law. It seemed to me in my youth to embody a tremendous philosophy.
Here, I used to say, as I pondered opinion and precedent,--here is
the very flower and fruit of the wisdom of the ages. I little dreamed
that both sides of every case may be supported by authorities of equal
dignity. Imagine my bewilderment when I found that a case which is
likely to prove weak before one infallible judge may be shifted with
little trouble to another, equally infallible, but with views known
to be friendly to the cause in question. I sojourned for a time in a
judicial circuit where there was considerable traveling to be done by
the court and bar. The lawyer who was most enterprising in securing a
sleeping-car stateroom wherein to play poker--discreetly and not too
successfully--with the judge, was commonly supposed to have the best
chance of winning his cases.
Our neighbors’ failures are really of no use to us. “No Admittance”
and “Paint” are not accepted by the curious world as warnings, but as
invitations.
“A sign once caught the casual eye,
And it said, ‘Paint’;
And every one who passed it by,
Sinner or saint,
Into the fresh green color must
Make it his biz
A doubting finger-point to thrust,
That he, accepting naught on trust,
Might say, ‘It is, it is!’”
Cynic, do I hear? The term is not one of opprobrium. A cynic is the
alert and discerning man who declines to cut the cotton-filled pie or
pick up the decoy purse on All Fools’ Day.
We are bound to test for ourselves the identical heating apparatus
which the man next door cast away as rubbish last spring. We know
why its heat units were unsatisfactory to him,--it was because his
chimneys were too small; and though our own are as like them as two
peas we proceed to our own experiment with our eyes wide open. Mrs. B
telephones to Mrs. A and asks touching the merits, habits, and previous
condition of servitude of the cook Mrs. A discharged this morning. Mrs.
A, who holds an honorary degree bestowed upon her by the good Doctor
Experience, leans upon the telephone and explains with conscientious
detail the deficiencies of Mary Ann. She does as she would be done by
and does it thoroughly. But what is her astonishment to learn the next
day that Mary Ann’s trunk has been transferred to Mrs. B’s third story;
that Mary Ann’s impossible bread and deadly cake are upon Mrs. B’s
table! Mrs. B, too, took a course of lectures under Doctor Experience,
and she admires him greatly; but what do these facts avail her when
guests are alighting at the door and Mary Ann is the only cook visible
in the urban landscape? Moreover, Mrs. A _always was_ (delectable
colloquialism!) a hard mistress, and Mrs. B must, she feels, judge of
these matters for herself. And so--so--say we all of us!
Men who have done post-graduate work in the good doctor’s school are
no better fortified against error than the rest of us who may never
have got beyond his kindergarten. The results might be different if it
were not that Mistress Vanity by her arts and graces demoralizes the
doctor’s students, whose eyes wander to the windows as she flits across
the campus. Conservative bankers, sage lawyers, and wise legislators
have been the frequent and easy prey of the gold-brick operator. The
police announce a new crop of “suckers” every spring,--which seems to
indicate that Mistress Vanity wields a greater influence than Doctor
Experience. These words stare at me oddly in type; they are the symbols
of a disagreeable truth,--and yet we may as well face it. The eternal
ego will not bow to any dingy doctor whose lectures only illustrate his
own inability to get on in the world.
The best skating is always on thin ice,--we like to feel it crack and
yield under our feet; there is a deadly fascination in the thought of
the twenty or forty feet of cold water beneath. Last year’s mortality
list cuts (dare I do it?) no ice with us; we must make our own
experiments, while the doctor screams himself hoarse from his bonfire
on the bank. He has held many an inquest on this darkling shore of
the river of time, and he will undoubtedly live to hold many another;
but thus far we have not been the subjects; and when it comes to the
mistakes of others we are all delighted to serve on the coroner’s jury.
It isn’t well for us to be saved from too many blunders; we need the
discipline of failure. It is better to fail than never to try, and
the man who can contemplate the graveyard of his own hopes without
bitterness will not always be ignored by the gods of success.
