THE STEPS OF LIFE
  BY CARL HILTY




[Illustration]




  THE STEPS OF LIFE
  _Further_ ESSAYS ON HAPPINESS

  BY
  CARL HILTY
  PROFESSOR OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW
  IN THE UNIVERSITY OF BERN

  TRANSLATED BY MELVIN BRANDOW
  MINISTER OF THE CHURCH OF OUR FATHER
  IN LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA

  WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
  FRANCIS GREENWOOD PEABODY
  PROFESSOR OF CHRISTIAN MORALS IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO.
  LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1907




  COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

  Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1907.

  _Norwood Press_
  _J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co._
  _Norwood, Mass., U.S.A._




INTRODUCTION


_The welcome offered to the translation of Professor Hilty’s
“Happiness” amply justifies the translation of a second series of his
essays. The same notes of tranquil reflection and keen observation,
which have drawn to the earlier volumes many readers both in Europe and
America, are here struck again. Professor Hilty is not a preacher, and
his essays are not sermons. He is a professor of Constitutional Law,
and the studies of life which these volumes represent are products of
his leisure hours, wrought out of his meditation and experience. Sin
and sorrow, culture and courage, a just judgment of others, a rational
optimism, and a simple Christian faith--these are the “Steps of Life”
up which this wise teacher mounts, and which he invites thoughtful
readers to climb. Laurence Oliphant is reported to have said that
what England in the nineteenth century most needed was “a spiritually
minded man of the world”--a man, that is to say, who could live in
the world without being subdued to that he worked in, a man who could
survey and judge his world with the sanity and insight of the spiritual
mind. Professor Hilty in a very exceptional degree meets this test.
His vocation is among the institutions of the political world. His
last professional treatise dealt with the history of the Referendum
in mediæval Switzerland. When in these Essays he approaches the
problems of other professions, such as those of theology or Biblical
criticism, it is as an amateur, who satisfies himself with conclusions
which must appear to many minds untenable. It is, however, precisely
this unprofessional character of his reflections which gives them
their importance. Here is a learned man, whose business is with other
studies, and who has known much both of public honor and of private
affliction, who refreshes and consoles himself with the observation and
interpretation of life, and surveys the shifting landscape of human
experience from the height of a responsive mind and a chastened will.
It is the testimony of a spiritually minded man of the world._

_There are signs enough at the present time that the spirit of the age
is dominated by the creed of commercialism and materialism; and there
are writers enough who deplore this movement of events and who prophesy
social disasters; but something good may be believed of a generation
which is so ready to welcome books like Professor Hilty’s. It may be
true, as has been cleverly said, that many people like to read about
the “Simple Life” who have not the least idea of practising it; but
the inclination to such literature may be more reasonably traced to a
more serious cause. It indicates a survival, beneath the boisterous
prosperity of the time, of the instincts of idealism, which still
create in great numbers of persons a profound dissatisfaction with the
commercial tests of happiness and success. Never was a generation less
contented than ours with itself,--less satiated or tranquil in spirit.
Increase of wealth has brought with it increase of restlessness;
outward prosperity has induced nervous prostration; expansion of
opportunity has created expansion of desire. The fundamental problems
of sin and sorrow have become all the more baffling and mysterious
as the superficial problems of subsistence and livelihood have been
solved. At such a time it is not surprising that thoughtful minds turn
eagerly to any teacher who speaks with confidence of the realities of
idealism, who faces experience with a serene hope, and who points out
the “Steps of Life” which lead toward the things which are unseen and
eternal. To such readers Professor Hilty has already brought courage
and faith, and they will gladly accept his further guidance._

                                                     FRANCIS G. PEABODY.

  _Harvard University, December, 1906._




CONTENTS


                                        PAGE

  ESSAY I

    SIN AND SORROW                         1

  ESSAY II

    “COMFORT YE MY PEOPLE”                35

  ESSAY III

    ON THE KNOWLEDGE OF MEN               53

  ESSAY IV

    WHAT IS CULTURE?                     109

  ESSAY V

    NOBLE SOULS                          141

  ESSAY VI

    TRANSCENDENTAL HOPE                  165

  ESSAY VII

    THE PROLEGOMENA OF CHRISTIANITY      183

  ESSAY VIII

    THE STEPS OF LIFE                    213




I. SIN AND SORROW




I. SIN AND SORROW


Although the Way to Happiness is ever plain and open to all, yet not
all who have seen it succeed in really finding it. Like poor Pliable
in the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” they turn back when once they have fallen
into the Slough of Despond; and it is they, and not those who have
never tried it, who give the narrow path to genuine happiness the poor
repute it has with so-called realists.

Such deserters are often highly gifted and, at first, earnest; and they
are by no means always lacking in the courage needed to seek the truth
and for its sake to give up the enticing illusions of life. But on the
very threshold of that better life which alone brings peace stand two
dark figures, like the guardians at the mouth of Hell in the “Paradise
Lost”; and before them even the stoutest heart trembles, and they let
no man by who has not first had it out with them.

What stands in the way of our happiness is a twofold terrible reality
known to every one who has lived beyond the first half-unconscious
age of childhood--Sin and Sorrow. To be set free from these is the
true motive in all men’s strivings after happiness; no philosophy, no
religion, no economics, no politics, that is not essentially directed
to this end.

Of these two great antagonists, with which every man has to engage in
hard conflict, the first is Sin. It begins early in life, for the most
part earlier than sorrow, earlier even than the common expression of
“the innocence of childhood” implies. “Ye lead us into life amain,
ye let poor man all sinful grow, and then abandon him to pain;” thus
Goethe accuses the “heavenly powers,” really meaning, however, an
inexorable fate which, in his view, dominates human existence, and
against which neither Promethean revolt avails nor the attempt (more
common since his day) to deny the existence of sin altogether. In every
man there lives a relentlessly real feeling that duty and sin do exist,
and that sin not merely follows transgression, but is lodged within it
and must pour its consequences with mathematical certainty upon the
head of the guilty one, unless averted by some means or other; and that
can be by no mere philosophical train of reasoning.

Try (if you would be so bold) by mere negation to declare yourself free
from these realities, rooted like granite in all human existence!
Notwithstanding your resolution, there is, all the same, in every
action of yours, yes, in every thought, _a right way_, and if you do
not pursue it, then it is a sin. Or rather do not try; it is a reef on
which millions have already gone to pieces, and on which you will go
to pieces, too. “Beyond all Good and Evil” is a place not to be found
on earth outside the mad-house, where many men, often highly gifted,
are shut up to-day; not merely by chance, for the human spirit sinks
into madness whenever, in all earnestness, it seeks to disregard these
truths in its own life.

I am quite well aware that this does not “explain” the feeling of duty
and sin; besides, it is a matter of indifference to man’s welfare how
this feeling is to be explained, whether as a superstition handed down
for many generations, or as a belief wholly in accord with reason. Even
if it be a superstition, the champion has not yet been found who is
able to set humanity free from a nightmare which has burdened it from
the beginning of time; the isolated, weak attempts to do so have for
the most part fallen out very unhappily for those who undertook them. A
man who, with clear, unclouded brow, openly denies duty and sin, and,
though boldly believing he may do anything he pleases, has yet gone
through his whole life glad-heartedly, with the certainty of his inner
conviction unruffled--such a man we should first like to see, before we
believe in him. And though such a man were to be found, he would stand
alone and would be incomprehensible to all other men, so differently
constituted.

Duty and sin become wholly intelligible only when we recognize a
personal, extra-mundane God from whose will this inner law proceeds;
while the so-called “immanence” of God is but another name for atheism
or pantheism. To be sure, it would be idle to desire a reasoned
explanation of the transcendental God; everything transcendental by
its very nature escapes our comprehension, and for this reason the
so-called “proofs” of the existence of God have no power to convince
the human understanding. Nor do they seem as yet ever to have convinced
any one who did not first want to be. In so far, therefore, atheism
has a certain right to declare itself not convinced; but it is itself
just as little in a position to prove that its own system is in any
way reasonable, or to solve the doubts which that system generates.
Therefore so long as humanity abides, the matter will perhaps stand
simply at this, that one can not prove there is a God, but just as
little, if God indeed exists, can one remove him out of the account of
his own life by a mere denial. The decisive question of all questions
for every man (but always a question) will be: whether he shall attempt
such a denial and be able to attain the inward peace he expects
therefrom, or whether he shall acknowledge as binding the categorical
demand of the oldest divine revelation, “I am the Lord thy God, and
thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

The willing recognition of this demand (which in its second half
already comprehends all morality) by a man who has come to full
deliberation over himself and his life-purpose,--this it is that first
brings him out of a thoroughly ineffectual revolt against a divine
order he can not change by his thoughts alone, on into the possibility
of a harmony with himself and the surrounding world. And besides, the
whole history of humanity is nothing else than the gradual unfolding of
such a free will of the nations toward the will of God. Whoever denies
this, and lives up to his denial, acts against his own welfare and the
end for which he was destined, as well as against the good of mankind;
and this state of war against God and man, as well as against one’s own
life, is very likely the cause that calls forth the feeling of sin.
There is no other and better explanation for it, in my opinion.

Moreover, what Evil really is and exactly what Christ understood by
the prayer for deliverance from it will, as long as we live on earth,
remain just as obscure to us as what God is. We only know, and from
experience alone, that we can yield ourselves into its power, and
further, that it possesses no other power over us than we ourselves
grant it. This especially comes to pass through our disobedience to
what is true and through the preponderance of the sensual, animal
life over the spiritual. Every more finely organized man feels this
forthwith through a gradually increasing physical discomfort from
which nothing else than a turn-about shall free him. And likewise, the
spirit of truth in a man or a book, in a whole household or people, one
recognizes as something beneficent, while the spirit of falsehood he
feels to be something unhealthy and poisonous, like bad air in a room,
to which one can, to be sure, accustom oneself, if one desires. A man
can, of course, try to dismiss all this matter from his thoughts; he
has perfect freedom of will to do so. But whether it will let _him_
alone is quite another and more important question.

We neither can nor will, therefore, dispute with those who assert they
have never harbored any feeling of sin; we can not look into their
souls. We only reply that they would in that case find themselves in an
extreme minority and really at the stage of evolution of the animals;
for these also have no feeling of moral obligation and therefore no
sin, but everything is permitted them that their natural impulse
demands. If, on the other hand, such men possess the feeling of sin
only now and then even, still it must be said it is not explicable in
any other way than from the standpoint of a moral order of the world
which we can not change and contrary to which we may not behave, nor
even think.

We turn now to those who acknowledge all this. For them the problem
is to find a way of release from a burden which is by far the most
unendurable of all earthly burdens.

The first thing to say to them is this: Do not let sin get the least
foothold in your life; you must and can not do otherwise. For what
afterward becomes a crushing actuality is at first, for the most part,
merely a fleeting thought, an arrow from one knows not whence, shot
into the unoccupied soul. And if it lingers there, if it is not at
once thrust forth while it is still easy, then there soon arises an
evil propensity, upon which mostly follows, first the clouding of the
moral consciousness, and at last the deed. After the deed comes often
enough a despair that hopes for no salvation more; or what has happened
is now for the first time justified before oneself with materialistic
philosophy: in either case the death of the true spiritual life.

But unfortunately this counsel to “resist the beginnings” is only a
very theoretical one, and they who have the bold faith of being able
always to do this from a voluntary disposition toward the good, and by
their own strength, will, in the course of their own life and in their
observation of others, be compelled bit by bit to lessen altogether too
far the demands they make of human kind. This is the especial weakness
of the noble Kantian philosophy. A grievous passage through some Valley
of Humiliation, or an abatement in the clear vision of his moral
consciousness inevitably comes upon the man who, at first, believed
he was able, with uplifted head and without any help from without, to
tread the Path of Virtue without wandering from the way.

Therefore the second counsel is more important for man as he is
actually constituted: Free thyself at any cost from every sin thou
bearest, if thou wouldst arrive at happiness. This way passes the
unerring road; just as, in Purgatory, Dante could enter the portal of
salvation only by passing the grave angel guardian sitting upon the
diamond threshold with naked sword. There is no other way to set your
soul truly free. Goethe, it is true, has tried in the second part of
“Faust” to discover a kind of natural salvation from sin; and this,
in fact, has remained the path which many, still to-day, are seeking
out: namely, the noble enjoyment of nature, which at least now and
then can silence the accusing voices within; with art and the charm
of the beautiful, wherein many perceive at once the consummation and
the expiation of material man; or finally, action, a share in the work
of civilization, which is to uplift the depressed heart and to delude
itself with the applause of the multitude, at least for the moment.
But, alongside all this, nevertheless, sin remains inexorably standing,
a melancholy fact; and even the great poet was unable to set it aside
in any credible way. A divine love that receives a man to its bosom
even though he be not repentant, but, on the contrary, persists to the
last moment in defiantly living out his life in his own way--a divine
love of this sort is a mere picture of the fancy, an arbitrary poetical
invention, against which even Goethe’s Promethean soul was obliged, for
its own honor, to protest with the last breath of the body.

Yet even repentance does not alone release from sin, but there must be
a trustful turning of the soul to God, whose mighty arm of mercy (as
Manfred says in Dante’s great poem) receives all that turn to it; and
it will not be prevented from doing so, even by an authoritative decree
of a church.

And in this regard the greatness of the sin is no matter. What _is_
great and small in human sin anyway, weighed, not according to human
notions and the penal law-books, but in the eye of a judge who knows
all and metes a perfect justice?

Whoever finds within himself the courage to appeal to His mercy has
already received it in all essentials, for the disfavor of God
consists mainly in the “judgment of obduracy,” a judgment which lets
the offender remain unbroken and defiant until his end, and prevents
him from calling upon this mercy.

Our churches, to be sure, have in a measure widely strayed from this
simple way of atonement and affirm a very much more positive manner of
salvation from sin, either through outward works, or at least through
definite dogmatic conceptions of reconciliation with God.

In the first case, we hold that all outward works of penitence, as well
as all “good works,” are valueless unless they spring spontaneously
from the inner turning to God. Even then they are never meritorious
although helpful and pacifying. The essential thing in “repentance” (a
great matter, whose import, however, we have almost lost) is not the
sorrow of regret, which rather, often enough, merely “worketh death,”
but on the one hand, the complete turning of the will toward a change
of life, and on the other hand, the conviction that, for this purpose,
we stand in need of another power than our own, a power without which
the will itself often enough remains only a “good intention.”

Quite intelligible, therefore, at least for the Christian churches
and their sincere adherents, is the appeal to the help of Christ as
the Saviour sent into the world by God himself, and who for that very
reason may not be ignored. But the oppressed soul does not, therefore,
need an extensive “Christology”; indeed, there is really no Christology
that is trustworthy, but God alone knows the nature of this Saviour
and the mystery of salvation through him. All that men have spoken
and written about it for two centuries now has been condemned to
unfruitfulness and has given real comfort to no one, although human
error in these matters, if held in good faith, has probably of itself
never caused any one to be lost. Only by the practical but unfailing
road of experience, then, will you learn that a simple “Lord, help me,”
coming from the very depths of the heart, shall open a way that, to all
your philosophy, to all your submission to church, to all your severest
works of penitence, had remained closed as with tenfold iron doors.
This barricade is opened for you by the one great, unconditioned word
of the gospel: “Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.”

Whether you are to confess to men besides, and what reparation you have
to make to them, is to be determined only after you have experienced
this salvation, after you have taken the Hand that lifts you out of the
unstable floods of uncertainty and anxiety, and sets you upon the firm
ground of faith. Before, it is quite to no purpose; rather, this is
just the obstacle which keeps far the most men from any confession of
repentance--which has perhaps to take place before a third person, on
whom one then fears to stand, his life long, in spiritual dependence.
But very possibly you will feel yourself called to go to a man for
confession; for in addition to its transcendental side Christianity is,
after all, a human brotherhood also. And this will be especially the
case when pride is in your soul. In that event there enters, perhaps,
the psychological necessity of a humbling before men also, not alone
before God; and the actual expression of forgiveness, by a man called
thereto by God, contains for many men a quieting influence that they
can not find in a mere thought-process, real as it may be.

If, then, you know such a man, if you feel this inner summons, if
you can resolve to speak to him with entire sincerity as before God
himself, and if you are willing to accept his directions without
reservations, then simply go quietly to him; in so doing, it is
possible you are attaining to a greater advance in the inner life,
and in shorter time than otherwise. But if even a single one of
these presuppositions is wanting, then such a confession will profit
you nothing at all. And if you should make of it a merely human
transaction, out of regard to an existing ecclesiastical form, or in
order thereby to show honor to another, then you dishonor what is most
hallowed, and bring upon yourself, and upon him you honor, the greatest
harm.

And make up your mind to escape now, while it is still time and while
the summons still comes to you, no matter through whom or in what
way; whether through a voice within or a voice from without, whether
by chance or of set purpose, whether through sermon, or book, or
newspaper, or any other instrumentality. The Book of Job asserts as
a fact of experience that the summons comes to every one “twice or
thrice”:

  “_Lo, all these things doth God work,
  Twice, yea, thrice with a man,
  To bring back his soul from the pit,
  That he may be enlightened with the light of the living._”

But as a rule the summons has an outward semblance no more striking
than that of any other communication. Much more than upon its form and
manner it depends upon this: that it touch in the innermost heart of
man a string still sensitive to this tone, struck from another key than
one’s ordinary life and thought.

And so, if the summons shall come to you once more, then arouse
yourself, but at once, where you are and as you are, in business, on
the street, in society, even in the theatre or in any other place;
delay for not one minute the resolution to strike every sin out of
your life. Then everything will become easier and clearer; that gloomy
spirit and those false conceptions, which are simply the direct
consequence of sin itself, will leave you, and a day will come at last
when you also can say: “Now am I become, in God’s sight, a soul that
findeth peace.”


II

If you should ask men which of these two great evils, sin and sorrow,
they had rather see banished from their life, the majority, we fear,
would choose to see sorrow banished. But wrongly; for not only is sin
very often the basal cause of sorrow, but it is also comparatively
easy to bear heavy sorrow if no feeling of guilt is bound up with it.
On the contrary, even in the midst of grief one often feels a closer
nearness to God that beatifies the human heart in its inmost depths;
one feels, too, the truth of the saying that the spirit of man can be
joyous even in distress. And so, beyond all doubt, the greatest of
evils is sin; and in this fact lies, what is very often overlooked, a
tremendous equalizing force in human conditions, which in this respect
know no distinction between rich and poor.

On the other hand, to be sure, the relation of the two evils to each
other is, not rarely, an inverted one: the first impulse to sin comes
sometimes from sorrow, the tormenting anxiety how to get through life,
the conviction, in troubled moments almost forcing itself upon us, that
one will not be able to carry through the hard struggle for existence
if one is too painfully scrupulous, if one may not use a little
dishonesty, deception, and force, “just as everybody else does, and
as seems unfortunately to be inevitable, you know, in human affairs.”
Without this conviction many men would be upright who now think they
can not be. This is really a superstition which to-day almost seems
to be more prevalent than ever, and to destroy it should be one of the
chief concerns of the Christianity of our time. Christianity was also
much concerned therewith in the days of its beginnings, when it gave
not merely the counsel but the command, “not to be anxious,” giving at
the same time a very positive direction as to how the command might be
carried out: “Seek ye first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all
these things shall be added unto you.”

But this counsel, of course, presupposes trust in God; without this, it
is of no value. An unconquerable anxiety is, therefore, in most cases
evidence of a secret atheism. Among the most remarkable of the many
remarkable things of this life is this: that so many of the very wisest
people voluntarily submit to this punishment, their whole life through,
when they could have things so much better. For God is faithful, a
rock on which one may rely; this is the one thing we most surely know
of him, the one thing we can most easily ourselves experience. But
faithfulness is in its nature reciprocal, and our own faithfulness
consists far less in any sort of acts or confessions than in the
resolute shutting out of all distrust every time it would approach us
in the manifold difficulties and injustices of this life.

To be sure, complete confidence in the possibility of a release from
sorrows through trust in God comes to be a certainty only through
experience; but there is, in the Bible and in countless later writings
and in many human lives, such a mass of assurances and experiences of
trustworthy men, and on the other hand, there are, before our eyes, so
many obvious examples of the impossibility of any other release from
sorrow, that we may fittingly ask: Why is there so great an aversion to
making this experience? Why, when men are tormented with sorrow, often
to the point of despair, why do they not at least make trial of this,
instead of seeking death? The reason, perhaps, is mostly this: they do
not want to be dependent on God; they had much rather put dependence on
pitiless men. Indeed, the assurances of the Bible may be appropriated
in their literal, full meaning only by the man who has sought no alien
help beside, nor any human help at all before he has first sought
God’s. But how many are there to-day who do that? So long as the sun
of fortune shines for them, they believe in their “lucky star” with
a kind of ludicrous or sacrilegious fatalism, and therewith a secret
fear often takes them unawares; for “happiness of this kind needs many
supports, while the happiness of those at one with the will of God
has need of but one.” But when once they have misfortune and no human
aid to ward it off, they go all to pieces and fall into the manifold
“nervous affections” of our time, into sleeplessness and ceaseless
unrest, and these bring them to the numberless sanitariums, for the
most part vainly; for “the sorrow of the world worketh death,” and
against that no nerve specialist nor hydropathy avails.

It is certain that there is a way of release from continuous sorrow; it
must be just as certain that single and even frequent sorrows belong to
the necessary events of our life. There can be no human life without
sorrows; but to live with sorrows, yes, with many sorrows, yet free
from sorrow’s burden, that is the art of life toward which we are being
trained. It is, therefore, an everyday experience that men who have
too few sorrows buy themselves some; for riches, which in the view of
most men are meant to release one from anxiety, are not fitted to do
that; they are “deceitfulness,” as Christ himself calls them, and his
warnings against them, which we are wont to take so lightly, are surely
not there for merely “decorative effect.”

We must have sorrows, and for three substantial reasons: in the first
place, in order not to become arrogant and frivolous; sorrows are
the weight in the clock, to regulate its proper movement; misfortune
is really in most cases the only means of salvation for those who
are not on the right way. In the second place, to enable us to have
fellow-feeling with others; people who are too well nourished and free
from customary sorrows easily become egotists, who at last not merely
have compassion for pale faces no longer, but regard them as a kind
of offence, a disturbing element in their ease; they may go so far as
to feel downright hatred for them. And finally, because sorrows alone
effectively teach us to trust in God and seek his aid; for the granting
of prayer and the consequent release from sorrow is the only convincing
proof of God, and likewise the test of the truth of Christianity to
which Christ himself challenges us. Therefore the evil days are good;
without them, most men would never come at all to the soberer thoughts.

Furthermore, the deliverances from sorrow, the triumphal days when a
man beholds a mountain-load rolled away, belong to undoubtedly the
purest moments of happiness in life, moments that God must grant to
his own, if he is truly merciful to them. Spurgeon, therefore, rightly
says, in one of his finest sermons, that if we truly trust God, he is,
in the beginning, better than our fears, then better than our hopes,
and finally better than our wishes. For his people, sorrow always lasts
only so long as it still has a task to fulfil on their behalf.

If one wished to put the truth a little paradoxically, then one might,
with frank directness, say to many a man who is forever complaining of
all sorts of little things, to whom much in the world is not right,
neither weather, nor politics, nor social relations, “You have too few
cares; make yourself some, care for others who have too many; then you
will no longer have any of that sickly, discontented disposition, or at
least will no longer give so much heed to what now makes you unhappy.”
People in particular who have a spiritual calling should never wish
themselves freedom from sorrow, for then they can never effectively
speak with others who have sorrows; nay, in most cases they can not
really understand them.

And so we repeat: incessant sorrow there must not be; from such there
is a way of escape; if you will not use it, then bear your sorrow as
a punishment therefor. But of occasional troubles you must accept a
generous share with good grace and overcome them through the power of
your spirit and will.

And now we come to the various human remedies for sorrow.

The best is Patience and Courage. “Whoever,” says Bishop Sailer, “is
able to submit to God in every hour of darkness will soon see the
morning light again arise; for his submission is the cock-crow that
heralds and greets the coming day.” And indeed it is a fact remarkably
true to experience, how often all difficulty vanishes as soon as
we have taken a stand in regard to it, as soon as we have actually
shouldered it. Our very best possessions we really possess only when we
were once in our life compelled to give them up. Besides, it is easy
to notice, from our own experience, that even our judgment of things
that befall us is often wrong at first. Again and again we discover
that what was apparently unpropitious and injurious has later revealed
itself as advantageous, and that, on the other hand, so-called lucky
events have turned out to be of uncommonly little use, if not actually
harmful. And so, one is very sensible if he can suspend his judgment
in times of anxiety; and still more help can many a time be gained
from the thought that all trouble is always borne merely from moment
to moment, and that the next moment will bring a change, or at least
new strength. Very often trouble lasts, in its full force, no longer
than three days; those one may easily undertake to endure. The real
burden of unhappiness consists in the notion that it is going to last
an unlimited while; this is merely a delusion of the fancy.

But there are still some minor remedies besides, or at least
palliatives, and it is well worth the pains for one to review them
quietly and get a clear conception of them; for what is said in the
second part of “Faust” is only too true, that if sorrow but breathes
upon us, she makes us blind.

The first and most efficacious of these remedies is Work, not merely
for its immediate results, but because it busies the mind and keeps
it from useless brooding over things that perhaps never come at all;
for a great part of sorrow consists of unfounded fear. Work gives
courage, and it gives momentary forgetfulness in a legitimate way, as
unwarranted and pernicious “distractions” and drink do not. It is the
only true, permissible, and beneficent Lethe-draught of the modern
world.

The second means, which can, of course, be used only by those to whom
God is a living Personality and not merely an idea, is Prayer--indeed,
to pray to God first of all before one speaks with men. Spurgeon says,
perhaps truly, that herein lies hidden also the secret of success
with men--that is, the art of speaking rightly with men, through whom
God then sends help in a practical way. But we do not wish to write a
treatise here on prayer. Suffice it to say that, in prayer, faith is
necessary on the one hand, and on the other, that the man should turn
to God with his whole will, with all his spiritual power concentrated
upon a single point. The result, in any case, is power; and, besides
the experience of more frequent aid, there follows the conclusion,
entirely logical, that if God bestows on man the greatest of life’s
blessings, he will not refuse him those minor ones also, which serve
only for the preservation of life. There would really be no sense in
bringing a man so far on his way as to begin to lead an upright life,
and then to let him die of hunger. The expression, so often heard,
that there are no longer any miracles in these days, is most certainly
untrue. No one can bind a living God to “natural laws.”

Without doubt, however, it often happens that one must wait for the
prayer’s fulfilment, must at times, indeed, stand knocking for a long
while; or the prayer may never be fulfilled at all. But then, in the
first case, perhaps even this waiting is the right answer to the prayer
(as, to be sure, one mostly discovers only later); and in the other
case, you perhaps receive something better than you yourself had chosen.

A third means, chiefly availing in financial anxieties, is Contentment,
pleasure in simple things. From this, the men of our day have wandered
far; and, for many, an ever-heightening enjoyment passes for the only
true purpose of life, and a certain measure of luxury is regarded as
a requirement and a symbol of culture. It will be necessary for men
to return once more to simplicity in their mode of living and to a
voluntary renunciation of the philosophy of pleasure, if they are to
banish sorrow, and often still worse from their life. Praying for
pleasure nothing avails; it is not for the needs of luxury that God is
to be had, but for daily bread.

