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Title: The Five Great Philosophies of Life

Author: William de Witt Hyde

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Language: English

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THE
FIVE GREAT PHILOSOPHIES
OF LIFE

BY

WILLIAM DE WITT HYDE

PRESIDENT OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1924

All rights reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Copyright, 1904,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1904. Reprinted January, 1905; January, 1906; January, 1908; June, 1910.

Copyright, 1911,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1911. Reprinted May, 1912; May, 1913; May, 1914; July, 1915; January, November, 1917; August, 1919; February, October, 1920; June, November, 1921; September, 1922; June, 1923; September, 1924.

Norwood Press
J.S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

[Pg v]

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

When asked why some men with moderate talents and meagre technical equipment succeed, where others with greater ability and better preparation fail; why some women with plain features and few accomplishments charm, while others with all the advantages of beauty and cultivation repel, we are wont to conceal our ignorance behind the vague term personality. Undoubtedly the deeper springs of personality are below the threshold of consciousness, in hereditary traits and early training. Still some of the higher elements of personality rise above this threshold, are reducible to philosophical principles, and amenable to rational control.

The five centuries from the birth of Socrates to the death of Jesus produced five such principles: the Epicurean pursuit of pleasure, genial but ungenerous; the Stoic law of self-control, strenuous but forbidding; the Platonic plan of subordination, sublime but ascetic; the Aristotelian sense of proportion, practical but uninspiring; and the[Pg vi] Christian Spirit of Love, broadest and deepest of them all.

The purpose of this book is to let the masters of these sane and wholesome principles of personality talk to us in their own words; with just enough of comment and interpretation to bring us to their points of view, and make us welcome their friendly assistance in the philosophical guidance of life.

Why a new edition under a new title? Because "From Epicurus to Christ" had an antiquarian flavor; while the book presents those answers to the problem of life, which, though offered first by the ancients, are still so broad, deep, and true that all our modern answers are mere varieties of these five great types. Because the former title suggested that the historical aspect was a finality; whereas it is here used merely as the most effective approach to present-day solutions of the fundamental problems of life.

"Why rewrite the last chapter?" Because, while the faith of the world has found in Jesus much more than a philosophy of life, in its quest for greater things it has almost overlooked that. Yet Jesus' Spirit of Love is the final philosophy of life.

To the question in its Jewish form, "What is[Pg vii] the great commandment?" Jesus answers, "The first is Love to God; and the second, just like it, Love to man." Translated into modern, ethical terms his philosophy of life is a grateful and helpful appreciation; first of the whole system of relations, physical, mental, social, and spiritual, as Personal like ourselves, but Infinite, seeking perfection, caring for each lowliest member as an essential and precious part of the whole; and, second, of other finite and imperfect persons, whose aims, interests, and affections are just as real, and therefore to be held just as sacred, as our own.

To love, to dwell in this grateful and helpful appreciation of the Father and our brothers,—this is life: and all that falls short of it is intellectually the illusion of selfishness; spiritually the death penalty of sin.

From this central point of view every phase of Jesus' teaching, his democracy, compassion, courage, humility, earnestness, charitableness, sacrifice, can be shown to flow straight and clear.

Of course such a limitation to his philosophy of life leaves out of account all supernatural and eschatological considerations. We here consider only the truth and worth of the teaching; not who the Teacher is, nor what may happen to us hereafter if we obey or disobey.[Pg viii]

Yet even from this limited point of view we may get a glimpse, more real and convincing than any to be gained by the traditional, dogmatic approach, of the divine and eternal quality of both Teacher and teaching—we may see that beyond Love truth cannot go; above Love life cannot rise; that he who loves is one with God; that out of Love all is hell, whether here or hereafter; and that in Love lies heaven, both now and forevermore.

WILLIAM DE WITT HYDE.

Bowdoin College,
      Brunswick, Maine,
            July 25, 1911.

[Pg ix]

CONTENTS

THE FIVE GREAT PHILOSOPHIES
OF LIFE

[Pg 1]

CHAPTER I

THE EPICUREAN PURSUIT OF PLEASURE

I
SELECTIONS FROM THE EPICUREAN SCRIPTURES

Epicureanism is so simple a philosophy of life that it scarcely needs interpretation. In fact, as the following citations show, it was originally little more than a set of directions for living "the simple life," with pleasure as the simplifying principle. The more subtle teaching of the other philosophies will require to be introduced by explanatory statement, or else accompanied by a running commentary as it proceeds. The best way to understand Epicureanism, however, is to let Epicurus and his disciples speak for themselves. Accordingly, as in religious services the sermon is preceded by reading of the Scriptures and singing of hymns, we will open our study of the Epicurean philosophy of life by selections from their scriptures and hymns. First the master, though unfortu[Pg 2]nately he is not so good a master of style as many of his disciples, shall speak. The gist of Epicurus's teaching is contained in the following passages.

"The end of all our actions is to be free from pain and fear; and when once we have attained this, all the tempest of the soul is laid, seeing that the living creature has not to go to find something that is wanting, or to seek something else by which the good of the soul and of the body will be fulfilled." "Wherefore we call pleasure the alpha and omega of a blessed life. Pleasure is our first and kindred good. From it is the commencement of every choice and every aversion, and to it we come back, and make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good thing." "When we say, then, that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal, or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood by some who are either ignorant and prejudiced for other views, or inclined to misinterpret our statements. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and trouble in the soul. It is not an unbroken succession of drinking feasts and of revelry, not the enjoyments of the fish and other delicacies of a splendid table, which produce a pleasant life: it is sober reasoning, searching out the reasons for[Pg 3] every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which great tumults take possession of the soul." "Nothing is so productive of cheerfulness as to abstain from meddling, and not to engage in difficult undertakings, nor force yourself to do something beyond your power. For all this involves your nature in tumults." "The main part of happiness is the disposition which is under our own control. Service in the field is hard work, and others hold command. Public speaking abounds in heart-throbs and in anxiety whether you can carry conviction. Why then pursue an object like this, which is at the disposal of others?" "Wealth beyond the requirements of nature is no more benefit to men than water to a vessel which is full. Both alike overflow. We can look upon another's goods without perturbation and can enjoy purer pleasure than they, for we are free from their arduous struggle."

"Thou must also keep in mind that of desires some are natural, and some are groundless; and that of the natural some are necessary as well as natural, and some are natural only. And of the necessary desires, some are necessary if we are to be happy, and some if the body is to remain unperturbed, and some if we are even to live. By the clear and certain understanding of these things[Pg 4] we learn to make every preference and aversion, so that the body may have health and the soul tranquillity, seeing that this is the sum and end of a blessed life." "Cheerful poverty is an honourable thing." "Great wealth is but poverty when matched with the law of nature." "If any one thinks his own not to be most ample, he may become lord of the whole world, and will yet be wretched." "Fortune but slightly crosses the wise man's path." "If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches, but take away from his desires."

"And since pleasure is our first and native good, for that reason we do not choose every pleasure whatsoever, but oftentimes pass over many pleasures when a greater annoyance ensues from them. And oftentimes we consider pains superior to pleasures, and submit to the pain for a long time, when it is attended for us with a greater pleasure. All pleasure, therefore, because of its kinship with our nature, is a good, but it is not in all cases our choice, even as every pain is an evil, though pain is not always, and in every case, to be shunned."

"It is, however, by measuring one against another, and by looking at the conveniences and inconveniences, that all these things must be judged. Sometimes we treat the good as an evil,[Pg 5] and the evil, on the contrary, as a good; and we regard independence of outward goods as a great good, not so as in all cases to use little, but so as to be contented with little, if we have not much, being thoroughly persuaded that they have the sweetest enjoyment of luxury who stand least in need of it, and that whatever is natural is easily procured, and only the vain and worthless hard to win. Plain fare gives as much pleasure as a costly diet, when once the pain due to want is removed; and bread and water confer the highest pleasure when they are brought to hungry lips. To habituate self, therefore, to plain and inexpensive diet gives all that is needed for health, and enables a man to meet the necessary requirements of life without shrinking, and it places us in a better frame when we approach at intervals a costly fare, and renders us fearless of fortune."

"Riches according to nature are of limited extent, and can be easily procured; but the wealth craved after by vain fancies knows neither end nor limit. He who has understood the limits of life knows how easy it is to get all that takes away the pain of want, and all that is required to make our life perfect at every point. In this way he has no need of anything which involves a contest." "The beginning and the greatest good is prudence.[Pg 6] Wherefore prudence is a more precious thing even than philosophy: from it grow all the other virtues, for it teaches that we cannot lead a life of pleasure which is not also a life of prudence, honour, and justice; nor lead a life of prudence, honour, and justice, which is not also a life of pleasure. For the virtues have grown into one with a pleasant life, and a pleasant life is inseparable from them."

"Of all the things which wisdom procures for the happiness of life as a whole, by far the greatest is the acquisition of friendship."

"We ought to look round for people to eat and drink with, before we look for something to eat and drink: to feed without a friend is the life of a lion and a wolf." "Do everything as if Epicurus had his eye upon you. Retire into yourself chiefly at that time when you are compelled to be in a crowd." "We ought to select some good man and keep him ever before our eyes, so that we may, as it were, live under his eye, and do everything in his sight." "No one loves another except for his own interest." "Among the other ills which attend folly is this: it is always beginning to live." "A foolish life is restless and disagreeable: it is wholly engrossed with the future." "We are born once: twice we cannot be born,[Pg 7] and for everlasting we must be non-existent. But thou, who art not master of the morrow, puttest off the right time. Procrastination is the ruin of life for all; and, therefore, each of us is hurried and unprepared at death." "Learn betimes to die, or if it please thee better to pass over to the gods." "He who is least in need of the morrow will meet the morrow most pleasantly." "Injustice is not in itself a bad thing: but only in the fear, arising from anxiety on the part of the wrong-doer, that he will not escape punishment." "A wise man will not enter political life unless something extraordinary should occur." "The free man will take his free laugh over those who are fain to be reckoned in the list with Lycurgus and Solon."

"The first duty of salvation is to preserve our vigour and to guard against the defiling of our life in consequence of maddening desires." "Accustom thyself in the belief that death is nothing to us, for good and evil are only where they are felt, and death is the absence of all feeling: therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes enjoyable the mortality of life, not by adding to years an illimitable time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For in life there can be nothing to fear, to him who has thoroughly appre[Pg 8]hended that there is nothing to cause fear in what time we are not alive. Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatsoever causes no annoyance when it is present causes only a groundless pain by the expectation thereof. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that when we are, death is not yet, and when death comes, then we are not. It is nothing then, either to the living or the dead, for it is not found with the living, and the dead exist no longer."

These words of the master, given with no attempt to reconcile their apparent inconsistencies, convey very fairly the substance of his teaching, including both its excellences and its deep defects. The exalted esteem in which his doctrines were held, leading his disciples to commit them to memory as sacred and verbally inspired; the personal reverence for his character; and the extravagant expectations as to what his philosophy was to do for the world, together with a glimpse into the Epicurean idea of heaven, are well illustrated by the following sentences at the opening of the third book of Lucretius, addressed to Epicurus:—

"Thee, who first wast able amid such thick darkness to raise on high so bright a beacon and[Pg 9] shed a light on the true interests of life, thee I follow, glory of the Greek race, and plant now my footsteps firmly fixed in thy imprinted marks, not so much from a desire to rival thee as that from the love I bear thee I yearn to imitate thee. Thou, father, art discoverer of things, thou furnishest us with fatherly precepts, and like as bees sip of all things in the flowery lawns, we, O glorious being, in like manner, feed from out thy pages upon all the golden maxims, golden I say, most worthy ever of endless life. For soon as thy philosophy issuing from a godlike intellect has begun with loud voice to proclaim the nature of things, the terrors of the mind are dispelled, the walls of the world part asunder, I see things in operation throughout the whole void: the divinity of the gods is revealed, and their tranquil abodes which neither winds do shake, nor clouds drench with rains nor snow congealed by sharp frost harms with hoary fall: an ever cloudless ether o'ercanopies them, and they laugh with light shed largely round. Nature too supplies all their wants, and nothing ever impairs their peace of mind."

Horace is so saturated with Epicureanism that it is hard to select any one of his odes as more expressive of it than another. His ode on the "Philosophy of Life" perhaps presents it in as[Pg 10] short compass as any. He asks what he shall pray for? Not crops, and ivory, and gold gained by laborious and risky enterprise; but healthy, solid contentment with the simple, universal pleasures near at hand.

For a lesson from the new Epicurean testament we cannot do better than turn to the sensible pages of Herbert Spencer's "Data of Ethics."

"The pursuit of individual happiness within those[Pg 11] limits prescribed by social conditions is the first requisite to the attainment of the greatest general happiness. To see this it needs but to contrast one whose self-regard has maintained bodily well-being with one whose regardlessness of self has brought its natural results; and then to ask what must be the contrast between two societies formed of two such kinds of individuals.

"Bounding out of bed after an unbroken sleep, singing or whistling as he dresses, coming down with beaming face ready to laugh on the smallest provocation, the healthy man of high powers, conscious of past successes and, by his energy, quickness, resource, made confident of the future, enters on the day's business not with repugnance but with gladness; and from hour to hour experiencing satisfactions from work effectually done, comes home with an abundant surplus of energy remaining for hours of relaxation. Far otherwise is it with one who is enfeebled by great neglect of self. Already deficient, his energies are made more deficient by constant endeavours to execute tasks that prove beyond his strength, and by the resulting discouragement. Hours of leisure which, rightly passed, bring pleasures that raise the tide of life and renew the powers of work, cannot be utilized: there is not vigour enough for enjoy[Pg 12]ments involving action, and lack of spirits prevents passive enjoyments from being entered upon with zest. In brief, life becomes a burden. Now if, as must be admitted, in a community composed of individuals like the first the happiness will be relatively great, while in one composed of individuals like the last there will be relatively little happiness, or rather much misery; it must be admitted that conduct causing the one result is good and conduct causing the other is bad.

"He who carries self-regard far enough to keep himself in good health and high spirits, in the first place thereby becomes an immediate source of happiness to those around, and in the second place maintains the ability to increase their happiness by altruistic actions. But one whose bodily vigour and mental health are undermined by self-sacrifice carried too far, in the first place becomes to those around a cause of depression, and in the second place renders himself incapable, or less capable, of actively furthering their welfare.

"Full of vivacity, the one is ever welcome. For his wife he has smiles and jocose speeches; for his children stores of fun and play; for his friends pleasant talk interspersed with the sallies of wit that come from buoyancy. Contrariwise, the other is shunned. The irritability resulting[Pg 13] now from ailments, now from failures caused by feebleness, his family has daily to bear. Lacking adequate energy for joining in them, he has at best but a tepid interest in the amusements of his children; and he is called a wet blanket by his friends. Little account as our ethical reasonings take note of it, yet is the fact obvious that since happiness and misery are infectious, such regard for self as conduces to health and high spirits is a benefaction to others, and such disregard of self as brings on suffering, bodily or mental, is a malefaction to others.

"The adequately egoistic individual retains those powers which make altruistic activities possible. The individual who is inadequately egoistic loses more or less of his ability to be altruistic. The truth of the one proposition is self-evident; and the truth of the other is daily forced on us by examples. Note a few of them. Here is a mother who, brought up in the insane fashion usual among the cultivated, has a physique not strong enough for suckling her infant, but who, knowing that its natural food is the best, and anxious for its welfare, continues to give milk for a longer time than her system will bear. Eventually the accumulating reaction tells. There comes exhaustion running, it may be, into illness[Pg 14] caused by depletion; occasionally ending in death, and often entailing chronic weakness. She becomes, perhaps for a time, perhaps permanently, incapable of carrying on household affairs; her other children suffer from the loss of maternal attention; and where the income is small, payments for nurse and doctor tell injuriously on the whole family. Instance, again, what not unfrequently happens with the father. Similarly prompted by a high sense of obligation, and misled by current moral theories into the notion that self-denial may rightly be carried to any extent, he daily continues his office work for long hours regardless of hot head and cold feet; and debars himself from social pleasures, for which he thinks he can afford neither time nor money. What comes of this entirely unegoistic course? Eventually a sudden collapse, sleeplessness, inability to work. That rest which he would not give himself when his sensations prompted he has now to take in long measure. The extra earnings laid by for the benefit of his family are quickly swept away by costly journeys in aid of recovery and by the many expenses which illness entails. Instead of increased ability to do his duty by his offspring there comes now inability. Lifelong evils on them replace hoped-for goods. And so is it, too,[Pg 15] with the social effects of inadequate egoism. All grades furnish examples of the mischiefs, positive and negative, inflicted on society by excessive neglect of self. Now the case is that of a labourer who, conscientiously continuing his work under a broiling sun, spite of violent protests from his feelings, dies of sunstroke; and leaves his family a burden to the parish. Now the case is that of a clerk whose eyes permanently fail from overstraining, or who, daily writing for hours after his fingers are painfully cramped, is attacked with 'scrivener's palsy,' and, unable to write at all, sinks with aged parents into poverty which friends are called on to mitigate.

"And now the case is that of a man devoted to public ends who, shattering his health by ceaseless application, fails to achieve all he might have achieved by a more reasonable apportionment of his time between labour on behalf of others, and ministration to his own needs."

After this lengthy prose extract, let us turn to the modern Epicurean poets.

At once the best and the worst rendering of Epicureanism into verse is Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khayyam. It is the best because of the frankness with which it draws out to its logical conclusion, in a cynical despair of everything[Pg 16] nobler than the pleasure of the moment, the consequences of identifying the self with mere pleasure-seeking. It is the worst because, instead of presenting Epicureanism mixed with nobler elements, as Walt Whitman and Stevenson do, it gives us the pure and undiluted article as a final gospel of life. The fact that it has proved such a fad during the past few years is striking evidence of the husky fare on which our modern prodigals can be content to feed.

From this melancholy attempt to offer us Epicureanism as a complete account of life, overshadowed as it is by the gloom of the Infinite which the man who stakes his all on momentary pleasure feels doomed to forego, it is a relief to turn to men who strike cheerfully and firmly the Epicurean note; but pass instantly on to blend it with sterner notes and larger views of life, in which it plays its essential, yet strictly subordinate part.

Of all the men who thus strike scattered Epicurean notes, without attempting the impossible task of making a harmonious and satisfactory tune out of them, our American Pagan, Walt Whitman, is the best example.

Whitman, with this wild ecstasy, to be sure is an Epicurean and something more. Indeed, pure Epicureanism, unmixed with better elements, is rather hard to find in modern literature. One other hymn, by Robert Louis Stevenson, likewise adds to pure Epicureanism a note of strenuous intensity in the great task of happiness which was foreign to the more easy-going form of the ancient doctrine. In Stevenson Epicureanism is only a flavour to more substantial viands.[Pg 19]

THE CELESTIAL SURGEON

While we are with Stevenson, we may as well conclude our selections from the Epicurean scriptures in these words from his Christmas Sermon: "Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality: they are the perfect duties. If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say, 'give them up,' for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better men."[Pg 20]

II
THE EPICUREAN VIEW OF WORK AND PLAY

Pleasure is our great task, "the gist of life, the end of ends." To be happy ourselves and radiating centres of happiness to choice circles of congenial friends,—this is the Epicurean ideal. The world is a vast reservoir of potential pleasures. Our problem is to scoop out for ourselves and our friends full measure of these pleasures as they go floating by. We did not make the world. It made itself by a fortuitous concourse of atoms. It would be foolish for us to try to alter it. Our only concern is to get out of it all the pleasure we can; without troubling ourselves to put anything valuable back into it. Since it is accidental, impersonal, we owe it nothing. We simply owe ourselves as big a share of pleasure as we can grasp and hold.

This, however, is a task in which it is easy to make mistakes. We need prudence to avoid cheating ourselves with short-lived pleasures that cost too much; wisdom to choose the simpler pleasures that cost less and last longer. Such shrewd calculation of the relative cost and worth of different pleasures is the sum and substance of[Pg 21] the Epicurean philosophy. He who is shrewd to discern and prompt to snatch the most pleasure at least cost, as it is offered on the bargain counter of life,—he is the Epicurean sage.

We might work this out into a great variety of applications: but one or two spheres must suffice. Eating and drinking, as the most elemental relations of life, are the ones commonly chosen as applications of the Epicurean principle. These applications, however, the selections from Epicurus and Horace have already made clear.

The Epicurean will regulate his diet, not by the immediate, trivial, short-lived pleasures of taste, though these he will by no means despise, but mainly by their permanent effects upon health. Wholesome food, and enough of it, daintily prepared and served, he will do his best to obtain. But elaborate and ostentatious feasting he will avoid, as involving too much expense and trouble, and too heavy penalties of disease and discomfort. He will find out by practical experience the quantity, quality, and variety of simple food that keeps him in perfect condition; and no enticements of sweetmeats or stimulants will divert him from the simplicity in which the most permanent pleasure is found. To eat cake and candy between meals, to sip tea at all hours, no less than to drink[Pg 22] whiskey to the point of intoxication, are sins against the simplicity of the true Epicurean regimen.

The Epicurean will not lose an hour of needed sleep nor tolerate such an abomination as an alarm clock in his house. If he permits himself to be awakened in the morning, it will be as Thomas B. Reed used to when, as a student at Bowdoin College, he was obliged to be in chapel at six o'clock. He had the janitor call him at half-past four, in order that he might have the luxury of feeling that he had another whole hour in which to sleep, and then call him again at the last moment which would permit him to dress in time for chapel.

These things, however, we may for the most part take for granted. We do not require a philosopher to regulate our diet for us; or to put us to bed at night, and tuck us in, and hear us say our prayers. Those elementary lessons were doubtless needed in the childhood of the race. The selection from Spencer on work and play strikes closer to the problem of the modern man; and it is at this point that we all sorely need to go to school to Epicurus. Perhaps we are inclined to look down on Epicurus's ideal as a low one. Well, if it is a low ideal, it is all the more disgraceful to fall below it. And[Pg 23] most of us do fall below it every day of our tense and restless lives. Let us test ourselves by this ideal, and answer honestly the questions it puts to us.

How many of us are slaving all day and late into the night to add artificial superfluities to the simple necessities? How many of us know how to stop working when it begins to encroach upon our health; and to cut off anxiety and worry altogether? How many of us measure the amount and intensity of our toil by our physical strength; doing what we can do healthfully, cheerfully, joyously, and leaving the rest undone, instead of straining up to the highest notch of nervous tension during early manhood and womanhood, only to break down when the life forces begin to turn against us? Every man in any position of responsibility and influence has opportunity to do the work of twenty men. How many of us in such circumstances choose the one thing we can do best, and leave the other nineteen for other people to do, or else to remain undone? How many of us have ever seriously stopped to think where the limit of healthful effort and endurance lies, unless insomnia or dyspepsia or nervous prostration have laid their heavy hands upon us and compelled us to pause?[Pg 24] Every breakdown from avoidable causes, every stroke of work we do after the border-land of exhaustion and nervous strain is crossed, is a crime against the teaching of Epicurus; and these diseases that beset our modern business life are the penalties with which nature visits us in vindication of the wisdom of his teachings. Every day that we work beyond our strength; every hour that we spend in consequent exhaustion and depression; every minute that we give over to worrying about things beyond our immediate control, we either fall below, or else rise above, Epicurus's level.

If we rise above him, to serve higher ideals, conscious of the sacrifice we make, and clear about the superior ends we gain thereby, then we may be forgiven. What some of those higher ideals are we shall have occasion to consider later. But to work ourselves into depression, disease, and pain, for no better reason than to get high mark in some rank-book or other, to gratify somebody's false vanity, to get together a little more gold than we can spend wisely or our children can inherit without enervation, to live in a bigger house than our neighbour has or we can afford to take care of—to work for such ends as these beyond the point where work is healthy[Pg 25] and happy, is to commit a sin which neither Epicurus nor Nature will forgive. With the people who have risen above Epicurus, and are deliberately sacrificing to some extent the Epicurean to one of the higher ideals, as I have said, we have no quarrel; for them we have only hearty commendation. We do not ask the mother whose child is dangerously sick, the statesman in a political crisis, the artist when the conception of his great work comes over him, to heed for the time being the limits of strength and the conditions of completest health. All we ask of them is that later on, when the child has recovered, when the crisis is past, when the picture is painted, they shall reverently and humbly pay to Epicurus, or to Nature whom he represents, the penalty for their sin, by a corresponding period of complete rest and relaxation. We must bear strain at times; and Nature will forgive us if we do not take it too often. But we must not bunch our strains. We must not pass from one strain to another, and another, without periods of relaxation between. We must not let the attitude of strain become chronic, and develop into a moral tetanus, which keeps us forever on the rack of exertion from sheer restless inability to sit down and enjoy ourselves.[Pg 26]

What we take from excessive work Epicurus would bid us add to needed play. Play is an arrangement by which we get artificially, in highly concentrated form, the pleasure which in ordinary life is diffused over long periods, and attainable only in attenuated form. Play puts the great fundamental pleasures of the race at the disposal of the individual.

Foot-ball, for instance, gives the student of to-day the essential joy in combat of his barbarian ancestors, with the modern field-marshal's delight in subtle tragedy thrown in. Base-ball gives the intense zest that comes of speed, accuracy, and cunning exercised in emergencies. Golf, in milder form, gives us the pleasure that comes of accuracy of aim and calculation of conditions in good company and in the open air. Billiards give to the clerk cramped all day over his desk the joy of a delicate touch which otherwise would be the exclusive property of his artisan brother. The various games of cards give the mechanic and the housewife a taste at evening of the eager interests that fill the banker's and the broker's days. Checkers and chess give to the humblest in their homes some touch of the pleasures of the general and admiral. Dancing carries to the limit of orderly expression that delight in the[Pg 27] person and presence of the opposite sex which otherwise would have to be postponed until youth was able to assume the more serious responsibilities of permanent relationships. Sailing, tramping, camping out, hunting, fishing, mountain climbing, are all devices for bringing into the lives of studious, strenuous, city people the elemental pleasures which otherwise would be the monopoly of sailors, fishermen, foresters, and explorers. Swimming, skating, bicycle riding, driving a horse or an automobile, all give the keen joy that comes of the mastery of graceful and forceful motion.

The theatre, which embodies so distinctively the peculiar essence of play that its performances have appropriated the name, takes us in a couple of hours through the epitomised experience of many persons extending over many years in circumstances far removed from our individual lives. Poetry, novels, biographies, histories, painting, music, and all the forms of art perform for us this same function. They take us out of our local and temporal situation, and let us live in other days and other lands, in other customs and costumes; and so enormously widen the world of experience we imaginatively make our own. Besides in all the forms of play and art the ends[Pg 28] are made artificially simple, the means are made supernaturally accessible; so that instead of toiling for years in doubt of results as in actual work, we experience in play, and witness in artistic representation, the whole process of selecting materials and moulding them to a successful issue in a few minutes, or a few hours at most. All this reacts upon our power to prosecute with confidence the remoter ends, and marshal the more obdurate means of real work. It expands and limbers our capacity to subordinate means to ends and find delight in the process as well as in the outcome. Hence a man who goes a year without a considerable period given over to play, or a week without at least one or two solid periods of it, or lets many days go by without any play whatever, is selling his birthright of personality for a mess of pottage. Psychology and pedagogy are recognising the important function of play in the development of personality as never before. Professor Baldwin, in his "Social and Ethical Interpretations," sums up the functions of play in these words: "In the education of the individual for his life-work in a network of social relationships play is a most important form of organic exercise,—a most important method of realisation of the social instincts; gives flexibility[Pg 29] of mind and body with self-control; gives constant opportunity for imitative learning and invention, and is the experimental verification of the benefits and pleasures of united action."

III
THE EPICUREAN PRICE OF HAPPINESS

Whoever contracts his work and expands his play, on Epicurean principles, will of course have common sense enough to cut off hurry and worry altogether. Both are sheer waste and wantonness,—the most foolish and wicked things in the whole list of forbidden sins. The Epicurean will live his life in care-tight, worry-proof compartments; working with all his might while he works; and then cutting it off short; never letting the cares of work intrude on the precious precincts of well-earned leisure, or permitting the strain of remembered or anticipated toil to mar the hours sacred to rest and recreation. Some things are bound to go wrong in every life. That is our misfortune. But there is no need of brooding over them in gratuitous grief after they have gone, or dreading them in gloomy anticipation before they come. If either in anticipation or in retrospect these evils are permitted to darken the hours when[Pg 30] they are physically absent, that is not our misfortune; it is our folly and our fault.

We hear a great deal in these days about mind cures, and rest cures, and faith cures, and cures by hypnotism, and cures by patent medicines. If anybody needs these cures, of course he is welcome to them; though there is much to be said for the stalwart conservative who refused proffered aid of this sort with the remark that he would rather die in the hands of a skilful physician than be cured by a quack. Strict obedience to the plain, homely doctrine of Epicurus would prevent ninety-nine one hundredths of the physical and mental ailments which these various systems of healing profess to cure. In almost every such case work, or the square of work which is hurry, or the cube of work which is worry, carried beyond the sane limits which Epicurus prescribes, is at the root of trouble. Where it is not work and worry, it is their passive counterparts, grief nursed long after its occasion has gone by, or fear harboured long before its appropriate object has arrived. Cut these off and all the use you will have for either healers or physicians will be on such comparatively rare occasions as birth, death, contagious diseases, and unavoidable accident. You will not be the chronic patient of any doctor regular[Pg 31] or irregular; or the consumer of any medicine, patented or prescribed.

Neither useless regrets for the past nor profitless forebodings for the future should ever cast their shadows over the present, which taken in itself is always endurable, and may generally be made positively happy. Memory should be purged of all its unpleasantness before its pictures are permitted to appear before the footlights of reflection; and the searchlight of expectation should always be turned toward the pleasures that are still in store for us. Past and future are mainly in our power, so far as the quality of things we remember and anticipate are concerned. And even the brief and fleeting present is mainly filled by reminiscence and anticipation, so that it too is largely what we please to make it.

If any one of us is not happy all the time, except at the rare instants when toothache, or the news of a friend's illness or death, or a bad turn in our investments takes us by surprise—if happiness is not the dominant tone of our ordinary life, it is simply because we do not want it, in that thoughtful, enterprising, insistent way[Pg 32] in which the scholar wants knowledge, or the business man wants money, or the politician wants votes. Whoever is willing to pay the price in prudent planning of his daily pleasures, in relentless exclusion of the enterprises and indulgences that cost more pain than they can return in pleasure; whoever will cut out remorselessly the things in his past life on which he cannot dwell with pleasure, and lop off the considerations which give rise to dread; whoever is willing to pay this Epicurean price for happiness can have it just as soon and just as often as he pays down the cash of a faithful and consistent application of these principles. If any man goes about the world in a chronic unhappiness, it is ninety-nine per cent the fault, not of his circumstances, but of himself. There is not a reader of this book whose circumstances are so black that another person, in those same circumstances, would not find a way to be supremely and dominantly, if not exclusively and continuously, happy. There is not a reader of this book so rich, so blessed with family and friends, so occupied and diverted, but that another person in those same circumstances would be miserable himself, and a source of misery to everybody with whom he came in contact. Epicurus is[Pg 33] right, that happiness is up at auction all the time, and sold in lots to suit the purchaser whenever he bids high enough. And the price is not exorbitant: prudence to plan for the simple pleasures that can be had for the asking; resolution to cut off the pleasures that come too high; determination to amputate our reflections the instant they develop morbid symptoms, and to take an anti-toxine against fret and worry, the moment we feel the approach of their contagious atmosphere; concentration, to live in a self-chosen present from which profitless regret and unprofitable anxieties, projected from the past or borrowed from the future, are absolutely banished.

It is high time to treat melancholy, depression, gloom, fretfulness, unhappiness, not merely as diseases, but as the inexcusable follies, the intolerable vices, the unpardonable sins which a sane and wholesome Epicureanism pronounces them to be.

The Epicurean principle, then, forbids us to go whining, whimpering, and weeping through this glorious and otherwise cheery world, making ourselves a burden and nuisance to our friends; and tells us frankly that if we are so much as tempted to such melancholy living, it is because we are too improvident, too slothful, too stupid to cast[Pg 34] out these devils, which a little plain fare, hard work, outdoor exercise, vigorous play, and unworried rest would exorcise forever. It bids us put in place of these banished sighs and groans and tears, the laughter, song, and shout that "spin the great wheel of earth about." We may sum it all up in the picture of a worthy Epicurean's day.

After a night of sleep too sound to harbour an unpleasant dream, he greets the hour of rising with a shout and bound, plunges into the bath, meets with gusto the shock it gives, and rejoices in the glow of exhilaration a vigorous rubbing brings; greets the household "with morning face and morning heart," eager to share with the family the meal, the news, the outlook on the day, resolved like Pippa to "waste no wavelet of his twelve-hours' treasure"; then, whether work calls him forth immediately or not, takes a few minutes of brisk walking and deep breathing in the open air until he feels the great forces of earth, air, and sunshine pulsing in his veins; then greets the work of kitchen or factory, office or field, schoolroom or counter, bench or desk with an inward cheer, as something to put forth his surplus energy upon; and through the swift, precious forenoon hours delights in the mastery[Pg 35] over difficulty his stored-up power imparts; takes the noon-day meal gayly and leisurely with congenial people; through the early afternoon hours does the lighter portion of the day's work if he must; gets out for an hour or two in the open air if he may, with horse, or wheel, or automobile, or boat, or racket, or golf clubs, or skates, or rod, or gun, or at least a friend and two stout walking shoes; comes to the evening meal in the family circle widened to include a few welcome guests, or at the home of some hospitable host, in garments from which all trace of stain or hint of strain has been removed, to share the best things market and purse afford, served in such wise as to prolong the opportunity for the interchange of wit and banter, cursory discussion and kindly compliment; spends the evening in quiet reading or public entertainment, games with his children or visiting with friends; and then returns again to sleep with such a sense of gratitude for the dear joys of the day as sends an echo of "All's well" down through even the shadowy substance of his unconscious dreams. Surely there are some features of this Epicurean day which we, in our bustling, restless, overelaborated lives, might introduce with great profit to ourselves, and great advantage to the people with whom[Pg 36] we are intimately thrown. A series of such days, varied by even happier holidays and Sundays, broken once or twice a year at least by considerable vacations, added together, will make a life which Epicurus says a man may live with satisfaction, and after which he may pass away content.

