THE SECRET AND METHOD
There is a simile of Herbert Spencer's, in his book on Sociology, which
has often helped me in dealing with great moral problems. He says:
"You see that wrought-iron plate is not quite flat; it sticks up a
little here towards the left, 'cockles,' as we say. How shall we
flatten it? Obviously, you reply, by hitting down on the part that
is prominent. Well, here is a hammer, and I give the plate a blow
as you advise. Harder, you say. Still no effect. Another stroke.
Well, there is one, and another, and another. The prominence
remains, you see; the evil is as great as ever, greater, indeed.
But this is not all. Look at the warp which the plate has got near
the opposite edge. Where it was flat before it is now curved. A
pretty bungle we have made of it! Instead of curing the original
defect, we have produced a second. Had we asked an artisan
practised in 'planishing,' as it is called, he would have told us
that no good was to be done, but only mischief, by hitting down on
the projecting part. He would have taught us how to give variously
directed and specially adjusted blows with a hammer elsewhere, so
attacking the evil not by direct but by indirect actions. The
required process is less simple than you thought. Even a sheet of
metal is not to be successfully dealt with after those common-sense
methods in which you have so much confidence. 'Do you think I am
easier to be played on than a pipe?' asked Hamlet. Is humanity more
readily straightened than an iron plate?"[5]
Now, in our moral "planishing" we need to know where and how to direct
our blows, lest in endeavoring to lessen the evil we not only increase
the evil itself, but produce other evils almost as great as the one we
intended to cure. The mistake that we commit--and this is, I think,
especially true of us women--is to rush at our moral problems without
giving a moment's thought to their causes, which often lie deep hidden
in human nature. Our great naturalist, Darwin, gave eight years' study
to our lowly brother, the barnacle; he gave an almost equal amount of
time to the study of the earthworm and its functions, revealing to us,
in one of his most charming books, how much of our golden harvest, of
our pastures, and our jewelled garden-beds, we owe to this silent and
patient laborer. Yet we think that we can deal with our higher and more
complex human nature without giving it any study at all. We hit down
directly on its moral inequalities, without giving a thought to what has
caused the imperfection, when constantly, as in the sheet of metal which
has to be straightened, the moral disorder has to be met, not directly,
but indirectly--not at the point of the disorder itself, but of its
often unsuspected cause. Purity, like health, like happiness, like so
many of the higher aims of our life, has to be attained altruistically.
Seek them too directly, and they elude our grasp. Like the oarsman, we
have often to turn our back upon our destination in order to arrive at
our end.
Do not, therefore, think impatiently that I am putting you off with
vague theories when you want practical suggestions, if I ask you first
to give some patient thought to the causes of the disorder which seems
to mark the side of our human nature on which the very existence of the
race depends, and which cannot, therefore, be evil in itself. To me the
problem presented was almost paralyzing. It seemed as if Nature, in her
anxiety to secure the continuance of the species, had taken no account
whatever of the moral law, but had so overloaded the strength of passion
as not only to secure the defeat of the moral law, but even of her own
ends, by producing the sterility which results from vicious indulgence.
It was not till I met with two wonderful sermons on "The Kingdom of
God," by that great master of "divine philosophy," Dr. James Martineau,
that I first got a clue to the moral difficulty and to that fuller
understanding of our human nature which is so essential to all who have
the training and moulding of the young. And, therefore, I ask you to let
me enter at some length into this teaching, which will not only give us
light for our own guidance, but enable us to grasp the right principles
on which we have to act in the moral training of the coming
generation.[6]
Now, in trying to think out the laws of our own being, we are met at
the very outset by the great crux in the moral world: What is the true
relation of the material to the spiritual,--of the body, with its
instincts and appetites, to the moral personality, with its conscience
and will? On the one hand, seeing the fatal proneness of man to obey his
appetites and run into terrible excesses, ascetics in all ages and of
all creeds have taught that the body itself is evil and the seat of sin;
that its instincts must be crushed and its appetites repressed and
eradicated; and that it is only so far as you trample your animal nature
under foot that you can rise to be a saint. "Brute," "blind," "dead,"
have been the epithets bestowed on matter, which is a ceaseless play of
living forces that rest not day nor night. To look down on the material
pleasures with suspicion, to fly contact with the rude world and lose
one's self in the unembodied splendors of the spiritual, to save souls
rather than men and women, to preach abstract doctrines rather than
grapple with hideous concrete problems--this has been the tendency of
the religious spirit in all ages, a tendency of which positive
asceticism, with its mortification of the body, and its ideal of
virginity, and marriage regarded as more or less a concession to the
flesh, is only an exaggeration.
