in the form of government is no guarantee against abuse, tyranny,
cruelty, and greed. The old sufferings, the old passions are in full
blast among us. What, then, are the advantages of self-government? The
chief advantage is that self-government enables a man in his youth,
in his own town, within the radius of his first public interests, to
fight the important battle of his life while his powers are at their
strongest, and the powers of oppression are at their weakest. If a man
acquires the power of speech here, if he says what he means now, if
he makes his point and dominates his surroundings at once, his voice
will, as a matter of fact, be heard instantly in a very wide radius.
And so he walks up into a new sphere and begins to accomplish greater
things. He does this through the very force of his insistence on the
importance of small things. The reason for his graduation is not far
to seek. A man cannot reach the hearts of his townsfolks, without
using the whole apparatus of the world of thought. He cannot tell
or act the truth in his own town without enlisting every power for
truth, and setting in vibration the cords that knit that town into the
world’s history. He is forced to find and strike the same note which
he would use on some great occasion when speaking for all mankind. A
man who has won a town-fight is a veteran, and our country to-day is
full of these young men. To-morrow their force will show in national
politics, and in that moment the fate of the Malay, the food of the
Russian prisoner, the civilization of South Africa, and the future of
Japan will be seen to have been in issue. These world problems are now
being settled in the contest over the town-pump in a western village. I
think it likely that the next thirty years will reveal the recuperative
power of American institutions. One of you young men may easily become
a reform President, and be carried into office and held in office by
the force of that private opinion which is now being sown broadcast
throughout the country by just such men as yourselves. You will concede
the utility of such a President. Yet it would not be the man but the
masses behind him that did his work.
Democracy thus lets character loose upon society and shows us that in
the realm of natural law there is nothing either small or great: and
this is the chief value of democracy. In America the young man meets
the struggle between good and evil in the easiest form in which it was
ever laid before men. The cruelties of interest and of custom have
with us no artificial assistance from caste, creed, race prejudice.
Our frame of government is drawn in close accordance with the laws of
nature. By our documents we are dedicated to mankind; and hence it is
that we can so easily feel the pulse of the world and lay our hand on
the living organism of humanity.
THE DOCTRINE OF NON-RESISTANCE.[D]
[D] This was an address which I delivered before the International
Metaphysical League eight or nine years ago.
A dogma is a phrase that condenses much thought. It is a short way of
stating a great truth, and is supposed to recall that truth to the
mind. Like a talisman it is to be repeated. Open sesame--and some great
mystery of life is unlocked.
A dogma is like a key to a map, a thread to a labyrinth. It is all that
some man has brought back from a spiritual exaltation in which he has
had a vision of how the world is made; and he repeats it and teaches
it as a digest of his vision, a short and handy summary and elixir by
which he, and as he thinks anyone else, can go back into his exaltation
and see the truth. To him the words seem universally true--true at
all times and in any aspect. Indeed, all experience, all thought, all
conduct seem to him to be made up of mere illustrations, proofs, and
reminiscences of the dogma.
It is probable that all the dogmas were originally shots at the same
truth, nets cast over the same truth, digests of the same vision.
There is no other way of accounting for their power. If the doctrine of
the Trinity signified no more than what I can see in it, it would never
have been regarded as important. Unless the words “Salvation by Grace”
had at one time stood for the most powerful conviction of the most
holy minds, we should never have heard the phrase. Our nearest way to
come at the meaning of such things is to guess that the dogmas are the
dress our own thought might have worn, had we lived in times when they
arose. We must translate our best selves back into the past in order to
understand the phrases.
Of course, these dogmas, like our own dogmas, are no sooner uttered
than they change. Somebody traduces them, or expounds them, or founds
a sect or a prosecution upon them. Then comes a new vision and a new
digest. And so the controversy goes rolling down through the centuries,
changing its forms but not its substance. And it has rolled down to
us, and we are asking the question, “What is truth?” as eagerly, as
sincerely, and as patiently as we may.
Truth is a state of mind. All of us have known it and have known the
loss of it. We enter it unconsciously; we pass out of it before we are
aware. It comes and goes like a searchlight from an unknown source.
At one moment we see all things clearly, at the next we are fighting
a fog. At one moment we are as weak as rags, at the next we are in
contact with some explaining power that courses through us, making us
feel like electrical conductors, or the agents of universal will. In
the language of Christ these latter feelings are moments of “faith”;
and faith is one of the very few words which he used a great many times
in just the same sense, as a name for a certain kind of experience.
He did not define the word, but he seems to have given it a specific
meaning.
The state of mind in which Christ lived is the truth he taught. How
he reached that state of mind we do not know; how he maintained it,
and what it is, he spent the last two years of his life in expressing.
