Our part in the world

Front matter

MM il i I

I I I I ill

\RTJMnf, WORLD

Author's Preface

To write a book is to become aware that one is a debtor to uncountable other books. And because most of these debts have been left unacknowledged so long that they cannot now be paid, I all the more desire to express my gratitude to Houghton Mifflin Company for permission to print an extract from The Promised Land, by Marj- Antin; to E. P. Button & Co. for an extract from A Student in Arms, by Donald Hankey; to IMcClure, Phillips & Co. for an extract from He Knew Lincoln, by Ida M. Tarbell; to W. A. Butterfield for a paragraph from Mademoiselle Miss; to the Young Men's Christian Association Press and to Professor Home himself for an admirable list of the qualifications needed by teachers, used in the Teachers' Manual, from Leadership of Bible Study Groups, by Herman H. Home.

I have received many a valuable suggestion or found many an illuminating incident in The Uphuilders, by Lincoln Steffens, Doubleday, Page & Co.; A Lie Never Justifiable, by H. Clay Tmmbull, John D. Wattles & Co.; Priests in the Firing Line, by R^n4 Gael, Longmans, Green & Co. ; The Varmint, by Owen Johnson, A. L. Burt Co. ; The Immortal Hope, by William Adams Brown, Charles Scribner's Sons.

It gives me special pleasure to refer in my text to these and many other enriching books. To give even a taste of them must often mean to give a taste for them and so to put before the reader a liberal feast.

The editors of this course, Rev. William I. Lawrance and Rev. Florence Buck, have helped me more than xii Author's Preface

they know by their faith and their faithfulness, their encouragement and kindly patience.

And lastly, as I inadequately try to express my gratitude, I turn to what is far off and very near: How can I begin to tell a thousandth part of what I owe to the authors of our Bible?

Ella Lyman Cabot.

A WORD TO THE STUDENT

There has never been a time in the history of the entire world that the prompt service of youth was more needed. You are needed as food is needed in a famine, as water is needed in a raging fire, as nurses are needed in a pestilence, as a sea-captain is needed in a blinding storm at sea, as George Washington was needed after the Declaration of Independence. All nations are draiiving together. They are drawn together by suffering, by the chance to help and by abounding hopes. There is nothing that draws even strangers together as quickly as need and the chance to help. And it is your generation who will help or hinder in the greatest need the world has ever suffered and in the most widereaching design it has known since the time of Christ.

But how does one learn to help? you will ask. You know how you learn to play a tune well. You listen when it is played, you practise it over and over, repeating especially the parts you fail in, but also you think about the key, the time, the rhythm, the melody and the meaning of it all. So you will learn to help, partly by watching intently those who are helping now, partly by trying to do your bit, and partly by thinking about the meaning of this upsurging life about us.

In this book I have tried to show a glimpse of the universe when we try to see it, not just as getting up in the morning and going to bed at night, but as an amazingly complicated, thrilling, tragic, rejoicing, growing world that is calling to us. It has its immensely xiv A W(yrd to the Student

long history, whose beginning no man saw, its engrossing present, its future for which we are, in our minute but exigeant way, responsible. The world in which we take our part is wide as well as long. Each of us starts from his own center of family and friends, but we cannot go any distance without finding ourselves Hnked to nations three thousand miles aw^ay. The world is mysterious and full of problems. Why is one man rich and another poor? Why is one strong and another ill? Why does one suffer blow after blow and another go unscathed? There is but one answer, ''God knows." That is why in this book, as I attempt to point toward the direction of your part in the world, I must turn to religion.

God knows. How shall we best find out all of His truth that we are capable of understanding? In two ways. By watching for and doing His will, and by living with those who know Him best. The chances to know by doing are all about you. You may not feel strongly yet the need of living with those who know God. By and by you will. Whenever you do you will turn first to those very near you who seem to have an insight you want but do not possess, and then, I believe, to the source of their strength, to him who knew God best and who told us how we too could know Him.

Ella Lyman Cabot.

