THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 A STUDY OF 
 LIFE'S DEEPER FORCES 
 
 BY 
 JAMES THOMPSON BIXBY, Ph.D. 
 
 Author of '"The New World and the New Thought^'" 
 
 *' The Ethics of Evolution,^* '* Religion and 
 
 Science as Allies ^'^ etc., etc. 
 
 
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 'iJ^^n^S 
 
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 1 INLUCE- 
 f VERITAIIS 
 
 
 
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 ^^^ 
 
 1 
 
 BOSTON 
 AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 
 
 1912 
 
Copyright, 1912 
 AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 
 
 
 \4 vi 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I Vitality and Mechanism . 
 
 II The Cosmic Motor Power 
 
 III Atom and Spirit . 
 
 IV Purpose in Nature . 
 V Law and Providence 
 
 VI Good the Final Goal 
 
 VII Fate or Choice . 
 
 VIII Our Self-Made World 
 
 IX Partners in World-Making 
 
 X Search the Deep Things . 
 
 PAGE 
 1 
 
 24. 
 
 41 
 
 55 
 
 82 
 
 103 
 
 125 
 
 159 
 
 175 
 
 206 
 
 271810 
 
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 CHAPTER I 
 VITALITY AND MECHANISM 
 
 One of the notable things in that notable 
 book of the Old Testament containing the 
 prophecies of Ezekiel is the curious vision with 
 which the book opens. 
 
 A labyrinth of wheels and monstrous crea- 
 tures — the despair of commentators — is de- 
 scribed, where within the beryl-tinted wheels 
 are still other wheels, and again within each 
 wheel there is enclosed the spirit of some liv- 
 ing creature. Whenever any draughtsman 
 has sought to make a representation of these 
 winged cherubim, with their bovine feet and 
 symbolic faces of beast and man, appearing 
 like burning coals, or has tried to sketch pic- 
 tures of these enclosing wheels that were each 
 enclosed by other wheels and in their swift mo- 
 tion followed the guidance of the living spirits 
 within — whenever, I say, any artist has tried 
 to depict this vision he has found it impos- 
 sible to imagine it without becoming involved 
 in inextricable confusion. 
 
 Nevertheless, the general idea symbolized by 
 this vision is one which is not merely quite ra- 
 tional, but is an idea most significant and in- 
 
2 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 structlve. For the essential lesson of the vision 
 is that every living creature has around him 
 some revolving machinery, and that within all 
 the mechanical wheel-works which are visible 
 there is a living soul as the motor power and 
 directing agency of the enclosing enginery. 
 
 Think for a moment of that phrase: "The 
 spirit of the living creature in the wheels." 
 Is it not a wonderfully terse and pregnant 
 summing up of the infinitely vast and varied 
 phenomena of the universe.? What wheels 
 within wheels characterize the Cosmos? 
 Whirling suns and planets, satellites re- 
 volving punctually in their orbits, earth- 
 circling tides, the constant circuit of va- 
 pors from sea and lake to cloud and back 
 again by rain drop and streamlet to mother 
 ocean, and that Protean circle of transforma- 
 tions by which the solar energy changes from 
 light to heat, and heat to chemic or electric 
 attraction and returns again without loss of 
 original force — what wheels within wheels con- 
 stitute the complexity of Nature ! 
 
 A great German scientist, seeking a title 
 for his work on the mysterious phenomena of 
 vitality, could find none so satisfactory to him 
 as "The Circulation of Life." The very con- 
 dition of vitality seems to be this constant ro- 
 tary motion. In man, the blood under the un- 
 wearied beat of the heart must course out to 
 
VITALITY AND MECHANISM 3 
 
 the capillaries and brain cells with its fresh 
 supplies of nutriment and energy and must 
 then flow back again to the lungs to become 
 purified and recharged with oxygen. The 
 nerve currents must flow with their sense im- 
 pressions from the surface up the sensory 
 nerves to the brain and back again in appro- 
 priate motor responses to the muscles. In 
 lung, heart, ganglion, blood corpuscle, cell 
 and molecule, there is a constant round. There 
 is continual efflux and influx, consumption and 
 replenishment. It is only by this ceaseless dy- 
 ing and as ceaseless rebirth, that animate be- 
 ings keep alive. 
 
 And to maintain this circulation of life, what 
 curious and complicated machinery in every 
 part of the body — the valves of the heart, the 
 batteries of the brain, the triangular muscle 
 of the chin, the levers of arm and leg, with 
 their beautiful ball and socket joints, the key- 
 board of the ear with its three thousand strings, 
 and the hundred other equally ingenious con- 
 trivances that make up this moving house of 
 flesh, most of them working so automatically 
 and perfectly that it is only on the occasions 
 that they get out of order that man takes any 
 thought of the complicated mechanisms and 
 delicate adjustments by which he walks and 
 talks and breathes. 
 
 In former days life and mind were fancied 
 
4 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 to be powers only loosely connected with the 
 grosser flesh into which they were injected. 
 But the investigations of modern physiologists 
 have shown the connection of the vital and 
 mental with their material organs to be of the 
 closest kind. Only through the fuel of food 
 can the flame of hfe be kept alive, and every 
 vital spark costs its inexorable "quid pro-quo" 
 in disintegrated tissue. When we would get 
 extra muscular exertion from a laborer we must 
 give him an extra amount of nutritive sub- 
 stance to convert into force. The grass-feed- 
 ing ox, from the nature of the case, cannot 
 compete in speed or strength with the flesh- 
 feeding tiger. 
 
 Even the mind is dependent on its wheels, 
 its nervous mechanism. Slice ofl^, layer by 
 layer, a pigeon's brains and in the same meas- 
 ure you pare oiF its power of feeling and of 
 thought. Each of our senses, — sight, hearing, 
 smell, language — has its respective brain-cen- 
 ter. Cut out this cerebral seat and the cor- 
 responding faculty disappears. 
 
 What unwelcome thoughts at times obtrude 
 themselves upon us; what strange reproduc- 
 tions of habits and peculiarities of ancestors, 
 and what mysterious impulses, foreign to our 
 personal taste and choice, occasionally take 
 possession of us. When we are in an idle mood, 
 how thought follows thought, and how one men- 
 
VITALITY AND MECHANISM 5 
 
 tal picture succeeds another along the well 
 grooved channels of association, driven by some 
 intellectual enginery that seems quite alien to 
 our own personality. Or in the moral world, 
 what a bundle of habits does man often seem to 
 be — a conglomeration of half a dozen progeni- 
 tors, a mere will-less scale-yard, going up or 
 down, just according to the preponderance of 
 interested motives put into the mental weigh- 
 ing pans. 
 
 All these mechanical conditions of life have 
 to be admitted by the candid mind. It is only 
 in the minute and curious detail into which mod- 
 ern research has pushed its probe that there is 
 anything new in this line of facts. The essen- 
 tial truth that a sound mind always depends 
 upon a sound body has been acknowledged for 
 centuries. 
 
 But equally true and equally to be acknowl- 
 edged is the converse — that for the body's 
 soundness and activity there is needed a healthy 
 and active spirit ; it is equally evident that 
 flesh needs soul as much as soul needs flesh. 
 
 The materialist, concentrating his attention 
 solely on the mechanical side of life, of which 
 I have been speaking, would present this as the 
 sum total of vital existence. Animals and men, 
 the lowest star fish and the greatest of poets, 
 (he tells us) are all just so many machines. 
 The food supply determines the egg and the egg 
 
6 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 produces the bird or bee. As are the respect- 
 ive environments, sense-impressions and links 
 of association, so must be the man's ideas. 
 
 "Without phosphorous no thought," was the 
 favorite adage of the German man of science, 
 Moleschott. According to Naturalistic Mon- 
 ism, every act is predetermined by its conditions 
 before it arises. Free choice is a myth, and an 
 idea not generated or conditioned by the pliys- 
 ical environment is a chimera. He who is 
 most confident of the dominant power to direct 
 his course is the veriest bit of driftwood in the 
 eddies of inevitable destiny. 
 
 Such are the superficial dicta of the material- 
 ists. They are so fascinated by the shapes and 
 motions of the wheels surrounding the living 
 beings that they forget to ask, "What moves 
 them?" They are content to watch only the 
 outside changes and so miss the deeper and es- 
 sential qualities of humanity — the vital force, 
 the evolutive type, the comparing judgment 
 and the choosing Will. Even to keep the body 
 alive and in good order for its three score years, 
 there must be more than mechanism. For its 
 great peculiarity is the constant repair of its 
 daily waste, decay and minor ills and injuries. 
 If it is an engine, then it is one that contains 
 within an automatic registry of the experience 
 of its ancestors for centuries ; and as Prof. 
 J. Arthur Thomson says : "It is a self 
 
VITALITY AND MECHANISM 7 
 
 stoking, self-repairing, self-preservative, self- 
 adjusting, self-increasing, self- reproducing 
 engine." But who ever knew a machine to 
 mend its own breaks and replenish its own 
 wastes? It is by this super-mechanical power, 
 ever superintending, remaking and over-ruling 
 the ordinary chemic and physical tendencies 
 that would disintegrate its parts, that every 
 animate organism lives. 
 
 And it is the same spirit of life within the 
 physical machinery that is the real agent in 
 our mental and moral life. Powerful as are 
 our habits, our prejudices, and our fleshly in- 
 stincts, yet that which makes a man a man is 
 his consciousness that he can over-rule these. 
 He can check these impulses before they are in- 
 carnated in actions ; he can break away from 
 old and undesirable habits and initiate a new 
 kind of moral custom ; and, under the influence 
 of that loftier aspiration for an ideal best that 
 harries progressive humanity, he can turn away 
 from all beaten paths to climb spiritual heights 
 never before attained by man. 
 
 The mind has a power independent of the 
 forces, whether material or social, pressing 
 upon it, that may properly be called "the sov- 
 ereignty of the self in willing." Behind all 
 the cerebral machinery there hide, as the main 
 spring that moves it, those noble powers by 
 which man is a living soul and a child of God. 
 
8 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 It Is because of this infinite reservoir of strength 
 on which he can always draw (and only because 
 of this) that the will of the virtuous man ex- 
 hibits this peculiar mechanical paradox, viz: 
 that its power increases, not diminishes, with 
 the resistance. Physical force is a constant 
 quantity. But the moral power of the still 
 small voice draws aid from an inexhaustible 
 source to supply whatever energy it needs to 
 overcome the tide of temptation. 
 
 The limited outer view of things that leads 
 so many to a materialistic solution of the great 
 "World Riddle" is as superficial as it is de- 
 pressing. 
 
 They who delve too persistently in the base- 
 ment excavations of the Cosmic Temple often 
 fail to see the heaven-reaching pinnacles for 
 whose support these deep foundations were laid, 
 even when the sunlight of knowledge gilds them 
 with its brightest illumination. But they who 
 look at the evolving universe with the search- 
 ing vision of spiritual insight see in every 
 marvel of natural beauty and in every high 
 experience of the soul the fragrant blossom of 
 a Divine life and love, unfolding petal by petal. 
 Just as surely as all the loveliness and perfume 
 that emerge from the hyacinth when it comes 
 to full bloom were infolded at the start in the 
 homely bulb, so do all the spiritual forces and 
 consciousness, which have been evolved in the 
 
VITALITY AND MECHANISM 9 
 
 highest reaches of humanity, speak of the Di- 
 vine Power and Reason at the heart of the uni- 
 verse. The wing of the bird implies the air to 
 which it is adjusted. The eye of the animal 
 implies the corresponding light. Each organ 
 answers to an environing element which stimu- 
 lated it into existence. So the spirit's eye im- 
 plies the spiritual light and the immaterial ob- 
 ject. Our human reason implies the Universal 
 Reason and as we listen to the music of hu- 
 man duty and noble self-sacrifice we hear the 
 heart-beat of an Infinite Love. 
 
 To ride, as man does, at the head of the 
 procession of creation, in his triumphal car, 
 piled high with all the prizes and dainties of 
 earth, seems a sufficiently proud position ; but 
 man is so constituted that it is not enough for 
 the satisfaction of his heart. The human con- 
 sciousness needs to find and recognize its rela- 
 tion to the infinite and heavenly. The magni- 
 tudes of matter may suggest the limitless ex- 
 pansion of the Divine, but it is only through 
 the pure soul that we enter into its secret. If 
 George Eliot (as one who well knew the human 
 heart has said) had ever pressed a lifeless babe 
 to her bereaved bosom, she would never have 
 been content with the vague impersonal sur- 
 vival of her Choir Invisible. 
 
 You may call the beatitudes of the Galilean 
 Mount mere misty paradoxes, and those yearn- 
 
10 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 ings, that distinguish man from the beasts of 
 the field, prismatic bubbles that dissolve at 
 the pin-prick of common sense; but it is these 
 that illumine life with light which no earthly 
 darkness can dull nor care overshadow nor the 
 night of death extinguish. 
 
 Thus in our personal life and conduct we 
 should ever see within the wheels the living 
 spirit. And, secondly, in our view of the uni- 
 verse, in our philosophical and religious inter- 
 pretations, a similar conjunction of the me- 
 chanical and the vital should be recognized. 
 
 The science and theology of former days 
 acknowledged only the spiritual. The super- 
 natural was everywhere in the foreground; the 
 natural in the background. 
 
 To the chanters of the Vedas every flicker- 
 ing flame was a living creature, an appearance 
 of Agni, the fire god ; the Greeks beheld in every 
 rustling tree a Dryad, in every babbling foun- 
 tain a water nymph. The prevalent faith of 
 all the early nations, as of savages to-day, was 
 similar. Sun and moon, cloud, storm, evening 
 breeze, each had its impelling divinity. Each 
 spirit followed his own caprice on the impulse 
 of the moment. Nowhere was there any 
 fixed order. With the ascent of thought to 
 the higher faith of Monotheism, the only 
 change, for a long time, was that every ca- 
 tastrophe or trouble was interpreted as a retri- 
 
VITALITY AND MECHANISM 11 
 
 bution sent from the Supreme God upon the 
 sufferer for some known or secret sin. Life 
 was a succession of special providences, and 
 the career of every prophet or saint a series of 
 signs and wonders, manifesting the direct in- 
 tervention of the Most High. 
 
 Our modern thought, however, has gone to 
 the very opposite extreme. No wind bloweth 
 where it listeth; the wildest gust has its ap- 
 pointed course, from which it cannot swerve. 
 
 By uniform laws, every continent has 
 been moulded and uplifted. By simple proc- 
 esses of variation, struggle for existence and 
 accumulation of hereditary gains, the rudi- 
 mentary creatures have developed into complex 
 and elaborate organisms ; the tree of life has 
 sent forth a thousand different stocks and the 
 most curious and varied forms appear on its 
 genealogical stem. In all these diverse species, 
 in all their ingenious organs and vital adjust- 
 ments, in the rise, growth and decay of nations, 
 and in the most astonishing coincidences of 
 personal or social events, modern science sees 
 only the products of that great machine-shop 
 of interacting, unresting wheels of law and 
 force that we call Nature. 
 
 Now, the natural result of this extension of 
 the network of law and its mechanical processes 
 over the whole universe is at first most chilling 
 to faith. When the believer who has been 
 
12 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 brought up in the common conception of the 
 Deity as a vague presence immensely greater 
 than man, but with the personal loves and dis- 
 likes, moods of wrath, pity, imperfect counsels, 
 changeable purposes and incomplete forethought 
 which are characteristic of humanity, — when 
 such a believer, I say, comes by scientific investi- 
 gation to abandon these ideas, what a loss he 
 feels ! In what a freezing waste and friendless 
 world he seems to find himself. Having always 
 thought of God as the great intervener and re- 
 pairer of the cosmic system, manifest in every 
 mystery or eccentricity of the processes of Na- 
 ture, this reduction of the perturbations and 
 irregularities of the world to mechanical laws 
 seems to banish God from the universe. 
 
 This is the ground of that grave prejudice 
 which so large a part of the religious world has 
 against the doctrine of evolution. Since the 
 great champions of this pregnant law have 
 shown how every complex and higher phenom- 
 enon of the world has had its origin in some 
 simpler and lower form or force, and by their 
 astronomic, geologic and biological researches 
 have expanded the sway of this principle till it 
 is made to include the farthest nebulag and the 
 utmost rim of telescopic ken, God has seemed 
 to be pushed outside the verge of his own uni- 
 verse and made henceforth a superfluous hy^ 
 pothesis. 
 
VITALITY AND MECHANISM 13 
 
 Now, candid Christian thought must admit 
 the mediation of these mechanisms and wheels 
 — the wheel of evolution, the wheel of heredity, 
 of struggle for existence, of physical conditions 
 and environment, of unbroken order. 
 
 But scientific thought, if that also is candid, 
 must recognize the living spirit within the 
 wheels as even more essential. As the great 
 German philosopher, Lotze, has said: "The 
 true source of the life of science lies in showing 
 how absolutely universal, in the structure of 
 the world, is the mission of mechanism, yet how 
 completely subordinate is its significance?" 
 
 A profounder analysis of these modern theo- 
 ries and the methods which they suppose points 
 us back to that very supersensuous realm that 
 they are thought to make unnecessary. There 
 can be no evolution without a preceding involu- 
 tion from a power mighty and wise enough to 
 produce the marvels that later appear. 
 
 The materialist who explains life and thought 
 and all the other thousand wonders of the world 
 as but re-arrangements of an original stock of 
 energy and motion in the primal nebula only 
 accounts for the continuance of the world's ac- 
 tivities in some shape or other. This account 
 does not explain the wise and orderly direction 
 and harmony of these activities. To account 
 for that we must have a sufficient wisdom and 
 beneficence in the First Cause. The material- 
 
14 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 istic theory does not account even for the un- 
 decayed and freshly renewed action and ener- 
 gies of our universe. For on pure mechanical 
 principles it ought to be constantly losing its 
 working energy, and it is necessary, as Profes- 
 sors Tait and Stewart have shown, to suppose 
 an "Unseen Universe" surrounding us, which 
 may feed the visible universe and maintain its 
 customary activities. That which makes evolu- 
 tion a process of real progress, not a mere 
 swinging round the circle, is the progressive 
 saturation of matter by spirit which it exhibits. 
 More and more every day, as especially the 
 great discovery of the Roentgen rays illus- 
 trates, science is acknowledging the existence 
 around us of forces and substances which pass 
 through every pore of our bodies, and yet are 
 far too subtle to be weighed in any balance or 
 to be seen by any microscope. 
 
