Self-culture; physical, intellectual, moral and spiritual; a course of lectures

Front matter

Ciass

Book. J2l

Copyiight N?

Contents

PAGB

Introductory Chapter : Beginnings of Culture, in Childhood. — Natural and Artificial Methods

in the Education of Children 3

I. Man's Duty To Grow

I.

MAN'S DUTY TO GROW.

GOD has placed us here to grow, just as he placed the trees and flowers. The trees and the flowers grow unconsciously, and by no effort of their own. Man, too, grows unconsciously, and is educated by circumstances. But he can also control those circumstances, and direct the course of his life. He can educate himself; he can, by effort and thought, acquire knowledge, become accomplished, refine and purify his nature, develop his powers, strengthen his character. And because he can do this, he ought to do it.

It is curious that Christian teachers should have so often neglected to inculcate this duty of self-culture, seeing that it is so plainly taught by Jesus in the Gospels. This is the doctrine of the parable of the talents and of the pounds. Both teach that it is not enough to render back to our Master what we have received, unimpaired and uninjured ; but that we must bring back more than we receive, — that is, that we must add something, by our own industry and fidelity, to what God intrusts to us ; that we are his stewards. The parable of the talents teaches the law of responsibility ; that of the pounds, the law of retribution. The first shows that the more we receive, the more we are bound to do ; those who have two talents must bring two more ; those who have five, five more. The other shows that the more we gain, the more we shall receive ; that progress is not according to arithmetical but geometrical progression • that it is a constantly accelerated progress.

Ten men have each a single pound. One gains two pounds, and receives two cities ; one five, and receives five cities. Not merely two pounds, but two cities ; the powers developed in a lower service are employed in a higher one. The man who is faithful in a few things here will be made ruler over many things there. Here, perhaps, his business was to make horseshoes ; but he made them faithfully ; he learned how to make better horseshoes, and more of them, as he went on. Consequently he may be found fitted, in another sphere, not to make horseshoes, but to help govern- a planet. But, in both parables, the servant who brought back only what was given him, without improving it, is called a wicked and slothful servant, and loses what he first received. Improve your talents, or lose them, that is the austere law.

And this legislative enactment of the Divine Lawgiver, in the New Testament, has been confirmed by all the decisions of the Supreme Court of the

Deity in Nature. Use and improve, or lose. This is the sentence pronounced on each of us by all the courts of God, in the physical, intellectual, and moral world. Use and improve your muscles and your percejjtions, or they will gradually but certainly fail. Use and improve your memory, your understanding, your judgment, or they will become feeble. Use and improve your conscience, or it grows torpid. Use and improve the powers which look up to an infinite truth, beauty, and goodness, and they lift you towards these. Let them sleep, and they cannot see this kingdom of God, this Divine element in the universe. The fool, who has not developed his spiritual nature, says in his heart, " There is no God." Nature reaches its hand to Eevelation to maintain this law, and both, with concurrent voice, cry, " Use and improve, or lose."

If man has the power of self-improvement, then this power is itself a talent confided to him. Unless he improves, he does not use this power. But this power of perpetual self-improvement is one of the chief distinctions between man and the lower animals, between civilized races and savage races. Animals can be trained by man, but they cannot train themselves. They can be taught some accomplishments, formed to some new habits ; but where man has not done this for them, they remain uneducated. Savage races reach a certain point of improvement under the influence of circumstances; and then they stop, their development arrested.

But, in the higher civilization of Christendom, no such limit has been reached, and none such appears in the future. Christian civilization forgets the things behind, and reaches out to those before. Each generation is born on a little higher plane of attainment, in science, art, and social faculty, than that which preceded it. But this social progress depends on individual progress. Every man who improves himself is aiding the progress of society; every one who stands still, holds it back. The progress of society always commences in individual souls. A great advancing soul carries forward his whole age ; a mean, sordid soul draws it back. That is a good reason why the talent should be taken from him, and given to another.

That man was made for progress appears evident from the fact that, without progress in some form, life itself becomes undesirable, almost unendurable. With a sense of progress, even of the lowest kind, the interest of life revives. As long as a man has hope, he can bear anything, endure anything, and be happy. Take from him hope, and his heart is dead before his body dies. Nothing that we have, or are, can satisfy us for more than a moment. If a man fixes his heart on pleasure, then he must have some new pleasure to-morrow beyond what he has to-day, or he is weary. If he fixes his heart on the acquisition of wealth, then he must have a larger property this year than he had last. So with fame, position, power, knowledge, — all tire us if we have to stand still. We must look forward, or die. We are like the man crossing a wild stream on a narrow log, — he is only safe while he goes on ; if he stops, he falls. The dreadful disease of ennui, of lifeweariness, attacks all who have no aim, no permanent purpose, who are not looking forward, onward, upward. The only two classes of men who are safe from this poison of life are those who have an aim and those who are doing steady work. The great mass of men and women are contented because they are obliged to work. Of those who are not obliged to work, those only are contented who continue to work because they have some purpose, some object, something to which to look forward. The wine of life is the sense of progress.

