| Chapter 26
| 0 | |
| I think if a person were ever excusable for losing track of the
days of the week, the circumstances excused me. Indeed, if I had
been told that the method of reckoning time had been wholly
changed and the days were now counted in lots of five, ten, or
fifteen instead of seven, I should have been in no way surprised
after what I had already heard and seen of the twentieth century.
The first time that any inquiry as to the days of the week
occurred to me was the morning following the conversation
related in the last chapter. At the breakfast table Dr. Leete asked
me if I would care to hear a sermon.
| 1 | |
| "Is it Sunday, then?" I exclaimed.
| 2 | |
| "Yes," he replied. "It was on Friday, you see, when we made
the lucky discovery of the buried chamber to which we owe your
society this morning. It was on Saturday morning, soon after
midnight, that you first awoke, and Sunday afternoon when you
awoke the second time with faculties fully regained."
| 3 | |
| "So you still have Sundays and sermons," I said. "We had
prophets who foretold that long before this time the world
would have dispensed with both. I am very curious to know how
the ecclesiastical systems fit in with the rest of your social
arrangements. I suppose you have a sort of national church with
official clergymen."
| 4 | |
| Dr. Leete laughed, and Mrs. Leete and Edith seemed greatly
amused.
| 5 | |
| "Why, Mr. West," Edith said, "what odd people you must
think us. You were quite done with national religious establishments
in the nineteenth century, and did you fancy we had gone
back to them?"
| 6 | |
| "But how can voluntary churches and an unofficial clerical
profession be reconciled with national ownership of all buildings,
and the industrial service required of all men?" I answered.
| 7 | |
| "The religious practices of the people have naturally changed
considerably in a century," replied Dr. Leete; "but supposing
them to have remained unchanged, our social system would
accommodate them perfectly. The nation supplies any person or
number of persons with buildings on guarantee of the rent, and
they remain tenants while they pay it. As for the clergymen, if a
number of persons wish the services of an individual for any
particular end of their own, apart from the general service of the
nation, they can always secure it, with that individual's own
consent, of course, just as we secure the service of our editors, by
contributing from their credit cards an indemnity to the nation
for the loss of his services in general industry. This indemnity
paid the nation for the individual answers to the salary in your
day paid to the individual himself; and the various applications
of this principle leave private initiative full play in all details to
which national control is not applicable. Now, as to hearing a
sermon to-day, if you wish to do so, you can either go to a
church to hear it or stay at home."
| 8 | |
| "How am I to hear it if I stay at home?"
| 9 | |
| "Simply by accompanying us to the music room at the proper
hour and selecting an easy chair. There are some who still prefer
to hear sermons in church, but most of our preaching, like our
musical performances, is not in public, but delivered in acoustically
prepared chambers, connected by wire with subscribers'
houses. If you prefer to go to a church I shall be glad to
accompany you, but I really don't believe you are likely to hear
anywhere a better discourse than you will at home. I see by the
paper that Mr. Barton is to preach this morning, and he
preaches only by telephone, and to audiences often reaching
150,000."
| 10 | |
| "The novelty of the experience of hearing a sermon under
such circumstances would incline me to be one of Mr. Barton's
hearers, if for no other reason," I said.
| 11 | |
| An hour or two later, as I sat reading in the library, Edith
came for me, and I followed her to the music room, where Dr.
and Mrs. Leete were waiting. We had not more than seated
ourselves comfortably when the tinkle of a bell was heard, and a
few moments after the voice of a man, at the pitch of ordinary
conversation, addressed us, with an effect of proceeding from an
invisible person in the room. This was what the voice said:
| 12 | |
| MR. BARTON'S SERMON
| 13 | |
| "We have had among us, during the past week, a critic from
the nineteenth century, a living representative of the epoch of
our great-grandparents. It would be strange if a fact so extraordinary
had not somewhat strongly affected our imaginations.
Perhaps most of us have been stimulated to some effort to
realize the society of a century ago, and figure to ourselves what
it must have been like to live then. In inviting you now to
consider certain reflections upon this subject which have
occurred to me, I presume that I shall rather follow than divert
the course of your own thoughts."
| 14 | |
| Edith whispered something to her father at this point, to
which he nodded assent and turned to me.
| 15 | |
| "Mr. West," he said, "Edith suggests that you may find it
slightly embarrassing to listen to a discourse on the lines Mr.
