SLEEP’S CONQUEST
Invisible armies come, we know not whence,
And like a still, insinuating tide
Encompass us about on every side,
Imprisoning each weary outpost sense,
Till thought is taken, sleeping in his tents!
Yet now the conquerer with lofty pride
Becomes our guardian, with us doth abide
And plans all night our wondrous recompense.
He takes away the weary, worn-out day,
And brings to-morrow—bride without a stain;
Gives us fresh liberty, a chance to mend;
Life, hope, and friends enhanced with fresh array.
Then when we fail he conquers us again,
Paroling us each day until the end.
Charles H. Crandall.
(Courtesy of Harper & Brothers.)
CHAPTER XLII
THE NATURAL LAW
But what is the law of our being? It is harmony, peace, rest. We have but to look at the workings of our own marvelous physical bodies to perceive that law. The more we study the human body, the more we wonder at its mechanism. Yet every part of this intricate machinery, in harmony with each other part, finds its own work, unless man, through his misunderstanding, throws it out of order.
Perhaps the strongest proof of the naturally harmonious working of the body is found in the responsive distress or disease which result from the wrong use of any one function. It is not necessary to cut the heart itself to injure it. To sever an artery anywhere will interfere with the perfection of the heart’s work as effectively as a direct injury to the heart. To bring bad news may stop its action forever.
It is not necessary to strike the head to cause a headache; that will follow if we abuse the stomach, or live so that the liver becomes deranged. We get these results because of the perfect harmony in which all the parts of the body work when we conform to the law of our being. The pain is a kindly monitor, warning us that we have violated some law and bidding us get into line once more. It is always wise to heed such warning, gratefully.
Suppose that a man has a cellar which is so dark and damp and dirty that he hates to go into it, and tries to forget it. But it is flooded in a storm, and he is forced to go down to examine it, and then finds that the wall is unsafe, and must be supported, else the house may fall. Will he not say, “It was well that the flood came that took me down into the depths, so that I might find what was endangering my property and the lives of my family?” And if, in addition, he not only reinforces and buttresses the wall, but also lets in the light and cleans up the cellar, he will actually remove out of his life what was always a disagreeable and neglected task. He will add to the value of his property, and have besides a security in his house that he would never have had but for the “accident.” So we, if we heed the first pain that tells us we have violated the law of harmony in our physical body, may be led into a better and truer understanding of ourselves than ever before.
If the law of the physical body is harmony, peace, rest, it must be true that the law of the intelligence and the law of the spirit are the same. If it were not so, there would be constant warring between the three natures—physical, intellectual, and emotional—and happiness and rest would be impossible.
Harmony, peace, rest are the blessings that all men crave, even when they do not understand their own desires. To say that peace and rest are inherently impossible of attainment is to say that we are formed with desires that tantalize and torment us, as a mirage tantalizes the traveler dying of thirst in the desert, with no hope of satisfying those desires. It is in effect to say that a cruel monster governs this world and takes delight in our suffering.
He who tries with apparent disregard of harmony to enforce his own will is, after all, striving in his blind and hopeless way for harmony. He thinks that to make his will supreme would bring peace, and so he tries to have his own way: that accounts for much tyranny, especially domestic tyranny.
That so few do attain happiness and rest in their lives is because of this misunderstanding of life rather than from any inability to gain happiness and rest. We allow trifles to distract us from our real purpose. We feel ourselves so pressed and oppressed by petty cares that we cannot find time during the day to do all that we feel we must do. It would be well for us to follow Pitt’s rule, to do our part in the world instead of trying to run it.
If that rule worked in his high and responsible position, it would probably work in our less important places. Most of us spend our strength for that which is naught, largely because we do not examine the nature of the “duty” which presents itself to us. We should probably find that our duties are not worth doing, or else that another could do them as well.
Rest brings sleep more than sleep brings rest.
CHAPTER XLIII
“LETTING GO”
In sleep’s sweet fetters bound.
Lord Neaves.
A frequent cause of suffering among men and women is their idea that they are necessary to the running of things. Usually they find themselves mistaken. The head of a firm was once warned by a physician that he must take a rest to avert a breakdown, but the man declared it to be an impossibility for him to get away from the office for even a week. He gripped his business so tight that he could not let go, nor could he see that others could do it as well as he could. In such a state of mind the doctor’s warning added another worry, fear for himself,—so at last the predicted breakdown came. He had reached the point where he had to let go, for his grip, both physical and mental, was gone. For six months he could not concern himself with business affairs, the necessity of fighting for life and renewed health occupying all his faculties. He refused to let himself think of the outcome, but put his attention upon getting well.
When he returned to his business, with his mind braced to stand any disasters that he might discover, he was astonished to find everything in perfect condition, and that his assistant had even corrected the errors he had himself made in the last weeks of overworked body and fagged brain. It was at first a blow to his pride that he was not essential to the success of his own business, but, as he realized how big a price he had paid to learn this simple lesson, he made a decision that showed how far he had advanced beyond his former condition.
Turning to his assistant, he said: “Smith, as you can carry on this business so well, I shall take three months’ vacation every year, and have no more expensive breakdowns; and, as I want you to continue to carry it on as well while I am away, you would better take three months’ vacation every year, too, so there shall be no breakdowns for you.” He had really learned two lessons in one—what things were not worth doing, and what things could be done by somebody else. He still had left “the things that were quite enough for any man to attempt.” No man is really indispensable to any undertaking, however much it may seem so to him. When James Alexander controlled the Equitable Life Assurance Society, he made it his rule to discharge anybody who seemed to be indispensable. His reason for this was that, the longer such a man was retained, the more indispensable he would become, until the association would be in danger of going to smash if anything happened to that one man. Common prudence dictated the advisability of getting rid of him while the company could manage to get along somehow without him.
There was once a Dutchman who was of much the same opinion as Mr. Alexander. His manager applied for an increase of salary.
“I t’ink I buys you bretty dear, alretty, Hans.” “Yes,” said Hans, “I get a good salary, but then I am worth it. I know everything and do everything about the business; in fact, you couldn’t get along without me.” “Ach, ish dot so? Vell; vat I do if you vas deat, Hans?” “Oh, well! if I were dead, you’d have to get along without me.” “Ach!” replied the Dutchman, slowly, “den, Hans, I t’inks we gonsiders you deat.” It is well to think sometimes of how nicely the world got along before we came to it, and how likely it is to do just as well after we have left it. If, when we are rushing around, weighed down by anxiety and a feeling of our own importance, we should “consider ourselves dead” for a few moments, we might find that the fever of life had subsided.
We should have to admit that, judging from the past, the world would not even slip a cog if we were to pass from it. And even if we were ready to claim that no one heretofore had been so important, and no one could ever again be so necessary, even then it were the part of wisdom to cease hurrying and worrying. For, as the human frame can be exhausted by overwork and overworry, it behooves the indispensable person to preserve himself as long as possible, so as to save the world from the catastrophe of his loss. The very thing he aims to do—save the world—he defeats by his anxiety and haste.
Proper prudence tends to prevent trouble, not to prevent worry. No amount of precaution and care will cure worry. In fact, the prudence and care help to fix the thought on all the mischances, however improbable or impossible, that may be imagined.
Elaborate precautions often defeat themselves, like a corporal who kept all his squad out as pickets till they were cut off one by one.
I once saw a family going off to the country, five “masters” and three servants, eight hand-packages, coachman, footman, and an extra servant, and the family doctor to get them off. The cautious doctor got the tickets days before, and even got checks for the trunks. An extra trunk, taken at the last hour to hold some extra things that might be needed, upset all that arranging.
