Learning and Other Essays

by John Jay Chapman

The question is how to do it. First you go to the wrongdoers and beg them to stop, and they will not stop. Then to the officials in authority over them, with the same result. “Remove these officials” is now your conclusion, and you go and join the party that keeps them in power; for you intend to induce that party to change them. You now engage in infinitely long, exhausting struggles with the elements of wickedness, which seem to be the real cause and support of those injuries which you are trying to stop. You make no headway; you find you are wasting force; you are fighting at a disadvantage; all your energies are exhausted in antagonism. It occurs to you to join the other party, and induce that party to advocate a positive good, whereby the people may be appealed to and the iniquities voted down. But your trouble here begins afresh, for it seems as hard to induce the “outs” to make a square attack on the evil as it is to get the “ins” to desist from doing the evil. Your struggle, your antagonism, your waste of energy continues. At last you leave the outs and form a new party, a reform party of your own. Merciful heavens! neither will this new party attack wickedness. Your mind, your thought, your time is still taken up in resisting the influences which your old enemies are bringing to bear upon your new friends.

I had got as far as this in the experience and had come to see plainly that there was somewhere a mistake in my method. It was a mistake to try to induce others to act. The thing to do was to act myself, alone and directly, without waiting for help. I should thus at least be able to do what I knew to be right; and perhaps this was the strongest appeal I could make to anyone. The thing to do was to run independent candidates and ask the public to support good men. Then there occurred to me the phrase, “Resist not evil,” and the phrase seemed to explain the experience.

What had I been doing all these years but wrangling over evil? I had a system that pitted me in a ring against certain agencies of corruption and led to unending antagonism. The phrase not only explained what was wrong with the whole system, but what was wrong with every human contact that occurred under it. The more you thought of it, the truer it seemed. It was not merely true of politics, it was true of all human intercourse. The politics of New York bore the same sort of relation to this truth that a kodak does to the laws of optics. Our politics were a mere illustration of it. The phrase seemed to explain everything either wrong or mistaken that I had ever done in my life. To meet selfishness with selfishness, anger with anger, irritation with irritation, that was the harm. But the saying was not exhausted yet. The phrase passed over into physiology and showed how to cure a cramp in a muscle or stop a headache. It was true as religion, true as pathology, and true as to everything between them. I felt as a modern mathematician might feel, who should find inscribed in an Egyptian temple a mathematical formula which not only included all he knew, but showed that all he knew was a mere stumbling comment on the ancient science.

What mind was it that walked the earth and put the sum of wisdom into three words? By what process was it done? The impersonal precision and calm of the statement give it the quality of geometry, and yet it expresses nothing but human feeling. I suppose that Christ arrived at the remark by simple introspection. The impulse which he felt in himself to oppose evil with evil—he puts his finger on that impulse as the crucial danger. There is in the phrase an extreme care, as if he were explaining a mechanism. He seems to be saying “If you wish to open the door, you must lift the latch before you pull the handle. If you wish to do good, you must resist evil with good, not with evil.”

It is the same with his other sayings. They are almost dry, they are so accurate. “Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart”; the analysis of emotion could hardly be carried farther. “How hard it is for them that trust in riches to enter into the Kingdom of God”; here is neither exaggeration nor epigram. “Thy faith hath made thee whole”; a statement of fact. “Knock and it shall be opened unto you”; this is the summary of Christ’s whole life down to the time his teaching began. He had knocked and it had been opened to him. He had wished to make men better, and inasmuch as he wished it harder than anyone else before or since has wished it, he got farther than anyone toward an understanding of how to do it. The effectiveness of his thought has been due to its coherence. He was able to draw the sky together over any subject till all the light fell on one point. Then he said what he saw. Every question was shown to break up into the same crystals if subjected to the same pressure. Nor does his influence upon the world present any anomaly. It is entirely due to ordinary causes. Every man’s influence depends upon the depth of his will; for this determines his power of concentration. The controlled force that could contract Christ’s own mind to so small a focus, brings down to the same focus other minds of less coherence than his. This is will; this is leadership; this is power.

Yet in spite of his will there were plenty of things that Christ himself could not do, as, for instance, change the world at once, or change it at all except through the slow process of personal influence. He could not heal people who had no faith, or get followers except by going into the highways and hedges after them. And his whole life is as valuable in showing what cannot be done, as in showing what can be done. If you love your fellow-men and wish to benefit them, you will find that the ways in which it is possible to do this are not many. You can do harm in many ways, good only in one.

The world is full of people who want to do good, and men are constantly re-discovering Christ. This intelligence, superior to our own, possesses and utilizes us. There is always more danger of his influence being perverted than of its dying out; for as men begin to discover the scope and horizon of his thought they are tempted to becloud it with commentary. They wish to say what he meant, whereas he has said it himself. We think to explain something whose value is that it explains us. If we understood him, very likely we should say nothing.

The mistake Christians make is that they strive to follow Christ as a gnat follows a candle. No man ought to follow Christ in this way. A man ought to follow truth, and when he does this, he will find that, as he gropes his way through life, most of the light that falls on the path in front of him, and moves as he moves, comes from the mind of Christ. But if one is to learn from that mind one must take it as a lens through which to view truth; not as truth itself. We do not look at a lens, but through it.

There are moments in each of our lives when all the things that Christ said seem clear, sensible, relevant. The use of his sayings is to remind us of these moments and carry us back into them. The danger of his sayings is lest we rely upon them as final truth. They are no more truth than the chemical equivalents for food are food, or than certain symbols of dynamics are the power of Niagara. At those moments when the real Niagara is upon us we must keep our minds bent on how to do good to our fellow-men; not the partial good of material benevolence, but the highest good we know. The thoughts and habits we thus form and work out, painfully plotting over them, revising, renewing, remodeling them, become our personal church. This is our own religion, this is our clue to truth, this is the avenue through which we may pass back to truth and possess it. No other cord will hold except the one a man has woven himself. No other key will serve except the one a man has forged himself.