 In the processes of evolution it is these in- 
 fluences from a higher plane that especially ac- 
 celerate the development of life. How slow 
 was the upward climb of the vegetable kingdom 
 while its progress was carried forward chiefly 
 by the influence of the environment, fortuitous 
 variation and natural selection. How bare of 
 beauty was it and how meager in form and 
 variety! But when the higher forces of ani- 
 mal desire and visual pleasure and esthetic 
 taste came to act upon it, as bee and moth 
 
VITALITY AND MECHANISM 15 
 
 and butterfly became intermediaries in the 
 work of vegetable union and reproduction, what 
 an amazing diversity of form and glory of 
 adornment, and what rapid ascent in com- 
 plex organization took place! In the animal 
 kingdom, for example, it was only after the 
 mental forces of desire and effort, use, disuse 
 and habit came into play that the chief prog- 
 ress in complex organization was made. It 
 was these mental factors, as Prof. Cope and the 
 naturalists of the Neo-Lamarckian school have 
 shown, to which is due the building up of the 
 chief organs of the body, especially the feet, 
 hands, teeth, jaws, eyes and brain. So in hu- 
 man civilization, it is the uplift of a few superior 
 minds, in raising and inspiring the common 
 herd that has chiefly carried humanity forward. 
 Similarly, I believe, these highest human minds 
 — the great geniuses, the prophets and re- 
 formers and, indeed, all who have candidly 
 opened the windows of the soul to the light of 
 truth and right, — have in their turn been illumi- 
 nated by the influx and inspirations of the great 
 unseen world of spirit in which we are im- 
 mersed and have been drawn up and strength- 
 ened by our contact with it. 
 
 If the soul of animal and man has done so 
 much in evolution, how much more ought we to 
 credit to the Over-soul? 
 
 When the air plant, hung up in a room, gains 
 
16 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 weight and substance, we know there must be 
 in the air itself a source of nutrient supply. 
 So when the minds of men grow and burgeon 
 without visible feeding, we know it is by draw- 
 ing in and assimilating the invisible spiritual 
 nutriment. It is this continuous communion 
 of the finite with the infinite that we call revela- 
 tion. Conceived as some irregular and miracu- 
 lous injection of infallible truth which the mind 
 of a prophet or saint passively receives and 
 records without the slightest shade of human 
 errancy or imperfection, revelation is a difficult 
 thing to credit. But conceived as a constant 
 and orderly inflow and pressure of the ever 
 active Divine energy and light on the finite 
 mind, giving sensitiveness to the conscience, 
 illumination to the intellect and fortitude to 
 the righteous will (but conditioned and tinged, 
 nevertheless, in each individual according to 
 his personal capacity and teachableness), it is 
 entirely reasonable. 
 
 In the new scientific theory of mind, mental 
 power is not one energy out of several, but an 
 aspect which all the energies of Nature assume 
 when they pass through the brain and are 
 viewed from within. This direct view, then, be- 
 hind the scenes of Nature, which consciousness 
 gives us, shows the mental qualities, the spirit- 
 ual side which all forces of Nature possess 
 when really known. Through these inward ex- 
 
VITALITY AND MECHANISM 17 
 
 periences of the physical forces we legitimately 
 reinterpret all and ascribe to them a spiritual 
 nature. In that httle circle of physical proc- 
 esses through which we can look (viz, the mo- 
 tions of our own brains and nerves), we find 
 feeling, will and thought behind them. Hence 
 we feel justified in saying that feeling, will and 
 thought will be found behind all the physical 
 processes of the world as their cause and es- 
 sence. It is not because of certain breaks in 
 the chain of causality, certain gaps in the line 
 of the development of the animal world, or cer- 
 tain missing links between the brute and man 
 that materialism is unsatisfactory and that 
 physical nature demands a God to supplement 
 its insufficiencies. It is for far profounder rea- 
 sons : it is because all order implies reason ; all 
 change implies force ; all force implies will. 
 The great tree of Life should ever be thought 
 of as an endogenous organism, growing not 
 from without inward, but from within outward. 
 Nevertheless, the converse truth should not 
 be overlooked, that for successful growth there 
 should be suitable physical conditions and ma- 
 terialization in appropriate embodiments. 
 Spirit to pull eff'ectively must pull in the steady 
 traces of law. The ardent temperament chafes 
 at being obliged to use this rigid machinery 
 and groans at being tied up by these material 
 straps and external bonds. He thinks that 
 
18 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 there ought to be some quicker way to cure the 
 tuberculosis patient than by fresh air, and some 
 easier method of restoring the neurotic than by 
 food and quiet and Nature's healing processes. 
 
 The theologian is apt to believe that God has 
 given to the world some more immediate rev- 
 elation of divine truth than what he has im- 
 parted through the growing spiritual percep- 
 tion and clearer moral insight which has come 
 naturally to our human race. I once heard a 
 man of education say that he believed that inas- 
 much as in his youth he had given his heart to 
 the Lord and been converted according to the 
 received church customs, he had a right to ex- 
 pect to receive from God a superior measure of 
 health and personal power and influence; and 
 he was sorely disappointed that he had not re- 
 ceived this special largess. Like so many 
 others, this man had forgotten that God's uni- 
 verse has its distinct realms and planes and 
 conditions, and that whoever wants a particu- 
 lar crop must plant and cultivate its appropri- 
 ate seed. Whether we like it or not, we must 
 recognize the universality of God's laws and the 
 unchangeableness of his methods, and that it 
 is in vain to expect him to alter his eternal 
 plans to suit our petty convenience. There is 
 no magic, no witchcraft in the divine dispensa- 
 tion. 
 
 But though these wheels move straight for- 
 
VITALITY AND MECHANISM 19 
 
 ward, swerving not to prayer nor to curse, nor 
 to the most passionate outcry of the saintliest 
 soul, it is well to remember that the wheels are 
 full of eyes. The Omniscience of the Infinite 
 One, by its wise provisions, by its skillful, auto- 
 matic self-adjustments and by the transform- 
 ing power of the soul's chemistry, provides for 
 the good of all his creatures. Love everywhere 
 hides within these laws. Its pains are but dan- 
 ger signals; its penalties are correctives. 
 This changeless providence, hurting us only 
 when we transgress the divine laws, works ever 
 for greater good. This rigid uniformity and 
 intermediate machinery which we are obliged 
 to master is the means of our education and 
 spiritual development. 
 
 In our personal life and in our interpreta- 
 tion of Nature the secret of peace, power and 
 knowledge lies in recognizing these two comple- 
 mentary facts — the outer mechanism and the 
 inner life. 
 
 And if we are wise we shall also bear them in 
 mind in our associated efforts. In social life 
 nothing can be achieved without the wheels of 
 organization. He who carries his individualism 
 so far as to refuse to sacrifice the least particle 
 of his personal liberty in the partnership of any 
 association never accomplishes anything. It is 
 only through government and a settled order 
 that even freedom is to be obtained. The 
 
20 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 shouter for anarchy is the most transparent 
 "stalking-horse" of violence and tyranny that 
 there is on the road ; for those who plunder the 
 public always know the strength that lies in a 
 clever combine. Every political movement that 
 accomplishes anything in a State must either 
 organize a party of its own or take possession 
 of some political machinery already in exist- 
 ence. 
 
 Each new religion, doubtless, had its first 
 beginning in the solitary breast of some aspir- 
 ing soul who goes up into the mountain apart 
 to pray. But unless that heavenly spark is to 
 perish uselessly, it must kindle a kindred fire 
 in sympathetic souls. The new spiritual life 
 must incarnate itself in an ecclesiastical body. 
 Its faith must formulate itself in creeds, sing 
 itself in psalms, objectify itself in rituals, or- 
 ganize institutions, schools, missions, executive 
 machines of ail kinds. Otherwise, it will fade 
 away. 
 
 But, now, on the other hand, the State or 
 the church that would not perish with dry rot 
 must not become a mere set of wheels. That 
 is the unfortunate tendency of all organiza- 
 tions. Corporations, as the lawyers say, have 
 no souls. The board, whether civic, philan- 
 thropic or religious, is too apt to be correctly 
 named "a hoard,'' — wooden, hard and narrow. 
 The party machine, instead of being worked to 
 
VITALITY AND MECHANISM 21 
 
 spread principles and effect reforms, is used to 
 keep its members in office. So, likewise, many 
 a church becomes a similar machine, concerned 
 not about the promotion of spiritual life or 
 the attainment of truth, but only about the 
 maintenance of the creed and the ritual and the 
 securing of good places for the Pharisees who 
 with the least wincing can repeat the old shib- 
 boleths. Societies formed for the very purpose 
 of promoting the knowledge of the Scripture, 
 through a blind conservatism and an overbear- 
 ing financial interest, become the chief obsta- 
 cles to its candid study and enlightened under- 
 standing. Recall how our great Bible society 
 in this country still continues to reprint the old 
 version, so manifestly full of errors, and blocks 
 the way to a circulation of the more correct 
 Revised Version. It Is only one of the many 
 ways by which, instead of Christianity, we have 
 to-day a miserable "churchianlty," whose motto, 
 as Dr. Edward Everett Hale once said, is "The 
 intentional reversal of the great apostle's 
 motto ; and despising the things that are before, 
 they worship the idols that are behind." 
 
 It is for this reason that when on the heels 
 of the impractical prophet there comes the 
 shrewd priest and his ecclesiastical machinery, 
 next there must come the reformer to break the 
 machine in pieces, that the living being within 
 may not be done to death amid the multitude of 
 
22 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 whirling rods and the meshes of red tape. 
 "Dead mechanism will never supply the place 
 of living enthusiasm." 
 
 For genuine religion we need something more 
 than church ceremonies and institutions, lit- 
 anies and cathedrals. There must be the un- 
 calculating surrender of the spirit, the intimate 
 contact of the human soul with the Over-soul. 
 
 To make the wheels of state and church move 
 aright we must have a man within each. Let 
 us not be too anxious about these mechanical 
 instruments. If there is no vital spirit within 
 to guide them, the sooner they rust out the bet- 
 ter. If there be a vital spirit inside, it can 
 build a new set of organs for itself when it 
 chooses. It is not the body that constructs 
 the soul. It is the soul that constructs the 
 body. Let our chief concern be to have the 
 faith and vital energy which possess the build- 
 ing faculty. The needful thing is to discern 
 so clearly the Divine Spirit behind all the revo- 
 lutions of history and the mechanisms of nature 
 that the wheels of our daily life shall not drag 
 in sloth or gloom, but move cheerfully and 
 actively in the heavenly path. This life of 
 God is ever near us. Behind all the appar- 
 ently relentless machinery the heart's insight 
 recognizes the tenderness of the Father's all- 
 embracing forethought. The insight that dis- 
 cerns it is an insight not simply characteristic 
 
VITALITY AND MECHANISM S3 
 
 of a warm heart, but one normally possessed by 
 the clear mind, and for the human will it is the 
 essential condition of vigorous, hopeful and 
 progressive action. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 THE COSMIC MOTOR POWER 
 
 The spectacle of the universe is its ceaseless 
 display of movement. Nowhere, if we examine 
 closely, can we find anything really at rest. 
 The fixed stars, as we call them, are steaming on 
 their way swifter than express trains, and the 
 rigid, inert stone is really but a throng of ever- 
 dancing atoms. Or if we look into the past, 
 we find that the world has come to its present 
 condition through a countless series of changes 
 and transformations, no stage of which has 
 been more than momentary, or has ever exactly 
 repeated itself. We are led irresistibly to ask, 
 "What is the motor power that has carried 
 the world forward through these countless and 
 constant changes?" 
 
 To answer this question intelligently we must 
 go back to fundamental problems. We must 
 consider the conception of cause, and what it 
 necessarily implies. 
 
 Whenever any event in life or nature is re- 
 flected upon, the mind is always found going 
 behind it, inquiring how it came into existence. 
 By an intuitive principle, constitutional to the 
 
 intellect, reason traces back in the direction of 
 
 ^4 
 
THE COSMIC MOTOR POYTOR 25 
 
 that event, seeking the power by which it came 
 to pass. And until such a cause is found, rea- 
 son remains unsatisfied. 
 
 This is the principle of our practical life and 
 daily activity. In science it is still more fre- 
 quently and necessarily manifested. Auguste 
 Comte, to be sure, laid it down as a maxim that 
 science should study only the laws of phenom- 
 ena, their coexistences and sequences, and ab- 
 stain from asking after the origin and causes 
 of things. As for the duty of science, I may 
 quote the opposite and equally weighty author- 
 ity of Helmholtz, who declares that conformity 
 to law in nature must be conceived as a causal 
 connection, and that if we pursue to genuine 
 fulfillment the desire to know the laws of things 
 "we have to seek out the forces which are the 
 causes of phenomena." 
 
 And not only is the cause the great object 
 of the inquiries of men of science, but there is 
 none of them who considers the search ended 
 with the first induction of a cause. Beyond the 
 proximate cause, it is seen, there must be a 
 more remote cause," and when this has been 
 reached the inquiry renews itself. Thus the 
 mind is led farther and farther back, each sec- 
 ondary cause of the chain resolving itself, as 
 soon as reached, into an effect of something 
 constantly receding. 
 
 In this constant retrogression where shall we 
 
26 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 stop, or is there any stopping place? As long 
 as we pursue the line of changes, events, ap- 
 pearances, there is no halting-place. The end 
 flies before us as the rainbow before the pur- 
 suing boy. Can we be content, then, with such 
 a never-ending series, in which there is nothing 
 to bring us to a halt except our own weariness ? 
 This is always unsatisfactory to the intellect. 
 The intellect demands a cause of the whole chain 
 as one total as imperatively as it demands a 
 cause for each successive part. Otherwise we 
 have a line of effects without a single genuine 
 cause. To find the real cause we must go back 
 to that which does not disclose itself as an effect 
 requiring another cause, but is a sufficient 
 reason for itself, a self-subsistent activity. As 
 the first element of the idea of cause is the ret- 
 rogressive motion, so the second element is the 
 halt. An end, a final rest and repose, as has 
 truly been said, is included in the very idea of 
 cause. To accept in its stead an infinite series 
 of antecedents and consequents is to accept and 
 follow out the first half of the idea of cause — 
 the regression toward a cause, back from every 
 effect — but to reject the other equally essential 
 part of the idea — the repose in cause as a final 
 ground. If cause is not a requisite of the 
 mind, then believe from the first that no 
 event needs a cause. If cause is a requi- 
 site of reason, then believe in the kind of 
 
THE COSMIC MOTOR POWER 27 
 
 cause that it craves, a cause that is ultimate. 
 
 As the principle of causality, then, can find 
 no resting place in the chain of events, in the 
 surface of appearances or in the meshes of con- 
 tingent conditions and as in these paths it is al- 
 ways necessary for it, like Dickens' "Poor Joe" 
 in the streets of London, to ''move on,'' where 
 shall it find rest? Only by going beyond the 
 web of changes to the unchangeable Changer; 
 by passing behind the accidental to that with 
 which there is no chance ; by proceeding 
 through the shell of phenomena to the Reality 
 hid witliin it. 
 
 But here, perhaps, it will be asked: what is 
 the cause of this Ultimate Cause, this Abso- 
 lute Reality? Why does not this cause need 
 another cause behind it, as much as everything 
 else? If this cause can be conceived as existing 
 uncaused, why cannot other things? For this 
 reason: The principle of causality is not that 
 everything should have a cause, but that every 
 event or change, everything that begins to be 
 or shows in itself the qualities of an effect, 
 should have a cause. As long as we are on 
 the plane of the changing, the effected, the 
 phenomenal, we must go backwards and back- 
 wards in search of a sufficient origin. But 
 for that which is essentially a cause, ex- 
 hibiting no marks of being an effect or de- 
 rived from anything else and which has 
 
28 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 substance and power, the reason needs not to 
 demand a cause outside of it. It is sufficient 
 as its own cause, self-subsistent, and the mo- 
 ment we reach this "Permanent Reality," the 
 law which we must obey is no longer the first 
 part of the causal law, that which demands 
 search for an unfound cause, but the latter 
 part of it, that which requires rest and content 
 in the found cause, the Enduring Real. 
 
 Such in general is the idea of cause. What 
 is the bearing of this principle upon the origin 
 of the universe? 
 
 As was declared at the outset, the history 
 of the world, as far as we can trace it, is an 
 incessant series of changes, motions and trans- 
 formations. Looking at it, as a whole, it car- 
 ries us back irresistibly to a beginning on the 
 farther side of which something other than it- 
 self must be assumed. No theory of the uni- 
 verse that has any regard for its actual laws 
 and facts can avoid such an assumption. Take 
 the Darwinian theory, for example. Trace 
 back man to his simian ancestor, horse to hlp- 
 parlon and orohippus, dog to wolf, bird to rep- 
 tile, each walking and creeping and swimming 
 thing to a marine ascidlan or some other 
 equally low and primitive form. The question 
 recurs: "What power fashioned this primitive 
 form and stored within it these myriad poten- 
 tialities?" Suppose, then, we aim at thor- 
 
THE COSMIC MOTOR POWER 29 
 
 oughness and conceive of primal matter as the 
 universal mother. Suppose that life and mind 
 were implicated in the nebula ; suppose that air 
 and water, metal, plant and animal are but crys- 
 tallizations from the molten spheres, and that 
 the whole history of our universe is simply a 
 history of the aggregation of its atoms or elec- 
 trons. Still the question of Creative Power has 
 not been answered. It has only been pushed 
 farther back. It recurs as before, "Whence 
 this Primal Matter and its Formative Potency? 
 What was the cause and origin of this evolu- 
 tional process?" This question must still be 
 met and answered somehow. 
 
 Now I claim that no answer is satisfactory 
 that presents any part of the existing order of 
 changing appearances as the cause and origin 
 of Nature. The origin of Nature must have 
 been anterior and superior to Nature's laws and 
 forces. 
 
 In the first place, the existing matter of the 
 world could not have been the motor power 
 producing the present world-process. What- 
 ever changes take place in matter are forms of 
 motion, either motions of masses or of the 
 atoms. But matter has no power to move it- 
 self. It possesses no spontaneity of action. 
 An essential idea of matter, necessary to all 
 scientific dealing with it, is that of Its inertness. 
 If a mass of matter could start itself into mo- 
 
30 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 tion, or bring itself to a halt, or alter the di- 
 rection of its motion without the action of 
 something outside of itself, no science of it 
 would be possible. "Whatever matter is," saj^s 
 one of the most distinguished men of science of 
 our day, M. Leon Foucault, "physics should al- 
 ways introduce it into its calculations only as 
 a coefficient of inertia." 
 
 In whatever condition and position, then, 
 matter originally existed, in that it must re- 
 main unless acted on by other agency. If at 
 first at rest, it must always have remained at 
 rest, so long as no cause from without disturbed 
 its equilibrium. This is a general, universal 
 truth. 
 
