younger generation, as I have said, has an impediment of speech. It is
not glib nor explanatory.... One of the happiest things that has ever
befallen me is the spirit of the Chapel. It happened that The Abbot
brought in a bit of work that repeated a rather tiresome kind of
mis-technicality--an error, I had pointed out to him before. I took him
to task--lit into him with some force upon his particular needs of
_staying down_ a little each day--or the world would never hear his
voice.... In the silence I found that the pain was no more his than the
others in the room--that they were all sustaining him, their hearts like
a hammock for him, their minds in a tensity for me to stop.... I did.
The fact is, I choked at the discovery.... They were very far from any
competitive ideal. They were one--and there's something immortal about
that. It gave me the glimpse of what the world will some time be. There
is nothing that so thrills as the many made one.... Power bulks even
from this little group; the sense of self flees away; the glow suffuses
all things--and we rise together--a gold light in the room that will
come to all the world.
It is worth dwelling upon--this spirit of the Chapel.... The war has
since come to the world, and many who are already toiling for the
reconstruction write to the Study from time to time--from different
parts of the world. I read the class a letter recently from a young
woman in England. It was like the cry of a soul, and as I looked up from
the paper, a glow was upon their faces. A group of workers in the
Western coast send us their letters and actions from time to time, and
another group from Washington. All these are placed before the Chapel
kindred for inspiration and aliment.
"As this is the time for you to be here," I said one day, "the time
shall come for you to go forth. All that you are bringing to yourselves
from these days must be tried out in the larger fields of the world. You
will meet the world in your periods of maturity and genius--at the time
of the world's greatest need. That is a clue to the splendid quality of
the elect of the generation to which you belong. You are watching the
end of the bleakest and most terrible age--the breaking down at last of
an iron age. It has shattered into the terrible disorder of continental
battlefields. But you belong to the builders, whose names will be called
afterward."
... I have come to the Chapel torn and troubled; and the spirit of it
has calmed and restored me. They are so ready; they listen and give....
We watch the world tearing down--from this quietude. We have no country
but God's country. Though we live in the midst of partisanship and
madness, we turn our eyes ahead and build our thoughts upon the New
Age--just children.
... For almost a year I had been preparing a large rose-bed--draining,
under-developing the clay, softening the humus. The bed must be
developed first. The world is interested only in the bloom, in the
fruit, but the florists talk together upon their work before the plants
are set. The roses answered--almost wonderfully. They brought me the old
romance of France and memories of the Ireland that has vanished. This
point was touched upon in the Foreword--how in the joy of the roses that
answered months after the labour was forgotten, it suddenly occurred
what a marvel is the culture of the human soul.
The preparation of the mind is paramount. Not a touch of care or a drop
of richness is lost; not an ideal fails. These young minds bring me the
thoughts I have forgotten--fruited thoughts from their own boughs. They
are but awakened. They are not different from other children. Again and
again it has come to me from the wonderful unfoldings under my eyes,
that for centuries the world has been maiming its children--that only
those who were wonderfully strong could escape, and become articulate as
men.
Again, the splendid fact is that children change. You touch their minds
and they are not the same the next day.
... I do not see how preachers talk Sunday after Sunday to
congregations, which, though edified, return to their same little
questionable ways. There are people in the cults who come to teachers
and leaders to be ignited. They swim away with the new message; they
love it and are lifted, but it subsides within them. In their depression
and darkness they seek the outer ignition again. We must be
self-starters.... I once had a class of men and women in the city. We
met weekly and some of the evenings were full of delight and aspiration.
For two winter seasons we carried on the work. After a long summer we
met together and even in the joy of reunion, I found many caught in
their different conventions--world ways, the obvious and the temporal,
as if we had never breathed the open together. It was one of the great
lessons to me--to deal with the younger generation. I sometimes think
the younger the better. I have recalled again and again the significance
of the Catholic priests' saying--"Give us your child until he is seven
only----"
In one year I have been so accustomed to see young people change--to
watch the expression of their splendid inimitable selves, that it comes
like a grim horror how the myriads of children are literally sealed in
the world.
