Conscience

Contents

LECTURES.

FACE

I. Unexplored Remainders in Conscience . 5

II. Solar Self-culture

PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS.

Whoever becomes an incendiary or an assassin in the conflict between labour and capital, let him suffer the full penalty of the law, whether he be a millionnaire or a Molly Maguire. The riffraff rioter, the petroleum Communist, the fire-bottle loafer, are enemies of the human race; and if they defy the law, a republic must treat them with that kind of mercy which Napoleon showed toward the original Communists of Paris, when he closed the French Revolution by a whiff of grape-shot. Asked to account for the splintering of the Church of St. Roche, he said, "It is false that we fired first with blank charge: it had been a waste of life to do that.” As a republican of the American, and not of the Red or Communistic species, I passed in Paris some thank¬ ful moments, leaning against the rabbets and plinths of St. Roche Church, which show splintered by that shot to this hour.

The American lower ranks contain three different sets of men—the unenterprising, the unfortunate, and the unprincipled. The shiftlessness of the unenter¬ prising sometimes needs the spur of hunger. It is good political action, as well as good morals, to insist that if any man will not work, neither shall he eat. The unfortunate who are not unprincipled will not long remain unfortunate. Our civilization, therefore, will need to concern itself chiefly with those who

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are really without aspiration or principle enough to occupy their opportunities of rising in American society. Hampden and Cromwell, Adams and Wash¬ ington, have made it possible for any one to rise in the United States who has the strength and the will to do so. If any one does not rise, it must be because he lacks either energy or principle. “I began with twenty-five cents,” said a millionnaire to his dis¬ contented workingmen on the Mississippi last summer, “and every one of you has the same opportunity.” That was a distinctively American speech. Commonly the cripples and the roughs, the very unfortunate and the utterly unprincipled, are at the bottom of society in democratic great cities.

The lower classes abroad are composed very differ¬ ently from the American. Dives and Lazarus in the Old World have, and here they have not, hereditary positions. The mobility of our society is such that Dives or his sons may sink to the position of Lazarus, and Lazarus or his sons may rise to the position of Dives. We have no law of primogeniture. We have no inherited or artificial social rank. The sons of the poor and the rich easily change positions. It follows, from this fact, that the cause of the rich man in America is every mans cause. A man is a man, even if his father was rich. But it follows also, from the same fact, that the cause of the poor man is every man’s cause. A man is a man, even if his father was poor.

“For a’ that, and a 3 that,

A man’s a man for a’ that.’’

But if a man will work, shall he eat ? There is a distinction to be made between family wages and bachelor wages. At the bottom of the collisions of labour and capital, which caused ten cities in America to listen not long ago to volleys of sharp shot, was the competition of bachelor wages with family wages. John here has a dollar and a half a day, and can

SOLAR SELF-CULTURE.

barely support his family. James yonder has no work, and is a bachelor, and, of course, is -willing to labour for eighty cents a day. Vanderbilt says he could have manned all his railways by paying only eighty cents a day for labour. James comes to John, and says, “ There is a strike, and you are unwilling to labour for eighty cents a day; but I am willing, and will take your place.' 5 John replies, “James, if you do that, I will kill you. 55 James says, “ If you shoot me, the soldiers will shoot you. 55 John answers, “ I will stop the trains, and you shall not run them. 55 He is as good as his word. That is what it is: a conflict between bachelor wages and family wages. The soldiers appear when the roughs and the sneaks begin to Are round-houses and trains. The working¬ men did not intend to bum up valuables; but they meant to keep ill-paid labour from out-bidding them in a competition which was reducing wages. Their mode of doing this was to stop railway traffic,—no doubt a most suicidal as well as criminal procedure. Low-paid labour forgot two things: first, that it takes two to make a bargain; and, second, that it is not one of the rights of labour to prevent labour.

When two representatives of the workingmen— family wages on one side and bachelor wages on the other—come thus into collision in the youth, or rather in. the infancy of the Republic, the sign is talkative about much yet to come in the maturity of our land. There is a hope possessed by many, that the collisions between capital and labour may, in America, be settled by reason, and not by force, and settled, not according to the ideas of capital on the one hand, nor according to those of labour on the other. Force, in the riots of the Communists in Paris, settled the question for a while on the side of petroleum roughs and sneaks, or the unprincipled portion of the lower classes. In some other parts of Europe, hereditary position and wealth and absolute government have settled the question with equal injustice by force.