Whatever he was saying or doing, he was always conveying the same
truth--the whole of it. It was never twice alike and yet it was always
the same; even when he spoke very few words, as to Pilate “Thou sayest
it,” or to Peter “Feed my sheep”; or when he said nothing, but wrote
on the ground. He not only expressed this truth because he could not
help expressing it, but because he wished and strove to express it. His
teaching, his parables, his sayings showed that he spared no pains to
think of illustrations and suggestions; he used every device of speech
to make his thought carry.
Take his directest words: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”; “Love
your enemies.” One might call these things descriptions of his own
state of mind. Or take his philosophical remarks. They are not merely
statements as to what truth is; but hints as to how it must be sought,
how the state of mind can be entered into and in what it consists.
“Whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.” “That which cometh
out of the mouth, this defileth a man.” Or more prosaically still. “If
any man shall do his will, he shall know of the doctrine.” To this
class belongs the expression “Resist not evil.”
The parables are little anecdotes which serve to remind the hearer
of his own moments of tenderness and self-sacrifice. The Lost Sheep,
the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the Repentant Sinner, are
illustrations of Christ’s way of feeling toward human nature. They are
less powerful than his words and acts, because no constructed thing has
the power of a real thing. The reply of the Greek woman who besought
Christ to cure her daughter, “Yes, Lord, yet the dogs under the table
eat of the children’s crumbs,” is one of the most affecting things in
the New Testament. It is more powerful than the tale of the Prodigal
Son. But you will see that if the Prodigal’s father had been a real
father, and the Greek mother had been a personage in a parable, the
power would have been the other way.
And so it is that Christ’s most powerful means of conveying his thought
was neither by his preaching nor by his parables; but by what he
himself said and did incidentally. This expressed his doctrine because
his state of feeling was his doctrine. The things Christ did by himself
and the words he said to himself, these things are Christianity--his
washing the disciples’ feet, “Forgive them, for they know not what they
do,” his crucifixion.
I have recalled all these sayings and acts of Christ almost at
random. They seem to me to be equivalent one to another as a thousand
is equivalent to a thousand. They are all messages sent out by the
same man in the same state of feeling. If he had lived longer, there
would have been more of them. If you should summarize them all into a
philosophy and then reduce that philosophy to a phrase, you would have
another dogma.
The reason I called this lecture Non-resistance instead of using
some more general religious title, is that I happened to be led into
re-examining the meaning of Christ’s sayings through his phrase “Resist
not evil; but overcome evil with good.” It came about in the course of
many struggles over practical reforms. I had not the smallest religious
or theoretical bias in entering the field of politics. Here were
certain actual cruelties, injurious things done by particular men, in
plain sight. They ought to be stopped.
The question is how to do it. First you go to the wrongdoers and
beg them to stop, and they will not stop. Then to the officials in
authority over them, with the same result. “Remove these officials”
is now your conclusion, and you go and join the party that keeps them
in power; for you intend to induce that party to change them. You now
engage in infinitely long, exhausting struggles with the elements
of wickedness, which seem to be the real cause and support of those
injuries which you are trying to stop. You make no headway; you find
you are wasting force; you are fighting at a disadvantage; all your
energies are exhausted in antagonism. It occurs to you to join the
other party, and induce that party to advocate a positive good, whereby
the people may be appealed to and the iniquities voted down. But your
trouble here begins afresh, for it seems as hard to induce the “outs”
to make a square attack on the evil as it is to get the “ins” to desist
from doing the evil. Your struggle, your antagonism, your waste of
energy continues. At last you leave the outs and form a new party, a
reform party of your own. Merciful heavens! neither will this new party
attack wickedness. Your mind, your thought, your time is still taken
up in resisting the influences which your old enemies are bringing to
bear upon your new friends.
I had got as far as this in the experience and had come to see plainly
that there was somewhere a mistake in my method. It was a mistake to
try to induce others to act. The thing to do was to act myself, alone
and directly, without waiting for help. I should thus at least be able
to do what I knew to be right; and perhaps this was the strongest
appeal I could make to anyone. The thing to do was to run independent
candidates and ask the public to support good men. Then there occurred
to me the phrase, “Resist not evil,” and the phrase seemed to explain
the experience.
What had I been doing all these years but wrangling over evil? I had a
system that pitted me in a ring against certain agencies of corruption
and led to unending antagonism. The phrase not only explained what
was wrong with the whole system, but what was wrong with every human
contact that occurred under it. The more you thought of it, the truer
it seemed. It was not merely true of politics, it was true of all
human intercourse. The politics of New York bore the same sort of
relation to this truth that a kodak does to the laws of optics. Our
politics were a mere illustration of it. The phrase seemed to explain
everything either wrong or mistaken that I had ever done in my life.
