OF CRe ki^ R H llH SPIRif WILFORD L.HOOEE^ GIFT OF .^-Xj^^ \^yly^~^^"tr^^<^~€>-'^^~^ V •r,Z , '* *•• Copyright, 1910 Sherman, French & Company THIS PIECE OF WORK IS INSCRIBED REVERENTLY AND GRATEFULLY TO MY FATHER CONTENTS PART I THE CHARACTER OF LAWS THAT GOVERN THE SPIRIT . PART II Page THE CODE 11 The First Law . . 13 The Second Law . 25 The Third Law . 33 The Fourth Law . 45 The Fifth Law . . 57 The Sixth Law . . 71 The Seventh Law 85 The Eighth Law 97 The Ninth Law . 113 The Tenth Law . 125 PART III SUMMARY OF THE CODE . . 137 ADDENDA . 149 PART I THE CHARACTER OF LAWS THAT GOVERN THE SPIRIT THE CHARACTER OF LAWS THAT GOVERN THE SPIRIT The laws of spiritual living are, tradition- ally, the Ten Commandments. Those almost prehistoric words have flourished long not so much because of an obvious as because of a hidden meaning. That they purport and al- ways have purported to be the laws of the soul's health is, also, a reason for their survi- val. And the fact of their survival shows how practical is men's perception that the life of their spirit, like the life of any thing, can thrive only under the sway of certain ascer- tainable laws. To-day the word Commandment, when used in the biological sense in which religion speaks, is less intelligible than the word law. The tra- ditional word suggests a picture with which we have small sympathy. The quieter, non- vocal, the laboratory revelation suits us better than the dramatic, military one. It is, of course, a matter of mental habit. A hundred years more and we may prefer to think of all laws as commands. A little more militarism ; a little more influence of such things as wireless telegraphy where secondary causes are much concealed, — might change our mental habit. But to-day our habit is to emphasize the inher- ence of law. Therefore it is acceptable to us 1 2 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT to account the laws of our spirit, the laws gov- erning the development of manhood, as kin- dred to any other set of laws and to be known not by a peculiar name but by the common name, law. The laws governing a tree bear the same relation to the tree as the laws governing the spirit of a man bear to the man's spirit. The common name helps us to understand the function of the laws of the spirit. It helps us know, also, why the familiar Ten Laws have flourished so long: — ^they are rediscovered by even humble people in the laboratory of usual experience. Their revelation is biological and continual. In the interest of fairer understand- ing we may use the name most suited to us to- day. At the first considering, it is easy to sympa- thize with those who chafe at the use by the Christian Church of the ancient, the Mosaic statement of the laws of the life of the spirit. It may be admitted that the Church has over- done that use. She does seem to cling too tena- ciously to phrases which to herself are famil- iar. She seems too easily content with her own probable comprehension of her own meanings. She seems wanting in a sympathetic willingness to speak in simple and ever changing language. And because this is believed to be so, many serious men and women have not only derided the Church's use of the Mosaic statement but have missed the meanings of the laws them- LAWS OF THE SPIRIT 3 selves. What, they ask, is the value to a man's spirit in the First Commandment? It seems a mere protest against the abstract idea called Polytheism. What value to a man's spirit is there in the second law? It seems a belated outcry against an almost prehistoric religious custom, or, maybe only a mere growl at art. The third law seems to express a feeble fear of expletives. The fourth appears to be a blunder- ing definition of holiness as idleness on Satur- days. Who needs to be told, they ask further, to honor his parents if they are honorable peo- ple? Who needs to be told not to cut a throat or a purse? They do not believe that the pres- ervation of the physical integrity of marriage is a high standard of excellence. As for gos- siping, for mistaken or falsely tinctured com- ment, that is too vulgar to need notice. And as for coveting, — that seems on the whole to be a pretty good thing. Of course, if these popu- lar meanings be exhaustive there is only most elementary value in these laws, and the Church's use is to be deplored. Such meanings with such use, indeed, insult serious and intelligent men and women. For they belittle life. They reduce virtue to the good behavior of the nur- sery. It is easy to sympathize with those who chafe under such interpretations and such a notion of the Church's use of the code of the spirit. A second consideration shows, however, that 4 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT such chafing is to a large degree wilful. To ex- tract from a serious endeavor a petty result and say "This is the thing intended," is or ought to be, to discredit a critic in his own es- teem of himself. For however much the Church may fail to give precise, intelligible, contempo- raneous meanings to laws which she pronounces, yet she declares habitually that all her utter- ance is to be received under the terms of the personality of Jesus Christ. For instance, these laws, although they come to us from days earlier than the days of Jesus, are to be inter- preted in terms of his personality. What a man may think that a Church-given idea brings him, he has no right to receive except as illum- ined within his own judgment by the light of Jesus Christ. The receiver of the Church's messages has, as the Church has, the light of Christ. And he has also, as has the Church, the duty, the responsibility of using the light. Therefore it is, that he who misses the laws of life which are given in the ancient phrases of the Ten Commandments, is suffering to a large degree from a fault of his own. The Church may be blamable in her conservative immobility of speech. But whoever throbs with desire for life but fumes at the Church's statements of life's laws, has neglected the light, the Christ light, which tries to lighten a man as soon as he is bom into the world. From the stand- point of human need, the critics of Christ's LAWS OF THE SPIRIT 5 Church often increase the trouble by missing the real point. The real point is that men and women generally, including those who compose the Church, do not make enough use of the light of Christ. If we used the light of Christ then we should demand of the Church not merely a different life but more life and better. Now of the laws which govern and direct man's spirit there are at least three character- istics which are general and self-provable. A law of the spirit must rest upon a fact in na- ture ; it must be positive ; and it must be moral. Naturalness, assertion, morality are three gen- eral and self-provable attributes of spiritual law. No training of man's spirit can result apart from recognition that the business is a piece of moral work ; work, that is, upon a crea- ture whose task is to manage himself in compli- cated association with both others like himself and One, in fact or in idea, like but superior to himself, God. Nor can training of the spirit be carried far, apart from recognition that man's spiritual capabilities rest upon a consti- tution with which man has been endowed by the Creator and which, like the body's constitution, requires positive exercise and use. When these characteristics of laws governing the spirit are taken one by one they become more nearly self- evident. Taking the moral characteristic first, the assertion is that a law which governs man's 6 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT spirit must be moral. For the peculiarity of man is that he is moral; that is, man's good is a matter of association and of comparative values. Man is subject to many laws which affect as well the non-human part of the world, such as the law of gravitation. But any law which is concerned with men as distinct from the non-human parts of the world, must deal with men as moral beings. Human develop- ment, human life and spiritual fortunes, mean moral attainment. And the law which governs this sort of life is therefore moral law. For in- stance, the Second Commandment which talks much of idols or images is not concerned with blocks and stones. It is concerned with the use and the users of stones and blocks. Images and idols, indeed, are not stones and blocks ; they are stones and blocks plus use. And the law is directed upon the use, the human ingre- dient in the block, and the user. Or, the eighth law, "Thou shalt not steal," if it be a law of man's spirit, cannot be concerned with the ma- terial element in property but with the personal element. Property means material plus own- ership. A law governing the spirit of a man and having to do with property is, therefore, addressed to man as an owner. It is the moral quality which is, obviously, the key to the meaning of any law which has jurisdiction over the spirit of a man. Secondly, a law of man's spirit must be posi- LAWS OF THE SPIRIT T tive, rather than negative. Man is free; his nature has been given him; his manhood is in his own hands; nothing is forbidden; his need is to know what he must do. Nothing is forbid- den. There are limits and qualifications to the impulses of the spirit, but not a single, possible action stands prohibited as such. Indeed noth- ing is unqualified and nothing is forbidden. Killing, for example, is not forbidden. Mur- der, however, a limitation upon the spirit of the killer, is forbidden. Drinking liquors or laudanum, taking morphine, sexual inter- course, are not forbidden. Drunkenness, sen- suality, prostitution, are adulterations of the spirit, and as such are qualifications laid upon the free and pure actions of men. It is, of course, in order to develop freedom and purity of spirit that spiritual law operates. It is a positive injunction to develop the spirit which spiritual law must be assumed to convey. The negative form of the Decalogue, therefore, is a feature which an intelligent person is bound to transcend and disregard. Indeed he is under intellectual responsibility to understand the positive and directive revelation contained within the imperfect, negative utterances of these laws and to perceive that, in their positive meanings, they satisfy the need of the spirit to know not what cannot but what can be done. / To get the meaning of the law which Christ { revered, comprehended, and obeyed, is to per- 8 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT ceive that it illuminates vistas of positive pos4 sibility. .,«*««*^ The third feature of a spiritual law is natu- ralness. That is, a spiritual law must rest upon a fact of Nature. It is necessary here to use the word Nature. No other word ought to do or will do. To serious people Nature means "The thing that God created." Now what God creates is a real thing, a centre of action and influence, an object capable of giving and re- ceiving. And this is true of our spirit just as it is true of our eyes, our lungs, or of the trees of the field. Our spirit is not a zero hidden mysteriously in our bodies and suddenly, by a process of arm and leg or lung and eye work- ing, developed from zero to something. Our spirit starts as something, — ^just as our bodies do. Our bodies have eyes, ears, a mouth, arms, legs, and a number of other instruments imply- ing capability and promise. Our spirit also, — by nature, by the fact of its creation, because when God made our spirit he made something real from which a developing life could start, — our spirit is possessed of capability, of func- tion, of instrumentality, by means of which the life open to a man or woman is a life of defin- able scope and experience. In short, our spirit , has a constitution. It has a universal, a human f analysis. Its elements are discoverable. And upon those elements the laws of the spirit rest. What is the nature of the human spirit? What LAWS OF THE SPIRIT 9 is this thing whose development measures man's real life? That is not an artificial, an acad- emic question. It is the standing enquiry of all the ages, the interrogation which rises in the mind of every serious man. Its. answer dis- closes the bases of spiritual law. The Deca- logue is itself one of the answers to that standing inquiry. And the Decalogue im- plies that man's spirit, the thing which each man has got to train in order to satisfy his nature, is described analytically by these ten laws. Each law grasps and declares a fact in the composition of our spirit. Each law points out that its particular element in the spirit's constitution, must have its due exercise in order that the life of the spirit shall develop. Without a natural foundation there could be no spiritual structure. Without the natural fact of a spiritual constitution, in right of which we call ourselves, intelligently, the image of God, there could be no exercise or enforce- ment of law. But because the spirit has a na- ture, because man starts as a divine image, therefore, spiritual law is intelligible, a spir- itual career is possible, the divine image, photo- graphed thus on the film of the soul can be de- veloped into a divine life. It may now be said once again, that the spiritual life, which is man's destiny, the goal of man's instinct, the station toward which all the forces in experience impel a man, — is a life 10 THE CODE OF THE SPHIIT governed according to certain ascertainable laws. The historic statement of those laws is the Decalogue. And, read under the light of that Christ life which is the specimen spiritual life, the Decalogue is the code of the spirit. Each of the laws, as interpreted by a ChristN, governed mind, is natural, positive, and moral. Each law satisfies the requirements of that le- gality which attaches to the life of the spirit of a man. PART II THE CODE THE FIRST LAW The natural fact underlying the first law is the fact that man is a thinker. That God ex- ists is a conclusion of a thought process only. It is thought rather than observation, which yields both the result God and the result One- God rather than many. Revelation, which is commonly contrasted with observation, can yield a result only by the superior agency of thought. Thought is the interpreter of both observation and revelation. Hence, therefore, the first law whose language is "I am the Lord thy God and thou shalt have none other gods but me," is founded on the elemental fact that man is by nature a thinker. The connection between the fact and the law appears further from the familiar considera- tion that thought is the final exhibitor of real- ity. What we mean by real things are such things as force themselves into human con- sciousness and can by no means, for any length of time by any number of men and women, be kept out of consciousness. Some real things, indeed, are more fundamental than others. The more fundamental real things — such as elemen- tary moral principles, and the being of God — have forced themselves continually into the hu- man consciousness from the very beginning of history. Other real things — ^whether they be 13 14 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT of physical or spiritual construction, material forces like electricity, or moral forces such as the question of slavery, or religious problems such as the question of miracles — such things come into human consciousness at some specific time in human history. At that time only, it may be, is the reality of such things acknowl- edged. But whatever the real thing be — a prin- ciple, an idea, a material body, a problem, a social propensity, an object of faith, — ^it is real only if it forces itself into consciousness. We may say what we please about the possi- bility of our being altogether and entirely mis- taken in our intellectual conclusions, or too dull to receive an effect from things as they really are, but the fact remains that what we must mean by reality is just this invasion of our mental realm. For us there is no other reality. And one reality which this man or that man may recognize with loud acclaim to-day, is no whit more real than an entirely different sort of real object of which this same man may be temporarily oblivious but of which the race as such may be habitually conscious. One man to-day may shout his all-absorbing conscious- ness of physical material. But to-day or to- morrow or the day after, the human race will repeat its confession of consciousness of God. f?And the reality of God, of one God rather than many because thought rests only in unity, — is the same sort of reality and, by a wise man, THE FIRST LAW 15 to be estimated as of the same sort of practical import as the reality of physical material, of moral principle, or of social propensity. We talk much of our materialism, but we know that reality for us is still reality for thought only. The sun causes vibrations of ether. Man thinks about it, calls the effect light, and then, with naive disdain, talks as a materialist and forgets his thought which alone gave him an understanding of his experience. A bell rings, and men say they hear the sound of a bell. But what happens is that men receive a sensation from air waves which strike against their ear drums, and then their thought inter- prets their sensation. But still, neglectful of the thought which alone gives intelligibility to our sensation, we say we hear the sound of the bell. It is our own thought that we hear. It is by thought, not by sensation, that men have studied and catalogued the world. By thought, not by sensation, men have worked out the meanings of experience. By thought they have discerned laws within the operations of thought itself. By thought they have produced what is the only real world for man, the world of in- telligence, the world of mind. Of course sensa- tion has been necessary to the elevation of men. As the marble to the sculptor, the oil and colors to the painter, as the audible word to the poet, — so is sensation to the thinker. But marble does not create the statue ; oil and colors do not 16 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT make the picture; nor words the poem. There are as much marble, oil and color, there are as many sensations in Africa as in Europe or America. Sensation is the battle ground of hu- man advancement, but thought is the weapon by which mankind subdues the world. And in all the thinking of men there has been, as an essential quality of thought itself, a dominating sense of unity. Man is a thinker; as such preeminently, does he face the world. But such is the quality of this peculiar instru- ment that each man faces the world under the necessity of discovering the unity of himself and the unity of the universe. Consciousness of self is a man's destiny. And consciousness of God is a man's destiny. Man is a thinker. But to think is to discover an inviolable integer of self, and also an inviolable integer, a greater, another self behind the shifting phenomena of earth. Even more legibly than the fact that man is a thinker, there is written in our members the positive and compulsive assertion, thou shalt think, thou shalt live by the exercise of reason. Nature and circumstance drive men under the operation of this law. To circumvent the brutalities of beast life, man has to use thought. To outwit the destructive attack of disease and storm man is obliged to use thought. By thought only may man conquer the varying but always death-dealing seasons. To lure THE FIRST LAW 17 fruit out of the reluctant soil, man must think. To create society, to create civilization and its institutions, man must think. This, indeed, is not merely a general, a racial requirement; it is an individual obligation. There are men to- day who, because they will not^ think^ exhibit the brutalities of beast life. Countless men and women because they will not think, are, to- day, the victims of wind and weather and con- tagion. There are men and women and children who, with a fruitful earth lying fallow at their feet, have no food because they do not think. The law is not general only, it is individual. And it applies now as it has applied always. It was man's thought gripping, by the power of the instinct for unity, the thought of the one mind which is within the visible world, which turned man away from the beast that man might be toward the beckoning archangel, the divine ruler that man can be. It was man's thought in active operation which transformed social and physical disorder; out of chaos, which was nothing, brought intelligibility, which is reality, which is something. In the beginning was the Logos, that is. Reason. In the beginning, when things