Septimus had a narrow escape yesterday. He was reading “Tom Jones”
in the college library, when the doctor stole close behind him and
Septimus’s nervous system experienced a terrible shock. But it was
the doctor’s opportunity. “Read biography, young man; biographies of
the good and great are veritable textbooks in this school!” So you
may observe Septimus to-day sprawled under the noblest elm on the
campus, with his eyes bulging out as he follows Napoleon on the retreat
from Russia. He has firmly resolved to profit by the failure of “the
darkly-gifted Corsican.” To-morrow evening, when he tries to hitch the
doctor’s good old Dobbin to the chapel bell, and falls from the belfry
into the arms of the village constable, he is far more tolerant of
Napoleon’s mistakes. An interesting biography is no more valuable than
a good novel. If life were an agreed state of facts and not a joyful
experiment, then we might lean upon biography as final; but in this and
in all matters, let us deal squarely with Youth. Boswell’s “Johnson” is
only gossip raised to the highest power; the reading of it will make
Septimus cheerfuler, but it will not keep him from wearing a dinner
coat to a five o’clock tea or teach him how to earn more than four
dollars a week.
We have brought existence to an ideal state when at every breakfast
table we face a new world with no more use for yesterday than for the
grounds of yesterday’s coffee. The wisdom behind us is a high wall
which we cannot scale if we would. Its very height is tempting, but
there is no rose-garden beyond it--only a bleak plain with the sea of
time gnawing its dreary shores.
To be old and to know ten thousand things--there is something august
and majestic in the thought; but to be young and ignorant, to see
yesterday pass, a shining ripple on the flood of oblivion, and then to
buckle down to the day’s business,--there’s a better thing than being
old and wise! We are forever praising the unconscious ease of great
literature; and that ease--typical of the life and time reflected--was
a thing of the day, with no yesterdays’ dead weight dragging it down.
Whitman’s charm for those of us who like him lies in the fact that he
doesn’t invite us to a rummage sale of cast-off raiment, but offers
fabrics that are fresh and in new patterns. We have all known that same
impatience of the past that he voices so stridently. The world is as
new to him as it was to Isaiah or Homer.
“When I heard the learned astronomer,
When the proofs and figures were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture room,
How soon, unaccountably, I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”
The old doctor can name all the stars without a telescope, but he does
not know that in joy they “perform their shining.” The real note in
life is experiment and quest, and we are detached far more than we
realize from what was and concerned with what is and may be.
There is a delightful comedy,--long popular in England and known in
America, in which a Martian appears on earth to teach Dickens-like
lessons of unselfishness to men. Since witnessing it, I have often
indulged in speculations as to the sensations of a pilgrim who might
wing his way from another star to this earth, losing in the transition
all knowledge of his own past--and come freshly upon our world and its
achievements, beholding man at his best and worst without any knowledge
whatever of our history or of the evolution through which we have
become what we are. There you would have a critic who could view our
world with fresh eyes. What we were yesterday would mean nothing to
him, and what we are to-day he might judge honestly from a standpoint
of utility or beauty. Not what was old or new, but what was good, would
interest him--not whether our morals are better than those of our
ancestors, but whether they are of any use at all. The croaking plaint
of Not-What-It-Used-To-Be, the sanguine It-Will-Come-In-Time, would
have no meaning for such a judge.
“And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also; knowing that
tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience,
hope.”
The conjunction of these last words is happy. Verily in experience lies
our hope. In learning what to do and what not to do, in stumbling,
falling to rise again and faring ever upward and onward. Yes, in and
through experience lies our hope, but not, O brother, a wisdom gained
vicariously,--not yours for me nor mine for you,--nor from enduring
books, charm they never so wisely,--but every one of us, old and young,
for himself.
Literature is rich in advice that is utterly worthless. Life’s “Book
of Don’ts” is only read for the footnotes that explain why particular
“don’ts” failed,--it has become in reality the “Book of Don’ts that
Did.” It is pleasant to remember that the gentle Autocrat, a man of
science as well as of letters, did not allow professional courtesy to
stand in the way of a characteristic fling at Doctor Experience. He
goes, in his contempt, to the stupid creatures of the barnyard, and
points in high disdain to “that solemn fowl, Experience, who, according
to my observation, cackles oftener than she drops real live eggs.”
