Ultimate ideals

Foreword

This little book is the outgrowth of thirteen years of teaching. If it be asked why I have chosen to write upon so trite a subject, I reply that I had taught Bible many years before I had the faintest understanding of what was meant by the expressions, the poor in spirit, the meek, the pure in heart, before I had any comprehension of what it was to inherit the earth, or to see God. Because I think there may be others in like case with myself, I venture to put forth this little book as my attempt to interpret the message of the Divine Teacher in terms of the life of to-day.

Even in this age of war, unrighteousness and unhappiness, it may not be amiss to consider the ideals of peace, righteousness and happiness, given us by that Prince of Peace, who, we yet believe, would in righteousness make war.

Contents

PAGE

I The Ultimate Ideal 1

II The Poor in Spirit 12

II

Nothing is more curious than the way in which we repeat certain phrases from earhest childhood, without the faintest understanding of them, and furthermore without the faintest suspicion that we do not understand. Such was my experience with the expression " the poor in spirit." I did not know what it meant, nor had I the shghtest idea that I did not know, until in my senior year in college, a professor of philosophy startled me by asking me to define it. For the first time I realized that this was something that I had never thought about, and, furthermore, that it was something that it would be well to think about.

On the spur of the moment, I decided that the words were a curious roundabout way of saying " the humble " ; that just as the poor in material things are those who feel their need of material things, and desire them intensely, so the poor in spirit are those who feel their need of spiritual things, and desire them intensely. This made the blessing promised, the kingdom of Heaven, not only very appropriate, but even a matter of course. For it is impossible to desire spiritual blessings intensely, and not obtain them; if we really want the Kingdom of Heaven above all things else, we shall certainly have it. " If with all your hearts ye seek Me, ye shall surely find Me."

But this makes the first beautitude differ little in meaning from the fourth, " Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled." I remember, too, that St. Luke represents Jesus as saying, " Blessed are the poor." Does not St. Matthew give us simply another and more complete version of this, a more understanding version? Should not this beatitude be interpreted " Blessed are they who, whether they possess or do not possess worldly wealth, are at least in spirit poor; they who, if riches increase, set not their hearts upon them; they who, if riches decrease, set not their hearts upon them. For their object is to lay up treasure not on earth, but in Heaven. And so their reward is that upon which they have set their hearts, the Kingdom of Heaven. For what is the kingdom of Heaven? "The kingdom of Heaven is not meat and drink," not the meat and drink, upon which they have not set their hearts, " but righteousness, peace, joy in the Holy Spirit," the things upon which they have set their hearts. The kingdom of Heaven is within us, and that is the reason that they who have set their hearts upon outward things are not able to find it.

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Some time ago I heard a man condemn this as a soft and sentimental age, an age that was too lenient to the sinner, and had too little consideration for the respectable member of society. I could not help thinking that if this were indeed true, it might mean that we are beginning to understand the mind of Christ, to have that mind within us which was also in Him. For Jesus seems to have had nothing but compassion for the obvious sins, that bring their own punishment with them, the outcast was always His friend. Was it not that He felt that such sins had their place in the Divine plan for human development? For upon the one hand, they teach men their insufficiency and weakness, and thus throw them back upon God, while on the other hand, they teach them to make allowance for their neighbor, to forgive and to love.

For what is human development, human perfection, save getting closer to God, getting closer to man, understanding God better, understanding man better, loving God better, loving man better.? For such development it may be that such sin is necessary; it is possible that we can no more be made perfect without sin, than we can be made perfect without suffering. Is it because of this that there is more joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance .^^ It is gentleness that makes us great, and after all does not gentleness imply a certain weakness, at least sufficient weakness to understand the weak?

On the other hand, the vices of the mind, the respectable sins, avarice and hypocrisy, which in this life ordinarily bring not punishment but prosperity, are as much worse than the vices of the body as the mind is above the body, for they are the sins which in their very nature tend to separate us from God and man. Ye cannot serve God and mammon, ye cannot love God and mammon, ye cannot serve man and mammon, ye cannot love man and mammon.