Barton is laying down, and if so, you need not be cheated out of
a sermon. She will connect us with Mr. Sweetser's speaking
room if you say so, and I can still promise you a very good
discourse."
| 16 | |
| "No, no," I said. "Believe me, I would much rather hear what
Mr. Barton has to say."
| 17 | |
| "As you please," replied my host.
| 18 | |
| When her father spoke to me Edith had touched a screw, and
the voice of Mr. Barton had ceased abruptly. Now at another
touch the room was once more filled with the earnest sympathetic
tones which had already impressed me most favorably.
| 19 | |
| "I venture to assume that one effect has been common with
us as a result of this effort at retrospection, and that it has been
to leave us more than ever amazed at the stupendous change
which one brief century has made in the material and moral
conditions of humanity.
| 20 | |
| "Still, as regards the contrast between the poverty of the
nation and the world in the nineteenth century and their wealth
now, it is not greater, possibly, than had been before seen in
human history, perhaps not greater, for example, than that
between the poverty of this country during the earliest colonial
period of the seventeenth century and the relatively great wealth
it had attained at the close of the nineteenth, or between the
England of William the Conqueror and that of Victoria.
Although the aggregate riches of a nation did not then, as now,
afford any accurate criterion of the masses of its people, yet
instances like these afford partial parallels for the merely material
side of the contrast between the nineteenth and the twentieth
centuries. It is when we contemplate the moral aspect of that
contrast that we find ourselves in the presence of a phenomenon
for which history offers no precedent, however far back we may
cast our eye. One might almost be excused who should exclaim,
`Here, surely, is something like a miracle!' Nevertheless, when
we give over idle wonder, and begin to examine the seeming
prodigy critically, we find it no prodigy at all, much less a
miracle. It is not necessary to suppose a moral new birth of
humanity, or a wholesale destruction of the wicked and survival
of the good, to account for the fact before us. It finds its simple
and obvious explanation in the reaction of a changed environment
upon human nature. It means merely that a form of
society which was founded on the pseudo self-interest of selfishness,
and appealed solely to the anti-social and brutal side of
human nature, has been replaced by institutions based on the
true self-interest of a rational unselfishness, and appealing to the
social and generous instincts of men.
| 21 | |
| "My friends, if you would see men again the beasts of prey
they seemed in the nineteenth century, all you have to do is to
restore the old social and industrial system, which taught them
to view their natural prey in their fellow-men, and find their gain
in the loss of others. No doubt it seems to you that no necessity,
however dire, would have tempted you to subsist on what
superior skill or strength enabled you to wrest from others
equally needy. But suppose it were not merely your own life that
you were responsible for. I know well that there must have been
many a man among our ancestors who, if it had been merely a
question of his own life, would sooner have given it up than
nourished it by bread snatched from others. But this he was not
permitted to do. He had dear lives dependent on him. Men
loved women in those days, as now. God knows how they dared
be fathers, but they had babies as sweet, no doubt, to them as
ours to us, whom they must feed, clothe, educate. The gentlest
creatures are fierce when they have young to provide for, and in
that wolfish society the struggle for bread borrowed a peculiar
desperation from the tenderest sentiments. For the sake of those
dependent on him, a man might not choose, but must plunge
into the foul fight--cheat, overreach, supplant, defraud, buy
below worth and sell above, break down the business by which
his neighbor fed his young ones, tempt men to buy what they
ought not and to sell what they should not, grind his laborers,
sweat his debtors, cozen his creditors. Though a man sought it
carefully with tears, it was hard to find a way in which he could
earn a living and provide for his family except by pressing in
before some weaker rival and taking the food from his mouth.
