There comes over me occasionally an idea, as I look into the future, that the fact may become the mockery of the dream. Our temples are built with hands, they are fair to look upon even in the dream, but other builders will come and build on other foundations temples of the soul more fair, more enduring. Socialism the fact will have the higher individualism as the dream; but the conflict will be lifted from the sordid plane of the stomach to the realm of mind, heart, and soul.
The apologist of the status quo is of all things the most pitiful. If a politician, he has no dream; if a business man, he has no vision; if a preacher, he lives in a mausoleum of dead hopes. To these the ten commandments sum up the moral order of the universe. The eleventh commandment shares the fate of the seed that fell on stony ground.
The worst that a man can do against the democratic ideal is not to work for it. He might as well fight against the stars in their courses. What does it matter who brings it to pass or how it comes?
To work for it is the thing. To feel the thrill of a world-comradeship, a world-endeavour, to be in line with the workers and touch hands with men of all creeds, all classes, this is social joy, this is incentive for life!
"Then a man shall work and bethink him, and rejoice in the deeds of his hand,
Nor yet come home in the even, too faint and weary to stand.
Men in that time a-coming shall work and have no fear
For to-morrow's lack of earning and the hunger-wolf a-near.
Oh, strange, new wonderful justice! But for whom shall we gather the gain?
For ourselves and for each of our fellows, and no hand shall labour in vain.
Then all mine and all thine shall be ours and no more shall any man crave
For riches that serve for nothing but to fetter a friend for a slave.
And what wealth then shall be left us when none shall gather gold
To buy his friend in the market and pinch and pine the sold?
Nay, what save the lovely city and the little house on the hill,
And the wastes and the woodland beauty and the happy fields we till,
And the homes of ancient stories, the tombs of the mighty dead,
And the wise men seeking out marvels and the poet's teaming head.
And the painter's hand of wonder, and the marvellous fiddle-bow,
And the banded choirs of music—all those that do and know.
For all these shall be ours and all men's, nor shall any lack a share
Of the toil and the gain of living in the days when the world grows fair."
In the very advent of my spiritual life I gravitated toward the church. There I added to my faith a theology. A theologian is a fighter—a doctrinaire. Every item of knowledge I got I sharpened into a weapon to confound the Catholics.
Before my nakedness was wholly covered I was shouting with my sect for "Queen and Constitution," and I could discuss the historic Episcopate before I could write my own name. Then came a hidebound orthodoxy. I measured life by a book and for every ill that flesh is heir to I had an "appropriate" text. I had a formula for the salvation of the race. I divided humanity into two camps—the goats and the sheep. I had a literal hell for one crowd and a beautiful heaven for the other. The logical result of this was a caste of good (saved) people for whom I became a sort of an ecclesiastical attorney. Naturally one outgrows such obsolescence. Such archaism has an antidote: it is an open-minded study of the life of Jesus. The result of such a study to me was a rediscovery of myself, that I think is what Jesus always does for an inquiring soul. He is the Supreme Individualist, the Master of Personality.
I did not ask him what to wear or how to vote. I did not even ask him what was moral or immoral, for these things change with time and place and circumstance.
I asked him the old eternal questions of life and death and immortality, of God and my neighbour, of sin and service. The answers stripped me of fear and gave me a scorn of consequences. The secret of Jesus is to find God in the soul of humanity. The cause of Jesus is the righting of world wrongs; the religion of Jesus the binding together of souls in the solidarity of the race.