you wish to hold your hearers, observe this practise. Please remember
that this is America and everybody is in a hurry. They ought not to
be, but they are. Make thirty minutes the limit of your time. Twenty
minutes is long enough.
It was a very good sermon Paul preached on Mars Hill before the most
critical and cultured audience in the world. And still, allowing for
all deliberation of delivery and for portions of his speech which are
not reported, it could not have taken him longer than fifteen minutes.
Even the Master, when expounding the whole of the Christian religion
in the Sermon on the Mount, could not have occupied more than half or
three-quarters of an hour; yet he was covering a multitude of
subjects, whereas Paul covered but one. Indeed, the Saviour also made
it a practise to speak upon only one subject at a time.
The same is true of all great orators except, of course, political
stump speakers, who necessarily must cover all the "issues." The
political speaker is sorry enough that this is true--but there is no
help for it; "the questions of the day" must all be answered. But you,
Mr. Preacher, need not be so encyclopedic; and you ought to be
illuminating and uplifting on _one_ subject in half an hour--and no
longer. That light is brightest which is condensed.
The Christian religion is a livable creed, is it not? It is a
day-by-day religion; a here-and-now religion. True, it comprehends
eternity, and its perfect flower is immortal life and peace. But that
is for the hereafter. This side of the grave, Christianity is a code
of conduct. So, peculiarly human subjects for your sermons are
endless--subjects of present interest.
Think of the intimate and personal subjects of Christ's teachings. He
spoke of prayer and the fulfilment of the law, of master and servant
and of practical charity, of marriage, divorce, and the relation of
children to parents; of manners, serenity, and battlings; of working
and food and prophecy; of trade and usury, of sin and righteousness,
of repentance and salvation. Yet by means of all this he made noble
the daily living of our earthly lives and gloriously triumphant the
ending of them.
Speak helpfully therefore. Remember that the great problem with each
of us is how to live day by day; and that is no easy task, say what
you will. This human talking with human beings is not only consistent
with the preaching of your religion--it _is_ the preaching of your
religion. Christ came to save sinners, but how? By faith? Yes. By
repentance? Yes. By these and by many other things; _but by conduct
also_.
I do not think the ordinary layman cares to hear you preach about some
new thing. The common man prefers to hear the old truths retold.
Indeed, there can be nothing new in morals. "Our task," said a
clear-headed minister, "is to state the old truths in terms of the
present day." That is admirably put. In science progress means change;
in morals progress means stability. No man can be said to have uttered
the final word in science; but the Master uttered the final word in
morals.
Many people greatly debate whether the minister of the Gospel should
"mix up in politics." There is a protest against ministers using their
pulpits to express views on our civic and National life.
I have no sympathy with such views. Of course the preaching of his
holy religion is the minister's high calling; of course the spiritual
life practically applied should receive his exclusive attention. But
does not that include righteousness in the affairs of our popular
government? Does it not involve uprightness in public life?
It seems to me that the Master took a considerable part in public
affairs. Did he not even scourge the money-changers from the Temple?
And John Knox, Wesley, and other great teachers of the Word profoundly
influenced the political life and movements of their time. Savonarola,
to whom I have so often referred, was a skilled politician, though of
so high a grade that he may be justly called a statesman.
Upon this subject the views of the ordinary laymen of the country are
these: Whenever a civic _evil_ is to be eliminated it is not only
appropriate, but it is the office of the minister to help eliminate
it. Whenever the cause of light is struggling with the powers of
darkness the place of the Christian minister is in the ranks.
But as a general proposition he can do most good by merely preaching
individual righteousness day after day without definitely interfering
with things political. For there is always the danger that if he takes
part in many political agitations he will become so monotonous that
all his power for good will be dissipated.
But after all is said and done the millions want from the modern
pulpit the fruitful teaching of the Christian religion. They want the
fundamentals. They want decision and certainty. Their minds are to be
convinced, yes, but even more their hearts.
This is the task that awaits you, young man, who, from that spiritual
tribune called the Pulpit, are soon to speak to us who sit beneath you
that Word which is for "the healing of the nations." How exalted
beyond understanding is this high place to which you are going. What a
hearing you will have if only you will utter words of power and light.
Believe me, the world with eagerness awaits your message. But be sure
it _is_ a message in very truth--no, not _a_ message but THE
message.
VIII
GREAT THINGS YET TO BE DONE
Some four years ago a young man of uncommon ability, but lacking the
imagination of hope, said to me that it seemed to him as if everything
great had already been done.
