us to
+recognize; and life must know the diviner hunger, the deeper thirst,
+if it is to win significance.” This progress, which ignores the higher
+aspiration, the profounder stirring of the nature,—shall we be
+therewith content?</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Through hope, through faith, through love’s</div>
+    <div class="verse indent4">transcendant dower</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">We feel that we are greater than we know,</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>wrote a poet-philosopher who dared trust his soul as leader. In this
+mathematical and scientific age there is a dread of feeling, of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</span>
+impulse; a fear of this greater self that hopes and fears and prays.
+We recognize the great part that feeling and impulse play in the
+evolution of the world of living creatures; yet man, in trying to
+solve the riddle of his destiny, is forever searching for some narrow
+rationalistic explanation which will shut these large factors out.
+There is great distrust of intuition, of the imaginative faculty,
+when dealing with the inner life; yet imagination, intuition, hold
+an important place in the study of the outer world; the greatest
+discoveries in science are, no less than the great achievements of
+creative art, the result of imaginative grasp of the unrealized. If
+intuition, daring conjecture, afford such signal service in winning
+knowledge of the world of matter, why should we, who wish to believe
+something deeper than that world can ever teach us, be deprived of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</span>
+the use of our larger faculties? Feeling, emotion, play a large part,
+perhaps the best part, in our sum of human wisdom; passion is a fine
+instrument of discovery,—spiritual passion, of spiritual truth. Of
+the utmost help these can give us we have utmost need, as we have of
+imagination, the divining power, that seer into the inner realities of
+things, and of “the will as vision.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="VII">VII</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>IT is partly because of the largeness of its scope for activity of the
+entire man, the fullness of its appeal to the whole human being, that
+Christianity surpasses other idealisms as a working basis of life,
+proves itself the flower of them all. Sharing with others a purely
+idealistic theory, faith in the spiritual nature of the universe, it
+brings home that faith in ways unknown to other systems, makes it
+human, a matter of the hearth, of daily life. It is an idealism which
+is within the reach of the humblest intelligence; in its humanness,
+its simplicity, its nearness to the least, it may almost be said to be
+the only working idealism of all time. The vision of the Perfect Man
+appeals to the larger self; feeling is stirred by it, passion touched,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</span>
+and imagination, that power through which alone creative work is done,
+forever shapes fairer and fairer conceptions. No other idealism has
+the compelling power which brings the whole nature into play; so many
+elements to quicken the will and release hidden stores of energy. In
+all creative work, mere reasoning process lags behind; life, with its
+high spiritual possibilities, is creative work. It is for us to fashion
+it in accordance with our clearest vision of perfection; we have need
+of the largest hope that we can muster, the loftiest aim. For shaping
+life to great ends, for employment of all the faculties in the service
+of a great idealism, impulse, intuition, will, there is nothing that
+can match the Christian faith in the greatness of its simplicity.</p>
+
+<p>The old, old needs of life are always with us, the necessity of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</span>
+consolation in grief and loss, of hope enough to keep us trudging along
+our path. Perhaps not even in its swift response to these great needs
+of the human being comes the profoundest proof of its supremacy. From
+the point of view of potential evolution, from the greatness and depth
+of its challenge, we know its greatness. Christianity, with the sting
+of its challenge for eternity, suggests enough of progress to satisfy
+the human soul once started on its way. What deeper appeal has ever
+come than the thought of endless destiny, bringing the awful necessity
+of living in the light of it?</p>
+
+<p>Not long since, I read in some journal an article in which a writer
+speaks wistfully of our lost hope in immortality, but adds that we do
+not so greatly mind, and that our children will mind still less. If
+this faith is indeed gone, what has happened to rob us of so great a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</span>
+hope, once entertained? How the demonstration of organic processes in
+the physical world, which has been the great achievement of our time,
+can be assumed to reach to that which is beyond sense is hard to say;
+it would need eternity to disprove the belief, as it needs eternity
+to prove it. When you try with finite means to define the infinite
+you make trouble for yourself, and perhaps rob the young of inherited
+hopes. If our children do not mind, it will show a phase of degeneracy
+in them, of willful shutting off of light and life already attained. We
+shall count them craven if they let go any high ideal once conceived,
+for that means inevitable retrogression; this should be held as the
+unforgotten and unforgettable hope of the race. What mortal, when the
+splendor of such a thought had dawned on him, could let it go? The
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</span>
+endless possibility, the infinite opportunity for growth, the challenge
+for eternity,—who dare take it, and order his life in accordance with
+it?</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>Since no life can be worth living without faith in power transcending
+nature’s manifestations of physical force; without some ideal of human
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</span>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>The only genuine progress for us is progress in the inner life. We
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="VIII">VIII</h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</span></p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Yet England too has her theorists teaching the biological necessity of
+war, that the fundamental laws which govern human conduct are the laws
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</span>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</span></p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</span>
+life too great for word or present vision.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>One thing is evident in all this awful crash: men still are brave;
+never before, perhaps, have they fought against such great odds. The
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</span>
+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?</p>
+
+
+<p class="nindc space-above2">THE END</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="nindc">
+<b>The Riverside Press</b><br>
+<span class="allsmcap">CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS</span><br>
+U . S . A<br>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75631 ***</div>
+</body>
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