Chapter XV: Part 15

If any lesson can be learned from history, which historians tell us is not the case, it would seem to be that what we call "goodness" is on the whole ineradicable. By goodness the race survives. Every one of us, struggle as he may, is constrained in his degree to be less bad than he might be. Many of us confess freely that we do not know why this is so. We do not know whether there is a moral law. If there is a moral law, we do not know whether its origin is transcendental and arbitrary, biological and definitely ascertainable, or social and fluctuating. Moreover we do not so much as know whether we are free agents, choosing continually between good and evil, or automata, feeling, to be sure, the stress of conflicting forces, but bound mathematically to follow the line of their compromise. We are of course comfortably able to ignore all these considerations in our everyday trains of thought. Just as the schoolboy learns to say parrotwise that the sun sits still and swings us round, though he sees him every evening descend to rest in New Jersey like a tired commuter; and just as the uncompromising idealist behaves exactly like the man who believes in the knowable reality of the world; so the most convinced determinist must act from morning to night as though he were a free agent, and must judge his fellowmen as though they too were choosers. Moreover almost all of us adopt instinctively some concrete reason for the choices we assume we are making. These reasons being inevitably partial and ludicrously incommensurate with the cosmic results that we hang upon them, are constantly in process of giving way under the strain. The so-called "religious" reasons land us in the position of having to give an immoral basis for morality. Either they involve the doctrine of a future life, and so vitiate the moral impulse with egoism at its source, or, with a diminished confidence in the sureness of reward, which is all to the good, they tend to perpetuate affirmations that have lost their meaning, which is all to the bad. It seems to have been on the whole a misfortune that religion and morality, which historically and logically have neither more nor less to do with each other than marriage and love, should have become profoundly associated in Europe in the last two thousand years. The most pressing duty of the moralist--and every man is a moralist--is to dissolve the merger, and there are circumstances connected with its origin which may lessen our estimate of the inconvenience involved in the dissolution. The mythology, cult, doctrine, exegesis and ethics of Christianity are considerably more Greek than Hebraic in origin, and the Greeks in their prime had excellent ways of their own of dealing with all these matters. They managed to be profoundly religious while avoiding the two pits into which the Hebrews fell, first, the confounding of myth with history, and, second, the erection of morals on a supernatural, jural and egoistic basis. Let us then consider the Greeks.

II

The most remarkable fact in connection with the religion of the Greeks is its attitude towards the use of the reason. Of all the religions known to us this exercised the least restrictive power over the minds of those who entertained it. Over their conduct in matters of ritual it did of course exercise power both restrictive and positive, but the reason it left free. Greek religion is therefore recalcitrant to M. Reinach's definition of religion in general as "a sum of scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties." All that was obligatory was ritual; there was no confession of faith, the priests did not form a class with vested interests to maintain. The absence of dogma from a religion will not recommend it to everybody, but those who regard that as a fortunate circumstance will grant that the credit rests not with the religion itself but with the people who hold it. Just as any state can have as many paupers as it cares to pay for, so any body of religionists can have as many dogmas as it chooses to encourage. Greek religion began like any other with its terrors, its taboos and its magic. If it did not tie up its adherents hand and foot, as other primitive religions have done, that was due to the psychological idiosyncracy of the Greeks. When their time of expansion was over they became the patients and the agents of dogma, but in connection with a foreign religion. It might have been expected from the history of native religions in Greece, that the strong influence of Greek thought on early Christianity would have been anti-dogmatic. On the contrary, practically the whole dogmatic structure of the fathers, though Oriental in spirit, is Greek in form. The tradition of free thought could not stand before St. Paul, and Greek religion, which for fifteen hundred years had given the world a lesson in the true function and status of mythology, lent itself in its decay to the creation of a system which, in the hands of races of very different temperament, became dogma. But though Greek religion began with magic and ended with dogma, it very early rendered the one harmless, and never submitted to the other in connection with a native cult.

For the primitive Greek, as for the primitive Hebrew, the Latin, the Maori, the Melanesian, the American Indian, the world was full of a mysterious force, unaccountable, able either to curse or to bless; and man's very existence depended on his ability to learn the laws of this power's action, to direct it if possible, and if not, to placate it. As man proceeds along the well-worn path to animism, the force comes to be thought of as wielded by will and intelligence like his own. But he never leaves it behind him. After the gods are born, he worships them in terms of it. From his earliest ritualistic act, to the contemporary sacrament of the Christian church, holy water for instance has been the means of salvation. For unnumbered ages ritual has remained unchanged, but its psychology has changed. What is everywhere performed today with hope, originated everywhere in the dark past with fear.