 Why did this primal nebula stir at all from 
 its state of universal diffusion and begin at a 
 certain time to consolidate .^^ Now, the scien- 
 tific materialist who dispenses with a Creative 
 power usually supposes that originally the 
 whole immensity of space was filled with nebu- 
 lous matter of uniform density or rarity, and 
 each atom of that matter was endowed with 
 homogeneous kinds and intensities of force 
 diffused uniformly. But in that case all 
 force with which such an infinite mass of abso- 
 lutely homogeneous matter was endowed would 
 act in all directions alike, and would conse- 
 quently produce no result. In such a system 
 nothing has weight, for there is no attractive 
 
THE COSMIC MOTOR POWER 31 
 
 center. Heat and light would be impossible, con- 
 ditioned as they are upon unequal vibrations, 
 different media, and diverse molecular arrange- 
 ments. Electricity and magnetism, likewise, for 
 the same reason, would lie torpid. For the mani- 
 festation of physical activities and changes 
 there must have been in the world-nebula a con- 
 siderable primary differentiation, not due to 
 the laws of matter as such. For the condensa- 
 tion of the nebula. In the first place, there is 
 Implied a differentiation between the nebula and 
 the vacant, external space. And secondly, to 
 cause the rotation of the nebula there Is re- 
 quired either an original rotary impulse or such 
 diversity of form or substance as would occa- 
 sion revolution. For the primary steps, then, 
 of the evolution process, the consolidation and 
 motion of the heavenly bodies, a cause external 
 to the nebulous matter must be supposed. 
 
 "But why," the scientific materialist will 
 probably here Interpose, "do you suppose 
 primal matter originally to have been in re- 
 pose? That is a gratuitous assumption. 
 Should we not rather conceive matter as a sub- 
 stance never at rest but always In motion, from 
 all eternity ; and in that case its Inertia would 
 assist In maintaining it in motion?" 
 
 Doubtless that is a more probable supposi- 
 tion. But now let us consider the bearing of 
 well-known scientific laws on this. The scien- 
 
22 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 tific facts of the expenditure of motion show 
 that if material motion, unsustained or re- 
 cruited by anything else, has been going on 
 from all eternity, the motion must have been in 
 this infinity of time either destroyed or ren- 
 dered infinitesimal and inappreciable. In vir- 
 tue of the laws of energy, the stock of working 
 power in the universe is constantly undergoing 
 exhaustion. Heat diffuses itself in all direc- 
 tions in frigid interstellar space. Magnetism 
 and electricity radiate on all sides. Pressures 
 balance themselves against pressures. The ef- 
 fective energy of the universe is continually, 
 therefore, divided and subdivided into insensi- 
 ble quantities ; the opposed forces more and 
 more neutralize each other ; and the working 
 power of these balanced energies is now lost. 
 Potentially the sum of force may remain the 
 same, but practically it is expended more and 
 more beyond all natural recovery. Within our 
 planetary system, the bulk of space filled by 
 active material bodies, like the sun and the in- 
 candescent planets, capable of radiating en- 
 ergy, is only, as in comparison with the sphere 
 on whose rim Neptune revolves, as one to many 
 billions, and even if the whole of this planetary 
 system were filled with active matter and en- 
 ergy, it would be only as one to eleven trillions 
 in comparison with the immense sphere of inter- 
 stellar space between us and the nearest fixed 
 
THE COSMIC MOTOR POWER 33 
 
 star. According to physical principles, the 
 immensely preponderant interstellar space 
 where matter is so thinly diffused must suck 
 away and consume the working energy of the 
 solar system. In a sufficient time it would be 
 entirely consumed. Infinite time must be suffi- 
 cient. 
 
 If, therefore, motion has been going on from 
 eternity, and the working energy of the uni- 
 verse has been subject to this infinite expendi- 
 ture, we should behold a universe totally dif- 
 ferent from this present ever-bubbling fountain 
 of force. We should find it, through its uni- 
 versal and torpid equilibrium, sunk in a sort of 
 living death. It would be, as an able man of 
 science has well described it, "an immense tomb, 
 as it were, where would sleep the frozen forms 
 of existences and the germs of extinguished 
 life." 
 
 Thirdly, the hypothesis of the eternity of 
 the cosmic motions leaves open also the equally 
 pressing question, "Who or what directs these 
 motions?" Nature exhibits the atoms to us 
 not as heaped together at random, not as fly- 
 ing about aimlessly and purposelessly, but as 
 continually guided in certain paths and ar- 
 ranged in orderly groups. From the primitive 
 diffused state they are concentrated into orbs, 
 marshalled geometrically into crystals and 
 cells, and built up into plants and animals. 
 
34 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 What directs them in these processes by 
 which they acquire such new properties and 
 perfections? Taine says that it is by "the 
 blind instinct of artist Nature." What 
 bolder self-contradiction! If Nature be blind, 
 it is no artist. The very condition of art 
 is conscious purpose, harmonious aim. There 
 is a serious question here which naturalism 
 must solve if it would make itself accept- 
 able to human reason. Assuming nothing 
 more than inert matter and eternal motion, how 
 shall we account for the direction of the atoms 
 in the manifold, various, orderly, and artistic 
 — yes, wisely did Taine use that word — the ar- 
 tistic processes of the world? Is it at all prob- 
 able that merely material motion, unintelli- 
 gent, incapable of purposive selection, should 
 invariably move to such concordant and ideal 
 results as the world exhibits to us? 
 
 And if so, who or what directs it? If we 
 inquire what has directed the course of any 
 particular motion, we shall be referred to some 
 previous motion, and the direction of this will 
 be referred again to some still antecedent mo- 
 tion. But what directs the first motion or the 
 series as a whole? Can we conceive it as self- 
 directed? Bear in mind, as you must, that 
 this first motion, or whole scries of motions, is, 
 by the very hypothesis of the materialist, 
 destitute of any such sensation or emotion as 
 
THE COSMIC MOTOR POWER 35 
 
 would stimulate to a single tentative move- 
 ment; it is devoid of the will able to make an 
 effort, and is altogether without the conscious- 
 ness by which it might understand at what par- 
 ticular time or in what particular place or 
 direction of space to make it. Ask your- 
 self if, in these conditions, you can conceive 
 of this motion or series of motions as directing 
 itself. On the contrary, the conception of un- 
 intelligent motion directing itself is incon- 
 ceivable to an intelligent mind. Even if mat- 
 ter be supposed to be possessed of lo- 
 comotive energies and to be in motion 
 from all eternity, the fit and orderly direc- 
 tion of that motion requires a cause superior 
 to it. 
 
 For energy itself has no directivity resident 
 within. Its antecedents propel it intensely or 
 weakly, according as it is full or partially 
 stocked. But they do not account for its tak- 
 ing one path rather than another. Energy 
 by itself is like a runaway automobile, moving 
 onward where circumstances permit it, and 
 sooner or later, inevitably arriving at ruin or 
 a full stop. Wherever it moves successfully 
 and continuously we infer that there is an in- 
 telligent guide at the lever. 
 
 For the cause of the motions and changes 
 of the universe there is only one source to 
 which we can look, — the forces of Nature. 
 
66 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 Now if we look at these forces in reference one 
 to another, we discover most significant rela- 
 tions between them. We find them melting 
 one into the other, converging toward a single 
 principle hiding itself within these varied and 
 shifting phases. A force starting as gravity 
 may shift into heat, this into electricity, elec- 
 tricity into light and sound ; these in their turn, 
 acting on the living creature, transform them- 
 selves into nervous, muscular, and cerebral mo- 
 tion; these raise again the fallen weight, and 
 the circuit again is ready to recommence. And 
 in all this cycle no force has been lost. 
 Diverse as their successive phases have been, 
 they are but modulations of one stream of 
 energy issuing from a single fountain-head of 
 power. 
 
 Our problem, then, has been simplified, so 
 that instead of a thousand and one particular 
 forces, we have to deal only with one grand 
 cosmic force as the motor power of the uni- 
 verse. What then is the essential character 
 of force? This is the question of supreme in- 
 terest. For as we interpret force, so must we 
 interpret the whole universe. Can this perma- 
 nent principle, running through all phenomena, 
 the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, be any 
 unintelligent thing? Can this marvelous 
 unity, weaving daily the web and woof of the 
 universe, be any necessitated, material sub- 
 
THE COSMIC MOTOR POWER 37 
 
 stance? Or is it to be owned as an intelligent, 
 free and spiritual Being? 
 
 How is it that we become aware of force? 
 Do we perceive it directly in material things? 
 We see the frost-loosened crag topple over and 
 violently bury itself in the plain below. We 
 see the lightning-bolt fall and the forest tree 
 crash suddenly in riven fragments. But we 
 do not really see any coercive energy connecting 
 one of these events with what follows it. We 
 see only a succession of antecedents and conse- 
 quents. Were the line of events always ex- 
 ternal to us, we should know nothing of force, 
 only of the succession of changes. It is only 
 when the outward movement impinges upon our 
 senses and we feel its pressure and power, and 
 especially when, in return, we ourselves act upon 
 the outward world and are conscious of the ef- 
 fort of the attempt and that we predetermine 
 the result accomplished, that we acquire the 
 idea of force. Man is ever busy in this exer- 
 tion of force. He analyzes and combines his 
 sensations, framing at will new ideas, pure 
 creations of his mind. These ideals, under the 
 felt impulse of want or aspiration, he strug- 
 gles to realize. He remoulds matter. Ho 
 transforms the face of the earth. The lump 
 of clay becomes a bowl, the iron ore is turned 
 into needles and knives. Man can even tame 
 his own passions and carve his own personality. 
 
38 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 Preconceiving the result at which these volitions 
 aim before he puts them forth, he knows his vo- 
 lition as a force effective of that result. That 
 we possess force is at once the lowest and the 
 highest lesson of our experience. It is from 
 the consciousness of our own possession and 
 exertion of it, that we come to know it, and 
 later, when we see outside of ourselves succes- 
 sions of changes in Nature, that we conceive 
 force as binding them together. 
 
 This is not only the assertion of common 
 sense and of the general consciousness, but it is 
 the judgment of the most eminent thinkers in 
 philosophy and science. The list of authorities 
 that might be adduced here would include the 
 foremost names of recent times, such as Prof. 
 W. B. Carpenter, John Fiske, Professors Cope, 
 LeConte, Schiller and the Swedish naturalist, 
 Bunge. Especially noteworthy is the testi- 
 mony of Herbert Spencer. In discussing this 
 very point of the real nature of force, he em- 
 phatically says: "The force by which we our- 
 selves produce changes and which serves to 
 symbolize the cause of changes in general is the 
 final disclosure of analysis." 
 
 With equal positiveness Prof. John Le- 
 Conte, the noted geologist, once wrote: "We 
 cannot conceive of phenomena without force 
 or of effects without cause, because we are in- 
 tensely conscious of being ourselves through 
 
THE COSMIC MOTOR POWER 39 
 
 our wills an active cause of external phenom- 
 ena," 
 
 In further confirmation of this view I may 
 appeal to the distinguished physiologist, 
 Bunge, who advocates "interpretation of what 
 transpires in the external world of material 
 organization by our experience of causation 
 in the internal world of our own consciousness." 
 
 Our persevering analysis reaches, then, this 
 noble result: that the grand cosmic Force, the 
 motor power of the universe, must be connected 
 with will and intelligence, of which it is a func- 
 tion and expression. Inasmuch as this energy 
 and outflow is infinite, the fountain head . of 
 power must be equally infinite. It must be no 
 less than an all-powerful Spirit and eternal 
 Mind, of which the diversified phenomena of 
 Nature are simply the manifold phases. 
 
 Just as from the sun constantly flows forth 
 the ever-renewed photosphere of heat and light, 
 making known the hidden fount of energy 
 within, and just as the human body is moulded 
 and quickened by the inner soul — so out of the 
 secret bosom of the Almighty the outward uni- 
 verse is developed and guided, a glorious or- 
 ganism by which the Invisible makes himself 
 visible. With fascinated awe we see how He 
 manifests in astronomic space the miniature 
 of his stature, in geologic time some fragment 
 of his eternity and in the cosmic order some 
 
40 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 shadow of his constancy. In the plants He 
 discloses a little of his living activity and in 
 seeds somewhat of his creative energy. In the 
 flowers He reveals some reflection of his beauty, 
 in bird-song something of the divine music, in 
 the higher animals the dawning radiance of his 
 sensibility and intelligence, and at last in man 
 He incarnates himself most fully, displaying 
 his higher attributes, thought, righteousness, 
 self-consciousness and self-directing will. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 ATOM AND SPIRIT 
 
 In the preceding chapter I have presented 
 the reasons why philosophic minds find in the 
 great energies of the universe the varied ac- 
 tivities of a Divine Mind and WilL Objec- 
 tions, of course, have been brought forward to 
 break the force of this argument. One of 
 those most often urged is that to assume such 
 an identity between the forces within humanity 
 and those without as I have advocated would 
 compel us to endow the falling stone with con- 
 sciousness and even with a sense of muscular 
 tension. 
 
 But scientific speculation itself is moving 
 fast toward more or less similar conclusions. 
 In the alembic of modem scientific discovery 
 and analysis the old-time material particles, 
 hard and dead, have become every year more 
 immaterial. The infinitesimal atoms have been 
 dissected by Prof. J. J. Thomson and his fel- 
 low electricians into planetary groups of 
 corpuscles or electrons, thousands of times 
 smaller than the atoms and still further be- 
 yond ken of even the ultra-microscope that can 
 
 catch the gleam of particles which are only one 
 
 41 
 
42 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 two millionth part of a millimetre in diameter. 
 
 When it is asked what is the nature of these 
 infinitesimal electrons constituting the atoms, 
 the experts to be sure, quite disagree. One 
 school surmises that they are condensations of 
 that primitive substance, the universal ether 
 which fills all the interstellar and interatomic 
 vacuum. Another school says that all we 
 know of them is that they are electric charges 
 or centres of negative electric force. If they 
 themselves are not altogether immaterial, there 
 must be between them, and as their still minuter 
 components, some positive substance which is 
 even less material. Thus the deeper science 
 goes in its search, the more transcendental and 
 mysterious does the substratum of the cosmos 
 appear. 
 
 The life in living things, the sentience in 
 animal organism and the mind in human beings 
 are facts. They cannot have come from noth- 
 ing. What is the most rational explanation 
 of their origin? 
 
 Modern Theism most cordially accepts the 
 theory of evolution as the method by which 
 suns, worlds and all their denizens came Into 
 being; but it holds that a Supreme Conscious 
 Life has been and is the guiding power of this 
 developmental process. A dominant Intelli- 
 gence is the superior Power to which matter 
 and force have been the instruments. It is a 
 
ATOM AND SPIRIT 43 
 
 Creative Spirit, fully equipped from the first, 
 that has patiently worked through countless 
 ages, moulding the forms of the universe, 
 charging matter with life and mind, develop- 
 ing species and unfolding and guiding all the 
 varied developments of the cosmos. 
 
 The materialistic Monism that is now fash- 
 ionable takes up, on the contrary, an opposite 
 view. There was, at first, it maintains, no con- 
 scious Divine Mind, but only the latent life and 
 mind, the vital and mental germs within the 
 primal nebula which gradually, by certain 
 atomic interactions, became unlocked and de- 
 veloped into feeling, will and thought, as the 
 organic material forms, of which they were the 
 superior sides, were elaborated. Life and In- 
 telligence did not exist as potencies earlier and 
 superior to the original world-stuff" that cradled 
 all, but they were later and derived products, 
 phosphorescent gleams and glows, mystical 
 lights and glories, somehow attending the 
 chemical groupings and reactions of the cor- 
 poreal atoms. 
 
 Prof. Ernst Haeckel and other scientific 
 theorists of the day maintain that the earliest 
 living forms were spontaneously generated 
 from a protoplasmic slime, not yet endowed with 
 life; it was by the interaction of ordinary mat- 
 ter and energy that this was accomplished. 
 Every atom has a potential life and feel- 
 
44* THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 ing, and every cell a rudimentary sensibility 
 or cell-soul. The attractions and repulsions 
 of gases and chemical elements are elemental 
 likes and dislikes which bespeak latent will and 
 sensation. It is from such embryo vitalities 
 and intelligences, in each crystal and salt and. 
 electric circuit, that scientific Naturalism sup- 
 poses the marvelous endowments of bee and 
 bird, mathematician and inventor to have 
 arisen. 
 
 Which of these two views, then, supplies the 
 more rational explanation of the beginning of 
 things ? 
 
 Let us try to realize In thought this theory 
 of the materialistic Monists — that the cosmic 
 Life and Mind existed at first only in a ger- 
 minal form. What insuperable difficulties does 
 such a conception present to thought ! Think 
 of all the harmonious laws and co-ordinations 
 that Nature presents ; the mutual ministries of 
 flowers and insects ; the wonderful pairing 
 of masculine and feminine organs and instincts ; 
 and the coincident mathematics of planets 
 above and plants below. How absolutely un- 
 equal to these wonders of the vegetable and ani- 
 mal kingdoms is the supposition which main- 
 tains that originally there was in the world as 
 the source of these marvels only a rudimentary 
 mind and a germinal will! 
 
 Many as have been the sarcasms cast at the 
 
ATOM AND SPIRIT 45 
 
 Theistic theory of the Divine Being as a 
 "carpenter God" who made the world as a 
 hewer of wood makes a house, nevertheless it 
 seems to me a more dignified and more rational 
 view than the fanciful theory of the Infantile 
 Gods, these embryotic, atomic Deities, toddling 
 and lisping in their w^orld-cradle, in which ma- 
 terialistic Monism would have us believe. 
 
 That most distinguished scientific philoso- 
 pher of the last century, Herbert Spencer, once 
 criticised the Theistic idea of a Divine Mind 
 as before matter and antecedent to the various 
 processes of Nature and governing them, on the 
 ground that it is not possible to conceive of all 
 the actions throughout the universe, all the 
 motions of the multitudinous stars in space, the 
 revolutions of all their satellites and the in- 
 finitely multiplied physical and organic proc- 
 esses going on in each of the cosmic bodies 
 as flowing from an originating Mind. The 
 English philosopher seemed to fancy that the 
 multitude and complexity of these processes 
 are too much for intelligence, even an Infinite 
 Intelligence, to manage. Amidst such a 
 throng of intricate details Almighty Mind (he 
 seemed to think) would become distracted. In 
 the presence of such manifold gyrations Om- 
 nipotence would become dizzied. In such a 
 boundless field of operations Omniscience would 
 have to neglect a great deal. 
 
