ilifornia 
 
 ;ional 
 
 ility
 
 STANDARD SCHOOL LIBRARY 
 
 THE PRACTICE OF 
 SELF-CULTURE
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT 
 
 FRIENDSHIP 
 
 WORK
 
 THE PRACTICE 
 
 OF 
 
 SELF-CULTURE 
 
 BY 
 
 HUGH BLACK 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 
 
 All rights reservtd
 
 ' Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting." 
 
 SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1904, 
 BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1904. Reprinted 
 December, 1904; January, 1913. 
 
 J. 8. Cashing & Co. Berwick & Smith Co. 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE author recently published a book on " Cul- 
 ture and Restraint," which was a somewhat philo- 
 sophical discussion of the two great ideals of 
 self-development and self-effacement, showing the 
 strength and weakness of each and the need for 
 a completer ideal which would include both. Ser- 
 vice offers a great reconciling thought which finds 
 room for the two opposing ideals. This present 
 book deals with the practical ways in which the 
 self can be equipped for service. It frankly 
 admits that self-culture is not in itself a complete 
 ideal for human life, but has its place as the 
 necessary education to make a man's contribution 
 to the world worthy. Nothing could be finer as 
 a definition of education than Milton's, " I call a 
 complete and generous education that which fits 
 a man to perform, justly, skilfully, and magnani- 
 mously, all the offices both private and public of 
 peace and war." 
 
 The author trusts that the title "The Practice 
 of Self -Culture " will justify itself, not from the 
 
 V 
 
 2038S06
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 point of view of giving many details, but of giving 
 an impulse to practice. The counsels and details 
 are well enough known, but our chief need is to 
 lay hold of a comprehensive scheme into which 
 our efforts will fall easily and the possession of 
 which acts as an inducement. For example, in 
 treating of bodily culture there might well be a 
 paragraph with much good advice about eating 
 and drinking, and another about sleep and the 
 like, but these things, which would be in place 
 in a manual of hygiene, are matters of common 
 knowledge. What we need is the right view of 
 the whole subject, which will make us treat the 
 body sanely and reverently as an integral part of 
 the life. Practical advice does not necessarily 
 mean a list of petty precepts and counsels, but 
 advice that will lead to practice ; and if this book 
 gives to any reader some impulse in the great 
 education of life, it will have served its purpose. 
 A friend who has kindly looked over some of 
 the proofs has suggested that younger readers 
 who might find the first chapter a little difficult 
 should read it last, and should begin with the 
 second chapter.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE . . v 
 
 I 
 
 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT i 
 
 II 
 
 CULTURE OF BODY 35 
 
 III 
 CULTURE OF MIND 69 
 
 IV 
 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE ... 97 
 
 V 
 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 127 
 
 VI 
 
 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 153 
 
 vii
 
 viii CONTENTS 
 
 VII 
 
 PACK 
 
 CULTURE OF HEART l8 5 
 
 VIII 
 
 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE . 
 
 IX 
 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 2 33
 
 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
 
 ' I would have his outward fashion and mien, and the dis- 
 position of his limbs, formed at the same time with his mind. 
 'Tis not a soul, 'tis not a body that we are training up, but a 
 man, and we ought not to divide him.' MONTAIGNE.
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 r I "*HE aim of self-culture is a legitimate one so 
 -* far as it goes, setting as its ideal the just 
 equipoise of all the nature, the due balance of 
 powers, concurrent growth in all possible direc- 
 tions. True vital efficiency, even bodily efficiency, 
 depends on the harmony of all the varied pow- 
 ers of a man's nature. It sometimes seems im- 
 possible to combine the seemingly opposite 
 qualities that go to the make-up of a complete 
 man. It is easy to be one-sided, to specialise 
 in character, to develop a part at the expense 
 of the life as a whole. In practice we see the 
 difficulty of combining such common opposites 
 as duty to self and duty to others, to be wise for 
 self-protection and simple in our relations with 
 men the ordinary situation which meets us 
 every day in almost every act. The difficulty of 
 life is to live truly and completely, to make the 
 most of oneself, to become the highest character 
 3
 
 4 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 that is possible. We cannot devote all our 
 attention to one sphere of our nature without 
 the whole suffering, and even that favoured 
 sphere itself being weakened. However difficult 
 it may be, we feel that in the true culture of 
 character the ideal is balance of opposing ele- 
 ments. The complete character must be full- 
 orbed, with no undue development on one side, 
 poised amid the warring forces of human nature, 
 'below the storm-mark of the sky, above the 
 flood-mark of the deep.' 
 
 The fable of a warfare between different func- 
 tions of the body is a common one in ancient 
 literature, as in the speech of Menenius Agrippa 
 recorded in Livy, and made famous to us by 
 Shakespeare's use of it in Coriolanus. The illus- 
 tration is taken from the various members of the 
 body, each essential for perfect health and life, 
 hand, eye, ear, all dependent on each other and 
 all contributing to the good of the man. It was 
 applied to the body politic to show the need of 
 all grades of society taking their share in the 
 national life and working sweetly and harmoni- 
 ously for the good of the State. The common 
 weal in all its grades and ranks is a conception 
 which would naturally arise in ancient civic life,
 
 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 5 
 
 as it does in our modern social conditions. The 
 real organic unity of society is one of the great 
 fruitful truths which should lead the way in 
 practical efforts for the betterment of all classes. 
 St. Paul used the same illustration when teaching 
 the unity of the Church amid its variety of gift 
 and operation and administration. 'The body is 
 not one member, but many. The eye cannot 
 say to the hand, I have no need of thee : nor 
 again the head to the feet, I have no need of 
 thee. There should be no schism in the body, 
 but the members should have the same care one 
 for another.' l The Church is a social organism, 
 and needs the use of the different forms of 
 endowment and faculty which its members 
 possess. All individual distinctions of gift and 
 of temperament and of attainment, when con- 
 secrated by a common faith and love, blend into 
 one perfect life, as the colours of the spectroscope 
 make up the one white light. Each member 
 exists for the good of the whole, and only when 
 each is performing his part can the whole be 
 its best. 
 
 The illustration is true for itself in the lower 
 level of the individual, as well as in the wider 
 
 1 I Cor. xii. 12-31.
 
 6 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 social range to which it was so often applied in 
 ancient literature. After all, we should remember 
 that it was taken from a truth of the personal 
 life, and was applied to the larger life; but the 
 truth has not been exhausted by us even in its 
 lower level. We have not applied it with suffi- 
 cient vigour and breadth to the whole of our 
 individual life. What is true of the body is true 
 of the man : what is true of the physical side is 
 true of complete human nature. The truth of 
 the illustration needs to be enforced in the nar- 
 row sphere of the individual life as well as in 
 the wider sphere of the society. The personal 
 ideal as well as the social ideal is proportional 
 development many members one body, many 
 capacities one life. The unity of the social 
 organism is a magnificent conception which will 
 bear a great harvest in improved conditions and 
 a deepening sense of corporate responsibility for 
 all the members of the State ; as the unity of the 
 Church carries with it great possibilities of com- 
 fort and inspiration to all believing men. The 
 unity of the individual life also has vast bear- 
 ings on thought and conduct, and needs to be 
 emphasised in all consideration of true and full 
 education.
 
 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 7 
 
 This is the main thesis of this book, which * 
 seeks to treat the various divisions of our nature 
 as inseparably related to each other and to the 
 complete life. It proposes to take the common 
 principle of division, accepting the duty and the 
 right of the culture of each power, and at the 
 same time showing the danger of undue develop- 
 ment and the need of concurrent growth. In- 
 tellect, for example, must not be cultivated at 
 the expense of the affections, and emotion must 
 not entrench upon the place and power of the 
 reason. We know in practice how easy it is 
 in planting and tending a virtue to sow with 
 it its corresponding vice. We need to have 
 some scheme of what human nature stands for, 
 that we may be able to apply it to our own 
 case and see whether we are making the most 
 of ourselves. It does not matter much what 
 classification of the powers we follow. The 
 simplest and the commonest is for practical 
 purposes the best. The common division is 
 that which begins with the body, the physical 
 basis of life, and then considers the mental 
 superstructure built on that, and then the moral 
 and spiritual life. 
 
 This is roughly the line we propose to take,
 
 8 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 applying in each case our main thesis that there 
 should be no schism in a man's nature, and there- 
 fore that all these parts of life merge into each 
 other and affect each other. Naturally in a 
 treatise on self-culture most space is allowed 
 to that of intellect, which usually indeed arro- 
 gates the title exclusively to itself. For clear- 
 ness' sake a special chapter is given to the 
 place of imagination as a special power of mind 
 which asks for separate consideration. 
 
 The method of self-culture, which takes our- 
 selves to bits and goes over each part piece- 
 meal, looking after the interests of the various 
 sections, now the development of body and 
 now the claims of mind, is not a complete 
 method, and runs risks from which culture has 
 rarely escaped of a narrowness of its own and 
 sometimes an empty conceit. It suffers also 
 from its subjective method, and too little appre- 
 ciates the healthy unconcern of the man of 
 action who never stops to inquire within of 
 himself. But anything is better than living 
 at random, making no attempt at any sort of 
 self-knowledge or self-improvement. The surface 
 life is easy enough to lead, living with no defi- 
 nite object, only satisfying instinct when it
 
 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 9 
 
 becomes imperious enough to compel us, but 
 with no intelligent conception as to what we 
 should be and may be. Ruskin's condemnation 
 of much of our modern life was that it appeared 
 as if our only two objects were, whatever we 
 have to get more, and wherever we are to go 
 somewhere else. This aimless discontent is 
 largely due to the meagre view of human life 
 which comes from lack of a sincere endeavour 
 after self-knowledge. 
 
 A large culture which aims at complete self- 
 realisation, seeking the perfection of one's whole 
 nature in a complete unity of character, must 
 be confessed to be rather of the nature of an 
 ideal than an actual reality. Even so, it is 
 something worth striving after; for it will 
 deepen our self-knowledge, make it more fruit- 
 ful, and show us where are the points of least 
 resistance which need to be strengthened. It 
 is much to know where our weak points are 
 few men get even as far as that in self-knowledge. 
 They hide their weaknesses from themselves, 
 and never make a frank and candid examina- 
 tion of their attainments. To take stock of 
 our assets sometimes is as wise a thing in life 
 as it is in business. A man has been known
 
 io PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 to drift into bankruptcy in business, because he 
 dreads the revelation which a close inquiry into 
 his affairs would bring, and prefers to shut his 
 eyes to the real state of matters. The same 
 half-conscious fear sometimes keeps a man from 
 self-examination, in case he may lay bare to 
 himself the poverty of the land. Only the man 
 who has never examined his own knowledge 
 can plume himself on its sufficiency either in 
 quality or quantity. Rather, the profounder 
 the knowledge, the more does true humility 
 deepen. When we scrutinise our ideas of things 
 
 even our common and well-established ideas 
 
 we discover how vague some of them are, 
 and how mistaken are others. To bring our 
 powers into self-consciousness immediately 
 creates duty regarding them. This is the 
 practical result of a wise self-knowledge, and 
 explains why culture must begin with it as a 
 method. It seeks to make us take an intelli- 
 gent view of our various capacities, and so to 
 give us a larger conception of the real oppor- 
 tunities of life. A man who never looks within, 
 and takes as his rule of conduct the accepted 
 standards of his environment, can be very com- 
 placent about his attainments. He can leave
 
 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 11 
 
 large tracts of his nature barren, hardly know- 
 ing even that they exist. Thus we find many 
 for whom whole worlds of thought and feeling 
 arc shut ; some to whom the things of intellect 
 are a closed book, and others to whom the 
 things of spirit are as in a land that is very 
 far off. 
 
 A true self-examination is necessary for in- 
 tellectual progress, as well as for moral and 
 spiritual growth. It need not be, and should 
 not be, the morbid introspection which lowers 
 the whole vitality and weakens effort. That 
 ruins all healthy moral life. The minute search 
 into every motive of an act produces a fertile 
 crop of scruples, and results in a debilitated 
 state of spiritual hypochondria. To watch for 
 every sign of evil, questioning every feeling, 
 tormenting oneself with every fear, is the way 
 to induce some taint and to foster moral disease. 
 It is so in the region of the physical. We have 
 heard of the man who thought he was ill, and 
 after reading a medical book concluded that he 
 had every possible disease mentioned in the 
 book. As he came to the description of each 
 separate ailment, he felt all the symptoms and 
 could locate the pain in every organ. The
 
 12 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 wonder was that he was alive at all with such 
 a mass of aches and pains. Spiritual hypo- 
 chondria can be produced in the same way, by 
 a morbid self-scrutiny that will never let the 
 soul alone, and will insist on recognising the 
 taint in every thought and every motive. A 
 complete and fearless self-examination is a good 
 thing sometimes, perhaps even at stated in- 
 tervals, but constant and minute introspection 
 only saps the life of its power. 
 
 At the same time, self-knowledge is a necessity 
 if we are to have any consistent and wise culti- 
 vation of our nature. Self-discipline in every 
 sphere begins with self-consciousness, in the 
 fearless scrutiny of both powers and limitations. 
 The process is not complete until it is lost in 
 self-forgetfulness, as the art which remains self- 
 conscious never approaches perfection ; but that 
 same art requires the long discipline in technique 
 and mastery over the methods of work. Simi- 
 larly, character must ultimately get past the self- 
 conscious stage, though it too must begin by 
 taking itself to pieces to give strenuous attention 
 where it is needed. Thus the method of culture, 
 in spite of the objections, justifies itself practi- 
 cally ; for after all we are only able to do things
 
 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 13 
 
 by sections because of our natural limitations. 
 This explains the constant tendency of thought 
 to divide our life into departments. It is 
 necessary in practice and is right, provided we 
 do not lose sight of the larger whole and re- 
 member that no part can be its best without 
 some complete and harmonious development. 
 
 It has also to be admitted that the aim of self- 
 culture, as usually stated, is not in itself a suffi- 
 cient ideal, since its result is to concentrate all 
 care and attention on oneself. It fails even of 
 its own aim of complete development by neglect- 
 ing the all-important fact, that man is a social 
 being and can only come to his true self by 
 taking his place in the common service of the 
 community. No scheme which concerns itself 
 solely with the individual can be a final one, and 
 self-culture must never forget the strong tempta- 
 tion which besets it to wrap itself up in a dis- 
 guised selfishness. We can only obviate this by 
 taking ,a broader view than is common of the 
 sphere of culture itself, as this book seeks to do. 
 To devote all consideration to the development 
 of the intellect may be as essentially dwarfing as 
 to devote it to the training of the body. We 
 smile at the youth who spends much time com-
 
 I 4 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 placently measuring the increase of biceps or 
 calf, and we pity the man who is always thinking 
 of lungs or liver or nerves ; but the same sort of 
 one-sided narrowness can be charged against the 
 man who devotes all his attention to this or that 
 mental function in the pious belief that he is 
 growing up into a perfect culture. The funda- 
 mental thesis with which we began of the unity 
 of life should keep us right. It should show us 
 the place which the element of social service^ 
 must have as the groundwork even of our 
 schemes of education. We do this in the 
 chapter devoted to the culture of heart, as the 
 very existence of such social feelings of sym- 
 pathy and affection implies the duty of their 
 exercise as truly as the existence of intellectual 
 capacity demands opportunities for training. 
 
 It is true that in a sense we are doing the best 
 for others when we do the best for self, since we 
 thus bring a richer contribution to the world's 
 life. What we do ultimately depends on what 
 we are; and according to the depth and wealth 
 of our own nature can our value to society be 
 measured. Every highly trained capacity is a 
 possible instrument of social service, and adds 
 to the real possessions of the community. Still,
 
 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 15 
 
 any individual ideal which gives no definite and 
 conscious place to the claims of society is fatally 
 imperfect, and dooms itself to failure even in its 
 own sphere. To be himself, a man must get out 
 of himself. He must hold all he has for a larger 
 purpose than any self-improvement. At the 
 best, self-culture of all kinds is only like the 
 polishing and sharpening of an instrument to 
 make it serve for the best work. The completest 
 knowledge and refinement of feeling are not for 
 their own sake, any more than physical training 
 is for its own sake. It would be but another 
 kind of selfishness of a more subtle sort to make 
 such an ideal. These are to be sought in order 
 that we may be better qualified for the better 
 service of life. It is well to remember that 
 every gain carries a danger of corresponding loss, 
 and that the very things of which culture should 
 assure us are often occasions of a still more 
 delicate temptation. Every new endowment 
 brings a necessary possibility of its abuse. We 
 are not therefore to shrink from them, but rather 
 to grasp them with firmer hold, knowing the 
 danger and making provision against it as com- 
 pletely as possible. In dealing with the culture 
 of each section of our nature it is the plan of
 
 16 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 this book to point out how the exclusive train, 
 ing of a power lays it open to the danger of 
 loss. 
 
 Within its own sphere, then, we must recognise 
 the claims of a comprehensive scheme of self- 
 culture, provided it be comprehensive enough. 
 
 True physical health is reached, when all the 
 organs are in their right condition of depend- 
 ence and co-ordination, in a state of real har- 
 mony. The larger health also is secured when 
 the whole man is symmetrical, when all the ele- 
 ments of his complex nature blend in the unity 
 of life, when body and mind and heart and 
 imagination and conscience and will find their 
 legitimate scope, when intellect is cultivated with- 
 out starving the emotions and affections, when 
 the outward corresponds with the inward, when 
 the complete life is reinforced not only by an 
 enlightened mind and heart and conscience but 
 
 / also by the higher sanctions of religion. This 
 training of a full and perfect man must be the 
 aim of education. The great task of life lies in 
 the harmonious unity of opposites. We need 
 true proportional development, concurrent growth 
 in the different directions open to us, physical, 
 mental, moral, spiritual. The practical problem
 
 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 17 
 
 lies in what place to give each function, and 
 how to combine them in the unity of character. 
 It is no easy task, as we can imagine, for any 
 one to cultivate the whole field of his life. There 
 will be sure to be gaps, some portions overworked 
 and some neglected. To a large extent it must 
 remain an ideal to all of us, but an ideal is useful 
 even when we know we cannot attain it. Indeed 
 if we did attain, it would cease to be the Ideal. 
 It is the experience of all that the firmer a man 
 lays hold of an ideal, the more it eludes his grasp. 
 As he grows in knowledge and insight and moral 
 vision and spiritual attainment, his ideal likewise 
 grows with a more unearthly beauty. Far vistas 
 open up in the moral life as the seeker advances. 
 In any case, even with the confessed failure to 
 realise what the heart sees to be best, it is well to 
 have seen the vision and to have followed after. 
 Wordsworth, in a short preface to his great 
 Ode to Duty, in which he had committed himself 
 from that hour to the guidance of absolute duty, 
 confesses that his wife and sister often twitted 
 him with good reason for having forgotten this 
 dedication of himself to the * stern lawgiver.' 
 There may be some comfort to weaker folk in 
 the knowledge that even the man whose heart 
 c
 
 i8 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 burned and whose eye gleamed at the fair sight 
 of a great ideal should be compelled to admit 
 failure in the harder task of keeping the heights 
 his soul was competent to gain. But whatever 
 failure there may be and must be, who shall say 
 that it was nothing that Wordsworth made his 
 dedication to serve more strictly his ideal and to 
 follow in the wake of a star ? 
 
 We should encourage ourselves and each other 
 to cherish high aims and to hold out before us 
 great ends. One element of comfort is that we 
 never know what undeveloped and even unsus- 
 pected faculties lie dormant in us and in each 
 other. In the education of the young, for in- 
 stance, how often a new environment, the 
 inspiration of a new teacher, the introduction of 
 a new subject, the contact with a new thought, 
 will give the life a changed bent and enlarge the 
 whole vision. A student sometimes has gone 
 through the whole conventional curriculum list- 
 less and unawakened, till he came to a subject 
 that gripped him, and the whole man grew and 
 expanded in the light and heat, and all the pur- 
 poses of life were transformed. 'What the eye 
 never sees the heart never longs for,' is an Irish 
 proverb with immense truth in this whole region
 
 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 19 
 
 of education. It enforces the importance of 
 environment, the value of a rich and varied 
 treatment of a child's dawning faculties, open- 
 ing up possibilities in different lines till one day 
 the soul may wake and grow. 
 
 This is the reason why we cannot afford to 
 neglect altogether any side of our nature, and 
 why the different elements that go to the mak- 
 ing of a true manhood and a perfect character 
 deserve care and consideration. Artists tell us 
 that nothing needs so many colours for its por- 
 trayal as the human face, though to the outsider 
 the mere colour would appear to be the least 
 difficult thing in portraiture. Similarly, many 
 and varied elements are needed for the pro- 
 duction of a complete character and life. Many 
 members and one body : many faculties and one 
 personality. If we leave out of account at 
 present the ways in which the bodily nature 
 affects both mind and soul, and look merely at 
 the higher reaches of our being, we must notice 
 how varied the elements are that go to the 
 making of a full human life, and how well 
 balanced and harmonious they must be. Reason 
 and emotion, faith and action, conscience to 
 enlighten and will to initiate, are all needed.
 
 20 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 Also, they must be in due proportion held in a 
 rightful equipoise, thought and imagination and 
 sympathy with full play for their activity without 
 any one overshadowing the others the sensibil- 
 ity that does not weaken the intellect, the intellect 
 that does not dwarf the affections, the affections 
 that do not vitiate the conscience, the conscience 
 that does not unnerve the will, the will that does 
 not misdirect the moral action. 
 
 Such an ideal may seem to impose on us a 
 heavy load, but a deliberate and sustained 
 approach to this is the task of life, and without 
 dishonour we are not permitted to lay down the 
 burden of being men. In a sense, however, it is 
 not so hard as it looks ; for it is found in practice 
 that it is in some ways easier to attain a many- 
 sided development than an ill-proportioned one. 
 The part is harder than the whole. One function 
 helps another in the complete life ; one grace 
 encourages and nourishes another. Excesses or 
 deficiencies of one faculty are corrected by 
 another. The faults of the head are put right by 
 the virtues of the heart, whereas an exclusive 
 attention to intellect will leave the defects of its 
 quality untouched. The excesses of sentiment 
 and sympathy are held in check by reason.
 
 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 21 
 
 The dangers of a morbid spiritualism are obvi- 
 ated by an enlightened conscience and the moral 
 duties it enforces. Thus, any half measure of 
 culture is really further from the chance of suc- 
 cess than the undivided whole. If we look care- 
 fully we find that one power slides into another, 
 and that no department is cut off from the rest 
 with clear hard lines. 
 
 We are very fond of dividing our life into 
 departments, a tendency which has, as we have 
 seen, a necessity in practice, but we need to be 
 reminded of the underlying unity. We see this 
 even in the theoretic division which is usually 
 made in treating of the mind. The common 
 division of the mental powers is into feeling, 
 knowing, willing ; but while the distinction is a 
 real one and can be truly and usefully made, it is 
 only a distinction in function. The three states 
 are never completely separated, but intermingle 
 with each other. Every mental state contains 
 something of each division, even although the 
 preponderant element may be so great that we 
 practically omit the other two elements and call 
 one brain action a thought, another an emotion, 
 another a volition. The highest thought is
 
 22 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 always suffused with emotion, and even the 
 coldest and driest thinking has at least some 
 colour of feeling if it be only a prejudice against 
 emotion in thought ! ' The light of the under- 
 standing,' says Bacon, ' is not a dry or pure 
 light, but receives a tincture from the will and 
 affections.' On the other hand, an act of will 
 is impossible without some of both the other 
 ingredients. This fact of the inter-relation of 
 knowing and feeling carries with it some practi- 
 cal results that should influence our judgments 
 more effectively than they are usually allowed to 
 do. For one thing, it illustrates the narrowness 
 of all attempts to make one of these qualities the 
 supreme guide of life, as when reason is made 
 the test. of all things. Our vital faith, the practi- 
 cal creed by which we live, is dependent on more 
 than the tyranny of reason, and sometimes when 
 there is a conflict between intellect and emotion 
 the heart rightly speaks out in protest, as in 
 Tennyson's lines : 
 
 If e'er when faith had fallen asleep, 
 I heard a voice, ' Believe no more,' 
 
 A warmth within the breast would melt 
 The freezing reason's colder part, 
 And like a man in wrath, the heart 
 
 Stood up and answered, 1 have felt.'
 
 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 23 
 
 There can be no schism between these essen- 
 tial powers without loss to all. Feeling, thought, 
 and will act and re-act on each other ceaselessly. 
 In our commonest experiences we know how 
 intimate the connection is, when a train of 
 thinking is started by some feeling, and a 
 decision is reached as a result. How often if 
 we analyse some experience we will find that 
 an emotion begat the thought, and the thought 
 blossomed into a determination. There can be 
 no real and effective willing without both some 
 feeling and some thinking. And on the other 
 hand the will can discipline both emotion and 
 thought, can often determine what we shall feel 
 and think, can choose among various courses of 
 feeling and thinking, reject certain natural lines 
 of reflection and deliberately encourage other 
 classes of thought. That is why the will plays 
 such a large part in moral life, and why it is 
 important in any scheme of culture. A man can 
 determine to some extent what thoughts and 
 feelings and imaginations he will harbour in 
 his mind, and to which he gives ready hospi- 
 tality. It is perhaps this power of will which 
 distinguishes men most ; for intellectually con- 
 centration of mind depends on it, and morally
 
 24 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 often the whole character of a man's inward life. 
 The highest intellectual life will be where these 
 related powers are in harmony, where the 
 emotions are not starved by the reason, where 
 feeling is not permitted to distemper the mind, 
 and where the will is not atrophied by want of 
 use. The heart must be allowed to testify 
 boldly, if need be, against 'the freezing reason's 
 colder part.' What we feel is as true a fact 
 as what we think. To omit this fundamental 
 place of emotion, as so many do in making 
 judgments about religion, is to vitiate their 
 conclusions. 
 
 In other and broader ways we often look upon 
 ourselves as a bundle of qualities unrelated to 
 each other in any vital fashion, and give too 
 little thought to the unity of character which 
 should be our ideal. This sense of disunion is 
 probably a necessary stage in education, and 
 certainly it is encouraged by the various forces 
 that act upon us in creating our moral char- 
 acter. We can hardly help feeling as if our 
 moral life were in detached fragments ; for we 
 are the fruit of many social influences differ- 
 ing vastly in their effects and in their method 
 - of working. We speak of the organic nature
 
 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 25 
 
 of society moulding men and producing moral 
 results which in their sum we call character ; 
 but society is not one invariable force even 
 though we rightly enough call it an organism. 
 In the region of personality and moral life all 
 our analogies from the natural world are only 
 figures of speech, to be interpreted with a large 
 margin of exception and correction. An or- 
 ganism in the animal or vegetable kingdom is 
 a body constituted of various essential and inter- 
 dependent organs, and while it is true that in a 
 large view society shows an organic structure 
 built up by an indwelling principle of life in the 
 body politic, yet it must be remembered that 
 we cannot define the social organism completely 
 in terms of physiology. In this sphere of moral 
 character we are bound to blunder if we assume 
 that society contains a complete and perfect 
 ethical unity. The fact is that society, though 
 spoken of in the large as one definite and dis- 
 tinct environment, is composed for all of us 
 of various ingredients all seeming to work 
 blindly. When we say that the forces of society 
 play upon us, we must not forget how different 
 these forces are in their nature. They can only 
 be worked up into unity in the unity of our own
 
 26 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 life, and this is why an intelligent and compre- 
 hensive scheme of self-culture is needed. 
 
 Society, for instance, comprises to us such 
 different influences as the family, the Church, 
 the civic conditions, the industrial relations so 
 different in different trades and professions. 
 Even if the home life for all were one consistent 
 influence about which we could speak as of one 
 colour as, alas! we cannot there would still 
 be the great variety introduced by the other 
 component parts of society. The best home 
 life presents a type of moral education hugely 
 different from the influences of our ordinary 
 work, which also is expected to be a moral 
 education. A young man beginning life finds 
 it hard to relate the two standards to each other. 
 We cannot be surprised if the various social 
 forces now overlap and now leave gaps in the 
 production of a complete moral character; and 
 we cannot be surprised if in our own experience 
 we are troubled by a haunting sense of disunion 
 within, as though we were made up of unrelated 
 virtues and faults. The standard of the family 
 and that of the Church speak with such different 
 voices from the standard, say, in our commercial 
 or our political life. Yet we feel sure that there
 
 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 27 
 
 should be no real division, but that our character 
 should be built up in consistency and in unity. 
 
 In a very real sense this is indeed so in spite 
 of appearances. A man's life creates in him a 
 distinct character which is compounded of all 
 that he is. We come to feel that there is a root 
 principle, which unifies all his varied experience 
 and gives one colour and tone to his life. In 
 our practical judgment of men we accept this. 
 We may be wrong in our judgment, but that 
 does not destroy the fact ; it only shows that 
 from want of adequate data we have made a 
 mistake. When we know a man thoroughly, 
 his strong and weak points, his virtues and fail- 
 ings, we are able to sum up what we conceive 
 to be his character. Much nonsense is talked 
 about the dual nature of man, as if he were two 
 or more persons living within the one tenement 
 of the body, a Dr. Jekyll and a Mr. Hyde, now 
 one and now the other, now kind and now cruel, 
 now high-minded and now base. The truth of 
 this crude statement of life is of course obvious. 
 It is to say that character is complex, as it must 
 be when acted on by such various forces as we 
 have seen. Good in a man has often a very 
 unstable equilibrium, and evil is not enthroned in
 
 28 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 unchallengeable power. We see the strangest 
 mixture of qualities in a single man, and the 
 strangest mixture of motives in a single act. 
 There is a soul of good in things evil, and evil 
 clings to the skirts of good. Still, there is a 
 real unity of character which is in process of 
 growing in every man. It is only in the making, 
 but its dominant features are ceaselessly shaping 
 the whole. The two seemingly opposite features 
 of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are due often to 
 the one root of character. They may be both 
 the fruit of selfishness now kind and cruel, 
 generous and mean, according to circumstances. 
 The variety has a deep underlying unity of 
 disposition at its base. 
 
 This suggests another common way in which 
 we introduce division into our life, by cutting it 
 into sections which we label sacred and secular. 
 It is an even more artificial division, but it has 
 perhaps with most of us far more practical 
 effects. We know from experience how per- 
 nicious it may be in life, and how demoralising 
 to religion. We cannot divide our life thus into 
 air-tight compartments, as if what is in one bit 
 could have no dealings with what is in another, 
 as if the sacred side of us had nothing to say to
 
 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 29 
 
 the secular side, and the secular can be kept 
 from influencing the sacred. It is a vain dream. 
 Our character is all of a piece, and the value of 
 our life must some time or other get down to 
 one common denominator. We cannot cut off 
 a little section and label it sacred, hedging it 
 round from the contamination of secular things. 
 If the sacred is not elevating and inspiring the 
 secular, the secular will assuredly drag the other 
 down to its own level. 
 
 Without entering more fully into these com- 
 mon devices we have of creating disunion within 
 ourselves the common division we make 
 between body and mind to be treated in the 
 next chapter, the division between different 
 functions of the mind itself, the practical division 
 of life into sacred and secular the great question 
 we have to face is how we are to arrive at real 
 unity, how to reconcile all the diverse parts of 
 our complex life and stand complete without 
 any schism in the life. There is no swift and s 
 easy cure-all that can be used like a quack 
 medicine. It can only be done by a process of 
 unification, and the process must be a religious 
 one. There is no other power can do it. Deep
 
 3 o PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 and sacred sanctions of duty must pervade and 
 inspire the practical scheme of self-culture we 
 choose. It is certainly the religious task to 
 bring every power and thought and faculty into 
 relation to religion. We cannot let go any 
 department of our nature as of no account, 
 without suffering loss. 
 
 Faith needs reason to stiffen it and protect it, 
 as zeal needs knowledge to steady it and direct 
 it. The intellectual faculties have to be re- 
 deemed from waste and failure as well as the 
 other parts of our being. When they are so 
 reclaimed and taken into the service of the 
 highest, the intellectual enriches the whole life 
 of faith. To leave out reason as if religion had 
 no concern with it is to make an irreparable 
 breach in the life, and is as foolish as if the eye 
 said to the hand, I have no need of thee. We 
 hold our faith by a very insecure tenure if we 
 refuse to bring our understanding to bear on it. 
 The apostolic counsel is certainly safer and 
 wiser, to be ready to give to every man a reason 
 for the hope that is in us. In the course of a 
 high argument the author, of the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews stops to complain of the slowness and 
 dulness of apprehension of his readers, which
 
 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 31 
 
 makes it difficult for him to go on with the higher 
 teaching. He cannot explore the profounder 
 reaches of truth, he tells them, because they have 
 not made themselves fit to follow him. When 
 he comes to speak of such deep things, it is as if 
 they had suddenly become dull of hearing, and 
 could not understand his speech. They have 
 remained children content with the rudiments of 
 truth, content to live on milk diet so that they 
 cannot take the solid food he is prepared to give 
 them. And yet, he contends, they ought to have 
 grown up and gone on developing, and should 
 indeed have been in a position to be teachers 
 themselves. If they had exercised their powers 
 they would not now be placidly accepting spoon- 
 meat like children, but would have been full- 
 grown men to whom solid food was natural. 
 
