grows upon one’s mind. The security of childhood gives place to an
awareness of the perils of misfortune, disease, and sudden death which
seem to lie in wait for men and seize them without regard to their
choices or deserts. We are prone, of course, to believe in our personal
luck; it is the helplessness of others around us rather that impresses
us, as we see both friends and strangers visited with the most dreadful
evils, and with an impartiality of treatment that gradually tends to
force upon us the conviction that we, too, are not immune. At some
stage in our life, oftenest perhaps when the first flush of youth is
past, we are suddenly thrown into a suspicion of life, a dread of
nameless and unforeseeable ill, and a sober realization of the need
of circumspection and defense. We discover that we live in a world
where almost anything is likely to happen. Shocking accidents that
cut men off in their prime, pain and suffering falling upon the just
and the unjust, maladjustments and misunderstandings that poison and
ruin lives,--all these things are daily occurrences in our experience,
either of personal knowledge or out of that wider experience of our
reading.
Religion seems to give little consolation in the face of such
incontrovertible facts. For no belief in Providence can gainsay the
seeming fact that we are living in a world that is run without regard
to the health and prosperity of its inhabitants. Whatever its ulterior
meanings, they do not seem to be adjusted to our scale of values.
Physical law we can see, but where are the workings of a moral law?
If they are present, they seem to cut woefully against the grain of
the best desires and feelings of men. Evil seems to be out of all
proportion to the ability of its sufferers to bear it, or of its
chastening and corrective efficacy. Our feelings are too sensitive for
the assaults which the world makes upon them. If the responsibility
for making all things work together for his good is laid entirely
upon man, it is a burden too heavy for his weakness and ignorance to
bear. And thus we contemplate the old, old problem of evil. And in its
contemplation, the adventure of life, which should be a tonic and a
spur, becomes a depressant; instead of nerving, it intimidates, and
makes us walk cautiously and sadly through life, where we should ride
fast and shout for joy.
In these modern days, the very wealth of our experience overwhelms us,
and makes life harder to live in the sight of evil. The broadening of
communication, giving us a connection through newspapers and magazines
with the whole world, has made our experience almost as wide as the
world. In that experience, however, we get all the world’s horrors
as well as its interests and delights. Thus has it been that this
widening, which has meant the possibility of living the contemplative
and imaginative life on an infinitely higher plane than before, has
meant also a soul-sickness to the more sensitive, because of the
immense and over-burdening drafts on their sympathy which the new
experience involved. Although our increased knowledge of the world has
meant everywhere reform, and has vastly improved and beautified life
for millions of men, it has at the same time opened a nerve the pain
of which no opiate has been able to soothe. And along with the real
increase of longevity and sounder health for civilized man, attained
through the triumphs of medical science, there has come a renewed
realization of the shortness and precariousness, at its best, of life.
The fact that our knowledge of evil is shared by millions of men
intensifies, I think, our sensitiveness. Through the genius of display
writers, thousands of readers are enabled to be present imaginatively
at scenes of horror. The subtle sense of a vast concourse having
witnessed the scene magnifies its potency to the individual mind, and
gives it the morbid touch as of crowds witnessing an execution.
Our forefathers were more fortunate, and could contemplate evil more
philosophically and objectively. Their experience was happily limited
to what the normal soul could endure. Their evil was confined to
their vicinity. What dim intelligence of foreign disaster and misery
leaked in, only served to purify and sober their spirits. Evil did
not then reverberate around the world as it does now. Their nerves
were not strained or made raw by the reiterations and expatiations
on far-away pestilence and famine, gigantic sea disasters, wanton
murders, or even the shocking living conditions of the great city
slums. Their imaginations had opportunity to grow healthily, unassailed
by the morbidities of distant evil, which seems magnified and ominous
through its very strangeness. They were not forced constantly to ask
themselves the question, “What kind of a world do we live in anyhow?
Has it no mercy and no hope?” They were not having constantly thrown
up to them a justification of the universe. Perhaps it was because
they were more concerned with personal sin than with objective evil.
The enormity of sin against their Maker blotted out all transient
misfortune and death. But it was more likely that the actual ignorance
of that evil permitted their personal flagrancies to loom up larger in
their sight. Whatever the cause, there was a difference. We have only
to compare their literature--solid, complacent, rational--with our
restless and hectic stuff; or contrast their portraits--well-nourished,
self-respecting faces--with the cheap or callous or hunted faces that
we see about us to-day, to get the change in spiritual fibre which this
opening of the world has wrought. It has been a real eating of the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil. A social conscience has been born.