On the other hand, in disgust at the mutilation of human nature and
under pretext of its consummation, has arisen the "fleshly school,"
whose maxim is "obedience to Nature,"--leaving undefined what nature,
the nature of the swine or the nature of the man,--which holds that
every natural instinct ought to be obeyed, which takes the agreeable as
the test of the right, and which goes in for the "healthy animal" with
enlightened self-interest as the safeguard against excesses.
Alas! the results are no happier. The healthy animal treads under his
feet the helpless and the weak, who suffer that he may grow fat and
kick. The attractive warmth and color and richness are found to be but
rottenness and decay.
When, dissatisfied with the teaching of men, one turns to the great
world at large, to see whether some practical instinct may not have
guided men to a right adjustment, one's first feeling is one of dismay
at the spectacle presented. The bodily instincts and appetites that seem
to work aright in the animal world, in man seem fatally overloaded, and,
instead of hitting the mark, explode with disaster and death at the
outset.
Let us now turn to the teaching of Christ, and see whether it does not
explain the deep disorder of the animal instincts in the world of man,
and while saving us on the one hand from the self-mutilation of
asceticism, and from the swinishness of the fleshly school on the
other, whether it does not embrace the truth that is in both and teach
us how to correlate the material and the spiritual.
Now, Dr. Martineau points out that Christ teaches, in contradistinction
to asceticism, that the animal body, with its instincts and appetites,
is as good on its own plane as the higher and spiritual attributes of
man are on theirs. Our Father knoweth that, in common with other
creatures, we have need of physical good, and He has provided us with a
self-acting mechanism for its attainment, which will work rightly if
only it is left alone and not tampered with. There is the same
provision in us as in them of unconscious instincts and appetites for
carrying on the lower life which is necessary as the platform of the
higher spiritual being, to set it free, as it were, for the pursuit of
its legitimate ends--all those higher and wider interests in life which
are comprised under the one comprehensive name of "the kingdom of God."
And the teaching of Christ is: Neither hate nor fear this part of your
nature with the ascetic, nor pamper and stimulate it with the Hedonist,
but let it alone to act on its own plane; trust it, trust God who made
it, while you throw all your conscious energies into the higher
concerns of life; and you will find, when left to its own unconscious
activity, it is neither an over-nor an under-provision for carrying on
your subsistence and that of the race. "Take no anxious thought
[(Greek: me merimnesete)] for the morrow." "Your Father knoweth that ye
have need of these things," and has arranged your being accordingly.
"Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added
to you." "Behold the birds of the air; your heavenly Father feedeth
them."
"Oh," says the practical man at once, "that is all very fine as
sentiment; it is very Eastern and poetical; but I should like to know
how, in these overcrowded days, I could support myself and family if I
am to trust God to feed me and them like the birds of the air, and only
think about religion." But is not this wholly to misunderstand our
Lord's teaching? How does God feed the birds of the air? Is it not by
incessant and untiring effort on their part? Those who have watched a
pair of birds flying backwards and forwards to the nest under the eave
may well question whether industry can go further. But in the
unconscious being of a bird it is toil without [Greek: merimna],
without thought and worry, and becomes, therefore, the very picture to
us of trust in a higher Power, who has thus adjusted an unerring
instinct to an unfailing end. The insect and the bird provide for the
morrow, while they take no anxious thought for the morrow. "The agility
which achieves it is theirs, the skill and foresight absent from them
remain with God. And thus the simple life of lower natures, in its
unconscious surrender to involuntary though internal guidance, becomes
the negative type of perfect trust."[7]
But to leave his instincts and appetites to work, unimpeded and
unconscious, on their own plane, while he concerns himself with matters
of truly human interest, is just what man is not content to do. On the
contrary, he takes his higher and spiritual nature down into them. He
enhances their pleasure with all the powers of his imagination; he sets
his intellect to work to plot and plan for their gratification; he loads
them with the whole force of his spiritual will, and in so doing he
overloads and maddens them. The instinct for food and drink, which in
the animal is sufficient for the maintenance of health and activity, in
the man becomes gluttony and drunkenness; the instinct for the
preservation of the race becomes the licentiousness which produces
sterility and defeats its own ends; the instinct of self-maintenance
becomes the feverish greed and money-getting which leave no room for the
higher life of beauty, and science, and worship, and disinterested
service. "Seek ye first the material," says the world, "and all these
things shall be added unto you when you get the time for them"--which
will be probably never.
