Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation

Chapter IX: Part 9

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I have said to the Dakotan and to the others here: "It was good for you to come--but the time may arrive, when it will be just as good for you to go.... When you see me covering old fields; when you come here for continual reviews of my little story; when your mind winces with the thought of what I am to do and say next, because you know it well already--arise and come no more, but in passing, say to me, 'To-day we did not get out of the circle of yesterday....' I shall know what is meant, and it shall be good for you to tell me, since one forgets. It may be that there is still enough strength for another voyage--that I may be constrained to leave Telemachus and go forth to the edge of the land "where lights twinkle among the rocks and the deep moans round with many voices."

Recently the Dakotan told me of a dream, and I asked him to write it. I think he will draw nearer to you, if you read the story that he brought me:

"This is the latest and most complete of many under-water
dreams that have come to me. In their thrall as a child I
learned the deeps of fear. I do not know why dreams of mine
are so often associated with water, unless at some time, way
back in the beginnings, the horror of a water-existence has
been so stamped upon me that it has been retained in
consciousness. As a child, water and strong winds drove me to
tears. I can remember no other things that brought marked
fear but these. One incident of wind, on a boat going to
Block Island Light-house, off Newport, remains as vivid to
this day as when it was enacted, and I was not yet five at
the time. Every one wondered at these peculiar fears, but the
explanation is plainer if one can look either back or beyond.

"Knowledge is but a glimmering of past experience. We are the
condensed sum of all our past activities. Normal mind and
memory are only of the immediate present, only as old as our
bodies, but once in a long time we fall by chance into
certain peculiar conditions of body, mind, or
soul--conditions that are invoking to great reaches of
consciousness back into the past. Normally our shell is too
thick; we are too dense and too conscious of our present
physical being and vitality, for the ancient one within us to
interpret to the brain. Even in sleep, the brain is usually
embroiled or littered with daily life matters. The brain has
not yet become a good listener, and the voice of the inner
man is ever a hushed whisper.

"The exceptionally low temperature of my body was the
immediate cause of this dream. Here is a conviction that I
brought up from it: I believe that any one by putting himself
into a state of very low temperature and vibration, almost
akin to hibernation, may be enabled to go back in
consciousness toward the Beginnings. Evidently red blood is
wholly of man, but in some way the white corpuscles of the
blood seem to be related to the cold-blooded animals and
hence to the past. Under conditions, such as sleeping on the
ground or in a cold, damp place, these white corpuscles may
be aided to gain ascendency over the heart, brain, and red
corpuscles. This accomplished, the past may be brought back.

"It was a cold, rainy Fall night that the dream came. A
bleak east wind blowing along the lake-shore, probed every
recess of the 'Pontchartrain,' the tiny open-work cottage I
used. The place was flushed like a sieve with wind and rain.
It leaked copiously and audibly, and there was no burrowing
away from the storm. I sought the blankets early in a state
of very low circulation. The last thing I was conscious of,
as I drifted off, was the cold, the low sound of the wind,
and the rain beating upon the roof....

"There was a cohering line through this dream, every detail
stamped upon my consciousness so deeply that the memory of it
upon awaking was almost as vivid as when I was immersed....
It began very slowly with a growing perception of a low
monotonous lap and wash of water and a slight heaving,
lifting sensation, as of my being swayed gently to and fro.
It was very cold, not the biting cold we know, but a dank,
lifeless, penetrating cold of water and darkness.... The
manner of my own form was not clear to me; I was of too low a
consciousness to be aware of many exterior particulars. I
merely knew I belonged to darkness and deep water. In fact,
during the dream I had hardly a sense of _being_, except
through the outer stimuli of cold and danger. These were
horribly plain. That I was a creature of the depths and dark,
a bleached single-cell, was doubtless a mental conclusion
from the waking contemplation afterward. In the dream, I
seemed of vast size, and I believe all little creatures do,
since they fill their scope as tightly as we. The spark of
consciousness, or life within, seemed so faint that part of
the time my body seemed a dead, immovable bulk. No sense of
self or body in comparison to outer things, was existent,
except when a larger form instilled me with fear.

