Chapter VIII: Progress as Realization 243 (6)

Mark Twain quotes a schoolboy as saying: “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” This definition is turned from humor into seriousness by some modern thinkers when they charge immorality against all whose beliefs are not scientifically established on sufficient evidence. They look upon what they consider unwarranted beliefs as a species of lying to one’s self, demoralizing to intellect and character. If no element of faith may anywhere be tolerated, these same thinkers should reëxamine their own foundations. The only thorough agnostic in history or literature, agnostic even toward his own agnosticism, is Charles Kingsley’s Raphael Aben-Ezra. Let us listen to him. “Here am I, at last! fairly and safely landed at the very bottom of the bottomless.... No man, angel or demon can this day cast it in my teeth that I am weak enough to believe or disbelieve any phenomenon or theory in or concerning heaven or earth; or even that any such heaven, earth, phenomena or theories exist—or otherwise.”

In a last analysis our very foundation principles rest on a ground of faith, and a clear knowledge of this fact may make us more humble in the presence of other claims on our belief. Whenever the adventurous philosophic mind gazes over the dizzy edge at the “bottomless,” it draws back and gains a firm footing on the reality of conscious ideas. To abandon this is annihilation.

Years ago an old friend of mine, very worthy, but somewhat self-opinioned and truculent, in a discussion on religious thought exclaimed: “What! believe in anything I can’t see, touch, hear, smell, taste? No, sir!” He represented the uneducated instinctive belief in the reality of the outer world as revealed through the senses; and he would have violently affirmed the reliability of the senses and the existence of material things. But philosophy shows these also to be of faith.

Had he been asked whether he had a knowledge of space and time and of certain indisputable facts concerning them, and whether he could see or hear these entities and intuitive truths, he would have paused to think. The axioms of mathematics would have been a veritable Socratic poser to him, and he would have withdrawn from his position—would have acknowledged some truths as more certain, by the nature and need of the mind, than the existence of matter.

The modern scientist for practical purposes postulates the existence of conscious ideas, of the outer material world, of space and time. He accepts axiomatic truths. He goes farther; he postulates the uniformity of nature, and the validity of his reasoning processes. He discovers natural laws, and propounds theories concerning them. He investigates the physical correlates of mental processes. He has his favorite hypotheses concerning phenomena that defy his powers of analysis. He shows the process of the world as a whole to be evolution.

So far we have no controversy and should have none, did not some eminent investigators in the field of natural science claim to have covered the entire realm of legitimate inquiry, and deny the right to raise further questions or entertain beliefs, however strongly they may be prompted by our very constitution, concerning the origin and end of things, the meaning of the world, and man’s place in it. To the well-rounded nature, faith is not necessarily limited to the physical world, and the credulity implied in unwarranted denial is at least as unscientific as positive faith.

Human nature rebels against conclusions wholly discordant with its best instincts, and, in the light of the most recent data and speculation, begins anew a discussion as old as philosophy. The subject is all the more important, because the uneducated mind, misled by superficial catch phrases of materialism, fails to know the reverent spirit of true science.

Here is an illustration relating to the general theme. A prominent biologist puts this statement before the reading public: “There is no _ego_ except that which arises from the coördination of the nerve cells.” I might take the contrary of the proposition and reply: “There is an _ego_ not adequately described by your ‘colonial consciousness’ theory.” Regarding each position as dogmatic, perhaps mine is as good as the biologist’s. As to evidence, he founds his belief on the general fact of evolution and specifically upon the functions, partly known, partly conjectured, of nerve cells in the brain. He has no knowledge that a unit-being called the _ego_ does not exist. His is the faith of denial of something which from his standpoint he can neither prove nor disprove. I also accept the facts of evolution and of the mechanism of the brain. I base my belief in the _ego_ on certain views of other biologists, and on data of consciousness, morality, and religion, and the insight of all subjective philosophy. My faith is one of assent to something not admitting demonstrative proof. Have I sufficient reason for my faith in passing beyond the inductions of material science?

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We present some latest views of eminent biologists. While evolution must be accepted as a fact, there is great uncertainty as to the factors that produce changes in the organic world. To-day there is small evidence that variations are produced by direct influence of environment. In the germ is the “whole machinery and the mystery of heredity.” Since the microscope fails to reveal the causes, either of normal development or of variations, some are forced to accept, as the simplest and most rational hypothesis, the existence of a psychic principle in the germ. The facts appear to support the doctrine of purpose in evolution. So earnest and able a thinker as Professor LeConte frankly affirms: “With the appearance of Man another factor was introduced, namely, _conscious coöperation in his own evolution, striving to attain an ideal_.”

Professor Muensterberg is of high authority in experimental psychology and besides has a keen philosophic mind. His paper entitled “Psychology and the Real Life” is instructive and significant. He shows that it is the business of psychology to analyze the ideas and emotions, the whole content of consciousness, into sensations, to investigate the whole psychological mechanism, but that the primary reality is not a possible object of psychology and natural science. By his view it takes an act of free will to declare the will unfree; there can be no science, thought, or doubt that is not the child of duties; even skeptical denial demands to be regarded as absolute truth; there is a truth, a beauty, a morality independent of psychological conditions; psychology is the last word of a materialistic century, it may become the introductory word of an idealistic century. His views are maintained with force and power of conviction.

