My education and religion : an autobiography

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Contents

. DEFINITIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

. Stock: EpucATION By INHERITANCE . Memoriss oF My FourtH SuMMER . Tue INFLUENCE OF NATURE

. First Lessons in Metapuysics AND Locic

CHAPTER I DEFINITIONS AND IMPLICATIONS WO objects have been before my mind since I was a

young man, education and religion. The measure in which I have been able to gain an educated and a religious mind is for others to say, if indeed they should care to consider my unimportant life. Since I have, whether wisely or foolishly, allowed myself to be persuaded to write a sketch of my existence, the thread on which the events of that existence is strung, viewed in one way, is the aspiration after an educated mind; viewed in another way, the desire for a spirit heartily in the service of God and at peace in that service.

The history of a man’s mind is largely to be found in the family to which he belonged, the teachers he has had, the friends he has made, the aspects of nature he has loved, the books he has read, the work he has tried to do, and the free play of spontaneity. These educational and religious forces will appear in the sequel. Here and now we are concerned with definitions and implications; the consideration of these will perhaps clear the way for what follows.

By education I mean the methodical, wise, and unremitting development of latent mental power. The educated person is one who more and more finds his mind a ready and an availing servant. Perhaps this definition will do to begin with. It is, of course, implied in education that there is something to educate; it is taken for granted that one has mind. The philosopher Kant says that if a man has not mother-wit, he cannot be taught it.

Here is a desk with pigeon-holes all properly labeled, and here are papers all properly addressed; if one cannot find the right pigeon-hole for the right paper, he is simply hopeless. The farmer does not create the earth or the soil. He may improve it, enrich it, but he cannot create it; that is given. Education is of no use to a mindless human being. Education takes what is given; that is the first implication in education.

The second implication is that education must train to a high degree of efficiency the actual powers of the mind, Accuracy in observation, and in telling a story, is a mark of an educated mind. Carlyle says that his father, an Ecclefechan stonemason, was apt to exaggerate — most of us can sympathize with him — and the old man, when he had made a statement, would go back and revise it, and thus bring it into accord with fact; to that extent he was an educated man. Carlyle said that he found in himself the same tendency to exaggerate, and we can well believe it. In speech he was one perpetual torrent of humorous, or quasi-humorous, exaggeration; but when he wrote a book he was one of the most accurate men of his age, and thereby he showed his education. The Apostle Paul showed in the same way that he was an educated man, when he said, ‘Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one.’ Only a good education in Tarsus, supplemented by the Holy Spirit, could have led him to make such a careful statement.

Education trains the memory in tenacity, in wealth, in

DEFINITIONS AND IMPLICATIONS 3 reliability; and the memory is one of the great powers of the human mind. Knowledge is impossible without it; one cannot make a rope out of sand; there must be cohesion. In knowledge there is cohesion and continuity of experience. Thus we find another apostle saying in a crisis, “Then remembered I the word of the Lord.’ That word was in his memory; that memory was rich, tenacious, trained; when he faced a certain crisis there was a call for wisdom, help, and out of the depths of memory came the shining word of wisdom.

Judgment is, of course, profoundly affected by true education. When I was a boy on the farm of an intimate friend of my father, there were no scales on which to weigh the oxen that we intended to sell. How could we ascertain their value? We could not altogether trust to the judgment of the man who wanted to buy them. We measured the oxen; we put a line down the whole length of the animal’s back, and then took his girth, and, taking the length and the girth as premises, from these figured out the weight and the value of the animal. That farmer had a very great influence on me. I remember to this day his formula, ‘Measure with exactness, calculate with caution, and in that way you will reach something like a sound conclusion.’ And again, ‘Look out for your premises, and then look out for your processes, and when you do that, you can be fairly sure of your conclusion.’ That farmer was an educated man.

There should follow the discipline of the imagination, one of the greatest faculties of the mind. Those who read Swift with care must note his marvelously trained imagination. His Lilliputians, and the world of the Lilliputian, are in scale perfectly conceived and expressed; one meets with no disproportion or jar; and when one comes to Brobdingnag, everything again is on the right scale, carried out by an imagination under perfect discipline.

When we come to science we face the same educational necessity. Who ever saw a molecule, an atom, an electron, those physical forces that constitute the background of our ordinary physical universe? No man has seen them at any time, no man can see them; but the scientific man, working through experiments which guide his imagination, realizes by that faculty the existence of those infinitesimal forces. And in no way other than through imagination can the results of science be appreciated or new progress be made.

In ethics we are under the same law. Paul’s heavenly vision was invisible; it was in his imagination. Every young man who longs to lead a decent life must carry in his imagination a picture of what*he would like to be; in his imagination he makes, paints, frames, and hangs up the great banner of the life that he would like to lead.