In close relation to contentment stand two other great remedies against
sorrow. The first is a wise Frugality. This goes hand in hand, indeed,
only with honest acquisition; what is unjustly acquired is seldom
wisely saved, and, according to a true proverb, rarely descends to the
third heir. In such cases, therefore, frugality is of no use. Frugality
can also, in other cases, be actually harmful. Excessive calculation,
and anxiety extending to the smallest minutiæ of expenditure, leads
to needless care, and almost as many people come to spiritual ruin
through this as through heedless improvidence. And so, the blessing (or
curse) that rests on the actions of men has a manifest relation to the
observance of the moral commandments. If it were not so, it would be
truly enigmatical how so many thousands of honest men get through life
without property or sure income. They themselves would be least of all
in a position to explain it.

There is one more remedy against financial anxiety, and that, strange
to say, is systematic Giving. This the ancient prophets of Israel
already knew; in our day it has lately assumed prominence again,
especially through George Müller and Spurgeon. Whether the amount to be
laid aside for this purpose should be the tenth part of one’s income
would seem a matter of complete indifference; but a definite part it
must be; and it should never be allowed to remain a matter of mere
intentions, which the natural avarice of men will always find ways of
evading. In this way a man oftentimes acquires his first inclination
toward caring for his poor fellow-men, while otherwise they appear to
him only too often as troublesome claimants for something that rightly
belongs to himself alone or that he has need of for himself and for
his own. But when a man possesses such a fund, no longer belonging to
himself, then he looks around more freely to see where he may put the
money to good use; then at times he even anticipates the appeal of the
tongue when he sees the mute appeal of the eye. This single habit,
universally adopted, would help solve the social question more than all
the talking and scribbling with which the world now resounds, for the
most part vainly.

A stoical remedy we will finally name, because, when all the others
have first been tried, in most cases it is no longer necessary. It
consists in picturing to ourselves the worst that could happen. And,
in fact, this does afford a certain consolation, at least for him who
is able to make use of it; others, on the contrary, can be led by this
path, and without any need for it, to despair.

Nevertheless, all this does not always bring immediate help. The
Spirit of Sorrow often falls upon one like an armed man (especially
in sleepless nights), and leaves him no time for instant resistance.
In that case, the first step is to discover the cause. If it is sin,
it must be at once set right. If there is no definite cause present,
or if it is of a physical nature, then withstand it by physical
remedies, such as sleep, fresh air, exercise, or by work; never by mere
“distractions,” for afterward the trouble returns with doubled power.
Often a good quotation will strengthen, such as: “Can a woman forget
her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of
her womb? yea, these may forget; yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I
have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.”

If the cause of sorrow is some trouble actually present, and not one
feared in the future, then perhaps the following thought will help: We
must bear what God lays upon us; and we must, with all our power of
will, hold fast the conviction that nothing can possibly happen without
his permission and that all is measured in accord with our strength,
whose actual resources we often do not know ourselves. These two
thoughts, then, are provisionally our support; whoever gives up this
support is like a man who clings to a rope over an abyss and lets go
the rope. There is no call to be overstoical; we may give vent to our
sorrow, only not at all to ourselves and but sparingly to others; and
we should then take some action in accordance with our reason, though
not in accordance with that alone,--nor always at once, while it is
still troubled with excitement. With these presuppositions, one can
endure much.

It is quite possible that at times even this does not seem rightly to
avail. In that case, these are the periods of life when the genuine
steel of character is to be formed, that otherwise may not be brought
to pass. Then at least make the attempt simply to hold out for a short
time longer,--for a month, a week, three days, or even only for a
single day. Not rarely at the end of such a term you are stronger than
at its beginning, and frequently experience shows it to be the case
that from the very moment one is preparing himself for the apparently
inevitable, and no longer seeks or expects any human aid, at that very
moment relief is already coming. The suffering has then just fulfilled
its purpose.

In conclusion, only one thing more: we know very well how people, in
the hours of their heaviest struggles with sorrow, can lose faith in
every ground of consolation and look upon such grounds as unsatisfying,
or as the empty talk of people who have themselves suffered nothing
like. That may be true, or again it may not. But, in case you think
it is, nevertheless try to bear, for the glory of God, what you will
and can no longer endure for your own sake or for the sake of those
near to you. “When you are driven almost to despair,” says Spurgeon,
“and are tempted to lay violent hands upon yourself or to do some
other rash and evil deed, do nothing of the kind, but trust yourself
to your God; that will bring him more glory than seraphim and cherubim
can give. To believe the promise of God, when you are ill, or sad, or
near to death--that it is to glorify God.” This “giving God the glory,”
or “praising the Lord,” or “hallowing his name,” is one of the many
expressions of the Bible which have now quite vanished from our real
comprehension and have become an empty phrase. To render glory to God
on earth and still to live for him though one would otherwise be glad
to dispense with life, that is the highest of all life’s resignations;
and he to whom this duty is finally intrusted is not to make complaint,
but to be ashamed if it come to one unwilling to accept it. But if it
has come to a man who has something of the heroic in his nature, then
by its means he will, for the first time, develop the possibilities
that lay dormant within him; and the feeling of a larger and surer
nearness to God will then, in the bitterest hours of his life, so lift
him above himself that these very hours will seem to his after-memory
as the most beautiful--as those, indeed, to which he owes all his real
happiness in life.

Sin and sorrow cling close together in human life; therefore they are
also displayed here before the reader as an associated hindrance on the
way to happiness.

The first step, as a rule, must be to banish sin from life; only then
may one seriously think of getting rid of sorrow. For the only true
freedom from sorrow lies not in a man’s natural disposition, nor is it
the product of happy outward surroundings of any sort; true freedom
from sorrow is found in that higher happiness, painfully won, to which
Job was led, after his earlier happiness, dependent upon fortuitous
things, had been done away. To this happiness, henceforth secure, we
all without exception should attain and can attain, just as soon as we
have fought through the gates at which the guardians Sin and Sorrow
stand.




II. “COMFORT YE MY PEOPLE”




II. “COMFORT YE MY PEOPLE”


Many who are distressed over the manifold evils of our time (but do not
themselves have to suffer any too keenly under them) comfort themselves
and others in the end with a verse from one of the hymns of Paul
Gerhardt:

  “_The upper hand God holdeth, and maketh all things well._”

I do not know whether the poet put so strong a stress upon the words
“all things” as we are wont to do, but thus much I certainly do know,
that Christianity shows scant favor to an optimism of this sort;
all things will not be well in the end in spite of human folly and
baseness; but, until the consummation of all things human, good and
evil, justice and injustice, will continue to exist side by side as
Jesus, in the parable of the wheat and the tares, has clearly said once
for all.

No, the idealism of Christianity is something quite other than a
shallow optimism; it is much rather a strong faith that everything
genuinely good, however slight compared to the tremendous power and
might of the forces arrayed against it, never can be crushed by them,
but ever maintains itself victorious against its foes. That is the
comfort to be given its followers, a comfort that will take from them
the fear of losing poise in the midst of the merciless actualities of
daily experience; and that is the real meaning of many a Bible word
too often explained in the sense of striving after earthly power and
splendor; and that, too, is the meaning of some of the finest and most
familiar hymns from the fighting days of the Reformation, such as that
hymn of Luther, “A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never-failing.”

On the other hand, the power of what Christianity calls “the world”
is very great, and all the elements that make up that power, from the
lofty pretension of some distinguished atheistic philosophy all the
way down to the basest instinct of the most brutal selfishness, form
an extremely close alliance. And the human heart, now overdaring, now
overtimid, is so uncertain that even into the life of those who work
most effectively for the good, come hours when they despair, not of
their task only, but even of their whole manner of thinking, a despair
that once and again God must dispel with a “Be not afraid, but speak.”

If we look upon life from God’s standpoint, instead of our own as we
had rather do, we see it is not a matter of purely and simply making
his people happy. No, first of all they are to be made fearless, for
all right living is a life of battling, not of unruffled peace; but
of battling without fear, of warring in a good cause and under sure
guidance with that heroism which is the highest of all human qualities
and the best of all earthly joys.

This is that never-ending conflict between good and evil which every
single human being must fight out in his own life, although the final
issue is reached only at the end of all things and in a manner to us
unknown. “On the advance post of a man’s individual experience the
question is the same as in the great battle of the hosts, namely this:
whether a faith that is anchored in God is not the highest of moral
forces, able to overcome the ever-present power of evil, especially
the fundamental sin of self-seeking; for if the victory is gained at
the advance post, it may be gained all along the line.” Perhaps this
is truer than we know, or ever experience on earth. That there is no
higher power in the world than comes from association with God, every
single human life must by trial discover. But for that very reason
such association must be sought of one’s own free will, and of one’s
own free will always cling to; and that makes the problem of life.

In order to gain, in this warfare, a spirit of joy quite different
from the moroseness and half-despair of many Christians, the means
closest at hand is this: to try to battle, not according to our own
ideas, but, as in military service, punctiliously as commanded. Such
means, however, is external; there is an inner basis for the right
spirit of joy, without which that joy can not be enduring, and that
inner basis is the abiding of God in the heart. When all opposition
to God disappears, then appears the real joy of living and the great
consolation he gives on earth. This peace with God, which in time
may even grow, as it were, into an enduring and genuine friendship,
the human soul must experience, else it shall not know what inward
happiness is. And outward happiness is only the easy sequence of the
inward; God gladly does nothing but good to men as soon as he finds it
possible.

Here, also, lies the real cause of the philosophical atheism that makes
up the religion of many excellent people, who suppose they can not
think otherwise, though they would gladly like to. A man’s simple logic
will tell him that it is not consistent to say one believes in God, and
yet not allow God to dwell in him and rule him absolutely; and it is a
noble trait of many doubters that they do not dare to serve God with
mere phrases, but they see that if once he should be taken up into the
account of life, he would be a “consuming fire” for much that exists in
their lives, for much that they would be obliged to give up, but do not
want to give up. Faith is a matter, not of the reason, but of the human
will; and the difficulty lies in just this resolution to serve God,
with all its consequences--a resolution the man himself must make, for
no divine mercy can wholly take its place.

The principal things a man must surrender, if God is to be able to
dwell in him, are pleasure, riches, glory, and reliance upon men.
On the other hand, when this renunciation has once been made, more
and more there disappear within him, of themselves, fear, anger,
unrest, and the tormenting feeling of weakness, all of them the sure
inheritance and distinguishing mark of the godless. This is the road,
and they who think they can squeeze around this sharp corner with a
few philosophical considerations, or with an occasional cry of “Lord,
Lord,” will likely be the most deceived at last.

Fear is perhaps the most distressing, the most unworthy, yet the most
unavoidable of all human feelings; for life is a battle, and the fear
that naturally arises in the presence of battle no man can banish; he
can but subdue it by uplifting his point of view. Whether this can
be done through the ancient Stoic or the modern Kantian philosophy,
we will leave to one side; I have no intention of making any one
dissatisfied with these paths. But I do wish to say that there is
a surer and shorter path, requiring less education and strength of
character, and open, not merely to an aristocracy of philosophical
culture, but to every one. If this had not been so, if Christianity
had not lifted the poor and the humble up out of the dust, a “gentry
morality” would long ago have come into exclusive mastery in the world,
as it was in a fair way of doing at the time Christianity was born.

In our day there are two common conceptions of Christianity, both
of them overpassing the mark: one of them makes of it a sentimental
lamblike bliss that finds its pleasurable sensations solely “in
Christ”; the other considers it a fearful vale of tears, an unending
succession of trials and sorrows. But Christianity is not so; its path
is really much easier than any other; for it not only demands, it
also creates, brave people--brave people who, free from complaining,
free from overmuch seeking of even rightful pleasures, free from any
cowardly flight from the world, in the very midst of the world hold up
unshaken the banner of righteousness and never despair of its victory.

This is the spirit that we most need to-day; and this is the sure mark
of a genuine Christian. If we will, we can be wholly without fear,
not only before the forces of nature, which all stand in God’s higher
power, but also before the cares of daily life, and before men, who may
do nothing hostile without God’s permission. Firmly to trust in God
in all he does or allows, even if one is ill, or troubled, or almost
in despair of any good outcome of a matter, that it is to serve God;
and in comparison with this, all your other church “services” possess
a distinctly subordinate worth. And so Luther, too, himself endowed
with this bravery in high degree, says thus: “The reason knows no
means of making the heart contented and trustful, in those times of
need when all the good things the world can give shall fail. But when
Christ comes, the outward adversities, indeed, he lets remain, but the
personality he strengthens; he makes the weak heart unterrified, and
the trembling heart he makes bold; and he turns the restless conscience
into one that is peaceful and still. And, therefore, such a man is
comforted, courageous, and joyous in those very matters in which all
the world else stands terrified; that is, in death, in terror for sin,
and in all the times of need when the world can no longer help with its
good things and its consolations. Then there will be a real and lasting
peace, ever enduring and invincible so long as the heart shall hold to
Christ.”

Then add to this that God is faithful and lets no one be tried beyond
his strength; yes, even before the greatest of physical and moral
dangers he often holds his hands over our eyes, so that we see them
only when past.

To be sure, all this is inconceivable to those who have not themselves
experienced in evil days that even in misfortune’s blackest hour a
calm, bright, yes, even blithe spirit can yet abide deep within the
heart inclined to God; and men of such experience, therefore, often
endure incredible things, and then, at the slightest gleam of the
sun, quickly again lift themselves up anew, bodily and spiritually
strengthened from within; while other men are submerged in the waters.

It can not be denied, however, that we learn a right courage only by
degrees and in days of sorrow; and it is generally only through such
days that we attain to the right conception of life and grow into a
larger mould. So true is this that perhaps no human being of any real
worth has ever yet gone through life without many sorrows, sorrows
that the Scriptures often and quite rightly compare to a refining fire
that can be made thoroughly hot only when there is much precious metal
present; but then it brings all the gold within a man to light. He who
is not willing to suffer renounces the greatest gifts of God, and rests
satisfied with smaller things, needlessly: for even in the greatest
trouble he has no need to fear; so long as he does fear, there is still
within him something wrong that must out.

With fear, anger also disappears; and anger in most cases is only fear
in disguise. The angry are not courageous, they are afraid; you may
nearly always count upon that with entire certainty. For example,
the restless zealots and agitators who think their mission is to save
Christianity from its death-bed through the might of their zeal and
hate--such “wrathful saints” are but a kindred variety with those
timid, sweetish people who are forever accommodating themselves to
things, particularly to things that are grand and aristocratic; for the
demeanor of both these classes springs from the one same source, their
fear.

But what most distresses men, often even those who are well advanced
on the road of the Christian life, is the feeling of a constantly
recurring weakness such as we know from the epistles of the bravest of
all the apostles, and such as each one of us indeed knows from his own
experience; with this almost universal singularity, that such spells
of weakness are often wont to come on when quite unlooked for, and
sometimes just after the best days of the inner life; and then they can
bow down the soul to a genuine despair.

As to this, the first thing to say, for the comfort of those thus bowed
down, is that whatever is strong and powerful in the world always bears
within it I know not what of rough and undivine. This we may ourselves
observe in the case of men of exuberant force; involuntarily, we never
have, concerning them, the feeling that they especially please God.
Christianity, we may be sure, is in no way planned upon the model of
such giants and demi-gods.

Besides, it is not hard to perceive the educative purpose in this
feeling of weakness. Pride and its sister vanity can be torn out, root
and branch, only after a long-unbroken succession of hard buffetings
has issued in a deep and lasting humility. Through this purgatory, from
end to end, the proud and the vain must pass at some time in their
lives, if anything is to be made of them. For “though the Lord be high,
yet hath he respect unto the lowly; but the proud he knoweth afar off;”
to the proud he assuredly never comes nigh. If, then, this sense of
weakness is concerned with spiritual growth itself, there is surely no
reason that we should be disheartened. Rather, it is a consolation,
in such inner doubts over the weakness of our faith, that when the
Galatians had slipped back into an unspiritual and petty conception
of religion, the Apostle Paul could, nevertheless, assure them, “Ye
are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.” So long as
one’s faith has not entirely ceased, this time of weakness is only a
transient phase, and often bears more fruit than more resplendent days
do. And finally, the weakness may actually become a source of strength;
the feeling of one’s own power, flattering as it may be to one’s
pride, is rather a hindrance than a furtherance in the path of true
inner progress, and the most courageous men are not they who have the
greatest confidence in themselves, but they who have sure recourse to a
power that far transcends all powers.

When once this inward courage finds place in a well-tried man, then an
unassailable peace and joy, as the Scriptures promise, enter into the
soul till now often tossed by the waves of anguish and at times indeed
entirely bereft of hope. But henceforth it “shall dwell in a peaceable
habitation, and in sure dwellings, and in quiet resting places.”

A good life, quite purged of dross, is surely the highest of all things
attainable; yet, to those who are “comforted,” it is just this that
springs from an existence full, indeed, of ever-changing joys and
sorrows, but where no joy estranges one from God and no sorrow any
longer breeds impatience, for both joy and sorrow are received from
the same hand, as are the sunshine and the rain; and thankfully, for
both are inseparable elements in life. And their lives henceforth bear
blessing to others.

But, as far as compatible with the true well-being of a man guided by
God, his outward happiness also is far higher, and stands upon a surer
basis than is possible in any other conception of life. Yes, for such a
man all things again and again work together for good, even when he has
suffered seeming failure.

Such are the asseverations of the Bible; and are we to think that they
were meant only for the human beings of an age long vanished? Or may we
also apply them to our own use still to-day? Surely we may, if the God
of that day is still the God of this; and that is but a matter of test.

And we may hope it will, more commonly than hitherto, be put to the
test again, when all other attempts to regain a calm contentment and
a cheerful, healthy spirit of labor have suffered wreck, and when
a nervous humanity longs for real tranquillity again, and craves
some better bulwark against the increasing weariness of existence
than a merely materialistic conception of life affords. Then will
religion--and without any external compelling Authority, which can
never again in any manner be reëstablished--then will religion regain
anew its place in the life of the nations; whereas, now, it has often
become nothing but a pleasant play upon the feelings of leisurely or
(in a worldly sense) happy people, while to such as really need it to
deliver them in distress and sorrow, it is, through prejudice, closed.

Many of these latter, however, and perhaps at no very distant day,
will come to these old water-springs, now all but choked with rubbish;
though such an idea is far enough from their thoughts as yet. But,
wheresoever they may have tried, nowhere else can they still their
thirst for a tranquil philosophy of life. For what the old chronicler
said of Israel is true to-day: “The days will arise when there shall be
no true God, no law, and no priest to show the way; and in those times
there shall be no peace to him that goes out, nor to him that comes
in; for there will be great vexations upon all the inhabitants of the
earth; nation will break nation, and city city, and God will vex them
with all adversity.”

But as for you, you who find yourself upon the sure path of salvation
and peace, “be comforted, be strong, let not your hands be slack: for
your work shall be rewarded.”




III. ON THE KNOWLEDGE OF MEN




III. ON THE KNOWLEDGE OF MEN


Perhaps no one has ever seriously doubted that the ability to know and
to pass an accurate judgment on men closely concerns our practical
life; but whether a knowledge of human nature brings much happiness is
a question on which opinions have always differed. While some declare
that we really love men only so long as we do not know them, others
(like the duke in Goethe’s “Tasso”) believe that it is only so long as
we do not know men that we stand in fear of them; yet Goethe himself
seems partly to retreat from this conception in another expression of
his, where he says that while nothing is more interesting, indeed, than
to learn to know men, yet one must take care not to know oneself.

For our part, we believe at the outset that all knowledge of human
nature, even one’s own, can be but superficial, and that the real
depths of the soul, and especially the limits of its possibilities for
good and evil, God alone can fully know. But besides this, strange as
it may sound at first, the knowledge of men rests upon a basis of
pessimism joined with a considerable degree of love for human kind.
If any one looks upon humanity as something great and superior (not
so much in promise as in actual performance), he will, if he have
some measure of wisdom, find himself in the end disillusioned by his
life experiences. On the other hand, it is just as much a matter of
experience, with those who have known mankind most perfectly, that they
(Christ himself at the head) have always been friends to humanity; for
though they do not look upon man as quite free and nobly born, yet they
believe him destined to freedom and nobility of life. This gives them
their power to love him, in spite of his faults; yes, we may go so far
as to say, on account of his faults, just for the reason that love, in
this world at least, feels within it an impelling necessity to pity, to
save, to do good.

To understand men, therefore, we must first make sure that we love
them, and we must be, to a very considerable degree, independent of
them so far as our necessities go; for there must be as great an
absence of self-interest as possible on our part. Whoever desires to
get much out of men for his own advantage will always be blinded by
his interests, and whoever finds men necessary to himself will always
fear them. But the man who wishes to do something for them rather than
receive something from them, can alone really learn to know what they
are, and can tolerate that knowledge, even in its worst features,
without hating men; every one else, who is not a weakling, easily
falls into such a hatred of human kind. A thorough judge of men,
without love, would in fact be intolerable; the aversion against such
persons, who assert they are judges of men but who are at the same
time haters of men, is a very natural one, for it is based on a law of
self-defence. And so, you are not to use your knowledge of human nature
as something on which to construct the edifice of your own happiness;
but it is only in order that you may be the better able to further the
happiness of others that you are to desire to learn how rightly to
judge them. If you have any other purpose, you will never come to any
considerable attainments in this art.

The first step in the knowledge of human nature, so far as it is at all
attainable, is (quite contrary to Goethe’s view) self-knowledge and
self-improvement; the second step is the resolve to learn to know men
for their sake and not one’s own. But even so, we are not to expect a
perfect knowledge of so complicated a being as man; he does not even
succeed in understanding himself, or at the best gets only a partial
insight late in life; and then, too, no one individual is quite like
another. Rather, we must content ourselves with a certain number of
the results of experience; some of these we will try, later on, to set
before the reader.

The real secret of knowing human nature lies in possessing a pure heart
innocent of self-conceit; such people gradually acquire a keenness
of vision that pierces all the outer wrappings. The difficulty of
understanding men does not spring from the subtleties of a science of
“psychology,” but only from the difficulty of forgetting one’s own
self. We do not get to know men from whom we have something to hope or
to fear.

Even the prophetic gift is nothing else than a direct, intense insight
into human affairs,--their causes and effects. Such power resides in
every man who in large measure has set himself free from himself. But
self-seeking is like a veil of mist to hinder this power of vision,
which would otherwise be present.

An intercourse with men that rests upon a correct judgment of them is
therefore learned, not so much by frequent association with the men
themselves (as many believe), as through fellowship with God. If we
have this, then for the first time we begin to look upon men, both
the good and the evil, more with the just eyes of God; while, without
trust in Him, we must always rely more or less on men and so suffer the
disillusionments that will always follow.

In men, especially of the better sort, there is furthermore a necessity
that they shall worship something. Those who are not able to worship
anything transcendental throw a halo of fancy about certain men, and in
this self-deception not only lose all ability really to understand men,
but also work harm to those they reverence--if these are yet living and
are themselves poor judges of men. Wherever belief in God is lacking,
hero-worship, with all its detriments to the inner and outer freedom of
humanity, is unavoidable.

Every one can test this for himself. Whenever he finds himself fully
at peace with God, he at once becomes more indifferent toward men in
that very particular in which men are ordinarily most valued; for he no
longer cares for them for the sake of gaining some advantage. Indeed,
if the desire of conferring advantage upon them did not remain, he
feels that he could easily do without them altogether. For this reason
all ancient and mediæval monachism, as well as all modern pessimism,
are always somewhat suspicious in motive; for back of them lurks, for
the most part, either chagrin at not receiving, or disinclination to
give. Others, too, feel that this is so and are therefore, on the
whole, none too well disposed to men who thus hold aloof.

For there is nothing that men have a more instinctive discernment and
a greater aversion for than for self-seeking. Even the simplest, even
little children, yes, even animals, quickly find the selfish out, in
spite of all the pretence with which they surround themselves. Whoever
would acquire a strong influence over men must give up thoughts of
self-advantage. That is the surest way. For this reason children often
like grandparents more than parents, because they feel that in their
love is less of self; the parents are too much wrapped up in their
own concerns. Even the worst pessimists seek love, and no egotist is
earnest at bottom in his praise of egotism. But they despair of men’s
ability to be other than selfish, and they may be taught otherwise
only by repeated deeds; the mere phrases of love have long been
familiar to them, and they estimate them at about their correct value.
It does no good, therefore, to speak to them much of love; that will
only be misunderstood. At the most, speak of friendliness and public
benevolence; it seems to be less, yet is really more.

This spirit, then, is absolutely necessary if you would live in the
world without disgust at it; therefore acquire this spirit at any cost.

To understand the nature of any individual it is important to know
his derivation. Women in especial follow, almost without exception,
the character of their family, sons as a rule that of the mother or
the mother’s father, daughters oftener the paternal side. The proverb
that “the apple falls not far from its stem” indicates, therefore,
a strong presumption. Only, we often do not know the derivation
sufficiently well, and besides, with God’s mercy, a man can even
break away from a bad ancestry. As a matter of fact, there are no
“hereditary encumbrances” that can not be shaken off by God’s mercy
and man’s will. The assumption of such an unalterable fate is one of
the greatest sacrileges a man can make himself guilty of. On the other
hand, in the same limited sense, a certain aristocratic tendency is
warranted. Noteworthy individual characteristics, such as courage,
proper self-confidence, a natural fearlessness of men, fineness of
taste in all the matters of life, do not develop, as a rule, in the
first generation after breaking the yoke of slavery and oppression;
for these are largely transmitted qualities. For this reason the great
pioneers of political and spiritual freedom rarely spring from the
lowest stratum of the people, but from a middle stratum already trained
in these things, or even, often enough, from aristocracy itself. It
is, therefore, a great misfortune, almost a transgression against
one’s posterity, when a highly cultured man marries below his plane of
culture; for thus he takes a step back again.

In this connection, there is due to oneself and to others a certain
right which parents and teachers often forget. No one can easily
change his whole natural disposition; one can much more easily bring
that disposition to a higher perfection in its own kind. That is to
say, the phlegmatic man can attain to the noble calm of wisdom, the
sanguine man to a self-sacrificing activity for others, the choleric
man to a strong championship for whatever is great. A false estimate
of this natural temperament, or attempts to break it, usually lead
to deplorable half-results, where something complete might have been
attained.

We rightly learn to understand people only in their activities, the
men at their work, the women in their house affairs; best in their
difficulties and sorrows, least in social intercourse, especially at
hotels and summer resorts. The acquaintances made there often turn out
disappointing afterward. It is, generally speaking, an unwholesome
feature of human intercourse nowadays. People become acquainted with
one another, and yet not acquainted, when they live and eat together
day after day. One can not keep aloof altogether without appearing
supercilious, and one can not be too intimate without the risk of
making connections that would otherwise have been avoided.

It is easiest to know people by what they regard as their real aim
in life; if this aim is power or pleasure, they are not wholly to be
trusted.

In his later years, the outlines of a man’s character ordinarily come
out much more clearly than in his earlier. Real piety reveals itself in
the patient bearing of the manifold burdens of age, fictitious piety
in impatience and in a religion that becomes more and more formal.
Avarice, envy, covetousness, anger, the love of honor and praise, and
even, at times, the desire of secret, sensual pleasure, come with
elementary, unmistakable force to light as the ruling passions of life;
and the man pronounces his own judgment in the sight of his fellows.
Rarely does any one, like Augustus, carry a rôle through to the end,
and even this great actor was not successful. On the other hand, no one
can read Cromwell’s last prayer and think him a hypocrite, unless he is
one himself.

And finally, sorrows play their part in revealing human nature. In
any great sorrow the thoughts of men are disclosed. Envy comes to
light to rejoice; generosity, to help; and indifference, to pass by
on the other side. Whoever has had no thorough experience of this in
person, does not know men. In the first part of life, when experience
is still small, the greatest danger in one’s attitude to men is that
of considering them of too much importance; in the second, that of
becoming too indifferent to them.

