Points of View (Sherman)/Towards an American Type
When I was in college, I used to poke around in the library a good deal looking for books which would take me out of the shallow water of college life into the deep channel of experience, into the serious life of the world. And naturally enough the works of Tolstoy came into my hands. Now one knows what a typical Tolstoy novel is. The hero is a young man of rank and wealth and social position. He is at the outset a gay pleasure-loving fellow who enters heartily into the occupations and recreations and dissipations of his class. But somewhere midway in his career, while he is returning from a dance or from a fox-hunt, or perhaps while he is stationed at some lonely army post in the mountains, at midnight under the wintry stars, a great coolness and stillness invade his mind; and in the midst of the stillness he hears a voice which seems to come out of the depths of his own heart, crying: "Young man, what are you about in the universe?"—And then, for the first time in his life, he begins to think. His thinking troubles him. He begins to be worried about the reason and justification for his own existence. He begins to question the use of his wealth and his strength and his talent. His world begins to come tumbling about his ears. He plunges into philosophy; and he comes up gasping; and he asks himself whether life is worth living, and, if so, for what purpose.
Under the influence of Tolstoy and such writers, I used while still in college to go about among my class-mates and puzzle them somewhat and amuse them a good deal by asking them whether life was worth living. The question had never occurred to them. When I presented it, they mostly replied that they took it for granted that it was. And there they dropped the matter. They didn't care to discuss it. Well, I myself have long since dropped that question, too. I take it for granted that life is worth living, because practically every one acts upon the assumption that it is. But the settlement of that question gave birth to another question which I have been putting to my friends and acquaintances ever since. It, too, is a kind of Tolstoyan question. That is to say, it probes inquisitively into the foundation and underpinning of our daily conduct. It is this: "Assuming that life is worth living, what are its durable satisfactions?"
I think that is a useful question and quite in line with our modern ideas of efficiency. Before you can make any sort of intelligent working plan for your life, you must answer it. If you don't face it and answer it, you soon discover that you are not living economically. You find that you are wasting your energies on objects which make no adequate returns. You find that a bare twenty-five per cent. of your activities are yielding you durable satisfactions, while seventy-five per cent. of them are yielding only fatigue and regret. Or you find that you are mainly occupied with things which divert and amuse you to-day, but don't last. To-morrow they are gone; there is nothing there; you aren't accumulating anything. You aren't growing richer with the years, as you feel that you ought to grow, but are as poor as ever. But if you know clearly what the durable satisfactions of your life are, you know how to revise your business and your pleasure. You know what to keep and what to cut away. You have something definite to aim at. Your activities take a common direction. You feel all your powers, like a well-trained team, pulling together towards a known destination, pulling you home, home to the object of your heart's inmost desire. And so I think that, for both young people and old people, one of the most profitable questions is this: "What are the durable satisfactions of life?"
I used not to get much response to that question either. People used not to be very curious about it. They took it for granted that life has some durable satisfactions; but they hadn't considered the subject; and they thought me rather queer to pry into anything so intimate and so unexplored. Since the late war, however, there has been a great change in that respect. Nowadays, everyone is asking my question. The great war and its consequences have introduced into thousands of minds hitherto untroubled by such thoughts profound doubts regarding the tendencies and the quality and the satisfactions of our modern civilization—pointed questions regarding the amount of happiness that modern civilization pays to the private life. Skepticism, cynicism, and satire are the prevailing moods of contemporary enquiry. Here in America, since the war, our current literature has been filled with a kind of Tolstoyan unrest of which the most obvious symptom is a series of derisive pictures of objects to which we used formerly to "point with pride"; derisive pictures of our politicians; derisive pictures of the church; derisive pictures of the universities; derisive pictures of our great bulwark, the middle class; derisive pictures of the American business man; derisive pictures of the average American man and the average American woman.
