John H. Finley

BY

JOHN HUSTON FINLEY, LL.D., L.H.D.

There are many Hebrew legends which have gathered about that early figure on the dim edge of history, Enoch, the son of Jared,—not the Enoch, son of Cain (after whom the latter named the city that he builded in the land of Nod), but the Enoch of whom the Biblical record is simply that he lived so many years, “walked with God and was not, for God took him.” According to one of these legends he was the first great teacher, inventor, and scientist of the race and the first to attempt to pass on, in a systematic way, from generation to generation, the wisdoms of human experience and divine revelation. For, having been forewarned that the earth would be destroyed once by fire and once by water, he erected two pillars (that came to be known as “Enoch’s Pillars”) on which he caused to be inscribed “all such learning as had been delivered unto or invented by mankind.” “Thus,” the legend adds, “it was that all knowledge and learning were not lost, for one of these pillars remained after the flood.”

Here have we the primordial illustration of that subjective mystery of the mind’s desire which is ever pushing out beyond the verge of the known, and which is not content until it has tried to tell the next generation what it has learned, and has found expression objectively in such institutions as this and in such systems of education as to-day cover great portions of the earth.

There is a subsidiary legend about this primal teacher, inventor of sewing, and scientist (whose first text-book was one of these pillars) that has further pertinency. It is said of this patriarch, who did not die (and who may thus be said to personify the generic ideal teacher, in that his influence persists as if he were living), that he visited heaven once before his final translation, in order that he might be prepared to teach his fellow men upon his return to earth. (This would seem to impart a theological training, such as your new president has had—at any rate, instruction in sacred things.) He was lifted to the abode of the archangels, who, it is said, not only arrange and study the revolutions of the stars, the changes of the moon, and the revolutions of the sun, “but also arrange teachings and instruction and sweet speaking and singing of all kinds of glorious praise.” What better or more enchanting picture of an ideal institution for the preparation of teachers, established from the foundation of the earth! A curriculum in which science is interspersed with sweet speaking and singing by archangels! “Bring first,” said the Lord, “the books from the store place and give a reed to Enoch and interpret the books to him.” And so it was that this first university, with an archangel for its president, instructed its first earth pupil. For thirty days and thirty nights did the archangel instruct intensively (the legend has it, “his lips never ceased speaking”) while Enoch wrote down “all the things about heaven and earth, angels and men and all that it is suitable to be instructed in.”

And when the course of instruction was ended and Enoch had filled three hundred thirty-six note-books (this sounds very like a modern university lecture course), the Lord said: “Go thou with them upon the earth.... Give them the works written out by thee and they shall read them and shall distribute works to their children’s children and from generation to generation and from nation to nation.”

“From generation to generation and from nation to nation.” Here was the command given to the first schoolmaster. So Enoch went back to earth and began wide-spread education—even kings and princes coming with multitude to be instructed, as a result of which “Peace reigned over the whole world for two hundred and forty-three years.” His pedagogical influence extended over the whole of the little Biblical earth in its physical scope, and all that was known of angels and men (that is, the “supernal and temporal”) was embraced in his curriculum.

I have evoked this golden legend (for it should be included among the golden legends of the race), a legend which is not as familiar as the stories that have come down from the mythological days of Greece and Rome, and I have copied it to illuminate, as with a golden letter, my page, in the story of the inauguration of this new Enochian president.

We have an intimation in this legend of the rich curriculum that should be presented for the training of those who are to incarnate the best that the race has aspired to and striven for in one generation (and there is nothing more important than their broad, thorough training) and to carry on those supreme gifts to the next generation. A recent report of the Carnegie Foundation says, in its summary of a survey of the professional preparation of teachers, that if “training of any sort can provide men and women who are equipped and willing to serve youth as youth should be served, their service is pre-eminent”—and it is “altogether a more difficult service than any other to render well.”

I remember to this day my feelings as a college student at Knox, when the president of the college, Doctor Newton Bateman, whom Abraham Lincoln called his “little friend, the big schoolmaster” of Illinois, spoke in chapel of the qualities and knowledges which a teacher should possess. They were so far beyond what I, an awkward farm boy, could hope to attain as to give me a sense of guilt that I had ever attempted to teach even a district school, and to confirm me in my purpose to enter another field of work. But as I look back now, I realize that the “little friend” of Lincoln out here on the prairies was but saying what educational surveys and foundation studies are setting forth in ponderous volumes. And long, long back of my prairie schoolmaster, another was saying in the so-called Eternal City words that should be written in flaming letters on the walls of every legislative hall and every banquet-room. Indeed, I am not sure that we need others than these on our Enochian pillars, if only they were heeded by the nation:

For not alone they are useful to the State who defend the accused, bring forth candidates for office and cast their vote for peace or war, but they who encourage the youth [the teacher was ranked with the senator] who in so great a scarcity of good teachers instruct the minds of men in virtue [there was a great scarcity of good teachers then as now, but who knows what the eternal influence of some unknown teachers of to-day may be, for the greatest of world teachers was then going, as the record has it, “among the villages of Galilee, teaching”] and hold them back from running after wealth and luxury [for so it was in the first century, as in this] and teach what is meant by honesty, patience, bravery, justice, contempt of death and how much freely given good there is in a good conscience.

