GIFT OF 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
BY THE SAME A UTHOR 
 
 HUMAN CONFESSIONS 
 GOD AND DEMOCRACY 
 BUSINESS AND KINGDOM COME 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
 ESSAYS ON RELIGION FOR 
 MODERN MINDS 
 
 BY 
 FRANK CRANE 
 
 Author of 
 "Human Confessions" etc. 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 FORBES & COMPANY 
 1912 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1912 BY 
 FORBES AND COMPANY 
 
 C 7 
 
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 
 
 Religion and the Modern Mind 
 
 THE human race is incurably religious. 
 We are more religious to-day than were 
 the Puritans, the Crusaders, or the mediaeval 
 ascetic orders. 
 
 To see this we must understand what religion is. 
 
 Religion is nothing more nor less than life, in its 
 purest, most elemental form. 
 
 Jesus, the greatest of religious teachers, never 
 used the word religion : he spoke always of life. 
 
 It was the fortune, or misfortune, of the cult of 
 Jesus to be taken up by the Latin world. 
 
 The genius of the Roman was organization. 
 
 So the Roman world organized the Company of 
 Jesus into the Church, patterned on Caesar's em- 
 pire ; and the teaching of Jesus it organized into a 
 body of theology. 
 
 It is interesting to speculate what the Christ 
 Company on earth might have been, if it had re- 
 
 7 
 
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 
 
 mained fluid, free, a spiritual leaven of open-eyed 
 souls. 
 
 What if they had remained simply the spirit- 
 ually elect, putting away the lust of conquest, 
 either temporal or otherwise, refusing all endow- 
 ments of money, erecting no temples, refusing all 
 aid from the powers of this world, sticking stub- 
 bornly to the programme of Jesus and Paul ? 
 
 It is useless to inquire. Such was not the 
 plan of destiny, which has its own strange, slow 
 ways. 
 
 Perhaps organization, institutionalism, and dog- 
 ma, with their blinding quick success, are the 
 kind of things the world can never understand ex- 
 cept by living through them. Humanity had to 
 have them, as a boy has to have the measles. 
 
 The opening of the Twentieth Century is 
 marked by a change in the expression of ethical 
 feeling. 
 
 The dynamic of Jesus is manifesting itself in 
 terms of democracy, the removal of ancient priv- 
 ileges, the general rise in importance of the com- 
 mon people. 
 
 Socialism spreads in Germany, republicanism 
 bursts out in Portugal, the House of Lords is 
 clipped of its power in England, even China is in 
 
 8 
 
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 
 
 a ferment of democracy. Government every- 
 where is feeling the sun-rays of Jesus 1 influence. 
 
 In business more and more the principles of 
 justice, and the claims of " one of the least of 
 these," characterize modern life. 
 
 In literature the tendency is to study the com- 
 mon lot, to reveal its divinity and dignity, as well 
 as to put the best literature within the reach of the 
 multitude. 
 
 In art humanity is recognized in Millet and 
 Israels, while only saints and kings were thought 
 worth while by Rafael and Michelangelo. 
 
 The great discovery of modern times is The 
 People. 
 
 All this is precisely the spirit of Jesus. The 
 Puritan, monkish endeavor to attain individual 
 holiness, and to develop the sensation of religious 
 ecstasy, apart from the world, was a half-Jewish, 
 half-heathen idea, into which the genial, out-of- 
 doors and social Jesus never fit. 
 
 With him religious emotion meant nothing aside 
 from its altruistic vent. 
 
 Thinkers to-day, who have any sort of vision, 
 are ceasing to confound Christianity with the 
 Church. That was the mistake of most of the so- 
 called " infidels " from Voltaire to Ingersoll. 
 
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 
 
 Grant that Christianity and any one or more 
 organizations or theological schemes are identical, 
 and at once Christianity is indefensible. 
 
 It is only when we conceive Christianity to be 
 a larger thing, a vast spiritual leavening, a kinetic 
 spirit, of which the various churches are but one 
 expression, but which in its entirety means apply- 
 ing the wisdom and feeling of Jesus to govern- 
 ment, business, work, amusement, and all life, that 
 we grasp the significance of Christ. 
 
 The Church, as John the Baptist, must say, 
 facing him, " He must increase, and I must de- 
 
 crease." 
 
 The past deserves our reverence. It had its 
 noble souls, its heroic ideas. 
 
 The past is the mother of the present. Out of 
 the womb of its purpose the present has come with 
 great travail. And one should respect one's 
 mother. 
 
 But the past also must be criticised and judged, 
 or we make no advance. We are to perceive and 
 shun its mistakes, as every good son pleases his 
 mother best in profiting by her experience. 
 
 To imitate the past in evil as well as good, for 
 fear of being irreverent, is to live in slavery. 
 
 10 
 
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 
 
 Blind ancestor-worship means Chinese stagna- 
 tion. 
 
 With all respect, therefore, while we appreciate 
 that vision of God which our forefathers had, rep- 
 resented in such spiritual splendor as that of 
 Francis of Assisi, yet for our own and for our chil- 
 dren's sakes we must condemn their religion as 
 nine parts heathenism and one part Christly. 
 
 Through the murky air of monarchical ideas the 
 pure ray of Jesus 1 democracy hardly pierced. 
 
 The spiritual energy of this day takes a differ- 
 ent direction from that which it took in the days 
 before the dawn of democracy. We build no 
 more cathedrals and monasteries; we build hos- 
 pitals and public schools. 
 
 We go no more on Crusades to rescue the tomb 
 of the Saviour from the unbelievers; we march 
 against life insurance companies and railway com- 
 bines for the sake of " the little ones " with whom 
 the Saviour identified himself. 
 
 It is a fad to admire mediaeval faith, as we ad- 
 mire mediaeval stained-glass and picturesque cas- 
 tles. Carlyle and Chesterton both raise their 
 voices to sing the glory of the " religious ages." 
 
 But the sole advantage of those times over ours 
 ii 
 
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 
 
 is their perspective. It is " distance lends enchant- 
 ment to the view." Study them, come close to 
 them, and you will find that the religion of Dante's 
 day, as Symonds said of its civilization, was 
 founded on a dung-heap. 
 
 Their theology was based upon intellectual dis- 
 honesty. Their pious emotions were saturated 
 with cruelty. Their faiths were the war-cries of 
 party spirit. The religious wars in which they 
 constantly engaged were infernal caricatures of 
 that pure spiritual conquest Jesus set before him. 
 
 The flavor of the religion of the past is incense. 
 The flavor of modern religious life is soap. 
 
 We are no more applying the gospel to the sur- 
 face of the open sore of the world: we are treat- 
 ing the cause. We do not display our love for 
 mankind by largess to the picturesque beggars by 
 the church door; we are patiently endeavoring to 
 rearrange our business system and governmental 
 system so that all may have a chance to work at 
 living wages, and begging cease. 
 
 To-day we also, " for Christ's sake/' are widen- 
 ing our parks, seeking to curb the irresponsible 
 power of money, rescuing little children from 
 stunting labor and putting them in free schools, 
 giving women justice and equality instead of tyr- 
 
 12 
 
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 
 
 anny garlanded with sensuous poetry, going to 
 live in settlements in the slums instead of building 
 missions there, cleaning up Havana and Panama 
 instead of marching against yellow fever with a 
 crucifix, circulating literature and establishing edu- 
 cation among the masses to enable them to govern 
 themselves instead of training a few to govern 
 them. 
 
 Never before in the history of the world were 
 the fundamental principles of Jesus more appealed 
 to. Never before have men so defied ancient and 
 established fraud. Never has humanity seemed 
 more worth while. Never have classes, castes, 
 traditions and all vested humbuggery been so un- 
 safe. 
 
 Daily newspapers let the dread light of ex- 
 posure through courts and camps. Demos has a 
 thousand eyes. Kings and presidents, old fam- 
 ilies and millionaires, must show cause before the 
 fifteen cent magazines and the one cent dailies. 
 The rats and bats that for ages have fattened on 
 human weakness and ignorance are greatly dis- 
 turbed. 
 
 And what this age needs is to realize that this is 
 Christianity! 
 
 This is precisely what Jesus meant! 
 13 
 
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 
 
 We are actually doing, unconsciously, and all 
 the better so, the very business of Christ. 
 
 For we read that when the young Nazarene 
 came to his home town and entered the syna- 
 gogue, the book of the prophet Isaiah was handed 
 him, and when he had opened the book, he found 
 the place where it was written : 
 
 4 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because 
 he hath anointed me to preach the good news to 
 the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken- 
 hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and 
 recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them 
 that are bruised." And he added, as he closed 
 the book : " This day is this scripture fulfilled in 
 your ears." 
 
 Hundreds of earnest souls are doing this Christ- 
 work who are under the dominance of the tradi- 
 tional notion that Christ is only to be found 
 in some provincial, narrow organization. They 
 need to realize that they, too, are of the Christ 
 Company. They need to sing the ancient can- 
 ticle : 
 
 Doubtless, O God, thou art our Father, 
 Though Abraham be ignorant of us, 
 And Israel acknowledge us not. 
 
 14 
 
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 
 
 It is they who form the real, invisible Church. 
 
 That Church is inherently unorganizable. To 
 organize means to go in for money, influence and 
 other forms of power over men aside from pure 
 character, spiritual, personal influence. 
 
 You cannot organize religion any more than 
 you can organize poetry. 
 
 No money ever helped Jesus' work in the world, 
 no authority ever furthered it ; just as no money or 
 authority can hinder it. 
 
 The Church of Jesus is not " a mighty army." 
 The whole military analogy stinks of cheap suc- 
 cess. 
 
 All " campaigns," all efforts to raise money, to 
 multiply church members, and otherwise to ad- 
 vance the cause of Jesus, as we would advance the 
 cause of some candidate for President, displays a 
 blindness to Jesus* very nature and oft-repeated 
 notions. 
 
 For, if you ask him, he tells you that his 
 triumph is like a seed growing secretly, a lump of 
 leaven, the coming of the wind; and he will tell 
 you to beware of money, to refuse the seats of 
 high authority. 
 
 Against the mighty organization of the Roman 
 empire he set his personality alone. It was 
 
 15 
 
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 
 
 enough. The golden thrones have been tumbled 
 down; the thunder of the legions is forever still; 
 but the personality of the wise and gentle Son of 
 Man is the most powerful force in humanity now, 
 two thousand years after. 
 
 Why can we not understand this? Religion is 
 adjectival: it is not a noun. It is the quality of 
 our work; it is not some special work. It is the 
 tune of all deeds; it is no particular set of deeds. 
 
 The essays in this book are not to church mem- 
 bers. They are to human beings. 
 
 They were not spoken in any temple ; they were 
 first printed in a newspaper. 
 
 In provincial days the church bell rang, and the 
 neighbors gathered in the meeting house, which 
 thus was the symbol of communal righteousness 
 and aspiration. 
 
 To-day the ends of the earth are neighbors, by 
 the printed page. The new congregation gathers 
 about the newspaper, for better or for worse. 
 
 I am inclined to fancy that if Jesus were to come 
 to-day he would come into the columns of the 
 daily paper, and speak there, amidst the cries of 
 advertisers, the contention of politics, the antics of 
 the joke-makers, the parade of business; for there 
 he would find that same common people that once 
 
 16 
 
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 
 
 " heard him gladly " in the streets of Jerusalem 
 and the by-ways of Galilee. For his message is 
 not of the temple, but of the street. 
 
 In the name and spirit of Jesus therefore I send 
 these little preachments to the common folks, to all 
 those who for one reason or another are groping, 
 in the hope that something herein may make again 
 clear and dear to them those evergreen spiritual 
 truths and emotions which are the chief beauty of 
 souls. 
 
 The River of God runs through the streets of 
 the city. 
 
 For a Chicago newspaper I once wrote, concern- 
 ing Jane Addams of Hull House : 
 
 " There is a river the streams whereof 
 
 Make glad the City of God." 
 I went through death to find this thing 
 And all through heaven I trod. 
 
 Now heaven's a wide and wonderful place, 
 
 But the people are much as we, 
 So I came back home in sorrow and thirst, 
 
 And there one said to me: 
 
THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 
 
 " O fool, you have traveled far to find 
 
 What youVe crossed over time and again ; 
 For the River of God is in Halsted Street 
 And is running black with men." 
 
 " Then maybe Chicago's the City of God? " 
 
 Said I. "Perhaps," said he; 
 " For to find that City you need no wings 
 
 To fly, but eyes to see. 
 
 " And low in the rushes the river sings, 
 
 And sweet is its spirit lure, 
 For it waters the joys of loving and living 
 That grow in the hearts of the poor." 
 
 So I took me a place in the City slums 
 Where the River runs night and day, 
 
 And there I sit 'neath the Tree of Life 
 And teach the children to play. 
 
 And ever I soil my hands in the River, 
 
 But ever it cleans my soul; 
 As I draw from the deep with the Silver Cord, 
 
 And I fill the Golden Bowl. 
 
 18 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD RELIGION AND THE MODERN 
 
 MIND 7 
 
 LAME AND LOVELY 21 
 
 THE UNIVERSAL CREED 26 
 
 FRIENDSHIP 31 
 
 PREPARATION 35 
 
 THE INSIGHT OF LOVE 39 
 
 MAN Is A SPIRIT 43 
 
 THE WASTE IN HATE 47 
 
 THE ESCAPE FROM SELF 51 
 
 THE LOVE OF WOMAN 55 
 
 THE MOTHER OF EVIL 59 
 
 MONEY 63 
 
 POINTS OF SOCIAL DECAY 67 
 
 REDEMPTION BY SELF-RESPECT 71 
 
 THE SIMPLICITY OF MASTERS 75 
 
 THE RESERVES 79 
 
 FERMENTING THOUGHTS 83 
 
 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF A SENSE OF HUMOR 87 
 
 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOOD AND BAD 91 
 
 CHILDLIKENESS AND CHILDISHNESS 95 
 
 PRAYER 101 
 
 THE SIN OP SENSITIVENESS 105 
 
 THEY ALL Do IT 109 
 
 THE PRACTICAL USES OF DEATH 113 
 
 19 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 OTHERWORLDLINESS 117 
 
 THE SERMON OF THE CLOCK 121 
 
 ON GOING TO CHURCH 127 
 
 THE EYE OF THE SOUL 132 
 
 LOVING GOD 136 
 
 THEI USES OF CONFESSION 141 
 
 THE HEART OF FATALISM 146 
 
 A PREACHMENT TO PREACHERS 151 
 
 BEYOND THE GRAVE 155 
 
 YOKE JOY 160 
 
 THE SOUL LAOCOON 165 
 
 THE CENTER OF THINGS 170 
 
 THE THREE SPHINXES BY THE ROAD 175 
 
 THE HOUSE ON THE ROCK 179 
 
 THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE ....... 183 
 
 SALVATION BY RESPONSIBILITY . . . 187 
 
 LOVE THE TEST OF LIFE 191 
 
 THE TEETH AND CLAWS OF ALTRUISM 195 
 
 -IMITATION IN RELIGION 199 
 
 Do THE MEEK MAKE GOOD? 203 
 
 WIDENING 207 
 
 JESUS OUT OF DOORS 211 
 
 20 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
 And in the archives of heaven I had grace to 
 read, how that once the angel Nadir, being exiled 
 from his place by mortal passion, upswinging on 
 the wings of parental love, appeared for a brief 
 instant in his station, and, depositing a wondrous 
 birth, straightway disappeared. And this charge 
 was the self-same babe who goeth lame and lovely. 
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 AT first thought we seem to be drawn toward 
 one another by our excellences, but a little re- 
 flection will convince us that our truest attraction 
 lies in our defects. 
 
 Man's " lower nature " has come in for hard 
 knocks by nearly all moralists, but it is none the 
 less the cement of our sociality. 
 
 As humanity is now constructed, it is hard to see 
 how there could be any love, any family life, or 
 anything at all, in life or literature, except the 
 drabs and grays, were it not for the much berated 
 animalities. 
 
 21 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 We speak of *' the communion of saints," but is 
 there not also a communion of sinners are we 
 not bound together by our lapses? 
 
 I do not write this in praise of immorality. I 
 am no " deviPs advocate." Over and over again, 
 whoever speaks of moral laws at all must sound 
 the warning that what he says must not be carried 
 too far; that, no matter what his truth, it is but 
 half the truth; the other half abiding in the com- 
 mon sense, balance, and judgment of the reader's 
 mind. 
 
 And truly this unity in fault may be pushed to 
 the extreme indicated by Hawthorne in his " Mar- 
 ble Faun," where he speaks of the brotherhood of 
 crime, and how all murderers, for instance, from 
 them that slew Caesar by Pompey's pillar to the 
 last blood-guilty wretch named in to-day's paper, 
 have joined invisible hands in spiritual kinship. 
 
 But the truth of which I speak is to be taken 
 with care and niceness. Using thus due discrimi- 
 nation, we can get good out of the fact that prac- 
 tically all loveliness is lame. 
 
 Love does not leap toward perfection; it clings 
 to imperfections. No class is so universally loved 
 as babies, who are most incomplete. It is their 
 helplessness that appeals; and all our affection 
 
 22 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 rushes forth in response. So also a mother will 
 love a crippled child more than a sound one. 
 
 Have you never observed how a little weakness 
 in a hero brings him near? That story telling of 
 Lincoln, which was the main accusation against 
 him his enemies made, endeared him to the peo* 
 pie. And not a little of his hold upon our tender- 
 ness is due, I believe, to his most unprepossessing 
 of faces. 
 
 Washington never made a neater stroke to con- 
 quer " the hearts of his countrymen " than when 
 he lost his temper that time in battle, and said 
 things that are expurgated from school histories. 
 
 Whoever construes this as a recommendation of 
 evil misses the point. For the point, the moral 
 bearing, is this : That no person should lose heart 
 and hope because of his mistakes. Slips, errors, 
 and sins have the quality of lovely lameness only 
 in those who struggle against them and fall be- 
 cause of their humanity. Not to struggle, but to 
 turn and love and follow evil for its own sake, is 
 not human at all ; it is devilish. 
 
 To err is human, but not wholly. What is 
 really human is to err and hate it ; to sin and loathe 
 ourselves for it, to slip and to be ashamed of our 
 slipping. 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 And it is in this battling, this Alp-climbing, that 
 characterizes the human soul, that its loveliness in- 
 heres. We admire those who are on the heights; 
 we love those who are scrambling up, with torn 
 hands, bleeding knees, doubting hearts, spent 
 breath, full of fears but climbing, climbing ! 
 
 John has a light-giving saying: "Herein is 
 love; not that we loved God, but that He loved 
 us." Love is always from the higher to the lower, 
 from the more to the less perfect. So the Christ 
 was called " the Friend of Sinners." 
 
 Any soul that has genuine greatness, the kind of 
 holiness that springs from grandeur of soul in- 
 stead of from refined egoism, will ever be smitten 
 with love toward the weak and passion cursed, and 
 not with disgust. It is the mark of Jesus' majesty 
 that he was drawn so mightily to our foolish and 
 vice-shot humanity. Contempt has no place in a 
 soul that loves. 
 
 How vain, then, our fears that our dead, who 
 have been long in the pure perfection of heaven, 
 may despise us! Directly the contrary! for the 
 nobler they grow, by the side of him who loved 
 the weak and wicked with so miraculous a passion, 
 under his tutelage who put the sign of the cross 
 upon the divine stooping to our lowliness, the 
 
 24 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
 nobler they become, I say, and the more they 
 learn of the inward mystery of love, the more they 
 stoop to kiss our blind eyes and to bathe our 
 twisted wills and lusts with their tears. 
 
 " Lame, lame ! " cry out all the heavenly host 
 as they see this toiling band of mortals painfully 
 writhing up the slopes of light, " lame and 
 lovely!" 
 
THE UNIVERSAL CREED 
 
 Chi non stima la vita, non la merita. He ivho 
 does not value life, does not deserve it. LEON- 
 ARDO DA VINCI. 
 
 Men should be judged, not by their tint of skin, 
 The Gods they serve, the vintage that they 
 
 drink, 
 
 Nor by the way they fight, or love, or sin, 
 But by the quality of thought they think. 
 
 LAWRENCE HOPE. 
 
 IN the one universal church to which all good 
 men belong, composed of those of all faiths 
 who honestly live up to the best they know, 
 whether Christian or pagan, Jew or Gentile, Cath- 
 olic or Protestant, there is a certain fundamental 
 creed. This, the greatest common divisor of all 
 creeds, may be thus stated : 
 
 i. The good man sees, acknowledges, and be- 
 lieves in, first of all, the difference between right 
 and wrong. When the word ought disappears 
 from one's vocabulary he may be sure of moral 
 
 26 
 
THE UNIVERSAL CREED 
 
 decay. The one man abominable to any decent 
 society is the man who thinks nothing matters. 
 We can tolerate one, even, who doubts there is a 
 God; but if one believes there is no line between 
 right and wrong, then, as Dr. Johnson said, " let 
 us count our spoons when he leaves." 
 
 2. The good man believes that happiness will 
 come to him, permanently, and as a law, only as he 
 practices doing right. Joy, peace, and bliss are 
 not to be cozened nor juggled from God or nature, 
 but are the sure portion of them that persistently 
 do what they think right. Doing right, of course, 
 does not always bring money or fame or other ex- 
 ternal desired things, but it brings peace and poise 
 to the soul, as surely as three times five make fif- 
 teen. There are no more exceptions to this rule 
 than to a law of physics or of geometry. The 
 cosmic accuracy runs in spiritual as well as in ma- 
 terial things. 
 
 3. The good man's duty (in which he finds hap- 
 piness) is first of all to develop his personality. 
 God made him for a purpose; his joy will consist 
 in finding and fulfilling that purpose. He is not 
 to be some one else, not to copy; but, using all mas- 
 ters, to become more and more himself. 
 
 4. It is his duty to be strong. He can be of use 
 
 27 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 to others only as he has force in himself. He, 
 therefore, shuns all things that tend to weaken his 
 arm, his brain, or his heart 
 
 5. His duty is to be clean. This item of the 
 creed is oldest and newest; oldest, in that cleans- 
 ings were a part of every early religion, the com- 
 mands of Moses, for instance, abounding in lustral 
 rites; newest, in that the one lesson of modern 
 science is the power and safety of the antiseptic 
 life. The devil's name, as far as bodily health 
 and mental clearness and spiritual vigor is con- 
 cerned, is dirt. Dirt is the one enemy to be hated 
 with all one's soul and to be fought unto one's last 
 breath. 
 
 6. His duty is to be brave. The basic sin of 
 all sins is cowardice. The higher the realm of 
 life in which we move the more dangerous is any 
 kind of fear. And the most deadly of all fears 
 is the fear of the truth, or the fear for the truth. 
 Any man or institution that fights to preserve him- 
 self or itself, for the sake of " expediency," that 
 is to say, for fear the truth might do harm, any 
 man or institution, in the words of Zangwill, that 
 proposes to live and die in " an autocosm without 
 facts," is doomed. 
 
 7. His duty is to love. Although, according 
 
 28 
 
THE UNIVERSAL CREED 
 
 to the foregoing points in the creed, he is to de- 
 velop self and be clean, brave, and strong, yet he 
 is to find his motive for all this and the end for 
 which he does all this, outside and not inside of 
 himself. It is at this point that he rises, like an 
 aeroplane leaving the runway on the ground and 
 soaring aloft; here the man leaves the company 
 and similitude of all other creatures. In his 
 power to be actuated by unselfish motives he be- 
 comes as a god compared to the beasts. He lives 
 for his wife, his children, his friends, his country, 
 his race; so, in widening waves his radio-dynamic 
 flows. The good man, therefore, hates no living 
 creature. He despises no human being. In him 
 is a centrifugal power outflowing to inundate the 
 universe. 
 
 8. From this love arise all graces and virtues 
 as naturally as peaches grow from peach trees. 
 Loving all he cannot soil a soul, nor wrong a fel- 
 low being, nor hurt wantonly, nor usurp, nor push 
 for precedence, nor be unkind, nor in any way drift 
 into the low, poison life of egoism. 
 
 9. His one aim, last of all, is to serve. Strong 
 in himself, fearless and loving, he arises at length 
 to the platform where stands he who was called 
 " the first born among many brethren." He is 
 
 29 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 the Master's companion and also can put away all 
 cheap success, all luxuries of greed and dominance, 
 and repeat his Master's words: " Let him who 
 would be greatest among you be servant of all. 
 I, too, come not to be ministered unto, but to 
 minister." Over his grave may be inscribed what 
 Anthony said of Brutus : 
 
 His life was gentle, and the elements 
 
 So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up 
 
 And say to all the world, " This was a man! " 
 
FRIENDSHIP 
 / call you not servants, but friends. JESUS. 
 
 WHEN a man says friendship I think he 
 utters the deepest word in human speech. 
 It ranks even a little higher than love, being a sort 
 of unselfed love, love with the itch and hunger 
 extracted. 
 
 We do not love our friends ; we like them. We 
 love our children, wife and parents, and kinsfolk. 
 We like apples and custard pie and a cozy fire and 
 a good bed and slippers and our friend. 
 
 Like goes farther in than love. Like is a voice 
 from the subconscious self, a cry from the inward 
 and unknown me. It lies behind the will, beneath 
 the judgment, in the far darkness of our secret 
 soul. 
 
 It does not say that a wife cannot be also a 
 friend; but she rarely is; she is usually an enemy, 
 to whom we are most passionately attached. And 
 if she be a friend, then that friendship has grown 
 up from other sources, and is of a different texture 
 
 31 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 and quality from the sex motives which make mar- 
 riages. Not many women would tolerate com- 
 radeship from a husband. Perhaps this is as it 
 should be, and nature needs fiercer fires for her 
 necessary results. 
 