There is yet another and quite different source of the knowledge of
human nature, but a source not to be desired for any one not already
acquainted with it; I mean the power possessed by the nervously
disordered. In such cases there is a very clear physical intuition
as to the kind of nature there is in other people, of whom the one
may have as quieting and refreshing an influence upon the sick man as
clear, cool water, while the other only excites and frets. Such is
the knowledge of men the Bible ascribes to those “possessed of evil
spirits.” But these are diseased conditions which ought not to be, and
which should not be needlessly meddled with.

       *       *       *       *       *

Experience has established some of the following principles in the art
of reading men:

As with courtesy, so it is with a man’s probity; if it is genuine,
it shows itself in his conduct in the small things. Probity in small
matters springs from a moral foundation, while probity on the large
scale is often only habit or prudence and gives no clew as to a man’s
real character.

Vanity and the lust for honors are always a bad symptom, for both rest
at bottom upon a self-condemnation which tries to supply the missing
inner contentment by outward show or the approving judgment of others.
Thoroughgoing pessimists are always vain. By their pessimism they
give us to understand more or less clearly that they themselves would
really be an exception to this base human rabble if they could count on
understanding their nature.

An overmodest nature, especially if given to self-irony, is never to be
trusted; in most cases a strong dose of vanity and the love of praise
hides behind. Truly modest men usually speak neither good nor bad of
themselves, and do not want people to concern themselves about them.
Vain persons, on the other hand, by the apparently modest method of
self-depreciation, often seek to draw attention to themselves, or to
catch out-and-out compliments.

A kind-hearted readiness to help is the sure sign of a good character,
while cruelty to animals and ridicule of men is a sure sign of a bad
character.

One of the best tests of real kind-heartedness is the conduct of men
in the presence of long-persisting or altogether hopeless misfortune:
those who possess but little of that quality grow weary and soon
abandon the unfortunate one to his fate, perhaps with the fine
sentiment, “one must leave him alone with his God”; others, who with
a true sympathy persevere, stand the highest test of the unselfish
love of humanity. Such are ordinarily simple, poor people, while the
cultured and the rich far more rarely show themselves equal to the
test. This natural nobility of character, the most valuable of all the
natural endowments of men, is far more generally found in the lower
classes, and the “noblest of the nations” are to be sought elsewhere
than where we are wont, in the usual manner of speaking, to assume them
to be.

The basest human characteristic is innate faithlessness. When this is
present, all the other so-called good qualities do not countervail;
they but make the man the more dangerous, while faithfulness makes
some expiation for the worst failings.

A sure mark of an essentially mean man is ingratitude. It sets him
below the nobler animals, all of which are grateful. An especially
hateful form of ingratitude is that which, in order to escape the
necessity of showing gratitude, treats the acceptance of benefits as
a favor shown by the receiver and therefore an honor conferred upon
the giver for which he must feel under obligation. Benefits received
generally make only the noble-minded thankful. Others as soon as
possible seek a pretext to avoid this feeling, to them oppressive. The
paying back of borrowed money, particularly, is regarded as a merit on
their part for which the creditor owes them lifelong gratitude.

In the correct estimation of men, the most important consideration
is the caliber they possess. But caliber can not be given a man even
by the best of education and the highest of culture. Caliber is a
gift of nature; a baby cat will never become a lion, similar as they
may at first appear to be. The caliber present in a man can be but
enlarged, not changed, through the great happenings of life, through
severe sorrows, or through a very good environment, particularly if
one have faithful and very well-disposed friends, or if one make the
right marriage. We must, therefore, be careful not to wrong men by
rating them too high and so requiring too much of them; it is not in
their power to do it, but after their fashion, perhaps, they may be
good, faithful men, on whom we may count for something, and who often
accomplish more than they would if they imagined themselves to be of
more consequence than they are.

We must never seek for an intimate personal knowledge of the people
to whom we want to surrender ourselves unconditionally, or to whom we
intend to remain unconditionally hostile; for in both instances we
shall become easily disconcerted by finding characteristics in them
which will contradict our preconceived opinions. For a like reason, one
ought to learn to know one’s enemies in person, and on the other hand,
not to see one’s friends too often.

A man’s reputation is not absolutely determinative in forming an
estimate of him. Men of note, especially, are often different from what
we had fancied them to be. On the whole, however, the public judgment
passed on a man seldom goes altogether astray and is a very important
factor in making up our estimate. In particular, there is no such thing
as a complete misappreciation of a good man all his life through. The
public judgment as to men who are much exposed to such judgment is
generally subject, indeed, to continual fluctuation, like the surface
of water, but it, nevertheless, has the tendency (not to be deflected)
of ever returning again to its proper level. In the case of all good
men, we can count on their having an aristocratic nature. Democracy is
correct, as a political conviction, but as an ingrained characteristic
it has no worth.

Men who are fundamentally good we learn best to know in their time of
trouble, for then the possibilities that lie within them come more
clearly to light; but men of mediocre worth we learn best to know in
their time of prosperity and by their manner of enjoying pleasures.

All who hate men on principle are themselves egotists. On the
other hand, it is certainly a matter of experience that we do have
disillusionments even as to the best men, and as to educated people
even more than simple folk. As a general thing, one should not put
absolute trust in men, and the best and most trustworthy friendships
are those which have either sprung from a previous enmity, or have been
once (but not twice) broken off. For then alone does one see the shadow
side of his friend, and so can henceforth discount it. On the other
hand, a frequent vacillation between friendship and hostility is a mark
of a weak character.

That we learn to know our real friends only in time of need, and that
we should quietly let those go who are then unfaithful, is a truth
almost too trifling to be once more expressed.

Why it is that, when misfortune comes, we suddenly possess friends
so startlingly few, is to be explained psychologically thus: the
less generous natures are afraid they will be obliged to give actual
help, while the more generous often think they see the impossibility
of rendering any help at all and are ashamed, wrongly, to offer only
sympathy. In many cases even very well-wishing men fall into the
mistake of Job’s friends and involuntarily assume that every misfortune
is more or less one’s own fault, so that pity must be tempered by
censure and admonitions. Then the more thoughtless ones speak out
their mind, while men of finer feelings rather draw back, so as not to
be obliged to do it.

And all this is still oftener true in the case of relatives.

To be envied is a very disagreeable thing to have accompany one through
life, and it usually ceases only toward life’s end. But it is, for all
persons of real consequence, a very necessary protection against too
great a veneration on the part of others. Such veneration would do
much more harm if it were unmixed with envy. And it is generally of
little value. A dram of real friendship is worth much more than a whole
wagon-load of veneration.

One great rule for finding out men is this: give yourself out to be
frankly just what you are; above all, frankly hate wrong things on
principle, and let no opportunity of showing it pass by. Then men
will show their own cards more openly to you. Public personages, in
particular, must in their whole life be clear as glass and transparent
as crystal, so that men may see everything without reserve.

In general, as to good qualities, men like best to speak of those
they do not possess; while, as to evil qualities, the proverb speaks
truly: “With what the heart is full, with that the mouth runs over.”
People who take pleasure in speaking often of impure things and the
dangers of the world in this regard, although they may do so with
the most earnest show of disapprobation, always feel a strong secret
inclination thereto. Others, whose every third word is “benevolence”
and “good works,” have to struggle with a disposition toward avarice
or covetousness. The worst are those who are forever talking of
“uprightness” and “loyalty.”

Most fanatics for some specialty have become such because they knew
very well in the beginning that without such a heightening of their
feeling they would not persevere in it. In most cases, therefore, they
are not wholly sincere.

It is one of the best signs for a man if humble people feel confidence
and good-will toward him--little children, above all, but also
simple-hearted poor folks, and even animals. The man whom children
and animals can not endure is not to be trusted. Women, too, are good
judges--that is, if they themselves are good; otherwise they are just
the opposite. To be much with unpretending people contributes greatly
to one’s contentment with life. All great pessimists have despised
them, yet have found no satisfaction in the people of more importance
whose companionship they have sought.

Pessimism and the detestation of one’s fellow-men, when displayed by
young people, point (if they are not merely talking for effect) to
irregular habits of living. But they who keep their youth clean have a
source of unfailing delight in life.

We are not upright because men praise us; we are upright if we receive
the praise of God. Any one who has ever experienced this will also know
that, however unreliable and cheap the praise of men may be, it always
makes us a little proud and leads us away from the truth, but the
praise of God never has any such result. Of pious people who are proud
the assertion can quite safely be made that God has never praised them;
they praise themselves and let others praise them.

Pride is always mixed with a portion of stupidity. Vanity makes us
ridiculous to people, but not odious; pride, on the other hand, so
works upon others as to call out defiance mingled with contempt. As
the proverb says, pride always goes immediately before a fall. When a
man becomes proud, he has lost his game, and it may be safely counted
on that he is approaching a downfall. As soon as God forsakes us, our
own heart is lifted up.

On the other hand, the faults which have become clear to ourselves and
which have bred humility within us are often not so very perceptible to
others. They no longer put themselves so noticeably in evidence as do
the faults we will not or can not yet see. This is the first striking
reward of battling against oneself.

Every one stands in need of straight-forward but kindly criticism. This
is the reason progress is made by the simple people who, when they
make a mistake, are censured and admonished by everybody, without any
beating around the bush; while people of higher standing, after their
school years are over, seldom have the advantage of being judiciously
censured. Even their critics often only wish to show them how important
and indispensable they are to them, and attack some minor defeat of
little moment one way or the other.

It is an important thing to acquire the art of speaking of one’s
own doings in a quiet and matter-of-fact manner, if, indeed, they
have to be spoken of at all. It usually happens that some men show
themselves too vain of their accomplishments, and thereby arouse
open or secret opposition; while others speak of them with a certain
off-hand disparagement, as much as to say that they have plenty more
in stock. It is the best way to speak of one’s performances as little
as possible, and, in any case, never to introduce the subject oneself.
Vanity is always recognized, even by the simplest. The only sure means
of not passing for a vain man is--not to be vain.

If a young man is forward or even only very confident, if there is not
a little of shyness about him, he has a defective character and little
real merit; or at least he has ripened very early and will develop
no further. The widespread prepossession that, without plenty of
assurance, one can not get through the world is incorrect, unless one
is thinking of momentary success.

A very suspicious, at any rate imprudent, propensity of many people
is that of being the bearers of bad news. The motives, indeed, may
be very different; but in most cases there is mingled with it a kind
of self-elevation which takes pleasure in seeing others deeply shaken
and humbled, an ungenerous feeling that often comes very near to being
malice. This is instinctively felt on the other side, and something of
the unpleasant remembrance is ever afterward associated with the one
who caused it.

Those persons are of no worth who have never been broken by a great
sorrow or by a thorough humiliation of their self-esteem. They retain
something small, or arrogantly self-righteous, or unkind about them
which, in spite of their probity (which they ordinarily think a great
deal of), makes them disagreeable to God and man.

One must always be on one’s guard before people who do not have a
kindly nature. A natural disposition to maliciousness is very hard to
be overcome. It shows itself most easily in a tendency to making sport
of others.

It is an uncommonly pleasant thing, on the other hand, to have to
do with people who make their fellow-men feel comfortable in their
presence, who are always even-tempered, always friendly and ready to
help, never nervously unquiet or intrusive, rejoicing in the welfare
of others, sympathetic and consolatory in trouble. This does not
necessitate a clever mind; on the contrary, the very clever people
often lack just this quality, which, for the first time, would make all
their other qualities really useful and valuable.

At ordinary times it is very difficult to recognize real bravery. Yet
there is one unfailing sign. Brave people never enter a fight with
arrogance and are less afraid after a defeat than after a victory,
since every victory works some injustice to the opposing side; while
cowards show themselves arrogant after every victory. As to this
characteristic, a man best learns to know himself in his dreams. There
he sees himself as he is, being beyond the control of a better will
that does not depend upon merely physical and mental emotions.

A crafty shrewdness always lowers a man in our regard. We think of the
possibility of its being used against us. Therefore, as a proverb says,
“all foxes come to be skinned at last.” No one likes them, and in the
long run they lose their game.

Every man should perfect his own national type. When a man no longer
knows to which nation he belongs, he becomes an unedifying phenomenon.
Therefore dwellers on the border are often vacillating in their nature,
and polyglot speech is, as a rule, a mark neither of genius nor of
character. The most questionable people are those who mingle different
languages in a single sentence and who lack education besides.

Not very much, on the whole, is to be learned from the external
features of a man; the science of physiognomy is a deceptive one,
generally speaking. Yet a strong development of the lower part
of the face as contrasted with the upper, an insignificant chin,
expressionless eyes, an ever uneasy glance of the eye, and a habit of
speaking very loud in the case of women, portend nothing favorable.
Happily, these latter are never able to imitate the expression of
innocence.

The wide diffusion of photography has been very injurious for the
knowledge of human nature, since they usually make the photograph
a deceptive portrait, and one who sees it is, therefore, favorably
prepossessed.

As to human efficiency, it mostly depends upon a certain confidence a
man has with his contemporaries. God alone can give this, and, as a
rule, it appears late, in the case of men of real note. All the stones
must first be rejected by the builders before they can become the head
of the corner. This is the only right course for a man’s life to take,
and no sort of exertion can supply its place.

With men of original qualities one usually goes through three stages
of acquaintanceship. In the first stage, they please one absolutely;
in the second, they rather repel, on account of the angularities and
singularities of all sorts in their nature; in the third, however, the
whole man again pleases. But in the case of more ordinary men, one’s
first impression is slight, the second is often better, on account of
various good individual qualities, but the final impression, again,
is unsatisfying. Take it all in all, one may perhaps say that the
first impression one has of a man, provided one is himself quite
unprejudiced, is the right one.

Hardest of all it is to read human nature from the point of view of
religion. It is easiest to do so along the lines of the first epistle
of John, the first six verses of the fourth chapter, and the first five
verses of the fifth chapter. But, along with this, we must not exclude
a certain human excellence which rests upon philosophical culture, or
upon great sagacity and experience of life. All piety must make one
more friendly, or it is not genuine.

Who are to be preferred, the nice people who are not religious, or the
religious people (and there are really such) who are not (at least not
always) nice? I am afraid this is the point where our view does not
always coincide with God’s. (Luke v. 32.)

To do things on generous lines often seems, especially to the man still
young, easier than to do things along the lines of duty. Well, then, do
so at first. But when you can once do the one, then you must learn to
do the other also, else your life remains beautiful--but incomplete.

The visitation of sins unto the third and fourth generation may be
regarded from this point of view: that for so long a period God is
yet laboring with these generations. The worst that can happen to men
is not this visitation, but that God may leave them henceforth quite
to their own way and will. For the wicked, visitation is, therefore,
always a tender of amnesty, but lasting good fortune means rejection.

A temperament always equable, somewhat cool but not selfish, and
sympathetic and friendly to every one, is perhaps the happiest if one
wishes to be generally liked. Such men pass for especially amiable
people and are universally esteemed, without their often contributing
anything important and solid to the advance of the world. There are
actually people, therefore, who assume this manner from policy. But
whether these amiable people have not, after all, buried their talent,
is another question.

       *       *       *       *       *

That intercourse with men which is the art of life is necessarily
based, if it is to be brought under rational rules at all, upon
a correct knowledge of men. For whoever voluntarily seeks the
companionship of men whom he knows to be bad or false is, with all his
knowledge of human nature, a fool and a suicide besides. In this point
we have departed widely from the conceptions of our grandfathers; human
intercourse has to-day become much less sentimental and much more
serious than a hundred years ago. In this matter the ever-recurring
question whether the men are by nature good or bad is beside the mark.
As a matter of fact, men have the disposition to be both, and it is our
concern, therefore, as Paul says, not to be overcome of the evil we can
not avoid meeting, but to overcome evil with good.

If one does not always keep this before his eyes as a fundamental rule
of life, then all intercourse with the bad and weak (which is never to
be wholly evaded) will be, for men of the better sort, an evil that may
lead at last to a contempt for humanity and a desire for isolation, or
else to an indifference toward all true principles. Here, also, there
are a number of maxims taught by experience, whose observation will
make one’s intercourse with men at least more easy. They are as follows:

One gets into the best relations with men, on the whole, if he feels
a simple, natural, sincere friendliness toward every one he meets,
in much the same manner as unspoiled children do before they have
experienced the meanness of men. This manner, after many painful
experiences, can be again acquired,--at least at a certain period
in later life which may then be called, in this good sense, a second
childhood. When one has this attitude, it may even happen that he
treats evil men as if good, as they could be if they would, and as, in
their better moments, they would really like to be. And the result is
that these men forget their evil nature for a time and feel better and
happier. That, and not “the destruction of the wicked,” is a true man’s
greatest victory in this world.

At the same time it must not be forgotten that one should not put
too great stress upon a man’s behavior at the moment; for every one
can tell from his own experience how easily our moods alter, and how
changeable and uncertain our judgments of others are, so long as the
heart has not yet become constant in kindness.

All lasting human relationships rest upon reciprocity. We must never be
willing only to receive, nor must we ever be willing only to give; that
always ends in dissatisfaction.

The opportunity of rendering great favors to men is not very frequent.
On the other hand, one can quietly do any one some small pleasure,
though it be nothing more than a friendly greeting to light up, like
a sunbeam, some lonely and joyless existence. We should not begin a
day of our life without proposing to ourselves to make use of every
opportunity in this way. This friendliness is merely a matter of habit
that even men essentially kind-hearted now and then do not have, to
their great loss.

Quite ordinary natures, of course, understand only fear, not love. As
soon as they no longer fear, they become forward and intractable. For
these the proverb holds good: “Be always kind, yet not too kindly; else
the wolves will quickly grow bold.” For others, however, the proverb
is not true. On the other hand, real kindness is the ripest fruit of a
well-lived life.

Many men, by doing things in a large style, wish to compel their
fellow-men to recognize it. But they seldom succeed, since the other
man marks this purpose; and after all, egotism (though of a somewhat
different kind than usual) hides behind. They would attain their goal
far better if they paid less heed to outward show and did things more
quietly.

Many people who are really good-hearted at bottom have a way of always
finding something to blame or demur to even in matters that fall
in with their wishes. Thus they bring it about that other persons,
hearing only their “No, no,” prefer the company of more easy-going,
if also more unprincipled, people of the world. Nor should one always
be contradicting men, even where they are in the wrong; silence often
accomplishes more and does not embitter. Now and then their assertions
are not wholly in earnest, but if they experience opposition, then
they become fortified in their notions and say something that they
can no longer retract. But if one ought to contradict for the truth’s
sake, then a single contradiction is enough; when opinions are once
acknowledged and firmly fixed, continued disputation about them is
entirely fruitless.

“Whoever wishes to have his opinion find approval should express it
coldly and without passion,” says Schopenhauer, if I am not mistaken.
The word “coldly” is somewhat too strong; but to _parler sans accent_,
that is, to speak in the positive and not always in the superlative
degree, is a good custom.

Of one’s neighbor one should--so St. Maddalena dei Pazzi tells
us--“speak as little as possible, for one begins with good things, but
usually ends up with bad things. Our neighbor is a glass that easily
breaks if we take it into our hands too often.”

It is a great art in human intercourse to be able to show friendly
opposition on occasion. We should, among other things, give our
reasons--not merely for convenience simply say No, but try to convince
the other with good arguments rather than be dictatorial. All men see,
in such an appeal to their understanding, a proof of respect which
gratifies them and often quite reconciles them to the negative outcome.

A suspension of judgment is often very useful. With a “We will consider
it,” or “Let us think it over,” good-will is shown for the time being,
while the decision is put off; and with that, often enough, the whole
matter is discharged. The other man will in the mean time change his
mind; or the matter will seem to him of less importance; while, at the
moment, his desire was his very kingdom of heaven.

But all this does not apply in things indubitably wrong. Then we must
not give rise to the conception that we might finally be able to come
to an agreement in the matter or regard it as at least feasible; but on
the contrary, we must “resist the beginnings.”

The most unfortunate method of all is to yield in an unfriendly spirit;
by so doing we lose the game twice over. But with weak men this is the
usual course; they wish to hide their weakness by a little blustering
and scolding.

In matters of indifference (and they are infinitely many), we must
always do the will of others; that makes living easy and brings good
friends without any attending difficulties.

With dependent people it is best to be short, but always friendly and
good-mannered, if they themselves know their place; otherwise “_parcere
subjectis et debellare superbos_.”

It is always difficult to know how to conduct oneself rightly toward
very wealthy or very distinguished people; for to be with them means
either a kind of dependent relationship, or a constant watchfulness
against receiving favors that is inconsistent with real friendship.
Real friendship gladly gives and gladly receives, without keeping any
account. Besides, wealth and distinction very often make men insensible
to life’s true riches, and limit them in their views of men and life.

It is not pleasant to have to do with people who do not think out their
own problems, but are always seeking advice and never following it. One
should especially avoid lightly advising one to marry or not to marry,
nor should one ever express his opinion to authors about their yet
unpublished works. It is very hard, too, to fellowship with those who
are “persecuted by fate,” and have no conception of their own failings.
Christ himself on one occasion curtly dismissed such a man, who wished
to make him a “judge and a divider.”

Those who are always reflecting over themselves or others, likewise
make companions in whom is no reliance nor peace. They are always vain,
besides weak and forever vacillating in their judgment of others, as
well as in their estimation of themselves. They love no one, not always
themselves even, and are loved by no one. Shun them.

Against naïvely shameless people there are three kinds of self-defence:
roughness, which, however, is somewhat lowering; coldness, which is
not human and leaves a reproach on the conscience; and humor. The last
alone shows true superiority.

Selfish men who have quite lost the sense of shame have a way, when
they want something of another man, of insinuating to him that it will
be for his own advantage, so that they may be exempt from showing
gratitude or from resting under any other obligation in return. This
is something one must not, even tacitly, ignore, but first set the
matter quietly upon its proper footing, if he intends to respond to the
request.

Should one always give to those who beg? I believe, generally speaking,
yes; the commands of Christianity in this regard are too positive; in
most cases the question is rather “How much?” and this depends upon
the good-will of the giver. One should at least turn beggars away in
a friendly spirit; a kind word is also a gift and many a time of more
real value than a small bit of money. But that is something to be
learnt, and is really a very great art.

To give cheerfully is, on the other hand, partly a habit. Children
ought to be accustomed to it from childhood, instead of being
one-sidedly trained to mere frugality, as more commonly happens. They
should be frugal as regards themselves, but not as regards others.

An outward expedient is to carry no purse; it is easier to thrust the
hand into the pocket than to open a purse.

Very much that is not the proper thing in human intercourse springs
from simple inertness toward the good, or from a desire for personal
comfort.

Many men, whom everybody knows by sight and praises, are quiet and
tolerably dutiful--egotists,--whose ways one must not follow.

The really noble men, the aristocracy of the spirit as opposed to this
mere bourgeoisie, have always, on the other hand, found enemies.

Perhaps the most useful, though by no means the pleasantest,
intercourse is with our enemies; not only because they are often
future friends, but especially because we receive from them, more than
from any other, a candid disclosure as to our own faults and a strong
impulse to amend them; because, too, they possess, on the whole, the
truest judgment as to the weak points of a man’s nature. Finally, we
also learn, simply by living under their sharp eyes, how to know and
practise the important virtues of self-control, of a strict love for
the right, and of a constant attention to oneself.

That is, therefore, a foolish expression (which is often used with
intent to praise) when it is said of a man, perhaps in an obituary
notice, that “he had no enemies.” A man of the right sort does not go
through life without making enemies; but it is a fine thing, of course,
if at the end of his life he no longer has any.

By this I do not mean to imply that this intercourse with enemies is an
easy matter; on the contrary, it belongs to the most difficult tasks
of a rightly conducted life. It is particularly hard to endure a long
series of injustices which seem to have success on their side. Here
comes the need of faith in a just God, who can employ even the wicked
as his instruments, but can hold them so firmly in hand that they may
go no farther than he wills. Otherwise we should not go through these
things without harm. Surely no one who has learned to know himself
will make the assertion that he is already a past-master in this art.

Trust in God is the first essential; after that, the best means for
acquiring this art is seriously to resolve that we will, as much as
possible, avoid useless anger, and take care not to judge our opponents
unjustly; and in any case never to allow real hatred to settle in the
soul. This can easily be done at the very first moment of the affront;
it is harder later, when hate is once established in the heart. It is
very helpful, besides, to fix clearly in mind, from the beginning, that
we absolutely must forgive, even to “seventy times seven.” This thought
makes it much easier to determine from the outset to keep collected,
and thus we are better disposed to shut out hatred from the start.

Here are some other helpful considerations:

The truth is not always victorious on this earth; that is, not the
truth as it is embodied in a man, mixed with all his weaknesses and
errors; for which very reason it is impossible for it always to
conquer. But God is victorious, and nothing happens against his will;
this alone is the true consolation when enemies assault us.

The enemies God sends a man he also takes away, as soon as they have
fulfilled their purpose. “When a man’s ways please the Lord, then he
sets even his enemies at peace with him.” That is a very sure sign that
one stands in God’s grace.

It is much better to forget the evil one receives than to forgive it.
It is easy for a remnant of bitterness to cling about forgiveness, or
a kind of haughtiness, a kind of holding oneself superior to offenders
“beneath one’s notice.”

Bearing a grudge, feeling resentment, taking things ill is always a
mark of a rather small nature. Better take revenge; impotent hate is
quite worthless and injures only yourself, not your adversary.

In the criticisms made by one’s enemies there is in most cases a grain
of truth, though put in a light too sharp and one-sided. Therefore it
is always well to listen to an enemy’s criticisms, but not to rate them
too high nor to feel them too keenly. Above all, one should never let
them impose upon him; that is always a mistake.

That men speak evil of us is hard, but it preserves us, as Thomas à
Kempis says, “from the magic mist of vainglory,” and compels us to
seek God, who knows our innermost heart, as our witness and judge. Then
for the first time he becomes indispensable and fast bound to us.

Such a passage through ignominy is therefore especially needful for men
who afterward are to bear great honors without harm.

One may accordingly be induced not to hate his enemies, not merely
through motives of religion, but also through motives of prudence;
for enemies not only often become friends later, but one is likewise
indebted to them for very many correct views; on the other hand, those
who at first are very amiable often speak a different language later
on. Those who oppose one in important matters are always particularly
easy to come to terms with; for they are people who have serious
scruples and are open to reason. The indifferent, who interpose no
objections, but also do not listen, are far more dangerous opponents.

The right programme for one’s demeanor toward enemies is not, generally
speaking, that they must be crushed (as would be quite impossible in
most cases), but that they are to be reconciled. Whoever keeps this
constantly before his eyes will never hate too violently and will
suffer much to pass by in silence that discussion would make only worse.

Wherever possible, then, we must deal with our enemies in our best and
calmest frame of mind; for if we are inwardly ruffled, we are also much
more inclined to an unfavorable and unjust judgment of others. Nor
should we lower ourselves before them in order to gain their good-will;
that seldom succeeds. Many men, many nations in fact, will not at all
tolerate too much kindness.

Thus it is a great point of prudence not to come frequently, and never
unnecessarily, into the company of those who are radically opposed to
our conception of life. For we either suffer some loss in character, or
there results a widening of the chasm.

But what, then, is there left for us to hate? or are we to explain
everything away? I am far from asserting that. There is still enough
left in the world worth hating, and with this, war can and must be
waged. Above all, there is the spirit of being bad on principle, the
spirit that purposely contends against the spirit of God, and that
persecutes the good because it is good and endeavors to overthrow it.
To this spirit give your vigorous and outspoken hate, wherever and in
whatever form it appears; but in most cases it dies out in the men who
embody it, in the third or fourth generation at the very latest. Very
often it changes, in their descendants, to the opposite spirit of good.

To give help to evil men of this stripe, or to stand “impartially”
between them and good men, instead of standing by the latter in every
such conflict, is a serious fault that will be avenged on every one who
is guilty of it.