We believe that God is in everything; that we would be fools, or at best
innocuous angels if there were not evil in the world for us to be ground
upon and master. We are held and refined between the two
attractions--one of the earth and the other a spiritual uplift. We
believe that the sense of Unity is the first deep breath of the soul,
the precursor of illumination; that the great Brotherhood conception
must come from this sense. Next to this realisation, we believe that
man's idea of time is an illusion, that immortality is here and now;
that nothing can happen to us that is not the right good thing; that the
farther and faster we go, the more beautiful and subtle is the system of
tests which are played upon us; that our first business in life is to
reconcile these tests to our days and hours, to understand and regard
them from the standpoint of an unbroken life, not as a three-score-and-ten
adventure here. You would think these things hard to understand--they
are not. The littlest ones have it--the two small boys of seven and nine,
who have not regularly entered the Chapel.
* * * * *
The little girl brought us some of these thoughts in her own way, and
without title:
The soul is very old. It has much to say, if one learns to
listen. If one makes his body fine, he can listen better. And
if one's body is fine from the beginning, it is because he
has learned to listen before. All that we have learned in
past ages is coiled within. The good a man does is all kept
in the soul, and all his lessons. The little fairy people
that played around him and told him queer things when he was
first a rock, then flowers and trees, are still printed in
his soul. The difficult thing is to bring them out into the
world, to tell them. By listening, in time, the soul's
wonderful old voice will tell us all things, so that we can
write and tell about them. Every thought we try so hard to
get, is there. It is like losing track of a thimble. If you
know it is somewhere and you need it badly enough, you will
find it.
The brain cannot get for us a mighty thought. The brain can
only translate soul-talk into words. It was not the _brain_
which told Fichte, a long, long time ago, that Germany was
going wrong and that _he_ should fix it by telling them the
right way to go; but it was the brain that told the people
not to listen to him, but to go on just as they had been.
It is always the brain that makes one add columns correctly,
and learn the number tables and how to spell words. But these
will come themselves, without a life spent studying them.
After a life of this kind, the soul is not a bit farther
ahead than it was when coming into the world in the body of a
baby.
The brain will also show one the way to make money, perhaps
lots of it, the most terrible thing that can happen to you,
unless, as Whitman says, "you shall scatter with lavish hand
all that you earn or achieve."
15
A MAN'S OWN
The first and general objection to the plan made much of here, that of
educating young minds in small classes with a design toward promoting
the individual expression, is that the millions of our rising race could
not be handled so; in fact, that it is a physical and economic
impossibility.
The second objection is that I have in a sense called my own to me; that
the great mass of children could not be ignited except by an orderly and
imperceptible process, either from within or without. In fact, it has
been said repeatedly that I deal with extraordinary soil. I wish to
place the situation here even more intimately, in order to cover these
and other objections, for I believe they are to be covered in this book.
... In the last days of the building here, when the fireplace of the
study was the only thing we had in the way of a kitchen-range, when the
places of books became repositories for dishes, and the desk a
dining-table--the little afternoon Chapel was of course out of the
question for some weeks.... I used to see The Abbot (longer-legged each
week) making wide circles against the horizon, his head turned this way,
like a bird's in flight. And The Valley-Road Girl, whom I met rarely,
shook her head at me once, though I had to look close to catch it. The
little girl declared, with a heartbroken look, that the Chapel would
never be the same again after cabbage had been cooked there.
"But it was a wonderful young cabbage from the garden," I said. "And
then the Chapel cannot be hurt by being so differently valuable just
now. It is seeing us through these hard days."