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although with less noise, and on the side of capital. If, in America, this question can have fair discussion from the friends of both labour and capital; if, as is perhaps not easily possible, the question can be kept out of the hands of political demagogism; if it can be lifted up early to a plane of thought substantially Chris¬ tian,—then America, in settling the question for herself, will assuredly help much to settle it for the world.

u When a deed is done for freedom, through the broad earths aching breast

Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west; And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb

To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime

Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of time .’ 5

Lowell : The Present Crisis.

One full blossom has appeared on the American branch of the tree Igdrasil, in the abolition of slavery; perhaps a hundred years hence the time will be ripe for the appearing of another blossom in the peaceable settlement of the conflicts between labour and capital.

But when John refuses to allow James to take his place at eighty cents a day, John has his children in mind. What are comfortable wages ? If starvation wages were correctly defined in a previous discussion, shall we not ask, with sharp attention, What are natural or just wages ? My proposition, which I do not ask any one to defend, is that just wages will not violate the rights of children and of old age. By this I mean that whoever is willing to labour physically the legal number of hours a day should be paid enough to insure him, if he is prudent and economical, and has no bad habits, a living for himself and his children while they are too young to labour remuneratively, opportunity to educate them, and some support for himself and wife when the power to labour shall have ceased. That is only enough to give the State the ‘strength of its citizens. That is only enough to make firm the ground-sill which must lie under what your

Wendell Phillips calls the heavy working of republican institutions. If public sentiment, if arbitrating boards, if friends of capital or labour, will turn attention upon the facts officially ascertained and published by your Massachusetts Bureau, it will be found that children's rights are deeply complicated with this whole question of wages. Why, you have in this Commonwealth now 104,000 illiterates out of a popu¬ lation of 1,600,000. Twelve thousand of these illite¬ rates are native born. More than ninety thousand are foreign bom. But, whether bom here or abroad/ they failed to learn to read and write, chiefly because it was necessary for them to assist in the support of their families. It is understood very well by all who have looked into the statistics on this question, that children under fifteen years of age ”—I am reading the very words of the report of 1875 of the Massa¬ chusetts Bureau of Labour —“ supply by their labour from one-eighth to one-sixth of the total family earn¬ ings of the wage class in this Commonwealth. On children, parents depend for from one-fourth to onethird of the entire family earnings." Families with most children occupy usually the worst tenements. Without children's earnings a majority of the 897 families, which your Bureau visited in 1875, would have fallen into poverty or debt. With the assistance of children, there was only in a few cases a possibility of a family acquiring a competence, that is, of having a home of its own, even after the father was sixty years old.

Now, I am drawing near a time of life when I ought to begin to think of founding a home; and it would certainly seem to be hardship to me, if at forty or forty-five years of age I could not have a little place that I could call mine. But what if at fifty or sixty I could not ? How do I know that a grandson of mine will not be a labourer by the day ? How do you know that the haughty children of Boston may not have grandchildren that will not be haughty on a dollar a day ? We in this ^country are all members m

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of each other, for there is no hereditary position for any man; and what if at sixty your descendant could not, if industrious, economical, and without had habits, have a little home of his own when his power to labour ceases ? I conversed with a celebrated manu¬ facturer in old Manchester, England, once, and put the question to him, whether any large percentage of the ordinary unskilled operative class in England could have homes of their own. “ Not three in a thousand,” said he. Although you may not believe it until you examine the facts, low-paid labour in this country, in the very language of your own Massa¬ chusetts Bureau, " has only in a few cases a possibility of acquiring a competence,” that is, a home of its own.

My proposition is simply that we must not violate children’s rights, and add thus to the strangely cres¬ cent class of the illiterate ; and that we must not violate the rights of people in extreme age, and thus fill up the ranks of the poor-house and of all who depend on charity. We are closing the youth of the American republic. We are drawing near its majority, and childrens rights and the rights of age we must protect by a proper consideration of wages.

Who is to arbitrate ? Mr. Mundella says that arbi¬ tration abroad has effected more than anything else to heal difficulties between workingmen and their employers. I fear greatly that the State of Ohio, in now leading off American sentiment in the direction of governmental interference between capital and labour, is taking a somewhat unadvised step. This whole matter is going into politics. Demagogues are to discuss it. We are to have all kinds of deformers mingled with reformers on this theme. If I venture much in introducing it here, I do so because I believe that only a diffusion of conscientiousness by the churches, only the bringing of all classes, rich and poo?*, into those relations which belong to them when they are on the floor of God’s house and measured by His standards, can ultimately give safety to society

SOLAR SELF-CULTURE.

under republican institutions. You have no better arbitrating board in America between labour and capital than the voluntary system in the American church. Give us a glorious American church, and we will settle for the world here, and settle peaceably, the conflicts which only the bayonet has been able to put down abroad.