       *       *       *       *       *

A very difficult chapter to write is that on companionship with women,
for they are the instruments of both the best and the worst that can
be awakened in a man: on the one hand, unbridled self-gratification
and alienation from all that is higher and nobler, qualities which
they awaken especially in young people and which are the chief
cause of the downfall of entire nations; on the other hand, a most
efficacious uplift away from a man’s natural tendencies, to a wholly
different, freer, and better conception of life. Most critics of women
accordingly err in speaking of them as of a uniform mass similar in
character, while, on the contrary, in this part of humanity there
is a far more marked division into two distinct classes, and a much
more constant retention and transmission of good as well as bad
characteristics.

In a very peculiar passage of the Old Testament the same distinction is
made, even in that very early stage of humanity, between the “sons of
God” and the “daughters of men,” who are not lacking in outward charm,
indeed, but through their very charms become a curse.

This difference in women is still to be found in our day, and so
the first counsel is this: Have no unnecessary association with the
“daughters of men” and guard against every closer alliance with them,
no matter what may be sung by the poets, for they themselves are often
led astray by just this peculiar charm of women.

In other respects, however, the difference between women and men would
not be so great if their education and especially their legal position
were more alike, and toward this the politics and pedagogy of to-day
are striving. Christianity at any rate makes no distinction, and even
the Old Testament already knows of women (even married ones) who
filled the highest state offices, not of hereditary right as to-day,
forsooth, but solely by virtue of their own worth, of the spirit which
dwelt within. The “spirit of God” can surely dwell in every human
being, and this is the thing that decides, and not the structure of the
body.

Women are in general more easy to understand than men. They deceive
no man for long, in the sense that he really holds the bad in them
for good, but only in the sense that he prefers the bad to the good
because of its sensual charm, in the false hope that this charm may be
a lasting and happy one. For women, therefore, there is surely but one
means of lastingly appearing to be something that they desire; and that
is, to be it. Yet it is harder, though by so much the more meritorious,
for them to be spiritual, good, and noble, since, instead of reaping
recognition for it, they are often obliged to see exactly the opposite
qualities valued and sought. A truly noble woman, therefore, stands on
a higher level of moral perfection than the best man.

Furthermore, what is generally true of humanity is especially
applicable to women, that those who have not experienced trouble, but
have only been fed upon the pleasures of life, remain superficial and
mediocre. With women the latter experience is found in even special
measure, because their whole present training, in the so-called
cultured circles, tends to give them the impression that a finer
enjoyment of life is the real aim of their existence.

From this conception of life there results a naïve and thoughtless
egotism which conceives the whole world to be only a beautiful meadow,
where the women have all the flowers to gather to adorn themselves with
and to please themselves with. In this egotism they often far surpass
men in selfishness; the more amiable outer side of this naïveté may not
blind us to this.

The character of women can very well be judged from their treatment of
flowers. A girl that on her walk pulls as many flowers as possible for
herself and has no desire to leave any behind for others has a tendency
to greediness and pleasure-seeking. A lady who, after looking at a
beautiful flower or bouquet for a short time, will permit it to lie and
wither, instead of putting it in water or of making some poor child
happy with it, has no warm heart. But if she pulls flowers quite to
pieces, she will some day no less unconcernedly deal with men who have
put their trust in her.

It is naturally still worse with the hearts of those tender creatures
who with their fingers crush a harmless gnat sunning itself at the
window, or purposely tread upon a little worm or beetle crawling over
their path. It is well to keep oneself at a good distance from them.
Likewise from all those who wear conspicuous dresses; the clothing of a
true lady should never attract attention, either by being too striking
or too plain.

Women do rightly, on the whole, when they act with warmth and feeling;
they are rarely fitted for a merely intellectual companionship, and
those who are, are not very lovable, as a rule, and have no inward
peace. Even a very clever woman brings unqualified happiness only to
a man at least as clever, and she is herself never happy if she has
the constant feeling that she far surpasses the man. Ardent feminine
natures are a great happiness for him who understands how to enjoy
their companionship without blame; otherwise they are like a fire that
diffuses light and warmth indeed, but may consume their own house and
the houses of others. Very quiet women, on the other hand, easily grow
to be somewhat insipid.

What women value most in men is power, whose complete absence they
never pardon. Therefore adorers like poor Brackenburg, in Goethe’s
“Egmont,” never get their deserts from them; they actually think more
of the men who slight them or treat them badly than they do of men who
are weak.

Most unhappy are the feelings of a noble woman when, through her own
bad choice, or through the folly of her relations, she has fallen to a
weakling who seeks compensation for his unmanliness in the outer world
by a constant and petty mastery in the house. Dante would have had to
invent yet another special punishment for these house-tyrants, against
whom it is just the best women that are defenceless, and who may be
governed only by a woman of strong egotism.

With this, we have come to the question of marriage. The best
relationship with women not already in the family is marriage, and it
is one of the chief causes of the deterioration of our age that (and
in large measure on account of the pleasure-seeking and the false
education of the women themselves) marriage is made difficult to a
large proportion of educated men, so that they do not marry at all, or
do not marry at the right age. Indeed, among the “civilized” nations,
it has actually resulted in the circumstance, unfavorable for the
position of women, that they are no longer valued for their own sake,
but only for what they “bring along” with them.

Who in fact could wish to torment himself with cares his life long,
just to support a vain creature fond of dress and pleasure, while he
might, with the same means, procure a far pleasanter mode of life? This
is the word pretty generally current now among the younger lords of
creation, who have none too much of the spirit of sacrifice.

It is often rather doubtful whether marriage always deserves to be
called a “divine” institution under present-day conditions, when the
husband very commonly seeks in this way a betterment of his financial
situation, or, if he belongs to the less “cultured” classes, seeks a
slave to do his work without pay, while the parents of the wife wish
to secure, in marriage, a life-insurance policy for their daughter,
however wretched a one it may prove to be, and the daughter herself,
in the momentary triumph of this social promotion, forgets the sad
ensuing loss of her rights. It is one of the saddest yet commonest
tragedies to see a fine, highly educated girl in the almost unlimited
power of a mediocre young man, solely because many mothers still regard
it as a kind of shame to keep their daughters unmarried.

We can understand why most women are glad to marry, because it is only
in a good marriage that they have the opportunity of independently
unfolding all the powers that lie within them. But that the selfish
ones, who know how to put themselves at the right time upon a proper
footing of defence, have often a better lot than the good wives, who
lavish a vast amount of love, fidelity, self-sacrifice, thought,
and vitality upon a questionable man of whom they have made for
themselves an incorrect picture in their fancy--this is one of life’s
most melancholy experiences, and one that might most make us doubt
God’s justice. A woman, therefore, should never marry entirely below
her station, never marry a man who is morally not entirely above
suspicion, or is pettily egotistic, or is not a man of thoroughly
good disposition; nor, as a rule, should she marry out of her country
and nationality. But for men who are seriously struggling upward, an
alliance with a high-minded woman from the better ranks of life is the
method best of all suited to get quickly forward.

It will always be disputed whether it is better, in a good marriage, to
seek and to find ardent love, or quiet esteem and friendship. I would
decide for the latter, as a general rule; but--he who does not know the
former knows not what life is.

The true and unselfish companionship of a man with a worthy woman
of his home circle--wife, mother, sister, daughter, and not least,
grandmother and granddaughter--undoubtedly belongs to the highest, the
tenderest, the purest joys of this life, and brings out qualities in
him that otherwise would always lie fallow. A marriage is not by a long
way always to be called a stroke of good fortune, but an old bachelor,
too, is never the man that could and should be made of him.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the whole do not seek to know men by relying overmuch on theories.
The greater part of that knowledge is attained through one’s own
experiences, mostly sad ones. Only, resolve to experience nothing twice
over. They who do so are the truly wise; not those, if there are any
such, who make no mistakes.

Besides, our knowledge of men must not serve merely to help us separate
the goats from the sheep and henceforth concern ourselves only with
the latter; but it should serve to keep us from being deceived, and
to enable us to work for the improvement of ourselves and of all with
whom our lot brings us in touch, with a better understanding of their
character. For when a man once abandons the belief that every single
human soul has an infinite value and that it is worth any trouble taken
to save it, then he finds himself upon an inclined plane on which he
gradually slips back again into complete selfishness.

The final word as to the knowledge of men must be--love to all. Love
alone enables us to know a man exactly as he is, and yet not to flee
him. To know men, without love, has always been a misfortune and the
cause of the profound melancholy of many wise men in all ages; it has
driven them to renounce the society of their fellows, or to take refuge
in the theory of absolute government. For there are only two ways of
dealing with men, when one has once learned to know them--through fear,
or through love. All intermediate methods are delusions.

But if any one appeals to fear, or if love is to any one only
lip-service, let him hear Brother Jacopone da Todi: “That I love my
neighbor I really know only when, after he has injured me, I love him
no less than before. For if I then loved him less, I should thereby
prove that, before, it was not he I loved, but myself.”




IV. WHAT IS CULTURE?




IV. WHAT IS CULTURE?[1]


A prophet of Israel of the latter days of the Kings, who himself seems
to have been, in a way, self-taught, announces to his nation the
oncoming of a new era in about the following words: “Behold, the days
come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a
famine of bread, but of the hearing of the truth. In that day shall the
fair youths and maidens faint, who now are relying upon the god at Dan
and the way of Beer-sheba. For they shall so fall therewith that they
shall not be able to rise again.” What Amos meant by the god at Dan and
the “way of Beer-sheba” is hardly to be discovered now with exactness,
and indeed, for our purposes, we may leave it undetermined. Only thus
much is clear from the context, that they were for the time elements
of culture whose insufficiency should later come to light--as actually
happened at the beginning of the Christian era.

Widely recognized phenomena of our own days fittingly remind us again
of these ancient, half-forgotten words.

On the other hand, a struggle that may almost be called violent is
passing through the broad masses of the nations. They are striving to
win culture for themselves as quickly as possible, so that they may
elevate themselves to the power which, in their view, goes hand in hand
with this culture, or, as they mostly conceive it, with the acquisition
of certain kinds of knowledge.

On the other hand, the upper circles of the classes hitherto known as
cultured are being gripped with a kind of despair over the already
attained and still attainable results of this search for knowledge for
its own sake, as a renowned scientist has already plainly expressed
with his well-known saying, “Ignoramus, ignorabimus,” and as is
becoming actually manifest in the ever-growing specializing of the
sciences. For this specializing means, at bottom, nothing less than
that there is no universal knowledge any more, still less a universal
culture which comprehends all that men have achieved and thought; it
means that there are only isolated departments of knowledge, behind
which the abyss of ignorance yawns, for the most learned specialist,
no less than for the most commonplace layman.

In the young generation of the civilized nations which is growing up
under such auspices, there is prevailing a certain physical and mental
weariness, which makes one seriously doubt whether the whole of modern
education must not be on the wrong track if, instead of producing
mental and physical power and joy in the lifelong acquisition of new
and newer knowledge, it only prematurely dulls and destroys all these
capacities, and if it is bringing on a too weakly organized and nervous
race which would as little prove a match for the onset of some horde
of healthy barbarians as did, once upon a time, the Roman or Greek
cosmopolitan culture, outwardly brilliant, but likewise undermined by
just such over-civilization as ours.

With this, we have arrived at once at the heart of our question. By
culture we must understand something greater, something other than
knowledge, or learnedness in special subjects, if it is at all to be
something beneficial and desirable. Relatively speaking, the most
striking result of general culture must be the healthy and vigorous
development of every man’s personality into a full and rounded human
life, inwardly at peace. Otherwise it will be of no very definite
value, either to himself or to his state.

If it does not effect this it does not justify the hopes that have, for
so long a time, been set upon it, and there may stand before us a time
such as humanity has already more than once experienced, when the most
highly civilized peoples have been overpowered by barbarians, simply
by virtue of greater physical strength and greater mental freshness
and originality, and when too delicately constituted republics have
not been in a condition to withstand the momentum of such onslaughts,
directed by some single powerful will.

Therefore the question “What is Culture?” is a question of the life of
our whole present race, as well as, in a special degree, of our native
land and the nature of its government.


I

By this very ambiguous and therefore often misunderstood word “culture”
we must understand ourselves to mean _an evolving_ from an originally
formless, rough condition into a condition in which the development
into the best of which the material is capable is completed, or at
least is in the process of unfolding without hindrance.

Every man at the beginning is a rough block that can only be fashioned
into a true human form and a true work of art partly by the formative
power of life itself with its manifold influences, and partly by the
hand and sagacity of men. And as an unskilful sculptor may so misshape
and spoil a stone intrusted to him that no real work of art can any
longer be made of it, or may carve it so delicately that it loses the
massiveness and strength necessary to resist all outer influences,
so also, in the art of human culture, we often speak from painful
experience of a man’s culture as neglected, or distorted, or too
excessive and refined.

In true culture (one that does not injure but benefits men), three
things seem to be essential: the conquering of natural sensuality
and natural selfishness through higher interests, the wholesome and
symmetrical training of the physical and mental faculties, and a
correct philosophical and religious conception of life. Where one of
these three is lacking, there is a drying up in the man of something
that had been capable of a better development.

1. The final goal of all true culture is the liberation of man from the
“sensual gravitation” which every one experiences in himself, and from
the selfishness which, though it rests in the final analysis upon man’s
impulse to self-preservation, stands nevertheless in opposition to the
purpose of his life. Essentially as a creature of the senses man begins
his course in this world, essentially as a creature of the spirit he
should finish it here, and, as we hope, continue it in another world
under more favorable conditions. Thus there lies already in his nature
a conflict between that which _is_ and therefore would naturally like
to persist, and that which is undoubtedly demanded by his deepest and
best feelings and which is meant to grow and develop. If he does not
stay as he is, then the ground seems at times to give way under his
feet; but if he does stay as he is, then his better self is always
grievously reproving him, and saying that he is not fulfilling his duty
and is not becoming what he could and should become. This is the battle
that every man begins with himself as soon as he comes to consciousness
about himself, and in this battle he must at any cost carry off the
victory.

All inward dissatisfaction springs from sensuality or selfishness;
these two never fail to show themselves as the primal causes, when the
matter is run to the ground. Any genuine happiness is not conceivable
where the spiritual nature has not gained the day over the sensual,
and where a disposition toward liberality, humanity, and kindliness
has not won the victory over a disposition to narrow selfishness--a
victory already decided in one’s innermost tendency, and, as a matter
of practical life, to be daily gained anew.

Whoever has not been able thus to subdue himself will never be a
match for the world around him, which fights him with the same though
thousand fold greater powers of selfishness. All that is left for him
is to defend himself in this struggle for existence by continually
injuring and destroying others and by uniting himself with others into
groups with mutual interests, groups that are likewise of a purely
selfish nature.

To try to suppress this struggle for existence which now threatens to
destroy all the nobility that is in man and to make us like beasts of
prey, is the chiefest task of all the truly cultured men of our time.

They must first show by their own example that this struggle is not
necessary, and that there is a way out of the labyrinths of this life
other than the sad one of who shall be strongest in his selfishness.
After all, the man who proves strongest in this struggle, even in the
most favorable case, only makes the existence of many fellow-men the
heavier, and his own better self, besides, has suffered harm.

The first step is, that one shall no longer be recognized as a truly
cultured man who has any trace of such a conception of life. And it
must and will come to that, before long, in our civilized states. On
the one hand, selfish solicitude for self and as much as possible of
sensual enjoyment during a short life--on the other, human kindness,
care for others, mental advancement, and the development of the nobler
powers of the soul: these are the two great armies which now stand over
against each other, ready for battle, and in one or the other you will
be obliged to take your place.


2. The second point is the proper and healthy physical and mental
development of all our faculties, in the interest of these higher aims.
We are not to live with this better conception of life in cloisters or
studies, but as far as possible to bring it into use in our ordinary
life and in every calling--but not, of course, in any calling that
stands in radical opposition to this better conception of life.

Here is the point where oftentimes a somewhat morbid and exaggerated
philosophical, religious, or scientific tendency stands likewise
opposed to true culture. There is no profit in a philosophy that does
not hold its own in the full current of life, and there is little help
in a religion which exists only in the church on Sundays and has no
value in the market or in business. And even knowledge, in itself, has
no great worth if it does not serve, somehow, to build up a more worthy
kind of life for oneself or for others.

In a sickly, overfatigued body, with nerves continually overexcited, no
quite healthy soul can live and work unimpeded. It is one of the chief
mistakes in the culture of our day that a kind of misunderstanding
has arisen between body and mind, whereby the body is harmed directly
and, through the body, the mind. Besides, our whole modern education
is much more directed toward the mechanical acquisition of things to
be remembered than to the attainment of real convictions and of true
knowledge.


3. But all these things, the pursuit of ideals, the search for true
knowledge, and the maintenance of bodily tone, do not yet help a man
toward true culture, unless they rest upon the conviction of the
existence of a transcendental world whose forces can effectively come
to his help. His sensual tendency and his natural selfishness are
far too strong for him to subdue them wholly by his own expedients
and without the help of such a Power residing outside himself. And
the motives for doing it are too weak. What indeed should impel him
to fight a hard and at first apparently almost fruitless battle with
himself and the surrounding world his life long, if this life is only a
transitory animal existence with no further destination?

The strength of a merely natural nobility, which for a time, perhaps,
may lift itself above these things, does not, under all circumstances,
hold out in the presence of this conception of life, but easily
despairs of itself when trials, continuing and great, draw nigh. There
must therefore be the introduction into human existence of a power
which is mightier than all a man’s natural forces and which makes it
possible for him to master himself and no longer to fear all external
evils, in comparison with the evil of high treason to his better self.

That there is such a power, which one can not indeed logically prove,
but which he can put to the test and himself experience,--this is
the mysterious truth of religion; and it would be much less of a
mystery if all men, if but once in their life, would venture the trial
whether there is such a power. To be sure, if any one does not want
to let quite go of his pleasure-seeking and selfishness, or does not
altogether yet desire to attain, at any cost, to something better than
the ordinary life, then, in spite of his trial, he will not have a
perfect experience of this power, and in that case the mere outward
profession of a religion does not help him much. He remains on the
whole as he is, even though he go to church every day.

But if he has this will, then he receives this power, then he
infallibly becomes another man, to such a degree that one may
truthfully call it a new birth. Then only will all his natural gifts
and knowledge become really alive in him and productive for the welfare
of himself and others.

The highest step is complete self-renunciation, in which a man is
only the receptacle of divine thoughts and impulses; but it is very
dangerous to work oneself into such a condition by the fantasy, before
it comes of itself and is really at hand. The main thing in religion
is not its immediate perfect attainment, but that every one who will
may enter on the way and pass from a joyless existence to a gradually
ascending life.

This is the way to true culture, and every one must try to travel it by
himself. It can not be taught; it can only be shown.

The evidence that one has true culture is, first, a gradually
increasing mental health and power, then a certain higher sagacity
that comes in, and finally a peculiar, larger caliber of spirit which
one can bring about in no other way, which one can not imitate, and
which really forms the chief element in culture. Yet these thoroughly
cultured men are, for all that, entirely natural human beings, but free
from all pretence and vanity; free also from all struggling, from all
seeking for life’s good things, on which human happiness does not have
to depend, and in whose incessant pursuit men only lose their souls;
free from all unhealthy pessimism, or monkish seclusion; free from fear
or nervousness or impatience; cheerful and quiet in the innermost
centre of their being, and continuing in their mental and spiritual
soundness up to the highest goal of human life. “As their days, so is
their strength,” as the Old Testament says with great beauty and truth.

The highest imaginable degree of this culture is a complete devotion
to all that is good and great, a devotion that no sort of trouble any
longer clouds, or can cloud; it is that condition of the soul, mentally
conceivable but seemingly rarely attained, in which there is no longer
any battle with the sensual and the transitory, and the struggle of
nature against the law of the spirit is completely at end.

This is that condition of perfection which we ascribe, in its
consummate development, to the Divine Being alone, but toward which we
also are called to strive; and the gradual winning of all men to this
goal is the task in particular of all true education, and looked at in
the whole, it is the end to which all history is moving.


II

No false culture nor half-culture is therefore to be compared with this
true culture, which is unmistakable in its effects upon the whole
nature of men, and upon their manner of intercourse with others. Even
in the very simple relations of life it will always reveal itself by a
certain greatness of spirit it confers, a spirit that distinguishes its
possessor from the ordinary man in the like ranks of life. And along
with this there is a quiet sense of peace with oneself and with others
such as no other philosophy of life can assure, and which, by its
contagious serenity, is apparent to every one who has ever been with
such people.

However, it is not wholly unnecessary, particularly at the present
time, to set down the chief characteristics of a false or insufficient
culture, characteristics which one meets very often and can not help
but notice. They are particularly the following:


1. Great extravagance in living. A man of genuine culture will never
set a _very_ high value either upon his outward personal appearance,
or upon where he lives, or what he eats and drinks, or the like
things: and so he will carefully avoid luxury, as improper for himself
and unjust toward others. Excessive finery, golden rings on all the
fingers, watch chains with which one might, if necessary, tie a calf,
houses in which one can not move for the furniture, banquets at which
one risks undermining even a robust constitution--these are all quite
sure signs of a lack of culture and things that one must guard against.
For whoever has intelligence sees through all this; it is only the
fools who are blinded by it. The surest mark of culture in all these
things is a certain noble, easy simplicity in one’s whole personal
appearance and manner of life.

The love of display and pleasure is always a sign of lacking culture,
and culture alone can thoroughly guard against it. Even a general
raising of the standard of life in a country is desirable only in so
far as a rough, half-animal, unworthy mode of living is by its means
done away with; otherwise a continual increase in men’s needs is a
misfortune for any country, and the cultured classes must earnestly
strive against it and set a better example. A noble simplicity of
living has also the advantage that it can always remain the same under
any circumstances, while people inclined to luxury usually have two
modes of living, one before people, and the other for themselves.


2. An external, but also very easily recognizable and characteristic
mark of culture is the possession or absence of books; especially with
persons who have the most ample means of procuring them. A fine lady
who reads a soiled volume from a lending library you may safely set
down as but half-cultured at best, and if she slips an embroidered
cover over the volume, it does not remedy the matter; it only shows
that she is conscious of her fault. An elegant home in which but a
dozen books stand unread on an ornamental whatnot you may quietly
regard as uncultured, with all its inmates; especially if, as usual,
the books are only novels.

Much reading still remains, in our day as always, a necessity of
general culture. Of a thoroughly cultured man one can properly require
that in the course of a moderately long life he shall have read all
of the very best in literature, and shall have gained, besides, a
tolerably general and correct idea of all the branches of human
knowledge, so that “nothing of human is to him quite alien.”

But if you ask how one can get time for this, outside of one’s business
or occupation, the answer is this: Break away from all unnecessary
things, from the hotel, from societies, clubs, and social pleasures,
from the useless reading of a great portion of the newspapers, from the
theatre, where you learn little that is worth knowing in these days,
from the too frequent concerts, from skating for whole afternoons, and
from much else besides that every one can easily charge against himself
as his special manner of squandering time. One can not be very cultured
and at the same time enjoy all the possible pleasures going.

But, if necessary, you may even break away somewhat from business. That
pays, and you will soon see what a difference there is, even as regards
business success, between a cultured merchant and a merely clever
manager.


3. A further sign of defective culture is a loud, rude nature: talking
very loud, in public localities, in cars, in restaurants, etc.;
acting as if one were the only person there; and conducting oneself
discourteously in places where many men gather. Our age is less
cultured in this respect than some earlier ones have been.

On the same footing stands everything that savors of advertising and
boasting, all showy pretence and braggadocio. A merchant, for example,
who greatly exaggerates the importance of his business, or puts very
boastful advertisements in the papers; or a lady who wears a silk dress
without quite immaculate undergarments--those surely you would not take
for people of sufficient culture.


4. Work also belongs to culture. It is not only a quite indispensable
means of attaining thereto, but idleness, even if one can “afford”
it, is always the mark of a disposition with low ideals; and that is
directly opposed to culture. Such a man will seek his pleasure in
something else, something less fine, or will possess a foolish pride
in not being obliged to work, or finally he is a fellow of coarse
sensibilities to whom it is a matter of indifference whether others
perish by his side whom he could have helped by his exertions.

An idler by profession is therefore surely a man without ideals and
without real culture, however elegant may be the external forms of
culture he has gathered round him. They are empty forms without real
substance, and every man of better culture is bound not to allow
himself to be deceived thereby and not to respect such people.


5. But not much less harmful is the inordinate passion for work. When
it is voluntary, it nearly always springs from ambition or greed, two
of the worst enemies of true culture; they always show that one sets
the highest value upon something else than culture. Or this passion
for work is only a bad habit and the imitation of a bad example, or
finally it may spring from a want of inner peace and control, which are
themselves the fruit of culture.

Whoever works on Sundays just the same as on week-days, when he is not
compelled to, you may quietly consider as little cultured as the man
who does nothing any day.


6. A very necessary element in culture is an absolute trustworthiness
and an upright conduct in all money-matters. To the cultured man it is
not permitted to display prodigality, or an aristocratic contempt for
money; a disposition like that always indicates lack of culture, and is
unjust toward one’s needy fellow-men, besides being mostly pretence.
Nor is it permitted him, on the other hand, to show undue parsimony,
nor dishonesty even in the smallest particulars. On this point, the
Scriptures say quite truly: “He that is faithful in a very little is
faithful also in much.”

An absolutely rightful employment of money, with the strictest honesty,
with complete disregard for money as the goal of life, and yet with
a proper valuation of it as the means of attaining higher ends, is
perhaps the surest of all signs of a man of genuine culture; as the
chase after gains and the worship of money most surely betrays the
uncultured man.


7. Another sufficient indication of defective culture is arrogance
toward inferiors or toward those who are poorer off, and this is
usually combined with subservience toward superiors and toward the
wealthy. This is the special characteristic of parvenus who spring
from uncultured surroundings. A man of the best culture will always be
polite and friendly, but the more so, the more he has to do with those
who stand below him, with the dependent or the oppressed; and the less
so, even to the bare edge of politeness, the more he has to do with
some one who makes pretensions, or wants to treat him as an inferior.
To show deep respect for the mere wealth of another is, as said before,
the most unmistakable mark of a man completely lacking in any culture
of his own.


8. There are still a number of minor signs of lack of culture, which
may, however, be in part only bad habits or the result of defective
bringing up; they do not always point conclusively to a general lack of
culture. Among these minor signs one may rightly reckon: much talking
about oneself; gossip and scandal over the personal affairs of others;
a great tendency to talkativeness on all occasions; a hasty, uncertain,
violent temperament; making many excuses for oneself where it is not
necessary or has already been done; to accuse or disparage oneself
in the hope that others will then assert the contrary; a too-zealous
officiousness; or a too-effusive politeness.

The thoroughly fine aristocratic temperament, such as the English
especially prefer, demands a very great self-possession and
preciseness; but this can easily degenerate into indifference and
coldness, and is then a fault. Enthusiasm and eagerness for whatever is
good a cultured man always possesses; where this is lacking, there is
also a lack of true culture, in spite of fine pretences.

But this is also certain: when the enthusiasm is genuine and is not
merely manufactured or the zeal of a beginner in the noble art of life,
then it will never be too forward and loud in expressing itself. A
noisy virtue is always a little suspicious, or at least is still in its
infancy.

Culture, therefore, is essentially the gradual development of inner
power toward what is right and true, with the purpose of elevating
and liberating one’s own higher nature from the bonds of the ordinary
animal sensuality with which it came into the world, and of training it
up to a higher level of life in complete soundness of mind and body.
Wherever it does not do this, it is of very subordinate value; and this
it must always above all things do in the so-called cultured classes,
for whom this is a primal duty.