But these references are only incidental to the purpose of this discussion. They may serve to show (1) that science has no real proof against the dictum, “Evolution is God’s way of doing things;” (2) that on the contrary it may support the spiritual view of the world; (3) that there are grounds of faith with which science properly has no business.

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Evolution is according to nature’s laws. Man is a product of evolution. Man possesses poetry and sentiment, conceives the beauty of holiness, and has speculative reason. None of these can properly be explained by merely materialistic evolution; they are not necessary to preservation of life. We have tried to wholly account for the ideals, emotions, and aspirations of human nature by analyzing them into primitive sensations and instincts. This is the fatal error of materialistic philosophy. The process of evolution is not analysis; it is synthesis, development, the appearance of new factors—a gradual revelation. It is our business to analyze, but, also, to try to understand the higher complex, the perfected product. The first stand of spiritual philosophy is faith in the validity of our own evolved being, and to this we have as much right as to faith in the reliability of our five senses.

The geologist might say: To me the grandeur of the mountain means nothing; I know how it was made. The cooling and contraction of the earth, the crushing and uplifting of strata, the action of air, wind, and water, the sculpturing of time, the planting of vegetation by a chance breeze—and you have your mountain, a thing of science. Yet Coleridge, standing in the vale of Chamounix and gazing on Mont Blanc,

“Till the dilating Soul, enrapt, transfused,
Into the mighty Vision passing—there,
As in her natural form, swelled vast to Heaven,”

found it an emblem of sublimity, a voice from the throne of God. We shall find it hard to believe that the poetry of science can be explained on a merely physical basis. One may say: The religious sentiment means nothing to me; I know its origin; it is the result of bad dreams. A primitive ancestor, after a successful hunt, ate too much raw meat and dreamed of his grandfather. Thus arose the belief in disembodied spirits and a whole train of false conceptions. Yet we shall hardly grant that the religious feeling of the martyrs, which enabled the exalted spirit to lose the sense of unutterable physical torture, is adequately explained by the dream hypothesis.

A Beethoven string orchestra, to the musical mind, discourses most excellent music. It is a connected series of sublimated and elusive metaphors, arousing the harmonies of the soul, touching its chords of sweetness, purity, beauty, and nobility. Yet there are minds that find in it nothing—pardon the quotation—but the friction of horsehair on catgut. There are minds to which these grand mountains, this deep sky, these groves of pine are nothing but rock and vapor and wood. The elements make no sweet tones for them; they can not hear the music of the spheres. To them honor, courage, morality, beauty, religion, are but refined forms of crude animal instincts, by aid of which the race has survived in its struggle for existence. There are no soul harmonies—nothing but the beating of the primitive tom-tom. They believe nothing which can not be verified by the methods of physical science. They have no faith.

How many a man of science, on some slight hint pointing in a given direction, with faith and courage has pursued his investigations, adopting hypothesis after hypothesis, rejecting, adjusting, the world meanwhile laughing at his folly and credulity, until he has discovered and proclaimed a great truth. When in the world of mind we find phenomena calling for explanation, needs that can be met in only a certain way, higher impulses reaching out toward objects whose existence they prove and whose nature they define, shall we show less faith and courage because of some dogmatic view that there is no reality beyond the world of material existence? In this universe of mystery, anything may be supposed possible for which there is evidence, and any theory is rational that will best explain the facts. If we have not the sense to understand the deepest conceptions of philosophy, let us at least have the sense to stick to that common sense with which God has endowed us in order that we may know by faith the supreme truths concerning man.

Somewhere and somehow in the nature of things is an ideal that made us as we are—an ideal that is adequate to our nature, need, and conception. God at the beginning and God at the end of the natural world, and the world of consciousness seems a postulate that is necessary and warranted. Professor James writes of an old lady who believed that the world rests on a great rock, and that the first rock rests on a rock; being urged further, she exclaimed that it was rocky all up and down. Unless we postulate a spiritual foundation of things that is self-active and rational, we are no better off than the old lady. This appears to be a rational world, for it is a world that makes science possible; we believe it has a rational Creator.

We commonly account for our ideals as constructed in a simple, mechanical way; but the explanation will fail to satisfy the mind of artist or saint in his exalted moments when he has visions of perfection. He must conceive of a Being who possesses the attributes of perfect beauty and goodness. Belief in God consecrates man’s endeavor to attain the highest standards. Without God the world has not a home-seeming for man. As in the dream in Vergil, always he seems to be left alone, always to be going on a long journey in a desert land, unattended.

