HOW TO HELP THE C. L. S. C.
BY CHANCELLOR J. H. VINCENT, D.D.
The C. L. S. C. is an institution. It has an aim, a plan, an organization, officers and members. It began, has grown, and will continue to grow. The ends it proposes are useful and much needed. They lay hold of personal character. They reach society in the family, in the community, in the church. They are ends intellectual, moral, domestic, social, and religious. Every reason that can be urged in favor of general education, of refined manners, of cultivated tastes, of religious principles, of personal influence in favor of the true, the beautiful and the good, may be presented in behalf of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle. Its enthusiastic alumni, its undergraduates and outside persons of sound judgment who have studied its philosophy and watched its progress have said many strong and beautiful things in commendation of it. And there is no danger of saying too much, for however crude the beginnings of the movement, one may easily see in it the most splendid possibilities. The universal praise which the scheme has elicited is all deserved. The C. L. S. C. is a great institution.
But it must be remembered that institutions, however lofty in purpose and practical in organization, can not grow or work by virtue of mere aim and plan. Ideals and artistic apparatus are essential, but without personal genius and labor are impotent in the world of art. Something more is necessary to a transatlantic passage than a dock at Liverpool and a seaworthy steamer in New York. Between the two lie the conditions of success in human enterprise and effort. The C. L. S. C. needs appreciation as a scheme, but it needs also work—wise, unremitting, indefatigable work, on the part of those who believe in it.
The problem before us now is: How may we help the C. L. S. C.? Every member who receives benefit from it, and who believes in its value to others, may become an advocate and representative and thus may induce numbers to test its worth. This service, voluntary and uncompensated, is due to the Circle. I propose to show how it may be most effectively rendered.
1. There are multitudes of people who would welcome the C. L. S. C. as an angel of strength and comfort, if its existence were but made known to them. They have no definite idea about it. The mystic letters which represent it they have often seen, but having “no interest in secret societies” have not even asked what the C. L. S. C. is. They have seen the word “Chautauqua,” and know that Chautauqua County is famous “for butter and for Republican majorities.” Or they have heard about a “camp meeting at Chautauqua,” which being a camp meeting must of course be Methodist—and in “Methodist camp meetings they have never taken much interest”—indeed, they have a “prejudice against such things.” As for a “Sunday-school Assembly” at Chautauqua, if they do not think of it as “a big picnic with lots of children and barrels of peanuts,” they class it among “the pious conventions which only very good people care to attend.” Thus the widespread name of Chautauqua means half a dozen different things, according to the measure of the hearer’s ignorance. Now, members of the C. L. S. C. can do a world of good to people who would welcome and enter the Circle if they knew about it, by telling of its aims to persons whom they casually meet, by distributing the “Popular Educational Circular,” and by handing out judiciously copies of “The Green Book.” Thus they could soon disabuse minds which hold the superficial views of the movement above indicated and convince them that Chautauqua is not merely a “creamery,” that it is not a camp meeting, that it is not Methodist, that it is not a children’s or Sunday-school picnic at all, that Sunday-school work has a place, but a comparatively small place in the great Chautauqua Idea and movement, and that Chautauqua is CHAUTAUQUA—peculiar, instructive, broad, far-reaching—a place and an idea, a school and a society, a life and a power, representing all that is high in human aims, all that is delightful in human fellowship, all that is ennobling in broadest culture, all that is sanctifying in intelligent and reverent worship. A few words would do all this, for hosts of people who need and long for the very ministry our noble cause fulfills. Speak the words, then, dear fellow students, and distribute widely the circulars which spread this information.
2. Having sown the seed watch the growth. Urge the friend to whom you broach the subject to join the Circle. Take his or her name and address; a postal card later on may be a reminder. Insist upon prompt action in sending for blank form of application. Elicit questions. Remove difficulties. Answer objections. Be earnest and urgent, and from the seed by the wayside may come up quite a harvest of good. You can not be too urgent or emphatic. The cause and the institution justify your zeal, and those whom you win to the experiment will soon give it unequivocal indorsement, and will add a vote of thanks, for your suggestion and importunacy. Personal interest in people always pays. In a good work this interest yields the best results. And this is a good work. The young man you follow up with circulars and solicitations and offers of help will finally yield through your very earnestness in his behalf. And the more you help, the more zeal in the cause of the C. L. S. C. you will develop in him. The discouraged woman to whom the world of letters seems as inaccessible as the royal palace at Windsor, will believe your testimony because of the faith and fervor you show, and having had the door opened to her will enter in, and at every step will give thanks for what she finds, and for the thoughtful, sympathetic soul that pointed her to Temple of Knowledge.
3. Use the local press in the interest of the Circle. The columns of any paper in the land will be open to occasional items concerning the Chautauqua movement and its courses of reading. Editors who want news will be glad to receive your communications. Editors who believe in popular education will take a personal interest in the matter. They will cheerfully write editorials on some phases of the subject. They will report meetings of your local circle. They will publish choice literary extracts in the line of the current required reading. Suppose the subject for the month is Greek history and literature. Find some gem from the critics, some exquisite translation of a passage from Homer, Plato or Æschylus, some word-picture from the historians or from modern travelers; copy carefully, send to the editor, and ask its publication, and you will be surprised to find how glad editors will be to enrich their pages through your skill, taste and services. Every such item of news or passage from literature, if connected with Chautauqua or the C. L. S. C. will advertise the Circle and increase its membership.
