I was talking to a group of young artists in Chicago. There was a boy there who seemed disturbed because the others dared to be natural in my presence, and talk about themselves. I was quite at ease, enjoying myself, and getting altogether as much respect as I deserved.... This lad walked with me to the train. I wanted to take him home. I liked his voice and his hand and his mind. I thought at first that he could not mean all he said, but I was wrong about that. Reverence is sometimes very hard to take, but the one who brings it has the pure surface of receptivity. The boy said, as my train pulled out:

"No, I can't come now. There's a month to be spent at home in Michigan, and a season's playing with an orchestra up in the lake resorts, but after that—say October, I'll come to Stonestudy."

That was exactly what he did. He had it all planned months ahead. It's Shuk's[18] way—a mathematical mind, a crystal mind. The theosophists would say that he belonged to the intellectual ray.... We are always better with Shuk in the room. He comes half way to meet our process of lighting up, which is the devotional process; in fact, Shuk incorporated himself in our ideals in exchange for a year or two of living the life at Stonestudy.... These things never die.

A raincoat, a black bag—these are Shuk's possessions, all weight and measure minimised, even to the kind of white paper which wears best and packs best. Shuk means order. A page of his "copy" is a rest to the eye. There is a finished quality to his sentences. My tendency is to rush into a mental clean-up when he enters the room. I'm not impressing these details as his virtues. Shuk's virtues are cosmic. He will presently be telling the big tales, and telling them fast.

As a group, we are learning to come and go from each other. We have learned well not to lean—rather to anticipate the Law and leave the beloved when the tendency to cling becomes too keen.... There is a time to come and a time to go. I always think of the Master Jesus, leaving His disciples—saying that they would not find the Comforter within, if He remained with them always.

Shuk had much to do in bringing home to us this valuable concept. We had a way of thinking the world would come to us on the Lake Erie bluff. It would. It did. But we were getting fat and baronial; a bit fat of brain, perhaps.... Better than that, the gaunt, lean face forever at the window-panes of civilisation.... Comrades are always together. Big meetings, easy partings. One does not know how close he is to another, until their thoughts spark warm over a lot of mileage—the immortality of it all stealing in through the soft airs of night, perhaps.

I teach the young ones to stand alone at every chance. The idea is to make them penetrate for themselves, as swiftly as possible, the main tricks and illusions of matter; to make them see past any doubt that to be worldly-minded is to be inferior. Still they must see this for themselves. I formally renounced parentage in the case of the Little Girl. I take all my authority from the younger boys at frequent intervals—especially when they have been real mates:

"Don't advise with me," I tell them. "Show what you know about living.... Do it your way. If you begin to botch it, I'll come in and be a regular parent again, but the idea is to set you loose."

These matters come out naturally in relation to Shuk. He'll be surprised to read this. None of the young ones ever adequately credit the fact that I do a lot of sitting at their feet.... We could see the world as one piece better with Shuk in the room. His intense listening pulled my eyes constantly. He wanted to know about stories—about writing stories. His presence made us all better workmen because he was so zealous to become one. I had long been absorbed in the romantic side of world-politics, but Shuk decorated the subject with a new romance.... The farther away a country is, the more we know about it from a fiction standpoint. His mental forms are very strong. Shuk and I have practically covered the same run of thoughts in a morning's work—our machines a mile apart—no prearrangement. But this has worked out so often as to cease to be a novelty. The Little Girl's letters have often crossed with mine, carrying the same spiritual unfoldment—a four days' journey distant....

Another realisation related with Shuk's coming, is that I do not belong as the master of a school in the economic sense. There was much detail at Stonestudy, much householder's management required. I wouldn't have given it up, if I had been unable to do that part, but it was a waste of force—wretched economy for me to take charge of such affairs. We plan to support ourselves, but I cannot run a school, apportion tasks, or puzzle devotedly among the meshes of finance. This part of the work in California will doubtless be taken care of by those who do it well and profitably. There have been moments when I wanted to go among all the schools—happen in, stay an hour or a week—until the children and teachers forgot me, so I could find my own among the many.... But again it occurs to me that wiser plans than mine are behind it all. Those who are ready, come; numbers will take care of themselves; all we need to do is to make the most of the nearest, and keep up our song in such accord as we can in the midst of the world's sacrificial madness—many girls' voices now, for the war has plucked the boys....

