it in aggravated degree in bigger households; but, just as I told you
yesterday, I am not concerned very much with the multi-millionaire
excepting as we are foolish enough to allow ourselves to be hurt
by anything that is wrong in his example. I meet just as large a
proportion of good people among multi-millionaires as among others; but
anything merely affecting them is a small question. I am not dealing
with them. If they all went wrong, and the rest of the American people
went right, the nation would still be all right.
The man in whom I am primarily interested, the woman in whom I am most
interested, is the average man and the average woman, the American whom
we see about us running the trolley-cars, running the steam-cars,
running every small business, taking care of the small houses, doing
all the ordinary things around about us. It is for and to them that I
am speaking.
If the mother teaches the girl that when she comes home she is to sit
in the front parlor at ease and let the mother work in the kitchen and
run up and down stairs until at the end of the day she is utterly worn
out, she not only wrongs herself--that I am not concerned about, for
she is too foolish to have me care very much about her--but, what I am
concerned about, she inflicts a dreadful wrong on the daughter and upon
all with whom the daughter is afterwards to be brought into contact.
If the girl trained in such a way is a fundamentally good girl she
will finally unlearn the lesson she was taught at home; but it will
cost her years of effort to unlearn the lesson; and if she is of weak
character she will have been permanently spoiled.
And in just the same way with the father--and here I am going to say a
word especially to the father who is pretty well off in this world’s
goods. If the father brings up the boy in such fashion that he cannot
do anything except spend money in vacuous fashion he has not helped
the boy, he has hurt him. It would have been better for the boy that
the father had never earned money at all than to have earned money if
his training is to be in such fashion. Of course, you fathers, it is a
great error to think that it is necessary to show needless harshness
to your sons. I have no patience with that type of twisted Puritanism
which forbids the father to show love and affection and consideration
for his son. You do not make the boy hardier or better by making him
miserable; you do not tend to make him a good citizen by giving him a
feeling of sore dislike for his parent. Make him your companion, make
him your friend; do all you can for him; and then make him understand
that in his turn he must do all he can for you and for the rest of the
family. Make it a reciprocal bond between you. But never whether from
carelessness or folly let him grow up thinking that it is proper for
him to lead a useless or idle life or one of mere pleasure. We have
room in this country for a busy leisure class but we have no room for
an idle class, I don’t care at which end of the social scale, whether
of a hobo or a multi-millionaire.
And one more word to the mother. I have spoken of the mother’s
training of the daughter. Perhaps it is even worse if the mother
permits the son to grow up selfish and without regard for the feeling
of others. I remember a good many years ago reading a little story that
impressed me much. It described a tired, rather wornout mother getting
into a railroad train with her boy. The mother sat by the window in
the seat; the minute the little boy discovered that he was not by the
window he began “mother, I want to sit by the window”; she replied
“mother is tired”; then he, “mother, I want to sit by the window”; she
answered “now, Johnnie, you wouldn’t ask to sit by the window when
poor mother is so tired”; he, pouting and sullen “I want to sit by the
window”; she, patiently “Johnnie, I want to look out of the window, I
am very tired, I want to rest”; he, louder and more angry, “I want to
sit by the window”; whereupon at last the mother let him sit by the
window! The author of the story went on to say that sometime in the
future a sad little wife would wonder “why men were so inconsiderate”;
and that the blame would rest really as much with Johnnie’s unwise
mother as with himself. Of course, what the Johnnie of that type needs
is a firm parental hand. Let him have discipline in as ample a measure
as love.
I remember a most excellent backwoods mother whom I once knew who,
having disciplined a boy who sadly needed it, was addressed by a rather
sentimental lady of my acquaintance as follows: “Oh, my dear Mrs. So
and So, I am sure it hurt you worse than it did him”! To which my
backwoods friend responded, “indeed it did not, he had been very bad;
and I thoroughly enjoyed it”!
So my plea today is for that form of applied ethics which lies at the
base of every kind of good citizenship. We cannot have good citizenship
in the present unless the average man and the average woman do their
duty in their homes; we cannot have good citizenship in the future
unless in the average home the average boy and girl are so brought up
that in the future they will be American men and women of the right
type, able and anxious to meet all the exacting demands that American
citizenship now makes, and that it will make in ever increasing degree
upon our people as the generations pass.
THE BIBLE AND THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE
I have come here to-day, in the course of a series of lectures upon
applied ethics, upon realizable ideals, to speak of the book to which
our people owe infinitely the greater part of their store of ethics,
infinitely the greater part of their knowledge of how to apply that
store to the needs of our every-day life.