Now, then, do we not begin to see why the animal instincts and
appetites, which make for order and happiness, and fufil their end in
the animal world, lead to such intolerable disorder in the world of
man? Their laws, like all other laws in the Divine economy, are holy and
just and good; but man by not observing their conditions makes them work
evil and death. Do you not see that to be a healthy animal is just what
man cannot be except by being a true and high-minded man, all his
conscious energies taken up and absorbed on a higher plane, with none
left over to filter down into and disorder the animal instincts, which
only work aright when left to their own unconscious activity? Fix your
consciousness long enough on the tip of your little finger, and you will
feel a pricking sensation in it. The mind directed intently to any part
of the frame will produce a flow of blood there. Any physician will tell
you that this is one of the greatest difficulties he has to contend with
in his patients; the mind being steadily directed to some disordered
spot increases the congestion which is the result of disease.
Unconsciousness, therefore, is the very channel in which our animal
nature works healthily and undisturbed according to its own laws. But
you are a self-conscious being, and not as the animals. God keeps the
keys of their nature in His own hands. They are shut up to certain ends
which are in His purpose rather than in their minds. They are locked
within limits of their nature, which are absolute, and cannot,
therefore, be transgressed. But man, in virtue of his self-consciousness,
is emphatically "he who hath the keys, who openeth and no man
shutteth, and who shutteth and no man openeth." All the secret recesses
of your being lie open to you, and no man can close it to your vision.
You can voluntarily shut the door of salvation and hamper the lock, and
no man can open. A limit is no absolute limit to you because your very
consciousness of the limit involves your consciousness of the beyond
which makes it a limit. And therefore to you as a self-knowing
existence, with your being necessarily surrendered into your own hands,
two faculties have been given as a substitute for the unconscious
necessity of an animal nature: First, a self-judging faculty which we
call conscience, or a power of discerning between a lower and a higher,
and a sense of obligation to the higher which enables you to correlate
your faculties and functions in their true order of relative
excellence; and secondly, a spiritual will, capable of carrying the
decisions of conscience into practical execution and attaining to a
necessity of moral law. The true function of man's will is not,
therefore, to add itself on to any one of his instincts and give it a
disordered strength, but, while throwing its chief conscious energies
into the higher interests of life, to rule his instincts and appetites
according to those higher interests. This, when the condition of that
infinitely complex thing, modern civilized life, interferes, as at
times it must do, with the legitimate exercise of his instincts, and
his good has to be subordinated to the good of the greater number, may
occasionally involve a hard struggle, even when the instincts have been
left to their own healthy natural play; but at least it will be all the
difference between a struggle with a spirited animal and a maddened and
infuriated brute.
"But," asks Dr. Martineau, "if the animal instincts and appetites are to
be directed by conscience and ruled by the will in accordance with the
dictates of conscience, what becomes of the unconsciousness which is
necessary for their right action? Its place is gradually supplied by
habit, which is the unconsciousness of a self-conscious being." The
habit of plain living and spare food, so necessary to high thinking, at
first acquired possibly by real effort of will, by real fasting and
prayer, becomes a second nature, that sets the will free for higher
conquests. The habit of purity, which at first may have resulted only
from a sleepless watch of the will in directing the thoughts and
imagination into safe channels, becomes an instinctive recoil from the
least touch of defilement. The habit of unworldly simplicity, which may
have had to be induced by deliberate self-denial, becomes a natural
disposition which rejects superfluities from unconscious choice.