 If growth in knowledge and the development 
 of intellect are necessary to understand in a 
 progressive degree spiritual truth, no less needful 
 is the cultivation of the higher emotions. As 
 we have seen, this is true even in the sphere 
 of ordinary thought. Herbert Spencer in the 
 Preface to his Autobiography declares that he 
 has shown by his book that in the genesis of a 
 system of thought the emotional nature is
 
 32 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 perhaps as large a factor as the intellectual 
 nature. Spencer showed this rather negatively 
 than otherwise ; for one of the prominent marks 
 of his life seems to be that he held his emotional 
 nature in perpetual restraint. The sentiments 
 that appealed to him were usually the most 
 abstract, with little blood in their veins. But 
 there is a sense in which the remark is true even 
 of his own work, almost exclusively intellectual 
 as it appears. If true there, it is a hundredfold 
 truer in the range of common human life. The 
 region of feeling lies specially near to religion 
 and cannot be overlooked. The life of the heart 
 is what makes up the individuality of each of us 
 more than even our distinctive intellectual powers. 
 Religion shows her dominant power just here 
 amid the affections and sympathies. Religion 
 bends and shapes the life at the points where 
 feeling flames. 
 
 In the same way it can be shown that religion 
 demands the cultivation of imagination, and 
 conscience, and will, and every power and faculty 
 ' which man possesses. There are many capaci- 
 ties but the one life, and each faculty is needed 
 to make up the perfect unity. The truest 
 religion inspires the cultivation of intellect and
 
 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 33 
 
 all the higher emotions, and is itself in turn re- 
 inforced by their training. Lasting injury is 
 done to character when one of the elements is 
 neglected. Thus the proportional development, 
 which the best culture asks for, is also sanc- 
 tioned, and even required, by religion. 
 
 Many who go with us thus far and assent to 
 all this as a fair ideal for the life of man do not 
 see the further implication of their position which 
 relates to the place of religion itself, the place of 
 the soul, and the innate demand for spiritual 
 culture. If man has a life towards the things 
 below him, he has a life also towards the things 
 above him. Only when he fulfils the true end 
 of his being in that higher life does man truly 
 live. With satiated desire, gratified ambition, 
 intellectual attainment, it is a cramped and 
 narrow life with already the gnawing of the 
 worm in it, if there be in it no fellowship with 
 the divine, none of the faith and hope and love 
 of religion. There is a deadly schism in the life ; 
 all our best powers have broken, ragged edges to 
 them, if they are not carried forward and upward 
 into the life of God. The depth and richness of 
 a complete nature are lacking without this higher 
 culture. There can be no true proportional
 
 34 PROPORTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 development, no true balance of power, no true 
 harmony of gift, until they are all submitted in 
 humility and gratitude and loving service to their 
 Giver, who reconciles all the varied capacities 
 and divergent powers of our human nature into 
 one consistent whole.
 
 CULTURE OF BODY
 
 ' Perhaps nothing will so much hasten the time when body 
 and mind will both be adequately cared for, as a diffusion of 
 the belief that the preservation of health is a duty." 
 
 HERBERT SPENCER.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 CULTURE OF BODY 
 
 " I ^HE common division of man naturally begins 
 *- with the body, the physical basis of life. Its 
 claim to full culture is one which we must make 
 willingly and gladly, realising the immense part 
 it plays in every region. To neglect duty here is 
 to take away from efficiency everywhere. Any 
 serious derangement of the physical nature 
 maims and distorts every higher function. The 
 Greeks made physical training a science, one of 
 the necessary parts of their scheme of education. 
 The Gymnasium was one of the great centres of 
 a city's life, where especially all the young men 
 gathered. That is why philosophers and teachers 
 frequented them, as they easily and naturally 
 found an audience there. There were three great 
 gymnasia in Athens famous to us, because in one 
 of them Plato taught and Aristotle in another. 
 By their muscular development and their careful 
 37
 
 3 8 CULTURE OF BODY 
 
 bodily training, the Greek ideal of beauty and 
 dignity and proportion in the human figure 
 remains as one of the great glories of art. We 
 may sometimes think that the cult of athletics is 
 in danger of being carried too far among us, but 
 it is nothing compared to the practice of the 
 Greeks. To them it was almost a half of human 
 education. Every town had its gymnasium, its 
 baths, its racing-track, on a scale hardly con- 
 ceivable by us. Training of the body was set 
 about on scientific principles, not haphazardly as 
 sports for the pastime of children or as exhibi- 
 tions for the amusement of spectators. Philoso- 
 phers gravely reasoned out the due proportion 
 which athletic development should have in the 
 ideal education. Even Plato in his scheme of 
 education sets apart exclusively for 'gymnastic' 
 the years of a young man's life which seem to 
 us the most essential for establishing moral 
 character and intellectual pursuits those be- 
 tween seventeen and twenty. It was because 
 he took long views of life that he was willing to 
 make this sacrifice of these most precious years. 
 He believed that it would pay afterwards both 
 morally and intellectually. 
 The many references, casual though they are,
 
 CULTURE OF BODY 39 
 
 scattered through the New Testament itself give 
 us some indication of the place the gymnastic art 
 held in Greek life. The New Testament never 
 throws contempt on the body, but recommends a 
 wise and sane treatment of it, and even when 
 advocating a higher kind of discipline does not 
 denounce bodily training. It has its uses, it 
 asserts, though these can only be partial, having 
 reference only to one department of a man's 
 nature. All who saw the results could not but 
 admire the perfection of strength and beauty and 
 health which was the result of the classic training. 
 St. Paul more than once points the lesson of self- 
 discipline by a reference to the Isthmian games, 
 the great festival of Greece. Every competitor 
 at these great contests, every one who entered 
 for a race or for a boxing-match, did so after 
 the most careful training and the most stringent 
 discipline. 'Every man that striveth for the 
 mastery is temperate in all things,' says the 
 Apostle, asking from his readers for something 
 of the same eager interest and willing sacrifice 
 in the higher race and the nobler fight of life. 
 The training was very severe, and was entered on 
 ten months before the contest. Epictetus gives 
 the rules for the training of an athlete: 'Thou
 
 40 CULTURE OF BODY 
 
 must be orderly, living on spare food, abstain 
 from confections, make a point of exercising at 
 the appointed time in heat and in cold, nor drink 
 cold water, nor wine at hazard. In a word, give 
 thyself up to thy training-master as to a 
 physician, and then enter on the contest.' No 
 serious competitor could afford to be self- 
 indulgent, and so the training naturally suggested 
 metaphors for self-mastery, the taming of the 
 evil within and harnessing the powers of life to 
 good. 
 
 The Greek passion for gymnastic, or what we 
 would call athletics, finds some justification from 
 the facts of life. What the precise connection is 
 between the body and the higher life we need 
 not try to discover, whether in the ultimate issue 
 character depends on the physical nature, or 
 whether the body is the expression of the soul. 
 For a true sense of duty, all we need to know is 
 that the connection is of the closest, between the 
 higher life of intellect and morals and spirit on 
 the one side, and on the other what we are 
 accustomed to think the lower life of the body. 
 We need not accept entirely the fanciful idea of 
 some philosophers and poets, as in Spenser's 
 beautiful lines,
 
 CULTURE OF BODY 41 
 
 For every spirit as it is most pure, 
 And hath in it the more of heavenly light, 
 So it the fairer body doth procure 
 To habit in, and it more fairly dight 
 With cheerful grace and amiable sight ; 
 For of the soul the body form doth take ; 
 For soul is form, and doth the body make. 
 
 The relation at least is one that cannot be 
 severed, and to try to solve the problem as to 
 which comes first is like the ancient conundrum 
 which Plutarch tells us philosophers discussed, as 
 to whether the hen or the egg came first. For 
 practical purposes, all we need to know is that 
 there is a real and vital connection between the 
 hen and the egg. 
 
 Montaigne comes nearer the practical, though 
 some may think that even he is a little fanciful 
 in putting the cart before the horse, when he 
 says, ' The soul that entertains philosophy ought 
 to be of such a constitution of health as to render 
 the body in like manner healthful too ; she ought 
 to make her tranquillity and satisfaction shine so 
 as to appear without, and her contentment ought 
 to fashion the outward behaviour to her own 
 mould and consequently to fortify it with a 
 graceful confidence, an active carriage, and a 
 serene and contented countenance. The most
 
 41 CULTURE OF BODY 
 
 manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerful- 
 ness.' 1 We do not need to subscribe to what 
 is called the religion of healthy-mindedness in 
 order to admit freely the great and common 
 truth which it emphasises. If courage and hope 
 and trust have a conquering efficacy over some 
 bodily ailments and over some nervous states of 
 mind, while doubt and fear reduce vitality, we 
 know even more certainly the converse side that 
 states of body influence the higher life in all its 
 activities. The common man's philosophy is 
 usually the fruit of his physical temperament. 
 Most optimisms can be traced to a good 
 digestion, and most pessimisms to dyspepsia. 
 
 It influences art and literature in ways too 
 subtle always to discover. A very observant 
 doctor mentioned as an interesting fact that the 
 writers of the vulgar and brutal fiction of our 
 day are all in bad health. He spoke from know- 
 ledge of some of them, and perhaps he was not 
 far wrong in his diagnosis of all. Certainly one 
 might argue from the unhealthiness of mind to at 
 least bad habits of body. The greatest writers 
 impress us with a sense of the healthy vigour and 
 sanity of their mind. With them we are in a 
 
 1 Essay, The Education of Children.
 
 CULTURE OF BODY 43 
 
 large world, under wide skies, and amid whole- 
 some life. There is no feeling of depressed 
 vitality about them or their work. The morbid 
 and diseased and the tragic side of the world 
 have their place in their interpretation of human 
 life, but always in the natural proportion and 
 from the point of view that health is the normal. 
 Clear vision, and keen insight, and true feeling, 
 and productive energy in all forms of art depend 
 on conditions of health of body and mind and 
 soul. Disease of all sorts reduces vital force, 
 distorts the perspective, and takes away from the 
 power of working. When it invades the sanc- 
 tuary of the soul it ruins the qualities that go to 
 produce great art. As a fact on the other side 
 in this connection, Emerson in his classification 
 of the different kinds of eloquence has one 
 which he calls animal eloquence, the first quality 
 of which is a certain robust and radiant physical 
 health, and produces its effects by its great 
 volumes of animal heat. It is true that many a 
 man with weak lungs and frail stature has made 
 his mark in oratory through the inward flame 
 that triumphed over the physical weakness, but 
 it has been done at great cost and under severe 
 handicap.
 
 44 CULTURE OF BODY 
 
 We cannot fail to see that the connection 
 between body and mind is a very close one, and 
 when we note how the one affects the other we 
 must admit that health is a moral duty. The 
 value of health for Jtappiness is perhaps only 
 fully appreciated by those who have lost it. We 
 have all known some to whom the finest gifts of 
 fortune were made bitter and valueless through 
 physical weakness. There is, of course, the con- 
 verse truth that some bodily ailments have their 
 origin in the mind, and sometimes if physicians 
 could minister to a mind diseased, they could cure 
 their patients easily ; but this fact must not make 
 us careless of the equal truth, that depressed bodily 
 functions mean depressed mental functions, and 
 that the man likely to be happy and to live a 
 sane, wholesome life is the healthy man. The 
 connection between health and happiness is a 
 commonplace; at least we easily admit that 
 pain and constant bad health will counterbalance 
 almost any possible gifts of fortune. Carlyle in 
 his Rectorial Address to the students of the 
 Edinburgh University put this in weighty words : 
 ' Finally, I have one advice to give you which is 
 practically of very great importance. You are to 
 consider throughout much more than is done at
 
 CULTURE OF BODY 45 
 
 present, and what would have been a very great 
 thing for me if I had been able to consider, that 
 health is a thing to be attended to continually, 
 that you are to regard it as the very highest of 
 all temporal things. There is no kind of achieve- 
 ment you could make in the world that is equal 
 to perfect health. What to it are nuggets or 
 millions ? ' 
 
 The duty of a wise care for health is bigger 
 than merely adding an important asset for per- 
 sonal happiness. To a large extent it deter- 
 mines the efficiency of our lives. Its results are 
 seen all along the line, giving a bias to our views, 
 and affecting our capacity to work and the quality 
 of our work. Students especially sometimes 
 forget that the brain can be overtaxed, and like 
 an overbent bow may never quite recover from 
 the strain. It often demands from the student 
 great control, and what looks like sacrifice, for 
 him to rigorously follow the rules of health, such 
 as attention to diet and sleep and exercise. He 
 is not interested in physical exercise, and can get 
 up no sort of enthusiasm for games and has none 
 of the sportsman's instinct, while he is intensely 
 interested in his intellectual pursuits. He is 
 absorbed in great studies, the passion of high
 
 4 6 CULTURE OF BODY 
 
 thought is upon him, and noble ambitions kindle 
 in his mind. Yet even for the sake of his work 
 in the long run he cannot break these common 
 laws with impunity. Many a man learns after it 
 is too late that he would have been fit for better 
 and more work, if he had always preserved the 
 sane and sensible bearing towards the laws of 
 health and life which experience teaches. We 
 have a proverb which says that a man at forty 
 will be either a fool or a physician, with the evi- 
 dent thought that by that time he ought to have 
 learned the simple elementary rules of health. 
 The trouble is that then it is often too late, or at 
 least mischief is done which hampers a man all 
 his life. No one in these days has any excuse 
 for ignorance of the common practical rules of 
 health. There are many popular medical books 
 on the subject, such as the primers published by 
 the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 
 Health Series. Herbert Spencer deals with 
 the subject in connection with children in his 
 Education, and there are various manuals of 
 hygiene which give much good practical advice 
 on the management of the body. 
 
 Napoleon in one of his letters quoted 
 Fontenelle's saying that the two great qualities
 
 CULTURE OF BODY 47 
 
 necessary to live long were a good body and a 
 bad heart, the sort of cynical remark which 
 appeals to the coarse-grained man who makes an 
 idol of mere success and defines success in terms 
 of selfishness. We can extract the sting out of 
 the saying and accept the manifest truth it con- 
 tains, namely, that health is a condition of real 
 efficiency, enabling a man to do his work and ex- 
 pend himself freely in the various lines in which 
 his energy runs. We see at once that any work 
 which requires delicacy of touch or accuracy of 
 calculation or even special energy needs a basis 
 of health. In general life, commercial, political, 
 social, the qualities most prized of initiative and 
 enterprise and resourcefulness, all indeed that we 
 sum up under the head of practical capacity, have 
 their roots in health and strength. ' For perform- 
 ance of great mark it needs bodily health,' says 
 Emerson. ' Sickness is poor-spirited and cannot 
 serve any one ; it must husband its resources to 
 live.' 
 
 To say that health is a condition of a man's 
 efficiency is more than to say that it will probably 
 lead to success in his business. It should help to 
 make him a man of a more all-round character, 
 since character is formed, as Goethe says, in the
 
 4 8 CULTURE OF BODY 
 
 stream of the world. Of course there have been 
 exceptions. Many men have done magnificent 
 work who have been handicapped by a delicate 
 constitution, but they would be the first to admit 
 that it has been a handicap. They could not 
 enter the race on fair terms. It is worth while 
 remembering the exceptions, if only for the sake 
 of those who know that they are not like Samson 
 for strength, and who may have to contend 
 against much weakness. Even here, wise care 
 will enable one to get through much work, and 
 will even build up a fairly comfortable margin of 
 strength. Gibbon, who had very weak health in 
 youth, tells us in his Memoirs that his constitu- 
 tion was so feeble and his life so precarious that 
 in the baptism of each of his brothers his father's 
 prudence successively repeated the Christian 
 name of Edward, that in the case of the departure 
 of the eldest son this name might be still per- 
 petuated in the family. Till he was nearly six- 
 teen he was a most delicate boy, but thereafter 
 his constitution became fortified, and all the world 
 knows how much he was enabled to perform in his 
 life, largely because, as he says, he never possessed 
 or abused the insolence of health. Something of 
 the same is true of Julius Caesar, of Calvin, and of
 
 CULTURE OF BODY 49 
 
 many other great men who triumphed over much 
 weakness of body. It is proof of the supremacy 
 of the soul that the sick body can sometimes 
 be made to do its bidding. But even if the sick- 
 ness does not bring some taint of the morbid or 
 perverse, that bidding would be done more easily 
 and perfectly under conditions of health. 
 
 Charles Kingsley with his healthy body and 
 sane mind taught his generation a useful lesson 
 to treat the physical side of life wisely and 
 reasonably. He himself attributed part of his 
 success at Eversley to the natural and easy way 
 he could be all things to all men could swing a 
 flail with the threshers in a barn, turn his swathe 
 with the mowers in a meadow, pitch hay with 
 the haymakers in the pasture, as well as show 
 sympathy with all manly sports. In a letter 
 from Eversley he declares that there has always 
 seemed to him something impious in the neglect 
 of personal health, strength, and beauty, which 
 some religious people of his day affected. 'I 
 could not do half the little good I do here if it 
 were not for that strength and activity which 
 some consider coarse and degrading. How 
 merciful God has been in turning all the strength 
 and hardihood I gained in snipe-shooting and
 
 50 CULTURE OF BODY 
 
 hunting, and rowing, and jack-fishing in those 
 magnificent fens to His work.' 
 
 Apart from efficiency in work, mental and 
 moral qualities are affected when the state of 
 the body is abnormal. As on the one hand 
 self-indulgence produces slackness of fibre both 
 physical and mental, so bodily states influence 
 our higher capacities and colour our views. 
 Moral qualities cannot be dissociated from 
 physical results. The most intellectual life, or 
 the most spiritual life, proceeds upon a physical 
 basis. In a word, life is a unity; and if the 
 materialist makes a fatal error in leaving soul 
 out of account, so the spiritualist makes a fatal 
 error if he leaves body out of account. ' Conceit 
 in weakest bodies strongest works,' says Shake- 
 speare. Morbid or capricious judgments about 
 things are more likely to be had from the men of 
 irritable nerves, than from the robust and whole- 
 some nature. Not that all deep-chested and 
 strong men must be models of wisdom, nor that 
 any who cannot come up to the standard of a 
 health inspector can have no chance to become 
 wise. Here too there have been many exceptions 
 on both sides. Pascal was always a weakling, 
 and even made himself more so by his religious
 
 CULTURE OF BODY 51 
 
 austerities ; and to many a man pain has been 
 a school of the profoundest wisdom. We must 
 remember that it is always easy to overrate the 
 physical. It is the first thing we note and the one 
 thing we can easily mark. Some of the noblest 
 men have been among the class of invalids. 
 Some of the finest specimens physically have 
 been among the meanest and basest. Sympathy, 
 tenderness, and insight have come to many a 
 man through suffering; and nothing is so irri- 
 tating as the easy and joyous platitudes of the 
 deep-chested type who have never known any 
 sort of pain or tribulation. Many a man has 
 been able to say with the Psalmist, 'It is good 
 for me that I have been afflicted that I might 
 learn Thy statutes.' 
 
 At the same time, speaking in general terms 
 on this subject, we must stand for a sane and 
 wholesome physical nature as the ideal, from 
 which at least to expect a well-developed 
 character. The old adage is a true one, Mens 
 sana in corpore sano. The highest functions of 
 life can only be adequately performed in health. 
 Perhaps there never was more necessity for the 
 enforcement of this truth than to-day, when such 
 multitudes live in cities, and when so much
 
 5 2 CULTURE OF BODY 
 
 of our work is of a sedentary or confining 
 character. The ever-increasing demands of in- 
 dustry make a drain on all the resources of our 
 life, and ask for complete fitness not only in 
 body and mind, but also in the subtler region of 
 character, and we cannot afford to neglect any 
 element that makes for efficiency. 
 
 This is often treated as if there were some sort 
 of degradation in admitting that so much of the 
 higher reaches of life depend on such trivial 
 things as exercise and the right management of 
 the body generally. Rather, we should take it 
 as an evidence of the sacredness of all parts of 
 our nature. If we are wise we will accept the 
 fact of the relation of body to the highest life, 
 and will treat it accordingly. It will help us to 
 solve some of the practical problems we all meet 
 in the conduct of life the whole question of re- 
 creation and amusement, for example. 
 
 Some sort of recreation is necessary in the 
 interests not merely of the body itself but of the 
 whole man. The bow must be unstrung if it is 
 to retain its elasticity. For the mind's own sake 
 there must be diversion, and while variety of 
 mental work itself gives some diversion, yet the 
 most complete recreation for all whose work is
 
 CULTURE OF BODY 53 
 
 sedentary and intellectual is some form of physical 
 exercise. Per contra, the best recreation to those 
 whose work is largely manual consists in some 
 intellectual pursuit. Not only is it the best, but 
 it is absolutely necessary if a man is to retain 
 the highest qualities of his manhood. The most 
 effective recreation is certainly that which is in 
 contrast to our regular employment. Every one 
 will admit that a moderate amount of exercise in 
 the open air is good for body and mind. The 
 encouragement of athletics given to-day in 
 schools, by the press, and by the whole tone of 
 public opinion, is in some respects a good sign of 
 the times. We may have grave doubts about the 
 'cult of the arena,' where thousands of people 
 crowd together round a field to watch a select 
 number of professionals perform in a game ; 
 though even that is not to be indiscriminately 
 condemned, as there are many more unhealthy 
 ways in which masses of our young men could 
 spend some of their leisure time. Outdoor pur- 
 suits and open-air sports have their legitimate 
 place and do something to preserve the national 
 efficiency we hear so much about. Physical 
 exercise and fresh air will increase and preserve 
 the health and happiness of our town populations.
 
 54 
 
 CULTURE OF BODY 
 
 A man who is physically fit is surely all the 
 better citizen. No sensible man would like to 
 reduce the opportunities in this line open to our 
 clerks and artisans. 
 
 We are coming even to see how qualities that 
 may be classed as moral may be encouraged in 
 children by their very games. The most popular 
 games for boys have been recognized as doing 
 more than giving opportunities for health. They 
 teach lessons that may well be called moral, self- 
 reliance and yet self-restraint, good temper in de- 
 feat and moderation in victory, steady resolution, 
 and the value of combination. The perseverance 
 and energy and generosity which games can 
 teach boys make no small contribution to their 
 training for life. The value of drill to boys is 
 something more than the mere physical training 
 received by it. It is calculated to awaken a sense 
 of comradeship, and with it a subordination to the 
 good of others. It teaches habits of self-control 
 and thoroughness and exactness, and helps to root 
 out the inborn tendency of what Rudyard Kipling 
 calls 'doing things rather more or less.' 
 
 This ideal of physical culture is a far-reaching 
 principle, which should have great results both 
 for the personal and for the social life. It is at
 
 CULTURE OF BODY 55 
 
 the basis of all education, and the sooner and the 
 more completely we recognise this, the better will 
 it be for our social conditions. The rules for the 
 care of children are in a sense well enough known, 
 but the observance of them is not in keeping with 
 our knowledge. They are plenty of good air, 
 simple food, suitable clothing according to the sea- 
 son, and enough exercise. The most important of 
 these, because it is the one most neglected, is the 
 first, which really in a sense includes the last. 
 The way in which otherwise sensible people 
 poison children by stuffy houses and musty 
 schools is past speech. How can we expect 
 children to be bright of intellect in deadly school- 
 rooms full of impure air ? With a little more 
 wisdom also the demands of education could be 
 made to harmonise better with a child's physical 
 fitness, taking care that the nervous system is 
 not exhausted ; and better methods of education 
 could be introduced, with less cramming and 
 other stupid ways in which vanity encourages 
 infant precocity. If parents and teachers fully 
 realise how mental states are affected by physical 
 health, there will be less of the unreasonable 
 chastisement, which made Rousseau say when 
 writing about it after fifty years that the memory
 
 56 CULTURE OF BODY 
 
 made his pulse quicken still. This ideal of 
 physical culture must take a larger place in 
 all legislation, and through it the standard of 
 health for the community will be raised. It will 
 mean an increased importance to be attached 
 to the physical well-being of all the people, in 
 conditions of labour, in housing of the working 
 classes, in facilities for recreation, in opportunities 
 for leisure. 
 
 At the same time, while we gladly admit the 
 importance of all this side of life, we must take 
 care that athletics do not take an undue place, 
 as if they were an end in themselves and not 
 just a means to something larger. The mere 
 idolatry of muscle that is so common in many 
 quarters is anything but a good sign of the 
 times, and is of a piece with the view of life 
 which eliminates the spiritual. One must 
 make allowance for the boyish crazes which 
 pass over a community, when every youth 
 spends long time solemnly examining his 
 biceps : and one must also make allowance for 
 the youthful enthusiasm which makes a hero 
 of the captain of the football team and very 
 often he is a hero in school life. But the
 
 CULTURE OF BODY 57 
 
 danger to which we refer has much more wide- 
 spread roots than that. A considerable section 
 of our people is taken up with sports and games. 
 These seem to be the first thing in their lives. 
 Bodily exercise is made to profit everything ; 
 and if you take that away there is practically 
 nothing left. The things of the intellect and 
 the things of the soul have little or no place; 
 and even the things of ordinary business suffer. 
 At least employers sometimes say that with 
 some of their young men, the one important 
 thing is their sport football, or baseball, or golf. 
 From what has preceded in this chapter, it will 
 be understood that nothing here is written with 
 sour and narrow prejudices, which would con- 
 demn such innocent and even necessary recrea- 
 tion. But it is a poor life which has no deeper 
 and higher concern. If we get the right per- 
 spective, bodily exercise will fall into its true 
 and legitimate place. Its place is to give a 
 perfect instrument for the play of our higher 
 energies. It was never meant that a man with 
 all his Godlike endowments should spend all on 
 the outside of life, with no interests above the 
 body and the things of the body. The mere 
 athlete, however highly trained, is an incom-
 
 S 8 CULTURE OF BODY 
 
 plete person. Said Epictetus, It is a sign of a 
 nature not finely tempered to give yourself up to 
 things which relate to the body ; to make a great 
 fuss about exercise, about eating, about drinking, 
 about walking, about riding. All these things 
 ought to be done by the way ; the formation of 
 the spirit and character must be our real con- 
 cern.' 1 Some of us make a great fuss about 
 such things, and have no time or thought for 
 anything else. Bodily exercise does profit for 
 some things, but it has its limits, and the limits 
 are soon reached. 
 
 In itself it cannot even save the physical life ; 
 for our nature is a unity, and each part suffers 
 from loss elsewhere. If it is true that a healthy 
 body influences mind and soul for good, it is 
 also true that a healthy mind has its good effect 
 on the very body. Goodness is profitable for 
 all things, for the body as for the soul, for the 
 life that now is as well as for the life that is to 
 come. This is no theory merely, but a well- 
 established fact of experience. A happy mood 
 of mind, a sweet and simple piety, a generous 
 desire to help and serve others, will encourage 
 and strengthen health in ourselves. Faith re- 
 
 1 v. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy ', chap. I.
 
 CULTURE OF BODY 59 
 
 news youth like the eagle. The merry heart 
 maketh a cheerful countenance. Peace of mind, 
 a good conscience, a gentle, generous, unselfish 
 heart are all great elements of health, just as 
 anger and excessive grief and hatred tend to 
 destroy vitality. If we would be true and com- 
 plete men, we must have another sort of exercise 
 in addition to any physical training. Plato, who 
 made so much of the necessity of bodily training, 
 says, ' Excessive care of body beyond the rules 
 of gymnastic is most inimical to the practice 
 of virtue,' and after all, his interest in the one 
 was because of his concern for the other. We 
 must consider more than health, if we would 
 fulfil the end of our being. We must aim at 
 true proportional development, which will some- 
 times demand the good of the whole, even at 
 some self-sacrifice in the region of the physical. 
 We must exercise the higher part of our nature, 
 and most of all must give scope to the highest 
 part of all. There is a gymnastic which must 
 take precedence. Noble and virtuous life 
 not bodily development, nor even mental culture 
 by itself, nor happiness is our being's end 
 and aim. Without this we are stunted and 
 dwarfed, never attaining what we ought to
 
 60 CULTURE OF BODY 
 
 become, never approaching the stature of the 
 perfect man. No development in the lower 
 reaches of life can make up for failure in the 
 higher. Bodily exercise cannot profit for every- 
 thing, and can at the best profit only for a little. 
 By itself it leaves a man one-sided and distorted. 
 Its true place is to cultivate the body as an instru- 
 ment for a complete character. Even when we 
 follow after lower things and give our hearts 
 to unworthy aims, we know that goodness alone 
 counts : we know that the men and women who 
 truly succeed in life, are those who succeed here. 
 However much we may be spending our strength 
 for that which profiteth not, we know in our heart 
 of hearts that goodness alone is profitable for all 
 things and for all worlds. 
 
 The right view of this subject will only be 
 reached by laying firm hold of the principle 
 which runs through this book, of the unity of 
 the personal life. The body must be treated as 
 an integral part of human nature, not as a foe 
 to all that is best in man, a foe to be buffeted 
 ' and kept under. The true relation of the body 
 to the higher life of mind and soul is not one of 
 mutual antagonism. To think of man as pure
 
 CULTURE OF BODY 61 
 
 spirit, even in theory, is folly, and leads to endless 
 error. Even the abstract separation of spiritual 
 and material can serve no useful purpose, and 
 must always incur some serious dangers. It is 
 futile to regard the bodily functions as something 
 quite apart from the mental functions, as it is 
 futile to speak of our personality as if it had no 
 intimate connection with the body. We have large 
 evidence of the inter-relation of mind and body, 
 the reaction on each other of moral and physical 
 states. This close connection is admitted, though 
 even now we do not give it its full weight in 
 affecting conduct. Though we may make distinc- 
 tions in our nature for convenience of speech, yet 
 these distinctions are largely artificial. We can- 
 not cut up the being of man in sections, as if 
 there could be an intellectual life that had no basis 
 in the physical, or as if there could be a life of the 
 soul with no relation to the life in the flesh. 
 
 If we have such a conception of unity in our 
 nature, it follows that we can leave no part of 
 man outside our consideration, as if it did not 
 count. Education is seen to be more than a mere 
 brain development; it is the total forming of a 
 human being, physical, intellectual, moral, and 
 spiritual. It is, no doubt, sometimes humiliating
 
 62 CULTURE OF BODY 
 
 to us to feel how much we are affected by our 
 physical state. It makes us almost despise our- 
 selves, bound as we seem to be to the body of 
 this death. But for good or ill it is so. All 
 divisions of man's nature must be confessedly 
 inexact. All talk about religion being of the 
 soul, and sin having its seat in the body, is false. 
 The body in itself is morally neutral and colour- 
 less. All sins of the flesh are sins of the soul. 
 We may locate the manifestation, but the evil is 
 deeper than the surface. To parcel out the 
 nature of man in the common way, to separate 
 the body from the soul except in a popular and 
 general fashion, invariably ends in error accord- 
 ing to which side the stress is laid 
 
 On the one side it becomes rank materialism, 
 which places life frankly on a physical basis. 
 Virtue, if it is taken into account at all, is re- 
 solved into health of body merely. It means the 
 virtual denial of the soul. Now, this practical 
 materialism owes its place and power to a 
 natural protest against a false mysticism. It is 
 only of modified value even as a protest ; for it 
 also neglects the facts of human life. Man is 
 man not through that which he has in common 
 with animals, but that which distinguishes him
 
 CULTURE OF BODY 63 
 
 from them. It asserts the great truth that 
 wholesomeness of body is necessary for whole- 
 someness of mind, but is blind to the converse 
 truth that life has a moral as well as a physical 
 basis. 
 
 Extremes meet. Side by side with this 
 materialistic error, and due to the same initial 
 mistake, there is a religious error. St. Paul's 
 metaphor from the pugilistic ring, ' I keep my 
 body under,' or smite it, has been used to support 
 all the mediaeval ascetic disciplines, from pillar- 
 saints and flagellants who lashed themselves with 
 whips, down to the milder forms of self-torture, 
 and indeed the whole Roman monastic system. 
 It is stupidly prosaic to interpret the words in 
 this literal way. St. Paul was no doubt thinking 
 of the physical hardships which he had endured, 
 all the bodily afflictions that had been laid on 
 him in the course of his great work, but it is to 
 be noted that there was nothing of the self- 
 inflicted kind of discipline in his life. When he 
 used the metaphor, he was advocating not a 
 system of penance, but the need of self-control. 
 The root of this religious error is that it looks on 
 the body as evil, essentially and hopelessly evil, 
 and the only chance for a man is to renounce
 
 64 CULTURE OF BODY 
 
 it. There must be no truce in the great warfare 
 between sense and soul. Men were driven into 
 the desert to starve and scourge the sinful flesh 
 that the spirit might thrive. How common this 
 notion of some sort of self-torture is can be seen 
 from the Lives of the Saints. So much so, that 
 the special religious method seems to be self- 
 torture. They keep the body under and bring it 
 into subjection, buffet it like the boxers in the 
 Isthmian games. The ideal seems to be mutila- 
 tion of the physical powers, that the life may be 
 purified by pain, and sin expiated by suffering. 
 The ideal is to detach the affections from all that 
 is of the earth, though the roots bleed as they are 
 torn up, to pluck out the right eye, and cut off 
 the right hand. The method seems to get some 
 support from the example and the teaching of 
 every religious genius of the race. 
 