I firmly believe that this satirical and soulsearching mood through which the country is passing at present is tremendously good for it, is going to be a step towards its "salvation"; but its effects, like those of certain powerful medicines, are rather distressing while they last. Not long ago I spent several hours talking with three interesting men of wide experience and great energy of mind—an editor, a politician, and a man connected with one of our great educational foundations. They were all avowedly out hunting, hunting from New York to San Francisco. There were brains and money and power behind them; and they were hunting for adequate objects on which to expend them. They had not been very successful, nor much cheered by their contact with our fellow countrymen. They came back from their explorations of the democracy with such an account of the political and social and moral corruption and disintegration rampant in our great cities and in our small country towns, that I myself returned to the relative peace and order and sobriety of my own university community full of a kind of private and selfish thanksgiving that I lived there and not somewhere else. I came back full of a very genuine gratitude that my community consisted mainly of several thousand young men and women united in an inspiring enterprise, united in the quest of wisdom, and truth, and beauty. It seemed to me, for the moment, that, comparatively speaking, a university community had an interesting and adequate object for living.
"In the outside world," I said to myself, "there seem to be, if one may trust the reports, scattered individuals of energy and virtue and upward purpose; but the general force of society is against them; the general pull of society is down, not up. They can maintain their energy and virtue only by constantly resisting the social pressure towards slackness and vice and inefficiency. But here in the university community," I said, "the conditions are reversed. As individuals, many of us, perhaps most of us, have our weak moods and our slack and inefficient moods and our downward tendencies; but the force of our society is against the weak and ineficient moods; the total pressure of our community makes powerfully for energy, virtue, and upward purpose. In the outside world," I said, "one rises alone; one sinks with the community. In the university world one who sinks, sinks alone; one who rises, rises with the community."
I tried to communicate my gratitude and enthusiasm about this idea to one of my more thoughtful colleagues. I regret to say that he did not catch fire. He did not feel my enthusiasm about the superiority of the university community. He met me with profound doubts and skepticism. He said, "No; you talk as if the University, as distinguished from your three men out hunting, had actually found an object. I doubt it. I should like to ask you," he said, "if you know what we are here for. Do you really know what we wish to teach our students? Do you know what kind of men and women are being formed by the pressure of this community? If we have an adequate educational mold, where is the educational product of the mold? What is the distinctive type of American character formed by the educational machinery of this generation? Is it a type that you are proud of? Has the type any marks by which it can be distinguished from the crowd who have not been subjected to the mold? Can you tell a college man from a man who hasn't been to college? We aren't getting anywhere with our education, because we don't know where we want to go. We don't know what we want.
"Just contrast," he continued, "the situation in the older English universities. Consider, for example, the Oxford don early in the nineteenth century. He knew what he was there for. He had in his mind's eye a perfectly definite type of English character. He knew that it was his business to produce a Christian, a scholar, and a gentleman. He had a perfectly clear notion of how this task was to be accomplished. He knew that all he had to do was to apply to the boy in his charge three great pressures: the pressure of the English church; the pressure of classical culture; and the pressure of a society of gentlemen. When John Henry Newman became a Roman Catholic and wrote his beautiful treatise on the education of Catholics, he employed, with one change, the same mold: he applied the pressure of classical culture, the pressure of a society of gentlemen, and the pressure of the Roman Catholic Church. The product, however dull he might be, was of a recognizably fine type: a Christian, a scholar, and a gentleman. No finished product has been made in modern times without the use of these three molds; and we Americans have discarded them one by one, most completely in the west, and in the typical educational institutions of the west, the State Universities.
"In the older institutions of America we tried to imitate and repeat the English process; and so long as we preserved some parts of the English mold we had some success. America has seen the development of two great types of character: the New England Puritan and the southern Cavalier, the gentleman of the Old South. These two types were produced mainly under two great formative forces: the formative force of religion and the formative force of an aristocratic society. The idea of God was the dominant molding force in the one case; the idea of the honor of a gentleman was the dominant molding force in the other. While the New England Puritan and the Southern Cavalier remained in the mind's eye of our educators they knew their object. But these two great types are gone. When John Quincy Adams was beaten at the polls by Andrew Jackson, the doom of the Puritan was sounded. When Robert E. Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, the doom of the Cavalier was sounded. The triumph of the western rabble began. (My friend knows that I belong to the western rabble by birth and residence; but he has lived so long among us that he has acquired our western habit of calling a spade a spade.)