started, what started them was infused thought. Man's- start, man's progress was thought, and it is thought still. Circumstance beat on man to make him think. Nature took up the Creator's will to compel man to think. And it is still 18 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT true for all and for each that Necessity tries to compel a man to be himself, that is, to be a thinker. When we tell over the steps in the progress of men, we find that we have to yield the honor of leadership to thinkers. Not to logic chop- pers; not to sophists; not to bookmakers, are we largely indebted; but to men who have col- ored life with mind, to men not with hoes but with ideas, to men who, as Washington and Wellington did, have won campaigns with di- vine thought; to men who, as Luther and Lin- coln did, have recreated institutions with thought; to men who, as Darwin did, overcame the earth with thought; who resurrected souls, as Brooks did, with thought; to men who lived and worked with thought as did Jesus Christ who was such Reason as was with God and was God. All men are thinkers. That is more their nature than it is their nature to be bipeds. It was common once to describe the root differ- ence between man and the other creatures as Reason. Man has reason; other creatures have not. To-day this distinction is accepted with qualification, for it is now thought that creatures other than man possess reason to some appreciable degree. The difference is not precisely one of possession, but one of respon- sible use. In man, reason, the engine of thought, is not merely prominent as a charac- THE FIRST LAW 19 teristic power but also it inherits tasks and du- ties which are peculiar to developed thought. Man is a thinker. So, it is sometimes said, is a horse. So, indeed, it is sometimes supposed, is the vine which creeps toward the place pre- pared for its support. But man's thought is so full of duty that a man may not be content with the mere prattle of reason such at satis- fies the lower creatures, but he must be a theor- ist, a philosopher, an idealist, a dweller in a world of mind, — or else miss manhood. All men are pressed upon by forces which, by the mercy of God, try to compel men to live accord- ing to the positive, health-giving law of the spirit. Thou shalt think. But thou shalt think correctly. This is the completed utterance of the first law of the code ; and this language gives body to the moral pur- port of this first law. For it is not enough to be content with an endowed mind. Nor is it enough to give the power of thought abundant exercise. Content with the possession of the oracles of God may result in spiritual miserliness. Sophistry, Jes- uitry are not intellectual goals; they are intel- lectual diseases. Mephistophelean or Napole- onic use of intelligence is not the fruit of obe- dience but of disobedience of the first law of the spirit's life. A man must think correctly; he must succeed in thought. Unless he gains the vital rest of union with the mind of God, «0 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT unless, in other words, he gains the equipoise of truth, a man will die spiritually. Just be- cause man is by nature a thinker; just because there is this fact, namely, a creature whose characteristic power and dominant responsi- bility is thought, — therefore thought and its goal, God, are the very first truth about human nature and human welfare. Because man is a thinker, therefore, so man must conclude, the Eternal Mind exists. Be- cause man must think, therefore, man must seek the Eternal Mind. And because man, under the necessities of his highest life, must seek the Eternal Mind, therefore man must think ac- cording to the moral law, he must think cor- rectly, in conformity with everlasting fact, and must find his rest and his reward in the intel- lectual integrity of God. This is the notion back of the really great word Orthodox. It has been laughed out of use. Great words, seized by parties, are prone to take on two meanings, one, majestic and ex- alting, which cannot be lost except at our hu- man expense; one, petty, disputatious, irritat- ing, which cannot be kept except at our human expense. The great word orthodox has suf- fered from insult. It means thought coincident with God's thought. It means man palpitating with desire to get his mind in union with the Eternal Reason. It means the throbbing will of all the human life that ever lived to get the THE FIRST LAW 21 best member that it has, which is its mind, to name and praise the living God. We know well that this word was once great and majestic in its use. Only a gracious and noble ortho- doxy could have produced the language of Christian worship in prayer, in creed and dogma. Thought, splendidly reverent but splendidly bold, tried, in the Christian creed, to describe for our intellectual guidance, the historic activity of God. Thought, sweet with moral flavor, eager to reveal truth and honor it, in creed and prayer and song named the one great divine Mind by the most human of all the many names for God: Father, Son, and Spirit. Orthodoxy as an instinct, made men know that intellectual integrity can be in God only, so that to be of honest mind is to be in God, and to be in God must be to be of honest mind. Thou art a thinker; thou shalt think; and thou shalt think correctly, — says the first law of our spirit's life. And the law works in our members. It is part of the way that we are made. It is part of the way of life decreed for man's travel. Jesus stated this same law, only in another form. Thou shalt have none other gods but me, — is one form. There is a God, but there is but one God, — ^because thought is. We must think; we must think aright; that is the path to the fruition of our spirit. This is one way «2 THE CODE OF THE SPHIIT of putting the law. Jesus's way was only a difference of language, the meaning was the f same, — Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind. A man who links his mind to God's mind is, so far, living a spiritual life. He may be trained in the schools or untrained. But train- ing has nothing to do with the actual operation of the law. As the laws of chemistry work on a mountain top or in a valley, so the laws of the spirit of a man work in men educated or uneducated, rich or poor, prominent or ob- scure. God's mind is, in one word, Christ. The man who thinks in accord with God's mind is a spiritual man and will bring forth the fruits of the divine Spirit. It is not such a man who produces a rich crop of excuses for the blunders which injure mankind. It is not such a man who excludes ignorance from a genuine responsibility. It is not such a man who divorces thought from conduct and makes vital separation between belief and opinion on the one hand and the dignity and com- pletion of life on the other hand. Indeed the first effect of reverent thinking is the sense that all our life is of one piece and that "The head is not more native to the heart, the hand more instrumental to the mouth" than is thought to conduct or responsibility to thought. To think with God is to think aright. On the other hand to think awry is to miss THE FIRST LAW 23 God. It has ever been the fool, the clever fool, — ^who never paused to ask what his clever thought itself is, — ^who said in his heart "There is no God." But the man who thinks according to this first law of the spirit, because he thinks dutifully, because he thinks accurately, that thinking man, bold to experiment, humble enough to learn, honorable enough to pay every cost of pain required to purchase truth, that man, whether his field of thought be narrow or expanded, finds God and is, so far, a spiritual man. THE SECOND LAW MAN AS ADMIRER Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, nor the Hkeness of anything that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the water xmder the earth; thou shalt not bow down to them, nor worship them ; for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, and visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me ; and show mercy unto thousands in them that love me and keep my commandments . Thou shalt admire aright. THE SECOND LAW The second law governing the life of a man's spirit, is based on the natural fact that man is an admirer. As man is a thinker by nature, so by nature man is also an admirer, and upon that fact his life depends. The epigram "Man lives by his admira- tions" is familiar. It means, obviously, that admiration, — as contrasted with suspicion and contempt, or even with exertion or meditation, — quickens a man's vitality. A lover is in a pretty vital condition. His fears, at which men sometimes laugh, are yet the fruit of an invigorated fancy. His absorp- tion, while it has an almost comic side, is the fruit of a quickened power of concentration. But besides these double-faced qualities the lover is strangely capable of resolution and of enterprise. Dignity, too, dates often from falling in love. Such a condition is a vital one, and it is bom of admiration. So, also, a man devoted to a specific career is strangely vital. He has ability to suffer. He is able to wait. He is capable of contrivance. He can perse- vere indefinitely. He is irrepressible. Such a condition is a vital one, and it is born in him of his admiration for his work. By this, therefore, it is wisely said, a man lives. From it come elation and exuberance. ^7 28 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT From it come buoyancy, magnetism, charm. From it, as though it were a magic treasure- box, a man brings, without knowing how and to his own surprise, a lavish plenty of the qualities which make life attractive and worth while. Ad- miration is the secret. Admiration is the natural fact on which is built the structure of vital, of desirable life. Man is an admirer. He is that sort of creature. So obvious is the fact that there is an epigram about it. And there is laid upon a man the positive and compulsive demand "Thou shalt admire." There is neither speech nor language but the voice of this demand is heard by everyone. The forces innate in man's spirit strain, like impris- oned gases, to express themselves in admiration. The forces lodging in the outer world beckon and lure a man to lose himself and be happy in an object of admiration. It is the same with this law as with all divine law. Nature and cir- cumstance conspire to enforce submission, to compel one's admiration into ardent exercise. And man does admire. He admires or he dies. No such thing as a thorough nil admirari policy is possible. As soon may a stone flung into the air, refuse to rise or fall. A man must, and a man does admire something, or he dies. He may be indiscriminate ; he may be promiscu- ous ; he may be fickle ; but none the less the law works in his members as forcibly as the law of respiration, and the man proceeds daily upon THE SECOND LAW 29 his selection of divinities. It may be a woman ; it may be a man ; it may be a career ; it may be pleasure; it may be a mere quality of temper like indifference; it may be riches, power, knowledge, or God. But whatever it be, it is an object reached for by the eager hand of ad- miration whose motive is to bind the man to something which already deserves applause. There is a world about a man, a world full of things visible and things invisible, — and the man, created with that sort of impulse which bids him yield himself up as food, seeks by the force of nature to find his life by losing it in something got at by admiration and by admira- tion only. This is the root of the ideality and of the purest, the most efficient righteousness of man- kind. "Thou shalt admire" is the law. There- fore we make for ourselves gods. It is God's law that we shall do so. God himself is the first cause of all gods. And only because he is the God of gods does this law, in its universal operation, bring some of the children of men to its complete, its satisfying obedience. For the God of all gods has made the very goodness of the things that men admire to bring a man into injury and hurt unless above all gods a man admires the true, the Christlike, the Sovereign Spirit. What man admires is good. In itself it is good. That is why a man gives it his admiration. Pleasure, fame, riches, power, 80 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT food, a woman, wit, — they are good. It is an idle, foolish lie to say that badness is in these objects essentially. They may be the instru- ments of a good life just as surely as they may be the instruments of an evil life. The quarrel with these divinities is the well-worn problem of supremacy. "Thou shalt admire" — is the law which agitates but also guides every man. It is not, however, the completed frame of this law. Thou shalt admire aright; thou shalt admire that which is, above all else, admirable, — is the completed frame. In the words of the spiritual man the frame of this law is different although the meaning is the same: Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, the I Am, the Living Spirit, with all thy heart. The Living God, the Christ- revealed God, the Eternal Spirit, which alone can have provided this admirable world, — is the God of gods, and to this object every man who lives as a man must direct his admiration. Herein is the tragedy which thrives upon this law of a man's life. For this moral element is fair but cruel. Thou shalt admire is an easy law. All the lovelinesses of this abounding world help a man to move with almost boister- ous obedience upon this general, this broad and winding path. A career, a sensation, a reputa- tion, an accomplishment, a woman, — ^what a world of divinities there are! But over all is one God. These manifold divinities themselves have a Father, a Sovereign, a Sanctifier. These THE SECOND LAW 81 may be admired healthily only by him who most of all admires their God. With their God, a man who admires them and whatever else is good because of a prior admiration for their and man's own Christlike Sovereign, has joined the ranks of the most effective people. But without their God, a man who admires the greatest or the least of these lower divinities is turned toward destruction. And here is the ap- parent cruelty, in that there is laid upon man the heavy tax of admiration not for what man pleases but for the Living God. It is, however, from manhood made mighty by obedience to this so-styled cruelty that hu- man progress can most easily be traced. Ad- miration for the Living God — ^was the root of Israel. -Admiration for the gracious, mani- foldly vital God — was the root of Greece. Ad- miration for that potent God who embodies jus- tice — was the root of Rome. Admiration for the Christlike God was and is the root of Chris- tendom. And Israel, Greece, and Rome, and Christendom are the rocks of human attainment as of human expectation. In them have the generations of the earth been blessed. Because of them has mercy from on high been showered upon the race of man. For it is the man who obeys the laws of the spirit, the spiritual man, who has done the work which has been done on earth. And nothing can be clearer than the assertion that that man 32 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT is spiritual who, looking with delight upon the world which is so good, makes yet no idol of its excellences whereto to submit his soul but un- qualifiedly, heartily, and intelligently admires the Sovereign, the Monarch, the Christlike God of gods. THE THIRD LAW MAN AS CREATIVE WORKER Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless, that taketh his Name in vain. Thou shalt create aright. THE THIRD LAW The natural fact on which the third law of man's spirit stands, is the fact that man is a creator. Creation is an extensive idea. When we say "God is the One Creator," we are speaking in the language of the insoluble problem of ex- istence itself. Who made the material of the world, the substance which we think cannot vary at any time in quantity, — who made it.f^ Who or what made the spiritual beings, the people, who inhabit the earth? We answer, "God." And although in this answer there is concealed, as we know, a host of problems, yet we are con- tent so to explain the unexplained mystery of existence. In this sense of creation man is no creator at all. But creation is an extensive idea, and the common understanding of it does not begin until after existence has been, presuma- bly, accounted for. In this common under- standing man is as God is a creator. For, according to the familiar poem, in the beginning of the creative enterprises of God the earth already was. It was without form and void. And God laid His word. His idea. His reason. His spirit upon it, — and then the dra- matic course of continuous creation got under way. To-day we are accustomed to say that 35 S6 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT creation is a continuous process. It is the push that comes from the squaring of work to the ideal intention. God, the Creator, is forever busy with His worldful of things and people. In this extensive sense of creation man is, quite as really as God is, a creator. And the third law of I he spirit of a man is based upon this fact. It is important to get the idea of man as creator clear and distinct. To say that man is a laborer is not enough. The idea must be suf- ficient to serve as a foundation not for discom- fort, nor yet for good luck, nor yet for art only, but for the building of human character. Mere labor, mere drudging exertion, toilsome effort, or work containing no creative elements, do not possess the cohesive dignity which is needed to uphold a character. Every animal, every vegetable, is born to labor and work. "They toil not, neither do they spin" is true of them only in the language of human toiling and human spinning; they have their own sort of work. But they have no career in character. Indeed, one fattest root of trouble for men is their content with such analysis of their own nature as obscures or misnames their native dig- nity and leaves them too indiscriminate amongst the countless atoms of the world. Man is a worker, a drudge, a laborer. So is a bee, or an ant, or a maggot. With such analysis of him- THE THIRD LAW 87 self, with such implied specification of his quali- ties, a man is certain to esteem his life as of a piece in dignity or indignity with the maggot or the bee. But the facts of the case are otherwise. Man is a worker, — but he is more. The root of the opinion about the curse of work is the instinc- tive sense that a man's work has got to contain such quality as lifts man nearer to God, or else it is actually a damning influence. A peculiar quality of work it is which is demanded of a man. Upon human exertion the supremest gov- ernment has laid a dignifying tax. Man is, it is true, a worker like a maggot ; but man is also an architect. Man is a laborer hke an ant ; but man is also a designer. Man is a drudge like a bee; but he is also an originator and a pioneer. Man is an actor ;he is an automatic machine like a toy or a bug; but also he is a leader, a con- triver, a creator like God. Creation is the eff^ective application of rea- son, idea, mind, or imagination to whatever in- struments stand waiting to be used. The man who thinks out a house, a machine, a roadway, and by force of human energy gets constructed that thing which is in his thought, is a creator. An eff^ective designer is a creator. A thinker who incarnates his thought is a creator. A schemer, a leader, a planner, an originator is a creator. And it is this sort of quality which 38 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT must mark a man's work in order that his work may dignify him essentially. Oh, the tragic but irremediable complainings of the workers in this worldful of working men and working women ! It is a blood-stained fact, but still a fact, that their complainings shall never cease while the earth remaineth — except by one unwelcome means. Almost everywhere in the ranks of men the salt sweat of the worker will forever gall him. The centre of greatest pain in the crowded ranks may shift from day to day. The hand-workers may, to-day, feel the pain most keenly. To-morrow the head- workers may feel it most. The day after, it may be the unskilled man and woman who will most keenly feel it. But all workers shall chafe and suffer and bleed till doomsday — except by one unwelcome mercy. Only the worker's own self, only the worker's own obedience can bring this saving mercy to his rescue. This one or that one may indeed appear to be saved from inner agony. But he can be really and perma- nently saved