 And yet the method throughout the whole 
 history of the world has been a ghastly failure. 
 Life cannot be saved by a process of eviction. 
 The untenanted house of life lies open for seven- 
 fold more devils to inhabit. It is a mistake to 
 assume that the best way to strengthen the 
 higher nature is to weaken the lower, and that 
 spiritual life will grow rich and strong in pro-
 
 CULTURE OF BODY 65 
 
 portion as physical vitality is lowered. The 
 body is part of man, and is no more inherently 
 sinful than is the mind or the heart. Indeed, 
 our Lord in His diagnosis of sin declared that 
 from within, from the heart of a man, proceed the 
 baneful brood of sins. Thus it follows that there 
 may be the complete ascetic discipline, without 
 touching the seat of sin and without gaining any 
 real mastery over the life. Our physical nature 
 does not exist merely to be trampled upon and 
 buffeted. The body has rights, and we have 
 duties towards it. It is to misrepresent St. Paul 
 to make him in any way an advocate of ascetic 
 methods. He did teach self-control and self- 
 denial, as every religious teacher must do, but he 
 did it in the interests of the self-reverence which 
 has little place in the ascetic creed. The folly of 
 thinking that it does not matter what is done 
 to the body is too evident for much argument. 
 After all, the body is the life-long companion of 
 the mind, and it cannot be unimportant how it is 
 treated. It is through the body that the mind 
 and the spirit gather their stores of impressions, 
 and through the body they enact their will and 
 perform their functions. Mental vigour and 
 spiritual insight are only acquired by means of
 
 66 CULTURE OF BODY 
 
 the physical side of life. Sometimes, it is true, 
 the soul seems to be seen most brightly shining 
 through the chinks of a weak body, but never if 
 the weakness is due to self-inflicted injury. 
 
 Repression, as a mere negative method of 
 dealing with the physical life, keeping the body 
 under, despising it, throttling its instincts, cannot 
 - really solve the problem. Yet it must be asserted 
 that while no life can become truly great by 
 repression alone, also no life can become great 
 without it. We never can get away from the 
 necessity for self-denial. The body must be 
 brought into subjection, and a foot put upon 
 the neck of all animal passion. This is the 
 eternal truth of religious discipline. But the 
 distinction between this and the ascetics is 
 simply that this never looks upon it as a thing 
 to be done for its own sake, as if there were 
 any merit in bodily austerities, while the ascetics 
 make repression an end in itself. Self-control 
 is necessary for the highest development of the 
 body itself. The athlete in training must deny 
 himself ceaselessly : if he does not deny appetite 
 he cannot bring himself into fit condition. Much 
 more is self-denial necessary for spiritual train- 
 ing. The soul cannot be saved with self-denial
 
 CULTURE OF BODY 67 
 
 merely, yet it cannot be saved without it. The 
 mistake of the ascetic is that he raises into an 
 end in itself what should only have a place as 
 a means. Discipline is not for its own sake : 
 it is needed for the sake of the body as well 
 as for the sake of the soul. True bodily culture 
 implies discipline chastity, temperance, self- 
 control. Culture means harmonious development, 
 and that at once condemns excess of all kinds. 
 All moralists, even Epicurus, admit this. The 
 thought at the root of self-culture is complete- 
 ness, balance of powers ; and the aim is total 
 self-government. One unbridled passion is 
 enough to destroy the beauty of life. One 
 excess, if it does no more, can mar the grace 
 and harmony of the whole. ' He that striveth 
 for the mastery must be temperate in all things.' 
 He will need to be watchful at the weak places, 
 his heart knows where; watchful at the points 
 of least resistance. Repression and self-denial 
 there must always be. A man, to be a man, 
 must have his nature under the curb and must 
 be master of his life. 
 
 But the way to keep the body under is to 
 live above it, to have a life of the soul that 
 will use the body as its willing servant. A
 
 68 CULTURE OF BODY 
 
 deep religious sense of the sacredness of life 
 will alone give us the adequate motive for self- 
 mastery. Novalis said that we touch heaven 
 when we lay our hand on a human body, re- 
 ferring to the sacredness of man as the image 
 of God. The Christian faith sets new sanctions 
 on the physical life. It is opposed both to the 
 ascetic hatred and despising of the body in the 
 affected interests of spirituality, and equally 
 opposed to weak yielding to every animal im- 
 pulse. The body is sacred and must be treated 
 sacredly. We must feel the tremendous moral 
 motive introduced into life by a sense of the 
 body's high destiny. There has been no power 
 for personal purity like it in the history of the 
 world. The Christian method is not repression, 
 but consecration.
 
 CULTURE OF MIND
 
 'Culture is as necessary for the mind as food is for the 
 body. 1 CICERO.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 CULTURE OF MIND 
 
 / T""*HE aim of culture, as we have seen, is the 
 *- perfected development of the whole man. 
 The existence of a power or capacity implies duty 
 to make the best of it. A sound mind, trained 
 to form wise judgments, able to consider serious 
 subjects and to reach reasonable conclusions, is 
 part of the equipment of a true life, and may 
 be one of the best servants of religion. Religion 
 has sometimes distrusted the purely intellectual 
 way of looking at things, and with cause has 
 opposed the arrogance of reason claiming the 
 sole right of judging. But not even the most 
 obscurantist form of religion can deny that we 
 possess not only the right but the duty to strive 
 after education of mind. It must be the will of 
 God that the mental faculties should be trained 
 and developed. It cannot possibly be right to 
 mutilate the powers of intellect granted to us. 
 To despise thought is not only foolish but sinful ; 
 71
 
 7 2 CULTURE OF MIND 
 
 for thought is the medium of all truth. Religion, 
 so far from despising thought, concerns itself 
 with the largest thoughts and the noblest ideas 
 that can enter into the mind of man. Know- 
 ledge is the food of thought, and the purpose 
 of all religion is to give man the knowledge 
 of God. The greatest foe of religion is not 
 knowledge but ignorance, not reason but super- 
 stition. ' My people are destroyed for lack of 
 knowledge,' says the prophet Hosea a word 
 that is echoed in all the prophets. To give 
 up reason is to give up being men. More, to 
 give up reason is to give up God ; for the world 
 is built on reason. 
 
 God has given us reason, and to despise the 
 gift is to despise the Giver. If we are required 
 to renounce reason, we may ask why we should 
 not also renounce faith. If it is right to trample 
 on one human faculty, there can be no inherent 
 objection to trample on other faculties. If reason 
 can be rightly sacrificed, why may not emotion, 
 good feeling, charity? Should men give up 
 tenderness of heart, the sacred pity that makes 
 the world a gracious place ? The mind is lia- 
 ble to mistakes, but so also is the heart. Men 
 have abused pity and love in the interests
 
 CULTURE OF MIND 73 
 
 of what they deemed truth. The inquisitors 
 must some of them have made a painful sacrifice 
 of their humane feelings, and yet we do not 
 defend their conduct. No plan of life can be 
 a true or complete one, which does not give a 
 place to culture of the mind. A perfect scheme 
 will not limit itself to mental education, but it 
 cannot neglect it. For the sake of the mind 
 we cannot neglect the body, and for the sake of 
 the soul we dare not neglect the mind. ' I con- 
 sider,' says Addison, 'a human soul without 
 education like marble in the quarry, which shows 
 none of its inherent beauties till the skill of 
 the polisher fetches out the colours, makes the 
 surface shine, and discovers every ornamental 
 cloud, spot, and vein, that runs through the body 
 of it. Education after the same manner, when 
 it works upon a noble mind, draws out to view 
 every latent virtue and perfection, which, with- 
 out such helps, are never able to make their 
 appearance.' 
 
 The first danger which mental education meets 
 is due to the fact that it comes second in time 
 and is therefore inclined to be too long delayed. 
 Perhaps this is why Plato, in his conception of 
 the ideal republic, makes education begin with
 
 74 CULTURE OF MIND 
 
 music, which in his definition includes literature, 
 and makes gymnastics come later music for the 
 soul and gymnastics for the body and the soul 
 first. 
 
 'What shall be their education? Can we find 
 a better than the traditional sort ? and this has 
 two divisions : gymnastic for the body, and music 
 for the soul.' 
 
 ' True.' 
 
 'Shall we begin education with music, and go 
 on to gymnastic afterwards ? ' 
 
 'By all means.' 
 
 ' And when you speak of music, do you include 
 literature or not ? ' 
 
 ' I do.' 
 
 ' You know,' I said, ' that we begin by telling 
 children stories which, though not wholly desti- 
 tute of truth, are in the main fictitious ; and these 
 stories are told them when they are not of an age 
 to learn gymnastics.' 
 
 ' Very true.' 
 
 'That was my meaning when I said that we 
 must teach music before gymnastics.' 1 
 
 As a nation our progress in material things has 
 outstripped our progress in intellectual, and as 
 
 1 Republic, ii. 376.
 
 CULTURE OF MIND 75 
 
 individuals physical culture comes before mental ; 
 but in both cases the former should only be 
 a foundation for the latter. Most young men 
 have more muscle than brains, more strength 
 than ideas which is to some extent natural. 
 Some few have to be warned against incessant 
 mental overwork, but on the whole the greater 
 number need to be driven on, or tempted on, to 
 begin serious thought of any kind. 
 
 If the relation of education to the mind is like 
 that of food to the body, we do not often take 
 anything like the same care to give the mind its 
 right food as we do to nourish the body. Even 
 in the matter of reading, which is an acknow- 
 ledged instrument of mental training, it is seldom 
 seriously treated as such, and is much more 
 commonly used as a means merely of relaxing 
 the mind. There is milk for babes in mental 
 things as well as in physical and spiritual, and 
 many never seem to find any need for stronger 
 food. The powers of mind can be atrophied by 
 want of use, leaving the mind wayward and 
 undisciplined. We must learn to take this as 
 part of our religious duty, for we are false to 
 our complete endowment as men if we have no 
 sense of duty here. We have a glorious heritage,
 
 7 6 CULTURE OF MIND 
 
 and if we wilfully refuse our opportunities and 
 cut ourselves off from the inner life of our race 
 we are impoverishing ourselves. It is never^ a 
 small thing for a man to pass under the influence 
 of the master minds, to feel the spell of the rarer 
 spirits of the world, to come within the human- 
 ising sphere of great writers and thinkers. It is 
 much to be saved from the paltriness and sordid- 
 ness of ordinary life by the infusion of intellectual 
 tastes. 
 
 We are called to undertake cultivation of the 
 rich fields of life, and that implies the care 
 and method and toil of the husbandman. The 
 power of concentrated thought is only got 
 through long sustained use. Reason does not 
 come by spontaneous generation any more than 
 life does. Reason is the crown of intellect. 
 The 'dry light of reason,' as Bacon calls it, is 
 not struck off as a spark from flint and steel. 
 It has to be refined and super-refined, and 
 passed through rarer and rarer media, till it 
 becomes a light dry, and clear, and pure, fit 
 to examine the world by. Wisdom is know- 
 ledge organised into life. Even the more evi- 
 dent fruits of culture, such as taste for what is 
 beautiful and true in art, or the feeling for
 
 CULTURE OF MIND 77 
 
 style in literature, are capacities which come 
 from training, and at last almost become an 
 instinct. 
 
 Now, the same natural impulse which makes 
 men enjoy exercise of body makes them enjoy 
 exercise of mind. There is a certain innate 
 sluggishness to be overcome at first in both 
 cases. A man who for years has been slack 
 will have a good deal of inertia to overcome 
 before he can bring himself to enjoy even mod- 
 erate physical exertion but it can be done ; 
 and a man whose mind has been mostly fallow 
 ground will not easily take to the mental 
 plough and hoe ; but when he does persevere 
 he will find the natural law operate on his side, 
 the law which ordains joy for the sweat of the 
 brain as well as for the sweat of the brow. 
 It is no lowering of the standard to speak of 
 pleasure in intellectual pursuits ; for it has been 
 ordained that the legitimate and uncorrupted 
 use of all our natural powers should be accom- 
 panied with pleasure. And the higher the 
 power, the purer the pleasure, as if to tempt 
 us on to nobler things. The pleasures of mind 
 are keener and more lasting than the more 
 material pleasures. More lasting; so the young
 
 7 8 CULTURE OF MIND 
 
 man without intellectual interests is preparing 
 himself for an unhappy old age. But effort is 
 essential before pleasure is possible. For the 
 athlete's joy, the joy of a strong man to run a 
 race, one must toil terribly in the training. 
 For the scholar's joy, one must 'scorn delights 
 and live laborious days.' 
 
 The real training of any part of a man's being 
 is its own reward. It remains a possession. In 
 the region of the mind we recognise a cultured 
 opinion when we hear it. It is the fruit of 
 thought, the result of a broad way of looking at 
 things. It is not a trick of manner to be caught 
 by watching, but comes from serious effort and 
 honest toil. The habit of exact thought, if it 
 is to be a habit and not an occasional accident, 
 is only got through discipline. This is' not 
 something outside religion. Failure here is 
 failure to grasp the religious significance of all 
 life. Emerson speaks of the innocent men who 
 worship God after the tradition of their fathers, 
 but whose sense of duty has not extended to the 
 use of all their faculties. The spirit's work on 
 us of power and love is often hindered and 
 marred for lack of the sound mind. Most of 
 the mistakes of sincere religion are due to the
 
 CULTURE OF MIND 79 
 
 lack of it. All the instruments of religious 
 deepening, such as prayer, praise, meditation, 
 need this 'element to enrich their contents and 
 to guide their direction. St. Paul with his 
 vigorous, robust intellect argued against an 
 unintelligent use of religious gifts among the 
 Corinthians. ' If I pray in an unknown tongue, 
 my spirit prayeth, but my understanding is 
 unfruitful. What is it then ? I will pray with 
 the spirit and I will pray with the understand- 
 ing also : I will sing with the spirit and I will 
 sing with the understanding also.' As for our 
 religious meditation, much of it is mere idle 
 dreaming vacancy of mind, not thought. We 
 must confess to ourselves how little we indulge 
 in the habit of consecutive thinking. When we 
 give ourselves time to think it often ends in 
 mere vacuity, or we discover that our minds have 
 been vagrant, wandering hither and thither like 
 a stray horse without bit or bridle. What we call 
 thinking is aimless and spasmodic, developing 
 nothing, going nowhere in particular ; so that 
 after a time of meditation, if any one asked us 
 what we were thinking on, we would have to 
 confess that we did not really know. 
 
 Yet what traitors we are to our race by our
 
 80 CULTURE OF MIND 
 
 neglect ! We hang broken branches on the 
 tree of life, examples of arrested development ; 
 for the physical side of life seems to have come 
 to its destined end, but there is no limit to 
 evolution in the higher spheres. The bounds 
 of knowledge can be extended infinitely. In 
 the realm of nature, in the world of thought, 
 there is no end to the task set to man. That 
 task is to conquer the world and make it his 
 own ; not merely to occupy and develop its 
 material forces, but to understand it, to learn 
 its secrets and its lessons. It is humiliating to 
 think how little we have made the world our 
 own by knowledge, by sympathy, by under- 
 standing. To few of us come opportunities for 
 original research, but to all of us come oppor- 
 tunities for exercising our minds and gaining 
 power to make true judgments, and growing 
 in power and love and a sound mind. We need 
 not fear in the interests of truth reverent inquiry, 
 and scholarship, and increase of knowledge. 
 Rather, we have to fear lethargy of mind, intel- 
 lectual and moral indifference, the materialistic 
 life which judges truth by utility, and which 
 makes utility mean increased profit or pleasure. 
 The practical benefits in life of a cultivated
 
 CULTURE OF MIND 81 
 
 mind are too many even to mention. Foremost 
 among them is the fact that thought gives a 
 quality of abstraction which makes the little 
 things appear little. It gives a fine insight into the 
 value of things and settles their relative impor- 
 tance, and should therefore be to us the necessary 
 corrective of our common commercial standards. 
 It would keep us from the vulgar judgment of 
 men according to rank or wealth, and from the 
 vulgar judgment of things which sacrifices beauty 
 to utility. Intellectual pursuits will at least 
 save from absolute bondage to the material 
 side of life. To enlarge the number of our 
 interests creates a new standard of judgment 
 by widening the whole outlook. It would be 
 well for us as a community, as well as in- 
 dividuals, if we had a more general mental 
 culture. Questions would not be so much 
 settled by prejudice and party passion. We 
 would, for example, not have so many crude 
 and wayward experiments in education ; for we 
 would see education to be the great question of 
 home politics, and would not permit it to be the 
 butt of party and the game of sectarian ambition. 
 But most of all may be emphasised to young 
 men the moral value of intellectual pursuits.
 
 82 CULTURE OF MIND 
 
 If we would keep the body under, we must live 
 above it, and that means practically that we 
 must have interests above the body. It is not 
 merely that a man may thus be saved from the 
 freakishness and follies 
 
 Such as take lodgings in a head 
 That's to be let unfurnished, 
 
 but he will also to a large extent be saved from 
 the fierce assaults from an evil environment and 
 from his own evil passions. Purity of heart 
 and mind is not a negative state : it is an active 
 state of love for what is pure and true and 
 beautiful. When the city of Mansoul is be- 
 sieged and the fight presses sore, we dare not 
 leave any entrance undefended ; and when we 
 are hard bestead by an overmastering sin, a 
 besetting temptation, one strategical move, ap- 
 proved of by all masters of this craft of war, 
 is that we must not be content to strive and 
 pray and resolve : we must garrison the mind 
 with noble thoughts and pure desires. ' Not the 
 mouse but the hole is the thief,' is a Talmudic 
 proverb condemning the receiving and purchasing 
 of stolen goods. Leave not a hole in the defence 
 for even a mouse to creep in at. The empty 
 mind is the devil's opportunity. Many of the
 
 CULTURE OF MIND 83 
 
 sins of youth get their force through emptiness of 
 mind and lack of any sort of intellectual interest. 
 How can a man expect to be saved from the seduc- 
 tions within and without, if he have no higher 
 resources, if he have no interests that claim his 
 mind when his daily work is done ? Hugh 
 Miller in My Schools and Schoolmasters tells 
 how he was able to pass the critical point in his 
 life with regard to the huge drinking-customs of 
 his early trade as a mason. The men were 
 treated on all sorts of occasions, and on this 
 special time, at the laying of the foundation- 
 stone of a large house, they were all treated to 
 whiskey ; and when the party broke up and he 
 got home to his books, he found, as he opened 
 the pages of a favourite author, that he could 
 not master the sense, and the letters were 
 dancing before his eyes. He writes : ' I have the 
 volume at present before me a small edition 
 of the Essays of Bacon, a good deal worn at 
 the corners by the friction of the pocket ; for 
 of Bacon I never tired. The condition into 
 which I had brought myself was, I felt, one of 
 degradation. I had sunk by my own act for 
 the time to a lower level of intelligence than 
 that on which it was my privilege to be placed ;
 
 84 CULTURE OF MIND 
 
 and though the state could have been no very 
 favourable one for forming a resolution, I in 
 that hour determined that I should never again 
 sacrifice my capacity of intellectual enjoyment 
 to a drinking usage ; and with God's help I 
 was enabled to hold by the determination.' He 
 conquered by his love of intellectual pursuits, 
 and his experience is not an uncommon one. 
 
 In our next chapter we will deal with the 
 practical instruments of culture, the common 
 means of attaining this elevation of mind ; but 
 in pursuance of our plan of treating our nature 
 as a unity, it is necessary to take note of the 
 serious limits to the claim of intellect to 
 dominate life. We ought to admit mental 
 limitations as we do physical. The life is more 
 than meat, and it is also more than mind. 
 Exclusive attention to mind is one-sided and 
 defeats the true ends of culture. The life has 
 higher functions than even the mental. Even 
 from the point of view of education, brain de- 
 velopment is not everything. Intellect, for 
 example, can harden the heart as effectually as 
 sense can. Intellect needs a high ideal to save 
 it from itself. It must be in the service of
 
 CULTURE OF MIND 85 
 
 conscience and heart, or it is degraded into a 
 mere caterer to the material side of life. In- 
 tellectual selfishness can be as hard and cruel 
 as any other form of selfishness. The loftiest 
 thoughts and the most intellectual pursuits will 
 not in themselves save a life from emptiness. 
 If any one lived the intellectual life almost from 
 his very infancy, it was John Stuart Mill, and 
 yet in his Autobiography he tells us how futile 
 he found it even in early life. He asked him- 
 self : 'Supposing that all the objects of your life 
 were realised, and that all the changes in human 
 institutions and opinions which you desire were 
 completely accomplished at this very moment, 
 would it be for you a great joy and happiness? 
 My conscience replied to me directly and 
 irresistibly, No. At this response my heart 
 failed me ; all the foundations on which my life 
 was built were destroyed.' In spite of know- 
 ledge and learning and gratified intellectual 
 ambition, he felt the poverty and vanity of a 
 life that had no more in it than that. The 
 pathway to the higher life is not through the 
 portals of mind. The mind tempered to a fine 
 keenness may have taken on a hard, cold glitter. 
 For the ordinary conduct of life there comes
 
 86 CULTURE OF MIND 
 
 into play other elements for true success. Plato 
 declared that those countries are happy where 
 either philosophers are made kings or kings 
 turn philosophers. Erasmus's comment on this 
 philosophical dream is, ' Alas ! this is so far 
 from being true, that if we consult all historians 
 for an account of past ages, we shall find no 
 princes more weak nor any people more slavish 
 and wretched, than were the administrations of 
 affairs which fell on the shoulders of some 
 learned bookish governor.' 
 
 In our own personal life we must know that 
 there is an intellectual abstraction which is only 
 a form of selfish absorption. The worst of it is, 
 or perhaps in the long run the best of it is, that 
 such selfishness ruins the very intellectual capa- 
 city itself ; for it is a law of life that selfishness 
 of all kinds takes the edge off any faculty. 
 When it is used for self it loses its brightness 
 and keenness. The history of all the arts is full 
 of pathetic cases of failure through this. When 
 a man even stops in his work to admire himself 
 and his facility, his work suffers at once. We at 
 least see that a man of keen intellect has his 
 own special and peculiar temptations to face. He 
 may be freed from narrowness of vision, and at
 
 CULTURE OF MIND 87 
 
 the same time be chained by narrowness of heart. 
 The lowest deep to which man can fall is a 
 callous state in which the mind itself seems to 
 become stupid even when it is keen enough, for 
 it seems unable even to distinguish between right 
 and wrong. There are degrees and steps on 
 the way to that callous state, steps all the 
 more insidious because they are not necessarily 
 associated with gross evil. 
 
 One of them, for example, is that of a false 
 tolerance often assumed to be a highly intel- 
 lectual state of being. There is a breadth of 
 view which is at bottom only moral laxity. Life 
 and history are seen as a blur, a grey haze, with 
 the moral distinctions rubbed out. The way 
 the temptation works is obvious. History and 
 literature show human life governed by other 
 customs and codes of morals and religion in 
 other times, and even now in other countries. 
 The thought easily arises that nothing can be 
 of very much importance when there is such 
 a divergence of opinion and habit. The ideal 
 seems to be a fine broad philosophic calm which 
 accepts everything as it is and never lets itself 
 get excited or angry. To this mood of mind a 
 massacre in Armenia is only a regrettable inci-
 
 88 CULTURE OF MIND 
 
 dent in history, at the worst merely a backwash 
 in the tide. Not so thinks or speaks the man 
 who has gone down and kissed the very founda- 
 tions of life, who has the sound mind enlightened 
 by the Spirit of Christ. ' All cats are grey in 
 the dark,' says the proverb. There are no dis- 
 tinctions to the man who lives in a mental and 
 moral twilight and is incapable of seeing distinc- 
 tions. Much of our broad, cultured tolerance is 
 merely the fruit of indifference. We have not 
 seen life steadily or seen it whole, if we end in a 
 helpless state of indecision in moral things. 
 
 The truth is that in the region of mind, as else- 
 where, sacrifice is the law of life. The necessity 
 of self-denial is not limited to bodily passions, 
 it is as much needed for the highest life of the 
 mind as for the best development of the body. 
 In every region of man's nature there are two 
 voices with opposing counsels presenting divers 
 alternatives. The one demands satisfaction, the 
 other sacrifice, but though the voices seem hope- 
 lessly discordant, there is not such an absolute 
 contradiction between the two rival claimants as 
 might be imagined. In practice it is found that 
 in the very interests of culture self-denial is 
 necessary. Life of all kinds is only reached by
 
 CULTURE OF MIND 89 
 
 a strait gate and a narrow way. ' Thought, true 
 labour of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not 
 the daughter of pain ? ' asks Carlyle. Sacrifice is 
 always the method of salvation. This is not to 
 say that through restraint of mind some ultimate 
 spiritual good will result, but that only through 
 it can intellectual good result. The benefit first 
 of all is reaped in its own sphere. The athlete 
 must practise restraint of body to attain the 
 highest training of body. He must deny himself 
 many sorts of indulgence, must regulate carefully 
 his food and exercise and sleep, must practise 
 self-control, temperance in all things, abstinence 
 in some. It is physical control for the sake of 
 physical training. This is an essential condition, 
 and what is true here is true in the rest of life. 
 Discipline is needed for all education, and dis- 
 cipline implies self-denial. The result of this 
 discipline is to put a keener edge on the instru- 
 ment. An undisciplined mind is wayward and 
 fitful, easily lured by fancies and conceits, run- 
 ning off at a tangent, the sport of idle curi- 
 osity and prurient desire. Mental self-control 
 is as necessary as physical. The mind must 
 not be left to itself for its own sake. It needs 
 to be brought into some sort of submission, or
 
 go CULTURE O* MIND 
 
 it will run to waste, even if it does not run to 
 evil. 
 
 Further, it must not be left to itself for the 
 sake of the higher life, for the sake of the whole 
 man. We must often choose between the 
 different powers and instincts we possess : to 
 select means to reject and to repress. The 
 practical principle of choice is a simple one. In 
 cases of casuistry we must choose the higher. A 
 man is known by the way he chooses in possible 
 alternatives. If to a man life is meat, he will 
 always follow the material. If to another, mind 
 be the measure of life, he can be coldly intel- 
 lectual when his heart should burn with the 
 passion of pity, but at least he is saved from 
 utter bondage to the body. It is to him no 
 sacrifice except in name to give up some lower 
 pleasure for the sake of a loved intellectual 
 pursuit. Something in any case has to be given 
 up for it. When we speak of sacrifice we forget 
 that sacrifice of some kind or other there must 
 always be. Everything in the world has its 
 price. To gain the lower completely we must 
 give up the higher; to gain the higher we must 
 give up the lower. If we sow to the flesh, it is 
 only of the flesh we can reap. Therefore to
 
 CULTURE OF MIND 91 
 
 speak of restraint of the mind, of sacrificing 
 mental powers and opportunities, is not to re- 
 commend an unnatural and unheard-of thing. 
 It is, indeed, along the line of all law. It is 
 sacrificed for the sake of something we hold 
 dearer. If a man has seen the vision of the 
 spiritual, in giving up the lower he is only grasp- 
 ing his true life. There are times when a man 
 may have to renounce thought as a guide because 
 human life may still be cursed by the hell of a 
 'reprobate mind.' There are things a man must 
 believe, with or without reason, if need be against 
 reason ; because there are things a man must 
 believe to remain a man. Intellect by itself will 
 not save life from failure. There is a touch of 
 terrible truth in Robert Burns's despairing line 
 about ' a light from heaven that leads astray. 1 
 We speak glibly of the certainties of knowledge 
 and the absoluteness of truth. It is not so easy 
 to state the certainties. Again and again in 
 history has it been seen that God hath made 
 foolish the wisdom of this world. What in- 
 stances there are of the great revelations being 
 hid from the wise and prudent and revealed unto 
 babes, because proud, loveless learning only 
 hardens the heart. After all, life is not fudged
 
 92 CULTURE OF MIND 
 
 by mind ; mind is judged by life. Mental culture 
 must be kept in its place in the great scheme of 
 general culture which seeks to save the whole 
 man, character and heart and spirit, as well as 
 mind and body. 
 
 Remembering the high place we have accorded 
 to intellect in life and religion, it will not be 
 imagined that any depreciation of it can be meant 
 now, or that we are taking away with one hand 
 what was given by the other. Yet it must be 
 said with emphasis, that there is a true sense in 
 which a man may be called on to make sacrifice 
 of certain intellectual qualities to be a complete 
 man in the fullest meaning of the word. It was 
 this that Romanes found hardest of all in passing 
 over from Agnosticism to the Christian faith. 
 He tells how his habitual scepticism kept him 
 for a quarter of a century from ever performing 
 the simplest act of religion, that of prayer; how 
 he had been so long accustomed to constitute 
 his reason as the sole judge of truth that even 
 when his reason told him that his heart and his 
 will should join with reason in seeking God, he 
 was too jealous of his reason to exercise his 
 will in the direction of his most heartfelt desires. 
 He admitted that there were higher aspirations
 
 CULTURE OF MIND 93 
 
 of his nature than the intellectual, admitted 
 that since these aspirations were there he ought 
 to cultivate them also, yet all these years he 
 could not bring himself to make a venture in 
 the direction of faith. According to his better 
 judgment he even felt this to be irrational, and 
 to justify himself he was in the habit of making 
 what he felt to be only excuses ; and he candidly 
 confessed that, whatever were other men's temp- 
 tations and difficulties, his was an undue regard 
 to reason as against heart and will. 
 
 What we need in this, as in all other regions of 
 our nature, is to realise the sacredness of life, and 
 so to have a deep sense of responsibility and 
 duty. We will be saved from the vanity of some 
 intellectual pursuits by feeling the true religious 
 sacredness of mind. We must cover this region 
 of our nature with religious sanctions. We need 
 sanctification of mind as much as of any other 
 part of our being ; perhaps more, for it is with us 
 as with Milton's Satan 
 
 The mind is its own place, and in itself 
 Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. 
 
 It is only when God is the pivot of our life that 
 we are safe, and intellect can take its right place
 
 94 CULTURE OF MIND 
 
 and play its harmonious part in the full scheme. 
 If we would have our life raised, we must submit 
 mind, as well as heart and conscience and will, 
 to the process of sanctification. 
 
 We are not without our ideal here as in the 
 rest of life. Christ is the Christian ideal. To 
 have the same mind in us which was in Him is 
 distinctly set before us as our aim. How full His 
 mind was of beauty and truth, full of sweet 
 thoughts and noble ideas, because full of love. 
 It was the perfection of culture ; yet with the 
 Cross in it all through, with constant restraint of 
 intellectual ambition, constant giving up of all 
 worldly and selfish desires, constant thought of 
 God and constant thoughtfulness of man. If we 
 had the same mind, could think the same sort 
 of thoughts, judge life by the same standards, 
 accustom ourselves to the same great ideas, 
 pettiness would pass from us and evil would die 
 as in His presence. A mind so held in thrall 
 could not go far astray. We want consecrated 
 intellect as well as emotion. There is ample room 
 for it in Christian work, for inventiveness and 
 enterprise in methods, for the wise furtherance of 
 great causes. There are thousands waiting to be 
 led to great enterprises by the man of original,
 
 CULTURE OF MIND 95 
 
 consecrated mind who never arrives. There is 
 room also for satisfied intellectual research in 
 Christian truth, where are hid all the treasures of 
 wisdom and knowledge.
 
 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL 
 CULTURE
 
 ' Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, 
 and wise men use them ; for they teach not their own use ; 
 but that is a wisdom without them and above them, won by 
 observation. Read not to contradict and confute, nor to 
 believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, 
 but to weigh and consider.' BACON.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 
 
 f I ^HE approved methods of attaining mental 
 -* culture seem almost commonplace, but the 
 great things in life are very simple and within the 
 reach of all. The differences among men in this 
 department depend on the use made of the 
 common instruments that lie ready to our hand. 
 Matthew Arnold gives these three methods, and 
 in this order : reading, observing, thinking. The 
 order may be accepted, not as one of merit, but 
 only because the purpose, of reading and observ- 
 ing is to lead up to, and to give material for, 
 thinking. Reading means taking advantage of 
 the observations and thoughts and opinions of 
 others which are so bountifully stored up for us 
 in books. Observing would comprise all that 
 comes to us from our own experience through 
 the various avenues of approach: It will in- 
 clude knowledge of men and the world, love 
 of the beautiful in nature and in art, and even 
 
 99
 
 ioo INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 
 
 science in its practical aspects. It will include 
 conversation, which is after all one of the chief 
 methods of education. 
 
