RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION
At the present moment the most demoralising factor in education is
Christian religious instruction. What I mean by this is principally
catechism, Scripture history, theology, and church history. Even earnest
Christians have said, regarding the ordinary instruction in these
subjects, that nothing shows better how deeply religion is rooted in
man's nature than the fact that "religious education" is not able to
destroy religion.
But beside this, I believe that even a more living, a more actual
instruction in Christianity injures the child. Children should bring
themselves by themselves to live in the patriarchal world of the Old
Testament; indeed, in the world of the New Testament as well. This can
be done best in the form of children's Bibles. These works will be
treasured by children; they will find in them infinite material for
nourishing the imagination and the emotions. But this can only be done
by allowing children to read the Bible undisturbed, without the need of
pedagogical or dogmatic explanation. At home this book, like other
children's books, should be only talked about and explained when the
child requests it. It should never be treated as a school book or appear
on the school desk. If the child gets impressions in this way from the
Bible, freed from all other authority, apart from the subjective one of
the impressions themselves, the myths of the Bible will no more
contradict the rest of his instruction, than the Scandinavian story of
creation or the Greek legends of the gods.
But the most dangerous of all educational mistakes in influencing
humanity, is due to the fact, that children are now taught the Old
Testament account of the world as absolute truth, although it wholly
contradicts their physical and historical instruction. Besides children
learn to regard the morality of the New Testament as absolutely binding,
while its commands are everywhere seen to be transgressed by the child,
the moment he takes his first step into life. Our whole industrial and
capitalistic society rests on a contradiction of the Christian command
to love one's neighbour as one's self. The capitalistic axiom is that
every man is nearest neighbour to himself.
The eyes of children are here and in similar cases, clear-sighted in
their simplicity. At a tender age they are able to observe whether their
surroundings are in living accord with Christian teaching. From a
four-year-old child, with whom I was talking about Jesus' commandment to
love one another, I received the reply, "If Jesus really said so, Papa
is no Christian." Before long the child gets into conflict with his
instructors and with the commands of Christianity. A small child in a
Swedish city took the word of Jesus about charity to heart. Not only his
playthings, but his clothes he gave to the poor; his parents cured, by
corporal punishment, this practical type of Christianity. A teacher who
was impressing on a small girl in a Finnish city the commandment to love
one's enemies, received as an answer that this was impossible, for no
one in Finland could love Bobrikoff.
I know the sophism used in both cases to overcome the invulnerable logic
of the child; but I also know how these sophisms make hypocrisy so
natural among Christians, that it is now unconscious. It would take a
new Kirkegaard to shake up our consciences. Everywhere Rousseau's words
hold true, "The child gets high principles to direct him, but he is
forced by his surroundings to act according to petty principles, every
time he wishes to put the high ones into practice." He goes on to say
people have innumerable "ifs" and "buts," by which the child has to
learn that great principles are only words, that the reality of life is
something quite different.
The dangerous thing is not that the ideal of Christianity is high; it
comes from the fact that every ideal in its essence is unattainable. The
nearer we get to it the more lofty it is. This is the characteristic of
every ideal. But the demoralising feature in Christianity as an ideal
is, that it is presented as absolute, while man as a social being is
obliged to transgress it every day. Besides he is taught in his
religious instruction, that as a fallen being he cannot in any case
attain the ideal, although the only possibility of his living
righteously in temporal things, and happily in the world to come,
depends on his capacity for realising it.
In this net of unsolvable contradictions, generation after generation
has seen its ideal of belief obscured. Gradually each new generation has
learned not to take its new ideal seriously. As to the cowardly or
braggart concessions to the idiocies of fashion, and the follies by
which people are ruined in order to live according to their position,
among other psychological grounds for man's lack of steadiness must be
placed, as its ultimate cause, the following: The child, along with
religion, has breathed in the conviction that opinions are one thing,
actions another. This experience goes through the whole of life, even in
the case of those who have lost the conviction that the Christian
religion is absolute. The free-thinker is married, has his children
baptised, and allows them to be confirmed, without considering whether
he is forced to it by his own wish, or the wish of doing like other
people. The republican sings the royal hymn, sends loyal salutations by
telegraph, accepts decorations,--but I must break off, otherwise I
should have to enumerate all the small acts of insincerity to one's
self, of which the daily life of most people consists, and which are
defended under the name of non-essentials; I could never get to the end.
