ventures into abstract theory, but they are little more. We must always
remember that art is a result, not a product, and that sense of beauty
is a natural gift and not an accomplishment. On the other hand, much can
be accomplished by indirection, and by this I mean the buildings and the
grounds and the cultural adjuncts that are offered by any school or
college. The ordinary type of school-house--primary, grammar or high
school--is, in its barren ugliness and its barbarous "efficiency," a
very real outrage on decency, and a few Braun photographs and plaster
casts and potted plants avail nothing. Private schools and some
colleges--by no means all--are apt to be somewhat better, and here the
improvement during the last ten years has been amazing, one or two
universities having acquired single buildings, or groups, of the most
astonishing architectural beauty. In no case, however, has as yet
complete unity been achieved, while the arts of painting, sculpture,
music and the drama, as vital and operative and pervasive influences,
lag far behind, and formal religion with its liturgies and ceremonial,
its constant and varied services and its fine and appealing
pageantry--religion which is the greatest vitalizing and stimulating
force in beauty is hardly touched at all.
Bad art of any kind is bad anywhere, but in any type of educational
institution, from the kindergarten to the post graduate college, it is
worse and less excusable than it is elsewhere, unless it be in
association with religion, while the absence of beauty at the
instigation of parsimony or efficiency is just as bad. I am firmly
persuaded that we need, not more courses of study but more beautiful
environment for scholars under instruction.
I have touched cursorily on certain elements in education which need
either a new emphasis or an altogether new interpretation; religion,
history, art, but this does not mean that the same treatment should not
be accorded elsewhere. There are certain studies that should be revived,
such as formal logic, there are others that need immediate and complete
restoration, as Latin for example, there are many, chiefly along
scientific and vocational lines, that could well be minimized, or in
some cases dispensed with altogether: one might go on indefinitely on
this line, however, weighing and testing studies in relation to their
character-value, but certainly enough has already been said to indicate
the point of view I would urge for consideration. Before I close,
however, I want to touch on two points that arise in connection with
college education, if, even for the sake of argument, we admit that the
primary object of all formal education is the "education" of the
character-capacity in each individual.
Of these two, the first has to do with the college curriculum, but I
need to devote little time to this for the principle has already been
developed and applied in a singularly stimulating and lucid book called
"The Liberal College," by President Meiklejohn of Amherst, to which I
beg to refer you. The scheme is a remarkable blending of the prescribed
and the elective systems, and provides for the freshman year five
compulsory studies, viz.: Social and Economic Institutions, Mathematics
and Formal Logic, Science, English and Foreign Languages; for the
sophomore year European History, Philosophy, Science, Literature, and
one elective; for the junior year American History, History of Thought
and two electives, and for the senior year one required study,
Intellectual and Moral Problems, and one elective, the latter, which
takes two-thirds of the student's time, must be a continuation of one of
the four subjects included in the junior year. It seems to me that this
is a singularly wise programme, since it not only determines the few
studies which are fundamental, and imposes them on the student in
diminishing number as he advances in his work, but it also provides for
that freedom of choice which permits any student to find out and
continue the particular line along which his inclinations lead him to
travel, until his senior year is chiefly given over to the fullest
possible development of the special subject. The fad for free electives
all along the line was one of those curious phenomena, both humorous and
tragic, that grew out of the evolutionary philosophy and the empirical
democracy of the nineteenth century, and it wrought disaster, while the
ironclad curriculum that preceded it was almost as bad along an opposite
line. This project of Dr. Meiklejohn's seems to me to recognize life as
a force and to base itself on this sure foundation instead of on the
shifting sands of doctrinaire theory, and if this is so then it is
right.
For after all there is such a thing as life, and it is more potent than
theory as it also has a way of disregarding or even smashing the
machine. It is this force of life that should be more regarded in
education, and more relied upon. It is the living in a school or a
college that counts more than a curriculum; the association with others,
students and teachers, the communal life, the common adventures and
scrapes, the common sports, yes, and as it will be sometime, the common
worship. It is through these that life works and character develops, and
to this development and instigation of life the school and college
should work more assiduously, minimizing for the moment the problems of
curricula and pedagogic methods. If I am right in this there is no place
for the "correspondence school," while the college or university that
numbers its students by thousands becomes at least of doubtful value,
and perhaps impossible. In any case it seems to me self-evident that a
college, whatever its numbers, must have, as its primal and essential
units, self-contained groups of not more than 150 students segregated in
their own residential quad, with its common-room, refectory and chapel,
and with a certain number of faculty members in residence, the whole
being united under one "head." There may be perhaps no reason why,
granting this unit system, these should not be multiplied in number
until the whole student body is as great as that of a western state
university today, but to me the idea is abhorrent of an "university"
with five or ten thousand students all jostling together In one inchoate
mass, eating in numerical mobs, assembling in social "unions" as large
as a metropolitan hotel and almost as homelike, or taking refuge for
safety from mere numbers in clubs, fraternities and secret societies. A
college such as this is a mob, not an organism, and as a mob it ought to
be put down.