 Still rarer is friendship between parent and 
 child. It is an amazing thing I have noticed here, 
 how warm, intelligent and cultured father and son 
 both strive for friendship and cannot attain it. 
 Sometimes they succeed, but so rarely that it may 
 be called a phenomenon. 
 
 Whence, then, come friends? And who are 
 they? And how can one make them? All an- 
 swers to these pathetic questions seem to me to be 
 unsatisfactory, partial, insufficient, and by the way. 
 The rules of the wise will not work. We do not 
 make friends by being noble and good ; friendship 
 does not arise from similarity of tastes ; and other- 
 wise one can, in actual experience, drive a coach 
 and four through all and any of the prescriptions 
 of the proverbial philosophers. 
 
 The fact is that the secret springs of friendship 
 are wholly mysterious. Searching for them we 
 must report like the Louisiana sheriff reported on 
 the back of a writ " duces tecum " which he had 
 been given to serve upon a negro who had escaped 
 
 3* 
 
FRIENDSHIP 
 
 into the swamp : " Non comattibus, up stumpum, 
 in swampo." As I look over my friends I find 
 I like them as a dog likes his master. So I con- 
 clude that this emotion must originate in some 
 Newfoundland or St. Bernard region of my na* 
 ture, and is probably one of those instincts not yet 
 eliminated by evolution, something I share with 
 dogs. 
 
 For all that I honor it as the best thing I am 
 conscious of. I am prouder of liking my friends 
 than of any other of my small bunch of virtues. 
 When I think of Bill and Lige and Al and Ralph 
 and Newt I get a kind of warmth about the cockles 
 of my heart no other contemplation can produce. 
 
 And the bitterest hurts I have ever felt are 
 those made by the disloyalty of others whom I 
 thought friends and trusted. Nothing is so salt 
 and nauseous to the soul as the taste of Judas in 
 the mouth of memory. 
 
 And it seems to me for this, after all, is a 
 sermon that religion, rightly taken, is rather a 
 friendship for God than a love to God; and that 
 we would better translate all the Bible's admoni- 
 tions to love God by the paraphrase to be friends 
 with God. 
 
 To love God has a conventional sound; but to 
 33 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 be a friend of God that is a searching and 
 swordlike word. It means to like Him; not to 
 avoid Him; to seek His presence; to be at home 
 with Him ; to be cheered, consoled, quieted by the 
 thought of Him. 
 
 Speaking for myself, I can say that I never came 
 into this comfortable relationship until I had swept 
 away all I had ever been taught, dared to presume, 
 upon the debt God had incurred toward me by 
 making me, and took my rightful place as His son 
 at His table. 
 
 It does not require any assumption of holiness 
 or sinlessness to do this ; it only needs to presume 
 upon the vast noble-mindedness, kindness, and for- 
 bearing wisdom of such a heart as Jesus reveals 
 to us. It requires a tremendous burst of moral 
 courage to believe God likes the kind of man I 
 am; but I do believe it; and the result is the great- 
 est ethical dynamic of my life the friendship of 
 God. 
 
 34 
 
PREPARATION 
 
 Before an artist can do anything the instrument 
 must be tuned. HENRY DRUMMOND. 
 
 ONE way to open a locked door is to fall at it 
 and scratch, kick, and shove! A better 
 way is to get the key. 
 
 In other words, pluck and force and will power 
 are all right in their place, but they are far from 
 being the only secret of success. They are down- 
 right silly without preparation. 
 
 Knowing how is half the battle. Practice and 
 study count. Skill and efficiency mean a long time 
 getting ready. We are familiar enough with this 
 truth in ordinary matters. We send boys to 
 school and prentices to the shop, and would-be 
 stenographers to night school. For we recognize 
 that the untrained man these days has to get off 
 the earth, there's no room for him. But we often 
 fail to carry this primitive common sense over into 
 the more serious concerns. We forget that one 
 also has to learn * how to live. One cannot go 
 
 35 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 at it tooth and nail. It is not to be stormed, 
 forced, and stampeded. It takes science, training, 
 and practice. 
 
 The learning how is hard, always ; but essential. 
 The only things one can do without practice are 
 over-eating, over-drinking, laziness, bad temper, 
 selfishness, and general meanness, also uselessness. 
 But the good things come hard. Take humility, 
 rarest and noblest of virtues. The only road to 
 humility is by being humiliated, which hurts. 
 
 The only way to patience is by self-restraint un- 
 der irritation. If there is nothing to gnaw and 
 worry and heckle us, then we never learn that beau- 
 tiful art of patience. The only path to belief, 
 that is, to the only kind of belief that is of any use 
 to character, is through doubt. Faith is a product 
 that is ground out of the mill of dismay, confusion, 
 despair and struggle. Intellectual assent is cheap. 
 The confidence that is a triumph of the soul over 
 pessimism and fatuous reasonings is worth some- 
 thing. 
 
 The only means toward rest is work. It is to 
 tired bones the bed tastes sweet. The soul can 
 never enjoy letting go that has never hung on. 
 Real placidity is the product of strenuosity. 
 
 So also the preparation for knowledge is love. 
 
 36 
 
PREPARATION 
 
 Truth is not a lump of something a man may go 
 and pick up. Truth is not any thing at all. It is 
 relation, a quality, a shine, an odor. It is not per- 
 ceived by the intellect; it is perceived by the heart; 
 the intellect merely criticises and classifies it. The 
 secret of Edison's discoveries, and of Koch's, and 
 of Marconi's, is love. Only love can see. It has 
 the X-ray eye. And this is true in business, or 
 science, or literature, or art, quite as much as in 
 religion. Brains can amass truths and pigeonhole 
 them and arrange them; only passion of some sort 
 can find them out where they are hidden. 
 
 Sorrow, disappointment, heartbreak, bereave- 
 ment, all such things are the anterooms of great- 
 ness. There is a state into which a man can grow 
 where he resembles an ordinary man about as much 
 as a fine thoroughbred horse resembles a broken- 
 down hack horse, or as a big American beauty 
 rose resembles a dusty weed. Nobleness of char- 
 acter, grandeur of soul, sweetness of spirit, no one 
 can get these without being prepared. 
 
 Some of us have the ignorant notion that we 
 could be noble if we cared to make the effort. 
 We are like the man who, when asked if he could 
 play the violin, said he didn't know he'd never 
 tried. 
 
 37 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 What a deal of getting ready to live is needed ! 
 A man never really learns how to live till he's 
 ready to die. And if with most of us, all of us, 
 life is a mighty getting ready, then it is a getting 
 ready for what? 
 
 It is this tremendous question that unlocks the 
 door of death and gives us our surest hope of the 
 life beyond. 
 
THE INSIGHT OF LOVE 
 
 Faithfulness to us In our faults is a certain sign 
 of fidelity in a friend. J. G. HOLLAND. 
 
 LOVE has been called blind. That is because 
 it will not and cannot see faults. 
 
 So men have despised love and boasted of intel- 
 lect, which, they say, can discern the truth better. 
 
 And herein men simply display their ignorance 
 and show that they do not know what truth is nor 
 what knowing is. 
 
 For a living truth, or the truth about a living 
 thing, was never yet perceived by any brain. 
 Mind can see dead truths, such as that two and 
 two make four, or that here is a book and there 
 is a man, and all such things that have to do 
 merely with material and inanimate propositions; 
 but truths that grow in the human spirit are only 
 visible to the eye of love. 
 
 Whoever loves, sees; and whoever sees, sees 
 only things lovely. For the soul of a human being 
 
 39 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 is essentially beautiful, and only the love ray can 
 reveal it. 
 
 This is proved by the fact that wherever we find 
 love in its purest and intensest form you find al- 
 ways that it has this glorifying effect. In three in- 
 stances you will find love at its best. 
 
 First, in the love of a mother for her young 
 child. This affection cannot see evil. The 
 mother kisses the crippled feet, yearns over the 
 weak will, and sees beneath all naughtiness to a 
 substratum of charm that is invisible to you and 
 me. 
 
 Second, in the first love of a man and a maid. 
 Here Puck has squeezed upon their eyes the juice 
 of that same flower he used to make the fairy 
 queen love the clown with an ass's head. No mat- 
 ter how gross or common to our unlit eyes the girl 
 may be, her lover thinks her an angel. So this sex 
 love, when raised to its spiritual potency, is the 
 most wonderful of all discoveries. To the infat- 
 uated lover she has no faults; they are but eccen- 
 tricities of divinity no one but he understands. 
 He would not change her in any least way, lest 
 she should cease to be she, and so be less a miracle. 
 This is not folly, nor blindness. It is insight. 
 For any one of us is precisely so beautiful and 
 
 40 
 
THE INSIGHT OF LOVE 
 
 glorious and majestic, if any one could be found 
 who would love us enough to detect it. 
 
 For awhile, at least, it is given to us, in the 
 passion of youth, to see another soul as angels see 
 souls. There never yet was love enough in this 
 world. God send more! And to any lover we 
 may speak those words of Wordsworth : 
 
 Thou blest philosopher who yet dost keep 
 Thy heritage ; thou eye amongst the blind, 
 
 That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, 
 Haunted forever by the eternal Mind! 
 
 The third instance is God's love for the human 
 soul. The revelation of this, the emphasis he 
 placed upon this, is Jesus' chief contribution to the 
 happiness of the race. For, singularly enough, the 
 reverse of all the creeds, is truer than the creeds. 
 God's faith in me is more saturated with redemp- 
 tive potency than my faith in Him. The thought 
 that infinite goodness can and does love me is the 
 flame that lights my love to Him ; as it is written : 
 " The spirit of a man is the candle of the Lord." 
 
 What the world needs is trust, or rather to be 
 trusted. Slowly and through painful years and 
 centuries of intellectual stupidity we are to learn 
 that children are to be made better by believing in 
 
 41 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 them and appreciating them rather than by flog- 
 ging and scolding; that criminals can only be cured 
 by trusting them, never by punishing them; that 
 nations are best conquered by disarmament and 
 defenseless confidence, more certainly than by 
 armies; and that sinful men are to be won to 
 worship and morality by revealing to them through 
 love their own dignity as God's beloved, rather 
 than by threats and curses ; that while Sinai and the 
 white thunders of the law drive men to despair, 
 Calvary and the revelation of divine love lift 
 them to nobleness. 
 
 Love is not blind. Love is the only thing that 
 sees. 
 
MAN IS A SPIRIT 
 
 My little spirit, see, 
 
 Sits in a foggy cloud and stays for me. 
 
 MACBETH. 
 
 The final goal of all true culture is the liberation 
 of man from the " sensual gravitation " which 
 every one experiences in himself. Essentially as 
 a creature of the senses man begins his course in 
 this world, essentially as a creature of the spirit he 
 should finish it here, and, as we hope, continue it 
 in another world under more favorable conditions. 
 
 -CARL HlLTY. 
 
 OD is a spirit," said the Master, but for 
 that matter man is a spirit also. We are 
 all " spooks." The Bible says that no man hath 
 seen God at any time, neither hath any man at any 
 time ever seen a man. We are kin mysteries to 
 Deity. 
 
 Carlyle relates how old Dr. Samuel Johnson, 
 the grand mogul of English literature, used to go 
 poking about strange places in Cock Lane looking 
 
 43 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
 for ghosts when all the while the streets were full 
 of them, had he but known it; he jostled them 
 daily in the thoroughfare, and the good doctor was 
 himself a wraith, in a substantial envelope to be 
 sure. 
 
 Because you have seen my clothes and face and 
 hands is no proof you have seen me. I have never 
 even found myself. 
 
 The first and most pregnant of truths is that 
 we are essentially spirits, and we come into the 
 better quality of living only as we recognize this 
 fact and cultivate our spiritual nature. " To be 
 carnally minded is death," said St. Paul, " but to 
 be spiritually minded is life." 
 
 We enter the world as little animals ; we ought 
 to go out of it great spirits. An old man should 
 be more beautiful than a baby, for the baby is 
 but a charming animal, while the old man may be 
 a lofty, wondrous, fascinating soul. That this is 
 not the rule and that we dread old age shows that 
 we have not yet learned what it is to live, nor real- 
 ized the value of character. 
 
 To live, in the fullest sense of the word, is to 
 find our aims and enjoyments in the spiritual 
 plane. But spirituality must not be too narrowly 
 defined. It does not mean an absorption in reli- 
 
 44 
 
MAN IS A SPIRIT 
 
 gious emotions. That is only one phase of it and 
 too often overemphasized. 
 
 Whatever sets our pleasures over from the body 
 to the mind, from the flesh to the spirit, belongs 
 to our spiritual assets and helps give life poise and 
 permanence and the quality of immortality. 
 
 The American people do not yet fully appre- 
 ciate the moral and civic value of the arts. We 
 regard music and painting as mere amusements, 
 good for those who happen to like that sort of 
 thing. They rank a little higher than baseball. 
 But we are mistaken. They belong to the assets 
 of civilization. They assist in redeeming a nation 
 from brutishness, from the rule of coarse lust, 
 greed, luxury, and bloodthirstiness. They are a 
 part of the " kingdom of heaven." 
 
 The love of nature, the power to get satisfac- 
 tion out of the contemplation of the blue mystery 
 of the lake, the splendid spectacle of the night sky 
 and the stars, the loveliness of leaf, and tree and 
 flower, the imposing majesty of mountains, the 
 calm of rivers, and the moods of the great ocean 
 are also distinct aids in bringing our lives up out 
 of the slough of mere bodily desires. 
 
 Not that the body's appetites are wicked. 
 They are good. God made them. But He also 
 
 45 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 made hogs. They are simply low. They are 
 good only as they are kept in their place. And 
 more and more, as life unfolds, they should fall 
 away. And they will if you control them and dis- 
 cipline them. All their fiery forces will pass over 
 into soul power just as the rotting mold sends its 
 filthy juices into the plant stem to rise and become 
 white lily petals bearing fragrance. 
 
 Thus beginning as animals we work our way 
 up to our inherited privilege as spiritual beings in 
 the wide, beautiful, and healthful sense of the 
 word. By cultivating the mind, by science, by art, 
 by music, by the love of nature, by intercourse with 
 high-minded persons, we ascend out of the dirt 
 into the sunlight of life. 
 
 Nothing is so valuable to assist us in this as an 
 intelligent appreciation and reverence for God. 
 We ought to recognize His spirit in His universe 
 just as we recognize a man's spirit in his body. 
 Out of a rational, sensible religion, communion 
 with God and with good people we get what we 
 find nowhere else, a constant nourishment for 
 truth, love, honor, self-control, hope, and optimism 
 in our hearts. 
 
THE WASTE IN HATE 
 
 But I say unto you, love your enemies. JESUS. 
 
 ONE of the most luminous observations upon 
 hatred is that of Baudelaire: " Hatred is 
 a precious liquor, a poison dearer than that of the 
 Borgias, because it is made of our blood, our 
 health, our sleep, and two-thirds of our love." 
 
 The main point to know about hate is that it 
 does not pay. It is pure waste. It exhausts our 
 vital forces and gives us nothing in return. 
 
 Baudelaire well calls it poison. For of all pas- 
 sions that lodge in the soul it has the most septic, 
 heady, and yeasty quality. If we really hate a 
 man, we ought to hate him too much to hate him. 
 
 That is, we should not be willing to give him 
 the pleasure of making us unhappy; and we can 
 surely cause him more discomfort, if he bears us 
 genuine ill will, by letting him see that he cannot 
 disturb our peace. 
 
 Why should I let my enemy rob me of my 
 sleep? Why, for his sake, should I indulge in 
 
 47 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 thoughts that are to me as black coffee at bedtime 
 and give me a " white night " ? I shall put aside 
 all feeling about him, even if it takes as much 
 moral effort as a drunkard needs to refuse his 
 liquor. 
 
 The word of Emerson, speaking of Lincoln, is 
 to me the ideal of manhood, freed by its very 
 greatness from the self-torture of resentment: 
 " His heart was as large as the world, yet it had 
 no room in it for the memory of a wrong." 
 
 More practical, more mundane, perhaps, but 
 not less forceful, was the remark of the late Paul 
 Morton, who answered, when asked if he did not 
 like to " get even " with any one who had done 
 him wrong : " I haven't time. I am too busy." 
 
 A friend was once swindled out of $5,000 by a 
 rascal whom he had trusted. To the surprise of 
 every one, he made no effort to prosecute the man. 
 One of his friends asked him why it was that he 
 did not take steps to get justice. 
 
 " Well," said he, " it's this way: If I should 
 go to law I could possibly regain my money and 
 punish the fellow ; but it would take me about two 
 years to get the case through all the courts, and in 
 the meantime a world of hard feelings and feuds 
 would be created. Now, I figure that I can make 
 
 48 
 
THE WASTE IN HATE 
 
 that five thousand, and more, by strictly attending 
 to my business for those two years, and feel a 
 whole lot better." This, I take it, is as good 
 philosophy as was ever uttered in Greece. 
 
 To get rid of hate and its spendthrift results 
 upon us, we must live upon the heights. It is all a 
 question of the plane upon which our daily think- 
 ing and feeling take place. To bear grudges, to 
 harbor bitter animosities, to wish evil to any man, 
 to look and hope for disaster to any creature, is to 
 dwell in the lowlands, in the miasmatic swamps of 
 life, and to breathe febrile and malarious vapors. 
 
 If we can, by a moral effort, pull ourselves up 
 to the mesa, the highlands, where move such 
 figures as Antoninus and Lincoln and Jesus; if we 
 can rise thus to the point where we can feed our 
 enemy if he hunger and give him drink if he thirst, 
 we have the double satisfaction of triumphing over 
 him, which is pleasant, and over ourselves, which 
 is an infinitely greater pleasure. 
 
 Dr. Holmes calls argument the "hydrostatic 
 paradox of fools " that is, as water rises to the 
 same level in a small tube as in a large reservoir 
 with which it is connected, so to argue with a fool 
 is to put him on your level. " And," he adds, 
 "the fools know it!" 
 
 49 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 So anger and hate and all such heat against 
 wrongdoers might be called " the hydrostatic para- 
 dox of malice," for to fall into bad blood against 
 the man who has done us evil is to descend to his 
 plane and to share with him his devil's brew of 
 malignity. 
 
 Hate is destructive. Love is creative. Every 
 angry feeling tears down something in us. Every 
 emotion of love hardens our life fiber. In all an- 
 imal life love is the creative instinct and hate seeks 
 annihilation. Nowhere does the pure wisdom of 
 Jesus shine more refulgently than where he says 
 (and he practiced it) : " Love your enemies." 
 
THE ESCAPE FROM SELF 
 
 Speak to the children of Israel, saying, Appoint 
 out for you cities of refuge. JOSHUA, xx, 2. 
 
 Every individual soul has a history very similar 
 to that of society. CARDUCCI. 
 
 AMONG the ancient Jews they had cities of 
 refuge. The rash murderer, not with mal- 
 ice aforethought, might flee to any one of these 
 and be safe from the wrath of the avenging kin. 
 They were a wise people who thus had prevision 
 and made provision for their own weakness. 
 
 For a man's intelligence may be better gauged 
 by his knowledge of his own shortcomings than by 
 his consciousness of his own strength. And the 
 one person against whose folly and enmity one 
 needs most to guard is one's self. 
 
 I have therefore my own cities of refuge, 
 whither I flee to escape my implacable enemy 
 myself. For this eminently respectable me, that 
 I dress up in as good clothes as I can buy and 
 would have all people think to be sober, high- 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
 minded, self-controlled, and good yea, that I 
 have even at times set up in pulpits and on plat- 
 forms and made preach and lecture to honest folk, 
 telling them what they ought to do, is a fellow I 
 should hate to have you know too well. 
 
 As there were three cities of refuge in Jewry, 
 so I will give but three of mine, though there are 
 others. 
 
 First and foremost is work. I work not be- 
 cause I like it, for I would rather spend money 
 than earn it and I could loaf as thoroughly as the 
 next man; nor because I need to make a living, 
 for any one can knock off work and be a parasite ; 
 some one will always look out for the lazy as well 
 as for the sick; but because I am afraid not to 
 work. 
 
 In work I respect myself and am at peace with 
 the infinite without me and within me. When at 
 work I am Dr. Jekyll. I would not dare to start 
 out merely to live a life of ease; I would be afraid 
 of Mr. Hyde. Work is simply the salvation of 
 the soul, not possibly in an evangelical sense but 
 at least in common sense, because it saves me not 
 from theological horrors I know nothing about, 
 but from myself, which is a horror that " comes 
 home to men's business and bosoms." 
 
 52 
 
THE ESCAPE FROM SELF 
 
 Crime in society is largely the product of lei- 
 sure. Most of the ordinary moral lesions could 
 be cured by sawing wood. 
 
 The second city of refuge is called order. I 
 find that if I do not compel myself to system and 
 regular hours I get nothing done at all. If I 
 worked only when I felt like it you could put it in 
 your eye. The greatest humbug loose is inspira- 
 tion. Perhaps this should be qualified thus : occa- 
 sional inspiration is a humbug. 
 
 For the divine afflatus is a stream that runs in 
 grooves, as indeed all emotions, to be strong and 
 dependable, must be trained to come at certain 
 hours. The heart has its habits. The world's 
 best work, noblest poetry, and divinest prophecy 
 have come through men who were pounding away 
 so many hours a day. 
 
 Of course, out-of-the-way hints and whispers 
 come at odd moments to souls, and man is not a 
 treadmill; but one who depends upon feeling like 
 it to do his work soon ceases to feel like it, he is 
 weakening his will power. 
 
 By system you not only accomplish so much 
 more but you get a peculiar poise and a blissful 
 sort of contentment with yourself, the same sensa- 
 tion you get from seeing a swept and tidy room. 
 
 53 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
 An unordered day is like a cluttered desk or a 
 frowzy woman. 
 
 The third city of refuge is called wife. Any 
 man would be ashamed to tell how many vile and 
 blackguard thoughts have made at him only to be 
 warded off by this heart wall; how sometimes her 
 presence and the touch of her hand give peace and 
 avert a panic, as if an army with banners had 
 moved to the succor of a beleaguered city. 
 
 A good bachelor must be either a strong and 
 noble man or a bloodless paste. Most of us are 
 neither one nor the other; we are simply human, 
 and a human man needs a wife as a locomotive 
 needs an engineer, to prevent a wreck, as well as 
 to make him go. 
 
 These cities of refuge and these arts and ways 
 of saving one's self from one's self may throw 
 some light, perhaps, upon the reason why there is 
 inserted into the Lord's Prayer the petition : 
 
 " Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us 
 from evil 1 " 
 
 54 
 
THE LOVE OF WOMAN 
 
 Amor sementa in noi d'ogni virtute. Love im- 
 plants within us every virtue. DANTE. 
 
 L' Amour est un feu auquel s'epurent les plus 
 nobles sentiments. Love is a fire by which are 
 purified our noblest emotions. BALZAC. 
 
 THE universal opinion of mankind places the 
 love to God as the chief motive force in 
 morals. 
 
 Right next to this in importance and in power 
 comes the supreme love of one man and one 
 woman. 
 
 It may have its roots in the desires of the body, 
 as a lily has its roots in the mold, but its flower 
 and spiritual consummation is farthest removed 
 from earthliness and has the finest ethical flavor. 
 
 It is amazing how many saints and councils and 
 ecclesiastic polemics have regarded the love of 
 woman in some way akin to evil. While religion- 
 ists fulminated against the danger of soft smiles 
 and laughing eyes to the soul, down in Provence 
 
 55 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 the troubadours were founding a better theology, 
 which crept over the Alps and touched one Dante, 
 who perhaps more than any other genius has 
 rescued woman from the slough of sense and made 
 her man's spiritual guide. The substance of his 
 gospel was that it is woman whose soul awakens 
 the soul of man to his kinship with God. 
 
 Michelangelo, in his sonnet to Vittoria Colonna, 
 expressed it: 
 
 For O! how good that God must be 
 Who made so good a thing as thee! 
 
 The ancient Jews had their " court of women " 
 in their temples, and the Mohammedans deny 
 them souls ; so also the hermits and holy anchorites 
 prayed to be delivered from them. 
 
 If our civilization of today is better, and at 
 least it is kinder and more humane; if we have 
 penetrated into the core of all religion and found 
 it to consist of no more nor less than emotional 
 altruism (altruism with dynamic), the prime cause 
 of our advantage is that women have assumed the 
 spiritual leadership of the age. 
 
 In our churches it is " the court of men " that 
 fringes the rear of the meeting; with us, contrary 
 to Islam, we sometimes doubt if men have souls. 
 
 56 
 
THE LOVE OF WOMAN 
 
 I say if a man has become so entangled with insti- 
 tutional theology that he cannot tell whether or 
 not he dare claim he loves God, let him love his 
 wife. If that is not loving deity, it is the next 
 thing to it. 
 
 I speak soberly. I refer to ethical power. 
 Sincere, loyal love between one man and one 
 woman is to my mind a hundred times purer than 
 that purity supposed to bloom in the unmated. A 
 good wife is a better cure for unworthy thoughts 
 than fasting and flagellation. 
 
 And equally good is a supreme exclusive affec- 
 tion in the woman soul. To utterly love one man, 
 to choose him and cling to him " for better or for 
 worse," is not to be called conducive to religion: 
 it must be called religion itself. 
 