 Perhaps observation should come first among 
 the methods of culture, because it is earlier than 
 the more artificial method of reading. We often 
 forget that a child learns more in the first five 
 years of its life than in any similar period after- 
 wards. It has to learn a language, and all the 
 common facts of the world, the properties of 
 things, even the qualities of matter. The soul 
 makes its first discovery of the world through the 
 senses. There is no school so efficient and so 
 equipped as the school of nature, and the blunder 
 most of us make is that we do not take the hint 
 from the educational process that goes on un- 
 ceasingly during the first years of a child's life. 
 We interrupt its course instead of directing it and 
 developing it. There is much meaning for man 
 in the old classical fable of Antaeus, the giant 
 who was a son of Earth and challenged all to 
 wrestle with him. No one could throw him, 
 because every time he touched his mother earth 
 he received new strength. Hercules discovered 
 the secret of his strength and overcame him by 
 lifting him up from the earth and crushing him
 
 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 101 
 
 in the air. Man, so long as he keeps his feet on 
 fact, so long as he keeps in contact with nature 
 and is open to the influences of the world around 
 him, gets ever new accessions of strength and 
 knowledge. The best education grows from 
 the broadening intelligence that comes through 
 eye and ear and the simple experiences of life. 
 The man who forms the habit of observation in 
 its widest sense lives in a world that grows wider 
 and richer, and finds in it an inexhaustible source 
 not only of increasing knowledge but also of fresh 
 wonder and delight. The profoundest wisdom is 
 always that which is being constantly verified by 
 contact with nature and with life. The attitude 
 of the best culture is that of the alert observer 
 intensely interested in events and experiences. 
 The man who goes through life knowing nothing 
 of nature and little of the world around him 
 may be very learned in books, but can never be 
 completely educated. 
 
 Our whole system of education suffers from 
 our neglect to take the broad hint that nature 
 gives us. We think of education as the same 
 thing as instruction, and forget that instruction 
 is only one of the methods of education, and 
 not the most important at that. 'Most parents,
 
 102 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 
 
 of whatever rank or condition, fancy they have 
 done all they need do for the education of their 
 children when they have had them taught such 
 things as custom requires that persons of their 
 class should learn ; although with a view to the 
 formation of character, the main end and object 
 of education, it would be almost as reasonable 
 to read a treatise on botany to a flower-bed, 
 under the notion of making the plants grow and 
 blossom.' 1 One of the ways to obviate this 
 mistake of our common education, is to cultivate 
 the faculty of observation. It has value in every 
 region of life. Artists differ not so much in 
 their technical skill and mechanical capacity, as 
 in the truth and freshness of observation. A 
 trained eye notes colour and form, and selects 
 in mental vision a composition of beauty. Of 
 course, in speaking of observation as an instru- 
 ment of culture, we do not mean the eye and the 
 other senses, but the faculties which use the 
 senses. It is really a disciplined mind making use 
 of the various means of impulse and information. 
 It is very rare to find the perceptive powers 
 highly cultivated, though we should imagine 
 them the most natural. Ruskin's judgment 
 
 1 Guesses at Truth.
 
 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 103 
 
 was that a hundred men can talk for one who 
 can think, but a thousand men can think for one 
 who can see. Our system of education is largely 
 to blame, since it is usually a purely literary 
 education, the teaching of words rather than of 
 things. The city life, which is the environment 
 of so many children, makes it difficult for them 
 to train observation, and in many ways civilisa- 
 tion has dulled the powers of man. Hardly one 
 of us could tell the time with anything like 
 accuracy if we were deprived of clocks and 
 watches. The actual observation of a fact is 
 of far more educational value than the know- 
 ledge of the same fact from a book. The latter 
 adds a useful bit of information, the former 
 trains a faculty which is a permanent possession. 
 It is difficult to understand our carelessness as 
 to this instrument of education, which is really 
 at the basis of all possible culture. We lose 
 much happiness and interest as well as much 
 real training. The world becomes more wonder- 
 ful as man learns more about it, and Nature 
 opens up ever new vistas of beauty and mystery. 
 Intellectual curiosity grows by what it feeds on. 
 Within a given time in new surroundings, one 
 man will notice practically nothing, another will
 
 104 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 
 
 notice many new facts and make many deduc- 
 tions from them. To the untrained eye and ear, 
 a hedge or ditch means nothing but the names. 
 I once met an artisan in a country walk who 
 knew every plant and insect, all the flora and 
 fauna of that countryside, and all he had for his 
 favourite pursuit was the half day a week which 
 other working men spent in loafing about the 
 streets. As he pointed out to me interesting 
 things which I had carelessly passed by as 
 weeds, I blushed for my ignorance and blind- 
 ness. The natural sciences are specially useful 
 in training men in this direction. The founda- 
 tion of all science lies in trusting and training 
 the senses. 
 
 Observation, of course, must include classifica- 
 tion of the facts to be of practical use. We 
 need to have the mass brought into order and 
 system. The observant eye is that which 
 fastens on the link between facts, which sepa- 
 rates one from another and classifies others 
 together. The keener eye trained to observe 
 closely dismisses the superficial likenesses that 
 deceive others, and gets at the points of funda- 
 mental resemblance. Without this the world 
 is a bewildering mass of unrelated things,
 
 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 105 
 
 which patient observation brings into order and 
 beauty. 
 
 We need to distinguish between the mere 
 acquisition of facts or accumulation of know- 
 ledge and the development of the faculties. The 
 evolution of a faculty is of more importance 
 than the mere gaining of information. It is the 
 difference between perfecting an organism and 
 filling up a receptacle. It is not necessarily 
 developing the mind to be shovelling into it 
 other people's thoughts. If these thoughts are 
 not assimilated, the result can only be mental 
 indigestion. The picking up of crumbs of know- 
 ledge is not in itself education. When we observe, 
 we should ask ourselves if we also consider. 
 The facts are the material for thought. They 
 are needed for comparison, from which the 
 mind classifies, notes differences and resem- 
 blances, arranging knowledge in order and 
 system. 
 
 But above that is the discovery of causality, 
 the explanation of facts by law. The human 
 mind will never believe that anything can take 
 place without a reason for it. In spite of false 
 starts and mistakes due to accepting mere 
 sequence for cause, and the errors of hasty
 
 106 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 
 
 generalisation, and the fallacies of prejudice and 
 the like, we cannot be content till we see mean- 
 ing and reason and cause for what we observe 
 and consider. Here we recognise the need of 
 trained intellect, the cultivation of habits of true 
 reasoning, by which processes of thought are 
 brought to careful scrutiny that sophistries may 
 be detected. For purposes of training, mathe- 
 matics and logic are valuable, as mental gym- 
 nastics, if nothing else. Logic, of course, has a 
 danger of trusting too much to the mere steps 
 of formal reasoning, without examining the 
 contents of thought. A man is tempted to 
 trust too much to his method, and look more 
 to the verbal accuracy of his argument than to 
 its truth. It is related of Jowett, the late Master 
 of Balliol, that when asked whether logic was an 
 art or a science, he replied that it was neither an 
 art nor a science, but a dodge. The anecdote 
 probably refers to this danger we have men- 
 tioned, through forgetting that logic is only a 
 method of disposing of thought, and has itself 
 no real contents. Still, many a fallacy would 
 have been killed at its birth, if it had been 
 brought to the test of logic and examined care- 
 fully. A study of philosophy also would be a
 
 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 107 
 
 corrective of many a crude position assumed by 
 science. It would save science from any super- 
 ficial dogmatism, and would reveal what are the 
 real fundamental problems of existence. But 
 no mere study of logic and philosophy and 
 science will give the maturity of mind which 
 we call wisdom. It needs personal reflection 
 and experience acting on a reflective mind. 
 
 In this connection the importance of memory 
 may be mentioned, as storing up for us im- 
 pressions and observations enabling us to profit 
 by previous knowledge. Methods of study differ 
 according to temperament, and it is foolish 
 to speak as if there were one sacred way of 
 availing ourselves of the material at our dis- 
 posal. Some men remember only when they 
 have written down what they want to imprint 
 on the mind. Others from their own experience 
 are inclined to question whether the benefits of 
 this laborious method are worth the waste of time, 
 and agree with Dr. Johnson that what is twice 
 read is commonly better remembered than what 
 is transcribed, and that the true art of memory 
 is the art of attention. This applies to observa- 
 tion perhaps more than to reading. Certainly, 
 a thing fixed on the mind is of more value than
 
 io8 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 
 
 the same thing copied into a commonplace- 
 book, even if it is easily available for use ; for 
 we never know what living seed of thought the 
 piece of knowledge may contain and may all 
 the time be fructifying in the mind. Memory 
 is a faculty which must be cultivated in some 
 fashion, unless life is to be to us only a series 
 of impressions disconnected from the thinking 
 and experiencing self. It is memory that makes 
 observation of any permanent use. It has 
 always material for thought ready to hand, 
 recalling instances, resemblances, comparisons, 
 contrasts. Through memory the past is made 
 a conscious influence in the life of the present. 
 We are not the men we might have been either 
 in knowledge or character, because we have 
 brought so little from the past. Growth in 
 knowledge depends on memory. A mind with 
 a scientific bent and even with excellent capacity 
 for thought can achieve little if it can never 
 trust previous impressions and observations. It 
 will be like the hopeless labour of Sisyphus, 
 ever rolling uphill a mighty stone which never 
 fails to roll down again. 
 
 The memory can be cultivated in the best 
 sense by paying heed to the events and experi-
 
 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 109 
 
 ences of each day. This is to be done by 
 selection, by letting the really important things 
 leave their mark on us and by letting the un- 
 important slip. There is a true sense in which 
 the art of remembering is the art of forgetting. 
 A good memory does not mean the retentive 
 one that never forgets and lays hold of every- 
 thing indiscriminately, but the memory that 
 selects the right things to keep fast. The 
 memory that hangs on to all kinds of unrelated 
 knowledge turns the mind into a scrap-heap 
 with much in it that is trivial and much that is 
 only rubbish. Nothing is more tiresome than 
 a relation of all sorts of unimportant details led 
 off into endless side issues and miscellaneous 
 recollections. The real secret of memory is vivid 
 impression. We forget the things that are vague 
 and indefinite, while the things we care intensely 
 about make their indelible mark on us. So 
 the keener and richer our minds become, the 
 more easily do we remember what feeds them 
 and interests them. 
 
 A great help is to unify the different items of 
 knowledge, fitting them into each other and 
 placing them in their natural connection. This 
 is essential, as the mere gathering of informa-
 
 no INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 
 
 tion and acquiring of facts, to be stowed away 
 in the pigeon-holes of memory, may weaken 
 the mind instead of strengthening it. Pure 
 memory-work may to a large extent be wasted 
 labour from this point of view. Getting lists of 
 dates by heart will not necessarily improve 
 the faculties. Any system for aiding weak 
 memories which depends on artificial associa- 
 tion, is on wrong lines ; for though it may help 
 one to remember facts, it does nothing to train 
 the mind. Only things which have a real rela- 
 tion to each other should be associated together 
 in memory. There can be no mental disci- 
 pline in connecting an important fact with a 
 trivial and accidental one. Hammerton recalls 
 a book upon memory which was very popular in 
 its day in which this artificial method of associa- 
 tion is advocated. Men who forgot their um- 
 brellas were told that they ought always to 
 associate the image of an umbrella with that of 
 an open door, so that they could never leave 
 any house without thinking of one. 'But would 
 it not be preferable to lose two or three 
 guineas annually rather than see a spectral 
 umbrella in every doorway?' 
 
 Observation, as an instrument of mental
 
 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE in 
 
 culture, must be defined widely enough to in- 
 clude social intercourse, conversation, and the 
 direct contact with other minds. Many a living 
 impulse is received from the impact of a fresh 
 intellect. Society as well as solitude is needed 
 to produce true culture. Every student owes 
 much to comradeship in kindred studies, as 
 every worker owes much of his skill to comrade- 
 ship in work. There have been young men's 
 societies which have been a great element in 
 the formation of character and in the production 
 of intellectual taste, where mind sharpened 
 mind as iron sharpens iron, where noble 
 ambitions were nursed and encouraged. So 
 much of our social intercourse is trivial, that men 
 do not often dive into each others' minds and 
 bring up treasures from the depth ; yet there 
 have been times of great culture when con- 
 versation was practically the only method avail- 
 able. The dialogues of Plato suggest to us what 
 was possible in Greek life, and even yet the 
 great value of oral teaching lies in the contact 
 of mind with mind. The solitary thinker loses 
 much of impulse and correction and gets out 
 of touch with life. We might all make more of 
 this important instrument of education. There
 
 H2 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 
 
 is no one from whom we might not learn some- 
 thing, and many a man grows rich in mind 
 through his healthy interest in life and keen 
 curiosity, who has very little trafficking with 
 books. In his essay on the education of children, 
 Montaigne recommends that a boy should be 
 trained to learn from conversation. ' Let him 
 be advised, being in company, to have his eye 
 and ear in every corner of the room, for I find 
 that the places of greatest honour are commonly 
 possessed by men that have least in them, and 
 that the greatest fortunes are not always accom- 
 panied by the ablest parts. Let him examine 
 every man's talent a peasant, a bricklayer, or a 
 passenger. A man may learn something from 
 every one of these in their several capacities, and 
 something will be picked out of their discourse 
 whereof some use may be made at one time or 
 another ; nay, even the folly and impertinence of 
 others will contribute to his instruction. By 
 observing the graces and fashions of all he sees 
 he will create to himself an emulation of the 
 good and a contempt of the bad.' 
 
 The next great instrument of mental culture 
 is books and reading. A man who is ignorant of
 
 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 113 
 
 what others before him have thought will turn 
 down many a blind alley, will set great store on 
 ideas that have been proved false, and will prob- 
 ably overrate his own intellectual accomplish- 
 ments. We would never travel very far if we 
 had always to go back to the beginning and call 
 everything to question and start at first prin- 
 ciples. Books are the record of other people's 
 experience and thought and feeling, and as such 
 are of immense importance, widening our vision, 
 extending our limited range of life, correcting 
 our own conclusions, and giving vast data for our 
 thinking. But after all, we must rem ember that 
 what they contain is only the material in the 
 rough which we ourselves must use for our 
 culture. They are a valuable instrument, and 
 are often the first real impulse many men get for 
 the intellectual life. Most of us would be poorly 
 equipped mentally if all we had gained from 
 books were taken away from us. At the same 
 time, the great education is life, not literature. 
 The quality of our mind and character is formed 
 by our vital experience, the fruit of our own 
 thought and feeling and action. Knowledge can 
 be added to us indefinitely from the record of 
 what others have learned, but wisdom must
 
 114 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 
 
 issue from the living source within ourselves. 
 Even the value of what others can give us is 
 determined by our capacity to make it our own, 
 and to profit by their observation and thinking. 
 Erudition does not mean a cultivated mind. 
 The mere scholar may have never learned 
 wisdom, and all his learning may only be the 
 echo of others' words. Indeed it is astonishing 
 how intellectual workers will go on repeating the 
 fallacies of their predecessors, through their 
 blind dependence on what is stated in books. 
 Generation after generation of commentators 
 will repeat ancient and traditional interpreta- 
 tions, because they rarely trust their own in- 
 dependent vision and judgment. Some of the 
 greatest thinkers and writers were not bookmen 
 in our sense of the word. The bookmen are 
 those who write prolix commentaries on their 
 work. 
 
 There is a tendency to overestimate the value 
 of books in any scheme of culture. The mere 
 knowledge of authors is supposed to guarantee 
 education. Yet we know from sad experience 
 that a man can be bookish, and even learned, 
 a very dungeon of scholarship, and be narrow 
 in his judgments and cramped in his mind.
 
 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 115 
 
 Shakespeare satirises pedantic book-learning and 
 the exaggerated value of books in the scene 
 in Love's Labour's Lost where Sir Nathaniel 
 the curate and Holofernes the schoolmaster 
 bandy long words and Latin quotations with 
 poor old policeman Dull. The curate apologises 
 to the schoolmaster for the policeman's igno- 
 rance, ' Sir, he hath never fed of the dainties 
 that are bred in a book : he hath not eaten paper, 
 as it were ; he hath not drunk ink ; his intellect 
 is not replenished, he is only an animal, only 
 sensible in the duller parts.' Our view of culture 
 has been too scholastic, too much a literary 
 acquirement. We see that in many other ways 
 in practical life, in dealing with affairs, in ob- 
 servational science, in love of nature genuine 
 elements of culture can be attained. Literature 
 is a great gift to man, and all the inventions 
 which make it common property are among the 
 triumphs of the race. Yet a protest is needed 
 against indiscriminate valuation of it. Like 
 many gifts, it carries a menace in its bosom. 
 
 It is easy to speak in praise of books, and to 
 tell of the pleasure and profit reading can bring 
 to a man, but perhaps there is nothing in our 
 lives to-day which requires more careful regula-
 
 n6 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 
 
 tion and which gets less. Even printing is not 
 an unmixed blessing. Information was never 
 more universally extended, but information is not 
 education. Everybody can read, but the propor- 
 tion of thought and wisdom to folly has not in- 
 creased in its due ratio. We seem to think we 
 are doing well if we are reading a book any 
 book. Much of our reading is from idleness and 
 mere vacuity. Or we read in the vain idea that 
 we are thus entering into the life of thought, 
 when as a matter of fact reading is made a 
 substitute for thinking. Books must always take 
 an important place in culture, but they are only 
 one instrument of culture. Nay, reading is only 
 a means to a means, for the chief instrumtnt of 
 culture is thought, and books have their place as 
 an inducement to thought. Literature is not an 
 end in itself, but a means to develop sound judg- 
 ment and taste and intelligence. Of course 
 there is a place for recreation, a mere enjoyment 
 in reading, but it is not with that we are specially 
 concerned in our present connection. Books 
 have a ministry of comfort, and a ministry of 
 innocent happiness, and one might speak long 
 of the delights of reading, and the resource it 
 affords to a man in almost any situation. Our
 
 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 117 
 
 present purpose, however, is to deal with reading 
 as it ministers to intellectual culture. It was 
 never so important and perhaps so difficult to 
 know what to read, just because more than ever 
 of the making many books there is no end. 
 
 We must soon settle for ourselves what not to 
 read, or we may as well give up reading altogether. 
 The principle of selection means a principle of 
 rejection. We must be willing to know nothing 
 of the book of the month, or of the day, or of the 
 moment. We have to give up the attempt to 
 keep up with the outflow of books even along 
 one line. There is no reason in the world why 
 we need read the reams of minor poetry if we 
 have not lived with the great poets who have 
 fed the life of man. If reading is to be to us, 
 as it may be, a means of culture, we must have 
 a rigorous standard. We must avoid what De 
 Quincey called the gluttony of books. It is a 
 very good plan to give most of our spare time 
 for reading to the great standard accredited 
 books. These have achieved their position 
 through merit. Time has sifted her treasures 
 for us, and that not by haphazard. Why waste 
 time over the ephemeral prints, the endless 
 magazine articles, if we are ignorant of the
 
 Ii8 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 
 
 world's best works ? If we have serious views 
 of the place of literature in culture, we must do 
 more than read these books once and have done 
 with them, as we read a newspaper leader or 
 most modern novels. We must live with them 
 and let them influence the very fibre of our 
 minds, giving us elevated thoughts and calm 
 standards of judgment. After all, in spite of 
 the endless making of books, we can make some 
 headway with those which by common consent 
 are put on the first rank. It is not altogether 
 a counsel of perfection to set before ourselves 
 the mastery of the world's best. 
 
 Culture is not so much concerned with belles 
 lettres, or aesthetic style, or the curiosities of 
 literature, as with the great formative books of 
 universal and permanent value. And it is not 
 the number of these we master which is most 
 important, but the closeness of our intercourse. 
 A man has received more true culture from the 
 constant and patient study of one book than is 
 got by the ordinary desultory reader who samples 
 whole libraries. The influence of the Bible on 
 the life and thought of men need only be 
 mentioned to prove this. Not that we should 
 subscribe to the narrow doctrine of some that
 
 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 119 
 
 no other book is needed. That is not piety, 
 though it looks like it. Still, it would be well 
 if we enforced anew on ourselves the value of 
 the Bible as literature. Apart altogether from 
 what the modern world owes to the Bible, 
 morally and religiously, our debt to it as litera- 
 ture is immense. Almost every great writer has 
 acknowledged his own individual indebtedness. 
 
 More important than the question what to read 
 is the question how to read. A true method of 
 reading will solve the problem of the kind of 
 reading. If we read with attention and system, 
 and with desire to understand and profit, we 
 will naturally discard the trivial and empty 
 books, and will reserve ourselves for those that 
 are worthy of our steel. The fruits of culture in 
 wisdom, good taste, critical appreciation, are 
 not gathered by chance. They are not a gift, 
 but a growth. The attention which a serious 
 book requires is a power that comes from culti- 
 vation. Emerson speaks of creative reading in 
 which the mind is braced by labour and invention, 
 so that the page we read becomes illuminated 
 with manifold allusion. The suggestiveness of 
 a book depends very much on how we come 
 to it, and the impression it makes is often a test
 
 120 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 
 
 of ourselves more than a test of the book. If we 
 read with care and sympathy, taking pains to 
 understand and appreciate, we will soon find out 
 the books which nourish our mind, and will agree 
 with Macaulay when he said that he would rather 
 live in a garret with a library than in a palace 
 without one. 
 
 We have said that for the purposes of culture 
 all the means referred to have their place as 
 giving food for thought. The object of all 
 education is to form the mind, not merely to 
 furnish it with information, even the best that 
 books can give. Information is useful and 
 necessary to give data for making judgments 
 and arriving at decisions, but it is thought which 
 is the instrument of mental culture. John Fos- 
 ter, in a letter to a correspondent, remarked that 
 in the review of life we shall see that perhaps the 
 worst fault was that we had thought far too 
 little. All who have tried in any way to impress 
 their fellows with any truth have felt that this 
 was the one needful thing, to get them to think, 
 to take account of the facts and open their minds 
 to great issues. 
 
 It is so easy to refuse to consider facts till
 
 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 121 
 
 the facts hit us in the face, when it is usually 
 too late for any practical purpose. We seem 
 to have a constitutional disinclination to con- 
 sider matters of grave moment ; and to many of 
 us the last thing we would do is to stop in our 
 breathless life and give ourselves space to think. 
 We seldom think anything out right to its end. 
 We even take up our opinions ready made, giving 
 little personal investigation to a subject, with no 
 serious regard for the facts on which a decision 
 should be built, and with no deliberate thought 
 on the great issues that hang on a decision. 
 Among all the types of character in our midst 
 many of them excellent and some of them 
 beautiful the thoughtful type is perhaps the 
 rarest. The reason, of course, is that thoughtful- 
 ness implies the collectedness of mind which can 
 only come from a long discipline. Complacent 
 drifting with the tide is common in every 
 region. In politics we find everywhere the 
 unintelligent acceptance of a party creed, where 
 men repeat the old catch-words of party, and do 
 not really set themselves to master the problems 
 they are called on to decide. In business, even 
 when skill and energy and industry are lavished 
 on work, there is often a lack of initiative which
 
 122 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 
 
 comes from a complete grasp of the situation. 
 In religion, how common it is to find the tradi- 
 tional and the conventional, and how seldom 
 the original. By original is not meant the sense- 
 less striving after new opinions, but a living 
 faith that is the expression of a man's own 
 thought and experience. We do not often hear 
 a live voice that is more than an echo, speaking 
 out of the depths of personal and experimental 
 knowledge. 
 
 We have seen that books, which are a record 
 of what other men have thought and felt, and 
 should be a valuable provocative of thought, 
 are commonly used by us as a substitute for 
 thinking, or as a sedative to the mind, if not even 
 a soporific. Our practical activities and methods 
 of work and busy ways may be tending in the 
 same direction of stifling thought. It is far 
 easier to be busy than to be thoughtful. Activity 
 may be not the fruit of thought, but a substitute 
 for it. It is indeed one of the commonest 
 expedients to drown serious thought in a flood 
 of activity. A man can forget the keenest 
 impressions and can forget grief by throwing 
 himself into all sorts of affairs. There are more 
 ways of finding distraction than by the common
 
 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 123 
 
 way of worldly pleasure. Business may be a 
 distraction to a man, by which he gets rid of 
 the clamant call to consider, to give calm and 
 serious reflection to the greatest questions in the 
 world. We may be so engrossed in living that 
 we can neglect life. With the countless distrac- 
 tions of our modern life, with the many ways' of 
 evading thought by reading, by business, by 
 pleasure, and the like we may well take the 
 counsel to heart, to gather ourselves at the centre 
 and consider and think on our ways. 'A thinking 
 man is the worst enemy the Prince of Dark- 
 ness can have/ says Carlyle ; and that is true, 
 for thoughtlessness, carelessness, intellectual and 
 moral indifference are the great stumbling-blocks 
 in the way of the progress of true religion. 
 
 Culture has suffered in reputation by its 
 aloofness from life, as if the mere existence of 
 taste and judgment and thoughtfulness were a 
 complete end in itself. True thinking needs to 
 be directed in some form or other to practical 
 issues, and culture needs to be related to life. 
 It justifies itself by its invaluable contribution 
 to the world. What we need most is not 
 speculation nor vague pondering over a general 
 problem, nor the logical sequence of thought.
 
 124 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 
 
 A man may have many intellectual interests, 
 and may exercise his brain in very strenuous 
 fashion and be absorbed in profound specula- 
 tions, may love to crack the hardest nuts in 
 theology or philosophy or scientific investiga- 
 tion, and yet may come short of the highest 
 demands made upon him by true culture. In- 
 deed, science and theology and philosophy and 
 the intellectual life generally, may be made a 
 distraction to escape the further appeal of 
 thought. It is much to be seriously inclined, to 
 be open to consider difficult subjects, to have 
 trained the mind in veracity and accuracy and 
 fed it with noble ideas, to have thought broadly 
 and largely on the vast problems of the world. 
 That mental discipline gives the serious bent 
 and the wide outlook, and at least saves a man 
 from shallowness and incoherence of thought 
 and light-headed flightiness. It also saves from 
 the frivolity of mind and emptiness of life which 
 enable some to float gaily on the surface, or 
 which in others lead to satisfaction in corrupt 
 and evil pleasures, contentment with the life of 
 sense. But some have reached splendid views 
 of life at large, who have never translated it into 
 terms of their own life nor come to close quarters
 
 INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL CULTURE 125 
 
 with themselves. We need to see life in the light 
 of duty and personal responsibility and privilege, 
 and find one of our highest motives for self- 
 culture in the equipment of self for high service. 
 
 The methods we have dealt with of attaining 
 culture may be summed up in a quotation from 
 Ruskin, which states in general language what 
 we must each work out for ourselves. ' Intellec- 
 tual education/ he says in Fors Clavigera, ' consists 
 in giving the creature the faculties of admiration, 
 hope, and love. These are to be taught by the 
 study of beautiful nature ; and the sight and 
 history of noble persons ; and the setting forth 
 of noble objects of action.' These correspond 
 pretty accurately to our three divisions, observ- 
 ing, reading, thinking. The test of the value of 
 our culture we can apply to ourselves : whether 
 it has really inspired us with admiration and 
 love for all that is good and beautiful and true, 
 and how it works out in the service of our 
 lives.
 
 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM
 
 ' We are not born to solve the problems of the world, but 
 to find out where the problem begins, and then to keep 
 within the limits of what we can grasp.' GOETHE.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 
 
 THE possibilities of life are not exhausted 
 by the careful cultivation of one special 
 faculty. We are always beset by the temptation 
 to lay the stress on a particular side of our 
 nature, at the expense of all other capacities. 
 In the intellectual life we are usually developed 
 along one line, and are inclined to underestimate 
 the other branches of study and knowledge. The 
 scientist glorifies his subject and his methods, 
 sometimes without a glimmer of a notion of the 
 vast region of thought of which the philosopher 
 takes charge. The philosopher deals with his 
 systems in a kind of vacuum, with little tolerance 
 for the wisdom of the man of affairs. The 
 business man sometimes has a delightful oblivion 
 of both science and philosophy, and cultivates 
 his calculating and practical thinking powers. 
 While all of them may be ignorant that there 
 is a world of art, or poetry, or religion existing 
 
 K 129
 
 130 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 
 
 for others. It is dreadfully easy to grow narrow 
 and cramped even by those who do live a real 
 intellectual life. We are forced to be specialists 
 by the necessities of our work, and the danger is 
 imminent to all of neglecting the larger, richer 
 life, which is our birthright as the heirs of time. 
 In religion also the same danger arises of denn- 
 ing the saintly character in terms of one special 
 quality. The mediaeval church looked for the 
 ascetic note in its saints, abstraction from the 
 world and the virtues of the recluse. We can go 
 as far in the other extreme, and ask for nothing 
 but fussy practicality and a blatant zeal. If we 
 try to imagine the finest type of character to 
 which we would gladly give the name of saintli- 
 ness, we find ourselves giving the pre-eminence 
 to one of the graces. We usually think of one 
 special quality, and not of a full-orbed person- 
 ality defective on no side of true human nature. 
 The fact is, that in all these regions of life we 
 need to be reminded of the many-sided per- 
 fection which ought at least to be our ideal. 
 In most things our measure of excellence is 
 liable to be influenced by what we think our own 
 strong point. Selden in his shrewd lawyer's 
 Table Talk exemplified this by a tale of Nash
 
 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 131 
 
 the poet, poor enough (as poets used to be), 
 seeing an alderman with his gold chain, upon 
 his great horse, and said by way of scorn to one 
 of his companions, 'Do you see yon fellow, how 
 goodly, how big he looks? Why, that fellow 
 cannot make a blank verse ! ' If capacity to 
 make even indifferent blank verse were to be 
 the test of aldermen or of any other posts of 
 authority, there would be some startling changes 
 in the world. All of us in our judgments even 
 poets need to take a wider view than that of 
 our special calling. We would say that for com- 
 plete health and perfect physical condition the 
 growth should be all-round in every power and 
 part. And similarly, we would say that the 
 complete man must not be narrow in his sym- 
 pathies or his interests. The chief purpose of 
 all education should be to produce a well 
 balanced, fully developed mind. It is the 
 purpose of the great education of life to bring 
 every power to its best, to draw out the highest 
 faculties, and yet leave no part entirely uncared 
 for. This is the meaning of the much abused 
 phrase, general culture. It lives as a constant 
 protest against one-sidedness. In these days 
 of specialising, when in everything men are
 
 132 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 
 
 forced to limit themselves, to do almost 
 exclusively the one thing they can do best or 
 -have learned to do, the protest is particularly 
 needed. In all sorts of work this tendency is 
 going on, and increasingly so. It may not be 
 possible to alter the conditions of life to-day, 
 and perhaps we should not want to change 
 them, but it is foolish to shut our eyes to the 
 dangers and drawbacks of present conditions. 
 
 Of course we need to remember that there 
 are dangers on both sides. There are ever a 
 Scylla and Charybdis to be passed in the 
 voyage of life. The chief intellectual tempta- 
 tion of culture is the danger of being super- 
 ficial. This arises from the very nature of the 
 case, as culture implies breadth of interest. 
 We are inclined to make it too much a matter 
 of accomplishments. The very variety of pur- 
 suits produces the danger. The man whose 
 ideal is mental culture is always liable to 
 degenerate into the mere dilettante. Culture is 
 a useful corrective of undue development of one 
 part at the expense of the rest, for it aims at 
 symmetry of life. A tree to grow into its 
 fulness must have light all round it. If it is 
 too near a house, it will grow out on one
 
 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 133 
 
 side dwarfed or distorted. The mind needs 
 open space and light all round it to grow in 
 fulness, and culture at least attempts to give 
 it that. A largeness of interest in many things 
 counteracts the narrowness of our necessary 
 specialism in all branches of activity. 
 
 But culture in the repulsion from the one 
 ditch runs the risk of falling into the ditch on 
 the other side. A man in the name of culture 
 can live with vacuous general interests, with no 
 special life-work, with nothing he has made his 
 own. To such is due the contempt into which 
 the very name has fallen. It has come to mean 
 the quality of the dilettante, a smattering of 
 everything and a mastery of nothing, often 
 another name also for affectation. Even when 
 the effort after culture is serious and sincere, 
 there are pitfalls that lie near the life of study. 
 One is the overfastidious taste which keeps a 
 man from ever making any real use of his 
 acquirements, and which will not let him pro- 
 duce anything, making him spend his life in 
 dreams. Another is the danger of being 
 smothered in a mass of detail, letting the 
 acquisition of knowledge grow faster than any 
 power of using it. To trifle with this and
 
 134 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 
 
 that, touching now on one subject and now on 
 another, never concentrating the mind on the 
 mastery of a single subject, is to spread out 
 into shallows what might have gone to depth. 
 It is often due to weakness of character, lack of 
 perseverance and of will, and of serious applica- 
 tion. There is a many-sided cultivation which is 
 easier attained and more commonly possessed than 
 the force of character needed to perfect one 
 branch. 
 
