Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation

by Will Levington Comfort

"When we move in——" one of the children began.

I shivered.... But of one thing I was certain. If the lumberman didn't move in, we would....

A certain Order came out of it all. A man should build something beside his house, while he is at it. That something should enable him to build another (if he ever had to do it again) without raising his voice; without losing his faith in men; without binding himself to the place or the structure by any cords that would hurt more than a day or two if they were cut.... The house is a home. It wasn't the lumberman who moved in. The rooms are warm with firelight at this moment ... and yet with my back still turned upon it and the grinding and rending of chaos ended, I arise to remark with calmness and cheer that I would rent for indefinite generations rather than build again.

There is the order of the small man—a baneful thing in its way, sometimes a terrible and tragic thing. The narrow-templed Order which has destroyed our forests to make places for rows of sugar-beets. Then there is the order of Commerce which in multiplying and handling duplicates of manufacture, has found Order an economical necessity. Let that be confined to its own word, Efficiency.

The true individual rebels against the narrow-templed Order, rushes to the other extreme; and we observe a laughable phenomenon—the eccentricities of genius. In truth these eccentricities merely betoken the chaos of the larger calibre. Order in the case of the genius is a superb result, because of the broader surfaces brought under cultivation. "The growth of the human spirit is from simplicity to complication, and up to simplicity again, each circle in a nobler dimension of progress. There is the simplicity of the peasant and the simplicity of the seer. Between these two lie all the confusion and alarm of life, a passage of disorder, well designated Self-consciousness."[2]

Cleanliness of the body is said to be one of the first rules for the following of a certain religious plan of life. This is not the case exactly; rather one of the first things that occur to a man on the road to sanctity is that he must keep his body clean; second, that he must keep his mind clean; third, that he must begin to put his spiritual house in order. This is a basic principle of occultism. We must prove faithful in the small things, first.

I rode over to a little cottage occupied by two young men who came here in the interests of writing careers. They had talent, soul, brain, balance, the unmistakable ignitions of the New Age. In a word, they were large-calibred men, whose business in life was to put in order a fine instrument for expression. Their cottage was not orderly. They did not seem to mind; in fact, they appeared to disdain such trifles. They were at the age when men may eat or drink anything and at all times without apparently disturbing the centres of energy. They were, in fact, doing large quantities of work every day—for boys. Yet daily in their work, I was finding the same litter and looseness of which their cottage was but an unmistakable suggestion. In fact, the place was a picture of their minds.... We are each given a certain area of possibility. Not one in a million human beings even roughly makes the most of it. The organisation of force and the will to use it must be accomplished in childhood and youth. This driving force is spiritual.

In this sense, all education is religion. Work is that, as well. It is man's interpretation, not the fault of the religion, that has set apart six days to toil in the earth and one day to worship God. A man worships God best in his work. His work suffers if he misses worship one day in seven, to say nothing of six. I do not mean piety. A feeling of devoutness does not cover at all the sense I mean. A man's spirituality, as I would reckon it, has to do with the power he can bring into the world of matter from the great universe of spiritual force which is God, or the emanation of God, as all the great religions reverently agree.

I do not mean to bring cults or creeds or hymns or affirmations into the schools. This driving force which all the great workmen know and bow before, is above and beyond man-uttered interpretations, above all separateness, even above anything like a complete expression in matter as yet. One day the workman realises that he has fashioned something greater than himself—that he has said or sung or written or painted something that he did not know he knew, and that his few years of training in the world did not bring to him. He turns within to do it again.... I would have the children begin at once to turn within. In awe and humility, I beg you to believe that as a vast human family, we have but wet our ankles in an infinite ocean of potentiality designed for our use; that by giving ourselves to it we become at once significant and inimitable; that its expression through us cannot be exactly reproduced by any other instrument; and that if we fail to become instruments of it, the final harmony must lack our part, which no other can play.

That which we see by means of an optic nerve is but the stone, but the pit, of any object, a detached thing, which can be held in mind after the eye turns away, only by a sensible retaining of memory, as an object is held in the hand. There is a higher vision—and the word imagination expresses it almost as well as any other—by which the thing can be seen, not as a detached object, but in its relation to the whole.