The Warriors Part 9

So each man goes to the dictionary. He takes a word here, a word there, common words that everybody knows. He puts them together: the result is a presentation of the life of man, and lays hold of his inmost spirit.

"_Our birth is but a deep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From G.o.d, who is our home!_"

To write, the soul chooses, and G.o.d stands ever by to help. That is why great work always impresses us as inspired. G.o.d did it. It is G.o.d who whispers the deathless thought and phrase: the subtler collocations are divine.

Take the word _star_. To the child it means a bright point that glitters and twinkles in the sky, and sets him saying an old nursery rhyme. To the youth or maiden it suggests love, romance, a summer eve, or a frosty walk under the friendly winter sky. To the rhetorician it suggests a figure of speech--the star of hope. To the mariner it suggests guidance and the homeward port. To the astronomer it means the world in which he lives. His life is centred in that star. To the poet it means all these things and many more. For the poet is the one who, in his own heart, holds all the meanings that words hold for the race. Read again the lines just quoted, and think of Wordsworth's outlook on the star!

The dictionary definition of a word can seldom be the real one, nor does it reveal the deeper sense it has. It blazes a path for the understanding, but individual thought must follow. Take the words _time, friendship, work, play, heroism_. It took Carlyle to define Time for us.

Emerson has defined Friendship. Let the lights and shadows of the thought of Carlyle and Emerson play upon these words, they are at once removed from mechanical definition, and we dimly perceive that each word is larger than the outreach of the thought of man. Another generation than ours shall define and refine them. In heaven, in some other aeon, we shall find out what they really mean!

Thus knowledge is not permanent. It reels. It proceeds, it changes, it is iridescent with new significance from day to day.

What is true of a word, and what we make of it, is true of every phase of learning. The black-board is not all. Learning is not tied to it, or to any one person, demonstration, interpretation, event, or epoch. No wise man can keep his learning to himself, and yet he cannot, though he teach a thousand years, transmit his deeper learning to another. The atmosphere, the casual information, the spiritual magnetism of a great man, will teach better than the text-books, the lecture courses, and the formal resources of academic halls. Thus Mark Hopkins is in himself a university, given a boy on the other end of the log on which he sits.

It is the relativity of knowledge that dances before the eye, that bewilders, eludes, evades. Group-systems and electives seem like a makeshift for the real thing. We cannot tie a fact to a pupil, because to the tail of the fact is tied history itself. Until a pupil gets a glimpse of that relation, that dependence of which we have just heard, with all that has yet happened in connection with it, he is not yet quite master of his fact. He recites glibly the date of Thermopylae, and does not know that all Greece is trailing behind his desk. When, after subsequent research, he knows something of Greece, he discovers Greece to be dovetailed into Rome and Egypt, and they lay hold upon the plain of Shinar and Eden, and the immemorial, prehistoric years.

Ah, no! We never really know. Every fact recedes from us, as might an ebbing wave, and leaves us stranded upon an unhorizoned beach, more despairing than before. Education does not solve the problems of life--it deepens the mystery. What, then, may the sage know? Are there no sages? And have we all been misinformed?

A sage is one who knows what, in his position of life, is most necessary for him to know. The larger sage, the great Sage, is the one who knows what is necessary for the race to know.

It is a wrong idea of wisdom, that we must necessarily know what some one else knows. Wisdom is single-track for each man. There are in the world those who know how to build aqueducts, and to bake _charlotte russe_, and to sew trousers. Aqueducts and tailor work may be alike out of my individual and personal knowledge, yet I may not necessarily be an ignorant man. The primitive hunter stood in the forest. For him to be a hunting-sage, was to know the weather, traps, weapons, the times, and the lairs and ways of beasts. He knew lions and monkeys, the coiled serpent and the serpent that hissed by the ruined wall; the ways of the wolf, the jackal, and the kite; the manners of the bear and the black panther in the jungle-wilds. Kipling is the brother of that early man: he is a forest-sage, and would have held his own in other times.

The sea-sage was the one who could toss upon the swan-road without fear.

He knew the strength of oak and ash; the swing of oar, the curve of prow, the dash of wave, and the curling breaker's sweep. He knew the maelstroms and the aegir that swept into northern fiords; the thunder and wind and tempest; the coves, safe harbors and retreats. To-day, the sea-sage rules the fishing-boat, the ocean liner, the coastwise steamers, and the lake-lines of the world.

The fishing-sage knows the ways and haunts of fish. He is wise in the salmon, the perch, the trout, the tarpon, and the muscalonge. He says.

To-day the ba.s.s will bite on dobsons, but to-morrow we must have frogs.