"Great battles," said he, "have been fought; there will be no more
wars of magnitude. The great principles of the law have all been
announced and applied to every conceivable form of human rights and
controversy. For example, in our own country there will be no more new
and great constitutional arguments. Everything, from now on, will be
only an application of what has already been said and decided.
"In invention, there may be some improvements on old and present
devices, but there will be no more Edisons, no more Marconis. In
medicine, we are about at the top of the mountain. In literature, the
creative and fundamental things have all been done. There will be no
more Shakespeares, no Miltons, no Dantes, no Goethes. Even Hugo is
dead. From now on books will be mere second-hand talk.
"In statesmanship, nothing is left except that common housekeeping
which we call administering government. In diplomacy, the same old
lies will continue to be told, and so on."
This young man's profoundly melancholy view of life is that which I
have found crushing the _élan_ out of many young men; and particularly
college students. In their hearts they feel that progress is finished,
so far as individual effort _by them_ is concerned. They feel that
_for them_ there is nothing but to eat, sleep, laugh, grieve and go to
their graves. They feel that _for them_ there is no such thing as
leaving behind them a monument of their own constructive effort. Talk
to most young men in college or school, and you will find this
feeling, like a pathetic minor chord, running through their highest
and most daring boasts.
Is not our college training responsible for some of this melancholy
negativeness of life? However it happens, the truth is that too few
young men come out of our great universities with the greater part of
the boldness of youth left in them. Somehow or other those fine, and,
if you will, absurd enthusiasms which nobody but young men and
geniuses are blessed with, have been educated out of the graduate. How
many seniors in our historic American universities would not have
sneered John Bunyan out of existence, or have told the young and
unripe Bonaparte how presumptuous he was to think of fighting the
trained generals of Europe?
"Yes," says a certain type of young man, "all the great things have
been done. Nothing is left for me but the commonplaces." This is not
true.
The great things have not all been done; scarcely have they been
commenced. "There is more before us than there is behind us," said my
old forest "guide," wise with the wisdom of the woods and their
thoughtful silences. And the purpose of this paper is to point out the
infinite number of practical possibilities immediately at hand; to
awaken each young man who reads these words to some one of the million
voices which from all the fields of human endeavor is calling him; and
so, by showing him things to do, make him a doer of things, if he
will.
Let us take the law--that entrancing subject which exercises such an
empire over the minds of most young men. Our own constitutional law
is only a part of that universal body of jurisprudence with which all
real lawyers must deal. Very well; we have only begun the discussion
and settlement of our great constitutional questions. Marshall and
Hamilton, it is true, when they formulated the doctrine of implied
powers, seemed to unlock the door of all constitutional difficulties,
leaving nothing for future lawyers and jurists to do but to find their
way through the channels and passages thus opened.
But it was only one great field to which they laid down the bars.
Others equally large--yes, larger--lie beyond it. It is generally
admitted now by all thorough students of the Constitution that there
is such a thing as constitutional progress--constitutional
development. The Constitution does and will grow as the American
people grow.
Half a dozen questions are now in the public mind that measure, in
importance, up to the level of Marshall's elementary decisions. Beyond
these is still the application of institutional law to the
interpretation of the Constitution. There is no book so much needed in
the present, or that will be so much needed in the future, as a great
work on our institutional law--such a work as the world sees once in
a century.
Consider this one phase of jurisprudence for only a moment, young man,
just to see what a world of thought it opens to the mind.
Institutional law is older, deeper, and even more vital than
constitutional law. Our Constitution is one of the concrete
manifestations of our institutions; our statutes are another; the
decisions of our courts are another; our habits, methods, and customs
as a people and a race are still another.
Our institutional law is like the atmosphere--impalpable,
imperceptible, but all-pervading, and the source of life itself. Most
leading decisions of our courts of last resort, involving great
constitutional questions, refer to the spirit of our institutions as
interpreting our Constitution. It is our institutional law which,
flowing like our blood through the written Constitution, gives that
instrument vitality and power of development.
Institutional law existed before the Constitution. Our institutions
had their beginnings well-nigh with the beginning of time. They have
developed through the ages. Magna Charta only marked a period in their
growth; the assertion of the rights of the Commons marked another;
our Revolution marked another; the adoption of our Constitution marked
another still.
I have no respect for constitutional learning which deals alone with
the written words of the Constitution, or even with the intention of
its framers, and ignores the sources and spirit of that great
instrument. The Constitution did not give us free institutions; free
institutions gave us our Constitution. All our progress toward liberty
and popular government, made since the adoption of the Constitution,
has been the spirit of our institutions working out its sure results,
through the Constitution when possible, modifying it when necessary.
Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence a denunciation of
slavery, and called it an "execrable commerce." It was stricken out at
the request of Georgia and South Carolina, and years afterward slavery
was recognized in our Constitution.