When we come to God, it is the same. The great faculty by which we become sensible of the being, the pulsing tides and power of God, is imagination. We think of Him as the Absolute Soul of the universe; then by the force of imagination we draw near, we speak to Him as to a friend, we bring our life to Him as we do to those who love us in our own homes. Therefore, one of the greatest, philosophically greatest, lines in the New Testament is this: ‘He endured, as seeing him who is invisible.’

The third implication of an educated mind is knowledge. Our powers are trained in the acquisition of knowledge, and this begins with the very beginning of life. Probably

DEFINITIONS AND IMPLICATIONS 5 an infant learns more in the first year of its existence than in any ten succeeding years. Think for a moment of that little mind three or four weeks old, to which everything is a wonder, an interminable tangle; colors crowding upon its eyes, sounds pouring in through its ears to its brain, flowers with their perfume, foods with their taste! ‘What kind of a conglomeration is this?’ the baby would say, if it could speak. ‘Who put me into this unintelligible confusion?’ The baby does not despair; it asserts itself, it begins to work, and by the time it is a year and a half old, it has actually reduced its world to something approaching order; it has achieved more, I believe, in that first year of reflection and classification than in any succeeding ten years of its life. This process goes on through childhood, and when we think it is old enough to bear systematic training, we send the child to school, primary, high school, perhaps college.

Plato stands in the ancient world for the most amazing of all educational systems. For ordinary citizens, music, which included literature, and gymnastic; there must be from three to six years at that. For those who were qualified he had another programme. Arithmetic, by which he meant the science of number; plane geometry, solid geometry; astronomy, the science of motion in the heavenly bodies, or what he called ‘harmonics’; dialectic — that is, question and answer, the soul itself moving up from the realm of shadows and unrealities closer and closer to the realm of truth, beauty, and goodness in themselves; and last of all, the vision of the heart of the universe, the sovereign good, the light, life, fire, and glory of the whole universe. When his elect citizens had seen that great sight, they were ready to come back and be politicians. Reflecting on this, I have many times cried out, ‘My God, how far we have fallen!’

Business has been brought into the realm of education in the last ten or fifteen years in the finest sort of way. A school of business administration is now to be found in almost every university in the land. Business itself is one of the great universities of the world. If a man is not accurate, if he has not a memory rich and reliable and becoming more and more so, if he is not sound in his judgment, careful about his premises, his processes and conclusions, and if he has not an imagination that can open up the future for his business in a sound way, his name will swiftly be found among the failures.

Another implication of education is that he only is a properly educated man who takes pleasure in the right things and feels pain toward the wrong things. Plato and Aristotle gave this as a sign, a fundamental mark of a properly educated person, that he should take pleasure in the things in which he ought to take pleasure and feel disgust toward those things for which he should feel disgust. And those men and the best of their race had truth of feeling toward all our great human interests; they are still teachers and examples that the modern world cannot forget without immeasurable loss.

Victorious moral purpose is implied in genuine education. Ever since Fichte taught the German nation more than one hundred years ago, thoughtful men all over the world have seen that the will cannot be left out of education. Consider, for example, Edgar Allan Poe, a man of genius if any American ever had genius, a man who accom-

DEFINITIONS AND IMPLICATIONS 7 plished wonderful things. What might he not have achieved if his intelligence and his marvelous sensibility had been under the control of a victorious moral purpose!

Enough has perhaps been said to indicate what I mean by education, and it is time to ask what I mean by religion? My answer is the vision of God, and life lifted into moral power, freedom, and joy by that vision. It is my experience that the Christian religion is the greatest educational force in the world. It makes life worth living; therefore, under its administration all knowledges that illuminate life become of increased value. It lays sovereign emphasis upon the truth; ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free’; therefore it honors every intellect fitted to lay hold upon the truth. It gives the vision of Absolute Worth and thus brings to bear upon feeling an unmeasured power. It educates the mind in discrimination between seeming good and real good, between incidental good and essential and eternal good. It brings a man out through that discovery into intellectual self-reliance and freedom; and finally Christianity coalesces with moral power, it is known as victorious moral power.