For the excessive love of money not only extinguishes all divine ideals within a man, it also dulls all human interests. To the mere moneymaker, men become nothing but raw material, out of which he can make more money. And when he has made his money, he frequently does not know how to use it so as to enrich even his own nature, or give charm to his life. His pleasures, if he has any apart from money-making, are often costly but not ennobling, his home expensive but not refined, while his family are often averse to effort, living only for excitement, and helpless without it. If he is hospitable, his hospitality often springs more from love of ostentation, than from love of his friend, and enriches neither him that gives nor him that takes. There is no poetry in his life, for poetry is in its essence the discerning of beauty. And there is no room in the heart of the mere money maker for the strange and wistful longing which beautiful things arouse, for the rapturous emotion evoked by beauty.

To such a man there are no moods of souldelight, for there is no soul to be delighted. For what is the soul save the power to see the beauty in things, the power to see it where it is obvious, and the power to see it where it is not always obvious, in all the lives about us ? " What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? " In the multitude of his possessions, he has lost the power to become a son of God.

Even if he be the possessor of beautiful things, it is often not the sense of their beauty that thrills him, but the fact of his possession. He may enjoy his own beautiful gardens, but not those of his neighbors, still less the public parks, or the wild beauty of Nature. For a thing must be his exclusively, before he can enjoy it, and thus his possessions form a high wall about him, cutting him off not only from his fellows, but from all other beautiful things. Thus in order that he may possess a few things, he has given up everything. He lives, or rather is buried alive, in the little world of his own possessions, while the poor in spirit may claim the whole world that God has made as his own. Nay, he may live not only in this world, but in a thousand worlds, for all things are his, not only the things that he possesses, but also the things that he enjoys, not only the things that he experiences, but even the things that he imagines.

I was once present at a party, which a friend of mine gave to some pauper blind children. One little lad, greatly excited, wanted to feel of everything in the room, and to know to whom each belonged. When in answer to his questions I

said, " It belongs to Mrs. W , everything here

belongs to Mrs. W ," he put his hand on my

cheek, and with a beatific smile exclaimed, " Oh, no ! you made a mistake ! it is all mine for today ! " That is the way it is with the poor in spirit: everything that he can enjoy is his for today, and which is ours for today is ours forever.

" What entered into thee.

That was, is, and shall be ! '*

" How hardly shall they that trust in riches enter into the kingdom of God ! '^ For the kingdom of God is the kingdom of love, the kingdom of understanding, the kingdom of the ideal, the kingdom of the beautiful! And into that kingdom none but the poor in spirit may enter.

But we must remember that it is the poor in spirit that are blessed, and these are not necessarily the poor in this world's goods. There is no blessing in either riches or poverty, considered by themselves, nor is there necessarily any curse in either. There are times when having seen the vulgar materialism, the disgusting animalism, of certain rich people, we have a tendency to idealize the poor. But a closer view shows us that there is often quite as much materialism in the life of the poor, as in that of the rich. Poverty, like sorrow, is frequently a blessing, because it brings men nearer to each other, helps them to recognize each other's human hearts. Poverty, too, sometimes demands and cries out for faith in God. Those in comfortable circumstances were not eager to come to the marriage of the king's son; they had too many interests of their own. The blind, the poor, the halt and the maimed, having no such interests, were glad to come. In Tolstoi's " War and Peace," it was not until Peter, the richest man in Russia, had been taken prisoner and deprived of everything, that he could look upon the woods and the fields, and beyond to the limitless horizon, and exclaim, " All that is mine ! All that is in me ! and that is what they think they have taken prisoner ! "

Yet it is doubtful whether Peter would have felt this, if he had always been poor. We know that, for the very poor, life is often reduced to, " What shall we eat, and what shall we drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed? " and that this struggle, so far from throwing the soul back upon God and the neighbor, frequently leaves no room in the life for either God or the neighbor, no power to appreciate the beauty of either earth, or sea or sky. Is it not the ultimate tragedy of the slums, that, under slum conditions, one can scarcely, from birth to death, think of anything but the body? Existence becomes merely animal, men work in order to get food to keep the body alive, in order to do more work, to get more food, to keep the body alive, and so on in an endless chain.

