judgments that are made up and expressed in this world relate to
half-finished work? We hear a great deal of criticism indulged in with
regard to American society. I have no doubt that this criticism is just,
in a certain sense, but American society is only a half-finished
structure. If it had arrived at the end of improvement and growth;
if the elements which enter into it had already organized themselves
in their highest form; if the creation of a high, refined, and beautiful
society were not a thing of time; if such a society did not depend
upon the operation of forces that require a great range of influences
and circumstances, then the criticism might be entirely just; but it is
as unreasonable to expect a high grade of social life in America,
at this point of American history, as it is to expect perfection in a
church before the carpenters get out of it, and the staging is down.
Wealth, learning, culture, leisure--these cannot be so combined in
this country yet as to give us the highest grade and style of social
life. We are all at work upon the structure, and unless American
ideas are incurably bad, and we are faithless to our duties, American
society will be good when the work upon it is completed. No society
is to be condemned so long as it is progressive toward a goodly
completeness.
Men and women are always judging one another before they are
finished. A raw boy, with only the undeveloped elements of manhood
in him, is denounced as a dunce. A light-hearted, sportive girl,
with an incontinent overflow of spirits, is condemned as a hoiden.
Neither boy nor girl is half made. There is only the frame-work of
the man and woman up, and it does not appear what they are to
become. A young man is wild, and judged accordingly. It is not
remembered that there are various modifying influences to be
brought to bear upon him, before he will be a man. We see the bold
outline of a new house, and we say that it is not beautiful.
Soon, however, a piazza is built here, and a dormer is pushed out
there, and gracefully modelled chimneys pierce the roof, and
cornice and verandah and tower are added, until the structure
stands before us complete in beauty, convenience, and strength.
When we condemn a young man we do not stop to think that he is not
done,--that there is a wife to place upon one side of him, and
children to be grouped upon the other, and sundry relations to be
adjusted before we can tell any thing about him at all.
There is nothing more common in experience and observation than
the partiality felt by young and unmarried men for the society of
married women, and the love of unmarried young women for the
society of married men. I suppose that nearly every young man and
young woman has a time of feeling that all the desirable matches
in the world are disposed of, and that the marriageable young
persons left are really very insipid companions. This is entirely
natural, but exceedingly unreasonable. To expect a man to be as
much of a man without a wife as with one, is just as reasonable as
to expect a half-finished house to be as beautiful as a finished
one. It is impossible for an unmarried man, other things being
equal, to be as agreeable a companion as a married man; and lest I
be suspected of a jest in this statement, I wish to assure my
reader that I am entirely in earnest. Intimate contact with the
nature of a good woman, in the relation of marriage, is just as
necessary to the completeness of manhood, as the details of an
architectural design are to the homely conveniences around which
they are made to cluster. Every man is a better man for having
children, and the more he extends those relations which grow out
of the family life, the more does he open up to culture and carry
to completeness the very choicest portions of his manly nature. It
is natural, therefore, that the unmarried woman should become
possessed of the notion that all the desirable men are married,
and that the unmarried man should be the subject of a similar mistake
with relation to the other sex. It must be remembered that men and
women are made desirable by matrimony, and that half-finished work
should not be subjected to any sweeping judgments.
Men and women are always turning out differently from what we
expected and predicted they would. Men who have been laughed at
and slighted during all their early life, become, quite to our
surprise, very important and notable persons, and we are mortified
to ascertain that we have been criticizing half-finished men. The
college faculty give a diploma to some very slow young man, with
great reluctance, but in the course of twenty years he completes
himself, and when he comes back to honor them with a visit they
make very low bows to him. All young people are pieces of
unfinished work, to be judged very carefully, and always to be
regarded as incomplete. We can say that we do not like their
general style, as we would say that we do not like the style of an
unfinished house. Grecian may not be to our liking, and we may
prefer Gothic.
It seems to me that the Christian Church suffers more from the
judgments of those who criticize unfinished work than any
organized body of men and women. Here is an organization whose
members do not pretend to perfection; whose whole theory forbids
any such idea. They are disciples--learners of the Divine Master.
They are members of a school in which none ever arrives at fulness
of knowledge. Their prayer is that they may grow; and they know
that if they have the true life in them they will grow while they
live. If there is one thing in the world of which they are
painfully conscious, it is that they are pieces of unfinished
work. Some of the members are very much lower in the scale of
completeness than others. In some there is only a confused pile of
timber and bricks. In others only a part of the frame is up, or
the walls are hardly more than begun. In others, perhaps, the roof
is on. In comparatively few do we see the outlines all defined and
the rooms in a good degree of completeness. In none of them is
there a perfected structure, and none see and acknowledge their
incompleteness more than those whose characters are farthest
advanced toward perfection.