My purpose in the following pages is to exhibit certain permanent principles of human life through some of the experiences of an individual who early set his heart upon an educated mind. One hears a great deal about auto-suggestion, but what troubles me in this sketch is auto-intoxication. Madam Hardy, one of the most dignified, one of the most beautiful women of the Old South Church when I became its minister, the wife of Alpheus Hardy, chairman of the committee that called me, sent me at the time of my marriage, among other things, a bottle of Madeira wine, bottled in 1800. I put it away, thinking that as it had lived ninety years it might well live to be a century old. Later, having had an attack of grippe and not feeling in my usual health, I thought of the wine, but felt that I must not touch it because I did not know whether it would agree with me. I called in our beloved family physician, one of the best of physicians and one of the best of friends, and I said, ‘I am going to open this bottle now and you must take a little of it.” I gave him only about two tablespoonfuls. He sat for about five minutes and then said, ‘I am going home, lest I give away professional secrets.’ This sketch that I am to write stands before me very much like that bottle of wine.

There are mountains in Scotland, and there are hills, and knolls; the elevations of the earth’s crust are divided into these three classes, mountain, hill, knoll. From each of these, with its own atmosphere, one can look up and see the steady, glorious, everlasting lights. My purpose is to invite my reader to a knoll — not a mountain, not even a hill, but a knoll — and to ask him to look up with me at some of the permanent forces and splendors that guide, make, and bless human life. Forget the knoll, forget the atmosphere as much as you can, fix your gaze upon the things eternal.

Chapter II Stock: Education By Inheritance I

N the greatest of the songs of Israel we read, ‘We bring our years to an end as a sigh,’ or, as the Scottish version puts it, with inimitable music and pathos, at least to Scottish ears, ‘Our days wear awa’ like the sough of a sang,’ surely a counsel of perfection for any man about to write the story of his life. It is reported that in arranging for his funeral, while evidently dying, the poet Burns issued one prohibition, referring to a company of ill-trained volunteers, ‘Don’t let that awkward squad fire a salute over my grave. How many awkward salutes have been fired both by biographers and autobiographers over lives that should have been spared these humiliations. The best thing for small and great alike would seem to be to sink one’s history and one’s life in the being of the Eternal Silence, and if this

may not be, to come as near to it as possible.

In the many miseries of my first year in Boston I found, as many another youth has found in similar thoughts, a strange solace in a passage in Byron’s ‘Lara,’ which has clung to my memory ever since:

‘The crowd are gone, the revellers at rest;

The courteous host, and all-approving guest, Again to that accustom’d couch must creep Where joy subsides, and sorrow sighs to sleep, And man, o’erlabor’d with his being’s strife, Shrinks to that sweet forgetfulness of life:

O’er each vain eye oblivion’s pinions wave,

And quench’d existence crouches in a grave.... Glad for a while to heave unconscious breath,

Yet wake to wrestle with the dread of death,

And shun, though day but dawn on ills increased, That sleep, the loveliest, since it dreams the least.’

There is another view, called, in Israel, the Kingdom of God, in Greece, the State, and among ourselves, social good, and the delight of service rendered, however small, to this nearest and most real of all human causes. Thoughts, impulses, instincts in this direction, the majority of persons have or may have, by a little training, and these overcome all ordinary inertia, wipe the board clean of popular pessimism, and write in its place a healthy if moderate optimism. The City of God in time and in the universe, whether preached by the New Testament, by Marcus Aurelius, or by Augustine, has in it an immeasurable power of appeal, and wins to the service of civilized life alike the splendid gifts of the wise and mighty and the humble, no less beautiful, and infinitely moving sacrifices of the poor.

There is as every thoughtful man knows a profounder discouragement. The eminent person, much more one who fails of that distinction, who begins to set his poor individual existence in relations with universal human history, is like a mote in the sunbeam about to describe its relations to the interstellar spaces. No undertaking could possibly be vainer. Moment by moment changes come; oblivion inevitably claims its own, and seals it ‘within the iron hills.” The dust under one’s feet, or ‘blown about the desert air,’ is the symbol of external life, vanished intellect, unremembered goodness, forgotten genius. The stellar universe presents a crushing contrast to the brevity and vanity of man’s existence on this insignificant globe, and the stellar universe itself is but a moment in the endless evolution of Being.

Under the impression of thoughts like these who can justify his folly in thinking his life, to his fellow-pilgrims in the wilderness of this world, of sufficient importance to be recorded? The justification may lie in the fact that men need amusement on the way to annihilation or hell, as the case may be. Besides, the perspective for man is in things human, which strikes normal persons as much more real, and grander far than the sidereal universe. We invert the glass, look at things non-human, and see them vastly reduced in size and dignity; and we see our human world magnified, filled with beauty, and all possible splendor. This sacred hallucination, if such it be, cannot be broken for any length of time. Human things for human beings must continue to be supreme. We men find it next to impossible to believe that mind is only an incident in the history of a bit of highly organized matter; mind finally asserts itself, not as a function of the body, but as a great responsible master, as indeed transcendent in meaning, and the sole ultimate reality. Then, too, since warriors we all are, soldiers in the liberation of humanity, the memories of those who have fought bravely, in other times, private and petty officer, no less than great commander, may serve to cheer and inspire as they are recalled round the campfire of to-day.

