THE GREAT ENERGIES THAT WORK
I
TRYING THE BETTER WAY
A very fresh and unusual type of book has recently appeared under
the title, “_By An Unknown Disciple_.” It tells in a simple, direct,
impressive way, after the manner of the Gospels, the story of Christ’s
life and works and message. It professes to be written by one who was an
intimate disciple, and who was therefore an eye-witness of everything
told in the book. It is a vivid narrative and leaves the reader deeply
moved, because it brings him closer than most interpretations do into
actual presence of and companionship with the great Galilean. The first
chapter is a re-interpretation of the scene on the eastern shore of
Gennesaret, where Jesus casts the demons out of the maniac of Geresa. A
man on the shore of the lake told Jesus, when he landed there with his
disciples in the early morning, that it was not safe for any one to go
up the rugged hillside, because there were madmen hidden there among the
tombs: “people possessed by demons, who tear their flesh, and who can be
heard screaming day and night.”
“How do you know they are possessed by demons?” asked Jesus.
“What else could it be?” said the man. “There are none that can master
them. They are too fierce to be tamed.”
“Has any man tried to tame them?” asked Jesus.
“Yes, Rabbi, they have been bound with chains and fetters. There was one
that I saw. He plucked the fetters from him as a child might break a
chain of field flowers. Then he ran foaming into the wilderness, and no
man dare pass by that way now....”
“Have men tried only this way to tame him?” Jesus asked.
“What other way is there, Rabbi?” asked the man.
“There is God’s way,” said Jesus. “Come, let us try it.”
As Jesus spoke, “His gaze went from man to man,” the writer continues,
“and then his eyes fell upon me. It was as if a power passed from him to
me, and immediately something inside me answered, ‘Lead, and I follow.’”
The narrative proceeds to describe the encounter with the demoniac man
whose name was “Legion.” “He ran toward us, shrieking and bounding in the
air. He had two sharp stones in his hand, and as he leaped he cut his
flesh with them and the blood ran down his naked limbs. The men behind us
scattered and fled down the hillside; but Jesus stood still and waited.”
The effect of the calm, undisturbed, unfrightened presence of Jesus was
astonishing. It was as though a new force suddenly came into operation.
The jagged stones were thrown from his hands, for he recognized at once
in Jesus a friendly presence and a helper with an understanding heart.
His fear and terror left the demoniac man and he became quiet, composed
and like a normal person. Meantime some of the men who ran away in fear,
when the madman appeared, frightened a herd of swine feeding near by, and
in their uncontrolled terror they rushed wildly toward the headland of
the lake and pitched over the top into the water where they were drowned.
“Fear is a foul spirit,” said Jesus, and it seemed plain and obvious
that the ungoverned fear which played such havoc with the man had taken
possession also of the misguided swine. It was the same “demon,” fear. A
little later in the day when the companions of Jesus found him they saw
the man who had called himself “Legion” sitting at Jesus’ feet, clothed
and in his right mind—a quieted and restored person.
We now know that this disease, called “possession,” which appears so
often in the New Testament accounts, is a very common present-day
trouble. The name and description given to it in the Bible make it often
seem remote and unfamiliar to us, but it is, in fact, as prevalent in the
world to-day as it was in the first century. It is an extreme form of
hysteria, a disorganization of normal functions, often causing delusions,
loss of memory, the performance of automatic actions, and sometimes
resulting in double, or multiple, personality, a condition in which a
foreign self seems to usurp the control of the body and make it do many
strange and unwilled things. This disease is known in very many cases to
be produced by frights, fear, or terror, sometimes fears long hidden away
and more or less suppressed.