If there be no other life, let us by all means make the most of this. And if, both here and hereafter, there be a larger life than that perceivable by sense,—as, on deeper grounds than the Epicurean psychology recognises, most of us believe there is,—this healthy, hearty, wholesome determination to live intensely and exclusively in the present is a much more sincere and effective way to develop it than the foolish attempt of a false other-worldliness to anticipate or discount the future, by a half-hearted, far-away affectation of superiority to the simple homely pleasures of to-day.

IV
THE DEFECTS OF EPICUREANISM

Thus far we have pointed out certain valuable elements of truth which Epicureanism contains. Only incidentally have we encountered certain deep defects. Epicurus's "free laugh" at those[Pg 37] who attempt to fulfil their political duties, his quiet ignoring of all interests that lie outside his little circle, or reach beyond the grave, his naïve remark about the intrinsic harmlessness of wrong-doing, provided only the wrong-doer could escape the fear of being caught, must have made us aware that there are heights of nobleness, depths of devotion, lengths of endurance, breadths of sympathy altogether foreign to this easy-going, pleasure-seeking view of life. Justice requires us to dwell more explicitly on these Epicurean shortcomings. Much that has been charged against the school in the form of swinish sensuality is the grossest slander. Still there are defects in this view of life which are both logically deducible from its premises, and practically visible in the lives of its consistent disciples.

The fundamental defect of Epicureanism is its false definition of personality. According to Epicurus the person is merely a bundle of appetites and passions; and the gratification of these is made synonymous with the satisfaction of himself. But gratifications are short; while appetites are long. The result is that which Schopenhauer has so conclusively pointed out. During the long periods when desire burns unsatisfied, the balance of pleasure is against us. In the comparatively[Pg 38] brief and rare intervals when passions are in process of gratification, the balance can never be more than even. Therefore our account with the world at the end of any period, whether a week or a year or a lifetime, is bound to stand as follows: credit, a few rare, brief moments—moments, too, which have long since vanished into nothingness—when appetites and passions were in process of satisfaction. Debit, the vast majority of moments, amounting in the aggregate to almost the total period considered, when appetites and passions were clamouring for a satisfaction that was not forthcoming. The obvious conclusion from the frequent examination of the Epicurean account-book is that which Schopenhauer so triumphantly demonstrates,—pessimism. The sooner we cease doing business on those terms, the less will be the balance of pain, or unsatisfied desire, against us. To be entirely frank, the devotees of Omar Khayyam would have to confess that it is this note of pessimism, despair, and self-pity, at the sorry contrast of the vast unattainable and the petty attained, which is the secret of his unquestionably fascinating lines. Here the blasé amusement-seeker finds consolation in the fact that a host of other people are also yielding to the temptation to bury the unwelcome consciousness of a self they cannot satisfy in wine,[Pg 39] or any other momentary sensuous titillation that will conceal the sense of their spiritual failure—a failure, however, which they are glad to be assured is shared by so many that the sense of it has been dignified by the name of a philosophy and sung by a poet.

Pleasure cannot be sought directly with success; for pleasure comes indirectly as the effect of causes far higher and deeper and wider than any that are recognised in the Epicurean philosophy. Pleasure comes unsought to those who lose themselves in large intellectual, artistic, social, and spiritual interests. But such noble losing of self without thought of gain is explicitly excluded from the consistent Epicurean creed.

In the picture of the Epicurean life already drawn, while domestic and political life have been presupposed as a background, nothing has been said about the sacrifice which one is called upon to make in the support and defence of a pure home and a free country. That was expressly excluded by Epicurus. Whatever attractiveness there was in the picture of the Epicurean life previously presented was largely due to this background of presupposition that this happy life was lived in a well-ordered and stable family, and in a free and just municipal and national life. In fact[Pg 40] it is only as a parasite on these great domestic, social, and political institutions which it does nothing to create or maintain, and much to weaken and destroy, that Epicureanism is even a tolerable account of life. If we now paint our picture of the Epicurean man and woman with this background of domestic and civic life withdrawn, the ugliness and meanness of this parasitic Epicureanism will stare us in the face; and while we ought not to forget the valuable lessons it has to teach us, we shall shrink from the completed picture as a thing of deformity and degradation.

Who then is the consistent Epicurean man? He is the club man, who lives in easy luxury and fares sumptuously every day. Everything is done for him. Servants wait on him. He serves nobody, and is responsible for no one's welfare. He has a congenial set of cronies, loosely attached to be sure; and constantly changing, as matrimony, financial reverses, business engagements, professional responsibilities call one or another of his circle away to a more strenuous life. He is a good fellow, genial, free-handed with his set, indifferent to all who are outside. He generally hires some woman to serve for a few months as the instrument of his passions; only[Pg 41] to cast her off to be hired by another and another until in due time she dies, he cares not when or how.

As business men these Epicureans are apt to be easy-going, and therefore failures. As debtors, they are the hardest people in the world from whom to collect a bill. As creditors or landlords they are the most merciless in their exactions. Their devotion to the state is generally confined to betting on the elections; the returns of which they watch with the same interest as the results of a horse-race. Their religion is confined to poking fun at the people who are foolish enough to be going to church while they are at their Sunday morning breakfast.

We all know these Epicureans; we do business with them; we meet them socially; we treat them decently; but it is to be hoped that underneath the smooth exterior we all detect their selfish heartlessness. They have taken a doctrine, which, as applied to the good things which are made to minister to our appetites is sound and true, and have perverted it into a moral monstrosity by daring to treat human hearts and social institutions as mere things, mere instruments of their selfish pleasures.

Epicurean women, likewise, abound in every[Pg 42] wealthy community. They spend the winter in Florida, New York, or Washington; dividing the rest of the year between the sea-shore, the mountains, and the lakes, with occasional visits to what they call their homes. They must have the best of everything, and assume no responsibility beyond running up bills for their husbands to pay, or to remain unpaid. Their special paradise is foreign travel, and no pension or hotel along the beaten highways of Europe is without its quota of these precious daughters of Epicurus. They flit hither and thither where least ennui and most diversion allures. Two or three years of this irresponsible existence is sufficient to disqualify them for usefulness either in Europe or America, either here or hereafter. When they return, if they ever do, to their native town or city, the drudgery of housekeeping has become intolerable, the responsibilities of social life unendurable, and their poor husbands are glad enough when the restless fit seizes them again and they can be packed off to Egypt, or Russia, or whatever remote corner of the earth remains for their idle hands and restless feet, their empty minds and hollow hearts, to invade with their unearned gold.

There is no guarantee that the Epicurean[Pg 43] will be the chaste husband of one wife, or a faithful mother, or a good provider for the family, or a devoted citizen of the republic, or a strenuous servant of art or science, or a heroic martyr in the cause of progress and reform. If all men were Epicureans, the world would speedily retrograde into the barbarism and animalism whence it has slowly and painfully emerged. The great interests of the family, the state, society, and civilisation are not accurately reflected in the feelings of the individual; and if the individual has no guide but feeling, he will prove a traitor to such of these higher interests as may have the misfortune to be intrusted to his pleasure-loving, self-indulgent, unheroic hands.

There are hard things to do and to endure; and if we are to meet them bravely, we shall have to call the Stoic to our aid. There are sordid and trivial things to put up with, or to rise above, and there we may need at times the Platonist and the mystic to show us the eternal reality underneath the temporal appearance. There are problems of conduct to be solved; conflicting claims to be adjusted; and for this the Aristotelian sense of proportion must be developed in our souls. Finally there are other persons to be considered, and one great Personal Spirit living and working[Pg 44] in the world; and for our proper attitude toward these persons, human and divine, we must look to the Christian principle. To meet these higher relationships with no better equipment than Epicureanism offers, would be as foolish as to try to run barefoot across a continent, or swim naked across the sea. Naked, barefoot Epicureanism has its place on the sandy beaches and in the sheltered coves of life; but has no business on the mountain tops or in the depths of human experience.

It will not make a man an efficient workman, or a thorough scholar, or a brave soldier, or a public-spirited citizen. It spoils completely every woman whom it gets hold of, unless at the same time she has firm hold on something better; unless she has a husband and children whom she loves, or work in which she delights for its own sake, or friends and interests dearer than life itself. Epicureanism will not lift either man or woman far toward heaven, or save them in the hour when the pains of hell get hold of them. No home can be reared on it. The divorce court is the logical outcome of every marriage between a man and a woman who are both Epicureans. For it is the very essence of Epicureanism to treat others as means; while no marriage is tolerable unless at least one of the two parties is large and unselfish enough[Pg 45] to treat the other as an end. No Epicurean state or city could endure longer than it would take for the men who are in politics for their pockets to plunder the people who are out of politics for the same reason. An Epicurean heaven, a place where eternally each should get his fill of pleasure at the expense of everybody else, would be insufferably insipid, incomparably unendurable. It is fortunate for the fame of Epicurus and the permanence of his philosophy that he evaded the necessity of thinking out the conditions of immortal blessedness by his specious dilemma in which he thought to prove that death ends all. As a temporary parasite upon a political and moral order already established, Epicureanism might thrive and flourish; but as a principle on which to rest a decent society here or a hope of heaven hereafter, Epicureanism is utterly lacking. If there were nothing better than Epicureanism in store for us through the long eternities, we all might well pray to be excused, as Epicurus happily believed we should be. For any ultimate delight in life must be rooted in something deeper than self-centred pleasure: it must love persons and seek ends for their own sake; and find its joy, not in the satisfaction of the man as he is, but in the development of that which his thought and love enable him to become.[Pg 46]

V
AN EXAMPLE OF EPICUREAN CHARACTER

The clearest example of the shortcomings of Epicureanism is the character of Tito Melema in George Eliot's "Romola." Pleasure and the avoidance of pain are this young Greek's only principles. He is "of so easy a conscience that he would make a stepping-stone of his father's corpse." "He has a lithe sleekness about him that seems marvellously fitted for slipping into any nest he fixes his mind on." "He had an unconquerable aversion to any thing unpleasant, even when an object very much loved and admired was on the other side of it." According to his thinking "any maxims that required a man to fling away the good that was needed to make existence sweet, were only the lining of human selfishness turned outward; they were made by men who wanted others to sacrifice themselves for their sake." "He would rather that Baldassarre should not suffer; he liked no one to suffer; but could any philosophy prove to him that he was bound to care for another's suffering more than for his own? To do so, he must have loved Baldassarre devotedly, and he did not love him: was that his own fault?[Pg 47] Gratitude! seen closely, it made no valid claim; his father's life would have been dreary without him; are we convicted of a debt to men for the pleasure they give themselves?" "He had simply chosen to make life easy to himself—to carry his human lot if possible in such a way that it should pinch him nowhere; but the choice had at various times landed him in unexpected positions." "Tito could not arrange life at all to his mind without a considerable sum of money, and that problem of arranging life to his mind had been the source of all his misdoing." "He would have been equal to any sacrifice that was not unpleasant." "Of other goods than pleasure he can form no conception." As Romola says in her reproaches: "You talk of substantial good, Tito! Are faithfulness, and love, and sweet grateful memories no good? Is it no good that we should keep our silent promises on which others build because they believe in our love and truth? Is it no good that a just life should be justly honoured? Or, is it good that we should harden our hearts against all the wants and hopes of those who have depended on us? What good can belong to men who have such souls? To talk cleverly, perhaps, and find soft couches for themselves, and live and die with their base selves as their best companions."[Pg 48]

This pleasure-loving Tito Melema, "when he was only seven years old, Baldassarre had rescued from blows, had taken to a home that seemed like opened paradise, where there was sweet food and soothing caresses, all had on Baldassarre's knee; and from that time till the hour they had parted, Tito had been the one centre of Baldassarre's fatherly cares." Instead of finding and rescuing this man who, long years ago, had rescued Tito when a little boy from a life of beggary, filth, and cruel wrong, had reared him tenderly and been to him as a father, Tito sold the jewels which belonged to his father and would have been sufficient to ransom him from slavery, and finally, when found by Baldassarre in Florence, denied him and pronounced him a madman. He betrayed an innocent, trusting young girl into a mock marriage, at the same time ruining her and proving false to his lawful wife. He sold the library which it was Romola's father's dying wish to have kept in Florence as a distinct memorial to his life and work. He entered into selfish intrigues in the politics of the city, ready to betray his associates and friends whenever his own safety required it.

What wonder that Romola came to have "her new scorn of that thing called pleasure which[Pg 49] made men base—that dexterous contrivance for selfish ease, that shrinking from endurance and strain, when others were bowing beneath burdens too heavy for them, which now made one image with her husband." In her own distress she learns from Savonarola that there is a higher law than individual pleasure. "She felt that the sanctity attached to all close relations, and therefore preëminently to the closest, was but the expression in outward law, of that result toward which all human goodness and nobleness must spontaneously tend; that the light abandonment of ties, whether inherited or voluntary, because they had ceased to be pleasant, was the uprooting of social and personal virtue. What else had Tito's crime toward Baldassarre been but that abandonment working itself out to the most hideous extreme of falsity and ingratitude? To her, as to him, there had come one of those moments in life when the soul must dare to act on its own warrant, not only without external law to appeal to, but in the face of a law which is not unarmed with Divine lightnings—lightnings that may yet fall if the warrant has been false." The whole teaching of the book is summed up in the Epilogue. In the conversation between Romola and Tito's illegitimate son Lillo, Lillo says, "I should[Pg 50] like to be something that would make me a great man, and very happy besides—something that would not hinder me from having a good deal of pleasure."

"That is not easy, my Lillo. It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own narrow pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts, and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good. There are so many things wrong and difficult in the world, that no man can be great—he can hardly keep himself from wickedness—unless he gives up thinking much about pleasure or rewards, and gets strength to endure what is hard and painful. My father had the greatness that belongs to integrity; he chose poverty and obscurity rather than falsehood. And there was Fra Girolamo—you know why I keep to-morrow sacred; he had the greatness which belongs to a life spent in struggling against powerful wrong, and in trying to raise men to the highest deeds they are capable of. And so, my[Pg 51] Lillo, if you mean to act nobly and seek to know the best things God has put within reach of men, you must learn to fix your mind on that end, and not on what will happen to you because of it. And remember, if you were to choose something lower, and make it the rule of your life to seek your own pleasure, and escape from what is disagreeable, calamity might come just the same; and it would be calamity falling on a base mind, which is the one form of sorrow that has no balm in it, and that may well make a man say, 'It would have been better for me if I had never been born.'"

The trouble with Epicureanism is its assumption that the self is a bundle of natural appetites and passions, and that the end of life is their gratification. Experience shows, as in the case of Tito, that such a policy consistently pursued, brings not pleasure but pain—pain first of all to others, and then pain to the individual through their contempt, indignation, and vengeance. The truest pleasure must come through the development within one of generous emotions, kind sympathies, and large social interests. The man must be made over before the pleasures of the new man can be rightly sought and successfully found. This making over of man is no consistent part of the logical Epicurean programme,[Pg 52] and consequently pure Epicureanism is sure to land one in the narrowness, selfishness, and heartlessness of a Tito Melema, and to bring upon one essentially the same condemnation and disaster.

Still, not in criticism or unkindness would we take leave of the serene and genial Epicurus. We may frankly recognise his fundamental limitations, and yet gratefully accept the good counsel he has to give. Parasite as it is,—a thing that can only live by sucking its life out of ideals and principles higher and hardier than itself, it is yet a graceful and ornamental parasite, which will beautify and shield the hard outlines of our more strenuous principles. There are dreary wastes in all our lives, into which we can profitably turn those streams of simple pleasure he commends. There are points of undue strain and tension where Epicurean prudence would bid us forego the slight fancied gain to save the ruinous expense to health and happiness. Let us fill up these gaps with hearty indulgence of healthy appetite, with vigorous exercise of dormant powers, with the eager joys of new-learned recreations. Let us tone down the strain and tension of our anxious, worried, worn, and weary lives by the rigid elimination of the superfluous, the strict concentration on the perpetual present,[Pg 53] the resolute banishment from it of all past or future springs of depression and discouragement. Before we are through we shall see far nobler ideals than this; but we must not despise the day of small things. Though the lowest and least of them all, the Epicurean is one of the historical ideals of life. It has its claims which none of us may with impunity ignore. To serve him faithfully in the lower spheres of life is a wholesome preparation for the intelligent and reasonable service of Stoic, Platonic, Aristotelian, and Christian ideals which rule the higher realms. He who is false to the humble, homely demands of Epicurus can never be quite at his best in the grander service of Zeno and Plato, Aristotle and Jesus.

VI
THE CONFESSIONS OF AN EPICUREAN HERETIC

A heretic is a man who, while professing to hold the tenets of the sect to which he adheres, and sincerely believing that he is in substantial agreement with his more orthodox brethren, yet in his desire to be honest and reasonable, so modifies these tenets as to empty them of all that is distinctive of the sect in question, and[Pg 54] thus unintentionally gives aid and comfort to its enemies. Every vigorous and vital school of thought soon or late develops this species of enfant terrible. Like the Christian church, the Epicurean school has been blessed with numerous progeny of this disturbing sort. The one among them all who most stoutly professes the fundamental principles of Epicureanism, and then proceeds to admit pretty much everything its opponents advance against it, is John Stuart Mill. His "Utilitarianism" is a fort manned with the most approved idealistic guns, yet with the Epicurean flag floating bravely over the whole. He "holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure. Pleasure and freedom from pain are the only things desirable as ends; and all desirable things are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain." A more square and uncompromising statement of Epicureanism than this it would be impossible to make.

Having thus squarely identified himself with[Pg 55] the Epicurean school, Mr. Mill proceeds to add to this doctrine in turn the doctrines of each one of the four schools which we are to consider later. First he introduces a distinction in the kind of pleasure, "assigning to the pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments, a much higher value as pleasures than to those of mere sensation." When asked what he means by difference of quality in pleasures, or what makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as a pleasure, except its being greater in amount, although he tells us there is but one possible answer, he gives us two or three. First he appeals to the verdict of competent judges. "Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure. If one of the two is, by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a greater amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superi[Pg 56]ority in quality, so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison, of small account."

This appeal to competent judges, or, in other words, to authority, involves no philosophical principle at all unless we may call the doctrine of papal infallibility, to which this appeal of Mill is essentially akin, a principle. If these judges are competent, there must be a reason for the preference they give. In the next paragraph Mill tells us what that principle is; but in doing so introduces the principle of the subordination of lower to higher faculties, which we shall see later is the distinguishing principle of Plato. On this point Mill is as clear as Plato himself. "Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with, and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying both, do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties. Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool,[Pg 57] the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs. They would not resign what they possess more than he, for the most complete satisfaction of all the desires which they have in common with him. If they ever fancy they would, it is only in cases of unhappiness so extreme, that to escape from it they would exchange their lot for almost any other, however undesirable in their own eyes. A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and is certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence." This appeal to quality rather than quantity of pleasure puts Mill, in spite of himself, squarely on Platonic ground and abandons consistent Epicureanism. An illustration will make this clear. A man professes that money is his supreme end, the only thing he cares for in the world; he tells us that whatever he does is done for money, and whenever he refrains from doing anything it is to avoid losing money. So far he puts his conduct on a consistently mercenary basis. Suppose, however, that in the next sentence he tells us[Pg 58] that he prizes certain kinds of money. If we ask him what is the basis of the distinction, he replies that he prizes money honestly earned and despises money dishonestly acquired. Should we not at once recognise, that in spite of his original declaration, he is not the consistently mercenary being he professed himself to be? The fact that he prefers honest to dishonest money shows that honesty, not money, is his real principle; and, in spite of his original profession, this distinction lifts him out of the class of mercenary money lovers into the class of men whose real principle is not money but honesty. Precisely so Mill's confession that he cares for the height and dignity of the faculties employed rather than the quantity of pleasure gained lifts him out of the Epicurean school to which he professes adherence and makes him an idealist.

When asked for an explanation of his preference of higher to lower, Mill at once shifts to Stoic ground in the following sentences: "We may give what explanation we please of this unwillingness; we may attribute it to pride, a name which is given indiscriminately to some of the most and to some of the least estimable feelings of which mankind are capable; we may refer it to the love of liberty and personal independence,[Pg 59] an appeal to which was with the Stoics one of the most effective means for the inculcation of it; to the love of power, or to the love of excitement, both of which do really enter into and contribute to it; but its most appropriate appellation is a sense of dignity, which all human beings possess in one form or another, and in some, though by no means in exact, proportion to their highest faculties, and which is so essential a part of the happiness of those in whom it is strong, that nothing which conflicts with it could be, otherwise than momentarily, an object of desire to them. Whoever supposes that this preference takes place at a sacrifice of happiness—that the superior being, in anything like equal circumstances, is not happier than the inferior—confounds the two very different ideas of happiness and content. It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which we can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfec[Pg 60]tions qualify. It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides."

When pressed for a sanction of motive Mill appeals to the Aristotelian principle that the individual can only realise his conception of himself through union with his fellows in society: to the social nature of man and his inability to find himself in any smaller sphere, or through devotion to any lesser end. "This firm foundation is that of the social feelings of mankind; the desire to be in unity with our fellow-creatures, which is already a powerful principle in human nature, and happily one of those which tend to become stronger, even without express inculcation, from the influences of advancing civilisation. The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man, that, except in some unusual circumstances or by an effort of voluntary abstraction, he never conceives himself otherwise than as a member of a body; and this association is riveted more and more, as mankind are farther removed from the state of savage in[Pg 61]dependence. Any condition, therefore, which is essential to a state of society, becomes more and more an inseparable part of every person's conception of the state of things which he is born into, and which is the destiny of a human being. In this way people grow up unable to conceive as possible to them a state of total disregard of other people's interests. They are under a necessity of conceiving themselves as at least abstaining from all the grosser injuries, and (if only for their own protection) living in a state of constant protest against them. They are also familiar with the fact of coöperating with others, and proposing to themselves a collective, not an individual, interest, as the aim (at least for the time being) of their actions. So long as they are coöperating, their ends are identified with those of others; there is at least a temporary feeling that the interests of others are their own interests. Not only does all strengthening of social ties, and all healthy growth of society, give to each individual a stronger personal interest in practically consulting the welfare of others; it also leads him to identify his feelings more and more with their good, or at least with an ever greater degree of practical consideration for it. He comes, as though instinctively, to be conscious of himself as[Pg 62] a being who of course pays regard to others. The good of others becomes to him a thing naturally and necessarily to be attended to. This mode of conceiving ourselves and human life, as civilisation goes on, is felt to be more and more natural. Every step in political improvement renders it more so by removing the sources of opposition of interest, and levelling those inequalities of legal privilege between individuals or classes, owing to which there are large portions of mankind whose happiness it is still practicable to disregard. In an improving state of the human mind, the influences are constantly on the increase, which tend to generate in each individual a feeling of unity with all the rest; which feeling, if perfect, would make him never think of, or desire, any beneficial condition for himself, in the benefits of which they are not included. The deeply rooted conception which every individual even now has of himself as a social being tends to make him feel it one of his natural wants that there should be harmony between his feelings and aims and those of his fellow-creatures. It does not present itself to their minds as a superstition of education, or a law despotically imposed by the power of society, but as an attribute which it would not be well for them to be without."[Pg 63]

Lastly Mill introduces the Christian ideal. "As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as one's self, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality." In his attempt to prove the Christian obligation on an Epicurean basis the inconsistency between his Epicurean principle and his Christian preaching and practice becomes evident. Master of logic as Mill was, an author of a standard text-book on the subject, yet so desperate was the plight in which his attempt to stretch Epicureanism to Christian dimensions placed him, that he was compelled to resort to the following fallacy of composition, the fallaciousness of which every student of logic recognises at a glance. "Happiness is a good; each person's happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons." As Carlyle has pointed out, this is equivalent to saying, since each pig wants all the swill in the trough for itself, a litter of pigs in the aggregate will desire each member of the litter to have its share of the whole,—a fallacy which a single experience in feed[Pg 64]ing pigs will sufficiently refute. It requires something deeper and higher than Epicurean principles to lift men to a plane where Christian altruism is the natural and inevitable conduct which Mill rightly says it ought to be.

These confessions of an Epicurean heretic, wrung from a man who had been rigidly trained by a stern father in Epicurean principles, yet whose surpassing candour compelled him to make these admissions, so fatal to the system, so ennobling to the man and to the doctrine he proclaimed, serve as an admirable preparation for the succeeding chapters, where these same principles, which Mill introduces as supplements, and modifications, and amendments to Epicureanism, will be presented as the foundation-stones of larger and deeper views of life. Mill starts with a jack-knife which he publicly proclaims to be in every part of the handle and in every blade through and through Epicurean; then gets a new handle from the Stoics; borrows one blade from Plato, and another from Aristotle; unconsciously steals the biggest blade of all from Christianity; makes one of the best knives to be found on the moral market: yet still, in loyalty to early parental training, insists on calling the finished product by the same name as that with which he started out. The result is a[Pg 65] splendid knife to cut with; but a difficult one to classify. Our quest for the principles of personality will not bring us anything much better, for practical purposes, than the lofty teaching of Mill's "Utilitarianism," and its companion in inconsistency, Herbert Spencer's "Principles of Ethics." All our five principles are present in these so-called hedonistic treatises. But it is a great theoretical advantage, and ultimately carries with it considerable practical gain, to give credit where credit is due, and to call things by their right names. Thanks to the candour of these heretics, though the names we encounter hereafter will be new, we shall greet most of the principles we discover under these new names as old friends to whom the Epicurean heretics gave us our first introduction.

[Pg 66]

CHAPTER II

STOIC SELF-CONTROL BY LAW

I
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL LAW OF APPERCEPTION

The shortest way to understand the Stoic principle is through the psychological doctrine of apperception. According to this now universally accepted doctrine, the mind is not an empty cabinet into which ready-made impressions of external things are dumped. The mind is an active process; and the meaning and value of any sensation presented from without is determined by the reaction upon it of the ideas and aims that are dominant within. This doctrine has revolutionised psychology and pedagogy, and when rightly introduced into the personal life proves even more revolutionary there. Stoicism works this doctrine for all that it is worth. Christian Science and kindred popular cults of the present day are perhaps working it for rather more than it is worth.

Translated into simple everyday terms, this doctrine in its application to the personal life means[Pg 67] that the value of any external fact or possession or experience depends on the way in which we take it. Take riches, for example. Stocks and bonds, real estate and mortgages, money and bank accounts, in themselves do not make a man either rich or poor. They may enrich or they may impoverish his personality. It is not until they are taken up into the mind, thought over, related to one's general scheme of conduct, made the basis of one's purposes and plans, that they become a factor in the personal life. Obviously the same amount of money, a hundred thousand dollars, may be worked over into personal life in a great variety of ways. One man is made proud by it. Another is made lazy. Another is made hard-hearted. Another is made avaricious for more. Another is fired with the desire to speculate. Another is filled with anxiety lest he may lose it. All these are obviously impoverished by the so-called wealth which they possess. To rich men's wives and children, whose wealth comes without the strenuous exertion and close human contact involved in earning it, it generally works their personal impoverishment in one or more of these fatal ways. For wealth, in an indolent, self-indulgent, vain, conceited, ostentatious, unsympathetic mind, takes on the colour of these odious[Pg 68] qualities, and becomes a curse to its possessor; just because he or she is cursed with these evil propensities already, and the wealth simply adds fuel to the preëxistent, though perhaps latent and smouldering flames.

On the other hand one man is made grateful for the wealth he has been able to accumulate. Another is made more sympathetic. Another is made generous. Another is urged into the larger public service his independent means makes possible. Another is lifted up into a sense of responsibility for its right use. On the whole the men and women who earn their money honestly are usually affected in one or more of these beneficial ways, and their wealth becomes an enrichment of their personality.

Now it is impossible that this hundred thousand dollars should get into any man's mind, and become a mental state, without its being mixed with one or other of these mental, emotional, and volitional accompaniments. The mental state, in other words, is a compound, of which the external fact, in this case the hundred thousand dollars, is the least important ingredient. It is so unimportant a factor that the Stoics pronounced it indifferent. The tone and temper in which we accept our riches, the ends to which we devote them, the[Pg 69] spirit in which we hold them, the way in which we spend them, are so vastly more important than the mere fact of having them, that by comparison, the fact itself seems indifferent. Like all strong statements, this is doubtless an exaggeration. You cannot have just the same mental state without riches that you can have with them. The external fact is a factor, though a relatively small one, in the composite mental state. The virtues of a rich man are not precisely the same as the virtues of a poor man. Yet the Stoic paradox is very much nearer the truth than the statement of the average man, that external things are the whole, or even the most important part of our mental states.

The same thing is true of health and sickness. Health often makes one careless, insensitive, negligent of duty; while sickness often makes one conscientious, considerate, faithful, and thus more useful and efficient than his healthy brother. Popularity often puffs up with pride; while persecution, by humbling, prepares the heart for truer blessedness. Hence whether an external fact is good or evil, depends on how we take it, what we make of it, the state of mind and heart and will into which it enters as a factor; and that in turn depends, the Stoic tells us, on ourselves, and is under our control[Pg 70] Stoicism is fundamentally this psychological doctrine of apperception, carried over and applied in the field of the personal life,—the doctrine, namely, that no external thing alone can affect us for good or evil, until we have woven it into the texture of our mental life, painted it with the colour of our dominant mood and temper, and stamped it with the approval of our will. Thus everything except a slight residuum is through and through mental, our own product, the expression of what we are and desire to be. The only difference between Stoicism and Christian Science at this point is that Stoicism recognises the material element; though it does so only to minimise it, and pronounce it indifferent. Christian Science denies that there is any physical fact, or even the raw material out of which to make one. All is merely mental, says the consistent Christian Scientist with the toothache. There is no matter there to ache. The Stoic, truer to the facts, and in not less but more heroic spirit declares: "There is matter, but it doesn't matter if there is." The toothache can be taken as a spur to greater fortitude and equanimity than the man whose teeth are all sound has had opportunity to practically exemplify; and so the total mental state, toothache-borne-with-fortitude, may be positively good.[Pg 71]

This doctrine that external things never in themselves constitute a mental state; that they are consequently indifferent; that the all-important contribution is made by the mind itself; that this contribution from the mind is what gives the tone and determines the worth of the total mental state; and that this contribution is exclusively our own affair and may be brought entirely under our own control;—this is the first and most fundamental Stoic principle. If we have grasped this principle, we are prepared to read intelligently and sympathetically the otherwise startling and paradoxical deliverances of the Stoic masters.

II
SELECTIONS FROM THE STOIC SCRIPTURES

First let us listen to Epictetus, the slave, the Stoic of the cottage as he has been called:—

"Everything has two handles: one by which it may be borne, another by which it cannot. If your brother acts unjustly, do not lay hold on the affair by the handle of his injustice, for by that it cannot be borne; but rather by the opposite, that he is your brother, that he was brought up with you, and thus you will lay hold on it as it is to be borne." Here the handle is a homely but effec[Pg 72]tive figure for the mass of mental association into which the external fact of a brother who acts unjustly is introduced before he actually enters our mental state, and determines how we shall feel and act.

"If a person had delivered up your body to some passer-by, you would certainly be angry. And do you feel no shame in delivering up your mind to any reviler, to be disconcerted and confounded?" The reviling does not become a determining factor in my own mental state unless I choose to let it. If I feel humiliated and stung by it, it is because I am weak and foolish enough to stake my estimate of myself, and my consequent happiness, upon what somebody who does not know me says about me, rather than on what I, who know myself better than anybody else, actually think. A boy at Phillips Andover Academy once drew this distinction very adroitly for another boy. There had been a free fight among the boys causing a great deal of disturbance, and Principal Bancroft had traced the beginning of it to an insulting remark on the part of the boy in question. Dr. Bancroft accused him of beginning the trouble. "No, sir," said the boy, "I did not begin it. The other fellow began it." "Well," said Principal Bancroft, "you tell me precisely what[Pg 73] took place, and I will decide who began it." "Oh," replied the boy, "I simply called him a 'darned' fool, and he took offence." Now if the other boy had been a Stoic, he would not have taken offence, and the first boy might have called him a fool with impunity. Imputing Stoicism to that extent to other people, however, is very dangerous business. Stoicism is a doctrine to be strictly applied to ourselves, but never imputed to other people, least of all to the people we wish to abuse and revile.

Epictetus again states his doctrine most explicitly on the subject of terrors. "Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of things. Thus death is nothing terrible else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our notion of death, that it is terrible. When, therefore, we are hindered, or disturbed, or grieved, let us never impute it to others, but to ourselves; that is, to our views."

Again he makes a sharp distinction between what is in our power,—that is, what we think about things; and what are not in our power,—that is external facts. "There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power. Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and, in one word, whatever affairs are our own. Beyond our power are body, property,[Pg 74] reputation, office, and, in one word, whatever are not properly our own affairs."

"Now the things within our power are by nature free, unrestricted, unhindered; but those beyond our power are weak, dependent, restricted, alien. Remember, then, that if you attribute freedom to things by nature dependent, and seek for your own that which is really controlled by others, you will be hindered, you will lament, you will be disturbed, you will find fault both with gods and men. But if you take for your own only that which is your own, and view what belongs to others just as it really is, then no one will ever compel you, no one will restrict you; you will find fault with no one, you will accuse no one, you will do nothing against your will; no one will hurt you, you will not have an enemy, nor will you suffer any harm."

