The Western mining camp is not primarily an educational institution, yet it has served a most important function in the making of Americans. The young man is fortunate who on leaving college can take a post-graduate course in a community where he can study sociology at first hand. He will learn many things, especially that human nature is not so simple as it seems, but that it has many “dips, spurs, and angles.”
A SAINT RECANONIZED
ALL the world loves a lover,” but all the world does not love a saint. Our hearts do not leap up when we behold a halo on the title-page, and so the lives of the heroes of the Church are frequently neglected. When the saint has been duly canonized, that is generally the end of him in popular esteem. But sometimes the ecclesiastical and secular judgments coincide and the saint is invested with human interest.
So it has been with St. Francis of Assisi,—given the highest honors in his church, he has captivated the imagination of the world. Protestants vie with Catholics in doing him honor. At no time has his name been more familiar or his legend more often repeated than in our own day. He has been recanonized.
This renewal of interest in the Franciscan legend is all the more interesting because it carries us into a region so remote from that in which we habitually dwell.
“Now it came to pass that as Francis, the servant of the Lord, was singing the praises of the Lord with joy and gladness, certain robbers fell upon him and fiercely questioned him who he was. And he answered, ‘I am the herald of the King of Heaven.’ And the robbers fell upon him with blows and cast him into a ditch, saying, ‘Lie there, thou herald of nothing!’ When they had departed Francis arose and went through the forest, singing with a loud voice the praises of the Creator.”
These words take us into another world than ours. To enter that world we must not only lay aside our easily besetting sins, but our easily besetting virtues as well. We must cast aside all the prudential virtues, we must rid our minds of all prejudice in favor of scientific charity and rationalistic schemes of philanthropy, and we must disclaim personal responsibility for the progress of modern civilization. With such impedimenta the pilgrim of thought might possibly get as far back as the sixteenth century, but it would be impossible for him to penetrate into the thirteenth. He who would do so must first drink deep of Lethe. He must put out of mind those persons and events which have been the distinctive influences of the modern world. He must forget Luther, and wash his soul clean of every trace of Calvin; every echo of the raillery of Voltaire must have died away, and his mind must have been kept unspotted from the world of Newton and of Darwin.
Above all, if he would enter into the social dreams of the thirteenth century, he must forget that he ever heard of such a science as political economy. He must renounce the old Adam and all his works,—I mean Adam Smith.
But on the other side of Lethe there are pure fountains, and dark forests where robbers lurk, and where saints are singing the high praises of God, and beyond are the “regions dim of rapture” where they are lost from the eyes of their disciples.