by only one means and one mercy. That means and mercy is to think, to believe, to qualify the estimate of our own nature as highly as we ought, to count ourself and to be actually a creator, to put creative will into our work, to work habitually with our spirit. This is the decreed way by which a man can enter into life. It is the law. THE THIRD LAW 39 For the truth is that not only is a man by na- ture a creator like God but also the law works in a man with most positively compulsive force. Thou shalt be a creator. Thou shalt take the name of God. God's name is "The Creator." Thou, man, shalt take this name. Clearly this compulsive law is at the root of social progress. If the human race as a race obeyed this law, sublime and majestic manhood would abound and would dominate the world. The obedience of the few, it is, which has made the social world as good as it is. Look where we will for causes of the developed social state, none will appear as obviously forceful as this law working in harness with the other laws of the spirit of man. "Thou shalt take the name of God and be thyself a creator. Thou shalt ap- ply thy idea, thy ideal to thy work and to thy life." Is there any law which sounds as fa- miliar and imperative as that.? In youth when men set their resolution into plan, each man hears this law above all others. It runs parallel to a man's own pleasure. It fits in with a man's ambition. To be a leader, to be a commander, to be a designer, to create something, — that is what a man wants. He likes this law. And yet there is no harder task, no severer strain. It is an earnest of the loneliness of every man. It is the path to distinction and isolation. The few obey. The many, because of sloth, because of 40 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT timidity, because of comfort, forget the law. But kings and chieftains, reformers and philosophers, inventors and discoverers, patriots and martyrs have obeyed the law and by their obedience have lifted up the human world. From savagery to sociability, from barbarism to civility, from servitude to citizenship, from despotism to freedom, from superstition to hon- est doubt and on to lighted truth, from ha- bitual ignorance to habitual enquiry, from the ancient to the modern world, from the old pa- gan, hopeless humanism to the new Christian humanism, — man has moved under the leverage of an obedience rendered by some few men and some few women to the law "Thou shalt take the name of the Lord thy God, and be as God is, a creator." Liberated religion memorializes this obedience. Manifold industries, liberated commerce memorialize this obedience. The mul- tiplied schoolhouses and colleges of the world testify that men are trying to obey. Of the just finished century the characteristic was, not science but the application of science to common life. And what was that application other than the endeavor of men to obey this law working in their members? Man is by fact a creator. The law stands everlastingly, "Thou, man, shalt take the name of God." But not in vain, not ineffectually, not so that the result will be emptiness and worthlessness. THE THIRD LAW 41 On the contrary, thou shalt take the name of God as God takes it; thou shalt create virtue. Character is the product which interests God and which enriches the world. Men of spirit, women of spirit, are the pearls, of price hidden in the fields of this earth. Personality is the task on which all the instruments of God are employed. It is not a sunset, nor an eclipse, nor a tornado at sea which explains the en- deavors of the forces of the world. Nor is it simply a man. But it is a good man. And this faith is surely becoming more and more established. It may perhaps be denied that a greater number of persons or a greater proportion of the people are to-day better, that is, more spiritual, more godly, more true and right than a thousand years ago. But it cannot be denied that to-day it is becoming obvious, and is more and more admitted, that not only the forces and circumstances of human life but also the natural energies of the world work to produce manhood. Sooner or later it will be easy to acknowledge the truth and easy, too, to submit to it with joy. That manhood is the goal of things; that character, that personal quality is the meaning of things ; that character is the true riches and the true efficiency, this is hard for us to believe but is yet the conviction to which our present world is being rapidly led. For consider the manifold occupations of the 42 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT modem world. There has never been in the past anything like it. Does it not compel belief that the single occupation binding all the work- ers of the world together into a single enterprise is the common manhood of which each man is capable? Or, consider the vital strifes between intimate fellow-workers, the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, in our modern world. There has never been anything like this strife. It is far more intimate and immediate, it is far more above the plane of necessaries of existence than any strifes in the world before. And it is clear to any man that the only solu- tion of the strife is not a wrenching of posses- sions from one side in favor of the other side but such a changed esteem of man's life, such a changed esteem of possessions, such a center- ing of interest in the man who is to be user and master of things for manhood's sake, that wealth-worship and wealth-strife will lose their dignity before the developed manhood of the coming days. Or, again, consider the modem condition of personal independence. It is far more clear, it is far more real than ever before. Now, indeed, it is almost past its chaotic stage in develop- ment. Man sees now with some ease that to be independent means to will to be dependent upon attested experts. It is therefore becoming easier for a man to say "I must be both a follower THE THIRD LAW 43 and a leader. In most things, indeed, I must follow obediently because my independence bids me depend on experts in their own fields. In some one or few things my independence bids me become expert that I may lead." Modern independence means on the one hand obedience, on the other hand leadership. Thus have the forces of the world worked upon the character of men. Indeed the lessons of our age and the sum of experience are clear in their intent to make us work creatively to produce manhood full of vir- tue. To try to produce virtuous manhood is the way to be a virtuous man. That is the gist of this third law. A man must work. He must work with an idea. And he must work to pro- duce virtue. Thou shalt take the name of God effectively. Thou shalt create Godlike man- hood. That is the law of our life. If we are to be men, if we are to stand and grow upon the human plane on which we were bom, we are bound to take the name of God not in vain but so that there shall proceed from us an influence productive not of fortune merely, not of sys- tems of knowledge merely, not of states merely, not of art merely, but of that which is produci- ble in every human life, manhood. To be a spiritual man, to be a true man, it is necessary to be an active partner in this enterprise of God's. THE FOURTH LAW MAN AS RECEIVER Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath-day. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all that thou hast to do ; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God. In it thou shalt do no manner of work; thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, thy man-servant, and thy maid-servant, thy cattle, and the stranger that is within thy gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it. Thou shalt receive (i. e. absorb) the Spirit of God. THE FOURTH LAW The natural fact on which the fourth law is grounded is that man is so made as to be, it may be said, the very slave of rest. Indeed, it is hardly other than a matter of taste whether a man be described as a creature that works or as a creature that rests. Attach dignity to the idea of work; make work mean an activity that accomplishes something worthy ; call that man only a worker who strives not merely to keep himself and others alive, but to augment and deepen his own and others' man- hood: call only such effort by the honorable name work. Then on the other hand, be equally fair to the idea of rest. Make rest mean re- freshment, re-formation, re-pose, re-creation, a new start, a new consecration, a new attachment to an ideal. Give work its real, that is, its ideal meaning; and give rest its ideal which is its real meaning ; and then it is hardly other than a matter of taste whether the creature man be de- fined in terms of work or in terms of rest. In this sense, man is the only creature that works. In this sense, man is the only creature that can rest. There is, of course, a universal physical basis for this human ability to reach perfectness in both rest and work. That physical basis com- 47 48 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT mon to all creatures, confirms the assertion — since man is a peculiar creature, that man's rest must be peculiar to man. The fact of sleep, the actuality of fatigue, the startling truth that man is so limited as to spend almost half his lifetime in unconsciousness, have driven home to man's wit in all ages and places, a sense of the real, that is, the ideal contents of human re- pose.^ In all ages and places there has existed the well-known and significant attachment be- tween the ideas of rest and worship, or, if you choose, idleness and holiness. An actual linkage exists between these ideas, a linkage forged in physical terms. Rest is one of the elementary necessities of creaturehood. But rest, when it is a man's rest, is one of the essential features of spiritual living. The word rest, as it happens, has suffered from excessive use. The side of its meaning most in evidence is the negative one, the ease of idleness, the unconsciousness of sleep. Its other side shows a truer meaning. For the idleness and the sleep, indeed all the forms which rest as- sumes, have a clear, positive purpose, they obey an obvious fact in man's constitution, the fact that man is a receiver. To be the slave of rest is to be obliged to act as the receiver of power. It is clear that acting as a giver expresses positive power. But also, to receive, to open oneself so that the forces of the universe which THE FOURTH LAW 49 can buoy up one's life shall have the chance to do so, — expresses positive power. Man is made so that he can and must receive into himself the powers and persuasives of the world. Rest names the method or process; receptiveness is the feature, the natural fact of man's make-up. A man is made so as to be dependent upon the great, whole world. A man is under natural necessity to yield himself up to the influence of the whole. A man's part is, indeed, like that of the water drop in the ocean, which can realize within its own small self an ocean's dignity, and can do an ocean's work if it will employ, by as- similation and transmission, not its own power but the ocean's. Such is a man's part. Such positive receptiveness is essential to human growth. And rest is the expression of this fact. Con- sider rest, therefore, in any of its familiar forms. Sleep robs a man of his self-imposed tension and gives nature a chance to soothe him into tranquility. Idleness, when it offsets a usual activity, opens body and mind alike to a host of potent influences which empower a man as he chooses for good or ill. Sport, which is the next form of rest, feeds the imagination and is the seed of victory in contests had in other and so- called serious fields. Why is it true that Wel- lington won Waterloo on the foot-ball field at Eton.^ It is an acceptable truth. The powers 50 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT of contest got into him there, as they get into every honest player who keeps play in its right place, and they made Wellington strong for broadest battlefields. So is it in the next form of rest which is diversion. There, a man turns from action in which compulsion predominates, to action over which volition rules, until fa- tigue, appearing to be destroyed by another sort of fatigue, succumbs in fact to that power about us which takes us in charge at the in- vitation of our relaxation and self-f orgetfulness. In diversion, the guardianship of all our affairs except our hobby, is in the hands of tireless na- ture, and our hands are free. ^ And in the high- est form of rest, worship, the same process operates. Here, a man worshipping aright, communes with the Eternal Person, opens him- self to the Supreme Spirit, receives God, and becomes a renewed man. If a man is not rested by what he calls worship then that man has not worshipped aright. If a man has not wor- shipped aright, if a nation has not learned to worship, then that nation or that man has never known the blessed possibilities of rest. Man at rest is man acting for the superior powers of the universe as a receiver, — like the water drop receiving the ocean into itself. This is man's necessity as well as his privilege. It is a feature of man's nature. And the highest form of rest, the rest most needed, is that with THE FOURTH LAW 61 which all ages and all places have in their most serious study identified rest, — such worship as allows a man to receive into himself the most high and most holy Spirit of the Universal God. It is clearly true that "We can feed this mind of ours by a wise passiveness." But more is true: we must- do it. Man is a receiver and he must receive. Thou shalt keep holy the Sab- bath — which is the rest of God. Thou shalt rest as God rests. God rests, of course, in a very clear and ob- vious way. Not by idleness, as quick-tongued interpreters have said; not by sleep. God rests by a positive openness to truth and gracious- ness and right; by contemplation of the orig- inal merit of His plan ; by meditation upon His ideal for His creation. If God is alive, then there is truth in the idea of His rest. And that truth is the same as works through the common demand laid upon mankind to receive and be re- stored by the mysterious powers that be. Truth is God's refreshment. It is man's too. Gra- ciousness and good are God's repose. They are man's. God is rested by the realization of these within Himself. And all the multitudinous voices of rest lay a demand on man that hints of this same potent repose to be enjoyed by him who rests upon the bosom of his God. "Thou shalt rest" is the cry. And generation after generation bends to learn 5« THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT the lesson. Sport and play and holiday ; games, diversion, quiet; prayers and praise, — these are the institutions, quite as much as any others, by which we study men. A third of the indus- trial world and more is busy making play or rest for others. No one lives healthily a month without some deliberate and voluntary diversion. And while there are unhealthy people who do not play, there are none who do not need to re- ceive by some sort of positive opening of their soul, the powers that beat beneficently upon them. It is no negative endeavor. It is a posi- tive need of acting as a receiver. "Why do not all the people who play make choice of an amusement that shall be produc- tive?" That question is asked by more than one undiscriminating and miscalled serious stu- dent of his kind. He thinks men are here to produce things, to adjust materials, to polish up the earth. But that is only part of what we are here for, and the subordinate part. We are here first of all to make good men. We are here to make personality. We are here to de- velop the image of God which is photographed on the film of our nature and which awaits our developing. To do it a man must rest. He must become a receiver of power. He must learn to do this or else he cannot be a man. And he must do it, not because he can make some- thing out of it, but because he makes himself THE FOURTH LAW 53 out of it. Until a man begins to make himself, he has not begun to be a man. And the only way to do it is to open the doors and let the mighty but delicate powers of the Great Spirit have their chance to work within the soul. It is easy to see why the common sense of men has linked rest and worship together. And it is not difficult to see why Sunday questions are so generally debated as rest questions rather than as worship questions. The physical, the obvious elements in any problem tend to absorb attention. Nevertheless the Sunday rest de- pends finally on Sunday worship. Is worship of God, the institutional, customary, general worship of God necessary to the best life.? And will the people clamoring for rest, take rest in this way as far as it is actually necessary.? In the conflict of men there is no certain ground for human decisions except a belief that God demands this and not that, and works His demand through the continual and obedient operations of nature. If men want a merely inactive, idle rest, they will inevitably come in conflict with other men who want merely an ac- tive, strenuous exertion. If the one is right, the other is. And men will fight it out and the stronger will have their way. But if neither is right; if the actual law of every man's life is "Thou shalt rest, and thy rest must include a systematic and positive opening of thyself to 64 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT the Eternal, the Holy Spirit," then only when that law is accepted and obeyed is there a possi- bility that the Sabbath will be maintained and that no man shall lose his rest against his will. The fourth law in the code of the spirit of a man stands actually so. A man is a receiver. He must receive. And he must receive the Holy Spirit. A man must rest; and the highest rest, the rest which refreshes and restores a man's graciousness and purity and high resolve and sanctity, is worship of God. This law a man must learn how to keep. He must keep it as a man, that is, as one amongst many. He and his neighbor must bow before the same and only God. And here it must be said that if a man finds the aids to the keeping of this law offered by the institutions of to-day to be unfit, then the man is by that fact called to be the founder of new institutions. He must find some way whereby he and others may stir up within themselves a best quality of manhood. Prayer is a way. The Word, telling of other men possessed by the Spirit, is a way. The contemplation of Christ, the Ideal Man, is a way. The entering into the meanings of Christian sacrament and ceremony is a way. The present expression of any of these ways may, undoubtedly, be improved, and it is the duty of the unsatisfied man to do it. Some way to such rest as brings the Spirit of THE FOURTH LAW 55 the Christlike God into our soul must be trav- eled, — for that is an ordinance of nature. Thou art a receiver, a receptacle, if you choose; and thou shalt receive the Spirit of God. Christ recited this law in the familiar and sweeter way, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy soul." And we need to believe that the love which Christ thus calls for is no indefinite yearning and surging, but is the open- ing of the soul in such definite ways that the soul is rested and the primal work of God, the making of a good man, resumed. This is re- creation. This is reformation and refreshment. This is also worship and rest. And it is the law. THE FIFTH LAW MAN AS AN HEIR Honor thy father and thy mother; that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. Thou shalt honor those of whom thou art a beneficiary. THE FIFTH LAW The natural fact under the fifth law of the spirit is that man is an heir. ^FuU of treasure is the world. And the treasure is a man's. It is his by no less dignifying right than the right of inheritance. For a man is an heir. From his father and his mother a man in- herits both body and health. From them, also, with rare exception, come nurture and protec- tion. From them, by the mysterious transport of the blood, if not by the equally mysterious transmission through personal contact, come disposition and quality. Parents are the Crea- tor's agents for transferring this sort of inheri- tance to the new-comer to earth. There is, however, a parentage less obvious but no less real than that of the father who be- gets and the mother who bears. There is a spirit ancestry. The progenitors of to-day are the men and women who lived before to-day. All the makers of the past are parents to the man bom to-day. And he is the heir of them all. He owns a