The doctor went to the baggage-room in the gray dawn to get that precautionary trunk checked: after a long discussion about the place, he arranged to meet the family at the railway news-stand. The caretaker was shown once more how to work the burglar alarm, from which a necessary knob came off in the nervous hand of the Master of Cares—“telephone for the electrician” but at last the blinds were carefully pulled down, the house shut up and committed to Providence and the caretaker, and the family and its familiars arrived at the station nearly an hour before train-time, “getting off so nicely.” The Genius of Forethought sent out a pair of scouts to find the doctor. They returned, to report that there were three news-stands, but the doctor was not at any of them.
Then this Genius of Care went himself with one of the scouts, a long and hurried walk to the baggage-room,—not there.
Meanwhile, the doctor, who had stayed to see the trunks off, had found the main body with its camp-followers and light baggage. All stood in the station near a news-stand and waited for the return of the expedition, till the doctor got impatient as train-time approached and went off to find the Head of the House, who arrived in a flurry, having lost his own head a few minutes after he had gone with the tickets.
At last, after the pilgrimage from the ticket-gate down to the parlor-car, they are in the train, all safe, thank God; but the Genius of Care did not sleep that night “on account of the worry and fuss of getting off.” That was not the doctor’s fault. Like Martha, he had made his own punishment the same as the rest of us by being “careful about many things.” I remember an Irish servant who was shown one of our big banks with its huge window-bars, to make it safe. “Sure,” she said, “what’s the good of them things? The thieves is inside and not out.” Worry is inside and not out, and Sleep, like the Kingdom of Heaven, is not taken by force.
CHAPTER XLIV
REST IN TRUTH
The timely dew of sleep.
Milton.
It is not our work that wears us, but the way we take it. So long as we think of rest as meaning only inactivity, just so long will the activities of life exhaust us. Goethe said:
“Rest is not quitting the busy career,
Rest is fitting oneself for one’s sphere.”
When we do that, we find rest. But we may ask what is one’s sphere and how may one fit one’s self for it? If we wish to answer that truly, we must be willing to have some common misconceptions brushed away. The sphere of any individual is limited only by the possibilities of his own body, mind, and spirit. Our sphere is not a small circle of activities whose boundaries any man may mark. It widens as our inner nature expands, and what was the horizon line yesterday will be but a tiny hillock near at hand to-morrow. It includes all that has been achieved, and all that may be attained by the race.
The best standard of our life is not only what the race as a whole has achieved in the way of development, but the highest and best that any person has yet taught or lived; this is the true measure of man’s sphere to-day. Ordinarily, we talk of man’s sphere and woman’s sphere as if there were a clear line of separation between them, and each were continued in its own little space. This could not be, for, so long as men and women have the same three natures—bodily, mental, spiritual—so long as we have similar needs, aims, and aspirations, the larger sphere of man, whether male or female, is the same, and is bounded only by the possibilities of the life of all three natures.
To fit one’s self for such a sphere should bring rest while we are doing it, because that fitting means becoming harmonious with the purposes of the larger life; and rest is simply harmony, at-one-ness with the Universe.
The possibilities of the life of all three natures are inexhaustible. We have never touched the limit of even the physical man. Man at one time had only his hands for tools, and so was limited in his powers. But he used his mind to increase the power of his hands, and reached out for sticks and stones to help him. In time his thought devised implements that increased his physical power a thousandfold, until now he has harnessed not only steam, but the very currents of the air, and is making himself all-powerful.
He does not wholly understand the forces he tries to control, but he studies them, experiments upon them, and makes servants of them as far as he has grasped their laws. Had he insisted upon considering his mind and his physical powers as entirely separate and refused to use them together, he might still have claws for hands, and might still be a mere burrower in the earth. Moreover, his mind would not have developed as it has. Steam and electricity might have aroused his curiosity, but he would not have known how to make them to do his will.
Further, if man had been able to keep his intellect apart from his spirit, he would not have developed the qualities that lift him above the more intelligent animals. Sympathy and justice and love would not have come into his relations with his fellow-men.
These moral feelings expressed in our bodies, our minds, and our hearts are some of the possibilities of the life of all three natures, and to endeavor to know and harmonize them, thus “fitting one’s self for one’s sphere,” would bring us the happiness that follows action and the rest that flows from selfless purpose or harmony.
If we consider what the true object of life is, we cannot help trying to see the connection between the three natures of man. It does not seem possible that the life of any thinking being was intended to be a purposeless jarring jumble, or, as poor Stephen Blackpool said, “a’ a muddle.” We find such harmony in the life of the material world that we may expect to find a similar harmony in the life of man. So soon as we discover this, we see also that there must be harmony between the life of the material world and the life of man, and further harmony between both the material and the human life, and the Source of all life. Seeing this, and living it, is fitting ourselves for our sphere, preparing ourselves to take our destined places in the Universe as Men and Women.
CHAPTER XLV
THE SPAN OF LIFE
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Shakespeare.
Only a generation ago it was the custom for men and women to begin to grow old at about forty-five. A person of fifty was always called “old,” and a man was expected to be decrepit at sixty, a woman much earlier. It is not wonderful that such men begrudged the time spent in sleep.
When I was a boy, we used shamelessly to print books in big type, indorsed “For the Aged,” on the theory that everyone must be nearly blind at maturity. Even now Dr. George F. Stevens thinks that everyone “ought” to wear glasses after forty, notwithstanding that many Christian Scientists and Mental Scientists discard them long after that age.
There is as much truth as wit in the saying that “A man is as old as he feels, a woman as old as she says she is.” We used to insist upon every year being counted and noted, too, in dress, occupation, and general demeanor. But we have changed all this—even natty dress now common to older people shows it—but the change has come about slowly, and there are still many who think that people of sixty should give up all active life and prepare to “grow old gracefully,” that is, to drop willingly into senility. Those who are willing so to slip into uselessness quietly, need much sleep; but even for them the sleep is not a waste of time, but an aid to length of days.
There has been a great deal too much willingness to let go of active life, because of the idea that “threescore years and ten” was the natural limit of man’s life, and that to live beyond seventy-five was to live upon “borrowed time.” There is a sort of tickle for the mental palate in that expression “borrowed time,” but there is no substance in it, if we will but examine it. How can there be “borrowed” time and from whom is it borrowed?
Life is not a thing that begins to-day and ends to-morrow. So far as we know, it has neither beginning nor end. It is beyond our power to picture a limit to all life. Well, if life has neither beginning nor end, if it has no limits, and if time is merely the unit by which we measure seasons, why should there be a limit to what we can use of it, and how could a continued use of it be called “borrowing”?
In the earlier days of the race, when all progress was made through might, and war settled every question, when a man’s “work” meant chasing over the hills, when men fared hard, and knew little of Nature; when fear was the supreme emotion—it is probable that seventy years represented a long life. To escape all the chances of death from accident and ignorance for so long a time was an achievement, and, in this way, doubtless, seventy years came to be regarded as the natural period of man’s physical existence.
But with our increasing knowledge, with the extension of means for making life easier, with our conquest of Nature, there is no excuse for limiting ourselves or our fellows to the same short span. Consequently man’s life began to extend over a longer and longer period as the risks of living were diminished by civilization. War became a less common condition; the very inventions for making war more destructive of life helped to make people consider whether disputes could not be more wisely settled. The next step was a natural outcome of that reasoning. The latest wars have had more casualties and less fatalities; partly because the effort has been to incapacitate the fighting-men rather than to kill them off. We have begun to see dimly, at least, that the taking of life does not settle any question. This leads to a greater respect for life, and from respect to preservation is an easy step.