46 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 Now, of course, no human being can claim 
 with reason to be able to follow out in imagi- 
 native detail just how the Divine Mind can per- 
 sonally and simultaneously direct all the move- 
 ments of the universe. But without hesitation 
 it may be asserted (and a confident appeal 
 may be made to the common sense of any 
 normal man to sustain the appeal) that if 
 there be any inconceivability in supposing a 
 Divine Intelligence that is from the outset free, 
 full, active and perfect, as the cause and guide 
 of the infinite processes of the world, there is 
 certainly a hundred times as much inconceiv- 
 ability in supposing a cosmic Life which for 
 ages was rudimentary, somnolent and infantile, 
 or a cosmic Mind which only gradually awoke 
 to consciousness and grew up to the grade of 
 mental development now correspondent to the 
 amazing phenomena of our cosmos. 
 
 And if there be inconceivability in the best 
 ideas man can form of a guiding Mind as con- 
 nected with the evolution of the world, and if 
 there be difficulty in realizing in thought the 
 Theistic conception of a consciousness, ante- 
 cedent to the myriad movements and complex 
 processes of the Universe and directive of them, 
 there is surely a thousand times more incredi- 
 bility in the chance grouping of atoms, in the 
 undirected dance of molecules, or the blind push- 
 ing and pulling of unconscious forces as build- 
 
ATOM AND SPIRIT 47 
 
 ing up the Kosmic Temple, fulfilling in it, as it 
 has, ideas of the purest reason and the pro- 
 foundest wisdom, but none of them intended; 
 carrying the grand world structure up from 
 story to story, from detail to detail in a match- 
 less harmony of ideal finish, yet all un-planned ; 
 element adjusted to element, force tuned to law 
 and law fitted to life, yet the whole brought 
 about without foresight or reasonable direction 
 — certainly this is the most amazing of incredi- 
 bilities ! Inert matter, sightless motion and un- 
 conscious force equal to unfolding and guiding 
 a universe, but a Divine Mind not equal to it! 
 If anything that distinguished writers propose 
 may without hesitation be called nonsense, 
 surely this deserves the brand. 
 
 As the source and guide of the stupendous 
 powers and marvelous activities of crystal and 
 cell, star-reaching light wave and cosmos- 
 questioning brain, we can look at no lower 
 source (if we would escape the pit of irration- 
 ality) than the Theist's hypothesis of a full 
 Consciousness and Will at the heart of things. 
 That grand current of force that sweeps 
 through the varied mechanisms of the world, 
 keeping all its million wheels in motion, must 
 be the manifestations and effect of nothing 
 lower than an Infinite Will. If this is a ground- 
 less conclusion, then the conception of our own 
 muscular and mental efforts as manifestations 
 
48 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 of the intelligent will within the human being 
 must also be pronounced a groundless conclu- 
 sion. 
 
 But (it is further asked by certain philo- 
 sophic critics) is it not an extravagant demand 
 to require us to infer that volition causes all 
 these multitudinous activities of the world just 
 because it causes some one particular thing? 
 
 As Hume long ago put it : "What peculiar 
 privilege has this little agitation of the brain 
 which we call thought that we must thus make 
 it the model of the universe?" Why should we 
 leap from this single instance of mental causa- 
 tion to a universal truth? Because, I answer, 
 it is the one case where we get a direct interior 
 view of force, all other cases affording us only 
 indirect, external observations. In this one in- 
 stance we are admitted, as it were, behind the 
 scenes. Suppose that some wonderful moving 
 statue, which at first we had only gazed at 
 from a distance, we were allowed at length to 
 touch and then, in that touch, felt a living hu- 
 man being within. Suppose that there was a 
 marvelous automatic figure at whose intelli- 
 gence all the world had wondered, but suppose 
 that, after a while, a glimpse had been obtained 
 of its interior and it was seen to be actually 
 worked by a man. Shall we be accused of il- 
 logicalness in henceforth interpreting these 
 outward manifestations of the apparent mech- 
 
ATOM AND SPIRIT 49 
 
 anisms by the one inward glance which we have 
 enjoyed? If we accept the physical theory of 
 mind which these scientific objectors maintain, 
 then mind is not to be looked upon as one force 
 out of many, but as an aspect which all the 
 forces of Nature assume when they pass 
 through the brain and are viewed from within. 
 Whether the force be gravity, heat, light, 
 sound, magnetism, electricity, or chemical af- 
 finity to start with, yet as soon as it strikes the 
 nerve and runs up in its vibratile course to the 
 brain it draws back the material veil and dis- 
 closes clearly in that place and for that mo- 
 ment, however brief, its sentient character 
 and mental qualities. Have these repeated in- 
 ward glimpses into every material energy, re- 
 vealing successively in each a spiritual side, 
 nothing that may serve to give a new interpre- 
 tation to the external aspects of these forces? 
 As well say that the judgments of eye, touch, 
 and smell, which a mock wax apple may have 
 fraudulently secured, ought not to be corrected 
 by any evidence of the mouth that has tried to 
 eat it, because taste is but one sense out of 
 three. One bite into the centre of a lump of 
 painted wax is all-sufficient, both practically 
 and logically, to remake our judgment of it. 
 And so one mental state, one inward experience 
 of a physical force is enough for a new inter- 
 pretation of that force. 
 
50 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 The very school that objects, in re- 
 gard to the interpretation of force, to any 
 generalization from a single instance, con- 
 spicuously employs the same procedure and de- 
 fends its logicalness in its scientific researches. 
 
 The epoch-making discoveries of the radio- 
 active elements and the astonishing revolution 
 in chemical knowledge and theories that have 
 resulted from the researches of Madame Curie 
 and her fellow workers in this field depend 
 chiefly on logical inductions of this same 
 nature. They are generalizations from a 
 single kind of chemical element. In fact, what 
 other ground is there for believing that the 
 animals with whom we play, the neighbors with 
 whom we talk and the friends with whom we 
 live are not automatic machines, but are feeling, 
 thinking and willing beings like ourselves, ex- 
 cept this same assumption, that when we ob- 
 serve in them operations and activities similar 
 to our own, the cause in each creature must 
 be of the same psychic type as we know it to be 
 in ourselves. 
 
 That force originates in will is, then, that 
 which the inward view of it, given by conscious- 
 ness, attests ; and this is also what the facts of 
 the world require. They demand that the pri- 
 mary unit of the world, the single cause of all 
 things, be something capable of originating 
 movement, directing it and creating life and 
 
ATOM AND SPIRIT 51 
 
 mind. The principle of causality demands not 
 only some cause for these phenomena, but a 
 sufficient cause. Now, no material cause is 
 capable of producing the phenomena of the 
 world. Mind alone has the power of originat- 
 ing changes. Mind alone can be conceived 
 as producing mind. The effects cannot be 
 more precious and elevated than the cause. 
 The scientific laws of the correlation and per- 
 sistence of force imperatively require that the 
 highest term should exist from the first. Force 
 can mount through every stage of life only by 
 being constantly impelled and renewed from a 
 fountain at least as high as the highest level 
 to which it throws its waters. "Materialism," 
 as Papillon, the eminent French savant, once 
 well said, "is false and imperfect because it 
 stops short at atoms in which it localizes those 
 properties for which atoms supply no cause. 
 And because it neglects force and spirit which 
 are the only means that we have, constituted 
 as our souls are, of conceiving the activity and 
 the appearings of beings ; . . . the source 
 of differentiations cannot be in energy itself. 
 It must be in a principle apart from that 
 energy, in a superior will and consciousness, of 
 which we have doubtless only a dim and faulty 
 idea ; but as to which we can yet affirm that it 
 has some analogy with the inner light which 
 fills us and which we shed forth from us." 
 
52 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 Such are the lofty inferences to which the 
 strictest philosophic laws and the most modern 
 scientific facts and investigations point. And 
 equally inspiring, to the sensitive mind, are the 
 suggestions of Nature. What else gives to any 
 inspiring landscape its inimitable thrill except 
 this communion with the Unseen Sublimity be- 
 hind it? 
 
 "Only after celestial observations," Cole- 
 ridge somewhere says, "can terrestrial charts 
 be constructed." We can comprehend the 
 earth and the fascination of art, and we can 
 understand the full grandeur of Nature only 
 when we look at it with the penetrating lens of 
 spiritual vision. 
 
 To see in the tints of closing day splendors 
 which jasper and beryl only faintly suggest, we 
 must look with a more penetrating gaze than 
 the eye of flesh and blood. To find in the 
 blushing rhodora assurance that "Beauty is 
 its own excuse for being" and in the meanest 
 flower that blows "thoughts that do often lie 
 too deep for tears," we must enter into that 
 higher mood of the spirit, wherein we may be- 
 come conscious of relations to an immaterial 
 and diviner sphere. Apart from this the wood- 
 land flower is but a colored weed and the most 
 glorious sunset only an ephemeral play of 
 optic laws. 
 
 In one of the noblest passages of Words- 
 
ATOM AND SPIRIT 53 
 
 worth's "Excursion" he describes in lines as ex- 
 alted as they are beautiful the reverent emo- 
 tions which came to the poet as a growing 
 youth 
 
 **when from the naked top 
 Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun 
 Rise up, and bathe the world in light! He 
 
 looked ; — 
 Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth 
 And ocean's liquid mass, in gladness lay 
 Beneath him. Far and wide the clouds were 
 
 touched 
 And in their silent faces could be read 
 Unutterable love. Sound needed none. 
 Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank 
 The spectacle. 
 In such high hour of visitation from the living 
 
 God 
 Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired. 
 His mind was a thanksgiving to the power 
 That made him." 
 
 In such an experience as this, whence come this 
 beauty, this solemnity, these divine suggestions 
 that so subdue the soul? They are not con- 
 tained in any of the physical features of the 
 scene. On the retina of the body there are only 
 certain lines and forms and splashes of color 
 — ^just the same on the retina of the impassive 
 sheep as on the retina of the entranced poet 
 or artist. 
 
54 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 These heart-moving sensations are only to be 
 accounted for by the conviction that he whose 
 soul discerns these grander beauties and sub- 
 limer truths is not the victim of delusions, 
 but by a certain spiritual insight has pene- 
 trated into that rational order, into that living 
 power and eternal grandeur which form the 
 genuine essence of all these outward spectacles. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 PURPOSE IN NATURE 
 
 Wherever man has observed Nature care- 
 fully, he has found it full of apparent adapta- 
 tions and ingenious arrangements, so useful, 
 so rational, so admirably shaped to accomplish 
 certain ends, that they irresistibly suggest to 
 the investigator that there must have been an 
 intelligent purpose in their structure. 
 
 Every department of knowledge discloses to 
 us more or less of these noticeable co-ordi- 
 nations. In the Orchid family, how curious 
 are the complicated contrivances in certain 
 species which Charles Darwin has so well de- 
 scribed, for securing the transportation of the 
 pollen from one flower to another. To accom- 
 plish this purpose, so necessary to the perpetu- 
 ation of the species, baits of nectar, lustrous by 
 day and odorous by night, are provided to 
 tempt the moths to enter the flower. Then, 
 when they are once within, there are guiding 
 ridges to compel the insect go-betweens to pass 
 certain spots ; there are adhesive plasters, 
 nicely adjusted to catch their brows and de- 
 posit on them the pollen, and there are even 
 
 hair-triggers, connected with explosive shells, 
 
 55 
 
56 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 carefully set where the insects must discharge 
 them and cause the fertilizing yellow dust to be 
 shot out upon the bodies of the moths and thus 
 be carried across to the pistils on the neighbor- 
 ing flowers that need it to quicken and ripen 
 their seeds. 
 
 Or think of the wonders of the human ear 
 — that harp of literally thrice a thousand 
 strings ; think of the prospective contrivances 
 for the use of many animals which are provided 
 long before they are wanted ; or the eyes of the 
 child moulded in darkness, and the lungs fash- 
 ioned and prepared where there is no breath of 
 air. Recall the gauze-like wings and thread- 
 like antennae of the gnat folded in the chrysa- 
 lis beneath the water, in readiness for the time 
 when the mature creature shall mount into the 
 air above. 
 
 These are but a few out of the thousands of 
 cases of marvelous adaptation that Nature pre- 
 sents. I have not space to give even the 
 barest outline of the multitude and wonderful- 
 ness of these instances of constructive skill in 
 Nature, in comparison with which the most 
 skillful mechanisms of human ingenuity are but 
 coarse and clumsy contrivances. 
 
 What is the explanation and significance of 
 these apparent adaptations in Nature? 
 
 A century ago, there was but one answer to 
 this question that seemed reasonable. Paley 
 
PURPOSE IN NATURE 57 
 
 and the Natural Theologians of that day made 
 diligent catalogues of these natural con- 
 trivances and founded upon them what they 
 believed to be irrefutable arguments for an In- 
 telligent Creator, a Divine Designer of these 
 marvels of Nature. The leaders of science 
 generally accepted this argument from Design. 
 But fifty years ago, with the publication of the 
 Origin of Species, a great change in the scien- 
 tific attitude was initiated. 
 
 In these modern days the Universe has been 
 found not to be a structure or a machine made 
 at first in its present shape, as Paley supposed, 
 but it is a growth, "an evolution." The same 
 is true of every living form upon our earth. 
 The new born babe is the culmination of a mil- 
 lion previous steps and experiments by Nature. 
 The duck that toddles from its fresh-broken 
 shell into the water and strikes out as if it were 
 an old sailor is the embodiment of the experi- 
 ence of a million ancestors. All the wonderful 
 organs and complicated structures of the vege- 
 table and animal world have arisen by suc- 
 cessive differentiations from previous forms, 
 each of them as we go back, simpler and 
 simpler. 
 
 This process has resulted from a few neces- 
 sary laws. Such are the laws of heredity, 
 variation, multiplication, struggle for ex- 
 istence, or natural selection, the struggle for 
 
58 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 desired partners, or sexual selection, and the 
 law of vital adjustment of the plastic organism 
 to the pressure of the environment. The un- 
 avoidable issue of these laws, it is claimed, is the 
 accumulation of every favorable variation in 
 animal life and the consequent ascent of ex- 
 istence to higher and higher degrees of per- 
 fection, till the realm of life (either by a series 
 of happy accidents or as a necessary result) 
 has attained to the present wonderful co-ordin- 
 ation and apparently purposed adaptation to 
 certain rational ends. 
 
 In view of these laws and what they have 
 done and are doing, what justification is there 
 any longer for that "Magician of Nature" — as 
 Strauss called the idea of Design — "that turns 
 the world topsy-turvy?" 
 
 Professor Haeckel hails Darwin with ex- 
 ultation "as the Newton of a new era who has 
 established the purposelessness of Nature." 
 
 Now I freely admit at the outset that the 
 Design argument has often been stated in a 
 coarse, narrow and irreverent way which may 
 have deserved the sarcastic phrase, so often ap- 
 plied to It, of the carpenter theory. I freely 
 admit that the facts and arguments estab- 
 lished by modern science modify very ma- 
 terially our view of Nature and the manner in 
 which its varied forms come Into existence. But 
 do they authorize us to dispense with the idea 
 
PURPOSE IN NATURE 59 
 
 of purpose? Do they make the conception of 
 an intelligent Mind, as the most rational 
 source of intelligent adaptations, an invalid 
 conception? 
 
 Evolution and the discoveries that its keen 
 disciples have made bring out to view in the 
 pedigree of every special species or organ a 
 long line of transitional forms, exceedingly in- 
 direct routes and a multitude of intermediate 
 steps, through which each organic form in 
 Nature at the present day came into existence. 
 Neither eye nor ear nor foot was made perfect 
 at the outset. The bird's wing was originally 
 a reptillian leg. The arm of man was for- 
 merly used to walk with, before our quadrupedal 
 ancestors tried to stand erect. 
 
 Even now the human embryo goes through 
 transformations that successively recall the 
 marine and mammal and simian ancestry 
 through which man has ascended to his present 
 place at the head of living beings. 
 
 In the flounder the eyes start on opposite 
 sides of the head and then one passes across. 
 In the whale there are rudimentary teeth that 
 begin to form only to be absorbed ; and in man 
 there is that particularly troublesome appendix 
 that seems to have no earthly use except to 
 furnish big fees to the skillful surgeon who 
 has discovered how to cut It out in safety. 
 
 How can such awkwardnesses and imperfec- 
 
60 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 tions in Nature be reconciled with any rational 
 purpose? 
 
 If the world (as a scientific friend incisively 
 asks me) had a Creator, or its organic forms 
 were moulded into their present shapes and con- 
 ditions by a reasonable Being, would he begin 
 to make a one toed horse by first making a 
 five toed creature that climbed trees ? To pro- 
 duce a hen, would he start out by making eggs? 
 Or when this Creative Power wished to make a 
 man, would he, instead of aiming and working 
 directly toward the goal, begin at the bottom 
 of the biologic series by making an ascidian 
 and then change it into a lemurine creature or 
 some other lower animal and then transform 
 that into a simian, and so, by a lengthy circuit, 
 develop the human being, retaining in him nu- 
 merous survivals of his past which now are ap- 
 parently quite useless? 
 
 These satiric queries are undoubtedly tell- 
 ing. But do they necessarily compel us to in- 
 fer absence of purpose, which is the conclusion 
 drawn by Professor Haeckel? 
 
 How is it with a large part of the most 
 rationally planned human work? Does it not 
 accomplish its purpose by decidedly circuitous 
 methods? It is notorious how the iron-moulder 
 begins by making the sand matrix and then 
 breaks it and throws it away. The engineer 
 who builds a stone arch, first puts up the false 
 
PURPOSE IN NATURE 61 
 
 timber work and then, when he has got his 
 stones in place, pulls down his first wooden 
 structure. Shall we say that the engineer and 
 the iron-moulder have no plan? A tailor keeps 
 in his fashionable dress coat quite a number of 
 utterly useless features — the slits in the collar, 
 the division in the tail, the buttons adjacent, 
 and other useless features — mere survivals of 
 the days when that kind of a coat was worn 
 out-doors, the collar turned up and a sword 
 projected behind from the divided coat-tail. 
 
 In our English language how many silent 
 letters are there, of no use whatever except as 
 historic monuments of the former spelling and 
 the course of linguistic development! 
 
 Shall we say therefore that there is no pur- 
 pose in the work of the tailor and printer and 
 that intelligence has had nothing to do with 
 the evolution of language or costume? Is it 
 not possible that the Intelligence that works in 
 Nature may have a similar historic or esthetic 
 sentiment? Is it not possible that the Divine 
 Mind (like human minds) may choose to make 
 circuits provided he can thereby accomplish his 
 ends more easily? 
 
 But, it will probably be urged, do not such 
 explanations and excuses imply a lack of Om- 
 nipotence in God and an absence of perfection 
 in his work such as a Theist can not admit? 
 