This is not the way the Christian martyrs thought who might have freed
themselves from death by casting a few grains of incense on the
emperor's altar. Two grains of incense,--what an unimportant matter,
thinks the modern man, and with quiet conscience he daily sacrifices to
many gods in whom he does not believe.
How illogical Protestantism is too, and yet for so long it possessed a
spiritually educative power, while its dualism was unsuspected, while
one with full sincerity gave to holiday and work day its due share. But
now that a new Protestantism is come to life within the fold of
Protestantism, this method of speaking in two voices is deeply
demoralising.
Piece by piece has been torn down that system of teaching which the
Catholic church built up, so wonderfully adapted to the psychological
needs of the majority of people. It formed its fundamental creeds, just
as they still remain, on the deepest experiences of mankind. But
Protestantism is ever looking back from the results of its own
handiwork.
In home, in the school, in the high school, during military service, in
office work, everywhere passive dependence is insisted on under the name
of discipline, discretion, faithfulness to duty. And like all the fine
words, by which the living souls of men are turned into the slaves of
discipline, these terms exalt _esprit de corps_, and pass over really
serious faults. Discipline means subordinating one's self to every crude
force. Only when all Protestants really become actual Protestants, and
refuse to receive the greatest good of life, their religion, through
authority, will they begin even in social and political questions to
attain an independent opinion of their own. As teachers and leaders,
they will secure for school children, and for students, for officers and
for officials, the freedom in word and deed that is the right of the
citizen and the man. Men and women, who in their private life are
strictly honourable, have learnt, in general questions, to put their
thoughts, their acts, under the command of a leader, and above all they
have learnt to do this in the name of religious belief.
The courage to construct one's own opinion in everything that makes the
essential worth of life, but chiefly in one's religious belief, the
power to express it, the will of making some sacrifice for it, all these
give man a new share of civilisation and culture. As long as education
and social life do not consciously forward this kind of courage, power,
and will, the world will remain as it is, a parade ground of stupidity,
crudeness, force, and selfishness, no matter whether radicals or
conservatives, the democratic or aristocratic elements, have the upper
hand.
The most demoralising of all principles of belief was the discouraging
teaching that human nature was fallen and incapable of reaching holiness
by its own effort--the teaching that one could only come through grace
and forgiveness of sins into a proper relation with temporal and eternal
things. For those below the ordinary level, this position of grace
produced spiritual stagnation, not to speak of the business people, who
daily allowed the blood of Jesus to wipe out their day's debit in the
score of morality. Only those who were naturally superior increased in
holiness on being convinced that they were children of God in Christ.
Mankind, on the whole, showed the deep demoralisation of a double
morality. This dualism commenced as soon as the first Christians ceased
to expect the return of Jesus,--an expectation which brought their life
into real unity with his teaching. But this double morality has for
nineteen hundred years retained man's soul and the social order in
practical heathenism. Although some pure and great spirits really
received aid from Christianity in their longings for infinity, and
although in the Middle Ages many strong hearts tried seriously to
realise its teaching, yet the majority of mankind lived and lives still
in wavering irresolution. This is the result of having no place to
anchor to while the citizens of antiquity had an ethic, which could be
translated into reality and could turn them into sincere, steadfast
personalities.
Since nineteen hundred years have proved that there is no possibility,
in a humanly constructed society, of living according to the teaching of
Jesus, as a practical, infallible rule of holiness, man can escape this
immoral duplicity only in one way: the way already travelled over by
many separate individuals, who with Prometheus cry out, "Hast thou not,
thyself, completed all, O holy glowing heart!" In other words, these
individuals have become convinced that Christianity is the product of
humanity. Just as little as any other product of humanity does it
exhaust absolute and eternal truth.