To meet selfishness with selfishness, anger with anger, irritation
with irritation, that was the harm. But the saying was not exhausted
yet. The phrase passed over into physiology and showed how to cure a
cramp in a muscle or stop a headache. It was true as religion, true as
pathology, and true as to everything between them. I felt as a modern
mathematician might feel, who should find inscribed in an Egyptian
temple a mathematical formula which not only included all he knew, but
showed that all he knew was a mere stumbling comment on the ancient
science.
What mind was it that walked the earth and put the sum of wisdom into
three words? By what process was it done? The impersonal precision
and calm of the statement give it the quality of geometry, and yet it
expresses nothing but human feeling. I suppose that Christ arrived
at the remark by simple introspection. The impulse which he felt in
himself to oppose evil with evil--he puts his finger on that impulse as
the crucial danger. There is in the phrase an extreme care, as if he
were explaining a mechanism. He seems to be saying “If you wish to open
the door, you must lift the latch before you pull the handle. If you
wish to do good, you must resist evil with good, not with evil.”
It is the same with his other sayings. They are almost dry, they are
so accurate. “Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath
committed adultery with her already in his heart”; the analysis of
emotion could hardly be carried farther. “How hard it is for them that
trust in riches to enter into the Kingdom of God”; here is neither
exaggeration nor epigram. “Thy faith hath made thee whole”; a statement
of fact. “Knock and it shall be opened unto you”; this is the summary
of Christ’s whole life down to the time his teaching began. He had
knocked and it had been opened to him. He had wished to make men
better, and inasmuch as he wished it harder than anyone else before or
since has wished it, he got farther than anyone toward an understanding
of how to do it. The effectiveness of his thought has been due to
its coherence. He was able to draw the sky together over any subject
till all the light fell on one point. Then he said what he saw. Every
question was shown to break up into the same crystals if subjected to
the same pressure. Nor does his influence upon the world present any
anomaly. It is entirely due to ordinary causes. Every man’s influence
depends upon the depth of his will; for this determines his power of
concentration. The controlled force that could contract Christ’s own
mind to so small a focus, brings down to the same focus other minds
of less coherence than his. This is will; this is leadership; this is
power.
Yet in spite of his will there were plenty of things that Christ
himself could not do, as, for instance, change the world at once, or
change it at all except through the slow process of personal influence.
He could not heal people who had no faith, or get followers except by
going into the highways and hedges after them. And his whole life is
as valuable in showing what cannot be done, as in showing what can be
done. If you love your fellow-men and wish to benefit them, you will
find that the ways in which it is possible to do this are not many. You
can do harm in many ways, good only in one.
The world is full of people who want to do good, and men are constantly
re-discovering Christ. This intelligence, superior to our own,
possesses and utilizes us. There is always more danger of his influence
being perverted than of its dying out; for as men begin to discover
the scope and horizon of his thought they are tempted to becloud it
with commentary. They wish to say what he meant, whereas he has said it
himself. We think to explain something whose value is that it explains
us. If we understood him, very likely we should say nothing.
The mistake Christians make is that they strive to follow Christ as
a gnat follows a candle. No man ought to follow Christ in this way. A
man ought to follow truth, and when he does this, he will find that,
as he gropes his way through life, most of the light that falls on the
path in front of him, and moves as he moves, comes from the mind of
Christ. But if one is to learn from that mind one must take it as a
lens through which to view truth; not as truth itself. We do not look
at a lens, but through it.
There are moments in each of our lives when all the things that Christ
said seem clear, sensible, relevant. The use of his sayings is to
remind us of these moments and carry us back into them. The danger of
his sayings is lest we rely upon them as final truth. They are no more
truth than the chemical equivalents for food are food, or than certain
symbols of dynamics are the power of Niagara. At those moments when
the real Niagara is upon us we must keep our minds bent on how to do
good to our fellow-men; not the partial good of material benevolence,
but the highest good we know. The thoughts and habits we thus form and
work out, painfully plotting over them, revising, renewing, remodeling
them, become our personal church. This is our own religion, this is our
clue to truth, this is the avenue through which we may pass back to
truth and possess it. No other cord will hold except the one a man has
woven himself. No other key will serve except the one a man has forged
himself.
Christ was able to hold a prism perfectly still in his hand so as to
dissolve a ray of light into its elements. Every time he speaks, he
splits open humanity, as a man might crack a nut and show the kernel.
The force of human feeling behind these sayings can be measured only
by their accomplishments. They have been re-arranging and overturning
human society ever since. By this most unlikely means of quiet
demonstration in word and deed, did he unlock this gigantic power.
The bare fragments of his talk open the sluices of our minds; they
overwhelm and re-create. That was his method. The truth which he
conveyed with such metaphysical accuracy lives now in the living. Very
likely we cannot express it in dogmas, for such intellect as it takes
to utter a dogma is not in us. But we need have no fear for our power
of expressing it. It is enough for us to see truth; for if we see it,
everything we do will express it.
