WEALTH AND MANHOOD

209

hood and sisterhood in which "all things are common"? Was not Jesus aesthetically perfect, morally perfect and ideally perfect "perfect in every good work," so that we ought to pattern after him till we all come *** unto a perfect man-"unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ"-"perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect." When we cease our admiration of the grand works of Grecian sculptors, architects, poets, orators, philosophers, historians, etc., will we cease to admire the morally "perfect man"- -the Jesus of the New Testament. It is admissable that one did really and actually live the life pictured as that of Jesus of Galilee and it is possible that like the Jupiter of Phidias he is an ideal creation. But it is indifferent which, if he be our "Great Example." The former view let all hold who may, and the latter all who must.

YE 151ST LESSON.

Wealth and Manhood.

We are about come upon a time when all things will conform to rule. Invention has been the order of the day during the nineteenth century. But little progress has been made toward placing the beneficent fruits of invention on a common table to be partaken of by all. To do this will be the work of the twentieth century. A slight common benefit has been realized in the shortening of the hours of labor and a seeming increase of the wage price-seeming only, but not real, since natural resources have become less numerous--wild game and wild fruits becoming entirely cut off that once helped greatly toward the supply of the old-time family larder, and the skins of wild deer for clothing. I remember well when my father had his working pantaloons (that my mother made from the wool of our own sheep-spun by her own hands, and cut out, and sewed with thread of her own spinning) faced with buckskin to make them last the longer. This in Indiana in 1844, one hundred and twenty miles east of Chicago.

The time has come for reason to displace instinct. And reason will do so. When the exercise of a faculty is no longer needful the faculty falls naturally into disuse and in the end aborts. When society becomes schooled and mind needs become urgent, and they have reached, with the generality of people, the same stage as now they have reached with the better educated class, all men will feel as did Agassiz when he said: "I cannot afford to waste my time making money." The man compelled to give all of his time to so-called "business" is a galley slave held to the oar. He is only so much mechanical power and counts little in the scale of being. He weighs no more than his avoirdupois of bone and muscle, his mind nil and mind is the man.

No self-respecting man will be a hog, and he is a hog who has no higher aim in life than has a hog. He has no higher aim if he give all his attention to feeding his insatiable greed and no attention to feeding his immortal mind and heart. He has a mind rudimentary we may say. He is what his education has made him. And his education is what the ideal of his youth has compelled. For each man is self-made, and the force that has driven him forward has been an ideal either instinctive or acquired. With some it is sensual and blind. Such youths land in reformatories. Why does a man who has a competence reach after more? He is overmastered by the swinish instinct. It will not be many years hence until such an one will be despised by all men. "Stop when you have enough," the public will say. "Where are your brains?" will be asked.

There is, indeed, something higher to live for than money-making. What is it? Jesus knew; his apostles knew; Dorothy Dix knew; George Washington knew; every man who has died on the battle-field

knew; every student of nature knows; every true minister of the gospel knows. Did Darwin delve for money? Is any professor of science seeking money? Does any man worthy the name of man place money among the gods to be worshipped? Not one. There are Shylocks. They are despised. Men of wealth seem to be respected for their wealthiness. It is only seeming. They are not respected on account of their riches any more by the good to-day than they were by the typical "perfect man" of Judea nineteen hundred years ago. Get rid of the false idea, O ye rich! that ye are looked up to on account of your riches. Ye are not.

"I have nothing that I call my own, not even my life," every patriot that has fallen in defense of humanity has said; if not in words, he has said so by his actions. Is Andrew Carnegie a rich man? Not so, if, like the treasurer of the government at Washington, he only holds the purse-strings. I rail not at rich men that have the common welfare at heart and its promotion the one and only purpose of their lives. And Mr. Carnegie has a cultivated mind. He is a thinker and an able writer. It is the public-spirited man Carnegie that will be remembered, not the rich man. "Man's life," said Jesus, "consists not in the abundance of his possessions."

YE 152d LESSON.

Non-resistance and Stoicism.

What constitutes an educated person? It is not that his memory is stored full of rubbish, like an old garret. It consists not of aptness in any line. One may know all languages, be proficient in mathematics, have all literature by heart, be an orator like Webster, a musician like Wagner, a poet like Shakespeare, and still be uneducated. An educated man or woman is one whose mind holds the mastery of his being, one whose emotional nature, however strong, is yet under control of the mind. And it must not be said that the heart is ignored. On the contrary the heart sweetens all. This figure is true. The mind without the heart may be bitter as is the gall of bitterness. God is love. So it would seem that love is "all in all." Love is of the heart.