When men cease to teach their children belief in an eternal providence,
without whose will no sparrow falls from the roof, they will be able,
instead of this, to imprint on the minds of children the new religious
conception of the divinity of a world, proceeding according to law. The
new morality will be built on this new religious idea. It will be filled
with reverence for the absolute conjunction of cause and effect--a
connection which no grace can remove. Man's actions will really be
directed by this certainty. He will not rock himself to sleep in any
sort of hope, based on providence or a reconciliation, able to defer
surely fixed effects. This new morality, strengthened by the realities
of life, admits of logical consequences. No single command of this
teaching needs to remain an empty phrase. In its system, too, there will
be a place to apply all the eternal profound words uttered by Jesus or
by other great human souls. These words will ever furnish further
material for application, which is the same as saying material for
self-application. Yet the application will be worked out in complete
freedom. Each word will be used as furnishing the material just suited
to that style which men wish to apply to the architecture of their
personality. Yet neither the words nor the examples of one or the other
teacher will be taught as absolutely binding.
The soul of the child will not be stained by tears of repentance for
sins nor by the fear of hell. It will not be stained by a realism
without ideas and without ideals, by the contemptuous mistrust, which
the mouldering effects of fine words leave behind, like cold damp
spots. The weak, as well as the strong, will progress in the happy and
responsible belief in their own personality, as their only source of
help. The pulse of their purpose will be strong and warm with red blood.
They will not be forced to humility; they will not accept even equality
with all others, or with any other one. On the contrary they will be
strengthened in their right, to give their own individual stamp to their
joys, their sufferings, and their works. They will be warned to do their
best because it is their own; to seek their highest good, by drawing
their own boundaries at the place where the rights of others begin.
While the home and the school make compromises between two opposed views
of life, people obtain from neither of them any real good for the
education of children. I have already shown how in one and the same
school religious instruction and a certain amount of knowledge and love
for nature as well as history can be communicated. In one and the same
school the course of natural development and history can be taught in
connection with instruction in religious history. In this instruction
Judaism and Christianity will receive the first place. So the reverence
and love children were wont to acquire for the personality and morality
of Jesus, previously obtained in the Bible, can be increased. Guided by
sincere and serious purposes one can select either plan. But, during
religious instruction, to make Moses and Christ the absolute teachers of
truth, and in the hours devoted to natural history, to expound
Darwinism, cause more than anything else that want of logic, that moral
laxity and flaccidity that can effect nothing and want nothing.
Everything I have learnt, since these words were written, has
strengthened a hundred fold my previous convictions that the most
essential thing is not, what kind of view of life we have--this may be
important enough too--but that we have enough capacity of faith to
appropriate for ourselves some view of life, enough force to bring it to
reality in life. But nothing works more depressingly on the ethical
energy of growing generations than the dualistic view of life, received
at the present time at school. The school too must exercise its choice;
there must be no compromise between two schemes of education and two
views of life, if the strength of will and the power of faith in young
people is not to be broken. The question of a compromise is in this
case not a question of application; it is a most important question of
principle in education.
Since I set down these words, many points of view have been brought out
in this connection. One which made a sensation when it was published, in
1890, was Professor Dodel's book, _Moses or Darwin?_ The author showed
how deeply Darwinism was implanted in science and in civilisation; how
popular education was restricted, because it was kept remote from the
scientific views of the present day and forced into the circle of
ecclesiastical ideas. Religious instruction is simply a crime against
the psychological law of development. For children are taught by a
theological system to think about abstract conceptions, while they are
in no condition to do it. The worst is, he said, that in high schools
the theory of development is now taught as scientific truth, while in
the common schools, built and maintained by the same government, the
myth of the Mosaic story of creation continues to be taught, in the
sharpest contrast with what science and living nature teach the child.
This is an immoral and dishonest state of affairs that must be brought
to an end.
It is my deepest conviction that man, without religion in the emotional
element of his nature, can pursue no ideal ends, cannot see beyond his
own personal interest, cannot realise great purposes, cannot be ready to
sacrifice himself. Religious enthusiasm broadens our soul, binds us to
the acts we hold as ideals. But because Christianity weighs upon the
soul and can no longer be the connecting link of all factors in our
conduct, earnest men are abandoning it more and more, influenced by
purely religious reasons. Such men should not have their children
brought up as Christians, under the excuse that the child requires
Christianity. Here, as in other cases, in which adults are not agreed
about what the child needs, we should try to get, not from adults but
from children themselves, some information about their real needs. In
this way we can learn that the child himself begins at a very early
period to be concerned with the eternal riddles of mankind, to be
troubled with the questions of whence and whither. At the same time one
discovers that the sincere and honest childish nature is opposed to the
Christian explanation of the world, until the child's sincerity is
dulled and he either takes without question what is taught, or in his
own soul denies what his lips must repeat, or finally allows his heart
to be possessed by the only nourishment offered to his religious needs.