How difficult it is to prescribe the training for this high office of incarnation and instruction is best intimated in the answer which the president of a Missouri normal school gave when asked the question as to how teachers can be best taught: “This is a question which only angels can answer.” But we do, indeed, need educational archangels (as the legend of Enoch intimated) as the teachers of our teachers. And there are many of us who have reason to thank the Lord that here, in this valley, even, in some of its little prairie colleges, there were and are such archangels who revealed things about heaven as well as earth, and angels as well as men. One of them, who was my teacher, is to be the next speaker.

But my thought is rather of the transmission to the new generation, as a whole, of what—to paraphrase George Edward Woodberry—has been built out of the mystery of thought and passion of the past, as generation after generation has knelt, fought, faded, and given the best “that anywhere comes to be” to the souls of Enochian urge to carry on, “letting all else fall into oblivion. ”

As the most primitive and picturesque visualization of the curriculum of this bequest of the race mind of one generation to the next, the pillars of Enoch stood on the verge of history against the Eastern sky of our civilization’s dawn. They have crumbled, or they lie buried in sands that have hidden their wisdoms. The excavator’s spade could uncover no more interesting record than that which would tell us what this great teacher thought should be saved from flood and fire out of the experience of the race.

I have tried to imagine what was written there. It must have been a very meagre list to have all been written in the large letters or symbols of primitive speech on a single column. But the earth was then young to human eyes. (It has since grown so aged as to have its years counted by the thousands of millions.) And man was but come upon it, or so he then thought. When I was a college student, I supposed that he came in the year 4004B.C., but now we are informed that he has been here hundreds of thousands of years. Even so, in those days he was still living in what I have called the perinikian age; that is, in the age when he had conquered only the near, an age when the angels even were very near the earth and walked with man. The ideal being in that period was a creature with wings. I once turned to my Greek lexicon to discover how many far words there were in that perinikian period, whose world the Greeks had somewhat extended, and I found sixty-seven columns of “peri” (near) words and only about five, as I recall, of the “tele” (far) words, for the earth was only that which was within reach of the naked eye, the unaided voice. It was without the far-travelling printed word.

Out upon the shores of Phoenicia, in the days of the war, I imagined Cadmus, the legendary father of letters, who is reputed to have borne the alphabet to the Western world out of the Orient, as not entirely certain that he had blessed humanity with this last means of far conquest, in this our day of higher mobility and greater transmissibility of ideas. I seemed to hear him say:

But when one becomes reflectively conscious of what the world’s literature has added to the few sentences upon Enoch’s pillars, beginning with the Book of Books, the one book that man cannot be without, one has a reassuring answer for Cadmus. Indeed, I found it myself in the Christian literature that was collected in a city just north of Tyre and Sidon, awaiting the end of the war, for its scattering throughout all that region on whose edge the pillars once stood (as I have seen the columns of old Heliopolis, the city once so beloved of the sun that he hastened over the eastern hills to spend his cloudless days about it, and lingered upon the Lebanon Mountains as long as possible in the summer afternoon, reluctant to leave the sight of it).

There has recently been published by a Princeton professor of biology an essay which would seem to intimate that great progress has not been made since those pillars were set up somewhere beyond the Euphrates; for his contention is that human evolution has reached its end; that for at least ten thousand years there has been no notable progress in the evolution of the human body, and that there has been no progress in the intellectual capacity of a man in the last two or three thousand years—that all we can do now is to lift the mass to the height of the most perfect individual. I cannot assent to this, for I see man upon his way from God to God, while summing the race that’s been, ever giving glimpses of a diviner grace than has evolved (or will, if we accept the teaching of the biologic mind that sees his evolution at an end)—than has evolved, but will, for soul is bound to mould such body as its needs require to bear it toward the goal it seeks; else why were clay uplifted to this height if it can never reach the higher height, the image it would make of God in man?