The intelligent man to-day does not make his whole life a mere struggle to exist for his “allotted span.” Rather, he aims to preserve and prolong his life by exertion and, even more, by repose. He has learned that, while it is true that “not enjoyment and not sorrow is our destined end or way,” yet to enjoy, in the sense of understanding life and living, is to live so that “each to-morrow find us farther than to-day.” To enjoy life is to use it wisely; to get the most out of it that will make for happiness and development. It will not help to that end to worry or lose sleep, because man’s span of life is short. Love with your whole heart, and live according to reason, and you will win the prize of sleep, and happiness and length of days shall be added thereunto.
CHAPTER XLVI
WASTE STEAM
If there is one thing more than another for which Americans are noted, it is “nervous energy.” To this we attribute our notable achievements in science, industry, and literature. To this energy, also, or rather to the misuse of it, may be attributed the dyspepsia, the nervous headaches, the general “breakdowns,” and the suicides so much more prevalent of late years.
An abundant supply of nervous energy is one of the blessings of life, it denotes almost unlimited capacity for work and enjoyment. It is the steam that drives the engine; and which, under the control of a skilled engineer, pulls the train upgrade as well as on the level. It is only through ignorance or carelessness that the engine is allowed to run wild, and destroys that which it was meant to convey safely.
So with the people who “go to pieces nervously.” There has been an unskilled hand on the lever. Through ignorance or carelessness, the nervous energy has been badly handled, and the force that should convey us safely through life has caused our destruction. We should be as careful with our minds as with our machines.
When we find ourselves getting nervous and worried, sleepless, “blue,” or dyspeptic; or showing any of the numerous signs of misdirected energy, such as short temper or headaches, we should take a day off to examine the engine. It is time well spent, as we may thereby learn something that will avert a complete breakdown.
If we find that we are not overeating, overworking, or overworrying; not feeling animosity, nor suffering from an excessive idea of personal importance—if, in fact, there are no fears gnawing our heartstrings nor any other large and well-defined cause of trouble, we may well look closer for small causes. “The foxes—the little foxes that spoil the vines.”
There are often disturbing causes that we fail to notice as disturbing. For instance, disorder about us, the habit of stirring everything up and throwing everything around when we set to work. The confusion communicates itself to our feelings, besides which the uncertainty as to where we have put what we want next upsets our nerves.
It is a good plan, when we find ourselves “rattled” or not working easily, to stop and clear things up, put everything in order. It is marvelous how often that will smooth out the creases both in face and temper and make the world look pleasant again.
If that itself proves to be a certain strain or an annoyance, leave the whole thing and go out for a while, or take a nap, or even smoke, if you do not feel that smoking hurts you. Anything that will distract the attention from the seemingly annoying circumstances will relieve the pressure on overwrought nerves and allow the system to regain its poise.
At this point it will sometimes serve to put into practice the rule that William Pitt, Prime Minister of Great Britain, laid down for himself: When overwhelmed with official duties, he divided his work into three parts—that which was not worth doing, that which would do itself, and that which was quite enough for any man to attempt. Make a list of all the things you have to do, then go over that list and make it into three. Pick out first the things that could be left undone, because not really worth the effort they require. Having settled them, you will find your load already lightened.
Next select those things that you want to do, but which somebody else could do just as well. Make that list carefully. It is the hardest one of the three. It is comparatively easy to decide that a thing we may wish to do is not worth the effort it will cost, but it is quite another matter to admit that somebody else could do those things just as well.
And there is a reason for this feeling apart from mere ordinary conceit, although it may only be a more subtle form of conceit—self-approbativeness, as the phrenologists call it. It has its rise in our belief that, while our way of doing that particular thing may be no better than another’s way, yet it is “different,” and we long to see the result of that different way. Nevertheless, it may be that the best good of all concerned requires that somebody else do that thing, and our nervous restlessness is merely a warning for us to omit doing it ourselves.
Then, in the things left on the original list, we shall find all that one person should undertake, and we shall do them with a zest and ease that could not have been ours working in any other way. For myself, when all else fails, and none of these devices does away with the feeling of being pushed by my work, I close my desk and go for a walk. If soothed, I return in an hour or two and take up my work easily; otherwise, I leave it all until another day; it saves time in the end. Circumstances prevent many persons from doing that: but we can do it, in greater or less degree, far oftener than we think.
It is always advisable to stop long enough to find out what is the matter. If a good engineer finds his engine running hard, he examines it to finds the trouble. If your watch goes irregularly, you take it to an expert to find the cause of irregularity. Why should we be less careful with our minds?
What is needed is simply obedience to the laws of Nature that we know, but the case may be one for the physical culturist, for the mental therapeutist, for the moral teacher, or even for the alienist. Where common sense fails or is wanting, we should consult an expert before it is too late. (See Appendix A.)
CHAPTER XLVII
UNDERSTANDING
Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber;
Thou hast no figures and no fantasies,
Which busy care draws in the brains of men;
Therefore thou sleep’st so sound.
Shakespeare.
All unrest and uneasiness, all impatience and disharmony are due to some misunderstanding of life and its unity, of its unchanging and unchangeable laws. Froebel’s recognition of this principle created his idea of education as growth by exercise, the greatest definition of training that has yet been given to the world. He says that education consists in relating the individual life to the external life, the inner to the outer, or, in other words, it consists in getting the individual into harmony with the whole of life.
This is the substance of the doctrine of all the great thinkers of the world, the essential oneness in the teachings of all the philosophers of every race and of all the ages. Each gives expression to the special side of this oneness that presented itself most strongly to him, but on the plan of life they agree.
Although many of the followers of these great teachers have been able to see the beauty of their conceptions, few have been able to transmit them as pure and bright as they received them. It is by no means easy to avoid interpreting what we hear in a merely personal way. Seldom do the “hearers of the Word” have the humility “of the broken and empty vessel,” so well expressed in a hymn at one time popular among revivalists:
“Empty, that He might fill me
As forth to His service I go;
Broken, that so unhindered
His life through me might flow.”
Instead of that, we have tried to make the truth fit our ideas of “personal” life, when we should have made our “personal” life fit the truth.
One cannot conceive of the Universe growing weary, of infinity becoming exhausted, because material science has shown us that harmonious laws govern all life. Scientists have been able to state laws that experience has shown to be unfailingly true. For example, take the heavenly bodies: through the study and comparison of their motions, astronomers have stated laws that apply to all that is known of them, and which illustrate the perfection of the solar system. To-day, if some asteroid is discovered which seems to move in opposition to known laws, no one supposes that the laws are wrong. So impossible is any haphazard occurrence in the solar system that astronomers know that any disturbance simply shows some existence or activity not hitherto observed. They do not doubt the unchangeable universal nature of the laws; but they recognize that only lack of knowledge prevents our understanding the relation of what we see to the laws that govern it, and they bend every effort to the solution of the mystery.
If we but look upon the occurrences of human life with the same confidence, there is no cause for worry and uneasiness. Why should man chafe? Because of those who do ill? “Fret not thyself because of evildoers,” for they, too, have their uses. Every man is in the plan of God. It may be that he is here simply to show us something that we should not otherwise have seen. Had not someone done the ill and made the results known, many men might have made like mistakes and the consequences have been much worse than they are. Says Ernest Crosby:
“I thank the kind round-shouldered men
And treat them with respect
For teaching me to raise my chin
And hold myself erect.”
No man can tell how much more he owes to the things that he would have made different had he shaped his own life, than to the things he regards as good.
Most advances that we accomplish are forced upon us by circumstances with which we are discontented, and our happiness consists in recognizing that there is, in effect, no such thing as misfortune. There is no chance in the world: everything is the result of Energy; nothing ever happens by accident. I said once to a woman standing beside the coffin of her husband, trying to comfort her and trying to teach myself, “You know, this did not happen by chance.” “No,” she said, “I know that; if one chance got loose, it would wreck the world.” So it would.