But _I_ missed something through these days; the fact of the matter is,
my thoughts were not so buoyant as usual through the last half of the
days, nor nearly so decent. Something I missed deeply, and moved about
as one does trying to recall a fine dream. The little group had given me
a joy each day that I hadn't realised adequately. That was the secret. I
had been refreshed daily as a workman; learned each day things that I
didn't know; and because of these hours, I had expressed better in the
writing part of the life, the things I did know. Certainly they taught
me the needs of saying exactly what I meant. All of which to suggest
again that teaching is a mutual service. Just here I want to reprint the
first and last thought, so far as I see it, as regards the first
objection: These paragraphs are taken from a former essay on Work,
published in the book called _Midstream_.
"Work and life to me mean the same thing. Through work in my case, a
transfer of consciousness was finally made from animalism to a certain
manhood. This is the most important transaction in the world. Our
hereditary foes are the priests and formalists who continue to separate
a man's work from his religion. A working idea of God comes to the man
who has found his work--and the splendid discovery invariably follows,
that his work is the best expression of God. All education that does not
first aim to find the student's life-work is vain, often demoralising;
because, if the student's individual force is little developed, he sinks
deeper into the herd, under the levelling of the class-room.
"There are no men or women alive, of too deep visioning, nor of too
lustrous a humanity, for the task of showing boys and girls their work.
No other art answers so beautifully. This is the intensive cultivation
of the human spirit. This is world-parenthood, the divine profession.
"_I would have my country call upon every man who shows vision and
fineness in any work, to serve for an hour or two each day, among the
schools of his neighbourhood, telling the children the mysteries of his
daily task--and watching for his own among them._
"All restlessness, all misery, all crime, is the result of the betrayal
of one's inner life. One's work is not being done. You would not see the
hordes rushing to pluck fruits from a wheel, nor this national madness
for buying cheap and selling dear--if as a race we were lifted into our
own work.
"The value of each man is that he has no duplicate. The development of
his particular effectiveness on the constructive side is the one
important thing for him to begin. A man is at his best when he is at his
work; his soul breathes then, if it breathes at all. Of course, the
lower the evolution of a man, the harder it is to find a task for him to
distinguish; but here is the opportunity for all of us to be more eager
and tender.
"When I wrote to Washington asking how to plant asparagus, and found the
answer; when I asked about field-stones and had the output of the
Smithsonian Institute turned over to me, my throat choked; something
sang all around; the years I had hated put on strange brightenings. I
had written Home for guidance. Our national Father had answered. Full,
eager and honest, the answer came--the work of specialists which had
moved on silently for years. I saw the brotherhood of the race in
that--for that can only come to be in a Fatherland.
"Give a man his work and you may watch at your leisure, the clean-up of
his morals and manners. Those who are best loved by the angels, receive
not thrones, but a task. I would rather have the curse of Cain, than the
temperament to choose a work because it is easy.
"Real work becomes easy only when the man has perfected his instrument,
the body and brain. Because this instrument is temporal, it has a height
and limitation to reach. There is a year in which the sutures close.
That man is a master, who has fulfilled his possibilities--whether
tile-trencher, stone-mason, writer, or a carpenter hammering his periods
with nails. Real manhood makes lowly gifts significant; the work of such
a man softens and finishes him, renders him plastic to finer forces.
"No good work is easy. The apprenticeship, the refinement of body and
brain, is a novitiate for the higher life, for the purer
receptivity--and this is a time of strain and fatigue, with breaks here
and there in the cohering line.
"... The best period of a man's life; days of safety and content; long
hours in the pure trance of work; ambition has ceased to burn, doubt is
ended, the finished forces turn _outward_ in service. According to the
measure of the giving is the replenishment in vitality. The pure trance
of work, the different reservoirs of power opening so softly; the
instrument in pure listening--long forenoons passing, without a single
instant of self-consciousness, desire, enviousness, without even
awareness of the body....