spiritual pedigree. He accounts for himself by reference to his spiritual fore- fathers. From them he has inherited the influ- ences which make him to be himself. The wealth of some or many of these parents in the past is made over to the new-bom heir. The 69 60 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT greater part of whatever a man has or can have, he acquires by inheritance. And he cannot help this dependence. He cannot refuse his patri- mony. The world is made that way. Because he is a man he is the heir of men. This natural fact that man is an heir is ob- vious. Politically we, as Americans, inherit — and we continually affirm it — great riches. Our fathers in the spirit have bequeathed us politi- cal treasure without which we are sure we could not be content to live. How they could have been brave enough, unselfish enough, enough influenced by consideration for children yet un- born, how they could have persevered sufficient- ly, we can hardly understand ! We doubt if we could do such work. And yet so far as condi- tions go, we are much better equipped for work than our fathers were. For, indeed, we have profited more than they from their work. They did the work. We received, by inheritance, the pay. The same thing is obvious in religion so far as church conditions go. The treasure of a free church, free not merely from state control, but in its will to deal with men on the basis of their own freedom rather than on the basis of a sup- posed servitude to evil from which church force sets a man free, — ^this sort of treasure, this only hope for religion in our land, is ours by inher- THE FIFTH LAW 61 itance from our fathers. They, not we, did the work. We, rather than they, own the fortune. More obviously still this fact appears in the industrial, scientific, and educational conditions of to-day. Our fathers have opened occupa- tions, adaptations, and knowledge to us in more lavish measure than any one of them could have imagined. They worked and saved and be- queathed. We inherit and possess. And in our turn, we transfer a fortune bettered or im- paired to the sons of our spirit. Other men have labored. That is a fact. We have entered into their labors. That also is a fact, a fact in nature. Of the effects of frailty, of failure, of disease, of sin, we are quick to perceive our inheritance. It is just as obvious that, day by day, a man inherits the riches of his fathers. Although we all admit the inher- itance of ills and are reluctant to admit the in- heritance of riches, it is clear that in a progres- sive society the latter heritage is more influen- tial and effective than the former. But it is important to see what we do not ac- quire by inheritance. We do not inherit virtue. We do not inherit sin. Merit and demerit are not transferable. The effects of merit, the re- sults of demerit, the consequences, the wages, the savings of endeavor, — such are the prop- erty which is got by inheritance. There is, perhaps, such a thing as an inherited force of 62 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT habit. A force of habit making toward virtue or making toward vice, may, perhaps, be inherited. But a force is not itself a virtue. Virtue is like wisdom. A library can change owners; wisdom cannot. We can inherit free churches, free po* litical institutions, free educational institutions, vast scientific and industrial opportimities. They are, like any other transferable treasures, ours to use for good or for ill. But we cannot inherit virtue, reverence, freedom, wisdom, inventive- ness, industry, religion, any more than we can inherit sin and guilt. We are heirs, heirs to a fortune. And the fortune is just precisely that which we naturally mean when we wish for a fortune, namely, agreeable conditions in which to develop the spirit of a man. The positive element in this fifth law is more evident than in the other nine laws. Its fa- miliar wording declares that a man must wear in his soul that positive dignity of an heir, honor towards his benefactor. The wholesome attitude, indeed, for any man is the aristocratic one, the one habitually taken by the well-bom. It is wrong, it is stupid, to urge a disuse of such a reasonable pride. The wish should rather be that men in general should live in the truly aristocratic spirit. Only if a man is well- born can there be, even to the far-seeing eye of God, a place for the force of honor. Honor your father and your mother. If they be hon- THE FIFTH LAW 63 orable ; if they be meritorious ; if even there be the least doubt about their alleged dishonor, — yes. But if they be beneath worth, then truth and right rob a son of his privilege of giving honor. A son whose blood is sullied by parental indignity, can hardly know the spontaneous, aristocratic motive in his heart. But yet if he will discern his larger but equally true parent- age, nothing can keep him from his own; and with a conscious honor eager for bestowal, he will carry his head high and look genially into the faces of men. There is a "Noblesse oblige" quality which is demanded of a man because he is a man. And that is what this law is about. A man is re- quired by the positive will of the Creator to live in the spirit of the well-born. And a man can do so intelligently and honestly if he will remember the natural fact of his spirit parent- age. Thereby he may enter into his inheritance from some one or more of the master-men amongst his fathers in the past. He is an heir. He is well-born. It is required of him that he accept possession of genuine aristocratic quality. No other meaning can attach to the conten- tion that a man should esteem himself a son of God. Such sonship, — the essence of the Chris- tian momentum which has advanced the world, — ^means that God, working through men and 64 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT women, our natural and spiritual parents, pro- duced us. It means also that there is a positive pride, a propriety, in the constant exercise of honor because of our birth. We are sons and heirs of God. We should be, we must be aristo- cratic. How naively is this thought confirmed by the estimate of the parentage of Christ! How de- sirous men were to point out his blood relation- ship to distinguished and commanding persons in the days before Him! How content He was to call Himself the Son of Man! How defin- itely He declared a relationship, filial as well as fraternal, between Himself and others devoted to the will of the Supreme One! "Whosoever shall do the will of My Father which is in heaven, the same is My brother, and sister, and mother." And, finally, how men have rested their effort to describe the honor within Christ, the aristocratic quality of His spirit, by calling Him The Son of God! Its highest, its moral reach is attained by this law in its assertion that by the exercise of tionor toward parents men create social stabil- ity. For to this end it is not honor merely which is required, but honor of the best sort. It must be said again that the honor demanded of a man is not indiscriminate ; it is to be paid to our parents not because they are dead and gone, nor yet because they produced us, but when and THE FIFTH LAW 66 because they are meritorious. And further, it is to be had in mind that just as a man is the child of his own works, so honor, exercised cor- rectly, begets merit in the man who exercises it. It is obvious that the social stability of the past lodged in the people of merit. It always lodges there. Hence, when we honor our parents aright and thereby generate merit in ourselves, then it is that we make stable — in the true sense which admits of improvement — the society of which we are a part. We may dwell wisely for a moment upon the truth that social stability was and is the off- spring of merit. That community will live long which lives not upon the repute of its in- herited name merely, but upon that power, generative of social stability, which gets into operation by exercise of a discriminating honor. It is not enough to be content with the fact that we are heirs. An inheritance, let it be said again, brings no guarantee of virtue. The pride which is native to the heir of cir- cumstance and repute, may miss the truly aristocratic spirit and be instead a mere resting on the oars, if not a presumptuous impudence. From such come not social stability but social decay. But the moral element in this law whips men up to such discriminating honor toward their honorable, their classic parentage, as makes it possible for the stability of the past to 66 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT be repeated and improved in the present. In the past only classic people, that is, people of the first class, or rather, only people with clas- sic quality, may be credited with transmitting social stability to the present. It was the clas- sic qualities in the heart and the mind of our father and mother which are to be esteemed and honored. Other qualities, also influential it is true, have hindered and continue to hinder the quick and complete development of society. To these other qualities we owe no honor. Our honor is demanded of us as the due of those men and women who ordered themselves well and worthily. Their classic example, their parental influence, their social efficiency, are about us all. And the burden of this law lies upon us in order that, like our progenitors, we may become the honored parents of a social future that shall abide. Our part in this is to be discriminate in honor. We must select our true parentage. By virtue of our sacred individuality, we stand under bonds to choose from amongst the classic people of the past those from whom we shall consciously inherit. Thus shall we in part create ourselves. Thus shall we import into our day the social stability of earlier days and serve as a force enabling our people to live long in our God-given land. But in these respects we need be full of care- fulness. The Chinese nation is a monument of THE FIFTH LAW 67 a social stability of one sort ; and it is said that the virtue of the Chinese is their honoring of parents. Now, in our instinctive esteem, this virtue stands so high that some men have won- dered if, to a wise judge, Chinese civilization equals or surpasses the Christian. But surely this wonder fails to see the Christian effort to obey the deeper truth, the more vital element in this universal law, in accord with which Chris- tian peoples, by their sort of honor-giving, create a civilization which improves. The Chi- nese honor indiscriminately. The Christian honors the honorable, the first class, the classic. The Chinese present is born of the past and is exactly like the past. The Christian present is born of the classic in the past, and is ad- vancing toward a widespread possession of classic qualities. By social stability the Chi- nese mean, so we have been led to understand, social immobility. The Christian meaning is social improvement. Therefore we have as the opinion of one wise Christian, "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." We want to live long in the land, but we hope that the characteristic of our stability will be not its length of time, but its excellence of life. It is now, the quiet, subconscious working of this law, — which like all real laws, is written in our members, — ^that has turned the good 68 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT sense of men to-day to the study of history. The study of history, the method and the de- gree of that study, is, probably, a correct index of a civilization. Where the past is idolized, there is no history. And where there is no his- tory, where there is no squaring of the present to the classic standard, there can be, of course, no production of a higher classic, and therefore no progress. On the other hand, where there is an exercised instinct for history, that is, where there is an ambition to excel, and where the past is neither idolized nor forgotten but is honored, — there, the noblest abilities of men, in politics, in thought, in art, in religion, have a chance to exercise parental influence, helping its posses- sors to second birth and to most prosperous pro- creation. And so, finally, when it is remembered that the most influential classic is the classic person- ality, the classic human life; when it is remem- bered that the instinct for history is the sure and sensible path to an association with the classic man, Christ ; when it is remembered that to be born of Christ is to be bom of God and to be therefore a spiritual man; — ^then it appears reasonable and wise to consent gladly to. the highest operations of this law. All laws have in them hints of danger. This law works upon our taste for riches ; and there is danger there. It appeals to our instinctive desire for aristo- THE FIFTH LAW 69 cratic privilege; and there is danger there. It directs us to a delight in history, to a pleasure in the accomplishments of men; and there is a danger even there. But all this is to assure us of our parentage in both the classic Christ and in all the God-filled people of the days that are gone: it is to show us the divineness of our pedigree, to the end that by honoring our fa- thers and mothers who are honorable, we may generate in ourselves a classic sonship and trans- mit to our posterity, long established in our land, the qualities of classic men and women. THE SIXTH LAW MAN AS SAVIOR Thou shalt do no murder. Thou shalt save life. THE SIXTH LAW Jesus Christ could not have been the Savior of mankind unless there be in man, as part of his composition, a savior's nature. The differ- ence between Jesus and other men is in his ful- filled saving ability: we know by daily experi- ence that he and not another saves us. But we know, also, that the secret of his ability lodges in the manhood which we share with him. No other man possesses that particular commission which he received of God — the commission to be savior to the whole human race ; but every man, in being saved by Jesus Christ, in being ruled by his influence, finds that his own savior-nature gets quickened into life within him, and that he himself begins to realize a responsibility for the humanhood of each member of the human race with whom he has to do. For the fact is, we all are saviors, preservers. It is a fact of human nature. It is the fact which made pos- sible the Savior of our race. And this fact is really a familiar one. Its force is well recognized in the beaten paths of experience. Consider the much remarked incli- nation of men to obey whatever appears to have authority. For authority, so long as it is un- criticised, stands as the exponent of the true and right, and to these, the saving forces of 73 74 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT life, our obedience is given. We obey author- ity so that while it saves us it may with our help save others also. Then, too, we yield our- selves instinctively to the conditions or circum- stances in which we happen to be; we become, instinctively, supporters of our environment. And this expresses the fact that we are conser- vators by nature. We are predisposed to pre- serve things as they are, and to hold hard to the conviction that whatever is, so long as it is part of our make up, has a right to be. That is, admittedly, where a man begins. Culture alone rebels. Instinct bids him support, obey, save that which he finds enthroned. Take it in opinions. We greedily conserve what we heard in the beginning. To correct an opinion is to suffer from growing pains. Take it in taste. The standards of taste, whether they be good or bad, are in general almost sta- tionary. It is proverbially true, also, in cus- toms, many of which live so long as to grow stale. If we consider the peoples of the earth, it is very few who have rebelled against the conditions and standards under which they found themselves. The few indeed have re- belled. Culture has lighted up this group of individuals or that small commonwealth and then, by the power of rebellion, their savior in- stinct has received a new field, a wider field, in which to operate, one too in which to conserve new instincts. THE SIXTH LAW 76 By nature, then, man is a savior. Because he is a savior he can be saved by his brother, for otherwise his brother could not be a savior. And when a man is saved he is lifted into a de- veloped ability to be more true to himself and to assume a new measure of savior duties as his own. This is the basal reason for the law "Thou shalt not murder." Its other wording is "Thou shalt be a savior." But when applied to social experiences, this law seems fated to carry a dangerous error. For it is most common to restrict the meaning of murder to the loss of visible existence. Mur- der as a disposition of our spirit, however, has but little to do with loss of existence. To de- prive a man of existence may be wrong or it may be right. To deprive him of life, to di- minish or degrade his quality, is always wrong! Indeed, because of the over-esteem of mere ex- istence, the scope of murder, the facility with which a man may develop within himself a mur- derer's quality, is little seen, and men and women who talk with tearful eyes and bleeding hearts about untimely or violent death, may be themselves the very microbes of the spirit of murder. Untimely or violent death may not be murder. Killing may not be murder. If it were, who shall say that the God who has made death universal, is not revealed thereby as a murder- ous Spirit.? 76 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT Murder is, in short, a moral matter, not a physical. This law is a moral law, a law of the spirit. It is not a physical law nor is it con- cerned merely with temporal residence on the earth. The subject of this law about murder is not the existence of men but the life of men. It is often noted that men generally can see existence but are blind to life. Existence is the visible thing; life the invisible. Existence is the walls and materials of the house. Life is the associations, the honor, the personal quality which dwell in the house. And because of over- emphasis of the one at the expense of the other, there is upon the subject of murder general confusion. For instance, war is not usually discussed sanely. Whether the talk be for war or against it, the issue which, if murder has anything to do with it, is life and not temporal existence, is almost never brought clearly into light. If, however, it be true that murder is concerned with life rather than with existence, it is forci- bly conceivable that a nation might easily be guilty of the most iniquitous murder simply by refusing to engage in some specific war. It is the same in talk about capital punish- ment. Sentiment bred upon the nineteenth cen- tury virtue, pity, has befogged the wits of men, until the sovereign people are afraid to put a man to judicial death because the undiscrimin- THE SIXTH LAW 77 ating public tongue links repugnant murder even to judicial death. "If the criminal is dead there is no hope for him" cries the pitying reformer. Why not? Is he not as immortal as ever? Has he not just as actual a life as ever? Exclude immortality, and then his death is a matter of least importance. Include im- mortality, and then his existence and his death alike are incidents entirely subordinate to jus- tice. The one judicial question is — has he be- haved so that the life and, in this case, the ex- istence also of society have been struck at with fatal purpose and result? At that point, jus- tice, the real governor of society, calls some- times for the removal of the man beyond so- ciety's limits. And only death can do that. Dreadful as is the duty of inflicting death, jus- tice, which is one name of God, may require men in society to assume and execute it. — And the effort to save a criminal from deserved ju- dicial death, may easily make the consenting community so complacently murderous as to endanger both its own dignity, honor, and stem purity which are its life, and also the tem- poral existence of many of its better members, the murderers' victims. Likewise of lynchings, while there is no jus- tification of them there is this extenuation. They proceed from the quickening within the community of that natural fact on which the 78 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT law about murder is based. "Thou shalt do no murder" or "Thou shalt be a savior of life" is the law. And the same community which one day talks with fervor about the wickedness of war and of judicial executions, the next day with frenzy and often with unspeakable bru- tality, takes a man identified in