 This is often the value of a definite profession 
 or business. In the devoted application to a 
 profession a young man's intellectual energy is 
 often for the first time in his life concentrated. 
 His school education embraced so many sub- 
 jects, among which he could only dabble, 
 that his powers of mind were scattered, while 
 his professional training gives him at least a 
 command of one line which strengthens his 
 character, and reveals to him the value of per- 
 sistent labour. The foes of culture are of its 
 own household, and pedantry is one of the chief 
 of these, due to ignorance of life and an exalted 
 conception of mere scholastic acquirements. It 
 usually also develops into a petty conceit, which 
 makes mind the measure of man, and a know-
 
 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 135 
 
 ledge of books the measure of mind. It creates 
 a new barrier between men, as exclusive and 
 contemptuous as any other class or caste dis- 
 tinction. We are called to avoid the two ex- 
 tremes, learned pedantry on the one side, and 
 ignorant contempt of learning on the other. 
 Both are foolish, but the former is the more 
 culpable of the two, since it is in the name of a 
 pretended enlightenment, though it really has 
 its origin in superficial and vague knowledge. 
 Something is to be said for the advantages of 
 specialism even in education. 
 
 The young man who is allowed to follow the 
 lines of work for which he is most fitted is more 
 likely to succeed than when he is set to a variety 
 of things that may not be congenial to his 
 natural aptitude. And a smattering of accom- 
 plishments, which too often passes for education, 
 gives no real training, and often also produces 
 a very offensive type such as Mark Pattison in 
 his Memoirs protests against in the young Ox- 
 ford which the present system tends to turn 
 out. ' From showy lectures, from manuals, from 
 attractive periodicals, the youth is put in pos- 
 session of ready-made opinions on every con- 
 ceivable subject, a crude mass of matter which
 
 136 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 
 
 he is taught to regard as real knowledge. 
 Swollen with this puffy and unwholesome diet 
 he goes forth into the world, regarding himself 
 like the infant in the nursery as the centre of 
 all things, the measure of the universe. He 
 thinks he can evince his superiority by freely 
 distributing sneers and scoffs upon all that 
 does not agree with the set of opinions which 
 he happens to have adopted from imitation, 
 from fashion, or from chance. Having no root 
 in itself, such a type of character is liable to be- 
 come an easy prey to any popular charlatanism 
 or current fanaticism.' 
 
 The value of a special life-work is that it 
 presents a subject that a man is called upon 
 to master. The bread and butter sciences, those 
 by which men earn their living, do not deserve 
 the sneers so commonly passed upon them, as 
 if they had no place in what is called a liberal 
 education. Devotion to one's special work 
 brings a strength to both mind and character 
 which cannot be otherwise obtained. It is 
 always a good thing for a young man to peg 
 out a field for himself, which he sets himself to 
 master, even though it be a narrow field. The 
 serious man feels that he must limit himself
 
 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 137 
 
 to make the most of himself. There is a per- 
 ennial source of strength in the simplicity of a 
 definite purpose. The first secret of all art and 
 life is to learn the limitations of both and to 
 obey them. The really great man in science or 
 literature or art is the man who first of all has 
 mastered his own branch of work and refuses 
 to be tempted away to other attractive regions. 
 A definite aim persistently pursued gives both 
 strength and dignity to a life. More than 
 ever men feel that they cannot dissipate their 
 energies. Specialisation has come to stay, for 
 it cannot be avoided if knowledge is to be at all 
 thorough. Sound and complete mastery of a 
 subject implies a deliberate disregard of other 
 branches of knowledge. Of course this means 
 that we are menaced by the danger of becoming 
 one-sided in our faculties, and even narrow in 
 our sympathy. We need to remember that 
 education is designed to make men of us, and 
 not merely to make us capable business or pro- 
 fessional men. It is here that culture tells, in 
 presenting its ideal that the end of life is to be, 
 and not merely to get or succeed. 
 
 It is found in every industry that it pays 
 better for workers to confine themselves to
 
 I 3 8 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 
 
 doing one thing. A man who some years ago 
 would have been a general blacksmith engaged 
 in all the branches of that trade, will now perhaps 
 do nothing but shoe horses or hammer nails. 
 Division of labour, or specialising of function, 
 have become essential in modern industry. It 
 is even a tendency of our civilisation to divide 
 men into classes, and especially the two great 
 classes of those whose work is almost exclusively 
 manual and those whose work is intellectual. 
 The drawbacks are obvious, seen in our factory 
 system with its monotony of occupation, its 
 suppression of the individual, who becomes a 
 minute fraction of the whole. Much of the 
 work is dwarfing, as for example that of the 
 man who does one small operation in the pro- 
 cess of sharpening a pin, or that of the girl who 
 sticks labels on boxes all the day and every 
 day. In hardly any modern industry does one 
 man begin and finish an article, and thus much 
 of the old artisan's pride in turning out a com- 
 plete and workmanlike job is lost. There may 
 be some satisfaction in the increased facility 
 acquired, the ease with which a movement is 
 repeated, but all must admit that the system 
 is narrowing to the man as compared with the
 
 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 139 
 
 older ways. Here it may be said with emphasis 
 that if these conditions are necessary and per- 
 manent, as they seem to be, then there is all 
 the more reason why the rest of life should be 
 spent amid broader interests. Many men feel 
 that their daily work does not call out the best 
 that is in them. It is so constant and invari- 
 able that it has become purely mechanical. They 
 are not asked to think, and all that they need 
 do at the best in earning their daily bread is to 
 use one little lobe of their brain. The great 
 condemnation of much of our industrial life is its 
 deadly monotony. But even so, without touching 
 commercial conditions, there is at least a partial 
 escape open to every man. The larger intellec- 
 tual life in one or other of its forms offers a 
 refuge and an antidote. 
 
 The tendency to which we have referred is not 
 confined to our industrial conditions, but is true 
 of all conditions. It is seen in the sphere of 
 learning, in the professions, and literature and art 
 and science. No lawyer pretends to a complete 
 knowledge of law. Law has grown complex with 
 all the complexity of society, and we find a man 
 specialising in railway law, in commercial law, 
 and the like. In medicine the same tendency is
 
 I 4 o CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 
 
 seen. The general practitioner, who was physi- 
 cian and surgeon, and dentist and oculist, gives 
 place to men who have made themselves distin- 
 guished in one department, specialists on eye or 
 ear ; or even a surgeon will practically do one 
 sort of operation alone, acquiring a skill and 
 deftness and unerring accuracy in his work 
 impossible to any but a specialist. The danger 
 here too is to forget the whole in the part, and 
 treat a patient not as a living man, but as a 
 combination of organs. Yet it is a great gain to 
 medicine at large, extending the bounds of know- 
 ledge in that profession. In the same way the 
 whole field of knowledge is partitioned out and 
 subdivided. No longer can any single mind 
 profess to take all knowledge for its province. 
 The time when a man felt himself able to write a 
 commentary on the whole Bible has passed, or is 
 passing. A Greek scholar must be content to 
 leave to others the mastery of Hebrew. Only on 
 one subject or a department of a subject can a 
 man be an authority. Only to one class of work 
 or a branch of that can he give his life with the 
 best results. 
 
 We may think that in some cases this limita- 
 tion of work is carried too far, as with the scholar
 
 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 141 
 
 who died regretting that he had not devoted his 
 life to the dative case. This type of scholar is 
 no modern appearance merely. Montaigne de- 
 scribes the type in his day : ' This man whom 
 about midnight, when others take their rest, thou 
 seest come out of his study meagre-looking, with 
 eyes thrilling, phlegmatic, squalid and spauling, 
 dost thou think that plodding on his books he 
 doth seek how he shall become an honester man, 
 or more wise or more content ? There is no such 
 matter. He will either die in his pursuit, or teach 
 posterity the measure of Plautus' verse and the 
 true orthography of a Latin word.' On the other 
 hand, it has to be remembered that many promis- 
 ing young lives have come to nothing for want of 
 a concentrated purpose. It is true that many a 
 man has escaped being a great man, as some one 
 says, by splitting into two middling ones. Great 
 talents are often dissipated in a multiplicity of 
 interests, when a man with a talent for concen- 
 tration and perseverance will leave his mark in 
 one sphere of activity or in one branch of a 
 subject. Giardini, when asked how long it would 
 take to learn to play on the fiddle, replied that it 
 would take twelve hours a day for twenty years. 
 All men who have been great in their own line
 
 142 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 
 
 have had serious views of their duty towards it, 
 and of the immense demands it makes on its 
 followers. And it may be taken as an axiom 
 that the man who gives up his whole time and 
 thought to a pursuit will commonly taste some 
 measure of success. Restriction of effort is part 
 of the necessity of the case with all of us. To 
 make much of life we must give our chief strength 
 to one or two pursuits. But this subdivision, 
 besides the danger to which we have referred of 
 narrowness, has also the danger of taking the 
 trees for the wood, never rising to the general 
 from the mass of the particular. 
 
 The culture of the body is the perfection of its 
 health, by which a man lives and works with 
 ease, not sacrificing eye for ear or hand for foot. 
 It means a balance of physical power, along with 
 a development of any particular and special 
 capacity. A man whose gift lies in delicacy of 
 touch, by which his fingers can do the nicest 
 mechanical operations, is in duty to the com- 
 munity bound to use his gift and make that his 
 work. But in duty to himself, and ultimately 
 also to the community, he is bound not to neglect 
 the rest of him to get an abnormal delicacy of 
 touch. For even the exactest fingers lose nerve
 
 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 143 
 
 when the body loses health. To preserve the 
 requisite balance is the task of the body. It is 
 so with the mind also. Mental culture is the 
 perfection of intellectual health. As manual 
 workers have their one department, so brain 
 workers to be truly successful must have their 
 one sphere. Here also an unhealthy mental 
 condition may arise from narrowness. Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes has a character in The Poet at 
 the Breakfast Table who gave up his life to 
 the study of beetles. He was a Coleopterist, and 
 had no scientific interest in any living things, 
 even crawling things, but beetles. Even that 
 sphere was too large for his minute study, and he 
 specialised further and only claimed to be an 
 authority on a special kind of beetle. He was 
 a Coleopterist who was a Scarabeeist. He had a 
 mild interest in the Lepidoptera, butterflies and 
 moths; but life was too short for him to really 
 know anything but beetles. The value of such 
 quiet, painstaking work in every branch of human 
 knowledge can hardly be overestimated. But 
 there is no reason why the man should be dwarfed. 
 A man can take a saner and truer and more 
 scientific view of beetles who does not altogether 
 give up his soul to them. Sir Joshua Reynolds
 
 144 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 
 
 used to say that a man who is at the head of a 
 profession is above it. 
 
 The advocates of an unmitigated specialism 
 argue that the broadening of interests must lead 
 to superficiality, but often what appears to be 
 superficial is really the ample background of a 
 rich and ripe mind. We appreciate the value 
 of this breadth of training if we want a true 
 judgment on a particular question ; for we find 
 a largeness of view and a dispassionateness of 
 mind which alone come from wide knowledge. 
 Every man also who has lived the intellectual 
 life discovers how subjects merge into each 
 other, how separate sciences are branches of 
 the one science. The student whose mind is 
 full of a subject finds help everywhere; almost 
 every book he reads seems to have bearings on 
 his subject, and no branch of knowledge comes 
 amiss. It is surely possible after all to avoid 
 the two extremes that of a man who gives 
 up the general for the particular, like our 
 amusing friend the Coleopterist, and that of a 
 man who lives with vacuous general interests 
 and with no hold of particular knowledge. The 
 ideal certainly is the general along with the 
 special knowledge of many, mastery of one.
 
 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 145 
 
 The practical difficulty is that in some spheres 
 the demands are so insistent that a man fears 
 to undertake anything outside of his work. This 
 one thing he must do to preserve the force of his 
 special capacity. The fear is often ungrounded, 
 as a generous culture should really aid and not 
 hinder the technical skill. We must not forget 
 that in a very true sense a broad culture helps 
 even in the special spheres of activity, for it 
 feeds and refreshes the mind. 
 
 'Mass and meat hinder no man' that is, it is 
 not waste of time to do what will in the end aid 
 the capacity for working. There is great truth 
 in the advice that we must do more things than 
 one in order to do that one well. A genuine 
 love of intellectual things keeps the mind fresh 
 and open to influences other than those our own 
 pursuits bring. By broadening the range of our 
 knowledge we increase the measure of our sym- 
 pathy and give new point to our appreciation. 
 It corrects the narrowness of our special work 
 and the deficiencies of character which our special 
 work often fosters. We come back with new zest 
 and strength to our definite tasks from every 
 excursion into the larger world of life and 
 thought. ' Many tastes, one hobby ' is an old
 
 146 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 
 
 and very good adage, especially if the one 
 hobby be our life's work. The many tastes 
 bring relief and refreshment, and send us with 
 renewed power to our work. Life can renew 
 itself from many springs and drink from many 
 a brook by the way. Every noble enlargement 
 of thought and experience should enrich our 
 capacity even for special work. 
 
 Gounod used to say to his music pupils, 'Be 
 wider than your calling.' He practised it 
 himself, as can be seen in the breadth of his 
 literary and artistic and other interests, the fine 
 flavour of which the keen ear can note in his 
 music. Most of our great musical composers 
 have been men of varied culture and wide general 
 education. Mendelssohn especially was a man 
 of almost prodigious versatility an Admirable 
 Crichton in his many-sided talents and accom- 
 plishments. The more varied the intellectual 
 resources are, and the wider the range of the 
 mind, the more chance there is for a rich harvest 
 in the special line, say, of music. Of course 
 there have been exceptions where the native 
 genius has made light of disabilities, and has 
 perhaps brought a certain freshness and origi- 
 nality most welcome to a sophisticated age.
 
 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 147 
 
 Great talent for any art can overcome a pretty 
 big handicap in the race. At the same time, 
 a lack of culture always hampers a man in some 
 direction, and keeps him from the wide appeal to 
 all classes of society, and it certainly limits his 
 equipment. A lack of culture nearly always 
 carries with it a lack of self-criticism ; for the 
 material for true criticism is wanting. Many 
 a man has spent his strength attempting to do 
 something which has been done already, or, what 
 is worse, something which has been amply tried 
 and has been proved false. He suffers from lack 
 of the general education that at least would have 
 enabled him to choose his tasks with wisdom. 
 On the other hand, it must be admitted that a 
 very extensive culture is inclined to give a certain 
 pedantry, and, perhaps, a coldness of treatment 
 to an art. That, and the danger of the con- 
 ventional, are its temptations. But in the long 
 run, a broad and generous culture in touch with 
 the great human interests will give a man a 
 deeper insight into his own work, and by relating 
 his own small field to the broad acres of know- 
 ledge will enrich it indefinitely. The claim of 
 culture for a complete healthy development of 
 the whole man comes with great point to us. It
 
 148 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 
 
 means the conscious training of the mind by 
 which the best results possible for the individual 
 are reached. We do not fail to recognise a 
 cultured opinion on any subject, whether we 
 quite agree with it or not. We feel it to be sane 
 and comprehensive, not the fruit of narrowness 
 or conceit, but the calm judgment of a trained 
 mind. It may be true that civilisation demands 
 from us an ever-increasing specialism of function, 
 but, asks Schiller, ' Can it be intended that man 
 should neglect himself for any particular design ? 
 Ought nature to deprive us, by its design, of 
 a perfection which Reason, by its own, prescribes 
 to us ? Then it must be false that the develop- 
 ment of single faculties makes the sacrifice of 
 totality necessary ; or, if indeed the law of Nature 
 presses so heavily, it becomes us to restore, by a 
 higher art, this totality in our nature which art 
 has destroyed.' 
 
 The one great consolation for the increasing 
 specialism of function in modern life is that it is 
 a gain for society at large and for knowledge in 
 general. The individual may suffer, but the 
 larger life is enriched, and through that even the 
 individual gains. Social progress depends on 
 this narrowing of personal opportunity. When
 
 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 149 
 
 a single man did everything for himself he 
 probably had a more all-round development, but 
 civilisation was at a standstill. There could be 
 little general social advance without the appor- 
 tioning of special spheres of work and interest. 
 The division of labour means greater complexity 
 of society. Herein lies the great compensa- 
 tion for the specialism which in some ways we 
 are compelled to deplore. We need to take 
 larger views than of any self-advantage or even 
 self-culture, and look upon ourselves as part 
 of a great organic whole, serving a useful func- 
 tion in the life of the world. The unit is 
 no longer the individual, but the race. We 
 have each a contribution to make, a place to 
 fill, a work to perform. The selfish life is the 
 one damning offence. If the individual withers 
 that the race may grow, if social progress de- 
 pends on our becoming more than ever a little 
 bit of the great machine, we can turn even this 
 necessity into a great privilege, and can bring 
 into our lives a new breadth of view which itself 
 means culture. Our ideal will become the con- 
 secration of intellect and of all capacity by which 
 it is dedicated to service. This consecration 
 will save us from pettiness and will extend our
 
 ISO CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 
 
 vision. It is enough for the eye that it serves 
 the best life of a man : it should be enough for a 
 man that he is able to serve in some fashion the 
 best life of the world. Childish vanity of one's 
 own gift, or insolent contempt of the gifts of 
 others, become impossible; for we will see how 
 wide and varied service may be. In the richness 
 of human life as a whole we will partake and get 
 our share of the general gains. If we are con- 
 sciously consecrating ourselves, we will grow into 
 some largeness of nature. If we see the true 
 nobility of service, and are humbly desirous of 
 finding a place to serve, all petty pride in our own 
 gifts or all fretful repining for the lack of them 
 will pass from us. We will gladly see the place 
 for all sorts of true work in every sphere of 
 activity. It takes many kinds of men to make a 
 world. We see how eye and ear and foot and 
 hand in the social body have their place and 
 their duties and their rights. We see the need 
 for, and the dignity of, all true work of every kind. 
 Commerce, industry, science, art, literature, are all 
 contributing to the good of the whole. To have 
 attained this point of view is itself to have at- 
 tained culture, which sees the place of the part 
 in the whole. There is room for the scholar and
 
 CULTURE AND SPECIALISM 151 
 
 the statesman, the artist and the artisan, the man 
 of business and the poet 
 
 When God helps all the workers for His world, 
 The singers shall have help of Him, not last. 
 
 There is no culture like this generous tolerance, 
 and broad tender sympathy, which come from 
 the consecrated view of life.
 
 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION
 
 <To see a world fa a grain of sand, 
 
 And a heaven in a wild flower, 
 Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, 
 And Eternity in an hour.' 
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 T IMAGINATION as a faculty has suffered from 
 *- both inaccuracy of language and inaccuracy 
 of thought. In common speech it is largely used 
 for the unreal and often for the untrue. We 
 use it colloquially to mean baseless and fanciful 
 things, and even erroneous thoughts. We say 
 that a man's troubles are imaginary, as much as 
 to say that they do not exist. It suffers also 
 more than the ordinary fate of language, which 
 is always in danger of being rubbed down and 
 vulgarised and emptied of its original meaning. 
 Our prevalent inaccuracy of thought adds an- 
 other misapprehension. With our materialistic 
 standard we judge things by their appearance, 
 and the things which do not appear are assumed 
 not to exist. We call material things the real, 
 and the ideal we call an imagination, meaning 
 that it is something unreal. But the material is
 
 156 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 after all the fleeting and transitory, while the 
 unsubstantial is the truly permanent. The per- 
 manent thing in everything is the unseen part 
 of it. The sound of the word dies upon the 
 passing wind, and the thought it carries lives. 
 The outward form of music is momentary, 
 and the beautiful conception remains. The 
 canvas fades and the stone crumbles, but the 
 vision in the soul of the artist dies not. The 
 world of sense and sight and sound is only 
 appearance, but the thought of it is fact. The 
 material changes ever ; but the spiritual, the as- 
 piration, the ideal, the imagination lives in endless 
 life. 
 
 Imagination is a necessary part of man's equip- 
 ment, and is capable of culture, and therefore it is 
 our duty to give it room and opportunity to grow. 
 Even when we prize imagination and make it the 
 test of the highest forms of art, we are inclined 
 to omit the duty of its culture. We think it to 
 be like genius, a gift which cannot be cultivated. 
 But even genius is not a difference in kind, but in 
 degree. It does not mean another sort of flesh 
 and blood, another sort of head and heart. It is 
 a finer quality of nerve and brain. Indeed it 
 may be said to be a deeper and truer and more
 
 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 157 
 
 profound imaginative faculty. It is true that 
 some have more than others, but that is no 
 reason why the less gifted should despair of 
 the culture of what they really possess. Some 
 men have more and better knit muscle than 
 others, but most of us make shift to walk some- 
 how, and on occasion to run, though not perhaps 
 with the ease and grace of a great athlete. If we 
 have no imagination at all, then it must be a lost 
 art or an atrophied power, for every child has it. 
 We see it in almost every nursery game, in their 
 make-belief, in their pretty fancies about animals, 
 in their charming acting of parts, in their instinct 
 for the dramatic, in their love of fairy tales. 
 Romance is a child's natural food. Watch a 
 little maiden playing with her dolls, investing 
 them with life, composing dialogues for them ; 
 or watch a boy fancying himself the engineer of 
 a railway train, or the general of an army ; or 
 notice their complete withdrawal from the world 
 as they live through every incident of a story ; 
 and you must admit that imagination is the ear- 
 liest and the strongest faculty of childhood. It 
 is the age of fancy and mystery and poetry. A 
 mother reading a poem to a boy of six said, 'I 
 am afraid you can't understand it, dear,' and
 
 158 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 was promptly rebuked for her unbelief when he 
 replied, ' Oh, yes, I can very well, if only you 
 would not explain.' l The poem brought its own 
 train of thought to him, its own suggestions, its 
 own series of images. It was not her train of 
 thought, and hers only disturbed his. We often 
 hurt the tender feelings of a child, and help to 
 kill the imaginative faculty by our scepticism and 
 cynicism and impatience. It is as natural a gift 
 as reason, and has its part to play in the making 
 of a true life. When it is lost, and a man be- 
 comes a literalist, we appreciate what a gift it 
 is. The literalist will solemnly argue about a 
 joke, and ponderously explain a fancy. He 
 swells the great army of the world's bores. We 
 have all met the matter-of-fact man, like the one 
 Douglas Jerrold tells of, who, if you talked to 
 him of Jacob's ladder, would ask the number of 
 the steps. 
 
 Imagination is one of the finest gifts of mind 
 and can do much to make life happy. We have 
 a wonderful power of losing self in ideal scenes, 
 and can transform dull reality with beauty. 
 Amid the commonplace or even the painful, we 
 give rein to imagination and are off to fairer 
 
 1 Sully, Studies of Childhood, p. 56.
 
 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 159 
 
 realms. This power of putting ourselves in 
 other circumstances gives us a magic touch, 
 which is a real remedy for many an evil of our 
 lot. Imagination also is helpful to all the other 
 faculties. Even humour seems dependent on it ; 
 for both the pathos and the humour of life 
 are due to the discrepancy between the real 
 and the ideal. We see the real, and through 
 imagination we see the ideal, and the contrast 
 is sometimes pathetic and sometimes humorous. 
 All poetry and all art are children of imagina- 
 tion. To cut off the imaginative life would be 
 to make the world poorer to us all. Imagina- 
 tion is the window which lets in light to the 
 sombre house of life. As a rule, we have not 
 enough window-space to keep life moderately 
 healthy. There is a light that never was on 
 sea or land, and the man who sees it can never 
 rest in the sordidness of the usual. He has seen 
 enough of the vision to keep him from losing 
 his heart to what is base. If through the pas- 
 sion of a great ideal or through the vision of a 
 beautiful future he misses what the world calls 
 success, his life is not necessarily a failure. 
 'That man,' said Lessing, 'makes noble ship- 
 wreck who is lost in seeking worlds.' If the
 
 160 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 imaginative life can save the soul from acqui- 
 escence in the sordid, it well merits all the 
 culture we can give it. The highest accuracy 
 of impression and even the truest accuracy of 
 history are often attained by the poet rather 
 than by the word-grubbing scholar. Truth is 
 not formal but vital, and if the poet's version be 
 not exact in detail, it may be true in spirit. 
 Fact may be correctly stated in the fullest detail 
 and yet be false. 'The imagination may be 
 compared to Adam's dream : he awoke and found 
 it truth.' 1 That is why the seer and the poet 
 are needed to interpret life ; for they get to 
 the heart of an incident when others are only 
 fumbling at the fringe. The highest truths are 
 not reached by analysis, and the deepest appeal 
 is not made to logic. We may dissect and dis- 
 solve and analyse and get at many a hidden 
 fact by the way, while the secret has vanished. 
 The life and meaning and flavour and vital 
 breath elude prosaic methods. To imagination 
 we owe all our creative arts, poetry and painting 
 and music. 
 
 Without it even science itself would be a 
 gathering of observations and chaotic facts lack- 
 1 Keats.
 
 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 161 
 
 ing order or meaning or law. The prosaic 
 observer may make the most careful observa- 
 tions, but it needs a higher faculty to set the 
 observations in their true relations and to make 
 order and beauty out of the mass. Most of the 
 great discoveries in science have been made by 
 this power to imagine unseen conditions. The 
 mere observer of nature is smothered by details, 
 a confused crowd of phenomena, and it needs 
 the man of inductive and intuitive genius to 
 reach the natural law which includes and ex- 
 plains them. There must be in scientific research 
 accurate observation and careful arrangement 
 of facts, but every step in advance is attained 
 by a great imaginative effort which takes an 
 unproved working hypothesis and applies it to 
 the facts. A whole chapter might be written 
 on the place of imagination in the sphere of the 
 exact sciences, and on the mistakes which have 
 been made here through deficient imagination. 
 All great scientists have had something of the 
 poetic vision. The Copernican astronomy, the 
 law of gravitation, all wide syntheses of the facts 
 of nature, began with assumptions and were 
 the fruit of scientific imagination. The most 
 fertile work of our day in the region of biology
 
 162 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 has been done on the hypothesis of evolution. 
 To banish imagination from science would be 
 to deprive it of its chief instrument. 
 
 Morality, also, divorced from it becomes mere 
 legalism, the formal working of a puppet-show. 
 Prosaic morality means either moderatism or 
 pharisaism, unattractive, and in the true sense 
 unreal. As Thackeray with one of his keen 
 thrusts of genial cynicism says, 'The bad do 
 much harm, but no one knows how much evil 
 the good do.' There are endless illustrations 
 in this region of how the letter kills and the 
 spirit alone can give life. As for theology, it 
 has too often been cursed by the barrenness of 
 the commonplace. Unimaginative theology has 
 been a fearful weight on the Church. In ex- 
 egesis and interpretation and exhortation, an 
 ounce of poetry often outvalues a bushel of 
 some other theological qualities. Sanctified im- 
 agination is the great ally of religion. It gives 
 the wings for the higher flight of the spirit 
 of man. The world will never be without 
 its witness to the unseen. The wind bloweth 
 where it listeth, convincing the world of God. 
 If we had more imagination we would have 
 more faith. We would not mistake the place
 
 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 163 
 
 and power of religion, and we would never get 
 very far from God 
 
 As German Boehme never cared for plants 
 Until it happed, a-walking in the fields, 
 He noticed all at once that plants could speak, 
 Nay, turned with loosened tongue to talk with him. 
 That day the daisy had an eye indeed. 1 
 
 Thus the value of the imagination is not 
 restricted to the poet and novelist and dramatist, 
 but is needed for all forms of intellectual effort. 
 It is of use to the historian and the statesman, 
 no less than to the man of science and the 
 theologian. In the reconstruction of a scene of 
 the past, in revealing the steps by which a social 
 or political change came about, how institu- 
 tions grew and withered, how empires rose 
 and fell, the social conditions of a former age, 
 all these need an imaginative representation. 
 The most careful sifting of evidence and verify- 
 ing of fact, and the most formidable array of 
 authorities, will not reconstruct for us any scene 
 of history without the illumination of imagina- 
 tion. The statesman, too, must use this gift 
 if he is to be more than an opportunist. He 
 must have some vision of the large issues at 
 
 1 Browning, Men and Women ' 1 ranscendentalism. '
 
 1 64 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 stake, and make some forecast of state policy 
 if he would have any sort of permanent success. 
 Philosophy would have been saved from some 
 of its errors if it had been sometimes a little 
 less prosaic. Materialism as a philosophical 
 theory, as well as a practical scheme of living, 
 is due to a want of imagination. It shuts the 
 eyes to the whole course of man's religious 
 history, and to the spiritual facts which are as 
 truly facts as any on the plane of material 
 science. Romanes, who gave his life to science, 
 wrote as one of his last judgments : ' It is much 
 more easy to disbelieve than to believe. This 
 is obvious on the side of reason, but it is also 
 true on that of spirit, for to disbelieve is in 
 accordance with environment or custom, while 
 to believe necessitates a spiritual use of the 
 imagination. For both these reasons, very few 
 unbelievers have any justification, either intel- 
 lectual or spiritual, for their own unbelief. 
 Unbelief is usually due to indolence, often to 
 prejudice, and never a thing to be proud of.' J 
 
 In the conduct of ordinary life we are more 
 indebted to imagination than perhaps we think. 
 Memory is a form of imagination, without which 
 
 1 Thoughts en Religion, p. 144.
 
 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 165 
 
 the past would be a blank. It is reproductive 
 imagination, the power of reproducing a mental 
 image of what has occurred. The creative im- 
 agination is the faculty of the poet, the power of 
 making new images, of combining into beautiful 
 forms the ideal aspects of life 
 
 And as imagination bodies forth 
 
 The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
 
 Turns them to shapes. 
 
 It may be said that the differences of intellect in 
 men are differences of imagination. To all who 
 live at the same period there is a great common 
 body of thought. We have most things in 
 common, and variety is created by the way 
 we use our heritage. It is imagination which 
 gives distinction and colour and individuality 
 to thought. A man takes of the common 
 stock and appropriates it, makes it his own 
 by investing it with his imagination, as Shake- 
 speare took the plots and stories and even the 
 plays of his predecessors and made everything 
 'suffer a sea change into something rich and 
 strange,' or as Burns took the songs of his 
 country and re-created them by the heat of 
 his own heart. 
 
 Still further in ordinary life we see that the
 
 166 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 divine quality of sympathy is the fruit of im- 
 agination, by which we put ourselves in the 
 place of others and feel with them and there- 
 fore for them. Shelley in his Defence of Poetry 
 said, 'A man to be greatly good must imagine 
 intensely and comprehensively ; he must put 
 himself into the place of another and of many 
 others ; the pains and pleasures of his species 
 must become his own.' Most of men's cruelty 
 and callousness is due to lack of imagination, 
 to an incapacity to understand feelings different 
 from our own. We are not able to project 
 ourselves into the situation of others, or we 
 could never fail of sympathy. The world cannot 
 understand a poet going half mad with grief 
 and indignation at the sorrows and shames of 
 a butchered Armenia, because the world has 
 too dense and dull a soul to enable it to really 
 appreciate the deeds of horror. True imagina- 
 tion is the great ally on the side of God to 
 fight against selfishness. We would love our 
 neighbour as ourselves, if only we could imagine 
 him as easily as we can think of ourselves. 
 Sympathy begins by an imaginative getting 
 out of self and getting into the place of another. 
 We become him for the time. If he is in pain,
 
 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 167 
 
 we have some idea of what he is suffering. We 
 feel what we imagine he feels. We can be 
 accurately said to share his experience. Much 
 of the smallness and meanness of life results 
 from narrowing the horizon and restricting the 
 vision to the bounds of self. Our hearts would 
 be enlarged if our imagination were kept bright 
 and active. We sympathise with that which 
 we are able to picture to ourselves. To see a 
 child run over in the street fills us with grief, 
 and with desire to help. We know theoretically 
 that children in India in a time of famine must 
 suffer much greater pain ; or we know that in 
 all our cities the cry of the children goes up 
 to God for their joyless, woful youth we 
 know it when some specially bad case is un- 
 earthed by the Society for the Prevention of 
 Cruelty to Children, but we have not enough 
 imagination to give us more than a spasmodic 
 sympathy in both cases. Imagination is thus 
 the great social faculty which binds us to each 
 other. It needs culture, and can be cultivated 
 as all other faculties are cultivated by use. 
 We must not steel our hearts against the joy 
 and sorrow of others. Try, for example, to 
 realise the feelings of your friends and intimates
 
 168 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 and neighbours; try to picture to yourself what 
 a certain word or a certain line of action will 
 mean to them ; try to imagine how you can 
 bring light or gloom, pleasure or pain, and 
 you will develop tact, which is just the faculty 
 of touch, fineness of sensation, which will keep 
 you from hurting any human soul. 
 