Nor, and perhaps this is the greatest curse of all, is there any pleasure in the work, for it is of too monotonous a nature; it affords no opportunity for either self-expression or self-development. Consequently there is no self to be expressed, no self to be developed; man ceases to be man, and becomes a mere animal. The only pleasures that can be enjoyed are physical pleasures, and of the physical pleasures those that are most degrading are often most enjoyed. Some time ago I saw a letter from an educated man who had gone to work as a common laborer, in order that he might study the conditions, under which so many of his fellows had to live. He boarded in a house with other laborers, and he testified that ninety per cent of his house-mates got drunk once a week, and that as they sat at table it was unusual for five minutes to pass without an obscene jest.

And then there is a certain grace, finish, polish and pervasive charm, which people cannot easily acquire, except by a certain amount of leisure from drudgery and scrambling cares. We may say that this is not essential, and perhaps does not even matter very much, but in our inmost aO ULTIMATE IDEALS

hearts we know that it does matter; that it is this beauty of perception and proportion that attracts us, as nothing else does. The other day I read a story, in which the wife of the principal character experiences the shock of discovering that her husband had made money by questionable means. When she reproaches him with it, he replies, " You know very well that you would not have looked at me if I had always been poor. I grant that you can get along without the things that money buys, but you wanted the kind of man that it takes a certain amount of money to make."

Yes, it may be a sad truth, but it is a truth. Most of us, if we are high-minded, can get along without the things that money buys, but we demand as our friends the kind of men and women that it usually takes a certain amount of money to make. Of course we have all known simple country people who, by their natural kindliness and sympathy on the one hand, and acute observation on the other, have won their way to our hearts. We have felt that this natural essential culture was much better than any acquired culture. But the one does not necessarily exclude the other, and there is no denying the fact that the acquired culture greatly enhances the value of the natural culture, that the educated man, who works out far-reaching problems, is of more worth to the world, than the mere hewer of wood and drawer of water.

Moreover it is just the temperament that, under favorable circumstances, might have been artistic and contributed something of permanent beauty to the world, that is most likely to break down under monotonous toil in an uncongenial environment. It is a mistake to comfort ourselves with the thought that real genius will always conquer circumstances ; it will not. No doubt there have been many mute, inglorious Miltons. Many a struggling genius has prayed Sidney Lanier's prayer, " Only bread, dear Lord, not my will, but Thy decree, and then leisure to write my poems," and the prayer has not been answered, the world has been deprived of the poems.

I know of no sadder passage in all literature than one to be found in Zangwill's story, " The Master." The hero, the son of a poor, ignorant family, has become a world-renowned painter, and has fallen in love with a beautiful woman, made more beautiful by all that money can buy. And then " the thought of his mother came up from dim recesses of memory, and he was jealous of Eleanor for her sake, jealous of her beauty, her breeding, her wealth; jealous of all that made her different from his mother, of all that made her life fuller, freer, higher, richer, — of all, in fine, that made him love her." For it had suddenly dawned upon him that, after all, his wretched mother had the same temperament that Eleanor had, only circumstances had brought out all that was lovely in Eleanor, all that was unlovely in his mother.

And then in these days most men and women have to depend, not only upon their own labor for their daily bread, but upon another man^s will for a chance to labor, and doubtless this often means great curtailment of freedom of thought and speech, and of the development that comes with such freedom. " The only time a fellow like me can have an opinion," a laboring man was heard to remark, " is when he is in bed." The other day I heard of the principal of a school of whom it was said, " She would have had the highest possible ideals if only she had had a proper financial backing." It is to be feared that there are many people similarly placed.

When we consider all these things, we come to see, that so far from exalting poverty, it is right that the great end of civilization for this generation should be, as it is coming more and more to be, to abolish poverty, to do away not only with debasing and degrading conditions, but also to set men free from hopeless drudgery, to provide a certain amount of leisure and beauty for all, together with the training that is necessary for a proper appreciation of leisure and beauty. It is right that he who will not labor should not eat, but it is a disgrace to our civilization that he who is willing to labor should not have the chance to do so, and that he who does labor should often have the chance to eat so little. Such a man is entitled not only to corn and house room, but to what Emerson calls Athenian corn, and

Roman house room, and we who do have these things should never be quite happy in our possession of them, until all can share them with us.