their excited mind with one who has struck a mortal blow at their honor, and kills him. The illegality of the act admits of no justification whatever. But the cure of their perverted social behavior cannot be had until justice is executed in ac- cord with the reality, not the sentiment, of the law about murder. In reality the sixth law is concerned with life and not with existence merely. It is not con- cerned with length of days merely. It is con- cerned with quality, with virtue, with dignity, with honor. These it is, which justice, which the military, which, indeed, the very physical forces of the earth, strive under God's direc- tion to protect and develop. To maintain these, war may be necessary, judicial death may be necessary. And this price, though it be one of blood, is none too high to pay for any digni- fying of the lives of men. Once again then, man is by natural composi- tion a savior. By moral requirement that which is to be saved is life, a thing of quality, a thing full of comparisons. And by positive THE SIXTH LAW 79 necessity a man, in order to escape the guilt of murder, must apply his savior will to the en- tire field of his personal endeavors. For the saving of life is not a dramatic incident: it is a continuous process. Take, for example, the field of temperament or disposition. The law here brings out a sharpest issue between a fulfilling, a perfecting inclination and a scornful, a contemptuous, a destructive inclination. A man is constantly meeting oppositions. Every task, every service which we are called upon to do is, in fact, a form of opposition to our will. To adopt toward any opposition an undiscriminating contempt and scorn, is simply to train the spirit in murder. A thousand forces oppose our own — which we call our good-will. What is the law under which our life-quality in the presence of opposition is governed? Or, to put it dif- ferently, toward any opposition, excepting al- ways unqualified evil if there be such, how must a man behave in order to do a man's work and at the same time grow in virtue? "I came to fulfil, not to destroy" was the disposition of Christ. To educe the good from both the op- posing sides, — that is the requirement of this Christian law. But the traditional habit of men spiritually undisciplined, is destruction, wanton destruction. Toward any opposition, — ^in peace, in instruction, in play, in war, — 80 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT destruction is the undisciplined disposition of the spirit. We see it often in the petty tyr- annies of parents and teachers. We see it in the wanton destruction of wild game and of the forests. We see it in the abuse of privileges. We see it in the disputes of men. In labor con- flicts, for example, the dignity and efficiency, often the existence of commerce are threatened. Also in the intricacies of friendship, especially under domestic conditions, scorn and contempt constantly display in divorce courts a ruin of the capacity for friendship itself. Take, again, the field of opinion. A man must endeavor in this field to be a savior of life. And the common issue here is between a utility which makes existence easy, and an idealty which makes life choice. "Sell the ointment and give the proceeds to the poor so that the poor may have another day of existence. To anoint a kingly man with costly although sym- bolic ointment is a waste." The man who said that first was already in his heart a murderer. And it is a commonest temptation to approve of small utilities and be at pains to secure them even at the deliberate expense of courtesies and sanctities. Many men have pride in an undis- criminating neglect of social courtesies. They style themselves unconventional. They are in fact and by the bondage of habit, uncon- sciously contemptuous of the grace of life. THE SIXTH LAW 81 They are the destroyers of life's graces. They are breakers of the law. They say, "I have more pressing business." They mean, existence is worthier than life. How many men spend time and money and thought and discipline in effort to sanctify the day's experience? We talk much about the day's work. It is time to talk more about the day's sanctification. To make home gracious; to make work service; to make associations sa- cred, these are the real business of life. But many men are dazed by such words as sacred- ness and sanctity. Their wits have been be- fogged by a love for the utilities of existence. In these familiar and innocent looking fields men harvest a murderous quality. For life, far more than existence, is very precarious. Gra- ciousness, highmindedness, reverence, honor, courage, have a way of gasping and dying at the very moment when existence seems most fat and well liking. And it is far easier to be a murderer, to have a murderer's heart and taste and habit, than it is to bear about in the body the spirit of a savior of life. There is a familiar way of thinking ^bout the power of Christ which helps a man to be a murderer before he knows it. Christ being now identified with the power behind the visible world is thought to be saying to men, "Be good or I will kill you. Once you had the 82 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT power to kill me. But now I have the power to kill you." Against that thought men instinc- tively and properly rebel. Unhappily, how- ever, counting this threat a true index of Christ, they refuse to follow Christ; they shut the Savior out of their minds ; and, therefore, they impair their own quality and their effect upon the public life. But the truth to-day is exactly as it was before. Christ says always to men, "Be good, be Christian, or you will kill me." Unless men are saviors, saviors of life, in their own souls and in their influence, they must kiU out the ennobling Christliness which is the only salt and savor of their own manhood as it is of our Christian civilization. It is the crucifying of the Son of God afresh which is the social danger. Where that murderous will is, there is degeneracy in life, — a shrinkage in liberty, in endeavor, in culture, in character. But who is the guilty one? We say without hesitation that others besides Czolgosz were guilty of President McKinley's murderous death. We say, having forgotten the Roman soldiery, that Christ died at the hands of his own murderous brethren not one of whom touched a hammer or a nail. For it is from re- mote causes that murderous crime has its start. As you follow backward the path of influences you see all alongside the way, the ruin of some of the graces of life, the work of wanton, scorn- THE SIXTH LAW 83 ful destruction. Finally you reach the heart and mind of a man or a woman presumably re- spectable, who secretly defied this sixth of the laws of God. He or she defied it and under that influence life began to sicken, although it appeared then prosperous and ruddy. No one decides deliberately to grow up to be a cutter of a neighbor's throat. But unless a man obeys this law in its positive and moral sense, he is likely to be far more guilty. "Thou shalt be a savior of the life of men" is the law. And only by walking in its spirit can we keep our hand guiltless both of our neighbor's blood and of that nail and cross which kill the Christ who is within every man born into the world. THE SEVENTH LAW MAN AS PRIEST Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt sanctify thy experiences. THE SEVENTH LAW The fact in man's nature which is foundation for this law is that man is a priest. Analyze the nature of a man, and he is seen to be amongst other things, a sanctifier, a beautifier, a transfigurer, a discoverer and declarer of clean- ness and holiness. He is a priest, and the seventh law bids him be in practice that which he is in constitution. The business of a professional priest is to di- rect attention to the holy, the godly qualities in the common experiences of men. A priest speaks professionally, — and the thing he is trying to do is to utter not his own words but the sanctifying word of God. A priest baptizes, and thereby tries to sanc- tify birth; he lifts the minds of those who are willing, up above the low esteem whereby the birth of a man is not distinguished from the birth of four-footed beasts and creeping things, up even to the thought that the faithful men and women of all the ages, those who have been true not to themselves first of all but to the Per- fect Man, — are the parental source of healthy character. It is true that we are bom of God by nature. So is a shark, and a bat, and a viper. And it is in our power to be indiscrim- inate, indefinite and confused in all our thought 87 88 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT about birth, about nature, and about God. In baptism a priest directs our thought to the truth that godly character must be brought to birth in us by the influence of the godly people who have been in the world. The Creator has provided us a spiritual parentage (in which our natural father and mother may or may not be included). This provision permits us to believe and behave about birth as though, in the very first moment of life and by means of his agents, God brought to birth an heir to the Kingdom of Heaven. By such faith only is birth a holy event. And up to this esteem of the children born to us, the professional priest, using a symbol as an instrument, tries to lift our minds. Likewise in marriage, the professional priest expressing the priestliness of human nature, lifts up our minds. The esteem of marriage can be kept low with dangerous ease. To many people, it appears to be merely an interesting and convenient experiment. Many secretly es- teem it only a way to secure the comforts and advantages of a homestead at the lowest price in liberty or in money. Such esteem is the root of divorce. Such esteem is also the root of the disinclination of many to marry at all. If mar- riage means that; if that is the explanation of the strange fact of sex; if fatherhood and motherhood are but incidents in a scheme of domestic economy, who then would risk his soul THE SEVENTH LAW 89 in the intricacies and intimacies of marriage? If the choice lie between virtue such as thus im- plied, and vice, — vice seems more virtuous. But the priest's function is to solemnize and bless a marriage. He discloses to the reverent mind a holy friendship, such friendship as exists be- tween the spirit of Christ, the perfect man, and the spirits of people who are trying to be good. In all the cases where a professional priest tries to serve a man the purpose is the same. He points out and emphasizes that which al- ready exists but which needs loudest and re- peated mention, — ^the sanctifying, beautifying elements in our experiences. The priest does not bring the child to birth ; the priest does not make the marriage; he is not even required to legalize a marriage. But he solemnizes these experiences. He indicates the sanctifying ele- ments. He points to the presence of a holy God and to that estimate of men's experiences held by Jesus Christ. The professional priest is, indeed, only the specialized expression of what man naturally is. Man, because he is man, is a priest. He is a sanctifier, a beautifier of whatever he deals with. And to be true to his nature he must estimate his experiences not from below, but from the plane of holiness and cleanness on which the Creator has decreed that a man should stand. It does not follow, however, that a man be- 90 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT cause he is constructed by nature to be a priest, behaves therefore in a priestly way. He has the power to sanctify his experiences, but it does not follow that he uses it. The owner of tools may be a wretched mechanic. The owner of books may be a wretched student. A man can be endowed with a large brain and yet never do a day's serious thinking. He can possess the power to sanctify his whole lifetime and yet, — ^the pity of it, — defile every relationship into which he enters. It is, in fact, the easy habit of men and women to be content to be adulterous ; to taint and stain and discolor all the choice opportunites which life affords by serving more than one master and attaining, therefore, only a corrupt, an impure fidelity. Adulterous sin is in popular thought confined to the relationship of marriage. The civil law has made, in terms of marriage relationship, a technical definition of adultery. And as it so often happens with technical definitions of large-meaning ideas, the small, the narrow sig- nification abides in the popular mind, and men and women lured into complacency toward the larger truth, are hurt by the very effort to do them good. In the culture of the spirit, adul- tery has no such narrow meaning. The men and women who, hearing this seventh law of the spiritual life, are conscience-easy because of the physical integrity of their sexual relationships, THE SEVENTH LAW 91 are still in spiritual babyhood. The Church gives a larger than the popular meaning to this law, saying in its much overlooked instruction, that it means temperance, soberness, and chas- tity. But wider still is the meaning given by Christ, by the Scriptures, and by common sense. These make adultery apply to all human ex- perience, and make it mean every violation of faithful adhesion to either God or man. "With their idols they committed adultery," said Ezekiel. That is, they made love to War, or Plenty, or Prosperity, or Pleasure. "They have sworn by them that are no gods ; then did they," said Isaiah, "commit adultery." That is, — so says this father of the Church, — ^that man is adulterous who dallies with gods other than the Eternal Righteousness. And Jesus Christ, using the same wide meaning, said that the so-called best people of his time were "A wicked and adulterous generation." What is this wider, this human meaning except that if we will not be the priests that we are made to be, if we will not inject the priestly influence into human society, we are in the judgment of God and of common sense, in precisely the same class as the brazen and unrepentant harlot .f* The sexual fidelity of husband and wife is not the only fidelity there is. No personal associa- tions are possible without fidelity; and over all is the supreme fidelity due to the One, the Eter- 92 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT nal God. To swerve in this is to cultivate an adulterous spirit. To be sexually pure is to attain, let us say, the alphabet of purity, — it is an essential purity, of course; but it is not, as some zealous language seems to imply, the climax of purity. On the other hand, to de- base and belittle and violate the faith that moves any of the enterprises of men, is to be adulterous. And a whole community, a com- monwealth, a church, as well as any wretched pair of mortals, can become foul with this in- fectious iniquity. If the merchants of a community are con- tent to adulterate their goods; if the schools and churches of a nation are content to adul- terate their teachings and preachings, to let the smooth and profitable displace the true and right; if the public press and the public thea- tre violate their unwritten contract to benefit the community by faithful effort; if they ap- peal to and nourish the meaner, the baser im- pulses, prejudices, ignorances, and passions; if, finally, the community, led by its own accepted leaders, wanders indifferently away from God, from the true God, and sets up its idols in its heart, — why then fidelity is being daily vio- lated, purity is being habitually outraged, and an adulterous quality becomes the almost com- mon condition, the almost common destiny. We wonder how the family as an institution THE SEVENTH LAW 93 can possibly lose its dignity! We wonder how people can hold loose and vulgar opinions of any of the circumstances involved in father- hood, brotherhood, childhood, — those human relationships which can be so infinitely precious and satisfying! It can happen because fidelity in one field of human activity supports fidelity in other fields ; and infidelity supports other in- fidelity. It can happen because the infidelities of men in any of the fields of activity, work out into bad effects upon the character of men and women. Indeed all the manifold activities in which men may exercise but so often fail to ex- ercise fidelity to God and man, seem to collect the power of their infidelities and treasons to- gether and send it in concentrated hostility against men's households and men's souls. For the whole of the world is God's world. The first allegiance is due to him who by God's grace is king of men, the perfect man, the Savior, Jesus Christ. To him, commerce, education, religion, the public press, the public theatre owe fidelity. Whoever loves any of these things more than he loves Christ the King, is adulter- ous, is unfaithful, is foul. The perfect man is the first object of fidelity. And whoever is un- faithful to the perfect man, is a force making for the spread of family ruin and individual indecency and libertinism somewhere in the world. 94 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT Man is a priest. That is the first thing im- plied by the seventh law. The second thing is the positive injunction to fulfil practically that which we are constitutionally. Our function is to exercise a priestly influence, to maintain a priestly standard in the public and private re- lationships into which we enter. There is no place for adulteration. There is no place for idolatry, nor for self-worship. There is no place for infidelity and impurity. Because we are human we are called not to uncleanness but to holiness. To this esteem of himself and of all persons, to this way of dealing with others, every one is called. A man is intended to be a holy crea- ture. We are assigned to priestly responsibil- ity because our human nature is brought to fruition and maturity only when it is treated in a holy way. The seventh law calls men into this way of living. It does not name a tech- nical act of misconduct possible only to peo- ple who happen to be married and say, "The path which the human spirit must take to enter into life lies counter to this physical incorrect- ness." We ourselves read into this law a tech- nical significance. And we do so because we are so much under the influence of the man- made civil law. The law of the spirit, however, is no more man-made than is the law of gravi- tation. It speaks, then, not as does the civil THE SEVENTH LAW 96 law of a technical act, but it says, "A man, a woman, a nation must, in all their experiences, treat themselves and all persons in the priestly way because that is the one way to bring out the spiritual vigor, the virtue, the beauty, the holiness which are in whatever a man has to do and in whatever relationships he enters. Thou shalt be a priest. Thou shalt not be adulterous. Thou shalt not prostitute thy character or thy abilities. Thou shalt not de- grade nor debase nor stultify the human rela- tionships in which thou bearest a part ; for any such behavior is unclean and makes a human life deficient in integrity and justice and gracious- ness. Thou shalt be priestly and shalt seek and see and declare whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatso- ever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, thou shalt think of these things. It is these things which compose a sanctified expe- rience. And with these things men and women are fundamentally and permanently concerned. These things quicken and beautify human life. To them a man is called because he is a priest and because his manhood depends upon the priestliness of his daily practices. Now, however, when so many of us help the bad cause on, is it any wonder that the Ameri- can home, the American family is to-day endan- 96 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT gered? We help the bad cause on by the only force which helps on any cause, — our perverted faith. Our perversion in faith to-day is so com- prehensive as to be, under many lights, indis- criminate, unclean, diseased, adulterous. There can be no reasonable wonder that alcoholic in- temperance and sexual indecency gain year by year a growing number of self-excusing dis- ciples, because the faith of the public as a public is already to some degree adulterous. Corrupt faith, the general as well as the individual faith, is a cause. Conduct is the effect. Children are the victims. Fathers, mothers, guardians, and sponsors are the sinners. An adulterous faith, a faith that is blind to the priestly nature of a man or a nation, is fatal. It spreads death upon the earth. It kills society. It