But the mind determines what is just. The passionate part of the human machine is not trustworthy without a wise engineer to direct. That engineer is reason; his habitation the mind. The unimpassioned mind must rule, or else a Burns or a Poe or a Byron or a Sappho will grow up unbalanced. "There are many ways," says Seneca, in which passion may be checked-even anger. Most things may be turned into jest. It is said that Socrates, when he was given a box on the ear, merely said, 'It is a pity a man can not tell when he ought to wear his helmet out walking.' It does not matter," Seneca continues, “so much how an injury is done as how it is borne. Some one has offered you an insult; not a greater one, perhaps, than was offered the Stoic philosopher, Diogenes, in whose face an insolent young man spat just when he was lecturing on the evil of anger. He bore it mildly and wisely. I am not angry,' he said, "but I am not sure that I ought not be angry.' Yet how much better." argues Seneca, "did our Cato behave. When he was pleading, one Lentulus, whom our fathers remember as a demagogue and passionate man, spat all the phlegm he could muster, upon his forehead. Cato wiped his face and said, 'Lentulus, I shall declare to all the world that men are mistaken when they say that you are wanting in cheek.

Out of the Stoic doctrine that passion should never be indulged grew its carollary, "resist not evil"-the doctrine of non-resistance of injuries. The more carefully we examine what remains to us of the teachings of the philosophers of Greece and Rome the more do we recognize the kinship of Christian ethics with the ethics of the old

THE PERMANENT AND THE PASSING

211

philosophy. Example: "I will try," says Seneca, "to amend you by a reprimand given first in private and then in public." (See Matthew XVIII: 15. 16.).

Yet the qestion is not "Whence the doctrine;" but "Is the doctrine true?" Did we say truly that we have nothing of value that is not Greek; that out of the old the later was evolved; that we are still pupils of the Greek masters; that our own great works of art, literature, etc., are imitations only of Greek masterpieces that we have seen only in fragments and ruins; that the day of reconstruction has arrived when the foundations built upon by the Greeks of old must be rebuilt upon by us, after the accumulated rubbish of the dark ages has been removed-all this, if true, I say, only shows that the civilization, what we aspire to, depends upon the triumph of the individual genius of men of today as did that of the Greeks upon their individual genius, and not upon the interposition of gods. The natural supersedes the supernatural; science displaces superstition and truth has dethroned falsehood. The long-looked-for kingdom of God is at hand. So shall we "Ring in the Christ that is to be."

YE 153d LESSON.

The Permanent and the Passing.

It seems that nothing is permanent and that all is passing. And yet the impermanent is but change. The essence is continuous. The change is of form. "If a man die shall he live again?" But does he die? The world once was "without form and void." So were all the planets and our sun, and so the universe. And, too, it may become so again. The conservation of energy is a dogma of science. And yet if matter be but motion-"Whirls or eddies in the ether"-may not there be a cumulative, counter force that will in the end, nullify this motion and produce equilibrium that when reached will close the cycle? So we speculate. But what is positive?

All is change, and to appearance there is no permanency. But truth is eternal as is God who is Truth. But "Who by searching can find out God?" The question remains unanswered. "What is truth?" Socrates despaired finding an answer to this interrogatory, and he said "we know nothing absolutely." It does seem so when we see what changes of religious creeds have taken place within a century that have been long held by mankind to be positive truth? Where are the Olympic gods? They have passed. Where is now the "religion of our fathers?" It is not that of today. And will the religion of to-day be the religion of tomorrow? Only nominally so. The effort to hitch to a post the Pegasus of religious belief has been a costly experiment and yet it is not quite given up. Trials for "heresy" still go on.

A standard of well doing was set up of old of which the New Testament is the written record. It has not been fully lived up to in any age, by any people since the Apostles' day. The nearer it has been approached the greater the common felicity. When the church drop "Creed" and make "well doing" the criterion of religion will not all men be as anxious to "join the church" as now to "go to college" and get a college education? I think so. Who would not be beautiful? And what beauty can compare with the beauty of mind and beatific character? Character building is the only legitimate or proper work of the church-moral perfection or "righteousness" the end-or rather a means to a higher end. What is that higher end?

We have only to undestand the paramount motive influencing the ideally "perfect man"-Jesus of Nazareth-to know the end or pur

pose to be held supreme by every sane mind-the motive to all right doing the common welfare-the welfare not of self, but of others. The perfection of the ego is a preparation for a mission, which is to lift up and not tear down. I have heard good men remark that "the Japs are better Christians than we." Why so? There is much for us to learn from the learned Confucians of China and from the learned Buddhists of India and Japan. To say that an individul or a people is "Christian" signifies little. The Coptic "Christians" of north Africa, the "Christians" of eastern Asia today where the Apostles preached and of Russia in Europe and Turkey are besotted and superstitious! And it is said that in Scotland good Scotch whisky is even now as dear to the flock as is the Covenant. But one to live up to the high standard of morals presented in the New Testament and carry out its altruistic teachings, reaching the "measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" he might be truly said to "dwell in God and God in him;" and, indeed, we (letting all else go by in Christian endeavor but character building and "going about doing good," with the zeal of the primitive Christians-willing to suffer martyrdom to achieve the end of bringing men and women to be like Christ, that is to say, "bringing them to Christ") yea, every "professor of religion,` so living and so doing how long would it be before all men would follow our and their example and Jesus have drawn all men unto him?