 This human love, romantic affection, which 
 looks to marriage as its normal fulfillment, ousts 
 sin in the best way sin can be ousted, by what Chal- 
 mers called " the expulsive force of a new emo- 
 tion." It stops moral lesion by the most potent 
 of moral antiseptics, love itself. It heals the 
 diseases of the soul, not by the crude methods of 
 bleeding and blistering, incantations and amulets, 
 but by the rational scientific principle of " assisting 
 nature to throw off the poison." 
 
 57 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 It goes to the seat of life and empowers there. 
 It stimulates the white corpuscles of the spirit to 
 devour and destroy all deadly microbes and dan- 
 gerous bacilli. 
 
 It is significant that all through the middle ages 
 men worshiped a woman with a baby in her arms. 
 It is still significant that the most vigorous reli- 
 gious movement in this opening of the Twentieth 
 Century is headed by a woman. 
 
 The dying Bunsen said to his wife, as she 
 stooped to kiss him : " In thy face have I seen 
 the eternal! " 
 
THE MOTHER OF EVIL 
 
 The Mother of Evil is not Joy, but the Lack of 
 Joy. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. 
 
 / am come that your joy may be full. JESUS. 
 
 BY a curious twist in the morbid nature of man 
 the sunny gospel of Jesus Christ has often 
 been construed into a shadow of gloom. 
 
 No one had a firmer hold on life, a sounder 
 taste of its pleasure, a richer appreciation of the 
 higher possibilities for joy concealed in existence 
 than Jesus. 
 
 Unfortunately, he was an oriental, and by 
 some strange will of destiny his cult first spread 
 among occidentals. All his picturesque imagery, 
 his poetry, his delicate, piercing shafts of intui- 
 tional perception, were hardened into doctrines 
 and syllogisms, and his social truth, intended to 
 permeate " like a lump of leaven," became a rigid 
 organization. 
 
 We may have gained something who shall 
 say ? but we certainly have lost much. When 
 
 59 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 you pluck your lily to pieces, scatter its odorous 
 petals on the ground, and transect with a sharp 
 knife its swelling seed-sac, you may have added to 
 your knowledge of systematic botany, but you have 
 lost your lily ; its grace, color, fragrance, and fruit- 
 fulness > and the flower was created for those. 
 
 And we may be sure there was some charm of 
 life, some fullness of deep joy, that played like a 
 felt radiance about his eyes and smile, that so 
 drew to him the " multitudes," for the common 
 people follow only what smacks of life. Most 
 of all does our age lack in the realization of his 
 warm humanity. 
 
 He came, he said, that our joy might be full. 
 There is the cure of sin. It remained for 
 Nietzsche, the declared enemy of our faith, to see 
 it most clearly. " It is not joy, but the lack of 
 joy, that is the mother of evil." 
 
 There never was a mortal sin that did not 
 spring from an empty heart. What are all 
 blasphemies but brutish, twisted prayers for 
 inward peace? What are drunkenness and all 
 fleshly naughtiness but the struggling of souls to 
 fill themselves at the swine's trough of sensuality? 
 What are cruelties and injustice and oppression 
 but the attempt to stay the appetite for joy with 
 
 60 
 
THE MOTHER OF EVIL 
 
 poison and bitter passions ? And, taking the whole 
 range of human wickedness, murder, envy, hate, 
 lust, theft, unkindness, and money-madness, do 
 they not seem to be the cries and grimaces and 
 wild gestures of starving gods locked out of the 
 banquet hall of truth, beating with bruised hands 
 against the door? 
 
 Whoever, therefore, plants one pure pleasure in 
 the garden of men, and teaches us how to eat 
 thereof and not sicken, has helped to stay the open 
 wound of human sin. We are beginning, these 
 last days, to perceive that the way to make the 
 world as good as possible is to make it as happy 
 as possible, and not as miserable as possible. 
 
 Economists are commencing to understand that 
 what makes slums is dark, wretched lives; what 
 makes drunkenness and the social evil is emptiness. 
 
 Our new gospel is unconsciously the old one and 
 the true one. We are trying to make the people's 
 joy full, to save the people from vice and death. 
 So in Jesus' name we may not be building lofty 
 cathedrals, as they did in another age, but we are 
 laying out parks, setting apart playgrounds for 
 children, rearing a mighty public school system to 
 shatter ignorance, promoting science to woo the 
 truth, building hospitals for the sick, and asylums 
 
 61 
 
LAME AND LONELY 
 
 for the insane, and blind, and deaf and dumb, and 
 feeble minded, transforming prison hells into sane 
 reformatories. 
 
 We are extending art and learning and music 
 and the drama and all civilizing pleasures more 
 and more toward the common man, establishing 
 libraries and making the best literature cheap and 
 popular all in the name of the Son of Man, to 
 shunt the vast river of human joy that for cen- 
 turies ran only into the pools of the elect, into the 
 broad lowlands of the people. 
 
 To this end all philanthropists, labor unions, 
 socialist movements, democracies, scientists, and 
 schools, march along different roads. 
 
 Law, repression, punishment, didactic warnings, 
 and prohibitions, these do not cure crime ; they do 
 but " heal the hurt of the daughter of my people 
 slightly, crying, peace, peace, when there is no 
 peace." Whoever will cure us, let him " come 
 that our joy may be full." 
 
 62 
 
MONEY 
 
 Quel bien lui en revtent-il? What good does 
 he get of it? BOSSUET. 
 
 SINCE the dawn of preaching we preachers 
 have been threatening^rich men with our right 
 fist and extending to them our left palm. It is 
 hardly to be wondered at that we find difficulty in 
 being taken seriously. 
 
 And our advice has been so confusing that we 
 have not had much effect. For now we exhort 
 the youth to all the virtues, giving as an induce- 
 ment the assurance that thus they will be enabled 
 to get on; and again we turn to those that have 
 gotten on and warn them of the danger of riches. 
 It might well be asked, if riches be dangerous, why 
 acquire them ; and if virtues lead to riches, are they 
 really worth cultivating? 
 
 It may be well, therefore, to set down a few 
 common-sense facts in regard to riches and the re- 
 lation of them to the moral values. 
 
 In the first place, money is simply the token or 
 
 63 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 sign of our common human wants. It means 
 power, power over others, power to make our per- 
 sonality felt. No wonder we want it. 
 
 Again it means liberty. Poverty is a curse. It 
 ties the hands. It binds the mind. It narrows 
 the soul. One who has to sweat ten hours a day 
 for bread has no time nor strength left to develop 
 the higher part of himself. 
 
 Money means also a full life. We can gratify 
 our cravings, whether they be for beer or art, for 
 Paris gowns or Wagner music. With money we 
 have a chance to grow ; without it we are stunted. 
 
 Money, therefore, is simply concentrated we 
 might say canned human value. 
 
 It naturally follows that it is good or bad, never 
 of itself, but only as giving opportunity to its pos- 
 sessor. Here, then, we have the moral gist of the 
 whole matter : money is simply opportunity. 
 
 It unlocks the door and bids the cramped and 
 chafing passion go and do its will. It liberates de- 
 sire. Hence it simply emphasizes a man. If he 
 is good he can now be better, having more scope ; 
 if bad he can, and probably will, be worse. If idle 
 and useless, he becomes a living fountain of idle- 
 ness and uselessness, poisoning others. 
 
 So, money is like any other gift; as beauty, 
 64 
 
MONEY 
 
 which adds power to the person; or genius, which 
 multiplies the efficiency of the mind and hand; or 
 position, for kingship magnifies a common man to 
 heroic proportions, in his influence on other men. 
 
 Now, the sole relation of morals to power of 
 any kind is this: that the moral sense adds to 
 power responsibility. 
 
 The root of any genuine moral feeling is al- 
 truism. Given any desire, it becomes moral as it 
 takes a direction toward the welfare of other peo- 
 ple: it is immoral exactly in proportion as it dis- 
 regards others and looks only to self. 
 
 Wicked people, therefore, are those who live, 
 think, and do for self alone ; and that whether poor 
 or rich. Whoever says, " I would like to be rich, 
 for I could do so much good with my money," 
 should examine himself and ask what good he is 
 doing with the little he has. It is all a matter of 
 relation. If one is not helpful and liberal on $40 
 a month, he would not be so on $4,000 a month. 
 
 In the ultimate realm of morals there are no 
 commandments ; there is only one test do I live 
 for myself or for others ; am I altruistic or egocen- 
 tric? 
 
 The dawdling smart set, flitting from bridge to 
 matinee, from theater to bedizened restaurant, 
 
 65 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 from the club to the horse race, are wicked ; but no 
 wickeder than the bitter poor who want to lead 
 such a life, and who curse their lot because their 
 selfishness is bound and chained. 
 
 To the real man, therefore, riches means noth- 
 ing at all, as to his character; it simply means an 
 opening to give vent to his character. And a 
 clear-eyed soul, that sees and realizes what re- 
 sponsibility means, is never eager for power and 
 opportunity. It is easier to be good in moderate 
 means than in riches for the principal reason that 
 it is easier to bear a small than a great load of 
 responsibility. " It is hard for a rich man to enter 
 the kingdom of heaven," just because a rich man 
 to be moral must be great. And, unfortunately, 
 great souls are scarce among great fortunes. 
 
 The greatness of Jesus was not in his wisdom, 
 magnetism, nor ethical perception, but in the fact 
 that he was utterly altruistic; that is, he used all 
 his powers not to advance himself but to help 
 others. His tormentors unwittingly told the truth, 
 and stated unknowingly his very secret, when, as 
 he hung on the cross, they wagged their heads at 
 him and cried : 
 
 " He saved others; himself he cannot save ! " 
 
 66 
 
POINTS OF SOCIAL DECAY 
 
 You are the salt of the earth. Put yourselves 
 at the decaying points of social life and stop the 
 putrefaction. MALTBIE BABCOCK. 
 
 EVERY man that has in him the health of 
 sound principles, owes a duty to the mass of 
 men of which he is a part. 
 
 All genuine conviction is militant. A sincere 
 belief always wants to " go out and compel them 
 to come in." It is essential to any honest faith 
 that it desires to draw all others to it. 
 
 Truth is at heart intolerant; knowing itself, 
 with a fierce certainty, to be unspeakably better 
 than error. 
 
 In most things we know ourselves ignorant, 
 children facing mysteries; so in most things we 
 should be tolerant and liberal. But in the few 
 things that we know through and through it be- 
 hooves us to be hard as nails. On a question of the 
 trinity or the miracles let us argue calmly and 
 endlessly; but on a question of decency versus 
 
LAME AND LONELY 
 
 indecency, or cruelty versus kindness, it is a word 
 and a blow. 
 
 Hence, it is for every modern soul, who feels 
 the strong truths of civilization coursing through 
 his thought, to stand for them, against all comers. 
 He who has the truth is salt. Error is putrefac- 
 tion. Where wrong prevails in the social organ- 
 ism, let the man of salt thrust himself, as his duty 
 to the universe. 
 
 Certain main points of decay may be mentioned; 
 certain places where error is flagrant, fragrant, 
 and stifling. First, it is the duty of every child 
 of light to shine out against the ancient world 
 fraud and inherited curse of militarism. Where- 
 ever the harpy head of war lust shows itself 
 he ought to take a shot at it. 
 
 For war is the most monstrous putrefying 
 agency on earth to-day, and that includes all mil- 
 itary preparedness. Whoever believes in truth 
 and justice should do what he can, in his small cor- 
 ner, to bring about the parliament of man, the 
 federation of the world. 
 
 Again, every man of salt and health should do 
 his utmost to break down caste wherever he finds 
 it. Whatever system or organization or custom 
 impedes the free rise and scope of the individual 
 
 68 
 
POINTS OF SOCIAL DECAY 
 
 is a rotting point. All select classes, aristocracies, 
 plutocracies, bureaucracies, and whatever schemes 
 there may be for controlling the people or the 
 wealth or labor of the people by a set of persons 
 who are chosen by any other than the people, and 
 who are not directly responsible to the people, are 
 germ centers of tyranny, and eventually always of 
 injustice and cruelty. 
 
 All that devious thing we call graft is also a 
 breeding spot of social disease. In whatever 
 mask it appears, however polished, honored, and 
 disguised, wherever one sees the fatal symptom of 
 public office for personal gain he ought to de- 
 nounce and oppose it. It may lurk in intricate 
 tariffs, or sit smug in wigged courts, or blow like a 
 sperm whale in dignified senates, or pervade as an 
 invisible spirit the circles of business; but no mat- 
 ter where, how, or why it is, it is rotten. 
 
 In the nearer affairs of life we may safely lay 
 down the rule that whatever threatens the integ- 
 rity and happiness of the home life, where one 
 man, one woman, and their children are gathered 
 in the family, the oldest and best institution on 
 earth, is foul. Whatever makes a good woman 
 blush is septic. Whatever tends to make little 
 children unhappy is poison. Whatever gospel 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
 takes the nerve out of men and discourages them, 
 in its general effect is unjustifiable and depraved. 
 Also, whatever or whoever loves and clings to a 
 lie, to anything that he knows to be untrue, is 
 pregnant with trouble and obliquity. 
 
 The only healthful, pure, sound, stanch self- 
 cleaning, and exceedingly good and green growing 
 tlhing under heaven or in heaven, among men or 
 among angels, is the truth. 
 
 70 
 
REDEMPTION BY SELF-RESPECT 
 
 It is hard for a man to respect himself when 
 he is denied respect by all around him. W. E. 
 CHANNING. 
 
 THE foundation of character is self-respect. 
 The citadel of virtue is a proper pride. 
 
 Out of self-contempt flow bitterness, suspicion, 
 yielding to sensualities, and the acceptance of low 
 standards. Self-respect is not egotism, but resem- 
 bles it about as a good apple resembles a decayed 
 one. Self-respect is sound, sweet, and healthy. 
 Egotism is morbid and sore to the touch. Self- 
 respect is tough ; egotism is tender. 
 
 Call a child low, and bad, and lazy and you 
 make him so. All accusation, and scolding, and 
 punishment is unpedagogic. It never did any 
 good. To punish a child by beating simply proves 
 to him one thing, to-wit: that you are a bigger 
 brute than he. The whole business of breaking 
 the will, taking down the pride, humiliating and 
 subduing people, is utterly immoral, and that 
 whether applied to children or to grown people. 
 
 71 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 No human being was ever morally helped in his 
 weakness or morally cured of his perversion by 
 any other means save one that is, by apprecia- 
 tion. It is that which reaches down into the soul 
 and raises the prostrate will; that and nothing else. 
 
 Love is the only creative, healing force. Hate 
 and all the arts and actions of hate are vicious. 
 Anger and condemnation are devastating always. 
 Hence our whole prison system is ignorant and the 
 most fruitful manufactory of criminals we have. 
 Prisons are holdovers from the dark ages. They 
 are vile, stupid, and poison fountains in society. 
 Any warden of the penitentiary will tell you con- 
 victs are not reformed in his institution; they are 
 punished. 
 
 That means their self-respect is broken down 
 by all the ingenuity of devilishness society will al- 
 low, and the self-despising wrecks are turned loose 
 again on the people. Any system of justice that 
 starts from the principle that a criminal is to 
 be punished is unscientific, unintelligent, and im- 
 moral. Punishment simply means vengeance. 
 
 To send a criminal to the horror of the peniten- 
 tiary is of the same grade as kicking a horse in the 
 stomach because he shies or balks. 
 
 A criminal is such usually because he has lost his 
 72 
 
REDEMPTION BY SELF-RESPECT 
 
 self-respect. And the prison ought to be a place 
 where he can regain it. It ought to be a school 
 for weak wills, a training house where human na- 
 ture could learn a little dignity. It is refreshing 
 to note that attempts are being made in this direc- 
 tion in some states with most encouraging results. 
 
 The worst blot on our civilization is that we 
 have made so little progress in the cure of the 
 socially unsound. Our theology is practically past 
 condemning souls to eternal punishment; but our 
 actual sociological practice can still find no use to 
 make of a depraved man but to vent our hate on 
 him by sending him for from one year to a life- 
 time to a hell on earth. Society still has got no 
 further along than to strike back when it is struck. 
 But it ought to be the glory of organized justice 
 to be free from this bestial heat for revenge and 
 to do with the lawbreaker precisely what is for the 
 best interests of the community at large. And 
 those interests never demand that he be taken and 
 hardened into a professional pervert, but that he 
 be healed and set right. 
 
 That we do not know how to do this is igno- 
 rance and pardonable; but that we don't try nor 
 want to know how is disgraceful and unpardon- 
 able. 
 
 73 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 Jesus was right. Tolstoi was right. They 
 were not crazy nor Utopian. They were in line 
 with sound common sense and with the known 
 truths of psychology. God help us! We apply 
 modern science to transportation, and cooking, and 
 lighting, and to all forms of business and comfort, 
 but not to the cure of fallen self-respect, exactly 
 where it needs most to be applied. 
 
 We have left off flogging children and have be- 
 gun to study them. Let us leave off brutalizing 
 and stunting men and women and begin to study 
 how to help them. 
 
 74 
 
THE SIMPLICITY OF MASTERS 
 
 La philosophic nest que le retour consc'ient et 
 reflechi aux donnees de l f intuition. M. BERG- 
 SON. 
 
 THIS sentence of M. Bergson, professor in the 
 College de France and one of the most ad- 
 vanced and thorough of modern philosophers, has 
 been called by Edouard Schure " simple, conclu- 
 sive, and immense, containing the whole future," 
 and may be freely translated : " Philosophy is 
 only the discovery by the conscious, reflective mind 
 of what we already know by intuition." 
 
 Here, then, is the circle of wisdom, the return 
 of truth upon itself; for all the deep, vast, eternal 
 laws of life are woven into the very texture of the 
 soul, and the old man, after years of search and 
 wandering, comes back to the little child. Emer- 
 son said that " when God has a point to carry with 
 the race he plants his arguments in the instincts," 
 and Jesus' exclamation was to the same effect: 
 " I thank thee, O Father, that Thou hast hidden 
 
 75 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 these things from the wise and prudent, and hast 
 revealed them unto babes! " 
 
 It is only among the partly wise that we are fed 
 with involved and profound sayings; when we 
 reach the masters, Epictetus or Socrates or Jesus, 
 they talk to us in the language of the street and 
 their sentences are homespun and childlike. 
 
 The fakirs are complex. Those who know but 
 little and would seem to know much are mysteri- 
 ous. The masters baffle us by their plainness. 
 The lights are turned low in the fortune teller's 
 booth; Jesus taught on the hillside in the sun. 
 The road to wisdom leads through and beyond all 
 night shades of dim temples and sacred woods, 
 into the dawn. The real truth is clear as the 
 morning. 
 
 We shall come to poise and peace, therefore, as 
 we learn to perceive and to follow the few great 
 intuitions, and these we find best in children. In- 
 stead of trying to teach children, that is, drilling 
 into them our stupid conventionalities and cow- 
 ardly moral compromises, we ought to let 
 them teach us; we should sit at their feet and 
 observe their unconscious revelation of God's 
 secrets. 
 
 Properly studied, children will teach us the 
 
THE SIMPLICITY OF MASTERS 
 
 three great arts of life the art of joy, the art 
 of faith, and the art of reverence. 
 
 From them we may learn, if we be humble 
 minded and teachable, the art of joy, which con- 
 sists in living like birds and flowers. The child 
 is not afraid to be happy; he throws himself head 
 first into what pleasure he finds, which is plainly 
 the purpose of nature. 
 
 It is the philosophy and religion of grown-ups 
 that set so much value upon misery. Of course, 
 we can twist this truth into an excuse for sin and 
 folly; the purer and truer the law of God the more 
 dangerous it is in the hands of ignorance and per- 
 version. 
 
 From children we learn the art of faith, which 
 is merely the conviction that the universe and its 
 forces are friendly. The child instinctively be- 
 lieves that all people are well disposed toward 
 him ; he has to be taught the adult facts of hatred 
 and enmity and malice. The whole progress of 
 the race is through fear and wars and distrust unto 
 the millennium, which is confidence in the universal 
 friendliness of men. 
 
 Through dark theologies and harsh political 
 theories we are working our way to the ultimate 
 child truth that to believe in one another and not 
 
 77 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 to be afraid of neighbors or antipodes, and not 
 even of the spirits of the air nor of the Great Spirit 
 himself, is the ultimate solution of the problems 
 both of government and of religion. 
 
 And we learn from children the art of rever- 
 ence. That feeling of awe and wonder, inborn 
 in the normal child, is the one secret of greatness 
 in grown persons if they can retain it. From this 
 emotion comes all poetry, all majesty of spirit, all 
 grandeur of character. It is likewise the subtle 
 cause of all morality, as well as of all the courtesies 
 and decencies of life. 
 
 Can we wonder that Jesus, when the disciples 
 were .disputing among themselves who should be 
 the greatest among them, took a little child and 
 when he had set him in their midst said that, " Ex- 
 cept ye be converted and become as little children 
 ye shall not see the kingdom of God." 
 
 For the important affair is not getting into the 
 kingdom, but seeing it, knowing what it is, realiz- 
 ing and recognizing it. And we see the kingdom 
 in proportion as we " discover by the conscious 
 and reflective mind what we already know by in- 
 tuition." 
 
THE RESERVES 
 
 Si succiderit, de genu pugnat. // he stumbles, 
 he fights on his knees. (Motto for Will Moore's 
 tombstone.) 
 
 We have only to set the one annoying circum- 
 stance over against our whole relation to life to dis- 
 cover its insignificant proportions. J. BRIERLY. 
 
 IN Mrs. Burnett's charming play, " The Dawn 
 of a To-morrow," a millionaire, disgusted 
 with life and bent on suicide, wandering through 
 a slum district of London, meets a street waif, a 
 girl named Glad, who perceives his intent and 
 turns him from it by her naive philosophy, not 
 knowing him to be a " swell " and thinking him 
 but one of the underworld like herself, she advises 
 him to " think of something else," whenever the 
 suicidal obsession grips him. 
 
 " The Gospel of Something Else," as we may 
 term it, is amazingly practical and fruitful in im- 
 mediate, definite good results. There is always 
 something else. The one distressing thing that 
 
 79 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 threatens us may be dodged, not always literally, 
 but always spiritually. We can get a man's body 
 into a corner, but the mind cannot be cornered. 
 
 The most effectual resources are those within 
 the soul. The great soul is the one with uncon- 
 querable resources. The thing that strikes us in 
 Socrates is that Athenian spite, prison, and hem- 
 lock somehow do not touch the man, he is smiling 
 within him superior to his enemies all the time. 
 The Bhagavad Ghita speaks of those " inner 
 treasures of the mind, on which depending one 
 is not moved by the severest pain." Amiel says, 
 " Rentrer dans 1'ordre, se soumettre, et faire ce 
 qu'on peut." [Get into step with the universe 
 and do what you can.] Even death, that seems 
 final to most men, is despised when it approaches 
 Nathan Hale, for he brings to his rescue the over- 
 powering odds of patriotism and is happy, regret- 
 ting only that he has but one life to give for his 
 country. We hear no shrieks and panic fears 
 from General Wolfe as he dies before Quebec; as 
 they assure him that the enemy flees he cries, 
 " Then I die happy." 
 
 The moral grandeur of Jesus appears in this 
 connection. Truly he has " meat to eat that his 
 disciples know not of.' 1 He sets this small life 
 
 80 
 
THE RESERVES 
 
 over against eternity : " Rejoice when men perse- 
 cute you, for great is your reward in heaven." 
 
 He escapes the harassment of the petty by 
 refuge in the vast : " Take no thought what ye 
 shall eat and drink : seek first the kingdom of God 
 and his righteousness, and all these things shall be 
 added to you." He even submerged death with 
 the flood of his inward glory, for he " endured 
 the cross, despising the shame, for the joy that was 
 set before him." 
 
 How much more effective we should be, how 
 much steadier our hand, and accurate our judg- 
 ment, if we would learn this secret! The most 
 important thing in the world to me is the weather 
 in my soul. Let it be sunshine there and calm 
 day and the odor of hidden flowers and I can front 
 anything. No matter how terrible the trial to 
 come, I have half won already if I can meet it 
 serenely. And no matter what prize and joy may 
 be given me, I have half spoiled it if I take it with 
 a troubled and muddy soul. 
 
 Let us set down then in our books that we are 
 absolutely unconquerable. Nothing shall break 
 us. For it is only the one special thing that is my 
 enemy : the universe is my friend. 
 
 While I have eyes, no one ugly thing shall dis- 
 81 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 tress me, for the earth and sky are crowded with 
 beauty; while I have ears, no single sound shall 
 irritate me, for the world harmonies cease not, 
 and: 
 
 There's not a star that thou beholdest 
 But in his motion like an angel sings, 
 Still quiring to the young eyed cherubim. 
 
 While I have a heart no treachery nor coldness 
 on the part of any one I love shall utterly cast me 
 down, for there is true love somewhere, and for 
 me, and if I find it not on this planet, still my 
 world is wider and none can rob me of the hope of 
 some day meeting again those I have loved long 
 since and lost awhile. 
 
 Our little earth is clasped by the majestic sky, 
 our small planet is surrounded by an innumerable 
 company of worlds, my insignificant body is one of 
 a billion similar bodies now extant, my whole self 
 and all my concerns are as a drop of rain falling 
 into the Atlantic. 
 
 I take refuge in the infinite. O mine enemy, 
 you cannot find me ! I have hidden in the infinite. 
 In peace I sing the words of Mrs. Browning: 
 
 And I smiled to think God's goodness 
 Flowed around our incompleteness, 
 Round our restlessness His rest. 
 82 
 
FERMENTING THOUGHTS 
 
 O f that way madness lies; let me shun that! 
 
 KING LEAR. 
 