"Every law that makes for man's finer workmanship makes for his higher
life. The mastery of self prepares man to make his answer to the world
for his being. The man who has mastered himself is one with all. Castor
and Pollux tell him immortal love stories; all is marvellous and lovely
from the plant to the planet, because man is a lover, when he has
mastered himself. All the folded treasures and open highways of the
mind, its multitude of experiences and unreckonable possessions--are
given over to the creative and universal force--the same force that is
lustrous in the lily, incandescent in the suns, memorable in human
heroism, immortal in man's love for his fellow man.
"This giving force alone holds the workman true through his task. He,
first of all, feels the uplift; he, first of all, is cleansed by the
power of the superb life-force passing through him.... This is rhythm;
this is the cohering line; this is being the One. But there are no two
instruments alike, since we have come up by different roads from the
rock; and though we achieve the very sanctity of self-command, our
inimitable hallmark is wrought in the fabric of our task."
* * * * *
Guiding one's own for an hour or two each day is not a thing to do for
money. The more valuable a man's time (if his payment in the world's
standards happens to be commensurate with his skill) the more valuable
he will be to his little group. He will find himself a better workman
for expressing himself to his own, giving the fruits of his life to
others. He will touch immortal truths before he has gone very far, and
Light comes to the life that contacts such fine things. He will see the
big moments of his life in a way that he did not formerly understand.
Faltering will more and more leave his expression, and the cohering line
of his life will become more clearly established.
_A man's own are those who are awaiting the same call that he has
already answered._ Browning stood amazed before a man who had met
Shelley and was not different afterward--a man who could idly announce
that he had met the poet Shelley and not accept it as the big event of a
period. Browning described his dismay at the other in the story of
finding the eagle feather. He did not know the name of the moor; perhaps
men had made much of it; perhaps significant matters of history had been
enacted on that moor, but they were nothing to the mystic. One square of
earth there, the size of a human hand, was sacred to him, because it was
just on that spot that he found an eagle's feather.
I stood waist-high to Conan Doyle years ago--was speechless and outraged
that groups of people who had listened to him speak, could gather about
afterward, talk and laugh familiarly, beg his autograph.... Had he
spoken a word or a sentence to me, it would not have been writ in
water.... There is no hate nor any love like that which the men who are
called to the same task have for each other. The masters of the crafts
know each other; the mystics of the arts know each other.
The preparation for the tasks of the world is potential in the breasts
of the children behind us. For each there is a magic key; and that man
holds it who has covered the journey, or part of it, which the soul of a
child perceives it must set out upon soon. The presence of a good
workman will awaken the potential proclivity of the child's nature, as
no other presence can do. Every autobiography tells the same story--of a
certain wonder-moment of youth, when the ideal appeared, and all
energies were turned thereafter to something concrete which that ideal
signified. Mostly the "great man" did not know what he had done for the
boy.... I would have the great man know. I would have him seek to
perform this miracle every day.
There's always a hush in the room when some one comes to me saying,
"There is a young man who dreams of writing. He is very strange. He does
not speak about it. He is afraid to show what he has done. I wanted to
bring him to you--but he would not come. I think he did not dare."
Formerly I would say, "Bring him over some time," but that seldom
brought the thing about. A man should say, "_Lead me to him now_!..."
Those who want to write for money and for the movies come. They put
stamps upon letters they write. God knows they are not ashamed to come
and ask for help, and explain their symptoms of yearning and show their
structure of desire.... The one who dares not come; who dares not mail
the letter he has written to you, who is speechless if you seek him out,
full of terror and torture before you--take him to your breast for he is
your own. Children you have fathered may not be so truly yours as he....
Do you want a slave, a worshipper--seek out your own. You want nothing
of the sort, but you alone can free the slave, you alone can liberate
his worship to the task. He can learn from you in a week what it would
take years of misery in the world to teach him. You have done in a way
the thing he wants to do--that's the whole magic. You have fitted
somehow to action the dream that already tortures his heart. There is
nothing so pure as work in the world. There is something sacred about a
man's work that is not elsewhere in matter. Teaching is a mutual
service.... It is not that you want his reverence, but because he has
reverence, he is potentially great.