Philosophy has spent much time and energy to discover the origin of evil; a saner quest would be the origin of good in the world. We know that in accounting for evil there is always an unexplained remainder—the righteous suffering, and the weak crushed under burdens too heavy. It may be that Spencer’s age of perfection, seen away down the vista of evolution, will, when realized, not be inviting. Some one suggests that then men will be perfect, but perfectly idiotic. It is the great moral paradox that perfection must be obtained through struggle with imperfection. Laurels worn but not won are but a fool’s cap. Freedom is possible only in a world of good and evil, a world of choice, and with freedom the humblest creature is infinitely above the most perfect mechanism made and controlled by a blind necessity. Cease to prate of a life of perennial ease under June skies; the divinity within us rises in majesty and will not have it so. After all, those who are overcome in the struggle may have their reward; at Thermopylæ the Persians won the laurels, the Spartans the glory.

Does evolution transform the nature of duty into a mere calculation of the sum of happiness? On the contrary, it adds to duty a practical way of discovering duties. Evolution affirms the truth that knowledge of right and wrong is a growth, and that new conditions bring new problems. The laws of nature and the organization of society promptly teach us applied ethics. True, we no longer search for eternally fixed codes; but whatever conduces to happiness and genuine welfare, whatever conduces to the beauty, dignity, and goodness of self and others is, as ever, a stern duty. It is not in the nature of man to bridge over the chasm between right, known as right, and wrong, known as wrong. The moral imperative, Turn toward the light, seek to see your duty and perform it, is “a presence which is not to be put by, which neither listlessness nor mad endeavor can utterly abolish or destroy.”

“Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible,” says a modern scientific writer. He continues: “Faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance. It is in fact the same moral quality which we call courage in practical affairs.” We admire confidence and courage in the world of affairs, even when disaster may possibly follow. Have we not in our hearts the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” which constitute the faith of St. Paul? And shall we not use the courage of faith to seek a supreme good, when, though we do not find it, there is a reward even in the seeking? If I were to define faith I would call it the X-ray of the soul.

There can be no absolute break between old thought and new. The history of thought is a history of evolution. Modern science has not destroyed the old grounds of faith; it enables us to correct the beliefs built thereon. The next step of science will be a recognition and examination of subjective problems as such. When discarding old things, separate the treasure from the rubbish. If you have ceased to pray selfishly for rain, you need not deny the efficacy of prayer for change of heart, forgiveness of sins, and communion of spirit. If you cannot accept certain views of the Trinity, you need not reject the sublime Christian philosophy, or refuse to pay homage to the perfection of Christ. If you have discarded some doctrine of inspiration of the Bible, you need not deny or neglect the value of the divine ethical teachings of the Hebrews, or their grand sacred poetry—

“Those Hebrew songs that triumph, trust or grieve,—
Verses that smite the soul as with a sword,
And open all the abysses with a word.”

There is a faith which is a personal and conscious relation of man to God. It is said that in its true nature faith can be justified by nothing but itself. Here we enter the temple of the human heart and approach the holy of holies. This we do with reverent mien, even with fear and trembling. We quote from Prof. T. H. Green: “That God is, Reason entitles us to say with the same certainty as that the world is or that we ourselves are. What He is, it does not, indeed, enable us to say in the same way in which we make propositions about matters of fact, but it moves us to seek to become as He is, to become like Him, to become consciously one with Him, to have the fruition of his Godhead. In this sense it is that Reason issues in the life of Faith.... It is our very familiarity with God’s expression of Himself in the institutions of society, in the moral law, in the language and inner life of Christians, in our own consciences, that helps to blind us to its divinity.”

There is a poem, from an author not widely known, entitled “The Hound of Heaven.” It will affect you according to the education, experience, and beliefs of each; but appeal to you it will, for in all is an insistent something that makes for righteousness.

“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—
‘All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.’”

The poem recounts a life made tragic by many a human error, but ever forced to listen to the following “Feet.” It closes thus:

“Halts by me that footfall:
Is my gloom, after all.
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
‘Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.’”

To me it requires greater faith to call the Christian experience an illusion than to accept its reality and validity.

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The true poet is the living embodiment of instinctive faith. His mind and heart are keenly alive to God’s revelation of Himself in man and nature. He is a seer. His themes are the truths that come to him in visions from the realms of truth. He sees the principle of beauty in things; and familiar scenes, commonplace experiences are clothed in a spiritual glory. He accepts the world of facts and of science, but gives them their real meaning. Poetic insight, a thing so much contemned, because so little understood, is one of the best illustrations and evidences of the nature of faith. Wordsworth calls poetry “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.”

