OTHER CLEANLINESS
Clean? Of course, we all know what cleanliness means. It is not possible
to drive, to ride in a trolley, to go on a train without being impressed
with at least the advertising energy that is put into trying to get or
keep the world clean. Dear me, there are the ever-present, cheerful Gold
Dust Twins, well up with the times, you may believe, and nowadays taking
to aviation. Their aeroplanes may not be very large, but they are clean
as gold dust can make them, and the twins, without any of the friction
that comes from dirt, are flying at last. What’s more, intrepid as some
old Forty-Niner, they are penetrating the camper’s wilderness. Most of
us do not want to be twins, and we certainly do not want to be gold
dusters or any other kind of dusters, yet we should miss these jolly
little youngsters. And there are Sapolio and Sunny Monday advertisements
and Pears’ soap--have you used it?--and a dozen other kinds and goodness
knows what not besides.
Yes, we Americans, and especially American women in the household, know
what it is to make an effort in the midst of heated, dusty or uncared
for streets to keep our houses and everything in them clean. In
Pennsylvania you see the people scrubbing off white marble steps. In New
England they turn the hose on the outside of their white farm houses. In
the West they flood the side-walks to keep the dust and heat down. And
our houses? Well, all houses are being built with bath tubs nowadays,
even our camps, which is more than can be said for very good houses
indeed in other countries than America. Some people think that camping
is an excuse to be dirty. Often they are very nice people, too, but they
keep a dirty camp. They don’t keep even themselves clean.
But there is another kind of cleanliness, not superficial, not that of
the skin, or of the clothes or of the cabin, about which we are coming
to think more and more deeply. It is what might be called vital
cleanliness, the cleanness of stomachs, of the intestines, of all the
vital organs. We begin to realize the truth of what those most helpful
of missionaries, the health culturists, are saying: One may be clean
superficially, that is one may scrub enough and yet vitally be very far
from clean. We know, although it is of the greatest assistance to keep
the skin free and vigorous so that it is able to do its part of the
house-cleaning work for our systems, that vital cleanliness, clean,
strong, internal organs performing their work with the vigor of
well-constructed engines, uninjured by foolish clothing, unharmed by
impure food, keen for opportunity to grow and be vigorous--we know, I
say that that cleanliness is more important than skin cleanliness.
Indeed, without such deep-seated cleanliness it is impossible for the
skin to be really clean.
But clean how? I wonder whether we are clean in the way I mean. Yes, we
are clean in our houses, perhaps in our camps, clean on the outsides of
our bodies, clean probably, on the inside. Yet no one of these kinds of
cleanliness is what I have in mind. Can any girl by the camp fire guess
what it is? I will not say it is more important than household
cleanliness, although it is so,--vastly more so. I will not say that it
is more important than bodily cleanliness, external and internal, yet it
is so,--vastly more so. I could almost say that it is more important
than anything else in the world of human experience. Do you know what
it is now? _It is cleanness of the mind, cleanness of the soul_, and of
that kind of purity the great outdoor world is one indivisible whole.
On this cleanliness of mind and soul all the vital activities of the day
depend, all the growth, the gain, the development. It might be well said
that the way we take up the sun into our bodies--and we could not live
any length of time without some sun--depends upon the cleanness or
uncleanness of this mind and soul of ours. What we shall eat, what we
shall hear, what we shall see, what we shall look forward to, what we
shall care for--all these things will be according to laws as inevitable
as those governing the sun and moon and stars, valuable or worthless,
vicious or sacred, as we feel them and we make them. We dip our fingers
in pitch and pick up a book. What is the result? Any child could tell us
that we ruin the book with our pitch-covered fingers. We dip our minds
into filth, a nasty story, a perverted way of looking at things which in
themselves are good and of God’s plan, or we actually commit some ugly
act ourselves and then we go out into the presence of those things which
are clean, the sunshine, the hills, the lakes, the woods, the white
lives of others, the ideals which, it may be, have been ours. Do you
suppose we feel or see that sunshine, or that we are aware any longer of
the white lives of others, that our past ideals are evident to us when
our hearts and minds are no longer clean? Do you suppose that there is
anything in nature which comes home to us in quite the beautiful way it
once did, the flowers, the birds, the song of the wind, the little
creatures of the wood? Can they ever be entirely the same? No, by an
inevitable law of compensations some of the fullness of our joy in these
things is gone. If we want to be really happy it does not pay to think
evil, to touch evil or to commit it.
When our hands are dirty we know it, and if we have been careless about
them we are ashamed. If people’s bodies or camps are not clean it is
painfully easy to know that, too. But a dirty mind, who could ever tell
anyway that we had one? Who could ever tell? I will tell you: _Every one
knows it_, or perhaps, better, every one feels it. If we are not good,
if our minds are not clean, our presence in some mysterious way
proclaims that fact. If we have injured some one, if we have been
foul-tongued, others will know it with no need for any one to tell them.
Even the little rabbit we meet in the woods will not greet us in so
friendly a way. _We need not think that because we are concealing a bad
thought that it is therefore hidden._ No, indeed, it is screaming away
like some ugly black crow on a spruce tip, and there is no one within
hearing distance who, whether he wishes to or not, does not hear what
it says.
The mind has its plague spots even as the body, and one has to
work--because of one’s environment or some inheritance which has made us
not quite wholesome by nature, or because of friends whose feelings one
would not injure, and yet who are not what they ought to be,--one has
often to work to keep the mind clean. But as you would flee from the
plague, run from a dirty story. Don’t let the camp life be spoiled by
anything to be regretted! Do not let any one touch you with it, even
with a word of it. Keep a thousand miles away if you can from folk who
have an impure way of looking at life, and camp is a good place to get
away from such people. Shut your minds against them. One is never called
upon on the score of duty to have an unclean mind because others have
it. And if through some misfortune, something that is unlovely,
unclean, has been impressed upon you, fight valiantly not to think of
it, to put it away from you. And never forget that to rule our spirits,
to be in command of our minds, to have them wholesome and sweet and
clean as a freshly swept log cabin, is greater than to win such
victories as have come down in the records of history.
I remember that when I was a child, I thought my heart was white and
that every time I said or thought anything naughty, I got a black spot
on its surface. I dare say that in the first place some dear old negro
woman put this fable into my mind. And, dear me, some days it seemed to
me that heart of mine was more spotted than any tiger lily that ever
grew in any neglected garden. Perhaps it was foolish to think such a
thing. I do not know, I only know that there were times when I was
mighty careful of that white heart of mine,--wrapping it up in a pocket
handkerchief would not have satisfied my eagerness to keep it clean.
And what better could one wish than to go on one’s holiday, and on
forever, with the white shining heart of a child?