The Eleusinian mysteries sprang doubtless from as primitive beginnings as any Greek ritual of which we have knowledge. Nevertheless they are free from many of the marks of primitive ritual. They show no cannibalism, probably no totemism, certainly no orgiastic excesses. If animal sacrifice was practised in the precincts, no blood was spilt in the hall of the mysteries. Moreover there was originally nothing either mystic or mysterious about them, in our sense. But a god came to be associated with them, a newcomer to Greece, who brought mystery and mysticism in his train, a god whose mission was to emotionalize religion. Dionysus, of Thracian origin, was, to begin with, a vegetation-power, the son of the earth-goddess. The vine with its strange psychic powers became the plant oftenest associated with him, but the plane and the pine were also his, and if he was Dionysus-the-Grape at Philippi, he was Dionysus-the-Ivy at Acharnania. Remnants of strong magic, compelling the earth to fertility, were present in his rites. Like other vegetation-powers he had a dark side; he suffered death and resurrection, and was powerful in the world of the dead. In the history of culture the ritual of Dionysus has a distinguished place as the putative father of tragedy. In the history of religion that ritual is chiefly remarkable for having brought into Greece, together with all the phenomena of auto-suggestion, a conception that was to have a portentous sequel, the conception of a sacramental meal consisting of the body and blood of the god himself, by partaking of which the communicant shared the divine nature. The whole aim of the Dionysiac method in its native Thrace was hypnosis; the wild Bacchic dance, the tossing of the head, the frantic clash of the tambourine, the harrowing cry of wind-instruments, the waving of torches in the night, the use of stimulants or narcotics, and finally the rending and devouring of the still quivering flesh of the animal which incarnated the god, were all means of so altering the psychic states of the participant that he was no longer conscious of the operation of his own will, but was filled with the god,--enthusiastic. The practical aim of the induced ecstasy was doubtless originally the acquisition of divine power for magical purposes. As the savage eats his brave enemy to acquire his bravery, so the early agrarian eats the vegetation-god to acquire his power of making things grow. But in classical times the phenomena of enthusiasm had taken on a significance that overshadowed the claims of vegetation-magic. Among a people temperamentally self-restrained, nothing is more curious than the psychology of self-abandonment. If we must select one aspect of the godhead as most expressive of the Greek mind, that aspect will unquestionably be Apollo, lucid, rational, self-possessed and civilized. The gulf between the two doctrines, between Apollo's "never too much" and Dionysus' exhortation to let yourself go, would have constituted heresy and schism in a dogmatic age.

But the Greek, seeing how true and how indispensable both are, made shift to bridge the gulf by the set of opinions associated with the name of Orpheus. The state of our knowledge of the origins of Orphism may be illustrated by the fact that Maass says Orpheus was a god and indigenous in Greece, Miss Harrison believes him to have been a man, probably a native of Crete whence he made his way to Greece by way of Thrace, while Reinach declares he was a fox-totem of the Bassarids. Fortunately it does not greatly matter. What is really important, not only for Hellenism but for Christianity, is the spirit of his doctrine, of which we can recover, not it is true, anything like expository teaching, but the traces of the color it laid on almost every fabric of Greek thought. No image could more justly picture it than the faded remnants of paint found on the remains of Greek buildings and sculptures. It is pretty nearly impossible to our imagination to tolerate the vision of a temple or a statue clad otherwise than in its original whiteness or in the beautiful tones bestowed by time and rust. And similarly the forms of Greek spiritual expression show to the soul's eye as logical, pure and monotone. But just as surely as the houses of the gods were painted gaudily with red and blue and green, as surely as their hair was ruddy and their cheeks glowing, so surely was their worship touched and tinted with the emotion that transcends and defies reason.

Orphism took up and developed the mystic elements of the Dionysiac cult, giving them a higher spiritual content and a more restrained expression. It was a scheme of salvation, based on the hope of life after death. The central fact of religious experience was communion with the god; by eating his body and drinking his blood the worshipper partook of his nature, of which immortality was an attribute. "To become Bacchus" was the aim of the partaker of the sacrament. But whereas the old Thracian ritual surrendered the worshipper to the god by means of drunkenness and frenzy, the new ritual induced ecstasy by the equally efficacious use of fasting, silence and quiet suggestion. Orphism though of foreign origin became a genuine Greek religion, and was the last. It was never adopted by the state, but remained in the hands of private congregations. Through these it permeated Greece. Thinkers and poets and the plain people were reached by its different methods of appeal. If we sum up its most striking characteristics, we cannot fail to see how strong was its influence on the world-religion that was to succeed it. Orphism took up the beliefs of paganism, and adapted them to its own ends. It gave them fresh life through its doctrine of the immortality of the soul. It taught that the soul after death rests for a time in a state of probation, and is finally, according to the works done in the body, either admitted to felicity or punished by reincarnation. Final felicity was to be obtained by ceremonial purity of life, reached through the use of sacraments necessary to salvation, and the chief of these sacraments was the symbolic and memorial partaking of the body and blood of a god slain by his enemies. By the proper use of sacraments, the living could improve the condition of the dead; unscrupulous priests sometimes traded on the simplicity of ignorant worshippers, and engaged for money to perform rites that should free the transgressor from the consequences of his transgression, whether he were alive or dead. The cult of Orpheus therefore summarizes an enormous range of human history. From the Mountain Mother of the Cretan seals and her son, through the patriarchal reign of Zeus, to Mary and the son of Mary, it follows certain apparently unchanging requirements of the soul.