Three things are necessary to give moment and interest to the record of any man’s life. The first is that the universal experiences of life should have meant much to the writer; the second essential is that experiences of more than ordinary range should have been his; the third essential is that the truth and nothing but the truth should be told. The Scottish judge who divided witnesses into three classes, liars, damned liars, and experts, might have said, instead of experts, autobiographers. These three tests I venture to believe I may perhaps meet fairly well. Almost all the experiences, similar to those of other men, that I have passed through, have been deeply significant to me; and some of my experiences have been somewhat exceptional, and I claim to be an honest man. I shall therefore endeavor to record some of the things that my eyes have seen and my heart has felt in the changing environments in which I have lived.

After all, how little any man can tell of himself! The sources of his being are in the Infinite Mystery; the relations of his life to his cosmic and human environments are established by an invisible hand; the tides of decrease and increase are an ebb and flow from a sea eternally screened; the original fountains of our existence, our nurture, our psychic force, and our fortune, are past finding out. It is a superficial tale that we relate; the deep things are with God. Perhaps the story may conduct, like a mountain path, to an occasional outlook other than and infinitely greater than itself; such a path was that which, a generation ago, led from Zermatt and the brawling Visp, first through the woods to the Riffel Alp, and then upward to the Gorner Grat. The path, its toil and its terminal, were lost in the transcendent outlook; there was the supreme thing, the solitude, the majesty, the incomparable sublimity of the Everlasting. Any truly human life, simply told, will bring writer and reader alike to the verge of fathomless abysses of being and to the vision of Infinite heights. Whittier sings, ‘Alas for him who never sees The stars shine through his cypress trees.’ Whether it be cypress tree or rosebush, it is the splendor of the Everlasting that glorifies it; whether it be the great human experience or the ordinary, its meaning lies in the

Infinite.

II I was born on the estate of Pitodrie, in the parish of Oyne, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, January 2, 1853. The estate of Pitodrie rests on the side of Bennachie, a very shapely mountain less than two thousand feet in height, but much more impressive than many greater elevations, owing to its central pyramidal form and its black appearance. It is seen over a wide stretch of territory; it has served as the meeting-place for the eyes of parted lovers, and I recall walking with my mother three miles when I was seven years old, and she twenty-nine, that from a position of advantage she might see the summit of the lovely mountain within sight of which her rarely happy girlhood was passed. I cannot forget the tender memories that she recalled that afternoon nor the sight of the tears that filled her large, beautiful eyes. Bennachie is the immemorial sentinel of East Aberdeenshire; itself the survivor, it has become the symbol of the waste and havoc of time. Uncounted generations have passed in review before its searching eyes; the character that has gone into the well-cultivated soil from the age-long procession of toilers and the character that has been won in the struggle, it has witnessed. It stands the great Recorder of all these silent generations, the solemn memorial of their achievement, their bequest, their forgotten love and grief. As one born beneath its shadow looks toward it, one feels the wonder, the pathos, and the character of a vanished humanity.

My father whose name I bear was the grieve or overseer of the estate of Pitodrie. He was born in the neighboring parish of Insch, and descended from the Gordons of Huntly, but beyond three or four generations back nothing is known of the family tree. Mist and cloud, impenetrable to the keenest antiquarian eyes, cover the far-off lives that lay behind his. The race of the Gordons has a history in Aberdeenshire of eight hundred years; nothing remains, however, but this general appeal to imagination. Here in the fruitful county of Aberdeen the blood that flowed in my father’s veins descended from the far past of the Gordon clan; all definite knowledge has been swept away by the flood of the years.

George Gordon, of Pitodrie, my father, was one of the most remarkable men whom I have known. He was one of ten children, eight sons and two daughters, born to William Gordon, Largie, Insch, and his wife, Ellen Roger Gordon. My grandfather was farmer and schoolmaster, a man of amazing industry, upright in all his dealings, proud and independent, an Elder in the Established Church, universally respected for his worth, a God-fearing man, as the saying went, and thereby made free from all other fear. When his ten children successively reached the age of twenty-one, they received from this most honorable father sixty pounds or three hundred dollars each; a great sum considering the time, the place, and the scale of in-

GAIHOVNNGE comes. He reserved a sum sufficient as he thought to carry his wife and him to the end of their days with frugal comfort. When he attained the age of eighty-one, this small reserve was almost spent. His youngest son, who had returned with a modest fortune from New Zealand, offered his father thirty pounds or one hundred and fifty dollars a year. The old man declined the offer, saying that he and his wife could live comfortably on seventy-five dollars a year, that his wife had twelve hundred and fifty dollars of her own still untouched. If worse came to worst, the old stoic added, they had decided to begin on his wife’s reserve fund. This would save him from the one humiliation he could not brook, of becoming a burden upon his children.

