Part 37

Our tendency is to return to the pioneers for inspiration.... I was thinking this morning how in all our studies we had passed quickly over the intellectualists, the simplifiers, the synthesisers and explainers--back to the sources of philosophy and sanctity. It is there that we find the flame. We linger and return to such men as Boehme, Fichte, Romini-Serbati, Fröbel, 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 passion 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 Compassion. 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 institution of an ideal of the imminence of great helpers, the Compassionates. 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 passing 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 analogies 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 mass 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 passed 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 God 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 snatch. 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 God 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 competition 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 passages 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.

ASSEMBLY 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 assure 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 municipally. 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 pass 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 rectitude.

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 Fröbel'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.