rots the bonds of family, and makes men false to their neighbor and their God. And against such false faith the law, thun- dering from Sinai, is echoed by the immaculate Christ — Thou shalt not, thou canst not be adul- terous and at the same time attain the life that appertaineth to a man. Thou shalt hallow thy experiences, for man is a priest ordained by God. Man is called to holiness. And life awaits a man, life awaits human society, only on the terms on which it awaits every other crea- ture, — obedience to the laws of the nature (in man's case a priestly nature), which the Holy Creator has given. THE EIGHTH LAW MAN AS OWNER / Thou shall not steal. Thou shalt be a Proprietor in the Social State. THE EIGHTH LAW The natural fact on which this law is built is the fact that man is an owner. God is an owner. Man is an owner also. **A11 the whole heavens are the Lord's ; the earth hath He given to the children of men," is a good text for the study of the Eighth Commandment. "Thou shalt not steal" means, first of all, "Thou shalt be not a thief but an owner." What is it that by the power of nature man owns? We talk of common rights and of nat- ural rights. But we take a too academic ac- count of that right which is deepest of all rights, that one in which those rights most on our tongue are themselves submerged, the right of ownership of the Social State itself. For the Social State is essentially an association of Proprietors. Man, as man, is the owner of the Social State. Of this ownership a man, to be in vital health, must be proudly aware. "The earth hath He given to the children of men," and the jewel of that possession is the brother- hood, the interweaving of the human life, which is society itself. Unless man reaches up above the earth and brings down some of the cohesion of the eternal world, some of the Right that rules there, he is less than man, — unsocial. When he establishes society, then he begins a 99 100 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT human career. Society is his first, his essential possession. Because he is a man he is an owner in society and of society: he holds a share of stock in it. And Society is the "Lord para- mount" in which all rights are vested and by which all rights are to be defended and main- tained. If then a man is to be a man, if he is to de- velop his spirit, he must obey this law written by God's finger in the stone table of his nature. He must be true to the fact that he is a pro- prietor. It is usual to account this law as concerned with property distinguished in some way from persons. But such thinking is not accurate, it ignores the nature of property, it violates the meaning of the thing. Indeed, if property be what it is often said to be, there would exist no moral obliquity in the seizing of another man's goods, and no essential iniquity in a thief. A thief would be only impolite. A loss of goods by robbery would be not a wrong but only an irritating inconvenience. For what is property? Many persons think of it solely in terms of land, houses, cattle, shares of stock, or money, — and have in mind merely some material that can be weighed and measured. There is, it is true, a colloquial mis- use of the word that encourages such a thought. For example, we say "The man died but the >.J».», • -1 » THE EIGHTH LAW ' *' ' * ' ' 1^1 property survived," and we get by suggestion a picture of the visible goods collected and awaiting a new owner. But the collected mate- rials alone are not property. Property is a right vested in a person. It is a relation be- tween a person and some specific material. It is neither the person nor the material, but it is the relation between the two. It is a right, — and the right is to an exclusive authority over some particular thing. Material, until it has attained the condition of property, has no value. Some person, or some company of persons, must have the right to an exclusive authority over it and must be secure in that right, or else material cannot be property and cannot have value. All the treas- ures of the Solar System might be collected on the earth, but if they were not property, if no man or no nation was secure in ownership, they would be as valueless, they would be as little used as material treasure always is in savage lands whose characteristic is the comparative absence of rights. Property is a right, a spiritual thing, a per- sonal matter. It is this which carries the value. It is this which awakes the desire. This it is which makes property a force in the moral de^ velopment of men. And this, this right, prop- erty, is bom out of society itself. A man as such is an owner. He owns society. And so- I6k T'HE CODE GE THE SPIRIT ciety, the solvent of all rights, develops in so far as man imposes the peculiar proprietor- ship of social sovereignty upon the earth, and converts the earth's material wastes into the moral thing, property, to which society owes protection and by which society itself stands or falls. Think of property as a right, as nothing other than a right, and the assertion that so- ciety stands or falls by it is clearly true. It gives body to the familiar and acceptable state- ment that only that nation is stable which is right-eous, that is, full of right. Now there are other rights than property rights. There are certain essentially personal rights which are common in any developed so- ciety. These are the ones most often in the pub- lic mind and on the public tongue. But these are not only dependent for actualization upon the social state, as is property, but also their operation is subordinate to the operation of property rights. Life, justice, liberty, freedoms of speech and travel, depend on the social state. To-day and here they may be maintained. To- morrow and elsewhere or here, they may be dis- regarded. They depend on the State, on the condition of the State, on the communal charac- ter. And these rights touch directly on man's use of those materials of the earth by means of which property itself is created. The right which is primary, the right which society must THE EIGHTH LAW 108 first of all keep clear-headed about in order to administer itself, to keep itself in health, and make other and more favorite rights possible, is property. Therefore it is that the roots of social welfare are touched when, calling men to a sense of their proprietorship of the social state, and fixing attention upon the idea of property, we hear the law "Thou shalt not steal." Its positive assertion is "Thou shalt live in human society as an owner." But difficult as it is to keep the sense of prop- erty as a right as distinct from a material, it is more difficult to keep on the side of the truth about title to specific property. Here it is that confusion is heaped up. Because title is ac- quired very largely by fashion or fancy, it is hard to see the momentous importance of main- taining an owner in his right. And yet it is not only important but it is the very hope of social betterment. For how is title acquired.? It is acquired by service. It is transferable through the action of "Market price." Title is not had through the pressure of population on the means of sub- sistence, that is, by force of need. Necessity in itself confers no benefit on society. Service confers a benefit and so acquires a right. But all services do not acquire property rights. Services may be purely personal just as rights may be purely personal; and such services may 104i THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT win praise, respect, and gratitude, or, on the contrary, may win persecution, crucifixion, or neglect; they may or may not win property rights. It is largely a matter of market price, which means the prevailing taste, fancy, and de- sire of the people. Only a community which sets high esteem upon the accumulation of prop- erty rights as distinct from culture, leisure, taste, and the like, may either accumulate wealth or include large numbers of persons dis- tressed by poverty and depressed by failure to get what they so much desire. The high mar- ket price set upon riches, the life energy which people willingly exchange for them, is the cause of both effects. And the way to better the condition, the way which is the hope of society, is not by perversion of property right, nor any compromise between service as the path to rights and necessity (which would of course destroy the cohesion of society itself), but is a change in the prevailing faith, so that market price may change, and the taste and fashion and fancy of men be no longer confined to the accu- mulation of property rights but be expanded enough to include a full measure of the graces of existence. The disorder of social opinion to-day is startling. It is startling in particular because it entertains no sound, no genuine hope. To be desirous of more things and better; to wish for THE EIGHTH LAW 106 increased wages, is wholesome enough. But to spurn the facts of nature ; to pay no heed to the everlasting fact that not the title to, but the production of material goods in a condition fit for use depends upon the pressure pf population upon the means of subsistence ; to pay still less heed to the uncontrollable whimsicalities, the freaks, fancies, and errors which make human nature fickle like the wind while at the same time they combine to create market price; to talk loudly of right and justice, regardless of service on the one hand, and of the inequalities in individual capabilities on the other, — are un- wholesome. It is the obscurity of right that is startling. To attain rights by temporarily abolishing rights is a delusion. To better so- ciety by paring individual liberty and capability to the quick is a delusion also. And such opin- ion is startling because although false, it is be- lieved. A law which actually does govern the human spirit is the thing which is under discussion here. It is a law which lights up the way where- on a man may become the opposite of a thief. And property is the subject of the law because property is the right for the sake of which society organizes and by means of which society itself is both developed and disciplined. Because property is a right, the personal qual- ity of this law appears. And because the ac- 106 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT tualization of this as of any right depends on society itself, there appears also the common, the natural right of man as man to esteem him- self an owner in the Social State whether he hold other specific property rights or not. And, further, this law is not negative, it is positive. Thou shalt be this practically that thou art constitutionally. Thou shalt live as an owner thyself, and thou shalt maintain the truth that every person is an owner. A man because he is a man shall be a proprietor in and of the Commonwealth. This positive demand for the sense of propri- etorship is a commonplace of statecraft. A sturdy peasantry, — which means people whose characteristics grow from their property right in a home and a bit of land, — a sturdy peasan- try is, in the estimation of statesmen, both a nation's pride and its strength. It is a common- place too of philanthropic work. To get a man who is down onto a firm foundation where it be- comes almost sure that he will improve, one must help him attain a sense of positive propri- etorship over something. In certain serious educational endeavors to produce good citizens, such as the work at Tuskegee Institute, this is happily the avowed method. It need hardly be remarked that the specific sense of ownership, that is, partnership in society, is the principle and the hope of a democracy. If this sense THE EIGHTH LAW 107 cannot be widely developed; if it cannot be de- veloped with a correct appreciation of owner- ship ; if the responsibilities of ownership be not apprehended; then democratic society is sure to fail. From the exercise of this positive sense of ownership spring personal health and hearti- ness. Force grows out of it, and ambition. It developes resolution and honest pride. The seed of manhood, the seed of the well-being of society itself, is there. But at the first assertion, this seems to state the very cause of the acknowledged trouble in the social conditions of the world. One man here, another there, has said "I am an owner," and he has lived strenuously in obedience to his principle. Now he seems to be the only owner there is. Over all the goods in sight he seems to have exclusive authority, — and almost over the persons of thousands of his neighbors. And the principle of ownership seems to be the cause of this monarchial sort of condition. But it is not the cause. The cause is deeper. The man who lived strenuously as an owner chose, so far, the better part. He said "I am the state." So far, he said well. So far, his principle is right and true. The trouble comes because so few of his neighbors take the same stand. The favor- ite behavior seems to be to deride and deny the principle in practice, but to acknowledge it in theory. But if all took this stand practically; 108 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT if we all insisted on living as though we were the state ; if each man lived as a responsible pro- prietor of society, as an owner of the commu- nity, as one of the makers of "Market price," — ^then the state would come to be big with choicest life ; we should cease to treat social en- deavors as though they all were a mere scram- bling for materials; we should cease measuring success in terms of property right alone. But while there would be great private fortunes be- cause some men excel in the acquisition of prop- erty rights, still there could be neither indus- trial slavery nor any eclipse of culture, taste, thought, morality, piety, and tranquility. Eco- nomic conditions are the fruit of social faith. It is usual now to dwell almost exclusively on the debt owed by the rich to the poor. The debt of course exists, because of the mutuality of life. But therefore, also, the poor owe a debt to the rich. If the poor would pay it, it would be the first step in the control of that whimsical thing, market price. If the poor would pay their debt, it would then be easier than it is now for either the rich man or the poor man to get into the kingdom of heaven. For the poor now follow the rich. They seem to adore his riches. Worse still, they applaud the rich man's follies and ignore his virtues. The rich man's pomp wins envious applause. But who wants his responsibilities, his concen- THE EIGHTH LAW 109 trated industry, his anxieties, his tenacity of purpose? His pomp, his apparent doing-as-he- pleases, his errors, and his sins are more ap- proved than his virtues. And by this mistaken approval, the rich man, whom only the greatest men have been able to pity, — is liired on to his own destruction. He says "I am the state," and he says well. It is well also that he nurses his desire to amass wealth. Almost all his neigh- bors in these industrial days have the same de- sire. But it is his neighbors' fault, as well as his own, that the rich man can begin to say to his neighbor, "You are not the state but I am." When he says this, both himself and neighbor are to blame and are the losers. But every man finds the keeping of this law a hard task. The usual way to speak about the state is to say "They" do this or that. Who is this "They".? So do men speak of the Church and say "She" teaches this or that. Who is this "She".? "She" is thought nowadays to be de- crepit. Is the state to become decrepit too? Only identification of oneself with society ; only personal responsibility for essential social enter- prise ; only a citizenship and a criminality meas- ured in terms of such identification, can make social stages into stages of progress. "I am the state and my neighbor is the state," is the prin- ciple that can generate health in a community. And it means that nobody must steal. Rich 110 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT man, poor man, nor the community itself, — no one must steal. Stealing violates right. And right is the only foundation upon which society can rise. There is nothing so frequently disappointing as the truth. If the troubles of social systems could be settled in ways widely believed in and occasionally attempted; if revolution, if public violation of contract, which is another name for confiscation; if collectivism, whose other name is making everything or many things every- body's business, — could guarantee individual liberty and individual enterprise; if, in short, all could be made right by simply starting anew, than human nature would needs be much other than it seems. It is probable that there is no new social system under the sun. Indeed, of social systems it may be said, as Doctor John- son said of governments, that one is as likely to be as good or as bad as another. For the roots of difficulty are not in social systems as such, nor in governments as such, but in human nature itself. Social conditions will be good when the rich are public spirited, merciful, and honest; and when, at the same time, the poor are honest, and self-reliant, and public spirited. It is a matter of faith in the stern truth. To hope for good conditions apart from good peo- ple, is vain. To confuse goodness with either riches or poverty, is idle. Rich and poor alike, THE EIGHTH LAW 111 young and old, ignorant and learned must obey the law which obliges the maintaining of prop- erty right as the price required for the exist- ence of society itself. For the law is universal. It is the basic law of the general association of men, in which association alone manhood can come to perfectness. It is a path along which the spirit of a man must walk in order to be de- veloped. Habitually to maintain property right, to distinguish habitually between prop- erty and material, is to subject the soul to a habitual training. But in these terms, who is the thief? Who- ever takes for his own whatever belongs by right to another is a thief. A man who exacts more than is appointed him, — one, that is, who dis- regards market price, is a thief. So is he a thief who yields dishonest service and yet grasps an honest wage. These all feed a thievish spirit and train their manhood in knavery. But most of all are they thieves who either with despotic will rob men of ownership in the Social State, or with demagogic will spoil men with illusions of false rights and rob them of the truth. These are thieves indeed. And the robbed are always society itself. I may lose or another may lose ; but by a thievish action, society, people generally, men as men, finally suffer. Perverted rights, false rights, must mean a social ill effect. The home, the 11£ THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT savings, the pride of one man totter and weaken when the pride and savings and home of another man weaken and totter. It is man as man for whom Right operates. No man can escape either the beneficence of right or the malignity of wrong. THE NINTH LAW MAN AS WITNESS Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. 4 Thou shalt report the truth. THE NINTH LAW. The root word of this law is witness. Com- monly it is thought that the word false gives here the basic idea. That is a mistake. The basic idea is the one which serves as foundation for the moral idea. That a man is a witness is a settled matter. The Creator settled it. Whether or not the man be false, is as the man chooses. Witness-bearing is the expression of a natural fact. It is the function of one par- ticular element of man's constitution. Until a man perceives this part of his natural likeness to his Maker; until he sees that living is a process of witness-bearing, — a man lacks complete knowledge of what it is to be a man. A man is a witness because he is a man, and his development in spirit depends upon the fact. Bearing witness is a wide-reaching responsi- bility. In one most prominent human activity, the administration of justice, it is almost the characteristic feature. Wherever there are men, there are also courts of justice and the technical bearing of witness. Even in a condition of sav- agery, society has some form for the adminis- tration of the law and therefore some technical witness-bearing. Witness-bearing has, indeed, an end greater than itself. It is the handmaid of Judgment. 