Contents

Page

Editors' Preface ix

Author's Preface xi

Chapter I God Cares For A Barren World

We know that ages ago the earth was seething, sizzUng hot, hke molten ii'on ; but it is hard to believe it until we happen to feel this central heat still at work. One afternoon when I was traveling through the Yellowstone Park and examining strange blue pools that tasted of sulphur, I heard voices on all sides crying: "The Giant! The Giant is spouting!" I looked up, and everybody was racing, — galloping soldiers, tearing stage-coaches, scurrying nurse-maids, shouting children, breathless tourists. The Giant Geyser spouts only once in five or six years and it never lets you know when it is going to perform; but there it was, shooting a fierce, white stream up into the sky. It was a wonderful sight. A thunderous roar sounded from the bottom of the crater and a great cone of water throbbed up in enormous pulsations. "Keep out of the steam!" someone shouted. It was scalding hot.

An experience like this makes one think about the beginning of the world. After the earth had cooled somewhat, its crust began to form, and with the air mo\'ing rapidly about it — as we sometimes shake a piece of paper to dry the wet ink — the earth began to dry. It became less hot, and its crust grew thicker. By and by clouds condensed around the earth and a great sea covered all the land.

"Strange days and nights those must have been on the earth when the great sea was still too hot for hving things to exist in it. The land above the water-line

2 Our Part in the IVorld

was bare rocks. These were rapidly being crumbled by the action of the air, which was not the mild, pleasant air we know, but was full of destructive gases, breathed out through cracks in the thin crust of the earth from the heated mass below. If you stand on the edge of a lava lake, like one of those on the islands of the Hawaiian group, the stifling fumes that rise make you feel as if you were back at the beginning of the earth's history, when the sohd crust was just a thin film on an unstable sea of molten rock, and this volcano but one of the vast niunber of openings by which the boiling lava and the condensed gases found their way to the surface. Then the rivers ran black with the waste of the rocky earth they furrowed, and there was no vegetation to soften the blackness of the landscape." *

Almost such a barren picture as this the first verses of Genesis describe: ''And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God moved (or was brooding) upon the face of the waters."! Waste and void: they are suggestive words, words with more than one meaning. "Waste" we think of as meaning bare or desolate, but also useless. We have waste-paper baskets to toss away papers that we think of no value, and waste barrels in which to throw the scraps of food we have done with. ''Void" is an interesting word because it means absolutely empty. But is any place ever entirely empty? We talk about empty houses. Are they empty? If you take all the furniture, rugs, curtains and books out of a room it looks empty, doesn't it? But something else — air — rushes in to fill the space. When we say, then, that any place is empty or void what do we mean? We mean empty or void

* Earth and Sky Every Child Should Know, Julia E. Rogers, pp. 134-135. t Revised Version.

God Cares for a Barren World 3

of interest. There is nothing in it that we care for. "Oh, there's nothing in the newspaper to-night!" you exclaim as you throw it down. Well, there are as many printed columns as usual and they may be what someone else most wants to read, but they don't hit your interest. You want to know about the National Baseball League, and there is not a word about it in the paper. It is void of interest.

WTiat, then, are the enduring interests of the world? We care for our family, our friends, our homes, our nation, for books, for music, for our basket-ball team or our baseball team. We care for the friendly animals who seem to want to live with man, — horses, dogs, canaries. But when the v/orld began, billions of years ago, longer indeed than any man can really think of, there was little we should have loved for there were no human beings, nor even any animals, flowers or ferns in existence.

Have you ever tried to think what it means to say that there was a world with no human beings in it? There w^ould seem to be nobody to know about it. The rocks and clouds do not understand the world. Can the universe be real if nobody knows about it? No ; and this is very important. You or I do not have to be there, nor anyone we know, but there must be someone who understands, loves, and guides even this strange world. Who is this maker and guide of the world? The Bible says, ''The Spirit of God was brooding over the face of the waters." There could be no truer expression than this. God loved the world. He saw the coming life of His creation even when it was barren and dark and waste. Because He cared for the world and brooded over it. His love filled the universe and made it become all that it was capable of becoming. He saw even from the beginning the coming of Christ.

In the winter, when the ground is frozen hard, we begin to plan for summer; to think: What shall I plant in my garden? Where shall I go in vacation time? Have you seen the baseball field deep in snow and thought how soon it would be spring and the field made ready to be played on?

" Over the winter glaciers I see the summer glow, And through the wild-piled snow-drift, The warm rosebuds below." *

That is how I believe God saw the world even from the beginning. It was not waste, void, or dark to Him, because He cared for it in both senses of the word care. He loved the world and He guided it toward its own ends.

