Remember the Weekday
Did it ever strike you that it is a most absurd and semi-barbaric thing to set one day apart as holy? If you are a writer and a beautiful thought comes to you, you never hesitate to write it down because it is Sunday ❦ If you are a painter, and the picture appears before you, vivid and clear, you make haste to materialize it before the vision fades. If you are a musician, you sing a song or play it on the piano, that it may be etched upon your memory—and for the joy of it. ¶ But if you are a cabinetmaker you may make a design, but you will have to halt before you make the table, if the day happens to be the “Lord’s Day”; and if you are a blacksmith, you will not dare to lift a hammer for fear of conscience or the police. All of which is an admission that we regard manual labor as a sort of necessary evil, which must be done only at certain times and places. ¶ The orthodox reason for abstinence from all manual labor on Sunday is that “God made the heavens and the earth in six days and rested the seventh day”; therefore, man, created in the image of his Maker, should hold this day sacred. How it can be possible for a supreme, omnipotent and all-powerful being, without “body, parts or passions,” to become wearied through physical exertion, is a question that is yet unanswered. ¶ The idea of serving God on Sunday and then forgetting Him all the rest of the week is a fallacy. Sunday with its immunity from work was devised for slaves who got out of all the work they could during the week. No man can violate the Sabbath; he can, however, violate his own nature, and this he is more apt to do through enforced idleness than through either work or play. Only running water is pure; stagnant nature of any sort is dangerous, and a breeding-place for disease. ¶ Change of occupation is necessary to mental and physical health. As it is, most people get too much of one kind of work. All the week they are chained to one task, a repugnant task because the dose is too big. They have to do this particular job or starve. This is slavery, quite as much as when man was bought and sold as a chattel. ¶ Will there not come a time when all men and women will work because it is a blessed gift—a privilege? Then, if all worked, wasteful consuming as a business would cease ❦ As it is, there are many people who do not work at all, and these pride themselves upon it and uphold the Sunday laws. If the idler would work, no one would be over-worked. If this time ever comes, shall we not cease to regard it as wicked to work at certain times, just as much as we should count it absurd to pass a law making it illegal for us to be happy on Wednesday? Isn’t good work an effort to produce a useful, necessary or beautiful thing? If so, good work is a prayer, prompted by a loving heart—a prayer to benefit and bless. If prayer is not a desire, backed up by a right human effort to bring about its efficacy, then what is it? ¶ Work is a service performed for ourselves and others. If I love you I will surely work for you—in this way I reveal my love. And to manifest my love in this manner is a joy and a gratification to me. Thus, work is for the worker alone, and labor is its own reward. These things being so, if it is wrong to work on Sunday, then it is wrong to love on Sunday; every smile is a sin, every caress is a curse, and all tenderness a crime. ¶ Must there not come a time when we shall cease to differentiate and quit calling some work secular and some sacred? Isn’t it as necessary for me to hoe corn and feed my loved ones (and also the priest) as for the priest to preach and pray? ¶ Would any priest ever preach and pray if somebody did not hoe? If life is from God, then all useful effort is divine; and to work is the highest form of religion ❦ If God made us, surely He is pleased to see that His work is a success. If we are miserable, willing to liberate life with a bare bodkin, we certainly do not compliment our Maker in thus proclaiming His work a failure. But if our lives are full of gladness and we are grateful for feeling that we are one with Deity—helping God do His work—then, and only then, do we truly serve Him. ¶ Isn’t it strange that men should have made laws declaring that it is wicked for us to work?
Reciprocity
The first requisite in life is that we shall be able to earn a living. For our own good we must be able to produce as much or more than we consume, and to make two grins grow where there was only a grouch before. And we can help ourselves only by helping others. A transaction where only one side makes money is immoral. ¶ Reciprocity, Co-operation, Mutuality, are the three big words. To be of genuine advantage, all human effort must be reciprocal. The worker who works merely with his own benefit in mind doesn’t get much benefit ❦ Personal good comes incidentally, and to go after a gain direct is to have it elude you. The very effort you put forth to secure the thing sets in motion an opposition that makes it slip away beyond your reach. The man who seizes culture by the cosmic scruff will never secure her tender confidences. ¶ If you want to study the birds you do not go in wild search for them; you simply seat yourself on a log in the woods and, lo! soon the branches are vibrant with song. To clutch for love and demand it makes you both unlovely and unlovable. If you would have friends, be one. ¶ This great spiritual law which provides that we lose the thing for which we selfishly strive has seemingly been overlooked in our universities and institutions that foster the so-called Higher Culture. Fond parents send their sons to college for but one reason—not to earn a living, not to render the world a service, not to perform some necessary task—they send them to college in order to absorb and appropriate a certain imaginary good. The idea of reciprocity in a college is a barren ideality. The “work” is non-productive, futile, fictive, fallacious and imaginary. In all Nature there is no analogy to this thing of making an animal as big as his father exempt from securing his own living ❦ The birds in the nest are fed, and the young are suckled; but a weaning-time that does not take place until long after adolescence is fraught with danger. The plan is medieval and dates to a time when conspicuous waste and conspicuous leisure were the badge of respectability. The college is really a mendicant institution: its teachers and students belong to the parasitic class. ¶ The fact that a thing has to be endowed proves there is something wrong with it. It is not self-sufficient and in itself supplies no excuse for being. It requires an explanation. No explanation ever explains the necessity of making one. ¶ Our system of teaching will never approximate the perfect until we devise an Industrial College where the students will produce as well as consume. The school then will not be an imitation of life—it will be life ❦ The fact that many college graduates are highly successful men does not answer the argument—that very many college graduates are wholly incompetent is the thing that forms the damning count. The man who gets his education out of his work, at his work, is the type that has always ruled and yet rules the world. We are safe only as we move with Nature; and any system of teaching that seeks to improve on Nature is founded on fallacy. ¶ There is only one valid reason for sending a boy to college, and that is, so he can discover for himself that there is nothing in it. A college degree, as matters now stand, is like a certificate of character—useful only to those who need it. However, there must surely come a time when degrees will be given only to those who can earn a living—and this degree will be signed by the young man’s employer. ¶ All this for the simple reason that no man is a safe person whose time is not employed in some useful daily occupation where others as well as himself are the gainers. Time and energy not used, or misused, form a dangerous dynamite; while time and human effort fused with reciprocity produce radium. Can you earn a living? Also, do you? ❦