Even the ministers of religion were not exempt from this cruel
necessity. While they warned their flocks against the love of
money, regard for their families compelled them to keep an
outlook for the pecuniary prizes of their calling. Poor fellows,
theirs was indeed a trying business, preaching to men a generosity
and unselfishness which they and everybody knew would, in
the existing state of the world, reduce to poverty those who
should practice them, laying down laws of conduct which the
law of self-preservation compelled men to break. Looking on the
inhuman spectacle of society, these worthy men bitterly
bemoaned the depravity of human nature; as if angelic nature
would not have been debauched in such a devil's school! Ah, my
friends, believe me, it is not now in this happy age that
humanity is proving the divinity within it. It was rather in those
evil days when not even the fight for life with one another, the
struggle for mere existence, in which mercy was folly, could
wholly banish generosity and kindness from the earth.
| 22 | |
| "It is not hard to understand the desperation with which men
and women, who under other conditions would have been full of
gentleness and truth, fought and tore each other in the scramble
for gold, when we realize what it meant to miss it, what poverty
was in that day. For the body it was hunger and thirst, torment
by heat and frost, in sickness neglect, in health unremitting toil;
for the moral nature it meant oppression, contempt, and the
patient endurance of indignity, brutish associations from
infancy, the loss of all the innocence of childhood, the grace of
womanhood, the dignity of manhood; for the mind it meant the
death of ignorance, the torpor of all those faculties which
distinguish us from brutes, the reduction of life to a round of
bodily functions.
| 23 | |
| "Ah, my friends, if such a fate as this were offered you and
your children as the only alternative of success in the accumulation
of wealth, how long do you fancy would you be in sinking
to the moral level of your ancestors?
| 24 | |
| "Some two or three centuries ago an act of barbarity was
committed in India, which, though the number of lives
destroyed was but a few score, was attended by such peculiar
horrors that its memory is likely to be perpetual. A number of
English prisoners were shut up in a room containing not enough
air to supply one-tenth their number. The unfortunates were
gallant men, devoted comrades in service, but, as the agonies of
suffocation began to take hold on them, they forgot all else, and
became involved in a hideous struggle, each one for himself, and
against all others, to force a way to one of the small apertures of
the prison at which alone it was possible to get a breath of air. It
was a struggle in which men became beasts, and the recital of its
horrors by the few survivors so shocked our forefathers that for a
century later we find it a stock reference in their literature as a
typical illustration of the extreme possibilities of human misery,
as shocking in its moral as its physical aspect. They could
scarcely have anticipated that to us the Black Hole of Calcutta,
with its press of maddened men tearing and trampling one
another in the struggle to win a place at the breathing holes,
would seem a striking type of the society of their age. It lacked
something of being a complete type, however, for in the Calcutta
Black Hole there were no tender women, no little children
and old men and women, no cripples. They were at least all
men, strong to bear, who suffered.
| 25 | |
| "When we reflect that the ancient order of which I have been
speaking was prevalent up to the end of the nineteenth century,
while to us the new order which succeeded it already seems
antique, even our parents having known no other, we cannot fail
to be astounded at the suddenness with which a transition so
profound beyond all previous experience of the race must have
been effected. Some observation of the state of men's minds
during the last quarter of the nineteenth century will, however,
in great measure, dissipate this astonishment. Though general
intelligence in the modern sense could not be said to exist in any
community at that time, yet, as compared with previous generations,
the one then on the stage was intelligent. The inevitable
consequence of even this comparative degree of intelligence had
been a perception of the evils of society, such as had never
before been general. It is quite true that these evils had been
even worse, much worse, in previous ages. It was the increased
intelligence of the masses which made the difference, as the
dawn reveals the squalor of surroundings which in the darkness
may have seemed tolerable. The key-note of the literature of the
period was one of compassion for the poor and unfortunate, and
indignant outcry against the failure of the social machinery to
ameliorate the miseries of men. It is plain from these outbursts
that the moral hideousness of the spectacle about them was, at
least by flashes, fully realized by the best of the men of that
time, and that the lives of some of the more sensitive and
generous hearted of them were rendered well nigh unendurable
by the intensity of their sympathies.
| 26 | |
| "Although the idea of the vital unity of the family of
mankind, the reality of human brotherhood, was very far from
being apprehended by them as the moral axiom it seems to us,
yet it is a mistake to suppose that there was no feeling at all
corresponding to it. I could read you passages of great beauty
from some of their writers which show that the conception was
clearly attained by a few, and no doubt vaguely by many more.
