People will then not do as they do now, misuse the name of the Father, whom Jesus has taught men to proclaim with their lips, will not murder one another en masse on the battlefield, to solve political and economic questions of supremacy. A society which calls itself Christian will no longer tolerate capital punishment, prostitution, stock exchange gambling, and child slavery. Men will not then as they do now, learn on their mother's breast to love their neighbours as themselves, and then tread in the footsteps of their fathers, trampling one another down in the struggle for bread.
Our reverence for God will then be found in our capacity to humanise existence by humanising the human race.
The youth of our day have not always successfully passed out of the Christian circles of ideals into another circle. The successful method would be to face immediately new purposes and aims that are really believed, and for which men wish to live. But many of our young generation know of no new purposes and aims in which they can believe. Hence comes that spiritual apathy which has mastered a great part of the young generation. Without undervaluing the influences of environment, I still believe that young people who have lost their ideals without getting new ones in their place are to be pitied. The young who are not making ideals out of their own souls will have no other time than this to find ideals. A generation of young men of this type laughed at Socrates. They would have nailed Jesus of Nazareth to the Cross, with a shrug of the shoulders; they would have become, undoubtedly, in 1789, emigrés with the Bourbons.
When the youth of any period remains without ideals, we pass through a fin de siècle period no matter what the exact date may be. But when the young generation is inspired with the feeling of having great acts to do, a new century begins. It is always the fortunate right of young people to stimulate individualism before everything else. This is done every time a young person full of sound egoism develops his own personality completely and powerfully, throws himself keenly into the struggle for his own fortune. Any one who takes his individual development seriously will find that it is hard to become an independent, noble, and exalted personality by treading underfoot other individuals. He will moreover see that it makes more demands on his personal powers to try to create new values by new means, to devote his youthful energy to new tasks, than to look back to ideas that are already exhausted. There is another truth the young man will soon find to be valid. If an individual throws himself into the struggle of life without consideration for any one else, he is all the more likely to get hurt in the struggle. The more developed, too, an individual is, the more assailable points there are about him to be wounded. Great pain, as well as great happiness, is for great men a part of the fulness of life. Failures of a personality are often better proofs that it is above the average than its victories. But failures, even if they frequently leave our innermost personality shattered, can be borne, when we have learnt that there is a bandage to heal our own wounds, the bandage, I mean, that we lay on the wounds of others.
No real man needs to wait until life has taught him, to sympathise with others. The inspiring age of youth may experience this, as well as the strong individual feeling of power. In this sense, many remain ever young, always able to pass through inspired moments, such moments when a great action, a great truth, a great and beautiful thing, or great good fortune, absorbs our whole existence; moments when our eyes fill with tears, when our arms stretch out to embrace the world and the thoughts which it contains. Such moments include the most intensive emotion of our own personality; at the same time they bring the fullest absorption in the common feeling of existence as a whole. A great life means giving continuity of action to such inspired moments.
There are young people who can look back on no such moments, who arrogantly look down on the problems of their times from the height of their "superman" theories or from their superior learning; who measure them by the iron law of historical development. At all times there have been such people. There is no question in which it is more fatal for young people to isolate themselves, than that which deals with social conflicts. This age requires the young above all others to test this question from all points of view, to investigate all other ideas in connection with it. Every reform plan must be investigated in connection with its influence on the problems of individualism and socialism. From youth we have a right to expect something for the future. This hope implies that youth, in approaching it, in thinking and acting for the many whose lot it is the immediate task of the future to improve, adopt as their own the words of Walt Whitman, "I do not ask whether my wounded brother suffers; I will myself be this wounded brother."
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