I said at the outset of this lecture that we could not lay the present
failure of civilization to the doors of education, however great its
shortcomings, for the causes lay deeper than this. I maintain that this
is true; and yet formal education can not escape scatheless, for it has
failed to admit this decline while acknowledging the claim set up for it
that it could and would achieve this end. Certainly it will incur a
heavy responsibility if it does not at once recognize the fact that
while it can not do the half that has been claimed for it, it can do far
more than it is doing now, and that in a very large degree the future
does depend for its honour or its degradation on the part formal
education is to perform at the present crisis. To do this it must
execute a _volte face_ and confess that it can only develop inherent
potential, not create capacity, and that the primary object of its
activities must be not the stall-feeding of intellect and the practical
preparation for a business career, but the fostering and the building up
of the personal character that denotes the Christian gentleman. I do not
think that I can do better for a conclusion than to quote from the
"Philosophy of Education" by the late Dr. Thomas Edward Shields.
"The unchanging aim of Christian education is, and always has been, to
put the pupil into possession of a body of truth derived from nature and
from Divine Revelation, from the concrete work of man's hand and from
the content of human speech, in order to bring his conduct into
conformity with Christian ideals and with the standards of the
civilization of his day.
"Christian education, therefore, aims at transforming native instincts
while preserving and enlarging their powers. It aims at bringing the
flesh under the control of the spirit. It draws upon the experience and
the wisdom of the race, upon Divine Revelation and upon the power of
Divine grace, in order that it may bring the conduct of the individual
into conformity with Christian ideals and with the standards of the
civilization of the day. It aims at the development of the whole man, at
the preservation of unity and continuity in his conscious life; it aims
at transforming man's native egotism to altruism; at developing the
social side of his nature to such an extent that he may regard all men
as his brothers; sharing with them the common Fatherhood of God. In one
word, it aims at transforming a child of the flesh into a child of God."
VII
THE PROBLEM OF ORGANIC RELIGION
If philosophy is "the science of the totality of things," and "they are
called wise who put things in their right order and control them well,"
then it is religion, above all other factors and potencies, that enters
in to reveal the right relationships and standards of value, and to
contribute the redemptive and energizing force that makes possible the
adequate control which is the second factor in the conduct of the man
that is "called wise." Philosophy and religion are not to be confounded;
religion is sufficient in itself and develops its own philosophy, but
the latter is not sufficient in itself, and when it assumes the
functions and prerogatives of religion, it brings disaster.
Religion is the force that relates action to life. Of course it has
other aspects, higher in essence and more impalpable in quality, but it
is this first aspect I shall deal with, because I am not now speaking of
religion as a purely spiritual power but only of its quality as the
great coordinator of human action, the power that establishes a right
ratio of values and gives the capacity for right control. Whether we
accept the religion of the Middle Ages or not; whether we look on the
period as one of high and edifying Christian civilization, or as a time
of ignorance and superstition, we are bound to admit that society in its
physical, intellectual and spiritual aspects was highly organized, and
coordinated after a most masterly fashion. It was more nearly an unit,
functioning lucidly and consistently, than anything the world has known
since the Roman Empire. Whatever its defects, lack of coherency was not
one of them. Life was not divided into water-tight compartments, but
moved on as a consistent whole. Failures were constant, for the world
even then was made up of men, but the ideal was perfectly clear-cut, the
principles exactly seen and explicitly formulated; life was organic,
consistent, highly articulated, and withal as full of the passion of
aspiration towards an ultimate ideal as was the Gothic cathedral which
is its perfect exemplar.
The reason for this coherency and consistency was the universal
recognition and acceptance of religion as the one energizing and
standardizing force in life, the particular kind of religion that then
prevailed, and the organic power which this religion had established;
that is to say, the Church as an operative institution. So long as this
condition obtained, which was, roughly speaking, for three hundred
years, from the "Truce of God" in 1041 to the beginning of the
"Babylonian Captivity" of the Papacy at Avignon in 1309, there was
substantial unity in life, but as soon as it was shaken, this unity
began to break up into a diversity that accomplished a condition of
chaos, at and around the opening of the sixteenth century, which only
yielded to the absolutism of the Renaissance, destined in its turn to
break up into a second condition of chaos under the influence of
industrialism, Puritanism and revolution.