The love of money, says the Apostle, is the root of all evil. So it is ; but it is also the root of a great amount of good. The love of money, in bad men and weak men, incites to cheating, lying, cruelty, meanness, reckless speculation, cold-blooded murder. But love of money, as the desire of getting on in the world, is a constant source of industry, foresight, prudence, economy. It educates the whole community to these virtues. It furnishes hope to ten thousand homes. Stand in the street of a large city at evening, and see the very poor going to their houses. What are they ? Cellars, garrets, hid away in dark courts, dirty, without ventilation, with nothing of comfort about them, still less of beauty or taste. You say, " How can they bear life under such conditions ? " Because in these poor homes there is love, there is intelligence, warm social affections. A great deal of strong thinking is done in them. But, besides this, there is a sense of progress. They are getting on, or hoping to do so. They hope to lay by enough to buy a small house some day ; to educate their children, and to leave them higher up in the world than they are themselves.

Progress, in the sense of acquisition, is something ; but progress in the sense of being, is a great deal more. To grow higher, deeper, wider, as the years go on ; to conquer difficulties, and acquire more and more power ; to feel all one's faculties unfolding, and truth descending into the soul, — this makes life worth living.

We all believe in education ; but what is it that we call education ? A few years at school ; a little reading, writing, arithmetic ; a few studies superficially pursued, — this is commonly understood to be education. But education, in the true sense, is not mere instruction in Latin, English, French, or history. It is the unfolding of the whole human nature. It is growing up in all things to our highest possibility. This is a life-work ; a work in which our teachers are the heavens and the earth, day and night, work and rest, nature and society, heavenly inspirations and human sympathies, success and failure, sickness, pain, bereavement ; all of this great human life. And with this teaching, there must be the earnest desire and purpose in our own soul to grow, to become larger, deeper, higher, nobler, year by year.

For these reasons, we say that all should aim at self-culture. " Very early," said Margaret Fuller, "I perceived that the object of life is to grow." She herself was a remarkable instance of the power of the human being to go forward and upward. Of her it might be said, as Goethe said of Schiller, " If I did not see him for a fortnight, I was astonished to find what progress he had made in that interim." Every year she lived added depth to her thought, largeness to her comprehension, devotion to her soul. Being at first somewhat egotistic, disdainful, proud, she became, at last, modest, sympathetic, and kind to the lowest and humblest. This generous nature took its own way to perfection. Whether teaching young girls in New England, or nursing wounded Italian soldiers in Rome ; whether studying with untiring energy the literatures of Europe, or scraping lint for the patriots who followed Mazzini, — she was always going forward and onward to the end of her days.

Consider, also, such a character as that of John Milton, who, having determined early to write a work " which the world would not willingly let die," thought within himself " that he who would truly write a heroic poem must make his whole life a heroic poem." He, therefore, describes his long devotion to that work of improvement, and tells us how his " appetite for knowledge was so voracious that from twelve years of age he hardly ever left his studies or went to bed before midnight;" then how he " passed seven years in the University of Cambridge," "with the approbation of the good, and without any stain on my character." And how, then, " being anxious to visit foreign parts, and especially Italy," he saw great kindred souls, like Grotius and Galileo, and the antiquities and arts of Florence and Eome. After defending the Eeformed religion in the capital of the Pope, he returned to England, when he heard of the civil commotions there ; "for I thought," says he, "it base to be travelling for a moment abroad, while my fellow-citizens were fighting for liberty at home."

John Milton did make of his whole life a heroic poem, and at last, old and blind, fallen on evil days and tongues, he sat in his obscurity and composed his immortal poem, which the world will never " willingly let die." We reverence him most of all, because he was himself greater than his poetry.

" But we cannot all be Miltons," you say. Not every man by any amount of culture can become a Milton ; not every woman can become a Margaret Fuller. No, nor is it so intended. But we can all be as faithful in our measure as they were in theirs. Each of our souls may be unfolded into something as beautiful, as necessary to God's world, as the souls of the great heroes and saints. It would not do to have too many heroes and saints. An army made up wholly of generals would win no battles.

