XXII
THINKING AND THE HIGHER LIFE

The preceding chapter pointed out the function of thinking in the arts, and the reciprocal influence of these upon the power of thought. It remains to point out the relation of thinking to the higher life. The best point of departure for such a discussion is the book which has done more to foster the higher life of the soul than all other books combined. From some points of view the best book on teaching ever made is the Book of books. In it we find not only practical examples and marvellous illustrations of the art of the teacher, but also the most significant maxims and statements bearing upon the development of the inner life. In the account of the Temptation in the Wilderness, we have an utterance from the lips of the Great Teacher, directing our attention towards the higher life. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” (Matt. iv. 4.)

In the universities one hears a great deal about bread-studies. Knowledge for its own sake, culture for culture’s sake, education, not for the sake of its money-value, but for the mind’s sake, are the ideals held up before the minds of the students. A world-famous professor of mathematics demonstrated a new theorem, and closed the demonstration with the exclamation, “Now, that is true, and, thank God, nobody can use it!” Does knowledge increase in value as its utility diminishes? This professor was drawing an annual salary of five thousand dollars, and could well afford to ignore the money-value of an education. Lifted above the struggle for bread, he had no sympathy with the multitudes in whose experience the struggle for bread is the all-absorbing problem of life. The theory of life propounded by the Great Teacher is very different. He did not despise the arts that make bread and win bread. Twice He miraculously multiplied the loaves and fishes, in order to feed the multitudes. For many years He worked at the carpenter’s bench, and after the death of His father helped to support His mother. When hanging upon the cross, He intrusted His mother to the care of John, the “disciple whom Jesus loved.”

But when Satan came to him and suggested the making of bread by unlawful means, He repelled the tempter, saying, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” Bread here stands for more than physical food. It is symbolic of the life that turns upon what we eat and drink, the garments we wear, and the houses we live in.

The best of French kings cherished it as the ambition of his life to make every one of his subjects so well off as to be able on Sunday to have roast fowl for dinner. Had he lived in our day, he would have included among the objects of his ambition a new bonnet for every woman at least twice a year. Roast fowl and new bonnets cost money; and money indicates the plane from which very many people look at every question of government and education. Money stands for what we eat and drink, for the garments we wear and the houses we live in, for the thousands of creature comforts which we deem essential to our well-being and happiness. Perhaps the school has not done all it is destined to accomplish in fitting the pupils to win these, but there is abundant evidence to show that a good school increases the earning power of the individual, and thereby makes possible the higher life of mind, or of the soul. The untutored red man eked out a scanty existence in spite of unparalleled advantages in soil and stream and climate; the intelligence begotten by the modern school has enabled our people to utilize and develop the material resources of the New World to such an extent that Carlyle sneeringly said, “America means roast turkey every day for everybody.” Let us accept the remark as an acknowledgment that the American people are better fed than those of England or Continental Europe; and yet Carlyle was right in hinting that there is a life higher than that which turns upon what we eat and drink and wear, for this is in accord with the view of life taught by the greatest Teacher of all the ages.

It is worth while to pause a moment for the purpose of pointing out the relation of the higher life to the side of life symbolized by bread. In a word, the higher life rests upon the other as a basis. Where the vital energies of a people are exhausted in the struggle for bread, the very mention of education is a mockery. The school lays the foundation for the higher life when it increases the average earning power of the industrial classes, and thereby makes it easier for them to gain a livelihood. Here is the first point of contact between the school and the higher life. There is no language sufficiently strong to condemn the spirit of the professor who, when he had demonstrated a new theorem in higher mathematics, thanked God that nobody could use it.

Only professors filling well-endowed chairs at our universities can afford to speak disparagingly of Brot-studien and to advocate theories of education which would sunder the school from practical life. An education that unfits the pupil for bread-winning in case of necessity cannot be too severely condemned; among other reasons, because it fails to lay a proper foundation for the higher life. On the other hand, the school that does not aim at something higher than dollars and cents deserves equally severe condemnation; for that which makes life worth living cannot be bought with money. If you are rich, you may buy a fine house, but you cannot buy a happy home; that must be made,—made by you and by those who occupy it with you. With money you may rent a pew in some fashionable church, but you cannot rent a good conscience,—that depends upon your manner of living and dealing with others. Money will enable you to buy a fine copy of Shakespeare, but it cannot purchase for you the ability to appreciate a play of Shakespeare,—that is the result of education. Wealth will enable you to cover the walls of your costly mansion with beautiful pictures; and the sewing-girl, if she has been properly taught in a public school, will get more enjoyment out of them than can possibly be gotten by the sons and daughters of wealth and luxury whose proper education has been neglected.

Plato wrote above the door of the academy, “Let no one enter here who is destitute of geometry.” Why did he value geometry so highly? Not merely as an introduction to the study of philosophy, for in one of his dialogues he says, “God geometrizes.” He had an idea that a youth in thinking the theorems of geometry is thinking divine thoughts. When Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion, he exclaimed, in ecstasy, “O God, I think thy thoughts after thee!” When a pupil learns to think the thoughts which the Creator has put into the starry heavens above us and into all nature about us, he is thinking God’s thoughts and tasting the enjoyments of the higher life. When he is taught the right use of books, and given access to a public library, he may acquire the power to think the best thoughts of the best men at their best moments. In nature study, in the reading lesson, in the teaching of science and literature, the school fosters the higher life of the pupil by enabling him to think God’s thoughts and man’s best thoughts as these are enshrined in creation and in the humanities. The objection is sometimes heard that the school makes the working-classes discontented with their lot. “Teach a man to think,” says the opponent of universal education, “and you make him dissatisfied with what he has and knows.” If the school fixes the eye upon wealth, fame, glory, official position, and other things which can be attained only by a few, and which, when sought as the chief end of life, resemble the apples of the Dead Sea, turning to ashes on the lips as soon as they are tasted, then, indeed, the school may doom its pupils to a life of discontent and disappointment. But if the school fixes the eye upon the things of the higher life, things which are within the reach of every boy and girl at school, it lays the foundation for a contentment far transcending the possibilities of a life that turns upon feasting, office-holding, and the things that can be bought with money.

