The Moral Obligation To Be Intelligent/The Call to Service
THE CALL TO SERVICE
THE CALL TO SERVICE
A COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS
I
As I feel for a moment the wholesome dizziness that is the penalty of mounting a platform above one's fellows, and as I look down at the young faces courteously lifted for my first words, I am aware of—what shall I call it?—of an enforced collaboration; suddenly I have a vision of other rooms filled with other young men, who wait, as you do, for the first words of the commencement speaker, and at once I feel a sudden sympathy with those other speakers, who desire, as I do, to translate the occasion into wise and appropriate words. I see our various schools and colleges keeping their commencements with a single mind—the audiences all expecting the same address, and the speakers, however original, all delivering it. You expect, every graduating class expects, to be told what to do with education, now you have it; your school or college owes it to itself, you think, to confess in public the purpose for which it has trained you. I can almost hear the speakers, from ocean to ocean, responding in unison to this expectation in the graduates they face; the simultaneous eloquence is so inevitable that I can follow it almost word for word; in fact, I almost join in.
The speech they are delivering is known as the Call to Service. The substance of it is that educated men should be unselfish; that learning is a vain and dangerous luxury if it is only for ourselves; that the following of truth, the reverent touching of the hem of her garment, is not, as we may have thought, a privilege, nor is even the love of truth a virtue, until it is converted into a responsibility toward others. Few of us care to challenge this teaching. We share in the will to serve, not merely as an annual attitude, but as a year-long passion, until it becomes our one authentic motive to good living—or, if we disobey it, a witness against us, incessant and uncomfortable. No wonder that at commencement time particularly, at a moment of success and hope, the instinct of the young graduate is to hear the call to service, and the instinct of the speaker is to sound it.
Yet some of us hesitate. So long as the mind is enclosed within the happy commencement scene, the circle of well-intending graduates, affectionate parents, and earnest teachers, it is easy to say "Come into the world now, young man, and begin your life-long service; your good fortune, your privileges, have set you apart, but other men, alas, are also set apart by the very lack of what you have enjoyed; now bring your plenty to their want." If our thought is centered, I repeat, on those whom we call into the world, this speech comes easy, but it sticks in our throat if we begin to think of those who, we say, are in need of service. Immediately a second and profounder vision rises before us—no cheerful reaction of commencement audience and commencement speakers, but a violent opposition between the fortunate who are preparing aid and the more numerous unlucky who presumably are preparing to accept it. What confounds us is the plain fact that only those who hope to render the service have the slightest enthusiasm for it. We might well expect also some due and ardent recognition, some rising to the moment, from those about to be served. Their need, to be sure, has no such focus, no such rallying-point, as the impulse to their rescue; no commencement address puts them in mind to receive, as you graduates are stimulated to give. But their need itself, we might think, should at first prepare in them, and experience year by year confirm, a receptive and a thankful heart. Yet those about to be served are silent. If there are distinctions in silence, theirs leans less toward humility than toward defence. Those who have already been served and who now hear again the summons to their benefit, break silence by gradations of reproach. They deprecate the ministrations of the educated. They invite the physician to heal himself. They intimate hypocrisy in their would-be rescuers, who, they say, instead of equalizing men's misfortunes once for all, so that no further rescue might be needed, actually prefer to patch up life's injustices from year to year, finding a moral satisfaction in being charitable, and craving, therefore, a supply of the unfortunate to exercise that virtue on.
These criticisms, it seems to me, have too much truth in them. They throw us back upon our conscience, and force us to examine the motives with which we call others to service or answer the call ourselves. Is service truly a rescue or a profession? Do we hope to cure our neighbor's misfortune or to live by it? Nothing could be more reasonable than that service should be judged by its value to the served, yet too often we practise this unselfishness as it were for our own good; we obey the call to service as an invitation to a salutary exercise of the soul. When the disturbing vision rises before us of half the race in need, and of the other half eager to help, we must withhold approval till we ask the eager helpers, "Do you look on the unfortunate as on your brothers, in temporary distress, or do you see in them objects of charity? Do you think your function is to serve, and their function is to be served? If by a miracle they should get on their feet, would you have lost your career?"
II
If these questions seem rhetorical and strained, let me put them in other terms to several of you who presumably desire to be in the truest sense serviceable. My object, frankly, is to show that the life of service is often exploited in such a way as to come fairly within the range of criticism, and that the men who sound the call to service nowadays and those who respond to it have often no right conception of what is serviceable. I should like to indicate what are the signs of true service and what are the signs of something else that masquerades in its name.