It noway suffices to be always talking of the “elevation of the lower
classes,” who are often superior now to the upper in particular
elements of true culture. The chief need of our present day is much
rather the vigorous rehabilitation of this upper class, which is deeply
sunk in pleasure-seeking and the materialistic conception of things,
and has turned aside from the higher ends of life.


III

Now if you should resolve to try in this manner to attain to true
culture, you must have great patience with yourself. It is not the
matter of a single day or of a single resolution, although a great part
is played by making, once for all, a firm and binding resolve, to which
one always comes back again as often as one has in some particular
departed from it.

True culture, like true virtue in the main, is a matter of growth. By
degrees it grows in strength and insight, but can not be suddenly and
forcibly won by any kind of magic process; one must make some definite
beginning and then persevere in it for life. But this is the only true
purpose of living, never to be laid aside, and the only outcome of life
wholly to be wished.

A beginning can be made in different ways: in a purely practical way
by the acquisition of good habits; or philosophically, by meditating
upon, and coming to know, and discriminating between, the true and the
untrue in the conduct of life; or, through religion, at once seeking
the infinite and the power that thence springs. The easiest way is
undoubtedly the last, and to this, even though one takes the other
ways, one is finally led. For the secret of true culture, its beginning
and its real key, lies in the conquering of selfishness and especially
of the inordinate desire for pleasure. Thus it comes about that often
a very simple man, who possesses little knowledge and has had little
contact with so-called good society, is nevertheless more truly
cultured than some aristocratic or learned gentleman. He has the real
essentials of culture before they have, and has taken the easiest way
to acquire it.

Only when a man is no longer constantly busied about himself and no
longer thinks of himself alone does he receive his freedom of spirit
and the full use of the forces that lie in his mental and spiritual
power. The spirit, then for the first, becomes in some sort free from
an occupation not worthy of itself, and becomes capable of taking up
and quietly working at things which otherwise had remained forever
concealed under personal cares and pleasures.

To be sure--and this also must be said--these things are hard so long
as the youthful man is in the full tide of his physical and mental
unfolding. Such young people as have already attained to these things
very early in life usually do not live very long. It appears that man,
like the animal, and like the plant before it bears fruit, needs a time
of self-seeking activity, in order first to obtain a sufficient growth
and strength as a natural creature. In the case of man, however, there
surely and naturally comes a moment when an exclusive or preëminent
occupation about one’s own self becomes unnatural, and in every larger
nature--and, it may perhaps be said, in every existence at all worthy
of men--there comes the impulse to free oneself from oneself and to
live for an idea.

This is the most decisive moment of existence. It is, with some men,
comparable to a sudden, violent death, and a new birth to another life.
With others, it is more like the gradual and quiet sinking of the
former things into slumber, and the awakening and slow fashioning of a
new nature.

But if this change has once taken place, in one way or the other, then
all the real questions of human existence appear in another light,
clear and solved.

But if this change does not take place in a man who is not wholly
animal in his nature, then there always stays with him a never-quieted
thirst for such a change; and likewise a feeling of guilt, which
clearly says to him that he could and should have become something
better, a voice within him he can not drown, however great his seeming
success.


IV

With this we have also solved the last question you will put: “What
shall we get out of it? What real gain has a man from true culture?” To
this is to be answered that every great inward advancement a man makes
rests first upon a faith. He must forsake something he knows, and seek
something toward which only a presentiment is leading him, something he
can not understand yet fully, because the capacity is for the present
lacking.

But if he possesses the courage to will it, he attains it; and of those
who have attained this goal, not one has yet found the cost too high,
or the toil too hard.

The reward of virtue in this world is just this, that virtue _is_,
and that it can be overcome by no power of the world, but itself is
the only real power and force that will completely fill life full and
satisfy.

Tennyson has expressed this very beautifully in his poem “Wages”:

  “_Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song,
    Paid with a voice flying by to be lost on an endless sea--
  Glory of Virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong--
    Nay, but she aim’d not at glory, no lover of glory she:
  Give her the glory of going on, and still to be._

  “_The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue be dust,
    Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly?
  She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,
    To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky:
  Give her the wages of going on, and not to die._”

It is therefore, in the judgment of the best even of our own day,
fully worth the trouble to strive for true culture, and all attain who
really desire--rich or poor, learned or unlearned. Indeed, what Christ
first said for his own generation is also very appropriate for ours,
that simple souls and modest lives stand much more intimately near to
true culture, and on the way to it do not meet so many and so great
hindrances as do the wise and the prudent, and especially the rich,
who must first strip off infinitely many prejudices and attachments to
outward things, all of which are irreconcilable with true culture.

It is therefore harder for some and easier for others to attain to
culture, but for none impossible, save those whose mind is wholly
bound up with material things, and are satisfied besides with a merely
external culture that is rather form and show than reality, however
much it may claim to be real.

An ancient Chinese philosopher has already expressed this very well in
the following verses, somewhat naïvely translated:

  “_Men who win the highest prize
  Are quick to learn and quickly wise;
  Men in the second rank belong
  Who’re wise, but in the learning long;
  Those people must be classed as thirds
  Who stupid stay, and learn--but words._”

It scarcely lies within the will of every one of us whether his lot
shall assign him to the first of these classes, and happily it is not
a matter of very much concern. They are the great exceptions, the
moral geniuses of humanity. But to the second rank every one of us
is called, yes, emphatically challenged, when once the way has been
shown. And the saddest thing that can happen to him in life is, if he
nevertheless remains among the third sort of men, whose existence, at
the end, has had no real worth, either for themselves, or for others.

“Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth
understanding; for the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise
of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold.

“Wisdom is more precious than rubies: and none of the things thou canst
desire are to be compared unto her.

“Length of days is in her right hand; in her left hand are riches and
honor.

“Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.”




V. NOBLE SOULS




V. NOBLE SOULS


Kant somewhere suggests that all the natural capacities of a being were
intended completely to unfold, at some time, along the line of some
definite purpose, but that in man (the only reasonable being on earth)
the capacities intended for the use of the reason can be unfolded
completely only in the race, and not in every particular individual.

But since this does not come about quite of itself, the conclusion
would necessarily follow that there must always be separate individuals
who are specially called, to bring about for the whole of humanity this
development to a higher stage of its existence--with the proviso that
they shall also have willed to devote themselves to this purpose and,
to this end, to set aside all other personal aims. And even the further
conclusion would seem to be justified that no single human life would
fully suffice for this, but that rather a certain bequeathal of this
mission from hand to hand would be possible and fitting.

With this intent, the Mosaic legislation cherished the magnificent
plan of lifting a whole tribe out of the ordinary conditions of the
life of the nation, and devoting it to this, the noblest of the
activities. Very significantly, this tribe was forbidden the possession
of property; the Lord alone should be their inheritance, and every
pious Israelite was obliged, in the interest of the whole, to help
support them with the tenth part of his income (which, however, he
could bestow on any Levite he chose). Whether such an arrangement could
be realized in any of our modern states, and whether (and this is the
important point) it could be kept up indefinitely as established,
might be very questionable. But the certainty remains that every human
society needs, for its preservation, some such kind of salt, without
which it would the more easily fall into corruption. This salt is--the
“noble souls.”

Doubtless Christianity, at the beginning, had the intention of
requiring such a temper of soul of every one of its followers. But
we have since become much more modest in our demands on Christendom
in its entirety; we have been driven to say that there exist certain
higher claims than the ordinary ones laid on everybody, but that these
higher claims shall never require, so long as the world stands, an
artificial, castelike order of men, but rather men who will accept
them in a spirit of perfect freedom and even joy; and all thoughts
of a specially privileged position resting on these claims, and all
consequent feelings of superiority, must be completely shut out.

Thus this aristocracy has the advantage over all others in that it is
immediately accessible to all and that every one may become the founder
of an aristocratic family after this sort. Nor will there ever be
much crowding to get into this aristocracy, but nearly every one will
be ready to yield this place to the modern Levites, if only they, in
return, will give up the eager competition for other advantages.

Noble souls, therefore, are those who completely renounce the chief
aim of ordinary souls, the personal enjoyment of life, in order that
they may devote themselves the more effectively to the elevation of the
whole race.

The ready objection, that both can perhaps be combined, may well
be disputed. Unless one purposely closes his eyes, his experience
will rather show that this is not the case; and any proof other
than experience will convince no one on this point. Nor can we yet
really believe in any transformation and elevation of the _whole_
of Christendom through anything that may happen in the future.
Christendom, at least at first, can be regenerated only by the
gradual formation once more of such a band of volunteers within it
as will earnestly and literally accept the demands of the Christian
faith--more earnestly than (in a purely practical sense) is possible
to the majority of the souls comprising Christendom, or than, at least
for the present, can be expected of them. The danger lurking therein,
that a new Pharisaism might spring from it, is a real one; but the
danger is lessened because this conception of life could remain on
a purely individual basis, without taking any outward or organized
form. It appears in general to be a characteristic mark of the present
evolution of Christianity that, apart from all essential improvements
in its outward form, it is going first to develop again from within
into an “invisible church,” into a kingdom that truly is not of this
world. To explain this, however, is not the purpose of this chapter;
it would rather contradict this chapter’s leading thought, that it
is first of all a duty for the individual to proceed to his own
transformation. The question for us here, therefore, is only this: What
are the necessary characteristics of a truly noble soul? What are the
chief obstacles that stand in the way of this extraordinary guidance
of the spirit? And finally, is it possible in our day, and is it worth
the trouble, to strive after this goal? What will they, who do thus,
receive?

The opposite to “noble” is not “bad” or “vicious” (though these are not
noble), but “little, narrow-hearted, provincial, thinking only of small
aims in life and only of oneself or of one’s immediate surroundings.” A
broad vision, a large heart for all, indifference for one’s own self,
care for others--all these are noble. Fearlessness is an essential
element; also the not allowing oneself to be imposed upon by anything
in the world, under any circumstances. This latter characteristic the
genuine nobility has in common with the false, though in a pleasanter
form and united with a sincere esteem for what is truly honorable,
an esteem that the spurious nobility lacks. Another element is a
certain finer cleanliness of spirit. No longer to be an animal in
any direction, no longer in any way to favor the merely physical
being--this is our real calling, which we are to learn here on earth
that we may pursue it hereafter. When the soul stands firmly upon this
level (and it seldom reaches it in one generation), what is vulgar
becomes, to noble souls, unnatural and therefore physically repugnant;
while, at the lower level of development, it still charms and entices,
though it may spiritually be already overcome.

The following particular qualities, then, are not noble: first, all
vanity; this is a quite certain mark of a soul still small; therefore,
second, all boasting, all self-praise in general, and all pretensions
of even (so to speak) the most permissible nature. These last are not
unmoral, perhaps, but they are at any rate common and small. Then we
must add, further, all immoderate pleasure in any kind of enjoyment,
even when not purely physical; in eating and drinking, in music and
the drama, or what not. The noble man must always stand above his
pleasure and never yield himself into its power. Only one step farther
in the very common though often innocent gratification of pleasure is
the finding of delight in luxury; a stain of injustice is already
associated with luxury, which infallibly means depriving another man
of his own, and creates and maintains a dividing-line among men such
as ought not to exist. A noble simplicity of living which does not
degenerate into the cynicism of the Stoic is a certain mark of a soul
by right of heredity already nobly born; but the love of luxury is the
characteristic trait of the upstart. Luxury, with debts besides and
one’s consequent dependence upon men, is the acme of commonness and
leads very often on into wrong-doing.

It is quite the contrary of noble to speak much of oneself, and
particularly to boast of one’s deeds or philanthropy--the latter,
because one is scarcely justified in making much of a stir about it;
for very few people give away what they themselves can make good
use of, but only a part of their superfluity, which, because it is
a superfluity, they do not even quite rightfully own. Those who are
charitable in a really large-hearted fashion are, for the most part,
only the poor, who regard it as a matter of course that they should
help one another with everything they possess. With them, giving is
not associated with glory, nor is receiving associated with shame;
while the higher classes often seek to balance accounts with their
Christianity on the cheapest terms, by bringing their philanthropy well
forward into men’s notice.

To be sure, there is a way of concealing one’s deeds in such a fashion
that they are meant to be discovered and thus win double praise. And
it is not wholly right, and particularly not wholly Christian to free
oneself altogether from personal contact with poverty by means of
contributions to benevolent institutions. The Gospel knows nothing of
such societies as yet (perhaps it even excludes them), but simply says,
“Give to him that asketh thee”; one might at most add, “unless it will
manifestly do him harm,”--as really happens in some cases. The anxious
avoidance of any contact with a callous or not quite cleanly hand is
anything but truly noble.

It is not noble to feel disdain toward inferiors, toward poor people
who are often the truly noble of this world, toward children, toward
the oppressed of every sort, and even toward animals. The chase
especially, much as it may belong to the pleasures of noble or
would-be noble people, can not be regarded as anything truly noble,
and particularly if it is connected with no danger, but is simply a
pleasure in the killing of defenceless creatures. Frederick the Great
has a sharp passage about this in his writings, while the last French
Bourbons were zealous huntsmen.

To be ever sincerely friendly with servants, never domineering or
condescending, never familiar, but always generous and careful, is a
great art which is rarely learned in a single generation, but is always
a sure mark of nobility.

The moods of a noble soul are not based on pessimistic lines. The
pessimists are those who have somehow fallen short and are incapable of
struggling with courage for the highest things of life and of gaining
them by the power and endurance necessary. Therefore they give out
that they disclaim them, or represent the renunciation of them as the
highest attainable goal. When their pessimism is not merely a passing
phase in development, pessimists are always egotistical men of a narrow
range of ideas, to whom one must not pay the honor of admiration.
Thorough faultfinders, constant critics of everything, tormentors of
women, overexacting, capable of falling into painful agitation over a
misplaced article or over a train they have missed,--such are the least
noble among them.

The noblest thing of all is the love of one’s enemies. To be kind to
one’s friends, or to be friendly and fair toward everybody, is socially
excellent, but a long way still from being noble. But they who take
injuries quietly, and can always be just even to enemies, are the
genuine aristocrats of the spirit.

The perfect pattern of nobility is Christ; many of his biographers give
quite a false impression in depicting him too much from the humble and
outwardly meek point of view, and thus carry many conceptions of our
own bit of sky over into the oriental world, with its different ways
of thought. It is just that unattainably perfect combination of the
tenderest affection for the little ones, the poor, the oppressed, and
the guilty, with that large and calm self-consciousness before all the
high, the rich, and the mighty of that day (which nevertheless is never
defiance or pride),--it is just that combination that lends to this
personality a stamp it would be hard to declare purely human. To follow
this type has since been the task of all who strive after perfection,
and whoever turns away from it will always run the risk of chasing
after a false ideal and not attaining the goal. As one of these false
ideals has himself truly said, “In the breast of every man two souls
inhabit: the one, in the strong joy of love, holds to the world with
clinging organs; the other lifts itself forcefully away from the mist
to the fields of high surmise.” A force exerted to subdue oneself,
and a faith in these fields, will always in truth belong to the truly
noble; and if the great poet, who never completely subdued the lesser
of these souls in himself, says, in the second part of his most famous
work, “Fool, whoever lifts yonder his blinking eyes, and fancies
himself above the masses of his equals, let him stand fast and look
about him here, for to him that can hear, this world is not mute,”--if
he says this, then it is to be answered that to nobility there also
belongs something of a foolishness that is yet wiser than all the
wisdom of men.

The chief obstacles in the way of genuine nobility are the nobility
that is not genuine and the fear of men.

The presence of some sort of “aristocracy” in every human society of
long continuance is a proof of the need of something such, and at
the same time the chief cause of its decay. One might say, somewhat
paradoxically, that an aristocracy is at its purest and best where it
has no right to exist; and at its worst where it possesses the greatest
“rights.” Those who belong to these higher classes live now, for the
most part, in the vain delusion (to which they are systematically
brought up, and by which they are debarred from any better conception)
that they owe to humanity nothing further than their mere existence,
or that there is in general no other society for them but the “upper
ten thousand,” as they are called in England. They deem it quite
sufficient if they in a certain measure stand as representatives of
“the beautiful” in the life of humanity, somewhat in the sense of the
tasteless expression, “The rose that doth itself adorn, adorneth, too,
the garden,” or in accordance with the better expression, not always
rightly applied, that common natures count for what they do, noble
natures for what they are. Taken in the right sense, this last is true;
for from nobly living, nobly doing necessarily follows of itself,
while it is but hypocrisy without it. One of the surest marks of men
with noble natures is that the unfortunate are dearer to them than the
fortunate. Where this is not so there is no genuine aristocratic nature
of God’s grace, but only an ordinary man, however showy his station in
life.

A certain haughty inaccessibility is very pleasant to the proud,
and passes with them for noble. With God, however, this is not the
case, and the man to whom he is merciful he transfers to conditions
of life where that must be given up. For no one has any feeling for
such distant demi-gods who do not share in the common human lot. They
purchase their “exceptional position” much too dearly, since by it they
are shut out from knowing what real love is.

Then, too, it is strange that the most useless of these
birds-of-paradise of human society (and proud, too, of their
uselessness) very often deport themselves as zealous followers of
Christianity, while their whole mode of existence and their whole
conception of the world stand in contradiction with the most elementary
Christian principles.

It will therefore remain on the whole as Cromwell said, “The cause of
Christ goes hand in hand with the cause of the people.” The spirit of
nobility in the ordinary sense goes no further than a curious hearing
of the gospel, or than the attempt to use the gospel for quite other
ends than it was meant.

Still less noble than this aristocracy of birth (unless it is also
inwardly noble) are, as a rule, the new arrivals into it from the lower
classes, who mostly bring with them their inborn servile nature, or the
arrogant money-aristocrats who have made themselves rich, but to whom
the feeling of the rightfulness of their possessions must be wanting.
Of such a man Demosthenes, in one of his finest speeches, asseverates
that he was surely the child of some slave spuriously substituted in
the place of the real child, and was not in the least fitted to belong
in a free state.

All arrogance (even that over one’s talents or success) is an unfailing
sign of a small soul. Of pride, however, one can not say quite the
same. In Dante’s great poem it is very noteworthy that it is only
inside the gate of grace that release from pride, that is, humility,
is imparted to the man who is purifying himself from all his faults;
before, he employs his pride in overcoming other and lower sins that
conflict yet more with the nobility of the soul.

We can not, then, change this fact, that every genuine aristocracy
rests upon the appointment of God, who is the only rightful “lord” upon
earth, beside whom there is no other “right of lordship,” and who
accepts those as his “vassals of the crown” whom he deems qualified.
On the other hand, it is just as undoubted that individualism, the
right of mastery over one’s own nature and over one’s free will so far
as it is employed for good ends, is the most inalienable of all human
rights, and one that no political democracy can or will ever set aside.
To lower this individualism to a mere class or mass consciousness and
to a common average of culture is barbarism; to develop it partially
and selfishly only for oneself is criminal or insane. Beauty of form
has its value and its right in the training of individual men and of
whole generations, provided it is developed on the sound basis of the
good--as if its blossom. But then it is the most perfect expression of
manliness, of virtue in the ancient sense, of that chivalrous spirit of
the Middle Ages which to-day is expressed in the word “gentlemanlike,”
though this word often stands only for an empty mould without real
contents. “Gentleness, when it weds to manhood, makes a man.” Otherwise
not.

“The fear of man bringeth a fall,” says the wise Hebrew proverb-writer;
“but whoso putteth his trust in the Lord shall be safe.” That is very
much in accordance with experience. The fear of man leads always into
by-paths and is ever somewhat petty and ignoble. Yet no one, even the
highest and strongest, can forever remain without fear, if he knows no
invisible Lord above him on whose protection he may absolutely rely, so
long as he acts rightly.

With the fear of men is allied a crowd of other petty vices which
all take their origin therefrom. Hate, envy, jealousy, vengeance,
resentment, readiness to take offence, malice, injustice in the
judgment of others, all as little noble as possible, are nothing but
the consequences of fear. Even covetousness, the restless struggle for
money and property, often springs not so much from a mad propensity to
scrape everything together for oneself alone, as from the necessity
(justified if there were no God) of winning and maintaining in the
“struggle for existence” a place which never can be sufficiently
assured against all mischances, and against all the assaults of
a like-minded overwhelming number of enviers and haters of every
individual prosperity. Looking at the matter just from the standpoint
of covetousness alone (which has its own great inconveniences), if
this fear were not present, there would very likely be no men wholly
dispossessed and no social question.

If one would remedy these conditions, otherwise so hopeless, then some
must be freed from the fear of being obliged to spend a short life
without a just share in the happiness earth has to offer, whereby they
are necessarily driven to half-insane exertions to win it by force;
and others must be freed from the apprehension lest they shall see all
become poor and wretched on account of a new distribution of property
equally among all. To desire to mediate between these two opposites by
means of palliatives is the fruitless exertion of the hour. Neither
attitude of mind, however, has anything noble about it.

A soul that has attained complete nobility, free from fear and resting
upon a firm ground of faith, is the most beautiful but also the rarest
thing there is now. Very few will arrive at this goal to-day otherwise
than by roundabout paths, be it through great doubts or through great
sorrows; though to some the way thereto is made easier because of their
parentage and ancestry, so that they can already begin to strive after
it with the advantage of a better footing.

Yet it remains a sad fact that every child that is born clearly bears
upon it the stamp of such a destiny, whose attainability is, with most,
more and more lost with advancing age, although a heavy curse hangs
over the head of him who draws away from this destiny a single one of
the millions endowed with a nature called to the highest things.

Nevertheless, this is actually so, and, as was said at the beginning,
it is impossible that there should be none but noble souls on earth;
that would be at once the “state of eternal rest.” Such a noble and
“exclusive” society we picture for the future life, so far as we can
imagine that life at all. But there must always be at least a number of
people who will not bow the knee to the “Baal” of the hour and just as
little desire to live out their lives on a merely natural basis (for
this is of the nature of animals); but their only care is, that God may
continually dwell upon the earth.

To this, all are called, especially those who belong to the fellowship
of Christianity; and if few are actually “chosen,” yet they form
an élite to which every man has access. This kind of aristocracy
will never pass out of existence, and to it undoubtedly belongs the
immediate future, the more the democratic reform wins the upper hand
in the life of the nations. But it will also, wherever it is genuine,
be ever confirmed and upheld by God. An aristocracy, on the other hand,
that no longer has any basis in its nation, is certainly a false or
degenerate aristocracy that rightfully falls into decay.

For the genuine aristocracy there is another and a sterner privilege
than what are commonly considered privileges. Something more is
demanded of it than the continuous longing ordinary souls have for
happiness and pleasure. And it is not good for it if it is ever quite
absolved of the sorrows which alone keep it in this disposition,
or if it succeeds or is disappointed in something that sprang from
ordinary motives. The belief in the purifying power of sorrow and
therefore in its necessity is always the kernel and centre of all true
ethics, whether based upon philosophy or upon religion. The noblest
of all earthly lots is sorrow cheerfully borne, and the blessing that
springs therefrom for many. And herein lies the key to an otherwise
perplexing riddle; and on this account many men, who will have nothing
to do with religion, nevertheless stand nearer to it than many who are
loud in their religious professions. Whoever can accept sorrow with
a good-will and turn it victoriously to the building up of a better
nature within him, is and will remain a noble man, with a nature
fundamentally religious, much as his reason may resist any positive
confession of religious faith. And in this one point lies the unity,
which, silently surmounting all limitations, binds the nobler men of
every faith and confession.

And so, a noble soul must be able to endure a considerable amount of
injustice as it now exists in the world, apparently never to cease; nor
will it find a cause of offence either in its own misfortunes or in
those of others; nor must it try too carefully to escape a reputation
for being somewhat foolish.

It is not always the greatest talents that are adapted to the greatest
things. It is very significant that Isaiah says, “Who is blind, saith
the Lord, but my servant? or deaf, as my messenger that I send?” In
the same manner Christ often says that, to be fit for the Kingdom of
Heaven, one needs a childlike nature which the unwise are closer to
than the wise. And the same thing was shown during the Reformation
in the case of many who were the wisest of their time, but could not
decide to surrender a certain “cultured” attitude of open-mindedness
and impartiality toward questions of which the learned know, of course,
that one can, in any event, “look at it from another point of view.”
This is yet to-day the narrow defile which very many of the cultured
shun to whom Christianity would be quite right, if it only fitted in
a little more with the demands of the time, if it only would give up
something of its uncompromising attitude in regard to ethics, and
something of its absolute demand for faith in respect to things that
are transcendental and not to be proved.

Christ himself would undoubtedly in his day have been able to conceive
his calling in another way than he did. The story of the temptation
was an event such as, once in his life, has happened to every highly
gifted man, and for which he could assign place and date. Happy if
he then struck the right road and no longer let himself be misled
because the whole world was against him. Again and again it has finally
been obliged to yield, this “whole world,” before a single soul; and
we often experience yet to-day, in the smallest as in the greatest
questions, the truth of the bold saying, “Who firmly holds to his mind,
will fashion the world to himself.”

There is therefore always a place and a need in the world for this
kind of people, and in this fact they find their modest portion. They
have their difficulties, to be sure; but to be without them is neither
necessary nor good for them.

Finally, that is a very true word a wise man once spoke, though from an
opposite point of view, “In the struggle for existence there is always
room above.” Only the lower and middle places are overfilled.

Therefore, you who are young or are dissatisfied with your search thus
far for happiness, strike at once for the highest goal. In the first
place, that is the surest and best way because it is God’s will and
because he expressly calls you to it. In the second place, it is, of
all goals, the one that most brings peace, while all the others bring
many disillusionments and bitternesses in their train. And lastly, it
is the only one where the race with those contending for the same prize
of victory is one with friends and helpers, and where you will not be
received at the goal by enviers and secret opponents, but by sincere
friends and men of the same high intent--just noble souls, with whom
alone it is easy and good to live.




VI. TRANSCENDENTAL HOPE




VI. TRANSCENDENTAL HOPE


This earthly life can not be the end of all life; it can not be the
final word concerning our destinies, unless they are, even in the
most favorable cases, to close with an enigmatic deficit, and with an
unexplainable divergence between capacity and accomplishment, between
task and performance: this must be evident to every one who carefully
reflects upon it, to every one who is unwilling to dismiss such
questions curtly, unwilling to accept of death as an all-conclusive,
comfortless fate.

The life of every thinking man who does not believe in its continuance
after death, ends, therefore, in deep sadness. The decline of all the
powers, bodily and mental, fills the heart that knows no further hope
with dejection, and with a terror, at times, that no circumstances of
earthly fortune can save him from. Even the consideration that the
works of a man survive him, or that “when the body shall fall to dust
the great name shall still live on,” gives him no adequate comfort for
the passing away of life itself. Some then forcibly rouse themselves
and seek in feverish activity to use up the last moments of vanishing
existence in making sure that others will have something to remember
them by, or feel a momentary regret over their loss. In other aging
men, on the other hand, once more there awakens with almost elementary
force the long-slumbering desire for pleasure in every direction,
seeking again to blow into flame the pitiful spark of the fire of life.
The end in both cases, however, is a helpless breaking-down in the
face of the constantly approaching Unknown, or the banishment of all
thoughts on the subject as far as possible, or finally, in the bravest
cases, a stoical surrender to an unavoidable fate--unless there is a
_hope_ that life will continue beyond. Only where such hope is present
is Death the friendly-earnest messenger who heralds to the tired
wanderer the end of his journey and the soon impending prospect, from a
slowly and toilsomely mounted hilltop, into a broad new world; for all
others he is the ugly skeleton as represented in the mediæval Dance of
Death, or at least the inexorable, cruel Reaper of the very beautiful,
but very melancholy poem of Clemens Brentano, “There is a reaper whose
name is Death.”