But slavery was opposed to the spirit of our institutions, and while
legalized by our Constitution and defended by armies as brave as ever
marched to battle, constitutional slavery went down before
institutional liberty; and Appomattox was the capitulation of the word
of death in our Constitution to the spirit of life in our
institutions. Every amendment of our Constitution marks the progress
of our institutions.
The Constitution contemplated and provided for the election of
Presidents by electors, who should select the best man to preside over
the Republic, irrespective of the people's choice. That was the
intention of the fathers. But in that they did not correctly interpret
the spirit and tendency of our institutions, which is toward getting
the Government as close to the people as possible.
And so, in spite of the Constitution, in spite of the intention of the
fathers, in spite of the fact that this plan was pursued for several
elections, the spirit of our institutions prevailed over our
Constitution, and no presidential elector now dare cast his ballot
against the candidate for whom the people instruct him to vote.
Even outside of the doctrine of implied powers by which our written
Constitution has been made to meet many of the emergencies of our
history, there are important things in our National life that have all
the force of organic law which are unprovided for by the Constitution.
For example, the Constitution does not say that a congressman must
live in the district which he represents. So far as constitutional
law is concerned, he might live anywhere. But no matter--our
institutional law settles that. The theory of local self-government
requires the representative of a locality to live in that locality.
Wherever our Constitution has been weak and insufficient in its
apparent expressed powers, the spirit of our institutions has given it
life. Read Marshall's opinions; read most of our great constitutional
decisions; read the whole history of American constitutional progress,
if you would know the beneficent influence of our institutions on our
Constitution.
Thus we see that our institutions are the preservers of our
Constitution. The doctrine of implied powers, which has saved the
country and the Constitution too, has been made possible only by
reading our Constitution by the light of our institutions, as Hamilton
and Marshall did.
And so our security is not in the written word of the Constitution
alone; it is there, of course, but it is in our institutions also
which are the spirit of the Constitution, which illumine and emphasize
the meaning of that noble instrument. England has no written
constitution; certain other countries have had and have now ideal
written constitutions.
And yet England has steady and continuous liberty and law, while those
others, even with written constitutions, frequently have had
bureaucracy and military absolutism. They had the _forms_ of liberty
and popular government in these written constitutions, but they did
not have free institutions, which alone make formal constitutions
living and vital things.
England, without a written constitution, is almost as free a
government as ours. Law reigns supreme. The poorest gatherer of rags
has equal rights before the bar of justice with belted earl or
millionaire, and those equal rights are impartially enforced. Neither
wealth nor title are favored more than poverty or humble rank in the
courts of England; and even royalty appears as witness, the same as
his meanest subject.
The Government itself is subject to the will of the people; and no
ministry remains in power in face of an adverse majority, or forces
into law an act of which the people disapprove. The English Parliament
goes to the people as often as the Government, in any of its proposed
measures, fails of a majority. The suffrage is constantly enlarging,
and the rights of labor are almost as carefully guarded by the laws
of England as by ours.
England's treatment of Ireland has been harsh, severe, unjust; and yet
even there the spirit of a larger liberty in the interest of the Irish
tenant, approaching state socialism, compels the landlord to sell his
land whether he wants to or not, at a price fixed by others than
himself, and enables the tenant to buy the land by the payment of his
rent. Tolerance, justice, and individual liberty are daily developing
throughout the British Empire, instead of diminishing.
And yet England has no written constitution. But she has institutions,
free institutions, institutions similar to those we have here in
America. It is the free institutions of England that preserve and
increase the liberty of Englishmen, and diminish and destroy the
authority of the monarch, who is now only the personification of the
nation, the emblem of the Empire.
It is England's free institutions that, in Egypt, in Hongkong, in
Ceylon, in the Malay states, in India, have given the people of those
dark places some of the fruits of liberty to eat for the first time in
all the strange history of the oppressed and wasted Orient. And it is
our free institutions, as well as our Constitution, that in America
make kings impossible, and have, for a hundred years, wrought for a
larger liberty and a more popular government.
And it is the spirit of our institutions, as well as our Constitution,
that will prevent the abuse of power by American authority in Porto
Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines, or any other spot blessed by the
protection of our flag. It is our free institutions, working now by
one method and now by another, after the fashion of our practical
race, that are establishing order, equal laws, free speech,
unpurchasable justice, and "life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness" throughout our ocean possessions.
It is our institutional law, therefore, of which men should inquire
who would know the meaning and the life of our constitutional law. We
have heard from lawyer and orator of "the Constitution," "the letter
of the Constitution," etc.; we have listened for "our institutions,"
and in vain. And yet, is it not written that "the letter killeth, but
the spirit giveth life"?