But our American society is drunken, immoral, accursed! And the English and the Germans and the French-yea the people of every European state, language and nation in Christendom are no better than we. But the Japanese are more temperate than we; so are the Chinese, and so are the people of India, the people of Arabia, the people of Turkey-Mohammedans, Buddhists and Confucians! But the New Testament is a moral code superior to any other book or Bible on earth extant at the present time.

YE 154TH LESSON.

The Ideally "Perfect Man."

If one could correctly define the ideally perfect man in a few words there would be no further need of written or spoken language in treating the subject that occupies all the pages of the Bibles of the ages and of all the treatises of morals, religion and law in the Universe. To define an ideally perfect state can be done only by a sculptor like Phidias, and even he could not do so except by exhibiting the thing itself-his masterpiece-his Jupiter or his Minerva, or his Apollo. The perfect man to most Europeans is the Christ, to the Arabians, Mohammed, to the Persians, Zoroaster, to the Hindus, Buddha, and to the Chinese, Confucius. Yet one may give a general precept that will aid in the formation of a perfect character. It is: "Be Natural."

Now, what do these two words mean? We understand what it is to be natural, if we understand the law of all life, plant and animal, excepting that of man. In him there is a double law or two seeming antagonistic laws-the "law of the mind" and the "law of the flesh,' as defined by St. Paul, which in life other than of man, are wanting. "I see," says he, "another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind." Herein is man's nature unique. Herein we see the fruitage of the "tree of knowledge of good and evil." The brute and the insect are purely natural. But into man's makeup another factor intrudes. We call it convention. This is outside the domain of instinct and within that of reason. Here thought is operative; here, too, design; here calculation, A purpose intervenes. Our "eyes are

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND METAPHYSICS

213

opened and we become as gods knowing good and evil." We have "eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge." So Josephus is right in saying of the Old Testament account of Adam and Eve in the garden that here Moses speaks allegorically, that is to say philosophically.

The conventional curbs the natural. So we say, "Let reason guide." "Love your enemies; do good to them that hate you." This is not instinctive. Therefore we say it is not beastlike. Do we say it is natural? Not according to the rule of lower animal life. Is it so according to reason? It is. We see in it the fruitage of full-grown intellectuality. "But Jesus said it," says one; another says, "it was born of the brain of the Greek-the highest conception of his deductive reasoning -his philosophy." We have indeed again reached the period in human history when the ipse dixit of neither gods nor men is accepted as final. "Prove all things; hold fast the good," we say, as said St. Paul.

Be natural! Apply this to eating and drinking, to all God-given appetites. There are persons of but one thought: "Good things to eat; good things to drink." Their lives are spent in the undue indulgence of natural and acquired desires and appetites. Now such persons must in some way have come to believe it right so to do; for if men or women do what they are presumed to know to be wrong, and that all sane people know to be so, and without concealment persist in so doing, they are at once placed in asylums for lunacy.

All moral instruction appeals only to sane minds. It can affect them and them alone. Say to a sane person "to do this is right; to do that is wrong," he at once applies his mind to determine the correctness of your theses. When convinced that what you have said is true he will be instructed by it and try to conform his behaviour to his conviction. If this be not true there would be no need of schools or churches, teachers or preachers.

But all are more or less insane. Find the truly sane and rightthinking person with perfectly correct views of life and duty and who has obtained complete self-mastery and you have found the "perfect man." "That which I do I allow not; for what I would I do not; but what I hate that I do." Here is the candid confession of a real man -not by any means "perfect" by his own admission. He calls this condition "death." He exclaims, "Who will deliver me from the body of this death!" How far was St. Paul astray in his philosophy?

YE 155TH LESSON.

Righteousness and Metaphysics.

For what do the churches stand? Increasingly for uprightness. Increasingly, I say; for the church or churches have hitherto stood rather for hairsplitting. What is meant by this is shown by what marks the difference between Unitarian and Trinitarian. Is it that the one stands for a morality superior to the other? Does the one "go about doing good" and the other not? Is the one more upright -more devoted to wife and family and to country-more given to combatting evil; is the one a better citizen or better man-more ready to feed the hungry and clothe the naked-to visit the fatherless and the widows in their afflictions and keep himself unspotted from the world than the other? No. The one believes in tweedledum and the other in tweedledee (a fair translation of homoiousian and homoousian). That is all the difference. Metaphysics!-"how many angels may stand on the point of a needle?"-not exactly this but what is as impossible of comprehension by a modern mind. The Alexandian Greek, or even Plato who believed that ideas were real entities might have grasped the meaning of the metaphysical dogmas that have