These things may be brought about by revolution, just as democracy was brought about in France after the teachings of Voltaire, Rousseau, and the French encyclopædists had blazed the way and the aftermath of the American Revolution had reached that country; but I am firmly convinced that one of the things that the World War will accomplish is that this social reformation and reconstruction will be brought about without violence and without revolution. Once a satisfactory integration of a large number of individual lives is brought about, then integration of the community and of the state is bound to follow. No one is so fatuous or so blind as to hope that integration of individual life can come to him whose creative impulses in any field are hampered or stultified, but when these creative impulses, whatever they be, are encouraged, nurtured, developed, facilitated, then the genus homo will reach its full estate and we may confidently look forward to community and state integration upon which lasting reform can be carried out socially and politically. There is not the slightest advantage to be gained by what is called political and economic reform unless at the same time there is a reformation of the creative forces of life—education, sex relations, and religion.
Any scheme of life that concerns itself only with life is bound to be a failure. Man is so constituted that he must have a philosophy from which he can form a creed that facilitates his craving for immortality. It is this belief in immortality, as fundamental a demand as life itself, which is the final conditioning impulse of all that is best in man and which gives him an inexhaustible strength and a lasting peace.
How any intelligent person can believe that the teachings of Christ as practised to-day, and I emphasize the word "practised," furnish such a philosophy or a system of ethics, transcends my understanding. The chief branch of the Christian religion stands for dogma to-day just as firmly as it did before the Renaissance, and it pretends the humility of Christ while maintaining the imperiousness of Cæsar. There is scarcely a minister of the Protestant church who is not selling his birthright for a mess of pottage by not daring to get up in his pulpit and tell his flock that they must live up to the basic principles of Christ's teachings. These ministers are just as cognizant as I am that their branch of the Christian church has lost its hold upon the people except in so far as its alleged teachings are reconcilable with their pleasurable conduct in private and in public affairs. I do not mean to say that there are not many wholly sincere and devout believers in these churches who feel the inspiration of the teachings of Christ. But because they are paid workers in the vineyard of the Lord they dare not jeopardize their existence and take no heed for the morrow, and they dare not insist that those to whom they minister should conform their conduct to Christ's commandments, because it would hazard their very existence and provoke the starvation of their children.
Do the meek inherit the earth? Have they inherited it? Does any one rejoice and be exceeding glad when men revile him and persecute him and say all manner of evil against him falsely? Is there any clergyman to-day who is teaching and insisting that if any one shall break any one of these least commandments and shall teach men to do so he shall be called the least in the Kingdom of Heaven? Suppose we grant that the Sermon on the Mount is not to be taken literally, but symbolically, of what are these mandates symbolical? "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee. If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee." Why does one not give the same heed to these commands as he does to "Thou shalt not kill; thou shall not commit adultery"? The reason is that he who kills or commits adultery is liable to be punished by the law, and he is deterred by the fear of such punishment or of the social ostracism to which he would be subject. Christ referred to the fact that "It hath been said that whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement, but I say unto you that whosoever shall put away his wife, save for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery." But the present-day mandates of Christianity are in no way in keeping with this.
As a matter of fact, every one must admit that the only conformation which Christians make to the commands and counsel of the Sermon on the Mount is a repetition of the verses following on "After this manner therefore pray ye," and those commands which are at variance to-day with statutory and conventional laws.
I am not railing against Christianity. I am of those who firmly believe that if we were to conform our lives to the tenets of the ethical and moral teaching of Christ we should not have the need of social reconstruction which we have to-day. I am contending against the hypocrisy of those who proclaim themselves Christians from the housetops and who persecute others who do not conform to those trivial doctrinal modifications which one sect maintains are the only true interpretations of Christ's teachings. I am clamoring against the flimsy hypocrisy under which half the people of the civilized world live in regard to marriage, and who pretend to shudder and feel ill when you profess that you cannot look upon marriage as a sacrament. I am railing against those who believe that there should be one code of so-called morality for men and an entirely different one for women. If the code that is practically universally accepted to-day is proper for men, it is likewise proper for women, and I want to live to see the day when women will have as much freedom in their conduct in every walk of life as men have. The idea that woman's life centres in motherhood and that all her instincts and desires are directed, consciously or unconsciously, to that end is buncombe. It would be just as legitimate to contend that all man's instincts and desires centre in fatherhood and that his frenzied passion to accumulate fortune, or his uncontrollable ambition to obtain fame, or his insatiate appetite for power, or his insuppressible feeling to externalize his thoughts in music, in art, in poetry, in invention, were all secondary characteristics. The reproductive faculty of woman is incidental to her existence. If any one desires to claim it was the purpose of God in creating her, I shall not deny it, but as a student of human nature, and as a physician whose life has been spent with women—most of them, fortunately for me, honest and intelligent—I maintain that civilized, cultivated, thinking women do not find that motherhood satisfies their demands, their yearnings, their aspirations—in brief, their personal development. The creative will has other yearnings; not so imperative always in their demands for satisfaction, but nevertheless insistent on being satisfied if the possessor is to be spiritually content.
There are other reasons for the decline in the birthrate of the educated and civilized people of every country than the fact that motherhood does not completely satisfy the physical and mental demands of women—financial reasons, social reasons, and reasons that partake of both of them, yet not entirely of them, such as the occupation of women and the celibacy which comes of enforcement or from choice. These must be taken into consideration in our social renaissance when we shall erect our ideals of justice and liberty. The time will never come again when woman shall be man's willing or unwilling slave. The time has gone by when society shall require that the wife be faithful while the husband is faithless. Never again will the saintly, self-sacrificing woman who never questions her husband's authority but who yields supinely to his will be our ideal.
Woman may not be so strong as man. She may not be so truthful. She may be more impressionable to sinister influences. She may be less capable of erecting ideals and conforming her conduct to them. She may be less steadfast in the pursuit of any plan of life, or less capable of adhering to the ideal canons of conduct. She may or may not have any or all of the sins of omission or commission of which she is accused by man, but she is a human being made in God's image, of whom He may be more proud than He is of man. She has been rocked in the cradle of liberty and of freedom for the past five years, and to such purpose that at the present moment she is not only able to walk but to stride. In the future it will require the best effort of man to outdistance her, even though he has the benefit of ages of experience and the advantage of a start of forty thousand years.
We shall soon see whether Socrates was right when he said: "Woman once made equal to man becometh his superior."