My own recollections of childhood caused me to make observations of the
religious ideas of children at an early period. I have now before me
comprehensive accounts of this investigation, going back twenty-five
years. I recollect my own fierce hate against God, when I, at the age of
six years, heard of the death of Jesus being caused by God's demand for
an atonement, and at ten years I recall my denial of God's providence,
when a young workman died far away from his wife and his five children,
to whom his existence was so necessary. My brooding about the existence
of God took on this occasion the form of a challenge. I wrote in the
sand, "God is dead." In doing so I thought, If there is a God, he will
kill me now with a thunderbolt. But since the sun continued to shine,
the question was answered for the time being; but it soon turned up
again. I had no other religious instruction than reading the Bible on
Sunday, preaching on Sunday, and reading from the catechism, which, by
the way, was never explained. Yet the New Testament belonged to my play
books; I learnt in it to love Jesus as profoundly as other great
personalities of whom I read. But during the confirmation period, I
received explanations of the Bible; in them every point, every name in
the Gospel was explained, every sentence made the basis of
hair-splitting distinctions, to show the fulfilment of prophecies and
the edifying hidden meaning of every word, that formerly seemed so
simple. The dogma of the Trinity for example was shown to be contained
in the second verse of Genesis. This was a terribly sad discovery for
me, that the living book of my childish heart and my childish
imagination could be so stone dead. That religious indifference is a
frequent result of religious instruction, that spiritual maladies come
from the desire to convert the souls of children, numerous proofs can be
given. I have heard children of six years speak with holy horror of
their four-year-old brother who dug with a spade on Sunday. On the other
hand I have heard a six-year-old child who was dragged in one day to
three church services ask after reflection whether it was not more
tolerable to go to hell immediately.
The Judaic Christian conception of a creative and sustaining providence,
which gives the fullest perfection to all things, is so absolutely
opposed to all that experience and evolution teaches us about existence,
that one cannot even conceive of the possibility of holding both ideas
theoretically at the same time. Much less can one practically unite them
by the paste of compromise. The child with sharp-sighted simplicity does
not allow himself to be deceived. If we do not wish to speak the truth
then let us not speak to children about life at all--life in its unity
and diversity, its manifold creative acts, its process of continuous
creation, its eternal divine subjection to law.
But this means that it is impossible to save the Christian God for
children, after the child begins to think about this God, in whom he is
taught blind confidence. Nor can the child be prepared in this way for
the new conception of God with its religious, its uniting and elevating
power, I mean for the conception of a God whose revealed book is the
starry heavens, and whose prophetic sight is in the unfathomable sea,
and in the deeps of man's heart, the God who is in life and is life.
Nothing shows better how imperfect is the real belief of modern
thinkers, than the fact that they always teach their children a system
which they do not wish to live by spiritually themselves, but which
they hold as indispensable for the moral and social future of the child.
When we pass from the conception of providence to the conception of sin,
we find in children the same natural logic. A small girl, an only child,
asked: "How could God allow his only child to be killed? You could not
have done it to me!" And a small boy said, "It is a very good thing for
us that the Jews crucified Christ, so that nothing happened to us."
These are both poles of an emotional and a practical way of looking at
the Atonement. Within them all similar circumferences are drawn. To a
more comic and naïve sphere of ideas belongs the proposal of a small
girl to call the Virgin Mary God's wife. Also there is the story of a
boy who spoke in school of Our Lord and the two other Lords, meaning the
Trinity.
From the classes in Bible history and catechism, there are innumerable
examples of children reading the words incorrectly, and misunderstanding
the ideas they stand for. A boy, warned to keep the lamps burning,
answered contentedly, "We have petroleum gratis." Another, asked whether
he would like to be born again, said, "No, I might be turned into a
girl." These are typical examples. There is an anecdote of a child,
who, on being consoled with the statement that God was in the dark near
her, asked her mother to put God out and light the lamp. Another child,
seeing the pictures of the Christian martyrs in the arena, cried out
sympathetically, "Look at that poor tiger; he hasn't got a Christian."
