The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit

So within the nation during this great reconstruction period, these are times that call for heroic men and women. In a Democracy or in any representative form of government an alert citizenship is its only safety. With a vastly increased voting population, in that many millions of women citizens are now admitted to full citizenship, the need for intelligent action and attention to matters of government was never so great. Great numbers will be herded and voted by organizations as well as by machines. As these will comprise the most ignorant and therefore the herdable ones, it is especially incumbent upon the great rank and file of intelligent women to see that they take and maintain an active interest in public affairs.

Politics is something that we cannot evade except to the detriment of our country and thereby to our own detriment. Politics is but another word for government. And in a sense we the individual voter are the government and unless we make matters of government our own concern, there are organizations and there are groups of designing men who will steal in and get possession for their own selfish aggrandizement and gain. This takes sometimes the form of power, to be traded for other power, or concessions; but always if you will trace far enough, eventual money gain. Or again it takes the form of graft and even direct loot. The losses that are sustained through a lowered citizenship, through inefficient service, through a general debauchery of public institutions, through increased taxation to make up for the amounts that are drawn off in graft and loot are well nigh incalculable—and for the sole reason that you and I, average citizens, do not take the active personal interest in our own matters of government that we should take.

Clericalism, Tammanyism, Bolshevism, Syndicalism—and all in the guise of interest in the people—get their holds and their profits in this way. It is essential that we be locally wise and history wise. Any class or section or organization that is less than the nation itself must be watched and be made to keep its own place, or it becomes a menace to the free and larger life of the nation. Even in the case of a great national crisis a superior patriotism is affected and paraded in order that it may camouflage its other and real activities.

When at times we forget ourselves and speak of rights rather than duties in connection with our country, it were well to recall and to repeat the words of Franklin: "The sun never repents of the good he does nor does he ever demand a recompense."

Not only is constant vigilance incumbent upon us, but realising the fact that the boys and the girls of today are the citizens of tomorrow—the nation's voters and law-makers—it is incumbent upon us to see that American free education through American free public schools, is advanced to and maintained at its highest possibilities, and kept free from any agencies that will make for a divided or anything less than a whole-hearted and intelligent citizenship. The motto on the Shakespeare statue at Leicester Square in London: "There is no darkness but ignorance," might well be reproduced in every city and every hamlet in the nation.

Late revelations have shown how even education can be manipulated and prostituted for ulterior purposes. Parochial schools whether Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, or Oriental, have no place in American institutions—and whether their work is carried on in English or in a foreign language. They are absolutely foreign to the spirit of our institutions. They are purely for the sake of something less than the nation itself. Blind indeed are we if we are not history-wise. Criminal indeed are we to allow any boys or girls to be diverted to them and to be deprived of the advantages of a better schooling and being brought under the influences of agencies that are thoroughly and wholly American.

American education must be made for American institutions and for nothing less than this. The nation's children should be shielded from any power that seeks to get possession of them in order at an early and unaccountable age to fasten authority upon them, and to drive a wedge between them and all others of the nation.

The nation has a duty to every child within its borders. To fail to recognize or to shirk that duty, will call for a price to be paid sometime as great as that that has been paid by every other nation that did not see until too late. Sectarianism in education stultifies and robs the child and nullifies the finest national instincts in education. It is for but one purpose—the use and the power of the organization that plans and that fosters it.

Our government profiting by the long weary struggles of other countries, is founded upon the absolute separation of church and state. This does not mean the separation of religion in its true sense from the state; but keeping it free from every type of sectarian influence and domination. It is ours to see that no silent subtle influences are at work, that will eventually make the same trouble here as in other countries, or that will thrust out the same stifling hand to undermine and to throttle universal free public education, and the inalienable right that every child has to it. Our children are the wards of and accountable to the state—they are not the property of any organization, group or groups, less than the state.

We need the creation of a strong Federal Department of Education of cabinet rank, with ample means and strong powers to be the guiding genius of all our state and local departments of education, with greater attention paid to a more thorough and concrete training in civics, in moral and ethical education, in addition to the other well recognized branches in public school education. It should have such powers also as will enable it to see that every child is in school up to a certain age, or until all the fundamentals of a prescribed standard of American education are acquired.

