In the pursuit of wealth, men have aggregated themselves into towns and cities, whose area is measured by square miles, and their population by hundreds of thousands or millions; the mind meanwhile, instead of increasing in proportion to the demands thus made upon it, has rather diminished in power. Added to this, each man finds his own private affairs in the same state. The social barrier of birth is either gone or fast departing, and each man recognizes wealth as the only way to power; but the concentrated attention of men and nations in this direction has so complicated its pursuit that he must give his whole mind and heart to this alone, if he would hope to succeed in it, or even comprehend it. While these two worlds, the objective and the thinking subjective, have thus grown so enormously out of proportion, the world has found a remedy again in division of labor. The different relations, which are the unalienable obligations of every man, have been parcelled out among all, and each takes but one as his vocation, leaving all the rest to the vicarious performance of others. Politicians care for the state, teachers for the children, charitable societies for each man's neighbor, and preachers fulfil his duty to God.
The first mistake in the world's action is this. In this partition, thoughts and actions have become separated, the world is filled and the individual confounded by new religions, methods of education, theories of government, propounded by those par excellence called the thinking men, while the men who work have no time for thought. Wisdom is theory proved by experience, but here, alas! the reasoning man and the practical man are separated, so that we are farther than ever from the living truth.
Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore,
And the individual withers, and the world is more and more.'
Behind this first mistake, that one man can do the thinking for another, the great error in the world's reasoning on this subject is this, that one man can perform another's duties at all. The duty is his, the responsibility is his, and none can perform the one or assume the other. Granting that he may supply the thought or mechanical; the dynamical, the love and soul power which would make that logic effectual, can come only from each individual himself.
The duty which each man owes to his children is education and training. Schools and teachers may supply schemes of education, improved methods of study, and instil some facts or even ideas into the mind; but that which vivifies the intellect and brings out every power in its fullest development is the motive of love; and it was meant that the filial affection of the child toward its parent should be the life of its opening mind. The mere logic of religion, Sunday schools and teachers, may supply one day out of seven; but to animate that logic and make it a practical thing, a faith instead of a belief, it must be made concrete and living in the loving life of home. In this case no one does the duty or assumes the responsibility of the parent.
Our duty to our fellow men is not charity as we use the word—a bill dropped into the contribution box, or a subscription to a charitable society; but χἁρις in the old meaning of love and help. Poverty springs from two causes—improvidence, a lack of the savoir-faire in the affairs of life, or overwhelming circumstances, which have broken the spirit of the man and made him sit down discouraged and despairing. In either case, money is no remedy. If the man be improvident, it only helps the evil for a moment, and the want soon returns: what the man needs is instruction and care from those better versed in the art of living. And in the second case, to give money is no avail, but rather an evil; for instead of thus recognizing his degradation, the man needs encouragement, the enthusiasm of a strong and successful heart, giving life and light to him who thus sits in darkness. This demands the time and careful thought of every man, or the duty is left undone. Charitable institutions are well enough: the only error is in supposing that they can assume the responsibility of the individual. 'This ye ought to have done, and not to have left the other undone.'
Our country cannot be left to politicians, for its first great demand is the careful thought of every man in the direction of its affairs; and this, no single man or class of men can supply. The action of Government should be conditioned by the needs of the people, and these can be known only by the people themselves. It is for every man, therefore, to keep an earnest and heedful eye to his own needs and the wants of those about him, if the vox populi would be vox Dei, the utterance of God's truth; otherwise the opinion of the people will be the voice of demagogues, which is as far as possible from the voice of God. Another need is that of continual watchfulness, lest the country be defrauded, or its rulers become corrupt. No class of men can be appointed as watchmen, lest they also go in the same way: but it is the unalienable duty of the whole people. When the emergency of defence arises, no man can really perform his duty by the payment of money or the providing of a substitute; for that which makes a country strong is not armies or cannon, but life. The Moors held Grenada, in the midst of Spain, for years, the Swiss have remained amid the storms of Europe for centuries, a Rome of huts went out to conquer the world, while a Rome of palaces is doomed to invasion and death. Every nation has money enough, if it have only patriotism and its attendant courage. Even if war has become mechanical and men fight at a distance, so that the courage of a hand to hand conflict is of no avail, it finally comes to the same result; a nation needs not cannon or armies, but men whose hands are strong and whose minds are quick because of the love in their hearts. No man performs his duty unless he sends a substitute of equal bravery and patriotism to that which he should himself possess, and then he must do the substitute's duty by going in his place. Politicians and hired soldiery can neither govern nor protect a country; it needs the people themselves as individuals.
In religion, no man pretends to say that a class of men can perform the duty which each man owes to God, and the person who should say such a thing would be considered in jest or partially deranged. Yet it is so tacitly held, and practically believed. As the man sits in his cushioned seat on the Lord's day, and looks up at the stately edifice which he has helped to build, and hears the eloquent words of the preacher whom he in part pays, he has a comfortable feeling that his work is done. To be sure, no man can love God without knowing Him, and none can know Him well without a careful and intelligent study of His works in creation and revelation; but the man himself has no time for this, he has something else to do, and if he but hire another to dig out these truths, and present them to him, as it were ready made, of a Sunday, he considers that it is enough. The preacher performs the thinking and the architect the acting of man's duty to God. So the world goes on; religion is merely logical, mechanical, a kind of 'greatest amount of happiness' affair, a lubricant to make the wheels of society move on smoothly, instead of being from the soul, dynamical, giving love and life to the world.
This mechanical tendency has also an element which makes it worse than any corresponding state in former times, for these at least contained a faith which was positive, while ours is utterly negative; theirs sprang from want of mental power, ours from want of time. When in times past a people felt the power of thought going from them, and became conscious of their inability to solve the great riddle of life which was perplexing them, they chose the best remedy for what was irremediable, and turned to wiser men than they for direction and help. From thence sprang faith, reverence, hero worship, which stands next in rank to independent thought. But we, having no time to attend to these things, have yet no faith in those to whom they are entrusted, and no hope of their successful issue; we but shrug our shoulders at the thought, say, 'I cannot attend to it,' and let it go. So laisser aller is the cry of the age, a dead negation of thought and volition.
By proving the existence of the causes that produce it, we have shown the presence of a mechanical tendency in our social state; the same thing may be done in another way, by proving the existence of effects that flow from it. The truest index of a people's condition is found in the meaning which they attach to certain, words. A history of the word virtus, manhood, is a history of the social condition of the Roman people. If, then, we find that the conceptions which we attach to such words as God, man, and society are mechanical, then society must have such a tendency, for these words lie at the foundation of all government, all social movements, and all individual actions.