Chapter III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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