Part 4 (2/2)
The brave knight died in his dungeon, but the story of his heroism lived. What the knight learned in suffering the poets have taught in song. The captive hero has a permanent place in civilization, though the foresight of his influence was denied him.
Those whose harvest is delayed are a great company. Elizabeth Barrett Browning exclaiming, ”I have not used half the powers G.o.d has given me,” poets dying ere the day was half done; the inventors and reformers denied their ideals; obscure and humble workmen--the mechanic who emanc.i.p.ates man by his machine; the artisan whose conveniences are endless benefactions to our homes; the smith whose honest anchor holds the s.h.i.+p in time of storm--all these labored and died without seeing the fruitage, but other men entered into their labors.
To parents who have pa.s.sed through all the thunder of life's battle and stand at the close of life's day discouraged because children are unripe, thoughtless and immature; to publicists and teachers, sowing G.o.d's precious seed, but denied its harvests; to individuals seeking to perfect their character within themselves comes this thought--that character is a harvest so rich as to ask for long waiting and the courage of far-off results. Nature can perfect physical processes in twenty years, but long time is asked for teaching the arm skill, the tongue its grace of speech, to clothe reason with sweetness and light, to cast error out of the judgment, to teach the will hardness and the heart hope and endurance.
Four hundred years pa.s.sed by before the capstone was placed upon the Cathedral of Cologne, but no trouble requires such patient toil as the structure of manhood. For complexity and beauty nothing is comparable to character. Great artists spend years upon a single picture. With a touch here and a touch there they approach it, and when a long period hath pa.s.sed they bring it to completion. Yet all the beauty of paintings, all the grace of statues, all the grandeur of cathedrals are as nothing compared to the painting of that inner picture, the chiseling of that inner manhood, the adornment of that inner temple, that is scarcely begun when the physical life ends. How majestic the full disclosure of an ideal manhood! With what patience must man wait for its completion! Here lies the hope of immortality; it does not yet appear what man shall be.
THE SUPREMACY OF HEART OVER BRAIN.
”Out of the heart are the issues of life.”--_Prov. IV. 23_.
”For out of the heart man believeth unto righteousness.”--_Paul_.
”Heart is a word that the Bible is full of. Brain, I believe, is not mentioned in Scripture. Heart, in the sense in which it is currently understood, suggests the warm center of human life or any other life.
When we say of a man that he 'has a good deal of heart' we mean that he is 'summery.' When you come near him it is like getting around to the south side of a house in midwinter and letting the suns.h.i.+ne feel of you, and watching the snow slide off the twigs and the tear-drops swell on the points of pendant icicles. Brain counts for a good deal more to-day than heart does. It will win more applause and earn a larger salary. Thought is driven with a curb-bit lest it quicken into a pace and widen out into a swing that transcends the dictates of good form.
Exuberance is in bad odor. Appeals to the heart are not thought to be quite in good taste. The current demand is for ideas--not taste. I asked a member of my church the other day whether he thought a certain friend of his who attends a certain church and is exceptionally brainy was really entering into sympathy with religious things. 'Oh, no,' he said, 'he likes to hear preaching because he has an active mind, and the way that things are spread out in front of him.' In the old days of the church a sermon used to convert 3,000 men, now that temperature is down it takes 3,000 sermons to convert one man.”--_Charles H.
Parkhurst_.
CHAPTER VII.
THE SUPREMACY OF HEART OVER BRAIN.
To-day there has sprung up a rivalry between brain and heart. Men are coming to idolize intellect. Brilliancy is placed before goodness and intellectual dexterity above fidelity. Intellect walks the earth a crowned king, while affection and sentiment toil as bond slaves.
Doubtless our scholars, with the natural bias for their own cla.s.s, are largely responsible for this wors.h.i.+p of intellectuality. When the historian calls the roll of earth's favorite sons he causes these immortals to stand forth an army of great thinkers, including philosophers, scientists, poets, jurists, generals. The great minds are exalted, the great hearts are neglected.