Some of you, doubtless, have decided to enter the Church. There was a time when the call to service was identical with a call to enter the religious life. Religion, the oldest, was once the broadest avenue to good works, so broad that for centuries it included those two other main paths, now become quite secular—science and education; and with science and education it still provides the main opportunities for ministering to the soul, the body, and the mind of our fellows. Those of you, then, who contemplate the religious life, ought to be furnished out of antiquity with a definition of the service you would render; you ought to know the nature of the benefit the layman comes to religion for, and how to assist him to that benefit.
Perhaps you do not agree with me that you ought to know all this; perhaps, having felt a call to the ministry, you think the call justifies itself. As I speak, I see once more that ominous gulf between the server and the served. On one side I see you priests-to-be, loving your historical church, or your theology, or your revealed truth—loving, that is, certain gifts of God which you think you can prepare for by study, and receive by heavenly grace, and by your faithfulness transmit unimpaired to others after you; and your loyalty to theology or church or revelation you conceive to be service. On the other side of the gulf I see men waiting for real service at the hands of the Church, and not getting it. If there is hostility in the world to religion per se, at least that is not what I am talking about; I speak solely of those optimistic veterans in the pews who still expect the service of religion from the new arrival just out of the divinity school.
They have a pretty clear notion as to what religion promises, and they grow impatient for the promise to be kept. Religion promises, in the old words, a more abundant life, an immediate as well as a distant benefit, an enjoyment to be entered upon in this present world. It would provide at once an exercise to develop the spiritual faculties we now have into powers we but faintly imagine. "More abundant life," to the religious-minded, is the phrasing of an old battle-hope, a more than ancient faith in his own sufficiency to approach God, which individual man, in this sense forever Puritan, has never entirely let go. Even when the priest in his primitive function stood between the people and their deity, mediating by virtue of his superior gifts and training, the savage in his fear still had glimpses of a time when each heart should perform to God its vows and sacrifices, consecrated by the mere sharing in human life. "I will make him a nation of priests," promised Jehovah to Israel. The program of religion, therefore, is not to do away with the priest, but to bestow the priestly character more abundantly upon all men.
Must I qualify my words, and say that this is only the layman's program of religion? It seems to be different from the program of the loyal priest. He hopes to perpetuate his office for the good of more and more laymen; the layman hopes that the distinction between priest and layman will disappear. The priest looks upon his office as destined to serve perpetually, and upon the layman, therefore, as destined to be perpetually an object of service; but the layman hopes to need service less and less. How very disconcerting it would be for the Church, as it is at present organized, if all the laymen should become, in the truest sense, priests. Even if we grant that the organization conforms at present to a situation, yet we detect no wish on its part that the situation should be changed. In every denomination there seems to be a tendency to widen the gulf between priest and layman, honoring the first without ennobling the second. The very devotion which is the warrant of true religion, bids the layman look up, as to a higher order of being, to the holder of the priestly office. But when a man begins as it were to cherish holiness in another's life rather than in his own, the mischief is done; religion then robs him of the very thing it promises to give. If we cannot find the illustrations close at hand, the book of history opens at the very places. Whenever the priesthood has been exalted as a separate ideal of goodness or of wisdom, some integrity, some consecration, has been taken away from common men. In so-called Puritan moments, when the priesthood has been least remote, the conduct of the average man has been most nobly severe; but where the distinctive holiness of the priest has been most devotedly cherished, the average man has needed a system of pardons and indulgences. No doubt the priests were holy, and were eager to serve mankind, but was it service that they actually conferred? It appears that no man can be holy for his neighbors; or if he persuades them to submit to the experiment, the little holiness they have is taken away.
Perhaps you have not thought of the religious life as involving these problems. "Going into the ministry" has perhaps meant to you simply a process by which you dreamt of getting a parish to work in and people to serve. Yet even in the smallest parish the division I speak of, the opposition between priest and layman, between the serving and the served, will be awaiting you. Do you dream of a congregation to help? Your congregation dream of rising beyond need of help. Do you expect to be consecrated above the layman? The layman, who nowadays has a dialectic of his own, will ask how your consecration manifests itself. If you explain that your superiority is not in you but in your office, he will press you to explain why the office, even if sacred, is necessary; he will ask whether a system of superiorities and inferiorities is vital to the religious life and whether, if all men were equally sanctified, the religious life would cease.