 In religion there is room for the use of 
 imagination. It is that which enables us to 
 see past the forms and externals of faith and 
 worship to the spirit within. All kinds of 
 idolatry are due to too little, and not too 
 much, imagination. In the early church an 
 image was only a symbol, and the spiritual 
 man never dreamed of worshipping the image 
 but only used it to assist him to think of the 
 reality for which the symbol stood. But the 
 prosaic soul soon mistook the form for the sub- 
 stance. Religion always suffers from the lack 
 of imagination. If we had more of the poetic 
 power of faith, we would see without needing 
 so much prompting and directing. If imagina- 
 tion is as the window which lets in light to 
 the house, then sanctified imagination is as the 
 coloured windows of a great cathedral which 
 flood the place with glory and stain the noble
 
 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 169 
 
 pillars. The high realms of faith can only be 
 explored by the sanctified imagination. Imag- 
 ination gives wings to thought, enables it to 
 soar, and keeps it from grovelling in the dust. 
 Faith is glorified imagination, which embodies 
 the unseen and gives shape to the unknown. 
 
 Think of Christ's use of the imagination. He 
 used it continually in His teaching, which was 
 ever the poetic expression of truth. He spoke 
 in parables in which all nature is made to 
 preach, the corn and the lilies, and the trees 
 and the birds. The great lesson of His teach- 
 ing and the great purpose of His life was to get 
 men to imagine the infinite love of God. If we 
 would strive to comprehend that wondrous con- 
 ception, if we would give ourselves to the thought 
 of it, if we would steep our souls in it, if we 
 would live in it by day and dream of it by 
 night, we would keep God in our lives. If we 
 would but imagine the love of God, dwell on 
 it, hug the thought of it to our heart, life 
 would be a home to us instead of a mere 
 shelter. The house of life would be a home, 
 not bare walls, but a place where love dwells ; 
 and sanctified imagination would hang in the 
 chambers of the house pictures of the good,
 
 iyo CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 the beautiful, the true. It is the vision and 
 not the possession which gives life its value, the 
 quest and not the conquest, the attempt and not 
 the attainment, the dream and not the fulfilment, 
 the aspiration and not the achievement. 
 
 This spiritual imagination can be cultivated 
 as poetic imagination can be. The culture of 
 the imagination is the culture of the ideal. It 
 is the culture of faith and the culture of 
 prayer. If we imagine the love of God, if we 
 pray for the mind of the Master, if in every 
 difficulty we stop to think what He would have 
 done and said, if we make His teaching and 
 will and life the test and example, if we keep 
 ever the vision of Christ before us, we will 
 live the higher imaginative life, not always 
 down among the dust and sordidness of the 
 world, but sometimes among the angels and 
 the spirits of just men made perfect. It purifies 
 passion and cleanses the heart even to go with 
 Him in fancy through His earthly life, and to 
 realise that He is the same to-day in nature 
 and in purpose, to live with Him over again 
 in His life in Galilee and Jerusalem, to follow 
 Him from Nazareth to Capernaum, to Bethany, 
 to Samaria, to Gethsemane, to make it all real
 
 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 171 
 
 to us, and then realise that He is as He was, 
 and so practise the presence of Christ with us 
 to-day. ' Methought I was as if I had seen Him 
 born,' says John Bunyan in Grace Abounding, 
 'as if I had seen Him grow up, as if I had seen 
 Him walk through this world from the cradle 
 to the cross, to which also when He came I 
 saw how gently He gave Himself to be hanged 
 and nailed on it for my sins and wicked doing. 
 Also as I was musing on this His progress 
 it dropped on my spirit that He was ordained 
 for the slaughter. When I have considered 
 also the truth of His resurrection, I have seen 
 as if He had leaped out of the grave's mouth 
 for joy that He was risen again and had got 
 the conquest over our dreadful foes.' Browning 
 might have been translating these words of 
 Bunyan into poetry, as he was certainly ex- 
 pressing the same thought in the passage 
 
 Oft have I stood by Thee 
 Have I been keeping lonely watch by Thee 
 In the damp night by weeping Olivet, 
 Or leaning on Thy bosom, proudly less, 
 Or dying with Thee on the lonely cross, 
 Or witnessing Thy bursting from the tomb. 
 
 There is another side to the consideration of 
 this high subject which shows us the need of
 
 172 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 wise training and guidance. Like the other great 
 gifts of man, imagination has suffered in the 
 house of its friends. There is no human faculty 
 which has been looked more askance on and been 
 more condemned. The attack has come from 
 three very commanding quarters. It has been 
 carried on in the name of morality and philosophy 
 and religion. 
 
 Morally, the imagination is seen to be the 
 seat of all evil. Sin is conceived there and 
 harboured there before it is brought out into 
 the open as full-blown fact. A great moral 
 writer in his impeachment of the imagination 
 has declared, 'Here is the devil's lurking-place, 
 the very nest of foul and delusive spirits.' To 
 the moralist, therefore, it often appears as the 
 seat of evil and only evil, the breeding-place of 
 all the sins. Temptation comes by presenting 
 to the imagination in a pleasing and alluring 
 fashion sinful acts. The psychology of sin is 
 thus stated by St. James, ' Every man is tempted 
 when he is drawn away of his own lust and en- 
 ticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth 
 forth sin.' Evil enters the mind by suggestion, 
 by playing on the fancy. It captures the will 
 and the heart through the imagination. Evil
 
 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 173 
 
 thoughts, dallied with and made welcome, 
 blossom into evil deeds. 
 
 By the philosopher also imagination sometimes 
 is taken to be the one and inveterate foe of reason, 
 keeping back the progress of truth by creating 
 a fanciful region where a man can find a spurious 
 peace from troublesome thought. Pascal calls it 
 ' that deceitful part of man, the mistress of error 
 and falsity, the more knavish that she is not 
 always so, or she would be an infallible rule of 
 truth if only she were an infallible rule of lying.' 
 To him it is a proud potentate who loves to rule 
 and dominate over its enemy, reason. When 
 reason would make a man unhappy, and by the 
 very pain lead to truer thinking and sounder 
 living, imagination will sometimes bring content- 
 ment and so triumph over reason. Buckle, in his 
 History of Civilisation, while admitting that in a 
 complete, well balanced mind the imagination 
 and the understanding have each their respective 
 parts to play and are auxiliary to each other, 
 thinks it undoubtedly true that in a majority of 
 instances the understanding is too weak to curb 
 the imagination and restrain its dangerous 
 licence. He believes that the tendency of ad- 
 vancing civilisation is to remedy this dispropor-
 
 174 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 tion and to invest the reasoning powers with 
 authority at the expense of the imagination. 
 
 By the theologian also it has been condemned 
 as the cause of the delusions and the lying visions 
 and the ecstatic impressions which lead men 
 astray into all sorts of unstrung and hysterical 
 states. Jonathan Edwards speaks strongly of the 
 delusions in religion fostered by trusting to the 
 impressions made on the imagination, and thinks 
 that though often at first it seems to beget a per- 
 suasion of the truth of invisible things, yet the ulti- 
 mate tendency is to draw men off from the word 
 of God and to cause them to reject true religion. 
 
 Now, there would not be such a remarkable 
 condemnation if there were not some ground of 
 accusation. It would not be easy to account for 
 so virulent a charge by so many and so great 
 thinkers, if there were not facts which give colour 
 to it even though it be accepted as a one-sided 
 statement. There is at least enough to make 
 us convinced that, while imagination has a true 
 and strong place in life and religion, and while 
 the duty of its culture is plain, there is an equal 
 necessity for its adequate control. Imagination 
 must of course be accepted like all the other 
 qualities of mind. No alarmist talk of its danger,
 
 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 175 
 
 either in the name of reason or morality or re- 
 ligion, can alter the fact. It can put us on our 
 guard that we may avoid its abuse, but unless we 
 stultify our whole intellectual life we must be 
 content to possess imagination as one of the 
 gifts of mind. Not only so, but, as we have seen, 
 it is the highest and most precious attribute we 
 have. No danger of its misuse could warrant 
 anything like an attempt at extinction of this 
 faculty. Even if it were possible, the policy of 
 repression in itself is a failure. Its fruits may 
 sometimes be vagueness and obscurity, or ex- 
 travagance and hysteria, or worse still, morbidness 
 and disease. But with all our gifts we must take 
 the thick and the thin together. When we call 
 attention to abuse, we do not mean to deny use ; 
 when we point to disease, we do not condemn 
 health. The power of use implies the possibility 
 of abuse. The place of imagination in art and 
 life and religion is secure, and we only help to 
 make it more secure when we truly discriminate ; 
 and we make its culture more possible for our- 
 selves and for all when we use restraint. There 
 can be no true discipline and education of 
 imagination without strong control of it. The 
 training of the imagination is necessary for its
 
 176 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 own best life as well as for our character. The 
 depraving effect of a corrupt imagination has 
 many illustrations in every region of life. 
 
 In this connection we naturally think first 
 of the huge place which the literature of fiction 
 has taken in our time. It has earned its place 
 as a great instrument for the interpretation of 
 life, and plays a large part in mental recreation. 
 We know the value of romance when it is the 
 healthy expression of a healthy imagination, but 
 we cannot fail to know the blighting, polluting 
 power it has when it has ceased to be healthy. 
 So much so, that we can understand the mood of 
 mind which makes the moralist who is a lover of 
 his kind speak as though he would sweep the 
 whole art from the life of a man. It is rather 
 strange that in defence of evil literature, the claim 
 of realism should be made on behalf of what 
 is admittedly a purely imaginative art. Want 
 of art is often responsible for what passes for 
 realism. It is want of creative imagination, 
 and that means lack of the capacity for the 
 business the writers have taken in hand. They 
 speak of transcripts from life, but life is not so 
 mean and stupid as such art sometimes makes 
 it. George Meredith, who will be accepted as a
 
 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 177 
 
 master, calls it 'soundings and probings of poor 
 humanity which the world accepts for the very 
 bottom-truth if their dredge brings up sheer 
 refuse of the abominable. The world imagines 
 those to be at our nature's depth who are im- 
 pudent enough to expose its muddy shallows. 
 It is true of its kind, though the dredging of 
 nature is the miry form of art.' l One loves to 
 think of the greatest romancist of them all, Sir 
 Walter Scott, with his nobility of soul, and to 
 remember that there is not a base thought, not 
 an evil suggestion, not a morbid feeling, not an 
 impure word in the whole magnificent array of 
 volumes ; and we cannot escape the thought 
 that a man's work here as elsewhere is only the 
 reflection of himself, and in this case we feel that 
 there is revealed a simple, brave, gentle, and 
 generous heart. There is nothing so harmful in 
 the world as a bad book, because it touches the 
 subtlest and most delicate of our powers, the 
 imagination. It leaves a scar on the heart and a 
 stain on the mind. 
 
 Our moral responsibility in connection with 
 this great gift is not confined to approving or 
 disapproving of the artistic work of others. 
 
 1 Diana of the Crossways. 
 
 N
 
 178 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 Control is needed over our own imagination to 
 keep it from running away with us, and becoming 
 master instead of servant. If we have not a 
 firm hand on the reins of imagination, one of 
 two moral evils results. 
 
 (i) We will be plagued by the sins of emptiness, 
 and our life can at best be a useless dream. This 
 is common in youth before the mind has force 
 enough to control the fancy, and bring it into 
 subjection. Many precious days and years are 
 spent in dreams without any fulfilment. It is 
 specially the temptation of the student, and 
 often the finer the mind the more subtle the 
 temptation. Many a life has been enervated 
 by sinful indulgence in the pleasures of the im- 
 agination, even when these are pure and innocent 
 enough. All of us know men who should have 
 done better work for the world than they now 
 will ever do, because their powers of deciding 
 and acting have been eaten away. Absent-mind- 
 edness is not always the attribute of genius, but 
 is oftener the fruit of idleness and feckless moon- 
 ing. Most young people love to dream of them- 
 selves achieving great things in some beautiful 
 future, watching themselves playing a magnificent 
 part as a great artist, or orator, or scholar, or
 
 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 179 
 
 lawyer, or man of business the dream of a full 
 theatre with applauding crowds. It is usually an 
 unsanctified dream. Imagination was not given us 
 for such idle and selfish fancies. Our life to-day, 
 and especially our intellectual life, is cursed with 
 false ambitions, and these are largely fostered 
 by such self-indulgence of the imagination. 
 This dream-power of projecting ourselves into 
 ideal scenes, and of anticipating the future can 
 be a great blessing, but becomes a positive 
 weakness if it does not inspire to moral action. 
 We need to be master of ourselves and of our 
 faculties. We need the self-control which will 
 give us a grip of ourselves, and not let life and 
 its tasks slip past us. 
 
 (2) But failure to restrain imagination rarely 
 ends in such negative failure, bad as that is. Here 
 also the empty house is the ready resort of the 
 seven devils. Imagination uncontrolled usually 
 means imagination run riot. The power we have 
 of making mental pictures and calling up images 
 at will means that these pictures and images may 
 be evil. We cannot forget the psychology of 
 temptation, how it gains foothold in the imagina- 
 tion, and entices and seduces and draws away of 
 its own lust. The first step in the ruin of many
 
 l8o CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 a man's life is by the indulgence of a misplaced 
 curiosity. No moral catastrophe comes all of a 
 sudden. It has a long history of evil imaginings, 
 finding pleasure in them, giving them house-room, 
 living with them and loving them. A man is a 
 cheat in heart, dreaming of easy gains, before he 
 becomes dishonest in act. A man is impure in 
 thought before he becomes profligate in life. A 
 man lets self dominate his mind before he becomes 
 selfish in deed. Imagination is polluted before 
 vice is born. Sin gets its secure seat in the 
 soul before it comes out to view in conduct and 
 habits. Self-control must begin here, because im- 
 agination affects the whole man to the very finger- 
 tips. Unholy thoughts end in unhallowed acts; 
 evil imaginings translate themselves into life. 
 
 Christ in His diagnosis of sin is not content 
 with mentioning its manifestations, but points to 
 the baneful root. He teaches us that the genesis 
 of murder is anger in the mind, and the genesis of 
 adultery is lust in the eye, and the genesis of 
 revenge is hardness of heart. Keep thine heart 
 with diligence, for out of it are the issues of life. 
 Look well after the beginnings of evil, as it 
 sneaks for its lurking place in the imagination. 
 It is a terrible transformation when the house of
 
 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 181 
 
 life, which should be a home with order and 
 cleanliness and peace, is a sepulchre which, 
 though whitened without, is full of dead men's 
 bones and all manner of excess. When the 
 imagination is corrupt, how can the life escape 
 the taint ? A man cannot take fire into his 
 bosom and his clothes not be burned. If we 
 would save our imagination from becoming a 
 nest of foul spirits, we must determine to endure 
 no evil thing before our eyes. Surely it is the 
 ultimate failure to have in the house of life, 
 instead of pictures of the good, the beautiful, and 
 the true, a gallery of the obscene, a gallery of pic- 
 tures impure and foul, humiliating the high soul 
 of man, and chaining the life to a body of death. 
 In addition to this need for control of imagina- 
 tion in the region of morals, there is no less need 
 for its control in the realm of the spiritual. An 
 untutored imagination in religion is ever in 
 danger of false mysticism. All true religion has 
 of course a mystical heart ; for it means direct 
 communion with God, and implies the open face 
 and the beatific vision. But, because of this, 
 delusions of all kinds are possible, and Jonathan 
 Edwards' impeachment of the imagination finds 
 some basis in fact. Uncontrolled imagination has
 
 182 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 led to the most fatal errors. Our Lord, who 
 knew the heart of man, warned against false 
 Christs and false prophets, who would show 
 great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray if 
 possible the very elect. St. Paul also warned 
 his disciples against these very signs and lying 
 wenders. We see how needful the warning was, 
 when we think of the false supernaturalisms and 
 mysticisms and occult arts and theosophies and 
 spiritualisms that have afflicted the race since. 
 Apart from all such gross delusions, it is always 
 dangerous to trust too much to a susceptible 
 imagination in times of religious excitement. 
 We need to remember that religion does not 
 depend on our states of mind and feeling, and 
 that faith is not dependent on personal visions. 
 The danger of paying heed to the pictures of a 
 lively and excitable imagination is that it loses 
 sight of the truly spiritual side of religion, and 
 lays stress on what is after all only another form 
 of materialism. It has also a danger to the in- 
 dividual in puffing him up with conceit at the 
 thought that he is favoured with a special 
 revelation to himself; and pride is the first of 
 the seven deadly sins. 
 
 There is a place in religion for sanctified
 
 CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 183 
 
 imagination, but it must be restrained by the 
 practical needs of living, and restrained most of 
 all by the endeavour to keep step with Christ. 
 Whatever is inconsistent with His teaching, and 
 out of harmony with the simplicity of His life 
 and the beauty of His spirit, must be dismissed. 
 Idle curiosity about the mysteries of providence, 
 empty speculation about a future life, receive no 
 support from His example. They are an insult 
 to true faith, which among its spiritual contents 
 includes patience. To be a Christian is to sub- 
 mit the whole life to Christ, judging all things by 
 His spirit. Safety for the imaginative life is got 
 by this submission, which saves it from excess, 
 guards it from evil, and uses it to the best advan- 
 tage. It is made a home of all that is fair and 
 lovely in the Father's lovely world, and through 
 it comes lasting pleasure in all that is good and 
 beautiful and true. The life He offers is not 
 emasculated and feeble, but rich and full and 
 joyous, with all the world's true treasures at 
 command, because we are Christ's, and Christ is 
 God's.
 
 CULTURE OF HEART
 
 * Religion consists much in holy affections.' 
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 CULTURE OF HEART 
 
 'THHE mistake which many advocates of cul- 
 *- ture have made is that they limit it to the 
 sphere of intellect. Culture has thus been 
 looked on as a forcing ground for prigs, devel- 
 oping the superior person who is above the 
 sentiments and prejudices which move the mass 
 of men. Such a man looks with contemptuous 
 pity on the ordinary motives of human action, 
 the feelings and passions and instincts and en- 
 thusiasms of the vulgar crowd. He sits above 
 the tumult and criticises in a cynical way, pro- 
 fessing to make reason the guide of life, while 
 others are content with feeling. The need for 
 reason and the duty of thought we have admitted, 
 but if emotion can go astray, reason can also 
 be a will-of-the-wisp. It can be as much the 
 plaything of prejudice as even sentiment. To 
 set it up as the infallible rule would put the 
 world more at sixes and sevens than ever; for 
 187
 
 1 88 CULTURE OF HEART 
 
 as a matter of fact men are not solely, if even 
 chiefly, united by reason. All the permanent 
 relationships of life are held together by the 
 affections rather than by the intellect. The 
 culture which neglects the facts and forces of 
 human nature other than mental is not culture ; 
 for it is condemned by its onesidedness. If men 
 were isolated individuals there might be some 
 excuse for such narrowness. But human nature 
 is essentially social : men are developed only in 
 society. So, even for the sake of the individual 
 himself, culture must be social in its objects and 
 seek the good of others, and as the great nexus 
 of men is not the intellect but the affections, 
 there must be room for culture of the heart. 
 
 Intellect in itself will not ennoble life. The 
 very power of reason, without a corresponding 
 development of the higher feelings, would only 
 make man a more dangerous brute than all other 
 animals. The sensual when combined with the 
 intellectual results in the devilish. Shakespeare 
 draws such a character for us in lago. His 
 selfish scheming, his accurate reading of the 
 hearts of others so that he plays off skilfully 
 their different feelings and passions against each 
 other, his treachery to friend and hypocrisy to
 
 CULTURE OF HEART 189 
 
 foe, his cold-blooded policy in using living men 
 and women as pawns in his own game, his 
 cynical contempt for what he considers the 
 weakness of his victims, as when, after work- 
 ing up Othello to the climax of jealousy, he 
 sneers 'thus credulous fools are caught' all 
 these make him perhaps the most consummate 
 villain in literature. lago's want of heart damns 
 his intellect. This is not a mere fancy picture. 
 The world has often been cursed with such a 
 combination of the sensual and the intellectual. 
 The history of almost every country can give 
 illustrations of such men who attained power by 
 trampling on the rights of men. Caesare Borgia, 
 the son of his unscrupulous and only less hated 
 father, Pope Alexander VI., is such an instance 
 in the renaissance history of Italy. With force 
 of intellect cursed by selfish ambition, a patron 
 of the arts, pictured by Macchiavelli as a great 
 ruler, he because of his very gifts made his 
 name a terror and his memory a shame. Per- 
 fidy, sacrilege, assassination, vileness unspeak- 
 able, were as his daily food till men had to 
 kill him like a mad dog. The mere stupid 
 sensualist lacks the power to be a world-curse, 
 though he blights all he touches; but when
 
 igo CULTURE OF HEART 
 
 added to that there is the cold selfishness of 
 real mental power he can make his name a 
 hissing. Intellect without the affections can 
 create a monster. Conscience is needed to regu- 
 late life, the heart is needed to guide it. Even 
 when intellect is not dragged into the service 
 of evil, if it is without the warmth of affection, 
 it is only 
 
 Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, 
 Dead perfection no more. 
 
 Absence of emotion does not necessarily mean, 
 as we are inclined to think, the presence of 
 the practical virtues, commonsense and courage. 
 We imagine that coldness of temperament im- 
 plies an abnormal development of wisdom and 
 the best sort of prudence. It may be only 
 dulness and insensibility all round. The people 
 who cannot afford one single expression of 
 sympathy, who are seldom kind and never 
 really tender-hearted, have not necessarily even 
 more commonsense than their more susceptible 
 neighbours. Some men, it may be, seem for a 
 time to get a clear brain from a stifled heart. 
 Hardness of heart may seem necessary for some 
 kinds of success, but it is not a success worth 
 having. A man with very fine feelings perhaps
 
 CULTURE OF HEART 191 
 
 handicaps himself in the attainment of some 
 ambitions, but these ambitions are not the 
 highest and the best. It is no great ideal for 
 a man to be like Job's leviathan, whose ' heart is 
 as firm as a stone ; yea as hard as a piece of the 
 nether millstone.' The self-seeker may carve out 
 a great career, may achieve wealth or position, 
 may astonish by his brilliance and power, may 
 make men admire him and envy him, but he 
 will not make them love him. He will not 
 grapple hearts to him as with bands of steel. 
 Pity is the gate to influence of the highest and 
 deepest sort. The empire of souls is given not 
 to the clever but to the loving, not to those 
 who command our attention by their force of 
 brain but to those who touch us with their 
 sympathy, their devotion, their sacrifice. The 
 true test even of art in painting and literature 
 is not that it inspires wonder at its cleverness 
 but that it inspires a large sense of the mystery 
 of the world and life, and a large tolerance and 
 pity. The world is held in thrall not by the 
 great conquerors and statesmen and financiers 
 but by the great sentimentalists, the poets and 
 prophets and mystics and saints. Men are 
 melted by the example and story of all who
 
 192 CULTURE OF HEART 
 
 have lived and died for men, and by the work 
 of those who by their feeling have interpreted 
 the dumb desires and speechless pain of the 
 race. Even their mistakes are forgotten, as 
 with Shelley when we know how true these 
 words of his are of himself 
 
 I who am as a nerve o'er which do creep 
 The else-unfelt oppressions of this earth. 
 
 There is a brilliant saying of Horace Walpole, 
 that this world is a comedy to those who think, 
 and a tragedy to those who feel. It is also a 
 true saying, but only on the surface. The 
 comedy will not last long ; it will become a 
 greater tragedy to those who do not feel ; for 
 the only hope of a solution of the whole problem 
 of existence lies in the discoveries of the heart- 
 life, and the only permanent union among men 
 must be found not by logic but by love. 
 
 Now, the affections, like the other parts of our 
 nature, need care and education and training. 
 We seem to expect the life of the heart to go on 
 of itself by what we call nature. The affections 
 are natural, but not more so than physical or 
 mental health is natural. We must set before 
 ourselves the aim to live the life of the heart 
 constantly and continually, just as we think it a
 
 CULTURE OF HEART 193 
 
 good thing to set before us the aim to live the 
 life of thought. As the athlete must go into 
 training for the perfection of his bodily powers, 
 and as the scholar must give himself to learning 
 even when the flesh rebels, so we must set our- 
 selves to cultivate the affections. We need to 
 encourage and develop the life of the heart by 
 consistently setting before ourselves the practice 
 of all true and noble sentiments. This is one of 
 the implications of our original starting-point of 
 the duty of proportional development. 
 
 How can the heart-life be trained? The pre- 
 cepts are plain enough, though the practice may 
 be difficult precepts such as 'be ye kind one to 
 another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another.' 
 The sentiment of kindness is got by being kind. 
 The sentiment of gentleness is got by being 
 gentle, by stopping the cutting word at the teeth 
 if it cannot be stopped before, by crushing down 
 the harsh judgment, by replacing the cruel 
 thought with a tender one, by persistently prac- 
 tising kindness, by doing the generous deed, by 
 speaking the encouraging word, by thinking no 
 evil. This training of the Christian sentiment 
 cannot be left to haphazard, but must be accepted 
 deliberately as a duty, and persisted in con-
 
 194 CULTURE OF HEART 
 
 stantly as a plan of life ; for if we are not 
 deliberately kind, we will often be cruel if only 
 through thoughtlessness. Some may have no 
 opportunities of living the life of thought, but all 
 have opportunities to live the life of the heart, 
 by gentle courtesy to servants and dependants, 
 by consideration for friends and comrades, by 
 doing something and giving something to alle- 
 viate human sorrow. 
 
 De Musset said that most men have in them 
 a poet who dies young. The tragedy of that 
 early death, the death of fine feeling and gener- 
 ous emotion ! We need continually to replenish 
 the heart : the fire dies out for want of fuel. 
 It is so easy to become cynical and bias/. Self- 
 ishness soon eats into every generous ideal 
 like an acid. A cheap contempt comes easily 
 when we look to the follies of men rather than 
 to their sorrows, but contempt is a wrong to the 
 man despised, and a wrong to human nature, and 
 a wrong to our own selves. Impatience with 
 others and indignation against them, if these 
 feelings are not the fruit of love, are an insult to 
 our common humanity. There is a satire even 
 in the name of righteousness which is the devil's 
 weapon; there is an anger even in the cause of
 
 CULTURE OF HEART 195 
 
 good which is sin. Charity will often disarm 
 criticism by its generous refusal to throw too 
 cold a light upon the infirmities of men, and 
 this not through the weakness which pretends 
 not to see, but because it sees more deeply and 
 widely. It softens the sight because it sharpens 
 the insight. It touches life tenderly and looks 
 on it gently. We need to bear and forbear, 
 exercise patience and tolerance and pity. We 
 must learn to take the generous side in all the 
 causes that emerge. Lamartine called Chris- 
 tianity an insurrection of justice in favour of the 
 weak. There is nothing sadder than to see 
 young men always taking the cynical and 
 prudential view of life, and never practising 
 themselves in standing up for the weak and 
 oppressed. Better to be a partisan of lost causes 
 than to have the heart seared by self-interest or 
 callousness. The light of generous enthusiasm 
 dies out soon enough into the common light of 
 day. The world's use and wont soon enough 
 deprives men of their unselfish passion. In all 
 the problems of our day as a nation and as a 
 society, we should expect to see the young on 
 the generous side. Certainly, if religion is to be 
 real to us, we must learn to feel, we must culti-
 
 196 CULTURE OF HEART 
 
 vate pure sentiment, we must set to ourselves 
 as a task the training of our heart -life. ' You 
 have heard many outcries,' said Ruskin, 'against 
 sensation lately ; but I can tell you it is not less 
 sensation we want, but more. The ennobling 
 difference between one man and another 
 between one animal and another is precisely 
 in this, that one feels more than another. If we 
 were sponges, perhaps sensation might not be 
 easily got from us ; if we were earthworms, liable 
 at every instant to be cut in two by the spade, 
 perhaps too much sensation might not be good 
 for us. But being human creatures, it is good for 
 us ; nay, we are only human in so far as we are 
 sensitive, and our honour is precisely in pro- 
 portion to our passion.' 
 
 We are afraid of sentiment. We kill our 
 affections by hiding them even from those we 
 love ; we let our friends die without telling them 
 how much we owe them; the sweetest souls of 
 our households pass from us before we even 
 know how we have taken everything and given 
 nothing. For want of sentiment men are hard- 
 ening into worldlings, money-grubbers, material- 
 ists, sensualists. We deprecate passion ; and 
 noble life is dying because there is in our midst
 
 CULTURE OF HEART 
 
 197 
 
 little passion for anything great. Every true 
 and unselfish passion purifies, it lifts the life to 
 a higher platform. Even the passion of a great 
 sorrow has saving power. We moralise over the 
 foolish loyalties of men, their capacity of creat- 
 ing heroes out of very inferior material, such as 
 the great Jacobite sentiment in Scotland for the 
 Stuarts. Even if in the judgment of history the 
 heroes do turn out to be unworthy, the devotion 
 of honest hearts is not always wasted it makes 
 them worthy. Mark Rutherford in the Revolu- 
 tion in Tanner s Lane describes the tremendous 
 ovation Louis XVIII. got in London. 'There 
 was a great crowd in the street when he came 
 out of the hotel, and immense applause ; the mob 
 crying out " God bless your Majesty " as if they 
 owed him all they had and even their lives. It 
 was very touching, people thought at the time, 
 and so it was. Is there anything more touching 
 than the waste of human loyalty and love? As 
 we read the history of the Highlands, or a story 
 of Jacobite loyalty such as that of Cooper's 
 Admiral Bluewater, dear to boys, we sadden that 
 destiny should decree that in a world in which 
 piety is not too plentiful, it should run so 
 pitifully to waste, and that men and women
 
 198 CULTURE OF HEART 
 
 should weep hot tears over bran-stuffing and 
 wax.' But it is better that men and women 
 should in sincere if mistaken enthusiasm give 
 their heart's treasure to what we think only bran- 
 stuffing and wax, than that they should imagine 
 that there is nothing in the world to love pas- 
 sionately, and none they should loyally believe 
 in and follow. Hero-worship is a great factor in 
 education, as all who have to do with boys can 
 testify. 
 
 Emotion is at the basis of life, even of intellect- 
 ual life. It is folly to imagine that thinking is at 
 its highest when feeling is at its lowest. The life 
 of the heart is necessary for the life of thought. 
 True culture here does not interfere with other 
 culture, but rather gives it new grace and fills its 
 incompleteness. A poet will have more exalted 
 feelings and thoughts at the sight of the stars 
 than an astronomer with all his science if he is a 
 mere observer and recorder of facts. There is no 
 great thought when it is not transfused with 
 great feeling. In moments of emotional excite- 
 ment the intellect can grasp ideas that otherwise 
 would be impossible. There is no profound 
 morality which is not touched with emotion. 
 Morality will not remain a permanent force in
 
 CULTURE OF HEART 199 
 
 life unless it is supported by purified sentiment 
 and by personal love. Both as individuals and 
 as a community we suffer from too little true 
 sentiment. We have too little of the high and 
 holy fear that is the beginning of wisdom, too 
 little of the deep indignation at wilful evil, too 
 little of the keen sorrow that takes on the heart 
 the burden and mystery of life. We doom our 
 emotional nature to seek satisfaction in petty 
 feelings and in transient thrills. There is no 
 religion even where the heart is not moved. The 
 great revelation is that God is love. If He 
 were only wisdom and power and justice and 
 righteousness, we could at the best stand to Him 
 in the relation of subjects; but when we know 
 that He is also love, we can stand in the relation 
 of children. One of the fruits of faith is seen in 
 the quickening and deepening of sentiment, the 
 creation of finer feelings of pity and compassion 
 and charity. It produces sympathy, and is far 
 removed from the purely intellectual outlook of 
 the man whose boast is that he regulates life by 
 cold reason. 
 
 Here also true education implies restraint. 
 Some human emotions, such as joy and compas-
 
 200 CULTURE OF HEART 
 
 sion, are of a high and noble character, and can 
 usually be expressed without much danger of 
 abuse, though even here, as we shall see, care is 
 needed ; but there are others equally natural and 
 spontaneous which always need the most careful 
 watching, such as grief and fear and anger. 
 Some schools of philosophy have insisted on 
 these feelings being curbed, and as far as possible 
 crushed, as if it were unworthy of our manhood 
 to give them any place, making the ideal of life 
 a passionless calm. But the true way is not to 
 attempt to kill emotions, but to purify them, and 
 our appeal is to preserve the life of the heart by 
 insisting on the need of control. How great 
 that need is we can see, when we think how life 
 suffers when emotion is allowed to run to seed. 
 We know in ordinary practice how feckless 
 the most sympathetic people may be, and how 
 unreliable they often are at a pinch. They spill 
 themselves all over the place, and when they 
 have poured out their sentiment there is nothing 
 left. In times of difficulty, how we value what 
 we call the sober mind, the man of sane judg- 
 ment who has a grip of himself and thus of the 
 situation, who never lets himself go in idle words 
 or in rash resolves. The facile, shallow tempera-
 
 CULTURE OF HEART 201 
 
 ment that easily boils to passion and as easily 
 freezes to despair, that moves now to extrava- 
 gant hopes and again to extravagant fears, that 
 lives ever subject to storms, to swellings, and 
 tumults of soul, can give little practical help in 
 a crisis. 
 