You toss up a coin and it seems to you to be chance whether it comes down heads or tails. It isn’t chance at all. If one thing happened by chance, you would know that it was the end of natural law. Suppose that the thing to be tossed were an iron plate, ten feet across by two feet thick, then the engineer could figure out just how many pounds of powder would turn it once and how many would turn it twice or three times; and, if you told him when he had adjusted his charge that it was chance which side would come up, he would say that you did not understand dynamics. He knows that there is no chance about it; that the number of turns depends exactly upon the amount of force, and how it is applied. So it is with the tossing of the penny; it may seem to be chance to us because we cannot measure or perceive the causes, but its fall is as directly and fixedly due to causes as the sinking of an ocean-liner.
It is not likely that Charles Dickens would have chosen the hard childhood he had if he could have arranged his own life, but there is little room to doubt that much of his understanding and sympathy, much of the power that made him the novelist of the masses, was due to those experiences. Even though he may never have seen during his life how necessary those experiences were, nor accepted them philosophically, that did not alter their use. The work of the “evildoers” in giving Socrates hemlock to drink did not destroy Socrates’ usefulness; the death by the cross did not check the spread of the good news the Nazarene brought to man.
Men have always stoned the prophets and killed those who would bring deliverance. This is an expression of the conservatism which is the balance-wheel of the race: if it were not for that, the leaders of the people would get so far in advance as to be clear out of sight. But the prophecies have been fulfilled, and, step by step, deliverance has been won. Moreover, whom one generation destroyed, succeeding generations have honored; it is impossible to get the rear rank in line with the vanguard. But wherein has evil triumphed or the law of good been set aside?
In the study of history we see the persistent progress of the race. However slow the march, it has always been from darkness into light, from low aims and small ideas to higher purposes and larger thoughts. Each nation has contributed something to the sum of that progress. Not only have they had glimpses at their best of better things, but even at their worst they have caused other nations to see and avoid like errors or cruelties. In this way the civilized and the savage have both helped to advance civilization. And, if the blind works of evildoers do not triumph over the plans of Good, if they do not even hinder the working of the law of universal Good, why should we fret ourselves because of them?
But the unrest may be caused by our lack of that worldly success which we think would bring us happiness. Of course, if the real desire be worldly success, and there is no other way in which we can learn that it will not bring happiness, then we must attain worldly success. To-day, this demands a resolute will, concentration, a steady nerve, and a lack of human sympathy. It is difficult for us to see this in our own case when we make worldly success our aim, but, if we examine the career of any “successful” man, we shall see how true it is.
Nothing is truer of modern business life than that the success of one involves the failure or seeming failure of many. We have but to look around at the few who are acclaimed by the world as successful business men and the many who toil for a bare subsistence, to find the proof of this. To succeed, a man must first resolve to succeed, and must concentrate all his powers to that end. He must have iron nerves so that unexpected good-or ill-fortune may not upset him, and he must so steel his heart that he may not see the needs or hear the groans of his suffering fellows, if to hear or heed would interfere with his purpose.
After men have attained worldly success, they sometimes give liberally to charity and public purposes. Nobody has yet revealed how much of that giving is atonement for the half-remembered times when some heart was hardened, some ear deafened, and some hand tight closed against the cry of the needy. Some rich men unhappily become so hard of heart, so bound by the habit of refusing, that giving becomes an impossibility.
Now worry and unrest upset the nerve, disturb the concentration, and keep alive at least one phase of human sympathy—that which we call irritation. We do not usually regard irritation as an expression of sympathy, but that is just what it is. Irritation towards our fellows is an indication that we cannot rid ourselves of the knowledge that they have claims upon us. It is an evidence that we do not understand them, or that we are not in harmony with them. That may be because their aims are so different from ours that they are a standing rebuke to our selfishness, or because their aims are so similar to ours that they become a threat to us. In either event they are forced upon our attention, and we are unable to forget them. We are not able to crush them ruthlessly if they stand in our way, for to do so causes us pain and dissatisfaction, and prevents our joy in our success. Sometimes, when the pain and dissatisfaction become keen enough, they may even turn us from our purpose, and thus destroy our chance of worldly success.
Thus worry and unrest defeat the very thing we are aiming at, and leave us out of harmony with the laws governing the accomplishment of our purpose. Even in business and in matters of health, that rest which comes from a cool, steady purpose, undisturbed by fretfulness or impatience, is the main factor of success.
CHAPTER XLVIII
THE SUPERSTITION OF FEAR
Fear of Death thus dies in senseless sleep.
Beaumont.
Primitive man feared thunder, and, being unable to explain it, made a god of it, offered sacrifices to it in the hope of averting the harm it might do. Fear has perverted many religions. What man feared he first crouched before in helpless terror, and afterwards knelt before in wonder and worship. In the early days of the race he looked upon every new or strange thing with terror, because he did not understand its connection with the things he knew.
Man first knew himself as a physical creature with certain needs and cravings that must be gratified if he were to live at all. He did not at first realize that the presence of another person would make life easier and more secure for him; rather, he feared that every other would injure him. Later, as men formed themselves into groups, clans and tribes, each recognized the interests of the immediate group as of supreme importance, but feared the other groups. This was the origin of “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land.” Those families that obeyed their natural leader, the patriarch, held together and survived; the others were separated and destroyed. The early records of the Jews are scarcely more than a chronicle of the wars of a coherent race against various other tribes inhabiting that part of Asia, together with the lessons to be drawn from its experience. Even in the vast new continent of America, different tribes of Indians roving its plains looked upon other tribes with distrust and hatred, and made war upon them. There was plenty of land; animal life abounded; there was nothing in the aims and pursuits of one tribe that was necessarily injurious to any other, yet apprehension and the superstition of enmity kept them apart.
The world has not yet got rid of this old superstition. In this modern Christian era there is scarcely a civilized nation which does not keep itself in readiness to attack its neighbor. All the peace the nations yet know is an armed peace, so that even when we cry, “Peace, peace!” we know “there is no peace,” because man does not yet trust his fellowman. He is fearful of him, not only as encroaching upon his actual territory, but he resents his competition even in the making of the tools and goods that civilized life demands.
We erect tariff walls, that the people of other countries may not easily sell to us the goods they make, forgetting that, even without those walls, they could not sell their goods to us, if we did not want them. For, in free buying and selling, the desire must be mutual, else there will be no exchange.
In all the relations of the most modern civilized society the effect of this distrust, of one toward another, is plain to be seen. Even those who devote their lives to preaching the doctrine of the gentle Nazarene do not always grasp the full significance of that doctrine. The city of Toledo, Ohio, is blessed with a mayor who has lost all distrust in man (or perhaps he never learned it) and, in his efforts to administer civic affairs on a basis of love and understanding, he is finding his strongest opponents in some of the preachers of the community. Such is the blinding effect of misunderstanding the unity of all life.
It cannot, therefore, be a matter of surprise to the student of present-day affairs that his ancestors were slow to learn about other groups what their still earlier ancestors had learned of individuals. As the circle of man’s interests enlarged, including more and more fellow-creatures, he began to come more and more into harmonious relations with the Universe. Out of his personal experience he began to perceive the mutual interests and the underlying oneness of human life, and, through that perception, some have now begun to realize the oneness of all life.
This is the road along which man must travel to reach harmony, and harmony is rest. It is living in accord with the universal law which regulates the growth and development of all things as well as their activities. To the undeveloped savage the whole material universe, so far as he could see it, was a jumble of inharmonious and unrelated things—he saw no relation between the different bodies in the heavens as they circled in their orbits; each created thing seemed to have its separate existence, which had to be maintained without regard to any other form of life. But science has shown us that the heavenly bodies, however huge or remote, are all parts of one great system, under one perfect law. We know now that, instead of the earth being the center of the universe, round which all the stars, suns, moons, and other bodies revolve, it is itself but a tiny unit in a tremendous system of systems.