There have been many collections of the sacred books, the sacred
writings of the Old and New Testaments--many collections of note. Upon
an occasion such as this we who think most of all of the King James
version of the Bible should be the first to acknowledge our obligation
to many of the other versions, especially to the earliest of the great
versions, the Vulgate of St. Jerome, a very great version, a version
that played an incalculable part in the development of Western
Europe, because it put the Bible into the common language of Western
Europe, the language known to every man who pretended to any degree of
learning--Latin--and therefore gave the Bible to the peoples of the
West at a time when the old classic civilization of Greece and Rome
had first crumbled to rottenness and had then been overwhelmed by the
barbarian sea. In the wreck of the old world, Christianity was all that
the survivors had to cling to; and the Latin version of the Bible put
it at their disposal.
Other versions of the Bible followed from time to time, and gradually
men began to put them into the vernaculars of the different countries.
Wyclif’s Bible is one version to which we must feel under deep
obligation. But the great debt of the English-speaking peoples
everywhere is to the translation of the Bible that we all know--I
trust I can say, all here know--in our own homes, the Bible as it was
put forth in English three centuries ago. No other book of any kind
ever written in English--perhaps no other book ever written in any
other tongue--has ever so affected the whole life of a people as this
authorized version of the Scriptures has affected the life of the
English-speaking peoples.
I enter a most earnest plea that in our hurried and rather bustling
life of to-day we do not lose the hold that our forefathers had on the
Bible. I wish to see Bible study as much a matter of course in the
secular college as in the seminary. No educated man can afford to be
ignorant of the Bible; and no uneducated man can afford to be ignorant
of the Bible. Occasional critics, taking sections of the Old Testament,
are able to point out that the teachings therein are not in accordance
with our own convictions and views of morality, and they ignore the
prime truth that these deeds recorded in the Old Testament are not
in accordance with our theories of morality because of the very fact
that these theories are based upon the New Testament, because the New
Testament represents not only in one sense the fulfillment of the Old
but in another sense the substitution of the New Testament for the Old
in certain vital points of ethics. If critics of this kind would study
the morality inculcated by the Old Testament among the chosen people,
and compare it, not with the morality of to-day, not with the morality
created by the New Testament, but with the morality of the surrounding
nations of antiquity, who had no Bible, they would appreciate the
enormous advances that the Old Testament even in its most primitive
form worked for the Jewish people. The Old Testament did not carry
Israel as far as the New Testament has carried us; but it advanced
Israel far beyond the point any neighboring nation had then reached.
In studying the writings of the average critic who has assailed the
Bible the most salient point is usually his peculiar shallowness in
failing to understand, not merely the lofty ethical teachings of the
Bible as we now know it, but the elemental fact that even the most
primitive ethical system taught in the primitive portions of the Bible,
the earliest of the sacred writings, marks a giant stride in moral
advance when compared with the contemporary ethical conceptions of the
other peoples of the day.
Moreover, I appeal for a study of the Bible on many different accounts,
even aside from its ethical and moral teachings, even aside from the
fact that all serious people, all men who think deeply, even among
non-Christians, have come to agree that the life of Christ, as set
forth in the four Gospels, represents an infinitely higher and purer
morality than is preached in any other book of the world. Aside from
this, I ask that the Bible be studied for the sake of the breadth it
must give to every man who studies it. I cannot understand the mental
attitude of those who would put the Bible to one side as not being a
book of interest to grown men. What could interest men who find the
Bible dull? The Sunday newspaper? Think of the difference there must
be in the mental make-up of the man whose chief reading includes the
one, as compared with the man whose chief reading is represented by the
other--the vulgarity, the shallowness, the inability to keep the mind
fixed on any serious subject, which is implied in the mind of any man
who cannot read the Bible and yet can take pleasure in reading only
literature of the type of the colored supplement of the Sunday paper.
Now, I am not speaking against the colored supplement of any paper in
its place; but as a substitute for serious reading of the great Book,
it represents a type of mind which it is gross flattery merely to call
shallow.
I do not ask you to accept the word of those who preach the Bible as an
inspired book; I make my appeal not only to professing Christians; I
make it to every man who seeks after a high and useful life, to every
man who seeks the inspiration of religion, or who endeavors to make his
life conform to a high ethical standard; to every man who, be he Jew or
Gentile, whatever his form of religious belief, whatever creed he may
profess, faces life with the real desire not only to get out of it what
is best, but to do his part in everything that tells for the ennobling
and uplifting of humanity.
