Child and Country Part 23

Our tendency is to return to the pioneers for inspiration.... I was thinking this morning how in all our studies we had pa.s.sed quickly over the intellectualists, the simplifiers, the synthesisers and explainers--back to the sources of philosophy and sanct.i.ty. It is there that we find the flame. We linger and return to such men as Boehme, Fichte, Romini-Serbati, Frobel, Swedenborg. We delight in the few great and isolated names of Greece and Rome that are above style. We turn continually to the perpetual fountains of India, but seldom to Egypt.

We love the prophets of the Old Testament, but despise chosen peoples at every appearance; we delight in the lineage of the Messiah; we are stimulated by the Hebrew literature, by its symbolism, its songs and precepts, the Oriental colour of it, the hierarchy of its saints, the strange splendour of its women, but as a book of devotion its chief significance is that of a huge vessel prepared for the coming of a Master.

The New Testament is our first book. Manhandled and perverted as it has been by early writers, who still wanted Moses and laboured under the misconception that Jesus was expounding the doctrines of Moses afresh, instead of refuting many of them--yet the New Testament stands highest above all hands pointing heavenward.

In the case of the teacher here, it was not the so-called orthodoxy that accomplished this allegiance to the New Testament. Modern churches drove him forth into the Farther East. It was the return from Patanjali and the Vedas and much of that excellent and ancient wisdom of the Earlier Arrival, that gave him a fresh surface for understanding the pilgrimage and the pa.s.sion of Jesus.

Our own Tolstoi has done much to restore the Son of Mary to a sceptical generation. To us Tolstoi's great work is not through the vehicle of the novel. Though comparisons are everywhere questionable, it seems to us that the Russian's task on the later Scriptures is as significant as Luther's. Certainly he has prepared them to stand the more searching and penetrative gaze of the coming generation. Many of the new voices rise to declare that it is doubtful if there really was an historic Jesus.

Still the man matters less than his influence. His story is emphatically in the world; the spirit of it lives above all dogma and vulgarity, even above nationalism. It is the breath of Brotherhood and Compa.s.sion.

It is nearer to us and less complex than the story of the Buddha.

Every such coming heightens the voltage of spiritual power in the world.

The greatest stories of the world are the stories of such comings. Of first importance in the education of children is the inst.i.tution of an ideal of the imminence of great helpers, the Compa.s.sionates. Children become starry-eyed as they listen. I think if we could all shake ourselves clear of the temporal and the unseemly, we should find deep in our hearts, a strange expectancy. A woman said, as we talked of these things:

"I seem to have been expectant for centuries."

When such ideals are held in mind, an adjustment of conduct follows at once. To be ready (I am not talking religiously) for a revered Guest, one immediately begins to put one's house in order. Indeed, there's a reproach in finding the need of rushed preparation, in the hastening to clear corners and hide unseemly objects; and yet, this is well if the reorganisation is more than a pa.s.sing thought. To make the ordering of one's house a life-habit is a very valid beginning in morality.

We talk continually of the greatest of men; sometimes our voices falter, and sentences are not finished. We have found many things alike about the Great Ones. First they had mothers who dreamed, and then they had poverty to acquaint them with sorrow. They came up hard, and they were always different from other children. They suffered more than the others about them, because they were more sensitive.

They met invariably the stiffest foe of a fine child--misunderstanding; often by that time, even the Mother had lost her vision. Because they could not find understanding in men and women and children, they drew apart. Such youths are always forced into the silence.... I often think of the education of Hiawatha by old Nokomis, the endless and perfect a.n.a.logies of the forest and stream and field, by which a child with vision can gain the story of life. Repeatedly we have discussed the maiden who sustained France--her girlhood in the forests of Domremy. It was a forest eighteen miles deep to the centre, and so full of fairies that the priests had to come to the edge and give ma.s.s every little while to keep them in any kind of subjection. That incomparable maiden did not want the fairies in subjection. She was listening. From the centres of the forest came to her the messages of power.... Once when the Chapel group had left, I sat thinking about this maiden; and queerly enough, my mind turned presently to something in St. Luke, about the road to Emmaus--the Stranger who had walked with the disciples, and finally made himself known. And they asked one to the other after He had vanished: "Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked with us by the way, and while He opened to us the Scriptures?"