"My dream seemed a direct reversion back into the Beginnings,
in form, consciousness, state of being, perception and
instinct--everything--so that I actually lived, in infinitely
dwindled consciousness, the terrible water-life.

"All was blackness. I possessed some slight volition of life
that contracted in the cold. I was not in any keen suffering;
I seemed too low and numbed to sense to the full the
unpleasantness of my condition.... Presently there came a
dawning light which gradually grew stronger. I did not seem
to have eyes, but was conscious of the ray seemingly through
the walls of my body. Slowly it increased, to a sickly wan
filter of grey. It was light shining through water, a light
which would have been no light to a human being. To me it was
intense and fearsome, seemed to reach centres of me that were
sensitive beyond expression. Though I was a mere blob,
boneless and quivering, the ray was foreign and I knew what
it was to cringe.

"And now I find the difficulty of interpreting the dream
exactly from the point of the Cell. These things that I write
I could not know then, except in smallest measure. As our
greater forces are diminished by passing through the brain,
these little affairs are increased by adjustment to man's
waking faculties. From now, I shall give the picture as it
appears to me from this distance:

"As the light increased, I contracted and sank slowly into
the depths. The bottom was not far. I descended in a flowing,
undulating fashion and settled softly on the water-bed,
beside a large, up-jutting fang of rock. It was black in the
depths. The cold penetrated all. Torpid and prone, I lay
there numbed into absolute quiescence. It seemed that a
torpid inertia, doomed to be everlasting, had settled upon
me. I knew no want, no desire, had not the slightest will to
move, to rest, to sleep, to eat, even to exist, just the
dimmest sense of watchfulness and fear. It was perfect
hibernation. I had descended into too low a degree of
temperature and vibration to feel the need even of
nourishment. I was becoming dead to the cold; everything was
a pulseless void. I should never have generated an impulse to
move again had not extraneous influences affected me after
seeming ages had passed.

"The bottom on which I now lay was of soft, oozy silt; about
me were rocks, slippery and covered with a coating of
grey-green slime. Spots in the slime moved. I could hear it,
or rather feel it--a sort of bubbling quake, mere beginnings
of the life impulse. The tops and sides of the rocks were
festooned with waving green fringes of growths, which trailed
out into the water. Long, snakelike fronds and stems of
whitish green, half-vegetable, half-animal, grew on the
bottom. They were stationary at their bases, but were lithe
and a-crawl with life in their stems, extending and
contracting into the water at intervals, in a spiral, snakey
manner. Their heads were like white-bleached flowers, with
hairy lips, which contracted and opened constantly, engulfing
the myriads of floating, microscopic forms.

"Upon the heads of some of the creepers were ghostly
phosphorescent lights, which winked on and off at intervals
as the stems waved gently to and fro. I did not have an
instinctive fear of these. They seemed friendly. They lit up
the black depths. They and I seemed of a similar bent; they
feared the forms that I feared and contracted tight to the
bottom when these enemies approached. There were certain
permanent spots about me that gave off other lights at
intervals. The whole bottom was a dim, vast region of
many-coloured lights, or more properly, dim lambent glows, of
blue, green and yellow, which winked and nodded on and off in
the blackness. They seemed to be the decoys of the feeders
that possessed them. Each glow lit up a circle in the depths
and seemed to attract food to the watcher who waved it. They
were all cold lights, mere phosphorescent gleams without the
searching, penetrating qualities of the light I had first
felt, and they did not bother me.

"... The ray was filtering down again. It was this that kept
me alive. It increased until all above was a wan grey. One by
one the many-coloured lights of the bottom winked off, the
long feelers and contractile stems were drawn in, and the
whole bottom became once more a motionless, dead-grey
world.... Little sacks without eyes in that grey light, the
gorging not begun, kept alive by the whip of fear. The low
life would have gone on to death or dissemination had it not
been for exterior forces which reached me in the shape of
Fear. I shall never forget it--the Fear of the Black Bottoms.

