never surpass nor equal them. He was in mind the greatest in his day and as great as he may never be again. Pleasure, as we define it and seek it, belongs to passion and appetite natural and unnatural. The gratification of natural and borrowed appetites we make our chief object of life. We (it seems) have not enough natural desires to hold us down below the beastial plane. We add borrowed ones to complete our degradation. The natural desires, if not curbed and held under control of the intellect, would make us worse than are beasts; add the unnatural or borrowed ones, we sink immeasurably below them. We would, indeed, have honorable names. So we build grand houses to dwell in, wear fine clothes, ride in costly automobiles "to be seen of men." Having made our wills and died, our bodies are laid away in artificial caves, and behind us we leave bank accounts, lots, blocks, government bonds and mining and railroad stocks, causing interminable lawsuits by undeserving heirs, in order to break the wills of the "crazy donors to charitable and educational institutions." So the heirs declare of us. But, after all, the heart, under mastery of the brain, is the motor. It is the most important part of our nature. Jesus was all heart. God, the Father, is both heart and intellect. God is love. Here He is heart. And He is truth. Here He is intellect. But the heart of Jesus was divine and above the animal plane. Yet we may be like him. The command from above to us then is: "Trust thy heart!"-which means the heart of Jesus in us: When the somber clouds descending cast a gloom upon thy mind, Trust thy heart. Rise above the clouds of sorrow; sail in the empyrean; Trust thy heart. Yea, let Love, the sacred passion, rule thy being evermore, Though thy mind, with care o'erclouded, land thee on the Stygian shore, Trust thy heart. Trust thy heart; follow its bidding; follow love though love be blind; Trust thy heart; distrust thy reason; listen to the Angel kind,—— Trust thy heart. Better perish as did Jesus, loving, serving, saving all; Trust thy heart. What, then, is the call of duty? What true magnanimity? What will make thee ever-blessed? What will make thee ever free? Trust thy heart! Trust thy heart and all is beauty; trust thy heart and all is bright; Trust thy heart and thou art happy; trust thy heart and thou art right; Trust thy heart! YE 147TH LESSON. Progress and Public Opinion. The high-water mark of progress is the record made by public opinion. Nothing can stand against an intense public opinion and long survive. What burned the martyrs at the stake? Public opinion. The shapers of public opinion are the rulers of manknd. It was the public opinion of the European race that abolished chattel slavery. But in reference to social betterment, on what is it grounded? evolution. In what direction? Up and not down. Degeneracy belongs to the individual and not to the whole. Advancement is the law, not alone of sentient life, but of all life-yea, of all creation. But of mind what is advance? In the direction of the good; not of class, but of On PROGRESS AND PUBLIC OPINION 205 mass of the whole. The altruistic faculty is the final-the climax of human development. This is the end that all great thinkers have perceived to be final from him who said, "The lion shall lie down with the lamb and a little child shall lead them"; to him who gave utterance to the words, "If thine enemy hunger, feed him"-"love thy neighbor as thyself." And, later, all scientists perceive that evolution will bring in universal brotherhood. And mankind have reached today a higher plane of love than that on which they stood even a century ago; but we are savages still. Why so? It is because public opinion is far from ripeness on the tree of knowledge. What will ripen it? The "schoolhouse on the hilltop and no saloon in the valley." While more than twenty per cent. of the whites of the ex-Confederate States of America can neither read nor write, and more than fifty per cent. of the blacks, and in Europe the illiteracy of the masses, in Russia, Italy and Spain, and the poverty and ignorance of the commons of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales are horrible, because of the greed of the aristocracy; and the same condition prevails even in Germany, Austria, France and in all the other states of Europe-we are yet hardly advanced beyond the cave man in true refinement. With drunkenness universally common and the exploitation of the weak and helpless, and the madness of commercialism, to say nothing of the immorality and crime so prevalent everywhere, the world is far from civilized. But the vast increase of wealth, brought about by labor-saving inventions and the triumphs of science and discovery, leave only one factor lacking to place mankind on the plane of equality pointed to and anticipated by him who wrote the following, quoted often in ye lessons: "For I mean not that other men be eased and ye burdened: but by an equality, that now, at this time, your abundance may be a supply for their want, that their abundance also may be a supply for your want: that there may be equality." Why, after nearly two thousand years, have we not reached universally this plane of enlightenment? This plane of equality? This plane of Christianity? reason is, that our foreparents at the time this sentence was first recorded in Greek letters and words, were degraded savages in the woods of Germany, Britain and Scandinavia, dressed in the skins of wild beasts; and we have not, as yet, emerged from the savage state. The factor lacking to us is mental and moral culture. The Let us, then, build a "schoolhouse on every hilltop and let no saloon be set up in the valley." Our children must be given better environments than were ours in our youth. Tradition is rapidly giving way and the aesthetic is bound to come in and do away with the ugly. The ugly! What can be more ugly than the moral leprosy found in the hells of drunkenness and crime, and debauchery licensed in the cities! Public opinion of a people with brains