 The Greeks were right when they made Apollo 
 the god of both imagination and sanity; for he was 
 both the patron of poetry and the patron of heal- 
 ing. G. K. CHESTERTON. 
 
 HAVE you ever noticed how thoughts feel in- 
 side your mind? Some are satisfying as 
 bread, some fiery as pepper, some refreshing as 
 water, some heady as wine, and some and these 
 are they I am going to treat of lie in the mind's 
 stomach heavy as lead, painful, nauseating, and 
 making one sick of life. 
 
 These last are thoughts that ferment and do not 
 digest. I once ate a ham sandwich at a railway 
 lunch counter. I found no relief until the physi- 
 cians had made use of a stomach pump, and I did 
 not recover from the effects for a month. There 
 are certain thoughts that act precisely the same 
 
 83 
 
LAME AND LONELY 
 
 way within the brain; they cause "mental gas- 
 
 tritis." 
 
 In the mind's cellar everything must be kept 
 sweet and clean, if we do not want to breed spirit- 
 ual fevers. As soon as an idea begins to " work " 
 and spoil and sour, out with it! It does not pay 
 to go about this bright world with something 
 yeasting and seething in our souls. 
 
 It is the very best of foods that spoil the most 
 quickly, such as cream, beefsteak, and butter. 
 The cream, beefsteak, and butter of the soul are 
 love, religion, and laughter. 
 
 So it is these things we must watch most care- 
 fully. Love, the very milk of life, is worth all 
 that poets have written and fond and foolish heads 
 have dreamed of it. But if love thoughts are go- 
 ing to " keep " and not play havoc within us, we 
 must air our hearts often and keep them clean and 
 be on the watch for the insistent microbe that 
 dearly loves to multiply in a love " culture." 
 
 Love made Dante divine, but of Othello it 
 made a crazy fool. Cared for intelligently and 
 kept clean, love will give you a heavenly peace 
 and glow there's nothing like it; but if it be- 
 comes unclean and begins to spoil, you will know 
 what eternal punishment is. Whether, therefore, 
 
FERMENTING THOUGHTS 
 
 love shall be a radiant shekinah or a driving ruin 
 in the brain is largely a sanitary question. 
 
 Laughter is good. It may not save our souls, 
 but it often saves our lives. It prevents insanity. 
 But it is like butter. It must be fresh; likewise 
 clean; also spread not too thickly over the bread 
 of serious business. 
 
 No one can eat solid butter, unless he be an 
 Eskimo; and no one, outside a madhouse, can 
 laugh all the time. Some of the saddest people I 
 have known have been those whose only business 
 was to find something to amuse them. 
 
 And religion. This is man's greatest passion 
 and privilege; hence, also his greatest danger. 
 Sometimes it is a blessing, and sometimes it seems 
 quite the opposite. It will inspire a Francis of 
 Assisi to amaze the world with his love, a William 
 Booth to lead an altruistic army into the slums, and 
 a Father Damien to consecrate his life to the lep- 
 ers; and it will strengthen men's moral sinews, 
 cheer their hearts, brighten their faces, and cause 
 them to be a sun ray to their fellows and to tri- 
 umph over death. 
 
 And again, sad to say, it seems to make others 
 morose and dark-souled, narrow and bigoted, con- 
 tentious, and even cruel. As was said of liberty, 
 
 85 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
 so it may be said of religion, " What crimes have 
 been committed in thy name! " 
 
 Whatever may be your faith and every man, 
 even so-called infidels, have a belief of some kind 
 I wish to make one suggestion : Keep it sweet ! 
 Rest assured that if your belief makes you crabbed 
 and pugnacious, or critical, or morose, then it is 
 bad. No matter what your creed is it ought to 
 bring forth the one flower that makes any creed 
 worth while, and that is amiability. 
 
 Clean up or cast out every fermenting thought, 
 whether uncleanliness or distrust, the memory of 
 a wrong or the apprehension of disaster. Feed 
 your mind on clean, sweet, wholesome thoughts. 
 Above all, do not indulge in self-pity, most horri- 
 ble of all mental toadstools ! 
 
 " Keep thy heart," said the wise man, " with all 
 diligence, for out of it are the issues of life ! " 
 
 86 
 
RELIGIOUS VALUE OF A SENSE OF 
 HUMOR 
 
 Humor has all along been the candid friend of 
 religion. It has done more to hasten the disintegra- 
 tion of narrow religious conventions than all the 
 German commentators together. Humor is a re- 
 ligious force in that it discounts fictitious values and 
 minimizes the petty rivalries of existence. 
 
 RICHARD LE GALLIENNE. 
 
 **T T 7HO can reply to a sneer? " asked a the- 
 VV ologian. The answer is plain; who- 
 ever cannot resist a sneer had better look to his 
 position. For the most searching, merciless, and 
 effective thing in the world is humor. 
 
 " The tragic poet rolls the thunder that fright- 
 ens," says Landor; " the comic wields the lightning 
 that kills." 
 
 There seems to be something in laughter that 
 is directly opposed to the reverence and awe of re- 
 ligion. But for that reason wit has all along been 
 for piety a most necessary, if bitter, physic. 
 
 8? 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 The higher moods of the soul have always a 
 tendency to grow unhealthy. It is but a step from 
 the sweet ripe to rotten; and spiritual ecstasy has 
 more than once, in the world's sad history, run 
 into refined sensuousness, also into the worst of 
 tyrannies and cruelties. And what an argument 
 or a scripture text could never reach has been trans- 
 fixed by a smile. The walls of many a spiritual 
 Jericho-folly that have withstood laws, arms, and 
 reasons, have tumbled at the sound of laughter. 
 
 But the best quality in humor, for individual 
 use by the saint, is its inherent sanity. People deep 
 in love do not laugh much because they are quite 
 crazy. Egoism, in its overdevelopment, when it 
 becomes a besetting sense of dignity, when it makes 
 one feel he is a great and misunderstood man, 
 laughs little, because that also is a form of insanity. 
 The religious bigot is most monstrously serious, 
 for the same reason. 
 
 When we say a sense of humor has religious 
 value we do not imply that it is a divine or heav- 
 enly thing, for it is not. But it is something fully 
 as necessary; it is most human. And what re- 
 ligion needs as much as heavenliness is humanness. 
 
 When one looks abroad in this comfortable 
 world and sees the infinite amount of play and un- 
 
 88 
 
SENSE OF HUMOR 
 
 mixed fun which its Creator has written into it 
 he can hardly resist the logical conclusion that God 
 is not so utterly sober as we have been led to be- 
 lieve. " Who," asks Dr. Holmes, " taught the 
 kitten to play with its tail, and the canary to perk 
 its head from side to side while singing? " It can 
 hardly be irreverent to conceive of Him who 
 planted such capering instincts in all young things, 
 in romping poodles and leaping lambs, in birds and 
 insects and children; it cannot be a sin to think 
 of Him who ordered this, and made the blithe 
 morning and all morning feelings, as being jocund, 
 and having somewhere in His mighty mind a strain 
 of mirth. 
 
 Humor, of course, is not always right. Every- 
 thing human has its perversions. There is a dev- 
 il's glee, there is the snicker of the gross and fleshy, 
 and there is that goatlike inanity that would caper 
 on its mother's grave to raise a grin. But let 
 such things have their day. Our deepest rever- 
 ences do not hear them, our real purity cannot see 
 them. 
 
 The humor of a kindly heart, the friendly wit 
 that is the bubbling over of a full humanity, the 
 surgical smile that lances our too sickly sentiments, 
 the sunny laugh that with its genial broadness re- 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
 bukes our narrow thought, the disinfectant raillery 
 that purges our egotisms, these are all friends of 
 man and true him to life and destiny. 
 
 If it be, as Carlyle says, that in the center of 
 worship is sorrow, it is no less true that all about its 
 edges is a fringe of humor. 
 
 He is our friend who makes us weep for our 
 sins, and he is not our enemy who makes our fol- 
 lies ridiculous. 
 
 90 
 
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOOD 
 AND BAD 
 
 Hast thou reflected, O serious reader, Advanced 
 Liberal or other, that the one end, essence, and use 
 of all religion, past, present, and to come, is to re- 
 mind us of this only, of the quite infinite difference 
 between a good man and a bad? THOMAS CAR- 
 
 LYLE. 
 
 WITH microscopic vision, Carlyle has here 
 seen the rock bottom on which rest not 
 only all religion, but all ethics, morals, and de- 
 cencies. 
 
 The thoroughly bad man is not the one who, 
 like Lucifer says, " Evil, be thou my good 1 " He 
 is the one who denies the distinction. Goethe's 
 Mephistopheles was a better Bad Man than Mil- 
 ton's Lucifer; for Milton's hero of darkness sulked 
 and raged and rebelled; Goethe's smiled. The 
 highest impiety is not a blasphemy; it is a smile. 
 
 The wickedest people are not they who cele- 
 brate the black mass and dance in witches' sab- 
 
 91 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 baths, are not the Ingersolls speech-making against 
 theology, nor the Nietzsches couching a lance 
 against morality itself; all these are as orthodox 
 as the narrowest saints. In fact, when a man sets 
 out to demolish Christianity he really joins the most 
 absurd corruption of it he can find, by assuming 
 that the peculiar distorted sect he selects is true 
 Christianity. Hence all the so-called militant " in- 
 fidels " are really the friends of our faith, since 
 they help to purge it of its diseases. 
 
 But our real foe is Gallio, who " cares for none 
 of these things." Morality and immorality do 
 not concern him. He will not discuss the place 
 for the line between good and evil. He has 
 rubbed out the line. 
 
 The rebel and the king's troops both believe in 
 the same flag; one is for and the other against 
 it. So the deserter and the good soldier both 
 have the same standard, which one runs from and 
 the other toward. But it is the same flag. 
 
 Even so, the thieves and drunkards and wicked 
 women, and all the soiled and vagabond crew we 
 are wont to look upon as the opponents of the 
 good and pious, are not they with whom religion's 
 danger lies. In fact, they are not far from the 
 kingdom. Did not Jesus say that the slum peo- 
 
 92 
 
GOOD AND BAD 
 
 pies would enter into the kingdom before the Phar- 
 isees ? 
 
 The actual danger to religion is found among 
 the so-called " emancipated." Those who hold 
 that white is the same as black if you have the 
 right point of view, those to whom nothing mat- 
 ters, those who have made of science a means to 
 rob the soul of its power to blush, and have re- 
 duced conscience and its motions to atavism and 
 molecular gyrations, these are " our friends, the 
 enemy." A shallow wading in science is likely to 
 bring on such a moral anemia. 
 
 Bacon tells us that a little knowledge bends men 
 to atheism, but deeper goings bring them about to 
 religion. And Tennyson warns his too sciolistic 
 age: 
 
 Hold thou the Good, define it well 
 For fear divine philosophy 
 Should go beyond the mark and be 
 Procuress to the lords of hell. 
 
 If there is any one thing that the wisdom of 
 all humanity, east and west, has beaten out of 
 the mixture and confusion of human hearts and 
 events, if there is any one pure, golden truth upon 
 which a man may leave his life and risk his destiny, 
 
 93 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 it is that the word " Ought " has a meaning, that 
 in the sense of right and wrong is hidden the fun- 
 damental truth about God and the hereafter. 
 
 Out of all the whirl of arguing sects, the specu- 
 lation of philosophers, the doctrines and counter 
 doctrines of divines, this one solid and wholly un- 
 shakable bit of rock emerges as the one fit thing a 
 soul can afford to build his house upon, to-wit : that 
 right is right and to live by and to die for, and 
 wrong is wrong and to be hated and fought with 
 all one's mortal might. 
 
 That is religion; the rest is trimmings. 
 
 94 
 
CHILDLIKENESS AND CHILDISHNESS 
 
 When I was a child I spoke, acted, and thought 
 as a child, but when I became a man I put away 
 childish things. SAINT PAUL. 
 
 Verily I say unto you, except ye be changed, and 
 become as little children, ye shall not enter into 
 the kingdom of heaven. Little children, of such 
 is the kingdom of heaven. JESUS. 
 
 An ancient proverb warns us that we should not 
 expect to find old heads on young shoulders; to 
 which it may be added that we seldom meet with 
 that unnatural combination but we feel a strong 
 desire to knock them off; merely from an inherent 
 love we have of seeing things in their right place. 
 
 CHARLES DICKENS. 
 
 I ONCE had a silly book, compiled by some 
 rabid bibliophobiac, and entitled " The Con- 
 tradictions of the Bible," in which were arranged 
 in parallel columns those texts which seemed to 
 contradict each other, each sentence being set op- 
 
 95 
 
LAME AND LONELY 
 
 posite its negative. The whole work was based 
 upon the error that a contradiction is equivalent 
 to a lie. The truth, however, is quite the contrary. 
 Contradictions are the favorite method of wise 
 teachers; they are numerous in Socrates and in 
 Bacon. 
 
 Emerson said that " consistency is the hobgoblin 
 of little minds, adored by little statesmen, and 
 philosophers, and divines." And I have known 
 but two classes of people who were absolutely con- 
 sistent idiots and dead men. 
 
 The fact is that when you find a contradiction 
 in a wise man or in a wise book, you will usually 
 find midway between the two clashing statements 
 one of the choicest morsels of truth, and one which 
 could not have been expressed half so well in any 
 other way. For often when a truth cannot be 
 directly come at by a positive declaration, it can be, 
 as it were, pointed at fr f- teracting asser- 
 
 tions. 
 
 In the quotation above, tie : ostle indicates 
 that when one grows up he should cease to be like 
 a child; while the Master declares that except we 
 turn and become like a child we are lost. And the 
 confusion of this is but seeming, for it may be 
 loosed and made into common sense by two words 
 
CHILDLIKENESS AND CHILDISHNESS 
 
 that are in our mouths every day to-wit : the 
 words childlike and childish. 
 
 To be childlike, says Jesus, is to be great. I 
 have seen some great men in my time, and have 
 tried to learn something of their secret; and I have 
 never known one who was not simple, approach- 
 able, and with a child heart. Great speech is 
 always plain, lucid, and direct. Great art is least 
 ornate. Great emotions are downright. Where- 
 as pettiness of all kinds is sophisticated, smart, 
 adorned, perfumed, and jeweled, or wants to be. 
 
 Childishness is another matter. About nine- 
 tenths of what we call sin is mere childishness, 
 undeveloped morality, arrested ethical growth, a 
 persistent child longing for gingerbread and gew- 
 gaws, an inability to appreciate the future, and a 
 readiness to sacrifice the future always for the 
 present. 
 
 Note some of the childish things which we are 
 to put away. First of all is crying, the most char- 
 acteristic of all child faults. Analyzed carefully, 
 crying is found to consist in this: the gaining of 
 what we desire by the use of our disagreeableness. 
 It is the weapon of weakness. In adults we call 
 it complaining, or pouting, or sulking. How 
 many a woman gets her way by " the tyranny of 
 
 97 
 
LAME AND LOFELJ 
 
 tears " ! And how many a man rules his house by 
 sheer surliness ! Such are but grown up " bawl 
 babies." It is almost worse than wickedness; it is 
 meanness, and utterly despicable. Pardonable in 
 a child of six, it is unpardonable in a big, 
 bewhiskered hulk of forty-six. 
 
 Another trait of childishness is the desire to 
 " show off." Vanity, and love of notice, and the 
 hunger for admiration is cunning enough in little 
 Mable in short dresses and baby curls, but when 
 Mable becomes Mrs. Q. K. Philander Jones, age 
 thirty-five, and is president of the Ladies' Aid, and 
 the mother of four children, and the wife of the 
 leading grocer, it becomes her mightily to " put 
 away childish things," and especially the desire to 
 preen and prance, and occupy the spotlight. Mod- 
 esty and a modicum of humility ought to come with 
 maturity. 
 
 A child, too, is naturally egoistic in his instincts. 
 Every child seems to be a born predestinarian. I 
 have had children at my own table, and I know 
 that each seemed to believe, as his inborn creed, 
 that he alone was predestined from the foundation 
 of the world to have the largest piece of pie and 
 the choicest portion of chicken. When we grow 
 up this egocentric trait also is to be put away. A 
 
CHILDLIKENESS AND CHILDISHNESS 
 
 man ought to learn, with years, that " there are 
 others." 
 
 But that element of the child view which, if 
 retained, works most havoc in us is, as I have 
 hinted, the lack of power to visualize and realize 
 the future. When a baby wants a thing he wants 
 it now. The one thing he cannot do with grace is 
 to wait. The present, the actual, hems him in 
 and dominates him. With years ought to come 
 that strongest increment of spiritual power, the 
 ability to see the unseen; that is, to see how our 
 acts will affect others, how the future. The 
 greater a man is, and the manlier, the more he 
 weighs these invisible motives and is governed by 
 them. 
 
 For what is all defiling greed, and theft, and 
 treachery, and sensuality, and spite, and fraud, but 
 a reaching forth of sightless and infantine desire, 
 ignorant and heedless of the unseen thunder and 
 lightning of the moral world? And what are 
 heroes but they who in one form or another, in 
 quiet domestic sacrifice, or in business integrity, or 
 in patriotism, or in religious devotion, have " en- 
 dured the cross and despised the present shame 
 for the joy that was set before them " ? 
 
 Children are sweet, almost divine, even, in their 
 99 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
 innocent little shortcomings; but it is because they 
 are children. The wisdom concealed in the two 
 contradicting texts given above consists in the truth 
 that there is, in grown persons, a vast difference 
 between childlikeness and childishness. 
 
 100 
 
PRAYER 
 
 Lord, what a change within us one short hour 
 Spent in thy presence will prevail to make! 
 Why, therefore, should we do ourselves this 
 
 wrong, 
 
 Or others, that we are not always strong? 
 RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH. 
 
 THE gist of the prayer is not asking, but com- 
 munion. So the test of prayer is not the 
 getting of what we ask, but the sense of the pres- 
 ence of Him of whom we have asked it. 
 
 Therefore, all " remarkable answers to prayer/* 
 all instances where the thing sought came to sur- 
 prise the seeker, and all faith founded upon such 
 arguments, contain an element of peril to the 
 thoughtful and well-balanced mind. 
 
 For the intelligent believer in God must always 
 conceive of the universe as under the control of 
 one all-wise will, who knows vastly better what 
 ought to be done than we ; and the last thing such 
 
 101 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 a believer would wish is that this all-wise will 
 should be set aside, or influenced in the least by 
 his ignorant will. 
 
 The first of all prayers, therefore, and the one 
 prayer which contains the seed of all other prayers 
 is: " Thy will be done." 
 
 This does not all imply that we are to ask God 
 for no favors, such as rain or good crops, health 
 or good fortune. In fact, nothing is too small 
 or insignificant to ask God for, if it is significant 
 enough for me to want. 
 
 Why, then, ask Him for anything, when He 
 already knows best, and our only wish is that He 
 do as He pleases? 
 
 Right here many have become helplessly puz- 
 zled and have given up praying. But the solution 
 is a simple one. 
 
 It is best understood by an illustration. God is 
 to us as we are to our little children. We do 
 not give them all they request, but we wish them 
 none the less to keep confiding in us their wishes. 
 In other words we should feel very bad if, because 
 we after all are going to do as we think best for 
 them, they should be piqued and never speak to us 
 again. 
 
 The thing we want of our children is precisely 
 102 
 
PRAYER 
 
 communion with them. We want their confidence, 
 friendship, presence and prattle. 
 
 So the thing God wants with us, and that we 
 need from Him, is the mutual presence, conscious- 
 ness, and friendship between us. 
 
 The asking for things is simply one phase of this 
 communion. The refusal of them, as well as the 
 granting of others of them, is a part of our educa- 
 tion ; even as the instances wherein we decline our 
 children's requests is a part of their training and 
 reveals to them in time our nature. 
 
 Prayer, therefore, is simply an attempt to feel 
 God. It is the opening of the heart to let in the 
 infinite. It is the union of a man's highest will 
 and consciousness with his loftiest conception of 
 goodness, nobleness, and beauty. 
 
 Any man who leaves off praying is doing him- 
 self a distinct harm. There is no possible excuse 
 for it. If he has fallen out with his church, or 
 with all churches; if he is incapable of accepting 
 recognized creeds; if he doubts the sincerity and 
 believes in the delusion of many of those who 
 claim sanctity; all these are no reasons why he 
 himself, in his own way and in his own heart, 
 should not seek to know and feel the infinite. 
 
 The presence of immense and age-long institu- 
 103 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 tions who are supposed to be the guardians of all 
 the truth about God, renders it difficult to think 
 originally and simply on the subject. But who- 
 ever will have the courage in his own manner and 
 according to his own light to try to cultivate a 
 sense of God and to come into personal relations 
 with the infinite will and heart that is above and in 
 all things, will find his life lightened, ennobled, 
 and given great strength and poise. 
 
 And the more a man feels that he is what is 
 called a " sinner," the more he is conscious of 
 having done what he should not, and of coming 
 short of his own notions of rectitude and purity 
 and an ideal life, the more he needs to cultivate 
 in his secret moments the feeling that he can talk 
 it over with the invisible Spirit. It is exactly the 
 man who is conscious of his unworthiness that the 
 spirit of God most easily enters. It will repay 
 any man to keep up what Jeremy Taylor called 
 " the practice of the presence of God." 
 
 It may not imply that he join this church or that, 
 nor subscribe to this or that creed, but it will mean 
 for him a sweeter, richer, solider, kinder, and 
 happier life. 
 
 104 
 
THE SIN OF SENSITIVENESS 
 
 Blessed are the poor in spirit. JESUS. 
 The thirst for applause, if the last infirmity of 
 noble minds, is also the first infirmity of weak ones. 
 
 RUSKIN. 
 
 IF we examine sensitiveness under the micro- 
 scope we shall find it to be no more nor less 
 than a variety of egotism. The sensitive nature 
 is simply one that is too much occupied with self. 
 That way madness lies, ever. 
 
 I suppose no more exquisite torture has been 
 devised by the evil one, at least in this world, than 
 the endowing of a highly organized, keenly per- 
 ceptive person with a too large self-consciousness. 
 
 In Galsworthy's " Fraternity " such a character 
 is drawn with wonderful accuracy by that master, 
 in Bianca Dallison. Here are a few of his 
 touches : " It was Bianca's fortune to be gifted to 
 excess with that quality which, of all others, most 
 obscures the real significance of human issues. 
 
 105 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 " Her pride had kept her back from her hus- 
 band, till she felt herself a failure, and her pride 
 had so revolted at this that it led the way to utter 
 estrangement. Her pride even prevented him 
 from really knowing what had spoiled their lives 
 her ungovernable itch to be appreciated. This 
 was the tragedy of a woman who wanted to be 
 loved slowly killing in the man the power of loving 
 her." 
 
 Of all the unlit and tortuous places in this world 
 the human heart is darkest and farthest past find- 
 ing out; and the heart of an intelligent, cultured 
 egoist with delicately strung feeling is worst of all. 
 The only remedy is the persistent effort toward 
 disinterestedness. 
 
 We approach peace only as we leave ourselves 
 and come to humanity. No self-forgetful person 
 is ever sensitive. No self-forgetful person is 
 habitually unhappy. 
 
 This sin of sensitiveness and we ought to 
 face it as a distinct sin, a thing never to be boasted, 
 always to be ashamed of takes many forms. 
 Some of them are of that most dangerous kind, the 
 kind that resembles virtues. 
 
 For instance, self-examination. There is a sort 
 of luxury in probing one's own heart and handling 
 
 106 
 
THE SIN OF SENSITIVENESS 
 
 our faults, like the pleasure of pressing upon a 
 sore tooth. 
 
 Conscience may descend to be a species of moral 
 indigestion. Copybook philosophy and teachers 
 of moral platitudes commend this self-scrutiny. 
 But as a rule it is vicious. As with our bodies so 
 with our spirits, the healthiest are those that are 
 the least tampered with and worried over. The 
 noblest soul is the one that is unconscious either 
 of nobility or ignobility. The righteousness that 
 knows itself and the sin that knows itself are akin 
 both bad. 
 
 Another and common form of this protean soul 
 disease is self-depreciation. Wordsworth hits it 
 off: 
 
 There is a luxury in self-dispraise; 
 And inward self-disparagement affords 
 To meditative spleen a grateful feast. 
 
 I wonder if the housewife knows how uncom- 
 fortable she makes the guest feel when she pre- 
 ludes her dinner with apologies? And does the 
 young lady know what an egregious, conceited 
 minx she seems to all simple and normal souls when 
 she will not begin to play the piano or to sing until 
 she has rehearsed her limitations ? 
 
 107 
 
LAME AND LONELY 
 
 And there be those women who are forever 
 slandering their own appearance, and men forever 
 decrying their own ability. This is not humility. 
 The one blazing beauty of humility, genuine, is 
 that it forgets itself, that the one being it will 
 neither blame nor praise is self. 
 
 And worst of all phases of sensitiveness, per- 
 haps, is self-pity. Worst, because of it is born a 
 deal of plain wickedness. The man who is sorry 
 for himself is not far from smashing law and con- 
 science for his own dear sake ! Of all slops into 
 which a manly man or a womanly woman ought 
 not fall the maudlin kindness for one's own poor 
 soul is the most disgusting. 
 
 I am sure if we stop to reflect that the whole 
 troop of degenerates, the murderers and thieves, 
 and sneaks and unclean, are uniformly sorry for 
 themselves, we should hesitate about allowing our- 
 selves to drift into such company. 
 
 Sensitiveness, and all egoisms, are not forms of 
 self-respect; they are the opposite of self-respect. 
 They are self-defiling, self-condemning, self-de- 
 stroying. 
 
 The only religious, sensible thing to do with 
 this precious me is to forget him. 
 