"There was a long, hideous suspense, as the Ray held me, and
the thing that I feared was not the Ray, but belonged with
it. In the midst of a kind of freezing paralysis, the
struggle to flee arose within me. Yet I was without means of
locomotion. Through sheer intensity of panic I expanded. Then
there was a thrusting forward of the inner vital centre
against the forward wall of the sack. It was the most vital
part of me that was thrust forward, the heart of a rudiment,
so to speak. That which remained, followed in a kind of flow.
The movement was an undulation forward, brought about by the
terror to escape.

"Fear is always connected with Behind. With the approach of
Danger I had started _forward_. There had been no forward nor
backward before, nor any sides or top to me. Now a back, a
dorsal aspect, came into being, and the vital centre was
thrust forward within the cell, so as to be farthest away
from the danger. It is in this way that the potential centre
of an organism came to be in the front, in the head, looking
forward and always pointed away from the danger--protected to
the last.

"As I flowed forward, the sticky fluid substance of my body
sucked into the oozy bottom. I spatted myself as flat as
possible, seeming to press the tenderest parts closest to the
bottom. And it is in this way that the vital parts of
organisms came to be underneath, on the ventral aspect,
protected from above by the sides and back. As the Fear
increased, I gained in strength and speed of locomotion, the
same parts of my form protruding rhythmically, faster and
easier, until I did not need to concentrate so intensely upon
the moving-act. Doubtless I covered ages of evolution in the
dream. It is in this way through the stimulus of Fear that
the rudiments of organs of locomotion were begun. And they
came in the Beginnings on the ventral side, because that side
was pressed close to the earth. Every sense, volition,
reasoning power--everything--was generated and fostered by
Fear in the Beginnings. So Fear is really the Mother of our
first overcoming of Inertia.

"I do not recall being devoured by that creature of the Ray;
and yet it seems as if half the life in the Bottoms was
clutched in the torture of that danger. The other half was
gorging.... Gorge, gorge, with unappeased appetite, body
bulging to the bursting point, the Devourers all about me,
the larger engulfing the smaller, not with mouths, but
literally enclosing their prey with the walls of their
bodies, so that the smaller flowed into the larger. And often
the engulfed would be of greater length than the engulfer....

"There was a sound made by the gorging, a distinct sound born
of gluttony, not audible, but to be felt by my sensitive
surfaces, a sort of emanation, not from the gorgers, but born
from the engrossing intensity of the gorging act. I shall
always remember it, a distinct 'ummmmmmm,' constant, and
rising and falling at times to a trifle faster or lower
pitch.

"Always, as the Ray would cross above me, there would be a
stoppage of the emanations from the gorgers, a sinking to the
bottom, and a rising again. Also there were Shadows,
sinister, flowing grey forms, that preyed about the rocky
bottom. These were more felt by me than heard or seen, and
instilled more deadly fear than the larger Shadows that
passed above. The drama of the feeding seemed doomed to go on
and on forever. Repletion would never have come to the
Gorgers. Only Fear broke the spell.

"I recall a last glimpse of that ghost-life of the depths.
About the rocks, the long snakelike stems and feelers were
extended, and the luring decoys waved and glowed again at the
ends of the stalks. With the cessation of the feeding, began
the vaster, unquenchable feeding of the engulfing plants. It
was steady, monotonous, inexhaustible--the winking and waving
of the blue-green glows, the clustering of the senseless
prey, a sudden extinguishing of the light, devouring--then
the nodding gleam again. No mercy, no feeling, no reason
existed in this ghost-region of bleached and bloodless
things. The law was the law of Fear and Gluttony. There was a
thrall to the whole drama which I am powerless to express.

"... The embryo in the womb eats and assimilates, all
unconscious. With life there is movement. The first movement
takes the form of sucking-in that which prolongs life. Then
there is the driving forward by Fear from without. Low life
is a vibration between Fear and Gluttony. In every movement
is the gain of power to make another movement. That is the
Law of life.

"I opened my eyes. The wan grey light of morning was shining
In my face. I felt weak and unrested. There were puddles of
water on the foot of the bed. The blankets lay heavily about
my limbs, and circulation was hardly sufficient to hold
consciousness. The effects of the dream oppressed me the rest
of that day and for long afterward."

FOOTNOTES:

[3] H. A. Sturtzel.