The ceremony of the Eleusinia was a magnificent pageant, the culmination of the religious year. It was a strong appeal to eye and ear, and to the _psychologie de la foule_. It was probably accompanied neither by dogmatic exhortation nor by any appeal to the intellect. Aristotle analyzed the method in a sentence: "The initiated do not learn anything; rather they feel certain emotions, and are put into a certain frame of mind." This frame of mind was a hopeful one for this life and the next. On the supernatural side, the mystic felt that he was sure of the good-will of the great powers of the underworld, having done them honor, eaten of their food and enrolled himself as their friend and follower. On the natural side, he had felt the benefit--on which all ritual is based--of performing, in unison with others, after preparation both bodily and mental, and with the moving accompaniments of beautiful and impressive sights and sounds, certain acts entirely apart from the ordinary routine of life, and venerable with the usage of the past. But it is to be noted that although the door was open for communication between religion and morals, the original conception of purity was formal and ceremonial, a survival of magic. We may picture Greek morals as standing with one foot on a religious, the other on a social basis; but if, as in the usual posture of Greek sculpture, the weight of the body is thrown chiefly on one foot, that is the social one. When foreign cults began to make their way into Greece, they generally followed the form of the mystery. Isis, Serapis and Mithras, oriental in origin but Hellenized in ritual, were centers for religions of the personal, mystic and consolatory type. All these oriental cults brought with them a tendency to take literally what the Greeks had taken loosely, and Mithraism brought a high development of the tendency to base morality on the egoistic motive.

Bearing in mind the wide prevalence of these and similar rites on the shores of the Mediterranean during the first century of our era, we are in a position to understand a situation which Archdeacon Cheetham and Dr. Hatch discussed fifteen years ago. In apostolic times the Christian sacraments were of the most informal character possible. A man could be baptized at any time in any place by anyone. "Lo, here is water; what hindereth me to be baptized?" For the years immediately succeeding the apostolic, we have no evidence, and by the time evidence begins again, a great change is visible. Baptism no longer follows at once on conversion, but is preceded by a probationary term, as was initiation. It can no longer be performed anywhere at any time, but only in the great churches and at one of the great festivals, generally Easter-even or Pentecost. Similarly, once in the year, on the 16th of Boedromion, the candidates for initiation used to go down to the sea in a body to be purified by immersion. And baptism is no longer a simple thing done in the sight of all men but a mystery--so Justin Martyr calls it--and the officiant is a "mystagogos." The baptized are now called "initiate," the unbaptized "uninitiate." Before the Lord's supper, the priest now asks, as the mystagogos used to ask, "Is there anyone who has a quarrel with any?" And until infant baptism removed the distinction, the "uninitiate" were directed to withdraw before the consummation of the mystery, as for unnumbered ages they had been bidden to withdraw from the crowning rites of the Eleusinia. It is clear that the founders of Christian mysticism, Clement for instance and Dionysius the Areopagite, did consciously all in their power to emphasize the resemblances between the new and the old. Gregory of Nyssa calls baptism "the mystic bath," Athanasius calls unction "the mystic oil," Gregory of Nazianzen calls the elements "mystic food." Secret formulas, the idea of which comes from the mysteries, are called by the old name, "what must not be spoken." Clement speaks the technical language of the mysteries. "O truly sacred mysteries! O stainless light! My way is lighted with torches, and I survey the heavens and God! I am become holy while I am being initiated! The Lord is my hierophant!"

During the last ten years the researches of Reitzensteim and Cumont have corrected the first impression that the influence of mystic cult and language was late and self-conscious. The very origin of the Christian sacraments, the very theology of Saint Paul, are now believed by many scholars to reflect the Hermitic and Gnostic versions of the mysteries.

III

The doctrine of the early church underwent as great a modification as its cult. The studies of Hatch were directed by the reflection expressed in the first paragraph of his _Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages on the Christian Church_. "It is impossible for anyone, whether he be a student of history or no, to fail to notice a difference of both form and content between the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene Creed. The Sermon on the Mount is the promulgation of a new law of conduct; it assumes beliefs rather than formulates them; the theological conceptions which underlie it belong to the ethical rather than the speculative side of theology; metaphysics are wholly absent. The Nicene Creed is a statement partly of historical facts and partly of dogmatic inferences; the metaphysical terms which it contains would probably have been unintelligible to the first disciples; ethics have no place in it. The one belongs to a world of Syrian peasants, the other to a world of Greek philosophers." The simple first formula of the creed dealt with matters of fact only, "Jesus Christ and him crucified." At the end of the second century it included various philosophical ideas, the creation of the world out of nothing, the Word, the revelation of the Creator to the world, of the Word or Son to the Father and of both to men. The Word--the _logos_ of Heraclitus and Philo--threatened to supplant the Messiah, and originated the endless and bitter controversies of the early church about the Trinity and the Incarnation. Christian scholars take pleasure and apparently pride in deriving the philosophical and ontological elements of their faith from the Greeks. Dr. Caird says, "In this case we can see that conquered Greece laid spiritual fetters on its victor. Greece provided Christianity with the weapons of culture which enabled it to subdue the minds of its opponents, but at the same time it did much to determine the main bias and direction of the religious consciousness which was established by its means. It gave its own form to the life and doctrines of the Church."