The famous cases of Doris Fischer and Miss Beauchamp were both of this
type. They were only extreme instances of a fairly common form of
mental trouble, generally due to fears, and capable of being cured by
wise, skillful understanding and loving care, applied by one who shows
confidence and human interest and who knows how to use the powerful
influence of _suggestion_. Dr. Morton Prince, who has reported these
two cases, has achieved cures and restorations that read like miracles,
and his narratives tell of minds, “jangling, harsh, and out of tune,”
broken into dissociated selves, which have been unified, organized,
harmonized and restored to normal life. Few restorations are more
wonderful than that effected upon a Philadelphia girl under the direction
of Dr. Lightner Witmer. The girl was hopelessly incorrigible, stubborn,
sullen, suspicious, and stupid. She screamed, kicked, and bit when she
was opposed, and she utterly refused to obey anybody. So unnatural and
dehumanized was she that she was generally called “Diabolical Mary.” She
was examined by Dr. Witmer, underwent some simple surgical operations to
remove her obvious physical handicaps, and then was put under the loving,
tender care of a wise, attractive, and understanding woman. The girl
responded to the treatment at once and soon became profoundly changed,
and the process went on until the girl became a wholly transformed and
re-made person.
The so-called shell-shock cases which have bulked so large in the story
of the wastage of men in all armies during the World War, turn out to be
cases of mental disorganization, occasioned for the most part by immense
emotional upheaval, especially through suppressed fear. The man affected
with the trouble has seemed to master his emotion. He has not winced or
shown the slightest fear in the face of danger; but the pent-up emotion,
the suppressed fear and terror, insidiously throw the entire nervous
mechanism out of gear. The successful treatment of such cases is, again,
like that for hysteria, one that brings confidence, calm, liberation
of all strain and anxiety. The poor victim needs a patient, wise,
skillful, psychologically trained physician, who has an understanding
mind, a friendly, interested, intimate way, a spirit of love, and who
can arouse expectation of recovery and can suggest thoughts of health
and the right emotional reactions. This method of cure has often been
tried with striking effect upon the so-called criminal classes. Prisoners
almost always respond constructively to the personal manifestation of
confidence, sympathy, and love. Elizabeth Fry proved this principle in an
astonishing way with the almost brutalized prisoners in Newgate. Thomas
Shillitoe’s visit to the German prisoners at Spandau, who were believed
to be beyond all human appeals, though not so well known and famous, is
no less impressive and no less convincing.
There was perhaps never a time in the history of the world when an
application of this principle and method—God’s way—was so needed in
the social sphere of life. Whole countries have the symptoms which
appear in these nervous diseases. It is not merely an individual case
here and there; it takes on a corporate, a mass, form. The nerves are
overstrained, the emotional stress has been more than could be borne,
suppressed fears have produced disorganization. There are signs of
social “dissociation.” The remedy in such cases is not an application of
compelling force, not a resort to chains and fetters, not a screwing on
of the “lid,” not a method of starving out the victims. It is rather an
application of the principle which has always worked in individual cases
of “dissociation” or “possession” or “suppressed fear”—the principle
of sympathy, love and suggestion—what Jesus, in the book mentioned
above, calls “God’s way.” The “dissociation” of labor and employers in
the social group, with its hysterical signs of strikes and lockouts,
upheaval and threats, needs just now a very wise physician. Force,
restraint, compulsion, fastening down the “lid,” imprisonment of leaders,
drastic laws against propaganda, will not cure the disease, any more
than chains cured the poor sufferer on the shores of Gennesaret. The
situation must first of all be _understood_. The inner attitude behind
the acts and deeds must be taken into account. The social mental state
must be diagnosed. The remedy, to be a remedy, must remove the causes
which produce the dissociation. It can be accomplished only by one who
has an understanding heart, a good will, an unselfish purpose, and a
comprehending, i.e., a unifying, _suggestion_ of coöperation.