These are a few out of a mass of examples, typical of the explanation
given by children to the religious ideas they receive, notions forcing
them into a world of ideas which they either accept in a material sense,
or by which they are absolutely nonplussed.
The childish circle of ideas is revealed by anecdotes of this kind, or
by the comment of a small girl who asked when she heard that she had
been born about eleven o'clock at night, "How could I have remained out
so late?" These examples show that such conceptions as original sin, the
fall of man, regeneration and salvation, are first necessarily
meaningless words, and afterwards terribly difficult words. In my whole
life fear of hell never absorbed my attention for five minutes, but I
know children and grown people who are martyrs to this terror. I know
children too who, when belief in hell was presented to them in school as
absolutely necessary, bewailed that their mother had said she did not
believe in hell, and therefore thought she must be very wicked.
We are certainly a long way off from those times when, to use the
picturesque expression of an historian of civilisation, "The fear of the
devil constantly darkened the life of men, as the shadow of the sails of
a windmill darkens the windows of the miller"; far from the times, too,
when divine persons constantly revealed themselves to the believer, and
when miracles belonged just as really to the daily habits of thought as
to-day they are disregarded even by the believer. But so long as belief
in the devil, providence and miracles is upheld in religious
instruction, it will be impossible for the sunshine of the civilised
view, which is the scientific as opposed to the superstitious view, to
penetrate the darkness where the bacilli of cruelty and insanity are
nurtured.
The ideas children form of heaven are generally fine examples of
childish realism. A child thought his brother could not be in heaven,
because he would have to climb a ladder, and so would be disobedient,
for he had been forbidden to climb one. A girl asked, when she heard
that her grandmother was in heaven, whether God was sitting there and
holding her from falling out. These are a few of the many proofs of the
child's sense of reality, that leads to mistaken answers here, as in so
many other instances. If it is said by way of protest that the childish
imagination needs myths and symbolism, the answer is an easy one. We
cannot and should not rob the child of the play of imagination, but play
should not be taken in earnest. It is not to be wondered at that
children construct for themselves realistic ideas about spiritual
things. This practice is no more to be opposed, than any of the other
expressions of the life of the child's soul. But when these false ideas
are presented as the highest truth of life, they must disturb the sacred
simplicity of the child.
I know children in whom the origin of unbelief is to be traced to the
words of Jesus, that everything asked for by the believing heart will be
received. A small child, locked up in a dark room, prayed that God might
show people how badly he was being treated, by causing a lamp of
precious stones to be lit in the dark. Another asked to have a sick
mother saved; another prayed by the side of a dead companion that she
might rise again. For all these three, the experience of having their
most believing, most fervent prayer unanswered, was the great turning
point in their spiritual life. I can authenticate from my own experience
and the experiences of others the ethical revolt which the cases of
injustice in the Old Testament--for example God's preference of Jacob
over Esau--occasion in a healthy child. The explanations offered in this
case and in others like it fill the child with silent contempt. When the
child ends in finding that adults themselves do not believe the religion
they teach, the childish instinct for belief and for reverence, that
capacity which is the real ground for all religious feeling, is injured
for life.
I will say nothing of the heroes and heroines of the pious literature
written for children, with their stories of conversion and holiness.
Parents are able to protect their children from them. I speak here only
of that way of looking at the world, which is forced on children with or
against the will of their parents. This degrades their conceptions of
God, of Jesus, of nature. These conceptions, the child if left to
himself can develop simply or powerfully. It is this way of looking at
the world that causes unnecessary suffering and dangerous prejudices.
The inclination of the child to deep religious feeling, sound faith,
and ardent zeal for holiness will be strengthened by an ability to draw
the standards of life as freely from the Bible as from the world's
literature. The same result will be produced by books on other
religions, like Buddhism, from the great religious personalities who
illustrate the struggle for an ideal, and from such children's books as
show like efforts in a healthy form. No child has the slightest need of
the catechism or theology for his religion or for his training; no other
church history is needed than that connected with the general history of
the world. In this last study the chief stress should be laid in
teaching on the errors, in order to impress on the young the conviction,
that all new truths are called by their contemporaries "errors." In
other words these "errors" are the best negative material man has for
discovering the truth.