Artists also have united with authors for strengthening this idolatry of intellect. One of the great pictures in the French Academy of Design a.s.sembles the immortals of all ages. Having erected a tribunal in the center of the scene, Delaroche places Intellect upon the throne.
Also, when the sons of genius are a.s.sembled about that glowing center, all are seen to be great thinkers. There stand Democritus, a thinker about invisible atoms; Euclid, a thinker about invisible lines and angles; Newton, a thinker about an invisible force named gravity; La Place, a thinker about the invisible law that sweeps suns and stars forward toward an unseen goal.
The artist also remembers the inventors whose useful thoughts blossom into engines and s.h.i.+ps; statesmen whose wise thoughts blossom into codes and const.i.tutions; speakers whose true thoughts blossom into orations, and artists whose beautiful thoughts appear as pictures. At this a.s.sembly of the immortals great thinkers touch and jostle. But if the great minds are remembered, no chair is made ready for the great hearts. He who lingers long before this painting will believe that brain is king of the world; that great thinkers are the sole architects of civilization; that science is the only providence for the future; that G.o.d himself is simply an infinite brain, an eternal logic engine, cold as steel, weaving endless ideas about life and art, about nature and man.
But the throne of the universe is mercy and not marble; the name of the world-ruler is Great Heart, rather than Crystalline Mind, and G.o.d is the Eternal Friend who pulsates out through his world those forms of love called reforms, philanthropies, social bounties and benefactions, even as the ocean pulsates its life-giving tides into every bay and creek and river. The springs of civilization are not in the mind. For the individual and the state, ”out of the heart are the issues of life.”
What intellect can dream, only the heart realizes! John Cabot's mind did, indeed, blaze a pathway through the New England forest. But with burning hearts and iron will the Pilgrim Fathers loved liberty, law and learning, and soon they broadened the path into a highway for commerce, turned tepees into temples and made the forests a land of vineyards and villages. Mind is the beginning of civilization, but the ends and fruitage thereof are of the heart.
Christopher Wren's intellect wrought out the plan for St. Paul's Cathedral. But all impotent to realize themselves, these plans, lying in the King's council chamber grew yellow with age and thick with dust.
One day a great heart stood forth before the people of London, pointing them to an unseen G.o.d, ”from whom cometh every good and perfect gift,”
and, plying men with the generosity of G.o.d, he asked gifts of gold and silver and houses and lands, that England might erect a temple worthy of him ”whom the heaven of heavens could not contain.” The mind of a great architect had created a plan and a ”blue-print,” but eager hearts inspiring earnest hands turned the plan into granite and hung in the air a dome of marble.
Thus all the great achievements for civilization are the achievements of heart. What we call the fine arts are only red-hot ingots of pa.s.sion cooled off into visible shape. All high music is emotion gus.h.i.+ng forth at those faucets named musical notes. As unseen vapors cool into those visible forms named snowflakes, so Gothic enthusiasms cooled off into cathedrals.
Our art critics speak of the eight great paintings of history. Each of these masterpieces does but represent a holy pa.s.sion flung forth upon a canvas. The reformation also was not achieved by intellect nor scholars.h.i.+p. Erasmus represents pure mind. Yet his intellect was cold as winter suns.h.i.+ne that falls upon a snowdrift and dazzles the eyes with brightness, yet is impotent to unlock the streams, or bore a hole through the snowdrifts, or release the roots from the grip of ice and frost, or cover the land with waving harvests. Powerless as winter suns.h.i.+ne were Erasmus' thoughts. But what the scholar could not do, Luther, the great heart, wrought easily.
Thus all the reforms represent pa.s.sions and enthusiasms. That citadel called ”The Divine Right of Kings” was not overthrown by colleges with books and pamphlets. It was the pulse-beats of the heart of the people that pounded down the Bastille. Ideas of the iniquity of slavery floated through our land for three centuries, yet the slave pen and auction block still cursed our land. At last an enthusiasm for man as man and a great pa.s.sion for the poor stood behind these ideas of human brotherhood, and as powder stands behind the bullet, flinging forth its weapons, slavery perished before the onslaught of the heart.
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