A recent tabulation made public by a Federal Deputy Commissioner of Naturalization has shown that a little over one tenth, in round numbers, 11,000,000, of our population is composed of unnaturalized aliens. Even this however tells but a part of the story; for vast numbers of even those who have become naturalized, have in no sense become Americanized.

"Of the millions of aliens who have gone through the legal forms of naturalization a very large proportion have not in any sense been Americanized, and, though citizens, they are still alien in habits of thought, in speech and in their general attitude toward the community.

"There are industrial centres not far from New York City that are wholly foreign. There are sections of this city that—except as the children through the schools and association with others of their own age yield to change—are intensely alien.

"To penetrate these barriers and open new avenues of communication with the people who live within them is no longer a task to be performed by individual effort. Americanization is a work that must be undertaken and directed on a scale so extensive that only through the cooperation of the States and the Federal Government can it be successfully carried out. It cannot longer be neglected without serious harm to the life and welfare of the Nation."

Some even more startling facts are given out in figures by the Department of the Interior, figures supplied to it by the Surgeon General's Office of the Army. The War Department records show that 24.9 per cent. of the draft army examined by that department's agents were unable to read and understand a newspaper, or to write letters home. In one draft in New York State in May, 1918, 16.6 per cent. were classed as illiterate. In one draft in connection with South Carolina troops in July, 1918, 49.5 per cent. where classed as illiterate. In one draft in connection with Minnesota troops in July of the same year, 14.2 per cent. were classed as illiterate. In other words it means for example that in New York State we have in round numbers 700,000 men between 21 and 31 years of age who are illiterate. The same source reveals the fact that in the nation in round numbers over 10,000,000 are either illiterate or without a knowledge of our language. The South is the home of most of the wholly uneducated, the North of those of foreign speech. And in speaking of this class a recent editorial in another representative New York daily, after making mention of one industrial centre but a few miles out of New York City, in New Jersey, where nearly 16 out of every 100 cannot read English, has said:

"Such people may enjoy the advantages America offers. Of its spirit and institutions they can comprehend nothing. They are the easy dupes of foreign agitators, unassimilable, an element of weakness in the social body that might easily be converted into an element of strength. Many of them have the vote, controlled by leaders interested only in designs alien to America's welfare.

"The problem is national in scope * * *. The best way to keep Bolshevism out of America is to reduce ignorance of our speech and everything else to a minimum. However alert our immigration officers may be, foreign agents of social disorder are sure to pass through our doors, and as long as we allow children to grow up among us who have no means of finding out the meaning of our laws and forms of government the seeds of discontent will be sown in congenial soil."

"The first thing to do is to teach them, and make them realize that a knowledge of the English language is a prerequisite of first class American citizenship. * * * The wiping out of illiteracy is a foundation stone in building up a strong population, able and worthy to hold its own in the world. With the disappearance of illiteracy and of the ignorance of the language of the country will also disappear many of the trouble-breeding problems which have held back immigrants in gaining their fair share of real prosperity, the intelligence and self-respect which are vital ingredients in any good citizenship. Real freedom of life and character cannot be enjoyed by the man or woman whose whole life is passed upon the inferior plane of ignorance and prejudice. Teach them all how to deserve the benefits of life in America, and they will soon learn how to gain and protect them."

It is primarily among the ignorant and illiterate that Bolshevism, anarchy, political rings, and every agency that attempts through self-seeking to sow the seeds of discontent, treachery, and disloyalty, works to exploit them and to herd them for political ends. No man can have that respect for himself, or feel that he has the respect due him from others as an honest and diligent worker, whatever his line of work, who is handicapped by the lack of an ordinary education. The heart of the American nation is sound. Through universal free public education it must be on the alert and be able to see through Bourbonism and understand its methods on the one hand, and Bolshevism on the other; and be determined through intelligent action to see that American soil is made uncongenial to both.

Our chief problem is to see that Democracy is made safe for and made of real service to the world. Our American education must be made continually more keenly alive to the great moral, ethical and social needs of the time. Thereby it will be made religious without having any sectarian slant or bias; it will be made safe for and the hand-maid of Democracy and not a menace to it.

We are finding more and more that the simple fundamentals of life and conduct as portrayed by the Christ of Nazareth not only constitutes a great idealism, but the only practical way of life. Compared to this and to the need that it come more speedily and more universally into operation in the life of the world today, truly "sectarian peculiarities are obsolete impertinences."

