LIKE every other attentive reader of our periodical literature, I am increasingly aware of our persistent exposure of sin and wrong-doing in high places and in low; like many another attentive reader, I am growing a bit rebellious against this constant demand and supply in the matter of information regarding recent evil. Have we not grown over-alert in the search for this special kind of news? We take vice with our breakfast porridge; perjury with our after-dinner coffee; our essayists vie with one another in seeing who can write up the most startling story of crimes; and it is a bankrupt family nowadays that cannot produce one member to expose civic or political corruption. Undoubtedly much genuine ethical impulse lies back of all this; undoubtedly, too, much of the picturesque and spectacular treatment springs from a desire to startle, and ministers, in many a reader who would scorn paper-covered fiction, to a love of the sensational. Surely it must seem to the people of other countries that we take pride in the immensity of our sins, as we take pride in Niagara, in the length of the Mississippi, in the extent of our western plains.

Many may be, and must be, the good effects of throwing the searchlight upon dark places, but the constant glare of the searchlight bids fair to rob us of our normal vision of life. My poor mind has become a storehouse of misdeeds not my own. I am sick with iniquity; I walk abroad under the shadow of infamy, and I sup with horrors. I shrink from meeting my friends,—not that they are not the best people in the world, but I dread lest they pour into my ears some newly acquired knowledge of wrong-doing. For me, as for others, the sun of noonday is clouded by graft, bribery, treachery, and corruption; and I fear to close my eyes in the dark because of the pictured crimes that crowd before them. Suppose poor Christian had had to drag after him not only his own bag of transgressions, but those of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Mr. Facing-both-ways, and all the denizens of Vanity Fair, what chance would he ever have had of getting out of the Slough of Despond?

It is not that I wish to shirk; I am not afraid of facing anything that I ought to know, and I have not the slightest doubt that we are all, in great measure, responsible for our neighbors' sins. But I am not sure that we are taking the wisest way to mend them. It seems to me incontestable that, with the large issues of individual and of national well-being in mind, we are over-doing the exposure, and slighting the incentives to right action; emphasizing the negative at the expense of the positive; and that, with our weakening convictions regarding the things that are right, it is dangerous to go on loudly proclaiming the things that are wrong. We are much in the position of a village improvement society which has pulled down a bridge because it is rotting, and is impotent to build another and a better. We have invested our national all in wrecking machinery, and have nothing left for constructive tools. It is said that in our explosive setting forth of civic and national wrong-doing, we are all too prone to stop with the explosion, as if mere knowledge of these things would set them right. Mere knowledge never yet set anything right; only the ceaselessly active, creative will can fashion a world of law out of chaos.

Of the criticism often made that exposure of wrong should be followed, more closely than is done here, by constructive action, if anything is to be really effected, it is not my task to speak. The aspect of the matter which interests me especially concerns the youth of the land; it is the educational aspect. Not through loud wailing over evil can a nation be built, but through resolute dwelling with high ideals. In certain ugly tendencies of recent years among the young, as, for instance, the unabashed sensuality of much of the modern dancing, may we not detect, perhaps, a cynical assumption that life is at basis corrupt,—a natural result of continued harping on evil things, and of failure to keep before them images of moral beauty? Our magazine writers would be far better employed, if, instead of making our ears constantly resound with reports of civic iniquities, they were, part of the time at least, studying Plato's Republic, and filling mind and soul with the hope of the perfect state. Wrong things we dare hope are of small and fleeting consequence as compared with the right; it is not the sin of Judas Iscariot, but the righteousness of his Master, that has brought the human race a gleam of hope and possible redemption. When I was told, not long ago, of a student in one of our great universities who had elected 'Criminology 16,' I could not help reflecting that he might far better have taken Idealistic Philosophy I.

Whether or not our study of evil should be lessened, our study of the good needs to be vastly strengthened. We are losing the vision! 'Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions,' said the prophet, in promising wonders in the heavens and in the earth, after his account of fasting, weeping, mourning, and beating the breast. There is a time for beating the breast and for tearing the hair, and of this we have had our day, but perpetual sitting upon the ash-heap and howling will not raise the walls of state. Sitting there may, in time, even become a luxury; can it be that we are doing so much of it partly because it is easier, and because the heaven-sent task of building up and shaping is too hard for us?

Take away from youth the power of seeing visions, of dreaming dreams, and you take away the future. It would behoove us to remember, perhaps, that the eras of great deeds have not been eras of analysis, but eras when the creative imagination was at work. Yet our modern mental habit is overwhelmingly a habit of analysis, for which science, in teaching us to pick the world to bits, is partly, though not wholly, responsible. It has brought us an immense amount of interesting information; it has brought also a danger whose gravity we can hardly estimate, in the constant lessening of the synthetic power. The power to image, to fashion high ideals, and to create along the line of the imagining, is weakening, instead of growing more strong. In the glorious days of Queen Elizabeth, in the unparalleled days of Periclean Athens, great ideals formed themselves before men's eyes and great achievements followed; emotion, hope, vision, shaped human nature to great issues. I wonder what influence those perfect marble representations of perfect form had upon the very bodies of the youths and the maidens of Athens, what creative force they exercised,—the imaginative grasp of the perfect reaching forward toward perfectness in the human being. I wonder what influence the character of Sir Philip Sidney alone, with 'high-erected thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy,' has had upon succeeding generations of English youth. 'A man to be greatly good,' said Shelley, 'must imagine intensely and comprehensively.'