"to-day," he continued, "we have no models and no molds for creating an American type. We have discarded classical culture, and are teaching salesmanship in its place. That mold is broken. We don't dare apply Christian discipline; we are educating Jews, Hindus, Japanese, Buddhists, Confucians, and thousands of scientific free-thinkers. We don't dare to apply the Christian mold. We don't accept the code of the society of gentlemen. We don't know what it is. We haven't the means to keep it up; we work with our hands; we pay our way; we struggle for existence; men and women together in a hard fight, where courtesy and chivalry are impediments to survival, and the behavior of a lady is regarded as an affectation and the honor of a gentleman as an old-fashioned piece of snobbishness. We have broken the old molds. We have found no effective new ones; and the only truly, typical products of our educational chaos are the flapper, the roughneck, the materialist and the ignoramus."
I thought that my colleague was painting our scene pretty black; but from one end of the country to the other you hear nowadays very much the same, story, namely, that our democracy is not justifying itself, that the molds which make character are broken or out of commission, that our society is beginning to show signs of essential disintegration in lawlessness, immorality, and anarchy. One doesn't need to dwell on the symptoms. I will remind you of a recent editorial in a western metropolitan paper, apparently written for the purpose of encouraging every man to do as he pleases about obeying a constitutional law of the United States. I will remind you of an article in an eastern metropolitan paper, professing to present the present state of sexual morality, and apparently written for the purpose of urging every man to do as he pleases in this field. In a certain university community of my acquaintance, when a young man met tragic disaster in resisting arrest for a violation of elementary law, instantly an attempt was made to mobilize sentiment against the officer of the law. In every one of these cases the spirit exhibited was essentially anarchical. I will remind you finally of the general picture of American society, to-day presented by scores of our realistic novelists, stationed at various points of observation between the two seas; and you will recall readily enough the basis for the common charge that our national culture is not producing an admirable, or even a defensible, national type.
What the nation needs, to pull it together, many critics tell us, is a rewakening of the religious sense. Religion, they say, is the only power that can stop the movement of disintegration and initiate a movement of integration. During the administration of President Harding there began, as every one knows, a counter-revolution in politics, in morals, in religion. Hitherto, I don't think that counter-revolution has been very well managed. It has been allowed to take the form of an obscurantist reaction. The attempt to tighten up has been too much left in the hands of stony-eyed standpatters in politics and the small prehistoric element among the clergy. The recent labors, for example, of William Jennings Bryan in this field, have been those of a prehistoric clergyman. Mr. Bryan honestly sees the need of a strong binder for a nation that is falling to pieces. He honestly believes that religion is the necessary binder. He wants to put religion on its feet. How does he propose to do it? By calling for the legislative suppression of the most fruitful scientific theory of modern times; and the answer to that call takes the shape of mass-meetings of 60,000 benighted Bible students passing resolutions against the doctrine of evolution. Whoever in this country attempts to mold character by suppressing knowledge, or by clamping a lid on the honest discussion of knowledge and opinions, destroys the molds of character. A church, or a university, if there is any such, which attempts to suppress truth by a majority vote is not molding characters but nursing hypocrites and imbeciles. A religious movement of that sort multiplies the evils which it is intended to cure. It does nothing towards national integration. On the contrary it makes a new division in the nation with the prehistoric minds on one side, and the rest of mankind on the other.
Mr. Bryan is right: we need religion. But Mr Bryan is wrong: we don't need his brand of religion. The objection to his brand of religion as a binder of our characters is simply this: we don't believe in it. That objection is final. There is no use in trying to bind us with what doesn't hold us. What is religion? Religion is that which binds us and holds us. Religion is that which at heart we do earnestly believe in, whatever it is.
