Part 20

Which brings us to the very pith of the endeavour: The child is ready to change--that is the whole story. The child is fluid, volatile, receptive to reason. In all our world-life there is nothing so ostentatiously or calamitously amiss as the ignorance and customs of our relation to children. The child will change in a day. The child is ready for the beauty and the mystery of mercy. The prison-house must not be closed to sensitiveness and intuition. If that can be prevented the problem of animal welfare is solved, and in the end we will find that much more has been done for our children than for the animals. So often again we set out to discover the passage to India and reach the shores of a New World.

CHILDREN CHANGE

The first of the young men to come to Stonestudy followed an attraction which has never been quite definite to me. He was strongly educated, having studied art and life at Columbia and other places. His chief interest at first appeared to be in the oriental philosophy which he alleged to have found in my work. After that he intimated that he aspired to write. The second young man came from Dakota, also a college-bred. A teacher there wrote to me about him. I looked at some of his work, and I found in it potentialities of illimitable promise. I was not so excited as I would have been had I not met this discovery in other cases from the generation behind us. Their fleets are upon every sea.

The need of a living was somehow arranged, I worked with the two a while in the evening on short manuscript matters. In fact, the dollar-end has not pinched so far; and they help a while in the garden in the afternoons, designating the period, Track, as they named the little class after mid-day, Chapel. At first, I was in doubt as to whether they really belonged to the class. It was primarily designed for the younger minds--and I was unwilling to change that.

You would think it rather difficult--I know I did--to bring the work in one class for ages ranging from eleven to twice that. I said to the young men:

"Of course it is their hour. I don't want to bore you, but come if you like. Be free to discontinue, if what you get isn't worth the time. As for me--the young ones come first, and I am not yet ready for two classes."

They smiled. About a week later, they came in a half-hour late. It happened we had been having an exceptionally good hour.

"I would rather have you not come, if you cannot come on time," I said.

They sat down without any explanation. It was long afterward that I heard they had been busy about a trunk; that their delay had been unavoidable in getting it through customs, a barbarous and war-making inconvenience which cannot flourish much longer. And one day we went out into the garden together for the hoes, and the Dakota young man said:

"Chapel is the best hour of the day----"

He said more, and it surprised me from one who talked so rarely. This younger generation, as I have said, has an impediment of speech. It is not glib nor explanatory.... One of the happiest things that has ever befallen me is the spirit of the Chapel. It happened that The Abbot brought in a bit of work that repeated a rather tiresome kind of mis-technicality--an error, I had pointed out to him before. I took him to task--lit into him with some force upon his particular needs of staying down a little each day--or the world would never hear his voice.... In the silence I found that the pain was no more his than the others in the room--that they were all sustaining him, their hearts like a hammock for him, their minds in a tensity for me to stop.... I did. The fact is, I choked at the discovery.... They were very far from any competitive ideal. They were one--and there's something immortal about that. It gave me the glimpse of what the world will some time be. There is nothing that so thrills as the many made one.... Power bulks even from this little group; the sense of self flees away; the glow suffuses all things--and we rise together--a gold light in the room that will come to all the world.

It is worth dwelling upon--this spirit of the Chapel.... The war has since come to the world, and many who are already toiling for the reconstruction write to the Study from time to time--from different parts of the world. I read the class a letter recently from a young woman in England. It was like the cry of a soul, and as I looked up from the paper, a glow was upon their faces. A group of workers in the Western coast send us their letters and actions from time to time, and another group from Washington. All these are placed before the Chapel kindred for inspiration and aliment.

"As this is the time for you to be here," I said one day, "the time shall come for you to go forth. All that you are bringing to yourselves from these days must be tried out in the larger fields of the world. You will meet the world in your periods of maturity and genius--at the time of the world's greatest need. That is a clue to the splendid quality of the elect of the generation to which you belong. You are watching the end of the bleakest and most terrible age--the breaking down at last of an iron age. It has shattered into the terrible disorder of continental battlefields. But you belong to the builders, whose names will be called afterward."

... I have come to the Chapel torn and troubled; and the spirit of it has calmed and restored me. They are so ready; they listen and give.... We watch the world tearing down--from this quietude. We have no country but God's country. Though we live in the midst of partisanship and madness, we turn our eyes ahead and build our thoughts upon the New Age--just children.