The very word "faith" changed its meaning under Greek influence. When the Hebrews spoke of having faith in Jehovah they meant that they had confidence in his character and good intentions. They used the word as people used it when they said that they had faith in Mr. Gladstone. Of course the formula assumed the existence of Jehovah, as of Mr. Gladstone, but that was supposed to be an object of knowledge, not of faith. The disciples again meant by faith the knowledge, direct or based on direct evidence, of certain historical facts. It was the Greeks, with their reliance on the processes of reason, who developed the doctrine that since the reflective action of the mind is at least as authoritative as the reports of the senses, the results of its cogitations are the objects of positive knowledge and faith is the evidence of things not seen. In a word the reasoned monotheism of the Greeks, originating, as far as we are concerned, with Plato, afforded a dialectic basis for the naive monotheism of the Hebrews. A passage from the writings of Hippolytus, of the third Christian century, puts the matter clearly before us: "The one God, the first and sole and universal Maker and Lord, had nothing coaeval with him, ... but he was one, alone by himself.... This supreme and only God begets Reason first, having formed the thought of him, not reason as a spoken word, but as an internal mental process of the universe.... The cause of the things that came into being was the Reason, bearing in himself the active will of Him who begat him ... so that when the Father bade the world come into being, the Reason brought each thing to perfection thus pleasing God." Obviously persons interested in tracing the pedigree of the God of Hippolytus will do well to turn not to _Genesis_ but to Plato's _Timaeus_.

The fact that the Greek philosophers were the real fathers of the church, that the theological systems which have played so dominating a social and political role in Europe are rooted in the speculations of the great pagans, is a tribute to the power of Hellas. But the circumstances under which that power was exerted were unfavorable. It is interesting to consider what might have been the religious history of our civilisation if Christianity had appeared while the Greek was still not only mythopoeic but mythocrates, still the master of his creation; if Socrates, for instance, perhaps the only religious teacher in history who could have dominated Saint Paul, had been the apostle to the gentiles, and if the great dynamic power of Christianity had been attached to the mechanism of Greek thought at its best. The Greek thought of early Christian times had become stereotyped; it is often characterized as sterile, but no adjective could be less apt in view of the mass and power of the doctrines that sprang from it. And stereotyped as it was, it was still flexible in comparison with its Christian offspring. The history of the word "dogma" is an instructive one. Beginning with a modest connotation, since it meant only "my impression," it stiffened gradually as accumulated authority adhered to it, yet even to the last in pre-Christian usage it meant simply a doctrine which one might take or leave. The union of the Christian notion of divine authority with the Greek notion of hard and fast definition made ruinous combination, and gave birth to the Christian belief that it is sometimes necessary to put a man to the torture or to the death to correct his ideas.

IV

Christian exegesis also is of Greek origin, but Greek exegesis sprang in the first place from a rationalistic motive. The first case of allegorical interpretation of the scriptures of which we know occurred in the sixth century before Christ, and was an attempt to moralize one of the most scandalous passages in Homer, the battle of the gods in the twentieth book of the Iliad. Reason and morality had already combined at that time to acknowledge a uniform course of action in nature, and to make the gods the guardians of this uniformity. What could be said therefore of a hand-to-hand scrimmage between the guardians of the order of the world? Why, it could be said, and Theagenes of Rhegium said it, that the gods represented inimical natural powers or inimical passions of the mind. "Against Hephaestos stood the great deep-eddying river whom gods call Zanthos and men Scamandros." Naturally, since fire and water cannot dwell together in unity. Science adopted this attractive way of dealing with scripture. Diogenes of Apollonia, who devoted his life to the effort to reconcile every system to every other, declared that Homer used the myths to propagate scientific truth. Antisthenes and the Cynics--a preaching order--developed the method to the full. When Christianity was making its way into a Hellenized world, the principle was established that the written word might have three meanings, the obvious one, the inferential ethical meaning and the symbolic meaning. This principle was eagerly adopted by educated Jews, and applied to their own scriptures. "The application," says Hatch, "fulfilled a double purpose. It enabled educated Jews on the one hand to reconcile their own adoption of Greek philosophy with their continued adhesion to their ancestral religion, and on the other hand to show to the educated Greeks with whom they associated, and whom they frequently tried to convert, that their literature was neither barbarous nor unmeaning nor immoral." Christian exegesis naturally adopted the same method in order to find Christianity everywhere, not only in the Pentateuch but in Homer. And it was inevitably applied to the New Testament, for the time came when the story of the life of Christ needed as much squaring with theology as the old traditions of the Hebrews. Irenaeus says, for instance, that "when Simeon took the young child in his arms and said _Nunc dimittis_, he was a picture of the Demiurge who had learned his own change of place on the coming of the Saviour, and who gave thanks to the infinite depth." As the pope said later to Father Tom, "the figgers of spache are the pillars of the church."