Now I put it to the world outside of the Christian Church to say
if it has been entirely fair, and just in its judgments of the
Church. Has it not judged Christianity by these imperfect
disciples, and has it not condemned these imperfect disciples
because they are not what they never pretended to be? Has it not
criticized half-finished work, and condemned, not only the work,
but Christianity itself, because this work was not up to the
sample? It is very common to hear men say that such and such a
Christian is no better than the average of people outside of the
Christian Church, thus condemning the genuineness of his character
because he is not a perfect Christian. A house is a house, even if
it be only half-finished. At least, it is not any thing else; and
as Christians cannot by any possibility be perfected on the
instant, it follows that the large majority of Christians must be
in various stages of progress--nay, that most of this large
majority are not even half-finished. The Christian Church itself
is a piece of unfinished work, and every individual member is the
same. It is not pretended that either is any thing else. I never
knew a Christian to set himself up as a pattern. So far as I know,
they are very shy of pretension, and deprecate nothing more than
the thought that anybody should take them for finished specimens
of the work of Christianity in human life and character.
A sermon upon any important subject is always a piece of
unfinished work. I once heard a famous preacher say that he could
preach throughout his whole life on the text, "the heart is deceitful
above all things and desperately wicked," and even then have
something left to say. The statement illustrates the many-sidedness
of truth, and the multitude of its relations to the life of the individual
and the world. Any sensible preacher knows that, within the compass
of a single sermon, he can only present a single aspect of a great
and important truth, yet he is criticized as if it had been expected
that the work of a dozen volumes could be crowded into the
utterances of half an hour. What is called an "exhaustive" sermon
would exhaust an audience long before it would its subject. A sermon
is only the dab of a brush upon a great picture, and if it gives a
single striking view of a single great truth, it accomplishes its object.
It must necessarily be an unfinished piece as regards its exposition
of truth; and the same may be said of any essay on any subject.
Every writer begins in the middle of things, and leaves off in the
middle of things; and every thing he writes relates at some point to
every thing that everybody has written. No man cleans up the field
over which he walks, and leaves nothing to be said; and the best
we do is unfinished work.
There are those who, in view of the sin and suffering which appear
on every hand, are moved to impugn the goodness and love of Him
who created the world by His power, and sustains and orders it by
His providence. Millions are whelmed in the darkness of
heathenism; other millions are bound by the chains of slavery; the
oppressor is clothed in purple and fine linen; the beautiful and
innocent are the victims of treacherous lust; children cry for
bread beneath the windows of luxury; justice is denied to the poor
by men who take bribes of wealth; and deceit circumvents and
baffles honor. Such a world as this the critics condemn as a
failure, which reflects alike upon the benevolence and power of
its Maker; but these men have an eminent place among the fools who
criticize half-finished work. If they could have witnessed the
creation of the earth, and watched it through all the processes by
which it was prepared for the reception of the human race, they
would doubtless have been quite as critical as they are now, and
quite as unreasonable. Suppose a man should visit his pear-trees
in midsummer, and on tasting the fruit upon them, should condemn
them and order them to be cut down and removed--how should we
characterize his folly? He has criticized half-finished fruit, and
made a fatal mistake. It is just as unreasonable to condemn a
half-finished world as a half-finished pear. Human society must be
brought to perfection by regularly instituted and slowly operating
processes. It may take as long to perfect society as it did to
create the world that it lives on; and God is not to be found
fault with for the flavor of a fruit slowly ripening beneath the
light of His smile and the warmth of His love, but not yet fully
ripe.
Mr. Buckle has undertaken to write a history of civilization, or,
rather, he has commenced to write an introduction to a history of
civilization. His progress has not been great, and he doubtless
realizes that he has undertaken a task which he can never finish.
He will probably labor upon it while he lives, and then some other
daring man will take up the thread where he will drop it, and go
on until he in turn will be obliged to relinquish his unfinished
task to a successor. When the work shall be finished, after its
original design, it will doubtless be found to be antiquated. It
undertook to organize a half-finished life--to reason upon forces
that had only half revealed their nature and their power--to
develop principles whose relations were imperfectly known. In
short, it must necessarily prove to be a half-finished history of
a half-finished civilization, whose every newly-opened event will
throw a modifying light on all that shall have preceded it.
We have, therefore, but little finished work in this world. Not a
finished character lives among mankind. No nation of the world
illustrates a consummate civilization. All presentations of truth,
of whatever nature and relation, are necessarily incomplete. Life
is too short, comprehension too limited in its grasp, and
expression too feeble or too clumsy, to allow the mind fully to
organize, vitalize, and fill out to roundness and just proportion,
a single creature of legitimate art. It is, therefore, literally
true that the criticisms of the world are the judgments of the
world's half-finished men on the world's half-finished affairs.
Imperfection sits in judgment on incompleteness, and the natural
consequence is that criticism, in whatever field of demonstration,
is little more than a record of notions which assume to array
themselves against other notions, which may be better or worse
than those that oppose them.
It is with a depressing sense of the incompleteness of these
lessons in life, that I now indite their closing paragraph. I
cannot but be aware that the criticisms I have indulged in relate
very largely to half-finished work, and I painfully feel that they
are the product of a most imperfect judgment. If the reader has
found them kind, charitable, hopeful--tending toward that which is
good--and lenient toward human frailty, loyal to common sense, and
faithful to virtue; if he has found in them that which leaves him
a larger and a more liberal man--advanced in some degree toward
that perfection which we are ever striving for, but which we never
reach, then my aim has been accomplished, bid him God speed!
THE END.