 108 
 
THEY ALL DO IT 
 
 Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that 
 leadeth to eternal life, and few there be that find 
 it. JESUS. 
 
 / believe that, although none other follows the 
 doctrine of Jesus, and I alone am left to practise 
 it, I cannot refuse to obey it, and that it will give 
 me in this world the greatest possible sum of hap- 
 piness. TOLSTOI. 
 
 LET us, at least for the moment, consider this 
 shattering statement of Jesus, not as describ- 
 ing the difficulty of getting into heaven when we 
 die, but getting into any sort of success, efficiency, 
 and poise of soul while we live. Look at it once, 
 not as a day-of-judgment decree, but as a simple 
 law of our human nature. 
 
 That law is that whoever gauges and models 
 himself after other people is on the road to de- 
 terioration and eventually ruin; that all real moral 
 advancement and true success is solitary and along 
 " the lone trail." 
 
 109 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 Men go to the devil in crowds. One goes 
 because the rest are going. The boy gets drunk 
 because he does not like to refuse " the fellows." 
 The politician steals because he hears they all do 
 it. 
 
 In fact, the devil's other name is " They-all-do- 
 it." A girl becomes bad usually trying to keep 
 step. Almost all vice is social; almost all right- 
 eousness that is of any account is purely personal. 
 
 The real gist of any kind of genuine salvation, 
 Jew or Gentile, Catholic or Protestant, is that a 
 man has formed a partnership of two, himself and 
 God, against the universe and all that dwell there- 
 in. Saving one's soul is, in its last essence, a sort 
 of a declaration of independence, a sworn alle- 
 giance to one's own inner, individual convictions 
 and ideals and renunciation of all outside authority. 
 
 This makes plain why the Bible tells us to be- 
 ware of the world. The world means the mob 
 other people. The prince of this world is one of 
 the names Jesus gives Satan. He is " Mr. They- 
 all-do-it." ' 
 
 When the devil was cast out of the Gadarene 
 swine he confessed his name was Legion. God is 
 one ; the devil is the many. 
 
 The truth of this appears in ordinary business, 
 no 
 
THEY ALL DO IT 
 
 The kind of clerk that is hardest to find is the one 
 who simply does what he ought to do. Says Kip- 
 ling: 
 
 Creation's cry goes up 
 
 From age to cheated age, 
 Give us the men who do the work 
 
 For which they get the wage! 
 
 It is a pity, but true as gospel, that the average 
 servant is inefficient, the average mother incom- 
 petent, the average business man incapable, the 
 average actor a poor one, and the average preacher 
 a bore. 
 
 In fact, the average of any class of men is below 
 the average, so to speak. The world's work is 
 carried on by makeshifts. If any man will train 
 himself properly and correctly perform the duties 
 of his calling, whatever it is, he will find that 
 people call him a remarkable person, unusual ! ex- 
 traordinary ! 
 
 If you want to amount to anything, follow the 
 gleam, satisfy yourself and not others, go in for 
 your own self-respect and not the admiration of 
 the crowd. The curse of many a youth is that 
 he has been content to do as well as those about 
 him. 
 
 in 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 You have heard possibly many a sermon on 
 "What shall I do to be saved?" Here is one 
 on " What shall I do to be ruined? " and it is a 
 short one: Do nothing! Follow the crowd. 
 Aim for the average. 
 
 " For wide is the gate and broad is the way 
 that leadeth to destruction, and many there be that 
 walk therein." 
 
 I 12 
 
THE PRACTICAL USES OF DEATH 
 
 // is expedient for you that I go away. JESUS. 
 
 The neighborhood of the tomb enlarges the 
 mind. The proximity of death sharpens the per- 
 ception of truth. VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 "TQRAGMATISM," says Papini, one of the 
 
 JL Italian exponents of this new-old philos- 
 ophy, " lies in the midst of our theories, like the 
 corridor in a hotel." 
 
 Which means that, in whatever sectarian or 
 partisan chamber you live, you must come down 
 to pragmatism if you want to go anywhere. 
 
 In other words, we do not need so much to 
 explain and to theorize over the facts and mys- 
 teries of life as we need to know what to do with 
 them. The greatest question about anything is 
 not " Why is it? " but " What will you do with 
 it?" 
 
 And right here is where death commends itself 
 to the highest ideals and sweetest instincts of man- 
 kind. Its function is to be the revealer of what 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 is worth while in life. Quite apart from the con- 
 ventional religious teachings about the hereafter, 
 the fact of the irrevocable separation involved in 
 death, the coming of its dread, silent footstep into 
 the house, casts certain clear, sharp lights upon all 
 human values. 
 
 There is this in the atmosphere of death: 
 Reality at last stands revealed. Whatever be the 
 future beyond the grave, when we stand by the 
 cold silence of one whom we knew in the warmth 
 of love, we can have but one supreme wish 
 that our dealings with the lost and gone had 
 been more unselfish, more forbearing, more loyal, 
 nobler. 
 
 You may have fumed and fretted with your 
 child in the heyday of earthly events, but when 
 you come to fold the stiff fingers for the last time 
 over the little breast you ask yourself how much 
 your worry and fret and petulance were worth. 
 
 In this garden of death bloom the rarest flowers 
 of life. Here are humility and gentleness, for- 
 giveness and forbearance, sympathy and goodness, 
 reverence and awe. 
 
 Why, if no one ever died, if the human herd 
 lived on and life had its rude way forever un- 
 checked, we should grow hard and merciless and 
 
 114 
 
PRACTICAL USES OF DEATH 
 
 cruel, our vices instead of being but poison flowers 
 would become sturdy upas trees, and all the gentler 
 elements of character would take their flight like 
 frightened fairies from a midday wood. 
 
 Death, after all, is not harsh and monstrous. 
 He is the sweetest, loveliest prophet of nobility. 
 
 We touch the infinite mystery at two points, 
 birth and death. And it is the little babies and 
 the dying men that continually link us to those 
 higher qualities of soul which pertain to the better 
 kind of life. 
 
 But the greatest lesson of all which death has 
 for us is the truth about love. Here where the 
 coffin stands there can be no doubt any more that 
 love is " the greatest thing in the world." Here 
 the last wretched excuse we made ourselves 
 for our impatience and fretfulness disappears 
 ashamed. 
 
 Here there is no longer any doubt that it is 
 better to give than to receive. Here our mis- 
 erable pride and egotism shrivels and expires like 
 an accursed Mr. Hyde. 
 
 And here we see things. Here the greed for 
 wealth and luxury and power stands unmasked in 
 all its salt, leprous reality. In the calcium light 
 of death we know, we know through and through 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 our souls, that love was best. We need no minister 
 to read: "Though I speak with the tongues of 
 men and of angels, and though I have all knowl- 
 edge, and though I bestow all my goods to feed 
 the poor, and though I give my body to be burned 
 and have not love, it profiteth me nothing." 
 
 There is a pocket in the shroud. But it only 
 holds a handful of love. This then is the practical 
 use of death. It solves no speculative problems, 
 it tells us nothing about the mysteries beyond, but 
 death does show " clear as the sun, fair as the 
 moon, and terrible as an army with banners " that 
 honor and truth, virtue and humbleness of mind, 
 loyalty and purity and love are the things worth 
 while. 
 
 116 
 
OTHERWORLDLINESS 
 
 What the writer, the teacher, the pastor, the 
 philosopher, has to do is to defend humanity in 
 man. AMIEI/S JOURNAL. 
 
 SAID Jesus once : " Ye are not of the world, 
 even as I am not of the world." And men 
 have forgotten the second in striving to realize 
 the first part of his saying. That is to say, in 
 reaching for otherworldliness they have over- 
 looked the manner and pattern of it, the life of 
 the Master himself. 
 
 There has always been a deep conviction that 
 the man of religious conviction ought in some way 
 to be different from ordinary men. This is a 
 sound and true feeling, but in what bizarre and 
 amazing shapes it has been worked out ! To mark 
 the difference between a God's man and a world 
 man one will wear a yellow robe and live on 
 begged rice, another will shave his head, another 
 wears a uniform and a poke bonnet, another wears 
 a broad hat and drab garments, another uses no 
 
 117 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 buttons but hooks and eyes in their stead, another 
 sings no songs but David's Psalms, another will 
 use only Latin in worship, some shout and leap 
 and some sink into ascetic silence, and thus in a 
 thousand ways our poor humanity has tried to be 
 " not of this world " so as to secure the approval 
 of God. 
 
 And when we brush aside all this mixed and 
 marbled history of human headiness and return to 
 the Master's words, how simple they are and how 
 absurd seem our vagaries! For he says that it 
 is " even as I am not of the world " that we are 
 to gauge and set our pace. 
 
 And how was his unworldliness ? Did it con- 
 sist in strange apparel, or a pious tone of voice, 
 or ascetic withdrawal from his fellows? Not in 
 any of these outward things. For he dressed as 
 far as we know precisely as other carpenters 
 dressed; he mingled freely with sinners, in fact, 
 preferred their society to that of the saints of his 
 day, and in all of the points where we in our folly 
 have tried to be unlike the world he was exactly 
 like the world. 
 
 His unlikeness to the common run of folks lay 
 wholly in his spirit. 
 
 In the midst of a society where the leading 
 118 
 
O THERWORLDLINESS 
 
 religionists (the Pharisees) were proud, he was 
 humble. 
 
 While about him was a sea of selfishness, he 
 was unselfish. 
 
 When the world, harsh, cruel, and merciless in 
 its conventional slavery, would have cast stones at 
 the fallen woman he said : " Neither do I con- 
 demn thee. Go and sin no more." 
 
 All around him the world was wrestling, biting, 
 elbowing, goring, snarling for so-called success 
 that is, for prominence and power; he shunned 
 prominence and refused power. 
 
 The world was mad to rule, to dominate; he 
 was " servant of all." 
 
 They sought to get the service of others by 
 means of money; he sought only to serve others, 
 and needed no money. 
 
 The world believed goodness was a matter of 
 conformity to certain conventions; he showed 
 how goodness was in the liberation of the in- 
 dividual soul from all rule and its unity with God. 
 
 The world was then occupied (and still is oc- 
 cupied) in getting; men get on, get rich, get 
 famous, get drunk, get educated, and get religion. 
 He was busy giving, he got nothing; he gave 
 sympathy, gave health, gave bread, gave truth, 
 
 119 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 gave himself and his blood. Hence, while the 
 great getters have been swept into forgotten 
 graves, upon him, the greatest giver, have been 
 placed all crowns. 
 
 The world put its trust in force, hate, terror, 
 money, armies, and dignities; he staked his all 
 on love and service. 
 
 Hence, to this day, he remains the most mar- 
 velously misunderstood figure in history. The 
 thing that calls itself Christian civilization is nine- 
 tenths pagan. Even those organizations that as- 
 sume to be his body are often how alien from his 
 spirit ! 
 
 120 
 
THE SERMON OF THE CLOCK 
 
 Yes; when you put on Ms hat and turn this 
 diamond button a little, from right to left here, 
 like this, see? it presses a bump on your head, 
 which no one knows about, and which opens your 
 eyes It is magic, you know and you see the 
 Reality of Things, the Soul of Bread, for instance, 
 or of Wine, or of Pepper. MAETERLINCK; 
 The Blue Bird. 
 
 Tick tock, tick tock, 
 
 This is the sermon of the clock. 
 
 ONCE there was a very unhappy man. The 
 cause of his unhappiness makes no matter. 
 It is never of any use to ask why one is miserable ; 
 the point is, how can he escape his gloom and 
 become happy? In his dumb wretchedness he sat 
 down one day and stared at the clock. If you will 
 look at anything sympathetically enough and let 
 your soul listen you will hear some of the secrets 
 of nature. The way to learn nothing is to talk, 
 
 121 
 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
 and read, and gabble, and do so continually. Be 
 still and things will speak to you. 
 
 Tick tock, tick tock, 
 
 Listen to wisdom, said the clock. 
 
 Furthermore, the clock said: You are a fool. 
 This is always the first thing a human being ought 
 to grasp. Wisdom abides in the things that are; 
 folly and woe abide in the things that ought to be 
 and the things that might have been. Hence only 
 men are wicked and unhappy. Clocks, trees, rab- 
 bits, and fishes take the world as it is; men are 
 always trying to change it and wishing it had been 
 different. That is why flowers smile and women 
 weep. 
 
 Tick tock, tick tock, 
 
 What do you think of that? said the clock. 
 
 Happiness abides somewhere hidden in what is, 
 the clock went on to say. The trouble with you 
 humans is that you are ever seeking for it in what 
 is not. Of course, you cannot find it; for, in the 
 first place, it is not there ; and, in the second place, 
 if it were there you could not get it because there 
 is no such place. 
 
 God is, of course. He is happy. It is only the 
 122 
 
THE SERMON OF THE CLOCK 
 
 kind of God that is not, that is angry and vengeful 
 and anxious to make people suffer. 
 
 All His universe is set for joy. The sky is glad, 
 and the little streams giggle all day, and birds sing 
 for love, and fishes wriggle for fun, and even a 
 piece of wood is glad it is a piece of wood, and 
 milk and bread and honey and fire are all quite 
 comfortable bodies. 
 
 Tick tock, tick tock, 
 
 This world is a pretty good world, said the clock. 
 
 People have either too much brains or too little. 
 If you consider the idiots you find them usually 
 merry. They laugh at nothing at all and play 
 with their fingers, as kittens play with their tails. 
 And then if you consider the sage you find him 
 also happy, because he has come close to the heart 
 of what is, which is that thing we call truth; and 
 so he does not fret any more, for he is drinking 
 at the hidden stream of joy that flows through the 
 universe, through the sun and sand, and through 
 little children and the blessed dead. 
 
 Tick tock, tick tock, 
 
 Cabbages are happier than kings, said the clock. 
 
 Yes, yes, continued the clock, happiness is the 
 123 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 peculiar juice of the isness of things, and not of the 
 oughtness. And then, look at me I What am I 
 doing? Why, ticking, of course. It is my busi- 
 ness to tick. Now, I have to make four ticks a 
 second, or 240 ticks a minute, or 14,440 an hour, 
 or 345 > 600 a day, and to think of a week makes 
 my head reel; and a year amounts to many mil- 
 lions, where numbers cease to have any meaning 
 and are just trills. 
 
 If I were a fool man I should be everlastingly 
 counting up how much I had to do in a week or a 
 year, and I should simply give one tremendous 
 whizz with my works and quit in despair. Being 
 a sensible clock, however, I remember that while 
 I have several million ticks to do per year, I have 
 just as many seconds to do them in, and do not 
 have to work per year at all. I make one tick at 
 a time, never bother about those I made or am 
 to make, and everything goes off nicely. 
 
 Tick tock, tick tock, 
 
 For every Tick there's a Now, said the clock. 
 
 And you people are just as happy and content 
 as we clocks, if you only knew it. 
 
 Most everybody is happy. Our unhappiness 
 is borrowed; borrowed from the past in shape of 
 
 124 
 
THE SERMON OF THE CLOCK 
 
 remorse or regret, and from the future in the shape 
 of apprehension. The present is always tolerable. 
 You drag up from the pit of the past your sins and 
 follies and mistakes, and load them on the poor 
 little Now, and when you are not doing that you 
 are reaching forward to the future and imagin- 
 ing things disagreeable that are going to happen 
 and piling them upon the back of poor little 
 Now. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the past is not yours. It 
 is God's. It belongs to the universe. It has been 
 dissolved into the eternities, as a drop of water is 
 lost in the sea. It is beyond your control. Let 
 it go. All you need take from it is a little wisdom 
 to help you to use your own. And the future is 
 not yours. That is also God's. 
 
 " Every bud has but once to bloom," says a 
 philosopher, " and every flower but one hour of 
 perfect beauty. 
 
 " Each star passes but once at night the meridian 
 above our heads, and burns there but an instant. 
 So each feeling has its floral moment in the heart, 
 each thought in the mind's sky its zenithal instant." 
 Let us watch the punctual universe. All things 
 are but one huge clock. 
 
 Your heart has its beats. Earth has its seasons. 
 125 
 
LAME AND LOfELY 
 
 Generations of men come and go as the hours upon 
 my face. Everything has its moment. You have 
 yours. It is now! 
 
 For every creature except man, heaven is now. 
 
 126 
 
ON GOING TO CHURCH 
 
 Fous qui pleurez, venez a ce Dieu, car il pleure. 
 Fous qui soufrez, venez a lui, car il guerit. 
 Fous qui tremblez, venez a lui t car il sourit. 
 Fous qui passez, venez a lui, car il demeure! 
 You that weep, come to this God, for he weeps. 
 You that suffer, come to him, for he heals. 
 You that tremble, come to him, for he smiles. 
 You that pass, come to him, for he abides. 
 VICTOR HUGO; Lines Written Beneath a 
 Crucifix. 
 
 GOING to church is getting to be more and 
 more out of the fashion. 
 
 I am convinced that it is a mistake and that we 
 are missing much that is fine and worth while. 
 Though I share a good deal of the acerbity and 
 irritation against the historic institution, yet it does 
 not blind me to the immense human value and real 
 serviceableness and lovableness of it. 
 
 Hence, though far from following all the im- 
 plications and connotations implied in being a 
 
 127 
 
LAME AND LONELY 
 
 churchgoer, I go just the same. For I do not 
 wish the inference of other folks' minds, or their 
 gratuitous assumptions, to deprive me of a sterling 
 privilege. Let me here set down some of my 
 reasons. 
 
 First, let us define the word. By church I do 
 not here refer to any one sect. What is in mind 
 is that wider institution, of which each denomi- 
 nation is a part, which is made up of human beings 
 associated together for the worship of God. That 
 is to say the society for the promotion of the re- 
 ligious feeling. This includes Jew, Catholic, and 
 Protestant. 
 
 I am not ignorant of the mistakes of this organi- 
 zation, even of its crimes. I know that religious 
 institutions have persecuted, been cruel and narrow, 
 and have often opposed science and political prog- 
 ress. Neither have I any excuse or apology for 
 these things : they were and are wrong and wicked. 
 But it is not excuse nor apology to observe what is 
 the truth, that in every instance these evils arose 
 plainly from the human weakness, ignorance, and 
 perversity of the men, and never can be traced to 
 the influence of the religious feeling itself. 
 
 The gold of divine love is necessarily alloyed 
 with human imperfection; and the things com- 
 
 128 
 
ON GOING TO CHURCH 
 
 plained of came every time from the alloy and 
 not from the gold. 
 
 Laying aside its frailties, therefore, with the use 
 of a little common sense and sympathy, we note 
 first of all that the church is the oldest organi- 
 zation on earth. It antedates masonry; no family 
 tree has roots so deep; no existing dynasty is so 
 venerable. It is a comfort to get hold of some- 
 thing that has stood through the centuries. In my 
 little meeting house I claim membership and unity 
 with that church whose altar fires Moses built in 
 the wilderness, whose services were held in the 
 catacombs of Rome in the reign of Nero, whose 
 lofty cathedrals grace Milan and Cologne, and 
 whose weekly gatherings still take place in every 
 city and hamlet of the world, whether in Jewish 
 synagogue, Catholic church, or Protestant chapel. 
 
 It all means God, one way or another ; it always 
 has meant God. I am drawn to this antiquity, 
 this persistence, this triumph over time. There's 
 a deep thrill in the heart of man in response to 
 Bishop Cox's hymn : 
 
 Oh, where are kings and empires now 
 
 Of old that went and came? 
 But, Lord, thy church is praying yet, 
 
 A thousand years the same. 
 129 
 
LAME AND LONELY 
 
 Speaking of the sins of the church, too, it might 
 not be out of place to remark that it has always 
 been the religious feeling itself that has pointed 
 out these sins and demanded and secured reform. 
 The church carries in herself her own cure. 
 
 Another, and most human reason, for church- 
 going, is that churchgoers as a rule are the best 
 kind of people. I speak of averages. 
 
 Of course there are bad people in and good 
 people out. But I speak of averages when I say 
 that the clean-minded, honest, straight, kindly, 
 generous, and loyal folk gravitate churchward. 
 The mass, at least, of the unclean, wicked, criminal, 
 false, treacherous, and cruel folk drift from the 
 church away. 
 
 On the whole, therefore, I go to church because 
 there I find " my kind of folks " ; the kind I want 
 to know, to have for my friends and to be my com- 
 panions and furnish atmosphere for my children. 
 This is not a low motive nor sordid, but high and 
 pure. 
 
 Of creed I say nothing, because this writing is 
 not about joining the church, but about going to 
 church. To go, and there to worship, does not 
 necessarily imply that one intellectually assents to 
 the theory of the universe set forth by the preacher. 
 
 130 
 
CW GOING TO CHURCH 
 
 I go to church to develop my religious feeling, 
 not to acquire facts. Most important of all rea- 
 sons for churchgoing, however, is that it is the 
 most practical way of keeping alive and efficient 
 one's idea and feeling of God. 
 
 I do not like to have any dark corners walled 
 off in my soul where I am afraid to look. I refuse 
 to allow any dogmatist or organization to make 
 me afraid of God. I want to be familiar with the 
 thought of Deity and not ever to turn from it with 
 a shudder or a shrug, as men turn from a fear or 
 from a hopeless puzzle. Now, we may talk as we 
 please about finding God in trees and books, in 
 poetry and in our meditations, but human nature 
 is human nature, and unless we give regular ex- 
 pression to an emotion or conviction it will die of 
 inanition. 
 
 The race is some thousands of years old and is 
 some wiser than you or I, and the experience of 
 the race is that stated times of worship alone keep 
 alive the disposition to worship. Moses knew 
 what he was doing when he inserted among the 
 commandments the order to devote every seventh 
 day to the religious feeling. On the whole, there- 
 fore, I am sure any right-minded person will be 
 helped by regular attendance at church. 
 
THE EYE OF THE SOUL 
 
 // thine eye be single thy whole body shall be 
 full of light. JESUS. 
 
 What a man aspires to is the creative cause in 
 his life, what he forever is to be. EDWARD 
 HOWARD GRIGGS. 
 
 THE expression, " the single eye," is some- 
 times used with a ludicrous misunderstanding 
 of the word as found in our King James version 
 of the New Testament, where it is employed in its 
 obsolete sense of " whole " or " healthy." 
 
 Well-meaning people have expressed their wish 
 to have " an eye single to God's glory," or to their 
 duty, in which the idea is that of looking at one 
 thing and not at two. The phrase in our Bible, 
 however, simply refers to the advantages of having 
 a good eye over having a bad or diseased eye. 
 
 The eye may be taken as the most practical and 
 serviceable of all our organs. It puts us most in 
 communication with the outside world. By it 
 
 132 
 
THE EYE OF THE SOUL 
 
 through one lens we range the ultimate stars ; and, 
 through another, we perceive the infinitesimal 
 forms and motions of the cell world. What the 
 eye is to the body the instincts are to the soul. 
 
 As all the things we learn by reason are small 
 in their sum compared to the myriad things we 
 learn through the glance; so the wisdom, virtue, 
 commandments, creeds, and counsel we gather by 
 instruction in the spirit, are small compared to that 
 higher, quicker, more perfect, and more infallible 
 wisdom we obtain by the direct sensing of our 
 spiritual eye of feeling and appreciation. 
 
 If you want a book in a room upstairs and if 
 you tell me to go and find it with my eyes shut, 
 what numberless and minute directions you must 
 give ! I must take so many steps to the right and 
 as many to the left, and guide myself by the hands 
 passed along this and that object, and the like! 
 Whereas, if you -tell me to go with my eyes open 
 and bring you the blue book lying on your dresser 
 by the pin tray, I can find it a hundred times more 
 easily and infallibly. 
 
 It is precisely the same in making one's moral 
 way through life. A few sound instincts and clear 
 ideals are better than reams of rules. No system 
 of ethics, saturated with wisdom of antiquity, and 
 
 133 
 
LAME AND LONELY 
 
 approved by all the philosophers of earth, is of 
 much practical use to a morally blind man. 
 
 The business of living a pure, true, and right 
 life is, therefore, after all, a simple one, and not 
 complex. Follow your deepest longings, heed 
 your inner repulsions. Keep sound and sane and 
 follow your nose. 
 
 There is more purity in the instinctive shrinking 
 of a simple maid than in all the infinite maneuvers 
 of propriety. There is more worship in the child's 
 wonder at the thunder and admiration before the 
 flaming sunset than in all the formulas of heathen 
 ceremonies or Christian ascriptions. There is 
 more true repentance in the misery of an honest 
 man at telling a lie or doing any mean action than 
 in the longest litanies. 
 
 It is not only human to err, it is just as human 
 to feel sorry that we have erred. The nobler, 
 finer instincts and ideals of life are as innate as 
 original sin. Every man knows them. 
 
 It is when we cease obeying them instantly and 
 begin arguing with them, that we fall into the 
 sloughs of moral confusion. 
 
 And what Jesus came to do for us was not 
 to guide us from without, but from within ; not to 
 give us objective, external laws to guide us, but to 
 
 134 
 
THE EYE OF THE SOUL 
 
 awaken in us a lambent, guiding principle. He 
 came " to open the eyes of the blind." His dy- 
 namic is not implicit obedience, but " perfect love. 1 ' 
 
 This explains all that mystical-sounding lan- 
 guage of the New Testament that speaks of 
 " Christ formed within," " I in you and you in 
 me," " if any man will open the door I will come 
 in and sup with him," and so forth. All of which 
 means that Jesus' aim is to be an inspiration of the 
 individual moral forces, an enkindling of personal 
 perceptive powers, the awakening of the soul to 
 its normal moral functioning. 
 