... Returning from their silences, these torture-quickened youths found work to do--work that people could not understand. The people invariably thought there must be a trick about the giving--that the eager one wanted hidden results for self.... Invariably, they were prodigious workers, men of incredible energy. Thus they ground themselves fine; and invariably, too, they were men of exalted personal conduct, though often they had pa.s.sed before the fact was truly appreciated.

First of all, they were honest--that was the hill-rock. Such men come to make crooked paths straight, but first they straighten out themselves.

They stopped lying to other men, and what was greater still, they stopped lying to themselves. Sooner or later men all came to understand that they had something good to give--those closest to them, not always seeing it first....

You couldn't buy them--that was first established; then they turned the energies of their lives outward instead of in. The _something_ immortal about them was the loss of the love of self. Losing that, they found their particular _something_ to do. They found their work--the one thing that tested their own inimitable powers--and that, of course, proved the one thing that the world needed from them. As self-men they were not memorable. Self-men try to gather in the results to themselves. The world-man wants to give something to his people--the best he has from his hand or brain or spirit. That's the transaction--the most important in any life--to turn out instead of in.... Here I am repeating the old formula for the making of men, as if in the thrill of the absolutely new--the eternal verity of loving one's neighbour.

Each man of us has his own particular knack of expression. Nothing can happen so important to a man as to find his particular thing to do. The best thing one man can do for another is to help him find his work. The man who has found his work gets from it, and through it, a working idea of G.o.d and the world. The same hard preparation that makes him finally valuable in his particular work, integrates the character that finally realises _its own religion_. The greatest wrong that has been done us by past generations is the detachment of work and religion--setting off the Sabbath as the day for expressing the angel in us, and marking six days for the progress of the animal.

All good work is happiness--ask any man who has found his work. He is at peace when the task is on, at his best. He is free from envy and desire.

Even his physical organs are healthfully active. The only way to be well is to give forth. When we give forth work that tests our full powers, we are replenished by the power that drives the suns. Giving forth, we automatically ward off the destructive thoughts. Our only safe inbreathing physically, mentally, and spiritually is from the upper source of things----not in the tainted atmospheres of the crowds. A man's own work does not kill. It is stimulus, worry, ambition, the tension and complication of wanting results for self, that kill.

Each man stands as a fuse between his race and the creative energy that drives the whole scheme of life. If he doubles this fuse _in_ to self, he becomes a non-connective. He cannot receive from the clean source, nor can he give. What he gets is by a pure animal process of struggle and s.n.a.t.c.h. He is a sick and immoral creature. Turning the fuse outward, he gives his service to men, and dynamos of cosmic force throw their energy through him to his people. He lives. According to the carrying capacity of his fuse is he loved and remembered and idealised for the work he does.

A jar of water that has no lower outlet can only be filled so full before it spills, but open a lower vent and it can be filled according to the size of the outpouring. Now there is a running stream in the vessel. All life that does not run is stagnant.

There is a task for every man. We are born with different equipments, but if we have a gift, be very sure it is not fortuitous. We have earned it. It should make us the finer workman. But all work is good. The handle of an axe is a poem.

We would never destroy the natural resources of the earth, if we, as men, found our work. Rather we would perceive the way of old Mother Earth who turns to her G.o.d for light and power, and from that pure impregnation, brings forth her living things. We would shudder at all destruction and greed, and perceive as good workmen the excellent values of woods and coals and gases, and the finer forces of the soil. We would perceive that they are to be cared for; that their relation to man is service; that they have no relation to great individual fortunes. These are the free gifts from our Mother. As good workmen we would realise that greed and compet.i.tion pulls upon, and tortures into activity, all that is insane within us.