Moreover, it must not be forgotten that the nineteenth century
was in name Christian, and the fact that the entire commercial
and industrial frame of society was the embodiment of the
anti-Christian spirit must have had some weight, though I admit
it was strangely little, with the nominal followers of Jesus Christ.
| 27 | |
| "When we inquire why it did not have more, why, in general,
long after a vast majority of men had agreed as to the crying
abuses of the existing social arrangement, they still tolerated it,
or contented themselves with talking of petty reforms in it, we
come upon an extraordinary fact. It was the sincere belief of
even the best of men at that epoch that the only stable elements
in human nature, on which a social system could be safely
founded, were its worst propensities. They had been taught and
believed that greed and self-seeking were all that held mankind
together, and that all human associations would fall to pieces if
anything were done to blunt the edge of these motives or curb
their operation. In a word, they believed--even those who
longed to believe otherwise--the exact reverse of what seems to
us self-evident; they believed, that is, that the anti-social qualities
of men, and not their social qualities, were what furnished the
cohesive force of society. It seemed reasonable to them that men
lived together solely for the purpose of overreaching and oppressing
one another, and of being overreached and oppressed, and
that while a society that gave full scope to these propensities
could stand, there would be little chance for one based on the
idea of cooperation for the benefit of all. It seems absurd to
expect any one to believe that convictions like these were ever
seriously entertained by men; but that they were not only
entertained by our great-grandfathers, but were responsible for
the long delay in doing away with the ancient order, after a
conviction of its intolerable abuses had become general, is as well
established as any fact in history can be. Just here you will find
the explanation of the profound pessimism of the literature of
the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the note of melancholy
in its poetry, and the cynicism of its humor.
| 28 | |
| "Feeling that the condition of the race was unendurable, they
had no clear hope of anything better. They believed that the
evolution of humanity had resulted in leading it into a cul de
sac, and that there was no way of getting forward. The frame of
men's minds at this time is strikingly illustrated by treatises
which have come down to us, and may even now be consulted in
our libraries by the curious, in which laborious arguments are
pursued to prove that despite the evil plight of men, life was
still, by some slight preponderance of considerations, probably
better worth living than leaving. Despising themselves, they
despised their Creator. There was a general decay of religious
belief. Pale and watery gleams, from skies thickly veiled by
doubt and dread, alone lighted up the chaos of earth. That men
should doubt Him whose breath is in their nostrils, or dread the
hands that moulded them, seems to us indeed a pitiable insanity;
but we must remember that children who are brave by day have
sometimes foolish fears at night. The dawn has come since then.
It is very easy to believe in the fatherhood of God in the
twentieth century.
| 29 | |
| "Briefly, as must needs be in a discourse of this character, I
have adverted to some of the causes which had prepared men's
minds for the change from the old to the new order, as well as
some causes of the conservatism of despair which for a while
held it back after the time was ripe. To wonder at the rapidity
with which the change was completed after its possibility was
first entertained is to forget the intoxicating effect of hope upon
minds long accustomed to despair. The sunburst, after so long
and dark a night, must needs have had a dazzling effect. From
the moment men allowed themselves to believe that humanity
after all had not been meant for a dwarf, that its squat stature
was not the measure of its possible growth, but that it stood
upon the verge of an avatar of limitless development, the
reaction must needs have been overwhelming. It is evident that
nothing was able to stand against the enthusiasm which the new
faith inspired.
| 30 | |
| "Here, at last, men must have felt, was a cause compared with
which the grandest of historic causes had been trivial. It was
doubtless because it could have commanded millions of martyrs,
that none were needed. The change of a dynasty in a petty
kingdom of the old world often cost more lives than did the
revolution which set the feet of the human race at last in the
right way.
| 31 | |
| "Doubtless it ill beseems one to whom the boon of life in our
resplendent age has been vouchsafed to wish his destiny other,
and yet I have often thought that I would fain exchange my
share in this serene and golden day for a place in that stormy
epoch of transition, when heroes burst the barred gate of the
future and revealed to the kindling gaze of a hopeless race, in
place of the blank wall that had closed its path, a vista of
progress whose end, for very excess of light, still dazzles us. Ah,
my friends! who will say that to have lived then, when the
weakest influence was a lever to whose touch the centuries
trembled, was not worth a share even in this era of fruition?