You Christianize Magdalen, you wish to Christianize Lazarus, you would Christianize Dives. Has not the hour come in America when religion, in the name of political science and of Him who once had not where to lay His head, should stand erect in her shining garments, and teach, in no craven or apologetic tone, not only that republican institutions must Christianize Magdalen and Lazarus and Dives, but that, first of all governmental institutions in the world, they must Christianize Csesar ?

THE LECTURE.

Dante, describing the angels whom he met in the Paradiso, impresses us at once with their external glory and their spiritual effulgence. Invariably he makes the former a result of the latter. With closer faithfulness to physical science than he dreamed, and building better than he knew, he sings:—

“Another of those splendours Approached me, and its mil to pleasure me It signified by brightening outwardly,

As one delighted to do good;

Became a thing transplendent in my sight,

As a fine ruby smitten by the sun. 3 '

Paradiso, canto ix. 13-19.

Dante says of Beatrice, as he saw her in the Para¬ diso, that,—

. “ She smiled so joyously,

That God seemed in her countenance to rejoice.”

Paradiso , canto xxvii. 103.

Allow me to adopt this last line of Dante’s, and all

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it suggests, as a description of what I mean by solar light in the face of man. This radiance ought to be by us, as it is by natural law, most searchingly dis¬ tinguished from all lesser illuminations. Its specific difference from every other light is that in it God seems to overawe beholders and to rejoice. It is scientifically incontrovertible that there is sometimes seen such a light in the present world. Many a poet and seer and martyr and reformer, or woman of the finest fibre, has at times had a face that has looked like porcelain with a light behind it. But this is not solar light, unless it have in it that specific overawing difference which Dante names. The mysteriously commanding and glad light is to be distinguished from merely aesthetic or intellectual luminousness in the counte¬ nance, by a peculiar moral authority, incisive regnancy, and unforced elateness, bliss, and awe. The radiance cannot be counterfeited. It can come into existence only on inexorable conditions. The appearance and disappearance of the solar light in the face of man are governed by fixed natural laws. Is it possible to dis¬ cover any of them ?

First of all, I ask you to look at the whole topic of solar self-culture through the lenses of the coolest in¬ ductive research. Put aside all mysticism; fasten the attention only on visible facts, as well known to be a part of human experience as that men walk or breathe; build only on the granite of the scientific method, and let us see what structure can be erected by the use of blocks cut on a line with the natural cleavage of the rock from this unhewn quarry, that is, by untutored, indisputable propositions certified by daily observation.

1. There is sometimes in the face a solar look.

2. There is sometimes in the face an earthy look.

3. The former arises from the activity of the higher nature when conscience is supreme.

4. The latter arises from the activity of the lower nature when conscience is not supreme.

5. The earthy look, other things being equal, quails before the solar look.

6. The merely intellectual light in a face quails before the solar light when other things are equal.

7. Merely aesthetic light, or that arising from the action of the faculties addressed by what is commonly called culture, quails, other things being equal, before the solar light.

8. The light of merely executive force, other things being equal, quails also.

9. The intellectual, the aesthetic, the executive, and all other light combined, quail, other things being equal, before the solar light.

10. It follows necessarily that onfy such self-culture as brings this light to the face can give its possessor all the power possible to man.

11. Only such self-culture can cause the lower forms of culture to stand in awe befoi’e it.

12. The only complete and the only victorious self¬ culture, therefore, is scientifically known to be solar self-culture.

Be Greeks, gentlemen, long enough to believe that every change, and therefore the variation in the inner illumination of the countenance, must have an ade¬ quate cause. How is it that this peculiar commanding light springs up from within the multiplex whole of our physical organism ? Your materialist will say that certain emotions increase the tension of the mechanism of the eye ; and that, therefore, external light is more readily reflected by it, and that we have hence, appa¬ rently, a new light in the eye when those emotions are active. But what is to be said of the light that beams from the forehead, and from the cheeks, and seems to be capable of beaming from the whole exterior of our mysterious form ? That radiance does beam from the forehead; it does beam from the cheeks; and why might it not, if this capacity of the organism to shine were once put into full action, beam from the whole man ?■ The materialist would say that the particles

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of matter in the cellular integument are capable of re-arrangement by certain emotions, and that they reflect light better on account of this re-arrangement. But what gives those emotions the power to re-arrange physical particles in any way, and especially in such a way as to cause them to reflect light overawingly ? It is incontrovertible that a very peculiar, command¬ ing light is brought into the face by the activity of the upper faculties in man. We are to explain this light and its effects, by studying man as an organic multi¬ plex. The light is there, and you know it is there. We see it. It is a physical fact.