THE HILL ROCKS

Our tendency is to return to the pioneers for inspiration.... I was thinking this morning how in all our studies we had passed quickly over the intellectualists, the simplifiers, the synthesisers and explainers--back to the sources of philosophy and sanctity. It is there that we find the flame. We linger and return to such men as Boehme, Fichte, Romini-Serbati, Froebel, Swedenborg. We delight in the few great and isolated names of Greece and Rome that are above style. We turn continually to the perpetual fountains of India, but seldom to Egypt.

We love the prophets of the Old Testament, but despise chosen peoples at every appearance; we delight in the lineage of the Messiah; we are stimulated by the Hebrew literature, by its symbolism, its songs and precepts, the Oriental colour of it, the hierarchy of its saints, the strange splendour of its women, but as a book of devotion its chief significance is that of a huge vessel prepared for the coming of a Master.

The New Testament is our first book. Manhandled and perverted as it has been by early writers, who still wanted Moses and laboured under the misconception that Jesus was expounding the doctrines of Moses afresh, instead of refuting many of them--yet the New Testament stands highest above all hands pointing heavenward.

In the case of the teacher here, it was not the so-called orthodoxy that accomplished this allegiance to the New Testament. Modern churches drove him forth into the Farther East. It was the return from Patanjali and the Vedas and much of that excellent and ancient wisdom of the Earlier Arrival, that gave him a fresh surface for understanding the pilgrimage and the passion of Jesus.

Our own Tolstoi has done much to restore the Son of Mary to a sceptical generation. To us Tolstoi's great work is not through the vehicle of the novel. Though comparisons are everywhere questionable, it seems to us that the Russian's task on the later Scriptures is as significant as Luther's. Certainly he has prepared them to stand the more searching and penetrative gaze of the coming generation. Many of the new voices rise to declare that it is doubtful if there really was an historic Jesus. Still the man matters less than his influence. His story is emphatically in the world; the spirit of it lives above all dogma and vulgarity, even above nationalism. It is the breath of Brotherhood and Compassion. It is nearer to us and less complex than the story of the Buddha.

Every such coming heightens the voltage of spiritual power in the world. The greatest stories of the world are the stories of such comings. Of first importance in the education of children is the institution of an ideal of the imminence of great helpers, the Compassionates. Children become starry-eyed as they listen. I think if we could all shake ourselves clear of the temporal and the unseemly, we should find deep in our hearts, a strange expectancy. A woman said, as we talked of these things:

"I seem to have been expectant for centuries."

When such ideals are held in mind, an adjustment of conduct follows at once. To be ready (I am not talking religiously) for a revered Guest, one immediately begins to put one's house in order. Indeed, there's a reproach in finding the need of rushed preparation, in the hastening to clear corners and hide unseemly objects; and yet, this is well if the reorganisation is more than a passing thought. To make the ordering of one's house a life-habit is a very valid beginning in morality.

We talk continually of the greatest of men; sometimes our voices falter, and sentences are not finished. We have found many things alike about the Great Ones. First they had mothers who dreamed, and then they had poverty to acquaint them with sorrow. They came up hard, and they were always different from other children. They suffered more than the others about them, because they were more sensitive.

They met invariably the stiffest foe of a fine child--misunderstanding; often by that time, even the Mother had lost her vision. Because they could not find understanding in men and women and children, they drew apart. Such youths are always forced into the silence.... I often think of the education of Hiawatha by old Nokomis, the endless and perfect analogies of the forest and stream and field, by which a child with vision can gain the story of life. Repeatedly we have discussed the maiden who sustained France--her girlhood in the forests of Domremy. It was a forest eighteen miles deep to the centre, and so full of fairies that the priests had to come to the edge and give mass every little while to keep them in any kind of subjection. That incomparable maiden did not want the fairies in subjection. She was listening. From the centres of the forest came to her the messages of power.... Once when the Chapel group had left, I sat thinking about this maiden; and queerly enough, my mind turned presently to something in St. Luke, about the road to Emmaus--the Stranger who had walked with the disciples, and finally made himself known. And they asked one to the other after He had vanished: "Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked with us by the way, and while He opened to us the Scriptures?"