Working over and explaining the contradictions met with by the child in
such religious instruction, as I am outlining here, belongs to the
preparation for a true life, in which people have to put up with
innumerable contradictions. But this personal work injures neither the
piety nor the soundness of the child's soul. Such injuries come rather
from irritating pietism or vain hypocrisy, from spiritual fanaticism,
from deceits of the reason, barrenness of soul, or perverted feeling of
right, all of which are the notorious results of Christian training and
Christian instruction, given according to the usual methods of the
present day. For the present as well as for the future, a child will be
able to solve more easily these spiritual problems if his fine feeling
for right and his quick logic have not been dulled by the dogmatic
answers to those eternal problems, that place him in as much difficulty
as the thinker.
Kant exposed long ago the most serious injuries of the kind of religious
instruction which still prevails. He showed that by making the church's
teaching the basis of morality, improper motives were assigned to
action. A thing must be avoided, not because God has forbidden it, but
because it is in and for itself wrong. Man must aim at good, not because
heaven or hell awaits the good or the bad, but because good has a higher
value than evil. To this point of view of Kant there must be added the
truth, that a position is ethically weakening, when man is presented as
incapable of doing good by his own power. So he is told in this as in
all other cases, he must be humble and trust in God's help. Confidence
in our strength and the feeling of our own responsibility have a strong
moral influence. The belief that man is sin-laden, without chance of
change, has led him to remain where he is.
If the future generation is to grow up with upright souls, the first
condition of such growth is to obliterate from the existence of children
and young people, by a mighty scratch of the pen, the catechism, Bible
history, theology and church history.
We must bow down before the infinities and mysteries of our earthly
existence and of the world beyond. We must distinguish between and
select real ethical values; we must be convinced of the solidarity of
mankind, of man's individual duty, to construct for the benefit of the
whole race a rich and strong personality. We must look to great models.
We must reverence the divine and the regular in the course of the world,
in the processes of development of man's mind. These are the new lines
of meditation, the new religious feelings of reverence and love, that
will make the children of the new century strong, sound, and beautiful.
These changes will destroy that idea of God that combines "God help us"
with our victories, that has increased the national lust for conquest,
the passion for mastery, the instinct of gain. It will be felt that
mixing up God in the standards of human passions is blasphemous. People
will see, that patriotism, nourished on egoism and ambition, is the most
godless thing because the most inhuman of all the life-perverting sins
with which man outrages the holiness of life.
Intellects which can now pass over the contradiction between
Christianity and war, which can even derive strength and consolation
from them, have been depraved by the ideas forced upon mankind through
thousands of years. Nothing more can be expected from men of such
brains, than that they should die in the wilderness, without ever
obtaining a sight of the promised land.
But the brains of children can be protected from the most unholy of all
mental misconceptions, from the superstition that the patriotism, and
the nationalism, which injures the rights of others, have something in
common with ideas about God.
Let children be taught that national characteristics, the use of force,
the right of independent action, is as essential for a people as for an
individual, that it is worth every sacrifice. Let them be taught that,
on their appreciation of the nature of their country, of its life in
the past and in the present, depends their own development. Let them be
taught to dream beautiful inspiring dreams of the future of their
country, of their own work, as the necessary foundation of this future.
They should be taught at an early age to understand the deep gulf
between patriotic feeling and the egoism which is called patriotism.
This is the patriotism in whose name small countries are oppressed by
great countries, in whose name nineteenth-century Europe has armed
itself under the stimulus of revenge, in whose name the close of the
century witnessed the extension of violence in north and south, in west
and east.
Militarism and clericalism, both principles presenting authority as
opposed to individual standards of right, are ever closely combined; but
they are not what they are called. They are not patriotism and religion.
These two words involve a sense of common citizenship, of freedom, of
justice, exalted above the narrow sphere of the individual, of the
interests of class, of the interests of one's own country. Such are the
principles which unite different groups within a land in great interests
common to all, just as they unite different peoples in great vital
questions common to all. But militarism and clericalism oppress freedom
by the principles of authority, oppress the idea of individual
development, by that of discipline, oppress the feeling of common weal
by the desire for glory and war, oppress the feeling for right by the
feeling for military honour. In Germany under the badge of Christianity
and militarism, the civil rights of the citizen, his claims for social
freedom, have been seriously menaced. Hypnotised by these principles
many members of the Russian, French, and English nations, respectable as
they are individually, have gloated over the deeds of unrighteousness
committed by their respective governments.