This is what takes place where direct conflict is necessitated by the
constant readjustment of the individual, with his instincts and
appetites, to his social environment which so complex a state of society
as that of modern civilization involves. But under ordinary
circumstances, where the teaching of Christ is observed and all the
conscious energies of the man are absorbed in seeking first the kingdom
of God, there the need of conflict on the lower plane is at least
partially done away with. The whole current of thought and will, flowing
into higher channels, is drained away from the lower instincts and
appetites, which are thus restored to their natural unconsciousness,
with only an occasional interference on the part of the will to
subordinate them to human ends and aims, or to those demands of a high
and complex civilization in the benefits of which we all share, but for
whose fuller and richer life we have in some directions to pay, and
perhaps at times to pay heavily. The scientific man who in his
passionate devotion to the search after truth--the kingdom of God as
revealed in the order of the universe--exclaimed testily that he had no
time to waste in making money, had no conflict with the instinct of
self-subsistence maddened into greed. It worked out a sufficient
quotient of bread and cheese to insure the healthy exercise of his
brain, and that was enough. The Alpine climber, intent on mastering a
printless snow-peak, has not to control an appetite sharpened by
mountain air from sinking into the gluttony which would be fatal to the
cool head and steady foot necessary for his enterprise. The man who has
a noble passion for the weak and defenceless, who from the first has
cultivated a chivalrous loyalty to women, putting far from him the
lowering talk, the cynical expression, the moral lassitude of society,
and guarding his high enthusiasm from the blight of worldly commonplace,
has no need to fight against the lower instinct that would degrade them
or wrong the weak and defenceless. The conflict is there, but it is
removed to a nobler and higher battle-field, a battle against the
sacrifice of the weak by the strong, whilst in him the lower life may be
left to settle itself, as in the unconscious birds of the air. "Love
God," as St. Augustine said, "and do what you will." "Be a child of the
water, and you may be a child of the wind, blowing where it listeth."
"Seek the kingdom of God first, and all these things shall be added to
you."
This, then, is the first great practical lesson that we learn from the
study of the laws of our human nature, taken in their widest aspect,
under the teaching of the Divine Master, the "open secret" of overcoming
in man and woman alike, that which restores to us our whole nature, and
vindicates it, even in the depths of disorder into which it has
practically fallen, as originally bearing the Divine stamp. The more
unconscious we are in the pursuit of physical good, the better for the
ends of life; the more conscious we are in the pursuit of moral and
spiritual good, the nearer we are to that kingdom of righteousness and
peace and joy in the Holy Ghost which we seek. Get out of the narrow
individualism or atomism--for let us never forget that individual and
atom are the same word--which threatens to dwarf and pulverize us, which
keeps within our view only the narrow range of our own interests and
defeats their true pursuit by the very intensity of attention it
concentrates upon them; and live, as Goethe says, "in the beautiful, the
good, and the whole," the kingdom of the Eternal. Have the higher
passion that casts out the lower. The physician whose conscious aim is
the relief of human suffering and the enforcement of the laws of health,
even though a large professional income may be added to him; the lawyer
who regards himself as the minister of the Just One to uphold the law of
right and equity, whose reputation does not rest on his skill in getting
off a fraudulent company without costs, and who makes his money not by
his "practices," but by his honest practice; the man of science who
reverently devotes himself, as the servant of the truth, to "think God's
thoughts after Him," in the words of Kepler's prayer, and establish the
kingdom of law and order, in the humbleness of conscious limitation
which forbids dogmatizing; the artist who is true to his art and does
not subordinate the laws of the eternal Loveliness to the shifting laws
of the temporary market; the capitalist who looks upon himself as the
steward of the public good, and to whom material gain is the means and
not the end; the workman who does good work for the kingdom of God's
sake, knowing that every stroke of good work is a brick in the palace
of the great King, and who scorns to scamp because it pays; and,
generally speaking, every man who is so intent on helping and serving
others that his thoughts are taken off himself and centred on
another--these are the men who are seeking first a kingdom of God,
wherein dwelleth righteousness; these are the men who, living in the
higher life can rule the lower--the men whose feet are in the lilies,
and to whom the floods of earthly passion, even when they beat hardest,
end in the flight of a dove and in a triumphal arch of light.