more than half cooked with alcohol and blood poisoned with the nicotine drug-what good! No good at all! So where is left room for hope that a better day is coming bye and bye? It is in the aesthetic. It will ripen. The ugly will disappear. But the standard of beauty of mind-the guage of duty-where found? Oh, it is old. Read the words of Lao Tsze, spoken 500 B. C.: "To those who are good I, too, will be good; Virtue is ever good; Those who are faithful I will meet with faith: This it is to be civilized. That period with us is near at hand. Public opinion will ripen in a day. Its growth is cumulative. When men come to the same mental ripeness they think the same, do the same and are the same the world over and in all times. YE 148TH LESSON. The Church of the Future. How much of the church, essentially,. is not a fabrication? Very little. How far forth has it been a good? In so far as it dealt with society in reference to morality. But this is the thing of highest utility of highest worth. In so far as relates to creedism Christianity has been harmful. But this phase of its entity is giving way-is almost, if not quite, obsolete. So we may say what is good survives and will be preserved. But the church is founded on artifice. It is as far from the real as Scott's Ivanhoe. But that grand work is not without a foundation of truth. It presents a true picture of mediaeval society. Hence, in a positive sense, applicable to the general order then existing, it is a verity. So is the church. It is a great good and has ever been and it will continue so, growing better and better, on and on, as mankind rises to a loftier plane of enlightenment. But the element of superstition will be eliminated entirely that is to say, fear. Here will be centered the intelligent purpose to build up men and women ideal in character, as it was the purpose of the Socratic philosophy. All that is noble-all the good that has ever blessed the world born of thought and experience of the grandest thinkers and the highest orders of society will be gathered into the church, or Christian order a great educational force. The grand church edifices shall not have been erected for no trivial end. But the builders did not know or anticipate what the future would bring— did not anticipate any more what the development of mind would result in, in the field of mentality, ethically and altruistically, than that we would send messages by wireless telegraphy and by telephone. speaking audibly to our friends miles away. The Christian religion will be accepted as the religion of every individual the world over. It will not be the mediaeval but the Pentecostal type that born of ancient culture. Oh, how grand! We will catch on to the concept that held St. Paul in its grasp that opened before him the door of the holy of holies and made him "mad"; for, without a divine madness man is nothing. Now our madness is a rage for riches. St. Paul's madness was a rage to make the world a brotherhood to bring in universal felicity-not in the sense we now hold felicity to mean-but in the sense of the felicity of giving one's life to make the world the better, the wiser and the happier. Let no man raise a hand to break down the church; but let every one do all he can to help re-establish it on its ancient foundation-the foundation of "all things common." This is no difficult task. Say every man alive is my brother; every woman my sister. Break up the slums? How? Ask every one that knocks at your door to "Come in!" That is the way our own grandparents did. Ask him to sit up to your table. That is the old way. Don't drive by any one on the road without asking him to get in and ride with you. Have nothing you call your own-though a millionaire. Let the "authorities" see that every family is well housed. What barbarity! See the Whitechapel. Why does it exist? There is not a woman there that would not take hold to earn an honest living if she had to. That is the duty of society-make it impossible to get a living in any way but by honest effort. We have reached the end of the order of the nineteenth and previous centuries. We have arrived at the twentieth century order of society. The liquor joint must go by so the redlight-so the pool hall-the gambling resort. And society must be transformed. What will bring in the new order? Zeal. Of whom? Not of the lawyers-not of the preachers. No. The people. They must take hold en masse. The word must be"RECONSTRUCT." What? Religion, politics, society in toto. He that cares more for his own personal welfare than for the general welfare is a bad man. He that is eager to have and to hold property beyond his essential needs and of those of his family, is a bad man. In society, as constituted to-day, the poor and the rich, and children and other helpless and dependent ones suffering want, he that, having an abundance, is unwilling that those in need shall share his abundance-unwilling to sell all beyond his own reasonable needs and share it gladly with those who have not a sufficiency-is a bad man. So did Jesus teach; or so, in the New Testament, it is taught in his name. Now to what extent is the New Testament an authority? It is an authority to the extent that it is Greek, as is the Apollo Belvidere an authority; as was the Parthenon in its perfect and finished state in the time of Pericles; as is the Iliad of Homer; as is Thucydides' History; as is the Agamemnon of Aeschylus; as are the orations of Demosthenes; as are the works of Plato and the works of Aristotlethat is to say, to the extent that the art and literature of ancient Greece are authority to-day in sculpture, architecture, poetry, history, oratory, philosophy, etc. The Greeks reached the acme of perfection beyond which the mind and skill of man may never go. Jesus is the most perfect ethical, aesthetical and altruistic ideal "Son of Man" ever born of human thought. The concept is as really Greek as it is perfect. But was there ever a Jesus other than ideal? Ask, was there ever an Achilles or a Socrates? It is conceded that