 No man, no teacher, not even Christ himself, 
 can guide a man, so as to develop his manhood 
 as well as keep him from harm, except such teacher 
 or Christ enter into a man, by his personal influ- 
 ence, and strengthen and clear " the eye of the 
 soul." 
 
 135 
 
LOVING GOD 
 
 Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God. JESUS. 
 Nulla sine Deo metis bona est. No mind is 
 good without God. SENECA. 
 
 PERHAPS of all words in human speech none 
 is more elastic than love. It means as many 
 different things as there are minds. It is the one 
 word which when a man speaks means no more 
 nor less than his personality. It is the gist, sub- 
 stance, and quintessence of what he is; more, of 
 what he longs to be ; for 
 
 The thing we long for, that we are 
 For one transcendent moment. 
 
 When you say, therefore, that you love a man, 
 a woman, a child, or God, we cannot have much 
 idea of what you mean until we know you. Pious 
 folk express their most exalted ideal, the feeling 
 of their union with God, and even describe the 
 nature of deity itself by this word; while vicious 
 and perverted creatures use precisely the same 
 
 136 
 
LOFING GOD 
 
 word to express their lowest form of selfishness. 
 
 Love is thus self-revealing. Our truest formula 
 of belief consists not in what our minds assent to 
 and our reason acknowledges, but rather in what 
 our desires are drawn to. A soul sometimes de- 
 ceives itself in what it says, for our words are 
 themselves but thought forms borrowed from 
 others; and in what it does, for few of one's acts 
 carry with them one's utter approval ; but no soul 
 is ever deceived in what it likes. 
 
 Let us analyze, as far as we can, this thing called 
 love, using the term in its highest sense, and mean- 
 ing the emotion that beautifies the family, pre- 
 serves friendship, and appropriates God. 
 
 First of all it is a distinct emotion. It comes, 
 as we say, from the heart, and not from the intel- 
 lect or the will. As near as we can define it, it is 
 that pleasurable feeling aroused in us by the pres- 
 ence of the beloved object in our thoughts. 
 
 It is well not to drift away from this common- 
 sense basis. No intellectual process, no speech nor 
 act, can be called love, unless it be heated from our 
 subconscious self by this strange fire. We love a 
 man or a book or a flower, only as the thought of 
 the object in question gives us pleasure, and stirs 
 this emotion. 
 
 137 
 
LAME AND LONELY 
 
 Those who talk of loving God, therefore, when 
 there is no inward joy, no stir of the feeling in 
 some ardent measure, are clearly mistaken. They 
 may obey God, or approve of Him, or fear Him, 
 but they do not love Him except He makes in them 
 some spot of gladness. 
 
 Is it not absurd then, it may be inquired, to com- 
 mand us to love God? Can love be forced by the 
 will? If it cannot, and it certainly cannot, as it 
 lies beneath the will and moves before the will, 
 why should Jesus put as the supreme " duty " of 
 man the love of God? 
 
 The answer to this plain and substantial objec- 
 tion is this : that the command to love anything 
 essentially good and beautiful is no more nor less 
 than a command to learn to know it. 
 
 We are justified in commanding any human be- 
 ing to love, for instance, Shakespeare's or Ra- 
 phael's works, because by common consent such 
 art ought to and does appeal to a normal, healthy 
 taste. 
 
 So we ought to love the beauties of nature, and 
 deeds of heroism, self-sacrifice, and the like, and 
 little children. The obligation here consists in 
 our being human; whoever does not like such 
 things steps aside from the human race, he is 
 
 138 
 
LOFING GOD 
 
 perverted, and is a subject for the alienist and not 
 for the moralist. 
 
 God, no matter what our religion may be, so 
 long as it is civilized, stands for the perfection of 
 human character. In Him are all those excel- 
 lencies every right-minded person wants to possess. 
 Naturally, therefore, simply to conceive of such a 
 being must awaken in us love to Him. 
 
 If the thought of God is distasteful to .us, we 
 either have a false and distorted notion of what 
 God is, or our tastes are perverted and our backs 
 turned upon what we know to be really worth 
 while. 
 
 The command to love God is a command to 
 know God, to think of Him, to come into the in- 
 fluence of His personality. Once we see God we 
 can no more help glowing in love to Him than we 
 can help the glow in our hearts when we see a 
 perfect rose, a gorgeous sunset, a kind deed, or an 
 innocent child. 
 
 The curse of sensualism, of selfishness, of hate, 
 of greed, and of all flesh-centered or ego-centered 
 passions is that they stop up the eye of the soul. 
 " Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see 
 God." 
 
 Lowness, pessimism, and all bitter and base 
 139 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 thinking not only prevent us from seeing God, but 
 also from seeing anything else that is worth seeing. 
 Bound in such meshes we cannot see a woman as 
 her spirit should be looked on, nor a man for what 
 he really is, nor any of the moral loveliness of the 
 universe. 
 
 I do not ask that your idea of God be the same 
 as mine, for perhaps both of us are far from the 
 truth, but it is right to demand of any man that he 
 have some notion or mental image of the highest, 
 truest, noblest things in life; whatever your God 
 may be He ought to be no less than that; and you 
 are missing the meaning of life if you don't love 
 Him. 
 
 140 
 
THE USES OF CONFESSION 
 
 Sincerite, comme le feu, purifie tout ce qu'elle 
 embrasse. Sincerity, like fire, purifies everything 
 it embraces. MAETERLINCK. 
 
 One can have my confession without having my 
 heart; when one has my heart, he needs no con- 
 fession of mine; all is open to him. 
 
 LA BRUYERE. 
 
 WHEN the whole world has tried a truth and 
 found it good it compresses it into a prov- 
 erb. One of these compressed tablets of ever- 
 lasting truth is: Confession is good for the soul. 
 To confess a sin or a mistake, a weakness or 
 a fault, in some way separates it from our souls 
 and, as Maeterlinck says, purifies it as by fire, 
 sterilizes its dangerous germs. 
 
 So to open a heart is to cure it. Only our 
 concealed, disavowed, or unconscious sins eat into 
 the soul and attack the life principle. 
 
 This is true in our relations with each other. 
 141 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 The little child that goes frankly to his mother 
 and admits his disobedience is taken quickly into 
 the arms of love. Man and wife who live in a 
 continual white clarity of mutual confession have 
 an unbreakable peace, a love bastioned and secure 
 against all attack. 
 
 In society it is not the known but the unknown 
 vice that is dangerous. Every exposed fraud, 
 every aired scandal, every known scoundrel is a 
 red flag of warning to the young and innocent. It 
 is the prosperous, devious, and secret wrongdoing 
 that spreads its cancerous roots wide and sinks 
 them deep into the body politic. 
 
 Newspapers are a sort of public confessional. 
 What is known is half cured. No one hates the 
 organ of publicity as much as the corrupter of 
 public virtue, the agent of private fraud, who 
 needs darkness for his success. 
 
 Confession is impossible between man and man 
 unless there be some sort of moral stature in the 
 one confessed to greater than in the one who 
 confesses. 
 
 To a soul nobler than myself I can speak freely 
 of my cowardices, my falseness, my lapses. As 
 I talk to him even my envy and littleness, my 
 egotism, vanity, disloyalty, and selfishness, I know 
 
 142 
 
THE USES OF CONFESSION 
 
 not how, seem to lose their septic and dangerous 
 quality and to become objects of curious interest. 
 
 What a relief, what sweet joy, to find a friend 
 from whom you have been estranged, perhaps by 
 some fault of yours, and to lay bare your weakness 
 and wrong in plain, surgical strokes. In some 
 mysterious way, out of your very evil there springs 
 a tenderness, a strength of mutual affection which 
 was unknown before. What would lovers be with- 
 out lovers 7 quarrels and the making up ? 
 
 It is precisely this psychological quality that 
 characterizes our relation to the infinite to 
 God, under whatsoever form we conceive Him. 
 Whether it be the prostration before the ancient 
 altar of sacrifice, whereon burns the lamb of atone- 
 ment, or the whispered outpourings of a troubled 
 heart through the wicker of the confessional, or 
 the prayers and groans at the Methodist mourners' 
 bench, or the Salvation Army's penitent form, the 
 principle is the same. The soul is unveiling itself. 
 
 Just to say, to admit, to avow what we are, in 
 the face of infinite goodness, floods the life with 
 a cleansing stream. It is for this reason that all 
 religions have placed confession, in one form or 
 another, as the central point of their ritual. 
 
 For confession is, at its core, sincerity. It is 
 143 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 only in sincerity that the soul can breathe deep 
 breaths, that life is free and joyous. To live in 
 conscious deception with those we love is to walk 
 with feet entangled with strands. We are ever 
 on the watch. There is no peace, no utter relax- 
 ation. Those men and women whose private 
 moral code admits the doing of things unconfess- 
 able live a fevered and restless existence. 
 
 The first thing is peace with the infinite. Even 
 if a man belongs to no church at all, if the impli- 
 cations of institutional religion repel him, let him 
 in certain quiet moments call up his soul and lay 
 bare his deepest self to his own ideal of God; let 
 him admit himself, avow and confess himself, and 
 he will carry from his silent interview a lighter 
 heart than he has known. 
 
 Nothing is more foolish than dodging the idea 
 of God and evading His presence in the thought. 
 I would that all unchurched men might lay aside 
 their prejudices, the various ideas about God which 
 they have been taught, and all notions of their own 
 fitness or unfitness, and open their mind's door and 
 invite in whatever they believe God to be, and 
 then and there strip themselves of all subterfuge, 
 of all supposed goodness and supposed badness, 
 and be once sincere with the infinite fearlessly, 
 
 144 
 
THE USES OF CONFESSION 
 
 confidently sincere, as a child before his father, as 
 a creature before him that made him, as a being 
 of half lights, mysteries, and shadows before the 
 sun. 
 
 Whoever commences to live a white, honest life 
 in the face of his inner ideal, will begin to be honest 
 with himself. And whoever is downright and 
 square with himself is the only one who can pos- 
 sibly be loyal to his friends. 
 
 To thine own self be true, 
 
 And it must follow, as the night the day, 
 
 Thou canst not then be false to any man. 
 
 " And hereby," says John the beloved, " we 
 know that we are of the truth and shall assure our 
 hearts before him. For if our hearts condemn us 
 not, then have we confidence toward God." 
 
 145 
 
THE HEART OF FATALISM 
 
 That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by 
 the prophet. MATTHEW. 
 
 There are many truths that seem repugnant and 
 contrary one to the other, yet which subsist to- 
 gether in admirable agreement. The source of 
 most religious errors is the exclusion of one or the 
 other of these truths. PASCAL. 
 
 ONE of the most striking and suggestive say- 
 ings of the gospel is the nai've explanation 
 Matthew gives of this and that act of Jesus, " that 
 it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the 
 prophet." It is a luminous expression, masterful, 
 dramatic. 
 
 One sees a life moving according to programme 
 laid out ages ago; a personal career which rises 
 from a petty thing of chance and becomes a part 
 of unfolding destiny, a cog in the great wheel of 
 time; it is fatalism, but only the sweet juice of 
 fatalism, with the bitter rind thrown away. 
 Every doctrine has some good and some bad in 
 146 
 
THE HEART OF FATALISM 
 
 it. Any statement of truth, followed to an ex- 
 treme exclusion of all other truths, becomes un- 
 reason. 
 
 And there is a vast deal of truth and comfort 
 in the old creed of predestination. There is a 
 sense of rest comes to the mind with a realization 
 of the sovereign and all-compelling will of God. 
 Always, of course, provided one believes, as we 
 might say, in moderation, and does not push his 
 faith to the point of paralysis. 
 
 For, while predestination is true, it is not the 
 whole truth, for no truth can be wholly crowded 
 into a statement nothing but life can perfectly 
 inclose or express truth. It is not the word made 
 printer's ink; it is the word made flesh, which is 
 complete, well rounded, and safe to follow. 
 
 The source of dissipation in life is the feeling 
 that one is the creature and puppet of chance. 
 Hence spring our mad follies, our profligate 
 wastes, our toxic pleasures and septic negligence. 
 If it's all luck, then let us eat, drink and be merry, 
 for to-morrow we die. 
 
 When one speaks of destiny, one ordinarily 
 refers to one event only in life to-wit: death. 
 But the end of life is not the only part that 
 is scheduled. It is all according to programme. 
 
 147 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
 We are born each on his appointed day, as much 
 as Jesus himself came not until " the fullness of 
 time." And every man's life is a plan of God, 
 as Bushnell puts it. The varied structure of our 
 days is made after some plan drawn upon the 
 divine trestle board. There are blue prints and 
 specifications in heaven for each soul's growth. 
 
 A conviction like this must give one poise. It 
 corrects the dangerous extremes of despair and 
 overconfidence. It takes away worry. It re- 
 moves our nervous sense of haste. " He that 
 believeth shall not make haste." It spreads a 
 summer calm throughout our thoughts. It clears 
 the brain and steadies the hand. The spirit of 
 man becomes a candle of the Lord. 
 
 In some form this sense of programme is dis- 
 cernible in every great man. It is the essence of 
 heroism. Napoleon called it his star. Socrates 
 spoke of his daimon, who whispered him advice. 
 Caesar bade the frightened boatmen have no fear, 
 for Caesar was on board, and his fortunes. 
 
 The remarkable courage of the Japanese springs 
 from their perfect acceptance of fate. And what- 
 ever force there is in Islam is traceable to the same 
 source. 
 
 When we exclaim that we cannot accept fatalism 
 148 
 
THE HEART OF FATALISM 
 
 we are guilty of our western fault, which is 
 logic. Carrying fatalism to its logical extreme, 
 it is a deadening thing, and produces only a stoic 
 stolidity. But why carry it to an extreme? 
 
 The art we western people need to learn is to 
 extract the feeling, the flavor, the life element, 
 out of a dogma, and not run it down to its pitiless 
 logical end. For, as I have said, there is not a 
 solitary credo, whether in Christianity, positivism, 
 rationalism, or in any other religion or philosophy 
 which does not become eventually false and salt 
 and bitter, if treated with pure reason alone. 
 
 It is only in the temperamental mixture and 
 blend of all the great truths that we gain wisdom 
 and peace. 
 
 Let me feel, therefore, that this day is marked 
 out for me ; that the past, good and bad, is inevit- 
 able [even if it was not], and is now dissolved into 
 the ocean waters of the infinite purpose; that the 
 future is moving toward me as fixedly as the past 
 is receding; that all reform and right work, all 
 truth and goodness and noble action are almighty; 
 their failure is only seeming; they have in them- 
 selves the very toughness and conquering inde- 
 structibility of God himself; that every mean deed 
 and impure thought and cruel gratification and 
 
 149 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
 unworthy self-indulgence must meet its purifying 
 pain and whitening grief some time, somewhere; 
 that the stars are my friends and the three fates 
 are motherly souls ; that whatever power made the 
 lily and clothes it, created the sparrow and marks 
 its fall, has also a place and programme for me ; in 
 fine, let me, in my little corner also, go about my 
 Father's business, even as the Great Teacher, with- 
 out fear or haste or heat, moving as planets move, 
 doing what I may do " that it might be fulfilled 
 which was spoken by the prophet." 
 
 150 
 
A PREACHMENT TO PREACHERS 
 
 My dear brother: You are indeed out of your 
 place, for you are reasoning when you ought to be 
 praying. Yours truly, JOHN WESLEY. 
 
 FROM the layman in the pews this silent appeal 
 rises to the minister in the pulpit: he that hath 
 ears to hear let him hear ! 
 
 What we want from you, sir, is but one thing 
 yourself. 
 
 If you preach Christ, it does us no good, unless 
 you preach him in terms of your own personal life. 
 The historic Christ and the doctrinal and tabulated 
 Christ we, as well as you, can get from books. 
 
 We want no words from you except those that 
 are red with your blood. 
 
 We do not want the Word, but the Word made 
 Flesh. 
 
 We do not want you to arouse our emotions ; we 
 want to see you gripped by your own. 
 
 We do not want argument; we do not want 
 
LAME AND LONELY 
 
 anything proved to us ; for where you lay one doubt 
 you raise twenty. 
 
 We do not want information ; all its sources are 
 open to us as well as to you. We do riot want 
 science, history, or philosophy; we want of you 
 what we want of the one great neighbor heart. 
 
 Please go through your sermon, before you 
 bring it to us, and cut out every platitude, every 
 fine-sounding phrase, everything that you will say 
 just because you think your church requires it, or 
 because it is your duty to say it. Give us only 
 what you cannot help saying. 
 
 We ask you to compete with novels and stories 
 in one thing human interest. 
 
 We ask you to compete with poets in just one 
 thing vision. 
 
 We ask you to compete with men of science in 
 just one thing absolute honesty. 
 
 We ask you to compete with those who make us 
 bad in just one thing in that you like us. 
 
 We do not need your guidance; we need your 
 confession that shall most truly guide us. 
 
 Do not berate us; we know how bad we are. 
 Do not dictate to us; for the soul leaps to truth 
 and not authority. Do not urge us ; for souls that 
 can see need no urging. Simply show us one who 
 
 152 
 
A PREACHMENT TO PREACHERS 
 
 is in the clutch of some reality; then we shall be 
 shamed and smitten, reborn and set on the right 
 way. 
 
 Do not entertain us. You cannot compete with 
 the actor. Strip your soul naked to us and show 
 us what no man can simulate life in its pure 
 motion. 
 
 Speak low. The things you should have to 
 say are secrets. Every man's religion is utterly 
 modest; it is his most shrinking and sensitive vital 
 spot. 
 
 Remember that we are interested in the ultimate 
 things love, life, God and death. Whenever 
 you mention one of these things we are anxious to 
 hear if you have any light. Remember that the 
 spirit of this age is not as the spirit of former ages. 
 Learn these words of Griggs: " Our interest 
 everywhere these days is in the distinctively per- 
 sonal. If one can tell openly and clearly the story 
 of his own life, there are many who will find deep 
 interest in this. Literature is becoming more and 
 more autobiographical. It all means the deepen- 
 ing consciousness of the absolute significance of 
 the human soul." 
 
 It is not doctrines any more we want. It is not 
 theorems and saving formulas. We want doc- 
 
 153 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 trines incarnated, theorems shining through souls, 
 formulas that are the aureoles of experience. 
 
 Holy church has become a trysting place for our 
 souls with yours. 
 
 We do not want to believe ; we want to see. 
 
 We do not want gold any more, but the gold 
 mine; not money, but the bank and mint; not the 
 law, but the lawgiver; not the botany of Christ, 
 but the rose of Christ; not the sermon, but the 
 human being behind it. We, too, " seek not 
 yours, but you ! " 
 
 154 
 
BEYOND THE GRAVE 
 
 // in this life only we have hope in Christ we 
 are of all men most miserable. SAINT PAUL. 
 
 THE idea of immortality is one that is most 
 tenaciously clung to by our sentiments and 
 most conclusively rejected by materialistic reason- 
 ing- 
 There is danger that the mind of the average 
 intelligent person, trained to the strict honesty and 
 self-control of modern scientific methods, will put 
 aside the sweet persuasion as belonging to the 
 myths and guesses of former ages of ignorance. 
 Let us, therefore, state succinctly the grounds upon 
 which an enlightened, strictly truthful intelligence 
 bases such a belief. 
 
 And, first, the whole matter must be recognized 
 as lying outside of and beyond the realm of ac- 
 curate knowledge. 
 
 It has no kinship with botany, mathematics, 
 chemistry, or any of the other exact sciences. It 
 lies rather in that region which every cultured 
 
 155 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
 scientist to-day acknowledges to exist, where the 
 overtones of truth play, where are the deep mys- 
 teries of the personality, the subliminal instincts, 
 and the finer esthetic perceptions. 
 
 These things, of course, are just as real, 
 though not so well defined, as the exact sciences, 
 and have quite as much, if not more, to do with 
 life. 
 
 All materialistic proofs of a future life, there- 
 fore, such as psychic research and spiritualistic 
 performances, may be set aside as hardly consistent 
 with intellectual self-respect. 
 
 The profoundest argument perhaps is the one 
 emphasized by Emerson, who says that " when 
 God has a point to carry with the race he plants 
 his arguments in the instincts." The fact that the 
 conviction that personality will outlast death is 
 as old as humanity, has never been absent from 
 human experience, and is practically acknowledged 
 universally to-day, has great force. So persistent 
 a phenomenon of human consciousness goes a long 
 way toward proving that it corresponds to a fact. 
 
 Science, as John Fiske points out, has nothing 
 more to do with the matter than to weigh this 
 fact. Science does not prove immortality impos- 
 sible. He says : " In the course of evolution 
 
 156 
 
BEYOND THE GRAVE 
 
 there is no more philosophical difficulty in man's 
 acquiring immortal life than in his acquiring the 
 erect posture and articulate speech." 
 
 The most convincing proof of our continued 
 existence, however, to thoughtful persons is the 
 fact that, without this, life loses its moral signifi- 
 cance. The next world is inextricably bound up 
 with our ethical sense. And that not merely by 
 tradition, but by a profound reason, which has been 
 truly felt, though fantastically stated, by men since 
 the beginning of time. 
 
 The point is that moral motives are too long to 
 fit this earthly short career. All the higher, more 
 humanizing, subtler, and more altruistic sentiments 
 are too cramped for room. They cannot fitly 
 play inside a space of thirty-three years or so. 
 
 Brutal, bestial, sensual, and all destructive 
 emotions reap a quick harvest. Their reward is in 
 their hand. The selfish man gets what he goes 
 after. He makes his money, he sates his lust, he 
 fills the measure of his pride, and, as with the 
 beasts, death comes mercifully with the decay of 
 his powers, so that his term is in a way rational. 
 
 But the rewards of virtue are long and slow. 
 The increment of goodness seems a cosmic process 
 that needs not days but centuries. Honesty is 
 
 157 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
 not the best policy always, within a period of a 
 year nor of a lifetime; we feel it to be the best 
 policy always only when it can get a chance to 
 outlive all opposition. 
 
 Even so loyalty, purity, nobility, and all the 
 diviner traits of men only have chance to stand 
 erect when they can pierce through death. The 
 world would miss its proudest instances of manly 
 strength and womanly beauty if there should be 
 taken away all cases where men and women went 
 smiling to death for a principle. 
 
 Hence, to remove from men the feeling that 
 another life supplements this would cut the nerve 
 of moral emotion ; it would remove the halo from 
 our flesh; it would rub out our tint of divinity; it 
 would eliminate all that far-reaching heroism of 
 souls that leads them to commit themselves utterly 
 to noble aims. 
 
 Efface heaven, and the result is psychologically 
 sure there would be left for us but the slough of 
 the senses more or less refined, and instead of 
 " enduring the cross and despising the shame for 
 the joys set before us," we should adopt the advice 
 of Propertius: 
 
 " Dum licet inter nos igitur laetamur amantes ; 
 non satis est ullo tempore longus amor. Let us 
 
BEYOND THE GRAVE 
 
 enjoy pleasure while we can; pleasure is never long 
 enough." 
 
 The world would be poor without its Nathan 
 Hale, and Wiclif, and Savonarola, and Bruno, and 
 Paul, and Socrates, and Jesus, all of whom had 
 moral contents that spilled over death. 
 
 The best reason for keeping heaven is because 
 it is needed. 
 
YOKE JOY 
 
 And establish thou the work of our hands upon 
 us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it! 
 
 MOSES. 
 
 Wind and Wave and Sun, how regenerative 
 these elder brothers are! WILLIAM SHARP. 
 
 NATURE forgets nothing. 
 She not only produces with inexhaustible 
 fecundity but she keeps on producing the same 
 kind of things. 
 
 Like the witches in "Macbeth," she sings: 
 " I'll do, and I'll do, and I'll do," and she does the 
 third time what she did first. We emphasize the 
 fact that no two blades of grass are exactly alike, 
 and no two waves, and no two faces; but the most 
 striking factor in the case, after all, is that all grass 
 blades are on the same pattern, and all waves and 
 faces. 
 
 Yesterday the sun rose in the east and set in the 
 west; to-morrow and forever it will repeat the 
 same performance. Rain ascends from the ocean, 
 
 1 60 
 
YOKE JOY 
 
 journeys on cloud ships to the mountains, is con- 
 densed and rolls down in rivers to the sea once 
 more, a huge, endlessly turning water wheel. 
 
 Beavers build the same kind of dams to-day 
 they built in the four rivers of Eden, and hens lay 
 the same sort of eggs that Eve boiled for Adam's 
 breakfast. Bees make honey in the same shaped 
 cells and of the same sweetness and by the same 
 process their ancestors used for the honey Samson 
 found in the lion's carcass and turned into a riddle. 
 
 Nature produces a new thing only by infinitely 
 repeating the old with minutest variations. It 
 took her eons and centuries to create a human 
 arm, for instance, having practiced for a tremen- 
 dous space of time on the foreleg of the quad- 
 ruped, the wing of the bird, and the flipper of the 
 sea creature. And how many millions of experi- 
 ments with sensitive skin dots before she could 
 bring forth an eye to feel light or an ear to ex- 
 perience sound I 
 
 Atoms and molecules, as well as the people of 
 New England, are characterized by doing just as 
 they always have done. Otherwise there would 
 be no such thing as science. 
 
 The reason why coal ignites at a certain tem- 
 perature, why oxygen and hydrogen leap together 
 
 161 ' 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
 under certain conditions and separate under cer- 
 tain other circumstances, is precisely the same rea- 
 son why the ladies' aid society at Worcester, 
 Mass., always serves cold ham and hot coffee and 
 beans at the church supper, and why waiters wear 
 dress suits " they always have." 
 