| 32 | |
| "You know the story of that last, greatest, and most bloodless
of revolutions. In the time of one generation men laid aside the
social traditions and practices of barbarians, and assumed a social
order worthy of rational and human beings. Ceasing to be
predatory in their habits, they became co-workers, and found in
fraternity, at once, the science of wealth and happiness. `What
shall I eat and drink, and wherewithal shall I be clothed?' stated
as a problem beginning and ending in self, had been an anxious
and an endless one. But when once it was conceived, not from
the individual, but the fraternal standpoint, `What shall we eat
and drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed?'--its difficulties
vanished.
| 33 | |
| "Poverty with servitude had been the result, for the mass of
humanity, of attempting to solve the problem of maintenance
from the individual standpoint, but no sooner had the nation
become the sole capitalist and employer than not alone did
plenty replace poverty, but the last vestige of the serfdom of
man to man disappeared from earth. Human slavery, so often
vainly scotched, at last was killed. The means of subsistence no
longer doled out by men to women, by employer to employed,
by rich to poor, was distributed from a common stock as among
children at the father's table. It was impossible for a man any
longer to use his fellow-men as tools for his own profit. His
esteem was the only sort of gain he could thenceforth make out
of him. There was no more either arrogance or servility in the
relations of human beings to one another. For the first time
since the creation every man stood up straight before God. The
fear of want and the lust of gain became extinct motives when
abundance was assured to all and immoderate possessions made
impossible of attainment. There were no more beggars nor
almoners. Equity left charity without an occupation. The ten
commandments became well nigh obsolete in a world where
there was no temptation to theft, no occasion to lie either for
fear or favor, no room for envy where all were equal, and little
provocation to violence where men were disarmed of power to
injure one another. Humanity's ancient dream of liberty, equality,
fraternity, mocked by so many ages, at last was realized.
| 34 | |
| "As in the old society the generous, the just, the tender-hearted
had been placed at a disadvantage by the possession of those
qualities; so in the new society the cold-hearted, the greedy, and
self-seeking found themselves out of joint with the world. Now
that the conditions of life for the first time ceased to operate as a
forcing process to develop the brutal qualities of human nature,
and the premium which had heretofore encouraged selfishness
was not only removed, but placed upon unselfishness, it was for
the first time possible to see what unperverted human nature
really was like. The depraved tendencies, which had previously
overgrown and obscured the better to so large an extent, now
withered like cellar fungi in the open air, and the nobler
qualities showed a sudden luxuriance which turned cynics into
panegyrists and for the first time in human history tempted
mankind to fall in love with itself. Soon was fully revealed, what
the divines and philosophers of the old world never would have
believed, that human nature in its essential qualities is good, not
bad, that men by their natural intention and structure are
generous, not selfish, pitiful, not cruel, sympathetic, not arrogant,
godlike in aspirations, instinct with divinest impulses of tenderness
and self-sacrifice, images of God indeed, not the travesties
upon Him they had seemed. The constant pressure, through
numberless generations, of conditions of life which might have
perverted angels, had not been able to essentially alter the
natural nobility of the stock, and these conditions once removed,
like a bent tree, it had sprung back to its normal uprightness.
| 35 | |
| "To put the whole matter in the nutshell of a parable, let me
compare humanity in the olden time to a rosebush planted in a
swamp, watered with black bog-water, breathing miasmatic fogs
by day, and chilled with poison dews at night. Innumerable
generations of gardeners had done their best to make it bloom,
but beyond an occasional half-opened bud with a worm at the
heart, their efforts had been unsuccessful. Many, indeed, claimed
that the bush was no rosebush at all, but a noxious shrub, fit
only to be uprooted and burned. The gardeners, for the most
part, however, held that the bush belonged to the rose family,
but had some ineradicable taint about it, which prevented the
buds from coming out, and accounted for its generally sickly
condition. There were a few, indeed, who maintained that the
stock was good enough, that the trouble was in the bog, and that
under more favorable conditions the plant might be expected to
do better. But these persons were not regular gardeners, and
being condemned by the latter as mere theorists and day
dreamers, were, for the most part, so regarded by the people.