there was. But the real and the ideal are not the same-no more the same than is the Moses of Michael Angelo a perfect likeness of the real Moses or the many pictured Madonnas perfect likenesses of the "Mother of God." The real and the ideal are never the same. But St. John defines Jesus as the "Word made Flesh." He crystalizes, in idea, Infinite Love into positive reality-the "Son of God"; and in the Acts three words: "All things common" define the "Commonwealth of Perfection" that ripens into reality, in epitome the "Kingdom of God"-that is to say, the universal, the world-wide order of society that must inevitably come in when all mankind shall have risen to the plane of highest development. It is the grandest concept of human thought the perfection of philosophy. This trinity of words, "All things common," comprehends all that the Alexandrian library contained-all that the libraries of the entire world have ever contained-the whole truth of human welfare. The universal good. A statue of ivory and gold, they may be defined to be. The perfection of art. Authoritative? As truly so as the threelinked syllogisms of Aristotle are convincing. Because the ancient Greeks arose to perfection-the very zenith of perfection-in the realm of art and literature, their ideals are to us supremely authoritative. The Greek masters are our instructors, our guides, in whatever belongs to the art realm. The ideal perfect man, was moved solely by the divine impulse-the idea of unselfish devotion to the common welfare; and this altruistic motive culminated in the Pentecostal Commonwealth with all things common, epitomizing the universal order-the ripeness of humanity-the perfection that evolution is hastening to bring in-pictured in idea by the sages, not of Hellas alone; but the Roman sibyl caught a view of the same and so did John of Patmos. It is now at our very door. Have the crops failed in India? America has a superabundance. What does the New Testament teach that is applicable here? It teaches the doctrine of equality. "By an equality," says St. Paul, "that now at this time your abundance may be a supply to their want, that their abundance may be a supply to your want, that there may be equality, as it is written, He that hath gathered much had nothing over and he that had gathered little had no lack." (II Cor. viii: 13-14-15.) This is Greek philosophy. And so, too, the following: "One God, the Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all." Authority goes no farther than perfection. That is supreme authority. That is the reason why ancient Greek ideals in art and philosophy, etc., are authoritative; they reach the lofty plane of perfection. YE 150TH LESSON. Occidentalism vs. Orientalism. All the plagues that have afflicted Europe came from Asia-cholera, bubonic plague, black death, etc. But the worst of all the plagues that Asia has brought on Europe and that has cursed both Asia and Europe alike, affecting not the body, but only the mind, and that has held China enthralled until since Japan has been disinfected by an American potion, is named "The Backward Look." It culminated in ancestral worship. It is the belief that all greatness is ancient, that we must do as the fathers did and we must think and believe what the fathers thought and believed. Hence, progress ceased. In the realm of science and philosophy the Semite was similarly afflicted. "Moses and the Prophets" became to the Jews objects of worship, in the sense we define "hero worship." And the West caught the contagion. But the "higher criticism" has emancipated the Western, or European, mind, aided by the investigations of Darwin and others in the realm of science. Semitism is now dead and will, ere long, be entombed never to rise again. The European mind is rid of it. We have returned to European ideals. Ancient Greece was not confined to the Grecian peninsula wholly, but extended along the borders of the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, the Sea of Marmora and to Italy and Africa, and also including many of the islands of the Mediterranean and all those of the Aegean Sea and to the eastern shore of Sicily. She planted colonies wherever she could find footing. Iona, extending hundreds of miles along the shores of Asia Minor, was earliest in the development of art; but in the end Attica surpassed all the other Grecian communities in art and philosophy. Says Gillies: "The Apollo Belvidere of Phidias is universally felt and acknowledged to be the sublimest figure that either skill can execute or imagination conceive. * Animated by the noblest conception of heavenly powers, the artist has far outstepped the perfection of humanity, and if we may speak without irreverence, made the corrupt put on incorruption and the mortal immortality." The Greeks did not stop with portraying physical perfection but essayed to outline moral or ethical perfection, halting only when the ideal "outstepped the perfection of humanity” in the Christ of the New Testament, the Semitic element absent, which left a figure (morally) above the human. I am aware that I now tread upon a thin crust of scoria, red-hot lava beneath, yet I am unharmed and without fear of danger. It is safe now to say that "good works" consist less in ceremonials than in deeds of love, like those of him who "went about doing good." "Behold one came and said unto him: 'Good Master, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?' And Jesus said unto him. * 'If thou wilt enter into life keep the commandments.' * * * The young man said: 'All these things have I kept from my youth up. What lack I yet?' Jesus said unto him: If thou wilt be perfect go and sell all thou hast and give to the poor * * * and come and follow me.' But when the young man heard that saying he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions." Now is one to be anathematized and excommunicated as a heretic who insists on the literal compliance of all with the positive commands of the Great Teacher, and the re-institution of the Pentecostal brother |