Several years ago I rode down the Grand Canon of the Colorado River in Arizona from the top — eight thousand feet high — to the river bottom. Oh! but the path was steep and stony and barren. Nothing seemed to grow in the hard rocks. How could anything grow? I thought. The air is so dry that no flower can Uve. The rocks are so hard that no delicate root could penetrate them. And then with startling suddenness I saw rising out of the very rock a glorious white flower, a yucca on a stem eight feet high. However barren the soil and however dry, that flower had managed not merely to struggle along in a dead-alive way, but to soar up and shine white against the steelblue sky. God knew it would flower even through the waste. Even so He could love the world and help it to become itself at a moment when the earth looked utterly void. When men love one another as God loves the whole world they too have chances to be creators.

* R. W. Emerson, "The World Soul," Poems, p. 23, Riverside Edition.

Chapter II The World As Moulded By Men's Hands

There is no animal that has ever constructed a tool. True, the beaver makes a remarkable dam by using his strong, flat tail, but he does not seem to have thought of using a spade to help him dig. Stags in the forest fight with their great antlers, but they do not invent swords or guns. Birds with the help of their bills weave intricate nests, but they have never learned to make or to use a needle in order to bind the strands firmly together. If you drop a bit of twine out of doors in springtime you may see an English sparrow dart on it and carry it streaming behind him up to his nest, but as for weaving a bit of twine on a frame, the idea never seems to occur to him.

So man is sometimes called the tool-using animal. It gives an extraordinary power to be able to use tools. Even strong men are physically weak compared to the larger animals. Bulls, oxen, horses, could knock any man down, and yet by whips and reins men can control them. Men cannot run nearly as fast as many animals, but men can invent engines that move faster than the swiftest deer. Men have weak teeth compared to those of the tiger, but they have made knives to cut their food, and they can sharpen them to the finest edge. Men cannot draw oxygen from water, like fish, but they have invented submarines in which the air is brought to them compressed and stored for days. Men have no wings, but they have invented aeroplanes to sail in the air and to carry weight no birds can carry. Men have short sight compared to eagles, but through telescopes they can look even into the secrets of the stars and the moon. Men have weak voices, and ears that unaided can hear only for a short distance, yet in 1915, through the invention of the wireless telephone, the breaking of waves on the Pacific Coast was clearly heard by people on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

This power of invention, of creation, sharply differentiates men from beasts. The animals live their lives, and except for a few dens they have scooped out or the grass and herbs that they have eaten the world is unchanged. But when human beings come, they can begin, with God's help, to be creators, and change the face of the world.

In what ways do men mould the world?

(1) Men mould and change the physical world. Mountains seem far more permanent than men. Men come into life and depart from life ; mountains remain. Yet tunnels have been driven through the greatest mountains of Switzerland and hills leveled to the ground. ''If ye have faith even as a grain of mustard seed," said Jesus, ''ye shall say unto this mountain. Be ye removed." It is true; it has been done again and again by faithful engineers; not at one stroke, but with equal sureness.

Irrigation and planting are other ways by which men change the face of the physical world. In going west one sees arid deserts strewn here and there with the bones of animals who have died of thirst. But men learn to harness the river high up the stream and its water is turned on the arid land. Then it becomes not only productive land, but often superlatively good. The desert leaps into verdure, corn and flowers spring up, houses are built, trees are planted, herds of cows and sheep graze on the new grass. In a few years the country is unrecognizable.

The World as Moulded by Men's Hands 7

(2) Men change the vieaning of time and space. Many scientific inventions do not affect perceptibly the outward world but they revise the mode of life of all who use them. The wireless telegraph and the telephone have already annulled distance for us and the aeroplane and submarine enlarge our highways. Man is taking possession not only of the earth but of the air and the bottom of the sea. Here is an astounding extract clipped from a business-like Annual Report of the American Telephone Company. It shows what the wireless telephone is beginning to accomplish:

''On October 22, 1915, from the Arlington tower in Virginia, we successfully transmitted speech across the Atlantic Ocean to the Eiffel Tower at Paris. . . . This same day (when speech was being transmitted by our wireless telephone apparatus at Arlington to our engineer and the French military officers at the Eiffel Tower in Paris) a man who was the engineer at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, together with an officer of the United States Na\^, overheard the words." *

Thus through the genius of hard-working inventors the dullest of us is able to do things that a century ago would have seemed miracles. It is not we who deserve the credit. The first telegraphic message sent by the Morse system beat out words that are forever true: "What hath God wrought! "

(3) Men bring in art to change the world. Often enough it is very bad art, but still it is intentional decoration. Look around your dining-room. Patterns and designs are everywhere, — on wall-paper, furniture, mantelpiece, curtains, rugs, forks and spoons, even on the radiator and the stove.