On the other hand, there is an earthy, opaque look. “ 0 ye hapless two,” says Carlyle of Charlotte Corday and Jean Paul Marat, “ mutually extinctive, the Beautiful and the Squalid, sleep ye well in the Mother’s bosom that bore you both. This was the History of Charlotte Corday; most definite, most complete; angelic, demonic; like a star.” (.French Revolution, vol. ii., book vi., chap, i.) Compare the faces of Charlotte Corday and Marat.

Certain passions give a dark look to the countenance. How do they do that ? Is it merely by a re-arrange¬ ment of the ultimate atoms of the skin and of the external parts of the eye ? The astute materialist admits that certain emotions are accompanied by such displacements of the atoms of which the body is com¬ posed as permit the exterior of the countenance to reflect light only imperfectly. How is it that the bad passions thus relax us ? It is incontrovertible that earthy passions give an earthy look to the countenance. The bestial man acquires an opaque and peculiarly repulsive complexion.

When I stood once in the Jewish Wailing-place in Jerusalem, and contrasted the pure blood of the Jew with the coarse blood of the Arab, I had before me, on tile one hand, countenances singularly capable of illumination; and on the other, faces singularly inca¬ pable of it. Say, if you please, that I am going off

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scientific ground here. I affirm that I have a scientific light to take the monogamistic Jew and the pofygamistic Aral), or the Old Testament and the Koran put into flesh and blood by long centuries of experience, and to compare them. Not a few children from some of the best Jewish families on the earth are sent to Jerusalem for education; and even the careless ob¬ server of the faces of many of them must see that they are pure in blood, and, as I was compelled to think, of liner grain than the Italians and the Greeks of the Forum and the Acropolis. But, I said, “ You have forgotten the English; you have forgotten the Americans; ” and, as my conclusions were taking that posture, there came into the brown, crowded square two children in English dress, and began to converse with the Jewish children. I thought, “ These are sons of rough men probably: they do not represent the English or the American fineness.” They were supe¬ rior in animal force, but plainly inferior in capacity for the solar look, to the Jewish boys with whom they conversed face to face. I asked to whom the outrivalled children belonged, and found they were sons of one of the most cultured men, indeed, of one of the 'missionaries, in the Holy City. The Arab, however, was the greater contrast,—opaque, repulsive, conspicu¬ ously impervious to light in his countenance; while, in the best specimens, the Jew shone from behind his physical integument at times like a light behind thin translucent marble. We know that this contrast exists in different men we meet, and in different moods of the same individual. Men may be made of flosssilk, and have aesthetic luminousness in their faces, and yet no solar light. The darkness of the Ethiop face does not hinder it from exhibiting either the solar light or its opposite. It is a wholly incontrovertible fact, that an earthy look comes from an earthy jnood, and a solar look from a conscientious.

But now, will any one who reveres the scientific method deny my chief proposition, that the earthy

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look, other things being equal, quails before the solar ? Is not that known to ordinary observation ? No doubt, if a Caesar or a Napoleon comes before some man of weak will, the latter, although he may be a good man, —and especially if he is a goody, a very different thing, —will quail. But give the latter the executive power and intellect of your Caesar, and what is the result ? Other things being equal, Ccesars eye goes cloivn when¬ ever it meets and does not 'possess the solar look The veriest sick girl with this solar light behind her eye¬ balls is more than a match for Caesar without it. Yes, Cromwell’s daughter was a match for him once, and Caesar’s wife for the man whose finger-tap overawed a Roman senate. There are no forces known to the lights of the eyes, that, other things being equal, ever do or can put down the solar light, even in the sick and the weak. Poets have celebrated many lesser radiances, and occasionally this highest radiance that can belong to woman. There are behind it an awe, and a right to command, which distinguish it from all other lights.

We know that the brute sees the sunset; but does it feel its pensiveness ? No doubt the monsters that tore each other in the early geological ages beheld the risings of the suns, and their noons, and their descendings. The eyes of many a winged creature in the night reflect as perfect images of the stars as did Newton’s. But do they appreciate what we call beauty, or sublimity, or natural law ? The ivorld is a sealed booh to the brute; and an archangel would say that it is to us. On his vision, were he in the world, might fall no more than on ours; but he would read as many more meanings than we, as we than the brute. What is the significance of this mysterious, commanding, solar light ? It is a visible fact, but we gaze on it apparently with brutish, uncomprehending eyes. # We do not intellectually fathom it, and yet we feel it much as the brute feels the authority of the human eye.