You understand that this is but a figure of speech. The layman will not argue with you in this fashion; he will stay away from your church on Sunday and avoid your society during the week. If empty pews mean anything, he is resolved to escape your benefits, but for old time's sake he prefers not to quarrel with the minister. With religion he still has no quarrel, but the Church seems to him actually irreligious—well-organized, yes, well-meaning and well-behaved, even indefatigable in distributing warm clothes and wholesome food to the needy, yet also in spite of her gifts increasingly remote, strangely indisposed or incompetent to share or impart the religious spirit. No wonder that, since it is spiritual development he craves, he will give his allegiance to other organizations than the Church. He sees that to join a parish for love of God comes to practically the same thing as joining it for love of the priest, to whose credit in a worldly sense an increase in the congregation is reckoned; he sees that against any criticism from the congregation the priest can and often does assert the authority of his office; he sees that though attendance at church will be counted as approval of the particular minister in charge, absence from church will be diagnosed as hostility to religion; and rather than accept the service of religion on terms so compromising to his self-respect, he retires from the field and cultivates indifference. From this mood he is roused only when a loud call to his rescue excites his wrath. The reform, he thinks, should begin elsewhere.
III
I have been speaking to those of you who, in love of service, may think of entering the ministry, and my purpose has been to describe that gulf between your good intentions and the real needs of those whom you may have thought of as destined to be served. Yet others of you, I am aware, may not be stirred to repentance by the picture I have drawn; you may indeed be far from displeased by it. Perhaps you have left religion behind you, as an old-fashioned preoccupation of your grandmothers, and whatever seems to be a criticism of it will confirm your complacency at having left it behind. You also are in love with service, but it is the call of science that you hear—real service, as you would say, without superstition or humbug.
Science does call you to a service of her own, but her program is perhaps less original than you think. Like religion, she would teach you an attitude of mind, an intimate approach to the universe. Like religion, science also urges you to good works; but whereas the rewards of religion are often indirect or deferred, science can appeal to your selfishness by showing an immediate as well as a remote profit. In this smaller, practical office science might be expected even to surpass the service of religion, telling you how to make yourselves immune to disease, how to regulate your diet, how to choose your dress, how to keep the streets clean, how to secure sanitation. Science has far larger and more difficult things to teach, principles and prospects of which these matters are the merest incidents; but out of her exuberant joy of service she freely bestows these simple aids toward a more abundant life.
Yet you can no more be scientific for your neighbors than you can be holy for them. If you persuade them to submit to the experiment, they will lose what little intelligence they had. Do we not see that the average man is more and more disposed to honor a few scientists, superstitiously exalting their skill into a kind of magic, and relying less and less upon himself? For every service science has rendered, some common intelligence has been taken away. She gave us the barometer, and we ceased to be weatherwise; the almanac, and we forgot the stars. If this service from without left us free to apply our knowledge in other fields, there might be a compensation for the intelligence that has been taken away. But with intelligence departs the willingness even to be intelligently served, and just as religion falls back upon threats of hell, so at last science calls in the police. If my house is ventilated and sanitary, it is not because science has made me intelligent, but because the expert to whom I have delegated my intelligence is now applying it on my behalf, with or without my consent. When my fire-escape was cast in the foundry, perhaps for the rescue of my life some day, they fixed in the mold a threat to fine me ten dollars, if ever I should block it up.
However we may condemn the result, the intention to serve us is unmistakable. But science is strangely inconsistent. Having assumed the place of our intelligence, she develops what seems to be a startling indifference to our welfare. At times she surpasses the worst that has been charged against religion in the disposition to fall in love with her own image. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, men at her invitation have contemplated their unsavory beginning and the myriad processes by which they are supposed to have escaped from it. They have not been greatly edified; kinship with the monkey, if true, is uninspiring. Into what nobler relations are we to enter? Science does not reply. The excuse is that science is collecting facts, or perfecting methods, or at best is occupied in remedial work, in solving problems of disease and in reducing the discomforts of life. Service so vast and so humane cannot be overvalued. Yet even in the region of this service, is not science frittering itself away upon methods, instead of setting before us the end? And is it possible to estimate the value of the method, until we know the end? One scientist tells us, as a matter of fact, that our best days are over at forty. Much of the information which science imparts is as cheerful as that. Another tells us how to prolong life, by drinking sour milk. But if the first doctor is right and our heyday is over at forty, why should we wish to grow old? Our true benefactor would tell us how long we ought to wish to live. Or even when science is not so blind, it often sins by applying itself to an end it knows to be wrong. It invents vehicles of constantly greater speed, though it assures us that such acceleration is the ruin of our nerves. It invents methods of killing people, and means of protecting them, though it persuades us at the same time—as if we needed persuasion!—that war is an awkward way of serving mankind.