In far greater ways the art of man changes the world. The great cathedrals of Europe have made their impress upon many generations, so that all civU-

* Report of the American Telephone Co., 1915.

8 Our Pari in the World

ized nations cried out with horror when Rheims Cathedral was deUberately ruined by German shells. The Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor shouts to every incomer who has ears to hear, ''America stands for freedom to worship God!" Trumpet,, organ, drum, and violin, these tools of art, rouse and change men. Often in the presence of martial music cowardice is abashed and vanishes; when the Angelus rings, the peasants of France bow confessing their sins.

(4) Great men change the world of thought. Lincoln, brooding over the nation's problems, was reminded perhaps of some family quarrel among his neighbors when he wrote concerning our nation, ''A house divided against itself cannot stand." That thought made history and a new South. It is as true now as it was when Lincoln said it, and it is applicable in many places. If we are to play our part in the world, we must learn to work together. We cannot be a house divided against itself.

I spoke once to a college president about the difficulties of handling men of many different opinions.

"Ever been in a cotton mill?" he asked quickly. ''The very first operation is the carding-machine, to straighten out the tangled threads. You can't weave unless all the threads run the same way." Here is a thought to tie to!

(5) Great thinkers change the actions of future generations as well as of their own. Less than one hundred years ago prisoners were thought of as degraded men and women, fit only to be herded together and kept from doing harm. Now expert psychologists examine criminals with tests to judge fairly what they are capable of doing or understanding. They are given memory tests: to look at a picture a minute and recall what they saw. They are given easy drawings to imitate or blocks to fit together — things that children

The World as Moulded by Men's Hands 9

of different ages could easily do. These tests show that fully one-third of our prisoners are mentally below par. We used to think of criminals as clever and quick. On the contrary, many of them are underwitted. And from this thought has just begun a new treatment of prisoners that you in your generation must carry farther. You will be able to separate the prisoners who are feeble-minded, and so do not understand what doing wrong means, from the others. Keep them from hurting themselves or others; keep them for life if necessary ; but treat them as sick or as childish, not as wicked.

(6) In proportion to the greatness of a man is his power to enlarge our knowledge of God. Because it is more important to know God than to know anything else, the names of religious leaders stand out in the history of the world. Probably you know very few names in India or Arabia, but you have heard of Buddha and of Mohammed. I doubt if you could tell of any great Chinese general, but you know the name of Confucius. You know it because these religious teachers have made dents in the world through teaching us of God. And if it is true that the names of Confucius and Buddha mean something to us, how much more does the name of Jesus. Here is a simple peasant of a far remote town of Galilee who, because he knew and loved God as no other man has done, changed the whole life of the world. More than nineteen hundred years have passed since his birth, yet there is no one more alive and nearer to all of us, no one without whom our lives would be so utterly changed, as Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus changed the outer world very little in his lifetime. Probably as a carpenter he built a few boats or sheds, made a few yokes for oxen; and on Lake Gennesaret, whose name now sounds sacred to us, he

10 Our Pari in the World

caught fish. But since his death he has utterlychanged the world. Cathedrals, churches, meetinghouses, statues, pictures, poems, chorales, songs, rise in his praise, and for his sake missionaries go out to risk their lives among the heathen. I suppose it is true to say that the greater part of the work done for the sick, for prisoners, for the handicapped, for the despairing, has been done in the name of Christ.

Chapter III The Family

It seems perfectly natural to be alive, yet it is really marvelous, for the whole earth had to be made ready for oiu" coming. For untold centuries we could not have lived on it at all. It was scorching hot, barren, and, except in God's thought, lifeless. And when the beginnings of life were once estabhshed in ways that nobody understands, even then danger for the new lives was on every hand. The early forms of amoeba had. Professor Shaler tells us, only one chance in a hundred thousand to live. I once heard of a very sick man who asked whether he was going to die. "Well," answered the doctor, ''you have one chance in a hundred to get well." ''AH right," repUed the patient, cheerfully, "I'll take the one chance." Every one of us has had far less chance than one in a hundred to be alive at all. Yet here we are.