But whether the biologist be right or I, we agree that it is the constant obligation of the living generation to try to lift mankind toward whatever highest height the individual has reached or can reach—and it is not a local, a parochial, a provincial, or even a national obligation, but a world obligation, in this tele-victorian age—from generation to generation, from nation to nation. As Mr.Wells has put it, it is a dream not alone of “individuals educated,” but of a world educated for the sake of all mankind.

But long before Mr. H.G. Wells put before the world the suggestion of a fundamental world curriculum (it was even before the Great War had made the need more manifest), it came to me that the curricula of the elementary schools of the nations of the earth should be analyzed to discover just what each nation was attempting to teach its children through formal education, and then that the residuum, after the purely local matter was eliminated, should be synthesized into a single body of knowledge (“delivered to or invented by mankind”), which should embrace what the race as a whole seemingly thought it most vitally important to transmit out of its experience to those who were to follow.

Once that were had, we should then call upon the greatest minds of the earth—the Enochs of to-day—to confer as to what this minimum for every child should be; for mere mental inertia, pride, prejudice, the force of habit and such causes have prevented that curriculum from keeping up with the accumulation of fundamental truth as it has been brought into the luminous circle of the knowledge of some, at any rate, of the race, from the encircling darkness.

These pillars must stand in the clear sight of all the children of the earth, so that every child and youth may have advantage of all these race lessons and come to know them by heart (i.e., in their hearts), if there is to be progress toward a goal, which, if it were not beyond our present reach, would be a mean one, and if it were not ultimately attainable, would be Tantalian, for it is the law of progress that one generation shall stand on the shoulders of the one that went before.

When the captive king, Croesus, was asked by the victorious king, Cyrus, why he went to war, he answered that he had been directed to do so by the oracle, and he then volunteered the remark: “For no man in his senses would prefer war to peace; since in peace the sons bury their fathers, whereas in war the fathers bury their sons.” This is a biologic law, and it conditions intellectual and spiritual progress as well. The sons must bury their fathers not only by outliving them but by outdoing them.

This is so obvious that I should apologize for repeating it more than two thousand years after it was recorded (by Herodotus, as I recall), except for the fact that the world has not heeded it. As a distinguished university president said a few nights ago in my hearing, the world needs a “bath in the obvious.” While I should not characterize the perusal of H.G. Wells’s Outline of History as taking this sort of an ablution (so far as some of his conclusions are concerned), I think that he was justified in giving more space to this remark of Croesus and the incidental circumstances of its relation than he gave to certain whole periods of national or race existence. It is the caption that should be written at the top of our world Enochian pillars.

And I should write below it that utterance of President Fisher, of England’s Board of Education, made in the midst of the war, when the days were darkest:

“Education is the eternal debt which Maturity owes to Youth.”

And beneath that I should put, I think, the lines of Gilbert Murray, whom I saw the same day, taken from the lips of Hecuba:

What should be written in detail below these captions, I should let a great international committee recommend—a committee with planetary consciousness which could let each people continue the excellence that has “grown habitual to its being,” and yet include such instruction in the excellence of others as to abate the hatreds that now divide the men of the earth, even as they were divided by their misunderstandings in that early post-Noachian period when Eber, the son of Shelah, named his boy Peleg, “because in his day the earth was divided,” and the children could no longer read the lessons upon Enoch’s pillars.

I travelled the entire length of this line during the war, from the edge of the desert on the farther edge of which Enoch’s pillars stood to the North Sea. From the Mount of Olives I heard and saw the beginnings of the battle of Armageddon—not an allegorical battle, but the literal battle, for when I made my way to Headquarters down on the plain of Sharon, General Allenby, coming out of his map-room, said: “I have just had word that my cavalry are at Armageddon. The battle of Armageddon is on.” And a few nights after I walked through the broken entanglements of wire across that plain, past the Mount, as the dawn came, where our Lord is said by some to have delivered what we call the Sermon on the Mount, on to Nazareth, the little city which a Denver paper referred to familiarly as “Christ’s home town.” And I thought the thousand years of peace referred to in the Book of Revelation had come.

But I have since travelled over a great part of that way—the long, long way, let us not forget, by which we have come out of captivity—and I found that, while the barbed-wire entanglements have been cleared from most of the fields and the trenches had been filled, the entanglements, suspicion and hate, were still keeping nations apart, even without guns and bombs and poisonous gas.

I was the first American to make the journey across Asia Minor after the Armistice. Starting from the vicinity of the Tower of Babel, which stood amid “the whole earth of one language and one speech,” and which sought to reach the heaven until the builders were suddenly unable to understand one another’s speech and were dispersed, gibbering and gesticulating and quarrelling, over the earth—starting from the neighborhood of that Scriptural memory, I travelled for days through homeless misery and physical want and mental hate, which I felt were but the sequelÆ of the world disease, and would soon pass. But conditions are, if anything, worse than when I passed that way. It is only the mercy and ennobling philanthropy of Americans that are preventing the extermination or degradation of a race.