CLIMATE.
The influence of the planets, of deities good and bad, of spells and
incantations--of fatal or beneficial forces suddenly unlocked and, as
it were, let loose upon innocent men--as though one had walked into
a trap--all these myths and symbols were invented in past ages, by
discerning, deep-seeing men to express the impotence which they saw
about them, to express the fact that all men are walking in their
dreams and their dreams control them. What we see is illusion: what we
say is illusion. The reality is behind all; and we neither see it, nor
say it, but only feel it.
So also of those mysterious planes of identity which lie between soul
and soul, forming a continuous country and habitable world, between men
apparently sundered from one another by every human condition--sundered
by age, sex, epoch, language, occupation, religion--and yet undergoing
the same experience, valuing the same idea, twinned by the fact that
across time and space something in them is identical. Some wheel in
each of them is being turned by the same power at the same rate, and
makes these creatures cognate. They are one thing; they are portions
of a continuous, indestructible reality which conditions them both.
The experience comes to almost everyone at some time or moment in his
life, that he is nothing in himself, but only a part of something else.
It is a consciousness of the process of life, a consciousness of what
is happening. Whether through the touch of sickness or through intense
concentration, or through absolute abstraction, most men have felt the
prick of this thought, though the leisure and the impulse to record it
have been denied to them.
When European cattle are taken to Egypt, their forms begin to change
in one or two generations. Their backs and horns seem to be imitating
the cattle in the bas-reliefs of the rock tombs, which were carved
twenty-five centuries before Christ. So too, when American parents
settle in Rome, their children resemble Romans. It is not merely in
the expression of the face, or in the cut of the hair. It is in the
bones of the forehead and in the way the hair grows out of the skin
that these youngsters resemble the modern inhabitants of ancient Rome.
Professor Boaz has found by measurement that the skulls of children
born in America to foreign parents assume the American type. There
is something in the air here, or under the earth, that is at work
upon the immigrant child even before it is born. On the ship they are
remodeled, and in the womb they are shaped by the power that fashions
the skull to such dimensions as it is provided we shall wear to-day in
America. If you should steer the ship toward New Zealand or Japan, the
form of the infant’s cranium would vary and be modified accordingly.
The force that accompanied the ship would arrive with you, and be
present at your landing. The child would grow up in some sort of
unthinkable relation to the continent or island on which it landed. It
would be as one of the children of that land--nearer to them perhaps
than to its parents. We may call this influence climate, but if we do
so we must be sure to remember that perhaps the influence is really
due to soil, to electrical, magnetic, or even to sidereal influences.
As the influence is impalpable and tremendous, so it is unknown and
perhaps cannot be known.
I see the immigrant land and toil and push his fortunes. I see the
professor, with his calipers and his microscope, measuring the
immigrant’s brain. And above the professor, bending over him as he
looks into his microscope, I see the formative power modeling the
professor’s skull as he measures the skull of the immigrant--assigning
him what he shall see in it, apportioning to him what he shall believe
and tell other men about it--leading him on, yes, leading him as a
child is led by a butterfly. And all this vision of mine ranks itself
as a thing that has happened long ago, and is always happening. It is a
part of universal experience. I that suffer it am but feeling what man
has always felt, and shall feel forever--the power of God behind his
own illusion, modeling his thoughts--letting its influence be shut off
by his opacity, or else flash through him to its own ends in directions
which he cannot comprehend.
THE INFLUENCE OF SCHOOLS.
We are obliged to approach any church school through our own personal
religious sentiments. We do all of us approach it in this way. Any
religious institution is a tiny sample of the great question; and
whatever we say of it is a little voice in the great chorus of
humanity. We cannot isolate our subject: it is a part of the great
subject, religion. We have no achromatic lens through which to view
life. All that we see is colored by our own past, and surely, for any
man to believe that in describing his youth or his school-days he can
clear his mind of error, would be the greatest error and delusion of
all. It seems safer, then, in dealing with such a tremulous matter, to
lay it out as simply as one may, leaving others to be the judge of its
value.
Some years ago I had a long illness; and during those periods of mental
fixity which illness brings with it, my mind used to dwell in strange
places. It would pause over some spot in the world--some room or field
that I had seen, however casually, in former years--and would refuse to
move on. It would choose its exact position so that the perspective
of the place should be accurately seen, and there it would rest.
Sometimes for days at a time it would remain as carefully placed as a
camera, giving no reason for its choice, yet deriving some mysterious
assistance from the scene. The places were always empty--never a
person in them. There was, for example, a particular nook by a country
roadside--a barred gate with elm trees bending above it and a meadow
beyond--which I had passed by on the way to a child’s funeral some
years before. This place opened itself up out of the picture-book of my
memory, and for some weeks I lived within its influence--for there was
no question that life streamed out of it to me.