All this is simply carrying out the principle that we need not concern ourselves about purely external things, for those things pure and simple can never get into our minds, or affect us one way or the other. The only things that enter into us are things as we think about them, facts as we feel about them, forces as we react upon them, and these thoughts, feelings, and reactions are our own affairs; and if we do not think serenely, feel tranquilly, and act freely with reference to them,[Pg 75] it is not the fault of external things, but of ourselves.

In his discourse on tranquillity Epictetus gives us the same counsel. "Consider, you who are about to undergo trial, what you wish to preserve, and in what to succeed. For if you wish to preserve a mind in harmony with nature, you are entirely safe; everything goes well; you have no trouble on your hands. While you wish to preserve that freedom which belongs to you, and are contented with that, for what have you longer to be anxious? For who is the master of things like these? Who can take them away? If you wish to be a man of modesty and fidelity, who shall prevent you? If you wish not to be restrained or compelled, who shall compel you to desires contrary to your principles? to aversions contrary to your opinion? The judge, perhaps, will pass a sentence against you which he thinks formidable; but can he likewise make you receive it with shrinking? Since, then, desire and aversion are in your power, for what have you to be anxious?"

Epictetus bids us meet difficulties in the same way. "Difficulties are things that show what men are. For the future, in case of any difficulty, remember that God, like a gymnastic trainer, has pitted you against a rough antagonist. For what[Pg 76] end? That you may be an Olympic conqueror; and this cannot be without toil. No man, in my opinion, has a more profitable difficulty on his hands than you have, provided you but use it as an athletic champion uses his antagonist."

Epictetus does not shrink from the logic of his teaching in its application to the sorrows of others, though here it is tempered by a concession to the weakness of ordinary mortals. "When you see a person weeping in sorrow, either when a child goes abroad, or when he is dead, or when the man has lost his property, take care that the appearance do not hurry you away with it as if he were suffering in external things. But straightway make a distinction in your mind, and be in readiness to say, it is not that which has happened that afflicts this man, for it does not afflict another, but it is the opinion about this thing which afflicts the man. So far as words, then, do not be unwilling to show him sympathy, and even if it happens so, to lament with him. But take care that you do not lament internally also." At this point, if not before, we feel that Stoicism is doing violence to the nobler feelings of our nature, and are prepared to break with it. Stoicism is too hard and cold and individualistic to teach us our duty, or even to leave us free to act out our best inclinations, toward[Pg 77] our neighbour. We may be as Stoical as we please in our own troubles and afflictions; but let us beware how we carry over its icy distinctions into our interpretation of our neighbour's suffering.

I have drawn most of my illustrations from Epictetus, because this resignation comes with rather better grace from a poor, lame man, who has been a slave, and who lives on the barest necessities of life, than from the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and the wealthy courtier Seneca. Yet the most distinctive utterances of these men teach the same lesson. Seneca attributes it to his pilot in the famous prayer, "Oh, Neptune, you may save me if you will; you may sink me if you will; but whatever happens, I shall keep my rudder true." Marcus Aurelius says: "Let the part of thy soul which leads and governs be undisturbed by the movements in the flesh, whether of pleasure or pain; and let it not unite itself with them, but let it circumscribe itself, and limit those effects to their parts." "Let it make no difference to thee whether thou art cold or warm, if thou art doing thy duty, and whether dying or doing something else. For it is one of the acts of life,—this act by which we die; it is sufficient then in this act also to do well what we have in hand." "External things touch not the soul, not in the least degree."[Pg 78] "Remember on every occasion which leads thee to vexation to apply this principle: that this is not a misfortune, but to bear it nobly is good fortune."

The most recent prophet of Stoicism is Maurice Maeterlinck. In "Wisdom and Destiny," he says:—

"The event itself is pure water that flows from the pitcher of fate, and seldom has it either savour or perfume or colour. But even as the soul may be wherein it seeks shelter, so will the event become joyous or sad, become tender or hateful, become deadly or quick with life. To those round about us there happen incessant and countless adventures, whereof every one, it would seem, contains a germ of heroism; but the adventure passes away, and heroic deed there is none. But when Jesus Christ met the Samaritan, met a few children, an adulterous woman, then did humanity rise three times in succession to the level of God."

"It might almost be said that there happens to men only that they desire. It is true that on certain external events our influence is of the feeblest, but we have all-powerful action on that which these events shall become in ourselves—in other words, on their spiritual part. The life of most men will be saddened or lightened by the thing that may chance to befall them,—in the men whom I speak[Pg 79] of, whatever may happen is lit up by their inward life. If you have been deceived, it is not the deception that matters, but the forgiveness whereto it gave birth in your soul, and the loftiness, wisdom, completeness of this forgiveness,—by these shall your eyes see more clearly than if all men had ever been faithful. But if, by this act of deceit, there have come not more simpleness, loftier faith, wider range to your love, then have you been deceived in vain, and may truly say nothing has happened."

"Let us always remember that nothing befalls us that is not of the nature of ourselves. There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts; and deeds of heroism are but offered to those who, for many long years, have been heroes in obscurity and silence. And whether you climb up the mountain or go down the hill to the valley, whether you journey to the end of the world or merely walk round your house, none but yourself shall you meet on the highway of fate. If Judas go forth to-night, it is toward Judas his steps will tend, nor will chance for betrayal be lacking; but let Socrates open his door,—he shall find Socrates asleep on the threshold before him, and there will be occasion for wisdom. We become that which we dis[Pg 80]cover in the sorrows and joys that befall us; and the least expected caprices of fate soon mould themselves to our thought. It is in our past that Destiny finds all her weapons, her vestments, her jewels. A sorrow your soul has changed into sweetness, to indulgence or patient smiles, is a sorrow that shall never return without spiritual ornament; and a fault or defect you have looked in the face can harm you no more. All that has thus been transformed can belong no more to the hostile powers. Real fatality exists only in certain external disasters—as disease, accident, the sudden death of those we love; but inner fatality there is none. Wisdom has will power sufficient to rectify all that does not deal death to the body; it will even at times invade the narrow domain of external fatality. Even when the deed has been done, the misfortune has happened, it still rests with ourselves to deny her the least influence on that which shall come to pass in our soul. She may strike at the heart that is eager for good, but still is she helpless to keep back the light that shall stream to this heart from the error acknowledged, the pain undergone. It is not in her power to prevent the soul from transforming each single affliction into thoughts, into feelings, and treasure she dare not profane. Be her empire never so[Pg 81] great over all things external, she always must halt when she finds on the threshold a silent guardian of the inner life. For even as triumph of dictators and consuls could be celebrated only in Rome, so can the true triumph of Fate take place nowhere save in our soul."

It would be easy to cite passage after passage in which the great masters of Stoicism ring the changes on this idea, that the external thing, whether it be good or evil, cannot get into the fortified citadel of my mind, and therefore cannot touch me. Before it can touch me it must first be incorporated into my mind. In the very act of incorporation it undergoes a transformation, which in the perverse man may change the best external things into poison and bitterness; and in the sage is able to convert the worst of external facts into virtue, glory, and honour. Out of indifferent external matter, thinking makes the world in which we live; and if it is not a good world, the fault is, not with the indifferent external matters,—such as, to take Epictetus's enumeration of them, "wealth, health, life, death, pleasure, and pain, which lie between the virtues and the vices,"—but in our weak and erroneous thinking.[Pg 82]

III
THE STOIC REVERENCE FOR UNIVERSAL LAW

The first half of the Stoic doctrine is that we give our world the colour of our thoughts. The second half of Stoicism is concerned with what these thoughts of ours shall be. The first half of the doctrine alone would leave us in crude fantastic Cynicism,—the doctrine out of which the broader and deeper Stoic teaching took its rise. The Cynic paints the world in the flaring colours of his undisciplined, individual caprice. Modern apostles of the essential Stoic principle incline to paint the world in the roseate hues of a merely optional optimism. They want to be well, and happy, and serene, and self-satisfied; they think they are; and thinking makes them so. If Stoicism had been as superficial as that, as capricious, and temperamental, and individualistic, it would not have lasted as it has for more than two thousand years. The Stoic thought had substance, content, objective reality, as unfortunately most of the current phases of popular philosophy have not. This objective and universal principle the Stoic found in law. We must think things, not as we would like to have them, which is the optimism of the fabled os[Pg 83]trich, with its head in the sand; not in some vague, general phrases which mean nothing, which is the optimism of mysticism: but in the hard, rigid terms of universal law. Everything that happens is part of the one great whole. The law of the whole determines the nature and worth of the part. Seen from the point of view of the whole, every part is necessary, and therefore good,—everything except, as Cleanthes says in his hymn, "what the wicked do in their foolishness." The typical evils of life can all be brought under the Stoic formula, under some beneficial law; all, that is, except sin. That particular form of evil was not satisfactorily dealt with until the advent of Christianity.

Take evils of accident to begin with. An aged man slips on the ice, falls, breaks a bone, and is left, like Epictetus, lame for life. The particular application of the law of gravitation in this case has unfortunate results for the individual. But the law is good. We should not know how to get along in the world without this beneficent law. Shall we repine and complain against the law that holds the stars and planets in their courses, shapes the mountains, sways the tides, brings down the rain, and draws the rivers to the sea, turning ten thousand mill-wheels of industry as it goes rejoicing on its way; shall we complain against this law[Pg 84] because in one instance in a thousand million it chances to throw down an individual, which happens to be me, and breaks a bone or two of mine, and leaves me for the brief span of my remaining pilgrimage with a limping gait? If Epictetus could say to his cruel master under torture, "You will break my leg if you keep on," and then when it broke could smilingly add, "I told you so,"—cannot we endure with fortitude, and even grateful joy, the incidental inflictions which so beneficent a master as the great law of gravitation in its magnificent impartiality may see fit to mete out to us?

A current of electricity, seeking its way from sky to earth, finds on some particular occasion the body of a beloved husband, a dear son, an honoured father of dependent children, the best conductor between the air and the earth, and kills the person through whose body it takes its swift and fatal course. Yet this law has no malevolence in its impartial heart. On the contrary the beneficent potency of the laws of electricity is so great that our largest hopes for the improvement of our economic condition rest on its unexplored resources.

A group of bacteria, ever alert to find matter not already appropriated and held in place by vital forces stronger than their own, find their food and breeding place within a human body, and subject[Pg 85] our friend or our child to weeks of fever, and perchance to death. Yet we cannot call evil the great biological law that each organism shall seek its meat from God wherever it can find it. Indeed were it not for these micro-organisms, and their alertness to seize upon and transform into their own living substance everything morbid and unwholesome, the whole earth would be nothing but a vast charnel house reeking with the intolerable stench of the undisintegrated and unburied dead.

The most uncompromising exponent of this second half of the Stoic doctrine in the modern world is Immanuel Kant. According to him the whole worth and dignity of life turns not on external fortune, nor even on good natural endowments, but on our internal reaction, the reverence of our will for universal law. "Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good without qualification, except a Good Will. Intelligence, wit, judgment, and the other talents of the mind, however they may be named, or courage, resolution, perseverance, as qualities of temperament, are undoubtedly good and desirable in many respects; but these gifts of nature may also become extremely bad and mischievous if the will which is to make use of them, and which, therefore,[Pg 86] constitutes what is called character, is not good. It is the same with the gifts of fortune. Power, riches, honour, even health, and the general well-being and contentment with one's condition which is called happiness, inspire pride and often presumption, if there is not a good will to correct the influence of these on the mind."

"Everything in nature works according to laws. Rational beings alone have the faculty of acting according to the conception of laws, that is, according to principles; i.e. have a will."

"Consequently the only good action is that which is done out of pure reverence for universal law. This categorical imperative of duty is expressed as follows: 'Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a Universal Law of Nature.' And since every other rational being must conduct himself on the same rational principle that holds for me, I am bound to respect him as I do myself. Hence the second practical imperative is: 'So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end, never as means only.'"

In Kant Stoicism reaches its climax. Law and the will are everything: possessions, even graces are nothing.[Pg 87]

IV
THE STOIC SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

The problem of evil was the great problem of the Stoic, as the problem of pleasure was the problem of the Epicurean. To this problem the Stoic gives substantially four answers, with all of which we are already somewhat familiar:—

First: Only that is evil which we choose to regard as such. To quote Marcus Aurelius once more on this fundamental point: "Consider that everything is opinion, and opinion is in thy power. Take away then, when thou choosest, thy opinion, and like a mariner who has doubled the promontory, thou wilt find calm, everything stable, and a waveless bay." "Take away thy opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint: I have been harmed. Take away the complaint: I have been harmed, and the harm is done away."

Second: Since virtue or integrity is the only good, nothing but the loss of that can be a real evil. When this is present, nothing of real value can be lacking. A Stoic then says, "Virtue suffers no vacancy in the place she inhabits; she fills the whole soul, takes away the sensi[Pg 88]bility of any loss, and is herself sufficient." "As the stars hide their diminished heads before the brightness of the sun, so pains, afflictions, and injuries are all crushed and dissipated by the greatness of virtue; whenever she shines, everything but what borrows its splendour from her disappears, and all manner of annoyances have no more effect upon her than a shower of rain upon the sea." "It does not matter what you bear, but how you bear it." "Where a man can live at all, he can live well." "I must die. Must I then die lamenting? I must go into exile. Does any man hinder me from going with smiles and cheerfulness and contentment?" "Life itself is neither good nor evil, but only a place for good and evil." "It is the edge and temper of the blade that make a good sword, not the richness of the scabbard; and so it is not money and possessions that make a man considerable, but his virtue." "They are amusing fellows who are proud of things which are not in our power. A man says: I am better than you for I possess much land, and you are wasting with hunger. Another says: I am of consular rank; another: I have curly hair. But a horse does not say to a horse: I am superior to you, for I possess much fodder and much barley,[Pg 89] and my bits are of gold, and my harness is embroidered; but he says: I am swifter than you. And every animal is better or worse from his own merit or his own badness. Is there then no virtue in man only, and must we look to our hair, and our clothes, and to our ancestors?" "Let our riches consist in coveting nothing, and our peace in fearing nothing."

Third: What seems evil to the individual is good for the whole: and since we are members of the whole is good for us. "Must my leg be lamed?" the Stoic asks. "Wretch, do you then on account of one poor leg find fault with the world? Wilt thou not willingly surrender it for the whole? Know you not how small a part you are compared with the whole?"

"If a good man had foreknowledge of what would happen, he would coöperate toward his own sickness and death and mutilation, since he knows that these things are assigned to him according to the universal arrangement, and that the whole is superior to the part."

Fourth: Trial brings out our best qualities, is "stuff to try the soul's strength on," and "educe the man," as Browning puts it. This interpretation of evil as a means of bringing out the higher moral qualities, though not peculiar to Stoicism,[Pg 90] was very congenial to their system, and appears frequently in their writings. "Just as we must understand when it is said that Æsculapius prescribed to this man horse exercise, or bathing in cold water, or going without shoes, so we must understand it when it is said that the nature of the universe prescribed to this man disease, or mutilation, or loss of anything of the kind." "Calamity is the touchstone of a brave mind, that resolves to live and die master of itself. Adversity is the better for us all, for it is God's mercy to show the world their errors, and that the things they fear and covet are neither good nor evil, being the common and promiscuous lot of good men and bad."

V
THE STOIC PARADOXES

A good test of one's appreciation of the Stoic position is whether or not one can see the measure of truth their paradoxes contain.

The first paradox is that there are no degrees in vice. In the words of the Stoic, "The man who is a hundred furlongs from Canopus, and the man who is only one, are both equally not in Canopus."

One of the few bits of moral counsel which I[Pg 91] remember from the infant class in the Sunday-school runs as follows:—

This, in spite of its exquisite lyrical expression, the Stoic would flatly deny. The theft of a pin, and the defalcation of a bank cashier for a hundred thousand dollars; a cross word to a dog, and a course of conduct which breaks a woman's heart, are from the Stoic standpoint precisely on a level. For it is not the consequences but the form of our action that is the important thing. It is not how we make other people feel as a result of our act, but how we ourselves think of it, as we propose to do it, or after it is done, that determines its goodness or badness. If I steal a pin, I violate the universal law just as clearly and absolutely as though I stole the hundred thousand dollars. I can no more look with deliberate approval on the cross word to a dog, than on the breaking of a woman's heart. There are things that do not admit of degrees. We must either fire our gun off or not fire it. We cannot fire part of the charge. We want either an absolutely good egg for breakfast, or no egg at all. One that is par[Pg 92]tially good, or on the line between goodness and badness, we send back as altogether bad. If there is a little round hole in a pane of glass, cut by a bullet, we reject the whole pane as imperfect, just as though a big jagged hole had been made in it by a brickbat. We get an echo of this paradox in the statement of St. James, "For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all."

This paradox becomes plain, self-evident truth, the moment we admit the Stoic position that not external things, and their appeal to our sensibility, but our internal attitudes toward universal law, are the points on which our virtue hangs. Either we intend to obey the universal law of nature or we do not; and between the intention of obedience and the intention of disobedience there is no middle ground.

Second: The wise man, the Stoic sage, is absolutely perfect, the complete master of himself, and rightfully the ruler of the world. If everything depends on our thought, and our thought is in tune with the universal law, then obviously we are perfect. Beyond such complete inner response to the universal law it is impossible for man to advance.

Curiously enough, the religious doctrine of per[Pg 93]fectionism, which often arises in Methodist circles, and in such holiness movements as have taken their rise from the influence of Methodism, shows this same root in the conception of law. Wesley's definition of sin is "the violation of a known law." If that be all there is of sin, then any of us who is ordinarily decent and conscientious, may boast of perfection. You can number perfectionists by tens of thousands on such abstract terms as these. But if sin be not merely deliberate violation of abstract law; if it be failure to fulfil to the highest degree the infinitely delicate personal, domestic, civic, and social relations in which we stand; then the very notion of perfection is preposterous, and the profession of it little less than blasphemy. But like the modern religious perfectionists, the Stoics had little concern for the concrete, individual, personal ties which bind men and women together in families, societies, and states. Perfection was an easy thing, because they had defined it in such abstract terms. Still, though not by any means the whole of virtue as deeper schools have apprehended it, it is something to have our inner motive absolutely right, when measured by the standard of universal law. That at least the Stoic professed to have attained.[Pg 94]

Third: The Stoic is a citizen of the whole world. Local, domestic, national ties bind him not. But this is a cheap way of gaining universality,—this skipping the particulars of which the universal is composed. To be as much interested in the politics of Rio Janeiro or Hong Kong as you are in those of the ward of your own city does not mean much until we know how much you are interested in the politics of your own ward. And in the case of the Stoic this interest was very attenuated. As is usually the case, extension of interest to the ends of the earth was purchased at the cost of defective intensity close at home, where charity ought to begin. As a matter of fact the Stoics were very defective in their standards of citizenship. Still, what the law of justice demanded, that they were disposed to render to every man; and thus, though on a very superficial basis, the Stoics laid the broad foundation of an international democracy which knows no limits of colour, race, or stage of development. Though Stoicism falls far short of the warmth and devotion of modern Christian missions, yet the early stage of the missionary movement, in which people were interested, not in the concrete welfare of specific peoples, but in vast aggregates of "souls," represented on maps, and in diagrams, bears a[Pg 95] close resemblance to the Stoic cosmopolitanism. We have all seen people who would give and work to save the souls of the heathen, who would never under any circumstances think of calling on the neighbour on the same street who chanced to be a little below their own social circle. The soul of a heathen is a very abstract conception; the lowly neighbour a very concrete affair. The Stoics are not the only people who have deceived themselves with vast abstractions.

VI
THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF STOICISM

The Stoics had a genuine religion. The Epicureans, too, had their gods, but they never took them very seriously. In a world made up of atoms accidentally grouped in transient relations, of which countless accidental groupings I happen to be one, there is no room for a real religious relationship. Consequently the Epicurean, though he amused himself with poetic pictures of gods who led lives of undisturbed serenity, unconcerned about the affairs of men, had no consciousness of a great spiritual whole of which he was a part, or of an Infinite Person to whom he was personally related.[Pg 96]

To the Stoic, on the contrary, the round world is part of a single universe, which holds all its parts in the grasp and guidance of one universal law, determining each particular event. By making that law of the universe his own, the individual man at once worships the all-controlling Providence, and achieves his own freedom. For the law to which he yields is at once the law of the whole universe, and the law of his own nature as a part of the universe. "We are born subjects," exclaims the Stoic, "but to obey God is perfect liberty." "Everything," says Marcus Aurelius, "harmonises with me which is harmonious to thee, O universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late, which is in due time for thee."

A characteristic prayer and meditation and hymn will show us, far better than description, what this Stoic religion meant to those who devoutly held it. Epictetus gives us this prayer of the dying Cynic: "I stretch out my hands to God and say: The means which I have received from thee for seeing thy administration of the world and following it I have not neglected: I have not dishonoured thee by my acts: see how I have used my perceptions: have I ever blamed thee? have I been discontented with anything that happens or wished it to be otherwise? Have I wished to transgress the[Pg 97] relations of things? That thou hast given me life, I thank thee for what thou hast given: so long as I have used the things which are thine I am content; take them back and place them wherever thou mayest choose; for thine were all things,—thou gavest them to me. Is it not enough to depart in this state of mind, and what life is better and more becoming than that of a man who is in this state of mind, and what end is more happy?"

He also offers us this meditation on the inevitable losses of life, by which he consoles himself with the thought that all he has is a loan from God, which these seeming losses but restore to their rightful owner, who had lent them to us for a while.

"Never say about anything, I have lost it; but say, I have restored it. Is your child dead? It has been restored. Is your wife dead? She has been restored. Has your estate been taken from you? Has not this been also restored? 'But he who has taken it from me is a bad man.' But what is it to you by whose hands the giver demanded it back? So long as he may allow you, take care of it as a thing which belongs to another, as travellers do with their inn."

The grandest expression of the Stoic religion, however, is found in the hymn of Cleanthes. Elsewhere there is too evident a disposition to con[Pg 98]descend to use God's aid in keeping up the Stoic temper; with little of outgoing adoration for the greatness and glory which are in God himself. But in this grand hymn we have genuine reverence, devotion, worship, praise, self-surrender,—in short, that confession of the glory of the Infinite by the conscious weakness of the finite in which the heart of true religion everywhere consists. Nowhere outside of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures has adoration breathed itself in more exalted and fervent strains. The hymn is addressed to Zeus, as the Stoics freely used the names of the popular gods to express their own deeper meanings.

HYMN TO ZEUS

"Thee it is lawful for all mortals to address. For we are Thy offspring, and alone of living creatures possess a voice which is the image of reason. Therefore I will forever sing Thee and celebrate Thy power. All this universe rolling round the earth obeys Thee, and follows willingly at Thy command. Such a minister hast Thou in Thy invincible hands, the two-edged, flaming, vivid thunderbolt. O King, most High, nothing is done without Thee, neither in heaven or on earth, nor in the sea, except what the wicked do in their foolishness. Thou makest order out of[Pg 99] disorder, and what is worthless becomes precious in Thy sight; for Thou hast fitted together good and evil into one, and hast established one law that exists forever. But the wicked fly from Thy law, unhappy ones, and though they desire to possess what is good, yet they see not, neither do they hear the universal law of God. If they would follow it with understanding, they might have a good life. But they go astray, each after his own devices,—some vainly striving after reputation, others turning aside after gain excessively, others after riotous living and wantonness. Nay, but, O Zeus, Giver of all things, who dwellest in dark clouds and rulest over the thunder, deliver men from their foolishness. Scatter it from their souls, and grant them to obtain wisdom, for by wisdom Thou dost rightly govern all things; that being honoured we may repay Thee with honour, singing Thy works without ceasing, as it is right for us to do. For there is no greater thing than this, either for mortal men or for the gods, to sing rightly the universal law."

Modern literature of the nobler sort has many a Stoic note; and we ought to be able to recognise it in its modern as well as in its ancient dress. The very best brief expression of the Stoic creed is found in Henley's Lines to R. T. H. B.:[Pg 100]—

The chief modern type of Stoicism, however, is Matthew Arnold. His great remedy for the ills of which life is so full is stated in the concluding lines of "The Youth of Man":—

VII
THE PERMANENT VALUE OF STOICISM

If now we know the two fundamental principles of Stoicism, the indifference of external circumstance as compared with the reaction of our own thought upon it, and the sanctification of our thought by self-surrender to the universal law; and if we have learned to recognise these Stoic notes alike in ancient and modern prose and poetry, we are ready to discriminate between the good in it which we wish to cherish, and the shortcomings of the system which it is well for us to avoid.

We can all reduce enormously our troubles and vexations by bringing to bear upon them the two Stoic formulas. Toward material things, toward impersonal events at least, we may all with profit put on the Stoic armour, or to use the figure of the turtle, which is most expressive of the Stoic attitude, we can all draw the soft sensitive flesh of our feelings inside the hard shell of resolute thoughts. There is a way of looking at our poverty, our plainness of feature, our lack of mental brilliancy, our humble social estate, our unpopularity, our physical ailments, which, instead of making us miserable, will make us modest, contented, cheer[Pg 102]ful, serene. The mistakes that we make, the foolish words we say, the unfortunate investments into which we get drawn, the failures we experience, all may be transformed by the Stoic formula into spurs to greater effort and stimulus to wiser deeds in days to come. Simply to shift the emphasis from the dead external fact beyond our control, to the live option which always presents itself within; and to know that the circumstance that can make us miserable simply does not exist, unless it exists by our consent within our own minds;—this is a lesson well worth spending an hour with the Stoics to learn once for all.

And the other aspect of their doctrine, its quasi-religious side, though not by any means the last word about religion, is a valuable first lesson in the reality of religion. To know that the universal law is everywhere, and that its will may in every circumstance be done; to measure the petty perturbations of our little lives by the vast orbits of natural forces moving according to beneficent and unchanging law; when we come out of the exciting political meeting, or the roar of the stock-exchange, to look up at the calm stars and the tranquil skies and hear them say to us, "So hot, my little man";—this elevation of our individual lives by the reverent contemplation of the universe[Pg 103] and its unswerving laws, is something which we may all learn with profit from the old Stoic masters. Business, house-keeping, school-teaching, professional life, politics, society, would all be more noble and dignified if we could bring to them every now and then a touch of this Stoic strength and calm.

Criticism, complaint, fault-finding, malicious scandal, unpopularity, and all the shafts of the censorious are impotent to slay or even wound the spirit of the Stoic. If these criticisms are true, they are welcomed as aids in the discovery of faults which are to be frankly faced, and strenuously overcome. If they are false, unfounded, due to the querulousness or jealousy of the critic rather than to any fault of the Stoic, then he feels only contempt for the criticisms and pity for the poor misguided critic. The true Stoic can be the serene husband of a scolding shrew of a wife; the complacent representative of dissatisfied and enraged constituents; maintain unruffled equanimity when cut by his aristocratic acquaintances and excluded from the most select social circles: for he carries the only valid standard of social measurement under his own hat, and needs not the adoration of his wife, the cheers of his constituents, the cards and invitations, the nods and smiles of the four hun[Pg 104]dred to assure him of his dignity and worth. If he is an author, it does not trouble him that his books are unsold, unread, uncut. If the many could appreciate him, he would have to be one of themselves, and then there would be no use in his trying to instruct them. His book is what the universal law gave him to say, and decreed that it should be; and whether there be many or few to whom the universal law has revealed the same truth, and granted power to appreciate it, is the concern of the universal, not of himself, the individual author. Again, if he is in poor health, weary, exhausted, if each stroke of work must be wrought in agony and pain,—that, too, is decreed for him by those just laws which he or his ancestors have blindly violated; and he will accept even this dictate of the universal law as just and good: he will not suffer these trifling incidental pains and aches to diminish by one jot the output of his hand or brain. When disillusion and disappointment overtake him; when the things his youth had sighed for finally take themselves forever out of his reach; when he sees clearly that only a few more years remain to him, and those must be composed of the same monotonous round of humdrum details, duties that have lost the charm of novelty, functions that have long since[Pg 105] been relegated to the unconsciousness of habit, vexations that have been endured a thousand times, petty pleasures that have long since lost their zest: even then the Stoic says that this, too, is part of the universal programme, and must be accepted resignedly. If there is little that nature has left to give him for which he cares, yet he can return to her the tribute of an obedient will and a contented mind: if he can expect little from the world, he can contribute something to it; and so to the last he maintains,—

When there is hard work to be done, to which there is no pleasure, no honour, no emolument attached; when there are evils to be rebuked which will bring down the wrath and vengeance of the powers that be on him who exposes the wrong; when there are poor relatives to be supported, and slights to be endured, and injustice to be borne, it is well for us all to know this Stoic formula, and fortify our souls behind its impenetrable walls. To consider not what happens to us, but how we react upon it; to measure good in terms not of sensuous pleasure, but of mental attitude; to know that if we are for the universal law,[Pg 106] it matters not how many things may be against us; to rest assured that there can be no circumstance or condition in which this law cannot be done by us, and therefore no situation of which we cannot be more than master, through implicit obedience to the great law that governs all,—this is the stern consolation of Stoicism; and there are few of us so happily situated in all respects that there do not come to us times when such a conviction is a defence and refuge for our souls. Beyond and above Stoicism we shall try to climb in later chapters. But below Stoicism one may not suffer his life to fall, if he would escape the fearful hells of depression, despair, and melancholia. As we lightly send back across the centuries our thanks to Epicurus for teaching us to prize at their true worth health and the good things of life, so let us reverently bow before the Stoic sages, who taught us the secret of that hardy virtue which bears with fortitude life's inevitable ills.

VIII
THE DEFECTS OF STOICISM

Why we cannot rest in Stoicism as our final guide to life, the mere statement of their doctrine must have made clear to every one; and in[Pg 107] calling attention to its limitations I shall only be saying for the reader what he has been saying to himself all through the chapter. It may be well enough to treat things as indifferent, and work them over into such mental combinations as best serve our rational interests. To treat persons in that way, however, to make them mere pawns in the game which reason plays, is heartless, monstrous. The affections are as essential to man as his reason. It is a poor substitute for the warm, sweet, tender ties that bind together husband and wife, parent and child, friend and friend,—this freezing of people together through their common relation to the universal law. I suppose that is why, in all the history of Stoicism, though college girls usually have a period of flirting with the Stoic melancholy of Matthew Arnold, no woman was ever known to be a consistent and steadfast Stoic. Indeed a Stoic woman is a contradiction in terms. One might as well talk of a warm iceberg, or soft granite, or sweet vinegar. Stoicism is something of which men, unmarried or badly married men at that, have an absolute monopoly.

Again if its disregard of particulars and individuals is cold and hard, its attempted substitute of abstract, vague universality is a bit absurd. Sometimes the lighter mood of caricature best[Pg 108] brings out the weaknesses that are concealed in grave systems when taken too seriously. Mr. W. S. Gilbert has put the dash of absurdity there is in the Stoic doctrines so convincingly that his lines may serve the purpose of illustrating the inherent weakness of the Stoic position better than more formal criticism. They are addressed

TO THE TERRESTRIAL GLOBE

The incompleteness of the Stoic position is precisely this tendency to slight and ignore the[Pg 109] external conditions out of which life is made. Its God is fate. Instead of a living, loving will, manifest in the struggle with present conditions, Stoicism sees only an impersonal law, rigid, fixed, fatal, unalterable, unimprovable, uncompanionable. Man's only freedom lies in unconditional surrender to what was long ago decreed. Of glad and original coöperation with its beneficent designs, thus helping to make the world happier and better than it could have been had not the universal will found and chosen just this individual me, to work freely for its improvement, Stoicism knows nothing. Its satisfaction is staked on a dead law to be obeyed, not a live will to be loved. Its ideal is a monotonous identity of law-abiding agents who differ from each other chiefly in the names by which they chance to be designated. It has no place for the development of rich and varied individuality in each through intense, passionate devotion to other individuals as widely different as age, sex, training, and temperament can make them. Before we find the perfect guidance of life we must look beyond the Stoic as well as the Epicurean, to Plato, to Aristotle, and, above all, to Jesus.

[Pg 110]

CHAPTER III

THE PLATONIC SUBORDINATION OF LOWER TO HIGHER

I
THE NATURE OF VIRTUE

Epicureanism tells us how to gain pleasure; Stoicism tells us how to bear pain. But life is not so simple as these systems assume. It is not merely the problem of getting all the pleasure we can; nor of taking pain in such wise that it does not hurt. It is a question of the worth of the things in which we find our pleasure, and the relative values of the things we suffer for. Plato squarely attacks that larger problem. He says that the Epicurean is like a musician who tunes his violin as much as he can without breaking the strings. The wise musician, on the contrary, recognises that the tuning is merely incidental to the music; and that when you have tuned it up to a certain point, it is worse than useless to go on tuning it any more. Just as the tuning is for the sake of the music, and when you have reached a point[Pg 111] where the instrument gives perfect music, you must stop the tuning and begin to play; so when you have brought any particular pleasure, say that of eating, up to a certain point, you must stop eating, and begin to live the life for the sake of which you eat. To the Stoic Plato gives a similar answer. The Stoic, he says, is like a physician who gives his patient all the medicine he can, and prides himself on being a better physician than others because he gives his patients bigger doses, and more of them. The wise physician gives medicine up to a certain point, and then stops. That point is determined by the health, which the medicine is given to promote. Precisely so, it is foolish to bear all the pain we can, and boast ourselves of our ability to swallow big doses of tribulation and pronounce it good. The wise man will bear pain up to a certain point; and when he reaches that limit, he will stop. What is the point? Where is the limit? Virtue is the point up to which the bearing of pain is good, the limit beyond which the bearing of pain becomes an evil. Virtue, then, is the supreme good, and makes everything that furthers it, whether pleasurable or painful, good. Virtue makes everything that hinders it, whether pleasurable or painful, bad. What, then, is virtue?[Pg 112] In what does this priceless pearl consist? We have our two analogies. Virtue is to pleasure what the music is to the tuning of the instrument. Just as the perfection of the music proves the excellence of the tuning, so the perfection of virtue justifies the particular pleasures we enjoy. Virtue stands related to the endurance of pain, as health stands related to the taking of medicine. The perfection of health proves that, however distasteful the medicine may be, it is nevertheless good; and any imperfection of health that may result from either too much or too little medicine shows that in the quantity taken the medicine was bad for us. Precisely so pain is good for us up to the point where virtue requires it. Below or above that point, pain becomes an evil.