 We come to this, to begin with, that however 
 good and necessary emotion may be, reason must 
 be used as the ballast of feeling. Emotion un- 
 balanced by reason splutters itself out in sound 
 or degenerates into mere whim or prejudice. It is 
 terrible to think how much life is ruled by mere 
 prejudice, tossed about by every wave. ' Fine 
 feelings without vigour of reason are in the situ- 
 ation of a peacock's tail dragging in the mud.' l 
 It is dangerous to lose control of any of our 
 powers, and uncontrolled emotion is like a bull in 
 a china-shop. To know that we are in the zone of 
 danger here, we need only remember the common 
 tendency to relapse after a violent strain of feeling, 
 whether it be on the one side an unregulated 
 ecstasy of joy, or on the other an unrestrained 
 flood of sorrow. If it lives at all after such a re- 
 lapse, it lives only as a feeble sentimentalism. 
 The man of feeling, if he lets his feeling run away 
 
 i Foster.
 
 202 CULTURE OF HEART 
 
 with him, will probably become an empty dreamer. 
 When sentiment in excess and unbalanced is at 
 last exhausted, its place is often filled by a false 
 sentimentalism. Sentiment is the very soul of 
 human life, keeping it true and sweet and sound : 
 sentimentalism turns the wholesome force into 
 something degrading and diseased. 
 
 The urgent need for the guidance of the feel- 
 ings will be seen even in the region where there 
 is least of all danger of excess, that of compassion. 
 Even here we see that the instincts of pity 
 and help and charitable emotion need wise and 
 careful guidance if we are to avoid doing more 
 harm than good. Many a benefaction has missed 
 its aim through the lack of wise direction and 
 prudent oversight. If men thought more of the 
 remoter consequences of their acts, there would 
 be more judgment in their charity as well as in 
 their ordinary conduct. Indiscriminate charity 
 may be only another and subtler form of selfish- 
 ness, merely to get rid of the particular distress 
 that happens to be present. Philanthropy, in- 
 deed, needs more wisdom than it usually receives. 
 For example, if industry is discouraged by any 
 well-meant benevolence or by a law prompted by 
 philanthropy, the ultimate result will be only an
 
 CULTURE OF HEART 203 
 
 increase of poverty and distress. This is any- 
 thing but a plea for callousness and for the lack 
 of sensitiveness in which we saw that the most 
 aggravated forms of cruelty have their roots. It 
 is a plea for the wisdom that will bring to bear 
 on the problems of our times all the powers of 
 mind and not merely the casual charitable feeling 
 of the moment. 
 
 Not only in the region of charity, but along the 
 whole line of life, we find that when true and 
 pure and wise sentiment is exhausted, a spurious 
 substitute is often found in some form of senti- 
 mentalism. It finds many expressions in litera- 
 ture, as in Sterne and the school of Shandyism, 
 which is perhaps its most maudlin form, and 
 as to-day in works of fiction which flood us with 
 counterfeit pathos. Rousseau is an example of 
 another false form of sentiment, with his affecta- 
 tion of sympathy, a luxury of pity without any 
 grip on the heart or any correspondence in the 
 life. With all its great interest of matter and of 
 style, his Confessions often sickens with its mock 
 heroics and its drench of unreal sentiment. We 
 are compelled to assent to Professor James's 
 judgment, though inserted casually in a chapter 
 on Psychology, ' When a resolve or a fine glow of
 
 204 CULTURE OF HEART 
 
 feeling is allowed to evaporate without bearing 
 practical fruit, it is worse than a chance lost ; it 
 works so as positively to hinder future resolutions 
 and emotions from taking the normal path of 
 discharge. There is no more contemptible type 
 of human character than that of the nerveless 
 sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life 
 in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but 
 who never does a manly concrete deed. Rousseau, 
 inflaming all the mothers of France, by his elo- 
 quence, to follow Nature and nurse their babies 
 themselves, while he sends his own children to the 
 foundling hospital, is the classical example of 
 what I mean.' 
 
 There is an elevation of mind where pure 
 emotion raises thought to its highest power and 
 feeling suffuses reason, so that the life is ever 
 saved from becoming dully formal or inhumanly 
 cold. That is one thing ; but it is quite another 
 thing when the mind is open to be played on 
 by every wayward gust of feeling, in vehement 
 joy or ungovernable sorrow, never free from the 
 possibility of tumult. We cannot live in spasms, 
 and the best results of life are attained in calm 
 and serious effort, in submission of will and 
 resignation of heart. In practical life, when true
 
 CULTURE OF HEART 
 
 205 
 
 sentiment is lost, excitement is made to take its 
 place. It becomes a feverish lust to fill up the 
 void. Feeling, like fire, is a good servant but a 
 dangerous master. We are only saved from the 
 danger when there is some sort of real corre- 
 spondence in action with any feeling evoked. 
 The danger of tragedy as a spectacle lies in 
 the separation of the feelings excited from any 
 opportunity to assist practically. Tragedy may, 
 as Aristotle said, purge the soul with pity and 
 with fear, but the danger is that men are satisfied 
 and pleased with their own virtuous feelings; 
 they applaud virtue and hiss vice, and go out to 
 harden their hearts against the actual needs and 
 claims. Augustine noted this of himself in the 
 days when stage plays carried him away, full of 
 images of his miseries and of tinder for his flames. 
 He knew that to suffer in oneself is pain, and to 
 suffer from sympathy with others is pity. 'But 
 what sort of pity is this, 1 he asks, ' for the shams 
 and shadows of the stage ? For the auditor is not 
 moved to succour, but only asked to grieve ; and 
 he applauds the actor of these fictions the more, 
 the more he grieves. And if those human mis- 
 fortunes, whether they be histories of olden times 
 or mere fictions, be so acted that the spectator is
 
 206 CULTURE OF HEART 
 
 not moved to grief, he goes away disdainful and 
 censorious ; but if he be moved to grief, he stays 
 intent and enjoys the tears he sheds.' 
 
 There is some warning for us all in this danger 
 of losing control of what is one of our highest 
 powers, whether it be in excessive indulgence in 
 plays or music or novel-reading, or a futile senti- 
 mentalism that never inspires to anything. Even 
 the highest religious excitement is a state of risk, 
 and one of the commonest errors is to make 
 religion consist of feeling and to judge of religious 
 states according to the ardent sensibility or the 
 passion and emotion displayed. A man may be 
 melted to tears without any effect on life, and to 
 him religious excitement may be as demoralising 
 as any other form of dissipation. To be carried 
 away with a flood of feeling even about God's 
 love and the highest things in religion may be 
 very different from true elevation of soul. We 
 have admitted that there is no religion where the 
 heart is not touched, but emotion is not the end 
 of religion. It is a valuable instrument, a means 
 to influence reason and conscience and will. Its 
 great use is to drive a man with resistless force 
 over the obstacles that keep him imprisoned in 
 the channels of sense. The agitation and excite-
 
 CULTURE OF HEART 207 
 
 ment and tense feeling in the time of repentance 
 and decision are not in themselves religion, and 
 their great purpose is achieved when they make 
 us repent or decide or act. Religious excitement 
 needs to be saved from running to waste. It must 
 be mastered and harnessed to achieve the ends of 
 the spirit in a holy life and in noble service. 
 
 Thus, on every hand, we see that sentiment 
 needs to be weighted on the one side by true 
 thinking, and on the other by right action. 
 These are the true means of control and guid- 
 ance. It will be saved from running riot by 
 larger views of truth, and by being made ever a 
 provocative to good works. For example, in 
 religion undue excitement and excessive emotion 
 are restrained by cultivating large thoughts, and 
 also by bringing the sentiment to the proof of 
 action in actual life. This is not to make a cold 
 and unemotional state the ideal, but rather the 
 opposite : it is to preserve the force of feeling in 
 its true vigour and freshness. The power of 
 religious worship to regulate emotion and con- 
 trol excitement lies in the first means suggested, 
 the cultivation of large thoughts. When the 
 mind is off its balance, either with joy or sor- 
 row, with rapture or remorse, it is calmed and
 
 208 CULTURE OF HEART 
 
 steadied by being brought into the presence of 
 God in prayer or praise. It breaks the current 
 of passion, and brings the soul again to equi- 
 librium. Worship is a medicine of the soul to 
 allay agitation and give right expression to any 
 natural feeling. 
 
 The second test of sentiment which we have 
 mentioned, is the practical one of putting it into 
 practice. The emotion which is divorced from 
 action is unsafe. Life is real and earnest, and 
 though there is room for sentiment, there is none 
 for the sentiment which destroys action and 
 weakens life. After all, the test of steam is speed, 
 and the test of emotion is motion : the test of 
 pity is help : the test of the benevolent affections 
 is benevolence. ' To feel is but to dream until we 
 do.' We have sometimes seen a man enjoying 
 a rich luxury of emotion, and have thought that 
 what he needed most was a cold douche of 
 reality, and that he never would be right until he 
 made his feeling square with fact, and put it 
 into practice. No matter how many and how 
 good our sentiments are, our character cannot 
 change for the better, but only for the worse, if 
 we never attempt the concrete deed, if we never 
 let the emotion drive us into moral effort.
 
 CULTURE OF HEART 
 
 209 
 
 Now all this may seem to leave us floundering 
 amid contradictions. If at one time we declare 
 that we are rotting at the heart for lack of senti- 
 ment and passion, and now speak cautiously of 
 the danger of such tumult of soul ; if, for example, 
 at one time the teaching is that a man must be 
 willing to be deceived sometimes rather than let 
 his generous impulses be stifled, and now the 
 teaching is that charitable emotion may be a 
 source of evil. But the way out is simple, when 
 we see that the restraint of heart is necessary for 
 its own true culture. Emotion must be disci- 
 plined and trained, that it may not be squandered 
 on foolish causes, or perverted into evil channels. 
 Here, as elsewhere, the higher the gift the more 
 terrible is its abuse. The gifts of the heart, 
 being higher and more delicate than the gifts of 
 the mind, have a greater gulf fixed between their 
 highest and lowest forms. Love, which is the 
 joy of life, may be its curse. The golden bond 
 which links soul to soul may be a chain to bind 
 the life to loathsomeness. Friendship may lead 
 to heaven, or be ' procuress to the lords of hell.' 
 The romance of life may itself be poisoned and 
 become corruption. We see the need of wise and 
 careful training in this region of our nature.
 
 210 CULTURE OF HEART 
 
 Religion, whose sphere is the heart, includes 
 and combines the two opposites. To give God 
 the heart is to give Him the issues of life. Christ 
 unifies life for us. He safeguards every part of 
 our being, and uses every power. He inspires 
 passion, and regulates it. Evil desire and false 
 sentiment will not live where He is. In pro- 
 portion as He rules in the heart, conforming the 
 life to His own likeness, the affections are safe; 
 for He provides an infallible standard. He sat- 
 isfies the craving for a perfect love, and sets 
 great purposes before His lovers. He generates 
 passion in the heart His peerless passion for 
 purity His passion for weak folk, for justice 
 and mercy and righteousness. Even in the fierce 
 fight, He gives peace from the turmoil of con- 
 tending voices without, and from the tumult of 
 conflicting feelings within ; for a man can say, 
 from the safe anchorage of His love, 'My heart 
 is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed.'
 
 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE
 
 'The foundation of culture, as of character, is at last the 
 moral sentiment.' EMERSON. 
 ' The history of a man is his character. 1 GOETHE.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 /CONSCIENCE has been called the voice of 
 ^^ God in man, the divine speaking in the 
 human. In our common language it is a divine 
 spark kindled from heaven, and is as the meet- 
 ing place of God with man. Through this we 
 have the knowledge of good and evil, and have 
 something that may be called an inward guide 
 for conduct. But in our time, like every other 
 part of nature and of man, conscience has been 
 studied scientifically. Men have not been con- 
 tent simply to believe that conscience is a divine 
 guide. They have asked, what is the origin of 
 conscience, how did it come that we have this 
 moral witness, excusing or accusing ? They have 
 tried to trace out its growth in the individual 
 and in the community, and have written the 
 natural history of conscience. The attempted 
 explanations are not always satisfactory, as with 
 Darwin, who explains it thus : ' The social in- 
 213
 
 214 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 stincts are more persistent than the instinct of 
 vengeance or the instinct to steal food when 
 hungry, and at last man comes to feel that it 
 is best for him to obey his more persistent in- 
 stincts.' This does not carry us very far, and 
 does not explain how men could get at what 
 they feel to be an inviolable rule of obligation 
 and duty for themselves, a moral imperative 
 which says ' I ought,' and ' I ought not,' an 
 inward law which experience teaches them they 
 cannot disobey without suffering. The insuf- 
 ficiency of Darwin's explanation is exposed by 
 himself when he continues : 'It is obvious that 
 every one may, with an easy conscience, gratify 
 his own desires, if they do not interfere with his 
 social instincts, that is, with the good of others.' 
 It may be the beginning of the natural history 
 of conscience, but we have to travel a long way 
 before we come within sight of what the word 
 stands for in our ordinary language. 
 
 The inquiry has done much to make the sub- 
 ject clearer. We do see it to be a growth, and 
 that moral life has continuity like all other life. 
 The conscience of to-day is more enlightened 
 than is certainly different from the conscience 
 of a past age. There are things which would
 
 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE 215 
 
 not be tolerated now, which before were taken 
 as a matter of course. The Christian conscience 
 differs from the pagan conscience which it super- 
 seded. The mistake which is often made is the 
 very strange one that because we know con- 
 science to be a growth, because we can to some 
 extent trace its origin, therefore it has lost its 
 divine authority. It is a very common mistake to 
 imagine that because we can understand in some 
 measure how a thing came to be we have there- 
 fore explained it. A description of a process is 
 supposed to be an explanation of existence. The 
 same mistake is being made all along the line 
 of our scientific investigation. Because we can 
 see how life works and unfolds itself, developing 
 from form to form, therefore we have disposed 
 of the mystery of life. Because we can trace 
 the genesis of mind, or at least can partially 
 open up the stages of its development, therefore 
 we have explained the mystery of mind. Some- 
 times even a scientific definition, if learnedly 
 worded, is taken to be a sufficient explanation. 
 Rather the opposite is the case. The more 
 knowledge we possess regarding anything, the 
 more reverence should we have; for the more 
 do we see our essential ignorance.
 
 216 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 All questions on the origin of conscience are 
 practically of secondary importance. How it 
 came that men have learned knowledge of right 
 and wrong, how they came to recognise personal 
 responsibility before an internal tribunal, how 
 they were led to see this to be right and that 
 to be wrong the mere process is not of supreme 
 value though it is of very great interest. What 
 is of supreme importance is that we should 
 accept the fact. The conscience is no more 
 discredited by evolution than the body is. When 
 we are compelled to modify the old intuitional 
 theory of conscience, it does not lose its sacred- 
 ness or its authority. We know that the Chris- 
 tian conscience, which imperfectly governs our 
 civilisation, did not come full-grown by a miracle, 
 like Minerva armed and complete out of the 
 brain of Jove. It has grown, and is growing. 
 It is the fruit of the spirit of Christ working in 
 us and in the world. And we ourselves confess 
 how partially we have realised it, what higher 
 moral reaches remain open to us as a community 
 and as individuals. It is our sorrow and shame 
 that the conscience of the Church on many things 
 should be so unenlightened, and the conscience 
 of the world hard and untouched regarding many
 
 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE 217 
 
 social evils, and our own consciences not so 
 tender and scrupulous and susceptible as they 
 ought to be. We know that conscience has 
 grown ; for it is our prayer that it should grow. 
 Now, it is only in relation to others that it can 
 thus grow. The chief good which our modern 
 methods of study has brought us is the convic- 
 tion that conscience is a social thing and is 
 developed through society, and can only be 
 permanent when it is registered on social con- 
 ditions. It is not enough that one here and 
 there should have higher aspirations and a purer 
 standard than others. The work of the Church 
 is to affect the public conscience ; for as the social 
 conscience is, so in the long run is the individual 
 conscience. Take the things which are branded 
 by law and custom as sins and crimes. Some 
 of these things we cannot imagine ourselves, 
 whether we would commit them or not, thinking 
 of them otherwise than as sins and crimes. That 
 is because they are indelibly burned into our con- 
 science. But there are other things in business 
 and in general life which are kept sinful to us 
 just because of the public conscience on the 
 subject. If our environment were changed, 
 would we hold tenaciously to all the points of
 
 218 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 moral living which we possess now ? As a 
 matter of fact it is found when such restraints 
 are removed that often men revert to a lower 
 level of moral life and thought. That is found 
 too commonly in countries where there is no 
 Christian standard and no public conscience on 
 certain points. 
 
 But while that is true and represents the work 
 the Church has to do to elevate the whole mass 
 and Christianise the laws and institutions and the 
 community generally, still conscience is also a 
 personal thing as well as a social. The appeal 
 to conscience can be made just because the 
 individual can rise above the level of his day. 
 To live according to the public conscience 
 merely is to live a very somnolent moral life. 
 After all it does not need a very strong spiritual 
 sense and a highly vitalised conscience just to 
 keep out of jail, and even to perform all that is 
 expected of us in a creditable manner. Most of 
 us do not deserve any great praise for being 
 fairly decent and respectable, we are hedged in 
 and protected so securely by an inherited con- 
 science and the social conscience that is in the 
 very atmosphere around us. It is all the con- 
 science that many of us have. But this is not
 
 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE 219 
 
 enough. Conscience has its proper play when a 
 man rises to a higher level of moral practice than 
 that on all sides of him. Conscience is not 
 merely a moral policeman to prevent outrages 
 against the law of right. That is a low view 
 of it, though general. The testimony of our 
 conscience should not be merely a negative 
 one denouncing sins as with Shakespeare's 
 Richard III. 
 
 My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, 
 And every tongue brings in a several tale, 
 And every tale condemns me for a villain. 
 
 Conscience is not a mere registering machine 
 to estimate the value of our particular acts, con- 
 demning us to remorse when we go far astray, 
 but it may be a spiritual influence to prompt to a 
 higher moral level. It is a teacher encouraging 
 to purer and grander things, seeking to implant 
 an aspiration after an ideal of virtue which will 
 never be satisfied. That is why it is the voice of 
 God, not only rebuking a man for evil, but calling 
 him with irresistible impulse towards the good. 
 
 The feature of conscience in all its stages is the 
 acceptance of obligation. The particular obliga- 
 tions have differed in the different stages, the 
 ideas of right and wrong being often imperfect
 
 220 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 enough. The history of conscience is a history 
 of clearer conception of what we ought to, and, 
 therefore, must be and do. It has been an 
 education. The race had to learn to discriminate, 
 and with every fresh light it has seen the path it 
 must tread, and that for the time has been God's 
 perfect will. Conscience has ever meant this 
 sense of obligation, the idea of a law, a higher 
 will, a standard somewhere to which we must 
 conform. Obligation, constraint, almost moral 
 necessity, have been laid on men. I ought, you 
 ought, we ought. At every stage of conscience 
 there has been this constraint, the conception of 
 some law which it behoved men to obey. That 
 is why conscience, even when imperfect, has been 
 to the world the sacred flame which it dare not 
 let die, a divine light, part of the Light that 
 lighteth every man that cometh into the world. 
 
 Bishop Butler, in his great sermons on Human 
 Nature, after establishing the supremacy of the 
 moral element in life, sums up in these words : 
 ' Nothing can be more evident than that, exclusive 
 of revelation, man cannot be considered as a 
 creature left by his Maker to act at random, and 
 live at large up to the extent of his natural 
 power, as passion, humour, wilfulness, happen to
 
 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE 221 
 
 carry him ; which is the condition brute creatures 
 are in ; but that from his make, constitution, or 
 nature, he is in the strictest and most proper 
 sense a law to himself. He hath the rule of 
 right within : what is wanting is only that he 
 honestly attend to it.' It is not necessary to go 
 into disputed questions as to the origin and 
 growth of conscience in order to understand and 
 accept this sense of obligation. Practically the 
 conscience means the moral sentiment which is 
 an instinct in us. It is our recognition of, and 
 obligation to, a higher law than our own will or 
 pleasure. To enlighten and educate and train 
 our conscience represents the great moral task of 
 life. If we never honestly attend to this sphere 
 of our nature we are not dealing fairly by our 
 own powers. If care and cultivation are needed 
 elsewhere, how can we assume that here nothing 
 is required but a policy of drift? Rather, much 
 more important is it to have a trained and tender 
 conscience than to have a learned and educated 
 mind ; for the direction of life and its real safety 
 depend most of all on moral sanctions. 'There 
 is something very great and blessed as well as 
 inevitable,' says Rothe in his Still Hours, 'in the 
 fact that our mind is in agreement and harmony
 
 222 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 with the eternal and inviolable laws of the world 
 and its Creator. The bringing about of this 
 harmony in himself is one of the chief duties in 
 the self-training of the individual.' 
 
 How is the conscience to be trained ? It is 
 done by obedience to its dictates, by responding 
 promptly to our sense of right, by a life sur- 
 rendered to duty. Obedience is the test of our 
 advance in moral life. Conscientiousness is the 
 only proof of conscience, as faithfulness is the 
 proof of faith and service is the proof of love. 
 And obedience is not only the test of moral 
 attainment, but it is also the method of attaining. 
 Enlightenment through obedience is the ap- 
 proved religious method. The blessing comes 
 to those who are in the way of the command- 
 ments. We often reverse the process, and con- 
 cern ourselves with difficulties to be explained 
 and questions to be answered and contradictions 
 to be reconciled. We begin by wanting to know 
 rather than by wanting to obey. We make 
 religion too much a matter of opinion, of know- 
 ledge, of enlightenment, and think we do well to 
 refuse to go a step further than we can see. We 
 ask, What is truth? when it would be more to 
 the point if we asked oftener, What is duty ?
 
 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE 223 
 
 Truth is reached through obedience. Loyalty to 
 conscience brings light. The constant effort to 
 do what is right gives the spiritual discernment 
 to recognise what is right. There are more 
 pressing questions than the speculative ones 
 questions raised to every soul of us by uneasy 
 consciences and turbulent wills, by unfulfilled 
 duty and unworthy lives. When we are honest 
 with ourselves the questions that trouble us to 
 the heart are not how to reconcile this with that, 
 but how to reconcile what we are with what we 
 ought to be. 
 
 Now, conscience is a practical guide for the 
 conduct of life, not for settling speculative ques- 
 tions. Our real difficulties are practical, not 
 speculative. We may cheat ourselves into the 
 belief that if we had only some philosophical or 
 doctrinal doubt settled we would have got rid of 
 all our difficulties. These are not the things 
 that are keeping us from what we acknowledge 
 to be our highest life. It is a common expedi- 
 ent to get rid of the obligation of our practical 
 conscience by perplexing ourselves with what 
 are called cases of conscience. It is usually a 
 form of self-deception. We often want an 
 excuse for fulfilling our lower desires. We
 
 22 4 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 pretend we cannot separate right from wrong 
 and we are in straits how to reconcile the facts of 
 life with the facts of religion. We try to mystify 
 ourselves sometimes by showing that there are 
 two sides to every question. The truth is this, 
 that often we seek excuse to lead a lower moral 
 life than our conscience would let us. The worst 
 of it is that the very keenness of conscience 
 against which we struggle is a proof that we 
 might help the world to truer life, while we are 
 trying to cozen our soul into the belief that our 
 standard is absurd and morbid. 
 
 In the hour of temptation the one practical 
 rule is to cling to conscience as to life. Passion 
 draws a man into its smothering folds and in 
 weakness he gives in, believing that thus he will 
 get rest from the struggle and rest from con- 
 science. He is only piling up the fires of his 
 own hell. In the heat of temptation our only 
 chance lies in conscience as representing God to 
 us. The question is not the abstract one as to the 
 absolute reliability of conscience, but this practi- 
 cal and particular evil against which conscience 
 protests. In spite of all sophistry, duty in this 
 particular thing is clear. There is a leading of 
 God, a place where he meets man and prompts
 
 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE 225 
 
 to the higher life, and that place is the sanctuary 
 of conscience. 
 
 Further, conscience needs to be enlightened. 
 It has to be trained by accepting all the personal 
 and social obligations of our situation, and to be 
 reinforced by the fruits of knowledge and ex- 
 perience. Conscience needs to be guided by 
 thought and judgment and sensitive feeling, or it 
 may become an organ of wrong instead of right 
 and this although it is really active and re- 
 sponsive. An unenlightened conscience may be 
 very scrupulous and exacting and susceptible to 
 impressions, and all the time be an engine of evil 
 in the life and in the world. It may become 
 bigoted and fanatical, making a man self- 
 opinionative and harsh and even cruel. In 
 obedience to conscience men have perpetrated 
 hideous crimes because conscience was perverted. 
 A difference of opinion has often been made an 
 excuse for censorious judgments and for cruel 
 oppression. Conscientiousness is a great quality 
 of moral living, but it needs to be informed and 
 enlightened by knowledge and to be made 
 tender by deep feeling. A narrow conception of 
 duty may thus rob a man of his legitimate 
 influence over others. Goodness needs thought 
 Q
 
 226 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 and reason before she can take her regal place. 
 Goodness means the sanctification of all the 
 powers of our nature. We have here another 
 illustration of the need of proportional growth, 
 for like other capacities, conscience cannot be 
 made the most of if taken singly by itself. 
 
 Conscience needs to be educated through re- 
 flection, as only thus can duty grow clear. 
 Conscience becomes more sure in its discrimi- 
 nation as it is enlightened by knowledge and 
 reflection. Coleridge has a profoundly true 
 comment on this point. 'Few are so obdurate, 
 few have sufficient strength of character to be 
 able to draw forth an evil tendency or immoral 
 practice into distinct consciousness, without 
 bringing it in the same moment before an 
 awakened conscience. But for this very reason 
 it becomes the duty of conscience to form the 
 mind to a habit of distinct consciousness. An 
 unreflecting Christian walks in twilight amongst 
 snares and pitfalls.' 1 Mental and moral growth 
 go together. A forward moral impulse serves 
 also the highest purposes of intellect. A true 
 and deep religious character carries with it the 
 quickening of the whole being, among other 
 
 1 Aids to Reflection.
 
 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE 227 
 
 things enlarging the mental horizon. Often men 
 of no formal education have attained an intel- 
 lectual outlook from their sincere religious faith, 
 which has given them sympathy with all large 
 thoughts and all high purposes. 
 
 Conversely, intellectual culture should develop 
 moral character. A trained intelligence can 
 deal with cases of conscience, with difficulties of 
 moral choice, and should find its way easily to 
 wise and consistent decisions. When intellectual 
 development is accompanied by moral growth it 
 gains in richness and security. Milton dedicated 
 himself early to the great task which he felt to 
 be his portion in life, to leave something so 
 written to after times as they should not willingly 
 let die. As he strove to qualify himself for his 
 vocation of poet he laboured strenuously to 
 equip his mind fully ; but he saw deeper into the 
 sources of all great achievement, and knew 'that 
 he who would not be frustrate of his hope to 
 write well hereafter in laudable things ought 
 himself to be a true poem ; that is, a composition 
 and pattern of the best and honourablest things ; 
 not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men 
 or famous cities unless he have in himself the 
 experience and the practice of all that which is
 
 228 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 praiseworthy.' His self-cultivation included a deep 
 moral purpose, a determination to do nothing that 
 would taint his mind or blunt his conscience. 
 Few poets or artists have given themselves so 
 completely to such an ideal as Milton, and, as Dr. 
 Johnson said, it is from such a fervid and pious 
 promise might be expected the Paradise Lost. 
 A man of genius may be the victim of appetite 
 or passion and yet create some great and 
 beautiful works, but the character which his life 
 is creating will leave its mark upon his work and 
 will weaken his capacity. In the long run the 
 gains of intellect are only secured and conserved 
 by moral character. 
 
 We cannot deal with conscience apart from 
 the will ; for the moral choice of life is bound up 
 both with conscience and will. If it is necessary 
 to distinguish between these two powers, we can 
 say that will is conscience put into action. The 
 sphere of our own free will is the arena of all 
 moral fights, and at every point of moral choice 
 the conscience makes itself heard. In practical 
 ethics all action must be regarded as the fruit 
 of the will. We sometimes speak in common 
 language of doing a thing against our will, but 
 that is only an inaccuracy of speech. We may
 
 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 229 
 
 do an act against our judgment, and against 
 what we admit should be our will, against the 
 better part of our nature, but the will is the 
 responsible agent of the act. We may, and do, 
 often deceive ourselves, thinking that the citadel 
 of our will is intact though we have surrendered 
 to evil in life, by pretending that a course of 
 action is due not at all to our will but to some 
 necessity of environment. But that only means 
 that the particular motive or temptation has 
 advanced sufficiently strong inducements to 
 capture the power of will. When Romeo went 
 to the old apothecary to purchase poison with- 
 out disguising that the poison was to be used 
 for an illegal object, Shakespeare makes the 
 apothecary give the poison for the sake of the 
 reward, using this as a salve to his conscience, 
 'My poverty and not my will consents.' Nay, 
 it was against his conscience, against his better 
 judgment, but not against his will. The tempta- 
 tion was too strong for his will, and the selling of 
 the poison to be used for suicide was his will. 
 The poverty was only the motive which drove 
 his will in that direction. In all questions of 
 morals we come back to the will, and fasten 
 responsibility there.
 
 230 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE 
 
 So all-important is the will in the moral judg- 
 ment of a man, that we can say that according 
 to the character of the will is the character of the 
 life. Even in worldly business we know how 
 men are separated into classes by differences of 
 will. One man is of what we call a strong will, 
 knowing what he means and wants, and usually 
 gets it. The man of irresolute will is also of 
 feckless life. The will must be trained if we are 
 to have any real mastery over our lives. We 
 must practice decisions, to avoid the vice of 
 irresolution. We know the value of a resolute 
 will, not only in practical affairs, but in the 
 things of intellect, where mental concentration 
 seems to depend on it. In moral culture also it 
 is essential, and means the trained ability to 
 reject certain thoughts and courses. This is the 
 great strategy against temptation, to call up 
 other reserve forces and turn the enemy's flank 
 by different thoughts and nobler imaginations. 
 Also, when conscience bears witness to a duty, let 
 the will set about performing it, and both will 
 grow in strength. 
 
 As intellect is based on moral character, so 
 character is fed by religion. The gains of moral 
 life are secured by a reach forward into the
 
 CULTURE OF CONSCIENCE 231 
 
 spiritual life. We touch here the subject of our 
 next chapter, the Culture of Spirit. Only thus 
 can the conscience be fully illumined and 
 educated, and the will be strengthened and in- 
 spired. Experience shows to all of us the truth 
 in the old parable of life which represents a man 
 offered two alternatives, the allurement of the 
 ideal and the enticement of the real. State them 
 how we will, the alternatives are the facts of life 
 to us. We can only truly fulfil ourselves through 
 loyalty to the moral law and adherence to the 
 ideal. If we follow simply and sincerely we are 
 not long left in darkness or in doubt as to duty, 
 and one of the rewards is the joy of a good con- 
 science. ' Have a good conscience,' says Thomas 
 a Kempis, 'and thou shalt ever have joy.' Well, 
 even if there is not a very jubilant joy through 
 over-much struggle, there will be at least some 
 measure of peace.
 
 CULTURE OF SPIRIT
 
 ' The soul of all culture is the culture of the soul.' 
 
 BUSHNELL.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 
 
 T IFE in its deepest sense in the Bible is more 
 ' than the space of time between birth and 
 death, and more than material existence and the 
 continuance of the vital forces. It combines all 
 the functions of being. It finds a due place for 
 all the powers and needs of man. Life means, 
 besides the material existence, all that makes 
 man distinctive. It is the fulness of all his 
 powers, the completion of all his possibilities. In 
 addition to the material and the mental there is 
 the spiritual. A man is not said to live in this 
 sense unless he has part in the life of God. It 
 speaks of his entering into life when he enters 
 into relationship with God. Religion has to do 
 with the whole life, every power and every detail, 
 but it means first of all a higher principle of life 
 which recreates the whole. Not merely to draw 
 the breath, not merely to perform the functions 
 of animal existence, and not even to have a com- 
 235
 
 236 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 
 
 plete intellectual and emotional development, but 
 to be spiritually-minded is life. Can we be said 
 to have truly lived so far ? When we realise this 
 deeper demand of our own nature and our 
 clamant spiritual needs left unsatisfied, we under- 
 stand Augustine's lament after searching into his 
 heart and describing what he was at his worst 
 and at his best, ' Such was my life. But was it 
 life, O my God ? ' 
 
 Commonplace psychology ignores this spiritual 
 sphere, or speaks of the facts in this region of 
 human life as morbid, though for the credit 
 of this science modern psychologists are be- 
 ginning to accept these facts of the soul with 
 the same reverence as they accept other facts. 
 They are coming to see that this subject cannot 
 be dismissed by disparaging it in comparison 
 with the seemingly clear-cut truths of the exact 
 sciences. It is not enough to reject the claim of 
 religion on the ground that it is so vague and 
 indefinite, or that it is impossible to reach a 
 consensus of opinion on every point of religion. 
 The higher a human faculty is, the more liable 
 it is to be abused. The mistakes that can be 
 made about it increase in proportion to its 
 delicacy of nature. The finer the machinery,
 
 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 237 
 
 the more mischief can coarse, blundering ringers 
 make. It is only to be expected that in the 
 spiritual sphere this should be specially seen. 
 That is one reason why it seems impossible 
 to get unanimity in religion. Our sects are 
 often the exaggeration of different sides of 
 truth. In the intellectual life of man the con- 
 fusion is great enough, seen in the differences 
 of opinion on any question political or other- 
 wise, and in the difficulty of arriving at clear 
 views on any subject. The possibility of error 
 is increased in dealing with the still higher 
 sphere of spirit. The mistakes of religion have 
 been many, the superstitions, the foolish notions, 
 the undue prominence of particular phases. So 
 apparent is this danger and so palpable have 
 been the blunders, that some have declared that 
 truth here cannot be discovered, that religion 
 is not for us, that God is unknowable to man ; 
 in other words, that it is better to live in the 
 lower plane where we have less chance to err. 
 This is the agnostic position. But if the soul 
 is to be put out of court on such reasoning, 
 on the same ground also should the intellect; 
 for here too are found error and mistake. 
 Reason is not an infallible guide, as a dis-
 
 238 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 
 
 tracted world can testify. Indeed, there are 
 men who have given up thought for precisely 
 the same reason that some thinkers have given 
 up religion. The mental life can be denied 
 as reasonably as the spiritual. The true and 
 even scientific attitude is for us to live up to 
 our capacities. The very glimmerings and dis- 
 tortions and reflections and mirage are evidences 
 that there is light. We need patience and 
 humble seeking and careful correction of error 
 in spiritual truth as in scientific truth. Here, 
 too, the soul that seeks finds. 
 