I am making a plea, not only for the training of the mind, but for the
moral and spiritual training of the home and the church, the moral
and spiritual training that has always been found in, and has ever
accompanied, the study of the book which in almost every civilized
tongue, and in many an uncivilized, can be described as “the Book”
with the certainty of having the description understood by all
listeners. A year and a quarter ago I was passing on foot through the
native kingdom of Uganda, in Central Africa. Uganda is the most highly
developed of the pure Negro states in Africa. It is the state which has
given the richest return for missionary labor. It now contains some
half-million of Christians, the direction of the government being in
the hands of those Christians. I was interested to find that in their
victorious fight against, in the first place, heathendom, and, in the
next place, Moslemism, the native Christians belonging to the several
different sects, both Catholics and Protestants, had taken as their
symbol “the Book,” sinking all minor differences among themselves, and
coming together on the common ground of their common belief in “the
Book” that was the most precious gift the white man had brought to them.
It is of that book, and as testimony to its incalculable influence
for good from the educational and moral standpoint, that the great
scientist Huxley wrote in the following words:
“Consider the great historical fact that for three centuries this
book has been woven into the life of all that is noblest and best in
English history; that it has become the national epic of Britain;
that it is written in the noblest and purest English and abounds
in exquisite beauties of mere literary form; and, finally, that it
forbids the veriest hind, who never left his village, to be ignorant
of the existence of other countries and other civilizations of a great
past stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations in
the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much
humanized and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical
procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the
interval between the Eternities?”
I ask your attention to this when I plead for the training of children
in the Bible. I am quoting, not a professed Christian, but a scientific
man whose scientific judgment is thus expressed as to the value of
Biblical training for the young.
And again listen to what Huxley says as to the bearing of the Bible
upon those who study the ills of our time with the hope of eventually
remedying them:
“The Bible has been the Magna Charta of the poor and of the oppressed.
Down to modern times no State has had a constitution in which the
interests of the people are so largely taken into account, in which the
duties so much more than the privileges of rulers are insisted upon,
as that drawn up for Israel in Deuteronomy and in Leviticus; nowhere
is the fundamental truth that the welfare of the State in the long run
depends upon the righteousness of the citizen so strongly laid down....
The Bible is the most democratic book in the world.”
This is the judgment of Huxley, one of the greatest scientific thinkers
of the last century. I ask you to train children in the Bible. Never
commit the awful error of training the child by making him learn verses
of the Bible as a punishment. I remember once calling upon a very good
woman and finding one of her small sons, with a face of black injury,
studying the Bible, and this very good woman said to me with pride,
“Johnny has been bad, and he is learning a chapter of Isaiah by heart.”
I could not refrain from saying, “My dear madam, how can you do such a
dreadful thing as to make the unfortunate Johnny associate for the rest
of his life the noble and beautiful poetry and prophecy of Isaiah with
an excessively disagreeable task? You are committing a greater wrong
against him than any he has himself committed.” Punish the children in
any other way that is necessary; but do not make them look upon the
Bible with suspicion and dislike as an instrument of torture, so that
they feel that it is a pain to have to read it, instead of, as it ought
to be, a privilege and pleasure to read it.
In reading the Bible and the beautiful Bible stories that have
delighted childhood for so many generations, my own preference is
to read them from the Bible and not as explained even in otherwise
perfectly nice little books. Read these majestic and simple stories
with whatever explanation is necessary to make the child understand the
words; and then the story he will understand without difficulty.
Of course we must not forget to give whatever explanation is necessary
to enable the child to understand the words. I think every father and
mother comes to realize how queerly the little brains will accept new
words at times. I remember an incident of the kind in connection with
a clergyman to whose church I went when a very small boy. It was a big
Presbyterian church in Madison Square, New York; any New Yorker of my
age who happens to be present here will probably recollect the church.
We had a clergyman one of the finest men that I had ever met, one of
the very, very rare men to whom it would be no misuse of words to
describe as saintly. He was very fond of one of his little grandsons.
This little grandson showed an entire willingness to come to church
and to Sunday-school when there were plenty of people present; but
it was discovered that he was most reluctant to go anywhere near the
church when there were not people there. As often happens with a child
(every mother knows how difficult it often is to find out just what
the little mind is thinking), his parents could not find out for some
time what was the matter with the little boy or what he was afraid of
in the church. Finally, Dr. Adams, the clergyman, started down to the
church and asked his little grandson to come with him. After a little
hesitation the small boy said yes, if his grandfather were coming,
he would go. They got inside the church and walked down the aisle,
their footsteps echoing in the empty church. The little fellow trotted
alongside his grandfather, looking with half-frightened eagerness
on every side. Soon he said, “Grandfather, where is the Zeal?” The
grandfather, much puzzled, responded, “Where is what?” “Where is the
Zeal?” repeated the little boy. The grandfather said, “I don’t know
what you mean; what are you talking of?” “Why, grandfather, don’t you
know? ‘The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up’!” Now that little
fellow had been rendered profoundly uncomfortable and very suspicious
of the church because he had read this statement, had accepted it in
literal fashion, and concluded there was some kind of fearful beast
dwelling in the church, as to which it behooved him to be on his guard.
