There was a time when to be literary was to be ecclesiastical. Ability
to read was sufficient proof of exemption from the jurisdiction of the
civil courts; collections of books were exclusively housed in buildings
subject to ecclesiastical control--churches, monasteries, colleges.
Literature owes its preservation to the church of the Middle Ages, and
the church, in its turn, drew much of its vitality and influence from
its connection with letters.
This state of things no longer exists. Literacy is not for the clergy
alone, but for the citizen. The state teaches us to read, and it
assembles and distributes books. Schools and libraries are still
maintained by religious bodies, but we are agreed as never before that
everybody must be able to read and that illiteracy is a disgrace to the
community where it exists.
Thus the public library has become a lay concern. It has little to do
with the church, and the church, with some exceptions, does not heed
it. It is the great neutral public institution, storing and making
accessible recorded opinions but favoring none. And the odd thing is
that in so far as it ignores the church the library is nullifying in
one place its latest step in advance, which is to work with, in, and
for groups within the community; while by turning a cold shoulder to
the public library the church is refusing to make use of one of the
most powerful aids that could be offered her for the fulfilment of her
mission.
The modern library began to work with groups when it began its work
with children. Since that day, quite within the memory of most of us,
it has taken on teachers, the foreign born, the industries, business
men, hospitals, the military service, and many others. Group service
has been rapidly and successfully extended until it forms a network
over the whole field of the community.
Contact with groups has been facilitated both by the feeling that
initiative in service could properly be assumed by the library, and by
the discovery that library service by no means ends with the provision
of books or even of material in print, that it is a matter of social
contact. Many librarians have become so thoroughly adjusted to the
social contact of the library with groups that they are almost ready
to throw overboard the old name of library altogether, and consider
that they are conducting community clubs, whose chief aim must be to
encourage mental contacts and reactions, and to store and distribute
what must always be the chief tools through which these contacts and
reactions are made effective--namely, books.
The purely experimental manner in which this group service has
developed is evident from the fact that no comprehensive plan of it
has ever been made. The group closest in contact, and therefore the
one that was pressing hardest, has always been the one to receive
attention--to be given room, supplies, and service. The groups that
were already fairly well able to take care of themselves did not need,
of course, to exert this pressure, hence service was extended to them
later, or it still remains to be extended. Now the churches have always
been among our best organized groups, and they have themselves felt,
equally and at the same time with the library, the impulse toward
socialization. The institutional church is the response--it is an
American response, just as that of the library is. The older heads are
as much scandalized to see dancing and eating, and community singing
and politico-social discussion going on in the churches, as they were
to witness the same things in libraries. It is because the church and
the library have thus moved on parallel lines, that they have been so
long in coming into contact. A denominational body, however, is limited
on all sides in this social effort, in a way that can never be felt by
a public institution like the library. In the last analysis every man
has his own religion, just as he has his own philosophy--his mind is
an isolated point in the field of belief. Churches are groups of these
points so near each other as to feel sympathetic attraction. Some day
we may have this sympathetic nearness throughout the whole field. Until
it exists, we must rely on other means to get minds and spirits into
universal contact, and this means the public library is now furnishing
to a greater extent than either churchmen or non-churchmen yet realize.
There is one valuable piece of work that can be done by church and
library together, and that is to labor for Christian unity. I do
not mean by this a state of things where all Christian bodies think
alike or do alike, much less an organic union, but a condition of
affiliation, acknowledged or not, where they are willing to work side
by side. There are not wanting plenty of practical evidences that
this kind of unity is already here in some degree, and that more of
it is on its way. There is the University of Toronto, an aggregation
of denominational colleges--Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Baptist,
Methodist--each a residential and teaching institution, while the
university itself gives all the degrees and instructs in purely
non-religious subjects such as mathematics or logic. There are the
religious houses going up in connection with many of our western
universities. Originally social in their nature, a combination of
dormitory and club house, these are beginning to assume also teaching
functions, with the consent and approval of the universities. For
example, Wesley House at Urbana, Illinois, an admirable and beautiful
collegiate structure, is about to offer religious or semi-religious
courses, for which the University of Illinois will give credits. The
war drives, in which Catholic and Protestant bodies took part jointly,
will occur to all. The library cannot afford to be left behind in such
a movement, and indeed it has itself been a pioneer in some localities.
