By the Christmas Fire

by Samuel McChord Crothers

One of the earliest satires on the character of the Doctrinaire is to be found in the Book of Jonah. Jonah was a prophet by profession. He received a call to preach in the city of Nineveh, which he accepted after some hesitation. He denounced civic corruption and declared that in forty days the city would be destroyed. Having performed this professional duty, Jonah felt that there was nothing left for him but to await with pious resignation the fulfillment of his prophecy. But in this case the unexpected happened, the city repented and was saved. This was gall and wormwood to Jonah. His orderly mind was offended by the disarrangement of his schedule. What was the use of being a prophet if things did not turn out as he said? So we are told "it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry," Still he clung to the hope that, in the end, things might turn out badly enough to justify his public utterances. "Then Jonah went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city."

Poor grumpy old Jonah! Have we not sat under his preaching, and read his editorials, and pondered his books, full of solemn warnings of what will happen to us if we do not mend our ways? We have been deeply impressed, and in a great many respects we have mended our ways, and things have begun to go better. But Jonah takes no heed of our repentance. He is only thinking of those prophecies of his. Just in proportion as things begin to look up morally, he gets low in his mind and begins to despair of the Republic.

The trouble with Jonah is that he can see but one thing at a time, and see that only in one way. He cannot be made to appreciate the fact that "the world is full of a number of things," and that some of them are not half bad. When he sees a dangerous tendency he thinks that it will necessarily go on to its logical conclusion. He forgets that there is such a thing as the logic of events, which is different from the logical processes of a person who sits outside and prognosticates. There is one tendency which all tendencies have in common, that is, to develop counter tendencies.

There is, for example, a tendency on the part of the gypsy-moth caterpillar to destroy utterly the forests of the United States. But were I addressing a thoughtful company of these caterpillars I should urge them to look upon their own future with modest self-distrust. However well their programme looks upon paper, it cannot be carried out without opposition. Long before the last tree has been vanquished, the last of the gypsy moths may be fighting for its life against the enemies it has made.

The Doctrinaire is very quick at generalizing. This is greatly to his credit. One of the powers of the human mind on which we set great store is that of entertaining general ideas. This is where we think we have the advantage of the members of the brute creation. They have particular experiences which at the time are very exciting to them, but they have no abstract notions,—or, at least, no way of expressing them to us. We argue that if they really had these ideas they would have invented language long ago, and by this time would have had Unabridged Dictionaries of their own. But we humans do not have to be content with this hand-to-mouth way of thinking and feeling. When we see a hundred things that strike us as being more or less alike, we squeeze them together into one mental package, and give a single name to the whole lot. This is a great convenience and enables us to do our thinking on a large scale. By organizing our various impressions into a union, and inducing them to work together, we are enabled to do collective bargaining with the Universe.

If, for example, I were asked to tell what I think of the individuals inhabiting the United States, I should have to give it up. Assuming a round eighty million persons, all of whom it would be a pleasure to meet, there must be, at the lowest computation, seventy-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, three hundred and seventy-five people of whose characters I do not know enough to make my opinion of any value. Of the remaining fragment of the population, my knowledge is not so perfect as I would wish. As for the whole eighty million, suppose I had to give a single thought to each person, I have not enough cogitations to go around.

What we do is to stop the ruinous struggle of competing thoughts by recognizing a community of interests and forming a merger, under the collective term "American." Then all difficulties are minimized. Almost all our theorizing about human affairs is carried on by means of these symbols. Millions of different personalities are merged in one mental picture. We talk of a class even more readily than we talk of an individual.

This is all very well so long as we do not take these generalizations too seriously. The mistake of the Doctrinaire lies not in classifying people, but in treating an individual as if he could belong to only one class at a time. The fact is that each one of us belongs to a thousand classes. There are a great many ways of classifying human beings, and as in the case of the construction of tribal lays, "every single one of them is right," as far as it goes. You may classify people according to race, color, previous condition of servitude, height, weight, shape of their skulls, amount of their incomes, or their ability to write Latin verse. You may inquire whether they belong to the class that goes to church on Sunday, whether they are vaccinationists or anti-vaccinationists, whether they like problem plays, whether they are able to read a short passage from the Constitution of the United States, whether they have dyspepsia or nervous prostration or only think they have; or, if you will, you may make one sweeping division between the sheep and the goats, and divide mankind according to location, as did the good Boston lady who was accustomed to speak of those who lived out of sight of the Massachusetts State House as "New Yorkers and that kind of people."

Such divisions do no harm so long as you make enough of them. Those who are classed with the goats on one test question will turn up among the sheep when you change the subject. Your neighbor is a wild radical in theology, and you look upon him as a dangerous character. Try him on the tariff, and you find him conservative to a fault.

I have listened, of a Monday morning, to an essay in a ministers' meeting on the problem of the "Unchurched." The picture presented to the imagination was a painful one. In the discussion that followed, the class of the Unchurched was not clearly differentiated from the other unfortunate class of the Unwashed. In the evening I attended a lecture by a learned professor who, as I happened to know, was not as regular in church attendance as he should be. As I listened to him I said to myself, "Who would have suspected that he is one of the Unchurched?"