The ignition of one youth, the finding of his work for one youth, is a
worthy life task. The same possibility of service holds true for all
kinds of workmen; these things are not alone for the artists and the
craftsmen and the professions. There is one boy to linger about the
forge of an artisan, after the others have gone. I would have the
artisan forget the thing he is doing, to look into the eyes of that
boy--and the chemist, the electrician, the florist.
It is true that the expression called for here is mainly through written
words, but that is only our particularity. It need not be so.... The
work here would not do for all.... A young woman came and sat with us
for several days. She was so still that I did not know what was
happening in her mind. My experience with the others had prevailed to
make me go slowly, and not to judge. We all liked her, all learned to be
glad that she had come. I asked no expression from her for several days.
When I finally suggested something of the kind, I felt the sudden terror
in the room. Her expression came in a very brief form, and it showed me
the bewilderment with which she had encountered the new points of view
in the Chapel. I learned afresh that one must not hurry; that my first
work was to put to rest her fears of being called upon. I impressed upon
the class the next day that we have all the time there is; that we want
nothing; that our work is to establish in due time the natural
expressions of our faculties. To the young woman in particular, I said
that when she felt like it she could write again.
Presently there was a day's absence and another. I sent the little girl
to see if she were ill. The little girl was gone the full afternoon. All
I ever got from that afternoon was this sentence:
"... She is going to be a nurse."
I have wondered many times if she would have become a nurse had I
allowed her to sit unexpressed for a month instead of a week; permitting
her surely to find her ease and understanding of us.... Still we must
have nurses.
* * * * *
... And then the Columbia young man--a big fellow and a soul. I had
talked to him for many nights in an Upper Room class in the city. He
took a cottage here through part of the first summer, before the Chapel
began; then, through the months of Chapel and story work in the evening,
I had good opportunity to become acquainted with the processes of his
mind and heart. Of the last, I have nothing but admiration; invincible
integrity, a natural kindness, a large equipment after the manner of the
world's bestowal--but Inertia.
Now Inertia is the first enemy of the soul. It is caused by pounds. I do
not mean that because a body is big, or even because a body is fat, that
it is of necessity an impossible medium for the expression of the
valuable inner life. There have been great fat men whose spiritual
energy came forth to intensify the vibrations of the race, to say
nothing of their own poundage. It is less a matter of weight after all
than texture; still their fat was a handicap.
These facts are indubitable: Sensuousness makes weight in bulls and men;
all the habits that tend to put on flesh tend to stifle the expression
of the inner life. All the habits which tend to express the human spirit
bring about a refinement of the body. More spiritual energy is required
to express itself through one hundred and ninety pounds than through one
hundred and forty pounds. Accordingly as we progress in the expression
of the spiritual life, the refinement of our bodies takes place. As a
whole, the great servers of men carry little excess tissue; as a whole
in every fabrication of man and nature--the finer the work, the finer
the instrument.
The body is continually levitated through spiritual expression and
continually the more responsive to gravitation by sensuous expression.
The exquisite blending of maiden pink and sunlight gold that is brought
forth in the Clovelly tea-rose could not be produced upon the petals of
a dahlia or a morning-glory. That ineffable hue is not a matter of
pigment alone; it can only be painted upon a surface fine enough. The
texture of the tea-rose petals had to be evolved to receive it.... You
must have gold or platinum points for the finest work; the brighter the
light the finer the carbon demanded. It is so with our bodies. We live
either for appetites or aspirations. The flood of outgoing human spirit,
in its passionate gifts to men, incorporates its living light within the
cells of our voice-cords and brain and hands. With every thought and
emotion we give ourselves to the earth or give ourselves to the sky.
The soul is not inert; its instrument, the body, is so, by its very
nature, formed of matter. The earth has required the quickening of
countless ages to produce the form that we see--the gracious beauties of
the older trees, the contour of cliffs. The very stem and leaf of a
Clovelly rose is beautiful.