No sagacity is universal, but the love of sagacity may be. The man who starts out to implant a new way of education has a n.o.ble task before him, but is it a final one, or even a more than tolerably practical one?

Is there such a thing as a place for Truth at wholesale, even in an academy or college? Can a man receive an education outside of himself?

He may be played upon by grammars and by loci-paper, by electrical machines, and parsing tables and Grecian accents, by the names of noted authors and statesmen, and the thrill of historic battles and decisions.

He may be placed under a rain of ethical and philosophic ideas, and may be forced to put on a System of Thought, as men put on a mackintosh. But his true education is what he makes of these things. If he hears of Theodoric with a yawn, we say--the college-folk--He must be imbecile.

No, not imbecile! he may become a successful toreador, or snake-charmer, which things are out of our line! And a man may be an upright citizen, a good husband, and a sincerely religious man, who has never heard of Francesca, nor Fra Angelico, nor named the name of Botticelli!

The moment we set bounds to wisdom, we find that we have shut something out. Wisdom is the free, active life of a growing and attaching soul.

We must not only attach information to ourselves, we must a.s.similate it.

Else we are like a crab which should drag about Descartes, or as an ocean sucker which should hug a copy of Thucydides.

Education is the taking to one's self, so far as one may in a lifetime, all that the race has learned through these six thousand years.

Education is not a thing of books alone, or schools; it is a process of intellectual a.s.similation of what is about us, or what we put about ourselves. At every step we have a choice. This is the real difference between students at the same school or university. One puts away Greek, and the other lays up football and college societies. A third gets all three, being a little more swift and alert. One stows away insubordination--another, order and obedience. One does quiet, original work of reading and research; the other stows away schemes for getting through recitations and examinations. No two students ever come out of the same school, college, or shop with the same education. Their training may have been measurably alike, but the result is immeasurably unlike. Education, in the last a.n.a.lysis, is getting the highest intellectual value out of one's environment and opportunities. There is a cow-boy philosopher, a kitchen-philosopher, as truly as there is a philosopher of the academic halls.

Conduct is the _pons asinorum_ of life. Wise men somehow cross it, though stumblingly, and with tears. Fools, usurers, oppressors, and spendthrifts of life are left gaping and wrangling on the h.e.l.lward side.

Thinkers have always been climbing up on each other's shoulders to look over into the Beyond. What they have seen, they have told. Some men climb so high into the ethereal places of the Ideal, that they do not get down again. They are the impractical men. An impractical man is not necessarily the educated man; he is the man at the top of some intellectual fence, who wishes to come down, but has absent-mindedly forgotten that he has legs. The legs are not absent, but his wit is. So with the impractical man in every sphere. Education has not really removed his common-sense, as some say, his power to connect pa.s.sing events with their causes, and to act reasonably; but it has set his thought on some other thought for the time being, and the dinner-bell, we will say, does not detach him from his inquiry. His necktie rides up!

He goes out into the street without a hat! Let him alone till he proves the worth of what he is about. The practical man, who hears the dinner-bell and prides himself upon this fact, may not hear sounds far-off and clear, that ring in the impractical man's ear, and that may sometime tell him how to make a better dinner-bell, or provide a better dinner--a great social philosophy--for the race!

The really impractical man is not he who reaches out to the intellectual and ideal aspects of life; it is he who lives as if this life were all.

There are women who make pets of their clothes, as men make pets of horse or dog. They have just time enough in life to dress themselves up.

Looking back over their years, they can only say, I have had clothes! In the same number of years, with no greater advantages or opportunities, other women have become the queenly women of the race. Some women are girt with centuries, instead of gold or gems. Whenever they appear, the event becomes historic; what they do adds new l.u.s.tre to life.

We are all prodigals. We throw away time and strength, and years, and gold, and then weep that we are ignorant, and embeggared at the last.

Who shall teach us wisdom, and in what manner may we be wise?

What say the sages of the vast possibilities of the race? With one voice they say: Be brave! Do not cower, shrink, or whine. Throw out upon the world a free fearlessness of thought and word and deed. Courage, freedom, heroism, faith, exactness, honor, justice, and mercy--these traits have been handed down as the traditional learning of the heart of man.

Another ideal of the race is Law. We have given up a chaos-philosophy--the haphazard continuity of events--a cometary orbit, for the world. There are fixed relations everywhere existent: the succession of cycles is orderly and prearranged.

Another ideal is Progress. We are moving, not toward the bottom, but toward the top of possibility. We reject annihilation, because then there is nothing left. And there must always be something left--progress--a bigger something, a better something. Should annihilation be the truth of things, and all the race mortal, then some day there would be a Last Man. And after the Last Man, what? He would die, and then all that any of the other stars could view of the vast panorama of our earthly generations would be an unburied corpse, with not even a vulture hovering to pick it to freshness in the air!