Plato had deprecated the symbolic method. He causes Socrates to say, _à propos_ of the story of Boreas and Oreithyia, "If I disbelieved it as the philosophers do, I should not be unreasonable: then I might say, talking like a philosopher, that Oreithyia was a girl who was caught by a strong wind and carried off while playing on the cliffs yonder; but it would take a long and laborious and not very happy lifetime to deal with all such questions; and for my own part I cannot investigate them until, as the Delphian precept bids me, I first know myself." Plato's own method of exegesis consists quite simply of expurgation. "The chaining of Hera, and the flinging forth of Hephaistos by his father, and all the fightings of gods which Homer has described, we shall not admit into our state, whether with allegories or without them." To this method also Christian exegesis owed a great debt. Plato's famous short way with Homer and the other poets, his rejection of all myths that do not tend to edification, and that detract from the goodness of the gods, showed the fathers how to deal with what scandalized them in the Hebrew scriptures. Anyone who reads the last pages of the second book of Plato's _Republic_ will see whence Clement took his cue when he wrote: "Far be it from us to believe that the Master of the universe, the Maker of heaven and earth, 'tempts' men as though he did not know--for who then does foreknow? and if he 'repents,' who is perfect in thought and firm in judgment? and if he 'hardens' men's hearts, who makes them wise? and if he 'blinds' them, who makes them to see? and if he desires a 'fruitful hill,' whose then are all things? and if he wants the savor of sacrifices, who is it that needeth nothing? and if he delights in lamps, who is it that set the stars in heaven?"

V

But many feel that all these phenomena--cult, doctrine and exegesis, important as they are in the composition of Christianity, are still not the essential matter. Essential Christianity is a state of mind and a rule of life, and its basis is generally held to be the principles of the Sermon on the Mount. But while a great many people assent theoretically to the Sermon on the Mount, no one has ever put it in practice in its entirety and all the time. So-called Christian society is not organized on the lines of the Sermon on the Mount. It is not organized on the principle of self-abnegation tending to self-perfection, but on the principle of the development of the individual as a unit of society, with duties laid upon him by his relation to society, and rights guaranteed him by the society he supports. Our ethics are not conceived as founded on laws god-given and final, but as evolved by the growth of society, and subject to endless and progressive change. Where the interest of society requires that the desires of the bee shall be subordinated to the welfare of the hive, Christian ethics is often called in as an ally; but if it were fully in control, society as now organized would disintegrate. The ethics in which we live and move is that of Roman law, and Roman law is to a considerable extent a practical version of the ethics of the Stoics. Moreover the ethics of the Christian church is based on the doctrine of Ambrose, bishop of Milan, and the doctrine of Ambrose is based on Cicero _de Officiis_, and Cicero's book is based on the works of Panaetius the Greek stoic of the second century before Christ. Socrates and Plato had long ago bidden men to love their enemies, to take no heed for the morrow, to die rather than do wrong, and to hold their goods in common. The fathers were astounded by the Christlike utterances of these pagans, and cried in admiration that they were Christians before Christianity. When the old scholiast read how Plato's Socrates said that "there is no good thing which is not the gift of the gods," he wrote on his margin: "Every good gift and every perfect gift cometh from above." The anti-national character of Christianity, its determination to ignore frontiers, was anticipated in the Stoic and Cynic movements. The world was full of missionaries, and the itinerant Cynic preacher was very near to the Christian. Epictetus, who exhorted men to remember that they were sons of God, and to make their lives worthy of their divine parentage gives us a picture of the true Cynic apostle. That he may be free to deliver his message to his fellowmen the true Cynic goes as naked, homeless, and houseless, as a Christian apostle. Like the Christian he goes without wife, child and friends, if only he may thereby bring others to a knowledge of themselves and of God. We know of actual cases where Cynics became Christians, and Christians became Cynics, without any very great ado. It was, however, the Stoic system, embedded in Roman institutions, that conquered the world.

VI

It is clear that the Greeks are largely responsible for bringing religion in Europe to the present _impasse_, where many people seriously hold that if we cease to affirm the incredible and the unproven, morals will suffer, and that a boy had better believe in hell when he is entrusted with his first latch-key. But it is the Greek also who can get us out. Whatever worthy sense we attach to the word "religious," the Greeks illustrate it. Their extraordinary moral earnestness is obscured for us only by the variety of their appeals to our attention. But they never from first to last allowed religion to swallow morals. They first of men perceived and declared that morals are man-made and are constantly to be altered by man; that the state exists to secure the noblest life for the citizens; that therefore social science, by definition, (says Aristotle) deals with right conduct. Plato was deeply interested in all the problems of religion, and alive to all the religious implications of the mysterious universe in which we live; but he worked out in his masterpiece--_The Republic_--a complete account of the social origin and sanction of ethics. And as for his theology, "the father and maker of all this universe," said he, "is past finding out; and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible."