... For almost a year I had been preparing a large rose-bed--draining, under-developing the clay, softening the humus. The bed must be developed first. The world is interested only in the bloom, in the fruit, but the florists talk together upon their work before the plants are set. The roses answered--almost wonderfully. They brought me the old romance of France and memories of the Ireland that has vanished. This point was touched upon in the Foreword--how in the joy of the roses that answered months after the labour was forgotten, it suddenly occurred what a marvel is the culture of the human soul.

The preparation of the mind is paramount. Not a touch of care or a drop of richness is lost; not an ideal fails. These young minds bring me the thoughts I have forgotten--fruited thoughts from their own boughs. They are but awakened. They are not different from other children. Again and again it has come to me from the wonderful unfoldings under my eyes, that for centuries the world has been maiming its children--that only those who were wonderfully strong could escape, and become articulate as men.

Again, the splendid fact is that children change. You touch their minds and they are not the same the next day.

... I do not see how preachers talk Sunday after Sunday to congregations, which, though edified, return to their same little questionable ways. There are people in the cults who come to teachers and leaders to be ignited. They swim away with the new message; they love it and are lifted, but it subsides within them. In their depression and darkness they seek the outer ignition again. We must be self-starters.... I once had a class of men and women in the city. We met weekly and some of the evenings were full of delight and aspiration. For two winter seasons we carried on the work. After a long summer we met together and even in the joy of reunion, I found many caught in their different conventions--world ways, the obvious and the temporal, as if we had never breathed the open together. It was one of the great lessons to me--to deal with the younger generation. I sometimes think the younger the better. I have recalled again and again the significance of the Catholic priests' saying--"Give us your child until he is seven only----"

In one year I have been so accustomed to see young people change--to watch the expression of their splendid inimitable selves, that it comes like a grim horror how the myriads of children are literally sealed in the world.

We believe that God is in everything; that we would be fools, or at best innocuous angels if there were not evil in the world for us to be ground upon and master. We are held and refined between the two attractions--one of the earth and the other a spiritual uplift. We believe that the sense of Unity is the first deep breath of the soul, the precursor of illumination; that the great Brotherhood conception must come from this sense. Next to this realisation, we believe that man's idea of time is an illusion, that immortality is here and now; that nothing can happen to us that is not the right good thing; that the farther and faster we go, the more beautiful and subtle is the system of tests which are played upon us; that our first business in life is to reconcile these tests to our days and hours, to understand and regard them from the standpoint of an unbroken life, not as a three-score-and-ten adventure here. You would think these things hard to understand--they are not. The littlest ones have it--the two small boys of seven and nine, who have not regularly entered the Chapel.

* * * * *

The little girl brought us some of these thoughts in her own way, and without title:

The soul is very old. It has much to say, if one learns to listen. If one makes his body fine, he can listen better. And if one's body is fine from the beginning, it is because he has learned to listen before. All that we have learned in past ages is coiled within. The good a man does is all kept in the soul, and all his lessons. The little fairy people that played around him and told him queer things when he was first a rock, then flowers and trees, are still printed in his soul. The difficult thing is to bring them out into the world, to tell them. By listening, in time, the soul's wonderful old voice will tell us all things, so that we can write and tell about them. Every thought we try so hard to get, is there. It is like losing track of a thimble. If you know it is somewhere and you need it badly enough, you will find it.

The brain cannot get for us a mighty thought. The brain can only translate soul-talk into words. It was not the brain which told Fichte, a long, long time ago, that Germany was going wrong and that he should fix it by telling them the right way to go; but it was the brain that told the people not to listen to him, but to go on just as they had been.

It is always the brain that makes one add columns correctly, and learn the number tables and how to spell words. But these will come themselves, without a life spent studying them. After a life of this kind, the soul is not a bit farther ahead than it was when coming into the world in the body of a baby.

The brain will also show one the way to make money, perhaps lots of it, the most terrible thing that can happen to you, unless, as Whitman says, "you shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve."

A MAN'S OWN

The first and general objection to the plan made much of here, that of educating young minds in small classes with a design toward promoting the individual expression, is that the millions of our rising race could not be handled so; in fact, that it is a physical and economic impossibility.