... Returning from their silences, these torture-quickened youths found work to do--work that people could not understand. The people invariably thought there must be a trick about the giving--that the eager one wanted hidden results for self.... Invariably, they were prodigious workers, men of incredible energy. Thus they ground themselves fine; and invariably, too, they were men of exalted personal conduct, though often they had passed before the fact was truly appreciated.

First of all, they were honest--that was the hill-rock. Such men come to make crooked paths straight, but first they straighten out themselves. They stopped lying to other men, and what was greater still, they stopped lying to themselves. Sooner or later men all came to understand that they had something good to give--those closest to them, not always seeing it first....

You couldn't buy them--that was first established; then they turned the energies of their lives outward instead of in. The _something_ immortal about them was the loss of the love of self. Losing that, they found their particular _something_ to do. They found their work--the one thing that tested their own inimitable powers--and that, of course, proved the one thing that the world needed from them. As self-men they were not memorable. Self-men try to gather in the results to themselves. The world-man wants to give something to his people--the best he has from his hand or brain or spirit. That's the transaction--the most important in any life--to turn out instead of in.... Here I am repeating the old formula for the making of men, as if in the thrill of the absolutely new--the eternal verity of loving one's neighbour.

Each man of us has his own particular knack of expression. Nothing can happen so important to a man as to find his particular thing to do. The best thing one man can do for another is to help him find his work. The man who has found his work gets from it, and through it, a working idea of God and the world. The same hard preparation that makes him finally valuable in his particular work, integrates the character that finally realises _its own religion_. The greatest wrong that has been done us by past generations is the detachment of work and religion--setting off the Sabbath as the day for expressing the angel in us, and marking six days for the progress of the animal.

All good work is happiness--ask any man who has found his work. He is at peace when the task is on, at his best. He is free from envy and desire. Even his physical organs are healthfully active. The only way to be well is to give forth. When we give forth work that tests our full powers, we are replenished by the power that drives the suns. Giving forth, we automatically ward off the destructive thoughts. Our only safe inbreathing physically, mentally, and spiritually is from the upper source of things----not in the tainted atmospheres of the crowds. A man's own work does not kill. It is stimulus, worry, ambition, the tension and complication of wanting results for self, that kill.

Each man stands as a fuse between his race and the creative energy that drives the whole scheme of life. If he doubles this fuse _in_ to self, he becomes a non-connective. He cannot receive from the clean source, nor can he give. What he gets is by a pure animal process of struggle and snatch. He is a sick and immoral creature. Turning the fuse outward, he gives his service to men, and dynamos of cosmic force throw their energy through him to his people. He lives. According to the carrying capacity of his fuse is he loved and remembered and idealised for the work he does.

A jar of water that has no lower outlet can only be filled so full before it spills, but open a lower vent and it can be filled according to the size of the outpouring. Now there is a running stream in the vessel. All life that does not run is stagnant.

There is a task for every man. We are born with different equipments, but if we have a gift, be very sure it is not fortuitous. We have earned it. It should make us the finer workman. But all work is good. The handle of an axe is a poem.

We would never destroy the natural resources of the earth, if we, as men, found our work. Rather we would perceive the way of old Mother Earth who turns to her God for light and power, and from that pure impregnation, brings forth her living things. We would shudder at all destruction and greed, and perceive as good workmen the excellent values of woods and coals and gases, and the finer forces of the soil. We would perceive that they are to be cared for; that their relation to man is service; that they have no relation to great individual fortunes. These are the free gifts from our Mother. As good workmen we would realise that greed and competition pulls upon, and tortures into activity, all that is insane within us.

The thing that brings men together in real talk, that makes the hush in Chapel or where talk is anywhere; the thing that clutches the throat, and sometimes brings the smart to the eyes--is the quality of men who have found their work, and who have lost the love of self. They are the conservers. They see first what is good for us to do and be. We follow their thoughts in action afterward, as water follows the curve of a basin. They go after the deep-down men; they dream of the shorter passages to India; they sense the new power in the world; their faces are turned to the East for the rising of new stars. Often they die to make us see, but others spring to finish their work. Our hearts burn within us when we speak of their work.