You can't appeal to people effectively, except by reference to what they actually believe in. That is an elementary principle of religious tactics which any book agent could explain to Mr. Bryan. The book agent comes to the door with a book which he intends to sell to the busy housewife for ten dollars. The busy housewife opens the door three inches and peers suspiciously through the crevice. Does the book agent say: "Good morning! Would you like to buy a book this morning?" Not at all. He knows perfectly well that the busy housewife doesn't believe in books. He keeps his book behind his back, and lifts his hat, and says: "Good Morning! Are there any children in the house?" He knows that the busy housewife believes in children. The door opens another three inches. Through the widening aperture, he asks her whether she is interested in her children, and whether she would deny them anything essential to their welfare. In two minutes he is sitting in the parlor, explaining that for ten dollars she can provide her child with the sum and substance of a university education.
The book agent may be a humbug; but his method is psychologically sound. Mr. Bryan may not be a humbug; but his method is psychologically unsound. The first step towards the awakening and development of a religious sense that will bind up and give unity of purpose to a generation which seems all at loose ends is like the first step of the book agent: it is an appeal to what this generation believes in. The effective first step for the religious leader is not to revive and vamp up the discredited basis of an old religion. Neither, on the other hand, is it to invent and attempt to promulgate a new religion. The important, the effective, thing to do, is to discover, to uncover, the existing religion, and bring it to the surface and magnify it, recognizing it as the available binding and unifying power of the present generation. By discovering the existing religion, I mean discovering those principles and those objects which men work for, and spend their money for, and appear to find solid and permanent satisfaction in. Whatever these principles and objects may be, these are the molds upon which we must principally rely to shape our national type.
When I attempt to formulate reasons for national gratitude, I say to myself: "Come, let us consider what people actually believe in. Let us be concrete and realistic. Let us not be afraid to begin small, nar to speak of apparently ignoble things, provided only that these things are believed in by the great mass of our people, and therefore serve to bind them together in a unity of desire. What are our people to-day cheerfully spending their money for?" That is a good opening question; for the spending of money is a primary and tangible act of faith.
Well, all our people live in houses of one sort or another; and the cost of living in houses has risen tremendously since the time of the old oaken bucket, the Franklin stove, and the Saturday night tub. I asked an architect what part of the additional cost of living in houses was due to modern plumbing. He replied: "20%." I ask you: What is the significance of plumbing with reference to religion? Why, it is a great common bond of our civilization. It signifies that every civilized man, woman and child in the United States believes in being clean, and in what is compatible with that, and disbelieves in being dirty, and in what conduces to being dirty. It is a little point, but it is something that we agree on. The whole pressure of the American community is towards being physically clean. It is a mark of the national type that we intend to produce. A man who is dirty is dirty alone: a man who is clean is clean with the community. It is a little point, perhaps, but I notice that Mr. Kipling, in his latest book, declares that he has not met one man who wore the Victoria Cross "who had not strict notions about washing and shaving and keeping himself decent on his way through the civilized world, whatever he may have done outside it." "Somehow," he adds, "the clean and considerate man mostly seems to take hold of circumstances at the right end." Well, there is something definite that we all believe in; and are thankful for.
I turned in another direction. I inspected the cost of doctor and dentist in the family budget. I noticed the movement of medical inspection and corrective gymnastics in the schools. I observed the wide advertising of institutions to insure health, to prevent middle-aged men and women from getting fat, to restore old men to their youth, and to enable people to live for a hundred years. I asked what the benevolent millionaires were expending their millions for; and I found that they were pouring their millions into research for the extinction of pestilence, for the wiping out of hook-worm, and yellow fever, and tuberculosis, and cancer, and all forms of communicable disease. And it appeared to me obvious that the American people believe in health and youth, and are anxious and happy to invest heavily in them; and that they disbelieve in whatever is incompatible with health and the preservation of youth. There is another definite point for belief and religious gratitude.
I asked what was the most significant and farreaching enterprise upon which the states of the Union had expended large sums of money during the last thirty years. Obviously, I said, upon the public schools and the state universities, the most inspiring and hopeful phenomenon in America in our time. I don't need to dwell at all upon this. You all know what it means. It means that the American people believe in becoming intelligent just as fast as they can, and that they disbelieve in whatever is incompatible with that. And we may add, that somehow the intelligent man mostly seems to take hold of circumstances at the right end.