But I have more lately travelled over nearer sections of that long way back to the cradle of the race and of Christian civilization. Within the year I have walked, or ridden by ship or train or airplane, all the way from the west coast of Ireland to the then closed door of Russia and along its then impenetrable western wall down to Hungary and back. Alas! the separating, the estranging hatreds are still there.

Barriers and entanglements, visible and invisible, were upon every border all the way across Europe. Unspeakable inconveniences, often hardships, had to be endured by the ordinary traveller in these zones of suspicion and antipathy and hate, till I came to think of the countries they separated as the “United Hates of Europe.”

What I wish to bring out of this all is not our local obligations, our interstate and intranational obligations, but our world obligations, which we share with others—the obligations to see that all the children of the earth have a chance to escape from those hatreds into the best things of the race as a whole.

In my mid-European travels I came one day to the country where Copernicus had developed the new theory of the universe. There I had an experience which lifted my thought into the broader view which ignored barriers and entanglements. It was a journey in an airplane that rose high above boundaries and connected Warsaw with Prague and Strasbourg and Paris. It was the morning of Pentecost Day that I made the journey—the day which celebrates the coming together of people from many nations and their understanding one another and being understood because of the cloven tongues that descended upon them. As we flew over the prairies of Poland that beautiful, clear spring Sunday morning, I could see the shadow of the plane as of a cloven tongue flying beneath us from village to village, and even over the disputed territory of Upper Silesia. This was the symbolic prophecy of the new sort of understanding, the unifying fabric woven by such shuttles that must by their woof replace the separating entanglement of suspicion and hatred if Europe, and so the world, is to survive something worse than fire or flood.1

Before I began the airplane journey from Warsaw I went to take my last look at the statue of Copernicus, whose conception of a heliocentric universe is the capital event in modern thought. At the foot of the Vosges Mountains, which I crossed a day or two later into France, there is the little village of St. DiÉ, where, in a book on the Ptolemaic System, the name America was first put on the printed page, and on a world map. America was baptized into the Ptolemaic cosmos, but its inhabitants (after the aborigines) dwelt from the first in a Copernican universe, wanderers in an infinity of space, “with a shuddering sense of physical immensity.”

Europe could not readily forget the geography of its infancy and childhood and maturity, but America began its God-fearing settlement with an astronomy of infinite distances, with a cosmography in which it was itself infinitesimal, and with a geography partaking of the sky, as well as of the sea and land.

With this Copernican consciousness of the universe, America should be the least provincial, and Americans the most “universe-minded” of all the inhabitants of the earth.

Isolate we have indeed been as a people, but not provincially nor narrowly nor proudly isolate. We kept out of the partisan Ptolemaic concerns of Europe, but when the freedom of mankind was threatened, America’s policies leaped to the world horizon of her interest in humanity. Our America has had from the first a cosmic view, a concern for all mankind. “All men” are included in its national creed. It is only those who would narrow our horizon of sympathy and bring a Ptolemaic sky over our heads again that it has in its doctrine excluded.

So it is not by accident, I think, that we have put the stars in the field of our flag. They are cosmic symbols gathered from the immeasurable universe, not from pieces of earth and stretches of water, which together make up what we are accustomed to call, whatever our origin, “our native land”—a people of clearly defined national personality, but of planetary consciousness and of interdependent destinies.

But in this land of Copernicus, where “the capital event of modern thought” occurred, I found that only two million eight hundred thousand children of school age out of four million six hundred thousand had any schooling whatever. It was hoped by the minister of education that by1928, if only the fear of a new partition of Poland could be removed and credits found, they might make some most elemental provision for the rest—and this only because so many of the young men of Poland had perished in the World War that the coming generation would be a smaller one. I could present statistics of like import for other European states. They would all support my thesis, that since we have had a World War for freedom, we should have a world plan for giving the children who have suffered in this divided earth (the millions of “Pelegs”) an elemental chance to enjoy that freeing of the soul which is, with the unity of mankind, the ideal end of the state.

A plan which I proposed some time ago, and which I have now taken courage of the support in modified form by men of large financial and organizing experience to defend, is that the Allied debts be made a permanent trust fund, to be administered for the education of the children of all peoples, so far as they can be so applied. The proposal has been characterized as “good business,” not to demand the full payment of these debts with interest of that which we loaned, but spent largely at home, and after we entered the war. The fundamental thought on which I should base the proposal is that the world, as a whole, owes something to the children who have no fair chance in it because of what those upon whom they are naturally dependent have sacrificed for the good of the world as a whole.