Here my quarrel with our present intellectual trend and our present system of education becomes more acute. We are not only losing the habit of mind that fosters idealism, but we are more and more breaking with the past. The door of that storehouse of noble thought and noble example is being slowly but firmly closed, and there is little in modern teaching that can meet the inroads made by the devastating knowledge of evil of which we have been speaking; little that can build up where this tears down. Study of Greek life, with its incomparable power of shaping existence toward the beautiful, is all but cast aside; most unfortunately now, when, with the rush of ignorant peoples to our shores, it might have a far-reaching potency never attained before. The ignorance of contemporary youth regarding that other and finer loveliness of 'Gospel books' is amazing. More and more we are stripped of the humanities; the incredulity of science in contemplating philosophy, art, literature, as part of the educational curriculum, is full of menace. There has never been, I think, in the history of the civilized world, a time when people were so anxious to cast off the past. In our eager Marathon race of material and physical progress we want to go as lightly equipped as possible. The Æroplane carries small luggage; our light modern mind is ever ready to throw overboard even its precious heritage, in its eagerness for swift flight. As earlier days have reverenced the old, we reverence the new, and are all too insistently contemporaneous.

We need, as we never needed before, a broader and deeper study of history, of philosophy, of literature; for most of our young, a knowledge of the mental and spiritual past of the race is of far greater importance than a knowledge of the physical past, at the amoeba stage, or any other. Science, much as it can do for us, can never meet our deepest need; the world of imaginative beauty and the world of ethical endeavor are apart from its domain. It has no spring to touch the will, yet that which has, the magnificent inheritance of our literature, is more and more neglected for the latest machinery that applied science has devised, or the most recent treatise on insect, bird, or worm. It is well to study insect, bird, and worm, for they are endlessly interesting, but I maintain that neither the full sum of knowledge concerning them, nor even the ultimate fact about the ultimate star, can be a substitute for knowledge of the idealism of Thomas Carlyle, of the categorical imperative of Kant,—for that study of the humanities which means preserving, for the upbuilding of youth, that which was best and finest in the past, as we go on toward the future.

If the swift retort should come, from those who think the present the only era of attainment and the physical world the only source of wisdom, that the past is full of villainies, of lapses from high standards, one can but say that for ethical purposes our study should be frankly a selective study, emphasizing the fine and high, subordinating the evil. There is no hypocrisy in such selection; there is deliberate choice of the higher upon which to dwell, as a formative power, quickening feeling and imagination. I have heard it said that a woman, by resolute dwelling on things noble and pure, may shape the inner nature of her unborn child, and I have faith to believe it. Even so should the nation yet to be be shaped by resolute dwelling on the good. It was not all cowardice, as many a present writer thinks, that led the mothers of earlier days to say little to their sons and daughters regarding evil things, and much regarding right things. Doubtless greater frankness would have been better, yet I doubt if our protracted dwelling on the evil will produce better results.

Should any one object that this emphasis on the good means suppression of the truth, we can but reply that, for the rational soul, the truth is not necessarily the mechanically worked-out sum of all the facts. That we have forgotten the distinction between fact—that which has indeed come to pass, but which may be momentary—and truth, which endures, is one of the many signs of what William Sharp calls the 'spiritual degradation' of our time. Much of our modern thinking and teaching, much of our realistic fiction, rests upon a failure to make the distinction; much that is indisputable in individual instances of wrong-doing may be, thank God! false in the long run.

'That is not true, scientifically true,' we hear often in regard to some fine hope or aspiration of the race; but in the real import of the term there is no such thing as scientific truth. It is a pity that a word of such profound and distinctive meaning should come to be more and more exclusively identified with the observation of physical phenomena, and the formulation of physical laws, whereas the very root-meaning of the word true, from Anglo-Saxon treowe, signifying faithful, gives justification for the idealist's belief that vital truth is partly a matter of the will, not of mere perception and of intellectual deductions drawn therefrom. We have need of deeper truth than that of mere fact; and the truth that shall set us free is a truth of choice, of selection; it embraces that part of human thought and human experience which is worth keeping.