Plato spared no pains to disentangle the question of virtue from its complications with rewards and penalties, pleasures and pains. As the virtue of a violin is not in its carving or polish, but in the music it produces; as the virtue of medicine is not in its sweetness or its absence of bitterness, so the virtue of man has primarily nothing to do with rewards and penalties, pleasures or pains. In our study of virtue, he says, we must strip it naked of all rewards, honours, and emoluments; indeed we[Pg 113] must go farther and even dress it up in the outer habiliments of vice; we must make the virtuous man poor, persecuted, forsaken, unpopular, distrusted, reviled, and condemned. Then we may be able to see what there is in virtue which, in every conceivable circumstance, makes it superior to vice. He makes one of his characters in the Republic complain that: "No one has ever adequately described either in verse or prose the true essential nature of either righteousness or unrighteousness immanent in the soul, and invisible to any human or divine eye; or shown that of all the things of a man's soul which he has within him, righteousness is the greatest good, and unrighteousness the greatest evil. Therefore I say, not only prove to us that righteousness is better than unrighteousness, but show what either of them do to the possessors of them, which makes the one to be good and the other evil, whether seen or unseen by gods and men." Accordingly he attributes to the unrighteous man skill to win a reputation for righteousness, even while acting most unrighteously. He clothes him with power and glory, and fame, and family, and influence; fills his life with delights; surrounds him with friends; cushions him in ease and security. Over against this man who is really unrighteous, but[Pg 114] has all the advantages that come from being supposed to be righteous, he sets the man who is really righteous, and clothes him with all the disabilities which come from being supposed to be unrighteous. "Let him be scourged and racked; let him have his eyes burnt out, and finally, after suffering every kind of evil, let him be impaled." Then, says Plato, when both have reached the uttermost extreme, the one of righteousness treated shamefully and cruelly, the other of unrighteousness treated honourably and obsequiously, let judgment be given which of them is the happier of the two. Translating the language of the "Gorgias" and the "Republic" into modern equivalents: Who would we rather be, a man who by successful manipulation of dishonest financial schemes had come to be a millionnaire, the mayor of his city, the pillar of the church, the ornament of the best society, the Senator from his state, or the Ambassador of his country at a European Court; or a man who in consequence of his integrity had won the enmity of evil men in power, and been sent in disgrace to State prison; a man whom no one would speak to; whom his best friends had deserted, whose own children were being brought up to reproach him? Which of the two men would we rather be? And we must not introduce any[Pg 115] consideration of reversals hereafter. Supposing that death ends all, and that there is no God to reverse the decisions of men; suppose these two men were to die as they lived, without hope of resurrection; which of the two would we rather be for the next forty years of our lives, assuming that after that there is nothing?

Plato in a myth puts the case even more strongly than this. Gyges, a shepherd and servant of the king of Lydia, found a gold ring which had the remarkable property of making its wearer visible when he turned the collet one way, and invisible when he turned it the other way. Being astonished at this, he made several trials of the ring, always with the same result; when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared. Perceiving this he immediately contrived to be chosen messenger to the court, where he no sooner arrived than he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom. Plato asks us what we should do if we had such a ring. We could do anything we pleased and no one would be the wiser. We could become invisible, out of the reach of external consequences, the instant our deed was done. Would we, with such a ring on our finger, stand fast in righteousness?[Pg 116] Could we trust ourselves to wear that ring night and day? Would we feel safe if we knew that our next-door neighbour, even our most intimate friend, had such a ring, and could do just what he pleased to us, and yet never get caught? Can we tell why a man with such a ring on his finger should not do any unjust, unkind, impure, or dishonourable deed?

II
RIGHTEOUSNESS WRIT LARGE

The Republic is Plato's answer to this question. Why, you may ask, should he give us a treatise on politics in answer to a question of personal character? Because the state is simply the individual writ large, and as we can read large letters more easily than small letters, we shall get at the principle of righteousness more readily if we first consider what it is in the large letters of the state. In presenting this analogy of the state I shall freely translate Plato's teachings into their modern equivalent. What, then, is the difference between a righteous and unrighteous state?

An unrighteous state is one in which the working-men in each industry are organised into a union which uses its power to force the wages of[Pg 117] its members up to an exorbitant level, and uses intimidation and violence to prevent any one else from working for less or producing more than the standards fixed by the union; it is a state in which the owners of capital, in each line of industry, combine into overcapitalised trusts for the purpose of making the small sums which they put into the business, and the larger sums which they do not put in at all, except on paper, earn exorbitant dividends at the expense of the public; it is a state in which the politicians are in politics for their pockets, using the opportunities for advantageous contracts which offices afford, and the opportunities for legislation in favour of private schemes, to enrich themselves out of the public purse; it is a state in which the police intimidate the other citizens, and sell permission to commit crime to the highest bidder; it is a state in which the scholars concern themselves exclusively about their own special and technical interests, and as long as the institutions with which they are connected are supported by the gifts of rich men, care little how the poor are oppressed and the many are made to suffer by the corrupt use of wealth and the selfish misuse of power. Such is the unrighteous state. And wherein does its unrighteousness consist? Obviously in the fact that[Pg 118] each of the great classes in the state—working-men, capitalists, police, politicians, scholars—are living exclusively for themselves and are ready to sacrifice the interests of the community as a whole to their private interests. Now a state which should be completely unrighteous, in which everybody should succeed in carrying out his own selfish interests at the expense of everybody else, would be intolerable. United action would be impossible. No one would wish to live in such a state. There must be honour even among thieves; otherwise stealing could not be successful on any considerable scale. The trouble with it is that each part is arrayed in antagonism against every other part, and the whole is sacrificed to the supposed interests of its constituent members.

What, then, in contrast to this would be a righteous state? It would be a state in which each of these classes fulfils its part well, with a view to the good of the whole. It would be a state where labour would be organised into unions, which would not insist on having the greatest possible wages for the least possible work, but which would maintain a high standard of efficiency, and intelligence, and character in the members, with a view to doing the best possible work in their trade, at such wages as the[Pg 119] resources and needs of the community, as indicated by the normal action of demand and supply, would warrant. It would be a state in which the capitalists would organise their business in such a way that they might invite public inspection of the relation between the capital, enterprise, skill, economy, and industry expended, and the prices they charge for commodities furnished and services rendered. It would be a state in which the police would maintain that order and law which is the equal interest of the rich and poor alike. It would be a state in which the men in political offices would use their official positions and influence for the protection of the lives and promotion of the interests of the whole people whom they represent and profess to serve. It would be a state in which the colleges and universities would be intensely alive to economic, social, and public questions, and devote their learning to the maintenance of healthful material conditions, just distribution of wealth, sound morals, and wise determination of public policy.

Wherein, then, does the difference between an unrighteous and a righteous state consist? Simply in this—that in the unrighteous state each class in the community is playing for its own hand and regarding the community as a mere means to its[Pg 120] own selfish interests as the supreme end,—while a righteous state on the contrary is one in which each class in the community is doing its own work as economically and efficiently as possible, with a view to the interests of the community as a whole. In the unrighteous state the whole is subordinated to each separate part; in the righteous state each part is subordinated to the common interests of the whole. If, then, we ask as did Adeimantus in the Republic, "Where, then, is righteousness, and in which particular part of the state is it to be found," our answer will be that given by Socrates, "that each individual man shall be put to that use for which nature designs him, and every man will do his own business so that the whole city will be not many but one." Righteousness, then, in the state consists in having each class mind its own business with a view to the good of the whole. On this, which is Plato's fundamental principle, we can all agree.

As to the method by which the righteous state is to be brought about probably we should all profoundly differ from him. His method for securing the subordination of what he calls the lower class of society to what he calls the higher class is that of repression, force, and fraud. The obe[Pg 121]dience of the working-men is to be secured by intimidation; the devotion of the higher classes is to be secured partly by suppression of natural instincts and interests, partly by an elaborate and prolonged education. The rulers are to have no property and no wives and families that they can call their own. He attempts to get devotion to the whole by suppressing those more individual and special forms of devotion which spring from private property and family affection. In all these details of his scheme we must frankly recognise that Plato was profoundly wrong. The working classes cannot and ought not to be driven like dumb cattle to their tasks by a force external to themselves. The ruling class, the scholars and statesmen, can never be successfully trained for disinterested public life by taking away from them those fundamental interests and affections out of which, in the long run, all public spirit takes its rise and draws its inspiration. In opposition to this communism based on repression and suppression by force and fraud, the modern democracy sets a community of interest and a devotion of personal resources, be they great or small, to the common good on the part of every citizen of every class. The utter inadequacy and impracticability of the details of Plato's commu[Pg 122]nistic schemes about the wives and property of his ruling class should not blind us to the profound truth of his essential definition of righteousness in a state: That each class shall "do the work for which they draw the wage" with a view to the effect it will have, not on themselves alone, but primarily on the welfare of the whole state, of which each class is a serving and contributing member. This essential truth of Plato our modern democracy has taken up. The difference is that, while Plato proposed to have intelligence and authority in one, and obedience and manual labour in another class, the problem of modern democracy is to give an intelligent and public-spirited outlook to the working-man, and a spirit of honest work to the scholar and the statesman.

The defect of Plato lies in the external arrangements by which he proposed to secure the right relation of parts to the whole. His measures for securing this subordination were partly material and physical, partly visionary and unnatural, where ours must be natural, social, intellectual, and spiritual. But he did lay down for all time the great principle that the due subordination of the parts to the whole, of the members to the organism, of the classes to society, of individuals[Pg 123] to the state is the essence of righteousness in a state, and an indispensable condition of political well-being.

III
THE CARDINAL VIRTUES

Righteousness in a state then consists in each class minding its own business, and performing its specific function for the good of the state as a whole. Righteousness in the individual is precisely the same thing. There are three grand departments of each man's life: his appetites, his spirit, and his reason. Neither of these is good or bad in itself. Neither of them should be permitted to set up housekeeping on its own account. Any one of them is bad if it acts for itself alone, regardless of the interests of the self as a whole. Let us take up these departments in order, and see wherein the vice and the virtue of each consists. First the appetites, which in the individual correspond to the working class in the state.

Let us take eating as a specimen, remembering, however, that everything we say about the appetite for food is equally true of all the other elementary appetites, such as those that deal with drink, sex, dress, property, amusement, and the like. The Epicurean said they are all good if[Pg 124] they do not clash and contradict each other. The Stoic implied that they are all, if not positively bad, at least so low and unimportant that the wise man will not pay much attention to them. Plato says they are all good in their place, and that they are all bad out of their place. What, then, is their place? It is one of subordination and service to the self as a whole. Which is the better breakfast: a half pound of beefsteak, with fried potatoes, an omelette, some griddle cakes and maple syrup, with a doughnut or two, and a generous piece of mince pie? or a little fruit and a cereal, a roll, and a couple of eggs?

Intrinsically the first breakfast is, if anything, better than the second. There is more of it. It offers greater variety. It takes longer to eat it. It will stay by you longer. If you are at a hotel conducted on the American plan, you are getting more for your money.

Righteousness, however, is concerned with none of these considerations. What makes one breakfast better than the other is the way it fits into one's life as a whole. Which breakfast will enable you to do the best forenoon's work? Which one will give you acute headache and chronic dyspepsia? Immediate appetite cannot answer these questions. Reason is the only one of our[Pg 125] three departments that can tell us what is good for the self as a whole. Now for most people in ordinary circumstances, reason prescribes the second breakfast, or something like it. The second breakfast fits into one's permanent plan of life. The work to be done in the forenoon, the feelings one will have in the afternoon, the general efficiency which we desire to maintain from day to day and year to year, all point to the second breakfast as the more adapted to promote the welfare of the self as a whole throughout the entire life history. If we eat the first breakfast, appetite rules and reason is thrust into subjection. The lower has conquered the higher; the part has domineered the whole. To eat such a breakfast, for ninety-nine men out of every hundred, would be gluttony. Yet, though eating it is vicious, the fault is not in the breakfast, not in the hunger for it; but in the fact that the appetite had its own way, regardless of the permanent interests of the self as a whole; and that so far forth reason was dethroned, and appetite set up as ruler in its place. Indeed there are circumstances in which the first breakfast would be the right one to choose. If one were on the borders of civilisation, setting out for a long tramp through the wilderness, where every ounce of food must be carried[Pg 126] on his back, and no more fresh meat and home cooking could be expected for several days, even reason herself might prescribe the first breakfast as more beneficial to the whole man than the second. Precisely the same breakfast which is good in one set of circumstances becomes bad in another. The raw appetite of hunger is obviously neither good nor bad. The rule of appetite over reason and the whole self, however, is bad always, everywhere, and for everybody. It is in this rising up of the lower part of the self against the higher, and its sacrifice of the self as a whole to a particular gratification that all vice consists.

On the other hand, the rule of reason over appetite, the gratification or the restraint of appetite according as the interests of the total self require, is always and everywhere and for everybody good. This is the essence of virtue; and the particular form of virtue that results from this control of the appetites by reason in the interest of the permanent and total self is temperance—the first and most fundamental of Plato's cardinal virtues.

The second element of human nature, spirit, must be dealt with in the same way. By spirit Plato means the fighting element in us, that which prompts us to defend ourselves, the faculty of indignation, anger, and vengeance. To make it[Pg 127] concrete, let us take a case. Suppose the cook in our kitchen has times of being careless, cross, saucy, wilful, and disobedient. The spirit within prompts us to upbraid her, quarrel with her, and when she grows in turn more insolent and impertinent, to discharge her. Is such an exercise of spirit a virtuous act? It may be virtuous, or it may be vicious. In this element, considered in itself, there is no more virtue or vice than in appetite considered in itself. It is again a question of how this particular act of this particular side of our nature stands related to the self as a whole. What does reason say?

If I send this cook away, shall I be a long while without any; and after much vexation probably put up with another not half so good? Will my household be thrown into confusion? Will hospitality be made impossible? Will the working power of the members of my household be impaired by lack of well-prepared, promptly served food? In the present state of this servant problem, all these things and worse are quite likely to happen. Consequently reason declares in unmistakable terms that the interests of the self as a whole demand the retention of the cook. But it galls and frets our spirit to keep this impertinent, disobedient servant, and hear her irritating[Pg 128] words, and see her aggravating behaviour. Never mind, reason says to the spirited element in us. The spirit is not put into us in order that it may have a good time all by itself on its own account. It is put into us to protect and promote the interests of the self as a whole. You must bear patiently with the incidental failings of your cook, and return soft answers to her harsh words; because in that way you will best serve that whole self which your spirit is given you to defend. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred a quarrel with a cook, on such grounds, in present conditions, would be prejudicial to the interests of the self as a whole. It is the sacrifice of the whole to the part; which as we saw in the case of appetite is the essence of all vice. Only in this case the vice would be, not intemperance, but cowardice, inability to bear a transient, trifling pain patiently and bravely for the sake of the self as a whole.

Still, there might be aggravated cases in which the sharp reproof, the quarrel, and the prompt discharge might be the brave and right thing to do. If one felt it a contribution one was required to make to the whole servant problem, and after considering all the inconvenience it would cost, still felt that life as a whole was worth more with this particular servant out of the house than in it,[Pg 129] then precisely the same act, which ordinarily would be wrong, in this exceptional case would be right. It is not what you do, but how you do it, that determines whether an outburst of anger is virtuous or vicious. If the whole self is in it, if all interests have been fully weighed by the reason, if, in short, you are all there when you do it, then the act is a virtuous act, and the special name of this virtue of the spirit is courage or fortitude. Anger and indignation going off on its own account is always vicious. Anger and indignation properly controlled by reason in the interest of the total self is always good. Precisely the same outward act done by one man in one set of circumstances is bad, and shows the man to be vicious, cowardly, and weak; while, if done by another man in other circumstances, it shows him to be strong, brave, and manly. Virtue and vice are questions of the subordination or insubordination of the lower to the higher elements of our nature; of the parts of our selves to the whole. The subordination of appetite to reason has given us the first of the four virtues. The subordination of spirit to reason has given us fortitude, the second.

Wisdom, the third of Plato's cardinal virtues, consists in the supremacy of reason over spirit and appetite; just as temperance and courage[Pg 130] consisted in the subordination of appetite and spirit to reason. Wisdom, then, is much the same thing as temperance and courage, only in more positive and comprehensive form. Wisdom is the vision of the good, the true end of man, for the sake of which the lower elements must be subordinated. What, then, is the good, according to Plato? The good is the principle of order, proportion, and harmony that binds the many parts of an object into the effective unity of an organic whole. The good of a watch is that perfect working together of all its springs and wheels and hands, which makes it keep time. The good of a thing is the thing's proper and distinctive function; and the condition of its performing its function is the subordination of its parts to the interest of the whole.

The good of a horse is strength and speed; but this in turn involves the coördination of its parts in graceful, free movement. The good of a state is the coöperation of all its citizens, according to their several capacities, for the happiness and welfare of the whole community. Wisdom in the statesman is the power to see such an ideal relation of the citizens to each other, and the means by which it can be attained and conserved. The good of the individual man, likewise,[Pg 131] is the harmonious working together of all the elements in him, so as to produce a satisfactory life; and wisdom is the vision of such a truly satisfactory life, and of the conditions of its attainment. Since man lives in a world full of natural objects, and of works of art; since he is surrounded by other men and is a member of a state; and since his welfare depends on his fulfilling his relations to these objects and persons, it follows that wisdom to see his own true good will involve a knowledge of these objects, persons, and institutions around him. Hence rather more than half the Republic is occupied with the problem of education; or the training of men in that wisdom which consists in the knowledge of the good.

IV
PLATO'S SCHEME OF EDUCATION

Education, therefore, in Plato's ideal Republic, was a lifelong affair, and from first to last practical. For the guardians, the men who were to be rulers or, as we should say, leaders of their fellows, he prescribed the following course: From early childhood until the age of seventeen,—that is, through our elementary and high school periods,—he would give chief attention to what he calls[Pg 132] music; that is, to literature, music, and the plastic arts, with popular descriptive science, or, as we call it nowadays, nature study. This, with elementary mathematics and gymnastics as incidental, constituted the curriculum for the first ten or twelve years. The chief stress through all these years he lays on good literature,—good both in substance and in form; for children at this age are intensely imitative. Plato practically anticipated the latest results of child study, which tell us that the child builds up the whole substance of his conception of himself out of materials borrowed from others and incorporated in himself by imitative reproduction; and then in turn interprets and understands others only in so far as he can eject this borrowed material into other persons. Hence Plato says it is of supreme importance that the children shall learn to admire and love good literature. That teachers should be able to teach the children to read and write and cipher and draw he would take for granted. The prime qualification, however, would be the ability to so interpret the best literature as to make the children admire and imitate and incorporate the noble qualities this literature embodies. Into the literature thus inspiringly taught in the school, only that which praised noble deeds in noble language[Pg 133] should be admitted. Plato's description of good literature for schools will bear repeating: "Any deeds of endurance which are acted or told by famous men, these the children ought to see and hear. If they imitate at all, they should imitate the temperate, holy, free, courageous, and the like; but they should not depict or be able to imitate any kind of illiberality or other baseness, lest from imitation they come to be what they imitate. Did you never observe how imitations, beginning in early youth, at last sink into the constitution and become a second nature of body, voice, and mind?" "Of the harmonies I know nothing, but I want to have one warlike, which will sound the word or note which a brave man utters in the hour of danger and stern resolve, or when his cause is failing and he is going to wounds or death or is overtaken by some other evil, and at every such crisis meets fortune with calmness and endurance; and another which may be used by him in times of peace and freedom of action, when there is no pressure of necessity—expressive of entreaty, or persuasion, or prayer to God, or instruction of man, or again of willingness to listen to persuasion or entreaty or advice; and which represents him when he has accomplished his aim, not carried away by success, but[Pg 134] acting moderately and wisely, and acquiescing in the event. These two harmonies I ask you to leave: the strain of necessity and the strain of freedom, the strain of courage, and the strain of temperance. We would not have our guardians grow up amid images of moral deformity, as in some noxious pasture, and there browse and feed upon many a baneful herb and flower day by day, little by little, until they silently gather a festering mass of corruption in their own souls. Let our artists rather be those who are gifted to discern the true nature of beauty and grace; then will our youth dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds; and beauty, the effluence of fair works, will meet the sense like a breeze, and insensibly draw the soul, even in childhood, into harmony with the beauty of reason. Rhythm and harmony find their way into the secret places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, bearing grace in their movements, and making the soul graceful of him who is rightly educated, or ungraceful if ill educated; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art or nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly[Pg 135] blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason of the thing; and when reason comes, he will recognise and salute her as a friend with whom his education has made him long familiar."

Thus, according to Plato, the important thing for a youth to secure by the time he is seventeen is the admiration of noble deeds, and noble words, and noble character. The love of good literature is the backbone of this elementary education. Manual training and nature study, as a means to the appreciation of beautiful works of art and beautiful objects in nature, he would also approve. On the whole Plato is an advocate of those very reforms which are now being introduced into the elementary and secondary schools in the name of the New Education. What one loves is of more importance than what one knows; what one wants to do, and is interested in trying to do, is of more consequence at this stage than what one has done. Early education should be an introduction to the true, the beautiful, and the good in the form of great men, brave deeds, beautiful objects, and beneficent laws. The development of taste is more than the acquisition of information; the inspiration of literature, history, art, and descriptive science is far more valuable than drill beyond[Pg 136] the essentials in grammar, geography, and arithmetic.

Plato's programme for the years from seventeen to twenty, three of our four college years, is even more startling and heretical; and quite in line with certain tendencies in our own day. He would set apart the three years from seventeen to twenty for gymnastic exercises, including in such exercises, however, military drill. Plato appreciated both the advantage and disadvantage of intense athletic exercises. "The period, whether of two or three years, which passes in this sort of training is useless for any other purpose,—for sleep and exercise are unpropitious to learning; and the trial is one of the most important tests to which they are subjected."

At the age of twenty he would select the most promising youths and give them a ten years' course in severe study of science. This systematic study corresponds to the graduate and professional period in modern education, only he extends it over ten years, where we confine it to three or four. Again at thirty there is another selection of those who are most steadfast in their learning and most faithful in their military and public duties, and these are given a five years' course in dialectic or philosophy. They are trained to see the relation of[Pg 137] the special sciences to each other and how each department of truth is related to the whole. At the age of thirty-five they must be appointed to military and other offices. "In this way they will get their experience of life, and there will be an opportunity to try whether, when they are drawn all manner of ways by temptation, they will stand firm or stir at all." And when they have reached the age of fifty, after fifteen years of this laboratory work in actual public service, holding subordinate offices and learning to discriminate good and evil, not as we find them done up in packages and labelled in the study, but as they are interwoven in the complicated texture of real life, "those who still survive and have distinguished themselves in every deed and in all knowledge, come at last to their graduation; the time has now arrived at which they must raise the eye of the soul to the universal light which lightens all things and behold the absolute good; for that is the pattern according to which they are to order the state and the lives of individuals and the remainder of their own lives also, making philosophy their chief pursuit; but when their turn comes, also toiling at politics and ruling for the public good."

The wisdom which comes of this prolonged and elaborate education is the third of Plato's four[Pg 138] cardinal virtues. In the state it is the ruling principle, and its agents are the philosophers. As Plato says in a famous passage: "Until then philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who follow either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never cease from ill,—no, nor the human race, as I believe,—and then only will this our state have a possibility of life and behold the light of day." Precisely so, no individual will attain his true estate until this philosophic principle, which sees the good, through training has been so developed that it can bring both appetite and spirit into subjection to it, as a charioteer controls his headstrong horses.

V
RIGHTEOUSNESS THE COMPREHENSIVE VIRTUE

We now have three of the cardinal virtues: temperance, the subjection of appetite to reason; fortitude, the control of the spirit by reason; and wisdom, won through education, the assertion of the dictates of reason over the clamour of both appetite and spirit. But where, amid all this,[Pg 139] Plato asks, is righteousness? In reply he remarks, "that when we first began our inquiry, ages ago, there lay righteousness rolling at our feet, and we, fools that we were, failed to see her, like people who go about looking for what they have in their hands. Righteousness is the comprehensive aspect of the three virtues already considered in detail. It is the ultimate cause and condition of the existence of all of them. Righteousness in a state consists in each citizen doing the thing to which his nature is most perfectly adapted: in minding one's own business, in other words, with a view to the good of the whole. Righteousness in an individual, then, consists in having each part of one's nature devoted to its specific function: in having the appetites obey, in having the spirit steadfast in difficulty and danger, and in having the reason rule supreme. Thus righteousness, that subordination and coordination of all the parts of the soul in the service of the soul as a whole, includes each of the other three virtues and comprehends them all in the unity of the soul's organic life.

"For the righteous man does not permit the several elements within him to meddle with one another, but he sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master, and at peace with himself; when he[Pg 140] has bound together the three principles within him, and is no longer many, but has become one entirely temperate and perfectly adjusted nature, then he will begin to act, if he has to act, whether in a matter of property, or in the treatment of the body, or in some affairs of politics or of private business; in all which cases he will think and call just and good action, that which preserves and coöperates with this condition, and the knowledge which presides over this wisdom."

Unrighteousness, on the other hand, is the exact opposite of this. "Then assuming the threefold division of the soul, must not unrighteousness be a kind of quarrel between these three—a meddlesomeness and interference, a rising up of a part of the soul against the whole soul, an assertion of unlawful authority, which is made by a rebellious subject against a true prince, of whom he is the natural vassal—this is the sort of thing; the confusion and error of these parts or elements in unrighteousness and intemperance, cowardice, and ignorance, and in general all vice." In other words, righteousness and unrighteousness "are like disease and health; being in the soul just what disease and health are in the body." "Then virtue is the health and beauty and well-being of the soul, vice is the disease and weakness and[Pg 141] deformity of the soul." From this point of view our old question of the comparative advantage of righteousness and unrighteousness answers itself. Indeed, the question whether it is more profitable to be righteous and do righteously and practice virtue, whether seen or unseen of gods and men, or to be unrighteous and act unrighteously if only unpunished, becomes, Plato says, ridiculous. "If when the bodily constitution is gone, life is no longer endurable, though pampered with every sort of meats and drinks, and having all wealth and all power, shall we be told that life is worth having when the very essence of the vital principle is undermined and corrupted, even though a man be allowed to do whatever he pleases, if at the same time he is forbidden to escape from vice and unrighteousness, or attain righteousness and virtue, seeing that we now know the true nature of each?"

Righteousness, according to Plato, is the condition of the soul's health and life. To part with righteousness for any external advantage is to commit the supreme folly of selling our own souls. Righteousness is the organising principle of the soul; unrighteousness is the disorganising principle. Health and life rest on organisation. Disorganisation and vice are synonymous with disease and death. Therefore, all seeming gains that one may[Pg 142] win in the paths of unrighteousness really involve the greatest possible loss.

We have now seen what righteousness is, whether in a state or in an individual. It is the health, harmony, beauty, excellence of the whole state or the whole man, secured by having each member attend strictly to its own distinctive work, with a view to the good of the whole state or the whole man. Thus defined it is something so obviously desirable and essential, that nothing else is worthy to be compared with it. Whoever parts with it even in exchange for the greatest outward honours, emoluments, comforts, or pleasures, is bound to get the worst of the bargain. Yet men do part with it; states do part with it. And the eighth and ninth books of the Republic are devoted to a description of the four stages of degeneration through which states and individuals pass on the downward road from righteousness and virtue to unrighteousness and vice. The breaking up of a thing often reveals its nature as effectually as the putting it together; and as we have traced the four virtues by which either the state or the soul is constructed, it will throw added light upon the problem to trace in conclusion the four stages through which men and states go down to destruction.[Pg 143]

VI
THE STAGES OF DEGENERATION

The first step down is where, instead of the good, men seek personal honour and distinction. At first the deterioration, whether in state or individual, is hardly noticeable. An ambitious statesman, on the whole, will advocate, if he is shrewd and far-sighted, much the same measures as the statesman who is intent on the welfare of the state. For he knows that by promoting the public welfare he will most effectively gain the reputation and distinction he desires. Yet there is a marked difference in the attitude of mind, and in the long run that difference will express itself in action. When it comes to a close and hard decision, where the real interest of the state lies in one direction, and the waves of popular enthusiasm are running in an opposite direction, the man who cares for the real welfare of the state will stand fast, while the man who cares supremely for honour and distinction will be more likely to give way. Besides, contention and strife will arise, since the ambitious man is more anxious to do something himself than he is to have the best thing done by some one else. Hence the[Pg 144] state where the statesmen love power, office, and honour will be less well off than the state where they are disinterestedly devoted to the public good.

Just so the man who is supremely covetous of power and honour will be weaker than the man who loves the good and follows the guidance of reason as supreme, in both these respects. He will be prone to follow the clamour of the multitude when he knows it is not the voice of reason; and he will try to have his own way, even when he knows that the way of another man is better than his. As Plato says, "He gives up the kingdom that is within him to the middle principle of contentiousness and passion, and becomes proud and ambitious." Here, then, are the two tests by which each man may judge for himself whether he is a degenerate of the first grade or not. First: Will you do what reason shows you to be right every time, at all costs, no matter if all the honours and emoluments are attached to doing something a shade or two off from this absolutely right and reasonable course? Second: Would you rather have what is best done by somebody else, and let him have the credit of it, rather than get all the credit yourself by doing something not quite so good? The man of pride[Pg 145] and ambition can never be quite disinterested in his service of the good, although incidentally most of the things he does will be good things. As Plato puts it, "He is not single-minded toward virtue, having lost his best guardian." He has neglected "the one thing that can preserve a man's goodness through his life—reason blended with music."

It is a short and easy step, in state and individual, from the love of honour down to the love of money as the guiding principle of life. The appetitive side of life is always present, even in the most upright of men. It may be asleep, but it is never dead. And when there is nothing more deep and vital than the love of honour to hold it in restraint, it is sure to wake up and prowl about. Rivalry for honour soon reveals the fact that directly or indirectly honour and office can be bought. Then comes the state of things where only rich men can get office, or can afford to hold it if it comes to them. That in the state is what Plato calls an oligarchy. The deterioration of a state under this condition is very rapid, for, as he says, "When riches and virtue are placed together in the scales of the balance, the one always rises as the other falls. And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men[Pg 146] become lovers of trade and of money, and they honour and reverence the rich man and make a ruler of him, and dishonour the poor man." The evils of this oligarchical rule, he says, are illustrated by considering the nature of the qualification for office and influence. "Just think what would happen if the pilots were to be chosen according to their property, and a poor man refused permission to steer, even though he were the better pilot?" The other defect is "the inevitable division; such a state is not one but two states, the one of poor men, the other of rich men, who are living on the same spot and ever conspiring against one another."

The avaricious man is like the state which is governed by rich men. "Is not this man likely to seat the concupiscent and covetous elements on the vacant throne? And when he has made the reasoning and passionate faculties sit on the ground obediently on either side, and taught them to know their place, he compels the one to think only of the method by which lesser sums may be converted into larger ones, and schools the other into the worship and admiration of riches and rich men. Of all conversions there is none so speedy or so sure as when the ambitious youth changes into the avaricious one."[Pg 147]

Nowhere is Plato more keen or more fair than in his judgment of the money-maker. He says that he will generally do the right thing; he will be eminently respectable; he will not sink to very low or disreputable courses. All his goodness, however, will be of a forced, constrained, artificial, and at bottom unreal character. He will be good because he has to, in order to maintain that standing in the community on which his wealth depends. In Plato's own words: "He coerces his bad passions by an effort of virtue; not that he convinces them of evil, or exerts over them the gentle influence of reason, but he acts upon them by necessity and fear, and because he trembles for his possessions. This sort of man will be at war with himself: he will be two men, not one; but, in general, his better desires will be found to prevail over his inferior ones. For these reasons such an one will be more decent than many are; yet the true virtue of a unanimous and harmonious soul will be far out of his reach."

The next step down for the state is what Plato calls democracy. Of the democracy of intelligence and self-control diffused throughout the body of self-respecting citizens Plato had formed and could form no conception. By democracy he meant the state of things where each man does that which is[Pg 148] right in his own eyes. "In the first place the citizens are free. The city is full of freedom and frankness—there a man may do as he likes. They have a complete assortment of constitutions; and if a man has a mind to establish a state, he must go to a democracy as he would go to a bazaar, where they sell them, and pick out one that suits him. Democracy is a most accommodating and charming form of government, full of variety and diversity, and (this, perhaps, is the keenest of all Plato's keen thrusts) dispensing equality to equals and unequals alike."