All of these bodies have been circling in their orbits for untold millions of years, unaffected by the fact that no man knew of them. It is not too much to expect that they will continue to perform their circlings according to those same laws even after science has taught us all it is possible to discover. Man may profit from his knowledge of universal laws, but he cannot alter them.
And yet the man of average intelligence even to-day feels that things universal in relation to humanity and its needs are at “sixes and sevens,” and that his anxiety and feverish activity are needed to alter or better them. He still sees men as separate beings with interests that clash.
It is this failure to understand that every life is bound up for good with all other lives which leads us to worry about our “personal” affairs, and thus to miss the rest that clear understanding would bring.
CHAPTER XLIX
IMAGINARY FEARS
O soft embalmer of the still midnight.
Keats.
When we learn to confine our attention to “the things that are quite enough for any man to attempt,” we shall find that there is little real ground for worry or fretting in our daily life. It is a fact that, if our work wearies or exhausts us, either we are doing the wrong thing or else doing it in the wrong way. For the Spirit of Life is no taskmaster. It is we who make this world a daily grind. It is not naturally a “vale of tears” nor a “wilderness of woe.”
“Joy upon joy and gain upon gain
Are the destined rights of my birth,”
and we may all have those rights if we claim them as our own. Worry is a disease that some people enjoy as much as some others enjoy invalidism. There are some people who can hardly speak and think of anything but their physical ailments; they never recall the mornings when they felt strong and vigorous, the nights they slept soundly, but only the days when they had uncomfortable sensations of weakness or distress, and the nights when sleep was somewhat broken. And you will notice that they will say they “did not sleep well” when they mean that they did not sleep much. We may always sleep well, even though we do not sleep much.
There are other people who, though they do not weary us with accounts of their bodily symptoms, tell us always of their cares. They revel in tales of distress which shall go to show how much more oppressed they are than their fellows. They take their worries as the healthy farmer takes his food, eagerly, and would be distinctly upset if anything happened to interfere with their enjoyment of them. If they are going somewhere, they worry lest it should rain, or lest something unforeseen should happen to prevent the expedition. It is the same old story, they want their “own way.” They cannot conceive of a disappointment being a blessing in disguise; they know of nothing so hard to be borne as the setting aside of a passing desire.
For such as these life is full of “bitter disappointments”; cares and worries naturally fall to their lot; the sun seldom shines for them, and even when it does they think they can note the spots upon it,—while the rain falls so heavily and so frequently that it makes runnels over their whole plan of life, reducing it to a scene of desolation. And all the time the sun is shining, and joys are awaiting them did they but look in the right direction. They are “pulling the wrong string,” as it were. A little child kept calling to his mother that he could not find what he was seeking, because he could not “make the light come on.” His mother wisely replied: “You are probably pulling the wrong string, Harold. Pull the other.” The moment he did so the electric light flooded the room, and the child found what he sought. It had lain right to his hand all the time, but he did not know to pull the right string. Our heart’s desire lies just as close to us.
Many a person who is always having trouble, who is worried and uneasy, longing for rest and comfort but never finding it; to whom “life is a dreary puzzle scarcely worth the solving,” is simply “pulling the wrong string,” the string of self-will, of separateness. His soul is darkened by his refusal to turn on the light, and the shadow covers the whole of his life.
The darkness is filled with imaginary terrors. We people the corners with hobgoblins that do not exist, and that in our hearts we know could not exist. Little Bessie had for several nights cried out in terror after she had been put to bed, so that her mother was compelled to go to her. At first she would not say what had frightened her, but at last the story came out.
“I was thinking how frightened I should be if there was a bogey-man in the closet and he should suddenly put his head out and make faces at me.” “But, child,” said her mother, “you know there is no such thing as a bogey-man, so he could not be in the closet, nor make faces at you.” “Yes, mother, I know that,” answered the child, slowly; “but, mother, if there was a bogey-man, and he did get into my closet, and if he did put out his head and make faces at me, wouldn’t I be awfully frightened? Well, it’s that that makes me scream.” And often the thing that makes us “scream” has no more existence in fact than Bessie’s bogey-man. We get to turning things over in our minds, dwelling upon dire possibilities until they become actual to us, and we get as much pain and suffering from them as we should if they were real.
It would puzzle ourselves, if we gave the matter attention, to discover why we are more given to worrying than to rejoicing, if it is not that we misunderstand life and its purposes.
Consider life just on its physical side, and we shall see, as the Creator saw when he looked upon it, that it is all very good. There are more sunny days in the year than stormy ones; there is more growing time than decaying time, for spring, summer, and autumn comprise three parts of the year, and growth continues through them all; the moon shines always somewhere, and “the stars come nightly to the sky.” The bright-colored blossoms show more than the somber-hued; more birds sing sweetly than croak harshly, and even the croak melts into the symphony as a needed note. The purely material world points to joy and gladness rather than to sorrow and repining.
Then, when we come to man, we find that he has more strength than weakness, more health than sickness, more power than inability, else man had not survived the ages. Moreover, man must have more capacity for enjoyment than for sorrow, else he would abandon life in weariness, or at best he would forget how to laugh; the mere animal does not laugh, that is one of man’s accomplishments.
Man has also more desire for knowledge than for ease, else he would never have penetrated into the secrets and mysteries of Nature; man’s strong aspirations surmount his groveling tendencies, else he had never come up out of savagery into the light and development of kinship with the high gods.
Then, why should we give way to repining? All things point to the apostolic truth that “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” And always the morning comes. Moreover, the darkest night is seldom starless if we look up intently enough. If we blind our eyes with tears, we cannot see the light even when the horizon is rosy with the rising sun. Better by far is it to feel with Browning:
“How good is man’s life,
The mere living! How fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy.”
CHAPTER L
ILL SUCCESS
“And comfortress of Unsuccess
To wish the dead good-night.”
Kipling’s “True Romance.”
If we aim at worldly success, thinking that thereby we shall be able to do more for mankind and be more useful, we may defeat our own purpose by worry and anxiety. The present moment is all that any man has in which to come into agreement with his fellows.
If for lack of understanding he spends that moment in worry and unrest, he makes himself and everybody else more or less unhappy, thereby destroys his own usefulness, and proves his unfitness to gain success. But it may be that he is deceived as to his motive; he may desire success really for the satisfaction of winning against his less fortunate fellows.
Why should we desire worldly success to enable us to help our fellows? No amount of benevolence or philanthropy can atone for the selfishness, inhumanity and the greed necessary to acquire great wealth under modern conditions. The widow’s mite or the cup of cold water given from moment to moment is of greater value than the millions bestowed upon charity as a sop to one’s conscience, or as a pacifier of public clamor.
There is a degree of satisfaction in giving all that can never come from giving a portion of superabundance. We never hear of a very rich man giving all that he hath, over and above a comfortable, or even a luxurious, living. His giving hardly requires the sacrifice of even a whim. How can a man like Rockefeller, with an admitted income of nearly a dollar every second, be generous? How much would he have to give in order to feel it?—and what mischief would he not do in giving such a sum! The “luxury of giving” can never be his, for that is the result of giving at the expense of our daily desires. The widow who cast in her mite enjoyed the luxury of giving, and many still give in that way. This gift of somebody’s mite incited the giving of millions.
