In a world of sin, disease and death—death inevitable—what may man do
to drive out sin and cure disease, to the end that, barring accident,
old age shall set the limit on mortal life?
The quack doctor equally in ethics and in physics has played a leading
part in human affairs. Only within a relatively brief period has
science made serious progress toward discovery. Though Nature has
perhaps an antidote for all her poisons many of them continue to defy
approach. They lie concealed, leaving the astutest to grope in the
dark.
That which is true of material things is truer yet of spiritual things.
The ideal about which we hear so much, is as unattained as the fabled
bag of gold at the end of the rainbow. Nor is the doctrine of
perfectability anywhere one with itself. It speaks in diverse tongues.
Its processes and objects are variant. It seems but an iridescent dream
which lends itself equally to the fancies of the impracticable and the
scheming of the self-seeking, breeding visionaries and pretenders.
Easily assumed and asserted, too often it becomes tyrannous, dealing
with things outer and visible while taking little if any account of the
inner lights of the soul. Thus it imposes upon credulity and ignorance;
makes fakers of some and fanatics of others; in politics where not an
engine of oppression, a corrupt influence; in religion where not a
zealot, a promoter of cant. In short the self-appointed apostle of
uplift, who disregarding individual character would make virtue a
matter of statute law and ordain uniformity of conduct by act of
conventicle or assembly, is likelier to produce moral chaos than to
reach the sublime state he claims to seek.
The bare suggestion is full of startling possibilities. Individualism
was the discovery of the fathers of the American Republic. It is the
bedrock of our political philosophy. Human slavery was assuredly an
indefensible institution. But the armed enforcement of freedom did not
make a black man a white man. Nor will the wave of fanaticism seeking
to control the food and drink and dress of the people make men better
men. Danger lurks and is bound to come with the inevitable reaction.
The levity of the men is recruited by the folly of the women. The
leaders of feminism would abolish sex. To what end? The pessimist
answers what easier than the demolition of a sexless world gone
entirely mad? How simple the engineries of destruction. Civil war in
America; universal hara-kiri in Europe; the dry rot of wealth wasting
itself in self-indulgence. Then a thousand years of total eclipse.
Finally Macaulay’s Australian surveying the ruins of St. Paul’s
Cathedral from a broken parapet of London Bridge; and a Moslem
conqueror of America looking from the hill of the Capitol at Washington
upon the desolation of what was once the District of Columbia. Shall
the end be an Oriental renaissance with the philosophies of Buddha,
Mohammed and Confucius welded into a new religion describing itself as
the last word of science, reason and common sense?
Alas, and alack the day! In those places where the suffering rich most
do congregate the words of Watts’ hymn have constant application:
_For Satan finds some mischief still For idle hands to do._
When they have not gone skylarking or grown tired of bridge they devote
their leisure to organizing clubs other than those of the uplift. There
are all sorts, from the Society for the Abrogation of Bathing Suits at
the seaside resorts to the League at Mewville for the Care of Disabled
Cats. Most of these clubs are all officers and no privates. That is
what many of them are got up for. Do they advance the world in grace?
One who surveys the scene can scarcely think so.
But the whirl goes on; the yachts sweep proudly out to sea; the auto
cars dash madly through the streets; more and darker and deeper do the
contrasts of life show themselves. How long shall it be when the
mudsill millions take the upper ten thousand by the throat and rend
them as the furiosos of the Terror in France did the aristocrats of the
_Régime Ancien_? The issue between capital and labor, for example, is
full of generating heat and hate. Who shall say that, let loose in the
crowded centers of population, it may not one day engulf us all?
Is this rank pessimism or merely the vagaries of an old man dropping
back into second childhood, who does not see that the world is wiser
and better than ever it was, mankind and womankind, surely on the way
to perfection?
V
One thing is certain: We are not standing still. Since “Adam delved and
Eve span”—if they ever did—in the Garden of Eden, “somewhere in Asia,”
to the “goings on” in the Garden of the Gods directly under Pike’s
Peak—the earth we inhabit has at no time and nowhere wanted for
liveliness—but surely it was never livelier than it now is; as the
space-writer says, more “dramatic”; indeed, to quote the guidebooks,
quite so “picturesque and interesting.”
Go where one may, on land or sea, he will come upon activities of one
sort and another. Were Timon of Athens living, he might be awakened
from his misanthrophy and Jacques, the forest cynic, stirred to
something like enthusiasm. Is the world enduring the pangs of a second
birth which shall recreate all things anew, supplementing the miracles
of modern invention with a corresponding development of spiritual life;
or has it reached the top of the hill, and, mortal, like the human
atoms that compose it, is it starting downward on the other side into
an abyss which the historians of the future will once again call “the
dark ages?”
We know not, and there is none to tell us. That which is actually
happening were unbelievable if we did not see it, from hour to hour,
from day to day. Horror succeeding horror has in some sort blunted our
sensibilities. Not only are our sympathies numbed by the immensity of
the slaughter and the sorrow, but patriotism itself is chilled by the
selfish thought that, having thus far measurably escaped, we may pull
through without paying our share. This will account for a certain
indifferentism we now and again encounter.
At the moment we are felicitating ourselves—or, is it merely confusing
ourselves?—over the revolution in Russia. It seems of good augury. To
begin with, for Russia. Then the murder war fairly won for the Allies,
we are promised by the optimists a wise and lasting peace.
The bells that rang out in Petrograd and Moscow sounded, we are told,
the death knell of autocracy in Berlin and Vienna. The clarion tones
that echoed through the Crimea and Siberia, albeit to the ear of the
masses muffled in the Schwarzwald and along the shores of the North
Sea, and up and down the Danube and the Rhine, yet conveyed a whispered
message which may presently break into song; the glad song of freedom
with it glorious refrain: “The Romanoffs gone! Perdition having reached
the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs, all will be well!”
Anyhow, freedom; self-government; for whilst a scrutinizing and
solicitous pessimism, observing and considering many abuses,
administrative and political, federal and local, in our republican
system—abuses which being very visible are most lamentable—may
sometimes move us to lose heart of hope in democracy, we know of none
better. So, let us stand by it; pray for it; fight for it. Let us by
our example show the Russians how to attain it. Let us by the same
token show the Germans how to attain it when they come to see, if they
ever do, the havoc autocracy has made for Germany. That should
constitute the bed rock of our politics and our religion. It is the
true religion. Love of country is love of God. Patriotism is religion.
It is also Christianity. The pacifist, let me parenthetically observe,
is scarcely a Christian. There be technical Christians and there be
Christians. The technical Christian sees nothing but the blurred letter
of the law, which he misconstrues. The Christian, animated by its holy
spirit and led by its rightful interpretation, serves the Lord alike of
heaven and hosts when he flies the flag of his country and smites its
enemies hip and thigh!