ASSEMBLY OF PARTS

Others have come; there are fresh wonders to me, but this book must close.... The development of each young mind is like doing a book--each a different book. Fascination attends the work. I assure you a teacher gets more than he can give.... Every mill should be a school. Every professional man should call for his own. A man's work in the world should be judged by his constructive contacts with the young minds about him. A man should learn the inspiration which comes in service for the great Abstraction, the many, from which there is no answer; but he can only become powerful and unerring by trying out the results of his offerings face to face with his own group. It should be as natural for a matured man to gather his mental and spiritual familiars about him as it is for him to become the head of a domestic establishment.

There is chance for the tradesmen to turn a little from ledger and margin, to the faces of the young about them--those who have come for the wages of bread. Many philanthropists would carve their names on stone, as great givers to the public. The public will not take these things personally; the public laughs and lightly criticises. Men who have nothing but money to give away cannot hope to receive other than calculating looks and laughter that rings with derision.

The time will come when matters of trade in the large shall be conducted nationally and municipally. The business of man is to produce something. The man who produces nothing, but who sits in the midst of other men's goods, offering them for sale at a price greater than he paid, such a man moves in the midst of a badly-lit district of many pitfalls. It is the same with a man at a desk, before whom pass many papers representing transactions of merchandise and whose business it is to take a proprietary bite out of each. He develops a perverted look at life, and a bad bill of moral health. There is no exception to this, though he conduct a weekly bible lesson for the young, even move his chair to a church every seventh day.

The drama of the trade mind is yet to be written. It is a sordid story; the figure at the last is in no way heroic. It would not be a popular story if done well.

The time is not far off, except to those whose eyes are dim, when countries will be Fatherlands in the true sense--in the sense of realising that the real estate is not bounded land, vaulted gold, not even electrified matter, but the youth of the land. Such is the treasure of the Fatherland. The development of youth is the first work of man; the highest ideal may be answered first hand. Also through the development of the young, the father best puts on his own wisdom and rectitude.

The ideal of education has already been reversed at the bottom. There is pandemonium yet; there is colossal stupidity yet, but Order is coming in. It would be well for all men meditatively to regard a kindergarten in action. Here are children free in the midst of objects designed to supply a great variety of attractions. There is that _hum_ in the room. It is not dissonance. The child is encouraged to be himself and express himself; never to impinge upon his neighbour's rights, but to lose himself in the objects that draw him most deeply.

I have mentioned the man who caught the spiritual dream of all this, who worked it out in life and books. One of his books was published nearly a hundred years ago. It wasn't a book on kindergarten, but on the education of man. I have not read this of Froebel's work. I wanted to do these studies my own way, but I know from what I have seen of kindergartens, and what teachers of kindergartens have told me, that the work is true--that "The Education of Man" is a true book. Nor would it have lived a hundred years otherwise.

The child is now sent to kindergarten and for a year is truly taught. The process is not a filling of brain, but an encouragement of the deeper powers, their organisation and direction. At the end of the year, the child is sent into the first grade, where the barbaric process of competitive education and brain-cramming is carried on as sincerely as it was in Froebel's time.... A kindergarten teacher told me in that low intense way, which speaks of many tears exhausted:

"I dare not look into the first-grade rooms. We have done so differently by them through the first year. When the little ones leave us, they are wide open and helpless. They are taken from a warm bath to a cold blast. Their little faces change in a few days. Do you know the ones that stand the change best? The commoner children, the clever and hard-headed children. The little dreamers--the sensitive ones--are hurt and altered for the worse. Their manner changes to me, when I see them outside. You do not know how we have suffered."

Some of the greatest teachers in America to-day are the kindergarten teachers; not that they are especially chosen for quality, but because they have touched reality in teaching. They have seen, even in the very little ones, that response which is deeper than brain. If the great ideal that is carried out through their first year were continued through seven years, the generation thus directed would meet life with serenity and without greed. They would make over the world into a finer place to be.