The thing that brings men together in real talk, that makes the hush in Chapel or where talk is anywhere; the thing that clutches the throat, and sometimes brings the smart to the eyes--is the quality of men who have found their work, and who have lost the love of self. They are the conservers. They see first what is good for us to do and be. We follow their thoughts in action afterward, as water follows the curve of a basin. They go after the deep-down men; they dream of the shorter pa.s.sages to India; they sense the new power in the world; their faces are turned to the East for the rising of new stars. Often they die to make us see, but others spring to finish their work. Our hearts burn within us when we speak of their work.

32

a.s.sEMBLY OF PARTS

Others have come; there are fresh wonders to me, but this book must close.... The development of each young mind is like doing a book--each a different book. Fascination attends the work. I a.s.sure you a teacher gets more than he can give.... Every mill should be a school. Every professional man should call for his own. A man's work in the world should be judged by his constructive contacts with the young minds about him. A man should learn the inspiration which comes in service for the great Abstraction, the many, from which there is no answer; but he can only become powerful and unerring by trying out the results of his offerings face to face with his own group. It should be as natural for a matured man to gather his mental and spiritual familiars about him as it is for him to become the head of a domestic establishment.

There is chance for the tradesmen to turn a little from ledger and margin, to the faces of the young about them--those who have come for the wages of bread. Many philanthropists would carve their names on stone, as great givers to the public. The public will not take these things personally; the public laughs and lightly criticises. Men who have nothing but money to give away cannot hope to receive other than calculating looks and laughter that rings with derision.

The time will come when matters of trade in the large shall be conducted nationally and munic.i.p.ally. The business of man is to produce something.

The man who produces nothing, but who sits in the midst of other men's goods, offering them for sale at a price greater than he paid, such a man moves in the midst of a badly-lit district of many pitfalls. It is the same with a man at a desk, before whom pa.s.s many papers representing transactions of merchandise and whose business it is to take a proprietary bite out of each. He develops a perverted look at life, and a bad bill of moral health. There is no exception to this, though he conduct a weekly bible lesson for the young, even move his chair to a church every seventh day.

The drama of the trade mind is yet to be written. It is a sordid story; the figure at the last is in no way heroic. It would not be a popular story if done well.

The time is not far off, except to those whose eyes are dim, when countries will be Fatherlands in the true sense--in the sense of realising that the real estate is not bounded land, vaulted gold, not even electrified matter, but the youth of the land. Such is the treasure of the Fatherland. The development of youth is the first work of man; the highest ideal may be answered first hand. Also through the development of the young, the father best puts on his own wisdom and rect.i.tude.

The ideal of education has already been reversed at the bottom. There is pandemonium yet; there is colossal stupidity yet, but Order is coming in. It would be well for all men meditatively to regard a kindergarten in action. Here are children free in the midst of objects designed to supply a great variety of attractions. There is that _hum_ in the room.

It is not dissonance. The child is encouraged to be himself and express himself; never to impinge upon his neighbour's rights, but to lose himself in the objects that draw him most deeply.

I have mentioned the man who caught the spiritual dream of all this, who worked it out in life and books. One of his books was published nearly a hundred years ago. It wasn't a book on kindergarten, but on the education of man. I have not read this of Frobel's work. I wanted to do these studies my own way, but I know from what I have seen of kindergartens, and what teachers of kindergartens have told me, that the work is true--that "The Education of Man" is a true book. Nor would it have lived a hundred years otherwise.

The child is now sent to kindergarten and for a year is truly taught.

The process is not a filling of brain, but an encouragement of the deeper powers, their organisation and direction. At the end of the year, the child is sent into the first grade, where the barbaric process of compet.i.tive education and brain-cramming is carried on as sincerely as it was in Frobel's time.... A kindergarten teacher told me in that low intense way, which speaks of many tears exhausted:

"I dare not look into the first-grade rooms. We have done so differently by them through the first year. When the little ones leave us, they are wide open and helpless. They are taken from a warm bath to a cold blast.