Those of you who heard with complacence my criticism of religion ought not to protest if I bring the same judgment to bear on science. Indeed there is a fine irony in substituting the service of science for the service of religion as a target for the fault-finder; for science, which began by pointing out the insufficiencies of religion, and gradually usurped religion's place in this matter of serving mankind, has also, it may be, taken to herself some of the frailties she once condemned. Between you and those whom you would serve through science the same gulf lies as between the priests and those they would benefit. The protest against science is not yet so loud, I grant you, as that against religion, but it is the same in kind, and it is growing. Scientists are as eager to do our thinking for us as ever the Church has been, they are just as ready to use force to make effective the truth as they see it, and they keep their scientific spirit to themselves as effectively as the priests keep their priesthood. They look upon themselves as a caste, and in the name of science they presume to dogmatise outside of their field, exactly as the priests once did. We, meanwhile, as profoundly desirous of magic as primitive man ever was, wait with awe upon the word of these latest magicians, or begin to grumble because they do not let us into the secret. We grow rich, it appears, in the results of science, but poor in its spirit. If the symptoms of this unhealthy condition were found only in the man in the street, there would be less need to worry, for that mythical person is by definition the first to get hold of applied results and the last to be interested in principles. But the criticism is justified in the places where science is avowedly engaged in handing on her torch—in your college, for example, where almost all of you studied the sciences and almost none of you was suspected by anybody of being scientific. The technic of the laboratory instruments appealed to you exactly as does the management of a motor-car or the handling of a shotgun; most young men like to use a machine and to get mechanical results. But as to learning the insatiable love of truth, the precise observation and the inexorable deduction which are essential in the scientist, you probably have not even made a beginning.
IV
I can imagine that some of you will be as little troubled by the insufficiency of science as by the shortcomings of religion; you have heard the call to service, but you understand it as a call to teach. Observing that I am by profession a teacher, you probably think that I have saved up education for the end of my discourse as a happy contrast to those other ways of serving. The call to service does indeed seem to be a summons to inquiry, whether of religion or science or any other region of faith or experience, and the life of inquiry might seem to be the life of a college professor. The college is supposed to be a place of precious leisure, in which truth may be sought without distraction. It is not directly practical nor serviceable; it is the gymnasium rather than the arena of the spirit. As its name implies, it is a collection of diverse minds and natures, strengthening their noblest impulses and their finest knowledge by a communal sharing. Into this charged atmosphere of the spirit a student enters, to learn his capacities and to develop them, as his teachers develop theirs, by this high traffic of soul and soul. The service which the college can render is to keep the atmosphere properly charged—to see that there are enough teachers and enough students, so that this interchange of character may be complete. The ideal is a byword—"Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a boy on the other."
The log, of course, is not necessary. It is only a convenience. But unfortunately the college is seized with that spirit of service which looks for quick results. Neither Mark Hopkins nor the boy can be organized and administered to serve any very immediate popular demand; it is the log, therefore, that the colleges have organized and elaborated. With the sincerest desire to be of service to the greatest number—if possible, to all who present themselves—they have extended the log till some of the boys are almost out of earshot of Mark Hopkins, and for weak backs they have inserted a few bolsters. How narrow and unsympathetic sounds an extract from the report to the trustees of Columbia College in 1810 on the state of instruction in that institution—"Your committee cannot for a moment suppose that it is the intention of the Board to try that most fruitless and mischievous experiment—the experiment of educating either the naturally stupid or the incurably idle."
In justice to the modern educator who does not admit the existence of any such class as the naturally stupid or the incurably idle, be it said that he lives up to his ideal of service, even to the forfeiture of that leisurely investigation and contemplation of truth which is the prime delight of the scholar. The log has not been easy to organize. The college professor has had to manipulate embarrassing entrance requirements, and make the curriculum pliable, and serve as preceptor to the near-idle and as adviser to the near-stupid; nay, having evolved this system of dependence in intellectual things, he has carried it, in the spirit of service, into the amusements of the students, until he acts as director of their sports and treasurer of their gate receipts and sponsor of their business contracts. All this takes time. In more leisurely days the scholar would come from his meditations upon great truths like the prophet from Sinai, with the skin of his face shining. Now from a conference with student managers or from investigating the eligibility of the football captain he returns with that nervous step, that fretful eye, that palpable collapse of spirit, which announce to his sympathetic colleagues, "I have served."