Soldiers are as necessary as generals in the battle of life,—

" A battle, whose great scheme and scope They little care to know, Content, as men at arms, to cope Each with his fronting foe."

I do not believe that we are able to make of ourselves anything we please. But we can make of ourselves what God pleases we should be. In every soul he has deposited the germ of a great future. Every soul is a seed. It does not yet appear what it shall be, — it is bare grain. Of some seeds may be born beautiful roses ; others will become modest violets : some will tower into graceful elms, whose branches shall bend and wave in the summer air, and beneath whose far-reaching shadows the cattle shall stand resting in the hot days. Others shall become grasses for food, herbs for the cure of disease and solace of pain, — " to every seed its own body."

Formerly we were told of the formation of character, and this was inculcated, as though each man could carve himself into what he pleased ; that by sheer force of will he could make himself a character to suit himself. I have heard some prosaic persons say that, no doubt, if they had taken the trouble, they could have learned to write as good poetry as Lord Byron. I believe in no such possibility. I rather would believe that in every man's organization there was decreed, before the foundation of the world, every man's destiny. Every one of us was made to be something noble, good, lovely, useful, but not all the same. Instead of the formation of character, we now speak of development, which is a much truer word. There is a seed of the future in each of us, which we can unfold if we please, or leave to be forever only a stunted, halfgrown stalk. We are free to do, to become, or refuse to become, what God means us to be and made us be. One shall be a rose in God's garden, " angry and brave ; " another a buttercup or a sweet-pea. One shall open as a tender morning-glory, and give the poet a hint of a strain so sweet that it shall comfort all mourning mothers' hearts ; and another be a daisy, turned up by a Scottish plough, and, dying so, be born again into an immortal song. "Why shouldst thou envy thy brother because he is more wise, or has more genius, more business faculty, than thou ? Why envy thy sister because she is more fair, more brilliant ? The buttercup does not envy the rose, nor the prairie vine complain because it is not a Virginia creeper. God has made everything beautiful in its time and place ; let it only be contented to unfold into that which he intends it to become.

But the power of circumstances, you say, are so great that they prevent self-culture. We have no time, no opportunity, to make anything of ourselves. We are obliged to work for our daily bread ; we are fettered by unfavorable circumstances ; how can we ever unfold ourselves into anything of value ?

These are the arguments of cowardice and unbelief. Look ! O thou of little faith, at the great workers in the world, and see how they have fought their way to triumph against all sorts of opposing obstacles. Milton wrote " Paradise Lost " in blindness and poverty. Luther sang in the streets to buy bread as a child, and before he could establish the Reformation had to encounter the prestige of a thousand years, the united power of an imperious hierarchy, and the ban of the German Empire. Linnaeus determined to devote his life to the study of plants, and had only about forty dollars with which to get his education. He was so poor as to be obliged to mend his shoes with folded paper, and often to beg his meals of his friends. Columbus was not sent to discover America in a steamship ; but beset and importuned in turn the States of Genoa, Portugal, Venice, France, England, and Spain before he could get the control of three small vessels and one hundred and twenty men. Marlborough and Wellington won their great battles in spite of the perpetual opposition and resistance of the governments for which they were fighting. Hugh Miller, who became one of the first geological writers of his time, was apprenticed to a stone-mason, and, while working in the quarry, already began to study the stratum of red sandstone lying below one of red clay. Where other men complain of circumstances, the man or boy who has an idea and a purpose compels these untoward circumstances to serve him. Where others see nothing but bare rock, he notices analogies and differences. George Stephenson, the inventor of the locomotive engine, was a common collier, working in the mines. James Watt, the inventor of the steam-engine, was a poor sickly child, not strong enough to go to school. John Calvin, who gave a theology to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which it has hardly yet outgrown, was tortured with disease all his days. So was Eobert Hall, the greatest preacher of his time. What favorable circumstances helped the peasant girl of Arc to deliver France, when kings and great generals had failed ? In what cradle of easy circumstances were Pascal and Shakspeare, George Fox the Quaker, Spinoza and Charlotte Bronte or Harriet Martineau, rocked into success ? They were pillowed on hardship, taught by poverty, made strong by neglect, made pure by loneliness. All the great founders of religious sects, Buddha and Mohammed, Augustine and St. Francis, Wesley or George Fox, have been denounced, persecuted, and reviled through long years of fierce opposition. Have we not seen, in our own day, the antislavery reformers forcing their way to triumph against the combined opposition of churches, political parties, commerce and manufactures, and the saloons ? When were circumstances ever favorable to any great or good attempt, except as they were compelled by a determined purpose to become favorable ?