 In the forest the willow drops its arms, the oak 
 extends them straight out, and the poplar holds 
 them up, because they have the habit. Every- 
 thing is old, old, old; even our hunger for some- 
 thing new the Greeks had it. 
 
 Now, if nature is such a slave to habit, it must 
 follow that habit is a good thing. Nature is sat- 
 urated with joy; nature everlastingly repeats; 
 hence if we would attain joy, let us seek it in rep- 
 etition. That is a perfectly good syllogism. 
 
 And it works out excellently well in practice. 
 Most of our pleasure comes from the acts we per- 
 form over and over again; as breakfast, dinner, 
 and supper; sleep and daily work, the Saturday 
 holiday and the Sunday rest. To get religious en- 
 joyment firmly fixed in us Jehovah prescribed 
 every seventh day for it. 
 
 In proportion as a pleasure is healthful, normal 
 and permanent, it is found in grooves. Oppo- 
 sitely, as we become unhealthy and perverted we 
 
 162 
 
YOKE JOY 
 
 seek happiness principally in strange and unusual 
 sources. Not that there is no pleasure in what is 
 new, only it is not dependable. To expect con- 
 tentment from novelty is to be glad occasionally, 
 and miserable generally; while to train one's self 
 to get the zest and fun of life from its ordinary 
 course, is to enter into partnership with great 
 Nature's self. 
 
 The old distinction between happiness and joy is 
 in point. Happiness just " happens " ; that is, 
 comes now and then, and by chance; joy, however, 
 is in the nature of things; it is the condition of 
 spirit arising from being in harmony with the 
 universe. 
 
 No class of people will you find more wretched 
 than those whose pleasure consists in novelty, such 
 as gamblers, the " smart set," and all who are con- 
 tinually buying new gowns, new automobiles, new 
 houses and new wives. 
 
 They have fun, but it is in rare oases dotting 
 desert wastes. All aristocracies and plutocracies 
 who have no work to make them happy, float as a 
 green scum upon the vast, sweet, healthy pool of 
 humanity; they are an exanthematous excretion 
 upon the surface of the huge, sound body of the 
 race, which is made up of children and letter 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 carriers, bricklayers and scientists, typewriter girls 
 and grocers, tinkers, tailors and candlestick mak- 
 ers. 
 
 How carefully wrong we have all been trained ! 
 Success we imagine to consist in escaping from 
 those who work for a living to sit among those 
 who work only when they please. 
 
 Quite the contrary, the contented portion of the 
 earth's population consists of those who work 
 when the bell rings, whether they feel like it or 
 not. For they have heard the voice of Nature, 
 who cries, saying: 
 
 " Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, 
 and ye shall find rest for your souls." 
 
 Nature's peace is yoke peace. It lies within 
 the usual. The devil's peace, whose end is ashes, 
 is alcohol-jewelry-fame-novelty peace. 
 
 164 
 
THE SOUL LAOCOON 
 
 The Laocoon of Firgil! . . . I know of one 
 more terrible. It is the one smothered and de- 
 voured by serpents issued from his own heart. 
 
 CATULLE MENDES. 
 
 The prosperity of fools shall destroy them. 
 
 SOLOMON. 
 
 MODERN life is engaged in a tremendous 
 effort to " look pleasant." Literature of 
 the day is inundated with streams of advice, ur- 
 ging us all to cheer up. Those philosophers are 
 the fashion who tell us that nothing matters much 
 so long as we chew our food well and don't worry. 
 And the most successful of present day propagan- 
 dists are they who reveal to us that there is no hell, 
 no devil, no wrong, no dark, and no pain. Mean- 
 while hearts continue to break, homes to be ship- 
 wrecked, mouths to be full of the ashes of excess, 
 fortunes to be lost, quarrels to develop, and chil- 
 dren to have the gripes. 
 
 The great fact, eternal as the race, is tragedy. 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
 Not for nothing the great creative minds, from 
 ^schylus to Shakespeare, hold up to us the pol- 
 ished mirror of their verse and show us often the 
 divine human face stone smitten with a Medusa 
 look and snake haired with horrors. 
 
 And the secret of triumph lies in knowing how 
 to adjust one's self to the fact of sorrow. All 
 sorts of cure-alls have been hawked down the 
 streets of time. 
 
 One cult says of woe, laugh at it ; another, inflict 
 such penitential torments on yourself that you 
 outdo it; another, face it stolidly; another, deny it, 
 notwithstanding the facts; another, join our insti- 
 tution, which will insure you against it, if not in 
 this world, in the next; and so on. But the wise of 
 all ages have discerned the healing truth about it, 
 which is that all real trouble as well as all real 
 peace is from one's own heart, and in one's own 
 inner court is the real arena of triumph or of 
 defeat. 
 
 There is not a single tragedy in history, as 
 Maeterlinck points out, in his " Wisdom and Des- 
 tiny," where fatality really reigns. External fa- 
 talities there do seem to be, such as sickness, 
 accident, the deeds of the wicked, and the death 
 of them we love; but such a thing as an internal 
 
 1 66 
 
THE SOUL LAOCOON 
 
 fatality does not exist. The hero always tri- 
 umphs ; at least in that forum where alone triumph 
 or defeat has any meaning that is, within his 
 own heart. 
 
 Success and failure in life, then, are in no sense 
 dependent upon anything but myself, and neither 
 are they in any least degree the sport of chance; 
 they come by laws as sure in their operation as the 
 laws that move the sun. In other words, every 
 wretched man is a Laocoon tangled and crushed 
 by the serpents issued from his own self. 
 
 Among these serpents the most common are the 
 bodily appetites that have been allowed to stran- 
 gle the will. To change the comparison, it is as 
 if a man drives his sledge over the snows of des- 
 tiny, guiding strong wolves, which pull him for- 
 ward so long as he drives them, but turn and rend 
 him when he loses control. 
 
 Foremost comes alcohol, which has paralyzed 
 how many a noble will, and burned to the ground 
 how many a spirit's dwelling it might have 
 cheered! There is no drunkard that is not a 
 spiritual suicide. And the first point in the re- 
 demption of an alcoholic pervert is that he real- 
 izes that, as no one made him drink except 
 himself, so no one can cure him, except himself. 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 Alcoholism is never hopeless; one can always 
 quit. 
 
 It is the spiritual condition of an impotent will 
 that is hopeless. 
 
 Worse than this, however, and worse than any- 
 thing, is the perversion of the creative instinct. 
 The feeling that attracts man to woman is the 
 most sacred and strong of all the desires of the 
 body. When this passion ceases to be a mastered 
 force, at once warming and sanctifying life, and 
 becomes a python, torturing and crushing its vic- 
 tim, there ensues the bitterest death in life. The 
 most appalling of all ruins is the ruin of love. 
 
 We might also speak of greed, of ambition, of 
 idleness, of envy, of hate, of egotism, of pride, 
 and the hundred and one other snakes that are 
 nested in the human heart, hatched in the warmth 
 of self-satisfied ignorance and increased at length 
 to the size of tragedy. 
 
 The cure and banishment of all such things is 
 found in love and wisdom; love fixed on no less 
 object than utter perfection God. For to love 
 God is to let into one's life the forces of the in- 
 finite. Love means admiration and self-giving. 
 To admire and to give one's self up to such an 
 ideal as is presented to us in Jesus, is to admit into 
 
 168 
 
THE SOUL LAOCOON 
 
 our hearts the most antiseptic of all emotions, to 
 receive into our wills the most tonic of all spiritual 
 potencies. 
 
 And wisdom. That is, first of all, teachable- 
 ness, the recognition of our ignorance. It means 
 the openness to truth, and the closure against all 
 such fraudulent imitations of truth and alleged 
 substitutes for truth, as superstition, custom, and 
 authority. 
 
 Reason, enlighted by wisdom, the knowledge 
 and practice of the laws of the universe; and the 
 heart, lit up by love, the invigoration streaming in 
 from God and from good men and women; these 
 are they that shall rescue the Laocoon soul from 
 its own serpent brood. 
 
 169 
 
THE CENTER OF THINGS 
 
 I HAVE discovered the center of the universe. 
 It is very wonderful and comforting. I am 
 the center of the universe. In a minute this morn- 
 ing this flashed on me, and the puzzle of the ages 
 was solved. 
 
 No more dispute as to whether the earth goes 
 round the sun, or the sun round the earth, or both 
 round the constellation of Hercules, for the whole 
 cosmos revolves about me. I am the axis. 
 
 When Proctor Knott extolled Duluth as the 
 spot where the horizon comes down at equal dis- 
 tance in every direction, he spoke the sober truth. 
 I write these lines on a ship a thousand miles at 
 sea ; all around is water and sky ; and right in the 
 exact geographical center of everything am I and 
 my ship. Come to think of it, this has always 
 been the case, all my life. 
 
 My father and mother existed for the purpose 
 of bringing me into the world. The old Third 
 Ward schoolhouse in Springfield, Illinois, was 
 
 170 
 
THE CENTER OF THINGS 
 
 built that I might attend there, and (it has since 
 been torn down) learn to spell; indeed, the entire 
 educational system came into being in order that I 
 might go to that school. 
 
 Emperors die in China, and kings are upset in 
 Portugal; earthquakes shake Sicily and panics 
 Wall Street, and all simply that the news thereof 
 may be laid before me at the breakfast table. 
 
 The big and the little dippers whirl about the 
 polestar, Antares winks, and Venus glows, and 
 Halley's comet comes and goes for me. 
 
 And in all this there is no egotism. For in say- 
 ing I am the center of the cosmos I do not at all 
 imply that you also are not the center of the 
 cosmos. In fact, you are; everybody is. There 
 are as many centers as there are conscious beings. 
 The mistake we have made all along is in suppos- 
 ing there can be but one center. If you look 
 through a window pane covered with rain drops or 
 frost crystals at a point of light, you will notice 
 that any way you move your head the light always 
 remains the center of innumerable concentric rings 
 formed by the glistening reflections. It is even so 
 in life, as you move the center moves. 
 
 There are as many worlds as there are crea- 
 tures. As Zangwill says: " The scent world of 
 
 171 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 dogs, the eye world of birds, the uncanny touch 
 world of bats, the earth world of worms, the water 
 world of fishes, the gyroscopic world of dancing 
 mice, the flesh world of parasites, the microscopic 
 world of microbes, intersect one another inextrica- 
 bly and with an infinite interlacing, yet each is a 
 symmetric sphere of being, a rounded whole, and 
 to its denizens the sole and self-sufficient cosmos." 
 
 The account of creation as given in the Penta- 
 teuch is, therefore, psychologically and essentially 
 correct; God did make the sun to give man light 
 by day, and the moon and stars to shine on him 
 by night, as far as man is concerned. 
 
 If the Bible had been written for angels it might 
 have stated the case differently. When the peni- 
 tent at the mourner's bench is told that he will 
 never find peace until he believes that the Son of 
 God came to save him personally, he is told the 
 plain truth; the meaning of which is that he is to 
 move in from the suburbs into the center of crea- 
 tion. 
 
 For it is only when a soul feels the stars rise and 
 fall about him orderly, angels and devils tugging 
 at him, and all creation recognizing his geocentric 
 supremacy, that he gets poise and ceases to be 
 eccentric. Eccentric means, having the point 
 
 172 
 
THE- CENTER OF THINGS 
 
 about which a wheel revolves at one side of the 
 center. 
 
 There are so many discontented, unhappy peo- 
 ple in the world, simply because there are so many 
 eccentric, lopsided, bumpy, flat-wheeled, irregular 
 souls. Move in! Move in! Occupy your due 
 place in the spotlight of destiny! Worms do it, 
 why not you ? 
 
 Philosophers have ridiculed this homocentric 
 theory. Goethe turned from it in disgust. Pope 
 wrote caustically: 
 
 While man exclaims, " See all things for my use! " 
 " See man for mine! " replies the pampered goose. 
 
 But the instinct of humanity is wiser than the 
 wisdom of the learned. Homer breathed truth 
 when he represented the gods fighting for and 
 against Troy. The Old Testament is right when 
 it shows Jehovah actively interested in the chosen 
 people. Every people is a chosen people, and 
 there is no God but our own peculiar Jah or 
 Elohim. 
 
 And Jesus was most right and true of all when 
 he had us appropriate, each one of us, the spe- 
 cial care of the Father of All. There is no Prov- 
 idence that is of any mortal use to me but Special 
 
 173 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
 Providence ; if it is only general it had as well not 
 be at all. It is precisely because He clothes the 
 lilies of the field that He will also clothe you, O 
 ye of little faith. Because He notes the sparrow 
 He will note you. 
 
 You have an inalienable right to your centricity. 
 Occupy it. You cannot believe in God unless you 
 believe He is yours. The only real God is my 
 God. 
 
THE THREE SPHINXES BY THE ROAD 
 
 Nobility is not acquired by birth, but by life, 
 often by death. PLUTARCH. 
 
 44 11 TEN," says Pascal, "unable to find any 
 
 JL Y-L cure for death, misery and ignorance, 
 have the notion that, to render themselves happy, 
 they must not think of these things.^ 
 
 The real test of a wise man is suggested by thsfe 
 paragraph. For a wise man is precisely one who 
 has definitely settled his attitude toward, first, 
 death; second, failure; and third, the unknown. 
 
 No matter how much knowledge is in a man's 
 head, how much skill in his hands, and how much 
 purpose and force in his heart, he is still a fool 
 unless he has met and arranged with the three 
 great facts. 
 
 Not that any man can understand one or all of 
 these three mysteries. It is safe to say no man 
 understands them. Since the beginning of human 
 time they have sat like sphinxes by the roadside of 
 every man's life. 
 
 175 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
 But one can do better than understand, one can 
 adjust one's self to them. 
 
 After all, in anything, the truest wisdom is not 
 knowledge, but adjustment. 
 
 We do not know what electricity is, but we can 
 adjust ourselves to it, we can use it, make it work, 
 and cause it to serve us in the telegraphic wire in- 
 stead of killing us in the lightning. So also we 
 do not know what gravitation is, nor chemical 
 affinity, nor life; but we can employ these mys- 
 teries to our advantage. 
 
 The last three mysteries of life, which men in 
 general cannot use, and by which they are baffled 
 and downcast, are those I have mentioned. To 
 adjust ourselves to them implies the highest de- 
 gree of intelligence and of moral power. 
 
 First, death. Death is as natural as life. It 
 is a certainty. How many people have settled 
 with it? Sad to say, to most persons death comes 
 as an awful calamity, a blow in the dark, an event 
 that upsets all calculations and defeats all the aims 
 of life. 
 
 A wise man is one who is always as ready to die 
 as to live; his books are in order, his business ar- 
 ranged, and his thoughts are so set that death may 
 come at any moment. No man who is not so 
 
THE THREE SPHINXES BY THE ROAD 
 
 has a right to call himself happy or intelligent. 
 
 Second, failure or sickness. In whatever a man 
 proposes, he ought to make definite plans what he 
 will do in case he fails. 
 
 Any fool can manage to get along with good 
 health; only a wise man knows how to be ill. 
 
 Any general can succeed if he invariably is vic- 
 torious; the great general is the one who knows 
 what to do when defeated. 
 
 Third, ignorance. What one does not know is 
 infinite, compared with what one knows. The 
 supreme test of character is one's relation to the 
 unknown. 
 
 Out of the unknown come the plagues of life; 
 for the unknown is the lair of the greatest enemy 
 of life fear. 
 
 Out of the unknown issue fear of God, of 
 spirits, of nature, of the dark, of fate, of disease. 
 
 Properly adjusted to the unknown we have re- 
 ligion, instead of superstition; our lives are made 
 moral and brave and free, instead of base and 
 cowardly and enslaved. 
 
 The clear, scientific, religious mind sees clearly 
 the difference between the things it can and cannot 
 know; the untrained, low mind blurs the line be- 
 tween known and unknown. This is the chief 
 
 177 
 
LAME AND LONELY 
 
 distinction between the intelligent and the unintel- 
 ligent thinker. 
 
 Whoever, therefore, will have peace, poise and 
 wisdom let him make definite arrangement with 
 the three sphinxes death, failure and the un- 
 known. 
 
THE HOUSE ON THE ROCK 
 For their rock is not as our Rock. MOSES. 
 
 THE history of mankind is the record of a 
 huge experiment in getting together. 
 
 Without organization we get none of the finer 
 elements of life, such as orchestras and steam 
 heat, cities, street cars, dictionaries and police. 
 
 Pure individualism means barbarism. Each 
 man dwells in his own cave with the woman he 
 has taken. 
 
 The struggle upward on the part of the race 
 is merely a struggle to crush out those elements 
 that prevent cooperation. 
 
 Pride, lust, money-love, power-love and all 
 forms of primal egoism disintegrate society, pre- 
 vent unity, split all pacts of mutual help and are 
 thus agents of savagery. 
 
 They minister to primitive egoism, but they de- 
 stroy the higher, finer and more permanent ego- 
 ism; that is to say, while they seem to increase 
 a man, yet in reality they eat him up. They make 
 
 179 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 him small, they narrow his nature, provincialize 
 his ideas and push him back toward the brute. 
 They are not forces of evolution, but of dissolu- 
 tion. 
 
 Now, therefore, almost all attempts at getting 
 together, all efforts at organizing into states, 
 churches, armies, cults, unions, and the like, have 
 appealed to these primeval passions, which in their 
 nature can never give solidity to bodies of men. 
 
 The cementing passions are curious. For they 
 seem at first glance to be anti-individualistic; to 
 make for loss to me and gain to others. Really, 
 when we come to try them out they increase and 
 strengthen me. They are as a matter of fact, 
 powerfully egoistic, only that quality is concealed 
 in them; it takes time, faith, vision and spiritual 
 regeneration to see it. 
 
 For instance, take love-of-men, of men souls 
 themselves, instead of the love of power over 
 them. That seems to mean for me to annihilate 
 self for others. Also take joy-in-work, and devo- 
 tion-to-ideal, and delight-in-service. All of these 
 seem to strike at self. We rebel against them 
 with the instinct of self-defense. 
 
 It is only when we reach a certain point of 
 ripeness in experience, of maturity in wisdom and 
 
 180 
 
THE HOUSE ON THE ROCK 
 
 of power in spiritual insight, that we see through 
 the shell to the kernel. 
 
 It is then we perceive the actual truth of the 
 saying that " he that saveth his life shall lose it, 
 and he that loseth his life shall find it." 
 
 For we learn by and by that only as we put 
 away the cruder egoisms of lust, money-love, 
 pride, the desire to be master, the hate of service 
 and so on, do we come to a sweeter, wider, nobler 
 egoism; we come indeed to some sort of true ap- 
 preciation of our own souls and of their worth 
 to us and the world. 
 
 Only through altruism, only by the path of 
 altruism, do we reach a sound individualism. 
 
 In the highest realm of character altruism 
 and egoism mean the same thing. They blend. 
 They make the full harmony, the white light of 
 souls. 
 
 All those institutions, therefore, that are founded 
 upon the sands of crude egoisms must perish. 
 The state that means mere defense, the church 
 that stands for rescuing the elect " as brands from 
 the burning," the schools whose aim is to make 
 scholars and gentlemen apart from the vulgar 
 crowd, the business world which has for a motive 
 to make me rich and independent and separate 
 
 181 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 from my fellows, are on rotting piers and will go 
 down in time. 
 
 Jesus was right. Human society must be 
 built on the abiding altruistic motives; only so 
 shall " the gates of hell not prevail against it." 
 Nietzsche was shortsighted and superficial. 
 Tolstoi was right. Disarmament is right. 
 
 Only as we dare to trust the altruistic laws, only 
 as we fearlessly build our institutions on them, 
 only as we have a practical, bold faith in the 
 cosmic energy of love and trust, and an unshakable 
 belief that men will respond to it, in spite of what 
 they say, only so can we permanently get together 
 and build our houses upon the rock. 
 
 182 
 
THE DECLARATION OF 
 INDEPENDENCE 
 
 The only true courage is against fate. 
 
 LADY SOMERY. 
 
 THE Declaration of Independence by the 
 nation is not of much importance unless each 
 citizen of the nation issues and abides by his own 
 personal declaration of independence. 
 
 Join me, therefore, in this my declaration: 
 
 I deny that there is any such thing as chance 
 or luck. I affirm that the universe is managed 
 by an intelligent person. I can see only a little 
 way, but as far as I do see all is law; that is just 
 ground for believing that all is law everywhere. 
 I say a Person manages the universe, because my 
 experience furnishes me no grounds for conceiv- 
 ing of an intelligence apart from personality. 
 
 I deny that God is ever under any circum- 
 stances my enemy. I affirm He is always my 
 friend. 
 
 I deny that there is any caprice in the moral 
 
 183 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 or spiritual world. I affirm the cosmic accuracy 
 of the laws that govern souls. 
 
 I deny that there is so much as one grain of 
 truth in premonitions. 
 
 I deny that fear ever does any good. I affirm 
 that the sensation of fear is always poison, to 
 be resisted with all my might. Whatever comes, 
 I shall meet it better unafraid. 
 
 I deny that heredity has done anything to me 
 or to any person which we cannot turn to our 
 good. I affirm that the original heredity is that 
 I am a son of God, and that this inherited good 
 spirit, if we can realize it, is stronger than any 
 bad blood. 
 
 I deny that environment is stronger than I. 
 I affirm that I can make any possible environment 
 serve my success. 
 
 I deny that happiness is a worthy aim of life. 
 I affirm that I am put here to become great, not to 
 be happy. 
 
 I deny that any soul that is heroic is ever in 
 its depths unhappy. I affirm that joy is the in- 
 variable accompaniment of fearlessness, truth 
 and loyalty. 
 
 I deny that any habit, instinct or taste is 
 stronger than I. I* affirm that I can change these, 
 
 184 
 
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 
 
 and that the changing of them is all there is to 
 culture and progress. 
 
 I deny that money has ever either aided or 
 impeded the power of truth and of good in the 
 world. I affirm that the only spiritual dynamic 
 is personality. 
 
 I affirm that religion is nothing except the 
 personal influence of God, and that progress is 
 nothing except the personal influence of good 
 people. 
 
 I deny that I am " a worm of the dust." I 
 affirm that I am as important as the rest of the 
 universe. 
 
 I deny that death ends all. I affirm that my 
 personality shall live on after the dissolution of 
 my body. I affirm that the belief that the hu- 
 man soul ceases to exist at death is the most 
 profoundly immoral of all beliefs. 
 
 I affirm that this world was made for lovers; 
 that whoso misses love misses life; that loyal love 
 is tougher than all hates, envies and malice, and 
 will eventually overcome them. 
 
 I deny that " as I have made my bed I must 
 lie in it." I affirm that " if I have made my bed 
 wrong, please God, I will make it again." 
 
 I deny that opportunity knocks at every man's 
 
LAME AND LONELY 
 
 door but once. I affirm that every day is an op- 
 portunity. 
 
 I deny that it is worth while to seek to be rich, 
 to be famous, or to occupy great place. These 
 things are gambling chances. 
 
 I affirm that the one thing worth seeking is that 
 work which seems play. Only in doing that work 
 is a human being sound, sane and content. 
 
 I deny any authority whatever over my mind. 
 
 I affirm that I am absolutely bound to do what 
 seems right to me. 
 
 I affirm that my personal well-being is best pro- 
 moted by striving for the well-being of others. 
 
 I can prove none of these things. They are 
 axiomatic to me. There is nothing more self- 
 evident by which to prove them. 
 
 186 
 
SALVATION BY RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and 
 he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap. 
 
 THE PREACHER. 
 
 FIRST, what is salvation? 
 It may mean several things; it has been 
 used to mean making sure of the entrance of 
 one's soul into heaven. 
 
 Of that meaning I have nothing here to say. 
 I use the word in another sense, the modern sense 
 of making one's character strong, so that one is 
 master of one's passions, freed from fear, and 
 happily adjusted to the universe. In other words, 
 one is sure of one's self, and a source of strength 
 and joy to others. 
 
 This kind of salvation, however it may be with 
 any other kind, never is attained except by one 
 thing Responsibility. 
 
 A saved arm is an arm that is muscular and 
 skillful, a saved leg is one you can run and kick 
 with, a saved mind is one that thinks clearly. 
 
 187 
 
LAME AND LONELY 
 
 Each of these is saved by peril, burden and effort. 
 
 Protecting, coddling, and shielding them, only 
 makes them flabby and weak. 
 
 This is the law of life. The woman that is 
 most really saved is the woman who bears and 
 rears a large family of children. They mean 
 burden, anxiety, labor, self-giving, often agony, 
 always responsibility. And those are the things 
 that save a woman; save her from being petty, 
 dissatisfied, useless and bad. 
 
 The noblest women I ever knew have been 
 those who have launched young lives. The most 
 magnificent soul that can be grown on this earth 
 is a mother. 
 
 We all want to " help " boys. Yet that which 
 makes a boy great is that which hinders him. 
 Many a promising lad needs only to be kicked 
 out, battered, discouraged, and opposed, to make 
 a man of him. 
 
 Not that we should abuse boys. We shall help 
 them. But this old world, and nature, and des- 
 tiny, intend to haze him, to attack him, and to 
 roll him in the mud. 
 
 And if that rough treatment arouses him to 
 fight and win, he will be saved. Our safeguard- 
 ing does not save. 
 
 1 88 
 
SALVATION BY RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 Girls, it is commonly supposed, are to be 
 screened, protected. A girl, however, that has 
 always been carefully kept from all temptations 
 and responsibility, may be a very sweet, nice girl, 
 but she will not be a great woman. 
 
 Some of the purest souls I ever knew were Sal- 
 vation Army lassies, who grappled with vice and 
 uncleanness daily. 
 