The New York Public Library has several branches that originated as
church libraries--both Catholic and Protestant--and sensibly no effort
has been made to remove the religious element. Why should we not
cater to strong regional church groups as well as to regional groups
of industrials or scholars? In St. Louis one of our sub-branches is
the Catholic Free Library, given over to our care by the Archbishop
himself. I see no reason why branches should not specialize in
Methodist or Unitarian literature. They do in Jewish literature,
through the accident that the Jews are a racial and to some extent a
linguistic as well as a religious group. One cannot well purchase a
Hebrew collection without buying works on Jewish faith and practice.
This is to a lesser extent true of other linguistic groups in which
the overwhelming majority are of one faith, as with the Greeks, the
Russians, the Italians, or the Spanish.
The odd, the almost unbelievable thing is, that most religious groups
in this country seem to be as unaware of the public library as we
are of them. I will make but two exceptions--the Roman Catholic and
the Christian Scientists. The Roman Catholics have been active in
public library matters ever since I have known anything about public
libraries. They have operated public libraries of their own and they
have not hesitated to affiliate with tax-supported libraries, or to
become merged in them. There are Roman Catholics who shun the public
library or who look askance at it, but of those who seek it and work
with it, as I have known them, I must say that their attitude has been
liberal. They object to violent or scurrilous attacks on their faith,
and ask to have books containing these removed from the shelves. I do
not blame them. But they do not want a purely religious collection.
The Christian Scientists apprehend the library intensively in limited
directions. They have committees whose business it is to see that
all libraries are well supplied with “Science and Health”, and they
encourage the purchase of some other books. I have never known them
to protest against the presence in a library of attacks on their
faith, although there are some pretty stiff ones. But they are very
persistent in their objections to the classification of such attacks
under Christian Science. There is something to be said in favor of
such a view, but so long as we put critiques of Comte under positivism
and agnostic treatises under religion, we shall have to treat all
controversial books in the same way. Occasionally a high-church
Episcopalian will object to our use of the word “Catholic”, or to our
treating pre-Reformation liturgical material as if it belonged only to
the Roman branch of the church.
Outside of these evidences of religious interest, I have never known,
from my library contacts with readers, whether they were Baptists or
Mohammedans, Buddhists or Methodists. I account this a fault of my
own. It is strange that the religious group is the only body that the
librarian has not gone out to seek with some activity. We long ago
ceased to blame plumbers, or manufacturers of textiles, or Hungarians,
or business men, if they did not use the library. We are recognizing
that such failure is our failure. It may be theirs too; but we can mend
our own ways rather more quickly than other people’s, and so we soon
learned to go out after these gentry and to return with more or less
willing bunches of them. But who ever heard of a librarian going out
after a Methodist, or a United Presbyterian, or a Congregationalist?
The very suggestion makes one smile; and yet some of these are quite as
good game as engineers, or aviators, or students of Gaelic.
Here I may anticipate an interruption: “How about the Sunday Schools?”
We have long been treating Sunday Schools as groups, but not as
religious groups. The old Sunday School library was a joke. In my
boyhood, “Sunday School book” meant unreadable, mock-pious stuff
of the variety turned out by the ton from the mills of the Society
for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge in London, and from other
similar ones in our own fair land. This type of library is not yet
extinct--more’s the pity--but it has been altered or greatly modified,
largely, I believe, by the influence of the public library. In some
cases the part of the library devoted to general reading has been
abandoned, the children being sent to the public library. In others,
the type of book distributed has been improved. So far, however,
the influence of the public library has been away from religious
instruction rather than in aid of it. I see no reason why the Sunday
School group should not be given the aid that is not withheld from
other groups, and why a branch library should not contain a small
collection of instructional religious works. These would include
general titles and also books for the special use of the denominations
whose churches are in the immediate vicinity. This might well form part
of a general effort to supply more books on denominational subjects.
Our libraries are generally deficient in religious reference books.
We buy lists of English peers and of American dealers in plumbing
supplies, but we neglect the official clergy lists of our churches.
Every library of good size should include what I may call the official
literature of each church--its yearbook with a list of its clergy,
its fundamental law, whatever that may be termed in each case, its
statement of doctrine, its liturgy if it has any, and its authorized
book or books of hymns. If extended to all the principal denominations
this collection alone would constitute a very respectable library; its
limits, of course, will be determined by the necessities of the case.