This _way_ is no less urgent for the solution of the most acute
international situations. It has been assumed too long and too often that
these situations can be best handled by unlimited methods of restraint,
coercion, and reduction to helplessness. Some of the countries of Europe
have been plainly suffering from neurasthenia, dissociation, and the
kindred forms of emotional, fear-caused diseases. Starvation always makes
for types of hysteria. It will not do now to apply, with cold, precise
logic, the old vindictive principle that when the sinner has been made
to suffer enough to “cover” the enormity of his sin he can then be
restored to respectable society. It is not vindication of justice which
most concerns the world now; it is a return of health, a restoration of
normal functions, a reconstruction of the social body. That task calls
for the application of the deeper, truer principles of life. It calls for
a knowing heart, an understanding method, a healing plan, a sympathetic
guide who can obliterate the fear-attitude and _suggest_ confidence and
unity and trustful human relationships. Those great words, used in the
Epistle of London Yearly Meeting of Friends in 1917, need to be revived
and put to an experimental venture: “_Love knows no frontiers._” There is
no limit to its healing force, there are no conditions it does not meet,
there is no terminus to its constructive operations.
II
HE CAME TO HIMSELF
Was there ever such a short-story character sketch as this one of the
prodigal son! No realism of details, no elaboration of his sins, and
yet the immortal picture is burned forever into our imagination. The
_débâcle_ of his life is as clear and vivid as words can portray the
ruin. Yet the phrase which arrests us most as we read the compact
narrative of his undoing is not the one which tells about “riotous
living,” or the reckless squandering of his patrimony, or his hunger for
swine husks, or his unshod feet and the loss of his tunic; it is rather
the one which says that when he was at the bottom of his fortune “he came
to himself.”
He had not been himself then, before. He was not finding himself in the
life of riotous indulgence. That did not turn out after all to be the
life for which he was meant. He missed himself more than he missed his
lost shoes and tunic. That raises a nice question which is worth an
answer: When is a person his real self? When can he properly say, “At
last I have found myself; I am what I want to be?” Robert Louis Stevenson
has given us in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a fine parable of the actual
double self in us all, a higher and a lower self under our one hat. But
I ask, which is the real me? Is it Jekyll or is it Hyde? Is it the best
that we can be or is it this worse thing which we just now are?
Most answers to the question would be, I think, that the real self is
that ideal self of which in moments of rare visibility we sometimes
catch glimpses.
“All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.”
“Dig deep enough into any man,” St. Augustine said, “and you will find
something divine.” We supposed he believed in total depravity, and
he does in theory believe in it; but when it is a matter of actual
experience, he announces this deep fact which fits perfectly with his
other great utterance: “Thou, O God, hast made us for thyself, and we are
restless (dissatisfied) until we find ourselves in thee.”
Too long we have assumed that Adam, the failure, is the type of our
lives, that he is the normal man, that to err is human, and that one
touch, that is, blight, of nature makes all men kin. What Christ has
revealed to us is the fact that we always have higher and diviner
possibilities in us. He, the overcomer, and not Adam, is the true type,
the normal person, giving us at last the pattern of life which is life
indeed.
Which is the real self, then? Surely this higher possible self, this one
which we discover in our best moments. The Greeks always held that sin
was “missing the mark”—that is what the Greek word for sin means—failure
to arrive at, to reach, the real end toward which life aims. Sin is
defeat. It is loss of the trail. It is undoing. The sinner has not found
himself, he has not come to himself. He has missed the real me. He cannot
say, “I am.”
If that is a fact, and if the life of spiritual health and attainment is
the normal life, we surely ought to do more than is done to help young
people to realize it and to assist them to find themselves. We are much
more concerned to manufacture things than we are to make persons. We do
one very well and we do the other very badly. Kipling’s “The Ship that
Found Itself” is a fine account of the care bestowed upon every rivet and
screw, every valve and piston. He pictures the ship in the stress and
strain of a great storm and each part of the ship from keel to funnel
describes what it has to bear and to do in the emergency and how it has
been prepared in advance for just this crisis. Nansen was asked how he
felt when he found that the _Fram_ was caught in the awful jam of the
Arctic ice-floe. “I felt perfectly calm,” he said. “I knew she could
stand it. I had watched every stick of timber and every piece of steel
that went into her hull. The result was that I could go to sleep and
let the ice do its worst.” With even more care we build the airplane.