* * * * *

I wonder if I may dare to say it once more?... It came this way in Chapel just a few days ago. There was a pencil in my hand, and something of man's ideal performance here below appeared more than ever clearly. I am putting down the picture, much as it came then, for the straightest way to write anything is as you would tell it:

"... This pencil is a man, any man. Above is spirit; below matter. The world of spirit is finished. The plan is already thought out there, to the utmost detail. This above is the Breath, the Conception, the Emanation, the Dream, the Universal Energy--philosophers have called it by many names, but they mean the God-Idea wrought of necessity in Spirit, since God is spirit.

"The world of matter below is not finished. Certain parts are completed, but not all, and the assembly of parts is just begun. The material world is lost in the making of parts, forgetting that the plan is one--that the parts of matter must be assembled into a whole--that a replica must be made in matter of the one great spiritual Conception. So long as men are identified with parts, there is dissonance from the shops of earth, a pulling apart instead of together.

"The many are almost ready to grasp the great unifying conception. This is the next step for the human family as a whole; this the present planetary brooding. Much we have suffered from identifying ourselves with parts. Rivalries, boundaries, jealousies, wars--all have to do with the making of parts. Beauty, harmony, peace and brotherhood have to do with the assembly of parts into one. That which is good for the many is good for the one; and that which is good for the one is good for the many--_the instant_ we leave the part and conceive the whole.

"All the high-range voices for hundreds of years have proclaimed that the plan is one. The world to-day is roused with the Unifiers--voices of men in every city and plain crying out that we are all one in aim and meaning, that the instruments are tuned, the orchestra ready, the music in place--but the players, alas, lost as yet in frenzy for their own little parts. The baton of the leader is lifted, but they do not hear. In their self-promulgation they have not yet turned as one to the conductor's eyes. The dissonance is at its highest, yet the hour has struck for the lift of harmony.

"Look again at the pencil that stands for man. Above is the spiritual plan all finished. Every invention, every song and poem and heroism to be, is there. One by one for ages, the aspiring intelligence of man has touched and taken down the parts of this spiritual plan, forced the parts into matter, making his dream come true. Thus have come into the world our treasures. We preserve them--every gift from a spiritual source. Often we preserve them (until they are fully understood) against our will. The mere matter-models break down and are lost, for matter changes endlessly until it is immortalised, as our bodies must be through the refinement of spiritual union.

"Our pioneers, by suffering and labour, even by fasting and prayer, have made themselves fine enough to contact some little part of that finished plan. They have lowered it into matter for us to see--step by step--the song into notes, the poem into words, the angel into paint or stone; and the saints have touched dreams of great service, bringing down the pictures of the dream somehow in matter--and their own bodies often to martyrdom....

"Below the pencil is the world of matter, at this hour of its highest disorganisation. The very terror and chaos of the world is an inspiration to every unifying voice. Here below are already many parts; above, the plan as a whole and the missing parts. Man stands between--the first creature to realise that there is an above, as well as a below. All creatures beneath man are driven; they look down. Man alone has looked up; man has raised himself erect and may take what he will from the spiritual source to electrify his progress. Man becomes significant the moment he realises that the plan is not for self, but for the race; not for the part, but for the whole.

"I have written it in many different ways, and told it in many more. There are endless analogies. Thousands before me have written and sung and told the same. It is the great Story. We see it working out even in these wrecking days. The plan is already in the souls of men.... And what has this to do with education?

"Everything. The brain sees but the part. The development of brain will never bring to child or man the conception of the spiritual plan. There is a man to come for every missing part. Each man, as he develops, is more and more a specialist. These missing parts shall be taken down from spirit and put into matter by men whose intrinsic gifts are developed to contact them. Thus have come the great poems and inventions so far, the splendid sacrifices of men, and all renunciation for the healing of the nations.

"I would first find the work for the child. The finer the child the easier this part of the task. Then I would develop the child to turn to a spiritual source for his inspiration--his expectation to a spiritual source for every good and perfect thing. The dream is there; the other half of the circle is to produce the dream in matter.

* * * * *

"Education is thus religion--but not the man-idea of religion. It has nothing to do with creeds or cults, with affirmations or observances. It has to do with establishing connection with the sources of power, and bringing the energy down into the performance of constructive work in matter. Religion isn't a feeling of piety or devoutness; it is action. Spirituality is intellect inspired.