Now, for the first, there comes to light the most remarkable of all
the differences between men; now, at the end of life, the “simple
fool” comes to a victorious vindication. For while to all others every
autumnal falling leaf awakens the feeling of a hopeless passing away,
_he_ sees, even in the tree stripped bare, the buds already of a new
and gracious spring, and he hears, in his last days, not only the
unalterable judgment of death, “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt
return,” but at the same time likewise the word of life, “Arise, shine,
for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.”


II

The attitude of men toward the question of death, the most important
of life’s questions, is that which best characterizes each one of
them, and if one always knew their thoughts about it, one would be
able to draw therefrom the most definite conclusions as to their whole
conception of life.

The fear of death is also the best test-stone for every philosophy. A
philosophy that does not overcome this fear, or at best leads to sad
reflections upon the transitoriness of life, is in the first place
of not very much practical value, and in any case does not completely
fulfil its purpose. Nor is it even quite consonant with reason; for how
could we picture a reasonable condition of man and society, if there
were no death? For when the lives of prominent persons have been too
prolonged, it has been a manifest misfortune to their fellow-men. Far
from being an evil that makes a shrill discord in the universe, death
is rather an advantage, the only conceivably possible arrangement under
which a world such as ours, in which the good must contend with the
evil, can exist.

This at least is certain, that even upon those whose “heart is
fortified” against any event, the incompleteness and trouble of life
often lies heavily, and that to them this earthly existence seems
merely a transitory state from which there must some day be release.
Even the happiest life knows such moods, and though one might be
entirely satisfied with his own lot, he could not possibly be so for
his nation and for the millions of men whose life seems only one long
chain of deprivations and blunders that mock at all attempts to help.
An old German poet, Heinrich von Laufenburg (1445), already gives
expression to this mood in the following verses:

  “_I would I were at home on high,
  And all my worldly toil laid by;
  At home above is life deathless,
  And all is joy without distress;
  A thousand year make there one day,
  And pain and strife are gone for aye.
  Then up! my heart and hardihood,
  Seek ye the good above all good;
  Ye may not stay for long below,
  To-day, to-morrow, ye must go.
  Farewell, O world! may God thee bless;
  I fare to Heaven’s happiness._”

But neither is this yet the right conception of death. One can also die
“full of days,” and age is not necessarily a tedious, ever-increasing,
hopelessly incurable disease, but it can also be a continuous
advancing, an evolving of oneself toward a nobler and a purer life than
is possible on this earth. Death is then but the wholly natural and
by no means violent and illogical transition into an analogous kind
of existence that only needs to be continued; the fruit is ripe, and
falls, not to be destroyed, but for a useful harvest.

Moreover, if there is no awakening after death, then those who believe
in an awakening will suffer naught from such a delusion, but, without
ever being conscious of it, will share the common human fate of
extinction; while, if there is an awakening after death, such an
awakening can not be a pleasant thing for those who did not believe
in it. This, indeed, is where faith has the advantage, to speak quite
practically; for if it should be mistaken, it will fare no worse, in
this life or later, than the opposite view; but if it shall find itself
on the right path, it will fare better.


III

Still, our hope in a further life is only a hope and not a demonstrable
certainty. Yet perhaps it is a well-grounded assurance, resting first
of all on the fact that capacities and powers are placed in men for
whose complete development human life is too short, and which would
therefore be pointless if they did not attain to a further evolution.
This is particularly manifest in the case of all men who die young.

Again, we have the very definite testimony of Christ, whose whole
conception of life would otherwise rest upon a huge error. The
resurrection of the personality is one of the most indubitable and the
most definite promises of Christianity, and without it Christianity
would have a very dubious amount of truth and a very doubtful value
for life; no “resurrection of the body,” of course, in the literal
sense of the Christian confession of faith, as many conceive it, but
in the sense in which Christ, and Paul too on occasion, announced it
and in which alone it can satisfy us also. For though we do not wish
to lose our individuality, nor rise again, as Job rightly says, as “a
stranger to ourselves” (in which case there is no continuation of _our_
life and the whole question no longer has any meaning), yet we shall
surely not desire to live on with all “the weaknesses of the flesh”;
and under any circumstances there is need of a thorough transformation,
laying deep hold upon the whole nature of man, a transformation for
which the Catholic church, indeed, assumes a special preparatory stage.

The details of this transformed continued life we do not know at all;
nor do we know, in particular, how far those who are in that life have
any consciousness of their former condition (as, indeed, logically
belongs to a continued life, else it is none), nor how far they are in
a position to maintain a connection with their kinsmen here. Moreover,
we could not apprehend it with our present organs of perception,
even if it were to be disclosed to us. Likewise all descriptions
of “eternal glory” (with which the fantasy of men has taken so much
pleasure in busying itself), as well as the notion of an “everlasting
rest” (which, with our present ideas of rest, we could not endure),
are nothing further than fantasy, expressed in impossible, or at
any rate in quite imperfect pictures. It is surely possible, we may
hope, for the nature of the life to come to be, far beyond all human
understanding, greater than all these pictures represent; but it will
quite surely be intelligible only for those whose spiritual nature is
suited for it and sufficiently purified from everything that tends to
decay. That is, in other words, if there is a continued life for all,
and if they who have lived for nullities and have not developed their
capabilities toward the attainment of things eternal, do not sink into
nothingness, then every one surely continues to live in the element to
which he truly belongs.

Whether there is then an endless duration of this new state under all
circumstances, or whether there are still many separate steps of life,
as in our life, and a final purification for all men (the so-called
“restoration of all things”)--these are questions that no one will
ever be able to answer satisfactorily. Whether there is an eternal
punishment of the wicked does not seem to be so very important--less
important, at least, than the unending advance of the good; and whether
the wicked believe this, or do not believe, it has no very real
influence upon their conduct. The punishment of the resolutely wicked
(which many do not see brought about, and so become easily dubious of
the existence of divine justice in the world) is particularly this,
that they are unable to become better even if in their better moments
they wish to do so. They are obliged to remain slaves to their lower
nature, and to lose their life without any results worth while and
without the hope of an immortality which they could only fear. If that
still seems to you to be no satisfactory compensation for the sorrows
and deprivations of the good upon earth, then add this fact to the
account, that evil men do not experience the love and fidelity of men,
the best of all outward things the world has to offer, and without
which all their other possessions might well appear worthless, even
to him who has them in the greatest fulness. He who loves no one,
and whom no one loves, is a poor, lonely man, though he may, in the
common belief, be sitting in the lap of fortune. And things are so
arranged that these unhappy men can not understand or value the love
which perhaps is still tendered them, but must infallibly lose it
again through their own folly. To the things of highest value in human
existence, the nearness of God, an inward trust in the good ending of
a brave life, and that love and fidelity which can not exist without
reciprocal esteem,--to these the evil man never attains. The other
things let him enjoy in uneasiness and in the continual fear of the
envy and hate of thousands (if that can be called “enjoyment”), and do
not begrudge him a happiness that, for much the greater part, exists
only in the mistaken idea that others have of it. “_Non ragionam di
lor, ma guarda e passa_,”--speak not of them, but look, and pass them
by.

As far as concerns our present life and nature, what is necessary (and
therefore conceivable) as a reason for our faith, is only this: that
without faith (that is, a trust in the transcendental, in what we can
not grasp with the senses), we can not carry out the purpose of life
in its entirety, nor can we lift ourselves to that plane which, _with_
this faith, lies in our power of attainment and therefore becomes our
task; that, further, for the attainment of this plane we need a power
of love which is stronger than that which rests on human affections,
and which is also very likely the element that creates life and
sustains it and that possesses the power to overcome death; and that
finally neither this faith nor this love would endure in the face of
the enormous obstacles which oppose them on every hand in our earthly
existence, if it were not for the glad hope that “there remaineth a
rest to the people of God.”


IV

The most positive fact we really know as to an existence after death
is the resurrection of Christ. This is evidence not only historically
vouched for (better, indeed, than most so-called “historical facts” of
equal antiquity), but also a necessary postulate from a philosophical
and ethical point of view, unless the whole history of the world for
two thousand years past is to rest upon a delusion, or even, one may
say, upon an intentional falsehood. The resurrection is, and will
remain, therefore, the foundation both of all true Christianity and of
all transcendental hope.

Judging by this resurrection of Jesus, the future life would seem to be
somewhat similar to our present existence, and death accordingly an
event of much less importance and, one might properly say, much more a
matter of indifference than we usually assume it to be. At any rate,
the future life will be an evolution; neither an everlasting rest in
the literal sense, nor everlasting enjoyment. The latter would not be
noble enough, and the former appears to us as beautiful only in moments
of weariness and not when we are endued with new vigor.

On the contrary, indestructible power of work and joy in work, joined
with true depth and clearness of vision as to the ends of life one
should pursue, enter, in the case of all divinely guided men, only
toward the end of their life, when all seeking for pleasure has ceased;
and this is a very safe indication, both as to the continuation of life
itself (that it can not suddenly cease at this stage of development),
and as to the nature of that continuation (that it can only be a
heightening of the best of our present activities). This is often so
clear to the reason that the assumption of a sudden extinction of this
activity, just when it has become full of vitality, seems thoroughly
unmeaning, and unworthy of the order of the universe unless it rests
upon mere chance; and a cosmical order resting upon chance alone, yet
existing for thousands of years, would be a simple impossibility.

Banish from your life, therefore, the melancholy fancy of a helpless
sinking beneath the waters, for that is foolishness; but banish
likewise too great a contempt of life. Life is no mere vale of sorrow
that must be escaped from as soon as possible, but an important,
perhaps the most important, part of our whole existence, in which
we make our decision for advancing life, or for a gradual and real
death. Even the many weak-hearted men of our day who only want to
die quickly and “go to heaven” without a struggle, may well find
themselves deceived, and that the struggle will yet meet them, but
under less favorable conditions. Nor are we to envy the “innocent”
children and young people who, in the view of the Greeks, have died
early by a special favor of the gods; for they must none the less
begin from the beginning. It is through conflict and many troubles of
every sort that we must attain to the perfection which is our present
task. This perfecting process alone opens the hard and unreceptive
heart sufficiently to receive the noble seed of a higher conception
of life, a seed that must be sown in the heart, and first spring up,
then grow, then blossom, and at last bear fruit. This life-process may
neither be hastened nor avoided, but it must be gone through. It is
therefore reasonable that we should not be eager for death, even if
we do not fear it, but we may justly rejoice only over what we have
already happily gone through and now, for all eternity, no longer need
to experience and endure.

When one once believes firmly in a continuation of existence that
alone supplies our present life with an intelligible solution of all
its questions and riddles, then a bit more or less enjoyment or pain
during this short span of imperfect existence becomes more a matter
of indifference, and much that was important before falls away from
us as a form without meaning; while, if these thoughts are untrue,
and if this is the only world, full as it is of injustices, sorrows,
and passions, it is a simple impossibility to believe in a just and
almighty God. Upon this single point, therefore, hangs our entire
philosophy of life.

To me, the continuation of existence is a certainty, but its form
inconceivable; only it will be similar to our present life in its
purest moments, and will surely be no sudden leap into a quite
different spiritual condition, but a continuation, in which each man
can receive only that for which he has become ripe here. The difference
will therefore, perhaps, be smaller than is commonly thought.

But the scientists are quite right in denying immortality to a soul
that is simply a function of physical organs. Whatever in our nature
can be comprehended by the methods of natural science can not possibly
be immortal, but passes into annihilation, or rather into dissolution
and change, just as surely as any other object in the physical world.
But there is apparently something else in man besides bones, muscles,
sinews, veins, and nerves, and this something else can be embodied
again in some other form. And this seems to me relatively more
conceivable than a sudden and complete annihilation of the spiritual
life.

Death, in itself, is therefore nothing terrible, nor even something
undesirable, and whoever still fears it is certainly not yet upon the
right path of life. The only fearful thing is the backward glance,
when one is old, upon a life quite perverted and useless, or upon a
great accumulation of guilt unforgiven.

Not we shall pass away, but the present world shall pass away: this
is the one great thought which must lift us above all the terrors
of uncertainty. The other bright point in this darkness which the
understanding alone can not illumine, is the thought that the Lord of
all existence, whom we have already learned to know here as a sure
friend, must be quite the same for us there also as he was here, only
still nearer joined to us and still clearer known.

His voice--and this all know who have once stood near the dark
exit-gate of this life--his voice we shall be able to hear at last,
when all else has already sunk away behind us. Then, only one step
further, and

  “_I hope to see my pilot face to face,
  When I have crossed the bar._”




VII. THE PROLEGOMENA OF CHRISTIANITY




VII. THE PROLEGOMENA OF CHRISTIANITY


The cardinal fault of Christianity, which has persisted from generation
to generation for centuries, is perhaps this: that Christianity has
for long been no genuine, vigorous conviction of all those who bear
its name, but only a general notion of somewhat the same meaning as
“humanity” or “civilization.” Thus year after year many thousands
are received into its formal constituency without ever in their
lives receiving a correct idea of its demands, or a firm trust in
its promises, or, least of all, any definite resolution and will to
hold themselves in duty bound by these demands and promises. The
“Christian” nations distinguish themselves from the non-Christian in
much the same way as the ancient “Greeks” distinguished themselves from
the “Barbarians”; and the Christian faith has grown to be a special
confession _within_ the borders of Christendom; while quite other
convictions, never shared by Christ and his first confessors, and
conceptions of the world which claim an equal right in a “Christian”
state, venture to stand opposed to Christianity.

We may leave it undecided whether this is a fate that overtakes every
religion which ripens into a “world-religion,” but may nevertheless
doubt whether the formation of such a world-religion by means of a
great attenuation of all religious demands ever lay in the original
meaning and task of Christianity; even if one may grant that, even in
this form it has been a magnificent tool of civilization and, in fact,
is still such.

Yet it is certain that this course of evolution was dimly felt, even by
the first generation of Christians, as an unavoidable though deplorable
fate, and that the formal victory of the Christian religion over the
heathen cults in the Roman Empire, and the consequent transformation
into a Roman state religion, brought into it an element that Christ
himself, before Pilate, the Roman governor of Judæa, had disavowed in
the most distinct manner. All which has since been called “the Church,”
or “the relations between the Church and the State,” and which has
taken up so great a space in the thoughts of the nations, has, as an
organization, no support in the original records of Christianity;
indeed, it often almost seems as though the attainment of a definite
goal of human development and the consequent end of the present age of
the world were dimly surmised by the early Christians to be nearer than
proved possible, in the sequel. The Kingdom of God is wholly founded
upon the freedom of the human will, and it depends on that with what
speed and intensity Christianity will or can come to realization in an
individual, or in a nation, or in an epoch.

It is a serious article of belief with the Protestant group of
churches, that not merely in a general way, but for every single
individual during his earthly life, Christianity is to be realized
through a “church”; this “church” stands for the continuous visible
embodiment of Christianity, and accordingly it receives the individual
into its constituency as a mere unit in the totality, in order that it
may furnish him a safe passage through the judgment that shall finally
take place on all the deeds of men. And this does not prevent many men,
in all the Christian communions, from believing that membership in
these communions is the chief matter; and they busy themselves about
the fundamental conditions of such a membership only for a couple of
hours on Sundays.

This accounts for the title of this chapter. For we are going to
ask, not what belongs dogmatically to the Christian doctrine, but
what kind of preliminary dispositions are required in the human
intellect and will before we can accept and understand the teachings
of Christianity. In this sense they are “prolegomena.” If some reader,
after going through this chapter, should say that the very substance
of Christianity itself lies therein, I shall not disturb him in his
conception; for his conception would at any rate do him less harm than
the other view, which would declare these preliminaries to be too
difficult, or not necessary, for entrance into the church of Christ.

These first steps are quite easily outlined in a few words: first,
to regard God as an actual existence and not as a mere philosophical
idea of the schools,--and then, in consequence, to fear him alone and
to serve him alone--to have no other idols beside him, neither men,
nor possessions, nor glory; secondly, to love the men among whom one
is placed “as oneself,” as Christ says, in practical words we can
understand--not often more than oneself apparently, and as a matter
of fact, in most cases less; thirdly, not to devote one’s life to
pleasure even of the so-called “noblest” sorts, nor, on the other
hand, to suffering, to mere asceticism,--but to surrender oneself to
the doing of the will of God, in the firm confidence that this must
be practicable, though not through one’s own moral power, yet through
the divine help and grace; and, fourthly, if any one should at first
doubt whether all this is possible for man, to believe that, so far as
concerns himself, the matter lies only in his _will_, the only thing he
can, but must, contribute thereto.

These are the “prolegomena” of Christianity which every one must
consider, before he resolves, upon reaching his years of discretion,
to make a real entrance into the Christian life, instead of going
forward upon the broader way, easier at the first, but sure to be
unsatisfactory in the end.

If he does not consider these things, or if he relies upon his own
strength in the conduct of life because he trusts in the possibility of
an ethical uplifting tendency already present in human nature and does
not think he needs any transcendental support, then he is either like
the man in the Gospel who built a house upon the sand which stood only
as long as the weather was fair, or like that other who began to build
a tower which afterward he could not finish.

Or if he finds these demands too high-pitched, then, even under the
best conditions, there springs up in him that consumptive, anæmic,
half-hearted Christianity which is forever evading the urgings of
conscience and is consequently always dissatisfied--that hypocritical
and unlovely Christianity which we all know only too well.

It is not necessary to say much in “explanation” of these demands.
The requirements of the Christian religion are not usually lacking in
clearness; it is the human will that is lacking in the resoluteness to
accept them. It much prefers to have them explained away.

Belief in God is naturally the first and the most necessary preliminary
stipulation of Christianity, without which it does not exist, or is but
an empty dissembling name for an entirely different way of thinking.
This is also the case when the word “God” is accepted as a designation
for the totality of all things, or the Absolute Being, or, as with
most adherents of “deism,” as an expression for a something that
exercises no influence upon worldly things, but somehow exists only as
the law that in the beginning created the universe, but is now forever
unchangeable; where it itself came from and why it no longer continues
vital and active, no one can tell.

To be sure, we can not explain a “living” God, as we have often already
said. All explanations or so-called proofs of God are defective, both
the positive and the negative. It is not worth the trouble to linger
over them. God is something that can not be explained, but he is not
something that can not be experienced. But he is to be experienced
only by those who “keep his laws,” and one may be practically quite
sure that those people who will not do this are atheists at bottom, in
spite of all their asseverations; just as there are men, on the other
hand, whom God probably still regards as his followers, though we have
ourselves long given up regarding them as such.

The experience of God expresses itself thus: first, in spiritual
tranquillity, satisfaction, quieting of the thirst for truth (as Christ
calls it), a sort of strengthening of the spirit and of the inner life
such as is vainly to be attained in any other way, whether through
philosophy, or through a refusal to think at all about such things;
second, in inward serenity which, gained in any other way, is not so
long-enduring; and finally, in a general deeper intensity of life, the
effective cause of physical and spiritual health and so of the manifold
blessing which springs from this belief in God, both for individuals
and for nations.

It is this blessing that is showing itself when all one’s
circumstances, apparently of their own motion, so shape themselves that
what is truly excellent (the furthering of the inner, the protection of
the outer life) always prevails, and danger is averted; on the other
hand, no travelling in byways, no wrong actions, are attended with
good results. The latter is the usual punishment of evil men, whereby
they are hardened and kept from turning to a better life. It is also
the ever-visible means of distinguishing between the divine blessing
and that outwardly similar worldly “good fortune” in which even the
shrewdest of men often put an inconceivable and quite groundless
confidence, until, some time or other, it leaves them in the midst
of dire difficulties; for the most part at the very moment when they
believed they had definitely secured it and had attained to the proud
summit of their desires. Men are never faithful to the mere “children
of fortune,” but only to their fortune; while they can not, if they
wanted to, oppose those endowed with the divine blessing.

On this point the Old Testament contains many positive assurances
and many actual examples, and it may in general be said that for the
presentation of the Laws of God the New Testament alone would not
suffice; nor is that its purpose, for it always implies a knowledge of
the Old Testament.

“The man who keepeth my laws shall thereby live,” is the sum of these
promises. For these laws are the principle of life itself, and to
ignore them is to come within the jurisdiction of death. That may be
put to the test, and ought to be put to the test, if it is done with a
sincere desire to know what to believe, and if it is not continually
repeated after one has once gained a sufficiently clear knowledge. But
for those who will not do even that there is nothing left save to make
for themselves other gods “to go before them.”

These gods are, as a rule, human beings or the products of their mind
in some form,--once again to-day, as in the period of the so-called
Renaissance, preëminently in the form of art. Great crudeness of morals
and the absence indeed of all ethical conceptions may go hand in hand
with the finest and highest culture in this special direction, thus
showing that art can not be the highest goal men can strive for and
attain. We ought not to have had to experience this for the second
time, though it is often to be feared that we are now doing so.

We should never make idols for ourselves of even the dearest and best
men, not to speak of those who are highly gifted or hold a high place
in the world’s esteem. Not only the New Testament, but even the Old,
lays down in a very practical way the proper and easily recognized
limit; for they prescribe that we are to love God “above all,” and
men “as ourselves,” no more and no less. Even the simplest person can
easily compute this; and if in certain exuberant, “heavenly” moments of
life it seems too little, yet, taking one’s whole life into account, it
is really more than any of us perform, and at any rate is much more
salutary for our neighbor.

The opposite quality to “reliance upon men” is (what at first seems
unlikely) sympathetic compassion; when reliance departs, compassion
enters to heal. This is something quite different from what is
ordinarily called “love to men,” and is much more. It is something,
too, that does not naturally lie within us; we have to learn it,
usually late in life and through troublous paths. But when a man has
it, then it is henceforth sure that he is “fit for the Kingdom of God.”

If it is not men and their works, then it is possessions, ambition,
or the continuous search for enjoyment that stands most in the way
of that sincere union of the human soul with the divine spirit which
necessarily forms the foundation of all Christianity;--above all, it is
the “deceitfulness of riches,” as the Gospel well calls it, the very
common delusion that possession and happiness are identical, a delusion
from which the man first awakes when he holds in his hands that for
which he was striving and for which he had often sacrificed body and
soul; and now for the first he discovers that, looked at closely, it
was not, even on the best interpretation, worth all this exertion.

In the Gospel are found these words of Jesus: Lay not up for yourselves
treasures upon the earth; ye can not serve God and Mammon; whosoever
he be of you that renounces not all that he hath, he can not be my
disciple. If I were an adherent of the atheistic Socialism of our
day, I would constantly hold up these sayings of their Lord and
Master before the sincere followers of Christianity, who are by far
the most dangerous opponents of Socialism; for if they should obey
these sayings, without any further effort the solution of the social
question would follow. But there are many passages of the Bible which
are almost divested of their value because of a kind of disqualifying
law of customary usage; or they are at least not spoken of in religious
circles, because they have little that is “edifying” for many of those
present.

If we must admit that such passages designate the goal or ideal toward
which we should strive, rather than that to which every one can at once
attain, we should, nevertheless, keep our eyes continually upon it
and have the earnest will to make our way thither; else all the other
messages of the Gospel profit us nothing and are for us as if they
were not there.

To speak practically, then, one must never fix his heart upon
possessions, nor regard them as the most important thing to be lived
and striven for, nor make them the measure of his valuation of men and
circumstances, nor be unready or disinclined to diminish them at any
time for the sake of God or the common good, and if necessary even to
give them up altogether. They who can do this when it is required of
them are the only men who are free and worthy of God’s kingdom. At
different times in life they will often be put to this test, and if
this has never yet happened, it is no good sign for their inner life or
for their standing in God’s grace. Often it goes no farther than the
testing of their will, and when the will has surrendered, God does not
require of them the actual deed, or he lets the trial so shape itself
that in the end it is the more easily endurable. Sometimes, however, as
with Job, it comes to a real loss of all one’s goods; and not always
is there finally a double compensation therefor, but there always is
a complete consolation for what one has done, provided one will seek
for it and not merely helplessly and weakly bewail. In order always
to have the mastery of oneself and to put this to the proof, it may
often be a good thing, even before one resolves upon Christianity, to
make the test of Polycrates, who cast a much-treasured ring into the
sea. Try it once, this surrender of your dearest possession; though,
to be sure, the test will in most cases come to you unbidden, if it
is your lot to become a free man by God’s grace instead of a slave to
Mammon. But no matter how it comes to you, if you have shown yourself
able to make this surrender, you will be set free from the strongest
fetter with which the spirit of the world keeps man bound; the rest of
your possessions will henceforth become more a matter of indifference
to you. Of course, in this question of possessions, the concern is
rather with the spirit and the will than with the mere deed. One can
also “possess as though he possessed not” (though the possibility of
deception here is very great), and if one no longer spends anything
for mere enjoyment or luxury, but applies everything to useful
ends, not counting among such ends the mere senseless heaping up of
possessions for heirs and successors down to the remotest ages, then
one may believe his actions respond to the real meaning of the words
of Christ. We at least will not cast the first stone at those who so
comport themselves.

One good help in this, besides the firm resolve to forego all luxury,
is, as already explained in a former chapter, systematic giving;
another is, to reckon and calculate as little as possible, and to busy
oneself as little with money as is compatible with a necessary order in
one’s business and private affairs. For money has an evil charm about
it like that of philosophical heresy; neither will easily let a man go
again when once he has become much involved in them.

Glory is for many just as strong a fetter as mammonism--not only
the excessive eagerness for the ordinary human and civic honors
(exposed though they always are to the judgment of contemporaries
or, in the greater instances, of posterity) but also the anxiety for
respectability. As to the former, Paul, one of the most abused of men,
has left us a very good statement in 1 Cor. iv. 3 ff.; and that any one
loses the regard of his citizens quite without blame is really much
rarer than is commonly supposed. On the other hand, God often enough
makes one’s former enemies to be those who become the most satisfied
with him, and the prophetic words of Isaiah come splendidly to take
the place of the earlier underestimation: “And the sons of them that
afflicted thee shall come bending unto thee; and all they that despised
thee shall bow themselves down at the soles of thy feet.” But one
must be able to endure things if he is to adopt Christianity; those
too-sensitive Christians who crave the esteem of even those they do not
themselves esteem only show that the world and its praise are still far
from being enough a matter of indifference to them.

The real positions of honor are, after riches, the most dangerous thing
there is for faith; on this point the Gospel leaves not the least
doubt. Whoever runs into this danger quite of his own free will, even
perhaps with eager zeal, quite commonly perishes therein, so far as
concerns his better and only worthful life. But whoever, by his calling
or by his lot, is compelled to accept such positions and yet would like
to become or remain a Christian, has every cause to be watchful, and to
be thankful for occasional humiliations, an article in which, happily,
the world seldom lets him be lacking.

For the greater number of men in the ordinary situations of life
the hardest part in the prolegomena of Christianity is perhaps the
conquering of one’s desire for pleasure. The humbler classes often
escape this desire with still less success than do the wealthy and
the aristocratic, who may have learned, through experience, to place
a better estimate upon the worth or worthlessness of the pleasures of
the material life. One often finds in the lower classes a much more
unrestrained passion for pleasure, which, joined with the atheistic
mood they purposely cultivate, sometimes degenerates into a true
savagery and makes them like animals, and animals not of the noblest
sort, either.

But unfortunately the upper strata of society often enough lead the way
by their own bad example. They often complain of the love of pleasure
and the frivolity of the serving classes; but things would go better if
the servants did not perceive in their masters the same propensities
that restlessly agitate them.

Pleasure set up as a rule of life, sensuousness (taken in the widest
sense) established as the controlling power in the life of a man--this
is the infallible death of all faith in transcendent things. These
two powers, pleasure and faith, do not long exist side by side in a
man, but the one or the other must leave the field. Happy he in whom
it is the power of the sensual element that retreats before that of
the spiritual, vigorously striving for the mastery. For every victory
over the love of pleasure (what is not otherwise always the case on the
so-called path of virtue) brings at once its own reward in an increased
vigor of the ideal life, and often in a broad spiritual progress in the
wider sense. We can truthfully say that the most of the great advances
in the inner life are ushered in by some renunciation which brings its
own compensation.