Yet he would still have his reward, did his labors ennoble the served, or confer upon them a more abundant life. That the effect is otherwise might be prophesied from a certain complacency in his sacrifice. If he looks down to those he serves, if the angle of his condescension is to himself the warrant of his well-doing, if football or the college dramatics be not really his career, but only an excuse for demonstrating to the youngsters that he can still revisit their point of view—then he has robbed them of what it is his profession to give; robbed them not simply in their greater dependence, in their lessening enthusiasm and ability to conduct their own affairs, but far more tragically in the defeat of their right to live in the presence, and profit by the inspiration, of a scholar who follows with his whole heart the great quest of truth. Whether or not it is the students' duty to study, it is their right to behold the scholar at his work, and to imitate him; for it is by comradeship and imitation that they share the teacher's life. But if the teacher keeps his scholarship out of the comradeship and the life which they share; if he manages his days as though scholarship were a solace of the leisure to be earned by service, or a hoarded treasure not to be rashly displayed—he will no more make others scholarly than a priest who conceals his holiness will make others holy, or a scientist who does not live his science will make others scientific.
V
It would be wrong to let you think that by entering any great profession, even my own, you will automatically enter the life of genuine service. With teaching, with science, with religion, I have no quarrel; I long ago gave my allegiance to all three, and it is from noble priests and scholars and teachers that I have drawn the ideals here set forth. But while human nature remains what it is, there is a great temptation to mistake immediate results for the true ends, to impart the by-products rather than the vital principle, to think of ourselves as conserving the torch, instead of handing it on. The mass of mankind are good-natured enough to let us treat them for a certain length of time as objects of charity, as destined to be served, but there is an end to their good nature. In religion this conclusion has already shown itself; in science and in education the writing is on the wall. For that reason I hesitated to call you to service, lest you should understand the summons only in the familiar way, and by your enthusiasm should make the gulf wider between your ideals and your fellow-men. But to be truly serviceable is our loftiest ambition. The service we dream of is such education, such religion, such science, as will increase in all men the abundance of life. The method we dream of is such an illustration of religion or science or scholarship in our own lives as will increase in others a hunger for the same spiritual sustenance. To make this illustration, we must first cultivate religion or science or scholarship in ourselves.
This is the statement of the call to service which I have been approaching slowly and with care, for to the generous-hearted it is on first acquaintance a hard saying. Seek truth or seek goodness for yourselves, if you wish others to have it. If you rise to your own stature, you will thereby perform all the service you could desire—you will help others to rise. Doubtless some of your neighbors will think you selfish. Doubtless the man who buried his talent in a napkin was answering the call to service elsewhere. The sacrifice was his own concern, but the service so rendered must have been for the served also a lessening of spiritual wealth. True service lessens nothing. Not that the teacher should waste himself in the enterprises of boyhood, but that even boys should fall in love with the enterprise of truth; not that the scientist should become a commodity-monger, but that all men should enjoy the high commodity of the scientific spirit; not that the priest should be secularized, but that by a race-wide consecration man should become a nation of priests—this is the end of true service. For this we must be patient and with becoming care make ourselves ready; it is required of us only that we be productive of good at last. For a thousand years of inspiration to unnumbered men, how brief an investment are the forty years, or fifty, of the scholar's seclusion, the saint's discipline! Meanwhile the humble apprentice, so he be faithful, is even at the moment serviceable; for none of us can withdraw himself so far, but he will be still a ganglion of inspiration for all whose fate, by accident or kinship, is bound with his. We cannot too greatly desire to bring our fellows to the truth, but we may underestimate their own desire for it. When we ourselves seek it, every man who feels our contact will go with us.
This is the true call to service—not, "The world is waiting for you—come and help it"; but, "Are you fit to serve? Do you know how to live your own life? Either religion or science may be for you the City of God. If the ramparts need rebuilding, take counsel of those ancient men who after long captivity raised again the walls of Jerusalem. Every man built in front of his own house."