"The mountain is broad at the base only. There are many paths upward. These paths are far apart only at the base. On the shoulder of the mountain we hear the voices of those who have taken the other paths. Still higher, we meet. The Apex is a point; the plan is one.

"I would teach the young mind to find his own voice, his own part, his own message. It is there above him. True training is the refinement, the preparing of a surface fine enough to receive his part. That is the inspiration. The out-breath--the right hand of the process--is action, making a model in matter of the thing received.

"All training that does not encourage the child to look into the Unseen for his power, not only holds, but draws him to the commonness of the herds.

"... Many men to-day can believe in angels who cannot believe in fairies; but the child who sees the changes of light in the lowliest shadows, whose fancy is filled with little figures of the conservers and colourers of nature, shall in good time see the angels--and one of that host shall come forward (which is more important and to the point) bringing a task for the child to do.

"I say to the children here: 'I do not see the things you do, and in that I am your inferior. They shut the doors upon me when I was little, not meaning to, but the world always does that. That fineness of seeing went out from my eyes, but it is so good a thing that I do not want you to lose it. And always I am ready to listen, when you tell me what you have seen.'"

THE END

BY WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

MIDSTREAM

... A hint from the first-year's recognition of a book that was made to remain in American literature:

_Boston Transcript_: If it be extravagance, let it be so, to say that Comfort's account of his childhood has seldom been rivaled in literature. It amounts to revelation. Really the only parallels that will suggest themselves in our letters are the great ones that occur in _Huckleberry Finn_.... This man Comfort's gamut is long and he has raced its full length. One wonders whether the interest, the skill, the general worth of it, the things it has to report of all life, as well as the one life, do not entitle _Midstream_ to the very long life that is enjoyed only by the very best of books.

_San Francisco Argonaut_: Read the book. It is autobiography in its perfection. It shows more of the realities of the human being, more of god and devil in conflict, than any book of its kind.

_Springfield Republican_: It is difficult to think of any other young American who has so courageously reversed the process of writing for the "market" and so flatly insisted upon being taken, if at all, on his own terms of life and art. And now comes his frank and amazing revelation, _Midstream_, in which he captures and carries the reader on to a story of regeneration. He has come far; the question is, how much farther will he go?

Mary Fanton Roberts in _The Craftsman_: Beside the stature of this book, the ordinary novel and biography are curiously dwarfed. You read it with a poignant interest and close it with wonder, reverence and gratitude. There is something strangely touching about words so candid, and a draught of philosophy that has been pressed from such wild and bitter-sweet fruit. The message it contains is one to sink deep, penetrating and enriching whatever receptive soul it touches. This man's words are incandescent. Many of us feel that he is breathing into a language, grown trite from hackneyed usage, the inspiration of a quickened life.

Ida Gilbert Myers in _Washington Star_: Courage backs this revelation. The gift of self-searching animates it. Honesty sustains it. And Mr. Comfort's rare power to seize and deliver his vision inspires it. It is a tremendous thing--the greatest thing that this writer has yet done.

George Soule in _The Little Review_: Here is a man's life laid absolutely bare. A direct, big thing, so simple that almost no one has done it before--this Mr. Comfort has dared. People who are made uncomfortable by intimate grasp of anything, to whom reserve is more important than truth--these will not read _Midstream_ through, but others will emerge from the book with a sense of the absolute nobility of Mr. Comfort's frankness.

Edwin Markham in _Hearst's Magazine_: Will Levington Comfort, a novelist of distinction, has given us a book alive with human interest, with passionate sincerity, and with all the power of his despotism over words. He has been a wandering foot--familiar with many strands; he has known shame and sorrow and striving; he has won to serene heights. He tells it all without vaunt, relating his experience to the large meanings of life for all men, to the mystic currents behind life, out of which we come, to whose great deep we return.

_12mo., Net, $1.25_

End of Project Gutenberg's Child and Country, by Will Levington Comfort

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Child and Country: A Book of the Younger GenerationChapter IX: Part 9

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