Faithfulness to the best and finest in the past and in the present, rather than horrified gaping at the present's worst, is the attitude that means continued and bettered life, for we become what we will. What are we offering, in the way of concrete examples, or of finely expressed thought about virtue, to the young, to the ignorant nations who are pouring in upon us, that will help them form their vision of the perfect? With our narrowing knowledge of the greater past, our choice of heroes becomes more and more local and national, yet our hierarchy of sacred dead is too small to afford that variety of heroic action and heroic choice that should always be kept before the minds of youth. We teach them that George Washington never told a lie; we teach them something—and there could be nothing better—of Lincoln; but those two figures are lonely upon Olympus, and the great tragic story of the way in which Lincoln faced the greatest crisis in our history will not alone suffice to help the everyday citizen shape his thought and action toward constructive idealism. The lesser heroes of our young republic have acquitted themselves nobly in this struggle and in that, but the struggles have been too closely akin in nature to give the embryo hero that breadth and depth of nurture that he requires. We need an enlarged vision of history, and the sight of great men of all ages faithful to small tasks as to great; we need the companionship of heroes of other times and of other nations, and not of military heroes alone. Saint Francis with his unceasing tenderness to man and beast, Father Damien at work among the lepers, might far better occupy the pages of our magazines, than the pictured deeds of criminals and the achievements of contemporary multimillionaires.

If we need a wider range of concrete examples of the good, we need still more a wider range of nobly expressed ideals. Our thought grows narrow; we smother for lack of breathing space. Benjamin Franklin's philosophy was far from grasping the best of life, yet we remember him better than we do our Emerson, whose plea for spiritual values as the only real ones is lost in the louder and louder groaning of the wheels of our machinery. The idealism that is taught the young in Sunday schools is too often inextricably bound up with unnecessary theology; and many and many a pupil, in discarding the latter, discards the other also. The ideal of success upheld in much journalistic admonition is often rather mean and low; the young of this country need no printed incentives to urge them into commercialism and the victories of trade. The best influences that are being brought to bear upon them are those which concern social responsibilities and the needs of the poor. Yet all this thought and endeavor should supplement and not supersede, as it is doing, a deep concern with the things of the spirit; and no admonition regarding hygiene for one's self or others is a substitute for—

The great things of the past in all nations, history can teach us; the possible, both literature and philosophy can teach us. We must forego no noble expression of idealistic faith, lest we impoverish our own souls, and beggar those who come after us. The pure intellectual passion of Bacon's Advancement of Learning, the noble stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, the spiritual vision of Plato, of Spenser, the heroic strain of Wordsworth's 'Liberty Sonnets' and his 'Happy Warrior,' Shelley's ardent and generous sympathy, Browning's dynamic spiritual force, should make up part of our life and thought, checking our insistent impulse toward mechanical things, and correcting the evil within and without. More than anything else, we need a revival of interest in great poetry.

'Now therein of all sciences,' said Sir Philip Sidney, 'is our poet the monarch. For he doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way as will entice any man to enter it.... He cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-enchanting skill of music; and with a tale, forsooth, he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner, and, pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue.'

The poet's 'perfect picture' of the good, the great image, causes noble passion, wakes us out of our 'habitual calm,' and stirs us almost beyond our possibilities. The imagination is the miracle-working power in human nature; through it alone can the human soul come to its own. Only that which is fine and high can feed it aright, while baseness can make of it a destructive tool of terrible power. As I think back to childhood, I can remember the devastating effect that one tale of cruelty had upon my mind, haunting me by day in vivid pictures, turning my dreams to horror, and making me, while the obsession lasted, believe that the world of grown folk must be all alike cruel. So, too, the compelling vision of the good came through concrete instances; and the people, both the living and the dead, in whom I passionately believed, shaped all my faith.

The imagination of youth,—there is no power like it, no machine that can equal it in dynamic force, nothing so full of power, so full of danger. We become that which we look upon, contemplate, remember; it is for this that I dread the ultimate effect of the long, imaginative picturing of our neighbor's sins now presented in our periodicals. Images of evil can hardly help dimming and tarnishing the bright ideals of youth; is there no way—with all our modern wisdom can we find no way—of limiting our exposure of crime to the people who can be of service in helping check it, and keeping it from those who cannot help, but can only be silently hurt? A moment, an hour of some fresh vision, and a child's destiny is perhaps decided for good or for ill. One afternoon's reading of Spenser made the boy Keats a poet; who, knowing the potency of brief experience in the flush of youth, can doubt the lasting wrong wrought again and again by the sudden shock of contact with things evil?

Many images of wrong must of necessity come to the young; let them not be multiplied in our feverish and morbid fashion of to-day. Above all, let them be crowded out by constant suggestion of noble images and noble thought, which will work both consciously and subconsciously, shaping the dream when the dreamer is least aware. To hold up before the ardent and impressionable young that which they may become in strength, in purity, would surely be better than placing before them this perpetual moving-picture show of our civic and national transgressions. I can but believe, as I read article after article of exposure, that this continued presentation to youth of the unholy side of life, with our increasing tendency to make education a mere matter of the intellect and of the eye, is bound to lessen the moral energy of the race. Would it not be better if we were more diligent in searching history, philosophy, literature, for 'whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report,' and in bidding the young think on these things?

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