Contemporary writers on religion are trying, thus far unsuccessfully, to agree on a definition of their subject. But while no one can define religion, everyone feels what it is. No society that we know of has been without it, and there is no reason to suppose that it will ever disappear. Both religion and morals are apparently social products, both are, as far as we can see, indestructible, and both have suffered cruelly from too close a union. And when they recover their independence, the religious emotion, like the other emotions, must be governed by morals.

OUR SUBLIME FAITH IN SCHOOLING

I

Is it _not_ sublime? Really there appears to be no limit to the demands that are made on our schools and colleges. They are supposed to ground the rising generation in the principles and practise of good citizenship, in morality, and to some extent in religion; to develop the power to think (an endlessly difficult matter), the ability to enjoy nature and art, the desire to be useful; to instil habits of industry, self-control and wholesome living; and withal to impart _memoriter_ a mass of miscellaneous book-knowledge such as can be tested by examination. Of late, too, we hear more and more that the schools should fit the young for some specific business in life--for a job, that is. In short we look to the schools to inculcate all the possible virtues of mind and character, and at the same time to turn out what the newest jargon calls efficient social units. And then there are special problems, more acute in some places than in others, such as the induction of alien children into the mysteries of the English language and American ways.

Now all that makes a pretty big task. It is safe to say that an army of Pestalozzis, Arnolds and Horace Manns, if we could command their services and give them all the money they might ask for, would never perform it to our entire satisfaction. Here and there we should find loose ends of failure. What wonder, then, if the schoolma'am, mostly an ordinary sort of well-meaning mortal, who is the victim of routine and must do her appointed work under hopeless conditions of "mass-treatment"--what wonder if many people are saying that the schoolma'am does not seem to measure up to her mission? It is not altogether strange that she is being overtaken by the fate of Hamlet, whose tragic calamity it was, according to Goethe, to be obliged to shoulder a burden that was too heavy for him. In reading educational literature, one is sometimes reminded of those tribal gods from whom all things are demanded, and whom it is therefore proper to scold or to flog if anything goes wrong. For illustration let me quote a recent deliverance culled from a newspaper. It is by a man of some distinction, whose name I do not give because the language is probably nothing but a reporter's paraphrase. In speaking to an audience on "the fundamental trouble with conditions and the cause of the unrest today," the gentleman is said to have laid it all to "our national educational system, which is teaching the youth of our land to be consumers instead of producers, and only to acquire instead of to serve."

There we have it in a nutshell. It is the schools which are really to blame for the manifold ills that so many people are talking about. If we only had the right kind of schools--teaching the right things in the right way--our whole sea of troubles would quickly turn into pleasant arable land. Historical pundits are just now much interested in what is called the economic interpretation of history; that is, the theory that the whole history of man, including his religions and philosophies and ethnic movements, his flowerings of art, his Periclean and Augustan Ages, his Protestant Reformations and French Revolutions--has been determined primarily by economic conditions. And now, behold, the economic conditions themselves are the work of the schoolma'am. Verily, _das Ewigweibliche zieht uns hinan_ with a vengeance!

* * * * *

The newest thing is to have the schools cure the ancient ills that grow out of the pressure of sex--a subject that of late seems to claim more than its fair share of the limelight. The Paris dressmakers, accustomed for ages to attire women very seductively for evening exhibition, suddenly take to attiring them rather less seductively for the street. And lo, the Puritan eye is shocked. There are visions of social ruin à la Sodom and Gomorrah. Coincidently the theaters, newspapers and wofsmiths (Mr. Howells' word, wof meaning work-of-fiction), go in for the public washing of dirty linen, the existence and dirtiness of which have been known for some thousands of years. At the same time a new race of "sociologists" seek to alarm us by stirring up the foul pool of social vice and talking about it as if the filth were a thing of the day before yesterday. Result: a pretty general demand that the schools teach sex hygiene and physiology, in order that the boys and girls may be warned betimes of the dangers that lie in wait for them. I am not arguing that children should not be told the truth about these things. I am merely animadverting on the growing tendency to put everything on the schools.

II

The natural and intended inference from what precedes is that we demand too much of the schools--more than any schools could possibly do and do well. The result is that they are often blamed unreasonably, and that reasonable criticism is apt to be resented as unjust. There is wide-spread complaint of shortcomings--some even speak of the "failure" of popular education,--but the teachers reply with perfect truth that they are doing the best they can. The truth is, however, that there is more or less floundering due to multiplicity of aims, dispersion of effort, and the lack of a simple dominating principle by which to gage the relative importance of things. It is time for educationists to take sober thought and decide, if they can, what is on the whole the most valuable among the possible results of good schooling. If we could somehow reach a working agreement on that point, the path of wisdom would be tolerably clear: we should require our schools to drive hard at the particular thing deemed most essential, no matter how many smatterings might have to be thrown overboard. It were better for the nation to lose somewhat of its sublime faith in schooling, if by expecting less it might get a surer and more valuable return on its enormous investment. The best of teachers, in kindergarten, high school or university, can never give the best that is in him unless he has a fairly definite idea of what it is all for. Only then can he see the main issue in its proper relation to the side-issues of his routine. Let us then attack this question with holy boldness--somewhat in the spirit of a prudent householder considering what one thing would be best worth saving if his house should take fire.