An expansion of soul has been forced upon us. We have the double need
of a broader vision to assimilate the good that is revealed to us, and
a stronger courage to bear the evil with which our slowly-bettering old
world still seems to reek.
But the youth of this modern generation are coming more and more to
see that the gloom and hysteria of this restless age, with all the
other seemingly neurotic symptoms of decay, are simply growing-pains.
They signify a better spiritual health that is to be. The soul is
now learning to adjust itself to the new conditions, to embrace the
wide world that is its heritage, and not to reel and stagger before
the assaults of a malign power. Life will always be fraught with real
peril, but it is peril which gives us the sense of adventure. And as we
gain in our command over the resources, both material and spiritual,
of the world, we shall see the adventure as not so much the peril of
evil as an opportunity of permanent achievement. We can only cure our
suffering from the evil in the world by doing all in our power to
wipe out that which is caused by human blundering, and prevent what
we can prevent by our control of the forces of nature. Our own little
personal evils we can dismiss with little thought. Such as have come
to us we can endure,--for have we not already endured them?--and those
that we dread we shall not keep away by fear or worry. We can easily
become as much slaves to precaution as we can to fear. Although we can
never rivet our fortune so tight as to make it impregnable, we may by
our excessive prudence squeeze out of the life that we are guarding
so anxiously all the adventurous quality that makes it worth living.
In the light of our own problematical misfortune, we must rather live
freely and easily, taking the ordinary chances and looking To-morrow
confidently in the face as we have looked To-day. I have come thus far
safely and well; why may I not come farther?
But in regard to the evil that we see around us, the problem is more
difficult. Though the youth of this generation hope to conquer, the
battle is still on. We have fought our way to a knowledge of things as
they are, and we must now fight our way beyond it. That first fight
was our first sense of the adventure of life. Our purpose early became
to track the world relentlessly down to its lair. We were resolute
to find out the facts, no matter how sinister and barren they proved
themselves to be. We would make no compromises with our desires,
or with those weak persons who could not endure the clear light of
reality. We were scornful in the presence of the superstitions of our
elders. We could not conceive that sufficient knowledge combined with
action would not be able to solve all our problems and make clear all
our path. As our knowledge grew, so did our courage. We pressed more
eagerly on the trail of this world of ours, purposing to capture and
tame its mysteries, and reveal it as it is, so that none could doubt
us. As we penetrated farther, however, into the cave, the path became
more and more uncertain. We discovered our prey to be far grimmer and
more dangerous than we had ever imagined. As he turned slowly at bay,
we discovered that he was not only repulsive but threatening. We were
sternly prepared to accept him just as we found him, exulting that we
should know things as they really were. We were ready for the worst,
and yet somehow not for this worst. We had not imagined him retaliating
upon us. In our first recoil, the thought flashed upon us that our
tracking him to his lair might end in his feasting on our bones.
It is somewhat thus that we feel when the full implications of the
materialism to which we have laboriously fought our way dawn upon
us, or we realize the full weight of the sodden social misery around
us. Hitherto we have been so intent on the trail that we have not
stopped to consider what it all meant. Now that we know, not only
our own salvation seems threatened, but that of all around us, even
the integrity of the world itself. In these moments of perplexity
and alarm, we lose confidence in ourselves and all our values and
interpretations. To go further seems to be to court despair. We are
ashamed to retreat, and, besides, have come too far ever to get back
into the safe plain of ignorance again. The world seems to be revealed
to us as mechanical in its workings and fortuitous in its origin, and
the warmth and light of beauty and ideals that we have known all along
to be our true life seem to be proven illusions. And the wailing of the
world comes up to us, cast off from any divine assistance, left to the
mercy of its own weak wills and puny strengths. In this fall, our world
itself seems to have lost merit, and we feel ourselves almost degraded
by being a part of it. We have suddenly been deprived of our souls; the
world seems to have beaten us in our first real battle with it.
Now this despair is partly the result of an excessive responsibility
that we have taken for the universe. In youth, if we are earnest and
eager, we tend to take every bit of experience that comes to us,
as either a justification or a condemnation of the world. We are
all instinctive monists at that age, and crave a complete whole. As
we unconsciously construct our philosophy of life, each fact gets
automatically recorded as confirming or denying the competency of
the world we live in. Even the first shock of disillusionment, which
banishes those dreams of a beautiful, orderly, and rational world that
had suffused childhood with their golden light, did not shatter the
conviction that there was somehow at least a Lord’s side. The sudden
closing of the account in the second shock, when the world turns on us,
shows us how mighty has been the issue at stake,--nothing less than our
faith in the universe, and, perhaps, in the last resort, of our faith
in ourselves. We see now that our breathless seriousness of youth was
all along simply a studying of our crowded experience to see whether it
was on the Lord’s side or not. And now in our doubt we are left with a
weight on our souls which is not our own, a burden which we have really
usurped.
In its adventure with evil, youth must not allow this strange,
metaphysical responsibility to depress and incapacitate it. We shall
never face life freely and bravely and worthily if we do. I may wonder,
it is true, as I look out on these peaceful fields, with the warm
sun and blue sky above me and the kindly faces of my good friends
around me, how this can be the same world that houses the millions
of poor and wretched people in their burning and huddled quarters in
the city. Can these days, in which I am free to come and go and walk
and study as I will, be the same that measure out the long hours of
drudgery to thousands of youth amid the whir of machines, and these
long restful nights of mine, the same that are for them only gasps
breaking a long monotony? It must be the same world, however, whether
we can ever reconcile ourselves to it or not. But we need plainly feel
no responsibility for what happened previously to our generation. Our
responsibility now is a collective, a social responsibility. And it is
only for the evil that society might prevent were it organized wisely
and justly. Beyond that it does not go. For the accidental evil that is
showered upon the world, we are not responsible, and we need not feel
either that the integrity of the universe is necessarily compromised by
it. It is necessary to be somewhat self-centred in considering it. We
must trust our own feelings rather than any rational proof. In spite
of everything, the world seems to us so unconquerably good, it affords
so many satisfactions, and is so rich in beauty and kindliness, that
we have a right to assume that there is a side of things that we miss
in our pessimistic contemplation of misfortune and disaster. We see
only the outer rind of it. People usually seem to be so much happier
than we can find any very rational excuse for their being, and that
old world that confronted us and scared us may look very much worse
than it really is. And we can remember that adding to the number of the
sufferers does not intensify the actual quality of the suffering. There
is no more suffering than one person can bear.
These considerations may allay a little our first terror and despair.
When we really understand that the world is not damned by the evil in
it, we shall be ready to see it in its true light as a challenge to our
heroisms. Not how evil came into the world, but how we are going to get
it out, becomes the problem. Not by brooding over the hopeless, but by
laying plans for the possible will we shoulder our true responsibility.
We shall find then that we had no need of despair. We were on the
right track. When the world that we were tracking down turned at bay,
he threatened more than he was able to perform. Not less science but
more science do we need in order that we may more and more get into
our control the forces and properties of nature, and guide them for
our benefit. But we must learn that the interpretation of the world
lies not in its mechanism but in its meanings, and those meanings we
find in our values and ideals, which are very real to us. Science
brings us only to an “area of our dwelling,” as Whitman says. The
moral adventure of the rising generation will be to learn this truth
thoroughly, and to reinstate ideals and personality at the heart of the
world.
Our most favorable battle-ground against evil will for some time at
least be the social movement. Poverty and sin and social injustice
we must feel not sentimentally nor so much a symptom of a guilty
conscience as a call to coöperate with the exploited and sufferers in
throwing off their ills. Sensitiveness to evil will be most fruitful
when it rouses a youth to the practical encouragement of the under-men
to save themselves. Youth to-day needs to “beat the gong of revolt.”
The oppressed seldom ask for our sympathy, and this is right and
fitting; for they do not need it. (It might even make them contented
with their lot.) What they need is the inspiration and the knowledge to
come into their own. All we can ever do in the way of good to people
is to encourage them to do good to themselves. “Who would be free,
himself must strike the blow!” This is the social responsibility of
modern youth. It must not seek to serve humanity so much as to rouse
and teach it. The great moral adventure that lies still ahead of us is
to call men to the expansion of their souls to the wide world which
has suddenly been revealed to them.
* * * * *
Perhaps with that expansion youth will finally effect a reconciliation
with life of those two supremest and most poignant of adventures: the
thoughts that cluster around sex, and the fears and hopes that cluster
around death, the one the gateway into life, the other out of it. Youth
finds them the two hardest aspects of life to adjust with the rest of
the world in which we live. They are ever-present and pervasive, and
yet their manifestations always cause us surprise, and shock us as of
something unwonted intruding in our daily affairs. They are the unseen
spectres behind life, of which we are always dimly conscious, but which
we are always afraid to meet boldly and face to face. We speak of them
furtively, or in far-away poetical strains. They are the materials
for the tragedies of life, of its pathos and wistfulness, of its
splendors and defeats. Yet they are treated always with an incorrigible
and dishonest delicacy. The world, youth soon finds, is a much less
orderly and refined place than would appear on the surface of our daily
intercourse and words. As we put on our best clothes to appear in
public, so the world puts on its best clothes to appear in talk and
print.