Our time needs again more the prophet and less the priest. It needs the God-impelled life and voice of the prophet with his face to the future, both God-ward and man-ward, burning with an undivided devotion to truth and righteousness. It needs less the priest, too often with his back to the future and too often the pliant tool of the organisation whose chief concern is, and ever has been, the preservation of itself under the ostensible purpose of the preservation of the truth once delivered, the same that Jesus with his keen powers of penetration saw killed the Spirit as a high moral guide and as an inspirer to high and unself-centred endeavour, and that he characterised with such scathing scorn. There are splendid exceptions; but this is the rule now even as it was in his day.

The prophet is concerned with truth, not a system; with righteousness, not custom; with justice, not expediency. Is there a man who would dare say that if Christianity—the Christianity of the Christ—had been actually in vogue, in practice in all the countries of Christendom during the last fifty years, during the last twenty-five years, that this colossal and gruesome war would ever have come about? No clear-thinking and honest man would or could say that it would. We need again the voice of the prophet, clear-seeing, high-purposed, and unafraid. We need again the touch of the prophet's hand to lead us back to those simple fundamental teachings of the Christ of Nazareth, that are life-giving to the individual, and that are world-saving.

We speak of our Christian civilisation, and the common man, especially in times like these, asks what it is, where it is—and God knows that we have been for many hundred years wandering in the wilderness. He is thinking that the Kingdom of God on earth that the true teachings of Jesus predicated, and that he laboured so hard to actualise, needs some speeding up. There is a world-wide yearning for spiritual peace and righteousness on the part of the common man. He is finding it occasionally in established religion, but often, perhaps more often, independently of it. He is finding it more often through his own contact and relations with the Man of Nazareth—for him the God-man. There is no greater fact in our time, and there is no greater hope for the future than is to be found in this fact.

Jesus gave the great principles, the animating spirit of life, not minute details of conduct. The real Church of Christ is not an hierarchy, an institution, it is a brotherhood—the actual establishing of the Kingdom of God in moral, ethical and social terms in the world.

Among the last words penned by Dr. John Watson—Ian Maclaren—good churchman, splendid writer, but above all independent thinker and splendid man, were the following: "Was it not the chief mistake and also the hopeless futility of Pharisaism to meddle with the minute affairs of life, and to lay down what a man should do at every turn? It was not therefore an education of conscience, but a bondage of conscience; it did not bring men to their full stature by teaching them to face their own problems of duty and to settle them, it kept them in a state of childhood, by forbidding and commanding in every particular of daily life. Pharisaism, therefore, whether Jewish or Gentile, ancient or modern, which replaces the moral law by casuistry, and the enlightened judgment of the individual by the confessional, creates a narrow character and mechanical morals. Freedom is the birthright of the soul, and it is by the discipline of life the soul finds itself. It were a poor business to be towed across the pathless ocean of this world to the next; by the will of God and for our good we must sail the ship ourselves, and steer our own course. It is the work of the Bible to show us the stars and instruct us how to take our reckoning * * *.

"Jesus did not tell us what to do, for that were impossible, as every man has his own calling, and is set in by his own circumstances, but Jesus has told us how to carry ourselves in the things we have to do, and He has put the heart in us to live becomingly, not by pedantic rules, but by an instinct of nobility. Jesus is the supreme teacher of the Bible and He came not to forbid or to command, but to place the Kingdom of God as a living force, and perpetual inspiration within the soul of man, and then, to leave him in freedom and in grace to fulfil himself."[G]

We no longer admit that Christ is present and at work only when a minister is expounding the gospel or some theological precept or conducting some ordained observance in the pulpit; or that religion is only when it is labelled as such and is within the walls of a church. That belonged to the chapter in Christianity that is now rapidly closing, a chapter of good works and results—but so pitiably below its possibilities. So pitiably below because men had been taught and without sufficient thought accepted the teaching that to be a Christian was to hold certain beliefs about the Christ that had been formulated by early groups of men and that had come down through the centuries.