It would be a great misfortune for our people if they ever lost the
Bible as one of their habitual standards and guides in morality. In
addressing this body, which must contain representatives of many
different creeds, I ask you men and women to treat the Bible in the
only way in which it can be treated if benefit is to be obtained from
it, and that is, as a guide to conduct. I make no pretense to speak to
you on dogmatic theology--there are probably scores of different views
of dogma here represented. There are scores of different ways leading
toward the same goal; but there is one test which we have a right to
apply to the professors of all the creeds--the test of conduct. More
and more, people who possess either religious belief or aspiration
after religious belief are growing to demand conduct as the ultimate
test of the worth of the belief. I hope that after what I have said
no man can suspect me of failure rightly to estimate the enormous
influence that study of the Bible should have on our lives; but I would
rather not see a man study it at all than have him read it as a fetish
on Sunday and disregard its teachings on all other days of the week;
because, evil though we think the conduct of the man who disregards its
teachings on week days, it is still worse if that conduct is tainted
with the mean vice of hypocrisy. The measure of our respect for and
belief in the man and the woman who do try to shape their lives by the
highest ethical standards inculcated in the Scriptures must in large
part be also the measure of our contempt for those who ostentatiously
read the Bible and then disregard its teachings in their dealings with
their fellow-men.
I do not like the thief, big or little; I do not like him in business
and I do not like him in politics; but I dislike him most when, to
shield himself from the effects of his wrong-doing, he claims that,
after all, he is a “religious man.” He is not a religious man, save
in the sense that the Pharisee was a religious man in the time of the
Saviour. The man who advances the fact that he goes to church and reads
the Bible, as an offset to the fact that he has acted like a scoundrel
in his public or private relations, only writes his own condemnation
in larger letters than before. And so a man or a woman who reads and
quotes the Bible as a warrant and an excuse for hardheartedness and
uncharitableness and lack of mercy to friend or neighbor is reading
and quoting the Bible to his or her own damage, perhaps to his or her
own destruction. Let the man who goes to church, who reads the Bible,
feel that it is peculiarly incumbent upon him so to lead his life in
the face of the world that no discredit shall be brought upon the creed
he professes, that no discredit shall attach to the book in accordance
with which he asserts that he leads his own life. Sometimes I have
seen--all of you have seen--the appeal made to stand by a man who has
done evil, on the ground that he is a pillar of the church. Such a man
is a rotten pillar of any church. And the professors of any creed, the
men belonging to any church, should be more jealous than any outsider
in holding such a man to account, in demanding that his practice
shall square with the high professions of belief. Such a man sins not
only against the moral law, sins not only against the community as a
whole, but sins, above all, against his own church, against all who
profess religion, against all who belong to churches, because he by
his life gives point to the sneer of the cynic who disbelieves in all
application of Christian ethics to life, and who tries to make the
ordinary man distrust church people as hypocrites. Whenever any church
member is guilty of business dishonesty or political dishonesty or
offenses against the moral law in any way, those who are members of
churches should feel a far greater regret and disappointment than those
who are not members. They cannot afford for one moment to let it be
supposed that they exact from the attenders at church any less strict
observance of the moral law than if they did not attend church. They
cannot afford to let the outside world even for a moment think that
they accept church-going and Bible-readers as substitutes for, instead
of incitements toward, leading a higher and better and more useful
life. We must strive each of us so to conduct our own lives as to be,
to a certain extent at least, our brother’s keeper. We must show that
we actually do take into our own souls the teachings that we read;
that we apply to ourselves the Gospel teaching that a corrupt tree
cannot bring forth good fruit, and that the sound tree must prove its
soundness by the fruit it brings forth; that we apply to ourselves the
teachings of the epistle wherein we are warned to be doers of the word
and not hearers only.
I have asked you to read the Bible for the beautiful English and for
the history it teaches, as well as for the grasp it gives you upon the
proper purpose of mankind. Of course if you read it only for aesthetic
purposes, if you read it without thought of following its ethical
teachings, then you are apt to do but little good to your fellow-men;
for if you regard the reading of it as an intellectual diversion only,
and, above all, if you regard this reading simply as an outward token
of Sunday respectability, small will be the good that you yourself get
from it. Our success in striving to help our fellow-men, and therefore
to help ourselves, depends largely upon our success as we strive, with
whatever shortcomings, with whatever failures, to lead our lives in
accordance with the great ethical principles laid down in the life of
Christ, and in the New Testament writings which seek to expound and
apply his teachings.
THE PUBLIC SERVANT AND THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT
I am overcome more and more with your good nature in coming here. I
learn a great deal more from you than you can possibly learn from me.