I turned in another direction. I asked what large new expenditure the business men have been going in for, from one end of the country to the other. The reply was: They are going in heavily for advertising, for publicity. They believe in publicity. Every enterprising business man wishes to be known to as many as possible of his hundred million countrymen. He wishes his product to be under the national limelight. He wishes as a business man and a producer to be able to stand the critical scrutiny of a hundred-million pairs of eyes. He believes in everything that is compatible with that, and eventually he is going to believe in nothing that is incompatible with that. The pressure of a hundred million pairs of critical eyes is a tremendous molding pressure. The entire pressure of the American community is towards preparing a man to stand inspection, and whatever is compatible with that. Somehow, we may say, the man who is ready to stand inspection mostly seems to take hold of circumstances at the right end. The ethical implications of being able to stand inspection are immense.
While I was looking for national characteristics, indicated by what our people spend their money for, I was reminded that there are fifteen million automobiles in the United States, and that all the enterprising states are building millions of dollars' worth of roads to run them on; and that at least every tenth man, woman and child in the United States drives an automobile. Then I said to myself, the people of the United States believe in automobiles and what is compatible with them, and they disbelieve in what is incompatible with automobiles. They believe in, they rejoice in, swift mobility. They believe in being private engineers. Their delight is in driving a forty- or seventy-horse-power machine from place to place at a speed of from twenty to sixty miles an hour; and they believe in whatever is compatible with that. The ethical implications of being a private engineer are immense; but we have hardly begun to recognize what they are.
For example: those who protest against the enforcement of prohibition declare that drinking is a matter of private morals within the field of personal liberty; and they assert that opposition to drinking rests upon Puritan principles which they do not accept—which have never been a part of their beliefs. Very well. Let us drop "Puritanism," whatever its injunctions may be in this connection. Let us merely ask the liquor champions whether they believe in automobiles and in automobiling. Let us ask them whether they know that we killed some twenty thousand of our fellow-citizens last year in automobile accidents, a considerable number of them due to drunken drivers.
The indicated approach for the reformer is to show the essential incompatibility of either licensed saloons or bootlegging joints with an automobiling civilization. If we really believe in crowding the roads of the country with private engineers running private cars at twenty to sixty miles an hour, the whole question of drinking ceases to be a question of personal liberty. To protect our lives, we shall be obliged to prevent our—ten million private engineers from getting drunk. We have got to make the same exaction of private engineers that we long ago made of public engineers.
I will present one more characteristic of our national type. I drove last summer five hundred miles through Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, and! noticed with a good deal of pleasure the amount of money that little country towns everywhere are putting into golf links and country clubs. Occasionally, also, I look at the sporting pages of the newspapers and read of the enormous expenditure that the American people are putting into baseball. Then I walk out and look at our crowded tennis courts, and at our athletic field, and at our two million dollar stadium; and I think of the great stadiums that have been erected in the last ten or fifteen years all the way across the country from the Yale Bowl to Leland Stanford University. I don't think of any more significant architectural phenomenon since the cathedral building of the Middle Ages. For these objects any amount of money is to be had, because people believe in them. Money flows into them as a great act of faith. Our young people everywhere believe in the athletic life and in our out of door sports and athletic games; and in what is compatible with them, and they tend to disbelieve in what is incompatible with them.
Now, I must ask you to consider for a moment what is compatible with an athletic game—with, for example, a good game of tennis. In order to play tennis with satisfaction to yourself and your opponents, you must bring into the game health, high spirits, endurance, energy, quickness, force, accuracy, honesty, generosity and perfect obedience to rules—to rules which are arbitrary, elaborate, but inflexible conventions. You must have all these virtues to play well at any athletic game; and to play any game whatever you must submit to the rules. In the game of tennis, you are of course personally and physically free and at liberty to walk up to the net and drop the ball over, instead of serving it; you are physically free to put the ball into a gun and shoot it over the net; or you might hire a boy to carry it around the net; or you might bawl out in the middle of the game that you were going to change the rules and take three shots instead of two. You are physically free to do all these things. But you are not mentally or morally free to do any of them. You are religiously bound not to do any of them. If you did any of them, everybody would laugh at you, you would be put out of the game, no one would play with you. All good players respect the rules of the game, because they know that the rules make the game, and they believe in the game.