115 116 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT By judgment we carry on our lives. Whatever we have to do we do by judgment. But we arrive at judgment through witness-bearing. It is for the sake of a judgment according to the justice of the law that witnesses are called before the bar. This is the way to get light upon the paths of justice. This is the way the mind is made up. And the technical process of the courts is effective because all living, whether good or bad, is carried on by judgment and all judgment formed by testimony. It is not only a few hundred thousand summoned to court to help judges make up their minds who are wit- nesses. We all are witnesses, and by means of witness-bearing we all are continually making up our minds. Because all do this, therefore there can be a few who do it technically. It is not the courts that make witnesses. It is be- cause men are witnesses by nature that there are courts. And we are at this thing always. When we speak or think or pray or wonder we are testi- fying according to our experience. When we listen or read or observe or hesitate we are re- ceiving the testimony of others and making up within ourselves the judgment by which we ad- minister our life and influence. Our education is largely the reception of the testimony of men. What a man regards as the things to which he may bear witness he puts into the book THE NINTH LAW 117 he writes. All communication is a witness-bear- ing process toward the judgment by which we live. But the root of the energy which pro- duces judgment is testimony, witness-bearing, to which a man is called because it is his nature. It need hardly be said that the witness must not be false in the sense of being deceitful. If by the path of witness-bearing God conducts the human spirit to its fulfilment, that implies, obviously the expurgation of all deception. But the falseness which blocks the beneficent leading of our spirits to their fruition, is not merely the foolish lying, the idle misstatings we indulge in, but it covers the wide region in which mistakes and errors, negligences and ig- norances abound. The false witness of a deceitful heart works danger enough. That is true. Lying, hypoc- risy, teaching and preaching what we do not believe, hurt the common life severely; they keep it double faced. One must not belittle the injury that lying can and does do. It is the bad fruit of a bad seed. Jealousy, envy, fear, the love of success, the greed for influence or for popularity, the coils of partisanship, the heat of reform, the selfish service of even the true God, — produce in men the retroactive poi- son of a lie, such witnessing, that is to say, as has falseness at its heart. This is true enough and bad enough. But this, like all gross evil, tends to cure itself because it shames men. 118 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT Equal hurt is done by witness which is false, not because the witnesser is a liar, but because he is mistaken. Comfortable or cherished errors are as injurious as any of the other faults of men. For errors wear the halo of a good in- tention. Errors, ignorances, negligences, — are the ways that people who mean well but will not take the trouble to know, bear false witness. Their witness is contrary to the facts of nature. It controverts the truth of God. And it lays penalty upon the spirits of men because fact alone, God's fact, fact as it is in all of nature, is the measure of the truth or the falsehood which a man is able to attain and enjoy. The Indian Mutiny is a case, on the part of both participants, of witness false because mis- taken. The Indian soldiers mutinied because all the testimony by which they had been trained made them believe that tallow-covered cart- ridges when bitten (as they had to be before use in a gun) tainted the soul eternally. The English administrators persisted in the use of such cartridges because the testimony by which they were trained led them to believe that reli- gious fancies submit easily to the pressure of custom. There was no lying about it. There was false witness ; there was witness contrary to fact. And shameful atrocities innumerable, not to speak of death and agony, fell upon the Indiamen and the Englishmen alike. THE NINTH LAW 119 Another similar case is the false text-books in our American public schools. By false wit- ness in the schools the children are, or were, taught, in particular, two grievous errors. They learned so to misunderstand the war of the American Revolution that the Administra- tion under George IH has for years been com- monly identified with the English people. They still learn, also, to misunderstand the im- portant, the intimate subject, alcohol. Of the first of these two false witnessings, a specific, admitted result was the defeat of the treaty whereby England and America were to stand side by side in favor of arbitration for all the nations of the world whenever and wherever war is threatened. That upward step, a step which might, possibly, have prevented the Russo-Japanese war, was checked. Of the sec- ond, the false witnessing in regard to alcohol, it is difficult to escape the conviction that, by the power of reaction, or by irritation over mis- taken teaching, thousands of people who might easily have been temperate if they had learned temperance, have ruined themselves by alcohol. There was, probably, no lying there; there was no intentional deceit. But there was false wit- ness, for the testimony was contrary to fact. Common, every-day ignorance, prejudice, fanaticism, self-will, and obstinacy are the forces that work this sort of wrong. "They 120 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT know not what they do" prayed Jesus as he was dying. The magnanimity of that prayer is majestic. They should have known. And it is far harder to die because of the sin of stu- pidity than because of the sin of clever deceit. But such effects of false witness are on every side. If it is not a religious issue such as pro- duced the Indian Mutiny, it may be some ques- tion about the Bible, some misuse of it, or some no-use-at-all of it. It may be a question about the divine revelations through natural science and the influence upon our beliefs of new knowledge of the visible world, of the stars, and of the evolutionary processes. If it is not a matter concerning alcohol or the Ameri- can Revolution, it may be about the compara- tive merit of another age, another country, an- other civilization. But whatever vital matter be involved, if the witness about it be mistaken, if, for any reason, it be contrary to fact, then men, women, and children are fed on the poison of error whose effect is inevitably tragic. Tragic is the correct word. Any witness which is contrary to fact involves fatality. It kills. It kills not only in bone and body, but in happiness and character. All witness works out finally either for or against human life. The goal of witnessing is our neighbor. It is usual to think, however, that when we read books or study stars, or teach arithmetic THE NINTH LAW 121 or religion, — especially if by doing this we make our living — that the work is upon plain materials or plain ideas. The man who is called practical just because he manages things may be, in fact, far more impracticable than many an absent-minded, dreamy student. For many such students realize keenly that they are at work really upon people ; while the practical man quite commonly thinks he is working upon things. But all labor, all endeavor, in short, all witnessing by speech or act, works out at length for or against men and women. The geologist, for example, works to systematize a knowledge that shall be a tool for men. The merchant works by word and act to exchange materials which finally are used by men. So, also, the astronomer, although his eye is al- ways on the stars, bears a witness which affects not the stars but his neighbors. It was astron- omy that sent Columbus over the Atlantic and disclosed America. The personal consequence, the human result, is the thing which is finally and always at stake. So, therefore, this ninth law for the govern- ment of manhood runs thus : A man is by nature a witness, and his witnessing, which is bound to affect his neighbors because by the testimony which feeds their judgment all men live, must be free not simply from a false witness of his own but also from any variation from the 122 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT truth as it is seen by God. In other words, a man is called by nature to be a pioneer in the realms of truth, his business is to discern the truth and report it. This law is not only writ- ten in our members, but there it works and pro- duces history. For there are always in the world conspicu- ous men, conspicuous social movements, whose motive power is this inwritten, this God-oper- ated law. It is already late to explain in terms of this law the service rendered by the men of physical science in the nineteenth century. God raised up those men to bear witness to the truth. It is usual to recall the fact that men's obedience to this law written in men's na- ture, explains the rise of a civilization governed largely by Christ's principles. To-day the study of the Bible, and the critical examination of fa- miliar opinions and traditions in religion, are a part of men's present response to this inwrit- ten law of God. The hot controversy in indus- trial and political affairs to-day is, also, to be explained as the working of this law in our members. Truth purged of all error is this law's object. What the Creator has put into our possible experience; what the Creator himself can see, — ^that is what men who will be men are bound to search out. Scientists, reformers, stu- dents, try to tell their neighbors what God has THE NINTH LAW 123 shown to them. All men, indeed, are moved to do this thing. And, all alike, threatened both by a falseness of our own and by the comfort of favorite error, we stammer and stumble at the task. But the task is a man's task. Happy indeed is any man who can believe practically in the fact that every atom of his witnessing which is true, is and must be a help to all man- kind. It is significant that the manhood of Christ rested largely upon his sense of this law. "Art thou a king then?" said Pilate, scoffing. His standard of royalty was imperial Caesar. But the obscure but radiant man revealed another standard when he said, "I am a king." Caesar was a king. This peasant was a king, also. For, "to this end was I bom, and for this cause came I into the world that I should bear wit- ness unto the truth." To bear witness unto the truth is the kingly duty and the measure of the kingly character. Such witness-bearing made Christ what he was. And such witness-bearing is obedience to the law which calls every man to fulfil his nature and contribute to the better- ment of men by being an honest herald of fact. THE TENTH LAW MAN AS TRADER Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neigh- bor' s wife, nor his servant, nor his maid, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is his. Thou shalt exchange the fruits of the spirit. THE TENTH LAW The fact in human nature on which the tenth law of right and wrong stands is that man is by nature a trader. He must exchange. He must barter. Unless he gives something a man can get nothing. Living is a process of giving and taking by the means of exchange. There is neither unresponsive bestowal nor any acqui- sition by robbery; but there is exchange. When a man gives he does get something. When he takes he always gives. Whether he knows or cares to know what he gives or what he takes, the law still holds: — ^nothing is received whenever nothing is given; and when- ever something is given something is received. The exchange stands by nature. Man's task is to conduct it in choice and valuable commodi- ties and to will that it should be immediately and admittedly fair. But whatever the man may do, the fact stands. And because the fact is there governing mankind, therefore there rests on it a law by which man's spirit is devel- oped or destroyed. Man is by nature a trader and the law is — Thou shalt not covet, th^t is, trade falsely or in ignoble goods, but thou shalt trade so as to develop. Coveting means base trade in things ma- terial or spiritual. That is not an exhaustive 127 128 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT definition which makes it mean a wishing hard for things that others have. There is an emula- tion in desire for good things which is reason- able and right. That things belong to another does not make it wrong to wish for such things. In that point some instruction misses the mark. For the mark is the rendering of a fair ex- change for such good things as a man desires. A man ought to desire things that are good and useful not, of course, just because they are his neighbor's, nor yet to despoil nor to outdo the prosperity of his neighbor; but he ought to desire them for the same reason that his neighbor did, — ^because they are serviceable. Such desire is not simply good, it is duty. And the mark this law aims at is the companion de- sire, — ^the will to pay for these good things. A man shall pay for what he gets, — ^that is the es- sence of this law. Desire what you will, but be willing to pay the price. The Book of Common Prayer points this out. It says that the tenth law of a wholesome life is that, beginning in childhood, each person "Should learn and labor truly to get mine own living and to do my duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me." We may get more and more goods, — materials, learning, health, friends, character, — but we must will to pay and must learn how to pay for them because that is the way to be fit for the THE TENTH LAW 129 station unto which God is pleased to conduct us. The sin of coveting is the will to get something for nothing. Such will is sin because it is false. We get something when we give something. We get nothing when we give nothing. If we would have good things we must give good things. And the will to pay up, to pay enough, to pay in good coin, — that is the subject of this law. It is based on the natural fact that man is a trader. It is apparent that there is close affinity be- tween the laws of ownership and of trading; that is, between the law against stealing and the law which warns us not to covet. Indeed, none of these laws, — as is the case in any code, — is abstract or disconnected from the others; and these two, it may be, are noticeably affi- anced. The distinction which does exist is one of objectivity. The thief violates a right of which he should be the guardian. The coveter cultivates beggary in his own soul. It is likely, it is true, that coveting precedes and begets most theft. The embezzler, when he pauses to excuse himself, is extravagant in his estimate of the services, the inadequately remunerated ser- vices, which he asserts that he has habitually rendered. He thinks that somewhere in our misty environment of rights and duties, he can perceive his right to a larger portion of the country's prosperity than, according to the 130 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT contracts to which he has agreed, has fallen to him. Either by self-deception he estimates his services falsely and without regard to market price, or else he puts on, without any qualifica- tion, the pauper spirit and becomes so willing to acquire without an equivalent payment as to make it natural for him to violate rights and to appropriate the fruits of the services of others. The affinity between the two laws is thus close, but the distinction is also clear. The thief is a violator ; he is the doer of a bad deed. The coveter is he who desires to get something for nothing, he who desires to evade payment, he who is willing to be (though not to seem) a pauper, he who, like the common beggar and the common tramp, is content to get his for- tunes, — his food, his position, his citizenship, his comfort, — at somebody's else expense. The thievish embezzler is likely to be a coveter as well as a robber; the burglar or highwayman may be the bold and bad doer only. The cov- eter, however, whether he be an embezzler or only one of the undiscovered sinners, is, spir- itually, a pauper. But the day is past for speaking much about the man who fastens a greedy eye on such chat- tels of his neighbor as are quaintly named, in the Mosaic language, "His house, his wife, his ox, his ass, nor anything that is his." Men do covet and hurt their souls by a coveting THE TENTH LAW ISl prompted by goods and chattels which other people have. But the world has risen enough ^ above that plane of virtue and sin, that, think- / ing of coveting in such terms only, it is hard for many to see any vital meaning in it at all. I It happens, however, that although certain people look greedily upon their neighbor's ma- terial goods, still they are not, therefore, the chief and peculiar sinners. Their sin has but taken a vulgar form. They are sordid, base. But in point of coveting, their more elegant brothers and sisters are as guilty as they. For, while it is true that the better conditioned of us, if we want an ox or an ass or a house or a servant, go quickly and without repining into, the market and pay the price, yet if we want) popularity and social commendation; if we want piety and the peace of God; if we want courageous faith, — ^we are far too likely to take it out in coveting. Gossip asserts that thousands of people are wretched because they are not successful so- cially. In nearly every case the reason is they will not or do not pay the price. The price is social service of one sort or another. You must be able to change water into wine; to con- tribute cheer and happiness and good fellow- ship ; you must cause the fermentation of social pleasure, and do it well, that is, courteously and naturally. It does not matter what the assem- 132 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT bly of souls may be, — a fashionable set or a workingman's club, or even an institution like a church or a business house, — ^this much as the purchase price of welcome fellowship, this much as the cost of a social starting point, is required. For the law is moral. It governs moral as well as material transactions. One must trade not only in the commodities of business and the materials of life, but also in commodities social and religious. Would you be popular.? Would you enjoy the sense that people like you and desire your company.'' You must first of all proffer the price. Would you be virtuous and reverent.? Would you enjoy such peace of God as can make you at one with men of resolution and stability.? You must first of all present payment. Or, would you possess such godly armor as will enable you to walk undis- mayed through the shadowy valleys which make so large a part of almost every life's jour- ney.? You must pay the price in the proper coin. To acquire friends you must yourself be friendly. To acquire the peace of the Eternal, to develop in yourself the quality of Christ, you must be contrite and of humble heart. To ac- quire courageous faith you must make payment in habitual trust in God. For these prices these goods can be had. The law allows it. It is a moral law, a law, that is. THE TENTH LAW 133 which governs the development of a creature whose nature is moral. The higher possessions of the spirit equally with the tangible posses- sions for the body's uses are to be had by trad- ing. We trade with the industrial world and so satisfy our material wants. We trade with our neighbors, our family and our friends, so as to satisfy our aifectional, social wants. We trade with God, and only when we trade with God, do we satisfy our appetite for wholesomeness of life. In this sphere of trade it is easy and usual to covet, idly to wish or timidly to repine. The secret wish of every normal man or woman is to be a good person, to bear the godly stamp, to be the sort of person we have all heard of — an entirely tolerable and companionable sort of good person. But to pay the price; — that is another matter. Oftenest we are content to covet, to wish for virtue but to buy it not. Yet there is no other way of getting anything. The ox and the ass are for sale at a price. So are social satisfactions. So is the peace of God. So is faith. A man must not covet. He must not dream his character away. He must pay for whatever he gets. And it is a man's duty both to want and to get those things, those moral qualities, which belong to spiritual pros- perity. And with positive force this law asserts that a man must trade. We are bom traders. It is 134 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT as much human nature to trade as it is human nature for the blood to be warm. We can't help trading. Only it is our bounden necessity to direct our commerce to those concerns which