 One of the noblest souls I ever knew was a 
 vaudeville actress, who began life as a waif, strug- 
 gled up single-handed, and kept herself unspotted. 
 
 One way to save a soul is to pack it in cotton 
 and keep it in a glass globe. Another way is to 
 render it antiseptic and send it forth into an un- 
 toward world. 
 
 What modern souls want is not to be secure. 
 They want to be great. 
 
 Any theology can tell you what to do to be se- 
 cure; if you care for that. 
 
 But there is only one way to be great, to have 
 strength that can be depended upon in a crisis, 
 to have the kind of happiness that cannot be 
 bowled over by calamity, to have the kind of 
 faith that doubts strengthen and do not disturb, 
 and to have the kind of purity that comes from 
 wisdom and not from ignorance; and that way is 
 
 189 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 to accept responsibilities, grapple them, and bear 
 them nobly. 
 
 Then you are safe as a fearless warrior is safe. 
 
 The other way you are safe as a man in a 
 cyclone cellar is safe. 
 
 190 
 
LOVE THE TEST OF LIFE 
 
 Love is the best of moralists. BACON. 
 
 LOVE is the test of life. It tries every soul. 
 And it finds so much dross in us that it is a 
 wonder it stays with us at all. 
 
 When love comes it demands nobleness. It 
 sounds the trumpet for every high thought and 
 feeling in us to rally. 
 
 It smites every base thing in us. It refuses to 
 live in peace with meanness, selfishness or sor- 
 didness of any kind. 
 
 That is why so few people are capable of a 
 great love. They are not worthy of it. To be 
 sure, all of us have some of the tricks and imita- 
 tions of love; for love is so good a thing that if 
 we cannot have it we must have a pewter dupli- 
 cate of it. When men cannot see God they make 
 idols. 
 
 So we all have sex attraction. We treasure 
 up flatteries and fair words, kisses and gifts and 
 compliments: and these trinkets, ear-rings and 
 
 191 
 
LAME AND LONELY 
 
 shifts of love are the only things many of us un- 
 derstand. 
 
 But love itself is as shattering as God. Love 
 is a revealer. It is a revelation. It is blinding 
 vision. 
 
 For, have you not seen how, when a youth falls 
 in love, his first persuasion is of his utter unworthi- 
 ness? He is not fit to touch her glove. Every 
 little vileness of his past rises to scorn him. He 
 is crushed under a vast humiliation. That she will 
 smile on him is a miracle; and he is ashamed, 
 feeling that if she but knew him through and 
 through she would flee. 
 
 Marriage is so often a failure because they two 
 try to keep love without greatness of soul. The 
 only happy, contented marriages among petty 
 souls are those of indifference and convenience. 
 To love, and not to be noble, means tragedy. 
 
 Love wars with egotism. No egotist can love. 
 For love is the very soul of altruism. It means 
 self-sinking, self-forgetfubiess, self-obliteration. 
 It passes over and sees a self worthy of honor 
 only in the person of the beloved. 
 
 Love cannot dwell with pride. Its pith and 
 marrow is humility. Any preening and perking 
 up of self it abhors. It will not claim its own 
 
 192 
 
LOVE THE TEST OF LIFE 
 
 rights. Its joy is surrender, and not conquest. It 
 is great in meekness, after the manner of true 
 greatness. It always " takes upon itself the form 
 of a servant, and learns obedience." It refuses 
 thrones. It washes feet. 
 
 Love gives, gives, gives. It never can give 
 enough. Its climax of happiness is when it can 
 give life itself. Its triumph is crucifixion. 
 
 Love transfigures. It renders the beloved ob- 
 ject beautiful. Love does not spring from 
 beauty; a thing is beautiful because it is loved. 
 
 So we see why love means such misery. It is 
 a divine fire among earthly stubble. It comes to 
 us; we leap to it; for it is the most glorious of 
 all things; and then we discover its fatal require- 
 ment. Alas! we must be good, and we must be 
 great. We fail. We go broken to our graves, 
 hoping for a life beyond, where we may measure 
 up to love. 
 
 That is, most of us do this. Some put away 
 great love entirely. They choose littleness, be- 
 cause it is comfortable. They settle down to 
 pleasant lives; cultured swine, intellectual cattle, 
 more or less brainy beasts. 
 
 Still, though many strive with it and are 
 wrecked, and others give it up, love goes on, al- 
 
 193 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 mighty, inborn in every new child, inherent in 
 humanity. It is our redemption and our torment. 
 It is eternal. For it is God. God flowing, burst- 
 ing up, heaving in tidal waves in the souls of men. 
 
 Suppressed here, it rises yonder. Silenced in 
 one place its vocal harmonies break out in a hun- 
 dred new places. Love almighty is God almighty. 
 It is that breath which God breathed into the nos- 
 trils of the dust He had fashioned, and man be- 
 came a living soul. 
 
 Heaven and Hell are but love's flame and 
 shadow reflected upon the infinite. 
 
 194 
 
THE TEETH AND CLAWS OF AL- 
 TRUISM 
 
 Behind the idea of justice always lurks the idea 
 of force. DE TOCQUEVILLE. 
 
 AS civilization becomes more and more com- 
 plex, justice must become more and more 
 fundamental. Among simple people, in antique 
 and ignorant eras, security was possible by force. 
 The mediaeval baron lived safe in his castle at 
 home and in his harness in the field by the mere 
 process of keeping the common people cowed. 
 His walls and his soldiers were his sure support 
 and defense. He alone had the power to destroy. 
 He could hurt his people and hang or chop them ; 
 they could not touch him. 
 
 Times have changed. The invention of high 
 explosives has rendered all walls obsolete. Even 
 guards, armies and police are insufficient nowa- 
 days to protect a king. Bombs are cheap, and 
 a dollar buys a revolver good enough to slay 
 an emperor. The machinery of destruction is in 
 
 195 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 the hands of the proletariat. The power to hurt 
 has passed from duke and doge over to the 
 cobbler and the plasterer. 
 
 Every assassination of a royal person contains 
 this lesson. There is safety no more in high 
 places, except as there is justice in low places. 
 " Be wise now therefore, O ye kings, and be 
 instructed, ye judges of the earth. Kiss the peo- 
 ple, lest they be angry and ye perish from the 
 way when their wrath is kindled but a little." 
 
 The rise of democracy has been accompanied 
 with the growth of the terrific power of private 
 vengeance. The other edge of democracy, its cut- 
 ting edge, is the power of " one of the least of 
 these, my brethren," to kill. Along with the doc- 
 trines of altruism and universal brotherhood comes 
 the manufacture of fulminates, dynamite, nitro- 
 glycerin and all the black brothers of the out- 
 raged. 
 
 And there is no refuge from this menace ex- 
 cept justice. And not occasional justice, such as 
 of courts and arbitration boards and special com- 
 mittees, but bottom justice which reaches to the 
 basic equities, which indeed must utterly reor- 
 ganize the social arrangement. 
 
 Every man must have a fair chance. No child 
 196 
 
TEETH AND CLAWS OF ALTRUISM 
 
 shall under any circumstances have an unearned 
 preference over another. Bringing one child into 
 the world in the slums and feeding him on refuse, 
 alcohol and lust, and bringing another child into 
 the world in luxury and feeding him on milk and 
 honey and love; this injustice must cease. All 
 privilege, caste, every species of unfairness must 
 stop. 
 
 So preaches the mild Jesus. So runs the gentle 
 gospel. 
 
 But behind the flowers and perfume of this 
 appeal of goodness is an iron horror, a thing with 
 teeth and claws and fire-heart that says the same 
 thing. 
 
 Let us be fair and just and love our neighbor 
 and we will feel better. Quite so. But there is 
 a hell side as well as a heaven side to every true 
 preachment. Let us abide in unfairness, injustice 
 and selfishness, and out of the pit of wrong and 
 darkness by the side of which we feast shall come 
 fire balls and cyanic vapors. 
 
 Wherever there is injustice there is danger. 
 Wherever there is wrong there is concealed hell 
 fire. Every oppression means an explosion. Ev- 
 ery graft and connivance of roguery means, some 
 time, somewhere, agony and heartbreak. 
 
 197 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 " Wherefore hear the word of the Lord, ye 
 sorrowful men that rule this people. 
 
 " Because ye have said, We have made a cov* 
 enant with death and with hell are we at agree- 
 ment; therefore thus saith the Lord: 
 
 " ' Behold, judgment will I lay to the line, and 
 righteousness to the plummet; and the hail shall 
 sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters 
 shall overflow your hiding place. And your cov- 
 enant with death shall be disannulled, and your 
 agreement with death shall not stand.' " 
 
 198 
 
IMITATION IN RELIGION 
 
 The customs of a people are their motive 
 power. DUCLOS. 
 
 THERE is nothing more imitative than our 
 religious experience; nothing that seems to 
 ourselves more profoundly original; nothing in 
 which we follow more closely the footsteps of 
 others. 
 
 By this I do not mean to imply that our re- 
 ligious feelings are not genuine. Quite the con- 
 trary. We can be as sincere in a suggested 
 emotion as in a spontaneous emotion. 
 
 I believe in the religious feeling. I believe it 
 to be the highest functioning of the human in- 
 telligence. But I am of those who labor to free 
 it from ignorance, irrationality and base alloy, and 
 to get it properly set in its true psychological 
 place. Religion is not the private property of 
 the church; it belongs to mankind; it doubtless 
 exists in the house of God, but it is also -in the 
 outdoors of God, and there's a lot more outdoor 
 
 199 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 space in the universe than there ever will be house 
 room. I sympathize with and love all honest re- 
 ligious feeling. 
 
 But most of the feelings of any kind which we 
 think our very own are imitative. The lover feels 
 about as he has heard and read that others feel; 
 the instinct is his own, its form is mimicked. We 
 get angry at those things at which a man is sup- 
 posed to get angry. A young Albanian private 
 in the Turkish army the other day was executed 
 for stabbing his captain, who had slapped his face. 
 His defense was that his people always killed 
 those who slapped their faces. He was willing to 
 die to keep step with a racial impulse. 
 
 We eat and drink under the dictates of tastes 
 which are copied. When we go to Marseilles 
 we eat bouillabaisse, at Strasbourg we eat pate de 
 foie gras, at Budapest we eat goulash, at Naples 
 we eat macaroni, in Germany we eat limburger 
 cheese and sauerkraut, down South we eat hot 
 biscuit, and in Boston we eat beans; and in each 
 instance good livers can throw themselves into a 
 genuine imitative craving and relish for the spe- 
 cific dish of the locality. The most accomplished 
 gourmets are those with the most adaptable pal- 
 ates. 
 
 200 
 
IMITATION IN RELIGION 
 
 We build our houses to suit certain notions of 
 personal comfort which we have inherited from 
 our people or absorbed from our environments. 
 When we travel we consult Baedeker or follow 
 the suggestions of friends in selecting the places 
 where we are to let our enthusiasm loose. 
 
 So, looking back, I can see how all my early 
 religious experiences were run into molds ready- 
 made for me by my surroundings. I was not sat- 
 isfied until I had all the forms of emotion others 
 said they had. When I awoke to this fact I was 
 at first inclined to doubt the genuineness of my 
 feelings, but more mature reflection brought me 
 about to see that, while the manners and shapes 
 of my sentiments were copied, the core and gist 
 of them was truly my own, the moving of a deep, 
 entirely individual and personal instinct within 
 me. 
 
 Does not this explain some peculiar religious 
 phenomena? For instance, the permanence of 
 religious institutions, the fixity of creeds, the long 
 life of churches, generation after generation 
 growing up and passing through the same forms 
 of faith? 
 
 Does it not explain, also, the remarkable 
 spread, the epidemic nature of new religions, how 
 
 201 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 they seem to catch and go like fire, increasing in 
 arithmetical progression ? 
 
 And does it not explain, also, the slow progress 
 of trying to apply rational, scientific methods to 
 religious thought? It requires the constant effort 
 of reformers, prophets, saints and heroes to keep 
 religion from hardening into empty form, or run- 
 ning away into a travestied sentimentality, and to 
 keep it near to the individual, genuine truth. 
 
 Religion is eternal, because it is human. All 
 churches are true, in a way. The Jew, the Cath- 
 olic, the Protestant, the Christian Scientist, each 
 is trying out, in the long experiment of years, 
 some particular phase of the truth. Each doubt- 
 less will have a part in forming that sweet and 
 reasonable religion, that rational, intelligent, per- 
 fect attitude toward the infinite which our chil- 
 dren's children shall count not the least among 
 the treasures we have wrought for them with 
 our highest effort the religion of to-morrow. 
 
 202 
 
DO THE MEEK MAKE GOOD? 
 
 Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the 
 earth. JESUS. 
 
 A GENTLEMAN writes that a magazine has 
 offered a framed motto, " Blessed Are the 
 Meek," to any meek person who has made good. 
 He wants me to answer this. 
 
 One cannot answer a joke, much less a covert 
 sneer. But if any cares to think clearly about 
 meekness I can point the way. 
 
 The question is, what does it mean to make 
 good? If it means to get on, then meekness is 
 silly. If it means to become great, then meekness 
 is the only way. 
 
 If to make good means to have some feudal 
 master of dollars notice you, promote you or en- 
 dow you by his royal will or pleasure ; if it means 
 to win in the gamble of business; if it means cur- 
 rying favor with the vested interests until you 
 are made leading citizen of the village or judge 
 of the court; if it means scheming, fawning and 
 
 203 
 
LAME AND LOFELJ 
 
 handshaking until you are elected governor of the 
 state or bishop of the church; if it means spending 
 millions in printer's ink and upon billboards until 
 you make the multitude buy your brand of hats 
 or soups or pianos; if it means what is commonly 
 meant by success, to-wit, prominence, notoriety 
 or wealth, then the meek do not make good. 
 
 But if by making good is meant to become 
 strong, sane and sure in soul, wise and clear in 
 mind, sweet and wholesome in character, with 
 your own life full of peace and poise, and with 
 your whole influence a help and inspiration to 
 those who know you, then nobody ever does make 
 good save the meek. 
 
 Jesus said, " the meek shall inherit the earth." 
 To understand that you have to know what meek- 
 ness is. It is not timidity, cowardice, servility 
 and such tempers. It is Humility. 
 
 And what is humility? It is the wish to be 
 great and the dread of being called great. It is 
 the wish to help and the dread of thanks. It is 
 the love of service and the distaste for rule. It 
 is trying to be good and blushing when caught 
 at it. It is loyalty to truth and reality, and hate 
 of sham and seeming. 
 
 In all the real things of life it is only the meek 
 204 
 
DO THE MEEK MAKE GOOD? 
 
 who inherit. In love it is the meek who sit upon 
 thrones and it is the proud who bow down to 
 them ; in art it is the meek alone who have eyes to 
 see the shy secrets of nature and the grace to fitly 
 interpret them; in science it is the meek alone 
 who have the subtle instinct for truth; in good- 
 ness it is only the meek who have that rare flower 
 of unconscious purity, and in life's sterner affairs, 
 before the furies of sickness, failure, calumny and 
 death, it is only the meek who stand calm and 
 ready, while the braggarts tremble, whine or flee. 
 
 Who of us, in his serious hour, would not 
 rather be found worthy to stand beside old Soc- 
 rates, poisoned like a rat in a hole, and Jesus, 
 hung up to die between two thieves, and Lincoln, 
 shot down like a dog, than to be brother to the last 
 devious money lord or political baron who has 
 schemed and bludgeoned his way to the kingship 
 of these times? 
 
 To furnish the cheapest kind of prize to all 
 the meek who make good would bankrupt a mil- 
 lionaire. For all over the world, among simple 
 folk, " unwept, unhonored and unsung," each 
 faithful in his small corner, are myriads of brave, 
 helpful souls, who suppose themselves to be noth- 
 ing, who would be amazed if told there is any- 
 
 205 
 
LAME AND LONELY 
 
 thing noble about them, yet who are facing life's 
 responsibilities bravely and death's terrors un- 
 afraid and the unknown to-morrow with cheer 
 and strong hearts. No prize of men or maga- 
 zines can reach them, for they hide ; but they wear 
 unseen the crown of wild olive, for all that, and 
 unto them shall be given the morning star. 
 
 They are like God; for, have you never no- 
 ticed? God is so shy and humble and hidden that 
 the humbugs don't believe He exists ! God never 
 seems to make good, until the centuries have their 
 say. 
 
 206 
 
WIDENING 
 
 Rien ne ressemble moms a I'homme qu'un 
 homme Nothing less resembles mankind than 
 a man. BALZAC. 
 
 I KNOW a woman who is a perpetual child. 
 She retains all the childish strong love of 
 them that love her and hate of them that hate her. 
 And she makes no bones of it. She never tries to 
 dye her likes and dislikes with color of justifica- 
 tion, but is frank, open and above board slap-me- 
 and-I'll-slap-you, and kiss-me-and-I'll-kiss-you. 
 
 And I don't know but she gets along about as 
 well as those of us who try to be just and fair in 
 our emotions. 
 
 For I have walked about in the mess of men 
 and the ways of women some years and have ob- 
 served, and my conclusion is that when all's said 
 and done most of our instincts are downright 
 primitive. 
 
 A soul wriggles a good deal, like a wobbly 
 arrow, but as a rule it speeds from the bow of 
 
 207 
 
LAME AND LOP ELY 
 
 the cradle to the target of the grave in just about 
 the trajectory which the hand that shot it de- 
 signed it to take. 
 
 In plain prose, we are born with a bunch of 
 tendencies and our days are spent in working them 
 out. 
 
 We keep imitating and imitating other people 
 whom we admire, but it is only a business of try- 
 ing on successive suits till we find one that fits 
 us. For we never permanently come under the 
 influence of any one who is not just spiritually 
 adapted to our own self. 
 
 So we say such a poet, author, actor, man or 
 woman, " finds " us. Which simply means that 
 such person helps us express our self. 
 
 We like a certain preacher, for instance. 
 Why? Because he says what we think. We read 
 a certain author with pleasure because he helps 
 us give form to convictions we already have. So 
 Lord Bacon shrewdly said he wrote a book to tell 
 men what they had always known. 
 
 The soul is a narcissus that loves only those 
 other souls which are as pools on which it can see 
 the reflections of itself. 
 
 As life deepens we find in ourselves more and 
 more of the multiplicity of humanity. And so we 
 
 208 
 
WIDENING 
 
 love more and more kinds of men and different 
 traits of men. 
 
 It is herein that the sage differs from the petty 
 soul. He has come into a broad sympathy with 
 humanity because he has become more widely hu- 
 man. He sees that in himself are all crimes and 
 all sanctities. 
 
 Hence with the saint on his knees, drunk with 
 ideal holiness, the wise man is not shocked nor 
 has any contempt, but he says amen to any whitest 
 prayer, and with the drunkard, the thief and the 
 murderer he has no bitter words of abhorrence, 
 because in his own soul he has felt these swift 
 shadows and poison, desperate darkness of them, 
 and he wants to put his hand on the wretch's hand 
 and say, in pity and humbleness My brother ! 
 
 So it is a straight way from the direct and 
 childish soul that slaps back and kisses back, up 
 to the serene character of the great soul that loves 
 all and forgives all. 
 
 It is all a matter of more humanity, more life, 
 more inner resources, more wealth of personal 
 development. 
 
 A great man is like a wide sea and laves the 
 shore of all continents and kinds of men. He 
 loves all because he is akin to all. 
 
 209 
 
LAME AND LOVELY 
 
 Jesus said to the woman taken in adultery: 
 " Neither do I condemn thee " ; to the thief on 
 the cross : ' This day shalt thou be with me in 
 Paradise " ; to God, speaking of his murderers : 
 " Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
 they do." 
 
 The difference is one of degree. The little 
 soul sees itself only here and there among men. 
 The great soul (which we call divine) sees itself 
 in all mankind. 
 
 The child and the savage love their benefac- 
 tors; intellectual people love their kind; saints 
 love the brethren; sinners love their sort; the 
 Jah of the Hebrews loved the chosen people ; the 
 God of the middle ages loved the elect; Jesus 
 loved the world. 
 
 210 
 
JESUS OUT OF DOORS 
 
 The same day went Jesus out of the house t and, 
 sat by the seaside. MATTHEW. 
 
 TT 7E can never understand Jesus until we get 
 V V him away from the Temple. 
 
 It is when he steps from the altar and goes with 
 us to the home, the workshop and the seaside, that 
 we perceive his supreme significance to life. 
 
 And he is so much more splendid when we 
 take him out of formulas of salvation, and walk 
 with him along the ways of days. 
 
 The modern man, growing less and less sensi- 
 tive to the appeal of ritual and authority, finds, 
 like the two upon the road to Emmaus, that his 
 heart burns within him, as he talks with Jesus out 
 of doors. 
 
 Jesus out of doors, free from the stuffy air and 
 stuffier ideas of the " meeting house " ; Jesus, not 
 a wooden part of a wooden scheme, but a luminous, 
 warm Teacher; Jesus, unwrapped from the spicy 
 grave-clothes of heathen rites, and treading with 
 
 211 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 us the meadows of modern thought, with eternal 
 springtime in his look; Jesus, descending from 
 the incense-swathed niche and the light of candles, 
 into the open of life and literature; Jesus, with 
 his scepter of authority laid by, ruling now by the 
 inspiration of his word; Jesus, with the "many 
 crowns " of kingship removed, crowns he never 
 wanted, but which the ignorant enthusiasm of a 
 king-infested age forced upon him, thrice as un- 
 welcome to the real grandeur of his soul as the 
 Crown of Thorns; Jesus, coming among us with 
 the genuine greatness of his character, and 
 stripped of the artificial greatness of thrones, 
 dignities, and robes, great in vision and wisdom 
 and love, and relieved of soul-killing superstition; 
 this Jesus is one whose leadership rests not upon 
 his birth, nor prophecies, nor miracles, nor the 
 conclusions of logic, nor the authority of Church 
 and State, nor Tradition; but, with a fair field and 
 no favor, by sheer virtue of his dominant person- 
 ality and ideas, easily outstrips all competitors in 
 the race for mastery. 
 
 What a joy to him it must be to know that he 
 has ceased to be a battle-cry for the fierce passions 
 of war, is ceasing to be the bone of contention 
 between sects, and is coming to be the symbol of 
 
 212 
 
JESUS OUT OF DOORS 
 
 individual nobleness and social brotherliness every- 
 where I 
 
 The clash of theological discussion has died 
 away; people have lost interest in the mighty 
 themes that once rent nations; religious bigotry, 
 and its shadow, irreligious bigotry, have practi- 
 cally disappeared; vast libraries of religious dis- 
 pute and speculation molder away, read no more ; 
 ancient institutions are crumbling, upheld only by 
 enormous endowments; yet in all this downfall 
 and decay we see no diminution of the real mastery 
 of Jesus over the thought of mankind. 
 
 Only to him can the altruist appeal as to one 
 having those far dreams of perfect beauty for the 
 race. In him only, of all masters, the working- 
 man finds those ideals of dynamic power and seed 
 persistence that insure the downfall of all tyran- 
 nies. He alone stands in the ultimate ways of 
 all political economy. What God may be we 
 cannot tell, but up to this day no figure but that of 
 Jesus stands between us and our loftiest, sweetest 
 conception of God, " like an angel in the sun." 
 And of all the world's great teachers he alone 
 remains with us in the mist and dark of death, and 
 whispers: " It is I. Be not afraid! " 
 
 In endowed pulpits doubtless they are still dron- 
 213 
 
LAME AND LOFELY 
 
 ing upon the themes of Trinitarianism and Uni- 
 tarianism ; but the modern mind cares not whether 
 he was human, divine, or myth. It asks, What Is 
 he? not What was he? 
 
 Because the question to-day is, What does he, 
 or any man, or God, mean to my character ? We 
 have lost interest in salvation beyond the grave. 
 Now, as in the New Testament, it is a scarcely 
 mentioned topic. 
 
 We are interested in life here, power and depth 
 of life, that " eternal quality " of life, without 
 which any " eternal duration " would be as insuf- 
 ferable in Angelico's Heaven as in Orcagna's Hell. 
 
 And for purposes of character-making, inspi- 
 ration, wisdom, purity, holiness and nobility, we 
 need the Ideal Jesus. So long as the Ideal is 
 here we care not by what avenues it comes. It 
 came through the New Testament. It might have 
 come through Goethe, Plutarch or Victor Hugo, 
 only it did not. The point is that to the modern 
 mind it is the fact of Jesus, his teachings, his 
 life-story, the mental picture of him and his 
 fecundating thoughts, and not the vehicle through 
 which this fact has come to us, that is important. 
 
 214 
 
JESUS OUT OF DOORS 
 
 The little Christ that lay on Mary's breast, 
 The babe the mediaeval mind caressed, 
 
 Is not my Jesus ; mine's a new-born hope 
 That builds each morn within my life its nest. 
 
 The Christ that once in ancient Galilee 
 Strewed golden parables beside the sea, 
 Is not my Lord ; he vaster walks to-day 
 The avenues of souls, and talks with me. 
 
 That Christ between two thieves there on the hill 
 Is not the Son of God we helped to kill ; 
 
 In slum and prison, nailed twixt law and lust, 
 Hangs the dim horror of our common will. 
 
 There was no Christ, I say ! That thorn-set brow 
 Was not, but w, eternally and now ! 
 
 Up through the hate of centuries he bears 
 The unwilling world to love, we know not how. 
 
 215 
 
BY THE AUTHOR OF THIS BOOK 
 
 HUMAN CONFESSIONS 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANK CRANE 
 
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