It must be admitted that the exercise of the higher powers carries with it a certain feeling of discontent, but it is a feeling that conditions true progress and is not doomed to ultimate disappointment. The true test of what is preferable is the testimony of those who have knowledge of both modes of existence. Who that knows both does not value the pleasures of thinking above those of eating? Who would exchange the joy of doing right for anything attainable by the man who, for the sake of success, banishes ethics from his business or his politics? “Few human creatures,” says Mill, “would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though he should be persuaded that the fool, or the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they with theirs.” “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool or the pig is of a different opinion, it is only because they know only their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.” Who would not rather be an intelligent workingman seeking to better his condition, than an ignoramus contented with little because he knows nothing of the joys of the higher life?

Life is full of contradictions and incongruities and disappointments. Over against these, the school, in its relation to the higher life, has a duty to perform. For the discontent which springs from life’s contradictions and incongruities a safety-valve has been given to man in his ability to laugh. The person who never laughs is as one-sided and abnormal as the person who never prays. The comic is now recognized as one form of the beautiful, and the beautiful is closely allied to the true and the good. Without going into the philosophy of this matter, attention may be drawn to the fact that beauty has a home in the domain of art, as well as of nature; that the queen of the fine arts is poetry; that the greatest poet of all the ages was Shakespeare; that Shakespeare’s literary genius reached its highest flights in tragedies and comedies; that whilst tragedy and comedy are two forms of the beautiful in art, comedy is the highest form of the comic, whilst tragedy is the highest form of the sublime. In teaching us to appreciate the plays of Shakespeare, the school not merely teaches us when to laugh and when to weep, thereby furnishing the safety-valve to let off our discontent and to reconcile us anew to our lot, but puts us in possession of that which money cannot buy,—namely, the ability to appreciate the beautiful in its subtlest and sublimest forms. Who owns the moonlit skies, the millionaire or the poet? Who owns the hills and the valleys, the streams and the mountains; he in whose name the deeds and mortgages are recorded, or he whose soul can appreciate beauty and sublimity? Beauty has a home in nature and in art. It is the province of the school to put us in possession of the beautiful, the sublime, and the comic, for these quite as much as the true and the good belong to the things of the higher life.

How about life’s disappointments? Higher than the life of thought is the life of faith and hope and love,—higher, because these are rooted and grounded in the life of thought, ripen above it as its highest fruitage and efflorescence. The nineteenth century has been an age of faith. Every scientific mind has profound faith in nature’s laws, in the universal efficacy of truth; and, like Agassiz and Gray and Drummond, multitudes of the best minds have made the step from faith in natural laws to faith in the laws which govern the spiritual world.

The common people evince a faith almost bordering on credulity in the readiness with which they accept the results of scientific research and investigation. Faith lies at the basis of great achievements. Bismarck declared that if he did not believe in the divine government of the world, he would not serve his country another day. “Take away my faith,” he exclaimed, “and you take away my country, too.” Whilst no religious test can he applied to those who teach in our public schools, our best people prefer teachers who have faith in the unseen to teachers who lack faith in the truths of revelation. In ways that escape observation, the spirit of faith passes from teacher to pupil, and gives the latter a sense of something to live for and something to be achieved.

Faith begets hope. The hope of glory, of rewards in civil and military life, of immortality on the pages of history, has stimulated to deeds of heroism and self-sacrifice, and will continue to do so to the end of time. The higher life knows of higher objects of hope than these. Immortality on the pages of history is only an immortality in printer’s ink. The true teacher wishes his pupils to cherish the hope of an immortality far more real than an immortality in printer’s ink; he seeks to implant in their hearts the hope of an immortal life in a world where the soul shall be robed in a body like unto Christ’s risen body, which Stephen saw in a vision of glory and Paul beheld in a manifestation of overwhelming splendor.

That which makes life worth living is the life of love. In the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, which is a poem, though lacking metre and rhyme, Paul speaks of faith, hope, and charity, and says that, of these three, the greatest is charity, or love, as the Revised Version translates it. Faith shall be changed to sight, and hope to glad fruition, but love shall abide forever. Throughout the ceaseless ages of eternity, love of the truth, as it is, in Jesus,—yea, man’s love for his Maker and his Saviour, and for the whole glorious company of the redeemed,—will continue to glow and to grow, lifting the soul to ever loftier heights of ecstasy and bliss. A foretaste of this ecstatic bliss is possible in this life. Love of home and country, of kindred and friends, of truth and righteousness, of beauty in all its forms, of goodness of every kind, up to the highest forms of the good, gives life on earth a heavenly charm. Even in this world, the love that binds human hearts, that makes homes and brotherhoods, that issues in deeds of kindness, friendship, and charity, is bringing more happiness to the race than all other agencies combined.

The school makes possible the higher life when it teaches the pupil to think. Right thinking puts intelligence into the labor of his hands, increases his earning-power, lays the foundation for his physical well-being, and lifts him above an existence that is a mere struggle for bread. It promotes the higher life by teaching him to think God’s thoughts, as enshrined in all His works, and the best thoughts of the best men, as embodied in literature and the humanities. It fits the pupil for complete living by developing in him the power to appreciate the beautiful in nature and art, power to think the true and to will the good, power to live the life of thought, and faith, and hope, and love.

THE END.