 Now it is a fact of history and life that man 
 is capable of spiritual training, which is some- 
 thing other than mere mental acquirements. 
 The agnostic position is unscientific; for it is 
 to prejudge and set an arbitrary limit to man's 
 possibilities. There may be an obscurantism 
 of science as well as of religion. The true 
 attitude begins by accepting the facts ; and 
 religion is a fact of history and experience. 
 It is not enough to wave aside airily this whole 
 question of spiritual intuition because it happens 
 to be mysterious. Still worse is it to pass over 
 all the experiences that speak of intercourse 
 between the spirit of man and of God, as if
 
 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 239 
 
 they meant only some form of disease. Sabatier, 
 in his Life of the Apostle Paul, asks, ' Where 
 could we find a more wholesome mental con- 
 stitution than belonged to Socrates or to Luther ; 
 where a more true and delicate conscience than 
 that of Joan of Arc? And yet we know that 
 their spiritual life had its source far beyond the 
 sphere of pure reason. If this faculty of mystical 
 exaltation is a disease, we should have to acknow- 
 ledge that Jesus, despite the harmony of His 
 nature, possessed an unsound mind ; for He had 
 His moments of ecstasy sacred moments which 
 a coarse, vulgar understanding profanes by calling 
 them hallucinations. No ; this is not the sign 
 of a morbid disposition. In truth he is much 
 rather the sick man who has never known any 
 state but that of dry, cold reason. What else 
 is religion ? what is prayer and adoration but an 
 exaltation of spirit ? ' 
 
 We may call spiritual qualities only the finer 
 attribute of mind if we like, but we do not thus 
 shift the problem raised by the facts. And 
 whenever we admit the facts of spiritual ex- 
 perience, immediately duty emerges. The duty 
 regarding spirit is as plain as duty regarding 
 body or mind. We do not stop to ask whether
 
 240 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 
 
 we can really understand facts essentially before 
 we will accept anything as fact. We do not stop 
 to ask whether we can know absolute truth before 
 we try to find out what things are true. Why 
 should we refuse to entertain the thought of God, 
 because we cannot know God in His essence and 
 nature ? If men through all these centuries have 
 known some form of communion with the divine, 
 can it be that now at last it is all a delusion? 
 To hold such a view of history would be to 
 despair of all knowledge and progress. Browning 
 makes Cleon ask this question 
 
 The grapes which dye thy wine are richer far, 
 Through culture, than the wild wealth of the rock; 
 The suave plum than the savage-tasted drupe ; 
 The pastured honey-bee drops choicer sweet ; 
 The flowers turn double and the leaves turn flowers ; 
 What, and the soul alone deteriorates ? 
 
 To hold such a view is to deny all history and 
 to deny all law of progress. Religion is con- 
 scious union with God ; but whether we are 
 conscious of it or not, our whole life is bathed 
 in the infinite life. Wherever there is a door out 
 from the self of man, God stands at the door and 
 knocks. In every region of our nature there is 
 this contact with the infinite, in the ideal of 
 knowledge, in the ideal of holiness, in every
 
 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 241 
 
 aspiration towards that which is beyond. We are 
 enswathed and suffused by the infinite life of God, 
 and until we enter into conscious relationship 
 with the divine, we are incomplete and imperfect. 
 Duty comes to us the moment we admit this 
 fact. That is to say, a man is not justified in 
 saying that he does not happen to possess this 
 peculiar organ of religious knowledge, that he 
 does not have these spiritual experiences, and 
 therefore it is not for him to bother about it. He 
 is not justified in adopting this attitude, for one 
 thing because it is not true. He constantly uses 
 the very faculties in his relations with his fellows 
 which can be raised to the higher pitch that will 
 give him a conscious relation also to God. The 
 carnal mind which St. Paul speaks about is not a 
 different mind from the spiritual, but is the same 
 mind vitalised, so to speak. The carnal is not 
 hopelessly divided from the spiritual, separated 
 by an impassable gulf. When St. Paul made 
 this distinction between the carnal and the 
 spiritual, 1 he speaks of the former as babes 
 who have not grown up into their possibilities. 
 St. Paul, in other words, affirms man's natural 
 affinity to God. The organ may be rudi- 
 
 1 1 Cor. iii. I, 2.
 
 242 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 
 
 mentary, but it is there. The babe, if it 
 assimilates suitable food, will grow up out of 
 the period of babyhood into manhood. The 
 germ of the spiritual life is in us all, and will 
 grow if it gets a chance of growth. We must 
 come like children simply and humbly depend- 
 ing on God, if we would see the Kingdom ; and 
 when we come and make the venture of faith we 
 do see. We are ushered into the life of spirit, 
 and have the assurance of the reality of the 
 spiritual world. It is spiritually discerned. 
 Faith is the instrument of spiritual discernment ; 
 and when the discernment is reached, all life 
 becomes a holy shrine, where the soul serves at 
 the altar priest-like ; and when faith does its 
 perfect work, there comes down over the life 
 that sweet summer-calm of spirit which some 
 have known, and peace clings to the garments 
 like a fragrance. Faith is the instrument of 
 spiritual discernment, as knowledge is the in- 
 strument of mental culture. The just live by 
 faith. Religion is this exaltation of spirit above 
 the things of sense, above even the things of 
 intellect, the apprehension of the unseen and 
 eternal. 
 
 If a man were to live ever in this golden light,
 
 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 243 
 
 if he were to submit all his being to God, 
 thought, affections, desires, ambitions, he could 
 indeed, as the Apostle claims, judge all things 
 spiritual, and refuse to be judged of any man. 
 Who of us stands on this calm height, so stands 
 to the world that we are outside its judgment, 
 because above it, and can be overlooked by none 
 except by God ? The spiritual in us is over- 
 borne, overweighted by the animal. The soul 
 may be said to be in abeyance in us, in a state 
 of suspended animation, when it is not in im- 
 mediate danger of being asphyxiated for want 
 of air. It is one function of all religious methods 
 and ordinances to remind us of the imperious 
 claims of the soul, to recall us to our duty regard- 
 ing it, to convince us that we are throwing away 
 our birthright, and maiming our whole nature, if 
 we are neglecting our highest life. 
 
 The culture of the spirit does not mean some 
 larger and sweeter pleasure merely, but has a 
 practical bearing on the whole of life. It must 
 be admitted that there is very little moral 
 dynamic in intellect. It is often a moral pre- 
 servative, and can help to fill up the life with 
 good, but it cannot initiate. As mere negation 
 is not enough, we need a power which will lift
 
 244 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 
 
 the whole nature out of the region of evil. A 
 principle of life is needed. Reason in this 
 sphere can at best only provide a suitable and 
 pure environment for a larger life. That is good 
 so far, but we need something to beget the higher 
 life in us. We cannot conquer the evils of the 
 lower life except by living in the higher. True 
 morality comes, not by the mortifying of the 
 flesh, but by the vitalising of the spirit. The 
 lower clinging sins fall from us when we rise. 
 They cannot live in the rarefied atmosphere 
 above them. If it is borne in on a man that 
 to make his life truly livable he must abstain 
 from some habit, let him abstain ; but for ulti- 
 mate victory he must not rest in the negative 
 triumph ; he must get out of the region of the 
 struggle, and if possible forget it. It is dan- 
 gerous to live with a hungry appetite, for the 
 more it is mortified the more hungry it becomes. 
 If the evil we have for the time conquered still 
 engrosses our thoughts and fills our minds, the 
 danger is not past. The danger is past when 
 we have outlived it, and that can only be 
 achieved by a spiritual advance. The struggle 
 against temptation is the clearing of the decks 
 for subsequent action. It is necessary in view of
 
 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 245 
 
 the action, but in itself is not true conquest. 
 Conquest comes from spiritual-mindedness. If 
 we move forward, we step out of the way of 
 many of our difficulties. A reach forward into 
 faith removes the discrepancies of knowledge. 
 Entrance into the spiritual destroys the power of 
 many former doubts. Usually it is not explana- 
 tion we need, but a new standpoint. 
 
 For some the kingdom has to be entered 
 through struggle and soul-travail, through dark- 
 ness and doubt ; but the finest spirits seem to 
 come to the kingdom without that convulsive 
 ordeal, without anxious inquiry even into the 
 foundation of their faith. They lose their hearts 
 simply and easily to the beauty of holiness. 
 They see the vision, and are not disobedient, but 
 follow after. Their native piety of soul gives 
 them instinctively the spiritual outlook on the 
 world and life. They do not ask for proofs and 
 evidences and laborious argumentation; for truth 
 seems to evidence itself to their devout minds. 
 There is a lesson in this to all that religion is 
 not apprehended logically, and we can easily 
 over-estimate the value of our ordinary apparatus 
 for acquiring knowledge. However the awaken- 
 ing comes, through the severe birth pangs of
 
 246 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 
 
 spiritual life, or the simpler way of growth, we 
 realise that it is a higher stage. Consistent and 
 persistent faith gives even a distinction of man- 
 ner. There comes naturally a certain separate- 
 ness and aloofness from the trivial. The soul 
 that is accustomed to deal with larger things 
 cannot become engrossed and absorbed in petty 
 things. Men could not grow passionate about 
 trifles if they had larger causes at heart. Most 
 of our bitter religious disputes are due to lack 
 of spiritual culture. The man who has been in 
 the presence of God, cannot easily descend to 
 hair-splitting argument and barren theology. 
 
 How are we to attain to this spiritual dis- 
 cernment amid all the entanglement of the 
 carnal life ? If we desire to possess culture of 
 mind, we must lay hold of the instruments of 
 mental education. So here in this sphjre, if we 
 are really in earnest about it, we must use all 
 the available means of grace. We do not suffer 
 from ignorance of these common things, to 
 provide which is the chief duty of the Church 
 the value of holy meditation, of praise and 
 prayer, of devotional culture, of submission of 
 the life to conscience and God's will. Rather, 
 we need to feel the imperial note of duty regard-
 
 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 247 
 
 ing all this, and to realise that we are bound to 
 cultivate this spiritual discernment which we 
 possess as men. Perhaps we will listen to the 
 poet's description of these common instruments 
 of spiritual culture, when we might dismiss as 
 an oft-told tale a statement of religious method 
 in prose. In the Excursion, Wordsworth makes 
 the old Wanderer speak of the difficulty of 
 maintaining heights of spirit, how beset we are 
 with the things that make for decline of spiritual 
 power, how we are unequally matched with cus- 
 tom, time, and domineering faculties of sense, 
 and further entangled by temptations and vani- 
 ties, and ill-governed passions and discontent and 
 care; and he asks 
 
 What then remains ? To seek 
 Those helps for his occasions ever near 
 Who lacks not will to use them ; vows renewed 
 On the first motion of a holy thought ; 
 Vigils of contemplation ; praise ; and prayer 
 A stream, which from the fountain of the heart 
 Issuing, however feebly, nowhere flows 
 Without access of unexpected strength. 
 But above all the victory is most sure 
 For him who, seeking faith by virtue, strives 
 To yield entire submission to the law 
 Of conscience conscience reverenced and obeyed, 
 As God's most intimate presence in the soul, 
 And His most perfect image in the world.
 
 248 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 
 
 If we take this side of our nature seriously, 
 we will use all these methods of spiritual 
 culture. 
 
 All the masters of the devotional life, for 
 instance, lay emphasis on prayer. Perhaps the 
 reason why we lack the atmosphere of prayer in 
 our lives is because we do not make the oppor- 
 tunities. We must consciously and consistently 
 seek to live the separated life, submitting our- 
 selves to the discipline of heart and will which 
 prayer involves. No faculty is expected to 
 grow without the suitable environment and fit 
 means. Business capacity is developed by a 
 business training, and suitable opportunities are 
 as much needed for the soul life. We must 
 make the occasions. The making of a saint is 
 not the work of a day, any more than the 
 making of a scholar. The devoted life is the 
 fruit of devotion : piety comes from prayer. If 
 we would have moments on the mount, we must 
 toil up the hill's rugged side. It is the business 
 of a man who has the spiritual ideal to fix his 
 mind on heavenly things. To gain the sweet 
 strong mood of calmness, we must develop the 
 contemplative life. We must confess that we 
 have little of the devotional spirit among us.
 
 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 249 
 
 Even our religious life is largely a matter of 
 activities, and what we call Christian work. 
 There never were more organisation, more 
 machinery, more conventions, and conferences 
 and committees ; but even in the interests of this 
 side of religion, we need more attention to the 
 inward life. Our Christian activities cannot keep 
 themselves going; they must be fed by blood 
 from the pulsing heart of faith. The cold will 
 numb the limbs when the heart slackens its 
 beat. The seed which springs up so quickly 
 and strongly will wither away because it has 
 no root. Devotional culture requires the wise 
 and constant use of means as much as mental 
 culture does. As we recognise the cultured 
 mind with its wide and accurate reading, with 
 its careful study and observation, so we recog- 
 nise the cultured soul with its peace and grace 
 and its 'harvest of a quiet eye.' This separated 
 life is no affectation of manner. The most 
 spiritual men have no pietistic airs, and are to 
 be found in the market and in the street They 
 perhaps do not easily speak of the matters of 
 faith, but they have taken the crooked places of 
 their heart to God, and had them made straight 
 there.
 
 250 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 
 
 Even here, in the highest culture of all, we 
 have to guard against error, and have to bring 
 it into line with life. We see in the early Church 
 how the spiritual commotion from the influx of 
 new life created great dangers, and the Church 
 had to be guarded from excess and error and 
 mistaken standards. The Corinthian Church, as 
 we gather from its condition reflected in St. 
 Paul's Epistles, suffered from the fever of an 
 excessive vitality, and was beset by the tempta- 
 tions of its highly strung state. They were in- 
 clined to value the ecstasy of visions and to 
 despise the quiet calm walk of faith. They 
 were living in an atmosphere of spiritual excite- 
 ment, and sometimes even neglected the ordinary 
 morality of the Christian life. Never was there 
 more needed the strong sane guidance of St. 
 Paul, who combined a wonderful practical genius 
 with his perfervid religious enthusiasm. One of 
 the greatest dangers was the temptation to pride 
 and self-glorification, which of course led to 
 rivalry and unfriendly criticism of others. This 
 is an inevitable danger of all spiritual exaltation 
 and indeed of all spiritual culture. The tempta- 
 tions seem to increase in subtlety and seductive- 
 ness the nearer we approach the centre of life 

 
 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 251 
 
 The soul mounting higher to God, comes no nigher, 
 But the arch-fiend Pride mounts at her side. 
 
 If a man thinks himself to be specially spiritual 
 or endowed with peculiar and exceptional gifts, 
 the temptation at once arises to self-complacency 
 if not to arrogant self-conceit. St. Paul guarded 
 against this by reminding the Corinthians that 
 all gifts come from God, not of merit but of 
 grace, and are given not fcr their own sake, 
 not even for the sake exclusively of those who 
 are favoured with them, but for the larger sake 
 of the Church and the world. The test of 
 a gift is its power of service. The essential 
 difference between men lies not in their different 
 gifts but in their use of them. That is to say, 
 it is a difference of character, not of capacity. 
 In the Christian economy there is no room for 
 personal glorification and the clashing of vulgar 
 ambitions; for life is not judged by success but 
 by service. 
 
 It seems remarkable that spiritually-minded 
 men should need to be warned against the 
 temptation to pride, since these two things are 
 incompatible. The one will kill the other, and 
 they cannot really co-exist together. But we 
 can see where the danger lurks for the unwary
 
 252 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 
 
 soul ' I saw in my dream that at the very gate 
 of heaven there was a door to hell.' This is a 
 pitfall for all who dabble in the false spiritual- 
 isms that have always attractions for certain 
 temperaments. It comes as a delicate flattery 
 to a man that he is privileged to enter into 
 mysteries shut to others, that he is specially 
 selected as a medium of occult influences from 
 the spiritual world. Vanity is a leaven that 
 works mischief in every sphere of human life, 
 but nowhere is it so deadly as in this highest 
 sphere of the spiritual. In the Corinthian 
 Church great stress was laid on such apparent 
 marvels as the speaking with tongues, and the 
 humbler speech that could edify was looked 
 down on as inferior. Paul scarified this stand- 
 ard of valuation with keen sarcasm, and did 
 not hesitate to pronounce their esteemed gift 
 of tongues as mere gibberish if there was no 
 reasonable interpretation. He drew a picture 
 of the whole Church gathered in one place and 
 all speaking with tongues. If a simple un- 
 learned person or unbeliever should come in 
 amidst the babel, he asked what would be 
 thought of the proceedings, and answered by 
 the form of his question, 'Will they not say
 
 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 253 
 
 that ye are mad ? ' He insisted on bringing 
 all such gifts to the test of the practical and 
 the useful, and reversed the whole scale of 
 judging gifts. In the Christian life there stands 
 first, not the mystical in faith but the practical, 
 not the seeing of visions but the humble follow- 
 ing of Christ. 
 
 The same subtle temptation awaits all false 
 spiritualisms with their esoteric doctrines, with 
 their pretended insight into the spiritual world 
 closed to the mass of men, their shadowy mys- 
 ticism which the ordinary mind cannot grasp, 
 Of all spiritual experience we must ask how it 
 leads out in practice, how it issues in daily life, 
 how it affects character and conduct. Has it 
 led to new insight into the needs and tasks of 
 life ? Has it brought new moral truth into 
 light, or reinforced some new aspect of the old 
 truth ? Has it inspired to larger love and a 
 nobler sense of duty ? This appeal to practice 
 must be made all along the line of spiritual 
 life. There is a swift and sure penalty for all 
 forms of religious exaggeration in the deteriora- 
 tion of the spirit itself, working as we have seen 
 often in conceit of self and its usual accompani- 
 ment, censoriousness of others. In the same
 
 254 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 
 
 way the disease of introspection can only be 
 cured by bringing faith out into the light, by 
 judging the tree by the fruit. All the authorities 
 in this sphere speak of the dangers of mere 
 high-flying devotionalism without the steady- 
 ing influence of conduct. ' It is not possible 
 for thee, my son,' says Thomas a Kempis, 'to 
 continue in the uninterrupted enjoyment of 
 spiritual fervour, nor always to stand upon the 
 heights of pure contemplation.' It is so easy 
 to make feelings a substitute for practical 
 obedience instead of making them an inspira- 
 tion to obey. There is ever a danger of making 
 religion a matter of emotion and not a matter 
 of moral reverence, without sense of awe and 
 mystery and without the compulsion of con- 
 science. To trust merely to sublime feelings 
 and high states of soul without judging faith 
 by actual faithfulness will infect the whole 
 spiritual life with insincerity and an ever- 
 weakening sense of unreality. 
 
 We come, then, to this further principle that 
 spiritual-mindedness must be tested by the 
 moral conscience as well as by practical life. 
 The spiritual can never be divorced from the 
 moral. The commandments of God remain,
 
 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 255 
 
 and by them we must judge our spiritual state. 
 A man must not violate his moral perception 
 even in the supposed interests of religion. The 
 spiritual life is inseparably related to character, 
 and all spiritual truth must be tested by con- 
 science, by moral law, and if found wanting 
 there must be amended. F. W. Newman in 
 his Phases of Faith relates an incident which 
 came under his own knowledge of a man edu- 
 cated and thoughtful who became a convert 
 to the Irving miracles. After several years 
 he totally renounced them as a miserable delu- 
 sion because he found that a system of false 
 doctrine was growing up and was propped by 
 them. He was led astray by intellectually 
 seeing nothing false in the Irvingite position: 
 he was brought right by trusting to his moral 
 perceptions. We can only enter into the region 
 of religion, and remain in it, by moral sympathy. 
 It begins as an act of self-surrender, but must 
 then grow up into the life. 
 
 A further principle for our guidance in the 
 difficulties of this region is that the reason should 
 be taken along with the spirit. In the matter 
 of speaking with tongues, for example, Paul de- 
 clared that a gift must be to edification, and also
 
 256 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 
 
 that it must be intelligible. If a man speaks 
 with tongues it is of no earthly use, unless he 
 can interpret it and make it plain and under- 
 standable. For a true and useful spiritual life 
 the reason should be satisfied as well as the 
 emotions. Sane and sober judgment is needed. 
 ' If I pray in an unknown tongue my spirit 
 prayeth but my understanding is unfruitful.' 
 This demand for balance of judgment would cure 
 much religious extravagance and one-sidedness in 
 the acceptance of truth. Scripture itself should 
 teach us balance and proportion. A great truth 
 can be laid hold on in a one-sided way and 
 driven to extreme. It may issue in some blind 
 fanaticism, or in some dark mysticism. It is 
 sometimes assumed that a religious exercise is 
 stamped peculiarly spiritual if it is manifestly 
 irrational. Such gets no countenance from the 
 virile thinking of St. Paul, who insists that the 
 reason may be a vehicle of the spirit. Much 
 play has been made on the distinction between 
 religion and theology, the one as the life of the 
 soul, the other as the intellectual presentation of 
 that life. It is a distinction which sometimes 
 needs to be strenuously maintained; for religion 
 is the one important reality of which theology is
 
 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 257 
 
 the scientific study. At the same time, religion 
 cannot be left in vagueness, but must be clothed 
 with a body of systematic thought. The mind of 
 man cannot allow itself to be waved off from 
 the most important region of life. No religion, 
 however real and vivid in its personal appeal, can 
 be safe if the intellect has not been secured in 
 its service. Religion as an experience precedes 
 theology, as natural life precedes the science of 
 zoology, but it is a necessity of the mind to 
 attempt to bring into order all that human life 
 involves. 
 
 The truth to keep firm hold of is that man is 
 a real unity, and that the spiritual cannot be cut 
 off and considered by itself as if it had no rela- 
 tions to body or mind or morals. This inter- 
 relation of all the parts of our being is a fact 
 which we dare not lose sight of in religion as in 
 what are considered the lower levels of life. The 
 contemplative and the practical, the inner and 
 the outer, are connected with subtle bonds, and 
 one side cannot be neglected without the whole 
 life suffering. We sometimes speak as jf the 
 soul were some ghostly entity that could be at- 
 tended to by itself and nursed into richness of 
 nature ; and we have often longed to have leisure.
 
 258 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 
 
 to pay heed to the soul's life by itself, using all 
 the approved methods of cultivating spiritual 
 mindedness. It is a mistake which is responsible 
 for many an error. We must make the whole 
 life spiritual, and carry up all parts of our being 
 together. We suffer seriously by our sectional 
 experiments, but nowhere so seriously as in the 
 matter of religion. F. D. Maurice's experience 
 is that of many another : ' I dream sometimes of 
 times when one might have more inward and less 
 outward business; but after forty years' experi- 
 ence I find that the inward is not better in my 
 case but worse for want of the outward, and that I 
 really seek God most when I need His help to 
 enable me to do what He has set me to do.' 
 
 It comes to this, that devotion like everything 
 else must be tested by life. The practical must 
 always be used to restrain or at least to correct 
 the mystical. There is a mysticism which is 
 alien to the Christian faith. There is a mysti- 
 cism which is a morbid growth, which might be 
 called almost spiritual sensualism; for it is as 
 much a thing of the senses as of the soul. It is 
 divorced from action. Its spiritual ecstasies are 
 enjoyed without a thought of the duty and 
 service which should follow. True religion has
 
 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 259 
 
 always an eye to the practical. We should be 
 suspicious of the piety which does not know 
 service, of the prayer which does not lead to 
 work, of the mysticism which begins and ends 
 in its own emotions. If a man think himself 
 spiritual, let him take knowledge of the practical 
 demands made upon him by his special profession, 
 judging his experiences by reason and by con- 
 science and by the practical results in his life. 
 It is not an argument against spiritual ideals, but 
 for the control and education of them and their 
 growth in true grace. 
 
 We cannot forget also that the very methods 
 which are necessary to secure and maintain 
 spiritual insight can themselves become corrupt, 
 and sin can mingle in our most holy things. 
 The accredited means we use for spiritual culture, 
 approved by all who are in a position to advise 
 
 prayer, solitude, meditation, devotional reading 
 
 all are liable to abuse and need to be carefully 
 guarded against mistake. We can have all the 
 methods and seasons of prayer and yet not have 
 the heart brought into subjection. 
 
 The river is bound by the ice-king's thong ; 
 Below, the current runs swift and strong. 
 
 It is no valid argument against prayer that it
 
 260 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 
 
 can be misused, but it is an argument for a re- 
 newed serious endeavour to use it rightly. The 
 same is true of the other methods and aids to 
 devotion. Robertson of Brighton tells in a letter 
 how he stopped devotional reading for a time, 
 when he learned that devotional feelings may 
 be very distinct from uprightness and purity of 
 life. He had evidently come across cases where 
 he judged that these feelings were strangely 
 allied to the animal nature, seemingly the result 
 of a warm temperament, and were, as he says, 
 guides to hell under the form of angels of light. 
 These cases disgusted him, and made him sus- 
 pect feelings which he had hitherto cherished 
 as the holiest, and produced a reaction. He saw 
 that the basest feelings lie very near to our 
 highest, and that they pass into one another by 
 insensible transitions. ' The true lesson is to 
 watch, suspect, and guard aspirations after good, 
 not to drown them as spurious.' In spite of this 
 temporary disgust he felt the need which de- 
 votional books supply, and determined to begin 
 them again ; for ' our affections must be nurtured 
 in the Highest, or else our whole life flags and 
 droops.' 
 
 This is a region where one is afraid of dis-
 
 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 261 
 
 couraging any, since few enough seriously at- 
 tempt any spiritual culture at all ; but we will 
 be safe if we pay heed to the warning that every 
 gift means added responsibility, and every privi- 
 lege is meant for duty. Our Lord's example shows 
 us the mean between the extremes of the purely 
 contemplative and the purely active life. Devo- 
 tion is designed to fit us more truly for the tasks 
 and needs of life. The still hour is for the stormy 
 hours : communion is for life : prayer is for 
 work. The devotional life finds its meaning and 
 purpose in active service. By their fruits ye shall 
 know them. 
 
 But there can be no fruit at all unless the 
 branch abide in the vine. This is last of all and 
 first of all. Without God the soul is only an 
 empty possibility ; He is needed to vitalise it. 
 The appeal of this book is for a completer cul- 
 ture than most of us have hitherto attempted. 
 We are daily living below . our conscience, and 
 below our convictions, and far below our privi- 
 leges ; and all because we do not live our life 
 with continual reference to God, with thoughts, 
 affections, hopes, desires circling towards Him, 
 as a bird hovers to its nest. In spite of all the 
 dangers to which we have called attention, we
 
 262 CULTURE OF SPIRIT 
 
 must see that we are not fulfilling the end of our 
 being, if we have no unseen life hid with Christ 
 in God. We must see that to be spiritually 
 minded is the only life. The saintly M'Cheyne 
 said, ' It is not so much great talents God blesses, 
 as great likeness to Christ.' This is our great 
 ideal and example, and sums up to us all methods 
 of spiritual culture. He is so much the Master 
 of the spiritual world that when we mention 
 faith, we can only mean faith as it is in Jesus. 
 He is the way of access to the Father; He is the 
 assurance to us of eternal things, the sign of the 
 invisible ; He opens the door of the spiritual 
 world to us. To be in union with Him is life ; to 
 have His mind in us is to be spiritually minded. 
 The Christian task is the practice of the presence 
 of Christ. 
 
 My soul, wait thou upon God, with the holy 
 meditation which makes a man calm at the 
 heart, and strong for all the needs of living. 
 There is rest at the centre. Thou losest nothing 
 if thou losest not God. Let the world go past 
 with its dust and noise, with its fret and fume. 
 My soul, wait thou upon God.
 
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 " The story is one in which the spirit of the Old South figures 
 largely; adventure and romance have their play and carry the plot 
 to a satisfying end." 
 
 ii
 
 Remington Ermine of the Yellowstone. BY JOHN REMINGTON. 
 
 " A very original and remarkable novel wonderful in its vigor and 
 freshness." 
 
 Roberts Kings in Exile. BY CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS. 
 
 " The author catches the spirit of forest and sea life, and the reader 
 comes to have a personal love and knowledge of our animal friends." 
 Boston Globe. 
 
 Robins The Convert. BY ELIZABETH ROBINS. 
 
 ' ' The Convert ' devotes itself to the exploitation of the recent 
 suffragist movement in England. It is a book not easily forgotten 
 by any thoughtful reader." Chicago Evening Post. 
 
 Robins A Dark Lantern. BY ELIZABETH ROBINS. 
 
 A powerful and striking novel, English in scene, which takes an 
 essentially modern view of society and of certain dramatic situations. 
 
 Ward The History of David Grieve. BY MRS. HUMPHREY WARD. 
 " A perfect picture of life, remarkable for its humor and extraor- 
 dinary success at character analysis." 
 
 THE MACMILLAN JUVENILE LIBRARY 
 
 This collection of juvenile books contains works of standard quality, 
 on a variety of subjects history, biography, fiction, science, and 
 poetry carefully chosen to meet the needs and interests of both 
 boys and girls. 
 
 Each volume, cloth, 12mo, 50 cents net; postage, 10 cents extra 
 
 Altsheler The Horsemen of the Plains. BY JOSEPH A. ALT- 
 
 SHELER. 
 
 " A story of the West, of Indians, of scouts, trappers, fur traders, 
 and, in short, of everything that is dear to the imagination of a healthy 
 American boy." New York Sun. 
 
 Bacon While Caroline Was Growing. BY JOSEPHINE DASKAM 
 
 BACON. 
 
 " Only a genuine lover of children, and a keenly sympathetic 
 observer of human nature, could have given us this book." 
 Boston Herald.
 
 Carroll Alice's Adventures, and Through the Looking Glass. BY 
 
 LEWIS CARROLL. 
 " One of the immortal books for children." 
 
 Diz A Little Captive Lad. BY MARIE BEULAH Dix. 
 
 " The human interest is strong, and children are sure to like it." 
 Washington Times. 
 
 Greene Pickett's Gap. BY HOMER GREENE. 
 
 " The story presents a picture of truth and honor that cannot fail 
 to have a vivid impression upon the reader." Toledo Blade. 
 
 Lucas Slowcoach. BY E. V. LUCAS. 
 
 " The record of an English family's coaching tour in a great old- 
 fashioned wagon. A charming narrative, as quaint and original as 
 its name." Booknews Monthly. 
 
 Mabie Book of Christmas. BY H. W. MABIE. 
 
 " A beautiful collection of Christmas verse and prose in which all 
 the old favorites will be found in an artistic setting." The St. 
 Louis Mirror. 
 
 Major The Bears of Blue River. BY CHARLES MAJOR. 
 " An exciting story with all the thrills the title implies." 
 
 Major Uncle Tom Andy Bill. BY CHARLES MAJOR. 
 
 " A stirring story full of bears, Indians, and hidden treasures." 
 Cleveland Leader. 
 
 Nesbit The Railway Children. BY E. NESBIT. 
 
 " A delightful story revealing the author's intimate knowledge of 
 juvenile ways." The Nation. 
 
 Whyte The Story Book Girls. BY CHRISTINA G. WHYTE. 
 
 " A book that all girls will read with delight a sweet, wholesome 
 story of girl life." 
 
 Wright Dream Fox Story Book. BY MABEL OSGOOD WRIGHT. 
 
 " The whole book is delicious with its wise and kindly humor, its 
 just perspective of the true value of things." 
 
 Wright Aunt Jimmy's Will. BY MABEL OSGOOD WRIGHT. 
 " Barbara has written no more delightful book than this." 
 13
 
 University of California 
 
 SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1388 
 
 Return this material to the library 
 
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