Moreover, urged some eminent moral philosophers, even conceding
for the sake of the argument that the bush might possibly do
better elsewhere, it was a more valuable discipline for the buds
to try to bloom in a bog than it would be under more favorable
conditions. The buds that succeeded in opening might indeed be
very rare, and the flowers pale and scentless, but they represented
far more moral effort than if they had bloomed spontaneously in
a garden.
| 36 | |
| "The regular gardeners and the moral philosophers had their
way. The bush remained rooted in the bog, and the old course of
treatment went on. Continually new varieties of forcing mixtures
were applied to the roots, and more recipes than could be
numbered, each declared by its advocates the best and only
suitable preparation, were used to kill the vermin and remove
the mildew. This went on a very long time. Occasionally some
one claimed to observe a slight improvement in the appearance
of the bush, but there were quite as many who declared that it
did not look so well as it used to. On the whole there could not
be said to be any marked change. Finally, during a period of
general despondency as to the prospects of the bush where it
was, the idea of transplanting it was again mooted, and this time
found favor. `Let us try it,' was the general voice. `Perhaps it
may thrive better elsewhere, and here it is certainly doubtful if it
be worth cultivating longer.' So it came about that the rosebush
of humanity was transplanted, and set in sweet, warm, dry earth,
where the sun bathed it, the stars wooed it, and the south wind
caressed it. Then it appeared that it was indeed a rosebush. The
vermin and the mildew disappeared, and the bush was covered
with most beautiful red roses, whose fragrance filled the world.
| 37 | |
| "It is a pledge of the destiny appointed for us that the Creator
has set in our hearts an infinite standard of achievement, judged
by which our past attainments seem always insignificant, and the
goal never nearer. Had our forefathers conceived a state of
society in which men should live together like brethren dwelling
in unity, without strifes or envying, violence or overreaching, and
where, at the price of a degree of labor not greater than health
demands, in their chosen occupations, they should be wholly
freed from care for the morrow and left with no more concern
for their livelihood than trees which are watered by unfailing
streams,--had they conceived such a condition, I say, it would
have seemed to them nothing less than paradise. They would
have confounded it with their idea of heaven, nor dreamed that
there could possibly lie further beyond anything to be desired or
striven for.
| 38 | |
| "But how is it with us who stand on this height which they
gazed up to? Already we have well nigh forgotten, except when it
is especially called to our minds by some occasion like the
present, that it was not always with men as it is now. It is a
strain on our imaginations to conceive the social arrangements of
our immediate ancestors. We find them grotesque. The solution
of the problem of physical maintenance so as to banish care and
crime, so far from seeming to us an ultimate attainment, appears
but as a preliminary to anything like real human progress. We
have but relieved ourselves of an impertinent and needless
harassment which hindered our ancestor from undertaking the
real ends of existence. We are merely stripped for the race; no
more. We are like a child which has just learned to stand
upright and to walk. It is a great event, from the child's point of
view, when he first walks. Perhaps he fancies that there can be
little beyond that achievement, but a year later he has forgotten
that he could not always walk. His horizon did but widen when
he rose, and enlarge as he moved. A great event indeed, in one
sense, was his first step, but only as a beginning, not as the end.
His true career was but then first entered on. The enfranchisement
of humanity in the last century, from mental and
physical absorption in working and scheming for the mere bodily
necessities, may be regarded as a species of second birth of
the race, without which its first birth to an existence that was
but a burden would forever have remained unjustified, but
whereby it is now abundantly vindicated. Since then, humanity
has entered on a new phase of spiritual development, an evolution
of higher faculties, the very existence of which in human
nature our ancestors scarcely suspected. In place of the dreary
hopelessness of the nineteenth century, its profound pessimism
as to the future of humanity, the animating idea of the present
age is an enthusiastic conception of the opportunities of our
earthly existence, and the unbounded possibilities of human
nature. The betterment of mankind from generation to generation,
physically, mentally, morally, is recognized as the one great
object supremely worthy of effort and of sacrifice. We believe
the race for the first time to have entered on the realization of
God's ideal of it, and each generation must now be a step
upward.
| 39 | |
| "Do you ask what we look for when unnumbered generations
shall have passed away? I answer, the way stretches far before us,
but the end is lost in light. For twofold is the return of man to
God `who is our home,' the return of the individual by the way
of death, and the return of the race by the fulfillment of the
evolution, when the divine secret hidden in the germ shall be
perfectly unfolded. With a tear for the dark past, turn we then
to the dazzling future, and, veiling our eyes, press forward. The
long and weary winter of the race is ended. Its summer has
begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens are before
it."
| 40 | |
|