A few months ago I chanced to be looking from a railroad train near Lake Erie in the very early dawn. I beheld, as I supposed, a beautiful expanse of water, with islands and inlets, and, beyond, a range of blue hills. I was lost in admiration of the view. As the light increased, a suspicion, at last growing into certainty, arose that I was the subject of an illusion, and that my beautiful landscape was but a changing scene of cloud and open sky on the horizon. But the blue hills still seemed real; soon they, too, were resolved into clouds, and only a common wooded country remained to the vision. The analogy to the dawn of civilization and the flight of superstition, and, finally, of faith, forced itself upon me, and I was troubled, seeing no escape from the application. Just then the sun arose, bringing the glory of light to the eye, and with it came a thrilling mental flash. There was the solution, the all-revealing light, the greater truth, without which neither the appearance of the solid earth nor of its seeming aërial counterpart would have been possible. Both evidenced the greater existence. Are not our fancies and our facts, our errors in the search of truth and our truths, our doubts and our faith, our life and activity and being, proofs of a Universal Existence—the revealer of truth, the source of truth, and the Truth?

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This address has more than a formal purpose. Our beliefs in great measure determine our practical life. Freedom, God, and Immortality are conceptions that have ruled in the affairs of men and made the best products of civilization; they must still rule in the individual, if he would grow to his full stature. We are in a century of doubt, but I firmly believe that in the ashes of the old faith the vital spark still glows, and that from them, phœnix-like, will rise again the spiritual life in new strength and beauty.

Show your faith by your works; faith without works is dead. A mere philosophic belief in abstract ideals, not lived in some measure, may be worse than useless. A mere intellectual faith that does not touch the heart and brighten life and make work a blessing lacks the vital element. Follow your ideals closely with effort. Give life breadth as well as length; the totality will be the sum of your thought, feeling, and action. When the active conflict is over and the heroes recount their battles, may you be able to say: “I, too, was there.”

There is still a practical side. Many young men have powers of growth and possibilities of success beyond their present belief; faith creates results. Every one has rare insights and rare impulses, showing his powers and urging him to action; it is fatal to ignore them. Faith is needed in business; confidence begets confidence. It is needed in social life; friendship demands to be met on equal terms. It is a ground of happiness; suspicion creates gloom and pessimism. It is needed for practical coöperation; suspicion is isolated. It is needed by the educator; faith and love make zeal in the calling. It is due even the criminal; in most men there is more of good than bad. Charity for the sins and misfortunes of humanity, hope for the best, faith in our endeavor must attend successful effort to aid men.

After all it is the essential spirit that one cultivates within him that will determine his manifold deeds. We can invoke no greater blessing than a character that in all ways will assert the highest dignity that belongs to a human soul. Be brave in your faith. When materialism, indifference, doubt, ease, and unseemly pleasure claim you for theirs (the Devil’s own), let your answer be what is expressed in Carlyle’s “Everlasting Yea”: “And then was it that my whole _Me_ stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest: _I_ am not thine, but Free!”

When I see some grand old man, full of faith, courage, optimism, and cheerfulness, whose life has conformed to the moral law, who has wielded the right arm of his freedom boldly for every good cause, come to the end of life with love for man and trust in God, seeing the way brighten before him, turning his sunset into morning, I must believe that he represents the survival of the fittest, that his ideals are not the mere fictions of a blind nature, serving for the preservation of his physical being, but that the order of his life has been in accord with realities.

EVOLUTION OF A PERSONAL IDEAL.

A famous artist once painted a portrait on a unique plan. He secured a copy of every photograph of the subject from his babyhood. When the painting was finished, there appeared in it the pictures of seven people of different ages, skilfully grouped and variously employed, but all portraits of the same person, each representing a stage of growth. We shall not attempt the work of the artist, but will endeavor to furnish the brush and colors, leaving you to fill in the sketches, now and at future times, at your leisure.

A tale is told of a man who awoke one night thinking of his past and groaning in evident mental distress. To the solicitous inquiry of his guardian angel, he replied: “I am thinking about the people I used to be.” The angel, smiling, said: “I am thinking seriously about the people you are going to be”—thinking of

“The soul that has learned to break its chains,
The heart grown tenderer through its pains,
The mind made richer for its thought,
The character remorse has wrought
To far undreamed capacities;
The will that sits a king at ease.
Nay, marvel not, for I plainly see
And joy in the people you’re going to be.”

The gradual realization of higher and higher types is the general law of evolution in the organic world; it is also the process of the ideal spiritual development of the individual man. The potency of an infinitely varied and beautiful world was in the primeval mist. The potency of each higher type of being lies in the simpler form preceding. Ideally the potency of a soul of strength and beauty, of continuous development, is in the child and youth. The self of to-day is the material of possibility which should grow into the higher self of to-morrow.

Growth is not merely gain in knowledge and intellectual power. The science of education must include a vision of the entire human soul with its need of sympathy and direction, its vague dreams of possibility, its ideals half-realized. We must view the scale of feelings from the lowest animal instinct to the most refined ethical emotions, the order of their worth from the meanest vindictiveness to the highest altruism under God and duty, and note the struggle for the survival of the fittest of the impulses and motives under the guidance of reason and with the responsibility of freedom.

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We see men, yet in the vigor of life, men of learning, of position, of opportunity, complacent in their attainments, fixed in ideas and methods adapted to a previous generation or a different environment, psychically prematurely old, their powers half-developed, their life work half-done. The men who reach the complete development of their powers constantly renew their youth, and march with modern events.