If the old doctor were to be taken at his own valuation and we should
be disposed to profit by his teachings, our lives would be a dreary
round; and youth, particularly, would find the ginger savorless in the
jar and the ale stale in the pot. I saw my venerable friend walking
abroad the other day in the flowered dressing-gown which he so much
affects, wearing his familiar classroom smile. I heard him warning
a boy, who was hammering a boat together out of wretchedly flimsy
material, that his argosy would never float; but the next day I saw the
young Columbus faring forth, with his coat for sail, and saw him turn
the bend in the creek safely and steer beyond “the gray Azores” of his
dreams.
The young admiral cannot escape the perils of the deep, and like St.
Paul he will know shipwreck before his marine career is ended; but why
discourage him? Not the doctor’s hapless adventures, but the lad’s own
are going to make a man of him. I know a town where, thirty years ago,
an afternoon newspaper failed about once every six months. There was,
so the wiseacres affirmed, no manner of use in trying it again. But
a tow-headed boy put his small patrimony into a venture, reinforced
it with vigorous independence and integrity, and made it a source of
profit to himself and a valued agent in the community. In twenty years
the property sold for a million dollars. Greatness, I assure Septimus,
consists in achieving the impossible.
“Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleachèd garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.”
The season is at hand when Time throws his annual challenge in our
teeth. The bell tinkles peremptorily and a calendar is thrust upon
us. November is still young when we are dragged upon the threshold of
another year. The leisurely dismissal of the old year is no longer
possible; we may indulge in no lingering good-bye, but the old fellow
hustles out in haste, with apologetic, shrinking step and we slam
the door upon him. It is off with the old love and on with the new,
whether we will or no. I solemnly protest against the invasion of the
calendar. In an age that boasts of freedom, I rebel against a tyrant
who comes merely to warn us of the fugitive character of Time; for that
sharp elbow in the ribs has prodded many a noble soul to his death.
These pretty devices that we are asked to hang upon our walls are the
seductive advertisements of an insinuating and implacable foe. We are
asked to be _particeps criminis_ in his hideous trade, for must I
not tear off and cast as rubbish to the void a day, a week, a month,
that I may not have done with at all? Why, may I ask, should I throw
my yesterdays into the waste-basket? Yet if I fail, falling only a
few leaves behind, is not my shameless inefficiency and heedlessness
paraded before the world? How often have I delivered myself up to my
enemies by suffering April to laugh her girlish laughter through torrid
July? I know well the insinuating smile of the friend who, dropping in
on a peaceful morning, when Time, as far as I am concerned, has paused
in the hay-field to dream upon his scythe handle, walks coolly to the
calendar and brings me up to date with a fine air of rebuke, as though
he were conferring the greatest favor in the world. I am sure that I
should have no standing with my neighbors if they knew that I rarely
wind my watch and that the clocks in my house, save one or two that
are kept going merely to avoid explanations, are never wound.
There is a gentle irony in the fact that the most insolent dispensers
of calendars are the life insurance companies. It is a legitimate
part of their nefarious game: you and I are their natural prey, and
if they can accent for us the mortality of the flesh by holding up
before us, in compact form, the slight round of the year, they are
doing much to impress upon us the appalling brevity of our most
reasonable expectancy. How weak we are to suffer the intimidation of
these soulless corporations, who thrust their wares upon us as much as
to say, “Here’s a new year, and you’d better make the most of it, for
there’s no saying when you will get another.” You, my friend, with your
combined calendar and memorandum always before you, may pledge all your
to-morrows if you will; but as for me the Hypocritic Days, the Barefoot
Dervishes, may ring my bell until they exhaust the battery without
gaining a single hour as my grudging alms.