That to the love of pleasure all sorts of attractive names are given
and that it in truth assumes now finer, now coarser, forms, should not
lead us astray. It is, nevertheless, under all circumstances, that
trait in us which most resembles animal nature and forthwith reveals
its ignoble character in the fact that it is always united with egotism
and the exploitation of others for our own selfish inclinations. The
partial naïveté of the ancient world is wanting in humanity now, for
their eyes have been opened to its meaning; and a universal failure to
conquer the love of pleasure through higher interests would, in these
days, be an unprecedented and quite impossible relapse of humanity into
an earlier age.

With the pursuit of pleasure dies the inclination for riches and honor,
which are partly only means in that pursuit and not ends in themselves;
and instead there springs up joy in work, the best salvation from all
evil, that otherwise always surrounds and tempts a man in one way or
another. For when the pursuit of pleasure disappears as a rule of life,
then a man must work, or the world is too dreary. On the other hand,
with the pursuit of pleasure as his innermost spring of action, a man
will always look upon work as only a means, and a disagreeable one, to
the attainment of pleasure.

That one may, nevertheless, find an artless enjoyment in the beauty of
nature, in the serene succession of the days and the years, in one’s
family and in true friendship, in uplifting art and science, in the
life and welfare of his nation, even in the inoffensive animal and
plant worlds, and, above all, in all the great and good activities that
are going on in the whole realm of humanity--all this is to be taken
entirely for granted. Indeed, a keen sensitiveness to such things is a
sure mark of an unspoiled temperament, and especially of years of youth
purely spent, a youth that has not, by poisonous pleasures, prematurely
deadened its feeling for the true and harmless joys of life.

Furthermore, an excessive repression of the life of the body is
certainly not advantageous for spiritual progress--still less is it a
divine command, but it is rather, whenever it appears, merely a human
device with no decisive value. On this point a thoughtful commentator
of the oldest biblical records says, very truly, that men always have a
tendency to heighten the commands of God, which are themselves properly
meted and adapted to men’s capabilities; and that, in the Old Testament
narrative of the first trial of obedience, God did not say that Adam
and Eve should not touch the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
but only that they should not eat of its fruit; it was Eve herself who
added the further prohibition, “neither shall ye touch it,” and by so
doing placed the Tempter in the desired position of making an alleged
divine command manifestly untrue on its face, because the mere touch of
the tree did not cause death. (Genesis ii. 17, and iii. 3, 4.)

Thus it is, indeed, with many exaggerated and unnecessary commands
which parents lay upon their children or churches upon their adherents,
the non-fulfilment of which they then with equal facility overlook.

An exact and literal obedience to all the real divine commands, which
are all practicable, and a thorough scorn and disregard for all the
“commandments of men”--this is the only way by which our Christian
confessions could now bring themselves new life.

Even the inclination to undergo suffering and renunciation is somewhat
dangerous, and the more so because it is often joined with a secret
desire for praise, in which case one devil is but supplanted by
another, perhaps still more powerful. A man should not throw away
his life, not even by a lingering neglect of his powers; only, he
should not overvalue his body’s well-being nor put it too much in the
foreground.

Christ himself is in this respect an inimitable example of a simple
moderation which, at times, allowed itself to enjoy an almost luxurious
homage, as in the case of the box of precious ointment, which
evidently made Judas, the apostle of literal asceticism, to lose
faith in him. Even the most advanced Christian should live quite like
a natural man, not like a hermit or a pillar-saint, and should seek
the worth and purpose of life neither in pleasure nor in suffering and
renunciation, but only in the carrying out of the will and commission
of God. A wise saying of Blumhardt’s, often quoted, declares that one
must be twice converted, once from the natural to the spiritual life,
and then back again from the spiritual to the natural so far as is
justified; but that this is, perhaps, accomplished in some cases at
a single stroke, without a preliminary exaggeration of the spiritual
nature. Many linger too long in this double mutation, and during this
period afford no very agreeable spectacle.

Finally, one’s own power can never set the upward-striving man free
from all those enemies of his real happiness which keep him, in a very
genuine sense, from entering into true Christianity. The “old Adam”
is still to-day, as at the time when the expression was first used,
“too strong for the young Melanchthon,” and all good resolutions give
as good as no help, so long as the man will not lay hold on the aid
sent us by God himself to that end. But even he can not help unless
the man completely surrenders his will. This is the man’s share in the
work of his liberation from the fetters of the natural, selfish life;
everything else is done to him.

Dante, in particular, explains this very clearly in the twenty-first
canto of the _Purgatorio_, where the joyous trembling of the mountain
of purification, when a soul finally rises into its higher region, is
portrayed in the following verses:

  “_It trembles when any spirit feels itself
  So purified that it may rise, or move
  For rising; and such loud acclaim ensues.
  Purification by the will alone
  Is proved, that, free to change society,
  Seizes the soul rejoicing in her will.
  Desire of bliss is present from the first;
  But strong propension hinders, to that wish
  By the just ordinance of heaven opposed--
  Propension now as eager to fulfil
  The allotted torment as erewhile to sin.
  And I, who in this punishment had lain
  Five hundred years and more, but now have felt
  Free wish for happier clime._”

Every one acquainted with his inner life will confirm that for a long
time at first a partial will toward the good fought in him with
inclinations of which he very well knew that they would bring him just
suffering. So long as the soul is, nevertheless, unable to conquer this
desire, it will remain in essentially its former state. But if it holds
on to the impulse to freedom notwithstanding, by God’s grace there will
come a memorable day on which it will at last feel in itself the fully
determined will to move forward, and then forthwith it is free, and
afterward does not understand how it could have delayed so long.

Yet it would not be right to wait inactive till the will is thus fully
determined. Christianity, like many another thing, is learned only
through trial, not through study. On the contrary, idly talking about
it is most foreign to its spirit, and so-called learned explanations
easily make it but darker and more dubious; that is a “science” which,
like every other, one may leave entirely in the hands of those who are
called thereto, and which very often contributes nothing of moment
to their spiritual advancement. Christianity is surely completely
understood only through that spirit which the Gospel calls the Holy
Spirit. What that is, we do not know; we can only know that it is a
very real phenomenon which becomes manifest in its effects upon our
life, and which can gradually make us more and more indifferent toward
everything that the world considers as the greatest possessions and
the most indispensable pleasures. To this freedom we are called, and
it has been made possible through Christianity--what before might well
seem very doubtful. But we are not done when we have found Christianity
“interesting”--often because of its extravagances rather than because
of its real sobriety in the conception of man and his natural powers;
we must above all things make a beginning, and then progress therein
comes quite of itself.

Therefore, O soul, thou who, from the mazy gardens of the common
life of the world that no longer wholly satisfy, hast arrived at
happiness by this simplest and best of all roads, but nevertheless
still standest, somewhat trembling, before the actual entry into the
forecourts of Christianity itself (perhaps because thou seest there a
company that does not fully awaken thy confidence), take thy resolution
notwithstanding, and dare! It will not be long before thou seest at
least enough to have made thy daring seem worth while. It is but rarely
that any one turns back again from this road, and never yet, for
thousands of years, has any one who has travelled it quite to the end,
lifted up complaints of a wasted life, or even of an existence too hard
to be borne.

But how many there are to-day who complain, on the other roads to
happiness!

No one who is willing to confess the truth can deny that in every human
soul, even in one already resolutely set toward faith in transcendental
things, serious doubts can now and then arise as to the reality of
all its conceptions and hopes. They who most vehemently condemn such
temporary doubts in others are not the ones who are the best confirmed
in the faith, for by such zeal they are often only seeking forcibly
to suppress their own doubts. But in such moments, thus much remains
sure, that there is no certainty anywhere to be found as to the great
questions of the present and future life, better than that which
Christianity affords, and that there is no adequate satisfaction
to be found in trying to content oneself with only the results of
“natural science,” many of which are still very uncertain; while one
simply banishes from his thoughts all further questions, as to the
interrelation of all things in a higher sense, and as to the moral laws
of the universe,--questions on which the life and welfare of humanity
most of all depend. That will never succeed for long; after every such
period of a bare realism which limits itself to a smaller aim, in all
men not wholly superficial, not wholly submerged in the world of sense,
there arises with irresistible power the impulse to investigate anew
whether and how far the high pretension of Christianity to be the real,
the unique truth, and the only truth that brings happiness, is a just
pretension.

This impulse you also will more or less experience; otherwise you would
not have taken in your hand this book, which had its origin in that
same impulse. In no case thrust the impulse back from the threshold;
for it springs from the better part of your nature.

Accept, rather, one more bit of counsel: First consider more closely
the “prolegomena” of Christianity--those preliminary truths which
it considers to be self-evident; its dogmas take account of only
afterward, when you have already been able to resolve to live up to
these preliminary truths with all the power you have. The reverse way
is, to be sure, the more usual one, and it is the one to which we are
wont to be directed in our schools and churches. But if this more usual
course is taken, now and then there lies “a lion in the way” which does
not appear upon the path proposed in this chapter.

The power of resolve, of course, you will always be obliged to have,
for only “he who overcometh shall inherit all things;” for the
irresolute, as well as for those completely without faith, even in the
most favorable case only the decay of their personal life stands in
near and certain prospect.




VIII. THE STEPS OF LIFE




VIII. THE STEPS OF LIFE


It is an old and obvious fancy, that of dividing the inner life into
a series of steps, or of describing it in the allegorical form of a
pilgrimage with its various stages and halts and hindrances of one
sort or another. Yet I do not know of any such description that suits
the needs of our own day, especially the needs of people of culture;
indeed, it is, and has ever been, a fault of most sermons that while
they depict life’s attainable ideal with more or less exactness, they
are noways able to give as plain an account of the way thither. Yet
this is just the service (and the directions should be quite specific,
too) which the church, it would seem, is called upon to perform for
the present generation. What is known by the somewhat distasteful name
of “the cure of souls,” so far as it exists at all, has become too
professional (not to say too commercial) a matter with the churches:
in the things of the spirit there is nothing if not freedom and
individuality; yet it is just here that a kind of rigid technical
nomenclature has been devised, with expressions that once may have been
justified, but are now meaningless to many men and at some future time
will have to be replaced, perhaps, by others.

Of the writings we possess on the unfolding of the inner life by
steps, only one has come down to us from classical times; this is an
essay of Plutarch, the Greek professor of philosophy (as we should
now call him), who was born at Chæronea in Bœotia about 50 A.D., and
died between 120 and 130 A.D. at Rome, where, among other things, he
is said to have been the teacher of the future emperor Hadrian. Of his
hundred and more writings, some shorter, some longer, the “Parallel
Lives” are now almost the only ones read, and even these are less read
in the schools than is perhaps proper. Of the rest, which are usually
comprised under the general title of “Plutarch’s Ethical Writings,” one
of the most readable is that dedicated to Sosius Senecio, consul under
Trajan,--“How One may be Conscious of his Progress in Goodness.” On
the whole, it exhibits the Eclectic view (in the sense of Ciceronian
Eclecticism) as contrasted with the teachings of the Stoics, who only
recognize the perfect wise man who observes their principles, on
the one hand, and on the other, the man addicted to vice, without
intervening transitional grades. In this treatise, as each reader will
at once notice, there is a special lack of the depth which first came
into morals through Christianity (then but little known as yet), and
which will always come into morals only by that path; but it possesses
in considerable degree a sound and natural human good sense, which
is directed toward the nobler things of life, and whose development
in youthful temperaments is an indispensable purpose in so-called
classical culture.

Of the later writings of this kind the best are Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s
Progress,” a book from the great Puritan days in England, and the
“Homesickness” of Jung-Stilling, written about a hundred years ago.
In reality, the biographies of distinguished men should render this
service of pointing out the way to their contemporaries and successors;
but there are, unhappily, but few good and really true writings of
this sort. For the biographers do not always understand the inmost
experiences of those whose lives they are describing, many of which
experiences really can not be made comprehensible to them in their
full significance, since they were small occurrences with great
consequences. Yet the autobiographies, which could tell all this,
are usually marred with vanity and are sometimes the least true of
biographies. It will therefore be well, on the whole, to recognize that
in all these writings the individual character preponderates and that
there is no “method” that reveals the proper course of life. The most
useful thing about them, perhaps, is the very practical observations
that might serve to encourage the wanderer on this much-travelled,
yet universally unknown, way when he is likely to become weary, or
to enlighten him when the continuation of the journey appears too
uncertain or too much deflected from the presumably proper direction.

It is first of all to be said that every life has steps, and that
no life runs from beginning to end in unchanging uniformity like a
clear, murmuring meadow-brook, or in a straight direction, like an
artificially contrived canal. But no life perfectly resembles another
in its course, and even the apparently most natural steps often happen
in the reverse order, so that there are men who in their youth are
preternaturally wise, and have their youthful qualities only when old.

Yet there is never an inwardly healthy human life that shows no visible
development at all, or that has spurts or pauses in it that are wholly
arbitrary. A life that proceeds in a perfectly normal way is just
as rare, but in every life there are mistakes that could have been
avoided, and gaps that later it is no longer possible to fill out.

For every period in life has its purpose and its task. In spring the
tree must do little more than grow and blossom, but not bear fruit as
yet. The fruits one produces on the modern dwarfed trees, purposely
hindered in their natural growth and designed merely for a speedy
production of fruit, acquire neither the good quality nor, apparently,
the soundness of fruits ripened on trees that have attained their
natural full growth.

The various periods of life, then, must deposit and store away in
the human being each a product peculiar to itself; in childhood the
childlike nature, without which a man never becomes a well-rounded man,
exerting a kindly influence upon other men; in youth that freshness
and enthusiasm of spirit which begets the power of doing things; in
manhood and womanhood the fulness and ripeness of all the thoughts
and feelings, and the firmness that springs from a character steeled
by deeds already achieved. Only thus can age also do its worthy task,
not in falling into disconsolate decay, but in the quiet possession and
contemplation of what life was and should be, and in the preparation
for a greater and broader development.

Whoever skips any such period, or, as is more frequently the case,
hastens over it and makes no use of its peculiar advantages, will
seldom or never be in a position to retrieve it later, but will always
have a very perceptible deficiency in his make-up.

To prevent this in younger years is a matter of education, of which
I will not speak here, but in later life it is one of the chief
aspects of that self-training to which a man is indebted for the real
acquisitions of life more than to all the things that others can do for
him.

In reference to its general character, in the aspect which one usually
calls happiness or unhappiness, or a hard or easy lot, experience shows
(and in most cases very plainly) that every life consists of three
divisions, of which the first and the third are alike and the second
unlike. Whoever has had a hard, unhappy youth is more likely to have
a more favorable and successful manhood, but scarcely a cloudless end.
On the other hand, when the days of youth are golden, they are almost
always the precursor of exertions and storms in the middle part of
life, on which there follows a quieter evening of age. Oftentimes this
distinction also holds good for the minor steplike subdivisions of
these three great divisions.

Which is the happier case may well be doubtful. Very energetic men fond
of activity, who are substantially minded not to let “the vestiges of
their earthly days vanish in the æons,” will be disposed to lay the
greater value upon a successful manhood; but sunny-natured men need an
untroubled youth and likewise a rougher middle period, if they are to
be strong enough to exhibit in their age the pattern of a fully ripened
life, perfected in every direction, so far as lies in the power of man.
Once in his life, at any rate, a man must have it hard and heavy if he
is to attain to the right way himself and to gain an understanding of
the burdens of others; and on the whole a strong old age is best suited
for that. And if the childhood days have been joyous, they afford
an afterglow for the whole life, and in the reverse case, a bitter
feeling of wrong. It is likewise difficult to be obliged, for the first
time, to bear the hardest lot of all in old age.

One can not change the form of this lot; in this respect, at least,
a man is surely not the moulder of his own happiness; only, he is
not the inert slave of a blind Fate either. That is, if a hard youth
predestines him to an old age not quite without care, he can make
the best of this destiny by a clear and conscious submission and a
courageous endurance; or if he has a beautiful childhood behind him,
he can be thankful that it did not continue on thus into that stormy
period of later life which is necessary for the steeling of his
character. Thus conceived, even in these destinies the bold saying
turns out to be exactly true, that to those who love God all the
events of life, of whatever sort they may be, must turn out to their
advantage. But in the lives of all thinking men the question to be
decided is this: whether to choose much sorrow with much help from God,
or much sorrow without such help, but with the temporary forgetfulness
of momentary pleasure. The impotent Nietzschean revolt against such a
fate for men helps nothing.

Finally, one can not make of himself something quite different from
the native stuff that is in him. It is not proper that every one
should be able to become everything; a very extended many-sidedness
comes often only at the expense of depth. At the proper time rightly
to criticise oneself in order to correct the many errors of education,
which only very rarely estimates a human being quite correctly--this
is the chief task of the most decisive point of life. This point, if
life has proceeded quite normally, is at the beginning of the thirties,
when the man has the last step of education behind him, and now, “in
the midway of this our mortal life,” begins his self-training, for good
or for bad. At this moment of life some recognize, with deep pain of
soul, that they can not become all that to which the dreams of youth or
the advantages of birth and education seemed to destine them, and they
turn in despair to pleasure or to pretence. But others resolutely seek
the point whence they may conquer their special world, and henceforth
pursue a destiny which, perhaps, was not sung to them at their cradle,
but which shows itself, nevertheless, to be the right one.

On the whole, however, the dreams of youth are not to be despised.
In most cases they point to an unconscious native ability and so
likewise to the dreamer’s destination, which expresses itself at first
in fantastic pictures of the future; that is, in so far as they really
come from within and are not the products of a false education or of
a mistaken belief in the inheritance of talents. For it is only quite
rarely that talents are inherited and that the sons of great men are
themselves great. This is, to be sure, often made difficult for them
because of comparison with their fathers, and not less because of the
jealousy of men, who do not willingly suffer intellectual dynasties to
rule among them; in this they are all republicans. On the other hand,
men of much consequence seldom have or take the time to busy themselves
intently with the bringing up of their children, and in such families,
much oftener than in far simpler ones, the children fall into neglect,
unless a mother of sufficient intelligence steps in, and is not herself
too much busied with her celebrated and often very exacting husband.

It is scarcely necessary to say further that the mothers are the
deciding element of the family for the education and the formation of
the character of the children, especially the sons, and that the sons,
as a rule, take after them more than after the fathers. It is a less
familiar fact that the sons often resemble the mother’s brothers in
character and natural ability, and that the best though sometimes also
the most dangerous moulders of one’s youth are the grandmothers on the
mother’s side.

The promise of a curse upon families that have shown themselves
egotistical for several succeeding generations surely comes true; and
experience shows that a want of love towards one’s parents is avenged
through one’s own children, and, _vice versa_, a peculiar blessing
throughout life accompanies those who have shown their parents much
love.

There is no need to be anxious about the proper time for entering upon
new steps of life, if the earlier ones have been rightly used; they
will then do their own announcing through first an inner summons, and
finally a definite determination, to advance farther, and without this
experience it could not be well for any one to be in a higher plane.
We can not stand a task that is yet too great for us; such a task we
feel to be too ethereal, and we long for the coarser elements of life.
On the other hand, the divinely-led man does not as a rule know very
long beforehand what he has to do next or to what he will be called;
he could not commonly endure it. But any one who has already really
experienced many such instances of being personally guided in life
will at last be sure in his faith as to the existence of such a higher
guidance even in the life of individual men, while others (by their own
fault, to be sure) count only in the mass, not as individuals.

Finally, steps in the inner life are not, of course, for those to whom
life means nothing else than eating and drinking and dying to-morrow.
The steps of the inner life exist rather only for those who are
resolved to struggle out of a merely natural existence common to many
others, on through to a really spiritual life.

For these, Thomas à Kempis points out the safest way in the following
dialogue:

  MY SON, the perfect freedom of the spirit thou canst not win nor
  keep, if thou press not through to the complete renunciation of
  thyself.

  Slave-chains are borne by all who cling to something selfishly,
  who love themselves, who desire the outer world with eagerness
  and longing and curiosity, who seek the things that flatter the
  senses and not the things that further the Kingdom of Christ, who
  will always build and strengthen what yet hath no foundation; for
  everything falleth into nothingness that is not born of God.

  Hold thyself to this short saying, for it meaneth much: Forsake all,
  and thou findest all.

  Bid farewell to every desire; then enterest thou upon rest. Let this
  word never leave thy thoughts; bear it within thee day and night; and
  when thou hast brought it to fulfilment, then shalt thou understand
  all.


  But this, O LORD, is not the work of a single day, nor is it child’s
  play. In this shell lies the whole kernel of the perfection of those
  who seek God.


  SON, that must not frighten thee back, nor discourage thee, but
  rather draw thee to climb upward to the higher goal, or at the least
  to bear a longing thereto in thy heart. If thou wert already so far
  on the way that thou wert free from all blind love to thyself, and
  wert ready and prepared to obey every beck of thy fatherly superior
  whom I have set over thee, then might mine eye rest with pleasure
  upon thee, and thy whole life would flow along in peace and joy.
  For as soon as thou no longer wishest this or that in thine own
  self-conceit, but shalt have yielded thyself wholly to thy God
  without gainsay and from the innermost depth of thy heart, and shalt
  have laid down all thy wishes into the hand of God, from that moment
  onward shalt thou be at rest, and shalt find thyself at one with God,
  in that no other thing shall be to thee so agreeable and pleasing as
  God’s pleasure.

  Whoever hath thus, in simplicity of heart, swung his thoughts upward
  to God, and hath loosed himself from the inordinate love or hate of
  any created thing, he alone shall be fit and worthy to receive the
  gift of devotion. For where the Lord findeth empty vessels, there He
  layeth in his blessing. And the more completely any one looseneth his
  heart from the love of that which perisheth, and the more completely
  he maketh his own self to waste away under deepest disregard, by so
  much the quicker cometh this mercy, by so much the deeper it presseth
  in, and by so much the higher the free heart of man is lifted up.

  Then the eyes of man are opened, then standeth he amazed in rapture,
  then his whole heart is dilated, for the hand of the Lord is now
  with him, and he hath given himself wholly and for all eternity into
  His hand. Lo, thus is that man blest who seeketh God with his whole
  heart, and letteth his spirit no longer cling to the things that
  perish.


I

Everything spoken in this dialogue is wholly true; only it is not
merely not the work of a single day, but not even the work of a single
life-period; it is rather an uncompromising process of growth that can
not be hastened at will, but must gradually unfold itself in four great
stages and must furthermore be properly brought to maturity in each
separate period, if any real and beneficial good is to arise therefrom.
There may be no compulsion about it; a hastening of growth occurs only
in times of suffering; the first half of every task is mostly the
hardest; from that point onward it goes more quickly and easily to the
end.

The first stage is the seeking for a philosophy of life, and the
dissatisfaction with the usual conceptions of the universe: “How many
hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I
perish here with hunger!” The second is the turning to the eternal,
supernatural truth: “Look unto me and be ye saved, all the ends of the
earth; for I am God, and there is none else.” The third stage is the
new life which must gradually take shape therefrom, though falling
into many divisions. And the last has the promise of the prophet
Zechariah: “At evening time there shall be light.” Out of the first
stage the youthful man must pass with pure thoughts directed toward an
ideal, with no stigma of immorality upon his conscience, with pleasure
in work, and with a considerable amount of knowledge useful for his
life-calling. If the second period is rightly spent, it will be devoted
to the acquisition of three important things: position as a citizen of
the state, a worthy marriage, and a sound religious and philosophical
view of life. The third stage is that of the confirmation of this
view in the struggle of life; this stage forms the real work of life.
The fourth is the crowning of life with true success, and the final
transition to a larger sphere of activity.

It is clear from the beginning that this course of development really
rests upon self-training, and usually takes its start in that period of
life in which every earnest man is tired of the “fables of the world”
and is in the same frame of mind in which Dante has his great poem
begin with the words: “In the midway of this our mortal life, I found
me in a gloomy wood astray;” or in which St. Theresa says: “My soul was
submerged in the dream of earthly things, but it has pleased the Lord
to awaken me from this slumber of death, and I beseech Him nevermore
to let me fall back therein.” What education can do up to this point
is, as regards the inner life, merely of a preparatory and prophylactic
nature, and consists in keeping the young human being away from a
wholly materialistic conception of the world, as well as from a merely
formal religion, both of which would make difficult his later approach
to a true philosophical and religious conviction. Such children as are
educated in the natural sciences alone, as well as those who have heard
of Christianity too early and too often, or have been trained to make
use of religious expressions and forms mechanically (often against
the grain), only rarely grow up to be men who later have the power of
finding the way of peace. It is the especial task of education to keep
the young soul free from the strain of immorality, and inclined toward
a purer life than one that is based merely upon the senses. The soil
on which the noble plant of a true religion should later take root and
flourish is rendered unfit for that purpose by nothing so much as by
the dominance of sensuality. The soaring-power of the spirit is thereby
broken, and is regenerated again only with difficulty and partially,
if at all. With this, we return to the thought already expressed
elsewhere, that for the education of those who are to be given a higher
culture (for the boys, at least, and probably also for their mothers
and governesses and women teachers) the so-called classical education
is indispensable, and on the whole to be preferred to the ordinary
religious and moral instruction. Christianity then comes easily of
itself, later on, if any one has honestly traversed this stage of
instruction in the classical philosophy (which can not and should not
be the final stage); and, as history has shown, Christianity bears its
finest fruits upon a classical substratum. In particular, a classically
educated spirit will never be able to sink into mere ecclesiasticism,
and still less into the insipidities and the trivialities which,
much as they are foreign to the great and noble nature of pristine
Christianity, nevertheless, to its immense harm, cling to the quite
common conception of it.

Besides, Christianity undoubtedly contains an element of alienation
from the world, an element that can not be so suitable for the
education of a young human being still intent upon the growth of all
his intellectual faculties, as it is for the self-training that comes
later. Indeed, one may go so far as to say that physical well-being
(though by no means the highest form of feeling nor the highest
destiny), and a certain human impulse to self-exaltation (which later
finds its limit in the true humility of Christianity) are natural and
even necessary to the growth of youth, and for this very reason the
classical examples and ideals (and those of the Old Testament also, of
course) fit in better with this period than do those of the Christian
era. Only, the classical education must be adapted to the circumstances
of the pupils’ environment, or this environment must itself be able
to be elevated at the same time, or it will often make the pupils
discontented with their lot. Indeed, it is even as Flattich rightly
pointed out of old in the naïve words, “Youth must have its time of
raging, though not wickedly so;” and for those who do not have this
period in youth, it often comes afterward, only worse and more secretly.

When education has planted in the young human being a disposition
inclined toward the ideal, and has begotten in him an aversion to
all that is vulgar, together with some good life-habits, then it has
performed its most important duty. At present, indeed, it wants to do
more than this, but in reality it accomplishes less.

Two things must be made particularly clear to the young man at the
conclusion of the first life-period: in the first place, within the
limits of natural laws men attain to everything, so to speak, that
they earnestly desire. Only, they must begin at the right time, must
proceed in the right order, and must above all things not chase two
hares at once. To become rich, renowned, learned, or virtuous, there
is need in every case of a single-minded and orderly struggle that
suffers no competition of some rival purpose. One must therefore know
what one wants to be, and choose the right thing as early as possible.
Then “the man grows, of himself, along with his greater aims.” Without
these, he is vainly tempted to seek his development in the artificial
forcing-beds of education.