Since the accomplishment of the Reformation, this function of religion
has never been restored to society in any degree comparable with that
which it maintained during the Middle Ages. The Counter-Reformation
preserved the institution itself in the Mediterranean lands, but it did
not restore its old spiritual power in its entirety. Amongst the peoples
that accepted the Reformation the new religion assumed for a time the
authority of the old, but the centrifugal force inherent in its nature
soon split the reformed churches into myriad fragments, so destroying
their power of action, while the abandonment of the sacramental system
progressively weakened their dynamic force. As it had from the first
compounded, under compulsion, with absolutism and tyranny, so in the end
it compromised with the cruelty, selfishness, injustice and avarice of
industrialism, and when finally this achieved world supremacy, and
physical science, materialistic philosophy and social revolution entered
the field as co-combatants, it no longer possessed a sufficient original
power either of resistance or of re-creative energy.
Religion is in itself not the reaction of the human mind, under process
of evolution, to certain physical stimuli of experience and phenomena,
it is supernatural in that its source is outside nature; it is a
manifestation of the grace of God, and as such it cannot be brought into
existence by any conscious action of man or by any of his works. On the
other hand, it can be fostered and preserved, or debilitated and
dispersed, by these human acts and institutions, and in the same way man
himself may be made more receptive to this divine grace, or turned
against it, by the same agencies, the teachings of Dr. John Calvin to
the contrary notwithstanding. This is part of the Catholic doctrine of
free-will as opposed to the sixteenth-century dogma of predestination
which, distorted and degraded from the doctrine of St. Paul and St.
Augustine, played so large a part in that transformation of the
Christian religion from which we have suffered ever since. God offers
the free gift of religion and of faith to every child of man, but the
recipient must cooperate if the gift is to be accepted. The Church, that
is to say, the supernatural organism that is given material form in time
and space and operates through human agencies, is for this reason
subject to great vicissitudes, now rising to the highest level of
righteousness and power, now sinking into depths of unrighteousness and
impotence. Nothing, however, can affect the validity and the potency of
its supernatural content and its supernatural channels of grace. These
remain unaffected, whether the human organism is exalted or debased. The
sacraments and devotions and practices of worship, are in themselves as
potent if a Borgia sits in the chair of St. Peter as they are if a
Hildebrand, and Innocent III or a Leo XIII is the occupant; nevertheless
every weakening or degradation of the visible organism affects, and
inevitably, the attitude of men towards the thing itself, and when this
declension sets in and continues unchecked, the result is, first, a
falling away and a discrediting of religion that sometimes results in
general abandonment, and second--and after a time--a new outpouring of
spiritual power that results in complete regeneration. The Church, in
its human manifestation, is as subject to the rhythmical rise and fall
of the currents of life as is the social organism or man himself,
therefore it is not to be expected that it will pursue a course of even
exaltation, or maintain a status that is impeccable.
Now the working out of this law had issue in a great decline that began
with the Exile at Avignon and was not terminated until the Council of
Trent. In the depth of this catastrophe came the natural and righteous
revolt against the manifold and intolerable abuses, but, like all
reforming movements that take on a revolutionary character, reform and
regeneration were soon forgotten in the unleashed passion for
destruction and innovation, while the new doctrines of emancipation from
authority, and the right of private judgment in religious matters, were
seized upon by sovereigns chafing under ecclesiastical control, as a
providential means of effecting and establishing their own independence,
and so given an importance, and an ultimate victory that, in and by
themselves, they could hardly have achieved. In the end it was the
secular and autocratic state that reaped the victory, not the reformed
religion, which was first used as a tool and then abandoned to its
inevitable break-up into numberless antagonistic sects, some of them
retaining a measure of the old faith and polity, others representing all
the illiteracy and uncouthness and fanaticism of the new racial and
social factors as these emerged at long last from the submergence and
the oppression that had been their fate with the dissolution of
Mediaevalism.
Meanwhile the Roman Church which stood rigidly for historic Christianity
and had been preserved by the Counter-Reformation to the Mediterranean
states, continued bound to the autocratic and highly centralized
administrative system that had become universal among secular powers
during the decadence of Mediaevalism, and from which it had taken its
colour, and it kept even pace for the future with the progressive
intensification of this absolutism. This was natural, though in many
respects deplorable, and it can be safely said that adverse criticism of
the Catholic Church today is based only on qualities it acquired during
the period of Renaissance autocracy and revived paganism; qualities that
do not affect its essential integrity or authority but do misrepresent
it before men, and work as a handicap in its adaptability and in its
work of winning souls to Christianity and re-establishing the unity of
Christendom. Fortunately this very immobility has saved it from a
surrender to the new forces that were developed in secular society
during the last two centuries, as it did yield to the compulsion of
those that were let loose in the two that preceded them. It has never
subjected questions of faith and morals to popular vote nor has it
determined discipline by parliamentary practice under a well developed
party system, therefore it has preserved its unity, its integrity and
its just standard of comparative values. On the other hand, it has held
so stubbornly to some of the ill ways of Renaissance centralization,
which are in no sense consonant with its character, that it has failed
to retard the constant movement of society away from a life wherein
religion was the dominating and coordinating force, while at the present
crisis it is as yet hardly more able than a divisive Protestantism to
offer the regenerative energy that a desperate case demands.
