Part 4 (2/2)

The One Thing Needful

THE most ardent advocate of our present civilisation, the blindest wors.h.i.+pper of what we call progress, can hardly fail to be aware of the steadily increasing and brutal ugliness of life. Civilisation, whatever else it is, is a state in which a few people have the chance of living beautifully--those who take that chance are fewer still--and the enormous majority live, by no choice or will of their own, lives which at the best are uncomfortable, anxious, and lacking in beauty, and at the worst are so ugly, diseased, desperate, and wretched that those who feel their condition most can hardly bear to think of them, and those who have not imagination enough to feel it fully yet cannot bear it unless they succeed in persuading themselves that the poor of this world are the heirs of the next, while hoping, at the same time, that a portion of Lazarus's heavenly legacy may, after all, be reserved for Dives.

The hideous disfigurement of lovely hills and dales with factories and mines and pot banks--coal, cinder, and slag; the defilement of bright rivers with the refuse of oil and dye works; the eating up of the green country by greedy, long, creeping yellow caterpillars of streets; the smoke and fog that veil the sun in heaven; the sordid enamelled iron advertis.e.m.e.nts that scar the fields of earth--all the torn paper and straw and dirt and disorder spring from one root. And from the same root spring pride, anger, cruelty, and sycophancy, the mean subservience of the poor and the mean arrogance of the rich. As the fair face of the green country is disfigured by all this machinery which ministers to the hope of getting rich, so is the face of man marred by the fear of getting poor. Look at the faces you see in the street--old and young, gay and sad--on all there is the brand of anxiety, a terrible anxiety that never rests, a fear that never sleeps, the anxiety for the future: the fear of poverty for the rich, the fear of starvation for the poor.

Think of the miles and miles of sordid squalor and suffering in the East of London--not in comfortable Whitechapel, but out Canning Town way; think of Barking and Plaistow and Plashet and Bow--then think of Park Lane and Bond Street. And if your eyes are not blinded, the West is no less terrible than the East. If you want to be sure of this, bring a hungry, ragged child from that Eastern land and set it outside a West End restaurant; let it press its dirty little face against the plate gla.s.s and gaze at the well-to-do people gorging and guzzling round the bright tables inside. The diners may be smart, the ragged child may be picturesque--but bring the two together, and consider the conjunction.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE HIDEOUS DISFIGUREMENT.]

And all this ugliness springs from the same cause. As Ruskin says: ”We have forgotten G.o.d.” We have therefore forgotten His attributes, mercy, loving-kindness, justice, truth, and beauty. Their names are still on our lips, but the great, stupid, cras.h.i.+ng, blundering machine which we call civilisation knows them not. The Devil's gospel of _laissez-faire_ still inspires the calloused heart of man. Each for himself, and Mammon for the foremost. We no longer care that life should be beautiful for all G.o.d's children--we wish it to be beautiful for us and forget who, as we wish that wish, becomes our foster-father. There can be no healing of the great wound in the body of mankind till each one of us would die rather than see the ugliness of a wound on the body of the least of these our brethren. But so dulled and stupefied is our sense of beauty, our sense of brotherhood, that our brother's wounds do not hurt us. We have not imagination enough to know how it feels to be wounded. Just as we have not imagination enough to see the green fields that lie crushed where Manchester sprawls in the smoke--the fair hills and streams on which has grown the loathsome fungus of Stockport.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OF LOVELY HILLS AND DALES.]

Now I do believe that this insensitiveness to ugliness and misery, this blindness to wanton befouling of human life and the green world, comes less from the corruption of man's heart than from the emptiness of the teaching which man receives when he is good and little and a child. The teaching in our schools is almost wholly materialistic. The child is taught the botanical name of the orange--dissects it and its flower and perhaps learns the Latin names of the flower and fruit; but it is not taught that oranges are things you will be pleased with yourself for giving up to some one who is thirstier than you are--or that to throw orange-peel on the pavement where some one may slip on it, fall and hurt himself, is as mean a trick as stealing a penny from a blind man.

We teach the children about the wonders of gases and ethers, but we do not explain to them that furnaces ought to consume their own smoke, or why. The children learn of acids and starches, but not that it is a disgraceful thing to adulterate beer and bread. The rules of multiplication and subtraction are taught in schools, but not the old rule, ”If any will not work, neither shall he eat.”