Some of the things of Shuk's which I chose for this book were about the big war and are not profitable discussions now, but with his paper included in an earlier chapter, and one or two small things here, his quality can be seen. This is a letter to the Old Man:

... I haven't ceased to follow the Wars. Big one inside. Tremendous flights, dizzy careenings, impossible falls. Am tramping noisily through the forbidden garden of Books. Am becoming more and more vividly aware of Life, above actuality, beyond sorrow, interior to joy. Vital and thrilling peace to all your endeavours.... Enclosed a paragraph or two on tallying off the world-war within, with the world-war without:

Evil is stupid mixing of good things into in-harmony. Evil is simply ignorance. Ignorance does not fade away, but must be worked out, worn down. War is evil in this process. Man's higher nature is naturally at war with ignorance, manifesting in his lower nature. If man had always kept at this war against the domination of the lower self, he would never have needed another war to jar and jog him along. But man decided, in ignorance, that he had no cause for war with the lower self. This was his first illusion. The next mistake was natural. Man thought he would get rid of evil by killing off the lower selves of other men. All due to his first error in looking outside instead of in.

It's all wrong to think we must leave our own houses in order to fight the greatest battles conceivable. If we do not accept the fight within ourselves, we shall certainly have the same fight, once or twice removed, forced upon us....

Whatever portion of humankind is chastened and quickened by this big field-war and sea-war, is the first fruits of a nobler race. Man has had countless and continuous opportunities of doing this purifying process to himself in privacy and peace; instead, he has consistently, with rarest exceptions, used his will to serve the lesser self, or deal with the lesser selves of other men. Now, in these years, every man who failed, will learn the lesson, because it will be forced upon him. If our wisdom is not so great and old as we hope, if we have in the long past thrown away our chances, then we shall surely go out and fare as the others fare now—in exactly the right proportion.

Killing another doesn't work as a means of self-correction. Hereafter, I'm interested in correcting myself. There is very little outside work left to do. This is a commonplace, of course, yet it reminds me that the highest wisdom is something grandly simple and easy. Murder is an aggravated waste of both time and opportunity.

Yet I am at peace with nobody, not even myself. Peace ought to be more intense than war, and until it is, we shall have to go through many wars to arrive at any kind of peace. Many slaveries is the price of freedom.

One who fears will be brought up facing monster fears, until he learns next time that his personal fears were too petty to mention. One who has greed and envy will surely be made a pawn in a game of greed so colossal that perhaps, in a future time, he will have no interest in neighbourhood greeds, but will have learned to see and to desire the whole world. His greed has been stretched into a passion for dominion; and the most fascinating field for empire he will discover within himself.

So wherever we stand, we can't lose out. We can choose to do good, better, best—but without choosing, nothing less than all right can happen.

The brighter facts are that all these warring energies, whether of men or ordnance, are the force of one God, energies working out of the muddles men made. Man has disturbed the balance. Man now makes a sacrifice in order to restore equilibrium, to release the powers he misused.

The greatest conceivable struggle must sooner or later come between the higher and lower nature of every living thing. Man is now preparing himself, collectively and individually, for this final conquest. His prime illusion seized him when he turned away from his own faults, to correct the faults of his brother. The secondary illusion is that the brother will not be able to care for his own faults. The third is that we must help our brother correct himself. The fourth is that if he won't do it himself, in the way we say, we will do it for him.

The world (and this means me) is just learning the rudiments of war, just finding out how much vitality man has, how much courage, the stupidity of all fear, the size of the globe, the depth and possibilities of the elements, including the human soul; is perceiving more of life and accepting intenser vibrations than ever before on this terra. All this knowledge will go into the True Peace some day. But in these nearby years, men are prayerfully eager to get back "home," where all these godly lessons may be forgotten.

Real War will positively show man that he must remember what he is taught. When he comes "home," he will enlist immediately in the interior struggle with his lower self. His war with other men will train him to fight with the greatest enemy on earth, his own ignorance.

I have already enlisted in this big war. My first victory was in seizing the fact that the world is me and I am the world and nothing to the contrary. The universe rises and falls with me, subjectively. The goal is to make it—objectively.

I am locked with impatience these days.

After that, comes fear.

I may go to the red fields to learn the nonsense about fear. Of course I can theorise it now perfectly, and practise it at periods. But I want it steadily, the non-wobbling wisdom. Already I have conquered some fatuousness in myself. Out of my jubilation I write to you.... Of course, the Many is not a model to follow. The "Many" is a picture in every man's mind, composed of the inferior things that all other men do.... Inclusion—intensity—love—creativeness—these Stonestudy precepts contain all the story. They are certainly the way out and up and over into Life.

Shuk has done a little sketch or two on the big Romance of the new social order:

Humour, universality, the highest good will, he writes, are the symbols that flame from the temple of the New Race.... Everywhere appear children of the renovating, re-vitalising, more cosmic tribe. They are easily recognised. The hope of a full and decent future is with them.