We see young graduates, men of power, who, through degenerate tendencies, lack of faith, lack of insight or lack of courage, remain stationary and satisfied in the grade to which their diplomas duly testify. They have as much life and growth and are as ornamental as a painted canvas tree in a garden. A lazy indifferent man once said he would as soon be dead as alive. When asked why he did not kill himself, he could only explain that he would as soon be alive as dead.

In the established church is sometimes observed by its devotees a special season of solitude and silence for religious meditation; it is called a “retreat.” There is a German tale of an aged grandfather who, every Christmas season, spent a day alone in meditation upon the year and the years gone by, making a reckoning with himself, with his failures and his blessings, and casting a most conscientious account. On that day the noisy children were hushed by the servants—“The master is keeping his retreat”—and they went about in silent wonder and imagined he was making himself Christmas gifts in his quiet room upstairs. When he reappeared in the evening, after his day of solitude, he seemed by his quiet, gentle manners and thought-lit face to have received heaven-sent gifts.

I shall never forget the passage of Vergil which in my school days gave rise in me to a new sense of beauty in literature; nor shall I forget the unique and rich experience of the revelation. Every one has at times a new birth, a disclosure of hitherto unknown capacities and powers.

The soul must keep its retreats, not necessarily on church-anniversary days, but at epochs, at periods of dissatisfaction with the past, at stages of new insight—must have a reckoning with itself and readjust itself to life. When one reviews the panorama of his own history, and finds it inartistic, a profitless daub, empty of the ideal or heroic, he is keeping a retreat. When a new estimate of values and possibilities appears, he has experienced a conversion, has taken a new step in the evolution of his ideal life. The revolt of the soul may be as necessary to its health and growth as the upheaval of a nation is essential to its development. It is a battle for new principles, for advance, for freedom.

Tolstoï relates a most striking reminiscence of his own life, substantially thus: It was in 1872 that the Tolstoï of to-day saw the light. Then a new insight revealed his former life as empty. It was on a beautiful spring morning with bright sun, singing birds, and humming insects. He had halted to rest his horse by a wayside cross. Some peasants passing stopped there to offer their devotions. He was touched to the depths by their simple faith, and when he took up his journey he knew that the Kingdom of God is within us. He says: “It was then, twenty-three years ago, that the Tolstoï of to-day sprang into existence.”

President Garfield, when at the head of Hiram College, once addressed his students, in a way that made a lasting impression, on the subject of “Margins.” Personal distinction, success, depend, not on the average bulk of knowledge, power, and skill, but on that margin that extends a little beyond the reach of one’s fellows, a margin gained by some extra devotion, by sacrifice and work, by ideals a little more advanced or more clearly seen.

Some recent and notable inductions of physiological psychology along the line of evolution reaffirm that without pain there can be no happiness, that without struggle there can be no positive character, that at times punishment may be most salutary and that a deadhead in society degenerates as does a parasite in the animal kingdom. Since these views are in line with the teachings of instinct and reason, from old Plato down, we may believe that evolution as applied to the spiritual nature of man is, indeed, becoming a hopeful doctrine. We have had somewhat too much of Herbert Spencer’s pleasure theory, and pursuit of inclination, and the discipline of natural consequences, and lines of least resistance. The moral drama must be enacted on a field of conflict.

The principle of personal evolution is “ideals and action.” Mr. Gladstone’s wonderful character and great career are a pointed illustration of this fact. Even his fixed standards of conduct were a contribution to his growth and greatness. He always asked concerning a policy of state: Is it just? No unworthy motive was ever known to determine his public or his private acts. While working ever according to permanent standards of right, his was essentially a life of change and growth. Mr. Gladstone had a mind always seeking truth, and, moreover, had a rare capacity for receiving new ideas. In his history one can discover many distinct stages of development. He himself acknowledges three great “transmigrations of spirit” in his parliamentary career. He broke away from his early political traditions and, in consequence, more than once was obliged to seek new constituents who “marched with the movement of his mind.” He was ever “struggling toward the light,” and was ever a fighter. His political opponents said of him that his foot was always in the stirrup. His mind rested not by inactivity, but by “stretching itself out in another direction.” He threw himself into new and important movements for humanity with tremendous zeal and force.

Lord Macaulay pithily expresses a law of human progress: “The point which yesterday was invisible is our goal to-day, and will be our starting post to-morrow.” Maurice Maeterlinck says: “If at the moment you think or say something that is too beautiful to be true in you—if you have but endeavored to think or to say it to-day, on the morrow it will be true. We must try to be more beautiful than ourselves; we shall never distance our soul.”