There is no dogmatical teaching. That means a diet of dry bones. It means that the child is never shown how to look for happiness in the performance of acts which do not, on the face of them, look as though they would make him happy. It is not explained to him that man's life and the will of G.o.d are like a poem--G.o.d writes a line and man must make the next line rhyme to it. When it does rhyme, then you get that happiness which can only come from harmony. And when you do your best to make your line rhyme and cannot--well, the Author of the first line knows that it was your best that you did. G.o.d is shown, when He is shown at all, to our modern children, as a sort of glorified head master, who will be tremendously down on you if you break the rules: alternatively as a sort of rich uncle who will give you things if you ask properly. He is not shown as the Father to whom you can tell everything.

If you are successful in your work you win a prize and go home to your people, and tell them that you are first in history, receiving their applause without shame.

If you are good at games or athletics you can tell your mates that you made two goals or eighty-three runs or whatever it is, and delight in their admiration. If you are an athlete the applause of the bystanders is your right and your reward.

But whom can you tell of the little intimate triumphs, the secret successes, the temptations resisted, the kind things done, the gentle refrainings, the n.o.ble darings of that struggling, bewildered, storm-tossed little thing you call your soul?

G.o.d, your Father, is the only person to whom you can talk of these. To him you can say: ”Father, I wanted to pay Smith Minor out to-day for something he did last week, and I didn't because I thought You wouldn't like it. Are You pleased with Your boy?” Do they teach you this in schools or give you any hint or hope of what you will feel when your Father answers: ”Yes, My son, I am pleased.” Or do they teach you to say: ”Father, I am sorry I was a beast to-day, and I'll try not to do it again”--and tell you that a Voice will answer, ”I am sorry too, My son--but I am glad you told Me. Try again, dear lad. And let Me help you”?

As you show your Latin exes. to your master, so you should be taught to show the leaves of your life to the only One who can read and understand that blotted record. And if you learn to show that book every day there will be less and less in it that you mind showing, and more and more that will give you the glow and glory of the heart that comes to him who hears ”Faithful and good, well done.”

You cannot suppose that your life is rhyming with the will of G.o.d when you destroy the beauty of the country and of the lives of men so that you may get rich and you and your children may live without working.

Can you imagine a company promoter who should say: ”Father, I have made a lot of money out of a company which has gone to pieces, and a lot of other people are ruined, but I know that there must always be rich and poor, and if I didn't do it some one else would”?

Or--”Father, I spoiled the green fields where children used to play and I have built a lot of streets of hideous and uncomfortable houses, but they are quite good enough for the working people. As long as they have such low wages they can't live like human beings. And Thou knowest, O Father, that wages are and must be regulated by the divine law of supply and demand.”

Or--”Father, I have put sand in the sugar and poison in the beer, alum in the bread and water in the milk, all these being, as Thou knowest, Father, long-established trade customs.”

Men can say these things to themselves and to each other, but there is One to whom they cannot say them. It is of Him and not only of the wonders of His Universe that I would have the children taught. But they are only taught of the wonders, not of the Wonder-worker.

It is not that there are none who could teach, no initiates of the great and simple mysteries, no keepers of the faith. There are such, but they are muzzled, and the detestable horrors of civilisation go on in a community which calls itself after the name of Christ. And so long as we have in our schools this materialistic teaching, so long shall we raise up generation after generation to support that civilisation and to keep it the d.a.m.nable thing we know.

Talk goes on and goes on and goes on. There is talk now of a Great Measure for the Reform of National Education, much talk--there will be more. There will be much ink spilt, much breath wasted; we shall hear of Montessori and Froebel and Pestalozzi, of Science and the Cla.s.sics, of opportunities of ladders of scholars.h.i.+ps and prizes and endowments.

We shall hear how hard it is that the sons of the plumber should not be able to go to Oxford and how desirable it is that daughters of the dustman should sometimes take the Prix de Rome.

We shall be told how important are the telescope and the microscope, and how right it is that children should know all about their little insides. The one thing we shall not hear about will be the one thing needful.

A tottering Government may keep itself in power by such a measure, a defeated party may, by it, bring itself back to office, but such a measure will not keep the nation from perdition, nor bring back the soul of a man into the true way.

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