They will do little according to their immediate predecessors, and much by an inner light of their own. Being wise and simple and not destructive, they will gratefully accept all that has proven true for earlier peoples. But they will instinctively have nothing at all to do with the traditions based on three-score-and-ten, or any other of the unfortunately solid viewpoints that frost the world to-day.

They love the world, have come to claim it whole, to reclaim it from deluded ancestors who were solemnly, from birth, bent upon deeding and selling and stealing and fencing in bits of the planet's surface. Forerunners of this happier race have shown themselves to be masters of materials, true workmen in the solid stuffs; but by their sense of humour they are saved from any impulse to seize and sit upon fragments of earth.

These new ones are born with an urge towards unity. Their task, to set the world in order. Their means, not so much a rearrangement of objects as a very intense activity along the roads of Beauty and Truth, in a co-operation unstudied and normal with the rest of mankind and with the Igniting Principle.

It may be observed that Beauty and Truth are too vague to produce effective action in a solid world. This is invariably a saying of the material-minded, however virtuous they may be. It is they who loudly demand a dull utility over and above Beauty, and apart from it. It is they who have agglomerated the chaos that is in this hour threshing about in dust and blood. Their sober iniquities are the fertiliser to force the seed of the New Race.

It is not a cosmic blunder that the great minds of the world are found in art, including the supreme art of mystic religion—and seldom in the arena of statecraft. The world was never managed from a senate chamber; the cosmos is not guided by a king. When rulers of the past have become great figures, that greatness usually rested upon their gift of poetry, their love of art or wisdom, or some religious quality.

Poems of twenty words have outlived the might of forty wars. A great book is a higher achievement than a sweeping political move. The dullest changeling with an obsession may set his seal upon a war to the death of ten million men, but in the few lines of a true poem are stored the honey of millenniums of human life. A genuine work of art is more potent and practical than any blood-bought wall of tribal separation, more vital and immediate than the doings of armies. To judge of this properly, one need only know both kings and poets.

Of the early kings of Rome, it is Numa who is remembered—and he was in harmony with Celestial Order. Of countless other Roman figures, the average mind turns first to CÆsar, who was a literary man, and whose passion to write outlasted every march of his legions. Greece had kings and statesmen and great generals, yet it is her wise men who stand foremost. The conquering Alexander is famed chiefly because he was the unwitting distributor of Grecian beauty. In fact, Greek history began with Homer, the poet, and American history with Columbus, the dreamer who is still our creditor. The mystics of old China reached for the Torch of Light, and they might have attained a true dominion over the planet, had not their fear-inspired kings built a Wall and gelded the Empire once for all. Gautama Buddha gave up kingcraft in order to gain a higher mastery. Mohammed lived on the Road. Jesus the Christ set free an energy in the world that is only gaining its real momentum after two thousand years—and he firmly refused a material crown.

... A hopeful dream, the poem of an autumn afternoon, the building of a sphinx or a pyramid—these are not subject to time or conditions. They remain.

So the Children who are the hope of the world are not dismayed at the medley of illusions emanating from the so-called ruling class. Emperors and premiers do not get very much done either way; they themselves abandon their own works over night. They are deserving of profound sympathy. They only spread out more manful chaos to be set straight by the master craftsmen—the artists, humorists, vitalists, mystics.... Beauty is the sun-bright flash of the Infinite.

With duty raised to a joy, and pain forgot, the Singers come, the Builders, the Quickeners of man. The Unforgettables of the so-called past were of this stock. Their leisure is deep—of a sort that sustains the finitudes.

All the good goals of yesterday are to be counted as mile-posts. Direction is more important than any imaginable goal; unvarying tendency is more direct and splendid than any creed; the white path of the quester is more precious than a stationary heaven.

The modern children cannot stop on this side of the horizon because they are creators. Life is their religion. Their rites are broad and deep as man, as ancient and reverent as time, as new as dawn.

They do not reject the Vedas. They re-fashion the Upanishads in their own hearts. They study the travels and hopes of Jesus, listen for the divine songs of Orpheus, penetrate the glitter of numbers with Pythagoras, find satisfaction in the Mohammedan thinkers who connected Aristotle with Moses. These names do not belong to the past. The many Buddhas are perpetually modern. Kabir lives to-day in Tagore. Heracleitus and Plato are still living springs.

In just the same sense, the children of the New Race are old as the Pelasgian Zeus, though in point of time they are here for work and play in 1920. But their vitality, reality, beauty, power and achievement—these are affairs of all time.

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