4. Use the public schools. Secure the coöperation of teachers, especially high school principals and superintendents. Do not try to induce pupils to join the Circle. They have enough to do already, at school and at home. But watch the high school graduates, and those young people dropping out of the various grades, “giving up school,” as so many thousands do. Talk to them about what the C. L. S. C. will do for them. Tell them all about the “college outlook,” the “diploma,” the “seals,” the “societies,” and “degrees.” Urge them to enter this “Home College.” Press upon them the advantages. And if the arguments you present be so strong as to determine them not to give up school, but to keep on and enter college, you can afford to excuse them from entering the C. L. S. C. for this is the highest end of our Circle: To awaken an interest in college education, and to induce young people to secure it. Do not be disheartened if now and then a public school superintendent or teacher looks disapprovingly or with a faint touch of scorn on the C. L. S. C. It will be because he does not understand it. No scholar of a high order, who knows what we aim at and are doing, can disapprove the movement. He may object to this book or that. About what book are there no differences of opinion? He may find fault with the relative proportions of literature and science in our course. All curriculums are subjected to such criticisms. He may smile at our desires for promoting the esprit de corps. College societies, college athletics, college exhibitions have been often severely denounced as puerile, dissipating, and all that. And one has read college songs that have not been wholly weighted with wisdom or composed in conformity with highest rhetorical standards. No wise teacher can afford to sneer at the C. L. S. C. The most eminent educators of the country are in sympathy with it. Give your public school teachers a knowledge of the system and they will coöperate with you in the promotion of its interests.
5. Get the college men of your place enlisted. They are bound to help it. The C. L. S. C. is among all the educational movements of the age the best friend of the college system. It is a John-the-Baptist, going in advance and preparing the way in a wilderness-age of mercenary ambition, and among masses of people apathetic concerning especially the higher education. It goes into a household and captures parents while the children are yet young or unborn. It gives intellectual hope, confidence and ambition to those full grown men and women who supposed having left school their education had been finished. It gives them a new world to live in, a world of good books, a world of high art, a world of refined society. And into this world the children are born, and in this world they are trained, and because of this larger, nobler world they go to college. What put those better books and better pictures into the home? The C. L. S. C. What inspired the literary ambition in these mature people? The C. L. S. C. What filled the house with college atmosphere and college longings? The C. L. S. C. What led the mother to say and sing over and over again to the smiling infant in her arms, “My darling is going to college one of these days?” The C. L. S. C. If any people on the continent should honor and further the C. L. S. C. it is the college people, and as they learn its work they see its worth and give it sympathy and help. Our most enthusiastic friends are college presidents and professors.
Therefore make a point of enlisting college people in the enterprise. They will be glad to join. It will do them good after these years of neglect to read up Greek-in-English with Dr. Wilkinson, or to have Professor Appleton and Dr. Edwards tell them in their clear way what additions have been made to the science of chemistry since it was studied in the old college laboratory. There is not a subject or a book in the C. L. S. C. course that it would not pay any college graduate to read over again. And the really wise ones among them will do it. We have thousands of college graduates on the record lists of the Circle.
Where these men and women may not care to join for their own sakes they may be induced to give prestige to the movement for the sake of others. This is a power they have. They may well be proud of it; and if by putting themselves side by side with less favored people as fellow-students, they can help without seeming to do it, they may add to the influence and profit of the Circle. Stir up and use the college people.
6. And now for the ministers! No class has greater influence in matters pertaining to education. To hear some wiseacres talk one would suppose that churches and ministers were afraid of education. The fact is that both popular and higher education owes more to the church than to any other organization on earth, and college presidents and professors have for the most part been clergymen or active laymen ready for Christian service. The most efficient factor in the educational movements of the world is Christianity.
The ministers are able to do more for the C. L. S. C. than any other class. They have influence over the homes, and especially over the youth of their congregations. If they do not it is their own fault; and I have sometimes felt that the Chautauqua plan was a providential appliance adapted to the age, by which pastors may secure a firmer hold upon the young people, and keep them in more perfect sympathy with the social and spiritual ideas which it is the business of the church to set forth. What intellectual dissipation and what moral weakening follow the loose reading habits of the age! How can a minister of Christ bring people to an appreciation of stability, purity, thoughtfulness, by sermons on one day of the week while all the other days are filled (what time is left from business) with sensational and demoralizing stories, unreal in their pictures of life and fearfully false in the ethical and theological principles they embody? How can a minister train his people to solidity and self-sacrifice and spirituality, whose highest ideas of “society” are expressed in the sensuous and dangerous pleasures in which a frivolous world delights, and which by its consciousless requirements are made “fashionable?” Priestly prohibition is worthless. Bitter denunciation is worse. Appeals to higher tastes are useless—while the higher taste is lacking. There is only one way out of the difficulty. It is by “the expulsive power of a new affection.” To learn to loathe the low, one must learn to love the high and holy. To banish bad books we must create a delight in good books. To make worldly society seem the sensuous and senseless thing it often is, we must create a taste for refined, elevating and rational society. To put dignity and stability into a life we must feed it on truth, and cause it to delight in serving others. The C. L. S. C. is the pastor’s helper in all these lines. It puts good books into the hands of youth and age. It opens broad fields for exploration. It discovers and develops personal aptitude. It gives high ambitions. It makes conversation with rational and cultivated people more agreeable than frivolous amusements which have neither ideas nor useful inspiration in them. It quickens conscience. It gives dignity to life. It makes usefulness more desirable than self-gratification. It supplements Sunday aspiration by week-day effort, and increases the power—intellectual, social and spiritual—of every life and of every home into which it comes. All this our ministers should feel. If they knew they would feel. Then cause them to know. By talk and by circulars stir them up.
When new tastes are developed among their young people, tastes sanctified by prayer and fostered by lectures and lessons, and books and conversation, the ministers seeing the good work will appreciate the agency, and thank you for calling their attention to the C. L. S. C.
These are some of the radical ways of helping the C. L. S. C.