In the problem of growth do not neglect Emerson’s principle of compensation. As men injure or help others, so they injure or help themselves. Punishment is the inseparable attendant of crime. Requital is swift, sure, and exact. Vice makes spiritual blindness. The real drama of life is within. Some one has said that punishment for misdeeds is not something which happens to a man, but something which happens in a man. Balzac describes a magic skin, endowed with power to measure the term of life of its possessor, which shrank with his every expressed wish. Personal worth grows or shrinks with the daily life and thought. Every one can will his own growth in strength and symmetry or can become dwarfed and degenerate. Wrong takes away from the sum of worth; virtue makes increase from the source of all good. Emerson says that even a man’s defects may be turned to good. For instance, if he has a disposition that fails to invite companionship, he gains habits of self-help, and thus, “like the wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.”

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If you would see the fulness of God’s revelation in men, look into the minds of those whose biographies are worth writing—men who in affairs of the world have shown clear thought and accurate judgment, and in spiritual things have had visions that may strengthen and confirm your feeble faith. Study the record of their words spoken at the fireside in the presence of intimate and congenial friends, when they showed glimpses of the real self. Learn in biography the history of great souls and see in them the ideal which is the ideal of the race, and, hence, your ideal. With the going out of this century some great lives have ended—lives that embodied high types of rugged, honest satire, political power, poetic thought, pure statesmanship, ethical standards, religious faith, scientific devotion. Their histories have been written, and enough is in them to stir the semiconscious indolent nature of any young man to cultivate a high personal ideal. When I left college my first investment was in a few additional good books. I advise students to buy a few of the best biographies recently published, and read them with a reverent mind.

When you see a man of marked power, you may be sure, always sure, that he has used means of growth which average people ignore, means without which his strength would never have appeared. He has been a student, perhaps of Plato, of Shakespeare, of the Bible, of science or of human nature. He has gone deeply into the character or writings of master minds in some field of knowledge or activity. If he has a truly great nature he is able to find in many a passage of Hebrew writings a power that welled up from the great hearts of the prophets of old—or a wisdom that gradually evolved with civilization through experiment, disaster, struggle, and contrition, and was corrected and formulated with rare understanding by the few great minds of history. Such writings are a very wellspring of knowledge and understanding for a young man of this or any age.

Have you read the earlier as well as the later writings of Rudyard Kipling? What a growth of power! The evolution of his ideal ever promises and realizes greater things. When recently it seemed that the riper fruits of his progress would be denied us, the keenest solicitude was everywhere manifest. It was a spontaneous tribute to the principle of ideal spiritual evolution in the individual. We now know Kipling’s secret. In his weakness and his sorrow he has already turned to a new and more ambitious undertaking and has gathered to himself all material that may enable him to pluck out from his subject the heart of its mystery, and reveal it to the world of thought and culture. It is with the magic of industry that he evolves the ideal of his life.

The following story is told of Kipling—that it is not authentic does not rob it of its use: Father and son were on a voyage. The father, suffering from seasickness, had retired to his cabin, when an officer appeared and cried: “Your son has climbed out on the foreyard, and if he lets go he’ll be drowned; we cannot save him.” “Oh, is that all?” replied Mr. Kipling; “he won’t let go.”

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Be men of to-day; the past is useful to make us wise in the present. The poet Tennyson had a wonderful influence in his generation. His influence is due not alone to his rich thought and poetic skill; he had the broad liberal view that could adapt itself to the changing world of science, philosophy, and religion, and he thus opened up the avenues of approach to all classes of thinkers. He was a man with an evolving ideal, a free, sane, healthy mind.

Poetry is not a thing of the past; it has not yet become familiar with its new themes. Kipling can sing the “Song of Steam” and write the romance of the “Day’s Work”—can find poetry in a locomotive, a bridge, a ship or an engine. Kipling is right when he makes McAndrew, the hard-headed engineer of an ocean liner, see in the vast motor mechanism an “orchestra sublime,” “singing like the morning stars,” and proclaiming: “Not unto us the praise, or man.” “From coupler-flange to spindle-guide I see Thy Hand, O God”—and this vision is always the ultimate ground of poetry. On a palace steamer between New York and the New England coast I once heard an uncultured workman exclaim: “When I watch this mighty engine, with its majestic, powerful movement, I feel that there is a God.” At first thought the sentiment was humorously illogical, but his instinct was right. The works of nature and the works of man alike suggest a divine origin—God working in nature and working through man.

If this is a divine world, then there is no claim of the commonplace, no form of daily labor, no need of the unfortunate, no problem of society or government that is not a theme of dignity and worthy of attention and helpful effort. The form of truth is an empty, useless abstraction, unless it is given a content, unless it adjusts wrongs, removes evils, improves material conditions, and strengthens growth among all classes of people to-day. The man who beautifies his lawn, plants trees, lays good walks or cleans the streets is made more conscious of the divine within him—is a better man. Spinoza regarded his skill in making lenses to be as essential a part of his life as his philosophical interest.

Every advance in civilization changes the perspective, and new views and truths appear. Within a few years we have seen in America almost an entire change of attitude regarding many essential political and social questions. Throughout the world, Christianity, by clearer interpretation of its spirit, is gaining new influence in practical fields. New problems have not the enchantment of distance; history and poetry have not thrown a halo about them; but they have the interest of present, practical, living issues. Every great man has attained his self-realization as a creative factor in the work of his own age. Take a hand in making current history.