There must be no chance for capricious action. The propeller blades must
be made of perfect wood. There must be no defect in any piece of the
structure. The gasoline must be tested by all the methods of refinement.
The oil must be absolutely pure, free of every suspicion of grit.
But when we turn from ships and airplanes to the provisions for training
young persons we are in a different world. The element of chance now
bulks very large. We let the youth have pretty free opportunity to begin
his malformation before we begin seriously to construct him on right
lines. We fail to note what an enormous fact “disposition” is, and we
take little pains to form it early and to form it in the best way. We
are far too apt to assume that all the fundamentals come by the road
of heredity. We overwork this theory as much as earlier theologians
overworked their dogma of original sin from poor old Adam.
The fact is that temperament and disposition and the traits of character
which most definitely settle destiny are at least as much formed in those
early critical years of infancy as they are acquired by the strains of
heredity. Education, which is more essential to the greatness of any
country than even its manufactures, is one of the most neglected branches
of life. We take it as we find it—and lay its failures to Providence
as we do deaths from typhoid. It must not always be so. We must be as
greatly concerned to form virile character in our boys and girls and
to develop in them the capacity for moral and spiritual leadership in
this crisis as we are concerned over our coal supply or our industries.
There are ways of assisting the higher self to control and dominate the
life, ways by which the ideal person can become the real person. Why not
consider seriously how to do that?
He that overcomes, the prophet of Patmos says, receives a white stone
with a new name written on it, which no man knoweth save he that hath
it. It is a symbolism which may mean many things. It seems at least to
mean that he who subdues his lower self, holds out in the strain of life,
and lives by the highest that he knows, will as a consequence receive a
distinct individuality, a clearly defined self, instead of being blurred
in with the great level mass—a self with a name of its own. And that self
will not be the old familiar self that everybody knows by traits of past
achievement and by the old tendencies of habit. It will be the self
which only God and the person himself in his deepest and most intimate
moments knew was possible—and here at last it is found to be the real
self. The man can say, “I am.” He has come to himself.
We ask, at the end, whether it may not be that the world will soon come
to itself and discover the way back to some of its missed ideals. Here on
a large scale we have the story of a desperate hunger, squandered wealth,
lost shoes, lost tunics, and even more precious things gone—a world that
has missed its way and is floundering about without sufficient vision
or adequate leadership. If it could only come to itself, discover what
its true mission is and where its real sources of power and its line of
progress lie, it would still find that God and man together can rebuild
what man by his blunders has destroyed.
III
SOME NEW REASONS FOR “LOVING ENEMIES”
Nobody ever amounts to anything who lives without conflict with
obstacles. It seems to be a law of the universe that nothing really good
can be got or held by soft, easy means.
The Persians were so impressed with this stern condition of life that
they interpreted the universe as the scene of endless warfare between
hostile powers of the invisible world. Ormuzd, the god of light, and
Ahriman, the god of darkness, were believed to be engaged in a continual
Armageddon. There could be no truce in the strife until one or the other
should win the victory by the annihilation of his opponent. This Persian
dualism has touched all systems of thought and has left its influence
upon all the religions of the world. The reasons why it has appealed so
powerfully to men of all generations are, of course, that there is so
much conflict involved in life and that no achievement of goodness is
ever made without a hard battle for it against opposing forces. But if
all this opposition and struggle is due to an “enemy,” we certainly ought
to love this “enemy,” because it turns out to be the greatest possible
blessing to us that we are forced to struggle with difficulties and to
wrestle for what we get.