Their little faces change in a few days. Do you know the ones that stand the change best? The commoner children, the clever and hard-headed children. The little dreamers--the sensitive ones--are hurt and altered for the worse. Their manner changes to me, when I see them outside. You do not know how we have suffered."

Some of the greatest teachers in America to-day are the kindergarten teachers; not that they are especially chosen for quality, but because they have touched reality in teaching. They have seen, even in the very little ones, that response which is deeper than brain. If the great ideal that is carried out through their first year were continued through seven years, the generation thus directed would meet life with serenity and without greed. They would make over the world into a finer place to be.

I wonder if I may dare to say it once more?... It came this way in Chapel just a few days ago. There was a pencil in my hand, and something of man's ideal performance here below appeared more than ever clearly. I am putting down the picture, much as it came then, for the straightest way to write anything is as you would tell it:

"... This pencil is a man, any man. Above is spirit; below matter. The world of spirit is finished. The plan is already thought out there, to the utmost detail. This above is the Breath, the Conception, the Emanation, the Dream, the Universal Energy--philosophers have called it by many names, but they mean the G.o.d-Idea wrought of necessity in Spirit, since G.o.d is spirit.

"The world of matter below is not finished. Certain parts are completed, but not all, and the a.s.sembly of parts is just begun. The material world is lost in the making of parts, forgetting that the plan is one--that the parts of matter must be a.s.sembled into a whole--that a replica must be made in matter of the one great spiritual Conception. So long as men are identified with parts, there is dissonance from the shops of earth, a pulling apart instead of together.

"The many are almost ready to grasp the great unifying conception. This is the next step for the human family as a whole; this the present planetary brooding. Much we have suffered from identifying ourselves with parts. Rivalries, boundaries, jealousies, wars--all have to do with the making of parts. Beauty, harmony, peace and brotherhood have to do with the a.s.sembly of parts into one. That which is good for the many is good for the one; and that which is good for the one is good for the many--_the instant_ we leave the part and conceive the whole.

"All the high-range voices for hundreds of years have proclaimed that the plan is one. The world to-day is roused with the Unifiers--voices of men in every city and plain crying out that we are all one in aim and meaning, that the instruments are tuned, the orchestra ready, the music in place--but the players, alas, lost as yet in frenzy for their own little parts. The baton of the leader is lifted, but they do not hear.

In their self-promulgation they have not yet turned as one to the conductor's eyes. The dissonance is at its highest, yet the hour has struck for the lift of harmony.

"Look again at the pencil that stands for man. Above is the spiritual plan all finished. Every invention, every song and poem and heroism to be, is there. One by one for ages, the aspiring intelligence of man has touched and taken down the parts of this spiritual plan, forced the parts into matter, making his dream come true. Thus have come into the world our treasures. We preserve them--every gift from a spiritual source. Often we preserve them (until they are fully understood) against our will. The mere matter-models break down and are lost, for matter changes endlessly until it is immortalised, as our bodies must be through the refinement of spiritual union.

"Our pioneers, by suffering and labour, even by fasting and prayer, have made themselves fine enough to contact some little part of that finished plan. They have lowered it into matter for us to see--step by step--the song into notes, the poem into words, the angel into paint or stone; and the saints have touched dreams of great service, bringing down the pictures of the dream somehow in matter--and their own bodies often to martyrdom....

"Below the pencil is the world of matter, at this hour of its highest disorganisation. The very terror and chaos of the world is an inspiration to every unifying voice. Here below are already many parts; above, the plan as a whole and the missing parts. Man stands between--the first creature to realise that there is an above, as well as a below. All creatures beneath man are driven; they look down. Man alone has looked up; man has raised himself erect and may take what he will from the spiritual source to electrify his progress. Man becomes significant the moment he realises that the plan is not for self, but for the race; not for the part, but for the whole.

"I have written it in many different ways, and told it in many more.

There are endless a.n.a.logies. Thousands before me have written and sung and told the same. It is the great Story. We see it working out even in these wrecking days. The plan is already in the souls of men.... And what has this to do with education?