honestly enrich us and make us spiritually better off. Obviously we must trade. If we cheat our- selves by exchanging worthless effects, we are still trading. Obviously also, therefore, must we, to cultivate our spirit, trade positively, ac- tively, in those particular goods which have value. In good honest respect for our brethren, we must trade. Courtesy, modesty, and good will we must exchange. We must deal in piety, in contrition, in discernment, in reverence and prayer and worship. By such commerce we ac- quire social and religious riches. And there is no other way to gain a spiritual fortune. Happily, by such trade spiritual riches are positively certain. There is no doubt about it. Trade here is as fair as any trade in asses or in oxen or in man or maid servants. "Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap." You can get the goods if you pay for them. You cannot be cheated here if you pay. But this way of payment is the only way. An ox or an ass may stray into your bam and never be re- claimed. Materials do sometimes get misplaced in the world. But virtue does not. The peace of God does not. All the coveting in the world is just so much self-deception. It is even a THE TENTH LAW 136 sowing to the wind. For the law is simple and plain and sensible and true. He who violates it is at odds with the universe ; he is at odds with God. A man is a trader. That is a man's fun- damental constitution. His trade extends into the fields of fellowship and piety. He can and he must buy the best fruits of the spirit. It is impossible to get something for nothing. There- fore let no man befool himself by living covet- ously. Nowadays this God-operated law is held in peculiar and ominous disdain. For, in the mis- used name of Charity, we are all taught a high degree of moral and spiritual pauperism. The teaching is that it is all ill fortune which re- quires pay for the things we properly desire. From good government to good food, from the higher education to houses of prayer, from leisure to labor, — ^the doctrine of the day runs that all these things should belong to every man without cost to him. And the falsehood works out in fields in which its very presence is unsus- pected. For it is obvious enough that such teaching will hurt irresolute, idle, and dependent souls whatever their condition. By its influ- ence, many names will be added to the list of those who practically, if not nominally, are charges upon the community. Dependent rich men and dependent poor men are products of the same faith. The same creed produces the 186 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT prosperous idler and the incompetent unem- ployed. This is obvious enough. But in nobler fields the infection works, and men who desire to be heroic and brave and skilful and reverent, awake to find themselves destitute of these things and to learn, too late, that there was a price to pay. It is too much to say that the manhood of / these days is of a lower grade than in days ^ gone by. But who will deny that in the special and finer points of piety and reverence, in poesy , of mind, in a realizing sense of God, in religious- \ ness of life, it is harder than it once was to be \ all that a man can and should be? We are not enough trained to know that, like other riches, the fruits of the spirit are to be had only through exchange and for a price. But that is the truth. And the law by which God grants us our decreed development is "Thou shalt not covet, but thou shalt buy the fruits of the spirit and pay for them." PART in SUMMARY OF THE CODE MAN AS LOVER Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it ; Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets. Thou shalt love so as to develop into a likeness that image of God which is photographed by nature on the film of the soul. SUMMARY OF THE CODE Under the epitomized statement of the whole code of laws which govern our spirit, there stands, as was noticed in the case of each par- ticular law, a natural fact. For it is a natural fact that man is a lover. Not so many years ago it was too hard for men to see that there is a natural basis for love. To-day it is less dif- ficult to see this. We are now familiar with the fact that parental responsibility pervades the sentient world. We are now aware of tenden- cies in brute life to acts of unmistakable mercy and pity. We are now able, also, to see that even the severity of nature, in that it whips its offspring into capability, is esteemed with the more correctness when counted as expression of a loving will. Therefore in the law laid upon a man to live as a lover, we are the more able to believe that Christ and His living voice, the Church, reveal a fact in human constitution, namely, that by creation man is a lover. In accord with this fact, in accord with this nature, a man should live. But now what is needed by most men is that this revelation be completed. It is a great help for a man to know the name correctly given to the specific sort of creature which he himself is. It clarifies his judgment. It focalizes his self- 139 140 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT adjustments. The advantage is comparable to that of knowing the nature of any instrument or any problem which awaits our mastery. But in the present case we step from one puzzle to another. For, while we rejoice to know that, fundamentally, we are of the beneficent nature named love, yet, pausing to consider it, we see that, like all riches, this rich equipment suffers the greatest waste because it requires the great- est skill in its administration. We are lovers by nature. But after all what is love? There is no doubt that the predominant ele- ment in our thought of love is tenderness. Only tenderness could be for our minds a sufficient in- dex of the parental love which we are now per- suaded can be found throughout the animal crea- tion. Something of tenderness we find there, so we say there is love. In the love spent upon our- selves it is the tenderness which persuades us of love's existence. In parent, in teacher, in friend, in employer, in servant, wherever we confess that we have located love, there, we con- tend we have discovered tenderness. Other ele- ments may be in love. It is tenderness which wins our recognition and dominates our thought. And although in our reckoning we are not in positive error, we are in practical danger of misunderstanding and of consequent misbe- havior. The tenderness in love is, beyond ques- tion, the oil, the consolation of our life. So SUMMARY OF THE CODE 141 much do we need to be forgiven, so intensely do we yearn for sympathy, so ready are we to cry for mercy, that the exaltation of tenderness, the source of these coveted blessings, is the most natural of reckonings. But there is such a thing as divine equilibrium. Even love is not altogether one sided. Tenderness is not all there is in it. The love of the mother hen gath- ering her chickens under her wings has not ceased though the form of it be changed when she deserts her brood and forces responsibility upon her little ones. If tenderness were all, surely we should have to doubt the merit of love itself when we remember that the very tender- ness of the love spent upon us by God and men has encouraged us to misuse and waste it. The tenderness which is in love may, by force of willing habit, dominate our attention, but it is our honorable privilege to see not the obvious only but also the obscure elements in this love whose tender voice although it sounds like the voice of one who comes to help, may yet bring serious hurt. For there is a love that kills. Whether it be accurately named or not, it is named. "One word is too often profaned, for me to profane it," said Shelley, and he had in mind a love which passes widely as the badge of a good man. But such love is filled with secret, unrecognized hostility to the spirits of men and women. Its 142 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT language is the language of excuse. It yields always and indiscriminately what is miscalled by the great name Forgiveness, for the reason that, under the fancy that it thinks no evil, it has fallen short of any comprehension of evil at all. So much does it smooth away that there is left no serious difference between right and wrong. The "justifiable lie" it lingers over as over a sweet morsel to be secured and enjoyed as of ten as possible. Euthanasia is, to this emasculated love, a height of mercy. Pain to the feelings or the flesh is its most shocking ill. It forgets the anguish of disgrace, the shame of dishonor, the horrible pit of cowardice, — for it patronizes Conscience. In the name of such love far more than in the name of hate or malice, bit- ter is put fof sweet and sweet for bitter, dark- ness is put for light and light for darkness, and men and women, with weak or complacent smiles, call evil good and good evil. In modern life, this poisonous love enjoys a place of honor. In many a household, in many a friendly circle, souls are daily being killed by kindness. It has high place and power in much of the patriotism and the philanthropy of these times. "Char- ity" as much as anything has unmanned citizen- ship in both church and state. Justice, in its task of preventing crime, seems to have adopted the method of indulgence. Worship and work, alike, are suffering from a sentimentality mis- SUMMARY OF THE CODE 143 called love toward God and man. It is a fatal love. It is the offspring of pity. But the love decreed to be the parent of virtue is the off- spring of worth. Man is a lover, but his love must be such as honors God and develops the man on whom the love is spent. ^ Love for God honors God. And here love makes little use of that tenderness which else- where is often mistaken for love itself. Love for God perceives the divine merit, the divine integrity. It is worth in God; it is the merit whereby God can and does not only exercise love Himself but generates it in the hearts of His creatures; it is the merit whereby the divine equilibrium of tenderness and perseverance and right are eternally maintained. To discern God's worth is to loose the very fountain of love within the human heart and to become at once a lover not on grounds of pity but on grounds of a sublime, a majestic worth revealed to eyes straining until now to see the perfect. The same sort of love we are required to spend on men as well as on God. Filled with tenderness surely, as God's own love is filled, but none the less and still, like God's love, bent upon our brothers because of their worth; be- cause we all, as children of the Most High, carry within us as our essential make up the in- choate image of the Father; because, also, our common life is ours for the obvious purpose of 144 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT developing by the means of love received and love given that inchoate image into the full measure of the perfect man, the Son, the copy of God. What the essential man is we learn by a study of the code of laws which govern man's spirit. That code is the fruit of racial experience. The students of the human spirit, the researchers working in the laboratory of human affairs, have discerned what the laws of man's spirit are and, therefore, what a man essentially is. When man was made he was made to be something : he was endowed: he was equipped with a spiritual nature, the exercise of which is life, and the right exercise of which is godly life. Human nature may admit, it is true, of more detailed description, but the description yielded upon the mount of Sinai (a laboratory of the human spirit under a master's charge) is sufficient and, in meaning, is inexhaustible. A man is a thinker, and an admirer; he is a receiver or pupil, a creator, and an heir ; he is a savior, and a priest; he is an owner, and a witness, and a trader. He is all these, these forces, these func- tions, these propensities. He is this image of an Eternal, a supreme One, who has the world to administer and make worthy. Once, on Sinai, a master man looked into the nature of God's children and saw that, as a matter of fact, men are this sort of creature, that life and the laws SUMMARY OF THE CODE 145 of the life of the human spirit rest upon these natural facts, saw that any man who ful- fills this nature attains a quality of life such as must be lived by the Eternal God Himself. This human nature, then, is the image of God. This is the inchoate impression of God worked by nature into the film of the human soul. And the love which can develop the picture is such as perceives this nature perfected in God and then works to perfect the same nature in man. To such love as can reproduce the divine Original a man is called. To a stern, a seri- ous, a scientific and therefore patient but deter- mined love which works to make men actually what they are constitutionally, a man is called. Such love is full of mercy surely ; but also it is full of power. It is capable of justice as well as of mercy. The tragedies of life do not de- prive such love of its sanity. It knows that good and evil are mysteriously deep. It can look, therefore, with unfailing faith and hope on the wars, the ruin, the sin, the discourage- ment, the broken hearts of men; for it sees al- ways a great goal of social excellence attain- able even though distant. It is sure of itself. To it God is majestic; man is majestic too. And life, as this love esteems it, is not simply worth while, it is a blessing, it is a natural de- velopment, a habitual approach toward a per- fect happiness. "As for me, I will behold thy 146 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness." Strength, power, worth, in short, character- ize the love which can make men's spirits live and grow. Natural riches are its foundations. Its scope reaches to the moral realm wherein the bad, whatever it may be, is under perpetual summons to give way before the good, and the good under summons, also, to give way before the better and the best. And the temper of this love is positive. It is always positive. It prefers to love rather than to be loved. It is positive in its standards and commands. It is positive in its patience, its long-suffering, its mercy. It is positive in its punishment. It is positive in its forgiveness, in its sorrow, its self-surrender, its death. In length and depth and breadth the love with which God loves, with which Christ loved, with which men are called on to love both God and man, is com- manding, adventurous, audacious. Its quali- ties of tenderness and indulgence are eminent, truly. But eminent also, even if less winsome, are the qualities of capability, efficiency, expec- tancy, and resolution. Because of this, the love of Christian men for God is such as excludes all fear in the sense of fright, but has ever been adorned with the fear which means reverence and awe. Finally, a spiritual life is one wherein is this SUMMARY OF THE CODE 147 love which develops the image of God in one's self and one's neighbors. It is a growing life, a continual career, a passing on from good to better and toward best. The love it secretes is such as makes a man good for something. Its love works out upon home and community to make not mere smiling but efficiency abound. Its love can endure all things, bear all things, believe all things, and hope all things. But it does not think love's work is done when it en- dures and bears and believes and hopes. Love's work is done when the people, the persons, the souls on whom it is spent, are saved, are made good, are made resolute, reliant, useful, capable, just. It is not the man who has been ground to powder by his tribulations who is a spiritual man. It is he who came out of tribulations but had enough spirit to get his robes washed in the blood of the Lamb. He wanted to be good for something and he was willing to keep on trying forever. This dogged trying to be good for something; to develop the image; to be, and to help others be better thinkers, bet- ter traders, better witnesses, and all the other good things our nature will allow us to be, — this is the love which is the authentic badge of a spiritual man or woman. We must remind ourselves with emphasis that the spiritual life, the goal of evolution, is none other than life as it was lived here by Jesus Christ and as it is lived by God. In 148 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT both cases we refer, of course, not to the form of life, not to the peculiar schedule of duties, — for no one is called to be either the adminis- trator of the universe or the savior of the hu- man race, — ^but to the principles of self-govern- ment as they were employed by Christ and are employed by God. And we are quick to be- lieve that the key to these two pattern spiritual lives is love. Is not the love which we have de- scribed the love of Christ and the love of God.? Christ's love covered a strength which carried him through daily failure, daily disregard on the part of his own people, through the antici- pations of a death in which he was the victim of stupidity as well as of sin. There is strength surely. Now the strength of God is ob- vious enough. It has been hard to persuade the world that God is love. On the other hand, it has been, it is still hard to persuade the world that Christ is strong. But strength only, strength administered by love, love adminis- tered with power, could have lived the daily sacrifice of Christ's life. It is the part of a man to be angry at the wrong of the world. It is the part of a strong man to be angry and yet not to sin; to love unto the end, to waver never, and never to contemn. God's strength is such love. Christ's love was such strength. And it is such love that can spiritualize our present life and establish our resemblance to Him who is Eternal. ADDENDA A COMPARATIVE TABLE OF THE MORAL LAW THE IMAGE OF GOD ADDENDA The parallel columns which follow exhibit a comparison between that teaching of the Epis- copal Church given in the Catechism contained in The Book of Common Prayer, and the fore- going interpretation. The Catechism recites the Ten Commandments as they stand in the Bible at the twentieth chapter of Exodus, and then in answer to the question, "What dost thou chiefly learn by these Commandments," says "I learn two things ; my duty towards God, and my duty towards my neighbor." The next two statements in the Catechism serve in effect as a version of the Law as interpreted by the Church. They are printed below with no other changes than a few alterations in the order in which certain sentences occur. It is hoped that an examination of these comparative columns will show that the contents of this book are kin- dred to the Church's instruction and have a value for teachers in schools and in homes where the moral law is taught. 151 152 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT MY DUTY TOWARDS GOD IS— Law I. To believe in him, To honour his Word: And to love him with all my mind. Law n. To fear him, And to love him with all my heart. Law in. To honour his holy Name: To put my whole trust in him. And to love him with all my strength. Law IV. To worship him, to call upon him: to give him thanks : And to love him with all my soul, and to serve him truly all the days of my life. To think correctly. To admire aright. To create aright. To receive (absorb) the spirit of God. ADDENDA 15S MY DUTY TOWARDS MY NEIGHBOUR IS— Law V. To love, honour, and succour my father and mother : To honour and obey the civil authority: To submit myself to all my gov- erners, teachers, spir- itual pastors and mas- ters: To order my- self lowly and rever- ently to all my betters. Law VI. To bear no malice nor hatred in my heart: To hurt nobody by word or deed. Law VII. To keep my body in temperance, sob- erness, and chastity. Law VIII. To keep my hands from picking and steal- ing: To be true and ust in all my dealings. Law IX. To keep my tongue from evil speaking, lying, and slander- ing. To honour those of whom thou art a beneficiary. To save Ufe. To sanctify thy experiences. To be a Proprietor in the Social State. T o report the truth 154 THE CODE OF THE SPIRIT Law X. Not to covet nor desire other men's goods; But to learn and labour truly to get mine own livings And to do my duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me, — to do to all men as I would they should do unto me : and to love my Neighbour as my- self. To exchange the fruits of the spirit. I'HIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW AN INITIAL Fl^- ^^ OENts WILL BE AP-' -HE DaTp t!^^"^ ^O RET,,r, JB 29562 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY