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196 angry with me, and I hope you won't feel me simply 'aggravating' if I say that, thinking everything over, I've done my best to allow for that. But I can answer your question if I do answer it by saying that my discovery of your possible sacrifice of one of our most beautiful things didn't predispose me to decide in favour of a person—however 'backed' by you—for whose benefit the sacrifice was to take place. Frankly," the girl pushed on, "I did quite hate, for the moment, everything that might make for such a mistake; and took the darkest view, let me also confess, of every one, without exception, connected with it. I interceded with you, earnestly, for our precious picture, and you wouldn't on any terms have my intercession. On top of that Lord John blundered in, without timeliness or tact—and I'm afraid that, as I hadn't been the least in love with him even before, he did have to take the consequence."

Lord Theign, with an elated swing of his person, greeted this as all he could possibly want. "You recognise then that your reception of him was purely vindictive!—the meaning of which is that unless my conduct of my private


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Rh interests, of which you know nothing whatever, happens to square with your superior wisdom you'll put me under boycott all round! While you chatter about mistakes and blunders, and about our charming friend's lack of the discretion of which you yourself set so grand an example, what account have you to offer of the scene you made me there before that fellow—your confederate, as he had all the air of being!—by giving it me with such effrontery that, if I had eminently done with him after his remarkable display, you at least were but the more determined to see him keep it up?"

The girl's justification, clearly, was very present to her, and not less obviously the truth that to make it strong she must, avoiding every side-issue, keep it very simple. "The only account I can give you, I think, is that I could but speak at such a moment as I felt, and that I felt—well, how can I say how deeply? If you can really bear to know, I feel so still, I care in fact more than ever that we shouldn't do such things. I care, if you like, to indiscretion—I care, if you like, to offence, to arrogance, to folly. But even as my last word to you before you leave England

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198 on the conclusion of such a step, I'm ready to cry out to you that you oughtn't, you oughtn't, you oughtn't!"

Her father, with wonder-moved, elevated brows and high commanding hand, checked her as in an act really of violence—save that, like an inflamed young priestess, she had already, in essence, delivered her message. "Hallo, hallo, hallo, my distracted daughter—no 'crying out,' if you please!" After which, while arrested but unabashed, she still kept her lighted eyes on him, he gave back her conscious stare for a minute, inwardly and rapidly turning things over, making connections, taking, as after some long and lamentable lapse of observation, a new strange measure of her: all to the upshot of his then speaking with a difference of tone, a recognition of still more of the odious than he had supposed, so that the case might really call for some coolness. "You keep bad company, Grace—it plays the devil with your sense of proportion. If you make this row when I sell a picture, what will be left to you when I forge a cheque?"

"If you had arrived at the necessity of


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 lates of Speculative Thought. Indispensable, for instance, to the healthful energy of the religious life is an unsophisticated confidence in what is termed the omnipresence and omniscience of God, the Father of spirits; but on this ground, where the Hebrew writers are clear, peremptory, unfaltering, and unconscious of perplexity. Speculative Thought stumbles at its first attempts to advance; and as to that faculty by aid of which we realize, in some degree, an abstract principle, and bring it within range of the imagination, it is here utterly baffled. The belief in this doctrine is simple;—we may say it is natural:—but as to an intellectual realization of it, this is impossible; and as to a philosophic expression of such a belief in words, the most acutely analytic minds have lost their way in utter darkness; or they have landed themselves in Pantheism; or they have beguiled themselves and their disciples with a compage of words without meaning. The power of the human mind to admit simultaneously a consciousness of more than one object is so limited, or it is so soon quite exhausted, that a doctrine which we grant to be incontestably certain, refuses more perhaps than any other, to submit itself to the conditions of human thought:—it is never mastered. Aware, as every one who thinks must be, of this insurmountable difficulty, we ought not to except against that mode of overleaping the obstruction which the Hebrew writers offer to our acceptance:—figurative in phrase, and categorical


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Rh forging a cheque," she answered, "I should then resign myself to that of your selling a picture."

"But not short of that!"

"Not short of that. Not one of ours."

"But I couldn't," said his lordship with his best and coldest amusement, "sell one of somebody else's!"

She was, however, not disconcerted. "Other people do other things—they appear to have done them, and to be doing them, all about us. But we have been so decently different—always and ever. We've never done anything disloyal."

"'Disloyal'?"—he was more largely amazed and even interested now.

Lady Grace stuck to her word. "That's what it seems to me!"

"It seems to you"—and his sarcasm here was easy—"more disloyal to sell a picture than to buy one? Because we didn't paint 'em all ourselves, you know!"

She threw up impatient hands. "I don't ask you either to paint or to buy!"

"Oh, that's a mercy!" he interrupted, riding his irony hard; "and I'm glad to hear you at


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 in style, they affirm that —"The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good;" or thus again—"Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising; Thou understandest my thought afar off."

The longer we labour, in scientific modes, at the elements of Theism the deeper shall we plunge in an abyss; and we shall learn, perhaps too late, the wisdom of resting in a devout acknowledgment to this effect—"Such knowledge (of God) is too wonderful for me: it is high, I cannot attain unto it." But the Hebrew writers make short work of philosophic stumbling-blocks; and they secure their religious intention, which is their sole intention, in that one mode in which a belief which is indispensable to the religious life presents itself, on what might be called its conceivable side. They affirm the truth in the most absolute and unexceptive style, giving it all the breadth it can have; but in doing so, and in the same breath, they affirm that which serves to lodge it in the spiritual consciousness, as a caution, or as a comfort; they lodge the universal principle as near as may be to the fears, and to the hopes, and to the devout yearnings of the individual man. If we do not relish this style and this method, we should think ourselves bound to bring forward a better style, and to propound a more approvable method. At any rate, we should give a sample of some one style or method other than this, and between which and the Biblical manner we might make a choice.


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 Rh a sense of purpose, such a feeling of doing something.”

“It must,” I answered.

“Oh, goodness,” she exclaimed, “there’s the lunch bell. I must skip and get ready.”

She was just vanishing from my side when the Burly Male Student, who was also staying in the hotel, came puffing up after his five-mile run. He was getting himself into trim for enlistment, so he told me. He noted the retreating form of the college girl as he sat down.

“I’ve just been talking to her,” I said, “about her college work. She seems to be studying a queer lot of stuff—Social Endeavour and all that!”

“Awful piffle,” said the young man. “But the girls naturally run to all that sort of rot, you know.”

“Now, your work,” I went on, “is no doubt very different. I mean what you were taking before the war came along. I suppose you fellows have an awful dose of mathematics and philology and so on just as I did in my college days?”

Something like a blush came across the face of the handsome youth.

“Well, no,” he said, “I didn’t co-opt mathematics. At our college, you know, we co-opt two majors and two minors.”

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 Rh “I see,” I said, “and what were you co-opting?”

“I co-opted Turkish, Music, and Religion,” he answered.

“Oh, yes,” I said with a sort of reverential respect, “fitting yourself for a position of choir-master in a Turkish cathedral, no doubt.”

“No, no,” he said, “I’m going into insurance; but, you see, those subjects fitted in better than anything else.”

“Fitted in?”

“Yes. Turkish comes at nine, music at ten and religion at eleven. So they make a good combination; they leave a man free to”

“To develop his mind,” I said. “We used to find in my college days that lectures interfered with it badly. But now, Turkish, that must be an interesting language, eh?”

“Search me!” said the student. “All you have to do is answer the roll and go out. Forty roll-calls give you one Turkish unit—but, say, I must get on, I’ve got to change. So long.”

I could not help reflecting, as the young man left me, on the great changes that have come over our college education. It was a relief to me later in the day to talk with a quiet, sombre man, himself a graduate student in philosophy, on this topic. He agreed with me L

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 Rh that the old strenuous studies seem to be very largely abandoned.

I looked at the sombre man with respect.

“Now your work,” I said, “is very different from what these young people are doing—hard, solid, definite effort. What a relief it must be to you to get a brief vacation up here. I couldn’t help thinking to-day, as I watched you moving round doing nothing, how fine it must feel for you to come up here after your hard work and put in a month of out-and-out loafing.”

“Loafing!” he said indignantly. “I’m not loafing. I’m putting in a half summer course in Introspection. That’s why I’m here. I get credit for two majors for my time here.”

“Ah,” I said, as gently as I could, “you get credit here.”

He left me. I am still pondering over our new education. Meantime I think I shall enter my little boy’s name on the books of Tuskegee College where the education is still old-fashioned.

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text: Public Law 108-293/Title 6

title: Public Law 108-293/Title 6


text:
The Invention of a New Religion

Voltaire and the other eighteenth-century philosophers, who held religions to be the invention of priests, have been scorned as superficial by later investigators. But was there not something in their views, after all? Have not we, of a later and more critical day, got into so inveterate a habit of digging deep that we sometimes fail to see what lies before our very noses? Modern Japan is there to furnish an example. The Japanese are, is is true, commonly said to be an irreligious people. They say so themselves. Writes one of them, the celebrated Fukuzawa, teacher and type of the modern educated Japanese man: “I lack a religious nature, and have never believed in any religion.” A score of like pronouncements might be quoted from other leading men. The average, even educated, European strikes the average educated Japanese as strangely superstitious, unaccountably occupied with supra-mundane matters. The Japanese simply cannot be brought to comprehend how a “mere person” such as the Pope, or even the Archbishop of Canterbury, occupies the place he does in politics and society. Yet this same agnostic Japan is teaching us at this very hour how religions are sometimes manufactured for a special end—to subserve practical worldly purposes.

Mikado-worship and Japan-worship—for that is the new Japanese religion—is, of course, no spontaneously generated phenomenon. Every manufacture presupposes a material out of which it is made, every present a past on which it rests. But the twentieth-century Japanese religion of loyalty and patriotism is quite new, for in it pre-existing ideas have been sifted, altered, freshly compounded, turned to new uses, and have found a new centre of gravity. Not only is it new, it is not yet completed; it is still in process of being consciously or semi-consciously put together by the official class, in order to serve the interests of that class, and, incidentally, the interests of the nation at large. The Japanese bureaucracy is a body greatly to be admired. It includes most of the foremost men of the nation. Like the priesthood in later Judæa, to some extent like the Egyptian and Indian priesthoods, it not only governs, but aspires to lead in intellectual matters. It has before it a complex task. On the one hand, it must make good to the outer world the new claim that Japan differs in no essential way from the nations of the West, unless, indeed, it be by way of superiority. On the other hand, it has to manage restive steeds at home, where ancestral ideas and habits clash with new dangers arising from an alien material civilisation hastily absorbed.

Down to the year 1888, the line of cleavage between governors and governed was obscured by the joyful ardour with which all classes alike devoted themselves to the acquisition of European, not to say American, ideas. Everything foreign was then hailed as perfect—everything old and national was contemned. Sentiment grew democratic, in so far (perhaps it was not very far) as American democratic ideals were understood. Love of country seemed likely to yield to a humble bowing down before foreign models. Officialdom not unnaturally took fright at this abdication of national individualism. Evidently something must be done to turn the tide. Accordingly, patriotic sentiment was appealed to through the throne, whose hoary antiquity had ever been a source of pride to Japanese literati, who loved to dwell on the contrast between Japan’s unique line of absolute monarchs and the short-lived dynasties of China. Shinto, a primitive nature cult, which had fallen into discredit, was taken out of its cupboard and dusted. The common people, it is true, continued to place their affections on Buddhism, the popular festivals were Buddhist, Buddhist also the temples where they buried their dead. The governing class determined to change all this. They insisted on the Shinto doctrine that the Mikado descends in direct succession from the native Goddess of the Sun, and that He himself is a living God on earth who justly claims the absolute fealty of his subjects. Such things as laws and constitutions are but free gifts on His part, not in any sense popular rights. Of course, the ministers and officials, high and low, who carry on His government, are to be regarded not as public servants, but rather as executants of supreme—one might say supernatural—authority. Shinto, because connected with the Imperial Family, is to be alone honoured. Therefore the important right of burial, never before possessed by it, was granted to its priests. Later on, the right of marriage was granted likewise—an entirely novel departure in a land where marriage had never been more than a civil contract. Thus the Shinto priesthood was encouraged to penetrate into the intimacy of family life, while in another direction it encroached on the field of ethics by borrowing bits here and there from Confucian and even from Christian sources. Under a régime of ostensible religious toleration, the attendance of officials at certain Shinto services was required, and the practice was established in all schools of bowing down several time yearly before the Emperor’s picture. Meanwhile Japanese politics had prospered; her warriors had gained great victories. Enormous was the prestige thus accruing to Imperialism and to the rejuvenated Shinto cult. All military successes were ascribed to the miraculous influence of the Emperor’s virtue, and to the virtues of His Imperial and divine ancestors—that is, of former Emperors and of Shinto deities. Imperial envoys were regularly sent after each great victory to carry the good tidings to the Sun Goddess at her great shrine of Ise. Not there alone, but at the other principal Shinto shrines throughout the land, the cannon captured from Chinese or Russian foes were officially installed, with a view to identifying Imperialism, Shinto, and national glory in the popular mind. The new legend is enforced wherever feasible—for instance, by means of a new set of festivals celebrating Imperial official events.

But the schools are the great strongholds of the new propaganda. History is so taught to the young as to focus everything upon Imperialism, and to diminish as far as possible the contrast between ancient and modern conditions. The same is true of the instruction given to army and navy recruits. Thus, though Shinto is put in the forefront, little stress is laid on its mythology, which would be apt to shock even the Japanese mind at the present day. To this extent, where a purpose useful to the ruling class is to be served, criticism is practised, though not avowedly. Far different is the case with so-called “historical facts,” such as the alleged foundation of the Monarchy in 660 and similar statements paralleled only for absurdity by what passed for history in mediæval Europe, when King Lear, Brute, King of Britain, etc., etc., were accepted as authentic personages. For the truth, known to all critical investigators, is that, instead of going back to a remote antiquity, the origins of Japanese history are recent as compared with that of European countries. The first glimmer of genuine Japanese history dates from the fifth century after Christ, and even the account of what happened in the sixth century must be received with caution. Japanese scholars know this as well as we do; it is one of the certain results of investigation. But the Japanese bureaucracy does not desire to have the light let in one this inconvenient circumstances. While granting a dispensation re the national mythology, properly so called, it exacts belief in every iota of the national historic legends. Woe to the native professor who strays from the path of orthodoxy. His wife and children (and in Japan every man, however young, has a wife and children) will starve. From the late Prince Ito’s grossly misleading Commentary on the Japanese Constitution down to school compendiums, the absurd dates are everywhere insisted upon. This despite the fact that the mythology and the so-called early history are recorded in the same works, and are characterized by like miraculous impossibilities; that the chronology is palpably fraudulent; that the speeches put into the mouths of ancient Mikados are centos culled from the Chinese classics; that their names are in some cases derived from Chinese sources; and that the earliest Japanese historical narratives, the earliest known social usages, and even the centralized Imperial form of government itself, are all stained through and through with a Chinese dye, so much so that it is no longer possible to determine what percentage of old native thought may still linger on in fragments here and there. In the face of all this, moral ideals, which were of common knowledge derived from the teaching of the Chinese sages, are now arbitrarily referred to the “Imperial Ancestors.” Such, in particular, are loyalty and filial piety—the two virtues on which, in the Far-Eastern world, all the others rest. It is, furthermore, officially taught that, from the earliest ages, perfect concord has always subsisted in Japan between beneficent sovereigns on the one hand, and a gratefully loyal people on the other. Never, it is alleged, has Japan been soiled by the disobedient and rebellious acts common in other countries; while at the same time the Japanese nation, sharing to some extent in the supernatural virtues of its rulers, has been distinguished by a high-minded chivalry called Bushido, unknown in inferior lands.

Such is the fabric of ideas which the official class is busy building up by every means in its power, including the punishment of those who presume to stickle for historical truth.

The sober fact is that no nation probably has ever treated its sovereigns more cavalierly than the Japanese have done, from the beginning of authentic history down to within the memory of living men. Emperors have been deposed, emperors have been assassinated; for centuries every succession to the throne was the signal for intrigues and sanguinary broils. Emperors have been exiled; some have been murdered in exile. From the remote island to which he had been relegated one managed to escape, hidden under a load of dried fish. In the fourteenth century, things came to such a pass that two rival Imperial lines defied each other for the space of fifty-eight years—the so-called Northern and Southern Courts; and it was the Northern Court, branded by later historians as usurping and illegitimate, that ultimately won the day, and handed on the imperial regalia to its successors. After that, as indeed before that, for long centuries the government was in the hands of Mayors of the Palace, who substituted one infant Sovereign for another, generally forcing each to abdicate as soon as he approached man’s estate. At one period, three Mayors of the Palace left the Descendant of the Sun in such distress that His Imperial Majesty and the Imperial Princes were obliged to gain livelihood by selling their autographs! Nor did any great party in the State protest against this condition of affairs. Even in the present reign—the most glorious in Japanese history—there have been two rebellions, during one of which a rival Emperor was set up in one part of the country, and a republic proclaimed in another.

As for Bushido, so modern a thing is it that neither Kaempfer, Siebold, Satow, nor Rein—all men knowing their Japan by heart—ever once allude to it in their voluminous writings. The cause of their silence is not far to seek: Bushido was unknown until a decade or two ago! The very word appears in no dictionary, native or foreign, before the year 1900. Chivalrous individuals of course existed in Japan, as in all countries at every period; but Bushido, as an institution or a code of rules, has never existed. The accounts given of it have been fabricated out of whole cloth, chiefly for foreign consumption. An analysis of mediæval Japanese history shows that the great feudal houses, so far from displaying an excessive idealism in the matter of fealty to one emperor, one lord, or one party, had evolved the eminently practical plan of letting their different members take different sides, so that the family as a whole might come out as winner in any event, and thus avoid the confiscation of its lands. Cases, no doubt, occurred of devotion to losing causes—for example, to Mikados in disgrace; but they were less common than in the more romantic West.

Thus, within the space of a short lifetime, the new Japanese religion of loyalty and patriotism has emerged into the light of day. The feats accomplished during the late war with Russia show that the simple ideal which it offers is capable of inspiring great deeds. From a certain point of view the nation may be congratulated on its new possession.

The new Japanese religion consists, in its present early stage, of worship of the sacrosanct Imperial Person and of His Divine Ancestors, of implicit obedience to Him as head of the army (a position, by the way, opposed to all former Japanese ideas, according to which the Court was essentially civilian); furthermore, of a corresponding belief that Japan is as far superior to the common ruck of nations as the Mikado is divinely superior to the common ruck of kings and emperors. Do not the early history-books record the fact that Japan was created first, while all other countries resulted merely from the drops that fell from the creator’s spear when he had finished his main work? And do not the later annals prove that true valour belongs to the Japanese knight alone, whereas foreign countries—China and Europe alike—are sunk in a degrading commercialism? For the inhabitants of the “Land of the Gods” to take any notice of such creatures by adopting a few of their trifling mechanical inventions is an act of gracious condescension.

To quote but one official utterance out of a hundred, Baron Oura, Minister of Agriculture and Commerce, writes thus in February last:—

“That the majesty of our Imperial House towers high above everything to be found in the world, and that it is as durable as heaven and earth, is too well known to need dwelling on here…. If it is considered that our country needs a religious faith, then, I say, let it be converted to a belief in the religion of patriotism and loyalty, the religion of Imperialism—in other words, to Emperor-worship.”

The Rev. Dr. Ebina, one of the leading lights of the Protestant pastorate in Japan, plunges more deeply still into this doctrine, according to which, as already noted, the whole Japanese nation is, in manner, apotheosised. Says he:—

“Though the encouragement of ancestor-worship cannot be regarded as part of the essential teaching of Christianity (!), it is not opposed to the notion that, when the Japanese Empire was founded, its early rulers were in communication with the Great Spirit that rules the universe. Christians, according to this theory, without doing violence to their creed, may acknowledge that the Japanese nation has a divine origins. It is only when we realise that the Imperial Ancestors were in close communion with God (or the Gods), that we understand how sacred is the country in which we live. [Dr. Ebina ends by recommending the Imperial Rescript on Education as a text for Christian sermons.]”

It needs no comment of ours to point out how thoroughly the nation must be saturated by the doctrines under discussion for such amazing utterances to be possible. If so-called Christians can think thus, the non-Christian majority must indeed be devout Emperor-worshippers and Japan-worshippers. Such the go-ahead portion of the nation undoubtedly is—the students, the army, the navy, the emigrants to Japan’s new foreign possessions, all the more ardent spirits. The peasantry, as before noted, occupy themselves little with new thoughts, clinging rather to the Buddhist beliefs of their forefathers. But nothing could be further removed from even their minds than the idea of offering any organised resistance to the propaganda going on around them.

As a matter of fact, the spread of the new ideas has been easy, because a large class derives power from their diffusion, while to oppose them is the business of no one in particular. Moreover, the disinterested love of truth for its own sake is rare; the patience to unearth it is rarer still, especially in the East. Patriotism, too, is a mighty engine working in the interests of credulity. How should men not believe in a system that produces such excellent practical results, a system which has united all the scattered elements of national feeling into one focus, and has thus created a powerful instrument for the attainment of national aims? Meanwhile a generation is growing up which does not so much as suspect that its cherished beliefs are inventions of yesterday.

The new religion, in its present stage, still lacks one important item—a sacred book. Certain indications show that this lacuna will be filled by the elevation of the more important Imperial Rescripts to that rank, accompanied doubtless by an authoritative commentary, as their style is too abstruse to be understood of the people. To these Imperial Rescripts some of the poems composed by his present Majesty may be added. In fact, a volume on the whole duty of Japanese man, with selected Imperial poems as texts, has already appeared.

For consider this peculiar circumstance: the position of European investigators vis-à-vis Japan differs entirely from the of Japanese vis-à-vis Europe. The Japanese possess every facility for studying and understanding Europe. Europeans are warded off by well-nigh insuperable obstacles from understanding Japan. Europe stands on a hill-top, in the sunlight, glittering afar. Her people court inspection. “Come and see how we live”—such was a typical invitation which the present writer recently received. A thousand English homes are open to any Japanese student or traveller who visits our shores. An alphabet of but six-and-twenty simple letters throws equally wide open to him a literature clearly revealing our thoughts, so that he who runs may read. Japan lies in the shadow, away on the rim of the world. Her houses are far more effectually closed to the stranger by their paper shutters than are ours by walls of brick or stone. What we call “society” does not exist there. Her people, though smiling and courteous, surrounded themselves by an atmosphere of reserve, centuries of despotic government having rendered them suspicious and reticent. True, when a foreigner of importance visits Japan—some British M.P., perhaps, whose name figures often in newspapers, or an American editor, or the president of a great American college—this personage is charmingly received. But he is never left free to form his own opinion of things, even were he capable of so doing. Circumstances spin an invisible web around him, his hosts being keenly intent on making him a speaking-trumpet for the proclamation of their own views.

Again, Japan’s non-Aryan speech, marvellously intricate, almost defies acquisition. Suppose this difficult vernacular mastered; the would-be student discovers that literary works, even newspapers and ordinary correspondence, are not composed in it, but in another dialect, partly antiquated, partly artificial, differing as widely from the colloquial speech as Latin does from Italian. Make a second hazardous supposition. Assume that the grammar and vocabulary of this second indispensable Japanese language have been learnt, in addition to the first. You are still but at the threshold of your task, Japanese thought having barricaded itself behind the fortress walls of an extraordinarily complicated system of writing, compared with which Egyptian hieroglyphics are child’s play. Yet next to nothing can be found out by a foreigner unless he have this, too, at his fingers’ ends. As a matter of fact, scarcely anyone acquires it.

The result of all this is that, whereas the Japanese know everything that it imports them to know about us, Europeans cannot know much about them, such information as they receive being always belated, necessarily meagre, and mostly adulterated to serve Japanese interests. International relations placed—and, we repeat it, inevitably placed—on this footing resemble a boxing match in which one of the contestants should have his hands tied. But the metaphor fails in an essential point, as metaphors are apt to do—the hand-tied man does not realise the disadvantage under which he labours. He thinks himself as free as his opponent.

Thus does it come about that the neo-Japanese myths concerning dates, and Emperors, and heroes, and astonishing national virtues already begin to find their way into popular English text-books, current literature, and even grave books of reference. The Japanese governing class has willed it so, and in such matters the Japanese governing class can enforce its will abroad as well as at home. The statement may sound paradoxical. Study the question carefully, and you will find that it is simply true.

What is happening in Japan to-day is evidently exceptional. Normal religious and political change does not proceed in that manner; it proceeds by imperceptible degrees. But exceptions to general rules occur from time to time in every field of activity. Are they really exceptions, using that terms in its current sense—to denote something arbitrary, and therefore unaccountable? Surely these so-called exceptions are but examples of rules of rarer application.

The classic instance of the invention of a new national religion is furnished by the Jews of the post-exilic period. The piecing together, then, of a brand-new system under an ancient name is now so well understood, and has produced consequneces of such world-wide importance, that the briefest reference to it may suffice. Works which every critic can now see to be relatively modern were ascribed to Moses, David, or Daniel; intricate laws and ordinances that had never been practised—could never be practised—were represented as ancient institutions; a whole new way of thinking and acting was set in motion on the assumption that it was old. Yet, so far as is known, no one in or out of Palestine ever saw through the illusion for over two thousand years. It was reserved for nineteenth-century scholars to draw aside the veil hiding the real facts of the case.

Modern times supply another instance, less important that the first, but remarkable enough. Rousseau came in the middle of the eighteenth century, and preached a doctrine that took the world by storm, and soon precipitated that world in ruins. How did he discover his gospel? He tells us quite naïvely:—

“All the rest of the day, buried in the forest, I sought, I found there the image of primitive ages, whose history I boldly traced. I made havoc of men’s petty lies; I dared to unveil and strip naked man’s true nature, to follow up the course of time and of the circumstances that have disfigured it, and, comparing man as men have made him with man as nature made him, to demonstrate that the so-called improvements [of civilisation] have been the source of all his woes, etc.”

In other words, he spun a pseudo-history from his own brain. What is stranger, he fanatically believed in this his pure invention, and, most extraordinary of all, persuaded other people to believe in it as fanatically. It was taken up as a religion, it inspired heroes, and enabled a barefoot rabble to beat the finest regular armies in the world. Even now, at a distance of a century and a half, its embers still glow.

Of course, it is not pretended that these various systems of thought were arbitrary inventions. No more were they so than the cloud palaces that we sometimes see swiftly form in the sky and as quickly dissolve. The germ of Rousseau’s ideas can be traced back to Fénelon and other seventeenth-century thinkers, weary of the pomp and periwigs around them. Rousseau himself did but fulfil the aspiration of a whole society for something simpler, juster, more true to nature, more logical. He gave exactly what was needed at that moment of history—what appeared self-evident; wherefore no one so much as thought of asking for detailed proofs. His deism, his statements concerning the “state of nature” and the “social contract,” etc., were at once recognised by the people of his day as eternal verities. What need for discussion or investigation?

The case of Judæa is obscure; but it would seem that something analogous must have happened there, when the continuity of national life had been snapped by the exile. A revolutionised and most unhappy present involved a changed attitude towards the past. Oral tradition and the scarps of written records that had survived the shipwreck of the kingdom fell, as it were, naturally into another order. The kaleidoscope having been turned, the pattern changed of itself. A few gifted individuals voiced the enthusiasm of a whole community, when they adopted literary methods which would now, in our comparatively stable days, be branded as fraudulent. They simply could not help themselves. The pressing need of constructing a national polity for the present on the only basis then possible—Yahwe worship—forced them into falsifying the past. The question was one of life and death for the Jewish nationality….

Europeans there are in Japan—Europeanised Japanese likewise—who feel outraged by the action of the Japanese bureaucracy in the matter of the new cult, with all the illiberal and obscurantist measures which it entails. That is natural. We modern Westerners love individual liberty, and the educated among us love to let the sunlight of criticism into every nook and cranny of every subject. Freedom and scientific accuracy are our gods. But Japanese officialdom acts quite naturally, after its kind, in not allowing the light to be let in, because the roots of the faith it has planted need darkness in which to grow and spread. No religion can live which is subjected to critical scrutiny.

Thus also are explained the rigours of the Japanese bureaucracy against the native liberals, who, in its eyes, appear, not simply as political opponents, but as traitors to the chosen people—sacrilegious heretics defying the authority of the One and Only True Church.

“But,” you will say, “this indignation must be mere pretence. Not even officials can be so stupid as to believe in things which they have themselves invented.” We venture to think that you are wrong here. People can always believe that which it is greatly to their interest to believe. Thousands of excellent persons in our society cling to the doctrine of a future life on no stronger evidence. It is enormously important to the Japanese ruling class that the mental attitude sketched above should become universal among their countrymen. Accordingly, they achieve the apparently impossible. “We believe in it,” said one of them to us recently—“we believe in it, although we know that it is not true.” Tertullian said nearly the same thing, and no one has ever doubted his sincerity.

title: The Invention of a New Religion


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Our reason, according to certain of the cynical philosophers, is given to us less to direct our conduct than to enable us to justify it when it appears to be lacking in direction. When I ask myself how I can justify the variety of moods in this book and the mixture of pieces as elaborate as I cared to make them with skits and notes of obviously challengeable value, my reason points promptly to the conditions under which most writing of this sort is at present produced.

Our literary criticism is like the dove which emerged from the ark and, presently, with the olive leaf in her beak, returned to the ark, having found outside it no place to abide. The ark may here be taken as a symbol for a professorial chair or a desk in a publishing house or in an advertising agency or in some organization for the production of "valuable commodities." Criticism is tolerated in many quarters, encouraged in a few, but paid a "living wage" in none. Many professors, journalists, and the like practise it as an avocation or as a recreation. Nobody, almost nobody, follows it as a profession.

Having, like others of the fraternity of amateurs, taken it upon myself to think aloud, here and there, as opportunity offered, about men and books and ideas, I seem to discover a certain general tendency

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 and loose concatenation among these scattered discourses, which perhaps I overemphasize in speaking of it at all. But I seem to discover also that I have a little audience which is willing to listen, with the single proviso that it shall be informed where the speaking is going on. It appears therefore almost a duty of courtesy towards that part of the public for which one feels a particular kindness, to collect one's self from time to time into an accessible form.

The first essay is here published for the first time. For the rest, I owe acknowledgments as follows: to McNaught's Magazine for "Forty and Upwards," "On Falling in Hate," and "On Falling in Love"; to the Atlantic Monthly for "Unprintable"; to Charles Scribner's Sons for the two pieces from the introduction to Brownell's American Prose Masters, "For the Higher Study of American Literature" and "W. C. Brownell"; to the Bookman for "American Style" and "The Disraelian Irony"; to the New York Times for "The Apology for Essayists of the Press" and "Brander Matthews and the Mohawks"; to Harcourt, Brace and Co. for "The Significance of Sinclair Lewis"; to the Literary Review for "Where There Are No Rotarians," "Mr. Tarkington on the Midland Personality," and "A Note on Gertrude Stein"; to the New York Tribune for "Oscar S. Straus"; to the New York Evening Post for "Samuel Butler"; and to Boni and Liveright for the "George Sand and Gustave Flaubert," from Mrs. Mackenzie's translation of the Sand-Flaubert correspondence.

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When I was in college, I used to poke around in the library a good deal looking for books which would take me out of the shallow water of college life into the deep channel of experience, into the serious life of the world. And naturally enough the works of Tolstoy came into my hands. Now one knows what a typical Tolstoy novel is. The hero is a young man of rank and wealth and social position. He is at the outset a gay pleasure-loving fellow who enters heartily into the occupations and recreations and dissipations of his class. But somewhere midway in his career, while he is returning from a dance or from a fox-hunt, or perhaps while he is stationed at some lonely army post in the mountains, at midnight under the wintry stars, a great coolness and stillness invade his mind; and in the midst of the stillness he hears a voice which seems to come out of the depths of his own heart, crying: "Young man, what are you about in the universe?"—And then, for the first time in his life, he begins to think. His thinking troubles him. He begins to be worried about the reason and justification for his own existence. He begins to question the use of his wealth and his

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 strength and his talent. His world begins to come tumbling about his ears. He plunges into philosophy; and he comes up gasping; and he asks himself whether life is worth living, and, if so, for what purpose.

Under the influence of Tolstoy and such writers, I used while still in college to go about among my class-mates and puzzle them somewhat and amuse them a good deal by asking them whether life was worth living. The question had never occurred to them. When I presented it, they mostly replied that they took it for granted that it was. And there they dropped the matter. They didn't care to discuss it. Well, I myself have long since dropped that question, too. I take it for granted that life is worth living, because practically every one acts upon the assumption that it is. But the settlement of that question gave birth to another question which I have been putting to my friends and acquaintances ever since. It, too, is a kind of Tolstoyan question. That is to say, it probes inquisitively into the foundation and underpinning of our daily conduct. It is this: "Assuming that life is worth living, what are its durable satisfactions?"

I think that is a useful question and quite in line with our modern ideas of efficiency. Before you can make any sort of intelligent working plan for your life, you must answer it. If you don't face it and answer it, you soon discover that you are not living economically. You find that you are wasting your

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 energies on objects which make no adequate returns. You find that a bare twenty-five per cent. of your activities are yielding you durable satisfactions, while seventy-five per cent. of them are yielding only fatigue and regret. Or you find that you are mainly occupied with things which divert and amuse you to-day, but don't last. To-morrow they are gone; there is nothing there; you aren't accumulating anything. You aren't growing richer with the years, as you feel that you ought to grow, but are as poor as ever. But if you know clearly what the durable satisfactions of your life are, you know how to revise your business and your pleasure. You know what to keep and what to cut away. You have something definite to aim at. Your activities take a common direction. You feel all your powers, like a well-trained team, pulling together towards a known destination, pulling you home, home to the object of your heart's inmost desire. And so I think that, for both young people and old people, one of the most profitable questions is this: "What are the durable satisfactions of life?"

I used not to get much response to that question either. People used not to be very curious about it. They took it for granted that life has some durable satisfactions; but they hadn't considered the subject; and they thought me rather queer to pry into anything so intimate and so unexplored. Since the late war, however, there has been a great change in that respect. Nowadays, everyone is asking my question. The great war and its consequences have

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 introduced into thousands of minds hitherto untroubled by such thoughts profound doubts regarding the tendencies and the quality and the satisfactions of our modern civilization—pointed questions regarding the amount of happiness that modern civilization pays to the private life. Skepticism, cynicism, and satire are the prevailing moods of contemporary enquiry. Here in America, since the war, our current literature has been filled with a kind of Tolstoyan unrest of which the most obvious symptom is a series of derisive pictures of objects to which we used formerly to "point with pride"; derisive pictures of our politicians; derisive pictures of the church; derisive pictures of the universities; derisive pictures of our great bulwark, the middle class; derisive pictures of the American business man; derisive pictures of the average American man and the average American woman.

I firmly believe that this satirical and soulsearching mood through which the country is passing at present is tremendously good for it, is going to be a step towards its "salvation"; but its effects, like those of certain powerful medicines, are rather distressing while they last. Not long ago I spent several hours talking with three interesting men of wide experience and great energy of mind—an editor, a politician, and a man connected with one of our great educational foundations. They were all avowedly out hunting, hunting from New York to San Francisco. There were brains and money

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 and power behind them; and they were hunting for adequate objects on which to expend them. They had not been very successful, nor much cheered by their contact with our fellow countrymen. They came back from their explorations of the democracy with such an account of the political and social and moral corruption and disintegration rampant in our great cities and in our small country towns, that I myself returned to the relative peace and order and sobriety of my own university community full of a kind of private and selfish thanksgiving that I lived there and not somewhere else. I came back full of a very genuine gratitude that my community consisted mainly of several thousand young men and women united in an inspiring enterprise, united in the quest of wisdom, and truth, and beauty. It seemed to me, for the moment, that, comparatively speaking, a university community had an interesting and adequate object for living.

"In the outside world," I said to myself, "there seem to be, if one may trust the reports, scattered individuals of energy and virtue and upward purpose; but the general force of society is against them; the general pull of society is down, not up. They can maintain their energy and virtue only by constantly resisting the social pressure towards slackness and vice and inefficiency. But here in the university community," I said, "the conditions are reversed. As individuals, many of us, perhaps most of us, have our weak moods and our slack and inefficient moods and our downward tendencies; but

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 the force of our society is against the weak and ineficient moods; the total pressure of our community makes powerfully for energy, virtue, and upward purpose. In the outside world," I said, "one rises alone; one sinks with the community. In the university world one who sinks, sinks alone; one who rises, rises with the community."

I tried to communicate my gratitude and enthusiasm about this idea to one of my more thoughtful colleagues. I regret to say that he did not catch fire. He did not feel my enthusiasm about the superiority of the university community. He met me with profound doubts and skepticism. He said, "No; you talk as if the University, as distinguished from your three men out hunting, had actually found an object. I doubt it. I should like to ask you," he said, "if you know what we are here for. Do you really know what we wish to teach our students? Do you know what kind of men and women are being formed by the pressure of this community? If we have an adequate educational mold, where is the educational product of the mold? What is the distinctive type of American character formed by the educational machinery of this generation? Is it a type that you are proud of? Has the type any marks by which it can be distinguished from the crowd who have not been subjected to the mold? Can you tell a college man from a man who hasn't been to college? We aren't getting anywhere with our education,

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 because we don't know where we want to go. We don't know what we want.

"Just contrast," he continued, "the situation in the older English universities. Consider, for example, the Oxford don early in the nineteenth century. He knew what he was there for. He had in his mind's eye a perfectly definite type of English character. He knew that it was his business to produce a Christian, a scholar, and a gentleman. He had a perfectly clear notion of how this task was to be accomplished. He knew that all he had to do was to apply to the boy in his charge three great pressures: the pressure of the English church; the pressure of classical culture; and the pressure of a society of gentlemen. When John Henry Newman became a Roman Catholic and wrote his beautiful treatise on the education of Catholics, he employed, with one change, the same mold: he applied the pressure of classical culture, the pressure of a society of gentlemen, and the pressure of the Roman Catholic Church. The product, however dull he might be, was of a recognizably fine type: a Christian, a scholar, and a gentleman. No finished product has been made in modern times without the use of these three molds; and we Americans have discarded them one by one, most completely in the west, and in the typical educational institutions of the west, the State Universities.

"In the older institutions of America we tried to imitate and repeat the English process; and so long as we preserved some parts of the English mold

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 we had some success. America has seen the development of two great types of character: the New England Puritan and the southern Cavalier, the gentleman of the Old South. These two types were produced mainly under two great formative forces: the formative force of religion and the formative force of an aristocratic society. The idea of God was the dominant molding force in the one case; the idea of the honor of a gentleman was the dominant molding force in the other. While the New England Puritan and the Southern Cavalier remained in the mind's eye of our educators they knew their object. But these two great types are gone. When John Quincy Adams was beaten at the polls by Andrew Jackson, the doom of the Puritan was sounded. When Robert E. Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, the doom of the Cavalier was sounded. The triumph of the western rabble began. (My friend knows that I belong to the western rabble by birth and residence; but he has lived so long among us that he has acquired our western habit of calling a spade a spade.)

"to-day," he continued, "we have no models and no molds for creating an American type. We have discarded classical culture, and are teaching salesmanship in its place. That mold is broken. We don't dare apply Christian discipline; we are educating Jews, Hindus, Japanese, Buddhists, Confucians, and thousands of scientific free-thinkers. We don't dare to apply the Christian mold. We

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 don't accept the code of the society of gentlemen. We don't know what it is. We haven't the means to keep it up; we work with our hands; we pay our way; we struggle for existence; men and women together in a hard fight, where courtesy and chivalry are impediments to survival, and the behavior of a lady is regarded as an affectation and the honor of a gentleman as an old-fashioned piece of snobbishness. We have broken the old molds. We have found no effective new ones; and the only truly, typical products of our educational chaos are the flapper, the roughneck, the materialist and the ignoramus."

I thought that my colleague was painting our scene pretty black; but from one end of the country to the other you hear nowadays very much the same, story, namely, that our democracy is not justifying itself, that the molds which make character are broken or out of commission, that our society is beginning to show signs of essential disintegration in lawlessness, immorality, and anarchy. One doesn't need to dwell on the symptoms. I will remind you of a recent editorial in a western metropolitan paper, apparently written for the purpose of encouraging every man to do as he pleases about obeying a constitutional law of the United States. I will remind you of an article in an eastern metropolitan paper, professing to present the present state of sexual morality, and apparently written for the purpose of urging every man to do as he pleases in this field. In a certain university community of my

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 acquaintance, when a young man met tragic disaster in resisting arrest for a violation of elementary law, instantly an attempt was made to mobilize sentiment against the officer of the law. In every one of these cases the spirit exhibited was essentially anarchical. I will remind you finally of the general picture of American society, to-day presented by scores of our realistic novelists, stationed at various points of observation between the two seas; and you will recall readily enough the basis for the common charge that our national culture is not producing an admirable, or even a defensible, national type.

What the nation needs, to pull it together, many critics tell us, is a rewakening of the religious sense. Religion, they say, is the only power that can stop the movement of disintegration and initiate a movement of integration. During the administration of President Harding there began, as every one knows, a counter-revolution in politics, in morals, in religion. Hitherto, I don't think that counter-revolution has been very well managed. It has been allowed to take the form of an obscurantist reaction. The attempt to tighten up has been too much left in the hands of stony-eyed standpatters in politics and the small prehistoric element among the clergy. The recent labors, for example, of William Jennings Bryan in this field, have been those of a prehistoric clergyman. Mr. Bryan honestly sees the need of a strong binder for a nation that is falling to pieces. He honestly believes that religion is the necessary binder. He wants to put religion on its feet. How

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 does he propose to do it? By calling for the legislative suppression of the most fruitful scientific theory of modern times; and the answer to that call takes the shape of mass-meetings of 60,000 benighted Bible students passing resolutions against the doctrine of evolution. Whoever in this country attempts to mold character by suppressing knowledge, or by clamping a lid on the honest discussion of knowledge and opinions, destroys the molds of character. A church, or a university, if there is any such, which attempts to suppress truth by a majority vote is not molding characters but nursing hypocrites and imbeciles. A religious movement of that sort multiplies the evils which it is intended to cure. It does nothing towards national integration. On the contrary it makes a new division in the nation with the prehistoric minds on one side, and the rest of mankind on the other.

Mr. Bryan is right: we need religion. But Mr Bryan is wrong: we don't need his brand of religion. The objection to his brand of religion as a binder of our characters is simply this: we don't believe in it. That objection is final. There is no use in trying to bind us with what doesn't hold us. What is religion? Religion is that which binds us and holds us. Religion is that which at heart we do earnestly believe in, whatever it is.

You can't appeal to people effectively, except by reference to what they actually believe in. That is an elementary principle of religious tactics which any book agent could explain to Mr. Bryan. The

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 book agent comes to the door with a book which he intends to sell to the busy housewife for ten dollars. The busy housewife opens the door three inches and peers suspiciously through the crevice. Does the book agent say: "Good morning! Would you like to buy a book this morning?" Not at all. He knows perfectly well that the busy housewife doesn't believe in books. He keeps his book behind his back, and lifts his hat, and says: "Good Morning! Are there any children in the house?" He knows that the busy housewife believes in children. The door opens another three inches. Through the widening aperture, he asks her whether she is interested in her children, and whether she would deny them anything essential to their welfare. In two minutes he is sitting in the parlor, explaining that for ten dollars she can provide her child with the sum and substance of a university education.

The book agent may be a humbug; but his method is psychologically sound. Mr. Bryan may not be a humbug; but his method is psychologically unsound. The first step towards the awakening and development of a religious sense that will bind up and give unity of purpose to a generation which seems all at loose ends is like the first step of the book agent: it is an appeal to what this generation believes in. The effective first step for the religious leader is not to revive and vamp up the discredited basis of an old religion. Neither, on the other hand, is it to invent and attempt to promulgate a new religion. The important, the effective, thing to do,

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 is to discover, to uncover, the existing religion, and bring it to the surface and magnify it, recognizing it as the available binding and unifying power of the present generation. By discovering the existing religion, I mean discovering those principles and those objects which men work for, and spend their money for, and appear to find solid and permanent satisfaction in. Whatever these principles and objects may be, these are the molds upon which we must principally rely to shape our national type.

When I attempt to formulate reasons for national gratitude, I say to myself: "Come, let us consider what people actually believe in. Let us be concrete and realistic. Let us not be afraid to begin small, nar to speak of apparently ignoble things, provided only that these things are believed in by the great mass of our people, and therefore serve to bind them together in a unity of desire. What are our people to-day cheerfully spending their money for?" That is a good opening question; for the spending of money is a primary and tangible act of faith.

Well, all our people live in houses of one sort or another; and the cost of living in houses has risen tremendously since the time of the old oaken bucket, the Franklin stove, and the Saturday night tub. I asked an architect what part of the additional cost of living in houses was due to modern plumbing. He replied: "20%." I ask you: What is the significance of plumbing with reference to religion? Why, it is a great common bond of our civilization. It signifies that every civilized man,

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 woman and child in the United States believes in being clean, and in what is compatible with that, and disbelieves in being dirty, and in what conduces to being dirty. It is a little point, but it is something that we agree on. The whole pressure of the American community is towards being physically clean. It is a mark of the national type that we intend to produce. A man who is dirty is dirty alone: a man who is clean is clean with the community. It is a little point, perhaps, but I notice that Mr. Kipling, in his latest book, declares that he has not met one man who wore the Victoria Cross "who had not strict notions about washing and shaving and keeping himself decent on his way through the civilized world, whatever he may have done outside it." "Somehow," he adds, "the clean and considerate man mostly seems to take hold of circumstances at the right end." Well, there is something definite that we all believe in; and are thankful for.

I turned in another direction. I inspected the cost of doctor and dentist in the family budget. I noticed the movement of medical inspection and corrective gymnastics in the schools. I observed the wide advertising of institutions to insure health, to prevent middle-aged men and women from getting fat, to restore old men to their youth, and to enable people to live for a hundred years. I asked what the benevolent millionaires were expending their millions for; and I found that they were pouring their millions into research for the extinction

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 of pestilence, for the wiping out of hook-worm, and yellow fever, and tuberculosis, and cancer, and all forms of communicable disease. And it appeared to me obvious that the American people believe in health and youth, and are anxious and happy to invest heavily in them; and that they disbelieve in whatever is incompatible with health and the preservation of youth. There is another definite point for belief and religious gratitude.

I asked what was the most significant and farreaching enterprise upon which the states of the Union had expended large sums of money during the last thirty years. Obviously, I said, upon the public schools and the state universities, the most inspiring and hopeful phenomenon in America in our time. I don't need to dwell at all upon this. You all know what it means. It means that the American people believe in becoming intelligent just as fast as they can, and that they disbelieve in whatever is incompatible with that. And we may add, that somehow the intelligent man mostly seems to take hold of circumstances at the right end.

I turned in another direction. I asked what large new expenditure the business men have been going in for, from one end of the country to the other. The reply was: They are going in heavily for advertising, for publicity. They believe in publicity. Every enterprising business man wishes to be known to as many as possible of his hundred million countrymen. He wishes his product to be under the national limelight. He wishes as a business man

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 and a producer to be able to stand the critical scrutiny of a hundred-million pairs of eyes. He believes in everything that is compatible with that, and eventually he is going to believe in nothing that is incompatible with that. The pressure of a hundred million pairs of critical eyes is a tremendous molding pressure. The entire pressure of the American community is towards preparing a man to stand inspection, and whatever is compatible with that. Somehow, we may say, the man who is ready to stand inspection mostly seems to take hold of circumstances at the right end. The ethical implications of being able to stand inspection are immense.

While I was looking for national characteristics, indicated by what our people spend their money for, I was reminded that there are fifteen million automobiles in the United States, and that all the enterprising states are building millions of dollars' worth of roads to run them on; and that at least every tenth man, woman and child in the United States drives an automobile. Then I said to myself, the people of the United States believe in automobiles and what is compatible with them, and they disbelieve in what is incompatible with automobiles. They believe in, they rejoice in, swift mobility. They believe in being private engineers. Their delight is in driving a forty- or seventy-horse-power machine from place to place at a speed of from twenty to sixty miles an hour; and they believe in whatever is compatible with that. The ethical implications

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 of being a private engineer are immense; but we have hardly begun to recognize what they are.

For example: those who protest against the enforcement of prohibition declare that drinking is a matter of private morals within the field of personal liberty; and they assert that opposition to drinking rests upon Puritan principles which they do not accept—which have never been a part of their beliefs. Very well. Let us drop "Puritanism," whatever its injunctions may be in this connection. Let us merely ask the liquor champions whether they believe in automobiles and in automobiling. Let us ask them whether they know that we killed some twenty thousand of our fellow-citizens last year in automobile accidents, a considerable number of them due to drunken drivers.

The indicated approach for the reformer is to show the essential incompatibility of either licensed saloons or bootlegging joints with an automobiling civilization. If we really believe in crowding the roads of the country with private engineers running private cars at twenty to sixty miles an hour, the whole question of drinking ceases to be a question of personal liberty. To protect our lives, we shall be obliged to prevent our—ten million private engineers from getting drunk. We have got to make the same exaction of private engineers that we long ago made of public engineers.

I will present one more characteristic of our national type. I drove last summer five hundred miles through Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, and!

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 noticed with a good deal of pleasure the amount of money that little country towns everywhere are putting into golf links and country clubs. Occasionally, also, I look at the sporting pages of the newspapers and read of the enormous expenditure that the American people are putting into baseball. Then I walk out and look at our crowded tennis courts, and at our athletic field, and at our two million dollar stadium; and I think of the great stadiums that have been erected in the last ten or fifteen years all the way across the country from the Yale Bowl to Leland Stanford University. I don't think of any more significant architectural phenomenon since the cathedral building of the Middle Ages. For these objects any amount of money is to be had, because people believe in them. Money flows into them as a great act of faith. Our young people everywhere believe in the athletic life and in our out of door sports and athletic games; and in what is compatible with them, and they tend to disbelieve in what is incompatible with them.

Now, I must ask you to consider for a moment what is compatible with an athletic game—with, for example, a good game of tennis. In order to play tennis with satisfaction to yourself and your opponents, you must bring into the game health, high spirits, endurance, energy, quickness, force, accuracy, honesty, generosity and perfect obedience to rules—to rules which are arbitrary, elaborate, but inflexible conventions. You must have all these virtues to play well at any athletic game; and to play

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 any game whatever you must submit to the rules. In the game of tennis, you are of course personally and physically free and at liberty to walk up to the net and drop the ball over, instead of serving it; you are physically free to put the ball into a gun and shoot it over the net; or you might hire a boy to carry it around the net; or you might bawl out in the middle of the game that you were going to change the rules and take three shots instead of two. You are physically free to do all these things. But you are not mentally or morally free to do any of them. You are religiously bound not to do any of them. If you did any of them, everybody would laugh at you, you would be put out of the game, no one would play with you. All good players respect the rules of the game, because they know that the rules make the game, and they believe in the game.

The ethical implications of athletic games are immense. Democracy itself is a complex athletic game. Its existence depends, more than upon anything else, upon our hearty willingness, for the sake of the game, to refrain from doing what we are physically perfectly free and able to do. If we don't do that, we lack the first elements of sportsmanship.

My survey of the things our people believe in is far from exhaustive; but let us stop here and consider what we have got as a concrete, realistic basis of belief, remembering always that we have not occupied ourselves with reviving or with inventing objects of belief but simply with discovering and

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 bringing them together. I have enumerated six things that our people agree upon; six things that they spontaneously and gladly support and invest heavily in: cleanness, health, becoming intelligent, swift mobility, athletic games, and publicity or standing inspection. Now that we have brought them together, I observe that they belong together, and are more or less closely interdependent; in order to stand inspection, in order to play the game well, in order safely to enjoy swift mobility, one must be healthy, and in order to be healthy one must be clean, and in order to be clean and healthy one must be intelligent.

I observe also that the six things which are incompatible with our objects of belief also belong together: dirt, disease, ignorance, stagnation, inability to play the game and obey rules, furtiveness and unwillingness to stand inspection. If you accept the set of six objects of desire, the logical implication is that you reject the corresponding six objects of aversion. The American people are as yet but little accustomed to logical implications. They are illogical and sentimental. The American people are by temperament and lack of rigorous training a little inclined to be muddleheaded and soft and oversympathetic—a little too sympathetic with dirt and disease and ignorance and stagnation and inability to play the game and inability to stand inspection—too sympathetic with these things to say decisively that they wish to reject them.

Our young man and young woman in college, for

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 example, know well enough what is expected of them, and they know well enough what they themselves hope to be. They hope to be the flower of the younger generation, the human embodiment of the kalonkagathon, the good and the beautiful, in the society of their own times. And they have some notion of the necessity that is on them for being clean, healthy, intelligent, and able to stand inspection. Where they fall short, is in working out the necessary implications of their heart's desire. They are quite willing, they are eager, to be known as the flower of their generation, the finest young men and women of their time, improved successors in a modern democracy of the old-fashioned New England Puritan and the old-fashioned lady and gentleman of the Old South. But they haven't fully worked out the implication of this ambition. They haven't clearly recognized that the attainment of their ambition is incompatible, for example, with their soft and muddleheaded tolerance of loafing in their fraternities, cheating in their classrooms, and thieving in the gymnasiums and cloakrooms, passing bad checks at the banks, and sundry other practices by which they make no improvement upon the extinct types of the New England Puritan and the gentleman of the Old South. Their beliefs lie loosely around them, scattered and unvalued, like lumps of pig iron, which need to be gathered up, and melted, and forged and tempered and sharpened like a sword and girded to their sides, and used to cut their way out of the obscure jungle of their conflicting ideas.

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 For examples: with a tempered and practised sword of belief they would cut through this big bullying idea of Liberty, crying: "Only one half of liberty is good for anything; liberty to stagnate and rot is good for nothing; liberty to go to the devil is good for nothing."

They would cut through this roughneck idea of fraternity, crying: "Only one half of fraternity is good for anything. Fraternizing with rascals is good for nothing. A fraternity of thieves and vagabonds is good for nothing."

They would cut through this ignoramus idea of equality, crying, "Only one half of equality is good for anything. Equality in indolence and inefficiency is good for nothing. Equality in obscenity is good for nothing."

The moment that you see the logical implications of your own beliefs you have in your heart the immense virtue of hate for what you disbelieve in, without which you are incapable of any important love whatever. You have at your side the sharp sword of decisive choice, without which you can never cut a thoroughfare through the jungle of your conflicting ideas. You have in your hands the formative power of a religious purpose, without which you cannot hope, in an atheistical democracy, to mold a distinctive national type, to be compared with the product of Oxford, or New England, or the Old South.

We haven't worked out the full implication of our beliefs; but we know already what our beliefs

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 are well enough to consider where they point. What, I ask, should be, must be, the characteristic type of a younger generation which believes in cleanness, health, intelligence, swift mobility, playing the game, and readiness to stand inspection? When the younger generation disengages the object of its heart's desire from the rubbish with which it is now involved, when the younger generation has worked out the implications of its belief, what sort of national type shall we see? Well, every one of these indicators points towards a type resembling that which the Greek sculptors of the great period perpetuated in marble for the admiration of all times. The whole upward movement of our later American culture indicates a type of athletic asceticism as the necessary and inevitable corollary of our civilization. We can't have the sort of civilization that we want, unless we can produce in abundance characters of this type—the type of athletic asceticism.

I choose the word asceticism because it will be noticed and challenged, under the impression that asceticism means something sour, crabbed, thin, and starved. But asceticism, etymologically, does not mean that. Asceticism is a Greek word which means gymnastic. It means the rule and discipline of the athlete. It is not the self-denial and mortification of a morbid mind. It is the self-control and the self-development of a healthy mind. It is not a determination to suppress the life of the body; it is a determination to express the life of the body

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 in forms of accomplished grace and perfected strength. It is the voluntary choice of a man who is in training for power, in training for joy—the joy of contending in the Olympic dust for the crown of wild olive and for the applause of all Greece. Athletic asceticism is nothing but the intelligent application of logic to conduct. Asceticism is the discipline of a man who knows what he wants, and takes all the means to get it, and rejects all that interferes with his getting it. It makes him choose the means to be clean and fit and clear-eyed and swift. It makes him reject what leads to fat on his muscles, and mist in his eyes, languor in his blood, and dullness in his brain. He makes a religion out of the things that his heart desires, and he cheerfully consigns the other things to hell. And he feels the desirability of his object so powerfully that he lifts up his hands to the gods—the young Greek athlete lifts up his hands to the gods, and prays for victory in his race.

"Prayer for worldly goods is worse than fruitless," said George Meredith in a beautiful letter to his son, "but prayer for strength of soul is that passion of the soul which catches the gift it seeks."

I don't know whether the young Greek athlete won the race that he prayed for. But I think that after the prayer in which he put all things that he loved best under the protection of the gods, it was easy for him to understand the proverbial wisdom of his race, which declares that the half is greater than the whole. It was easy for him to avoid our

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 modern error of craving the undigested whole of; experience. It was easy for him not to be drunken, dissolute, slothful, gluttonous. It was easy for himnot to be insolent, ribald, and profane. Why was it easy?

Because he felt himself religiously bound.

Because he felt himself gloriously not free to waste and destroy the gifts of the heavenly powers.

Because he felt himself proudly bound by the golden fetters of his religion, by his athletic asceticism, to offer to the Shining Ones the integrity of his strength, the unspoiled flower of his youth.

Because he stood tiptoe with exaltation, joyously conscious that the object of his own heart's desire was also in the eye and affectionate solicitude of the gods.

Two thousand years ago an educated Jew who had received fire in his heart from heaven crossed the Mediterranean Sea and laid the fire from his heart upon the altar to the Unknown God in the midst of Mars Hill in Athens. Its flame leaped up; and in its flame, Jewish Christianity united with Athenian philosophy to form the most powerful mold of character the world has ever seen. The success of Paul was due to the fact that he laid the fire where the altar was. We shall not get much beyond Paul as religious tacticians. If we wish some measure of his success, we must worry less about our old shrines and churches. We must carry our vessels of fire to the place where the thronged altar is. We must build our churches

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 over the things that people believe in as the durable satisfactions of life. We must help the younger generation to work out the full implications of the athletic asceticism which is the ethical corollary of the civilization for which they have already manifested their desire.

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There is an interesting and true passage in the letters of Matthew Arnold which spirited young fellows encounter with a chill. It is this: "The aimless and unsettled, but also open and liberal, state of our youth we must perhaps all leave and take refuge in our morality and character; but with most of us it is a melancholy passage from which we emerge shorn of so many beams that we are almost tempted to quarrel with the law of nature which imposes it on us."

The revolt of youth, the cries of which are now so audible in our literature, is an attempt to resist as long as possible the imposition of the traditional morality and the traditional character upon the fluent welter of youth's desires and possibilities. The revolt derives its bright enthusiasm from the belief of the insurgents that as the yoke of custom is something wilfully imposed by tyrannical elders, it may, by a superior wilfulness of the young, be thrown off. The wise young Arnold dashes cold water on that belief by referring to the imposing power as a "law of nature."

What is that law of nature to which, in the end,

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 the rebel necks must bow? What power is it that drives young spirits, trailing clouds of glory, into the austere refuge of morality and character? Suppose, to begin with, we call it the law of self-preservation, individual and racial. That has a formidable sound. And, indeed, it is a formidable power. When we feel its wolfish breath at our back, we lighten our impedimenta; we stiffen our sinews; we lengthen our stride; we fix our gaze on the patch of light beyond the woods; and we become careless of wayside flowers.

Some of us, to be sure, seek for a time, to ignore or evade it. An occasional college boy, stimulated to believe that he is the maker of his own destiny, listens with wonder and eager curiosity to a lecturer commending the "cultural ideal" of Goethe—the seductive notion of the continuous growth and free unfolding of a many-sided personality, developed at all points. He may even, through his undergraduate years, revel a little in his own versatility and caress his multifarious unformed tastes and talents. By extending the years of schooling and popularizing higher education, by bobbing our hair and keeping our faces clean shaven, and by reading the novels of undergraduate authors and taking counsel of their tailors, a few of us manage to extend the plastic age and the experimental and uncertain appearance and opinions of adolescence well into our third decade.

But to pass for a youth beyond that point, requires far more money, leisure, and freedom from

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 the cares of this world than are ordinarily to be had upon the economic tableland of democracy. In a society where the most that the average person can expect is to start without a handicap, the occupations of the first four decades are essentially predetermined. Our average man has his work cut out for him if he keeps abreast of normal expectations; and to keep abreast, he is impelled by the strongest instincts in him.

There is nothing forbidding or externally formidable in the deputy powers that take him captive, and abduct him out of the irresponsible company of youth. Quite the contrary. He sees the invitation and the promise of life in a pair of grey eyes and white hands, and he runs to meet them, and while he is explaining in a moment of youthful intoxication, how sweet earth would be if Maytime would last forever and gipsying were in fashion, he is bound hand and foot, and delivered to a power which effectively terminates his roving in the Romany Rye. The law of self-preservation has him in thrall. Or to put the matter in plain terms, he must educate himself and pay for his education; he must find a profession; he must marry and pay for his wife; he must start a family and pay for his family; he must buy a lot and build a house; he must pay for his life insurance and start a fund for his old age; he must begin the education of his children. In this homespun garb the awful "law of nature" enforces itself before he knows what has got hold of him.

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 He enters upon these tasks with the unreflective gusto of youth—a fluent, unformed, unchanneled energy. All the "boys" are doing likewise. All the prizes are attached to doing likewise. As the heat of the contest heightens, he strips himself one by one of the recreations and accomplishments through which in his vernal days the mounting diffusive sap of his youth burst briefly into flower: dancing, acting, singing, mandolin-playing, drawing, verse-writing, tramping, shooting, camping, tennis, and the rest. He pulls himself together. He concentrates. He specializes. "Three meals a day," he says, "my work, my pipe, and no interruptions!" He is nothing but a driving energy. He drives so hard that the bloom of life is brushed off in his passage. Yet for a long time he does not cease to think of himself as one of the "young fellows." The very intensity and singleness of his effort is due, in fact, to a youthful pride and doggedness developed under a sense that the Old Men are watching the youngster critically.

But by and by comes a season when a lot of things, unimpressive singly, happen together and become impressive. His wife gaily discovers three grey hairs, one above his left ear, two above his right. "Yes," says his daughter, kissing a spot on the back of his head, "but Dad will never be grey!" At about the same time he discovers that he needs a stronger pair of glasses. His dentist, who has hitherto passed him easily through the semi-annual inspection, now suggests an extensive plan of bridge

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 construction. He still feels quite fit; but on the way home he mutters to himself with a playful grimness: "A-ha! Baldness, Blindness, and Toothlessness are scouting out a position before the main army of Death." Then he notices with a realizing eye how tall his sons are growing, and how independent, and how—well, he would call it saucy, if they were not so tall. He has to contradict them firmly because—well, they have no business at their age to know so much more about the point than their father. But he fails to feel impressive in the assertion of his authority, for even when they seem to assent, he has a subtle uneasy sense that they are merely humoring him, with an indulgent filial smile in their sleeves. Presently he overhears one of them referring to him as The Old Man.

"The Old Man! Good Heavens!" he exclaims, "How old am I? Forty?—Forty is nothing, nowadays. President Eliot went bicycling before breakfast, at seventy-five. Lounsbury played the New England tennis champion at seventy-five. At eighty-five or ninety Uncle Joe Cannon and Chauncey Depew had just got started. At forty, a man is a mere fledgling." So he soothes and flatters himself. But, in this season of disillusion, another fact gradually establishes itself in his awakened consciousness—a fact full of pathos and mystery: he discovers that the unchallengeably young people really prefer their own society to his, while he himself prefers their society to that of the men of forty. There is nothing like that to plunge a sword

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 into a man's viscera and twist it about in the wound. He tries to conceal his hurt. He rallies his gaiety and makes a desperate effort to retrace his steps and rejoin the merrymakers who are going a-Maying. But even when he presents himself in scenes dewy with sentiment, sparkling with young desires, and rich with dreams, somehow he does not seem to "enter in." He feels—he confides it soberly and in the utmost confidence to his own heart—he feels like Leonard Merrick's hero in quest of his youth, who fell asleep, and snored softly—didn't he?—while his old sweetheart bent over him, bitterly, in the trysting hour.

He feels "the fierce necessity to feel" but lacks the power. What is the trouble with him? He knows. He knows. He faces a tragedy. It isn't that he is forty. Other men have been forty. 'Tis common, Madam! His tragedy is that he possesses a character. No: his character possesses him. He is imprisoned in his morality and his character. He overhears the respectful rumor of his contemporaries: "Yes, Brown has achieved a character. We can count on Brown. We know where he stands."

The object of this applause inwardly squirms. He squirms on the pointed truth in what they say. He himself knows where he stands: he is a man of property, he is a professional man, he is a voter and taxpayer, he is the husband of one of the caryatides of society, he is the father of four children, he is one of four men with plates who

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 walk up the aisles of the church in frock coats on Sunday morning.

He acts from those positions. He acts only from them. His feeling is adequate to those positions. But he feels nothing more. So this is what is called "achieving a character." He has "achieved" nothing of the sort. This prison-house is not the edifice of his will; it was built about him by his destiny. It is nothing but his circumstances catching him in a trap. This character is a highwayman. It came up behind him, like a thief in the night. It cried "Halt! Stick 'em up!" And there he stopped; and delivered up his youth; and went no further. And that is why men know where he stands, and can count on him.

Yes: they can count on him—and so they don't count him any longer. If he speaks in public, his friends don't come out: they know well enough what he will say. If he publishes a book, no one buys it; they have the book that he wrote ten years ago. If he is absent from a committee, no one misses his counsel: any one of the members can easily present his "views." If a subscription list is circulating, they put him down for ten dollars without consulting him: he always gives ten dollars. If his own children conceive any enterprise, tainted with novelty, scandal, or promise of vivid interest, they first conspire with their mother to placate him, knowing for certain that "Dad will oppose it." Yes: he can be counted on. He is no longer an incalculable force. He is an homme rangé. He is a char-

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 acter. He is fixed at forty—like a monument, like a gravestone, with one blank line waiting to mark the formal decease and burial of his body.

Isn't it true that when one begins to stop growing one begins to die? When did he begin to die? He looks backward to discover the point at which his vital force began to draw in from the branches to the trunk and gradually retire towards the earth. He looks backward thirty years—thirty-five years. There was a time, back there, very early in his life—say between his fifth and his tenth years—when every morning multiplied his budding interests, and the green young shoots of his curiosity pushed eagerly into "the blooming buzzing confusion" of the universe.

Between five and ten he was a Roosevelt for versatility—yet in that respect he was exactly like every normal child! There was not a dull page from table of contents to index in the whole of life's sweet scented manuscript. All arts, all sciences, all religions, all philosophies, all histories, all customs of life "intrigued" him.

He modeled in clay, he painted in water colors, he composed unrecorded melodies, he participated in the folk dancing called "London Bridge Is Falling Down"; he was an "out-of-door naturalist" and explorer of rivers, caves, and valleys; he was a collector and classifier of stamps, minerals, coins, curiosities from the Holy Land, insects, flowers, birds' eggs; he shuddered under the knife of Aztec sacrifice; he learned from the Koran that Paradise

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 is under the shadow of the sword; he wrote to his grandfather for a copy of the Hebrew alphabet that he might study the Decalogue in God's own tongue; he dipped into "The Light of Asia"; he studied idolatry in the old Chinese quarter; he was interested in Jesus; he was knocked down by experimenting with the current in a trolley wire; he manufactured gunpowder, and cannon from brass shotgun shells; he molded bullets; he tanned squirrel skins; he attempted to stuff birds; he made maps of pulped brown butcher's paper; he prepared medicines from herbs; he distilled liquor and attempted to petrify wood; he built houses and trapezes and dams and attempted to build a lake; he raised pigeons, chickens, rabbits, and snakes; he drilled for oil; he examined openings in the fruit industry, lawnmowing, pickling, floriculture, printing, and the newspaper business; but most of all his heart was set on goldmining, exploring Indian graves, and swinging a rawhide lariat from a saddle of Spanish leather while spurring a lean broncho after the mavericks scurrying through the sagebrush of a western mesa.

Suppressed desires? Not at all! He found time and means and energy for all this rich and various life by the time he was thirteen. He has squeezed all the juice from those oranges. But what has he done since? Soon after thirteen, a drouth descended upon the tropical exuberance of his experience. The lighter foliage of his life withered up. Education fell upon him like a blight, and the luxuriant quick blossoms of childhood were

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 scattered. His sensuous contacts with the world diminished with amazing rapidity. He began to be concerned with words rather than with things; and things shrivelled and died and disappeared under the labels that he was taught to attach to them. His education, he perceives, operated like the old-fashioned dentistry, by killing off and extracting the nerves, so that a man in middle life should find himself with a set of dead and, theoretically, untroublesome bones in his mouth. (Only, it seems, these dead things festered.) His education was designed to make out of a piece of living matter a substantial economic block, useful for homebuilding, useful in the fundamental structure of society. He had been taken, so to speak, out of his own hands by the race, and had been thrust, half alive, into a chink of the wall, and on him an inscription had been carved: "Here lies a solid character. Requiescat in pace."

At just about this point one may predict with considerable assurance either that nothing at all will happen, or that something like a miracle will happen. Either Brown will quietly resign himself to being Brown for the rest of his days; or Brown will become that most dangerous type of rebel, a middle-aged rebel, and attempt to become something new and strange.

Let us assume first that at forty there is little rebellion left in this solid character. After a brief period of wistfulness, he surrenders to the indolence which men flatter with the name of destiny. He

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