But it is not possible that the gift of millions should bring the giver much happiness, if it brings any. There is too much publicity and display in such a gift; it is noised abroad from press and platform, and creates a new distress in the mind of the giver. The giver knows that unscrupulous, undeserving persons or causes will now lay siege to a share of his wealth, because of the notoriety his great gift has brought him. Some are so oppressed with appeals that they have to appoint committees to give away the money. There must be about as much satisfaction in that as in having a committee to kiss the women you love.
Besides this, great benefactions cause uneasiness, lest they be misapplied or unwisely distributed, or lest the glory may be eclipsed by some other millionaire giving a larger sum to a more popular cause. Thus donations become a source of unrest and worriment, and the donor’s last state is worse than his first. The giver of the mite is generally unknown of the crowd, sometimes unknown even of the one to whom he gives, so that his joy comes from the giving, and cannot be taken from him. To him alone is it true that “the gift is to the giver” and that “it is more blessed to give than to receive.” If there is no real joy to be had from giving of great wealth, why should we desire to have it, or fret ourselves that we do not win it? Neither to acquire wealth nor to possess it can bring happiness or peace. We have seen how great is the price we must pay to get great riches, and it is easy to see why their possession cannot bring peace or happiness.
Man has a limited number of wants, and there is an end even to whims. When all of these have been satisfied, what is left? The ordinary man must give time, skill, thought, and labor to satisfy his needs, and from the effort he gets a large measure of joy and satisfaction. Even if he never gets what he is after, the effort has given him pleasure, strengthened his purpose, and developed his whole nature. But the wealthy man is denied this natural satisfaction. He does not even have to seek what he wants; servants do that for him; he speaks and the thing is done. For him there is no joyous effort; no increase of pleasure in the very delay of fulfillment; no sense of achievement when he gets what he desires. For this reason he soon wearies, and, having run the whole gamut of pleasures, and exhausted his idle fancies, he becomes a prey to ennui, has no object in life, and finds no delight in the days. It could not be otherwise. As an old servant in my family once said, “If the rich were happy, we should know there was no God.” “How hardly shall a rich man enter into the kingdom of heaven,” said Jesus; meaning thereby that the possession of wealth destroys our sympathy with our poorer brethren and prevents a man from seeing his true relation to those who have it not; makes it difficult for him to recognize his oneness with all mankind, and so cuts him off from that heaven of love and peace on earth that can come only from agreement of his own life with the life of others outside his circle.
If we are worried or ill at ease for any other cause, such as ill-health, disappointed affections, unsatisfied desires, or from any of the innumerable causes to which we attribute our ill, we have but to examine them to find that in every instance the underlying error is the same. It is that we think of our separate interests, that we are for self; that “me” has a deeper significance to our mind than “us” that the “I” blots out the “thou.” All worry, all unrest comes from self-seeking, from the feeling of separateness rather than of oneness; from an inharmonious attitude towards life and its underlying verities.
“Seek ye first the kingdom of God,” said the Teacher, “and all these things”—material things, food and clothes that he had been speaking of—“shall be added unto you.” Now God is love, and the kingdom of God is universal love, the love that knows no separateness; therefore let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. Believe in God. The man who seeks first the wide Universal Peace does not worry nor fret. He has, by that very seeking, put himself in tune with the Infinite, and he finds that the sounds which have seemed to him like harsh discords are, to his listening ear, blended into harmony. He has heard the “sweetest carol ever sung” and nothing can drown its melody. With that song in his ears he can “run and never be wearied, he can walk and not faint.” He loses his feverish impatience, for “he that believeth shall not make haste”; he sees himself in every man and every man in himself; he has found rest for his soul.
When this peace reigns within, the seeming ills of life do not disturb us. We are not conscious of ungratified desires, and in this lies the truth of the promise—“all things shall be added unto you.” For, if man is not conscious of any ungratified want or desire, then, though he be poor in this world’s goods and entirely unknown, he is richer by far than the multi-millionaire who is compelled to heap silver upon gold, or the pushing politician whose thirst for fame can never be slaked. He is in harmony with the Universe, he has allied himself with moral gravitation, and, going with its force, he is upheld and supported, so that he has rest now and is neither worried nor afraid.
CHAPTER LI
SOCIAL UNREST
Peace, peace, thou over-anxious, foolish heart;
Rest, ever-seeking soul; calm, mad desires;
Quiet, wild dreams—this is the time of sleep,
Hold her more close than life itself. Forget
All the excitements of the day, forget
All problems and discomforts. Let the night
Take you unto herself, her blessèd self,
Peace, peace, thou over-anxious, foolish heart;
Rest, ever-seeking soul; calm, mad desires;
Quiet, wild dreams—this is the time of sleep.
Leolyn Louise Everett.
Inquiry into the causes and the cure of sleeplessness leads us inevitably to one conclusion: there must be peace of mind, harmonious action and interaction of mind and body in order to command the most refreshing sleep. A man may not know which of the many theories of sleep is correct—indeed, he may not know that there are any theories about it, but, if he lives a normal physical life and is at peace with the world, he is likely to sleep well.
Since health of body, mind, and soul is essential to our best development, and since sleep, restful sleep, is essential to such health, it would seem that such sleep is one of the things which rightly belong to every individual. And, if to individuals, then to groups of individuals, to nations, to the whole race. The race is subject to the same influence as the individual, and, since the chief cause of the unrest of individuals is their inharmonious relations towards one another, so the chief cause of the unrest of the race is its inherent discord.
Underlying the antagonisms of men to men is the question of economics—“the science of ... living well for the state, the family, and the individual,” as the Standard Dictionary defines it. While the question of how he shall sustain his mere physical existence—obtain the food, clothes, and shelter so essential to his maintenance—occupies all a man’s thought and energy, he does not readily turn toward the consideration of his deeper life. He feels that every man is his enemy, ready and willing to take from him, either by superior sharpness, fraud, or force the opportunity of supplying his needs.
So long as conditions lead anyone to adopt this attitude towards his fellows, he is not apt to give much time or thought to discovering his proper relations toward them. Forces stronger than any number of individuals, acting separately, may drive men into combinations— such as labor organizations among the masses, or large corporations among the privileged classes—until we find a sort of spurious co-operation taking the place of individual effort.
But this co-operation is based upon the necessity of combining to oppose and crush, not upon the desire to avoid friction and bring about harmonious relations between men. Wherever either labor or capital organizes to protect itself from the oppression of the other and to dictate terms to it, that other in its turn organizes to protect itself and to crush the opposing power. Neither party to the struggle sees its dependence upon the other. Capital forgets that labor called it into existence, that without labor there had been no capital, and that should labor cease capital would soon disappear. Labor does not see that capital is its own product, drawn from the land and used to enable men to produce more wealth. And neither sees that the object of producing wealth is not wealth for its own sake, but that man may, through its use, develop himself to an ever higher state.
It is scarcely possible that men should see this under present economic conditions; how, then, can it be possible for men to understand their relations to one another or the advantages of harmony?
And, if economic conditions destroy man’s relations to man, how much more completely do they destroy man’s relation to the higher life, to Nature or God? Even in his bitterest struggles with his fellows, man recognizes that he and those who oppose him are alike victims of circumstances and must fight. The resentment which he feels is less toward individuals than to the circumstances which make them antagonists when they should be coworkers, and he does not see that the circumstances are of man’s own creating.
So long as he regards these conditions as natural, ordained by some power outside himself, he cannot be expected to feel drawn towards closer relations with that power. While he has to watch his chance in the battle of life, he can hardly see that to get in harmony with the laws of the Universe, to recognize his oneness with all life, is to leave struggle and unrest behind. If life is nothing but struggle, he wonders how any attitude can destroy or obviate struggling.
