It would seem that a moment's candid reflection would convince these emotionalists that Not enjoyment and not sorrow Is our destined end or way; that impulse, emotion, ecstasy have no moral merit; that only right volition determines duty in the race for eternal life, But to act that each to-morrow Find us further than to-day. The theory is akin to the argument of a certain bishop in support of the dogma of the apotheosis of the Virgin Mary, that "it has been a great comfort to myriads of pious souls to feel that the mother of God is interceding in their behalf." The so-called "holiness testimony" in a Salvation Army campfire often amounts to little else than the assertion: "I feel myself cured of all sin; therefore my belief is correct." The listener is tempted to "put catechism:" How about the sin of intellectual indolence? Cognate with this point is the theological whim against which phrenological science is battling, namely, that the best mind in the sight of God and man is not the most symmetrical one, but a sort of lop-sided one wherein certain faculties preponderate over others. It is akin to the monkish asceticism that proclaimed St. Simon on his pillar superior to the rest of mankind, an idea as maniacal as to declare a Newport dandy loafer to be a greater benefactor to the race than a sturdy Western pioneer. The lately deceased pastor of a church in South Boston was occasionally obliged to send home some bereaved mother who would otherwise spend whole weekdays kneeling before the altar, leaving the wants of her husband and surviving children unprovided for. This reminds one of the comment of a certain housekeeper after listening to an old-fashioned sermon on the text, "Mary hath chosen the better part," namely, "I should have been tempted to respond to Jesus: 'Then let me sit down to conversation, and we'll all go without our supper."" The right solution of this question of mental balance lies in what Pat has designated as "the middle extrame." Mary and Martha are permanent types of character: the actively useful and the inwardly devout. One does good in order to be good; the other tries to be good in order to do good. One represents conscience, the other devotion; one stands for piety, the other for morality. Both elements are indispensable to any real excellence of character. To cultivate the Mary element exclusively and be always absorbed in solitary aspiration tends to selfishness. To cultivate the Martha element exclusively to be so absorbed in outward duties as to take no time for meditation-this tends to shallowness.* The phrenologist's convenient classification of the various human faculties, and his analysis of the "uses" and "abuses" of each, are well in point, even if his theory of brain localizations be erroneous. Take, for instance, the "bump" of "mirthfulness." Its "abuse" is levity. Its "use" is-well, everybody knows President Lincoln's reply when Stanton chided him for stopping to read and laugh over a "Nasby" letter: "Mr. Secretary, if I didn't so relieve this terrible strain of care, I should go mad; I could not live." On this point Beecher had an inspired utterance: "God smiled when he put humor in the human disposition, and said, 'That's good!'" More and more is it coming to be conceded that any Scripture implying a denial of the right and duty of all endowments of the human constitution to "live and let live" is to be "let slide." As Jeremy Taylor remarked, "If Reason justly contradicts an article, it is not of the household of Faith."† On the principle acted on by the Master when denouncing the traditionalism of the Pharisees, Christians are differentiating theology from religion sufficiently to weed out certain tares from the former without uprooting the wheat of the latter. For instance, the Golden Rule (of Confucius, Socrates, Rabbi Hillel, Jesus, and Paul) still stands firm as the everlasting hills, although Paul's theory of Christ's second coming has long ago passed into "innocuous desuetude." So also has his well-meant argument for immortality dependent on Christ's resurrection. Similarly is the doctrine of immortality unaffected by Dr. Hooykaas, of the Leyden school, explaining the origin of the legend of the supernatural post mortem materialization of the body of Jesus.§ See "Elsmere Elsewhere," p. 80. His theory puts the excited See "Life of Lives,” p. 12. ↑ I Cor. xv. § See "The Life of Lives," p. 260. condition of the sorrowing Peter's mind, as also the vision of the women, in much the same category as what De Boissemont and other psychological writers have called "hallucination with ecstasy," and have classed with the cases of Swedenborg, Engelbricht, Joan of Arc, Alexandrine Lanois, Daniel, John of the Apocalypse, and others. Similar cases, however, have received quite a different explanation from Robert Dale Owen.