The man corresponding to democracy in the state, is the man whose life is given over to the undiscriminating enjoyment of all sorts of pleasures. "In this way the young man passes out of his original nature which was trained in the school of necessity, into the freedom and libertinism of useless and unnecessary pleasures, putting the government of himself into the hands of the one of his pleasures that offers and wins the turn; and when he has had enough of that, then into the hands of another, and is very impartial in his encouragement of them all. Neither does he receive or admit into the fortress any true word of advice; if any one says to him that some pleasures are the satisfactions of good and noble desires,[Pg 149] and others of evil desires, and that he ought to use and honour some and curtail and reduce others—whenever this is repeated to him he shakes his head and says that they are all alike, and that one is as honourable as another. He lives through the day, indulging the appetite of the hour; and sometimes he is lapped in drink and strains of the flute; then he is for total abstinence, and tries to get thin; then again, he is at gymnastics; sometimes idling and neglecting everything, then once more living the life of a philosopher; often he is at politics, and starts to his feet and says and does anything that may turn up; and, if he is emulous of any one who is a warrior, off he is in that direction, or of men of business, once more in that. His life has neither order nor law; and this is the way of him,—this he terms joy and freedom and happiness. There is liberty, equality, and fraternity enough in him."

The life of chance desire, unregulated by any subordinating principle, then, is the third stage of the descent and degradation of the soul.

In the state democracy speedily and inevitably passes over into tyranny. All appetite is insatiable. In a state where each citizen does what he pleases "all things are just ready to burst with liberty; excess of liberty, whether in states or in[Pg 150]dividuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery. Then tyranny naturally arises out of democracy." He then proceeds, with prophetic pen, to trace the evolution of the modern political boss. First there develops a class of drones who get their living as professional politicians. Second, "there is the richest class, which, in a nation of traders, is generally the most orderly; they are the most squeezable persons and yield the largest amount of honey to the drones; this is called the wealthy class, and the drones feed upon them. There is also a third class, consisting of working-men who are not politicians and have little to live upon; these, when assembled, are the largest and most powerful class in a democracy; but then, the multitude is seldom willing to meet unless they get a little honey. Their leaders take the estates of the rich and give to the people as much of them as they can consistently with keeping the greater part themselves. The people have always some one as a champion whom they raise into greatness. This is the very root from which a tyrant (that is, as we should say, a boss) comes. When he first appears above ground, he is a protector. At first, in the early days of his power, he smiles upon every one and salutes every one; he, to be called a tyrant who is making promises in public and also in[Pg 151] private, and wanting to be kind and good to every one! Thus liberty, getting out of all order and reason, passes into the harshest and bitterest form of slavery." The worst form of government, according to Plato, is that which we know too well to-day in our great cities: the government of the professional politician who maintains himself by buying the votes of the poor with the money he has squeezed out of the rich. All pretence of administering the government in the interest of the community is frankly abandoned. The boss, or tyrant, as Plato calls him, frankly and unblushingly avows that he is in politics for what he can get out of it.

The true statesman, the philosopher king, in Plato's phrase, sees and serves the public good. Such a government Plato calls an aristocracy, or the government of the best for the good of all. First below that comes timocracy, or the government of those who are ambitious for power and place. Next comes oligarchy, the government of the rich for the protection of the interests of the moneyed class. Next below that, and as a logical consequence, comes populism, which is our word for what Plato calls democracy; a government which aims to satisfy the immediate wants of everybody, regardless of moral, legal, or constitu[Pg 152]tional restraints. Last, and lowest of all, comes the rule of the professional politician who has thrown all pretence of regard for the public good, all consideration of honour, all loyalty to the rich and genuine sympathy for the poor to the winds, and is simply manipulating the forms of government, getting and distributing offices, collecting assessments and distributing bribes, all in the interests of his own private pocket. Between disinterested service of the public good and such unblushing pursuit of private gain, Plato says that there is no stopping place. Logically Plato is right; historically, too, he was right at the time when he was writing. Modern democracy, however, is a very different thing from the populistic democracy with which Plato was familiar and which our large cities know too well. A democracy, resting on intelligence and public spirit, diffused through rich and poor alike, was beyond Plato's profoundest dreams. That great experiment the American people, with their public-school system, and their principle of the equality of all before the law, are now trying on a gigantic scale.

Corresponding to the tyrannical state comes the tyrannical man. "The wild beast in our nature gets the upper hand and the man becomes drunken, lustful, passionate, the best elements in him are[Pg 153] enslaved; and there is a small ruling part which is also the worst and the maddest. He has the soul of the slave, and the tyrannical soul must always be poor and insatiable. He is by far the most miserable of all men." "He who is the real tyrant, whatever men may think, is the real servant and is obliged to practice the greatest adulation and servility and be the flatterer of mankind; he has desires which he is truly unable to satisfy, and has more wants than any one, and is truly poor if you know how to inspect the soul of him. All his life long he is beset with fear and is full of convulsions and distractions. Even as the state which he resembles, he grows worse from having power; he becomes of necessity more jealous, more faithless, more unjust, more impious; he entertains and nurtures every evil sentiment, and the consequence is that he is supremely miserable and thus he makes everybody else equally miserable."

VII
THE INTRINSIC SUPERIORITY OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

Plato first constructs the ideal character and shows that it consists in the righteous rule of the intelligent principle in man over the spirit and the appetites. A soul thus in harmony with itself,[Pg 154] under the rule of reason, is at once healthy, happy, beautiful, and good. Later, reversing the process, he shows how the good, beautiful, true, healthy condition of the soul may be destroyed through the successive steps of pride, avarice, lawless liberty, ending at last in the tyrannous rule of some single appetite or passion which has dethroned reason and set itself up as supreme. The consequence of it all is that "the most righteous man is also the happiest, and this is he who is the most royal master of himself; the worst and most unrighteous man is also the most miserable; this is he who is also the greatest tyrant of himself and the most complete slave."

The reason why the life of a righteous man is happier than the life of an unrighteous man is that it has "a greater share in pure existence as a more real being." "If there be a pleasure in being filled with that which agrees with nature; that which is more really filled with more real being will have more real and true joy and pleasure; whereas, that which participates in less real being will be less truly and surely satisfied and will participate in a less true and real pleasure. Those, then, who know not wisdom and virtue, and are always busy with gluttony and sensuality, never pass into the true upper world;[Pg 155] neither are they truly filled with true being, nor do they taste of true and abiding pleasure. Like brute animals, with their eyes down and bodies bent to the earth, or leaning on the dining table, they fatten and feed and breed, and, in their excessive love of these delights, they kick and butt at one another with horns and hoofs which are made of iron; they kill one another by reason of their insatiable lust; for they fill themselves with that which is not substantial, and the part of themselves which they fill is also unsubstantial and incontinent." "Thus when the whole soul follows the philosophical principle, and there is no division, the several parts, each of them, do their own business and are righteous, and each of them enjoy their own best and truest pleasures. But when either of the other principles prevails, it fails in attaining its own pleasure and compels the others to pursue after a shadow of pleasure which is not theirs."

Having reached this point Plato introduces a figure, which carries the whole point of his argument. "Do you now model the form of a multitudinous, polycephalous beast, having a head of all manner of beasts, tame and wild, making a second form as of a lion, and a third of a man; the second smaller than the first, and the third smaller[Pg 156] than the second; then join them and let the three grow into one. Now fashion the outside into a single image as of a man, so that he who is not able to look within may believe the beast to be a single human creature. Now unrighteousness consists in feasting the monster and strengthening the lion in one in such wise as to weaken and starve the man; while righteousness consists in so strengthening the man within him that he may govern the many-headed monster." "Righteousness subjects the beast to the man, or rather to the god in man, and unrighteousness is that which subjects the man to the beast."

Finally Plato sums up the discussion by anticipating the question which Jesus asked four centuries later. "How would a man profit if he receive gold and silver on the condition that he was to enslave the noblest part of him to the worst? Who can imagine that a man who sold his son or daughter into slavery for money, especially if he sold them into the hands of fierce and evil men, would be the gainer, however much might be the sum which he received? And will any one say that he is not a miserable caitiff who sells his own divine being to that which is most godless and detestable and has no pity? Eriphyle took the necklace as the price of her husband's life, but he[Pg 157] is taking a bribe in order to compass a worse ruin." He even pushes the question a step further and asks, "What shall a man be profited by unrighteousness even if his unrighteousness be undetected? For he who is undetected only gets worse; whereas he who is detected and punished has the brutal part of his nature silenced and humanised; the gentler element in him is liberated and his whole soul is perfected and ennobled by the acquirement of righteousness and temperance and wisdom. The man of understanding will concentrate himself on this as the work of life. In the first place he will honour studies which impress these qualities on his soul and will disregard others. In the next place he will keep under his body and will be far from yielding to brutal and irrational pleasures, and he will be always desirous of preserving the harmony of the body for the sake of the concord of the soul. He will not allow himself to be dazzled by the opinion of the world and heap up riches to his own infinite harm. He will look at the city which is within him, and he will duly regulate his acquisition and expense, in so far as he is able, and for the same reason he will accept such honours as he deems likely to make him a better man. He will look at the nature of the soul, and, from the consideration of this, he will determine which is the[Pg 158] better and which is the worst life and make his choice, giving the name of evil to the life which will make his soul more unrighteous, and good to the life which will make his soul more righteous; for this is the best choice,—best for this life and after death. Wherefore my counsel is, that we hold fast to the heavenly way and follow after righteousness and virtue always, considering that the soul is immortal and able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil; then shall we live dear to one another and the gods, both while remaining here and when, like conquerors in the games who go round to gather gifts, we receive our reward."

With this magnificent tribute to the intrinsic superiority of righteousness over unrighteousness Plato concludes his greatest work. The question why a man should do right, even if he wore the ring of Gyges which would exempt him from all external consequences of his misdeeds, has been answered by a thoroughgoing analysis of the nature of the soul, and the demonstration that righteousness is that organisation of the elements of the soul into an active and harmonious unity, wherein its health and beauty and life and happiness consist. In conclusion let us borrow from another of Plato's dialogues the prayer which he ascribes to Socrates,—a brief and simple prayer,[Pg 159] yet one which, in the light of our study of the Republic, I trust we shall recognise as summing up the spirit of his teaching as a whole. "Beloved Pan, and all ye gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy; and may I have such a quantity of gold as none but the temperate can carry. Anything more? That prayer, I think, is enough for me."

VIII
TRUTH AND ERROR IN PLATONISM

Obviously this Platonic principle is vastly deeper and truer than anything we have had before. The personality at which both Stoic and Epicurean aimed was highly abstract,—something to be gained by getting away from the tangle and complexity of life rather than by conquering and transforming the conditions of existence into expressions of ourselves. Epicurus makes a few sallies from his cosey comfortable camp, to forage for provender. The Stoic draws into the citadel of his own self-sufficiency; and from this fortified position defies attack. Plato comes out into the open field, and squarely gives battle to the hosts[Pg 160] of appetite, passion, temptation, and corruption, of which the world outside, and our hearts inside are full. In this he is true to the moral experience of the race: and his trumpet-call to the higher departments of our nature to enter the "great combat of righteousness"; his demand of instantaneous and absolute surrender which he presents to everything low and sensual within us, are clear, strong notes which it is good for every one of us to hear and heed. To him as to Carlyle, "Life is not a May-game, but a battle and a march, a warfare with principalities and powers. No idle promenade through fragrant orange-groves and green flowery spaces waited on by the choral muses and the rosy hours; it is a stern pilgrimage through the rough, burning sandy solitudes, through regions of thick-ribbed ice. He walks among men, loves men with inexpressible soft pity, as they cannot love him; but his soul dwells in solitude, in the uttermost parts of creation. All Heaven, all Pandemonium are his escort. The stars, keen glancing, from the immensities, send tidings to him; the graves, silent with their dead, from the eternities. Deep calls for him unto deep.

"Thou, O World, how wilt thou secure thyself against this man? None of thy promotions is[Pg 161] necessary for him. His place is with the stars of Heaven; to thee it may be momentous, to thee it may be life or death; to him it is indifferent, whether thou place him in the lowest hut, or forty feet higher at the top of thy stupendous high tower, while here on Earth. He wants none of thy rewards; behold also he fears none of thy penalties. Thou canst not hire him by thy guineas; nor by thy gibbets and law-penalties restrain him. Thou canst not forward him; thou canst not hinder him. Thy penalties, thy poverties, neglects, contumelies,—behold all these are good for him. To this man death is not a bugbear; to this man life is already as earnest and awful, and beautiful and terrible as death."

This is a note which appeals forcibly to every noble youth. It has been struck by the Hebrew Prophets and the Christian Apostles: by Savonarola and Fichte, and a host of heroic souls; but by no one more clearly and constrainingly than by Plato. It is the note of earnest and aggressive righteousness; without which no personality can be either sound or strong. The man who has never heard this summons to go forth and conquer the evils of the world without and of his own heart within him, in the name of a righteousness high above both his own attainment and[Pg 162] the attainment of the world about him as the heavens are higher than the earth, is still in the nursery stage of personal development.

On the other hand, there is danger in the very sharpness of the antithesis which Platonism makes between the higher and the lower. For the most part this danger is latent in Plato himself; though even in him it came out in his tendency to regard family life and private property as detrimental rather than serviceable to that development of character on which the larger devotion to the state, and the ideal order, must ultimately rest.

In Neoplatonism, in the many forms of mysticism, in certain aspects of Christian asceticism, and notably in the numerous phases of what calls itself "New Thought" to-day, what was for the most part latent in Plato, becomes frankly explicit. In general it is a loosening of the ties that hold us to drudgery and homely duty; a weakening of the bonds that bind us to the men and women by our side, in order to gaze more serenely on the ineffable beyond the clouds. This developed Platonism admits that we must live after a fashion in this very imperfect world; but says our real conversation all the time must be in heaven. Individual people are but faulty, imperfect copies[Pg 163] of the pattern of the perfect good laid up on high. We must buy and sell, work and play, laugh and cry, love and hate down here among the shadows; but we must all the time feed our souls on the good, the true, the beautiful, which these distorted human shadows only serve to hide. These Platonic lovers of something better than their husbands or wives, or associates or friends, go through the world with a serene smile, and an air of other-worldliness which, if we do not inquire too closely into their domestic life and business efficiency, we cannot but admire. They undoubtedly exert a tranquillising influence in their way, especially on those who are so fortunate as to behold them from a little distance. But they are not the most comfortable people to live with, as husband or wife, colleague or business partner. Louisa Alcott had this Platonic type in mind when she defined a philosopher as a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends having hold of the ropes, trying to pull him down to earth.

A good deal that passes for religion is this Neoplatonism masquerading in Christian dress. All such hymns as "The Sweet By and By," "Oh, Paradise, Oh, Paradise," and the like, which set heaven and eternity in sharp antithesis against earth and time, are simply Neoplatonism baptized[Pg 164] into Christian phraseology; and the baptism is by sprinkling rather than immersion.

Thomas à Kempis's "Imitation of Christ," and indeed all the mystical books of devotion—Tauler, Fénelon, "The Theologia Germanica"—are saturated with this Platonic or Neoplatonic spirit. "Thou shalt lamentably fall away, if thou set a value upon any worldly thing." "Let therefore nothing which thou doest seem to thee great; let nothing be grand, nothing of value or beauty, nothing worthy of honour save what is eternal." "Man approacheth so much the nearer unto God, the farther he departeth from all earthly comfort." These words from the "Imitation of Christ" sound orthodox enough in our ears. But we ought to understand once for all that it is Neoplatonic mysticism, not essential Christianity, that breathes through them.

This type of personality reduces the world to two mutually exclusive elements, God and self; and permits no reconciliation or mediation between them. Fénelon puts this dualism in the form of a dilemma. "There is no middle course; we must refer everything either to God or to self; if to self, we have no other God than self; if to God, we are then without selfish interests, and we enter into self-abandonment." Undoubtedly for[Pg 165] evangelistic purposes the sharp antithesis has great practical advantages. It is an easy way to reach heaven—this of scorning earth; an easy definition of the infinite to pronounce it the negation of the finite.

As Carlyle has represented for us the stronger side of Platonism, his friend Emerson shall serve to illustrate the weakness that lurks half hidden in all this way of thinking. It is so concealed that we shall hardly detect it unless we are sharply on the watch for this tendency to exalt the Infinite at the expense of the finite; the Universal at the expense of the particular; God at the expense of our neighbour.

"Thus we are put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality. We are made to feel that our affections are but tents of a night. There are moments when the affections[Pg 166] rule and absorb the man, and make his happiness depend on a person or persons. But the warm loves and fears that swept over us as clouds must lose their finite character, and blend with God, to attain their own perfection." "Before that heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily praise any form of life we have seen or read of. Pressed on our attention, the saints and demigods whom history worships fatigue and invade. The soul gives itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who on that condition gladly inhabits it." "The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring, daring, which can love us and which we can love."

"I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their[Pg 167] visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods." "True love transcends the unworthy object and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its independency the surer."

Here you have Plato and Thomas à Kempis in the elegant garb of a heretical transcendentalist. But you get the same dualism of finite and infinite, perfect and imperfect; unworthy, crumbling earth-mask to be gotten rid of here on earth, and the stars to be sought out and gazed at up in heaven.

The combat of the higher against the lower is one in which we must all engage; and no doubt in order to win we must at times keep the lower solicitations at arm's-length. If, however, what appeals to us in the name of the highest counsels any relaxing of definite obligation, any alienation from the man or woman whom social institutions have placed closest by our side; any disloyalty to the plain companions and humble associates whom society or business places in our way; any breaking of social bonds which generations of self[Pg 168]-sacrifice and self-control have laboriously woven, and centuries of experience have approved as beneficent; then it is time to abandon Plato, or rather those who have assumed to wear his mantle, and look for personal guidance to those greater masters who have transcended the antithesis of higher and lower, which it was Plato's great mission to make so sharp and clear. The principle of such a reconciliation we shall find in Aristotle; its complete accomplishment we shall find in Jesus.

[Pg 169]

CHAPTER IV

THE ARISTOTELIAN SENSE OF PROPORTION

I
ARISTOTLE'S OBJECTIONS TO PREVIOUS SYSTEMS

Our principles of personality thus far, though increasingly complex, have all been comparatively simple. To get the maximum of pleasure; to keep the universal law; to subordinate lower impulses to higher according to some fixed scale of value, are all principles which are easy to grasp and by no means difficult to apply. The fundamental trouble with them all is that they are too easy. Life is not the cut-and-dried affair which they presuppose. A man might have a lot of pleasure, and yet be contemptible. He might keep all the commandments, and yet be no better than a Pharisee. Even Plato's principle in actual practice has not always escaped the awful abyss of asceticism.

In opposition to Epicurus Aristotle says, "Pleasure is not the good and all pleasures are not desirable. No one would choose to live on condition[Pg 170] of having no more intellect than a child all his life, even though he were to enjoy to the full the pleasures of a child. With regard to the pleasures which all admit to be base, we must deny that they are pleasures at all, except to those whose nature is corrupt. What the good man thinks is pleasure will be pleasure; what he delights in will be truly pleasant. Those pleasures which perfect the activity of the perfect and truly happy man may be called in the truest sense the pleasures of a man. The pleasure which is proper to a good activity is therefore good; that attached to a bad one is bad. As, then, activities differ, so do the pleasures which accompany them."

In our discussion of Epicureanism we saw that the principle of pleasure consistently carried out produced bad results, and, as in the case of Tito Melema, developed the most contemptible character. Aristotle shows conclusively why this must be so. Pleasure is the sign and seal of healthful exercise of function. A life which has all its powers in effective and well-proportioned exercise will, indeed, be a life crowned with pleasure. You cannot, however, reverse this proposition, as the Epicurean attempts to do, and say that a life which seeks the maximum of pleasure will inevitably have the healthy and proportionate exercise of function as[Pg 171] its consequent. According to Aristotle healthy exercise of function in a well-proportioned life in devotion to wide social ends and permanent personal interests, is the cause of which happiness is the appropriate and inevitable effect. Seek the cause and you will get the effect. Seek directly the effect, and you will miss both the cause you neglect and the effect which only the cause can bring. The criticism which we quoted from George Eliot on the career of Melema is the quintessence of the Aristotelian doctrine. To put it in a figure: Build a good fire and warm your room, and the mercury in the thermometer will rise. The cause produces the effect. But it does not follow that because you raise the mercury in the thermometer by breathing on the bulb, or holding it in your hand, that the fire will burn, or the room will be warmed. The Epicureans and hedonists are people who go about with the clinical thermometer of pleasure under their tongues all the time, and expect to see the world lighted with benevolence and warmed with love in consequence. Aristotle bids them take their clinical thermometers out of their mouths; stop fingering their emotional pulse; go to work about some useful business; pursue some large and generous end; and then, not otherwise, in case from time to time they have occa[Pg 172]sion to feel their pulse and take their temperature, they will as a matter of fact find that they are normal. But it isn't taking the temperature and feeling the pulse that makes them morally sound; it is doing their proper work and keeping in vigorous exercise that gives them the healthy pulse and normal temperature.

There are, however, two apparently contradictory teachings about pleasure in Aristotle, and it is a good test of our grasp of his doctrine to see whether we can reconcile them. First he says, "In all cases we must be especially on our guard against pleasant things, and against pleasure; for we can scarce judge her impartially. And so, in our behaviour toward her, we should imitate the behaviour of the old counsellors toward Helen, and in all cases repeat their saying: If we dismiss her, we shall be less likely to go wrong." "It is pleasure that moves us to do what is base, and pain that moves us to refrain from what is noble."

On the other hand he says: "The pleasure or pain that accompanies the acts must be taken as a test of character. He who faces danger with pleasure, or, at any rate, without pain, is courageous, but he to whom this is painful is a coward. Indeed we all more or less make pleasure our test in judging actions."[Pg 173]

Can we reconcile these two seemingly contradictory statements? Perfectly. On the one hand if we do an act simply for the pleasure it will give, without first asking how the proposed act will fit into our permanent plan of life, we are pretty sure to go astray. For pleasure registers the goodness of the isolated act; not the goodness of the act as related to the whole plan of life. Thus if I drink strong coffee at eleven o'clock at night, the taste is pleasant and the immediate effect is stimulating. But if it keeps me awake half the night and unfits me for the duties of the next day, in spite of the pleasure gained, the act is wrong. And it is wrong, not fundamentally because of the pains of wakefulness it brings; it is wrong because it takes out of my life as a whole, and my contribution to the life of the world, something for which the petty transient pleasure I gained at the moment of indulgence is no compensation whatsoever. Is not Aristotle right? Do we not pity as a miserable weakling, hardly fit to have been graduated from the nursery, any man or woman who will let the mere physical sensation of a few moments at the end of an evening count so much as the dust in the balance against the efficiency of the coming forenoon's life and work?

If we see this half of Aristotle's truth, we see[Pg 174] that the other is not its contradiction but its complement. If we are sorely and grievously tempted by the coffee, if we give it up with pain, if saying "No, I thank you," comes fearfully hard, if we cannot forego it cheerfully without so much as seriously considering the drinking of it as possible for us, why then it reveals how little we care for the life and work of the morrow; and since life and work are but a succession of to-morrows, how little we care for our life and work anyway. If we had great aims burning in our minds and hearts, wide interests to which body and soul were devoted, it would not be a pain, it would be a pleasure, to give up for the sake of them ten thousand times as big a thing as a cup of coffee, if it stood in the way of their accomplishment. Yes; Aristotle is right on both points. Pleasure isolated from our plan of life and followed as an end will lead us into weakness and wickedness every time we yield to its insidious solicitation. On the other hand, the resolute and consistent prosecution of large ends and generous interests will make a positive pleasure of everything we either endure or do to promote those ends and interests. Pleasure directly pursued is the utter demoralisation of life. Ends and interests, pursued for their own sakes, inevitably carry with them a host of[Pg 175] noble pleasures, and the power to conquer and transform what to the aimless life would be intolerable pains.

Aristotle rejects the Epicurean principle of pleasure; because, though a proof that isolated tendencies are satisfied, it is no adequate criterion of the satisfaction of the self as a whole. He rejects the Stoic principle of conformity to law; because it fails to recognise the supreme worth of individuality. He rejects the Platonic principle of subordination of appetites and passions to a supreme good which is above them; because he dreads above all things the blight of asceticism, and strives for a good which is concrete and practical.

What, then, is this good, which is neither a sum of pleasures, nor conformity to law; nor yet superiority to appetite and passion? What is this principle which can at once enjoy pleasure to the full, and at the same time forego it gladly; which can make laws for itself more severe than any lawgiver ever dared to lay down; and yet is not afraid to break any law which its own conception of good requires it to break; which honours all our elemental appetites and passions, uses money and honour and power as the servants of its own ends, without ever being enslaved by[Pg 176] them? Evidently we are now on the track of a principle infinitely more subtle and complex than anything the pleasure-loving Epicurean, or the formal Stoic, or the transcendental Platonist has ever dreamed of. We are entering the presence of the world's master moralist; and if we have ever for a moment supposed that either of these previous systems was satisfactory or final, it behooves us now to take the shoes from off our feet, and reverently listen to a voice as much profounder and more reasonable than them all, as they are superior to the senseless appetites and blind passions of the mob. For if we have a little patience with his subtlety, and can endure the temporary shock of his apparent laxity, he will admit us to the very holy of holies of personality.

II
THE SOCIAL NATURE OF MAN

Before coming to Aristotle's positive doctrine we must consider one fundamental axiom. Man is by nature a social being. Whatever a man seeks has a necessary and inevitable reference to the judgment of other men, and the interest of society as a whole. Strip a man of his relations and you have no man left. The man who is[Pg 177] neither son, brother, husband, father, citizen, neighbour or workman, is inconceivable. The good which a man seeks, therefore, will express itself consciously or unconsciously in terms of other men's approval, and the furtherance of interests which he inevitably shares with them. The Greek word for private, peculiar to myself, unrelated to the thought or interest of anybody else, is our word for idiot. The New Testament uses this word to describe the place to which Judas went; a place which just suited such a man as he, and was fit for nobody else. Now a man who tries to be his own scientist, or his own lawgiver, or his own statesman, or his own business manager, or his own poet, or his own architect, without reference to the standards and expectations of his fellow-men, is just an idiot; or, as we say, a "crank." A wise man may defy these standards. The reformer often must do so. But if he is really wise, if he is a true reformer, he must reckon with them; he must understand them; he must appeal to the actual or possible judgment and interest of his fellows for the confirmation of what he says and the justification of what he does. This social reference of all our thoughts and actions, which Aristotle grasped by intuition, psychology in our day is laboriously and analytically[Pg 178] seeking to confirm. Aristotle lays it down as an axiom, that a man who does not devote himself to some section of the social and spiritual world, if such a being were conceivable, would be no man at all. Family, or friends, or reputation, or country, or God are there in the background, secretly summoned to justify our every thought and word and deed.

Because man's nature is social, his end must be social also. It will prevent misunderstanding later, if we put the question squarely here, Does the end justify the means? As popularly understood, most emphatically No. The support of a school is a good end. Does it justify the raising of money by a lottery? Certainly not. The support of one's family is a good end. Does it justify drawing a salary for which no adequate services are rendered? Certainly not.

Yet if we push the question farther, and ask why these particular ends do not justify these particular means, we discover that it is because these means employed are destructive of an end vastly higher and greater than the particular ends they are employed to serve. They break down the structure and undermine the foundations of the industrial and social order; an end infinitely more important than the maintenance of any par[Pg 179]ticular school, or the support of any individual family. Hence these means are not to be judged by their promotion of certain specific ends, but by their failure to promote the greatest and best end of all; the comprehensive welfare of society as a whole, of which all institutions and families and individuals are but subordinate members.

Throughout our discussion of Aristotle we must understand that the word "end" always has this large social reference, and includes the highest social service of which the man is capable. If we attempt to apply to particular private ends of our own what Aristotle applies to the universal end at which all men ought to aim, we shall make his teaching a pretext for the grossest crimes, and reduce it to little more than sophisticated selfishness. With this understanding of his terms, we may venture to plunge boldly into his system and state it in its most paradoxical and startling form.

III
RIGHT AND WRONG DETERMINED BY THE END

We are not either good or bad at the start. Pleasure in itself is neither good nor bad. Laws in themselves are neither good nor bad. It is impossible to say with Plato that some faculties[Pg 180] are so high that they always ought to be exercised, and others are so low that as a rule they ought to be suppressed. The right and wrong of eating and drinking, of work and play, of sex and society, of property and politics, lie not in the elemental acts involved. All of these things are right for one man in one set of circumstances, wrong for another man in another set of circumstances. We cannot say that a man who takes a vow of poverty is either a better or a worse man than a multi-millionnaire. We cannot say that the monk who takes a vow of celibacy is a purer man than one who does not. For the very fact that one is compelled to take a vow of poverty or celibacy is a sign that these elemental impulses are not effectively and satisfactorily related to the normal ends they are naturally intended to subserve. All attempts to put virginity above motherhood, to put poverty above riches, to put obscurity above fame are, from the Aristotelian point of view, essentially immoral. For they all assume that there can be badness in external things, wrong in isolated actions, vice in elemental appetites, and sin in natural passions; whereas Aristotle lays down the fundamental principle that the only place where either badness or wrong or vice or sin can reside is in the relation in which these[Pg 181] external things and particular actions stand to the clearly conceived and deliberately cherished end which the man is seeking to promote. A simpler way of saying the same thing, but a way so simple and familiar as to be in danger of missing the whole point, is to say that virtue and vice reside exclusively in the wills of free agents. That, every one will admit. But will is the pursuit of ends. A will that seeks no ends is a will that wills nothing; in other words, no will at all. Whether an act is wrong or right, then, depends on the whole plan of life of which it is a part; on the relation in which it stands to one's permanent interests. For these many years I have defied class after class of college students to bring in a single example of any elemental appetite or passion which is intrinsically bad; which in all circumstances and relations is evil. And never yet has any student brought me one such case. If brandy will tide the weak heart over the crisis that follows a surgical operation, then that glass of brandy is just as good and precious as the dear life it saves. The proposition that sexual love is intrinsically evil, and those who take vows of celibacy are intrinsically superior, is true only on condition that racial suicide is the greatest good, and all the sweet ties of home[Pg 182] and family and parenthood and brotherly love are evils which it is our duty to combat. To deny that wealth is good is only possible to him who is prepared to go farther and denounce civilisation as a calamity. He who brands ambition as intrinsically evil must be prepared to herd with swine, and share contentedly their fare of husks.

The foundation of personality, therefore, is the power to clearly grasp an imaginary condition of ourselves which is preferable to any practical alternative; and then translate that potential picture into an accomplished fact. Whoever lives at a lower level than this constant translation of pictured potency into energetic reality: whoever, seeing the picture of the self he wants to be, suffers aught less noble and less imperative than that to determine his action misses the mark of personality. Whoever sees the picture, and holds it before his mind so clearly that all external things which favour it are chosen for its sake, and all proposed actions which would hinder it are remorselessly rejected in its holy name and by its mighty power;—he rises to the level of personality, and his personality is of that clear, strong, joyous, compelling, conquering, triumphant sort which alone is worthy of the name.[Pg 183]

How much deeper this goes than anything we have had before! A man comes up for judgment. If Epicurus chances to be seated on the throne, he asks the candidate, "Have you had a good time?" If he has, he opens the gates of Paradise; if he has not, he bids him be off to the place of torment where people who don't know how to enjoy themselves ought to go.

The Stoic asks him whether he has kept all the commandments. If he has, then he may be promoted to serve the great Commander in other departments of the cosmic order. If he has broken the least of them, no matter on what pretext, or under what temptation, he is irrevocably doomed. Plato asks him how well he has managed to keep under his appetites and passions. If the man has risen above them, Plato will promote him to seats nearer the perfect goodness of the gods. If he has slipped or failed, then he must return for longer probation in the prison-house of sense.

Aristotle's judgment seat is a very different place. A man comes to him who has had a very sorry time: who has broken many commandments; who has yielded time and again to sensuous desires; yet who is a good husband, a kind father, an honest workman, a loyal citizen,[Pg 184] a disinterested scientist or artist, a lover of his fellows, a worshipper of God's beauty and beneficence; and in spite of the sad time he has had, in spite of the laws he has broken, in spite of the appetites which have proved too strong for him, Aristotle gives him his hand, and bids him go up higher. For that man stands in genuine relations to some aspects of the great social end to which he devotes himself. And because some portion of the real world has been made better by the conception of it he has cherished, and the fidelity with which he has translated his conception into fact, therefore a share in the great glory of the splendid whole belongs of right to him. Good honest work, after an ideal plan, to the full measure of his powers, with wise selection of appropriate means, gives each individual his place and rank in the vast workshop wherein the eternal thoughts of God, revealed to men as their several ideals, are wrought out into the actuality of the social, economic, political, æsthetic and spiritual order of the world.

On the other hand, the man of scattered and unfruitful pleasures, the man of merely clear conscience, pure life, unstained reputation, with his boast of rites observed, and ceremonies performed, and laws unbroken, "faultily faultless,[Pg 185] icily regular, splendidly null," is the man above all others whom Aristotle cannot endure.

Do you wish, then, to know precisely where you stand in the scale of personality? Here is the test. How large a section of this world do you care for, in such a vital, responsible way, that you are thinking about its welfare, forming schemes for its improvement, bending your energies toward its advancement? Do you care for your profession in that way? Do you care for your family like that? Do you love your country with such jealous solicitude for its honour and prosperity? Can you honestly say that your neighbour gets represented in your mind in this imaginative, sympathetic, helpful way? Do you think of God's great universe as something in the goodness of which you rejoice, and for the welfare of which you are earnestly enlisted? Begin down at the bottom, with your stomach, your pocket-book, your calling list, and go up the scale until you come to these wider interests, and mark the point where you cease to think how these things might be better than they are and to work to make them so, and that point where your imagination and your service stops, and your indifference and irresponsibility begins, will show you precisely how you stand on the[Pg 186] rank-book of God. The magnitude of the ends you see and serve is the measure of your personality. Personality is not an entity we carry around in our spiritual pockets. It is an energy, which is no whit larger or smaller than the ends it aims at and the work it does. If you are not doing anything or caring for anybody, or devoted to any end, you will not be called up at some future time and formally punished for your negligence. Plato might flatter your self-importance with that notion, but not Aristotle. Aristotle tells you, not that your soul will be punished hereafter, but that it is lost already.

