This does not mean that all would manifest transcendent genius, but that each, in his place and degree, would have that strong instinctive tendency, that vivid delight in fulfilment of function which should accompany human work in every department.
XVII: THE TRUE POSITION
Summary
Duty of improvement for individual and race. Effect of Ego concept. Collective nature of Christianity—“‘our’ daily bread.” Unity of man. “Kingdom of Heaven.” First human duty to assume right functional relation to Society. Right social relation tends to develop all virtues, to eliminate all sins. Want Theory and theft corollary. Normal distribution prevents abnormal acquisition. Sins against property and person. Thieving produced by clot of wealth. Right organic relation. End of “the wolf,” of “our” sins, of unnecessary diseases. Twofold duty—to change concepts and conditions. Public school and library. Social debt to the worker. Malthusian doctrine. True law of increase in population. Natural selection among individuals. Difference in organic development. Artificial selection. Stirpiculture. Superior methods of social improvement. Poverty increases number of births, but decreases quality. “Individuation is in inverse proportion to reproduction.” Splendid opportunities. Two roads to health. Right condition—right action. General cause of local evil. The home, effect on social consciousness. Better housing. Way to growth. Human nature. Happiness.
XVII
THE TRUE POSITION
To be—to re-be—and to be better, none can deny this order of duties; and the last is the highest.
To become better as individuals has long been preached to us; to become better as a race is no unnatural proposition. Heretofore, the Ego concept ruling, we have supposed that this was only to be done by improving as many individuals as possible. And as individual conduct, ego-guided, consisted in each doing things for his own benefit, here and hereafter; our improvement has been somewhat hesitant and tortuous, both in person and in race. It is really singular to see how the Ego concept has held us from understanding what was best in our religion. The one great advantage of Christianity over Buddhism, or Mohammedanism, is in its radical collectivity. As far as a pure monotheism goes—the constant worship and service of God, the Mohammedan is beyond us. As far as a pure morality goes—an exalted sinlessness, the Buddhist is beyond us.
But none of them prays: “Give us each day our daily bread.” Now is it not, truly, a strange thing that we should have been taught that prayer for two thousand years, and yet every man Jack of us goes forth stoutly, to get his own private and personal daily bread as rapidly as possible?
The strongly enthroned Ego concept of more ancient times; buttressed hugely by the dark savagery and sordid barter of as ancient religions, has successfully evaded the recognition of Christianity’s great central truth, that man is one. Not only that God is one—Jew and Mohammedan know that; but that man is one—that we are inextricably interconnected, and cannot be considered separately. “No man liveth to himself, nor dieth to himself.” “He that seeketh his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for my sake [man’s] shall find it.” “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto me.”
Resting on the firm basis of natural law, and affirmed insistently by our prevailing religion, is the fact of human solidarity.
The improvement of human life does not consist in withdrawing as many individual souls as possible for a “reward” (that everlasting payment theory!) in Heaven; but in a diligent bringing about of what that same principal prayer of ours sets clearly before us—the Kingdom come, and the will done, right here. This, too, we have intellectually admitted to be desirable; but have united in transferring the occasion to a remote and uncertain period, known as the millennium.