Viewed from his standpoint, he is right. If, as man progresses, the desire to live well strengthens and deepens, and if this desire can be gratified only by waging relentless war against men and conditions, then no study of the relations of man to man or of man to life can lead to anything but greater cunning and more destructive methods of opposition. As the individual finds no way to fulfill his desires without fighting his neighbor, so the nation learns of no way to advance except through crushing other nations. There can rarely be true internal peace for the individual and no true rest and healthy growth for the nation while unjust economic conditions are maintained.
Wherever an individual feels the pressure of economic conditions too keenly he loses what little poise he may have had. He becomes restless and sleepless and the whole tone of his mind and body is lowered. Where the distress from such pressure becomes general, there the nation loses tone; quarrels are readily picked with other nations, and war is resorted to as a means of reducing population and of destroying all forms of wealth, so that a new demand may be created and the economic pressure for a time be lessened. These conditions recur again and again at longer or shorter intervals, and always the same futile means of meeting them is adopted. Man so little understands life that he has not learned that harmony with the laws of the Universe underlies his economic relations as well as his physical relations. If he knew this, he would know that the distress and dissatisfaction common to all nations could come only from the violation of natural laws, and he would begin to search out those laws. Men for a long time held false ideas of the laws of the solar system, and exhausted ingenious devices and systems to explain its phenomena. Then they began to discover underlying laws which explain phenomena more satisfactorily: some of those laws were found, and our knowledge of the solar system to-day is based upon these sure fundamentals.
It is as possible to make sure of the laws governing our economic conditions as of those that govern the solar system. They must lie at the root of all things economic and must explain all phenomena that any condition of society, whether the most primitive or the most complex, can produce. Until these laws are discovered and applied the earth will “turn, troubled in sleep,” and men may not know peace.
CHAPTER LII
ECONOMIC REST
Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep.
Shakespeare.
There are deep-lying causes of anxiety, unrest, and sleeplessness that more or less affect us all: yet, eighteen hundred years ago, One cried, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” Not, to come eventually, or to future peoples, but “the Kingdom is at hand.” We have looked over a world filled with injustice, for the coming of the kingdom—but we have not seen it. What is it that hides “the Kingdom at hand” from our eyes? Is it not iniquity? What kind of iniquity? We once had chattel slavery, which was denounced as “the sum of all villainies.” We still have monopoly of the gift of God, which is the fundamental iniquity. For every one of his children a loving father made ample provision in the earth, but we have allowed a few to monopolize it all; some nine out of every hundred own our earth, and we find that, under such circumstances, the laws of God are impracticable; therefore, we say “the Kingdom is not a real Kingdom—it is only in men’s minds, only in some far-off imaginable day it may be in their hearts.”
The kingdom of God is in our hearts, and, if to-day we will but allow all our fellows to share in the bounty of Nature, the kingdom will be around us also, here and now.
For there is a divine order, a natural law, obedience to which brings its own immediate rewards; disobedience to which involves its own punishment. The first order of Nature is that men should derive their subsistence from the land and the products of land, provided by an all-wise Creator. From what else can we derive it? Does not everything we need, from the wheat to the wheel of the watch, come from the earth? By many hands, by many processes, through many stages, all forms of wealth are obtained by labor from the land. Food, clothing, fuel, machinery, buildings, capital are all results of men working on the materials of the earth. So it is clear why, when we have allowed men to be shut out from that earth, we find ourselves surrounded by poverty and misery.
Like all fundamental laws, the law of our economic relations is simple and easily understood, even by children. It may be stated thus: food, clothes, and shelter, being essential to the maintenance of human life, all human creatures have equal need of and, therefore, equal right to access to the source of food, clothes, and shelter. This source is the earth, and the only method known whereby the earth may be made to yield food, clothes, and shelter is by the application of labor to land. For, no matter what picture we conjure up, whether it be of the farmer tilling the soil, the carpenter building a house, the factory operative weaving cloth, the engineer driving the locomotive that draws the produce to markets—there we find labor. And, if we try to imagine any of these forms of labor as cut off from land, we shall find our very concept of labor and of life wiped out.
Everything necessary to life, whether it be the life of the individual, the nation, or of the whole race, can be produced by the combination of land and labor. Anything that restricts or hampers the application of labor to land leads to suffering on the part of those deprived of this access. When the government of a new country wants to increase population, it offers free land to settlers. It does not say, “If you will come to this country, the government will build mills, factories, stores, offices, banks, and churches for you”; it says rather, “Here is land, come and use it; build for yourselves out of its materials.” All other forms of prosperity flow from the application of labor to land, and, therefore, it is sufficient to give to men free access to natural opportunities. If the government of a country owned all the land of that country, it could increase, restrict, or otherwise regulate population, and better or worsen the condition of that population by the way in which it granted or withheld the land under its control.
This is in effect what government has done. It first bettered conditions by allowing free access to land, and then worsened them by allowing a few to make the land their private property; this appropriation of the land carries with it the power to hold it out of use, thus depriving all men of their equal right to the use of the earth, the source of supply for all men’s wants. Instead of these favored few being made to pay those deprived of the land an equivalent for the privilege enjoyed, the disinherited many are compelled to pay a premium to the landholder for the opportunity to labor.
When there is a lockout, is it not the pressure of want that brings the men back, hat in hand, to the factory door? If one could go to the outskirts of this town to cultivate a bit of the unused land, could he not hold out till he got all that his labor was worth? And, when he and his fellows are offered less, if they could but get at the unused mines and quarries and coalfields and factory sites, and vacant lots, they would not need to seek an employer at all—they could get credit, if needed, and produce for themselves the capital which they now produce for others and employ themselves in doing it.
So many evils flow from the fundamental wrong of shutting up the earth, that rest, the peace of mind and body that makes for refreshing sleep, is to many impossible.
And who that understands would wish it otherwise? Were the power of rest and peace universal now, it would be a denial of the very cause of rest,—the proper understanding of man’s relations to humanity and to life. Until man has adjusted his economic contrivances to the underlying laws of a true Social Science, he cannot have national or racial rest. The material science, biology, is proving this ethical truth. Recently Dr. Woods Hutchinson has shown that it does not take even three generations to make a high-class man a “thoroughbred,” as he terms it. If good food, light, air, proper clothing, and wholesome recreation were extended to the masses, each generation would produce its own “thoroughbreds” from the “common people.” He says: “Men not only can but do get to be as able, as useful, and as desirable citizens for the community, in every possible regard, in one generation as they will ever get or are capable of becoming. Give the unspoiled, warm-hearted mass of humanity a fair living chance—good food, fresh air, sunshine, decent homes, no overwork, plenty of healthful amusements—and you will reap a far larger crop not merely of happiness, of justice, and of well-being, but also of geniuses, of great men and of all leaders and illuminators than any nation can possibly utilize.”
Until the privilege-created aristocracy of other countries and plutocracy of this country get off the backs of the people and cease to exploit them by monopolies, there can be no complete and permanent rest, for the “mania for owning things” possesses the rich, and the fear of want makes restlessness for the poor. The burden-bearing masses have not yet seen the cause of their burden, even though they feel its intolerable weight at times and make efforts to throw it off. All this deepens their unrest.
The very oneness of all life will put sound sleep and true rest ever beyond the general reach until all are given equal opportunity in Nature’s great gift to man, the Earth.
Then the worker, free of the taxes of rent and monopoly, free of cut-throat competition forced by monopoly, would have some leisure in which to use his brains and cultivate his affections; and liberty—moral, intellectual, and economic—would be here.
Was it not something like this which Jesus had in mind when he said “the Kingdom of God is at hand”? Did not he say that obedience to the laws of the Universe would bring their own immediate and immense reward? The kingdom and the peace of God is within our reach, did we but realize it.