But if neither wealth nor poverty in itself brings salvation, neither is there any salvation in middle-classness. I used to think the prayer of Agur, " Give me neither poverty nor riches," quite ideal, and for myself it is still what I want. But as a matter of fact when one lives in a community composed entirely of middle-class people, one finds their lives no more ideal than those of the very poor, or those of the very rich. I will grant that, as a class, there is probably a higher average of respectability among them, than is to be found among either the rich or the poor. They have less tendency to physical vice, but I am inclined to think that, except as the middle class includes professional people, there is less aspiration, less lifting up of the heart among them, than there is among either rich or poor.

For the God of the middle-class is too often respectability, and having attained that, there is no more to be desired. They have fewer vices than either the rich or the poor, but on the other hand, there is frequently a smugness and self-satisfaction among them, due to the fact that their virtue is chiefly negative. And with this smugness there is often associated a certain pretentiousness and artificiality. It seems as though they had lost the naturalness and simplicity of the lower classes, without gaining the naturalness and simplicitj of the upper classes. Since such people have so little in the way of positive virtue, it would be almost a relief to find more positive vice among them. " I would that thou wert cold or hot." One is never enthusiastic about them, never animated with a desire to be like them, for they are not themselves enthusiastic, and their virtue, while it may be orderly, is not beautiful, and their culture, like their goodness, is secondhand and conventional, and therefore uninspiring.

The difficulty with them is that they lack ambition; instead of struggling after more victory, they are content to sit down and enjoy the petty victories of the past. They are not " pressing forward to the things that are before," for they seem to interpret St. Paul's words " I have learned in whatsoever state I am therewith to be content," as applying not only to the material state, but also to the intellectual and spiritual state. And they are content with their present stage not only as a stage, but as an end, and to be content with anything as an end is death. They are what a friend of mine called " too damned happy." And the adjective was perfectly correct, for he who is absolutely content with himself and his surroundings is damned, damned or condemned not to grow.

For human nature inspires only as it aspires, turning its back upon every success attained, to pursue another higher and better still. When the crown falls upon one victory, it should only encourage us for the harder tug still to come. We gain one height, only that we may obtain a better view of the height that lies above it, and of the path by which we may ascend to it.

After all, does not the very expression " a dead level " imply that any level is deadening? Variety is the spice of life, and I believe that for life to be sufficiently interesting we need this variety, not only in temperament, character and abilities, but also in material possessions. Even in William Morris' ideal commonwealth, where everybody could have everything that he wanted, some people lived in big houses, and some people lived in little houses, because they preferred them. I prefer the little house for myself because it best expresses me, but I enjoy visiting in the big houses of some of my friends. And within certain limits the stately homes of England and America have their place,^ are a real addition to the spiritual life of the nation, especially when, as is more and more becoming the case, they are more or less open to the public. There is room for the beauty of Nature which is, or should be, free to all, but there is also room for the beauty of Art, which is sometimes very expensive.

1 Of course I do not mean in any sense to indorse what Ruskin describes as "that curious laying out of ground, that beautiful arrangement of dwelling-house for man and beast, by which we have grouse and blackcock, so many brace to the acre, and men and women — so many brace to the garret."

"WTiat then should be our attitude toward wealth? The mediaeval saints seem to have taken the same position toward material possessions, that they took toward the human body ; they regarded both as impure and unholy things, and thought it the duty of the Christian to despise them. But the body is not an impure and unholy thing, it is the temple of the living God, and neither is wealth in itself an unholy thing. It is true that temptations come to us from the world and from the flesh as well as from the devil, but the world and the flesh are not in themselves the devil, and to think of them as such is simply to blaspheme against the God who made them, as the highest manifestation of Himself.