Now, you will see at once the intensely practical bearing of this
teaching on the training of your boys. You are not called to hit down
directly on the evil, to give warnings against vice, or to speak on
things which your womanhood unspeakably shrinks from mentioning. What
you are called to do is to secure, so far as you can, that the mind and
soul moves on its own proper plane. It is more an attitude you have to
form than a warning you have to give. And here it is that the imperative
need of high positive teaching comes in. Till parents, and especially
mothers, recognize their God-given functions as the moral teachers of
their own children, till they cease to shunt off their responsibilities
on the professional shoulders of the schoolmaster, we had better frankly
give up the whole question in despair. Strange and sad it seems to me
that at the end of the nineteenth century after the coming of our Lord
I should have to plead that the moral law is possible under every
condition to any man, and that parents are _ipso facto_ the moral
teachers of their own children. And yet it is the denial, tacit or
explicit, of these two primary truths that has been the greatest
obstacle to the progress of my work.
But I appeal to you: Who but a mother can bring such a constant and
potent influence to bear as to secure the mind and character moving on
its own higher plane in relation to the whole of this side of our
nature? Who so well as a mother can teach the sacredness of the body as
the temple of the Eternal? Who else can implant in her son that habitual
reverence for womanhood which to a man is "as fountains of sweet water
in the bitter sea" of life? Who like a mother, as he grows to years of
sense and observation, and the curiosity is kindled, which is only a cry
for light and teaching, can so answer the cry and so teach as to make
the mysteries of life and truth to be for ever associated for him with
all the sacred associations of home and his own mother, and not with the
talk of the groom or the dirty-minded schoolboy? Who so well as a
mother, as he passes into dawning manhood, can plead faithfulness to the
future wife before marriage as well as after? Nay, as I hold by the old
Spanish proverb "An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy," who
like a mother, by her prayers and ever-present example and influence,
can lead him to the Highest, and impress upon him that his life is
given him for no lower end than, in the words of the Westminster
Confession, "to know God and to glorify Him for ever"; and that
therefore he is made on a very high plan--as Browning puts it, "Heaven's
consummate cup," whose end is to slake "the Master's thirst"; and that
the cup from which He drinks must be clean inside as well as out, and
studded within and without with the pearl of purity?
But refuse to give him this higher teaching and training; go on, as so
many mothers have done, blankly ignoring the whole subject, because it
is so difficult to speak to one's boys,--as if everything worth having
in this life were not difficult!--leave him to the teaching of dirty
gossip, of unclean classical allusions in his school-books, of scraps of
newspaper intelligence, possibly of bad companions whom he may pick up
at school or business, and be sure of it, as this side of his nature is
awakened--in his search after gratified curiosity or pleasurable
sensation, in utter ignorance of what he is doing, through your fault,
not through his--he will use his imagination and his will to strengthen
the animal instincts. What ought to have been kept on a higher plane of
being will be used to stimulate functions just coming into existence,
and pre-eminently needing to be let alone on their own plane to mature
quietly and unconsciously. Thus dwelt upon and stimulated, these
functions become in a measure disordered and a source of miserable
temptation and difficulty, even if no actual wrong-doing results. If you
only knew what those struggles are, if you only knew what miserable
chains are forged in utter helpless ignorance, you would not let any
sense of difficulty or shrinking timidity make you refuse to give your
boy the higher teaching which would have saved him.
It is told of the beautiful Countess of Dufferin, by her son and
biographer, Lord Dufferin, that when the surgeons were consulting round
her bedside which they should save--the mother or the child--she
exclaimed, "Oh, never mind me; save my baby!" If you knew the facts as I
know them, I am quite sure you would exclaim, in the face of any
difficulties, any natural shrinking on your part, "Oh, never mind me,
let me save my boys!"
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 5: _The Study of Sociology_, by Herbert Spencer (International
Scientific Series), p. 270, fifth edition, 1876.]
[Footnote 6: I quote here at some length from a White Cross paper called
_Per Augusta ad Augusta_, in which I summarized and applied Dr.
Martineau's teaching, as I do not think I can do it more clearly or in
more condensed form. By some mistake it came out, not under my name, but
under the initials of the writer of _True Manliness_ and several others
of the White Cross Series. I only mention the mistake now to safeguard
my own intellectual honesty.]
[Footnote 7: _Hours of Thought_, by Dr. Martineau, vol. i., p. 35, third
edition.]