 For my part, I do not see why a Theist who 
 
62 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 maintains that the facts of Nature bespeak in- 
 telligence in their source is obliged to main- 
 tain, also, that Nature is as yet a completed 
 work or that the Mind, immanent in our part 
 of the cosmos and guiding it, is Omniscient. 
 
 While the Theist believes in the existence of 
 a Supreme Being, he may, without incon- 
 sistency, suppose that the actual world-build- 
 ing of our solar system may have been dele- 
 gated to some subordinate Divinity, who, 
 though superhuman and wondrously wise and 
 skillful, was not either All-wise or All-power- 
 ful. At least, the thinker who has become an 
 Evolutionist will, if he is consistent, never re- 
 gard that stage and state of Nature in which 
 we now live as a finished result beyond which 
 there is to be no more progress. 
 
 On the contrary, as the Carboniferous Era 
 was only an introductory stage, not to be 
 criticised as intended to be complete, but to be 
 estimated rather in relation to the higher de- 
 velopments of life that were to come by and 
 by, so even our present cosmic epoch should 
 properly be regarded as a transitional stage 
 whose whole significance is only to be under- 
 stood later on, when the Divine Power has more 
 nearly finished his work. As a transitional 
 stage of life, of course, it has its imperfections. 
 But these do not show an absence of all Divine 
 Purpose. The scaffoldings and chips around 
 
PURPOSE IN NATURE 63 
 
 a half-built Cathedral are, of course, some- 
 what confusing and disappointing. But how- 
 ever meaningless to the careless eye, they do 
 not demonstrate that there was no mind or 
 purpose in its building. Wait till it is finished, 
 and then judge. The cosmic Architect works 
 still more slowly and patiently, and perhaps 
 will reveal in the end a still more impressive 
 design. It is too early, to-day, to judge it by 
 its scaffoldings. That would be a sufficient an- 
 swer to the critics of Theism. 
 
 But if it does not satisfy you, try the other 
 alternative. Suppose that the Wisdom guid- 
 ing Nature is perfect. Then is it not just 
 possible that it is due to our finite ignorance 
 and limited understanding that we do not com- 
 prehend his vast and subtle purposes.'' 
 
 I think so. The Evolutionists have shown 
 that the wing of the bat was not made at once 
 and was not made simply for that use in flying 
 which it now fulfills. But if we suppose (as 
 we do, on this alternative) that the Divine 
 Wisdom is perfect, why may not such a limit- 
 less Mind have intended that the original or- 
 gan should develop into all the forms it has 
 assumed and should fulfill all the uses which it 
 has actually served. An Intelligence that is 
 infinite, it is reasonable to suppose, could and 
 would have included in his plan, not merely the 
 present functions and services of the animal 
 
64 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 organ, but all functions and services which it 
 has been put to in the past or may be adapted 
 to in the future. The plasticity of the organ, 
 so far from being a quality requiring no wis- 
 dom to account for it, requires, on the con- 
 trary, immensely more explanation than any 
 present structure. 
 
 As to the alleged uselessness and absence of 
 purpose in the various relics of past develop- 
 ment found in many organisms, might not our 
 men of science, without too great a strain on 
 their imagination, see several very serviceable 
 purposes which might justify them to a reason- 
 ing mind? When a savant quotes, as he is so 
 fond of doing, Kepler's great saying "0 God 
 I think thy thoughts after thee," might he not 
 turn to these very relics of the past course of 
 the development of life and discover in them the 
 precious sources of instruction to man as to his 
 own history and God's method of creation? 
 They are conditions and aids to human educa- 
 tion and the understanding of God's laws, and, 
 therefore, of inestimable value in that which is 
 the great end of life, the development of the 
 soul. 
 
 Moreover, they are necessary incidents of the 
 government by general laws which reason 
 everywhere adopts. 
 
 If in civilized states government has 
 found it wise to supersede the special fiats 
 
PURPOSE IN NATURE 65 
 
 of barbaric rulers by a system of laws 
 strictly general, surely, the observation of a 
 similar system in Nature demonstrates, not an 
 absence of intelligence there, but rather the 
 presence of that higher order of reason to 
 which man has only of late attained. 
 
 The discoveries of modern science have indeed 
 shown that every well-adapted organ became 
 adapted by certain anterior means and methods, 
 by a certain variability, heredity, sexual in- 
 stinct, environing influence and gradual ac- 
 cumulation of advantages gained by the suc- 
 cessive generations in the struggle for life. 
 
 The method of producing animals supposed 
 by Paley and that which the Evolution theory 
 supposes may be compared to the old and new 
 methods of manufacturing. 
 
 In primitive times when a pin or a needle was 
 made, one man made personally every part of 
 it. He gathered the ore himself, melted it in 
 the fire, hammered the lump of metal with his 
 own hand, and rubbed and smoothed it till it 
 was fashioned into the final shape desired. 
 
 Now-a-days it is made in no such simple and 
 direct a way as this. Instead of one maker we 
 find scores — perhaps hundreds — concerned in its 
 production. Gang after gang of men, machine 
 after machine, successively put their one or two 
 little touches to it and pass it on. One band of 
 workmen mine the metal ; another band trans- 
 
66 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 port it; a third smelt it; a fourth cast it into 
 a large lump. Then one machine moulds it into 
 bars, another rolls it into rods, a third stretches 
 these into wires, a fourth cuts these into 
 lengths, a fifth sharpens and points each 
 length, a sixth contrivance heads it, a seventh 
 polishes it, an eighth shakes out every deformed 
 or imperfect pin. At last the completed pin 
 is produced. 
 
 The two ways are certainly very different. 
 But because of this difference, the numerous 
 steps concerned in the development of the 
 pin and the many transitional forms that it 
 takes on the way, must we say that nothing 
 planned the pin, that mind had nothing to do 
 with its present shape, that there were only 
 certain mechanical forces that rolled it and 
 pulled it and pointed it and shook out of the 
 hopper everything that was not a perfect pin? 
 
 Such an inference would be absurd. And 
 similarly in regard to the bearing of the discov- 
 eries of the Evolutionists in the Theistic debate. 
 Believing as I do in these evolutionary methods 
 and laws as well established — nevertheless, what 
 inconsistency is there between them and the 
 supposition of a Superintending Mind that 
 through them effects its purposes? 
 
 The purpose, the useful end, comes out at 
 last most clearly. To argue that because we 
 have found out the natural steps by which this 
 
PURPOSE IN NATURE 67 
 
 purpose was accomplished, therefore it could 
 not have been intended by any one, is an in- 
 ference quite uncalled for. 
 
 It would be like saying of our pins, we have 
 found out that they are made by ingenious ma- 
 chinery ; consequently no intelligent cause had 
 anything to do with them. If the machinery 
 makes the pins, what made the machinery? 
 
 Take this plastic power of the life-force, by 
 use and effort, in opposition to physical condi- 
 tions, to achieve its desired ends, and to grow 
 stronger and more finely moulded, the greater 
 be the demands made upon it — how much more 
 imperative is this, in its demand of a Higher 
 Cause, than is the claim of any secondary cause 
 which matter and its laws supply. 
 
 Take the variability of the organism and its 
 amazing capacity of self- adjustment to the new 
 conditions of sea or land or air and its power 
 to hand down by heredity a better body to its 
 offspring — who or what made this wonderful 
 variability? What more eloquent of intelli- 
 gent prevision than these grand laws? 
 
 Or analyze the proposed explanations of 
 beauty and ornament, drawn from Sexual Se- 
 lection. On what else do they all lean than 
 upon a most curious esthetic susceptibility in 
 all animals (for which the laws of matter sup- 
 ply no account, and of which life has no abso- 
 lute need), a susceptibility which suggests 
 
68 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 rather the beneficence of that Gracious Power 
 who delights in making his creatures happy? 
 
 If the various laws that we sum up under 
 the name "evolution" have made the eye and 
 the ear, then we are not excused from looking 
 further back, but, on the contrary, we are at 
 once called to look further back. Who or what 
 constituted these laws of evolution? None of 
 them are efficient forces or ultimate causes. 
 
 They are only abstract terms for certain 
 regular events. One of the old jests is the ex- 
 planation which Martinus Scriblerus gave for 
 the operation of the meat jack. It was due, he 
 said, to "its inherent meat-roasting power." 
 
 He who ascribes all the results of evolution 
 to the evolutionary law commits an equally 
 foolish blunder. The fact that there is an evo- 
 lutionary order and method does not refute the 
 existence of a Power acting through that or- 
 der. On the contrary, it implies it. 
 
 Moreover to assume that, because it operates 
 by general laws, it must be something else than 
 a Divine Mind is an equally uncalled-for infer- 
 ence. Must Omniscience be necessarily capri- 
 cious and scorn natural chains of cause and 
 effect? Is there any compelling reason why 
 the Creator should be supposed (on every oc- 
 casion that he moulds a creature or an organ) 
 to start in the clay-pit, at the bottom of the 
 ladder of life, instead of taking advantage of 
 
PURPOSE IN NATURE 69 
 
 his previous work as a scaffold on which to 
 build higher? Is it irrational to think of the 
 Divine Mind accomplishing its ends by the 
 skillful combinations of regular laws and 
 forces, using the foundations of his earlier 
 work? 
 
 On the contrary, wherever reason rises 
 highest, that is just the way reason manages. 
 And if that is the method of the wise man, why 
 not of the All-Wise Mind that governs the Uni- 
 verse ? 
 
 I know well enough the subtle objection 
 made by scientific critics, that Purpose and De- 
 sign are human methods, anthropomorphic con- 
 ceptions which we are not justified in attribut- 
 ing to Nature because we do not know in ad- 
 vance that Nature has any mind, or if it has, 
 whether it is a conscious mind or an uncon- 
 scious intelligence. 
 
 I reply — if these objections demolish the 
 proof of "Purpose in Nature," they demolish a 
 great part of modern science. They would 
 discredit Archeolog}^ Egyptology and Assyri- 
 ology. What do we know of the mind of pre- 
 historic peoples except by the intelligent char- 
 acter of their work, the tools, the pottery, the 
 hieroglyphics they have left? 
 
 These over-subtle objections are inconsistent 
 with the daily practice and working principles 
 of all our leading scientific investigators, and 
 
70 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 they would overthrow all their results, if they 
 are valid objections. 
 
 What is the principle of investigation used 
 by Prof. Wallace in his proof of the intelli- 
 gence (superior to blind instinct) used by birds 
 in the construction of their nests ; or by Sir 
 John Lubbock in his demonstrations of the 
 high intelligence shown by ants ; or by Binet 
 in his famous researches on the Psychic Life 
 of Micro-Organisms, from which he concludes 
 that they have sentience and probably a meas- 
 ure of choice and effort? 
 
 Do they not all have for their principle of 
 investigation and proof that the use of intelli- 
 gent means to accomplish intelligent ends be- 
 speaks intelligent purpose? 
 
 Well, then. If the hole drilled through a 
 prehistoric bone-needle, as an eye for the 
 thread, is claimed by the scientist to bespeak 
 an intelligent intent and intelligent maker of 
 the needle, by what logic is the similar hole 
 drilled through the nasal-bone for the escape 
 of the tear from the eye held to disclose no in- 
 tention in the Author of Nature? 
 
 If the rational character of the cuneiform 
 inscriptions, impressed on Nineveh tablets, as- 
 sures the Assyriologist of the rational purpose 
 and mind of their makers, why should not the 
 symmetrical and subtle mathematic series, pro- 
 ceeding according to a profoundly rational law 
 
PURPOSE IN NATURE 71 
 
 that governs at once both the branching and 
 leaf-arrangement of plants and the orbits of 
 planets, supply some indication of a planful 
 Mind in their Creator? 
 
 The only consistent view is that facts speak 
 for themselves ; and as, in scientific research, 
 savants daily do infer and have to infer (if 
 they would discover anything) that useful- 
 working combinations of means to ends imply 
 purpose, so in Nature and theological research, 
 also, they imply purpose. 
 
 As one who was for many years a foremost 
 leader in science and an early adopter and able 
 expositor of the theory of evolution has said: 
 "A strange contradiction would it be to insist 
 that the shape and markings of certain rude 
 pieces of flint, lately found in drift deposits, 
 prove design, but that nicer and thousandfold 
 more complex adaptations to use, in animals 
 and vegetables, do not 'a fortiori' argue de- 
 sign." * 
 
 The distinguished naturalist. Prof. Bunge, 
 says : "The more thoroughly and conscien- 
 tiously we endeavor to study biological prob- 
 lems, the more are we convinced that even those 
 processes which we have already regarded as 
 explicable by chemical and physical laws are in 
 reality infinitely more complex and at present 
 defy any attempt at mechanical explanation." 
 
 * (Prof. Asa Gray, pp. 152) "Darwiniana." 
 
72 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 What has enabled Science to penetrate the 
 secrets of Nature? What else but the fact 
 that Nature was not irrational but a rational 
 system. And as it is a rational system it must 
 be the manifestation of Reason, the work of a 
 purposing Mind. Intelligibility in the effect 
 implies Intelligence in the cause. 
 
 The further Science penetrates into the 
 secrets of the Universe the more regular seems 
 the march of thought presented there. 
 
 The eminent physiologist, Oscar Hertwig, 
 has not only pointed out the insufficiency of 
 physical and chemical energies to explain the 
 vital properties of the cell, but he maintains 
 that the facts indicate something that looks 
 like intelligent action. "The nature-process 
 resembles a process of thought." * 
 
 In the leading orders and species of living 
 creatures there are found certain ideal types 
 characteristic of each, variously modified but 
 never forgotten. Prof. W. B. Carpenter, in 
 tracing the life history of the Orbitolites, a 
 highly specialized species of Foramlniferse, says 
 "it seems to me impossible not to recognize 
 the fact that the evolution of this type has 
 taken place along a definite course, every stage 
 being one of progress, and each being, so to 
 speak, a preparation for the next." And Nat- 
 ural Selection, he affirms, "gives no account of 
 * Die Zelle und die Gewebe: p. 259. 
 
PURPOSE IN NATURE 73 
 
 the changes in the plan of growth which car- 
 ried the Orbitolites forward, evolving steadily 
 calcareous fabrics of ever-increasing complex- 
 
 ity." 
 
 Again in the evolution of the respiratory 
 apparatus from the swimming bladder of the 
 fish to the lung of the mammal, Prof. Carpen- 
 ter finds it undergoing a uniformly progres- 
 sive elevation of type, which he regards as 
 showing a preordained plan. "The doctrine 
 of Natural Selection," he affirms, "fails to ac- 
 count for that general consistency of the ad- 
 vance along definite lines of progress, which is 
 manifested in the history of Evolution." * 
 
 These cases that I have mentioned are only 
 two out of many. 
 
 In the striking instance of the electric or- 
 gans of the skate, even Prof. Romanes was 
 obliged to admit that the facts of the case 
 "assuredly do appear to sanction the doctrine 
 of prophetic germs." The electric battery in 
 the skate, although now so feeble as to be of 
 little practical use for defence to its owner, 
 does seem to be on its way towards becoming 
 such an organ as the electric batteries in the 
 Gymnotus and the Torpedo fish. And accord- 
 ingly Prof. Romanes admitted that "the facts 
 do present a serious difficulty to the theory of 
 Natural Selection, while they readily lend 
 Nature and Man," p. 463. 
 
 * «i 
 
74 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 themselves to the interpretation of a disposing 
 or foreordaining Mind that knows how to con- 
 struct a battery by thus transforming muscu- 
 lar tissue into electric tissue." 
 
 Note another significant thing. The course 
 of Nature has been found to be not an aimless, 
 fruitless motion, alternately rising and falling, 
 or moving round and round in unprogressive 
 circles. It is, in scientific phrase, an evolution, 
 i. e., a progress. And if often a natural series 
 seems to return to its point of beginning, we 
 find on examination that it is on a more ele- 
 vated plane. The path is a spiral, moving 
 steadily higher and higher. If occasionally 
 there is degeneration, on the whole the course 
 of Nature is steadily upward, toward higher 
 types — i. e., organisms more and more infused 
 with mind, the material forms increasingly 
 saturated with spirit. 
 
 Now, this upward course of Nature can only 
 be explained by a Divine Purpose. Utility in 
 the struggle for existence does not explain it. 
 For to an earthworm or an oyster, the struc- 
 ture of the vertebrate is of no advantage. 
 Accident does not explain this progress. 
 Chance pulls in every way — not steadily up- 
 ward. Chance pulls down quite as often as it 
 builds up. Chance writes no such intelligent 
 dramas, going upward from all beginnings in 
 orderly crescendoes to rational climaxes. 
 
PURPOSE IN NATURE 75 
 
 How the one Power of the Universe should 
 have pursued the path of evolution, moving 
 steadily from molecule up to monad, and from 
 monad to mammal and from mammal up to 
 man, from the non-living to the living and 
 from the apparently unconscious to the con- 
 scious, for millions of years, unless from 
 beginning to end the process was dominated 
 by a Purpose and by the Intelligence that 
 alone has purposes, this is inconceivable. 
 
 The reasonable mind must recognize that the 
 history of evolution is that of a consistent ad- 
 vance along definite lines of progress and can 
 only be explained as the work of a Mind in 
 Nature. Is there any way of escaping this 
 obvious conclusion? The only way that has 
 been suggested is to refer these harmonies of 
 Nature back to the original regularity of the 
 atoms or the electrons. As drops of frozen 
 moisture on the window pane, build up the 
 symmetrical frost forms, without design, by 
 virtue of the original similarity of the com- 
 ponent parts, so do the similar atoms or elec- 
 trons without plan or purpose build up the 
 harmonious forms of Nature. 
 
 But this explanation confronts the thinker 
 with a still more significant objection. 
 
 Why are the atoms or electrons thus regular 
 and similar .P Here are millions on millions of 
 atoms of gold just alike. Here are millions 
 
76 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 on millions of atoms of oxygen, — each with 
 substantially the same weight, size, velocity 
 of vibration and chemical qualities, so that 
 we can take out one billion of them from a 
 chemic compound and put back another bil- 
 lion and they combine and behave in the same 
 way. 
 
 Again, all the trillions on trillions of atoms 
 on the earth are not of infinitely varied shape, 
 weight, size and chemic quality. But there are 
 only seventy kinds (or less) of atoms; and all 
 the myriads in one chemic species are sub- 
 stantially alike — so that each successive atom 
 of oxygen that comes to a burning flame does 
 the same work and behaves just like its pred- 
 ecessor and its successor. 
 
 Plow can this marvelous identity of the 
 atoms be explained? Certainly not by chance 
 nor struggle for existence. Among the atoms 
 there is no heredity, no vital competition, no 
 natural selection nor sexual selection to ac- 
 count for this. Those two great scientific 
 thinkers of the last generation. Sir John 
 Herschel and Clark Maxwell, after long pon- 
 dering on these curious facts, declared that the 
 only reasonable solution was that the atoms 
 were marked by the essential characters at 
 once of manufactured articles and of subordi- 
 nate agents. 
 