Two years before his death a son was accidentally killed in New Zealand. His fortune — for so it was then called, of fifteen thousand dollars — went to his father, whose pride was now saved and his independence secured, although he added not a penny to his usual expenses. After his death at the age of nearly eighty-four, this money was equally divided among the nine surviving children.

These eight sons and two daughters were carefully educated and unalterably fixed in the faith of John Calvin. Calvinism was the perfect philosophy of the Old and New Testament, the last word about God and the meaning of man’s life. Prayers were offered morning and evening, a chapter read from the Bible, and a Psalm sung; the last exercise was both pious and humorous in the highest degree since there was not a singer, natural or trained, in the whole family. I suppose it was assumed, and rightly, I think, that the Deity of John Calvin was without the sense of humor, or that he possessed it only in the way of scorn; ‘He that sitteth in the heaven shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision.’

Since these eight sons and two daughters were splendid specimens of physical humanity, play, pranks, and often the heartiest fun were irrepressible and abundant. Halloween in particular was a great night. Cheese and bread and a glass of spirits were allowed each, and sometimes a little more was taken. The broom and gorse had been gathered in vast quantities from the hill behind the farm beforehand, and two armfuls of precious straw were allowed to each of the sons, and the old man turned his back when the young men stole two more. Sperm oil in quarts was poured upon the heaped-up material, and then a spark from the flint touched off the paper filled with saltpeter, and dried, and the bonfire went into glory. More cheese and bread and light refreshments followed; this went on till morning when the call came to worship and work.

Yuletide, then held on January 5th, was another alleviation of the stress of John Calvin. Here was a veritable feast, barley broth, boiled beef, plum pudding and cakes, and a conservative allowance of whiskey, the good mother adding a little to the allowance when she thought the father had been a little too strict with the lads. Two or three fairs were added during the year, at which there might be some sparring, and now and again a genuine fight, as well as the transaction of honest business, and if his sons concerned came off victorious no questions were asked by the sedate and dignified father; but if any one came home with a black eye, or other signs of an ominous character, there followed from the High Priest of the family the plainest words to the victim that he was headed for the ill pairt — hell, in our rougher speech.

No one of these sons became a drunkard; no more industrious men ever lived; all became men of mark in the several communities in which they lived; all became rich or well off for their time and condition, except my father; all were sincerely religious men, and to most of them religion, although it never became inconsistent with toddy or economic concerns, in four of the eight sons, and in the two daughters, was turned into victorious joy: this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.

I made one visit that I clearly recall to my paternal grandfather and grandmother. My grandmother received me, a boy of nearly twelve, with tender and beautiful affection. She was a handsome old lady, and she and I had a world of happy conversation while my grandfather was outside. The discipline of bringing up a family of ten children had given her some of the best things in life, grace of spirit, ready sympathy, tenderness, fullness of heart, eager and loving solicitude for the highest good of all her kith and kin. Her serene sadness, her beauty in old age, and her goodness have remained with me a pathetic and influential memory, and I can see her now in that far past, among the swift-gathering shadows of evening, her children long gone from her, her work almost done, with wonder and the sense of the sorrowful mystery of life in her sad sweet eyes. We knew each other at once and forever as friends.

My grandfather, I could plainly see, had little use for me. For one thing I talked too much, and I expected too much from this world, which seemed to me then, and still more now, so great with wonder. Brilliancy my grandfather detested as a sure sign that the person so endowed was not to be trusted, as indeed one better fitted to be a servant of the Devil than of the Lord. Solid worth in mind and character he alone respected. My father was infinitely the most brilliant of his children, but he was not equally distinguished for self-control, and consequently his father, although always kind, had little real regard for him, and no confidence in him. I fell to praising my father to the old man, and at the same time expressing my surprise that he should apparently have forgotten his promise to meet me at my grandfather’s at a certain hour. The austere old man listened to me mute as a block of granite, and when I paused for want of breath, he replied sarcastically, ‘Your father’s nae to ride the water on,’ the image here being that of an unreliable horse fording a river. My father came only an hour late, and as I thought to the utter confutation of his grim critic. Their conversation, free, abundant, informing, external, exact, I clearly recall, and I remember how formal and wanting in affection it seemed.