* Dr. A. P. Peabody once remarked that Tyndall's deistical work, "Christianity as Old as the Creation; or, the Gospel a Republication of the Law of Nature,” admits in its title the strongest ground-nay, the only ground-on which we can believe or defend Christianity. To suppose it a divine afterthought—a supplementary creation, an excrescence upon nature-is to dishonor it under shelter of a pretended advocacy. Nay, more, it is to impugn the divine immutableness, the integrity of those attributes that underlie all religion. The highest view of Christianity is that which regards it as the religion of nature, as the constitutional law of the spiritual universe, as corresponding to the mathematical laws which are embodied in the material universe, absolute, necessary, eternal truth, that which always was and ever will be. Revelation did not create it any more than Newton created the law of universal gravitation, or Kepler the laws of planetary motion. Pope tersely puts it: All must be false that thwart this one great end, This reduces all theologians to two categories, the Rationalists and the Irrationalists, and compels the conclusion that with the fall of the myth of Adam's fall† must also fall the itinerant revivalist's imputation of proxy righteousness and his assertion that any other doxy than his own is a mere "theology of negations.' One's individual religion may be something too sacred to be Pharisaically flaunted, yet on the evolutionists' banner may still be inscribed: The Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, the Leadership of Jesus, Salvation by Character, and the Progress of Mankind onward and upward. "The Debatable Land between this World and the Next." † See Dr. White's "History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom," chap. xx. IS AMERICAN DOMESTICITY DECREASING, MOR AND IF SO, WHY?* BY HELEN CAMPBELL. ORE than one question is tangled in this exceedingly awkward interrogative title, which no man may read without the instant inquiries, What is American? and what is domesticity? In answer to the first is summed up a background like that of an old minister known to my youth, who began any specially important occasion with the formula: "My friends, let us take a brief survey of the history of mankind, from the creation to the present time." Such survey is part of any understanding of this word, American, which carries with it, especially if woman be added, a never-ceasing, fascinating source of wonder, inquiry, speculation. The American woman is held abroad to be of but one type-the woman of countless trunks, much jewelry, worn of mornings, and with powers of fascination which are devastating the English peerage and making havoc with Continental "institutions." Yet this type is but one of unnumbered ones, to Europe chiefly unknown. This word, American, is a composite one. In the last analysis, English may remain uppermost, but the substance is conglomerate, and every country of the civilized world has added its contribution, national habits, national idiosyncrasies, tincturing at every turn this many-hued fabric of American life. Thus the home life of all peoples has mingled in the stream of tendency, whose course we are to follow, and whose storm-tossed waves, we are told, foretell the destruction of the American home. American, then, may stand to us as typical of general home life for all the world of thinking, living, loving, or unloving men and women, who, through all the world, are making or unmaking the homes of the world. As to domesticity-what is that? To our grandfathers and *A paper read before the Nineteenth Century Club of New York, Nov. 12, 1896. many a generation before them, back to and beyond the Greek and Aristotle's own formula of the thought, it meant, as it means for many to-day, just staying at home. "My dear little stay-at-home" is a Chinese pet phrase, the tenderest that Chinese thought holds for woman, to whom action, either in or outside the house, is rendered practically impossible. Let us see what shades of meaning have been added to or taken from the word, as it stood in the beginning, when thought and word had less complex relation than belongs to them to-day. What to-day is limited by its mere architectural meaning, the dome, as we know it in the cathedral or great public buildings, as the Capitol at Washington, had once a wider significance, and in Greek poetry, especially, meant a stately building, a great hall. To this we may still hold as we pass to the humbler forms in which domestic embodies itself, since in that earlier meaning lies, if not prophecy, at least hint of something to come, when the word home has found its larger application. From this first thought it passed on to the inclusion of all necessary activities and drudgeries, domestic duties, domestic service, and the like, till, born of close confinement to these, came the title, domestic man or woman. "See, Master Premium, what a domestic character I am!" Sheridan writes; and Emerson follows later: "The domestic man, who loves no music so well as his kitchen clock and the airs which the logs sing to him as they burn on the hearth, has solaces which others never dream of." Then follows, with some small side-issues between, other thought, braiding itself into the strand: Bishop Hall's, "If he were a forreiner by birth, yet he was a domestick in heart;" Sir William Temple's: "I found myself so unfit for courts that I was resolved to pass the rest of my life in my own domestick;" and then, most suggestive as to the thing that lies before us, old Cotton Mather's word: "The great Basil mentions a certain art of drawing many doves by annointing the wings of a few with a fragrant ointment, and so sending them abroad, that by the fragrance of the ointment they may allure others into the house whereof they are themselves the domesticks." |