My original proposal was that the principal should be cancelled as it was so spent, but Judge Lovett, president of the Union Pacific, has proposed merely the application of the interest at a moderate rate annually to this purpose if and when it can be paid, though he has given it a broader scope—putting education last—the care of widows, orphans, and crippled first—but ultimately it should all be devoted to education.

A ten-billion dollar war debt converted (as a thanksgiving offering for deliverance from something worse than the world knows even at its worst to-day) into a perpetual trust fund for the children of the world, especially for those who have come “trailing clouds of glory” into a part of the world where they haven’t a chance to come into the heritage of their generation.

Five hundred million dollars a year (an incredible number of Austrian crowns, Russian roubles, or Polish marks (if indeed the interest could be paid at the rate of five per cent)) which would give an elementary-school training to ten million children each year—as many children as are born each year into the world. And this interest could be paid if armaments were unnecessary.

Ten million children a year taught the best that has been “delivered unto or invented by mankind” (as listed in the world curriculum) and led in their tuition toward the conscious unity of the race—planetary consciousness!

Has a more stirring opportunity ever been offered to any people than is ours in the refunding of the great war debt, in such a way as to make it a blessing to the next generation instead of a crushing burden to the tax-paying generation that now goes bent with its burdens across Europe? If we were to demand our pound of flesh we should deserve the future fate of those in the “Inferno” who went eternally about weighed with cloaks of lead that were covered by a veneer of gold.

Some of the principal might be used to buy books in which these millions of children might enter into the common possession of the race (perhaps in a common language), free of scorn of other nations, and so never know the hatreds which estranged their fathers; and some might be spent for the syndicated material of which Mr. Wells speaks—the knowledges of those things which would help them to find their particular place in the cosmos.

Again, a part of the principal might be spent (and cancelled as a debt when so spent) in building schoolhouses where none can otherwise be built for a generation or two. These would be modern Enochian pillars—for what is a schoolhouse, after all, essentially but the very thing that Enoch caused to be erected—at any rate, when the teacher is in the schoolhouse furnished with the knowledge of the race mind?

Even so, there would be enough left to provide for millions of planetary pupils in perpetuity.

It would be the greatest foundation ever established upon earth for the salvation of civilization.

Many years ago, when as a young college president in this valley I was speaking at a real-estate dinner in Chicago, I recalled how an ancient city was saved by the fact that it had so many score thousand children who could not tell their right hand from their left hand—and also much cattle. Innocent children and cattle saved Nineveh for a time, but not permanently. If the prophet Jonah were alive to-day he would know that the doom he preached finally came upon the city. He sleeps (or so the tradition is) in a village but six or eight miles from Bethlehem, that might have seen the star if it had been awake on the night when it came and stood over the place where the young child was. He would know if he, himself, were awake that it is only children who have learned the lessons of the race who have the power of world salvation—children who have also learned by heart the lessons of the two great commandments.

Years ago I was ploughing corn on a hot June day on an Illinois prairie when I heard a sound in the air above me, which one unused to the country might have thought the thrumming of a choir celestial. But with a farm boy’s instinct I divined that it was a swarm of bees, even before I saw the little cloud moving over the field toward the woods two or three miles away. I did what any farm boy would have done if he could leave his team. I followed the swarm, throwing up dust and clods of earth, and making all possible noise, with the result that I brought the swarm down upon the branch of a tree at the edge of the field. Then at evening I got a hive, lured them into it, and then carried them home, where they made honey for the season.

So if we follow these ideals, which may seem at first but some millennial rhetoric, and bring them down to earth, we may find a way to sweeten the bitter bread of millions of children in other lands—and yet have enough and to spare for our own, in spite of the reports which I have been hearing to-day from those same corn-fields, whose bountiful crops the farmers cannot sell, though others are starving.

But let us take courage of the way we have already come, since Enoch reared his pillars in the pre-Noachian days. The children of Israel were required to keep each year the feast of the tabernacles, during the seven days of which they were commanded to leave their homes and go out and live in booths or tents, not for a holiday, but that they might be kept mindful of the fact that their fathers came out of captivity. I have often thought that it would have a very wholesome effect if all the world could keep such a feast, and this would be its proclamation, as I have drafted it, though not in the usual form:2

And along the way at intervals stand the Enochian schools, colleges, and universities, giving instruction in the best that the human race has learned “from generation to generation and from nation to nation.”