For an unhappy year or two he tried to act like his father, believe as his mother, and be like his neighbors. In addition, in order to satisfy a somewhat uneasy conscience, he prepared to enter politics on a platform of straight Americanism and the full dinner-pail. Then in one eventful week his workmen struck for an eight-hour day and shop committees, his mother announced her intention of bequeathing her share of the estate to the Anti-tobacco League, his best girl refused to marry him unless he should become an Episcopalian, and he was invited by the local boss to subscribe to a “slush” fund or give up politics.
Samuel went to the Maine woods to catch trout and think over the situation. What he did finally is not told in the story. What he decided is, however, of some significance. For, brooding over a dark pool in the spruces, he concluded that each generation must search out the foundations for its own morality, and determine for itself the worth and power of the ideals it proclaims. And so perhaps will America.
CHAPTER V
RELIGION IN AMERICA
THE rarest experience in America is a discussion of morals. You can hear morals preached about, but that is not a discussion. You can read about morals in arguments disguised as essays, but these seldom cause discussion. Fully a third of successful American plays and stories turn upon a moral axiom, but one that we accept without argument, like rain in April and the August drouth. One hears very little real discussion of moral questions here because “old Americans,” at least, agree in their moral standards as remarkably as did the Victorians.
In this respect we are, indeed, still Victorians, though in others already a century beyond them. Some of us may (or did) get drunk, but we do not believe in hard drinking; not even the saloon-keepers believed in hard drinking. Some of us make license of our liberty in sex relations; but the public disapproval of promiscuity is, to fall into the current phrase, nation wide. Some of us steal in a large and generous fashion, taking from him who hath not business ability for the benefit of him who hath shrewdness and its fruits. But if these actions can be described in terms of theft or misappropriation, every one will agree that they are wicked, even stock-holders and profiteers. You cannot get up a decent argument on moral questions in America, because, as with small boys in war-time, no one will take the unpopular side. The ethics of America are as definite as a code.
This accepted and not unlofty moral code, with its extension to justice and the rights of individuals, is the force behind our idealism that has made it an international factor to be reckoned with from the days of Jeffersonian ideology to our own. Like the dissenters’ vote in England, it is a dangerous force to oppose. Despite occasional hysteria and sentimentalism, despite its frequent betrayals by an unlovely common sense, it is strong because it has the momentum of tradition and the tenacity of prejudice. Of its worth I am American enough to be convinced. Of its intelligence one cannot be so certain. But what really concerns all lovers of our hard-built civilization is how durable under stress is this moral idealism, under such stress as the approaching change in our social order is sure to bring to morals and morale, as well as to railroad stocks and the Constitution.
Indeed, the inner fire, the spirit, is not easily discoverable in this American idealism with its moral causes. Historically, it is easy to explain it; habit has carried it on, and common sense must usually approve a moral investment that has been profitable; but, nevertheless, it is hard to see a continuing raison d’être for such idealism in America. It seems, as I have suggested in an earlier chapter, to lack a definable spiritual basis. Its persistence, its weaknesses, its dangers, raise constantly the question as to the status of religion in America.
I remember hearing Graham Wallas—who will not be suspected of bias in this matter—remark that England would not pass out of clouds and darkness until she had made for herself a new and felt interpretation of religion. America, founded by a curious partnership of the religious instinct and economic need and brought up on the moral and material profits of the union, cannot be supposed to be less in need of a fundamental spiritual readjustment. Every socialist and communist, every corporation president and ex-Secretary, every professional intellectual and amateur prophet, is declaring his mind on the one thing needful to save the world and America. I do not know why we, whose profession it is to teach, whose duty it is to interpret and to sympathize with every motion of the American mind, should hesitate to speak out also in this matter. It is, I think, demonstrable that America needs religion as much as steel and automobiles, as much as a better distribution of wealth and cheaper bread and meat.