The Hearts of Men

by H. Fielding

"Go back to that England you have forgotten, and in your forgetfulness begun to despise. Go back there on the eve of a great victory, or a great deliverance, such a day as that on which Ladysmith was relieved. And go not into the streets if the loud rejoicings hurt your philosophic ear, but go into the homes of the people. Go to the rich, to the middle class, to the artisan, to the labourer, and mark their glowing faces, their glad eyes, the look of glory, of thanksgiving that our people have been rescued, that our flag has escaped a disaster. Look at the faces of these men and women and children, whose hearts are full at the news. And then ask them, 'Is patriotism a mean and debasing passion?' They know. Or do better even than this, go yourself to Africa, to India, to the thousand league frontiers where men die daily for their flag, for their own honour, and that of their country. Take rifle yourself and beat back those who would destroy our peace, take up your pen and give some of your life to the people whom we rule. You will find it a better life, perhaps, than at a foreign spa. Give yourself freely for your country and those your country gives in charge to you. I think you will learn, maybe, what patriotism means. But argument, reason? I think you exaggerate the power of reason. It can argue only from facts. It is necessary to know the facts first. And you are ignorant of your facts, because you have never felt them. Only those who feel them know. Go and give your life, and before it be gone you will have learnt what neither I nor any man who ever lived can tell you. You will have learnt the realities of life.

"For you and those like you mistake the power of reason, you have forgotten its limitations. Reason is but the power of arranging facts, it cannot provide them. Your eyes will give you the facts they can see, your ears what they can hear, your sympathies will give you the realities of men's lives. If you have no emotions, no sympathies, how can you get on? You are like mariners afloat upon the sea vainly waggling your rudders and boasting that you are at the mercy of no erratic winds, while the ships pass you under full sail. Where will reason alone take you? It cannot take you anywhere. A rudder is only useful to a ship that has motive power. What motive power have you? So you float and work your rudders and turn round and round, and are very bitter. Why are all philosophers so bitter, so hard to bear with, so useless? Because you are conscious unconsciously of your futility, that the world passes you by and laughs.

"The functions of reason are very narrow. You forget them. You exalt reason into the whole of life, committing the mistake for which you rail on others. Unbridled emotion is, as you say, terrible. So is unbridled reason. Where has reason alone ever led anyone save into the dreariest, driest pessimism? Was a philosopher ever a happy man? Even your Utopias, from Plato's to Bellamy's, who would desire them? Hell would be a pleasant relaxation after any of them. The functions of the senses, of which sympathy is the greatest, are to give you facts, the function of reason is to arrange them. The emotions drive man forward, reason directs and controls them. That is all.

"You say religions are founded on errors, on what are your reasonings founded? They are founded on nothings."

Of what use is patriotism? Is it beautiful or no? Of what use is religion? Is it beautiful or no? Prove to me that it is necessary or beautiful. Show me why it should be so.

Is it not the same answer in each case? It is so easy to point out the evils of exaggeration in each. Anyone can do it. But the mean. Prove to me the use and beauty of the mean.

The answer is always the same. If you have religion in you, such a question would never occur to you, for you would feel its use, you would know its beauty. And if you have not, who shall prove it to you? Who shall provide you with the facts on which to reason, who shall open your eyes? But if anyone doubts that religion is useful and is beautiful to its believers, go and watch them.

It matters not where you go, East or West, it is always the same. In England, or France, or Russia, among the Hindus, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Parsees. It makes no matter if you will but look aright. For you must know how to look and where. You must learn what to read. It is never books I would ask you to read, never creeds, never theologies, never reasons, nor arguments. You will not find what you search in libraries nor yet in places of worship, in ceremonies, in temples, great and beautiful as they may be. Not in even their inmost recesses is the secret hid, the secret of all religions. I would have you listen to no preachers, to no theologians. They are the last to know. But I would have you go to the temple of the heart of man and read what is written there, written not in words, but in the inarticulate emotions of the heart. I would have you go and kneel beside the Mahommedan as he prays at the sunset hour, and put your heart to his and wait for the echo that will surely come. Yes, surely, if you be as a man who would learn, who can learn. I would have you go to the hillman smearing the stone with butter that his god may be pleased, to the woman crying to the forest god for her sick child, to the boy before his monks learning to be good. No matter where you go, no matter what the faith is called, if you have the hearing ear, if your heart is in unison with the heart of the world, you will hear always the same song. Far down below the noises of the warring creeds, the clash of words and forms, the differences of peoples, of climes, of civilisations, of ideals, far down below all this lies that which you would hear. I know not what you would call it. Maybe it is the Voice of God telling us for ever the secret of the world, but in unknown tongue. For me it is like the unceasing surge of a shoreless sea answering to the night, a melody beyond words.

The creeds and faiths are the words that men have set to that melody; they are the interpretations of that wordless song. Each is true to him whom it suits. Every nation has translated it into his own tongue. But never forget that those are only your own interpretations. Whatever your faith may be, you have no monopoly of religion. I confess that to me there is nothing so repellent as the hate of faith for faith. To hear their professors malign and abuse each other, as if each had the monopoly of truth, is terrible. It is as a strife in families where brother is killing brother, and the younger trying to disinherit the elder. I doubt if in all this warfare they can listen for the voice that is for ever telling the secret of the world. Whence came all the faiths but from that inexplicable feeling of the heart, that surge and swell arising we know not whence? If you would malign another's faith remember your own. If you cannot understand his belief stop and consider. Can you understand your own? Do you know whence came these emotions that have risen and made your faith?

The faiths are all brothers, all born of the same mystery. There are older and younger, stronger and weaker, some babble in strange tongues maybe, different from your finer speech. But what of that? Are they the less children of the Great Father for that? Surely if there be the unforgivable offence, the sin against the Holy Ghost, it is this, to deny the truth that lies in all the faiths.