The way in which this subjectivity (not wrong at the first) comes to
an end is not one that can be exactly determined, either as to the
time the end takes place or as to the cause that brings it about. The
change usually begins with premonitions which eventually become strong
impressions. These are often called forth merely by isolated words
which sometimes have been spoken by men, apparently by chance, but are
more frequently derived from reading. Books that fall into a man’s hand
at just the right time are nowadays most frequently the instrumentality
of the summons to a higher life. Many a time, also, the soul suddenly,
in moments of elevation, sees itself transported to a quite different
plane from that on which it really lives. It espies, as often happens
to the mountain-wanderer, a new and beautiful region quite near before
it, but which is still separated from its present standing-ground by
a vast chasm, over which a bridge leads, but only far below in the
depths.

In this period isolated experiences also occur which may be classed
as strange, as hard to be described, and as by no means essential to
development. On this point mystic writers say that there are three
kinds of more intimate union with the divine: first, the quite regular
kind (thus already understood in the Old Testament), that comes through
submission and sincere love, a union that always remains open in its
nature, that nothing can interrupt save a man’s own will contending
against the will of God, and that is at once reëstablished as soon as
the will is again accordant; second, an extraordinary kind, that comes
through devout contemplation, which can not, however, be artificially
produced, but which is only a yet greater affection of the heart,
waiting in patience and humility for the response that God will perhaps
give thereto; and lastly, a still more sensitive feeling of nearness
to God, coming for the most part quite unexpectedly, but, of all the
three, the least necessary and important for the progress of the inner
life.

The end of the first stage of life is not satisfying--can not and
should not be. All subjectivity is a form of thinking that ends in
dissatisfaction, and the nobler the soul, the more quickly and deeply
it falls into it. Along with this there very often comes a certain
failure in the outer life, almost enigmatical; the cause is given in
very picturesque language by an Israelitic prophet, Hosea, “I will
hedge up the way with thorns, and I will make a fence against her, that
she shall not find her paths.” It is the genuine mercy of God when
every false way a man wishes to strike into is hedged with thorns; or
when he, in another beautiful Israelitic simile, like a lily among
thorns, can find his growth only straight upward. Those are the sorrows
of youth for which later one is most thankful.

Nevertheless, because of these things a certain sadness masters
the soul, and but few noteworthy men are to be found who have not
temporarily suffered melancholy in their youth. Even at best, they live
in the mood which Goethe depicts in the words:

  _So still and thoughtful? Something is lacking; freely confess.
  “Contented am I, but ’tis not well with me, nevertheless.”_

But, as every brave young soul sees, life is not given us with the
purpose that we may always be only “still and thoughtful,” nor that we
may consume ourselves in disconsolate complaints or in the pessimism
that wastes the soul’s powers. Those are the conditions that attend
transition, and must appear. A new life must spring therefrom, but one
feels, indeed, that a kind of death first lies between.

This is the surrender of the personal will, intent upon the selfish
life; this will a man renounces with so much difficulty that Calvin was
able to found upon this fact his doctrine of a formal predestination
of some to this development of his true existence, and of others to a
loss of it. But every such death, for those who bear within them the
seed of an eternal life, is not the final goal, but the means to a
new and higher development of life. Whoever is unable to hold fast to
this hope with the tenacity with which Job clung to it, and yet is no
longer able to find any satisfaction in the world of the senses, falls
now into a gloomy asceticism which is forever shovelling at his grave;
or into an idle dialogue (in diaries and letters) with his painful
dissatisfaction with the universe; or into the confused Buddhistic
longing for some Nirvana; or, finally, into one of the various other
aberrations of the human spirit, which all agree only in considering
the true way as an impossible or fantastic one.

At this point of life, for a time, the word of salvation is, Forward!


II

At about the middle of a man’s life, and often the most quickly in the
case of the best and most successful lives, there comes a moment of
dissatisfaction with all that has hitherto been attained. This is more
frequently the case among the cultured than among the other classes,
because the continuous struggle of the latter for existence partly
spares them this dissatisfaction and more clearly shows the way to
free themselves from it. When, at this time, any one stands quite at
the exit-gates of earthly existence, all human concerns appear to him
literally nothing worth, and he would never feel kindly toward them
again, even in their highest activities, if the wisdom of this world
did not bring him back into the belief that these are only morbid
sensations that must be overcome by a feeling of robust vitality.
This, to be sure, they must do, but not unless a real death of the
selfish nature precedes; upon such a death the most in every human life
depends, although this event does not always come to pass in just the
same form. The same feeling, however, is present in all nobler souls,
that they do not get forward with their “intentions to do better,”
but daily find new hindrances in themselves and in the surrounding
world; and that, in their own nature, what is lacking is not the dream,
indeed, but the _power_ of attaining an existence truly worthy of man.
Those are conditions that often last for years; in their later period
arise thoughts which, to some, make this process seem to resemble the
ascent of a mountain.

But this ascending of the mountain does not always lead to the true
summit it is designed for, even in the case of the best men, and in
this respect, also, one is tempted to believe in predestination.
Another mountain-peak which is sometimes attained is a noble
scepticism, such as Gottfried Keller gives expression to in the
touching words that, at some time or other in life, one must accustom
himself to the thought of a real death, and that if he then gathers
himself together, he does not become any the worse man therefor.
Certainly not, only he is no perfectly satisfied man, with the thirst
for truth and eternal life slaked; that is a goal which the most
beautiful sceptical philosophy never reaches.

Doubting thought stands on a still higher plane in “The Holy Grail” of
Tennyson:

  “_Thereafter, the dark warning of our King,
  That most of us would follow wandering fires,
  Came like a driving gloom across my mind:
  Then every evil word I had spoken once,
  And every evil thought I had thought of old,
  And every evil deed I ever did,
  Awoke and cried: ‘This Quest is not for thee.’_”

Beyond this thought the most earnest and sincere souls would never get,
if it were not for the solution which the English poet himself offers
at the conclusion of his profound poem:

  “_Let visions of the night or of the day
  Come, as they will; and many a time they come,
  Until this earth he walks on seems not earth,
  This light that strikes his eyeball is not light,
  This air that smites his forehead is not air
  But vision--yea, his very hand and foot--In
  moments when he feels he can not die,
  And knows himself no vision to himself,
  Nor the high God a vision, nor that One
  Who rose again._”

It is very strange that a matter that has been in existence for almost
two thousand years, that has already busied the minds and hearts of
millions of teachers and writers, and that has been borne with great
cost and exertions over seas and preached to nations to whom it was
unknown, has become unfamiliar in its own place of dominion and among
the most cultured nations of the globe. Or can we asseverate that the
spirit, or, let us say, even the thought, of Christianity is something
that is generally known and acknowledged in our European states?

Far removed from this view, some within so-called Christendom, like
the Roman procurator Festus, hold Christianity to be a sort of more or
less harmless superstition concerning “one Jesus, who was dead, whom
Paul affirmed to be alive”; others regard it as a society which it is
the proper thing to belong to, without necessarily having any further
interest in it; a third class looks upon it as a hierarchy of priests
which, for reasons mostly external, they either reverence or abhor.
To yet others it is a science called theology, to penetrate which
there is need of very long courses of study and many examinations.
And when they come to the particulars in the “structure of doctrine,”
not many among the learned wholly agree as to what faith is, or
mercy, or the significance of the “sacrifice of Christ,” whether
there is predestination and eternal punishment, or a “restoration of
all things,” or what are the methodical steps one must take, to be
saved. Every one who ventures into these labyrinths of theological
and philosophical thought, without at the same time possessing a
very decided aspiration toward the highest truth and a very sound
understanding of human nature, is apparently in danger of losing the
one or the other. And so, thousands of the most cultured men of our day
have, in fact, given up making any further trial of what seems to be
joined with only trouble, contention, doubt, and renunciation of the
natural enjoyments of life, only to lead, at the end, to nothing other
than a kind of human slavery, without any better assurance than before.
Christianity is now, for the greater part of Christians, a doctrine of
the churches and the schools, which one listens to as long as one must,
but from which a cultured man will inwardly free himself as quickly as
possible, even if he still outwardly believes he must allow himself to
fit into forms of the social life when once they have become historical.

The simple answer to this is that we can neither dispense with
Christianity nor put something in its place. We do not know (and it
would be useless to wish to discover) what would have become of the
civilized world, if Christianity had not appeared in it when it did;
but it is certain that we can no longer get away from it now, nor
ignore it, but we must reckon with it as with something that will
endure, yet can not be wholly explained by science. True, science
can not be prevented from discovering, as completely as possible,
everything that is knowable, or from extending the sphere of the
knowable as widely as possible; that is its right and its duty. With
this there goes, in the conception of particular minds, the supposition
that everything is knowable that concerns mankind, or that, at any
rate, everything can be made knowable in time. This is the basis of
a considerable part of the courage and the perseverance found in
scientific investigation. But just as little may it be forbidden us to
doubt that men will ever succeed in completely fathoming human nature
in all its relationships to the universal Being and in its connection
with all things; but even so, it is the duty (and of cultured people
most of all) nevertheless, to stand firm, and in particular to put
away the presumption with which imperfect knowledge, or even mere
hypotheses, are wont to be set up in the place of the inward conviction
as to the existence and worth of super-sensual things.

Highly as humanity has cause to value science and its steady advance,
it would, nevertheless, take a tremendous backward step, if one should
be able to remove from the sphere of its life and from the motives of
its actions everything that is not scientifically provable. This is the
ideal of many educated people of our time, but it is a false and a very
inadequate one.

Our knowledge is patchwork, and will remain such. We shall scarcely
ever be able to know even everything that concerns ourselves. Nor
do the strongest motives of our best actions spring from the sphere
of knowledge; otherwise the most learned people must always be the
most perfect, which is by no means the case. Our spiritual Ego is
rooted rather in the Unexplainable, and experience shows that if this
something unexplainable is ever taken from the Ego in questions of
faith, it tries to make up for the loss by adopting some superstition
or other.

Of all the objects of faith, however, faith in Christ is historically
the best established, humanly the most intelligible, and as a matter
of personal experience the most easily found to be true. If in any
man it is not all this, truly and enduringly, then the cause lies in
his own will, or absence of will, for which the Gospel of John finds
the correct expression, “as many as received him, to them gave he the
right to become children of God.” Luther also truly says: “Because
the expression ‘to trust God and serve Him’ must be so elastic that
every man follows after his own thoughts, and one thinks so and the
other thus, therefore He has fixed Himself to a certain place and to a
certain person, since He wants to be found and met in such a way that
one may not miss Him.” A man’s faith is, therefore, itself no force
or power, else superstition must also be such, but all true power in
spiritual things is the property of God. But he summons this power and
makes its appearance upon earth possible.

Only, this is likewise true, that Christianity has no effect in a
man whose spirit is unbroken, who has no inner humility, but then it
remains an empty form at best. If it is then united with the office
of teaching, or with some other pretension of a special position or
distinction, it conduces to the man’s destruction. What is regarded in
the outer life as an irreparable harm, “a broken existence,” a rent
that runs through all the plans of life, is not at all such in the
inner; on the contrary, that is the soil in which faith in Christ best
prospers, and they of all men are most to be pitied who despair just
at the moment when they find themselves in such a position and can not
grasp how near they are to salvation.

From this moment of humility there enters into man the real
regenerative power of the good, which springs from that true
righteousness which “counts” with God.

His further journey is, on the one hand, much easier than is often
represented, for nothing more is now required of the man for which
he has not power and insight in sufficient measure, together with
a gladness of hope that can no longer be wholly troubled, and with
a special, personal guidance that lightens all. But, on the other
hand, it is more difficult than is, in this first moment, believed.
For life is yet far from its termination; indeed, now is its real
starting-point, and there begins a long series of occurrences which
all have the purpose of showing man his real nature more clearly than
he was in position to bear earlier, and of gradually being no longer
indulgent toward him in any respect, as was hitherto in great measure
the case. For “Zion shall be redeemed with judgment, and her converts
with righteousness.” But all this happens only in the following, or
even, now and then, in the final, period of life; before, it would have
been quite impossible.


III

The difference between this “new life,” as Dante already called it,
and the earlier seems not to be very great at first, and particularly
not so great as fantasy, which always flies higher than reality, and
enthusiasm, which must accompany every great resolve, had expected.
Indeed, it is possible that there will still be moments in which the
soul, freed from the slavery of selfishness, is seized with a certain
backward-glancing desire for the “flesh-pots of Egypt”; for, in truth,
the old “enjoyment of life” fades away only by slow degrees.

But there is one essential difference that is always noticeable: first
of all, in the taking away of the feeling of fear and anxiety before an
uncertain future, and of the continual fluctuation between exultation
and dejection, which never let the feeling of security prevail. But
now there is a fixed point where there is always rest. From this
there follows, of itself, more patience with oneself and others,
and less dependence upon them, besides a juster discernment for the
essential in all things, and therewith the true wisdom of life that
springs therefrom. Finally (and this is the chief matter), there is
an absence of the continuous sense of sin because it can always be at
once abolished, and there is a certainty of the right road, of steady
advance, and of a good outcome at the end of life: “the path of the
righteous is as the shining light that shineth more and more unto the
perfect day.”

The first period of this division of life is usually filled up with the
continuous strengthening and confirmation of these principles through
tests of many kinds. These can not fail to appear very soon, for faith,
in spite of what has been said above, is nothing traditional that
persists once for all, but something that must be engendered anew daily
and hourly. A faith that is not always living and present could not
be capable of successfully withstanding the attacks of Apollyon, who
desires surely to reclaim his rebellious subject.

The power of this “Spirit of the World” is very great; happily, one
experiences this only gradually in life; otherwise, perhaps, no one
would have the courage to take up the battle with it. But there is one
power that is still greater, and that is the power of God, which is
made alive in a man through true Christianity. The chief matter in this
(for most) the longest period of life is, therefore, steadfastness and
courage. “Hold fast that which thou hast, that no one take thy crown;”
and look not back, when thou hast once laid hand to plough.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing in this period of life is the union
in man of divine control with freedom. Whatever God wills, he carries
out in the man--easily, if he gives up his will, with difficulty and
sorrow, if he resists or desires to go another way, and no power in
the world can any longer prevent it. But there are, nevertheless, long
portions of time at this stage of life when all principles or doctrines
of belief refuse their service, and everything transcendental persists
in appearing again as a mere dream and sport of fantasy. Those are the
dangerous times in which the soul must keep itself quite still and
beware of all decisive activity. But if it is obliged to act, then let
it say with the Spanish poet, “And be my life or truth or dream, right
must my actions be.”

There must especially rise to full certainty in the soul the conviction
that an eternal divine order exists, against which all the might of
men who still have freedom of action contends quite vainly, and that
all real success and all true happiness consists only in the free
harmony of the free human will with this order, and that punishment
does not _follow_ every violation of this harmony, but resides within
it, and can only be set aside through God’s mercy. Then, as the
Berlenburg Bible says, “the commands of God acquire a pleasant aspect,
and we become their good friends and look upon them as true helps
and preservers, by whose means God wishes to set to one side whatever
hinders us from companionship and union with Him.”

Only when this conviction has become established within us, can we have
a guiding principle for fruitful activity outward; before, it is too
early, and so in most cases without result. Salvation is not a doctrine
in which one can remain quite the same, can say Lord, Lord, and yet be
far from him, but it is some actual thing that really happens to us if
we give up our will to it.

But in order that this may be able to happen to us, we must first
be free from self-love, from self-concern in all its forms; that is
the difficult work that is wrought within us slowly, with many a
halting-place and with much cross-bearing. For we must be quite empty
of ourselves before we can receive everything that we need for our
understanding and feeling, but it must come in daily rations like the
manna of the Old Testament, not all at once as the crafty “old man”
would much rather have it, so as to be as independent as possible of
God’s daily grace; that is the “last error, that is worse than the
first.” To train us thereto, so that we may receive the right gifts in
their fulness, is the meaning of our life-guidance up to this point;
only then, and not before, will our activity be full of blessing. In
this connection the “social question” comes in, not only for the men
of our time, but of every time; it has always existed, and always
will exist, so long as there are human beings; it will never find its
solution either through Church or through State, but only through the
ethical power and the personal love of infinitely many individuals,
each one of whom must, in the sphere of work indicated to him, do that
which is specially laid upon him, and neither bury nor exchange his
talent. That is his outward task in life, which he may neither evade
nor be unfaithful to, and only when and in so far as he is just to
this shall he teach it to others also, and help, during his lifetime,
to maintain this teaching of love upon the earth. When once money,
ambition, and pleasure no longer play any considerable rôle with a man,
then he finds so much leisure time upon his hands that he must really
look about him for some activity to fill it up, else he runs the risk
of falling back, through tedium, to where he was before.

This period is, therefore, essentially made up of work and struggle,
but if all goes rightly, the work is more and more joyous, done with
greater and greater gladness, and without any feeling of distress, and
the struggle against everything undivine in oneself or in others is
more and more victorious, more and more quiet; and in this period there
is finally “a rest that remaineth for the people of God.” God will give
them the end they are waiting for, and an end that is not sad, like
that of so many noble men who had a different aim in life.

Schiller’s picture is not the right one when he says, “Quietly, with
vessel barely saved, the old man returns to the harbor from which,
in youth, he set out with a thousand masts.” No; thankful for all he
has done and suffered, content with what he has become through God’s
mercy, and with the confident prospect of a yet greater and better
field of action, he already, without waiting for his death-bed, lays
his life-accounts to one side, and looks with simple quietness upon the
(for him) unimportant transition into a new sphere of life.


IV

Age comes on suddenly, in most cases; very often with some special
event, usually some sickness, which performs the function of what
is called picket-duty in military life. Then oftentimes there is
disclosed, just as suddenly, the difference (hitherto concealed)
between men and the various outcomes of their lives. While some still
endeavor with redoubled eagerness to enjoy the last fruits of their
autumnal days (though age often reveals them now as so little worth
while), or else give themselves up to pessimistic despair over the
transitoriness of all things earthly (which always forms the close
of each great period of pleasure), more earnestly minded spirits are
now for the first time saying: “Whither am I bound? The world’s call
to pleasure sounds hollow to me, now that the doors of eternity stand
open before; I am sated with the whited bowl of untruth and its vapid
draughts, and I bear my empty pitchers to thy springs, O thou city of
God!” These are the laborers that stood idle all the day, or fatigued
themselves with useless toil. These also will be accepted still, and
will receive their penny at the end of the day’s labor as well as those
who came earlier. The mercy of the Lord of Toil thus wills it, though
many murmur against this, even yet.

But it is better, nevertheless, if this incoming has taken place
earlier and the third period is not a time of turning about, but merely
the natural sequence and development of the second. For the true steps
of life have about them something of the Dantean Paradise; namely this,
that in each of them, even in the lowest, already resides something of
the uppermost--something that pacifies the soul, without longing for
more, and yet with hope for more.

In the life of people who have become old, three sorts of dispositions
are regularly shown. The ordinary one, when outward circumstances are
favorable, is that of elderly people who are fond of life and who want
as much as possible to enjoy the remnant of their existence in a finer
or coarser manner, and accordingly sink now and then into caricatures
of youth. The basis of this disposition is selfishness, which, even
in its finer form, at last affects unpleasantly every one who meets
it. Aristocratic idlers have such an exit to life, for the most part.
A worthier end is when people who have been busy for the most of life
take their repose, whether it be a resting upon their laurels, or, as
more frequently happens, upon their accumulated capital. These are,
in the best instances, the cheerful old people who are treasured and
cared for by their relatives, spend their last days in respectably
doing nothing, revel in memories of their youth, or student-years, or
travels, or campaigns, and now and then compose memoirs, or let their
jubilees be celebrated. Apart from a certain vanity and pettiness that
is always joined therewith, this is an innocent exit to life, and
the world is as a rule lenient toward it--if for no other reason, at
least for the reason that these people no longer stand in anybody’s
way; therefore it gladly gives them a handsome burial and a few
fitting obituary notices in the papers on the day of the funeral, and
with that its concernment is definitely fulfilled. The third kind of
conclusion to life is the moving forward to a higher existence, the
hand continuously at the plough, never looking backward to the past,
but always directing the eyes toward what is yet to be attained. This
conception of life is really only possible with persons who believe
in a future life; nevertheless, it also appears among other earnest
workers, but is then joined with sadness over the continual decline
of the powers. This is the worthiest, indeed the only worthy exit
to life, though often accompanied with sorrows of some sort, to
keep one in fit condition for conflict. These three endings of life
resemble the three caskets in Shakespeare’s drama: the first, in the
golden casket, is outwardly the most splendid, but within is full of
emptiness and is at bottom to be despised; the second, in the silver
casket, is not unworthy, but somewhat “ordinary”; the third contains,
in mostly invisible form, the real crown of a life that has been wisely
understood and well-employed to the very end, and that bears within
itself the full assurance of a yet better continuation beyond.

At any rate, the special task of the final step of life is living in
all sincerity in nearness to God--something that it is much easier
to think of than to describe. The descriptions of those who have
themselves experienced this suddenly leave us, as a rule, in the lurch,
whether because they lived in order to act, and not to describe, or
because they disdained saying things about themselves which, at their
stage of advancement, seemed matters of course and nowise meritorious,
but something to be continuously received in humility. The goal of this
period is just here--no longer to receive anything for one’s own sake,
but to become a blessing to others in that humble spirit which now has
come to belong to the virtues that have been won.

To begin with, there will usually come a great and final trial; for
all men in whom God takes a real interest (if we may so speak) must
again and again, in the different periods of their life, pass anew
into a kind of smelting fire, whose glow, as Dante says, alone brings
the spirit to its majority and separates the inferior elements of its
nature, which perhaps appear as still necessary at a lower stage.
Without a firm trust in God, such as should now exist in this final
period of life, these last trials were often not to be endured; yet in
them, nevertheless, each hard blow now has a tenfold effect. It is the
best sign of advance if the soul possesses the grace to welcome this
suffering and not to be tired of it until God himself removes it as
quite superfluous. Psychologically correct in this regard is the remark
of St. Angela of Foligni, that men at this stage must still, for their
penance, harbor within themselves for a time, quite against their will,
the very faults which once they voluntarily cultivated.

Out of all this there then arises the thoroughly humble man, no longer
in the least infatuated with himself, to whom everything is right that
befalls him, who believes he deserved nothing better, but something
still worse if pure justice had been done, and who can let everything
please him if it is God’s will. But if this is all genuine and not
mere pious talking, this is a difficult task for which the man will be
completely qualified only toward the end of his life. For self-love
must be burnt out still more thoroughly than before, and he must be
inflicted, or at least threatened, with the hardest blow that can be
given to his special failing. If he passes through this without ever
losing his trust in God, then he has approached nearer to the divine
than could happen in any other way; and if there is such a thing at all
as a life of blessed spirits after the fashion of our present feelings
and conceptions, then he will be brought so near to this by acquiring
such a temperament, that a transition to that life will now appear
conceivable and possible to him.

But in that case the last aggravations of the earthly life have,
without doubt, the further purpose of making the departure from it less
difficult for the man thus tried; just as nothing in old people pleases
us less, or makes a more vulgar impression upon us, than when they
still hang tightly on to life.

One of the best aids is never to look back, because he who in Purgatory
“looks back, must turn back”; and further, not to lose a single minute
of life, but to keep one’s full activity up to the last moment. For the
purpose of life in the period of age is to bear fruit, not to repose,
and so long as something is still left to be done, what is already done
is to be regarded as nothing.

The characteristic quality of this sort of old people is not an
imaginary “saintliness,” but their wholesouledness. The only
saintliness we attain to on this earth consists in a complete harmony
with the divine will and in a complete readiness to fall in with it,
so that no serious struggle between good and evil any longer finds
place within ourselves. On the other hand, a mediæval saint rightly
says that saintliness, whenever it is genuine, sets the outward man in
order also. For God is a “God of order” and by no means a friend of
singularities of any sort, especially in outward things. People who
set a value upon such singularities, though they may not be wholly
spurious “saints,” are certainly, nevertheless, very weak ones, whose
peculiarities make them sometimes uneasy to live with. If religion, in
this final stage of life, does not at least set such things right, but
lets the man go on being querulous and selfish and difficult for those
around him, then it has never been of much worth. A special indication
of the ripeness of age, furthermore, is the union of qualities which,
at other periods of life, are wont to exclude one another; for example,
naïveté and shrewdness, dignity and childlike gayety, fineness of taste
and complete simplicity, sternness and gentleness, clear judgment and
enthusiasm of emotion. This alone gives the impression of completeness,
as far as is possible here upon earth.

One or the other of my readers may still ask how one can remain young
in old age. The most important spiritual means is probably “always
to be learning some new thing,” to have an interest in something and
to keep something always before oneself. Therefore the great apostle
of Christianity said shortly before his departure: “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: let us therefore, as many as be
perfect, be thus minded, and if in anything ye are otherwise minded,
even this shall God reveal unto you.” This, then, is a clear and
simple road, and in this direction is already contained the final
watchword of life: Obedience. Everything that is done for oneself,
for one’s own elevation, even in the best sense, has, nevertheless, a
slight after-taste of self-seeking, and in old age one will scarcely
keep his life spiritually sound to the final moment, if it does not
result at last in an absolute military obedience, and in a “harvest of
God,”--reaped, that is, for Him, and not for ourselves. The secret of
religion lies indeed in one’s keeping near to God, in all the stages
of life; but first, one must learn to endure it (not to flee from it);
then to seek it; and finally to have it, and “dwell in the everlasting
glow.”

That this can not happen upon earth altogether without suffering,
even to the very end, lies in the nature of things, and is shown in
the life of many admirable men, who have eagerly longed for rest, and
have said with old Simeon at the end of their days, “Now lettest thou
thy bondservant depart, O Master, according to thy word, in peace.”
Besides, as already pointed out, it may really happen that a so-called
beautiful death, in the circle of one’s own people and amidst the
general recognition of one’s fellow-citizens, may not at all mean the
best destiny and the highest recognition on the part of God, as would
some heroic death which is itself a last deed done for country or for
humanity. But our time has become so feeble in its Christianity that
such a thought now lies quite outside the reckoning of most men, even
the most devout. But at any rate it does not lie in their power of will
what form their death shall take, any more than formerly what form
their life should take, and they must, under any circumstance, have
found their peace with God in respect to this last of all life-problems
also.

The most beautiful thing about a life near to its close is its repose
of soul, that abounding peace which nothing can shake any longer, and
which has fought it out with God and men, and has prevailed.

The essential element in all religion requisite thereto is very simple,
and really lies already in the forgotten meaning of that word itself.
It consists in the careful and constant maintenance of the “bond”
which unites us with God, through our unfailing good-will toward Him,
and through our renunciation of all that stands in the way--what the
Scriptures call “seeking God.” This is our part. Then God also comes
“ere we are aware, and lets much good fall to our share.” He comes even
to such as know him only very imperfectly (and, for that matter, that
is the case with us all), if only there is a sincere longing for Him in
their hearts.

But unless He does come, each and every religious practice, in
whatsoever form it now takes or may conceivably take hereafter, is
but a still-born device of man, and never procures us what we are all
nevertheless seeking--Happiness.




FOOTNOTE:

[1] Originally an address before an association of young merchants.




By CARL HILTY

HAPPINESS

Translated by the Rev. Francis G. Peabody, Plummer Professor of
Christian Morals in Harvard University

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The Way to Happiness

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President of Oberlin College


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“The lectures are a distinct contribution to a branch of literature of
which we stand in great need.”--_Boston Transcript._

  Cloth      12mo      $1.00 net (postage 7c.)




By NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS

Pastor of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn


=The Quest of Happiness=

_A study of victory over life’s troubles._

“‘The Quest of Happiness’ is Dr. Hillis’s very best book.”--AMORY H.
BRADFORD, Pastor of First Congregational Church, Montclair, N.J.

  Cloth, with colored page borders      $1.50 net


  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  PUBLISHERS      64-66 FIFTH AVENUE      NEW YORK




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Emboldened text is surrounded by equals signs: =bold=.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.