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.