So Christianity has become the most forbidding word in the language. Judging it by its present fruits—by a decadent church and by sweaty Y.M.C.A. gymnasiums—we have pronounced it to be woefully lacking. We have not seen that these are in reality not fruits at all, but abortions, that although the church in its present form has outlived its usefulness, the spirit which exists in each one of us is as dominating now as it ever was, if only we will open our hearts to it. We have never stopped to think these questions through to their conclusion. We take untruths and half-truths for granted, and allow misconceptions to pass current without ever a sincere effort to get at the eternal strength of things.
And so we hear men talk of humility, and we laugh at them. We wish to assert ourselves, to express our own individuality, and being humble seems to convey the very opposite. We look upon it as something synonymous with servility, as a state of grovelling self-abasement in which a man must sacrifice both his personality and his self-respect.
We hear men talk of brotherly love and it seems to us a farce. How could anybody pretend to care for everyone equally, to put his closest friend and the man in the street in the same class? What could be more unnatural, more hypocritical?
And again we hear men talk of self-surrender and we hate them for it. Why should I surrender myself? I am I. I possess my ideas and ideals, and these are enough. Why should I not strive to realize them without any external aid, any “something not myself”?
Thus we argue and thus we feel because we are repelled by words whose meaning we do not really understand. Our minds have never pried deeply enough to find the Truth that humility is nothing mean, nothing subservient, but rather the natural consciousness of reverence before everything beautiful and sacred in the universe. We have thought the ideal of brotherly love to be futile because we have looked upon it only superficially. We have not realized that instead of a mere question of surface like or dislike, it involves a tremendous tolerance and sympathy with all of mankind, and that although difficult, if not impossible, to attain in its fulness, it certainly is the antithesis of hypocritical. We have loathed the very sound of self-surrender because we have taken the word in its cold and literal sense, and have not understood that instead of sacrificing any trace of individuality in giving ourselves up to the spiritual and the ideal, we find instead a new fulness and depth to life. For self-surrender is actually a self-realization more compelling than our brightest dreams.
F. O. MATTHIESSEN.
Poems
I.
Sometimes you are younger than the dawn;