You have often thought, of course, how it is that new life is formed. Perhaps j'ou have read about it in encyclopedias. Boys and girls do, and no wonder, for it is extraordinarily interesting and important. In early organisms, such as the jellylike mass called amoeba, new families are made just by division. The parent spontaneously divides into several fairly equal parts, as an orange might be divided into its segments. This was all very well as long as there were no special organs, but if we comphcated beings were divided in such a way there would not be hearts or eyes or arms enough to go round. Then the next step was taken. New Hfe was made by buds. The sea-anemones bud from a parent stock, and when they are complete in the needed parts they are gently detached and swim off. Some buds, such as the corals and the sponges, and all our flower buds remain on the parent stock, though horticulturists know how to cut through a stem with a bud on it, plant it in sand, and let it root and become an entirely separate plant.

Some of the scientists who study evolutionary processes think that one reason why this budding method was outgrown is that it became important to have two parents instead of one. Parents are unlike one another. They naturally have different gifts to bring to the new life they are privileged to create. Each can give its best through inheritance and through personal influence. For a long time, however, the father or mother gave little besides inheritance to the new child. ''The seed or the egg," writes Professor Shaler, ''was sent forth from the parent, but it had to shift for itself to find food or shelter." And what happened was, of course, that only one seed or spore or one tiny egg in one hundred thousand survived to grow up. "Therefore we find that about as soon as the spores and germs are contrived there begins a series of experiments in the way of providing food along with them so that the new life may be helped a certain distance on its way."* This help more and more means strain for the parents and especially for the mother. Some moths die invariably in depositing their eggs. Among the birds anyone can see how busy the parents are kept, feeding their clamorous brood.

But for the human child even greater care and sacrifice is given. If the tiny eggs from which we all start were exposed to the air or protected only as birds

* Nathaniel S. Shaler, The Individual, D. Appleton, 1900.

The Family 13

protect their eggs, almost all would die. To keep babies safe they are not only developed within the body of their mother but fed by her and cared for by her for years ^^•hen if left to themselves they would be absolutely helpless. A calf can feed itself in a few weeks; a baby of a year would die with milk in a pail beside it unless it were fed.

And so not only must the earth be made ready from the beginning for our coming, but every single one of our direct ancestors must have been kept alive by someone's protecting care, and then must have helped to keep some son or daughter alive. Not one of us could be here except for the self-sacrifice of generations upon generations above us.

In The Promised Land, Mary Antin tells about her mother's engagement and marriage. Among the Jews in Russia where ]\Iary Antin was born, the strange custom prevailed of letting all the rest of the family circle except the bride and groom discuss whether they should be married. When Mary Antin's mother was betrothed, a troublesome cousin, a strange lady dressed in odds and ends with a scarlet flower stuck in her wig, made endless objections. It was hours before she could be silenced and the contract signed. Of this incident Mary Antin writes: ''That is the way my fate was sealed. It gives me a shudder of wonder to think what a narrow escape I had; I came so near not being born at all. If the beggarly cousin with the frowsy wig had prevailed upon her family and broken off the match, then my mother would not have married my father, and I should at this moment be an unborn possibility in a philosopher's brain. It is right that I should pick my words most carefully, and meditate over every comma, because I am describing miracles too great for careless utterance.

*'If I had died after my first breath, my history would still be worth recording. For before I could lie on my mother's breast, the earth had to be prepared, and the stars had to take their places; a million races had to die, testing the laws of life; and a boy and girl had to be bound for life to watch together for my coming. I was millions of years on the way, and I came through the seas of chance, over the fiery mountain of law, by the zigzag path of human possibihty. Multitudes were pushed back into the abyss of nonexistence, that I should have way to creep into being. And at the last, when I stood at the gate of life, a weazen-faced fishwife, who had not wit enough to support herself, came near shutting me out.

''Such creatures of accident are we, liable to a thousand deaths before we are born. But once we are here, we may create our own world, if we choose."*

You see, strange as it sounds, every living being is like someone who has been saved in a shipwreck by the courage of the captain and crew. We have escaped a million dangers that might have prevented our being born. And we are alive and well and strong only because for century after century there has been family life. Family life is a ship that has breasted all storms and brought us safe here. Without the family life behind us in the past no one of us would be alive. The future side of this truth is equally clear. Unless we make the right kind of family of our own there will be no chance for those who come after us. Over the hills of Greece in olden times messengers running with torches bore tidings important to the nation. Running till they were exhausted they surrendered their torch to fresh messengers. Family life is like a lighted torch. We have received it burning. We are next in line. It is our turn to pass on the torch undimmed.