CHAPTER LIII
“IF HE SLEEP, HE SHALL DO WELL”
Oh! thou best comforter of that sad heart
Whom Fortune’s spite assails; come, gentle sleep,
The weary mourner soothe.
Mrs. Tighe.
We believe in a ruling Principle of Order in the Universe, in accordance with which everything lives and moves—planets, plants, and man.
We call this “God,” “the Spirit,” the “Nature of Things,” or by some other name, but we find that, in crystal, vegetable, or animal, it always works: and we see that it tends forever toward a more harmonious arrangement and better relations of the whole system.
There are seeming lapses, where we cannot yet see, in this instance or in that, how it will work out; but in the arrangement of the stars, the growth of knowledge through experience, and in the history of man, we see in the broad view that it does so work out well. Probably Mary, certainly the disciples, thought at the time that the death of Jesus was a horrible mistake and misfortune. Now we see that it was “needful that this one man should die for all the people” and that to him, even then, it was no misfortune. The sacrifice of one for many is a great principle of life. The development of the earth from chaos to fruitfulness, the development of man from brutality to the rule of mind, the development of ourselves from single selfishness to the wider love, shows that there is a beneficent Force and that “all things work together for good.” If each of us considers himself alone, as having separate interests, this truth will be obscured; but when we recognize that each of us is a part of the whole, as the tongue is a part of the body, we see that no part can be favored without injuring the entire system.
If we unduly gratify the taste, the tongue is the very first to show that the stomach is “out of order,” and this disharmony is felt in the whole body.
Sometimes we have done wrong, or have seen others do wrong apparently with profit; but the wider view will always show that the way of the transgressor is as hard as his heart, that the wicked man is in truth the fool. We know that any attempt that man makes to disturb the right order for the sake of any separate interest must react upon himself, destroying his own happiness as well as the happiness of those about him.
Similarly we see that the prophet, the cultivator, the inventor, the martyr, the benevolent man, each doing what he is inspired to do, is working just as much for all mankind as for himself, that he cannot reap the benefit except as others share it. For our good, we are joined together in one connected whole, so that no man liveth, or so much as dieth, to himself.
We see how the Spirit makes “even the wrath of men to praise him” that the tyranny of a king was necessary to drive out colonists to proclaim liberty, and the fierce rivalry of nations in armament is needed to usher in a Court of International Peace. Since that is so, since we know that in great or universal affairs the eternal purposes cannot be interfered with, why should we think that it fails to work in our own little interests?
We see beautiful, symmetrical shells and well-adapted organs in creatures so small that we know of their existence only through high-power microscopes. In them we find the same rule of law, the same adaptation to supreme ends that we find in the measureless suns and in the measureless souls of men.
Accordingly, when what seems evil “happens,” as we say, to us, upon what principle can we conclude that this is an exception, that in this case something has occurred that ought not to have occurred? If one thing went wrong in the divine intent, it would show a limit to the rule of Good. We know that there can be no such limit.
It is not fatalism to believe that the same holy order rules over us, for each of us and each of our efforts is a part of the divine plan, and a means of carrying it out. We should strive for those things that seem to us desirable and good; although we may not have success, as we call it, so kind is the constitution of things that the effort to direct things right dulls the pain of finding that the event shapes itself in a way that we do not like.
We are threatened, perhaps, with what seems a horrible disaster: why, the very derivation of the word disaster refers to the influence which the stars are supposed to have upon our destinies. Some power there is that controls those destinies, in spite of our human limitations of time and space. Who would take the job, though he had the power, of controlling even the material world, arranging the growth of plants, the rise and fall of nations, the birth and waning of the stars?
Yet we do wish to assume just such Omnipotence and Omniscience in our personal affairs; to say that this possession must not, shall not slip from me, this one must not die. And, if this that is so dear does go away, then in that one instance, because it concerns us, we refuse to admit that that instance is no exception to the rule of Love, or to recognize the kind watchfulness of Him that, keeping Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps.
And yet the loss hurts, and the fear of it hurts still more, with a pain that seems past endurance—it hurts, and for ages long it has been necessary that we should have just such pain in order that we may make the efforts that contribute our part to the progress of the world.
But some of us do not in our hearts believe in a beneficent Order of the Universe. We think that some persons may seize what they want, regardless of others, and yet no evil come to them. Even if that be so, still it is wise to act so as to gain the most happiness and, therefore, to accommodate ourselves to the Nature of Things.
If we could but leave out the unreasonable self-pity and get into our hearts, as knowledge that is a part of ourselves, this understanding of the goodness and the loving kindness of God, we should be as gods ourselves, seeing the end from the beginning and recognizing that, success or failure, loss or gain, life or death, the times are in his hands, and it is all very good. And our hearts should not be troubled, nor our rest disturbed.
CHAPTER LIV
CONCLUSION
When the shining day doth die,
Sweet is sleep.
Dora Read Goodale.
We have finished our long inquiry, and it has brought us to thoughts and perhaps to conclusions for which we did not look. Such is the leading of the Spirit, into ways that we know not of.
“So read I this—and as I try
To write it clear again
I find a second finger lie
Above mine on the pen.”
Much of the ground we have merely passed over, it may be hurriedly, but we have seen a promised land of Peace, and, wherever the soles of our feet have trodden, the land shall be given to us and to our children for an inheritance—if we will.
Now, once again, dear reader—dear, for, in striving and in helping each other to get a clear view of these important matters, we become dear to each other—try these things.
If you have read and merely approved or disapproved, you will get little good from the reading. You remember the pathetically comic story of the little boy who was asked if his father was a Christian:
“Yes,” he said, “pa is a Christian; but he does not work much at it.” That man might more hopefully have been an infidel. You must put all that you can accept into practice if it is to be of any use.
We have found that what we call body and mind and soul are so closely bound together that no one of them can be well or ill independently of the others. We divide them in our thought and speech; but we cannot find any line of separation. Every state joins on to the next one: mineral and vegetable and animal are composed of the same elements which pass from one state to another. The silex and the lime are taken up to make the wheat hard, we eat wheat and these elements pass into our bones, and, when our bodies return to Mother Earth, the rootlets take them up again to run the round once more.
So the body and mind and soul are all one Life. There are no divisions in Nature. The form differs, but the essence is uniform. We classify for the sake of convenience and of clear statement. As Sir Oliver Lodge says, in “The Survival of Man”—“Boundaries and classifications must be recognized as human artifices, but for practical purposes distinctions are necessary”; but the philosopher never loses sight of the fundamental fact that each animal, flying-fish and whale, seal and polar bear, bat and bird, can be classified only by seizing on some acquired characteristic, such as the temperature of the blood, the method of birth, or the structure of the bones. These mark the animal as belonging to an order.
We see, then, that all are One, different manifestations of the Universal Life, which must be understood and treated as a whole to see and avail ourselves of the Universal Harmony. Accordingly we find that we must work with Nature if she is to bring forth abundantly, of bodily or of spiritual things, to satisfy our desires. Only in the sweat of our faces do we absorb the full comfort and strength of the bread of life.
Whatever you have willingly received, willingly give to others. Only when you cast the seed, this your mental bread, upon the fertilizing waters, shall it return to you in the harvest after many days.
What I have written, I have written as much for myself as for you: if it were not so, it would be useless both to you and to me. We must go up each for himself and take the strongholds of our own Ignorance and Distrust and Fear. Let no one think that he can get life by merely reading these words of life.
Try these things for yourself—teach these things to your other selves; breathe them in and live them out. Open your mind and enlarge your heart so that the Spirit may be able to bless you and keep you with him, and to be kind to you, and to lift up the Light of his countenance upon you and give you