I have given well-known instances of those who have struggled up to fame and influence in spite of the most unfavorable circumstances. But these famous people, often gifted with that mastering and irrepressible quality which we call genius, are not the best illustrations of the power of growth in man. Go out into any New England village and look around you. In each such community you will find men and women who have developed power of mind and heart by simple fidelity to truth and conscience, until they have become sources of light and comfort to all the neighborhood. Do any need advice, sagacious counsel, wise help, in difficulty ? — they go to this village Franklin, to this Oberlin or Algernon Sidney of the hillside, and find new courage and new hope. Is there a poor woman, half driven to despair by untoward fortune ? She goes to the mother-confessor of the town, and tells her tale of woe, and finds sympathy, advice, and help. This woman, who has taken no vows in any sisterhood, and wears no garb indicating that she is set apart to religion, is yet the true patron-saint of the little neighborhood. Long experience in well-doing has developed a wonderful gift of helpfulness. Sorrows of her own have taught her to feel for others. Blessings precede, attend, and follow her footsteps. Perhaps she is poor, perhaps unattractive in appearance or manners, and yet a sweet halo of generous kindness spreads soothing influence around her. Her cheerful patience and hope, and unfaltering courage, area perpetual inspiration. She, by patient continuance in well-doing, has grown up into all she was meant to be by her Creator.

I gave an address in Central New York one summer in which I described such a woman as this, and, after the lecture was over, the people of the town declared I had been painting the portrait of one of their neighbors. Of course I had never seen her nor known her, but this shows how many there are who by faithfulness inherit the promise, " Give and it shall be given you."

" Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife, Their sober wishes never learn to stray ; Along the cool, sequestered vale of life

They keep the noiseless tenor of their way."

A man cannot make of himself anything he chooses, but he can carry out God's intentions concerning him, if, with a single eye to doing what is best, and becoming what he was meant to be, he makes use of all circumstances, favorable or unfavorable.

But perhaps you may say, Is not self-culture, in the last analysis, a selfish aim ? Is it not better to make it one's aim to do the nearest duty, or to do all the good we can to our fellow-creatures, rather than to cultivate our own powers and unfold our own nature ? This objection is a serious one, and deserves to be considered before going further.

No doubt there is a danger in making self-culture an exclusive aim. There are rocks ahead, no matter in what direction we may steer. The rock ahead, if we steer toward self-culture, is selfishness. The man who devotes himself to the cultivation of any faculty, talent, or taste, is in danger of separating himself in his sympathies from the mass of his fellow-men, in whom that faculty or taste is dormant. Graver still is the danger which comes from making one's self the object of all one's thoughts. This has often been seen in religious experience, where too much stress has been laid on making personal salvation the great object of life. This may end in a morbid self-included aim. The Westminster Assembly therefore wisely declared that the chief end of man was to "glorify God," as well as " to enjoy him forever." And the Hopkinsian School of Theology went further, and so subordinated the desire of personal happiness here -or hereafter to the love of absolute goodness, as to declare that no one was capable of being saved till he was willing to be damned for the glory of God.

But in all extremes there are dangers. The modern equivalent for " the glory of God " would be Truth, Goodness, Humanity, Universal Progress, or some such generalization. But the same danger of egotism emerges also here. Men whose lives are devoted to these large abstractions, patriots, philanthropists, and reformers of all sorts, are often forgetful of daily duties, neglectful of home ties. This, at least, is their risk, — if they fall, they fall in that direction.

Thomas Carlyle, at one period, satirized this tendency of world-reformers with the whole force of his sharpest satire. The aim which he suggested and urged was the opposite to all this. " Do your nearest duty ! " A large class of his admirers immediately adopted this maxim as their motto in life, and began courageously to do their nearest duties. And certainly this, too, is a very useful rule, if not carried to an extreme, and not made an exclusive one. But there is evidently danger on this side too. Persons who are confined altogether to home cares and family duties become narrow. It is very well to talk about " fireside virtues," — but how many men and women have had their mental and moral growth stifled by limiting their obligations to their business and home. The danger from this aim is narrowness. If those who adopt it fall, they fall in that direction. " Doing good " is another aim. To do the greatest good to the greatest number, to help all who need help, is often, in our time, thought the true " imitation of Christ." The modern Christian does not retire into a cell to pray, but goes about doing good. He thus avoids the risk of narrowness, which attends the man who desires only to do the "nearest duty." But there is a danger here also, — that of shallowness. The man who is always giving, never receiving ; always helping others, and never feeding his own soul, is in danger of becoming empty, itis virtue leans that way, and if he falls, he will fall in that direction. No single aim, exclusively pursued, is without its risks. Moral forces are polar forces, and every virtue has its antagonist virtue. We admit, therefore, while advocating self-culture, that it should not be pursued to the exclusion of other aims, but including them, as necessary adjuncts and helpers. While seeking to develop one's powers in an integral way, we must bear in mind also one's duty to God and man. To live in The Whole, is the way to live wisely in any part.