All this will go on; people will continue to be burdened to the ground
by ever increasing military preparations. The rights of the small
nations will be constantly encroached upon by the larger ones, even
after the present world powers, like those that have preceded them, have
broken down under the burden of their own expansion. It will continue to
be so, until mothers implant in the souls of their children the feeling
for humanity before the feeling for their country; until they strive to
expand the sympathies of their children to embrace all living things,
plants, animals, and men; until they teach them to see, that sympathy
involves not only suffering with others but rejoicing with others, and
that the individual increases his own emotional capacity, when he learns
to feel with other individuals and with other peoples. It will go on, as
it is now, until mothers implant in the souls of their children the
certainty, that the patriotism which, in the name of national interests,
treads under foot the rights of other people, is to be condemned. The
moment children undertake to act as adults, we shall see a harmony
between ideas so taught and facts. When the conception of nationalism in
the child's mind is freed from injustice and arrogance; when the idea of
God is freed from its debased union with a selfish patriotism, then the
idea of the soldier will be ennobled. It will no longer be identified
with blind obedience and limited class courage. The word will come to
mean a man and a fellow-citizen with the same civilised interests, the
same conception of law, the same need of freedom, the same feeling for
honour, as all other fellow-citizens. The soldier will be a defender of
his fatherland, whose character will have no other warlike traits, than
those called forth for the protection of sacred human and civil rights.
Self-defense, personal or national, will be imprinted on the child as
the first of duties, not as it is represented in the commands of
Christianity. Or to speak more accurately the child has this instinctive
feeling; all that need be done is not to confuse this instinct. The
child understands quite well, that evil men, when not resisted, become
lords over the property of others. He knows that the low and the
unrighteous get the victory, and that right-thinking and high-minded
people are sacrificed by unrighteous and low-thinking people. The
impulse to resistance is the first germ of the social feeling for
righteousness, and by this feeling will the unreflecting judgment of the
child be led also in the study of history. The child never doubts that
William Tell was right, even when, in his instruction in religion, he
has been definitely taught obedience to the powers that be, that come
from God. Every straight childish soul applauds Andreas Hofer, despite
his uncompromising conflict with lawful authority. With his natural
directness the child cuts off all sophisms; at least all children do who
are not irrevocably stupefied by Christian principles.
To conclude what I have said against religious instruction, I will add a
statement of a ten-year-old child, made after three years struggling
with the catechism and biblical history: "I do not believe any of this,
but I hope, when men are some day wise enough, each person may have his
own belief, just as each one has his own face."
This small philosopher in these words hit unconsciously upon the most
serious spiritual injury done by religious instruction. It forces on
man's mind a special view of the world, like a conventional mask on a
man's face. But freedom and the rights of the soul's life can only be
secured by its own reflections. The soul itself must work out that
assurance of belief in which man can live and die. For generations the
great spiritual dangers of mankind have been caused by looking backwards
to find the ideal and the truth, by regarding both as once for all
given, as absolutely limited.
As soon as a child becomes conscious of himself he should feel that he
is a discoverer with infinities before him. The king's son, in the realm
of life, will no longer do menial service as a prodigal son in a foreign
land. With the whole power of his will, he can repeat those old words,
"I will arise and go to my father."
When Jaquino di Fiori in the Middle Ages preached of the Kingdom of the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, till his hair became as silvery
grey as the leaves of the olive tree, he compared these three realms
with the nettle, the rose, and the lily, the light of the stars, the
sunlight, and the sun.
In all the ends of the world this preaching is being heard now. But that
dream of a Third Kingdom, pure as the lily, warm as the sun, can only be
realised in the temper of the child who looks for life and happiness,
who brushes away joyously and frankly the clouds of man's fall and man's
humiliation.
Without becoming as little children, men cannot enter into the Third
Kingdom, the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost, the Kingdom of the human
spirit.