If we look for the fundamental charter of popular education in these United States we shall find it, if anywhere, in the famous Ordinance of 1787, one memorable passage of which runs thus: "Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." This formulation, which sees the purpose of education in the promotion of good government and the general happiness, may still be accepted. One might balk, perhaps, at the word "happiness," which to the modern mind is apt to connote a more or less passive contentment with one's lot. If the fathers ever thought that popular education was going to produce general contentment, they miscalculated. Its normal effect is the exact opposite. A wholesome discontent is the beginning of progress toward better things. It is vain to preach or teach contentment to the man who sees a chance to better his lot or who feels that he is being kept down by conditions that can in any wise be remedied. We have learned that class struggle of one kind or another is inherent in human society; and where there is class struggle there will be discontent. Today, then, one might prefer the word "welfare," which is not only compatible with discontent, but in great degree actually grows out of it.

The subject-matter of education was to be religion, morality and knowledge. Let us consider the impressive triad in the reverse order.

It is patent enough, and must have been patent to the fathers, that, so far as good government and the general welfare are concerned, there is no inherent virtue in mere knowledge. Knowledge got from books and teachers may be socially inert, or it may be positively harmful. Everything depends on the use to which it is put. It is true that, having regard to the long run, we may rest securely on the proposition that the more men know--really _know_ in an accurate way--the better off they will be, and the more likely to secure good government. The advancement of science--taking the word in its very broadest sense--is certainly an ideal that deserves our warmest allegiance. It is thus vastly important in any system of education, to keep open to talent a career from the humblest hovel to the high places of distinction and service.

But there are not many--not one in ten thousand--to whom it is given to increase knowledge in a way to affect government and the general welfare, which must always be largely concerned with the short run and with the preservation of a stable order amid the conflicts of classes, opinions and interests. And in this domain, as was remarked above, there is no inherent virtue in knowledge. What is learned in school may be put to bad use and become a social curse. Some knowledge of chemistry figures in the mental outfit of every dynamiter and adulterator of foods. A knowledge of law or medicine may be used to defeat as well as to promote the ends of justice. Indeed, a large part of our worst trouble comes now from "educated" men and women who prostitute their knowledge to anti-social purposes.

And then there is another reason why the schools should not conceive it to be their highest mission to impart book-knowledge, or to train the mind, as the phrase runs. That reason is that they do not and can not really train the mind, when operating on a large number of pupils at the same time by the method of "recitation." What gets trained in that way is at best the memory; and when the pupil leaves school--at whatever stage of progress--he soon forgets what he has learned, unless he has constant occasion to use it. The result is that the most of the knowledge laboriously acquired in school and college soon becomes quite inert for the purposes of good government and the general welfare. Now it may be necessary, indeed it is necessary, in a progressive school system, to spend a good deal of time over knowledges that are destined soon to be forgotten. But that essential thing that we are searching for, that which the schools are to regard as the vitally important thing, must clearly be something that the pupil is going to need and to use all the time, no matter when his schooldays come to an end.

Next in our triad comes morality. If any one chooses to insist at this point that there can be no morality without religion, let him wait a moment or go off and debate the subject with a metaphysician. In the common use of words morality may be and is independent of religion, and our question here is whether the inculcation of it can possibly be the thing we are looking for, namely the chief end of schooling. Hardly, the wise will say, if the word is to be taken in its usual sense. For it is distinctly a low-caste word. People commonly speak of "mere morality" as if the thing by itself did not amount to much. One recalls the remark of Emerson to the effect that this is very much as if one should say, "Poor God with nobody to help him." Still, the fact remains that the word connotes something rather ordinary. This is why Lord Haldane in a recent address preferred to avoid it and to commend the German _Sittlichkeit_, as a more soulful term. One notices, too, that thoughtful teachers who feel the weakness of a schooling that lays all the stress on memory-work such as can be tested by examination, are apt, when they wish to suggest something higher and larger, to use some such phrase as "character-building" rather than "moral training."

In short, the connotations of the word "morality" are such as to put it out of the running as a name for a high educational ideal; and a high ideal we must of course have. It suggests hardly more than what Mr. Roosevelt is wont to call "decent living;" and decent living is not a matter that can very well be progressively unfolded, idealized and realized. For a pupil coming from a family where decent living is the rule, and associating with mates of whom the same is true, it is not much to live decently. There is almost nothing for him to learn. This is no doubt why it is generally assumed, and in the main quite correctly, that in a normally wholesome environment morality will take care of itself or come as a by-product of school experience, the teacher having nothing in particular to do except to look after the occasional transgressor.

