It is the personality of Christ, what He represents as a man, the idea He gives of what God should be, what He has made of Christianity and the energy He has put into it, the universality of His doctrine and of His appeal and the beautiful story of His life which make Dr. Crane a Christian. He does not ask Christ to help him, to succour him, to save him and to give him happiness; he asks Him to give him enough force to help himself, enough energy to resist falls and enough strength to fight for his own happiness; he does not follow or wish to follow Christ and imitate Him, but he wishes Christ to show him how to get along on his way in the manner which is most pleasing to Him and of which He would approve.
Dr. Crane has made a note of most of the standardised beliefs of the world, of their ideals and fears. He labels them “delusions” and proceeds to smash them in their very foundation. That human nature is evil is a delusion of which reflection has purged him. Punishment and reward are delusions; goodness to be real must be positive; the fact that a man never lies, cheats nor hurts any one, never deceives his wife in thought or act, never does any of the things he should not do, is no proof that he has any goodness in him. The belief that competition is necessary to progress, which has been proved time after time, amounts to naught in Dr. Crane’s estimation; there is no superior class and the idle members of the community, those who have no need of working for a living, have been accursed by God. Dr. Crane thinks also that it is a delusion to believe that happiness resides in riches or in high positions; he advocates looking for happiness every day, as we go along, instead of storing up treasures on earth or happiness for the morrow.
All this leads us to wonder how much of the “Confession” is Dr. Crane’s and how much has been gathered from the wisdom of centuries. Most of his arguments are old and familiar; he writes a long chapter, for instance, on the text of Abraham Lincoln: “God must have liked the common people, He made so many of them.”
Dr. Crane has been writing pontifically so many years that he has come to believe that whatever he says is true. It is true because he says it. There is no discussion or argument about it; he knows. He is a gushing fountain of knowledge and adjectives. He is an oracle whose truth is not to be tested, but accepted.
“To be good, according to Christ’s program, is to fight here; to take up one’s cross daily; to fear not; to love much; to hold on, and to put forth vigour in every way.” Had Dr. Crane added “and to get the money for doing it” it would be his own programme, admitting that writing four hundred words of twaddle daily is the equivalent of taking up one’s cross. To fight here, indeed! “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.”
His reasons for belonging to a church are naïve to the point of childishness. They are: because it is imperfect; because its purpose is to disseminate the most important idea in the world; because he likes it and likes the kind of people that belong; because it is the oldest, most imposing and most beautiful of all the institutions of humanity. “It is in the church that we must seek the origin of every great movement for human welfare.” I suppose it is universally admitted that the French Revolution and the English industrial revolution were the two great modern movements making for human welfare. My information is the church did not have much use for the encyclopedists, and if Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, Cartwright and Watt were of the church, history does not say anything about it. The church had nothing to do with Pasteur’s discovery, which was the origin of a movement for human welfare which has lengthened the span of life nearly twenty years.
Here and there throughout the book, like freckles on the face of Juno, are sprinkled gems of wisdom. “All the great literature of the past has been tragic”—Rabelais and Don Quixote, for instance. “The fundamental insanity believed by the majority of the world to-day to be the truth is that the work of the world is to be done by defectives who are not clever enough to escape from work.” How pleasant it must be to be so omniscient! Dr. Crane must admit that Lenine and Trotzky did not have that fundamental insanity. And how sane Mussolini is!
Mr. Dawson is a clergyman and the leaves on his tree of life are sere and yellow. When they were green they were smudged by the smokes of London and Glasgow where he pumped up emotion in Methodist Chapel and peddled rhetoric in Presbyterian Church, and thereby gained such fame as pulpit orator that he was called to Newark, N. J., where he ministered unto the needs of the parishioners of the Old First Church for twenty years or thereabouts. Now one of the dreams of his youth has come true; he is living in a simple house near a flowing stream, and the sound of its running water lulls him to sleep and its garrulous voice calls him at dawn. The other, that one day he would become a great writer, he knows will not materialise, but he continues to write because that which was nearly an agony for Flaubert and an exhausting labour for Anatole France is not only a joy but a necessity for Mr. Dawson. To him, it is nearly a fundamental urge. Early in life while he was attending to the spiritual needs of the Wesleyans in the small towns of Devon and Cornwall he wrote poetry by the ream to save himself from the soporific effect of the thick, stagnant atmosphere of dulness that enveloped him. Fate made him a preacher, but his secret aim was to make himself a writer. If authorship of forty books entitles one to such designation, Mr. Dawson is a writer. Another writer whose career closely parallels Mr. Dawson’s, save that Dr. Algernon S. Crapsey had the notoriety of a trial for heresy, recently wrote that he had never seen nor heard Mr. Dawson’s name until the publisher sent him The Autobiography of a Mind for review. That is the only experience that Dr. Crapsey and the writer have had in common so far as I know save that we both read the book through in one sleepless night. But it provoked neither tears nor laughter in me as it did in his colleague. It provoked in me a series of interrogations. Why did he call his book the Autobiography of a Mind? Why did he stay in the Church upward of half a century? How did he reconcile his practices and his preachings? Why did a man so beholden to the ideas of intellectuality not do anything concrete to realise them? Why has a man who has written so extensively and has lived so conspicuously in the public eye been unsung?
To answer these questions it is not sufficient to say it was because he lacked humility; because he did not love his fellow-man, because he had a superiority complex. Many men who have made a permanent impression upon their time bore with similar limitations and suffered similar infirmities; it must be that Mr. Dawson lacked the talent which his personality, conditioned by his conscious mind, proclaimed. Were his book a biography of the mind he would have analysed his failure to obtain the success as a man of letters which he believed his talent justified.