 The latest scientific discoveries give a differ- 
 
PURPOSE IN NATURE 77 
 
 ent but no less significant answer. The bril- 
 liant and epoch-making work of Prof. J. J. 
 Thomson and his co-laborers refer back this 
 regularity of the atoms and their chemical 
 qualities to the still smaller corpuscles or elec- 
 trons (each carrying its characteristic electric 
 charge), of which each atom is composed; and 
 it is thought that the primitive types of the 
 elemental substances may be less than half a 
 dozen. It is from these few primitive types of 
 ethers and electrons, corpuscles and atoms, with 
 their original potentialities, compounded and re- 
 compounded into more and more complex com- 
 binations by a few regular laws and forces, that 
 the universe has grown up from the primal 
 nebula or ether ocean into our present world. 
 
 But in the light of this wonderful simplifica- 
 tion of the elements, with which the cosmos 
 started, is not the argument for a Planful Mind, 
 indwelling in the world and directing and push- 
 ing on its development, stronger than ever? 
 
 Who or what organized this marvelous cos- 
 mic embryo, with its co-ordinated elements and 
 latent forces, skillfully adjusted so as to de- 
 velop into our Universe? The agency of Mind 
 and Purpose in Nature is not dispensed with.' 
 It is only pushed further back, or rather, 
 farther in. It is shifted from the particular to 
 the general, from the special structure to the 
 laws and atoms, ethers and electrons that 
 
78 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 formed the primal cosmic cell and vital 
 nucleus of all. It is driven inwards from the 
 assumed outside Mechanician (occasionally or 
 originally active) to the "interior Artist," the* 
 indwelling Life and Mind constantly quicken- 
 ing and moulding from within all parts of 
 Nature, to whom logical thought must ulti- 
 mately come. 
 
 The question recurs : "Whence came this 
 primitive tuning of electrons and atoms 
 to rational laws? Whence came this har- 
 monious adjustment of plastic life to chang-. 
 ing conditions, this ordering of the myriad 
 forces of Nature into one column, moving stead- 
 ily toward a single objective, the development 
 of conscious life in the cosmos?" 
 
 This superb symphony of Nature implies a 
 "Tone-Master" as its cause. It implies an 
 ever-ruling Purpose and Superintending Mind 
 even more strongly than the most ingenious 
 structure of eye or ear does. 
 
 As Prof. Huxley was forced to admit, — 
 "The more purely a mechanist the speculator 
 is and the more firmly he assumes a primordial 
 molecular arrangement, of which all the phe- 
 nomena of the Universe are consequences, then, 
 the more completely is the thinker at the mercy 
 of the advocate of Design in Nature, who can 
 always defy him to prove that this molecular 
 arrangement was not intended to evolve the 
 
PURPOSE IN NATURE 79 
 
 phenomena that has been evolved in the Uni- 
 verse." 
 
 Certainly, the original arrangement of the 
 atoms of the Universe might have had any one 
 of an infinite num^ber of original dispositions. 
 Every different original arrangement of the 
 atoms would have produced a different Uni- 
 verse corresponding thereto. That out of this 
 myriad of possible primitive arrangements of 
 the atoms and possible universes just this par- 
 ticular atomic structure and arrangement was 
 chosen which, in its gradual and necessary un- 
 folding, would work out the present admirable 
 world which we see — what a marvelous fore- 
 thought and amazing wisdom of purpose was 
 needed for this ! 
 
 What a Supreme Reason and far-reaching 
 Purpose that could marshal this countless host 
 of electrons and atoms and this infinitely com- 
 plex system of interwoven laws and appropriate 
 faculties and capacities, and march them 
 through the immensities of space and down the 
 measureless vistas of time straight to their 
 goal in the grand world climax of to-day ! 
 Verily, Omniscience alone is equal to such a 
 marvelous consummation. 
 
 Nature can not give what it does not possess 
 itself. Unless there be reason in the source 
 of Life, reason could never evolve in the scien- 
 tific student of life. No law can unfold in the 
 
80 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 upper planes of life that which was not in- 
 folded in the lower planes. Evolution has 
 shown the mental and spiritual in man to be a 
 normal product, an integral part of the Cosmic 
 Life. Its manifestation in humanity implies its 
 presence throughout the Whole. Human con- 
 sciousness is the one place where we get an 
 inside view of the Reality of things. The only 
 things we do not infer, but directly know, are 
 'our own sensations, will and thoughts. As the 
 one part of the cosmos that we directly know 
 is conscious life, therefore logic and analogy 
 justify us in assuming that the rest of the 
 cosmos, the grand organism of the universe, 
 is also (at least on its superior side) a Con- 
 scious Life, and like other conscious life thinks 
 and acts with purpose. 
 
 As we watch the Universe from the outside 
 it may seem all mechanics and material instru- 
 mentality. But as, with the eye of philosophic 
 reason, we look within, we see that there is 
 everywhere attendant Mind and directing Will. 
 The laws of Nature are but the habits of that 
 Divine Will ; species and races and the decay 
 and birth of worlds are the projections of 
 God's thought on the screen of space, as he 
 silently initiates, quickens and superintends all 
 in accordance with his eternal plans. 
 
 In obedience to his tyrannical bias by "the 
 things seen" the materialist tells the Theist 
 
PURPOSE IN NATURE 81 
 
 that he has no right to believe in such a thing 
 as cosmic purpose and thought until the theist 
 can show the materialist a titan brain some- 
 where in the stellar universe. 
 
 It is a subtle argument, which to some seems 
 invincible. But may not the believer in God 
 with still greater cogency reply (as Martineau 
 has so well retorted) : "Lift up your eyes to the 
 arch of night and look upon the shining firma- 
 ment as the brow of the Eternal. See in the 
 wheeling suns of the celestial galaxies, the vi- 
 brating atoms of some infinite cerebral circuit. 
 See in its constellations the molecules and brain 
 cells of the universal consciousness." Yes. 
 The theist may with entire legitimacy recog- 
 nize in its ether waves the subtle currents of 
 the Omniscient Thought; and behold in the 
 great drama of Evolution the gradual unroll- 
 ing of some scant portion of the "Autobi- 
 ography of the Eternal Spirit" on the great 
 stage of infinite Space — that eternal Spirit in 
 whose history a thousand years are as one day, 
 and nebula and galaxies are but evanescent 
 sparkles of his Living Robe. This garment in 
 itself has no original or independent power. It 
 is only to the outward eye that it seems so. To 
 the inward eye it is the pulsing blood and flesh 
 of that Infinite Life who moves and breathes 
 in all things that have the semblance of reality. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 LAW AND PROVIDENCE 
 
 One of the most difficult of all questions, 
 but also one of the most important and far- 
 reaching, is that which concerns the methods by 
 which the government of the universe is carried 
 on. Does it move by law or by love? Is the 
 course of Nature invariable, or is it from time 
 to time miraculously modified? General or 
 special action, immutability or mercy, physical 
 fatalism or Providential privilege — which is the 
 block in this ancient puzzle that we must put 
 in the center to supply us with a solution? 
 
 The common solutions are two — the method 
 of science and that of generally accepted dog- 
 matic faith. 
 
 Dogmatic faith takes the grace and special 
 Providence of God and ignores law and invari- 
 able order. Science adopts natural law and 
 the unchanging connections of the physical 
 energies and processes and ignores Divine voli- 
 tion and good-will. 
 
 Dogmatic faith says: God is good and 
 comes again and again to help forward his 
 creation in its onward progress. He comes in 
 
 with his creative power and introduces new 
 
 82 
 
LAW AND PROVIDENCE 83 
 
 species and new revelations. When evils ap- 
 pear in the world he personally rectifies them 
 and punishes their authors. He cuts short the 
 wicked in their sins. He saves the virtuous 
 from the pitfalls of wicked foes. He takes pos- 
 session of the faculties of chosen men to im- 
 part to the people his revealed will. He inter- 
 rupts the laws of disease, gravitation, birth and 
 death to bring a favored nation safely out of 
 captivity and convince the world of the author- 
 ity of certain chosen messengers. He sends an 
 earthquake to engulf a Sodom, or a special calm 
 to save the sinking boat of the holy. If a saint 
 prays to him the Lord will arrest, till the 
 saint passes by, the avalanche that is about to 
 overwhelm him. 
 
 Directly opposed to this orthodox theory of 
 the Divine Government is that which science ad- 
 vocates. According to the teaching of nat- 
 ural knowledge, physical forces determine 
 everything, and those forces are always the 
 same ; they act in the same way and produce 
 similar results whenever the conditions are the 
 same. There is — there can be — no chance nor 
 miracle. What we fancy to be such things are 
 merely those events that are so complex that 
 we have not as yet discovered their regular 
 antecedents and conditions. The making of 
 the world and its inhabitants, the origin of 
 species, the course of history, the life and 
 
84 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 thoughts of each individual — all are but neces- 
 sary, gradual, unguided evolutions of the un- 
 conscious primal energies of the universe, ac- 
 cording to the same inflexible natural order 
 that is now in operation. Crystals, cells, 
 nerves, mammals and men have all developed 
 from primal chemical materials and combina- 
 tions and have differentiated themselves spon- 
 taneously by the necessary laws of Nature. 
 There are no interventions or corrections in 
 that august system to remedy any disorders or 
 keep them from bearing severely on particular 
 individuals. The great order of the cosmos 
 has no tenderness for childhood, no pity for 
 virtue, no regard for the most pathetic pray- 
 ers. It never swerves from the path that force 
 and circumstance prescribe. 
 
 Such are the two opposite answers. Which 
 «f these methods shall we accept as the real 
 course of action in the universe.'^ Shall we be- 
 lieve that the latter method of cosmic gov- 
 ernment prevails, viz., that of invariable nat- 
 ural law and the rule of blind, unconscious 
 force ? 
 
 Against this, as a full and sufficient explana- 
 tion, the heart of man protests, as a theory that 
 gives us only a gigantic glacier of unfeeling 
 force which with icy rigors would freeze the 
 very knees that kneel before it. 
 
 Of those who hold to this strict scientific 
 
LAW AND PROVIDENCE 85 
 
 interpretation of the processes of the cosmos, 
 there are two classes. One class would sup- 
 pose, in company with such eminent men of 
 science as the late Charles Darwin and Clark 
 Maxwell, that the first constitution of the 
 atoms and their properties, the first living cells 
 and the chief primal forms of life were due 
 to special acts of creation on the part of the 
 Supreme; but that after the universe was once 
 organized and started on its way it has been 
 left to go on evolving itself without the least 
 interruption by further supernatural inter- 
 vention. 
 
 Now, this theory of a Creator who at 
 first spends infinite care and skill in equip- 
 ping and launching the grand cosmic steam- 
 ship with its marvelous machinery, but who 
 thereafter takes no more thought about it, 
 seems somewhat absurd. If the Divine Maker 
 of all was so intensely active at the day-dawn 
 of time, why, throughout all succeeding ages, 
 has he remained in inactive torpor? Did the 
 work of creation so exhaust him as to over- 
 whelm him with lethargy ever since? The 
 old-time writer of the Genesis legend seemed 
 to have some such notion, but it certainly does 
 not comport with our modern ideas of the 
 Omnipotent Divine Life. 
 
 Or shall we adopt the more radical theory of 
 the origin of the universe, which denies out- 
 
86 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 right any knowledge or well-founded belief in 
 a Personal Creator and recognizes the Divine 
 Power, if at all, as only a mere material main- 
 spring of the universe, a primal energy or sub- 
 stance to which we are not entitled to attribute 
 either intelligence or good-will, but which goes 
 onward unfolding and progressing without plan 
 or purpose according to the irresistible laws 
 'of evolution? 
 
 Such a view leads the mind that analyzes it 
 to discern still further inconsistencies. The 
 ideas of time, space and substance are intuitive 
 ideas, of which the reason cannot divest itself. 
 Energy, motion, matter and mind are grand 
 facts which we cannot analyze into any simpler 
 elements. So the naturalistic theorist sup- 
 poses as Prof. Haeckel does, that each of them 
 is infinite. Accordingly, the insistent expound- 
 ers of Naturalism assure us that the universe 
 is eternal in time, infinite in space, illimitable 
 in variety, eternally persistent and unchange- 
 able in substance and energy, and that it al- 
 ways has had both material and mental sides, 
 which interact and develop by inflexible laws, 
 whose countless permutations constitute all the 
 myriad phenomena of the cosmos. 
 
 It is a speculation of colossal grandeur; 
 but it is as much an enterprise of faith and 
 imagination as any dogma of Theist or Pan- 
 theist. The domain of science is confined to 
 
LAW AND PROVIDENCE 87 
 
 the finite. All these "a priori'' intuitions as to 
 the infinite outreach in space and time of cer- 
 tain primal realities are plainly beyond the ex- 
 perimental boundary of natural knowledge. 
 Especially faulty is the conception that under- 
 lies this apotheosis of Nature's order. Read- 
 ers of popular science can hardly fail to notice 
 how these expositors of modern discoveries ex- 
 alt the laws of evolution, gravity, conservation 
 of energy and so on, as real things, active in 
 themselves. They are spoken of as creative 
 and governing forces, as the ultimate agencies 
 of the world — indeed, as the original realities 
 of the universe. "The unity of the universe," 
 says one of the boldest and most brilliant ex- 
 positors of this view, M. Talne, "did not come 
 from any exterior thing foreign to the world, 
 nor from any mysterious thing concealed in the 
 world. It came from a general fact similar to 
 others, a generative law from whence others are 
 deduced, in the same way as from the law of 
 gravitation all the phenomena of gravity are 
 deduced." Intoxicated with this new discovery 
 of thought M. Talne mounts his metaphysical 
 Pegasus and sings the new epic of creation. 
 "At the supreme summit of things, at the in- 
 accessible height of the lumlnlferous ether, the 
 eternal axiom pronounces itself; and the pro- 
 longed echo of that creative formula com- 
 posed, by its inextinguishable undulations, the 
 
88 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 immensity of the universe. . . . All life is 
 one of its expressions, all being one of its 
 forms, and the succession of things descends 
 from it according to indestructible necessi- 
 ties, bound by the divine rings of the golden 
 chain." 
 
 Surely, it is a marvelous axiom, an extraor- 
 dinary formula that can effect all this, and if 
 difficulties and inconceivabilities of thought, 
 such as (according to the opponents of theism) 
 require us to disbelieve in a Creator, are really 
 proper grounds for declining to accept any idea 
 at all, certainly they may well justify us in re- 
 fusing to embrace this. 
 
 "Words which should be the servants of 
 thought are too often its masters." By am- 
 biguity of language and subsequent confusion 
 of thought, laws are represented as working 
 things, capable of self-activity. But laws of 
 themselves have neither life nor movement, 
 power nor sanction. Laws of themselves do not 
 repress treason, punish perjury, nor protect 
 property. Will a statute put a burglar in 
 prison without the aid of constable, attorney, 
 or judge? Will merely engraving a sheepskin 
 prevent a communit}^ from drinking what it de- 
 sires to drink? Were this indeed true, how 
 easy would the work of government become ! 
 
 A law in itself is but a bit of parchment 
 covered with certain signs. Its power comes 
 
LAW AND PROVIDENCE 89 
 
 simply from the fact that, in the first place, it is 
 expressive of certain minds and wills, — the law- 
 givers' who enact it — and, secondly, that it is 
 recognized by certain other minds and wills 
 — those who know themselves rightly subject to 
 these law-givers. So what are called by a nat- 
 ural metaphor "the laws of Nature," have no 
 energy in themselves. Laws do not really 
 make a stone fall nor a vapor rise. What 
 we call the law of gravity is but a short, 
 abstract name for the universal fact. It sums 
 up the orderly series of phenomena, the uniform 
 recurrence of certain events. It is but our own 
 expression of a series which we observe, our in- 
 terpretation of a classification which w^e make 
 according to an inward ideal. It implies, like 
 civil law, an understanding power by which 
 the law is recognized, and also a motor power 
 of which it is the expression. In this motor 
 power lies the coercive character commonly at- 
 tributed to law. It is never contained in the 
 law itself (the mere line of facts) but it al- 
 ways belongs to the causative force behind, 
 which the order of effects implies, and of which 
 that order is simply the stated method of ac- 
 tion. While we notice only a customary rep- 
 etition of certain antecedents and consequents, 
 we cannot feel sure that this is more than an 
 accidental coincidence. It is only when we can 
 trace the shadow of some permanent force as 
 
90 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 the bond of the succession that we can feel con- 
 fident that we have found something absolutely 
 constant in its order. "The scientific mind," 
 as Tyndall well said, "can find no response in 
 the mere registration of sequence in Nature. 
 The further question intrudes itself with resist- 
 less might, Whence comes the sequence? What 
 is it that binds the consequent with its antece- 
 dent in Nature?' The truly scientific intellect 
 can never attain rest until it reaches the forces 
 by which the observed succession is produced." 
 
 Law is not, then, anything in itself, only the 
 method of action of a force. Nor is force to 
 be considered as insensate and impersonal, an 
 activity independent of mind. The intelligent, 
 orderly, progressive motions of force which 
 Nature exhibits, reason must conceive as guided 
 and impelled by an ever-present mind. Acci- 
 dental combinations and variations will revert 
 to their original condition unless there is in- 
 telligence to preserve and guide them. 
 