Is it not written that "man shall not live by bread alone, but by
every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God"? I respect not
the expounders of constitutional law who have not learned the history
of our institutions, of which the Constitution is the richest fruit,
until that history is a part of their being.
I respect not that constitutional charlatanism that fastens its eye on
the printed page alone, disdains our institutions as interpreting it,
and refuses to consider the sources of that Constitution--the
development of our present form of government for a century and a half
from the old crown charters; the English struggle for the rights of
man, regulated by equal laws which preceded that; the spirit of Dutch
independence, Dutch federation, and Dutch institutions working upon
that, and still back to the counsels of our Teuton fathers in the
German forests in the dim light of a far distant time.
If a people adopt a written instrument, you must understand that
_people_ and their _institutions_ before you understand the writing.
You cannot separate a people and their history from a written
constitution which is only a part of that history. The same words by
one people may have a different meaning used by another people. Any
writing can only be an index to the institutions of a people.
A people's _institutions_ are the soul of the written and unwritten
law. You must understand the French people, their history, and their
institutions, before you can understand their written constitution.
You must understand the American people, our history, and our
institutions, before you can understand our Constitution.
I have thus enlarged upon our institutional law to give young men a
hint of its possibilities. Before this century closes, the greatest
law book in all the literature of jurisprudence will be produced upon
the subject of our institutional law. The materials are as plentiful
as the history of our race, the demand as insistent as our daily life.
Great law books all written! Nonsense. As yet we have had only the
turgid descriptions of the toilsome and halting progress of justice
through the ages--that is all we have had, compared with the noble
volume that will be written, giving mankind the high, clear, and
simple thinking of a greater Blackstone and a wiser Kent. It may be
that this generation will produce this immortal judicial author; it
may be that you, young man, are he. At least one thing is sure--the
work is there waiting for the workman.
But if you do not feel equipped for this monumental effort, there are
other phases of the law more imminent, if not so comprehensive, in
each of which there is opportunity and demand for original work.
For example, it is clear to all that the laws of marriage and divorce
must be made rational and uniform throughout the Nation; that the laws
respecting corporations are inappropriate, inadequate, and unjust,
both to corporations and to the public--that they do not measure up to
the present complex conditions; that the laws respecting commercial
paper need to be systematized.
It is absurd, too, that a farmer living on one side of an imaginary
state line which separates his farm and the state in which it is
located from that of his neighbor living on the other side of the
imaginary line in another state, should have to deal with his neighbor
as if he were a foreigner in a foreign land and under foreign laws.
Again, the multiplication of decisions on all subjects has reached a
point where practise by precedent, to be exhaustive and thorough, has
become practically impossible; and so the problem that confronted the
Roman emperors, and terminated in the Pandects of Justinian, is now
demanding immediate solution at the hands of American legislators,
lawyers, and jurists.
So, you see, my ambitious young friend, that by no means all has been
done in the law, and that what has been done is so bulky, unorganized,
and confused, that even to reduce, rationalize, and systematize it is
the greatest task of all. The trouble will therefore be with yourself,
and not with conditions, if you remain an underling in this great
profession.
Take literature--take imaginative literature. More can be said on its
possibilities than on those of the law--and I enlarged upon the
unexplored fields of the law merely to outline the immensity of the
great things yet to be done in the law's domain. Is it not plain that
the great novel of modern society is yet to be written? The contest
between human nature and the complex machinery of our industrial
system, and the mastery of human nature over the latter, present a
theme such as Homer, or Vergil, or Dante never had.
The world awaits this genius! If you are not he, but talented in that
direction, there are a thousand phases of American life that are of
permanent historic value, which are rapidly passing away forever, and
need to be perpetuated by literature and art.
In poetry, the master singer of modern days has not yet appeared.
There have been faint signs of him, a suggestion of him, an indistinct
prophecy of him, in nearly all of the world's singers for a hundred
years. Some day he will come. It may be soon, and then he will sound
that note which shall again thrill the hearts and again turn
heavenward the eyes of men all round the world.
The point I am making is that the great things in poetry have not all
been done. On the contrary, it is the same old cry the world has heard
since Homer. Until Shakespeare wrote, it appeared, to those who had no
vision, that the immortal things in literature had all been done. But
these immortal things and things not immortal, things permanent and
things temporary, were only food and material for Shakespeare.
Literature, then, has only been furnishing the materials--the
timber--for the structure that is yet to be built. But the timber is
noble in dimension, and they must be giants who use it. If you are a
giant, your task awaits you.