We are all prone to be cowards, and to bend before the tyrant whose
banner is spread victoriously on all our walls. Poets and philosophers
aid and abet him; the preachers are forever telling us what a dreadful
fellow he is, and warning us that if we don’t get on the good side
of him we are lost forever,--mere wreckage on a grim, inhospitable
shore. Hypocrisy and false oaths are born of such teaching. Januarius,
let us remember, was two-faced, and it has come about naturally that
New Year’s oaths carry a reserve. They are not, in fact, serious
obligations. It is a poor soul that sets apart a certain number of days
for rectitude, and I can’t for the life of me see anything noble in
making a constable of the calendar. I find with joy that I am freeing
myself of the tyrant’s thrall. I am never quite sure of the day of the
week; I date my letters yesterday or to-morrow with equal indifference.
June usually thrusts her roses into my windows before I change the year
in dating my letters. The magazines seem leagued with the calendar for
man’s undoing. I sometimes rush home from an inspection of a magazine
counter in mad haste to get where Oblivion cannot stretch forth a
long, lean arm and pluck me into the eternal shades; for I decline
with all the strength of my crude Western nature, to countenance the
manufacture of yesterdays, no matter how cheerful they may be, out of
my confident to-morrows. A March magazine flung into the teeth of a
February blizzard does not fool the daffodils a particle. This stamping
of months that have not arrived upon our current literature is nothing
more or less than counterfeiting;--or rather, the issuing of false
currency by the old Tyrant who stands behind the counter of the Bank
of Time. And there is the railway time-table,--the unconscious comic
utterance of the _Zeitgeist_! If the 12.59 is one minute or one hour
late, who cares, I wonder? Who am I, pray, that I should stuff my
pocket with calendars and time-tables? Why not throw the charts to the
fishes and let the winds have their will with us awhile! Let us, I beg,
leave some little margin in our lives for the shock of surprise!
The Daughters of Time are charming young persons, and they may offer
me all the bread, kingdoms, stars they like; but they must cheer up
or keep out of my front yard! No shuffling around, like Barefoot
Dervishes; but in golden sandals let them come, and I will kindle a
fire of next year’s calendars in their honor. When the snows weigh
heavily upon the hills, let us not mourn for yesterday or waste time
in idle speculations at the fireside, but address ourselves manfully
to the hour’s business. And as some of the phrases of Horace’s ode to
Thaliarchus rap for attention in an old file box at the back of my
head, I set down a pleasant rendering of them by Mr. Charles Edmund
Merrill, Jr.
“To-morrow? Shall the fleeting years
Abide our questioning? They go
All heedless of our hopes and fears.
To-morrow? ’Tis not ours to know
That we again shall see the flowers.
To-morrow is the gods’, but oh,
To-day is ours.”
We all salute heartily and sincerely the “grandeur and exquisiteness”
of old age. It is not because Doctor Experience is old that we distrust
his judgment; it is not his judgment that we distrust half so much as
his facts. They are good, as facts go, but we are all foreordained and
predestined to reap our own crop. He need not take the trouble to nail
his sign, “No thoroughfare,” on the highways that have perplexed him,
for we, too, must stray into the brambles and stumble at the ford. It
is decreed that we sail without those old charts of his, and we drop
our signal-books and barometer overboard without a qualm. The reefs
change with every tide, adding zest to our adventure; and while the
gulfs may wash us down, there’s always the chance that, in our own way
and after much anxious and stupid sailing, we may ground our barnacled
hulks on the golden sands of the Happy Isles. Our blood cries for the
open sea or the long white road, and
“Rare the moment and exceeding fleet
When the spring sunlight, tremulous and thin,
Makes glad the pulses with tumultuous beat
For meadows never won nor wandered in.”
Should Smith go to Church?
Should Smith go to Church?
I THINK he should. Moreover, I think I should set Smith an example by
placing myself on Sunday morning in a pew from which he may observe me
at my devotions. Smith and I attended the same Sunday school when we
were boys, and remained for church afterwards as a matter of course.
Smith now spends his Sunday mornings golfing, or pottering about his
garden, or in his club or office, and after the midday meal he takes a
nap and loads his family into a motor for a flight countryward. It must
be understood that I do not offer myself as a pattern for Smith. While
I resent being classified with the lost sheep, I am, nevertheless,
a restless member of the flock, prone to leap the wall and wander.