Most of it may be bought once for all; the annuals should be purchased
as they appear. To these should also be added, however, considerable
unofficial material: the history of the denomination, the lives and
chief works of its principal divines, plans and descriptions of some of
its noteworthy church buildings, and so on.
Much of this will introduce the librarian to men, doctrines, and
events that he never heard of before, although probably they are no
more remote from his ordinary life than the contents of Maxwell’s
“Electricity” or a grammar of the Gaelic tongue. We buy these, not
because we know and appreciate them ourselves, but because somebody
else does. When we think that the religious groups are worth attracting
and attaching as well as the electricians and the philologists, we
shall at least divide our attention.
All these things will be parts of the library’s contribution toward
Christian unity, as I understand that much abused term and as I am
using it here. The first thing that we need, here as elsewhere,
is a survey of faith and order; and with all the work done toward
unification of Christianity, I cannot see that this has ever been
touched, perhaps not even sensed as a necessary element. Yet how can we
reconcile Presbyterian and Baptist, Protestant and Catholic--nay, look
abroad and ask how we can bring together Buddhist and Mohammedan, Tao
and Shinto, unless we know what now separates them? Much of this is on
record, but it is nowhere assembled. What Christian bodies believe in
justification by faith? Which have more than one order in the ministry?
Which are Congregational in government? Which have bishops? Which
believe in the apostolic succession? Do all accept the Apostles’ Creed
exactly as most of us recite it? I need not go on. The fact is that no
one Christian body knows exactly how near or how far it is from others.
It fails to recognize its closest neighbor.
The first step toward a general, intelligent recognition of points of
agreement and difference is the assemblage of material, and it is such
an assemblage that the library would be making, if it should proceed
as I advise. I do not advise for this purpose filling the shelves
with controversy, and buying works intended to convert Protestants to
Catholicism and Unitarians to Methodism; but I do think that we ought
to have the facts. It is a fact that a body of persons believe in a
stated thing, whether that thing is true or not; and for purposes of
record, of survey, these facts we must and should have somewhere.
Of the inspirational literature of religion, I need scarcely speak.
We are less derelict in our duty here, probably, than in any other
branch of the subject. Much of it is not denominational--it is merely
Christian. It is in the realm of feeling rather than in that of reason
that men first get together. Here we have already the Christian
unity of the spirit. “The Imitation of Christ”, “The Pilgrim’s
Progress”--these and a hundred other religious classics we have on our
shelves already. Yes; and what do we do with them? Will the librarian
who recommends to a reader the “Journal of John Woolman”, of which
she herself never heard until we knew that dear old President Eliot
liked it, recommend also “De Imitatione Christi”? If not, why not? Did
any librarian ever urge anyone to read the Bible? Must we not force
ourselves to realize that religion is qualified to bear a larger
part in the lives of most of our readers than even the Theory of
Groups or the fate of the Lost Digamma? Even Mr. Wells, who thinks the
American Civil War of only sufficient world significance to warrant the
expenditure of a paragraph, and Abraham Lincoln as not worth mention,
spends many a page on Buddha, and Mohammed, and even on Jesus Christ.
No, religion is still a world force! Librarians cannot be the universal
educators--the union of social forces--that they aspire to be, without
working with it and toward it. If there is
One far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves,
the library must perforce move with it.
_Aline Kilmer_
In “The Bookman Anthology of Poetry” I wrote the following of Aline
Kilmer:
“The first night that I met Aline Kilmer was at her house in Larchmont,
just before the children, Michael, Deborah and Christopher, went to
bed. Kenton was away at school. It was these unusual children who moved
with quaint grace through her early poems. Fair-haired, wide-eyed,
with the movements of an elf and the shyness of a faun, little Michael
is like a cherub stolen for an earthly visit. I had only just met the
father, Joyce Kilmer, shortly before he entered the army, and had
just missed seeing him again in France shortly before he was killed
in action. The children have inherited their mother’s gentleness and
wistfulness, and their father’s dreaming eyes. It is a family over
which there seems to fall the beauty, mysticism and faith of the Roman
church, with an especial benediction.”
This worried her. She likes to be considered more practical than I have
made her seem to be. She is. A good housewife, and a hard working one,
too, an earnest student, a whimsical essayist, and, in the main, not a
dreamer. However, any sketch of Aline Kilmer must include a description
of that very unusual manner of hers, that quite undeniable charm,
whether she likes it or no.