Part 51

Henry said: “He was a man of determination,” and, before I could answer, Alfred went on: “He was a man of large sympathies.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is the combination of the two; it is more than both. I mean that the great and good man is the man whose final far-off aim is the unity and completeness of man, who shapes his life and his work toward that aim, who works for it, lives for it, sacrifices himself and all things to it; and such a man was Lincoln. He made mistakes—he used them for his cause. His morality, his law, was the union—that symbol of the larger union—and for this immense self-fulfilment he worked with his might, and died for it.”

“Yes,” said Henry, “and the great man must make mistakes, and go beyond them. Roosevelt, for instance, is always making mistakes, and then acknowledging them, and going forward once more.”

“Surely. And so Lincoln worked for the union, in sympathy with all men.”

“In one speech,” said Henry, “he asked Davis, his opponent in the House, to ‘help him save the union.’”

“Now, Henry,” I said, “there is another thing in your paper—if you don’t mind my saying it?”

“Not at all.”

“I mean that when you quoted Hillel you should have finished the quotation: ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me?’ and ‘but if I am for myself alone, what am I then?’ You did not bring out the idea of the large and small self, of sacrificing the small self to the large, because you love the large self above all else, not because you like it better. This morning I heard a lecture by Professor Royce, of Harvard, and it is curious that he used exactly the same words we used in speaking of self-sacrifice. He said we sacrifice the small to the large self.”

At this point Ruth came in, and brought Marian’s paper. I read it at once:

“Our meeting of the Seekers of February 14th was very interesting. We talked about goodness. First we tried to define good, and finally reached the conclusion that goodness means being in a harmonious relation with all our fellow-beings. We should try to make our life like some beautiful picture or other work of art, making it a complete and harmonious whole. All our friends and acquaintances, everything we see, hear, do or know, help to make this picture; and if we try, we can consciously make it what we want. We are masters of our lives, and if we remember this, it will influence all our thoughts and deeds. We also spoke of happiness, and decided that each one has a different kind of happiness, depending on what he wants most. We also spoke of self-sacrifice. There is really no such thing as self-sacrifice, because when we give up one thing it is always because we think another finer, and because we want the other more. We cannot have every detail in our picture as clear as the main idea, and we must give up something to bring out this idea.”

We all thought this paper excellent. I told Ruth briefly what we had said before she came; and then we spoke at length of the importance of living our belief, of working for the cause, of giving ourselves to the large self.

I said: “Every great man has always done just that, whether he was writer, philosopher, artist, statesman or scientist; he has always devoted himself to a work which aimed toward the great union.”

Florence said: “You mean not like the philosophers, simply to dream of the good, but like the artist, to work it out? Didn’t you say that, when we spoke of choosing the artistic life?”

“No,” I answered, “not quite. The philosopher and dreamer also work for the supreme good, by showing what it is like, and pointing the way which men afterward go.”

“That is what I always thought,” said Florence.

“Yes,” I answered, “the philosopher is the teacher of teachers. But I chose the artistic way of viewing life, because it combines the philosophic and the scientific way, the vision and the work.”

Virginia now said: “But sometimes men who work for completeness, and whose motives are all good, do harm, anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“Jesus, for instance,” she said. “He has done so much harm throughout the ages, which he never meant to do.”

“It was not he who did the harm,” I answered; “it was the people who misunderstood him and misused his words. No great man ever does all that he sets out to do. He cannot, since his aim is no less than perfection.”

“I hate perfect people,” said Virginia, “or to think of any great man as perfect, because it is so inhuman. I read a book for children, lately, about Jesus, which made him out a perfect child. It was full of contradictions, for it said first that he was a wonder, who walked, talked and thought earlier than other children, and then it said that he was human, and understood all human weaknesses. I think that to know men a man must have human weaknesses and imperfections.”

“Yes,” I said; “and I never thought of Jesus as unhumanly perfect. He, too, had his temptation and weakness to fight and overcome. Indeed, only the petty man could be perfect.”

“But he would not be perfect,” said Henry.

“No,” I answered; “but according to his standard, he might think himself so. The great man, the Jesus, the Lincoln, could never be perfect, for his perfection could only come with the completeness and beauty and goodness of the whole world. You said of Jesus that he did harm, because the doctrine made from his words did harm. But you must see that until all men are great men, every man must suffer so. Take Lincoln, for instance. If he had lived, and kept control of the Government, surely the evils of the reconstruction period would have been avoided. You might say, then, that Lincoln did harm, because his work led to all that wrong and unhappiness.”

“But it has all come right now,” said Henry.

“Hardly,” I answered; “it is not nearly right, even to-day.”

“And I suppose,” Virginia said, “that finally the work of Jesus and of every great man will come right.”

“And Lincoln’s work,” said Florence, “will come right sooner, because it is not so large as the work of Jesus.”