Smith is the best of fellows,--an average twentieth-century American,
diligent in business, a kind husband and father, and in politics
anxious to vote for what he believes to be the best interests of the
country.
In the community where we were reared it was not respectable not to go
to church. I remember distinctly that in my boyhood people who were
not affiliated with some church were looked upon as lawless pariahs.
An infidel was a marked man: one used to be visible in the streets I
frequented, and I never passed him without a thrill of horror. Our
city was long known as “a poor theatre town,” where only Booth in
_Hamlet_ and Jefferson in _Rip_ might be patronized by church-going
people who valued their reputations. Yet in the same community no
reproach attaches to-day to the non-church-going citizen. A majority of
the men I know best, in cities large and small, do not go to church.
Most of them are in nowise antagonistic to religion; they are merely
indifferent. Clearly, there must be some reason for this change. It
is inconceivable that men would lightly put from them the faith of
their fathers through which they are promised redemption from sin and
everlasting life.
Now and then I hear it asserted that the church is not losing its hold
upon the people. Many clergymen and laymen resent the oft-repeated
statement that we Americans are not as deeply swayed by religion as
in other times; but this seems to me a case of whistling through a
graveyard on a dark night.
A recent essayist,[1] writing defensively of the church, cries, in
effect, that it is moving toward the light; don’t shoot! He declares
that no one who has not contributed something toward the solution of
the church’s problem has earned the right to criticize. I am unable to
sympathize with this reasoning. The church is either the repository
of the Christian religion on earth, the divinely inspired and blessed
tabernacle of the faith of Christ, or it is a stupendous fraud. There
is no sound reason why the church should not be required to give an
account of its stewardship. If it no longer attracts men and women in
our strenuous and impatient America, then it is manifestly unjust to
deny to outsiders the right of criticism. Smith is far from being a
fool, and if by his test of “What’s in it for me?” he finds the church
wanting, it is, as he would say, “up to the church” to expend some of
its energy in proving that there is a good deal in it for him. It is
unfair to say to Smith, who has utterly lost touch with the church,
that before he is qualified to criticize the ways and the manners of
churches he must renew an allegiance which he was far too intelligent
and conscientious to sever without cause.
Nor can I justly be denied the right of criticism because my own
ardor is diminished, and I am frequently conscious of a distinct
lukewarmness. I confess to a persistent need in my own life for the
support, the stimulus, the hope, that is inherent in the teachings
of Christianity; nevertheless the church--that is to say, the
Protestantism with which I am familiar--has seemed to me increasingly
a wholly inadequate medium for communicating to men such as Smith and
myself the help and inspiration of the vision of Christ. There are
far too many Smiths who do not care particularly whether the churches
prosper or die. And I urge that Smith is worthy of the church’s best
consideration. Even if the ninety-and-nine were snugly housed in the
fold, Smith’s soul is still worth the saving.
“I don’t want to go no furder
Than my Testyment fer that.”
Yet Smith doesn’t care a farthing about the state of his soul. Nothing,
in fact, interests him less. Smith’s wife had been “brought up in the
church,” but after her marriage she displayed Smith to the eyes of the
congregation for a few Easter Sundays and then gave him up. However,
their children attend Sunday school of a denomination other than that
in which the Smiths were reared, and Smith gives money to several
churches; he declares that he believes churches are a good thing, and
he will do almost anything for a church but attend its services. What
he really means to say is that he thinks the church is a good thing for
Jones and me, but that, as for himself, he gets on comfortably without
it.
And the great danger both to the church and to Smith lies in the fact
that he does apparently get on so comfortably without it!
I
My personal experiences of religion and of churches have been rather
varied, and while they present nothing unusual, I shall refer to them
as my justification for venturing to speak to my text at all. I was
baptized in the Episcopal Church in infancy, but in about my tenth
year I began to gain some knowledge of other Protestant churches. One
of my grandfathers had been in turn Methodist and Presbyterian, and I
“joined” the latter church in my youth. Becoming later a communicant of
the Episcopal Church, I was at intervals a vestryman and a delegate to
councils, and for twenty years attended services with a regularity that
strikes me as rather admirable in the retrospect.