 The theory of naturalism does not then seem 
 reasonable. Shall we accept, then, the first 
 theory, — that of Divine intervention at special 
 times for special objects? This theory also is 
 open to equal objections. It is opposed to 
 the instinctive belief of mankind in the uni- 
 formity of Nature. It is opposed to the fact 
 that wherever we can attain a thorough knowl- 
 edge of any supposed supernatural event we 
 
LAW AND PROVIDENCE 91 
 
 can trace It back to the action of some natural 
 cause, and find it occurring in strict accord- 
 ance with natural law. Like the previous 
 theory, this supernatural theory also regards 
 the world as an engine of brute force rolling 
 on alone, while its Author sits quietly aloof in 
 an infinite remoteness. Only, on this theory, 
 God now and then leans down from his repose 
 above to wind up the machinery afresh, to re- 
 place a broken pinion, or to fling loose a caught 
 band. God, on this theory, seems to have done 
 his work so imperfectly at first that he must 
 needs be, every once in a while, putting in his 
 hand to shove the machinery along, and keep 
 it from getting out of gear and bolting the 
 straw and throwing away the wheat. This 
 theory suggests a God who could not foresee 
 the results of his own laws, but has to interfere 
 afterwards in their action to meet an unantici- 
 pated emergency. This theory gives us a God 
 who becomes sorry for what he has done, changes 
 his mind, is capricious, inequitable, unstable 
 in his methods of action, altering, in accordance 
 with the petitions of selfish and short-sighted 
 mortals, the laws which in his utmost wisdom 
 he had devised. God is exhibited, in this rep- 
 resentation of him, as one who now becomes 
 angry and punishes, now is appeased by the 
 sinner's repentance, and remits the deserved 
 penalty. He appears to be a Deity who visits 
 
92 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 and succors special ones, leaving others un- 
 helped, who enlightens favored nations, leav- 
 ing others in darkness, who is now near, now re- 
 mote, now exorable, now inexorable. On this 
 theory God acts directlj^, indeed, in those phe- 
 nomena of Nature that are mysterious and 
 striking, but in the ordinary, general course of 
 events, in the usual order of Nature, he has 
 no hand. Man is, indeed, left free in general, 
 but, when an exigency occurs, his free-will is 
 entirely taken away. If it is God's will that 
 he should live, he cannot shoot himself; he 
 will not perish, though he stay in the midst of 
 a burning house. Man's consciousness that 
 he has at all times the power of taking away 
 life is, by this view of Providence, declared 
 fallacious ; the instinct that always bids him 
 preserve his life, and that always moves him to 
 employ natural means as indispensable for so 
 doing, is declared fallacious. 
 
 In the oldest tradition of any great physical 
 disaster that has come down to us (I mean that 
 of the great Flood, a tradition that probably 
 had an historical basis in some extensive and 
 destructive inundation in Mesopotamia in olden 
 time) the cause assigned was the universal and 
 irremediable wickedness of the human race, 
 which had made Jehovah repent that he had 
 ever created man. When a pestilence visited 
 Athens in the early history of that city it was 
 
LAW AND PROVIDENCE 93 
 
 held to be a manifestation of the wrath of 
 Minerva for sacrileges committed at her altar. 
 So in Brooklyn, New York, not many years ago 
 when a theatre burned to the ground and 
 many hundreds of people lost their lives in the 
 fire, several clergymen of that city asserted in 
 their pulpits that the disaster was a testimony 
 of the Divine displeasure against sinful dra- 
 matic exhibitions. 
 
 Of course, there are cases where there is a 
 measure of truth in this view of natural calami- 
 ties as Divine retributions ; for there are not 
 a few cases where there is a physical connection 
 between the violation of natural law and the 
 special disaster following it. Many physical 
 evils proceed from man's own folly, selfishness 
 or carelessness. Such are the diseases that 
 come from transgressions of the laws of bodily 
 purity, temperance and hygiene, the epidemics 
 that come from wide-spread uncleanliness, the 
 famines that come from social shiftlessness and 
 misgovernment and the droughts that arise 
 from clearing the earth too freely of its 
 forests. These may be properly regarded as 
 self-inflicted penalties for the infraction of the 
 sacred laws of Nature. The responsible cause 
 for such calamities is not to be found in the 
 lack of Providential care or in the infliction of 
 Divine wrath, but in the lack of proper human 
 carefulness. In a large proportion of the dis- 
 
94 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 asters from which our race suffers the cause is 
 that men, for the purpose of securing some ad- 
 vantage, essay too adventurously to handle the 
 titanic powers of Nature and carelessly neglect 
 the safeguards that should accompany their op- 
 erations. When it turns out that they have 
 made a terrible mistake, they cast the blame on 
 a "mysterious Providence" instead of upon their 
 own rashness or shortsighted economy. In the 
 terrible loss of life that in recent times has come 
 from disrupted reservoir dams, devastating city 
 conflagrations, vast national epidemics and the 
 wholesale loss of thousands of passengers when 
 huge steamboats come into collision with the 
 floating ice mountains of the Atlantic, the plain 
 lesson is that of a solemn warning against the 
 too general carelessness of our race when con- 
 fronting or trying to manage the colossal forces 
 with which our civilization calls us to deal. As 
 the modern chauffeur's method is not to see how 
 far away from the danger line he can keep, 
 but how near to it he can run, so the modern 
 engineer's custom is to see on how small a 
 margin of safety he can get along; his thought 
 is not, how strong a dam or how firm a pier 
 will give perfect security, but how weak a one 
 will hold under usual conditions. When the 
 unusual strain occurs and the ruin, against 
 which no safeguard had been prepared, comes 
 about, the popular blame is apt to be cast upon 
 
LAW AND PROVIDENCE 95 
 
 the indifference of God instead of upon the 
 recklessness of man. 
 
 But, while many physical catastrophes are 
 due to human infraction of the laws of nature, 
 nevertheless, to interpret these misfortunes in 
 general as Divine judgments on the particular 
 individuals that suffer them, is to add to them 
 an undeserved bitterness. Those who are 
 chiefly to blame often, in fact, escape alto- 
 gether the resultant calamity, while those who 
 are little or not at all responsible may have to 
 bear the full effects of the infraction of 
 Nature's order. It is a noticeable character- 
 istic of physical causation that the penalties 
 that result from breaking natural law spread 
 far beyond the field and life of the immediate 
 transgressor. 
 
 Moreover, it is a great error to confound 
 those two quite distinct trains of causation — 
 the physical and the spiritual. The natural 
 forces and the moral forces have each in gen- 
 eral their respective spheres and associations. 
 Fear and remorse follow moral laws and are 
 not kept out of tyrant hearts by the battle- 
 ments of citadels or by the bayonets of senti- 
 nels. So the material energies that produce 
 earthquakes follow physical laws and make no 
 inquiry into the character or usefulness of their 
 victims, as they proceed to their work of de- 
 struction. The tornado destroys saint and sin- 
 
96 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 ner with equal impartiality, if the man gets in 
 its way while the tornado is about its business 
 of purifying the atmosphere. The flood 
 wrecks the church as relentlessly as it does the 
 rum shop. The only question it asks is, "How 
 weak are the walls ; how low is the ground on 
 which it stands.?" It is superstition and not 
 religion that confounds the natural disturb- 
 ances of the elements with the wrath of God 
 upon the ungodly. 
 
 Such a connection of cause and effect, in 
 fact, is as spurious as that which in ancient 
 days supposed the success or defeat of an 
 army to be contingent on a clap of thunder 
 or the occurrence of an eclipse. 
 
 It is superstition and not religion that de- 
 grades the high dignity and majestic march 
 of Providence, in its wise, comprehensive, and 
 beneficent operations for the ph^^sical care of 
 the whole world, into such a petty and ca- 
 pricious conspiracy of the elements to favor or 
 avenge some special case in another sphere of 
 action. It proceeds on the gross idea that ex- 
 ternal rewards on this earth are the compen- 
 sations which virtue must have in order to vin- 
 dicate Providence. 
 
 This supernatural theory, then, no more 
 suffices than the other. It involves unworthy 
 conceptions of God. It satisfies neither the 
 heart nor the mind. Both methods of cutting 
 
LAW AND PROVIDENCE 97 
 
 the tangled skein are alike unsatisfactory. 
 No one ever cuts a knot without finding that 
 he has exscinded something that it was es- 
 sential to retain. It is better patiently and 
 laboriously to untie itj as far as you can, 
 though all its snarls may not be disengaged. 
 This let us now try to do. 
 
 Look at the sphinx from behind and it seems 
 a lion. Look at it in front and it seems a 
 woman. It is neither and it is both. That 
 which we have been puzzling over is just such a 
 sphinx. To make out the truth about it, we 
 must take the elements of both opposing 
 theories, put them together and fuse them into 
 a new product. 
 
 The key is to be found in larger and pro- 
 founder views of Nature and of God. Both 
 the deeper science and the deeper theology, in 
 my opinion, require such a combination of the 
 opposing elements of both theories. They each 
 lead, when thoroughly examined, to a point of 
 view where we see that all these seemingly in- 
 congruous factors can be united in one har- 
 monious system. 
 
 A Divine Will as the causative power of the 
 world's phenomena is the fundamental demand 
 of theology. But when the nature of such a 
 Divine Will is thoroughly considered, it is seen 
 that any high idea of God requires the events 
 of Nature to be orderly, and excludes all arbi- 
 
98 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 trarlness as much as science Itself does. The 
 world, to the understanding theologian, must 
 not only have had an intelligent cause as its 
 origin, but this Intelligence must have been per- 
 fect, this Power must have been infinite. By the 
 clear thinker, God is neither to be dehuman- 
 ized and likened to a blind force, nor on the 
 other hand is he to be likened to an imperfect, 
 short-sighted, partial man. God must, indeed, 
 be held as similar to a human spirit, but not be- 
 cause he is human-like, but because man is 
 faintly God-like; because with all its defects a 
 human spirit is the highest being the analogy 
 of whose nature can throw light upon God's 
 character. But we must not attribute to God 
 the limitations and infirmities that are in man. 
 We must take the highest ideals, the noblest 
 aspirations, the most exquisite skill, the most 
 consummate wisdom and goodness which we 
 can cull from the flower of all nations ; we must 
 expand this ideal with the fire of imagina- 
 tion, and purify it in the alembic of thought, 
 and then say, "This but faintly shad- 
 ows forth God's perfection. He is Omnipo- 
 tent, Omnipresent, All-Wise, All-Just, All- 
 Loving." 
 
 What kind of action is alone consistent with 
 the character of such a Being? It has some- 
 how been thought that will, even the Divine 
 Will, is necessarily changeful and capricious. 
 
LAW AND PROVIDENCE 99 
 
 Hence, whenever and wherever order has been 
 traced, there it has been considered that God 
 could not be acting. This comes from not rec- 
 ognizing the infiniteness and perfection of the 
 Divine. Will in man is variable, not from the 
 nature of will, but from the nature of man. 
 It is due to the imperfection common to all 
 human powers. Not being able to foresee the 
 end from the beginning, man can form no in- 
 variable plan of action, but he must modify 
 his action to circumstances, delaying his de- 
 cision until the moment of action. Not being 
 able to make his work perfect the first time, he 
 must resort to a method of trial and error. He 
 must learn by mistakes, and by change upon 
 change approximate to a complete achieve- 
 ment. In proportion as he grows in wisdom, 
 he is less and less led to change his method of 
 action. More and more he forms, at the out- 
 set, plans large enough and considerate enough 
 of all possible emergencies, so that afterwards 
 they do not need to be altered. Suppose the 
 knowledge perfect and the power infinite. 
 Then each operation would be done the very 
 first time in the very best way, and would never 
 need to be corrected or improved upon subse- 
 quently. Suppose, next, the nature of the 
 man to be made immutable ; then the immuta- 
 bleness of his action would also follow. Re- 
 move, then, even from human will, those finite 
 
100 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 conditions, and it becomes incompatible, not 
 with invariableness of action, but with variable- 
 ness. In the infinite and perfect God how much 
 more so ! The plans of such a Creator will 
 never need mending. There will be no unin- 
 tended, incidental results, no partialities nor 
 favorites. His previsions will care alike for 
 the special and for the common, for the small 
 and for the great. 
 
 In the laws of a God of infinite wisdom and 
 power, there is no need, then, no place, even, 
 for interruptions of the established order. The 
 great miracle of Providence, as Isaac Taylor 
 has well said, is that "no miracle is required to 
 accomplish its purposes." 
 
 We must put, therefore, at the foundation 
 of a true scheme of Providence, by the demand 
 of theology as well as that of science, the con- 
 ception that law, absolutely invariable law, 
 reigns throughout the universe. As Prof. Wm. 
 James has forciblv said: "The God whom 
 science recognizes must be a God who does a 
 wholesale, not a retail business." There may 
 be phenomena in regard to which we do not yet 
 know what law or laws they obey. There may 
 be laws which we have not yet discovered, as 
 the laws of magnetism, electricity, steam, were 
 unknown three hundred years ago and radio- 
 activity unsuspected even fifty years ago. 
 These undiscovered laws and forces may over- 
 
> ) « 
 
 LAW AND PROVIDENCF, 101 
 
 bear at times the laws which we do know. The 
 formulas of our laws may be of greater com- 
 plexity than we think, so that there may be 
 what seem variations from the law, which varia- 
 tions, however, are in strict accordance with it. 
 As examples of such cases may be cited the laws 
 by which our sun's heat is maintained, and the 
 tails of comets are thrown out in opposition to 
 the force of gravitation, as well as the laws by 
 which the luminiferous ether, though tenacious 
 as steel, avoids impeding the motion of bodies 
 moving through it. To these may be added 
 the phenomena of somnambulism, telepathy 
 and the mysteries of those events, so far as 
 they are real, which we call miracles and oc- 
 cult phenomena. These, like man}^ other 
 phenomena, are yet unreduced to law ; but if 
 they are to be credited as actual phenomena, 
 the mind must suppose that they have, how- 
 ever, their natural laws and causes, which may 
 some day be discovered. No event that really 
 happens can be an interruption of the original 
 order and plans of the universe. 
 
 The forces of Nature then must be recognized 
 as going on without interruption. If the air is 
 overloaded with moisture, the rain descends, 
 though it ruins the poor man's crop and washes 
 away the widow's cottage. If a spark be 
 dropped into a keg of gunpowder, it explodes 
 as promptly whether it shatters a trouble- 
 
102 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 some rock or kills a hundred innocent and 
 virtuous men. 
 
 There is no slip, no flaw in the interlinked 
 order. As the Commander-in-chief of a huge 
 army, numbering half a million soldiers, in bat- 
 tles like those of Gettysburg or Spottsylvania 
 cannot omit to hold strategic positions or as- 
 sault breastworks, whose capture is indispen- 
 sable, because many lives must be lost, so must 
 the grand Cosmic Campaign go onward with- 
 out favor, irregularity or privileged omissions. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 GOOD THE FINAL GOAL 
 
 The thinker who looks facts in the face must 
 then grant that the physical laws and energies 
 that reign in the Universe are so relentlessly 
 regular and so systematized to accomplish 
 wholesale effects rather than special and per- 
 sonal ends that whenever there is careless hu- 
 man management terrible mischiefs are apt to 
 result. Who is really responsible for them? 
 Is not the underlying blame for these ruinous 
 catastrophes much less that of the inexperi- 
 enced man who thoughtlessly drops the spark 
 that fires off the dynamite of Nature, than 
 that of the Author of the world who has so or- 
 ganized its formidable elements and deadly^ laws 
 that such an explosion is likely to occur? 
 
 Certainly, it is true that no solution to this 
 problem of evil is more than superficial that 
 does not justify the Creative Lawgiver and 
 that rigid system of general law that every 
 now and then gives such frightful results. 
 
 Let us then examine this system as a whole. 
 We shall see that all the energies and methods 
 of Nature that make up the great Order of the 
 Cosmos were intended for good and necessary 
 
 103 
 
104 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 to the welfare and happiness of the earth's liv- 
 ing inhabitants. Nothing in Nature was made 
 solely for evil or chiefly so. No nerve was 
 made solely to ache ; no organ merely or 
 chiefly that man should suff'er pain ; no force 
 only to do harm. The evils which sometimes 
 occur from the great laws of Nature are neither 
 purposed nor usual, but are incidental to the 
 regular and beneficent operation of the law as 
 a whole. Take as an instance one of the most 
 terribly destructive of modern catastrophes, 
 the volcanic explosion in the island of Marti- 
 nique a few years ago. The physical forces 
 that brought the appalling ruin on this occa- 
 sion were the same serviceable energies that in 
 their usual course of action heat our houses, 
 run our engines, turn our water-wheels and 
 keep every object and creature on the earth's 
 surface from flying off into the interstellar 
 void. For a volcanic eruption is but the efl'ect 
 of certain laws. There are the gravity and the 
 hydraulic forces that bring the upland mud 
 down the river and load it on to the yielding 
 ocean bed until a great fissure in the earth's 
 crust lets in the water to the molten depths 
 of the crater. Combined with these forces 
 there are the laws of heat that turn the sea- 
 water into steam when it comes into con- 
 tact witli the internal fires and so expels the 
 ashes and lava through the giant vent-hole 
 
GOOD THE FINAL GOAL 105 
 
 of the volcano to spread disaster far and wide. 
 
 To prevent such gigantic disasters would 
 you have the Ruler of Nature forbid heat to 
 expand and water to turn to steam and fire to 
 burn? That would indeed prevent this partic- 
 ular kind of catastrophe. But when these 
 forces of Nature are vetoed, what shall keep 
 us warm in winter and cook our food and work 
 our steam-engines and hold us down to this 
 comfortable earth, instead of spinning off into 
 the outer planetary spaces w^here the cold is far 
 below zero? 
 
 Suppose that by the gift of a miraculous 
 power you were enabled to forbid ashes to fall 
 and lava to run down the mountain side upon 
 the villagers settled below. But if you have 
 no gravity any longer to urge things down- 
 ward, what will bring the planet back in its 
 punctual orbit to give you the flowers of spring 
 and the fruits of summer? 
 
 Similarly in the case of the many other 
 natural processes, such as the tornadoes, floods, 
 cloudbursts and similar things that the critics of 
 Providence so anathematize as hard and cruel. 
 Suppress them and then what shall water the 
 valley and turn the mill-wheel and keep the 
 great ocean of the atmosphere from stagnat- 
 ing? In fact, it is only these troublesome laws 
 of heat and gravity which the grumblers 
 against Providence would eradicate that keep 
 
106 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 us all from freezing to death and hold our 
 planet back from flying to pieces under the in- 
 fluence of the centrifugal force of its revolu- 
 tion. "Abolish gravity," as Samuel R. Cal- 
 throp once so forcibly said, "and you dissipate 
 the earth. On second thought would it not be 
 better to keep our globe and our old friend, 
 Gravity, even if it does aff^ord us some inci- 
 dental trouble, now and then?" 
 