But now suppose we put in place of mere morality, the perfection of the social mind. Suppose we say that the central purpose of popular education ought to be the _development of a sensitive social conscience enlightened to the limits of opportunity_. To put it a little differently: suppose we could agree that the best possible result of education is a mind trained and habituated to think in terms of social obligation, and to act accordingly. We should then have, at any rate, something that is high enough and big enough for anybody; something that is capable of progressive realization from the kindergarten to the university and thereafter; something, in fine, that would reach out from the humblest ego to the utmost periphery of human existence.

Thirdly, religion. Let it be granted at the outset that for an immense number of the noblest souls that have ever lived "Thou God seest me" has been the highest, most inclusive, most compelling incentive to right social conduct, that we know anything about. In practise, however, a great deal depends on the nature of the God that is feared, and still more, perhaps, on whether that God is really and truly feared or only spoken of with conventional respect in token of some ecclesiastical loyalty. Can religion be "taught" in school--any kind of school? Can it be taught, I mean, not as a matter of formal observance and glib recitation, but in its vital essence as a quickening spirit destined to stick fast in the character and be a permanent incentive to right living? It is only in this sense that the "teaching" of religion has any bearing on good government and the general welfare.

The difficulty of teaching religion in this socially effective way is not confined to the secular public schools. It does not grow entirely out of the neutrality of the state, the jealousy of sects and the impossibility of finding a common basis free from any sectarian tinge. It goes deeper than that, and affects also church schools that fly the banner of religion and are conducted for the express purpose of giving prominence to the beliefs and usages of some particular denomination. What can be done to teach religion? Of course the pupil can be exposed to what are called religious influences, and made to breathe what is called a religious atmosphere. He can be required to attend chapel exercises, and to go to church on Sunday; to read the Bible or hear it read; to memorize texts, creeds, hymns and commandments. He can learn church history, and familiarize himself with the arguments and tenets of "our people." But when, as is usually the case, all this precedes any vital personal experience of religion, it is apt presently to float away, along with the Latin and algebra, into the limbo of things once known but no longer usable. The teaching of religion so that it will stick fast, not merely as an ecclesiastical loyalty, but as a socially regenerative force, is a very difficult matter. Multitudes of parents who are profoundly anxious about the matter, fail in the home, clergymen fail rather notoriously with their own sons and daughters. Can the school be expected to succeed where they are baffled?

But suppose it were understood that the supreme purpose of all education, no matter what banner the schoolhouse or college might fly, is the development of character trained and habituated to think in terms of social obligation, and to act accordingly: should we not then have a formula on which all who really mean well by their fellowmen could unite? For surely the perfection of the social mind--that and nothing else--is the finest flower of the religious spirit.

III

There are reasons for thinking that such a theory of popular education as has been outlined, and a modified practise based on the theory, are needed at the present time as a measure of social therapeutics. Without joining the prophets of evil who think we are moving swiftly toward a social revolution, one may say in all sobriety that there are signs which look ominous for the future of our democratic experiment. It is not merely that there is wide-spread discontent and a general breaking away from old standards and restraints. All that, which is apt to look so threatening to elderly people, especially if they are not much given to the reading of history, may be nothing but the sign of healthy life and growth. Stable democratic society may consist with almost any amount of discontent, provided it discharges itself by way of legal channels duly provided for the purpose in advance.

But the really menacing symptom of our time, is in a word,--lawlessness. I have not chiefly in mind the shocking and increasing prevalence of outrageous crimes against person and property. That is certainly bad enough. That life and property are not as safe in the United States as they were a generation ago, and not as safe as they are today in the British Empire, France, Germany, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries, is surely a fact to give us pause. And yet, in that fact alone there is nothing highly ominous for the future of democracy. In all ages, under all forms of government, there have been murderers, thieves and ravishers, but social order has never been destroyed or even seriously imperiled by them. Society has found ways to protect itself. The statistics of crime vary from decade to decade under the operation of causes that are fairly well understood by experts. An excess at any time can be corrected by known methods if a people sets resolutely about it.

The danger lies rather in a diminishing respect for law as such among large masses of the nominally respectable population. Multitudes have come to look on the will of the community as expressed in law, not as an obligation binding on the conscience, but as a sort of solemn joke--something meant for the other fellow. This cynicism with regard to law has become a veritable cancer of the social body. The matter is difficult to treat statistically, but surely there can be no doubt about it. It is no illusion of perspective, not the nightmare of a pessimist, but simple damning truth, that the law-abiding spirit has of late been losing ground rapidly. The case is not stated too strongly by a recent writer when he says:

In spite of his vulnerability he [the capitalist] is of all
citizens the most lawless. He appears to assume that the law will
always be enforced by some special personnel whose duty lies that
way, while he may evade the law, when convenient, or bring it
into contempt, with impunity. The capitalist seems incapable of
feeling his responsibility as a member of the governing class, in
this respect, and that he is bound to uphold the law that others
may do the like.... He therefore looks on the evasion of a law
devised for public protection, but inimical to him, as innocent
or even meritorious.[26]

[Footnote 26: Brooks Adams, _Theory of Social Revolutions_, page 212.]