A Last Man? No. Instead, the seers have shown us a great mult.i.tude in a heavenly country, praising G.o.d, and singing forth His Name forever.

Immortality broods over the great thought of the race. All great minds look upward to it: it is the final consummation of our dreams.

Another ideal is social adjustment, and social service. We must do something for some one, or we cast current sagacity behind the back.

People crowd each other to the wall. The weak of communities and nations are too often crushed. Redress is in the air. The longed-for wisdom of to-day shows a kaleidoscopic front, in which are turning the slum-dweller and the millionaire; the white man, the yellow, and the black; the town and the territorial possession. The slave-colony, garbage-laws, magistrates, and murderers are mixed in motley, and there are whirling vacant-lot schemes abroad, potato-patches, wood-yards, organized charity, Wayfarers' Lodges, resounding cries of munic.i.p.al reform, and various other interests of the wisdom-scale.

Hence, wisdom has not yet been arrived at: we are still on the run. This twentieth century will find new problems, new queries, new cranks, and new dismays!

One thing, however, shines out clear: Wisdom is being recognized as having a moral aspect, and men are looking for a Religion which shall sum up the learning of the sages, the information of the race.

When we look down into the physical universe, the primary thing that we find there is gravitation. When we look into the moral universe, the primary thing that we find there is also gravitation--a sinking to a Lower. This is sin--a contrariness of things--which makes the world an evil place to live in, instead of a good; which wrecks character and states, eats the hearts out of cultures and civilizations, destroys strong races, leaves a stain upon even the youngest child, and which is constantly drawing the race downward, instead of upward.

Sin, sin, sin! Everywhere the fact glares upon us, and cannot be hid, or put away. Sin is not an intellectual toy, for philosophers to play with or define as "a limitation of being." Sin is a reality, for men to feel, recoil from, and of which one must repent.

Sin is energy deliberately misplaced: energy directed against the course of things, the infinite development, the will of G.o.d. Sin is corruption, and desolation, and decay. Death broods over the spirit of man, unless a Redeemer come. The unredeemed ages hang over history like a pall. In them there are monumental oppression, cruelties, and crimes. The breath of myriad millions went out in darkness, and there was none to save. A plague swept over all the race.

Hence, even scientifically considered, the final aim of thinking must be, to arrive at some thought which will take hold of this primary fact of sin and uproot it; which will show how the world may be purged of sin.

Slowly but inevitably we are moving to this great Thought. It is summed up in one word: Redemption. The watchword of a century ago was gravitation. It explained the poise of the universe by a great and hitherto undiscovered law. The watchword of yesterday was evolution. It explains progressive change: the mounting-up of life "through spires of form." The forms of the universe are seen in a series which is in the main ascendant, and in which the survivor is supreme. The watchword of to-morrow is Redemption. The Thinker will some day live, who will make that great word Redemption stand out in all its vast majesty and significance. This, I take it, is the work of our new century.

Redemption is the explanation of the existence of man, of his present progress, and his future destiny. It is the great mystery of joy in which the race partakes; the spiritual culmination of all things earthly; the forecast of eternal things yet to be.

Redemption is not a dogma; it is a life. Redemption is a perpetual and ascendant moral growth. It marks a world-balm, a world-change. It is in the spirit of man that it works, and not in his outer condition, or external strivings. It is ultimately to root sin out of the world.

Through stormy sorrows and perpetual desolations comes the race to G.o.d.

Zion is the Whole of things--the encompa.s.sment of s.p.a.ce, and time, and endless years,--an environment of immortality and peace.

Virtue leads the race to Joy, and there is no byway to this height. The final aspect of the universe is joy. Joy is elemental--a vast vibration that sweeps through centuries as years! A day in His courts is as a thousand, and a thousand years are as one day, because they thrill with an immortal and imperishable emotion. The seraphim and cherubim, Sandalphon and Azrael, are angels of enduring joy. Joy is the soul's share of the life of G.o.d.

Thus when the world has breathed to us the holy name of Christ, it has told us the highest that it knows. The March of Sages is toward a Redeemer! The banner of Wisdom is furled about the Cross!

IV. THE WORLD-MARCH: OF TRADERS

[AMSTERDAM]

_Lo, my soul, look forth abroad And mark the busy stir: Wouldst thou say, in pride and scorn, Our G.o.d is not in her!

Nay, the bonds, the wares, the coin,-- These, in truth, are pa.s.sing things; Other treasures thrill the life Of earth's great merchant kings!