He who devotes himself to self-culture should therefore bear constantly in his mind the justification of this method of life. It is justified, if he seeks thus to advance the good of others as well as his own ; to use his developed powers for the cause of justice, truth, and humanity ; to become a better friend to his friends, a greater help and blessing in his home, to do the common duties of life more ably ; and thus to serve God and man better than he could do without such culture.

In my youth I knew two young men who adopted for their aims, the one, self-culture, the other, philanthropy. The one sought to educate himself ; the other, to do good. After a while, the youth who sought self-culture found that to get it he must quit the still air of delightful study, and go out to help his brother man. He found that he needed work, sympathy, society, in order not to freeze ; and so, in order to gain self-development, he became a man of usefulness. The other, who began by doing good, found himself ax, last growing; shallow. He had emptied himself, and had to stop to fill himself full again. He said, " I must be something, in order to do something. I must gain, in order to give." So, from motives of philanthropy, he proceeded to cultivate his mind and develop his faculties.

I do not think that making self-development an aim will ever lead to selfishness, if this aim is pursued in the spirit of the two parables to which I have referred. If we cultivate all the powers of body and soul in order to use them as talents in the service of God, not in order to gain for ourselves glory, or merely to excel others, but because God has made us to grow and intends us to grow, that we may be plants in his garden, every blossom a censer swinging its perfume on the air for him, every fruit ripening that it may bless and help his creatures, — then I believe that this aim will be in all respects a true and good one.

These, then, are the conditions, and these the possibilities of growth. We are put here to grow, and we ought to grow, and to use all the means of growth according to the laws of our being. Hereafter we will consider further what those laws are, and what are the means of our progress.

We grow only when we become more and more ourselves, our best selves, our truest selves, the selves that God made us to be. We do not grow when we try to be like this man or that, to strive for this man's wit or that man's scope, to become like this saint or that genius. The rose grows when it unfolds into a rose, not when it tries to become any other shrub or flower. The palm springs erect to heaven, and grows up a palm ; the vine creeps, and hangs, and swings in the air, and pours fragrance on the breeze, and grows into a vine. Thus God has made each of us to be something, to have a real place, and do a real work in this world, and that our own work, which no one else can do. If we are faithful to the inner light of our own conviction, and to the daily duties which God sends to us, we shall grow. With glad surprise we shall find ourselves becoming genuine and real plants, of use or beauty, in the garden of our God.

II. Training And Care Of The Body

II.

TRAINING AND CARE OF THE BODY.

IN many of the ancient religions the body was thought to be the enemy of the soul. The duty of a religious man, therefore, was to weaken the body, as far as was possible, without destroying life. The body was to be kept under by means of mortifying practices, — fasting, want of sleep, poor clothes or none, by living out of doors, and, finally, by self-inflicted flagellation. Only one ancient nation — the Egyptian — appears to have had much respect for the human body. The Egyptians took care of the body during life, and preserved it after death. They saw something divine in all living organizations. In worshipping animals and vegetables they worshipped the mysterious principle of organization, that vital power which is to us, as it was to them, utterly marvellous and inscrutable. The Egyptians thought it religious to adore and worship the body ; other nations thought it religious to despise and ill-treat the body. Christians have, therefore, followed the Brahmins and Buddhists more than the Egyptians in their view of the body, and have thought that the greatest saint was the man who lived in a cave, half-starved, and very dirty. But there is no such doctrine taught in the New Testament. The Son of Man came eating and drinking. Neither Paul nor John nor Peter advised their disciples to become monks and nuns. When Peter repented of denying his master, he did not proceed to inflict flagellation on himself, punishing his body for the sin of his soul. The letter and the spirit of the New Testament teach that we are to glorify God with our body, as well as our spirit. And I proceed now to show how we can glorify God with our body ; or, to speak in modern language, how the body may be made the means of self-culture.