The chapter that is now opening upon the world is the one that puts Christ's own teachings in the simple, frank, and direct manner in which he gave them, to the front. It makes life, character, conduct, human concern and human service of greater importance than mere matters of opinion. It makes eager and unremitting work for the establishing of the Kingdom of God, the kingdom of right relations between men, here on this earth, the essential thing. It insists that the telling test as to whether a man is a Christian is how much of the Christ spirit is in evidence in his life—and in every phase of his life. Gripped by this idea which for a long time the forward-looking and therefore the big men in them have been striving for, our churches in the main are moving forward with a new, a dauntless, and a powerful appeal.

Differences that have sometimes separated them on account of differences of opinion, whether in thought or interpretation,[H] are now found to be so insignificant when compared to the actual simple fundamentals that the Master taught, and when compared to the work to be done, that a great Interallied Church Movement is now taking concrete and strong working form, that is equipping the church for a mighty and far-reaching Christian work. A new and great future lies immediately ahead. The good it is equipping itself to accomplish is beyond calculation—a work in which minister and layman will have equal voice and equal share.

Britain's apostle of brotherhood and leader of the Brotherhood Movement there, Rev. Tom Sykes, who has caught so clearly the Master's own basis of Christianity—love for and union with God, love for and union with the brother—has recently put so much stimulating truth into a single paragraph that I reproduce it here:

"The emergence of the feeling of kinship with the Unseen is the most arresting and revealing fact of human history. * * * The union with God is not through the display of ritual, but the affiliation and conjunction of life. We do not believe we are in a universe that has screens and folds, where the spiritual commerce of man has to be conducted on the principle of secret diplomacy. The universe is frank and open, and God is straightforward and honourable. In making the spirit and practice of brotherliness the test of religious value, we are at one with Him who said: 'Inasmuch as ye do it unto one of the least—ye do it unto me.' We touch the Father when we help His child. Jesus taught us not to come to God asking, art Thou this or that? but to call Him Father and live upon it. Do not admit that many of our Brotherhood meetings are in 'neutral' or 'secular' halls and buildings! 'Where two or three gather in My name, there am I.' Where He is, there is hallowed ground."

We need a stock-taking and a mobilisation of our spiritual forces. But what, after all, does this mean? Search as we may we are brought back every time to this same Man of Nazareth, the God-man—Son of Man and Son of God. And gathering it into a few brief sentences it is this: Jesus' great revelation was this consciousness of God in the individual life, and to this he witnessed in a supreme and masterly way, because this he supremely realised and lived. Faith in him and following him does not mean acquiring some particular notion of God or some particular belief about him himself. It is the living in one's own life of this same consciousness of God as one's source and Father, and a living in these same filial relations with him of love and guidance and care that Jesus entered into and continuously lived.

When this is done there is no problem and no condition in the individual life that it will not clarify, mould, and therefore take care of; for "μὴ μεριμνᾶτε τῇ ψυχῇ ὑμῶν"—do not worry about your life—was the Master's clear-cut command. Are we ready for this high type of spiritual adventure? Not only are we assured of this great and mighty truth that the Master revealed and going ahead of us lived, that under this supreme guidance we need not worry about the things of the life, but that under this Divine guidance we need not think even of the life itself, if for any reason it becomes our duty or our privilege to lay it down. Witnessing for truth and standing for truth he again preceded us in this.

But this, this love for God or rather this state that becomes the natural and the normal life when we seek the Kingdom, and the Divine rule becomes dominant and operative in mind and heart, leads us directly back to his other fundamental: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. For if God is my Father and if he cares for me in this way—and every other man in the world is my brother and He cares for him in exactly the same way—then by the sanction of God his Father I haven't anything on my brother; and by the love of God my Father my brother hasn't anything on me. It is but the most rudimentary commonsense then, that we be considerate one of another, that we be square and decent one with another. We will do well as children of the same Father to sit down and talk matters over; and arise with the conclusion that the advice of Jesus, our elder brother, is sound: "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them."

He gave it no label, but it has subsequently become known as the Golden Rule. There is no higher rule and no greater developer of the highest there is in the individual human life, and no greater adjuster and beautifier of the problems of our common human life. And when it becomes sufficiently strong in its action in this, the world awaits its projection into its international life. This is the truth that he revealed—the twofold truth of love to God and love for the neighbour, that shall make men free. The truth of the Man of Nazareth still holds and shall hold, and we must realise this adequately before we ask or can expect any other revelation.