The ethical implications of athletic games are immense. Democracy itself is a complex athletic game. Its existence depends, more than upon anything else, upon our hearty willingness, for the sake of the game, to refrain from doing what we are physically perfectly free and able to do. If we don't do that, we lack the first elements of sportsmanship.
My survey of the things our people believe in is far from exhaustive; but let us stop here and consider what we have got as a concrete, realistic basis of belief, remembering always that we have not occupied ourselves with reviving or with inventing objects of belief but simply with discovering and bringing them together. I have enumerated six things that our people agree upon; six things that they spontaneously and gladly support and invest heavily in: cleanness, health, becoming intelligent, swift mobility, athletic games, and publicity or standing inspection. Now that we have brought them together, I observe that they belong together, and are more or less closely interdependent; in order to stand inspection, in order to play the game well, in order safely to enjoy swift mobility, one must be healthy, and in order to be healthy one must be clean, and in order to be clean and healthy one must be intelligent.
I observe also that the six things which are incompatible with our objects of belief also belong together: dirt, disease, ignorance, stagnation, inability to play the game and obey rules, furtiveness and unwillingness to stand inspection. If you accept the set of six objects of desire, the logical implication is that you reject the corresponding six objects of aversion. The American people are as yet but little accustomed to logical implications. They are illogical and sentimental. The American people are by temperament and lack of rigorous training a little inclined to be muddleheaded and soft and oversympathetic—a little too sympathetic with dirt and disease and ignorance and stagnation and inability to play the game and inability to stand inspection—too sympathetic with these things to say decisively that they wish to reject them.
Our young man and young woman in college, for example, know well enough what is expected of them, and they know well enough what they themselves hope to be. They hope to be the flower of the younger generation, the human embodiment of the kalonkagathon, the good and the beautiful, in the society of their own times. And they have some notion of the necessity that is on them for being clean, healthy, intelligent, and able to stand inspection. Where they fall short, is in working out the necessary implications of their heart's desire. They are quite willing, they are eager, to be known as the flower of their generation, the finest young men and women of their time, improved successors in a modern democracy of the old-fashioned New England Puritan and the old-fashioned lady and gentleman of the Old South. But they haven't fully worked out the implication of this ambition. They haven't clearly recognized that the attainment of their ambition is incompatible, for example, with their soft and muddleheaded tolerance of loafing in their fraternities, cheating in their classrooms, and thieving in the gymnasiums and cloakrooms, passing bad checks at the banks, and sundry other practices by which they make no improvement upon the extinct types of the New England Puritan and the gentleman of the Old South. Their beliefs lie loosely around them, scattered and unvalued, like lumps of pig iron, which need to be gathered up, and melted, and forged and tempered and sharpened like a sword and girded to their sides, and used to cut their way out of the obscure jungle of their conflicting ideas.
For examples: with a tempered and practised sword of belief they would cut through this big bullying idea of Liberty, crying: "Only one half of liberty is good for anything; liberty to stagnate and rot is good for nothing; liberty to go to the devil is good for nothing."
They would cut through this roughneck idea of fraternity, crying: "Only one half of fraternity is good for anything. Fraternizing with rascals is good for nothing. A fraternity of thieves and vagabonds is good for nothing."
They would cut through this ignoramus idea of equality, crying, "Only one half of equality is good for anything. Equality in indolence and inefficiency is good for nothing. Equality in obscenity is good for nothing."