Goodness does not consist in doing or refraining from doing this or that particular thing. It depends on the whole aim and purpose of the man who does it, or refrains from doing it. Anything which a good man does as part of the best plan of life is made thereby a good act. And anything that a bad man does, as part of a bad plan of life, becomes thereby an evil act. Precisely the same external act is good for one man and bad for another. An example or two will make this clear.

Two men seek political office. For one man it is the gate of heaven; to the other it is the door to hell. One man has established himself[Pg 187] in a business or profession in which he can earn an honest living and support his family. He has acquired sufficient standing in his business so that he can turn it over temporarily to his partners or subordinates. He has solved his own problem; and he has strength, time, energy, capacity, money, which he can give to solving the problems of the public. Were he to shirk public office, or evade it, or fail to take all legitimate means to secure it, he would be a coward, a traitor, a parasite on the body politic. For there is good work to be done, which he is able to do, and can afford to do, without unreasonable sacrifice of himself or his family. Hence public office is for this man the gateway of heaven.

The other man has not mastered any business or profession; he has not made himself indispensable to any employer or firm; he has no permanent means of supporting himself and his family. He sees a political office in which he can get a little more salary for doing a good deal less work than is possible in his present position. He seeks the office, as a means of getting his living out of the public. From that day forth he joins the horde of mere office-seekers, aiming to get out of the public a living he is too lazy, or too incompetent, or too proud to earn in private[Pg 188] employment. Thus the very same external act, which was the other man's strait, narrow gateway to heaven, is for this man the broad, easy descent into hell.

Two women join the same woman's club, and take part in the same programme. One of them has her heart in her home; has fulfilled all the sweet charities of daughter, sister, wife, or mother; and in order to bring back to these loved ones at home wider interests, larger friendships, and a richer and more varied interest in life, has gone out into the work and life of the club. No angel in heaven is better employed than she in the preparation and delivery of her papers and her attendance on committee meetings and afternoon teas.

The other woman finds home life dull and monotonous. She likes to get away from her children. She craves excitement, flattery, fame, social importance. She is restless, irritable, out of sorts, censorious, complaining at home; animated, gracious, affable, complaisant abroad. For drudgery and duty she has no strength, taste, or talent; and the thought of these things are enough to give her dyspepsia, insomnia, and nervous prostration. But for all sorts of public functions, for the preparation of reports, and the[Pg 189] organisation of new charitable and philanthropic and social schemes, she has all the energy of a steam-engine, the power of a dynamo. When this woman joins a new club, or writes a new paper, or gets a new office, though she does not a single thing more than her angel sister who sits by her side, she is playing the part of a devil.

It is not what one does; it is the whole purpose of life consciously or unconsciously expressed in the doing that measures the worth of the man or woman who does it. At the family table, at the bench in the shop, at the desk in the office, in the seats at the theatre, in the ranks of the army, in the pews of the church, saint and sinner sit side by side; and often the keenest outward observer cannot detect the slightest difference in the particular things that they do. The good man is he who, in each act he does or refrains from doing, is seeking the good of all the persons who are affected by his action. The bad man is the man who, whatever he does or refrains from doing, leaves out of account the interests of some of the people whom his action is sure to affect. Is there any sphere of human welfare to which you are indifferent? Are there any people in the world whose interests you deliberately disregard? Then,[Pg 190] no matter how many acts of charity and philanthropy, and industry and public spirit you perform—acts which would be good if a good man did them—in spite of them all, you are to that extent an evil man.

We have, then, clearly in mind Aristotle's first great concept. The end of life, which he calls happiness, he defines as the identification of one's self with some large social or intellectual object, and the devotion of all one's powers to its disinterested service. So far forth it is Carlyle's gospel of the blessedness of work in a worthy cause. "Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life purpose; he has found it, and will follow it. The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was happiness enough to get his work done. Whatsoever of morality and of intelligence; what of patience, perseverance, faithfulness of method, insight, ingenuity, energy; in a word, whatsoever of strength the man had in him will lie written in the work he does. To work: why, it is to try himself against Nature and her everlasting unerring laws; these will tell a true verdict as to the man."

When we read Carlyle, we are apt to think such words merely exaggerated rhetoric. Now Aris[Pg 191]totle says the same thing in the cold, calculated terms of precise philosophy. A man is what he does. He can do nothing except what he first sees as an unaccomplished idea, and then bends all his energies to accomplish. In working out his ideas and making them real, he at the same time works out his own powers, and becomes a living force, a working will in the world. And since the soul is just this working will, the man has so much soul, no more, no less, than he registers in manual or mental work performed. To be able to point to some sphere of external reality, a bushel of corn, a web of cloth, a printed page, a healthful tenement, an educated youth, a moral community, and say that these things would not have been there in the outward world, if they had not first been in your mind as an idea controlling your thought and action;—this is to point to the external and visible counterpart and measure of the invisible and internal energy which is your life, your soul, your self, your personality.

IV
THE NEED OF INSTRUMENTS

Aristotle's first doctrine, then, is that we must work for worthy ends. The second follows[Pg 192] directly from it. We must have tools to work with; means by which to gain our ends. General Gordon, who was something of a Platonist, remarked to Cecil Rhodes, who was a good deal of an Aristotelian, that he once had a whole room full of gold offered him, and declined to take it. "I should have taken it," replied Mr. Rhodes. "What is the use of having great schemes if you haven't the means to carry them out?" As Aristotle says: "Happiness plainly requires external goods; for it is impossible, or at least not easy, to act nobly without some furniture of fortune. There are many things that can be done only through instruments, so to speak, such as friends and wealth and political influence; and there are some things whose absence takes the bloom off our happiness, as good birth, the blessing of children, personal beauty. Happiness, then, seems to stand in need of this kind of prosperity."

How different this from all our previous teachings! The Epicurean wants little wealth, no family, no official station; because all these things involve so much care and bother. The Stoic barely tolerates them as indifferent. Plato took especial pains to deprive his guardians of most of these very things. Aristotle on this point is perfectly sane. He says you want them; because, to[Pg 193] the fullest life and the largest work, they are well-nigh indispensable. The editor of a metropolitan newspaper, the president of a railroad, the corporation attorney cannot live their lives and do their work effectively without comfortable homes, enjoyable vacations, social connections, educational opportunities, which cost a great deal of money. For them to despise money would be to despise the conditions of their own effective living, to pour contempt on their own souls.

Is Aristotle, then, a gross materialist, a mere money-getter, pleasure-lover, office-seeker? Far from it. These things are not the end of a noble life, but means by which to serve ends far worthier than themselves. To make these things the ends of life, he explicitly says is shameful and unnatural. The good, the true end, is "something which is a man's own, and cannot be taken away from him."

Now we have two fundamental Aristotelian doctrines. We must have an end, some section of the world which we undertake to mould according to a pattern clearly seen and firmly grasped in our own minds.

Second, we must have instruments, tools, furniture of fortune in the shape of health, wealth, influence, power, friends, business and social and political connections with which to carry out our[Pg 194] ends. And the larger and nobler our ends, the more of these instruments shall we require. If, like Cecil Rhodes, we undertake for instance to paint the map of Africa British red, we shall want a monopoly of the product of the Kimberley and adjacent diamond mines.

V
THE HAPPY MEAN

The third great Aristotelian principle follows directly from these two. If we are to use instruments for some great end, then the amount of the instruments we want, and the extent to which we shall use them, will obviously be determined by the end at which we aim. We must take just so much of them as will best promote that end. This is Aristotle's much misunderstood but most characteristic doctrine of the mean. Approached from the point of view which we have already gained, this doctrine of the mean is perfectly intelligible, and altogether reasonable. For instance, if you are an athlete, and the winning of a foot-ball game is your end, and you have an invitation to a ball the evening before the game, what is the right and reasonable thing to do? Dancing in itself is good. You enjoy it. You would like to go. You need recrea[Pg 195]tion after the long period of training. But if you are wise, you will decline. Why? Because the excitement of the ball, the late hours, the physical effort, the nervous expenditure will use up more energy than can be recovered before the game comes off upon the morrow. You decline, not because the ball is an intrinsic evil, or dancing is intrinsically bad, or recreation is inherently injurious, but because too much of these things, in the precise circumstances in which you are placed, with the specific end you have in view, would be disastrous. On the other hand, will you have no recreation the evening before the game; but simply sit in your room and mope? That would be even worse than going to the ball. For nature abhors a vacuum in the mind no less than in the world of matter. If you sit alone in your room, you will begin to worry about the game, and very likely lose your night's sleep, and be utterly unfitted when the time arrives. Too little recreation in these circumstances is as fatal as too much. What you want is just enough to keep your mind pleasantly diverted, without effort or exertion on your part. If the glee club can be brought around to sing some jolly songs, if a funny man can be found to tell amusing stories, you have the happy mean; that is, just enough recreation to put you in condi[Pg 196]tion for a night's sound sleep, and bring you to the contest on the morrow in prime physical and mental condition.

Aristotle, in his doctrine of the mean, is simply telling us that this problem of the athlete on the night before the contest is the personal problem of us all every day of our lives.

How late shall the student study at night? Shall he keep on until past midnight year after year? If he does, he will undermine his health, lose contact with society, and defeat those ends of social usefulness which ought to be part of every worthy scholar's cherished end. On the other hand, shall he fritter away all his evenings with convivial fellows, and the society butterflies? Too much of that sort of thing would soon put an end to scholarship altogether. His problem is to find that amount of study which will keep him sensitively alive to the latest problems of his chosen subject; and yet not make all his acquisitions comparatively worthless either through broken health, or social estrangement from his fellow-men. How rare and precious that mean is, those of us who have to find college professors are well aware. It is easy to find scores of men who know their subject so well that they know nothing and nobody else aright. It is easy to find jolly, easy-going fellows who[Pg 197] would not object to positions as college professors. But the man who has enough good fellowship and physical vigour to make his scholarship attractive and effective, and enough scholarship to make his vigour and good fellowship intellectually powerful and personally stimulating,—he is the man who has hit the Aristotelian mean; he is the man we are all after; he is the man whom we would any of us give a year's salary to find.

The mean is not midway between zero and the maximum attainable. As Aristotle says, "By the mean relatively to us I understand that which is neither too much nor too little for us; and that is not one and the same for all. For instance, if ten be too large and two be too small, if we take six, we take the mean relatively to the thing itself, or the arithmetical mean. But the mean relatively to us cannot be found in this way. If ten pounds of food is too much for a given man to eat, and two pounds too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order him six pounds; for that also may perhaps be too much for the man in question, or too little; too little for Milo, too much for the beginner. And so we may say generally that a master in any art avoids what is too much and what is too little, and seeks for the mean and chooses it—not the absolute but the relative[Pg 198] mean. So that people are wont to say of a good work, that nothing could be taken from it or added to it, implying that excellence is destroyed by excess or deficiency, but secured by observing the mean."

The Aristotelian principle, of judging a situation on its merits, and subordinating means to the supreme end, was never more clearly stated than in Lincoln's letter to Horace Greeley: "I would save the Union. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would do that. What I do about slavery and the coloured race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more when I shall believe doing more will help the cause."[Pg 199]

VI
THE ARISTOTELIAN VIRTUES AND THEIR ACQUISITION

The special forms that the one great virtue of seeking the relative mean takes in actual life bear a close correspondence to the cardinal virtues of Plato; yet with a difference which marks a positive advance in insight. Aristotle, to begin with, distinguishes wisdom from prudence. Wisdom is the theoretic knowledge of things as they are, irrespective of their serviceableness to our practical interests. In modern terms it is devotion to pure science. This corresponds to Plato's contemplation of the Good. According to Aristotle this devotion to knowledge for its own sake underlies all virtue; for only he who knows how things stand related to each other in the actual world, will be able to grasp aright that relation of means to ends on which the success of the practical life depends. Just as the engineer cannot build a bridge across the Mississippi unless he knows those laws of pure mathematics and physics which underlie the stability of all structures, so the man who is ignorant of economics, politics, sociology, psychology, and ethics is sure to make a botch of any attempts he may make to build[Pg 200] bridges across the gulf which separates one man from another man; one group of citizens from another group. Pure science is at the basis of all art, consciously or unconsciously; and therefore wisdom is the fundamental form of virtue.

Prudence comes next; the power to see, not the theoretical relations of men and things to each other, but the practical relationships of men and things to our self-chosen ends. Wisdom knows the laws which govern the strength of materials. Prudence knows how strong a structure is necessary to support the particular strain we wish to place upon it. Wisdom knows sociology. Prudence tells us whether in a given case it is better to give a beggar a quarter of a dollar, an order on a central bureau, a scolding, or a kick. The most essential, and yet the rarest kind of prudence is that considerateness which sensitively appreciates the point of view of the people with whom we deal, and takes proper account of those subtle and complex sentiments, prejudices, traditions, and ways of thinking, which taken together constitute the social situation.

Temperance, again, is not the repression of lower impulses in the interest of those abstractly higher, as it came to be in the popular interpretations of Platonism, and as it was in Stoicism.[Pg 201] With Aristotle it is the stern and remorseless exclusion of whatever cannot be brought into subjection to my chosen ends, whatever they may be. As Stevenson says in true Aristotelian spirit, "We are not damned for doing wrong: we are damned for not doing right." For temperance lies not in the external thing done or left undone; but in that relation of means to worthy ends which either the doing or the not doing of certain things may most effectively express. We shall never get any common basis of understanding on what we call the temperance question of to-day until we learn to recognise this internal and moral, as distinct from the external and physical, definition of what true temperance is. Temperance isn't abstinence. Temperance isn't indulgence. Neither is it moderation in the ordinary sense of that term. True temperance is the using of just so much of a thing,—no more, no less, but just so much,—as best promotes the ends one has at heart. To discover whether a man is temperate or not in anything, you must first know the ends at which he aims; and then the strictness with which he uses the means that best further those ends, and foregoes the things that would hinder them.

Temperance of this kind looks at first sight like[Pg 202] license. So it is if one's aims be not broad and high. In the matter of sexual morality, Aristotle's doctrine as applied in his day was notoriously loose. Whatever did not interfere with one's duties as citizen and soldier was held to be permissible. Yet as Green and Muirhead, and all the commentators on Aristotle have pointed out, it is a deeper grasp of this very principle of Aristotle, a widening of the conception of the true social end, which is destined to put chastity on its eternal rock foundation, and make of sexual immorality the transparently weak and wanton, cruel and unpardonable vice it is. To do this, to be sure, there must be grafted on to it the Christian principle of democracy,—a regard for the rights and interests of persons as persons. The beauty of the Aristotelian principle is that it furnishes so stout and sturdy a stock to graft this principle on to. When Christianity is unsupported by some such solid trunk of rationality, it easily drops into a sentimental asceticism. Take, for example, this very matter of sexual morality. Divorced from some such great social end as Aristotelianism requires, the only defence you have against the floods of sensuality is the vague, sentimental, ascetic notion that in some way or other these things are naughty, and good[Pg 203] people ought not to do them. How utterly ineffective such a barrier is, everybody who has had much dealing with young men knows perfectly well. And yet that is pretty much all the opposition current and conventional morality is offering at the present time. The Aristotelian doctrine, with the Christian principle grafted on, puts two plain questions to every man. Do you include the sanctity of the home, the peace and purity of family life, the dignity and welfare of every man and woman, the honest birthright of every child, as part of the social end at which you aim? If you do, you are a noble and honourable man. If you do not, then you are a disgrace to the mother who bore you, and the home where you were reared. So much for the question of the end. The second question is concerned with the means. Do you honestly believe that loose and promiscuous sexual relations conduce to that sanctity of the home, that peace and purity of family life, that dignity and welfare of every man and woman, that honest birthright of every child, which as an honourable man you must admit to be the proper end at which to aim? If you think these means are conducive to these ends, then you are certainly an egregious fool. Temperance in these matters, then,[Pg 204] or to use its specific name, chastity, is simply the refusal to ignore the great social end which every decent man must recognise as reasonable and right; and the resolute determination not to admit into his own life, or inflict on the lives of others, anything that is destructive of that social end. Chastity is neither celibacy nor licentiousness. It is far deeper than either, and far nobler than them both. It is devotion to the great ends of family integrity, personal dignity, and social stability. It is including the welfare of society, and of every man, woman, and child involved, in the comprehensive end for which we live; and holding all appetites and passions in strict relation to that reasonable and righteous end.

Aristotelian courage is simply the other side of temperance. Temperance remorselessly cuts off whatever hinders the ends at which we aim. Courage, on the other hand, resolutely takes on whatever dangers and losses, whatever pains and penalties are incidental to the effective prosecution of these ends. To hold consistently an end, is to endure cheerfully whatever means the service of that end demands. Aristotelian courage, rightly conceived, leads us to the very threshold of Christian sacrifice. He who comes to Christian sacrifice by this approach of Aristotelian courage,[Pg 205] will be perfectly clear about the reasonableness of it, and will escape that abyss of sentimentalism into which too largely our Christian doctrine of sacrifice has been allowed to drop.

Courage does not depend on whether you save your life, or risk your life, or lose your life. A brave man may save his life in situations where a coward would lose it and a fool would risk it. The brave man is he who is so clear and firm in his grasp of some worthy end that he will live if he can best serve it by living; that he will die if he can best serve it by dying; and he will take his chances of life or death if taking those chances is the best way to serve this end.

The brave man does not like criticism, unpopularity, defeat, hostility, any better than anybody else. He does not pretend to like them. He does not court them. He does not pose as a martyr every chance that he can get. He simply takes these pains and ills as under the circumstances the best means of furthering the ends he has at heart. For their sake he swallows criticism and calls it good; invites opposition and glories in overcoming it, or being overcome by it, as the fates may decree; accepts persecution and rejoices to be counted worthy to suffer in so good a cause.

It is all a question here as everywhere in Aris[Pg 206]totle of the ends at which one aims, and the sense of proportion with which he chooses his means. In his own words: "The man, then, who governs his fear and likewise his confidence aright, facing dangers it is right to face, and for the right cause, in the right manner, and at the right time, is courageous. For the courageous man regulates both his feelings and his actions with due regard to the circumstances and as reason and proportion suggest. The courageous man, therefore, faces danger and does the courageous thing because it is a fine thing to do." As Muirhead sums up Aristotle's teaching on this point: "True courage must be for a noble object. Here, as in all excellence, action and object, consequence and motive, are inseparable. Unless the action is inspired by a noble motive, and permeated throughout its whole structure by a noble character, it has no claim to the name of courage."

The virtues cannot be learned out of a book, or picked up ready-made. They must be acquired, by practice, as is the case with the arts; and they are not really ours until they have become so habitual as to be practically automatic. The sign and seal of the complete acquisition of any virtue is the pleasure we take in it. Such pleasure once gained becomes one's lasting and inalienable possession.[Pg 207]

In Aristotle's words: "We acquire the virtues by doing the acts, as is the case with the arts too. We learn an art by doing that which we wish to do when we have learned it; we become builders by building, and harpers by playing on the harp. And so by doing just acts we become just, and by doing acts of temperance and courage we become temperate and courageous. It is by our conduct in our intercourse with other men that we become just or unjust, and by acting in circumstances of danger, and training ourselves to feel fear or confidence, that we become courageous or cowardly." "The happy man, then, as we define him, will have the property of permanence, and all through life will preserve his character; for he will be occupied continually, or with the least possible interruption, in excellent deeds and excellent speculations; and whatever his fortune may be, he will take it in the noblest fashion, and bear himself always and in all things suitably. And if it is what man does that determines the character of his life, then no happy man will become miserable, for he will never do what is hateful and base. For we hold that the man who is truly good and wise will bear with dignity whatever fortune sends, and will always make the best of his circumstances, as a good general will[Pg 208] turn the forces at his command to the best account."

This doctrine that virtue, like skill in any game or craft, is gained by practice, deserves a word of comment. It seems to say, "You must do the thing before you know how, in order to know how after you have done it." Paradox or no paradox, that is precisely the fact. The swimmer learns to swim by floundering and splashing around in the water; and if he is unwilling to do the floundering and splashing before he can swim, he will never become a swimmer. The ball-player must do a lot of muffing and wild throwing before he can become a sure catcher and a straight thrower. If he is ashamed to go out on the diamond and make these errors, he may as well give up at once all idea of ever becoming a ball-player. For it is by the progressive elimination of errors that the perfect player is developed. The only place where no errors are made, whether in base-ball or in life, is on the grand stand. The courage to try to do a thing before you know how, and the patience to keep on trying after you have found out that you don't know how, and the perseverance to renew the trial as many times as necessary until you do know how, are the three conditions of the acquisition of physical skill, mental power, moral virtue, or personal excellence.[Pg 209]

VII
ARISTOTELIAN FRIENDSHIP

We are now prepared to see why Aristotle regards friendship as the crown and consummation of a virtuous life. No one has praised friendship more highly, or written of it more profoundly than he.

Friendship he defines as "unanimity on questions of the public advantage and on all that touches life." This unanimity, however, is very different from agreement in opinion. It is seeing things from the same point of view; or, more accurately, it is the appreciation of each other's interests and aims. The whole tendency of Aristotle thus far has been to develop individuality; to make each man different from every other man. Conventional people are all alike. But the people who have cherished ends of their own, and who make all their choices with reference to these inwardly cherished ends, become highly differentiated. The more individual your life becomes, the fewer people there are who can understand you. The man who has ends of his own is bound to be unintelligible to the man who has no such ends, and is merely drifting with the crowd. Now friend[Pg 210]ship is the bringing together of these intensely individual, highly differentiated persons on a basis of mutual sympathy and common understanding. Friendship is the recognition and respect of individuality in others by persons who are highly individualised themselves. That is why Aristotle says true friendship is possible only between the good; between people, that is, who are in earnest about ends that are large and generous and public-spirited enough to permit of being shared. "The bad," he says, "desire the company of others, but avoid their own. And because they avoid their own company, there is no real basis for union of aims and interests with their fellows." "Having nothing lovable about them, they have no friendly feelings toward themselves. If such a condition is consummately miserable, the moral is to shun vice, and strive after virtue with all one's might. For in this way we shall at once have friendly feelings toward ourselves and become the friends of others. A good man stands in the same relation to his friend as to himself, seeing that his friend is a second self." "The conclusion, therefore, is that if a man is to be happy, he will require good friends."

Friendship has as many planes as human life and human association. The men with whom we[Pg 211] play golf and tennis, billiards and whist, are friends on the lowest plane—that of common pleasures. Our professional and business associates are friends upon a little higher plane—that of the interests we share. The men who have the same social customs and intellectual tastes; the men with whom we read our favourite authors, and talk over our favourite topics, are friends upon a still higher plane—that of identity of æsthetic and intellectual pursuits. The highest plane, the best friends, are those with whom we consciously share the spiritual purpose of our lives. This highest friendship is as precious as it is rare. With such friends we drop at once into a matter-of-course intimacy and communion. Nothing is held back, nothing is concealed; our aims are expressed with the assurance of sympathy; even our shortcomings are confessed with the certainty that they will be forgiven. Such friendship lasts as long as the virtue which is its common bond. Jealousy cannot come in to break it up. Absolute sincerity, absolute loyalty,—these are the high terms on which such friendship must be held. A person may have many such friends on one condition: that he shall not talk to any one friend about what his friendship permits him to know of another friend. Each such relation must be[Pg 212] complete within itself; and hermetically sealed, so far as permitting any one else to come inside the sacred circle of its mutual confidence. In such friendship, differences, as of age, sex, station in life, divide not, but rather enhance, the sweetness and tenderness of the relationship. In Aristotle's words: "The friendship of the good, and of those who have the same virtues, is perfect friendship. Such friendship, therefore, endures so long as each retains his character, and virtue is a lasting thing."

VIII
CRITICISM AND SUMMARY OF ARISTOTLE'S TEACHING

If finally we ask what are the limitations of Aristotle, we find none save the limitations of the age and city in which he lived. He lived in a city-state where thirty thousand full male citizens, with some seventy thousand women and children dependent upon them, were supported by the labour of some hundred thousand slaves. The rights of man as such, whether native or alien, male or female, free or slave, had not yet been affirmed. That crowning proclamation of universal emancipation was reserved for Chris[Pg 213]tianity three centuries and a half later. Without this Christian element no principle of personality is complete. Not until the city-state of Plato and Aristotle is widened to include the humblest man, the lowliest woman, the most defenceless little child, does their doctrine become final and universal. Yet with this single limitation of its range, the form of Aristotle's teaching is complete and ultimate. Deeper, saner, stronger, wiser statement of the principles of personality the world has never heard.

His teaching may be summed up in the following:—

TEN ARISTOTELIAN COMMANDMENTS

Thou shalt devote thy utmost powers to some section of our common social welfare.

Thou shalt hold this end above all lesser goods, such as pleasure, money, honour.

Thou shalt hold the instruments essential to the service of this end second only to the end itself.

Thou shalt ponder and revere the universal laws that bind ends and means together in the ordered universe.

Thou shalt master and obey the specific laws that govern the relation of means to thy chosen end.[Pg 214]

Thou shalt use just so much of the materials and tools of life as the service of thy end requires.

Thou shalt exclude from thy life all that exceeds or falls below this mean, reckless of pleasure lost.

Thou shalt endure whatever hardship and privation the maintenance of this mean in the service of thy end requires, heedless of pain involved.

Thou shalt remain steadfast in this service until habit shall have made it a second nature, and custom shall have transformed it into joy.

Thou shalt find and hold a few like-minded friends, to share with thee this lifelong devotion to that common social welfare which is the task and goal of man.

[Pg 215]

CHAPTER V

THE CHRISTIAN SPIRIT OF LOVE

I
THE TEACHING OF LOVE

Jesus taught His philosophy of life in three ways: the personal, by example; the artistic, by parable; and the scientific, by propositions.

The first, though most vital and effective of all, is expensive and wasteful. For in life principles are so embedded in "muddy particulars," trivial and sordid details, that they are liable to get lost. The Master may be a long time with His disciples, and yet not really be known. Even the disciples themselves, after months of such teaching, like James and John may not know what manner of spirit they are of. Indeed it may become expedient for them that the Master go away, that His Spirit may be more clearly revealed.

The artistic method, too, has drawbacks. For though it gives the principles a new artificial setting, with carefully selected details to catch the[Pg 216] crowd, yet the crowd catch simply the story. Only the initiated are instructed; those who do not already know the principles learn nothing, but "seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not understand," as Jesus, past master of this art though He was, so often lamented.

The third or scientific method is dry and prosaic. It observes what qualities go together, or refuse to go together, in the swift stream of life; pulls them out of the stream; fixes them in concepts; marks them by names; and states propositions about them. It may go one short step farther: it may arrange its propositions in syllogisms, and deduce general conclusions, or laws. It may take, for instance, as its major premise, Love is the divine secret of blessedness. Then for its minor premise it may take some plain observed fact, Humility is essential to Love. Then the conclusion or law will be, The humble share the divine life and all the blessings it brings. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Of course no one but a pedant draws out his teaching in this laboured logical form. The syllogism is condensed; the major, and perhaps even the minor, premise is omitted, and often only the conclusion appears.[Pg 217]

At its best this method is hard and dry; yet this is the method employed in such sayings as those handed down in the summary called the Sermon on the Mount. Perhaps that is why the teaching of the "Sermon," in spite of its clear-cut form, is much less studied and understood than the teaching of Jesus' life and parables. To recover this largely lost teaching one must warm and moisten the cold, dry terms; supply, when necessary, omitted premises; use some one word rather than many for the often suppressed middle term; and so draw out the latent logic that underlies these laws.

The middle term of all this argument is Love. For that old-fashioned word, in spite of its sentimental associations, much better than its modern scientific synonyms, such as the socialising of the self, expresses that outgoing of the self into the lives of others, which, according to Jesus, is the actual nature of God, the potential nature of man, the secret of individual blessedness and the promise of social salvation.

In the two or three cases where the logic of His principle, applied to our complex modern life, points clearly to a modification of His literal precepts, as in the management of wealth and the bestowal of charity, I shall not hesitate to put the[Pg 218] logic of the teaching in place of the letter of the precept, citing the latter afterward for comparison.

A logical commentary like this will be most helpful if it reverses the order usual in commentaries of mere erudition, and introduces the steps of the argument before rather than after the passage they seek to make clear.

In whichever of the three ways it is taught, Love shines by its own light and speaks with its own authority to all who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

A person who loves carries with him a generous light-heartedness, a genial optimism, which show all his friends that he has found some secret which it is worth their while to learn.

Every well-told parable or fable, every artistically constructed novel or play, makes us take sides with the large-hearted hero against the mean, selfish villain.

In the same way Love's formulated laws, showing on what conditions it depends and to what results it leads, convince every one who has the experience by which to interpret them (and only to him who hath experience is interpretation given) that Love is the supreme law of life, and its requirements the right and reasonable conditions of individual and social well-being.[Pg 219]

II
THE FULFILMENT OF LAW THROUGH LOVE

Jesus was born in a nation which had developed law to the utmost nicety of detail, and recognised all laws as expressions of the good will of God seeking the welfare of men. Prolonged experiments in living had proved certain kinds of conduct disastrous, and the states of mind corresponding to them, despicable. Law had prohibited this disastrous conduct, and the prophets had denounced these despicable traits.

Of course latent in the prohibitions of law was the constitution of the blessed Kingdom that would result if the law were observed; and dimly foreshadowed in the figurative expressions of the prophets was the vision of the glorified human society that would emerge when the despicable traits should be extirpated and the better order introduced. This negative and latent implication of law Jesus developed into Love as the positive and explicit principle of life; and this figuratively foreshadowed prophet's vision He translated into the actual fact of a community united in Love. He fulfilled the law by putting Love in the heart, and fulfilled the prophets by establishing a com[Pg 220]munity based on Love. Jesus taught us to make every human interest we touch as precious as our own, and to treat all persons with whom we deal as members of that beneficent system of mutual good-will which is the Kingdom of Heaven. But the moment we begin to do that, law as law becomes superfluous; for what the law requires is the very thing we most desire to do: prophecy as prophecy is fulfilled; for the best man's heart can dream has come to pass.

In the ideal home, between well-married husband and wife, child and parent, brother and sister, this sweet law prevails. In choice circles of intimate friends it is found. Jesus extended this interpretation of others in terms of ourselves, and of both others and self in terms of the system of relations in which both self and others inhere, so as to include all the dealing of official and citizen, teacher and pupil, dealer and customer, employer and employee, man and man.

Jesus does not judge us by the formal test of whether we have kept or broken this or that specific commandment, but by the deeper and more searching requirement that our lives shall detract nothing from and add something to the glory of God and the welfare of man.

Is the world a happier, holier, better world[Pg 221] because we are here in it, helping on God's good-will for men? If that be the grand, comprehensive purpose of our lives, honestly cherished, frankly avowed, systematically cultivated, then, no matter how far below perfection we may fall, that single purpose, in spite of failure, defeat, and repented sin, pulls us through. If we have this Spirit of Love in our hearts, and if with Christ's help we are trying to do something to make it real in our lives and effective in the world, our eternal salvation is assured. On the other hand, is there a single point on which we deliberately are working evil? Is the lot of any poor man harder, or the life of any unhappy woman more sad and bitter, for aught that we have done or left undone? Is any good institution the weaker, or any bad custom more prevalent, for aught that we are deliberately and persistently withholding of help or contributing of harm? If so, if in any one point we are consciously and unrepentingly arrayed against God's righteous purpose, and the human welfare which is dear to God; if there is a single point on which we are deliberately setting aside His righteous will, and doing intentional evil to the humblest of His children; then, notwithstanding our high rank on other matters, our lack of the right purpose, at even a single point,[Pg 222] makes us guilty of the whole; we are unfit for His kingdom.

Jesus' principle of Love, though for clearness and incisiveness often stated in terms of mere altruism, or regard for others, yet taken in its total context, in the light of His never absent reference to the Father's will and the Kingdom of Heaven, is much deeper and broader than that. It gives each man his place and function in the total beneficent system which is the coming Kingdom of God, and then treats him not merely as he may wish to be treated, or we may wish to treat him, but as his place and function in that system require.

Mere altruism is often weakly kind, making others feebly dependent on our benefactions instead of sturdily self-supporting; making others unconsciously egotistic as the result of our superfluous ministrations or uncritical indulgence; and even fostering a subtle egotism in ourselves, as the result of the fatal habit of doing the easy, kind thing rather than the hard, severe thing that is needed to lift them to their highest attainment. A true mother is never half as sentimentally altruistic toward her child as a grandmother or an aunt; she does not hesitate to reprove and correct, when that is what the child needs to suppress the low and lazy, and rouse the higher and[Pg 223] stronger self. The just administrator discharges the incompetent and exposes the dishonest employee, not merely because the good of the whole requires it; but because even for the person discharged or exposed, that is better than it would be to allow him to drag out an unprofitable and cumbersome life in tolerated uselessness or countenanced graft.

"Treat both others and yourself as their place and yours in God's coming Kingdom require;" that is the Golden Rule in its complete form. "All things, therefore, whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you" (remembering that both you and they have places and functions in the Father's Kingdom of Love); "even so do ye also unto them: for this is the law and the prophets."

This fulfilment of law is a very different thing from selfishly breaking the law. That such a reformer as Jesus ever took the conservative side of any question seems at first sight so preposterous that most candid critics believe that He never said the words attributed to Him about breaking one of the least of these commandments, or else that He said them in a lost context which would greatly alter their meaning. That, however, is not quite sure. For Love at its best is never rudely iconoclastic. Every good law in its original intent is[Pg 224] aimed to lift men out of their sensuality and selfishness into at least an outward conformity to the requirements of social well-being. And however grotesque, fantastic, and superfluous such a law under changed conditions may become, its original intent will always keep it sacred and precious, even after its purpose can be accomplished better without it. To fulfil is not to destroy, or to take delight in destruction. "Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets; I came not to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth shall pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law, till all things be accomplished."

At the same time Love is always changing and superseding laws and institutions by pressure of adjustment to the changing demands of individual and social well-being. Laws and institutions are made for men, rather than men for institutions and laws; and the instant an old law ceases to serve a new need in the best possible way, Love erects the better service into a new law or institution, superseding the old. Any law that fails to promote the physical, mental, social, and spiritual good of the persons and the community concerned, thereby loses Love's sanction and becomes obsolete. Law for law's sake, rather than for the sake[Pg 225] of man and society, is the flat denial of Love. To exalt any tradition, institution, custom, or prohibition above the human and social good it has ceased to serve, is to sink to the level of the scribe and Pharisee—the deadliest enemies of Jesus, and all for which He stood. "For I say unto you, that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven."

In Love's eyes all anger, contempt, and quarrelsomeness are as bad as murder—indeed are incipient murder, stopped short of overt crime through fear. The look, or word, or deed of unkindness, the thought, or wish, or hope that evil may befall another, even the attitude of cold indifference, is murder in the heart. And it is only because we lack the courage to translate wish into will that in such cases we do not do the thing which, if done without our responsibility, by accident or nature, we should rejoice to see accomplished.

From a strange and unexpected source there has come the confirmation of this New Testament conception of the prevalence, not to say the universality, of murder. A brilliant but grossly perverse English man of letters was sentenced to imprisonment a few years ago for the foulest crime. From the gaol in which he was confined there came a[Pg 226] most realistic description of the last days and final execution within its walls of a lieutenant in the British army, who was condemned for killing a woman whom he loved.

The poem has the exaggeration of a perverted and embittered nature; but beneath the exaggeration there is the original truth, which underlies Jesus' identification of murder and hate. After describing the last days of the condemned man, his execution and his burial, the poem concludes as follows:—

Charge up against ourselves as murder the bitter looks, the hateful words, the unkind thoughts, the selfish actions, which have lessened the vitality, diminished the joy, wounded the heart, and murdered the happiness of those whom we ought to love, whom perhaps at times we think we do love, and who can profess to be guiltless?

The harboured grudge, the unrepented injury, the offence for which we have not begged pardon, the employer's refusal to "recognise" his employees or their representatives, and treat with them on fair and equal terms, the workman's cultivated attitude of hostility to his employer, are all such flagrant violations of Love that acts of formal piety or public worship on the part of a person who harbours such feelings are an affront.

Controversies, lawsuits, industrial or political warfare in mere pride of opinion, class prejudice, or greed of gain, without first making every effort to respect the rights and protect the interests of the other party and so bring about a reconciliation, are all violations of Love and doom the person who is guilty of them to dwell in the narrow prison-house of a hard and hateful secularity, where the last farthing of exacted penalty must be paid, and hate is lord of life. "Ye have heard that it was said of them of old time, Thou[Pg 228] shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment: but I say unto you, that every one who is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment; and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council; and whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of the hell of fire. If, therefore, thou art offering thy gift at the altar and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar and go thy way, first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift. Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art with him in the way; lest haply the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison. Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou have paid the last farthing."

Marriage to the Christian is an infinitely higher and holier estate than it could have been to any of the earlier schools. It is an opportunity to share with another person the creative prerogative of God. It brings opportunity for Love enhanced by the highest of complementary differences, under circumstances of tenderest intimacy, with the requirement of lifelong constancy.

From Love's point of view any lack of tender[Pg 229] reverence for the person of another, whether in or out of marriage sinks man to the plane of the brute. Not that the normal exercise of any appetite or passion is base or evil in itself. All are holy, pure, divine, when Love through them assumes the lifelong responsibilities they involve. All that falls short of such tender reverence and permanent responsibility is lust. Jesus established chastity on the broad, rational basis of respect for the dignity of woman and the sanctity of sex. The logic of His teaching on this point is to place chastity on the eternal rock foundation of treating another only as Love and a true regard for the other's permanent welfare will warrant. In other words, Jesus permits no man to even wish to treat any woman as he would be unwilling another man should treat his own mother, sister, wife, or daughter. For, from His standpoint, all women are our sisters, daughters of the most high God. This standard is searching and severe, no doubt; but it is reasonable and right. There is not a particle of asceticism about it. And the man who violates it is not merely departing a little from the beaten path of approved conventionalities. He is doing a cruel, wanton wrong. He is doing to another what he would bitterly resent if done to one whom he held dear. And what right has[Pg 230] any man to hold any woman cheap, a mere means of his selfish gratification, and not an object of his protection, and reverence, and chivalrous regard? The worst mark of uneliminated brutality and barbarism which the civilised world is carrying over into the twentieth century, to curse and blacken and pollute and embitter human life for a few generations more, is this indifference to the Spirit of Love, as it applies at this crucial point.

To destroy a wife's health, to purchase a moment's pleasure at the cost of a woman's lasting degradation, or to participate in practices which doom a whole class of wretched women to short-lived disease and shame, and early and dishonoured death (a recent reliable report estimates the cost of lives from this cause alone in a single city as 5000 a year) is so gross and wanton a perversion of manhood, that in comparison it would be better not to be a man at all.

All the devices for gratifying sexual passions without the assumption of permanent responsibilities, such as seduction, prostitution, and the keeping of mistresses, Christianity brands as the desecration of God's holiest temple, the human body, and the wanton wounding of His most sensitive creation,—woman's heart. The Greeks placed little restriction on man's passions beyond[Pg 231] such as was necessary to maintain sufficient physical health and mental vigour to perform his duties as a citizen in peace and in war. If the individual is complete in himself, with no God above who cares, no Christ who would be grieved, no Spirit of Love to reproach, no rights of universal brotherhood and sisterhood to be sensitively respected and chivalrously maintained, then indeed it is impossible to make out a valid claim for severer control in these matters than Plato and Aristotle advocate. If there are persons in the world who are practically slaves, persons who have no claim on our consideration, then licentiousness and prostitution are logical and legitimate expressions of human nature and inevitable accompaniments of human society. Christianity, however, has freed the slave in a deeper and higher sense than the world has yet realised. Christianity does not permit any one who calls himself a Christian to leave any man or woman outside the pale of that consideration which makes this other person's dignity, and interest, and welfare as precious and sacred to him as his own. Obviously all loose and temporary sexual connections involve such degradation, shame, and sorrow to the woman involved, that no one who holds her character, and happiness, and lasting[Pg 232] welfare dear to him can will for her these woful consequences. One cannot at the same time be a friend of the kindly, generous, sympathetic Christ and treat a woman in that way. It is for this reason, not on cold, ascetic grounds, that Christianity limits sexual relations to the monogamous family; for there only are the consequences to all concerned such as one can choose for another whom he really loves. If Christianity, at these and other vital points, asks man to give up things which Plato and Aristotle permit, it is not that the Christian is narrower or more ascetic than they; it is because Christianity has introduced a Love so much higher, and deeper, and broader than anything of which the profoundest Greeks had dreamed, that it has made what was permissible to their hard hearts forever impossible for all the more sensitive souls in whom the Love of Christ has come to dwell.

"Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt not commit adultery; but I say unto you, that every one that looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. And if thy right eye causeth thee to stumble, pluck it out, and cast it from thee; for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not thy whole body be cast into[Pg 233] hell. And if thy right hand causeth thee to stumble, cut it off, and cast it from thee; for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not thy whole body go into hell."

Divorce is a confession of failure in Love's supreme undertaking. No two Christians, who have caught and kept alive the Spirit of Love in the married state, ever were or ever will be, ever wished to be or ever can be, divorced. No one Christian who has the true Christian Spirit of Love toward husband or wife will ever seek divorce unless it be under such circumstances of infidelity or brutality, neglect or cruelty, as render the continuance of the relation a fruitless casting of the pearls of affection before the swinishness of sensuality. The determination of the grounds on which divorce shall be granted belongs to the sphere of the state, and is a problem of social self-protection. The Christian church makes a serious mistake when it spends its energies in trying to build up legal barriers against divorce. Its real mission at this point is to build up in the hearts of its adherents the Spirit of Love which will make marriage so sweet and sacred that those who once enter it will find, as all true Christians do find, divorce intolerable between two Christians; and tolerable even for one Christian[Pg 234] only as a last resort against hopeless and useless degradation. To translate Christ's Spirit into the life of the family is a much more Christian thing to do than to attempt to enact this or that somewhat general and enigmatical answer of His into civil law. It is generally a mistake, a departure from the Spirit of the Master, when the Christian community as such turns from its specific task of positive upbuilding of personality to the legal prohibition of the things that are contrary to the Christian Spirit. Laws and prohibitions, statutes and penalties against drunkenness, Sabbath-breaking, theft, murder, gambling, and divorce, we must have. But those laws and penalties are best devised and enforced by the state, as the representative of the average sentiment of the community as a whole, rather than by the distinctively Christian element in the community, which in the nature of things is very far above the average sentiment. Undoubtedly the Christian Spirit is the only force strong enough to save the family from degeneration and dissolution in this intensely individualistic, independent, materialistic, luxurious age. But we must rely mainly on the Spirit working within, not on a law imposed from without; on the healing touch of the gentle Master, not on the hasty sword of the impetuous Peter.[Pg 235]

"It was said also, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement; but I say unto you, that every one that putteth away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, maketh her an adulteress; and whosoever shall marry her when she is put away committeth adultery."

Love fulfils at once the law of truth-telling and the law against swearing; for words spoken in Love need no adventitious support. The appeal to anything outside one's self, and one's simple statement, is clear evidence that there is no Love, and therefore no truth within. Love has no desire to deceive, and hence no fear of being disbelieved. To back up one's words with an oath is to confess one's own lack of confidence in what one is saying, and to invite lack of confidence in others. Anything more than a plain statement of fact or feeling comes out of an insincere or unloving heart. Of course here, as in the case of divorce, what is the obvious and only law for the disciple of Jesus may or may not be wise for the civil authorities to enact into law and impose upon all. If the state and the courts think an oath helpful, the sensible Christian usually will conform to public custom and requirement; even though for him the practice is superfluous and meaningless.[Pg 236]

"Again, ye have heard that it was said to them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths; but I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by the heaven, for it is the throne of God; nor by the earth, for it is the footstool of his feet; nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, for thou canst not make one hair white or black. But let your speech be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay; and whatsoever is more than these is of the evil one."

Love is slow to take offence, and quick to overlook. Selfishness is sensitive to slights, resentful at wrongs; for it sees others only as their acts affect us. Love seeks out the whole man behind the harsh word or bad deed, takes his point of view, and tries to discover some clue to his concealed better self.

Whether he does well or ill, Love lets us appeal to nothing less than his best self, and do nothing less than what on the whole is best for him and for the community to which he and we both belong. Hence, whether we give or withhold what he specifically asks (and Love enlightened by modern sociology tells us we usually must withhold from beggars and tramps what they ask), in either case we shall not consult merely our per[Pg 237]sonal convenience and impulse, but do what we should wish to have done to us, for the sake of society and for our own good as members of society, if we were in his unfortunate plight. "Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth; but I say unto you, Resist not him that is evil, but whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man would go to law with thee, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go one mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away."

Love is kind to the evil and vicious, and magnanimous to the hostile and hateful. Kindness in return for favours received or in hope of favours to come; kindness to those whose conduct and character we admire, is all very well in its way, but is no sign whatever that he who is kind on these easy terms is a true child of Love. To share the great Love of God one must go out freely to all, regardless of return or desert,—be impartial as sunshine and shower.

When our enemy is plotting to harm us, to break down our good name, to injure those whom we love, even while we defend ourselves and our dear ones against his malice and meanness, we[Pg 238] must be secretly watching our chances to do him a good turn, and win him from hatred to Love. Nothing less than this complete identification with the interests of all the persons we in any way touch, however bad some of their acts, however unworthy some of their traits, can make us sharers and receivers, agents and bestowers of that perfect Love which is at once the nature of God, the capacity of man, the fulfilment of law, and the condition of social well-being.

"Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thy enemy; but I say unto you, Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you, that ye may be sons of your Father which is in heaven; for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. For if ye love them that love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the Gentiles the same? Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."[Pg 239]

III
THE COUNTERFEITS OF LOVE

Just because Love is so costly, it has a host of counterfeits. These counterfeits are chiefly devices for gaining the rewards and honours of Love, without the effort and sacrifice of loving. One of the most obvious rewards of Love is being thought kind, generous, good. But this can be secured, apparently, by professing religion, joining the church, repeating the creed, giving money to the poor, subscribing large sums to good causes,—all of which are much cheaper and easier than being kind, and true, and faithful, and considerate in the home, on the farm, in the factory, in the store. Yet Jesus tells us that unless we have Love in the close and intimate relations of our domestic, economic, social, and political life, all symbols of its presence elsewhere, all "services" directed otherwise, become intolerable nuisances, whose places would be better filled, and whose work better done, if they were once well out of the way and decently buried. All this, however, is not to deny, but by contrast to affirm, the great indispensable uses of symbols, officers, and institutions that are genuinely and effectively devoted to the cultivation and propagation of Love.[Pg 240]

The pure gold of the Spirit is most conveniently and effectually circulated when mixed with the alloy of rites, ceremonies, creeds, officers, and organisations. Though no essential part of the pure Gospel, yet these forms and observances, these bishops and clergy, these covenants and confessions, are as practically useful for the maintenance and spread of the Christian Spirit as courts and constitutions, governors and judges, are for the orderly conduct of the state. Their authority is founded on their practical utility. When their utility ceases, when they come to obscure rather than reveal the Spirit they are intended to express, then schism and reformation serve the same beneficent purpose in the church that declarations of independence and revolution have so often achieved in the state. That form of church government is best which in any given age and society works best; and this may well be concentrated personal authority in one set of circumstances, and democratic representative administration in another. Each has its advantages and its disadvantages.

Modes of worship rest on the same practical basis. Spontaneous prayer or elaborate ritual, much or little participation by the people, long or short sermons, prayer-meetings or no prayer-[Pg 241]meetings,—all are to be determined by the test of practical experience. It is absurd to profess to draw hard and fast rules about these matters from the precept or practice of Jesus and His Apostles, or the early church fathers, working as they did under conditions so widely different from our own. Probably centralised authority and elaborate ritual are most effective when bishops and priests can be found who will not abuse their power for their own aggrandisement. Until then, more democratic forms of worship and of government are doubtless more expedient. The friendly competition of the two systems side by side helps to keep sacerdotalism modest and make independency effective.

Creeds likewise have their practical usefulness, especially in times of theological ferment and transition, serving the purposes of party platforms in a political campaign. But it is the grossest perversion of their function to make assent to them obligatory on all who wish to enjoy the most intimate Christian fellowship, or to test Christian character by their formulas. One might as well refuse citizenship to every person who could not assent to every word in some party platform or other. The creed is an intellectual formulation of the results of Christian experience, interpreting the Christian[Pg 242] revelation; and it will vary from age to age with ripening experience, and maturer views of the content of the revelation. No creed was altogether false at the time of its formulation. No creed in Christendom is such as every intelligent Christian can honestly assent to. The attempt to make creed subscription a test of church membership, or even a condition of ministerial standing, is sure to confuse intellectual and spiritual things to the serious disadvantage of both. The most sensitively honest men will more and more decline to enter the service of the church, until subscription to antiquated formulas, long since become incredible to the majority of well-trained scholars, ceases to be required either literally or "for substance of doctrine." It is sufficient that each candidate for the ministry be asked to make his own statement, either in his own words or in the words of any creed he finds acceptable, leaving it for his brethren to decide whether or not such intellectual statement is consistent with that spiritual service which is to be his chief concern. Unless Christianity, in the persons of its leaders as well as of its laity, can breathe as free an intellectual atmosphere as that of Stoic or Epicurean, Plato or Aristotle, it will at this point prove itself their inferior. Infinitely superior as it is in every other respect,[Pg 243] it is a burning shame that its timid and conservative modern adherents should endeavour, at this point of absolute intellectual openness and integrity, to place it at a disadvantage with the least noble of its ancient competitors. The pure Spirit of Love will win the devotion of all honest hearts and candid minds. But the insistence on these antiquated formulas is sure to repel an increasing number of the most thoughtful and enlightened from organised Christian fellowship. The only serious reason for preferring the independent to the hierarchical forms of church organisation at the present time is the tendency of the latter to keep up these forms of intellectual imposition and imposture. Until the church as a whole shall rise to the standards of intellectual honesty now universally prevalent in the world of secular science, the mission of the independent protest will remain but partially fulfilled. "Ye are the salt of the earth; but if the salt have lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out and trodden under foot of men."

Any thought of the reputation or respectability or honour a right act will bring, just because it puts something else in place of Love, destroys the rightness of the act and the righteousness of the[Pg 244] doer. Righteousness will always remain a dry, dreary, forbidding, impossible thing until we welcome right as the service of those whom we love, and the promotion of interests we share with them; and shrink from wrong as what harms them and defeats our common ends. Without Love, righteousness either dries up into a cold, hard asceticism, or evaporates into a hollow, formal respectability; and in one way or the other misses the spontaneity and expansion of soul which is Love's crown and joy. "Take heed that ye do not your righteousness before men, to be seen of them: else ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven."

Love is too intent on its objects to be aware of itself or call attention to its own operations. The air of doing a favour takes all the Love out of an act; for Love gives so simply and quietly that it seems to ask rather than bestow the favour. In this way both giver and receiver together share Love's distinctive reward of two lives bound together as one in the common Love of the Father.

"When therefore thou doest alms, sound not a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have received their reward. But when thou doest alms,[Pg 245] let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth, that thine alms may be in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall recompense thee."

Professed Love, if unfruitful or pernicious, is false. If we make no one happier; help no one over hard places; bind no wounds; comfort no sorrows; serve no just cause; do no good work; still worse, if we make any one's lot harder; add to his burden or sorrow; corrupt public officials; break down beneficent institutions; plunder the poor, even if within technical legal forms; drive the weak to the wall; and connive in the perversion of justice,—then the absence of good fruits, or the presence of bad ones, is proof positive that we have never seen or known Love, that our profession of Love is a lie, our proper place is with Love's foes, and our destiny with the doers of evil.

"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves. By their fruits ye shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but the corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree[Pg 246] that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Therefore by their fruits ye shall know them. Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy by thy name, and by thy name cast out devils, and by thy name do many mighty works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you; depart from me, ye that work iniquity."

Neither eloquent speech nor elegant writing, neither ornate ceremonial nor orthodox symbol, nor anything short of actual toil to serve human need and help human joy can translate Love into life. Though the most beautiful idea in the world, the mere idea of Love is of no more value than any other mere idea. If it fails of expression in hard, costly deeds, its ritualistic or verbal profession is a sham. In Love's service, so far as things done are concerned, there is no high or low, first or last. To preach sermons and conduct religious services, to teach science in the university, or make laws in Congress, is no better and no worse than to make shoes in the shoeshop or cook food in the kitchen. All work done in Love counts, stands, endures. All work done in vanity[Pg 247] and self-seeking, all work shirked with pretence of religion, or excuse of wealth, or pride of social station, leaves the soul hard, hollow, unreal, and fails to stand Love's searching test.

"Every one therefore which heareth these words of mine, and doeth them, shall be likened unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock; and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house, and it fell not, for it was founded upon the rock. And every one that heareth these words of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand; and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and smote upon that house, and it fell; and great was the fall thereof."

IV
THE WHOLE-HEARTEDNESS OF LOVE

Love asks for the whole heart or nothing; and all the heart has, be it little or much, must go with it. The pursuit or possession of wealth, as an end in itself, or a means to mere selfish ends, will drive Love out of the soul.

All the wealth we can give to Love's service is most useful and welcome; but the retention of any[Pg 248] for miserly pride, or vain ostentation, or indolent uselessness for ourselves or our children, fills the heart so full of self that Love can find there no room. Not that giving away all one has is essential or desirable; but that every dollar one gives, spends, keeps, invests, or controls be held subject to the orders of Love.

Wealth is not so essential to the Christian as it was to Epicurus and Aristotle, for God can be glorified and man can be served with very little furniture of fortune; and therefore the Christian is able, in whatsoever material state he is, therewith to be content. On the other hand, the Christian cares more for money than either the Stoic or Plato; for there are ranges in God's universe of beauty, truth, and goodness which cannot be æsthetically appreciated and artistically and scientifically appropriated without large expenditure of labour and the wealth by which labour is supported; and there are wide spheres of business enterprise and social service essential to human welfare which only the rich man or nation can effectively promote. Divine and human service is possible in poverty; it is more effective and at the same time more difficult in wealth. The Christian rich and the Christian poor serve the same Lord, and have the same Spirit; but the accomplishment of the[Pg 249] Christian rich man can be so much greater than that of the Christian widow with her mite, that the Christian who is strong enough to stand it is in duty bound to treat money as a talent which in all just ways he ought to multiply. On the contrary, the moment it begins to make him less sympathetic, less generous, less thankful, less responsible, he must give it away as the only alternative to the loss of his soul, the deterioration of his personality.

"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth, where moth and rust doth consume, and where thieves break through and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth consume, and where thieves do not break through nor steal, for where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also."

Toward science and art, business and politics, the application of the Christian Spirit is different from anything we have met before. The Christian will not shirk these things, like the Epicurean and the Stoic; because they are ways of serving that truth, beauty, welfare, and order which are included in the Father's will for all His human children. In all these things we are co-workers with God for the good of man. Diligence and enthusiasm, devotion and self-sacrifice in one or more of[Pg 250] these directions is the imperative duty, the inestimable privilege of every one who would be a grateful and obedient son of God, a helpful and efficient brother to his fellow-men.

Yet in all his devotion to science or art, in all the energy with which he gives himself to business or politics, the Christian can never forget that God is greater than any one of these points at which we come in contact with Him; and that, when we have done our utmost in one or another of these lines, we are still comparatively unprofitable servants in His vast household. As God is more than the thing at which we work, so the Christian, through relation to Him, is always more than his work. He never lets his personality become absorbed and evaporated in the work he does; but ever renews his personal life at the fountain which is behind the special work he undertakes to do. Thus the true Christian is never without some useful social work to do; and he never lets himself get lost in doing it. To keep this balance of energy in the task and elevation above it, which enables one to take success without elation and bear failure without depression, is perhaps the crowning achievement of practical Christianity.

"The lamp of the body is the eye; if therefore[Pg 251] thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If, therefore, the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is the darkness! No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other, or else he will hold to one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon."

He who heartily loves and serves others will trust Love in God and his fellows to take proper care of himself. One who really loves others will take reasonable care not to be a burden to them, and to the world, and will avail himself of the insurance company, the savings bank, and the bond market as the devices of a complex modern society to distribute losses and conserve gains to the common advantage of all. Love does not make the individual or his family a parasite on the economy and industry of society. Love makes a man bear his own permanent burden as a preliminary to being of much use and no harm to his family, his friends, and his community. Such prudent provision of the means of Love's independence and service is consistent with entire absence of worry about one's personal fortunes. The essential question which Love, and Jesus as the Lord and Master of Love, puts to a man is[Pg 252] not "How much money have you?" but "What use do you intend to make of whatever you have, be that little or much?" If that aim is selfish, and the money is either saved or spent in sordid, worried selfishness, that low aim makes the money a curse. If held subject to whatever drafts Love may make upon it,—whether gifts to the poor, or support of good causes, or employment of honest workmen, or development of industrial enterprises, be the form Love's drafts take,—then all wealth so held is a blessing to the world and an honour to its owner, a glory to God and a service to man.

"Therefore I say unto you, Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than the food, and the body than the raiment? Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not ye of much more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit unto his stature? And why are ye anxious concerning raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God doth so clothe the[Pg 253] grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? Be not therefore anxious, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? For after all these things do the Gentiles seek; for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things."

Though material means sought as ends are fatal to Love, Love's ends kept in view insure needed means. To worry about to-morrow is to fail in devotion to the tasks of to-day, and so spoil both days. To do our best work to-day is to gain power for to-morrow. Competition complicates, but does not render insoluble, the problem of making all that we have and all that we do express Love to all whom our action affects. To be sure, there are city slums, uninsured accidents and sickness, unsanitary tenements, unjust conditions of labour, where even the service of Love does not bring to the worker appropriate means and rewards; but it is because Love has not quite kept pace at these points with swift-moving modern conditions. But public spirit, political progress, economic reform, are more sensitive to these violations of its laws than ever before, and eagerly bent on finding and applying[Pg 254] the remedy,—more Love of all for each, and each for all.

"But seek ye first his kingdom, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you. Be not therefore anxious for the morrow, for the morrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."

Love throws off all that hampers its action, as a runner his coat for a race. Love requires the sound body, the clear mind, the strong will, the sensitive heart, and foregoes all indulgences that impair these things, though in themselves innocent as eating and drinking. Yet Love makes no fuss about its sacrifices, takes them as a simple matter of course, not worth mentioning; for what Love gives up in mere sensuous indulgence is as nothing to the widened affections and enlarged interests gained. To be solemn or sad over what we give up, to proclaim or parade one's self-denials, would be an insult to Love; it would show that the persons we love and the causes we serve are not really as dear to our hearts as the pitiful things we forego for their sake—would show that our Love was a sham.

All pleasure that comes from healthy exercise of body, rational exercise of mind, sympathetic expansion of the affections, strenuous effort of[Pg 255] the will, in just and generous living, is at the same time a glorifying of God and an enrichment of ourselves. All pleasure which sacrifices the vigour of the body to the indulgence of some separate appetite, all pleasure which enslaves or degrades or embitters the persons from whom it is procured, all pleasure which breaks down the sacred institutions on which society is founded,—is shameful and debasing, a sin against God, and a wrong to our own souls. The Christian will forego many pleasures which Epicurus and even Aristotle would permit, because he is infinitely more sensitive than they to the effect his pleasures have on poor men and unprotected women whose welfare these earlier teachers did not take into account. On the other hand, the Christian will enter heartily into the joys of pure domestic life, and the delights of struggle with untoward social and political conditions, from which Plato and the Stoics thought it honourable to withdraw. Where God can be glorified and men can be served, there the Christian will either find his pleasure, or with optimistic art, create a pleasure that he does not find.

"Moreover when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance; for they disfigure their faces, that they may be seen of men to fast.[Pg 256] Verily I say unto you, They have received their reward. But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thy head, and wash thy face, that thou be not seen of men to fast, but of thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall recompense thee."

Just because Love includes the interests of all the persons we deal with, it excludes all mean, selfish traits from our hearts. There can be no pride and guile, no lust and cruelty, no avarice and hypocrisy, no malice and censoriousness, in a heart which welcomes to its interest and affection, and serves and loves as its own, the aims and needs of its fellows. That is why Love's true disciples are few, and the slaves of selfishness many. Ask how many,—not entirely succeed, for none do,—but how many make it the constant aim of their lives to treat others as more widely extended aspects of themselves, and, in order to do that, endeavour to keep out all the greed, hate, lust, pride, envy, jealousy, that would draw lines between self and others, and we see the answer: that the way must be narrow, a way few find, and still fewer follow when found.

"Enter ye in by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many be they that enter in[Pg 257] thereby. For narrow is the gate, and straitened the way, that leadeth unto life, and few be they that find it."

V
THE CULTIVATION OF LOVE

Love is so akin to our nature, so eager to enter our souls, that to want is to get it; to seek is to find it; to open our hearts to its presence is to discover it already there. Whoever knows what true prayer is—the intense, eager yearning for good of insistent, importunate hearts—knows that there never was and never can be one unanswered prayer. No man who has longed to have Love the law of his life, and struggled for it as a miser struggles for money, or a politician strives to win votes, ever failed to get what he wanted. For every person we meet gives occasion for Love, and every situation in life affords a chance to express it. The difficulty is not to get all we want, but to want all we can have for the asking.

"Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you, for every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. Or what man is there of you,[Pg 258] who, if his son shall ask him for a loaf, will give him a stone, or if he shall ask for a fish, will give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?"

Love will not grow in our hearts without deep, unseen communion with the Spirit of Love, who is God. To dwell reverently on the Infinite Love; to keep in one's heart a sacred place where His holy name is adored; to eagerly seek for Love's coming in our own hearts, in the hearts of all men, and in all the affairs of the world; to gratefully receive all material blessings as gifts for use in Love's service; to beseech for ourselves and bestow on others that forgiveness which is Love's attitude toward our human frailties and failings; to fortify ourselves in advance against the allurements of sense, and the base desire to gain good for ourselves at cost of evil to others; to remember that all right rule, all true strength, all worthy honour inhere in and flow from Love, and Love's Father, God,—to do this day by day sincerely and simply without formality or ostentation,—this is to pray, and to insure prayer's inevitable answer—a life through which Love freely flows to bless both the world and ourselves.[Pg 259]

"And when ye pray, ye shall not be as the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have received their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thine inner chamber, and having shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret, and thy Father which seeth in secret shall recompense thee. And in praying use not vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do; for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not therefore like unto them; for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him. After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one."

Our only ground of assurance that Love forgives us is our loving forgiveness of others. In the light of that fact of experience it is easy and obvious to believe that the Father whose children we are, is not less loving and forgiving than we. If we restore to our esteem and friendship those[Pg 260] who have wronged us, then we are sure that Love at the heart of the Universe, Love in the Father, Love in all the Father's true children, fully and freely forgives us. If we have this experience of our own forgiveness of our fellows, we know that Love would not be Love, but hate, God would not be God, but a devil, if any sincerely repented wrong or shortcoming of which we have been guilty could remain unforgiven.

"For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses."

To judge harshly another man's failings, however bad they may be, shows that we are less loving than he. For he may have failed through strength of appetite, or heat of passion,—failings that are still consistent with Love; but harsh judgment has no such excuse, and is therefore a deadly—that is, loveless—sin. We would never think of proclaiming to the idly curious or the coldly critical the failings of one whom we love; hence proclamations of any one's failings is a sure sign that we have no Love for him, and as long as there are any whom we do not love and protect, we have no part or lot in the great Love of God. Yet such charitableness does[Pg 261] not forbid our practical judgment of the difference between sheep and wolves, good men and bad, when important issues are involved. That Love requires. What it forbids is the rolling as a sweet morsel under our tongue, and the gleeful recital to others, of the mistake or the sin of another, as something in which we take mean delight because we think it makes him inferior to ourselves.

"Judge not that ye be not judged. For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me cast out the mote out of thine eye, and lo, the beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."

Love will waste no time trying to explain itself to the selfish. If Love does not commend itself by its own light and warmth to a man, no forms of words can make him understand it. The sensual, the greedy, the hard, and the cruel Love will treat as gently and kindly as circumstances[Pg 262] permit; yet expect as a matter of course that they will interpret Love's justice as hardness, kindness as weakness, temperance as asceticism, forbearance as cowardice, sacrifice as stupidity. Those who love will not mind being misunderstood by those who do not; knowing that any attempted explanation would only increase their conceit and hardness of heart, and so make a bad matter worse.

"Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast your pearls before the swine, lest haply they trample them under their feet, and turn and rend you."

Since Love is "the greatest thing in the world," we are bound to stand ready with girt loins, and trimmed, burning lamps, to shed its light far and wide. To cover it up would be to deprive ourselves and our fellows of the one sight in all the world best worth seeing, and so to hinder its spread. False modesty that would keep Love's good works out of sight is as bad as false pride that would thrust oneself forward. Though works done merely to be seen are not good at all, yet good works genuinely done for Love's sake gain added influence and lustre when frankly and freely allowed to be seen as the beautiful things that they are. The Christian is under spiritual compulsion to be a missionary. Other systems draw their little[Pg 263] circles of disciples about them, as Jesus drew His twelve. One cannot hold what he believes to be a true and helpful view of life without wishing to communicate it to others. Yet this tendency, which is natural to every principle, is characteristic of Christianity in a unique degree. For the Christian Spirit consists in Love, the desire to give to others the best one has. And what can be so good, so desirable to impart, as this very Spirit of Love, which is Christianity itself? That is why the Christian must, in some form or other,—by journeying to foreign lands, by contribution to missionary work at home, by gifts to Christian education, by support of settlement work, or perhaps best of all by the silent diffusion of a Christian example in the neighbourhood, or the unnoticed expression of the Christian Spirit in the home,—be a propagator of the Spirit of Love he has himself received.

"Ye are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a lamp and put it under the bushel, but on the stand; and it shineth unto all that are in the house. Even so let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven."[Pg 264]

VI
THE BLESSEDNESS OF LOVE

Does virtue bring happiness? is a question every philosophy of life must meet. Yet before it can be rightly answered it must be rightly put.

For if by virtue you mean something negative, conventional,—not lying, not cheating, not swearing, not drinking; and if by happiness you mean something passive, external,—riches, offices, entertainments, and honours; then virtue and happiness do not necessarily go together in life, and no philosophy can show that they should.

If a man were to persuade himself that they do go together, and should seek this sort of happiness by cultivating this sort of virtue, he would miss true virtue and true happiness. For both virtue and happiness are positive, active; so interrelated that the happiness must be found in that furtherance of our common social interests in which the exercise of virtue consists.

Jesus bids us take an active, devoted interest in the interests of others and of society. Now whoever shares and serves a wide range of interests has an interested, and therefore an interesting, life. But the interesting life is the happy life. Love, whether it has much or little wealth and station,[Pg 265] always has interests and aims; always finds or makes friends to share them,—in other words, is always happy.

The beatitudes are illustrations of this deep identity between interest taken and happiness found; statements of the truth that Love going out to serve and share the interests and aims of others, and blessedness flowing in to fill the heart thereby enlarged for its reception, are the outside and inside of the same spiritual experience.

To think little of self is the key to the joy that goes with much thought for others.

Love is so going out to others as to make them as real as self. But that is what no man puffed up with self-importance can do. Where self is much in the foreground others are pushed to the rear. Self-importance and Love cannot dwell together in the same house of clay. As one goes up in the scales of the balance the other goes down. To be rich in the shared lives of others one must be poor in his own self-esteem. The two are in inverse proportion. Modesty is impossible of direct cultivation. It isn't safe to talk or even think about it much. As Pascal remarks, "Few people talk of humility humbly." Like Love it is the manifestation of something deeper than itself. Unless one is in intimate per[Pg 266]sonal relations with one whom he reveres as greater, stronger, better than himself, it is obviously impossible for him to be modest. If he is in such relations, it is equally impossible for him not to be modest. Hence, as Love is the inmost quality of the Christian, the inevitable manifestation to his fellow-men of what the Father is to him, so modesty is the surest outward sign of this inward grace. Conceit is a public proclamation of the poverty of one's personal relations. For if this conceited fellow, this vain woman, really had the honour of the intimate acquaintance of some one better and greater than their petty, miserable selves, they could not possibly be the vain, conceited creatures that they are. Every one who lives in the presence of the great Father, and walks in the company of His glorious Son, is sure to find modesty and humility the natural and spontaneous expression of his side of these great relationships. "Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

Our shortcomings frankly confessed prepare us for Love's consolation.

We all fall short of that patient consideration, that courteous kindliness, which makes the feelings and interests of others as precious as our own. Some of us fail in one way, some in another.[Pg 267] But we all are unprofitable servants of the Love that would make our lives one with all the lives that we touch. To forget or deny that we fail is to lose sight of Love altogether. He who thinks he succeeds thereby shows that he fails; he who knows and laments that he fails comes as near as man can to the goal.

Love neither asks nor expects a clean record; else it would have no disciples. Love fully and freely forgives, at the eleventh hour welcomes the idler, and offers its fulness of joy to all who, whatever their repented past may have been, make service and kindness to others their eager present concern. For no sin frankly confessed, no wrong deed sincerely repented, no loss squarely met, no bereavement bravely endured, can shut out from Love's consolation those who serve with the best there is in them the persons who still need their aid. "Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted."

To meet criticism with kindness, crossness with geniality, insult with courtesy, and injury with charity is the way to conquer the world.

By nature we are creatures of suggestion. A hateful look, an ugly word, a spiteful sneer, a cruel blow, make us hateful and ugly and spiteful and cruel in turn. For the empty heart flashes[Pg 268] back in resentment whatever attitude another's act suggests.

Meekness greets as a friend the just critic, and for unjust and unkind treatment makes allowance as due to the blindness or hardness or weakness of the pitiful person who has nothing better to give. Meekness makes the soft answer that turns away wrath, and treats one who wrongs us all the more gently. Thus the meekness of Love gives both power to possess our own souls in patience under all provocation, and power, not indeed to coerce the bodies of others, but to win the consent of their souls. "Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth."

Righteousness is something of which we can have no more and no less than we wish.

He who is good enough is not good at all, and never will be any better. For righteousness is right relation to others; and so long as there are things we can do to help others, its infinite task is unfinished. Yet though the goal ever advances and never comes within reach, aspiration is achievement; progress is attainment. If we could come to the end of our journey; if we could see the world's claims on us met, the deeds of which we are capable done, that moment would mark the death of our souls. Just because Love grows by[Pg 269] loving and serving, and makes ever greater and greater demands, it prophesies there shall be forever and ever things to do that will make life worth while. "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness; for they shall be filled."

The depth of our sympathy for those below us in secular service and station measures our worth in the eyes of those spiritually higher than we.

Love is like a tree; if it is not to be scorched in the blaze of ambition and withered in the heat of competition, its roots of sympathy must go down as deep into the soil of the obscure and lowly lives on whose humble toil we depend as its branches spread into the upper air of social distinction and station.

Unless we have much sympathy for those who toil on the farm and on the sea, in the factory and the mine, behind the counter and the desk, in the kitchen and laundry, what we call courtesy in the drawing room, or charity on the platform, is hollow mockery and Pharisaic sham. "Blessed are the merciful; for they shall obtain mercy."

In order for Love to shine through them there must be nothing else in our hearts.

Love demands everything or nothing. It refuses to dwell in quarters or halves of our souls. The[Pg 270] least flaw of pride, greed, or lust is enough to make them opaque. Greed, lust, pride, hate, so blind our eyes to the real selves of others that we cannot see or treat them as they really are; that is, cannot love them. It reduces them to mere means and tools of our passions and pleasures; and one who so regards persons can never love either them or any person aright. Only the pure can see Love; for only the pure can experience that union of one's whole self with the whole self of others in which Love consists. "Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God."

Just so sure as we love two or more persons we shall do all in our power to keep them from hating each other.

We wish everyone to love those whom we love. If anybody hates one we love, it hurts us as much as it does the one hated, even more than it would to be hated ourselves. And if anyone whom we love is hating another, we are even more sorry for him than we are for the person he hates, and make all haste to deliver him from this most dreadful condition. The more we love our fellows, the more we hate to see misunderstanding, ill-will, strife, between them.

Not that the Christian is unwilling or afraid to fight. Where deliberate wrong is arrayed against[Pg 271] the rights of men, where fraud is practised on the unprotected, where hypocrisy imposes on the credulous, where vice betrays the innocent, where inefficiency sacrifices precious human interests, where avarice oppresses the poor, where tyranny tramples on the weak, there the man who shares the Father's Love for His maltreated children, the man who walks daily in the companionship of the Christ who owns all the downtrodden as His brothers, will be the most fearless and uncompromising foe of every form of injustice and oppression. Property, reputation, position, time, strength, influence, health, life itself if need be, will be thrown unreservedly into the fight against vice and sin. He cannot keep in with the Father and with Christ and not come out in opposition to everything that wrongs and injures the humblest man, the lowliest woman, the most defenceless little child.

Fighting, however, is not altogether uncongenial to the descendants of our brute progenitors. To fight our own battles, and occasionally a few for our neighbours, comes all too naturally to most of us. Fighting God's battles on principle is a very different thing. To feel entirely tranquil in the midst of the combat; to know that we are not alone on the side of the right; to have the real[Pg 272] interests of our opponents at heart all the time; to be ever ready to forgive them, and to ask their forgiveness for any excess of zeal we may have shown; to have the peace of God in our hearts, and no trace of malice, in deed, or word, or thought, or feeling,—this is not altogether natural, and the man who does his fighting on that basis gives pretty good assurance of dwelling in the Christian Spirit. No other adequate provision for maintaining peace in the midst of effective warfare, and making peace for others as well as for ourselves the instant the need for war is over, has ever been devised. The peacemakers of this fearless, earnest, strenuous type have the unmistakable right to be called the children of God. "Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God."

All who love must expect to be hated by the foes of those whom they love.

Because Jesus loved the common people and sought to deliver them from their fears and errors, the men who traded on those fears and errors put Him to an ignominious death. If we love and serve the despised, the abused, the plundered, those who despise and abuse and plunder them will do to us the worst they dare. The road of Love is marked at every turn by a cross. Who[Pg 273]ever in business, society, or politics makes as real as his own the interests and the wrongs of all whom he can reach and touch, will be disliked, criticised, misrepresented, vilified, condemned. He will pay Love's price of persecution.

Christian sacrifice closely resembles Greek temperance and courage. There is, however, this essential distinction. The Christian takes on not merely the pains and privations which are essential to his personal welfare, or the welfare of his community or state; he takes on whatever suffering the Father's Love for all His children calls him to undergo; gives up whatever indulgences the service of Christ requires him to dispense with; adopts whatever mingling of hardship and self-denial will keep him in most effective and sympathetic fellowship with those who have discovered the same great spiritual secret as himself. Thus, though to the uninitiated outsider much of his life looks hard and severe, on the inside it is easy and light; for the companionship with the Father, with Christ, and with Christian people is so much greater and dearer than the material and sensuous delights it may incidentally take away, that on the inside it does not wear the aspect of loss and sacrifice at all, but rather that of a glory and a gain. Still, since this element[Pg 274] of pleasant things foregone, and hard things endured, is ever present, and since it has to be judged by people on the outside as well as by those on the inside of the experience, in recognition of this truth Christianity has made its symbol before the uninitiated world the cross. As in the life of the Master, so in the life of every faithful disciple, the cross must be borne, the perpetual sacrifice must be made, as the price of Love's presence in a world of selfishness and hate; but the cross is transfigured into a crown of rejoicing, the sacrifice is transformed into privilege and pleasure by those precious personal relationships which are the supreme glory and gladness of the soul, and which could be maintained on no cheaper terms. The sacrifice that the Christian makes to get his Father's will, his Master's mission, accomplished in the world which so sorely needs it, is like the sacrifice a mother makes for her sick and suffering child,—the dearest and sweetest experience of life. The cross thus gladly borne, the yoke of sacrifice thus unostentatiously assumed, is the supreme expression of the Christian Spirit.

Like all high-cost things, sacrifice for Love's sake carries a high premium. It admits, as nothing else does, to the inner circle of the immortal[Pg 275] lovers of their fellows, to the intimate fellowship of the Lord of Love, Jesus Christ.

Joy follows incidentally and inevitably from the maintenance of these great Christian relationships. A gloomy, depressed, despondent tone and temper, unless it be demonstrably pathological, is public proclamation that the deep mines of these Christian relationships, with their inexhaustible resources, are either undeveloped or unworked. For no man who looks through sunshine and shower, through food and raiment, through family and friendship, through society and the moral order of the world, up into the face of the Giver of them all as his Father; who knows how to summon to his side the gentle and gracious companionship of Christ, alike in the pressure of perplexity and in the quiet of solitude; who knows how to unlock the treasures of Christian literature, to appropriate the meaning of Christian worship, and to avail himself of the comfort and support that is always latent in the hearts of his Christian friends,—no man in whom these vast personal resources are developed and employed can ever long remain disconsolate.

Even in prosperity, popularity, and outward success it takes considerable mixture of these deeper elements to keep the tone of life constantly on the[Pg 276] high level of joy. But adversity is the real test. Then the man without these interior resources gives way, breaks down, becomes querulous, fretful, irritable, sour. On the other hand, the man who can make mistakes, and take the criticism they bring, and go on as cheerfully as if no blunder had been made and no vote of censure had been passed; the man who can be hated for the good things he tries to do, and condemned for bad things he never did and never meant to do; the man who can work hard, and contentedly take poverty for pay; the man who can serve devotedly people who revile and betray him in return; the man who can discount in advance the unpopularity, misrepresentation, and defeat a right course will cost, and then resolutely set about it; the man who takes persecution and treachery as serenely as other men take honours and emoluments,—this man, we may be sure, has dug deep an invested heavily in the field where the priceless Christian treasure lies concealed.

"Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness' sake; for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are ye when men shall reproach you, and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad; for great is your reward in[Pg 277] heaven; for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you."

VII
THE SUPREMACY OF LOVE

Jesus' Spirit of Love is capable of absorbing into itself whatever we have found valuable in the four previous systems.

The Epicurean's varied and spontaneous joy in life is not diminished, but enhanced, by the Christian Spirit, which multiplies this joy as many times as there are persons whom one knows and loves. The Epicurean lives in the little world of himself, and a few equally self-centred companions. The Christian lives in the great world of God, and shares its joys with all God's human children. It is the absence of this larger world, the exclusive concern for his own narrow pleasures, that makes the consistent Epicurean, with all his polish and charm, the essentially mean and despicable creature we found him to be.

To be sure, Mill, Spencer, and others have endeavoured to graft the altruistic fruits of Christianity on to the old Epicurean stock. There is this great difference, however, between such Christianised Epicureanism as that of Mill and[Pg 278] Spencer, and Christianity itself. These systems have no logical bridge, no emotional bond by which to pass from the pleasures of self to the pleasures of others. They can and do point out the incompleteness of merely egoistic Epicureanism; they exhort us to care for the pleasures of others as we do for our own. But the logical nexus, the moral dynamic, the spiritual motive, is lacking in these systems; and consequently these systems fail to work, except with the few highly altruistic souls who need no spiritual physician.

This logical bond, this moral dynamic, this spiritual motive which impels toward altruistic conduct, the Christian finds in Christ. He certainly did love all men, and care for their happiness as dearly as He cared for His own. But this same Christ is the Christian's Lord and Master and Friend. Yet friendship for Him, the acceptance of Him as Lord and Master, is a contradiction in terms, unless one is at the same time willing to cultivate His Spirit, which is the Spirit of service, the Spirit which holds the happiness and welfare of others just as sacred and precious as one's own. He that hath not this Spirit of Christ is none of His. Hence what men like Mill and Spencer preach as a duty, and support by what their critics have found to be very inadequate and fallacious[Pg 279] logical processes, Christianity proclaims as a fact in the nature of God, as embodied in Christ, and a condition of the divine life for everyone who desires to be a child of God, a follower and friend of Jesus Christ. Christianity, therefore, includes everything of value in Epicureanism, and infinitely more. It has the Epicurean gladness without its exclusiveness, its joy without its selfishness, its naturalness without its baseness, its geniality without its heartlessness.

In like manner Christianity takes up all that is true in the Stoic teaching, without falling into its hardness and narrowness. The truth of the Stoic teaching consisted in its power to transform into an expression of the man himself, and of the beneficent laws of Nature, whatever outward circumstance might befall him, Now put in place of the abstract self the love of the perfect Christ, and instead of universal law the loving will of the Father for all His children, and you have a deepened, sweetened, softened Stoicism which is identical with a sturdy, strenuous, and virile Christianity.

If a man has in his heart the earnest desire to be like Christ, and to do the things that help to carry out Christ's Spirit in the world, it is absolutely impossible that he should ever find himself[Pg 280] in a situation where what he most desires to do cannot be done. Now a man who in every conceivable situation can do what he most desires to do is as completely "master of his fate" and "captain of his soul" as the most strenuous Stoic ever prayed to be. And yet he is saved from the coldness and hardness and repulsiveness of the mere Stoic, because the object of his devotion, the aim of his assertion, is not his own barren, frigid, formal self, but the kindly, sympathetic, loving Christ, whom he has chosen to be his better self. Like the Stoic, he brings every thought into captivity; but it is not the captivity of a prison, the empty chamber of his individual soul, swept and garnished; it is captivity to the most gracious and gentle and generous person the world has ever known,—it is captivity to Christ.

When misfortune and calamity overtakes him, he transforms it into a blessing and a discipline, not like the mere Stoic through passive resignation to an impersonal law, as of gravitation, or electricity, or bacteriology, but through active devotion to that glory of God which is to be furthered mainly by kindness and sympathy and service to our fellow-men. The man who has this love of Christ in his heart, and who is devoted to the doing of the Father's loving will, can[Pg 281] exclaim in every untoward circumstance, "I can do all things in Him that strengtheneth me." He can shout with more than Stoic defiance: "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" In all the literature of Stoic exultation in the face of frowning danger and impending doom, there is nothing that can match the splendid outburst of the great Apostle: "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or anguish, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Everything that we found noble, and strong, and brave in Stoicism we find also here; the power to transform external evil into internal good, and to hold so tightly to our self-chosen good that no power in earth or heaven can ever wrest it from us,—a good so universal that the circumstance is inconceivable in which it would fail to work. Yet with all this tenacious, world-conquering strength, there is, drawn from the divine Source of this[Pg 282] affection a gentleness, and sympathy, and tenderness, and humble human helpfulness, which the Stoic in his boastfulness, and hardness, and self-sufficiency could never know.

The Christian abhors lying and stealing, scolding and slandering, slavery and prostitution, meanness and murder, not less but far more than the Stoic. But he refrains from these things, not under constraint of abstract law, but because he cares so deeply and sensitively for the people whom these things affect that he cannot endure the thought that any word or deed of his should bring them pain or loss or shame or degradation. Thus he gets the Stoic strength without its hardness, the Stoic universality without its barrenness, the Stoic exaltation without its pride, the Stoic integrity without its formalism, the Stoic calm without its impassiveness.

Christianity is as lofty as Platonism; but it gets its elevation by a different process. Instead of rising above drudgery and details, it lifts them up into a clearer atmosphere, where nothing is servile or menial which can glorify God or serve a fellow-man.

The great truth which Plato taught was the subordination of the lower elements in human nature to the higher. In the application of this[Pg 283] truth, as we saw, Plato went far astray. His highest was not attainable by every man; and he proposed to enforce the dictates of reason by fraud and intimidation on those incapable of comprehending their reasonableness. Thus he was led into that fallacy of the abstract universal which is common to all socialistic schemes. Christianity takes the Platonic principle of subordination of lower to higher; but it adds a new definition to what the higher or rather the highest is; and it introduces a new appeal for the lowliest to become willing servants and friends of the highest, instead of mere constrained serfs and slaves. This highest principle is, of course, Love of the God who loves all His human children, friendship to the Christ who is the friend of every man. Consequently there are no humble working-men to be coerced and no unfortunate women to be maltreated; no deformed and ill-begotten children to be exposed to early death, as in Plato's exclusive scheme. To the Christian every child is a child of God, every woman a sister of Christ, every man a son of the Father, and consequently no one of them can be disregarded in our plans of fellowship and sympathy and service; for whoever should dare to leave them out of his own sympathy and love would thereby exclude himself from the Love[Pg 284] of God, likeness to Christ, and participation in the Christian Spirit.

Thus Christianity gives us all that was wise and just in the Platonic principle of the subordination of the lower elements in our nature to the higher; but its higher is so much above the highest dream of Plato that it guards certain forms of social good at points where, even in Plato's ideal Republic, they were ruthlessly betrayed.

Christianity finally gathers up into itself whatever is good in the principle of Aristotle. The Aristotelian principle was the devotion of life to a worthy end and the selection of efficient means for its accomplishment. On that general formula it is impossible to improve. "To this end have I been born, and to this end am I come into the world," is Jesus' justification of His mission, when questioned by Pontius Pilate. "One thing I do, forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before, I press on toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus," is Paul's magnificent apology for his way of life. The concentration of one's whole energy upon a worthy end, and the willing acceptance of pains, privations, and penalties which may be incidental to the effective prosecution of that[Pg 285] end, is the comprehensive formula of every brave and heroic life, whether it be the life of Jew or Gentile, Greek or Christian. It is not because it sets forth something different from this wise and brave prosecution of a noble end that Christianity is an improvement on the teaching of Aristotle; it is because the end at which the Christian aims is so much higher, and the fortitude demanded by it is so much deeper, that Christianity has superseded and deserves to supersede the noblest teaching of the greatest Greeks. What was the end which Aristotle set before himself and his disciples? Citizenship in a city state half free and half enslaved, with leisure for the philosophic contemplation of the learned few, bought by the constrained toil of the ignorant, degraded many; the refined companionship of choice congenial spirits for which it was expected that the multitude would be forever incapacitated and from which they would be forcibly excluded. Over against this aristocracy of birth, opportunity, leisure, training, and intelligence Jesus sets the wide democracy of virtue, service, Love. Whoever is capable of doing the humblest deed in Love to God and service to man becomes thereby a member of the kingdom of the choicest spirits to be found in earth or heaven, and entitled to the[Pg 286] same courteous and delicate consideration which the disciple would show to his Master. The building up of such a kingdom and the extension of its membership to include all the nations of the earth and all classes and conditions of men within its happy fellowship, and in its noble service, is the great end which Jesus set before himself and which He invites each disciple to share.

Whatever hardship and toil, whatever pain and persecution, whatever reviling and contumely, whatever privation and poverty may be necessary to the accomplishment of this great end the Master himself gladly bore, and He asks His followers to do the same. In a world full of hypocrisy and corruption, pride and pretence, avarice and greed, cruelty and lust, malice and hate, selfishness and sin, there are bound to be many trials to be borne, much hard work to be done, many blows to be received, much suffering to be endured. All that is inevitable, whatever view one takes of life. Christ, however, shows us the way to do and bear these things cheerfully and bravely as part of His great work of redeeming the world from the bondage and misery of these powers of evil, and establishing His kingdom of Love. To keep the clear vision of that great end before our eyes, to keep the sense of His com[Pg 287]panionship warm and glowing within our hearty never to lose the sense of the great liberation and blessing this kingdom will bring to our downtrodden, maltreated brothers and sisters in the humbler walks of life, Jesus tells us is the secret of that sanity and sacrifice which is able to make the yoke of useful toil easy, and the burden of social service light; and to transform the cross of suffering into a crown of joy.

Each of these four previous principles is valuable and essential; and the fact that Christianity is higher than them all, no more warrants the Christian in dispensing with the lower elements, than the supremacy of the roof enables it to dispense with the foundation and the intervening stories. Both for ourselves, and for the world in which we live, we need to make our ideal of personality broad and comprehensive. We need to combine in harmonious and graceful unity the happy Epicurean disposition to take fresh from the hand of nature all the pleasures she innocently offers; the strong Stoic temper that takes complacently whatever incidental pains and ills the path of duty may have in store for us; the occasional Platonic mood which from time to time shall lift us out of the details of drudgery when they threaten to obscure the larger outlook of[Pg 288] the soul; the shrewd Aristotelian insight which weighs the worth of transient impulses and passing pleasures in the impartial scales of intellectual and social ends; and then, not as a thing apart, but rather as the crown and consummation of all these other elements, the generous Christian Spirit, which makes the joys and sorrows, the aims and interests, of others as precious as one's own, and sets the Will of God which includes the good of all His creatures high above all lesser aims, as the bond that binds them all together in the unity of a personal life which is in principle perfect with some faint approximation to the divine perfection.

The omission of any truth for which the other ancient systems stood mutilates and impoverishes the Christian view of life. Ascetic Puritanism, for instance, is Christianity minus the truth taught by Epicurus. Sentimental liberalism is Christianity without the Stoic note. Dogmatic orthodoxy is Christianity sadly in need of Plato's search-light of sincerity. Sacerdotal ecclesiasticism is Christianity that has lost the Aristotelian disinterestedness of devotion to intellectual and social ends higher and wider than its own institutional aggrandisement.

The time is ripe for a Christianity which shall[Pg 289] have room for all the innocent joys of sense and flesh, of mind and heart, which Epicurus taught us to prize aright, yet shall have the Stoic strength to make whatever sacrifice of them the universal good requires; which shall purge the heart of pride and pretence by questionings of motive as searching as those of Plato, and at the same time shall hold life to as strict accountability for practical usefulness and social progress as Aristotle's doctrines of the end and the mean require. It is by some such world-wide, historical approach, and the inclusion of whatever elements of truth and worth other systems have separately emphasised, that we shall reach a Christianity that is really catholic.

To take the duties and trials, the practical problems and personal relationships of life up into the atmosphere of Love, so that what we do and how we treat people becomes the resultant, not of the outward situation and our natural appetites and passions, but of the outward situation and Love within our hearts,—this is what it means to live in the Christian Spirit; this is the essence of Christianity. Strengthened character and straightened conduct are sure to follow the maintenance of this spiritual relationship. Not that it will transform one's hereditary traits and acquired habits all at[Pg 290] once, or save one from many a slip and flaw. Even the Christian Spirit of Love takes time to work its moral transformation. The tendency of it, however, is steady and strong in the right direction; and in due time it will conquer the heart and control the action of any man who, whether verbally or silently, whether formally or informally, maintains this conscious relationship to that Love at the heart of things which most of us call God. Jesus and all who have shared His spiritual insight tell us that the maintenance of this relationship, close, warm, and quick, is the pearl of great price, the one thing needful, the potency of righteousness, the secret of blessedness; and that there is more hope of a man with a bad record and many besetting sins who honestly tries to keep this relationship alive within his breast, than there is of the self-righteous man who boasts that he can keep himself outwardly immaculate without these inward aids.

Christianity of this simple, vital sort is the world's salvation. Criticised by enemies and caricatured by friends; fossilised in the minds of the aged, and forced on the tongues of the immature; mingled with all manner of exploded superstition, false philosophy, science that is not so, and history that never happened; obscured under absurd rites;[Pg 291] buried in incredible creeds; professed by hypocrites; discredited by sentimentalists; evaporated by mystics; stereotyped by literalists; monopolised by sacerdotalists; it has lived in spite of all the grave-clothes its unbelieving disciples have tried to wrap around it, and holds the keys of eternal life.[Pg 292]

[Pg 293]

INDEX

Accident, Stoic explanation of, 83-85.

Adversity, test of Christian character, 276.

Altruism, 10-15, 222.

Ambition, 143-144, 182.

Amputation of morbid reflections, 33.

Apperception, 66-70.

Aristotle—
Limitations of, 212-213.
Summary of, 213-214.
On—
Celibacy, 180-181.
Chastity, 202-204.
Courage, 204-206.
Friendship, 209-212.
Need of instruments, 191-194.
Pleasure, 160-175.
Prudence, 200.
Social nature of man, 176-179.
Temperance, 201.
Test of character, 184.
The end, 179-191.
The mean, 194-198.
The virtues, 199-208.
Wealth, 192.
Wisdom, 199.
Completed in Christianity, 284-287.

Arnold, Matthew, 100, 107.

Avarice, 146-147.


Bacteria, on the whole beneficent, 84-85.

Beatitudes, 265.

Blessedness of Love, 264-277.

Boss, political, evolution of, 150-151.


Carlyle, 160-161, 190.

Celestial Surgeon, 19.

Celibacy, 180-181.

Chastity, 202-204, 229-232.

Cheerfulness, 19.

Christian—
Church government, 240.
Forgiveness, 259-260.
Joy, 275.
Modesty, 265.
Peace, 270-272.
Sacrifice, 254-256, 273-274.
Use and misuse of creeds, 241-243.
Worship, 240.
Interpretation of—
Art, 249-251.
Business, 249-251.
Divorce, 233-235.
Marriage, 228.
Murder, 225-228.
Pleasure, 255.
Politics, 249-251.
Profanity, 235.
Science, 249-251.
Wealth, 248-252.

Christianity—
The completion of—
Aristotle, 284-287.
Epicureanism, 277-279.
Plato, 282-284.
Stoicism, 279-282.
Missionary character of, 262-263.
In need of intellectual honesty, 241-243.
Supremacy of, 277-291.

[Pg 294]Christmas Sermon, Stevenson's, 19.

Circumstances alter acts, 129.

Cleanthes' hymn, 97-99.

Clubs, women's, 188-189.

Commandments, Aristotelian, 213.

Cosmopolitanism, Stoic, 94-95.

Courage, 204-206.

Cowardice, 128.

Creeds, 241-243.

Cynicism, 82.

Cynic's prayer, 96-97.


Death, Christian triumph over, 281.
Epicurean disposition of, 7, 8, 45.
Stoic view of, 73, 77.
Whitman on, 18.

Degeneration, Plato's stages of, 143-153.

Democracy, ancient and modern, 122.
Plato on, 147-149.

Depression, 32-33.

Diet, 5, 21-22, 124-126.

Difficulty, Stoic attitude toward, 75-76.

Divorce, logical outcome of Epicureanism, 44.
Christian attitude toward, 233-235.


Education, Plato's scheme of, 131-138.

Egoism, duty of adequate, 10-15.

Electricity, beneficent, 84.

Eliot, George, 46-51.

Emerson, 165-167.

End, not justification of means, 178-179.

Epictetus, 71-77, 81, 84, 87, 88, 89, 96, 97.

Epicurean—
Day, 34-35.
Definition of personality, 37, 51.
Gods, 9, 95.
Heaven, 45.
Man, 40-41.
Woman, 42-44.

Epicureanism, defects of, 36-45, 110, 159, 169-172.
Merits of, 23-25, 52-53.
Parasitic character of, 40, 44-45, 52.

Epicurus, 1-9.

Equality, Plato on, 148.

Evil, Stoic solution of, 87-90.

Eye of good man upon us, 6.


Fighting, a Christian duty, 270-272.

Fitzgerald, 15-16.

Forgiveness, 79, 259-260.

Fortitude, 126-129.

Friendship, 6, 166-167, 209-212.


Gentleness before all morality, 19.

Gilbert, W.S., To the Terrestrial Globe, 108.

Gluttony, 125.

Golden Rule, 223.

Good, the, according to Plato, 130.

Gravitation, beneficent, 83-84.

Gyges' ring, 115-116.


Handles, two to everything, 71.

Happiness and Virtue, 264.

Harmony, effect of, in education, 134.

Health, 10-13, 69.

Henley, To R. T. H. B., 100.

Heretic, definition of, 53-54.

Honesty, intellectual, 241-243.

Horace, Ode on Philosophy of Life, 10.

Humility, 265.

Hurry, 29-30.


Imaginary presence of good man, 6.

Independence of outward goods, 4, 74.

Indifference to external things, 71, 77-78, 81.

Intellectual honesty, 241-243.


Jesus' three ways of teaching, 215-218.

Joy, 275.

[Pg 295]Judas meets himself, 79.

Judging others, 260.

Judgment, Epicurean, Stoic, Platonic, and Aristotelian, 183.
Christian, 220-221.


Kant, categorical imperative, 86.
Good-will only real good, 85-86.
Uncompromising modern Stoic, 85.


Law, Jewish, transcended by Christianity, 219-238.
Stoic reverence for, 82-86.

Liberty, excess of, leads to slavery, 149.

Lincoln's letter to Greeley, 198.

Literature in education, 132-135.

Love, Christian, 215-291.

Lucretius, 8-9.


Marcus Aurelius, 77, 96.

Marriage, 228.

Mean, Aristotle's doctrine of the, 194-198.

Meekness, 268.

Melancholy, 33-34.

Mental healing, 30, 66, 70.

Mercy, 269.

Mill, Christian elements in his doctrine, 63.
Definition of happiness, 54.
Distinction in quality of happiness, 55-57.
Incompleteness of doctrine, 277-278.
Inconsistency of, 57-58, 63-65.
On social nature of man, 60-62.

Missionary character of Christianity, 262-263.

Modesty, 265.

Morrow, how meet most pleasantly, 7.

Murder, Christian definition of, 225-228.

Mysticism, 164.


Narrow way, 256.

Natural desires, 3.

Neoplatonism, 161-164.

"New Thought," 162.


Oaths, 235.

Obligation not to be relaxed, 167-168.

Office, good for one, bad for another, 186-187.

Omar Khayyam, 15-17, 38.

Opinion in our power, 74-75, 87.

Optimism, superficiality of modern, 82.

Otherworldliness, 36.


Pain, 2, 4.

Parasitic character of Epicureanism, 40, 44-45.

Patience, 128.

Penitence, 267.

Perfectionism, 92-93.

Persecution, 272-276.

Pessimism, 37-38.

Philosophers, as kings, 138.

Plato—
Defects of, 120-122, 162-168.
Merits of, 159-162, 278.
On—
Athletics, 136.
Cardinal virtues, 123-131.
Democracy, 147-149.
Education, 131-138.
Literature in education, 132-135.
Philosophers as kings, 138.
Riches and rich men, 145-147.
Righteousness, 113-223, 138-142, 153-159.
The good, 130, 137.
Completed in Christianity, 282-284.

Play, 26-28.

Pleasure, 2-4, 20, 39, 30-65, 110-111, 169-175, 255.

Politician, 117-119, 150-152.

Poverty, 4.

Power, things in our, 74.

Prayer, 257-258, 268.

[Pg 296]Present, the time to live, 6, 36.

Procrastination, 6-7.

Prudence, 5-6, 20, 251.

Purity, 270.


Reading Gaol, 226.

Religion of Stoics, 95-100.

Reverence, 215.

Rewards and penalties not essential to virtue, 112-115.

Riches, 4-5, 67-69, 89, 145-147, 248-252.

Righteousness, 113-123, 138-142, 153-159.

Romola, 46-51.


Sacrifice, 254-256, 273-274.

Self-regard and excessive self-sacrifice, 10-15.

Seneca's pilot, 77.

Sexual morality, 202-204, 270.

Sin, 93.

Sleep, 22.

Social nature of man, 60-62, 176-179.

Socrates' prayer, 159.

Sorrow, Stoic attitude toward, 76-77.

Spencer, 10-15, 277-278.

Spirit, one of three elements in our nature, 126-128.

Stevenson, 18, 19, 201.

Stoic—
Acceptance of criticism, 103.
Attitude toward sorrow, 76-77, 78, 80, 101-102.
Cosmopolitanism, 94-95.
Doctrine of no degrees in vice, 90-92.
Equanimity, 103-105.
Fortitude, 105-106.
Indifference, 71-81.
Paradoxes, 90-95.
Perfection of the sage, 93-93.
Religion, 95-103.
Resignation, 97, 104-105.
Reverence for law, 82-86.
Solution of problem of evil, 87-90.

Stoicism, coldness of, 107-109.
Completed in Christianity, 279-282.
Defects of, 106-109, 159.
Permanent value of, 101-106, 279-282.
Two principles of, 101.


Temperance, 200-204.

Theatre, 27.

Tito Melema, 46-51.

Tranquillity, 75.

Travel, foreign, the paradise of Epicurean women, 42.

Trial, Stoic endurance of, 75,89-90.

Tyranny, Plato on, 149-153.

Tyrant, most miserable of men, 153.


Unrighteousness the greatest evil, 140-141, 154-157.


Vexation, Stoic formula for, 78.

Virtue, 87-88, 110-116, 199-208.


Wealth, 4-5, 67-69, 145-148, 182, 248-252.

Whitman, Walt, 17, 18.

Wisdom, 129-131, 199.

Work, excessive, 10-15, 23-25.

Worry, folly of, 24, 29-30, 33, 252-253.

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