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Your pensive, wailing, inferior creature gazing into the human face seems very often to be governed by an awe that does not arise from fear of physical injury. There is command in the intellectual light when it is contrasted with the merely animal light. The poor four-footed brute goes away with, it may be, a vague sense of worship, or of affection at last, if you draw it towards you. The canine creatures can thus be tamed ; and untamable beasts can be looked out of countenance, —even your lion and your tiger, if you gaze steadily upon them, contrasting the human radiance with the animal. Now, just as that four-footed brute may feel, looking into your eyes, so I confess I have felt some¬ times when looking into the eyes of those better than myself. I have felt brutish; I have felt my inferiority; I have quailed, I confess it, before eyes -which I thought had behind them a holier light than mine have ever shown. I sometimes compare my mood at such in¬ stants with that of your creature that cannot speak, and that slinks away with a sense of inferiority. I know that this light is my master. I do not quite understand the light. The poor brute does not under¬ stand the radiance in the human eyes, but confesses that this light is above it; and so I have felt that in the solar radiance there is something above all my earthiness. There is no man that can look on what we call the solar light in the human countenance, and feel that it is genuine, and not reverence it. There is a natural awe in its presence. What does this incon¬ trovertible fact mean ? There are only a few animals so low that they cannot be looked out of countenance; and there are only a few men so low that they cannot be looked out of countenance also.

As the brute sees the sunset, and does not under¬ stand it, gazes upon the glory and beauty, and finds it a sealed book, so we see but do not appreciate this marvellous capacity of man's countenance to clothe itself in solar light; and yet in it we are looking upon something which in another age will bo better under-

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ss stood in the name of science. So much is already incontestably known : that the solar light exists; that all other light quails before it; that it springs from the heights of conscience; and that the only complete and the only victorious self-culture must be solar self-culture. Even if we were compelled to pause here, we should have attained a point of vision where, as Goethe said -when he climbed Vesuvius, one look backward takes away all the fatigue of the ascent, and is a regenerating bath. Our age believes in culture; a more scientific age will believe in solar self-culture. On the height to which our inductive research has now carried us will be erected tabernacles to the honour of the only culture by which, under natural law, the yet opaque face of civilization can find transfiguring and commanding radiance.

What of the Transfiguration ? Was that an example of solar light ? The clouds are slowly parting abovethis theme, and is it possible that we have not yet reached its summit ? Is this outlook of ours only from a mountain range so low as to be hardly a ves¬ tibule ? There is a solar light; and what if, adhering now to all that science proves concerning it, we gaze up the Alps, so unexpectedly uncovered, as the vapours part themselves above the stupendous veiled summits of revelation ? Is it possible that their height itself has kept them obscured until we had little knowledge of their existence ?

I am asking you here and now only to take scrip¬ tural facts as statements of the Christian point of view. If there is any man here who regards the history as mythical, even he will allow me to use it to show what Christianity believes. I am scientifically authorized to make reference to it all to indicate what has been taught on the topic of the solar radiance.

It .is recorded that in an Eastern city a martyr was once tried, and as all they who sat in the council looked steadfastly on him they beheld his face, as it were the face of an angel. Is it possible that the

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solar light present in this case, and in approximately similar cases in our day, is the same thing in each ? It is recorded also, as we remember, now that we allow our minds to sweep through the vistas of historical examples, that a lawgiver, who yet rules the centuries, once had, as he came down from a certain mount, a face that shone. The old Greek used to inquire with intensest philosophical interest what that light was which appeared once, not in the face only, but in the hands and in the feet and in the garments, of the only Member of the human race who has ever shown us solar light at its best. The Greek asked in the early days of Christianity, Whence that light ? There is incontrovertibly a solar light which fills the faces of a few men and women in our day. Dante, I take it, is looking towards this fact when he says, “ That which in heaven is flame, on earth is smoke.” Is it possible that the solar look which comes into the countenance whenever the loftier zones of feeling are in full action is of the same sort with that which appeared in the face of Dante’s Beatrice, delighted to do good; and in the face of Him whose countenance was like that of an angel; and in the face of Moses; and in the un¬ fathomed symbolisms of the Trans figuration ? Is it of the same sort with that light which fills the world of those who have no need of the sun, because the face of the Lamb doth lighten them, and the glory of God is the lamp of their tabernacle ?