Men ignore death, as if they were quite unconscious that it would
sometime come to them, yet who knows how many pensive or terrible
moments the thought gives them? But the spectre is quite invisible to
us. Or if they have passions, and respond as sensitively as a vibrating
string to sex influences and appeals, we have little indication of that
throbbing life behind the impenetrable veil of their countenances. We
can know what people think about all other things, even what they think
about God, but what they think of these two adventures of sex and death
we never know. It is not so much, I am willing to believe, shame or
fear that keeps us from making a parade of them, as awe and wonder and
baffled endeavors to get our attitude towards them into expressible
form. They are too elemental, too vast and overpowering in their
workings to fit neatly into this busy, accounted-for, and tied-down
world of daily life. They are superfluous to what we see as the
higher meanings of this our life, and irritate us by their clamorous
insistence and disregard for the main currents of our living. They seem
irrelevant to life; or rather they overtop its bounty. Their pressure
to be let in is offensive, and taints and mars irrevocably what would
otherwise be so pleasant and secure a life. That is, perhaps, why we
call manifestations of sex activity, obscene, and of death, morbid and
ghastly.
In these modern days we are adopting a healthier attitude, especially
towards sex. Perhaps the rising generation will be successful in
reconciling them both, and working them into our lives, where they may
be seen in their right relations and proportions, and no longer the
pleasure of sex and the peace of death seem an illegitimate obtrusion
into life. To get command of these arch-enemies is an endeavor worthy
of the moral heroes of to-day. We can get control, it seems, of the
rest of our souls, but these always lie in wait to torment and harass
us. To tame this obsession of sex and the fear of death will be a
Herculean task for youth in the adventure of life. Perhaps some will
succeed where we have failed. For usually when we try to tame sex, it
poisons the air around us, and if we try to tame the fear of death by
resigning ourselves to its inevitability, we find that we have not
tamed it but only drugged it. At certain times, however, our struggles
with the winged demons which they send into our minds may constitute
the most poignant incidents in our adventure of life, and add a beauty
to our lives. Where they do not make for happiness, they may at least
make for a deepening of knowledge and appreciation of life. Along
through middle life, we shall find, perhaps, that, even if untamed,
they have become our allies, and that both have lost their sting and
their victory,--sex diffusing our life with a new beauty, and death
with a courageous trend towards a larger life of which we shall be an
integral part.
When we have acclimated ourselves to youth, suddenly death looms up
as the greatest of dangers in our adventure of life. It puzzles and
shocks and saddens us by its irrevocability and mystery. That we should
be taken out of this world to which we are so perfectly adapted, and
which we enjoy and feel intimate with, is an incredible thing. Even if
we believe that we shall survive death, we know that that after-life
must perforce be lived outside of this our familiar world. Reason tells
us that we shall be annihilated, and yet we cannot conceive our own
annihilation. We can easier imagine the time before our birth, when we
were not, than the time after our death, when we shall not be. Old men
find nothing very dreadful in the thought of being no more, and we
shall find that it is the combined notion of being annihilated, and yet
of being somehow conscious of that annihilation, that terrifies us, and
startles our minds sometimes in the dead of night when our spirits are
sluggish and the ghoulish ideas that haunt the dimmest chambers of the
mind are flitting abroad. We can reason with ourselves that if we are
annihilated we shall not be conscious of it, and if we are conscious we
shall not be annihilated, but this easy proof does not help us much in
a practical way. We simply do not know, and all speculations seem to be
equally legitimate. If we are destined to assume another form of life,
no divination can prophesy for us what that life shall be.
On the face of it the soul as well as the body dies. The fate of the
body we know, and it seems dreadful enough to chill the stoutest heart;
and what we call our souls seem so intimately dependent upon these
bodies as to be incapable of living alone. And yet somehow it is hard
to stop believing in the independent soul. We can believe that the
warmth dissipates, that the chemical and electrical energies of the
body pass into other forms and are gradually lost in the immensity of
the universe. But this wonder of consciousness, which seems to hold
and embrace all our thoughts and feelings and bind them together, what
can we know of its power and permanence? In our own limited sphere it
already transcends space and time, our imaginations triumphing over
space, and our memories and anticipations over time: this magic power
of the imagination, which transcends our feeble experience and gives
ideas and images which have not appeared directly through the senses.
We can connect this conscious life with no other aspect of the world
nor can we explain it by any of the principles which we apply to
physical things. It is the divine gift that reveals this world; why may
it not reveal sometime a far wider universe?