I do not know whether secular society is responsible for the decadence
of religion, or the decadence of religion is responsible for the failure
of secular society, nor does it particularly matter. What I am concerned
with is a condition amounting to almost complete severance between the
two, and how we may "knit up this ravelled sleeve" of life so that once
more we may have an wholesome unity in place of the present disunity;
for until this is accomplished, until once more religion enters into the
very marrow of social being, enters with all its powers of judgment and
determination and co-ordination and creative energy, just so long shall
we seek in vain for our way out into the Great Peace of righteous and
consistent living.
Of course there is only one sure way, one method by which this, and all
our manifold difficulties, can be resolved, and that is through the
achieved enlightenment of the individual. As I have insisted in each of
these lectures, salvation is not through machinery but through the
individual soul, for it is life itself that is operating, not the
instruments that man devises in his ingenuity. Yet the mechanism is of
great value for even itself may give aid and stimulus in the personal
regenerative process, or, on the contrary, it may deter this by the
confusing and misleading influences it creates. Therefore we are bound
to regard material reforms, and of these, as they suggest themselves in
the field of organized religion, I propose to speak.
No one will deny the progressive alienation of life from religion that
has developed since the Reformation and has now reached a point of
almost complete severance. Religion, once a public preoccupation, has
now withdrawn to the fastnesses of the individual soul, when it has not
vanished altogether, as it has in the case of the majority of citizens
of this Republic in so far as definite faith, explicit belief,
application, practice and action are concerned. In the hermitage that
some still make within themselves, religion still lives on as ardent and
as potent and as regenerative as before, but in general, if we are to
judge from the conduct of recent life, it is held, when it is accepted
at all, with a certain formality, and is neither cherished with
conviction nor allowed to interfere with the everyday life of the
practical man. As a great English statesman remarked in the last
century, "No one has a higher regard for religion than I, but when it
comes to intruding it into public affairs, well, really--!"
The situation is one not unnaturally to be anticipated, for the whole
course of religious, secular and sociological development during the
last few centuries has been such as to make any other result improbable.
I already have tried to show what seem to me the destructive factors,
secularly and sociologically. As for the factors in religious
development that have worked towards the same end, they are, first, the
shattering of the unity of Christendom, with the denial by those of the
reformed religions of the existence of a Church, one, visible and
Catholic and infallible in matters of faith and morals; second, the
denial of sacramental philosophy and abandonment of the sacraments (or
all but one, or at most two of them) as instruments of Divine Grace;
third, the surrender of the various religious organisms to the
compulsion of the materialistic, worldly and opportunist factors in the
secular life of modernism. The truths corresponding to these three
errors are, Unity, Sacramentalism and Unworldliness. Until these three
things are won back, Christianity will fail of its full mission, society
will continue aimless, uncoördinate and on the verge of disaster, life
itself will lack the meaning and the reality that give both joy in the
living and victory in achievement, while the individual man will be
gravely handicapped in the process of personal regeneration.
It is not my purpose to frame a general indictment against persons and
movements, but rather to suggest certain ways and means of possible
recovery, and in general I shall try to confine myself to that form of
organized religion to which I personally adhere, that is to say, the
Anglican or Episcopal Church, partly because of my better knowledge of
its conditions, and partly because whatever is said may in most cases be
equally well applied to the Protestant denominations.
_The unity of the Church._ It is no longer necessary to demonstrate this
fundamental necessity. The old days of the nineteenth century are gone,
those days when honest men vociferously acclaimed as honourable and
glorious "the dissidence of dissent and the protestantism of the
Protestant religion." Everyone knows now, everyone, that is, that
accepts Christianity, that disunion is disgrace if not a very palpable
sin. The desire for a restored unity is almost universal, but every
effort in this direction, whatever its source, meets with failure, and
the reason would appear to be that the approach is made from the wrong
direction. In every case the individual is left alone, his personal
beliefs and practices are, he is assured, jealously guarded; all that is
asked is that some mechanical amalgamation, some official approximation
shall be effected.
Free interchange of pulpits, a system of reciprocal re-ordination, a
"merger" of church property and parsons, an "irreducible minimum" of
credal insistencies these, and others even more ingeniously
compromising, are the well-meaning schemes that are put forward, and in
the process one point after another is surrendered, as a _quid pro quo_
for the formal and technical capitulation of some other religious group.