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Successful men have shown at the close of their student life only the hope of what they finally became. But they were men who knew how to cherish every helpful impulse, to learn from every experience, to profit by each fresh insight, to concentrate their powers upon single tasks, and at each fulfilment look forward to still greater undertakings. Such minds wear the beauty of promise,

“that which sets
The budding rose above the rose full blown.”

The realization of ideal promise is not merely intellectual power and practical attainment. A man may have these, and yet lack a rich mind. Sympathy, pure ideals, morality, religious sentiment belong to a complete nature. Without them one is not a fit leader or a choice companion. A wholly irreligious man is not conscious of his soul. As the years advance, with the progressive man there is more heart, more simplicity and truth, more moral and spiritual interest.

In the “Memoir of Lord Tennyson” by his son, a chapter on the “In Memoriam” throws brilliant side lights on the essential character of the great poet. One would almost take the truths there expressed as his creed, and the inner life there revealed as the consummation of a personal ideal. We note his “splendid faith in the growing purpose of the sum of life, and in the noble destiny of the individual man;” his belief that “it is the great purpose which consecrates life;” his feeling that “only under the inspiration of ideals, and with his ‘sword bathed in heaven,’ can a man combat the cynical indifference, the intellectual selfishness, the sloth of will, the utilitarian materialism of a transition age;” his faith that “the truth must be larger, purer, nobler than any mere human expression of it;” his affirmation that, if you “take away belief in the self-conscious personality of God, you take away the backbone of the world.” He believed in prayer. In his own words: “Prayer is like opening a sluice between the great ocean and our little channels when the great sea gathers itself together and flows in at full tide.”

Ideals do not belong to a mystical realm, to a remote age or to an indefinite future. They are not the exclusive possession of sage, saint, or poet. They belong to this day, here, to us. They belong to the professional man, as a man, as much as to the man of liberal culture.

To see the idyllic in what is familiar, to realize the heroic in ourselves, to make the lessons of greatness our own, to work with the spirit of our time are the means of growth. Every thought and every act, flowing from the conscious will, fashion the soul.

“I held it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.”

THE GREEK VIRTUES IN MODERN APPLICATION.

At the risk of imitating the severe logical discourses which proceed at least as far as fifthly, let us enumerate some essential conditions that by the agreement of thoughtful men are requisite for a satisfactory life: (1) a sound body; (2) courage; (3) intellectual ideals; (4) moral ideals; (5) reverence. While these elements are selected for their intrinsic value, without reference to the history of ethical thought, the discovery that they show more than a fancied similarity to the ancient and the early Christian ideals strengthens our belief in their value, and suggests that essential human standards are not for one people or one age, but for all peoples and all time, and that they are spontaneously recognized even in an age like ours, when men readily turn toward utilitarian ends.

If we go back to the dawn of philosophic thought and listen to the early revelators of the nature of man and his relation to the world and society—converse with Plato in the groves of Academus, or walk with Aristotle in the shady avenues of the Lyceum—we find them proclaiming the great truths which have been confirmed by the experience of ages, and urging upon men Moderation, Courage, Wisdom, Justice, and the Good, or God, as aim. If we cross over from the ancient world to the Christian Empire, where old ethical thought was already taking on deeper meaning, broader application, and richer life, we find in the Cardinal Virtues of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine a new and vitalized form of the Greek Virtues: Temperance, Christian Fortitude, Christian Wisdom, Christian Justice, God as aim. If we come down to modern times, and catch the spirit of ideals that still dwell among the people, we find that human nature is everywhere the same, and that the experience of human life in all ages discovers through the organization of society the same divine principles—laws to be reverenced and obeyed, to be followed as practical guides to success.

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Modern psychology has rendered a service of far-reaching practical benefit in showing more definitely the intimate connection between the brain and mental action. In this connection of body and soul the two are correlated; the brain is organic to the functions of the soul. The health of the brain is largely dependent upon general physical conditions, and the old apothegm, “_Mens sana in corpore sano_,” is interpreted with a new meaning not fully known in the days of Juvenal. Maxims of health, sifted by the experience of ages, transmitted from generation to generation, and confirmed by the proofs of modern science, are wisdom of inestimable value for our instruction. He who wastes energy of the body wastes vigor and duration of mental power. Rev. William R. Alger used to say: “Keep yourself at highest working capacity by preserving the vigor of the body.” The various ways of wasting physical energy are susceptible of classification, and it is well worth the while to make a thoughtful analysis of the subject. We admire the firm step, erect bearing, clear eye, and bright brain that belong to healthful habits and noble manhood. Many a man by carefully conserving the vital forces will outlive and outdo others who, with stronger bodies, waste their energy.

Physical sins react upon the mind and debase character. They are signs of a character already weak, and the interaction between mind and body doubly hastens the relaxing of just restraint. The ancient virtue of moderation, or temperance, meant more than temperate habit; it meant the submission of animal unreason to reason—the “observance of due measure in all conduct.”