No, a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things that he possesseth, any more than a man's life consisteth in bodily strength. A man's life consisteth in the full and free exercise of his faculties. But for the full and free exercise of the faculties a certain amount of physical strength, and generally a certain amount of worldly wealth is necessary, and he who fails to do what he can to obtain both the health and the possessions, necessary to the full exercise of his God-given powers, is not only not praiseworthy, but even criminal.

It is true that some of the loveliest and most useful persons that the world has ever seen have been among those who, having found it impossible to obtain physical health, have accepted that fact, and have found even better self-expression in sickness than in health. And so the absolutely loveliest and most useful persons that the world has ever known have been those who, like Jesus and St. Francis, have recognized that their own peculiar genius could find its best expression in poverty, and so have deliberately chosen it. And not very far below this class have been some who, having found poverty inevitable, have accepted it cheerfully.

But when the physical or material state in which we happen to be seems to us to be such as to interfere with our best development, our best expression, our best service, we should not be content to remain in it, if it is possible to change it. Of course if we cannot change it, then we must believe that the development and service that seem to us to be best, are not really best and be satisfied " not to serve God more, which meaneth otherwise, than as God please."

And just as there are times in our lives when we may have to concentrate our energies upon obtaining physical health, so there are times in our lives when some of us may have to concentrate our energies upon obtaining material wealth ; only both should be regarded as means, and not ends. We sometimes hear a mother say " I am much more interested just now in my child's physical development than I am in his intellectual progress." And she may be quite right in feeling as she does. Dollars are more important than pennies, yet there is truth in the saying " Take care of the pennies, and the dollars will take care of themselves." So the intellectual and the spiritual are more important than the physical and material, but it is sometimes true of some people that if they can be made to take care of the physical and material, the intellectual and spiritual will take care of themselves.

No, a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things that he possesseth. But while life is not made up of things, life does use things ; and it is not right wholly to ignore this fact. Wealth ministers directly to the body, but the body, rightly used, ministers to the spirit, and it is right for us to want and to try to get as much wealth as is necessary, to make our particular bodies minister, in the best way, to our particular spirits. If the bread that we eat, the pleasures that we enjoy, become not only animal strength and animal spirit, but courage, endurance, thought, imagination and love, then we have a right to just as much bread, to just as much pleasure as can be so transmuted. Whatever we can honestly have that helps us, comforts us, enables us to do our work better, enables us to love more, we have a right to have.

I once heard a man ask William Morris whether he honestly thought that a chimney-sweep should be paid as much as a university professor. Morris replied, somewhat sarcastically, " If in order to do his work properly, the professor needs to eat more than the chimney-sweep, then he should be paid more." If by eating he meant, as Mr. Tulliver would say, " not exactly eating, but all that that signifies," the answer was a correct one. We are taught to pray " Give us this day our daily bread," and it is right that we should have our daily bread, and enjoy it. " Man does not live by bread alone," but man cannot live without bread; so it is right that he should both pray for it and work for it. Only the mind and heart should be set chiefly on work and love, not on bread.

It is sometimes assumed that Jesus meant that all men should be poor, but a close reading of the Gospel story does not lead to this conclusion. He Himself was not an ascetic. He came eating and drinking, and they said " Behold a gluttonous man, and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners." He prayed not that His disciples should be taken out of the world, but that they should be kept from the evil that is in the world. For, as Phillips Brooks has so well put it. He did not believe that perfection could be realized by " cutting off everything which by completing life should confuse it ; " it is not so easy and simple as that. He had friends among both the rich and the poor, for He was a partisan of neither wealth nor poverty. Neither was good nor bad in itself, either was good as it made the man good, bad as it made the man bad.

If He chose the life of a poor man for Himself,

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it was because His own particular nature, His own particular genius found its best expression in poverty. Other men's natures, other men's geniuses, might find their best expression in wealth, and He had no quarrel with them. It is true that, when He sent His disciples out to teach and to preach, He told them that they were not to take two coats, but that was because unnecessary luggage would impede them in their mission, not because there is anything wrong in having two coats. That is the test whether wealth is right for us, will it help us or hinder us in our mission? We are put here to work out our own salvation, but what is salvation for you is not necessarily salvation for me, and therefore the ways by which you find salvation may differ, and rightly differ, from the ways by which I find it.