The moment that you see the logical implications of your own beliefs you have in your heart the immense virtue of hate for what you disbelieve in, without which you are incapable of any important love whatever. You have at your side the sharp sword of decisive choice, without which you can never cut a thoroughfare through the jungle of your conflicting ideas. You have in your hands the formative power of a religious purpose, without which you cannot hope, in an atheistical democracy, to mold a distinctive national type, to be compared with the product of Oxford, or New England, or the Old South.
We haven't worked out the full implication of our beliefs; but we know already what our beliefs are well enough to consider where they point. What, I ask, should be, must be, the characteristic type of a younger generation which believes in cleanness, health, intelligence, swift mobility, playing the game, and readiness to stand inspection? When the younger generation disengages the object of its heart's desire from the rubbish with which it is now involved, when the younger generation has worked out the implications of its belief, what sort of national type shall we see? Well, every one of these indicators points towards a type resembling that which the Greek sculptors of the great period perpetuated in marble for the admiration of all times. The whole upward movement of our later American culture indicates a type of athletic asceticism as the necessary and inevitable corollary of our civilization. We can't have the sort of civilization that we want, unless we can produce in abundance characters of this type—the type of athletic asceticism.
I choose the word asceticism because it will be noticed and challenged, under the impression that asceticism means something sour, crabbed, thin, and starved. But asceticism, etymologically, does not mean that. Asceticism is a Greek word which means gymnastic. It means the rule and discipline of the athlete. It is not the self-denial and mortification of a morbid mind. It is the self-control and the self-development of a healthy mind. It is not a determination to suppress the life of the body; it is a determination to express the life of the body in forms of accomplished grace and perfected strength. It is the voluntary choice of a man who is in training for power, in training for joy—the joy of contending in the Olympic dust for the crown of wild olive and for the applause of all Greece. Athletic asceticism is nothing but the intelligent application of logic to conduct. Asceticism is the discipline of a man who knows what he wants, and takes all the means to get it, and rejects all that interferes with his getting it. It makes him choose the means to be clean and fit and clear-eyed and swift. It makes him reject what leads to fat on his muscles, and mist in his eyes, languor in his blood, and dullness in his brain. He makes a religion out of the things that his heart desires, and he cheerfully consigns the other things to hell. And he feels the desirability of his object so powerfully that he lifts up his hands to the gods—the young Greek athlete lifts up his hands to the gods, and prays for victory in his race.
"Prayer for worldly goods is worse than fruitless," said George Meredith in a beautiful letter to his son, "but prayer for strength of soul is that passion of the soul which catches the gift it seeks."
I don't know whether the young Greek athlete won the race that he prayed for. But I think that after the prayer in which he put all things that he loved best under the protection of the gods, it was easy for him to understand the proverbial wisdom of his race, which declares that the half is greater than the whole. It was easy for him to avoid our modern error of craving the undigested whole of; experience. It was easy for him not to be drunken, dissolute, slothful, gluttonous. It was easy for himnot to be insolent, ribald, and profane. Why was it easy?
Because he felt himself religiously bound.
Because he felt himself gloriously not free to waste and destroy the gifts of the heavenly powers.
Because he felt himself proudly bound by the golden fetters of his religion, by his athletic asceticism, to offer to the Shining Ones the integrity of his strength, the unspoiled flower of his youth.
Because he stood tiptoe with exaltation, joyously conscious that the object of his own heart's desire was also in the eye and affectionate solicitude of the gods.
Two thousand years ago an educated Jew who had received fire in his heart from heaven crossed the Mediterranean Sea and laid the fire from his heart upon the altar to the Unknown God in the midst of Mars Hill in Athens. Its flame leaped up; and in its flame, Jewish Christianity united with Athenian philosophy to form the most powerful mold of character the world has ever seen. The success of Paul was due to the fact that he laid the fire where the altar was. We shall not get much beyond Paul as religious tacticians. If we wish some measure of his success, we must worry less about our old shrines and churches. We must carry our vessels of fire to the place where the thronged altar is. We must build our churches over the things that people believe in as the durable satisfactions of life. We must help the younger generation to work out the full implications of the athletic asceticism which is the ethical corollary of the civilization for which they have already manifested their desire.