In accord with the maxims of health are the Greek Virtue of Moderation, the Cardinal Virtue of Temperance, the Hebrew Purity. Regard for these maxims is an important condition of success.

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Courage appears in the Greek Category as heart for energetic action, and in the Cardinal Virtues as firmness for the right and against the wrong. Courage is the _sine qua non_ of success. The student must have courage to overcome his inertia. A venerable professor of my college days used to say: “Every young man is naturally as lazy as he can be, and the greatest problem of education is to gain an energetic will.” Courage is required to undertake an enterprise demanding long years of toil. A volume recently published contains the early experience of celebrated authors now living, and nearly every one owes his success to a persevering determination, in spite of poverty, rebuffs, criticism, and repeated failures. Their genius lies in their courage. We need the courage of our convictions to stand by the right. The great reformers have shared this kind of confidence of soul. Nearly all of Carlyle’s types of the world’s great heroes possessed it to an almost sublime degree, and, most of all, the hero of the Reformation. Waiving all religious controversies that centre about the doctrines of Martin Luther, he is a figure for the world to admire. Some of his memorable words are known as household words, but, like strains of familiar grand music, are ever grateful—they lose nothing by repeating. When warned that Duke George of Leipzig was his enemy he said: “Had I business, I would ride into Leipzig though it rained Duke Georges for nine days running.” When summoned to the Diet at Worms, he answered the friends who would dissuade him: “Were there as many devils in Worms as there are roof tiles, I would on.” When urged in the presence of that august council to recant, he replied: “Here I stand; I can do no other; God help me.” And the courage of his religious faith rose to its climax when he boldly faced the supernatural and hurled his inkstand at the head of the Devil himself. The student needs the courage of faith in his own powers and possibilities. Many a one fails because he has not confidence in himself. In rare moments of meditation one sometimes discovers capacities and possibilities of attainment that become a life inspiration.

We are proud of our Teutonic ancestry; of the bold enterprise that led the Teutons across Europe in conquest, or impelled them to embark in their galleys and push forth with adventurous spirit, and fearlessly ride the tempestuous waves, as their oars kept time to the music of their songs of victory. Their courageous and progressive spirit, tamed and refined, reappeared in the religious convictions of the Puritans, in the settlement of America, in the westward march of civilization in our own country, in the confidence of the pioneers that early crossed the plains and pitched their tents by these mighty mountains, in the energy that has made all that the world holds as greatest and best in material civilization, invention, government, science, literature, and moral and religious principle. The young man who has in his veins the blood of this people, and inherits the blessings that his race has wrought out, is a recreant to his trust if he does not stand courageously for all that is best in his own development, and all that is best in the progress of his age. Thor, the Norse god, possessed a belt of strength by which his might was doubled, and a precious hammer which when thrown returned to the hand of its own accord. When he wielded the hammer, as the Northern legends relate, he grasped it until the knuckles grew white. This hammer is an heirloom of the Northern races, handed down from the Halls of Walhalla. And herein lies the secret of success: grasp the hammer until the knuckles grow white.

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Plato held Wisdom to be the supreme means by which to attain the great purpose of human existence. The Cardinal Virtue of Christian Wisdom is to gain knowledge of God. Plato conceived growth in wisdom to be a gradual realization, in the consciousness of man, of the eternal ideas. Man came from heaven and in his progress in knowledge he was but climbing the upward path to regain his lost estate. The exercise of wisdom marked him off from the lower order of beings, and he was fulfilling the distinctively human function only when living a rational life.

If nature is a congeries of metaphors arranged in a system of relations and constituting a sublime allegory, and we, being the offspring of God, may interpret this allegory and thereby come to a consciousness of verities, if there is a spiritual sense that may feel the presence of great truths and of a personal God—then man pursues his supreme calling when through the laws of physical nature, when through the beauty of its forms, when through knowledge of self, when through the world’s history and literature and philosophy he aims at a further acquaintance with truth. If knowledge and the power that comes through knowledge enhance our material civilization and make more favorable conditions for the body and more leisure for the mind and more refinement for the spirit, if to create material things brings us more in accord with the creative spirit of the universe, then we have the highest incentives to gain knowledge toward so-called practical ends.

The universities are not always the first discoverers of wisdom, but they are the storehouses of the wisdom of the ages, and the distributing points. They are not a substitute for nature and real life, but they help to interpret both. They are not a substitute for practical experience, but they bestow the instruments with which to do better the work of practical experience. They do not create power, but they develop power.

A few geniuses have in strong degree the intellectual impulse and follow it until they become original and creative, and contribute to the world’s insight. But the average youth needs all that the formal training of the schools can give him. When the student is once aroused by the sense of his privileges and duties, he will select no easy goal to attain. He will not be satisfied until he has learned the secrets of nature’s processes, has examined his own nature, has made use of the recorded experience of the ages—thereby taking a giant stride in knowledge that he could not have taken alone—has given himself the power to help in the work of his own time.

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