“Count it all joy,” said the Apostle James in substance, writing to his
friends of the Dispersion, “when you fall into manifold testings, or
trials, knowing that the proving of your faith worketh steadfastness,
and let steadfastness have its perfect work, that ye may be perfect and
entire, lacking in nothing.” St. Paul thought once that his “thorn in the
flesh” was conferred upon him by Satan and was the malicious messenger
of an enemy; but in the slow process of experience he came to see that
the painful “thorn” exercised a real ministry in his life, that through
his suffering and hardship he got a higher meaning of God’s grace; and he
discovered that divine power was thus made perfect through his weakness,
so that he learned to love the “enemy” that buffeted him.
The Psalmist who wrote our best loved psalm, the twenty-third, thought at
first that God was his Shepherd because he led him in green pastures and
beside still waters where there was no struggle and no enemy to fear. But
he learned at length that in the dark valleys of the shadow and on the
rough jagged hillsides God was no less a good Shepherd than on the level
plains and in the lush grass; and he found at last that even “in the
presence of enemies” he could be fed with good things and have his table
spread. The overflowing cup and the anointed head were not discovered
on the lower levels of ease and comfort; they came out of the harder
experiences when “enemies” of his peace were busy supplying obstacles
and perplexities for him to overcome.
It is no accident that the book of Revelation puts so much stress upon
“overcoming.” The world seemed to the prophet on the volcanic island
of Patmos essentially a place of strife and conflict—an Armageddon of
opposing forces. There are no beatitudes in this book promised to any
except “overcomers.”
“Not to one church alone, but seven
The voice prophetic spake from heaven;
And unto each the promise came,
Diversified, but still the same;
For him that overcometh are
The new name written on the stone,
The raiment white, the crown, the throne,
And I will give him the Morning Star!”
But the conflict that ends in such results can not be called misfortune,
any more than Hercules’ labors through which the legendary hero won his
immortality can be pronounced a misfortune for him. Once more, then, the
saint who has overcome discovers, at least in retrospect, that there is
good ground for loving his “enemies”!
The farmer, in his unceasing struggle with weeds, with parasites, with
pests visible and invisible, with blight and rot and uncongenial
weather, sometimes feels tempted to blaspheme against the hard conditions
under which he labors and to assume that an “enemy” has cursed the ground
which he tills and loaded the dice of nature against him. The best cure
for his “mood” is to visit the land of the bread-fruit tree, where nature
does everything and man does nothing but eat what is gratuitously given
him, and to see there the kind of men you get under those kindly skies.
The virile fiber of muscle, the strong manly frame, the keen active mind
that meets each new “pest” with a successful invention, the spirit of
conquest and courage that are revealed in the farmer at his best are no
accident. They are the by-product of his battle with conditions, which if
they seem to come from an “enemy,” must come from one that ought to be
loved for what he accomplishes.
These critics of ours who harshly review the books we write, the
addresses we give, the schemes of reform for which we work so
strenuously—do they do nothing for us? On the contrary, they force
us to go deeper, to write with more care, to reconsider our hasty
generalizations, to recast our pet schemes, to revise our crude
endeavors. They may speak as “enemies,” and they may show a stern and
hostile face; but we do well to love them, for they enable us to find
our better self and our deeper powers. The hand may be the horny hand of
Esau, but the voice is the kindly voice of Jacob.
All sorts of things “work” for us, then, as St. Paul declared. Not only
does love “work,” and faith and grace; but tribulation “works,” and
affliction, and the seemingly hostile forces which block and buffet and
hamper us. Everything that drives us deeper, that draws us closer to the
great resources of life, that puts vigor into our frame and character
into our souls, is in the last resort a blessing to us, even though it
seems on superficial examination to be the work of an “enemy,” and we
shall be wise if we learn to love the “enemies” that give us the chance
to overcome and to attain our true destiny. Perhaps the dualism of the
universe is not quite as sharp as the old Persians thought. Perhaps, too,
the love of God reaches further under than we sometimes suppose. Perhaps
in fact all things “work together for good,” and even the enemy forces
are helping to achieve the ultimate good that shall be revealed “when God
hath made the pile complete.”