 "But, tell us," persist these fertile critics 
 who delight in pointing out the improvements 
 that might be made in the great cosmic 
 scheme, "why might not the laws of nature be 
 suspended merely whenever they threaten to do 
 harm, but not at other times? Why have 
 them so cruelly constant?" The plain reason 
 is because this absolute regularity of law is the 
 indispensable means for the training and edu- 
 cation of every sentient being. Such a method 
 as has been proposed, of "special suspension of 
 natural law" whenever a man mishandles any 
 dangerous physical energy, would make of him 
 an animated puppet, whose strings are pulled 
 every minute by a Power outside of himself. 
 Under such circumstances man's opportunity 
 to learn wisdom by experience would surely be 
 removed. If the sequences of cause and efl*ect 
 were not thus unvarying, the past would throw 
 no light to guide us on the path before us and 
 to counsel us in our decisions. We should 
 
GOOD THE FINAL GOAL 107 
 
 know neither how to avoid the evil nor how to 
 attain the good, nor even what is good and safe 
 as distinguished from their opposites. Of 
 course, it seems a bitter thing when the care- 
 less approach of a bit of cloth to a gas-jet 
 sets a crowded theatre in flames; but it is just 
 this absolute inflexibility of the laws of fire 
 that enables us to use it daily with such gen- 
 eral safety. Attractive as the plan seems for 
 interposing a supernatural veto on the dis- 
 tructive action of every natural law whenever 
 any misfortune is imminent or whenever a pious 
 prayer is raised to the courts of heaven by any 
 of the multitudinous suppliants of earth, never- 
 theless such a plan would bring upon human 
 affairs confusion and anarchy right away. 
 Certainly, it would grievously impair that edu- 
 cational and moral discipline that now is the 
 very best gift of the government of God. How 
 could human beings ever learn knowledge from 
 mixing with life and the world under such a 
 denatured order, exempted from all penalties 
 or warnings that result from their own heed- 
 lessness or mistakes? Without a trustworthy 
 universe and a God who keeps his word, man 
 could never have gained that understanding 
 of the scientific order by which he has har- 
 nessed nature to his chariot wheels, nor could 
 he have gained that development of character 
 which now constitutes the shining aureole of 
 
108 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 his being. As James Martineau has so well 
 said, "A fickle world only admit of a lawless 
 race. No obedience could be required of those 
 who were placed among shifting conditions ; to 
 whom foresight is denied and where wisdom is 
 as likely to go astray as folly. As well might 
 you attempt to build upon the restless sea, or 
 steer by shooting stars as shape a mind or 
 train a character where action was a lottery." 
 An all-sufficient reason, then, why the laws of 
 Nature are general, and invariable instead of 
 special and variable is that on the whole, with 
 all its incidental calamities, it is the better 
 system. 
 
 Nevertheless, these would-be "improvers of 
 nature," who so abound, will still, I suspect, 
 persist and will ask if it is not at least con- 
 ceivable that an Omniscient God might have 
 drawn the fangs of nature and yet left sufficient 
 iron in its laws for the education and discipline 
 of humanity. 
 
 No doubt it is conceivable that in some way, 
 not understood by man, the whole great order 
 of Nature might have been made so tame and 
 gentle that the earth would have been watered 
 without floods and the atmosphere have been 
 purified without tornadoes and man have been 
 fed without sweating over work and children 
 might have been born without pain. I do not 
 care to deny that this might have been done. 
 
GOOD THE FINAL GOAL 109 
 
 But if we grant it to have been possible, then 
 comes a further question. After all, would a 
 world organized and managed on such a plan 
 have been better adapted than the present sys- 
 tem to human happiness and especially to that 
 great end which the evolution of life seems to 
 be aimed at, viz., the development of humanity. 
 Let us think seriously about this question. 
 Let us picture to ourselves such a world, 
 out of which all the rigidity has been ex- 
 tracted. It is a world in which there is un- 
 varying sunshine and tranquillity — no rough 
 places, no trials, nothing dangerous, nothing 
 violent, no severe work, no temptation, no 
 calamities, no pangs of birth or death. At the 
 first thought such a world seems an Eden. But 
 when we come to realize somewhat what it would 
 be to live on and on in its sluggish, monotonous 
 Lotus-land, we see how soon it would become 
 decidedly tiresome, thoroughly insipid and op- 
 pressive. Humanity needs something to hope 
 for and something to fear, or a wretched ennui 
 envelopes him in its enervating fog. The 
 posts in life where a man has least call to labor 
 and least to disturb him are precisely those 
 where he yawns and groans the most. There 
 is a delight that danger gives to the virile 
 human being which security can never bestow. 
 See with what joy the J^oung lad climbs the 
 steep cliff or hangs from the topmost bough of 
 
110 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 the tree. Notice with what exultation men 
 penetrate wilds of African jungles or the 
 frozen wastes of an Antarctic continent. How 
 does a furious storm make the pulse beat with 
 electric thrills and lift the mind toward the 
 sublime as no hour of comfortable quiet can 
 do ! A world free from all physical dangers 
 would not even make men happj. 
 
 Still less would it fulfill the great object of 
 life — the full development of the human spirit. 
 Whoever gets sufficient insight into the alpha- 
 bet of being to see that the great aim of our 
 human apprenticeship is not to breed a race 
 of Sybarites but to unfold the human soul to 
 strength and light and love, he will comprehend 
 how impossible it is to accomplish this except 
 by contact with danger and struggle with the 
 forces of nature. 
 
 Certainly, as we look back over the upward 
 path of animal and human life we can see that 
 this is the way in which the evolution of man 
 to his present state has been attained. In the 
 process of development the easy life often does 
 not lead upward but downward. The received 
 explanation of the chief degenerate forms of 
 life, such as the fungi, the barnacles, the para- 
 sites and the slave-owning ants, is that these 
 debased forms have come about from avoidance 
 of the more strenuous life of struggle and self- 
 help ; and so, while they have had at first a 
 
GOOD THE FINAL GOAL 111 
 
 very comfortable time, sponging their living 
 from some fellow-member of the animate king- 
 dom, they have eventually paid for it by drop- 
 ping ignominiously out of the upward proces- 
 sion of life. 
 
 I fancy that if any one of us were endowed 
 with omnipotence for a quarter of an hour and 
 allowed to improve the creative scheme accord- 
 ing to his own idea, the very first edict that he 
 would issue would be an edict abolishing all 
 pain. But I am afraid such a reformer of Na- 
 ture's laws would soon find himself in deeper 
 trouble than ever. For, unquestionably, sensa-. 
 tions of pain are the vigilant watch-guards 
 that now preserve the body from greater in- 
 juries. A very instructive incident in this con- 
 nection is that related by Prof. Wm. B. Car- 
 penter. A laborer, through a certain nervous 
 malady, lost the sense of feeling in his feet; 
 consequently, one night when in his sleep his 
 feet fell into a bed of quick lime, they were 
 so injured before he felt any pain that they 
 had to be amputated. As far as we can see, 
 it is only by these sensitive sentinels, the 
 nerves, that animal organisms can be kept 
 from dismemberment and the citadel of life 
 be saved from premature destruction. It 
 is the pangs of hunger in living things that 
 quicken them to the accumulation of food, that 
 spur us to exertion, ambition and progress and 
 
112 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 all the pleasures and good things linked with 
 them. When we seek the deepest root of the 
 grand tree of civilization we find it in pain. 
 Destitute as man was of the elephant's 
 strength, the armadillo's armor, the claws and 
 horns on which other animals have depended 
 for protection, man seemed the most weak and 
 defenseless creature, physically, of all the ani- 
 mals. But this very weakness developed in 
 him a superior sensitiveness to suffering, and 
 that sensitiveness and those severer dangers 
 and struggles stimulated in him, as in no other 
 denizen of earth, the civilizing faculties, such 
 as skill, enterprise and co-operation. 
 
 To disengage the ideal beauty of the human 
 spirit from the material matrix in which it 
 sleeps, it must know the touch of sharp and 
 often rough instruments. The heart must have 
 personal experience in bitter things as well 
 as in sweet. We need to test ourselves in the 
 storm and tempest as well as in the balmy 
 breeze and tuneful grove. Only in this 
 checkered arena of storm and sunshine, woe 
 and joy can humanity be unfolded to that 
 quickness of thought, moral robustness and 
 tenderness and bravery of heart to which it is 
 the very purpose of life to bring us. Even sin 
 has its use as a means of the soul's develop- 
 ment, because the struggle with moral evil ex- 
 ercises and tests the human spirit even more 
 
GOOD THE FINAL GOAL 113 
 
 than the grapple with material obstacles. 
 Moral innocence is but a weakling. All robust 
 virtue is gained by successive conflicts and self- 
 conquests. And similarly in sorrow there is a 
 notable education of our spiritual capacities. 
 In the same degree that we come to understand 
 the supreme worth of this self-development we 
 must recognize the beneficent purpose of human 
 grief. As the gray-haired man or woman 
 looks back over the vista of the years and puts 
 side by side its brightest, gayest and saddest 
 seasons, is there any hour on which the Divine 
 blessing seems more visibly to rest than just 
 that when the tears fell fastest.? 
 
 And just here it is well to notice another 
 thing. One of the familiar scientific facts is 
 that it is the break in the electric currents, 
 made by the carbon pencils, that causes the 
 illuminating spark to flash forth, and it is only 
 where there is resistance to the dynamic stream 
 that its hidden radiance is manifested. Just 
 so, it is the apparent breaks in the course of 
 God's regular beneficence that make this good- 
 ness of Divine Providence shine forth most 
 conspicuously. While all the wheels of mate- 
 rial prosperity run smoothly, it seems as if the 
 struggle for gold was man's ruling passion 
 and a selfish materialism the creed that com- 
 mands his worship. But when some great ca- 
 lamity makes its appeal to human aid, how the 
 
114 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 angel in the man asserts itself and resumes its 
 sway! How the halls of trade and exchange 
 (supposed to be dedicated only to mammon) 
 become the most prompt and generous in of- 
 fering relief! Recall the acts of noble exertion 
 and loyalty, the touching examples of self-sac- 
 rifice or uncomplaining endurance which in 
 such great exigencies spring forth before re- 
 vering eyes and light up the dark background 
 with a heavenly glory? See how the pathetic 
 appeals for aid banish for the hour the demons 
 of sectarianism and political partisanship and 
 obliterate ancient walls of jealousy and sepa- 
 ration! Is it not just the hard flints of these 
 rigid laws and their resultant calamities that, 
 as they strike the steel of true hearts, elicit 
 these sparks of human emotion and irradiate 
 the faces of great multitudes with the glow of 
 a generous benevolence to which they had long 
 been strangers? 
 
 In view of such instinctive outbursts of help- 
 ful response in every sore hour of human trial, 
 is it not as logical as it is natural to ask 
 if, when God inspires such tender compas- 
 sion in the hearts of his children, there is 
 no compassion In his own? Surely not. It is 
 the best of guarantees that he who organized 
 in the human heart such sympathetic emotions 
 is one whose Divine love exceeds all human 
 love, and who, in better ways than we surmise, 
 
GOOD THE FINAL GOAL 115 
 
 will bless and is now blessing every soul that 
 he has brought into life, however great this 
 man's temporary trouble seems to be. 
 
 Not so much in nature's inexorableness and 
 occasional destructiveness is the heart of God 
 to be seen, but rather in his customary good- 
 ness, in the recuperating life that so soon 
 makes the flowers bloom above the ashes and 
 the lava. Above all, it is seen in that answer- 
 ing flood of pity and in those abundant show- 
 ers of succor that from all parts of the com- 
 pass are poured out in such tragic times with- 
 out other compulsion than the appeal of human 
 need. 
 
 Such are some of the methods by which the 
 Divine Providence has so arranged that the 
 invariable laws, in directions where they seem 
 to bear hardly on living creatures, are bal- 
 anced, and the bad incidental effect is neu- 
 tralized by automatic adjustments. The ob- 
 servant mind notices a vast multitude of these 
 self-acting compensations. 
 
 As man fits his clocks with self-regulating 
 pendulums, where the expansion of one metal 
 corrects the contraction of another, so the Di- 
 vine Mechanician with infinitely more perfect 
 skill corrects the action of one invariable law 
 by another equally invariable. We have space 
 to give only one or two instances out of thou- 
 sands. Should the earth's rotation from any 
 
116 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 cause be increased, the waves of the Polar Sea 
 would rush off to the equator, and put a brake 
 on the too impetuous planet. Should its mo- 
 tion on its axis be from any cause diminished, 
 the equatorial ocean-bed would be drained off 
 to the poles, and spur up the flanks of the lag- 
 ging globe with their greater circumferential 
 velocity. Do the billows beat harder on the 
 crustaceans that denizen the sea side of the 
 breakwater? It quickens the secretions that 
 make their shells, and proportionately 
 strengthens their armor to endure it. Does 
 the lowered sun of winter bring greater cold 
 to animal life? It facilitates at the same time 
 the absorption of oxygen in the lungs, makes 
 the warmth there greater and the coverings of 
 fur or wool grow thicker and warmer. 
 
 And in the inward world, still more than in 
 the outward, are these wonderful compensa- 
 tions to be noticed. The elastic air fits no 
 more exquisitely into every nook and comer of 
 the earth's surface, giving room for each pro- 
 jecting object, contracting to suit every pres- 
 sure, expanding to fill every space, leaving no- 
 where the smallest vacuum, than will man's in- 
 ward nature fit into all deviations and irregu- 
 larities of his external circumstances. Come 
 ease or trial, success or failure, health or sick- 
 ness, life or death, yet that wonderfully 
 adapted human nature, with its spiritual de- 
 
GOOD THE FINAL GOAL llT 
 
 mands side by side with its material wants, its 
 heavenly goal contemporaneous with its earthly 
 aims, can find profit, good, contentment in 
 them all. What blocks the way to one object 
 is made the needed stepping-stone to something 
 else. Does the rain put a veto on a long- 
 looked- for enjoyment? It gives instruction in 
 self-denial. Does a conflagration reduce you 
 to poverty? It is a precious lesson in endur- 
 ance and humbleness. Does painful disease 
 tie you down to a sick bed? It gives a golden 
 opportunity for spiritual contemplation and 
 growth, which active business or household 
 cares deny. Does Death take away the friend 
 on whom we have leaned? It sends the com- 
 forter, the priceless one who will never leave 
 us, the regenerated self, with a will self-reliant, 
 a heart softened and sympathetic, a soul that 
 trusts unwaveringly in God, and that lives in 
 communion with him. As the deadly night- 
 shade can find in the purest soil the elements of 
 its rank poison, and as, contrariwise, the coral 
 can draw from unsunned seas the tints of rosy 
 morn, so our hearts, mightiest of all trans- 
 muters, will draw from all kinds of external 
 fortune exactly that which is meet for them ; 
 they will change horns of plenty into cups of 
 gall, roughest burdens into the pearly gates 
 that open into the New Jerusalem. 
 
 Thus, while the physical order keeps on un- 
 
118 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 swerving in its own way and sphere, seemingly 
 without discrimination, God's providence yet 
 makes perfect provision for all, giving to each 
 its due, and only its due. And it is be- 
 cause this is done so perfectly by the inward 
 laws that the outward laws do not have to be 
 turned aside to attend to it. 
 
 In a similar way is prayer answered, not 
 merely occasionally, but universally, while 
 physical laws retain all the time their invari- 
 ability. It takes place not in opposition to 
 fixed laws of cause and effect but in accordance 
 with them. They are laws in its own spiritual 
 sphere, working outside of and supplementary 
 to physical laws. Not a gust may blow gen- 
 tler, nor a wave be less devouring, for the 
 prayer of the shipwrecked sailor. Yet his 
 prayer is answered. As when the iron is pre- 
 sented to the magnet the attractive force is 
 evoked into action and draws the two fast to- 
 gether, so when a creature soul turns to the 
 great Soul the waiting power of the Holy 
 Spirit is given access to the finite spirit, bring- 
 ing in its influx, calmness to the mind, and 
 steadiness to the will, brushing conscience clear 
 of blurring mists and giving a trust in God's 
 wisdom and goodness that adopts whatever is 
 received, though it be death itself, as an order 
 from the Divine Commander not to be ques- 
 tioned. Law, moving with a prescient love as 
 
GOOD THE FINAL GOAL 119 
 
 undoubted as its fixity, is the flying shuttle that 
 weaves and maintains the universal web and 
 woof of worlds. Through every changing 
 process Providence wins its widening way 
 and carries all nearer and nearer the blessed 
 goal. 
 
 Is this, however, all that there is to the 
 Divine Government? Is this care which pro- 
 vides for the beneficent issues of nature and hu- 
 man life simply a thoughtful contrivance of 
 God, adjusted at the outset of things? Or is 
 it perhaps merely an undesigned effect of the 
 cosmic energies which protect life only because 
 the system could not otherwise keep itself in 
 motion ? 
 
 On the contrary, for the full satisfaction of 
 the religious instincts, God himself should be 
 recognized as having direct participation in 
 the operations of the world. The spiritual 
 emotions require a present and active God, not 
 an absentee Ruler. Our religious intuitions 
 can no more tolerate the idea that the Power 
 governing the universe should be blind or sub- 
 conscious than the reason can tolerate that con- 
 ception of it that makes it capricious and arbi- 
 trary. Only a conscious Divine Love and Life 
 can claim the spirit's loyalty and be recognized 
 by the human soul as sufficiently superior to it- 
 self to be worthy of worship. 
 
 The idea of the world as a titan machine, 
 
120 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 started and left to itself, is inconsistent with 
 any elevated idea of God. Man has to con- 
 struct machines to do his work in order to ob- 
 tain the help of forces outside of his own body, 
 such as the steam, the water power or the elec- 
 tric energies of nature. Otherwise he has only 
 the energies of his own body to draw upon and 
 he is obliged constantly to be present and per- 
 sonally to attend to the work. But the Om- 
 nipotent and Omniscient One does not need any 
 assistance nor are there such additional forces 
 outside of himself for him to draw upon. Om- 
 nipresent as He is. He needs no deputies to 
 act for Him in His absence. 
 
 Moreover, science, no more than religion, 
 can look upon this ceaselessly changing and 
 growing nature as a wheel-work of lifeless bits 
 and parts. Science is daily coming more and 
 more to the conviction that the cosmos is (to 
 use Humboldt's striking phrase) "a living 
 whole," an organism everywhere throbbing with 
 vital power and sensibility and struggling for 
 its unfolding into breathing, knowing creature 
 forms. Molecule, atom, vortex-ring and elec- 
 tron are found to be known onlv as centers of 
 force, charges of electric energy or points of 
 pressure in the ether, according to the par- 
 ticular scientific theory which the investi- 
 gator adopts. All the great laws of heat, 
 chemistry, ph^'^sics, planetary motion or psy- 
 
GOOD THE FINAL GOAL 121 
 
 chic attraction are but measures or meth- 
 ods of the particular forces that are acting. 
 What are each and all of these in the thought 
 of the candid analysts of modern science, ex- 
 cept symbols and special modes of a subtle 
 Protean Power ever shifting from one form to 
 another, but always coming out with sub- 
 stantially the same sum-total of force, actual 
 or potential, with which it started. The 
 dynamic source of this ceaseless transformation 
 play is a Grand Energy, more than physical, 
 ever acting, out of an exhaustless Life, and 
 from this higher fountain sending down the 
 streams of vitality which circulate through all 
 the veins of the vast, out-spreading cosmos. 
 But energy, according to the testimony of our 
 most eminent philosophers and men of science, 
 we know only as connected with conscious effort, 
 the push or the resistance of the will. Thus 
 at length the vast universe, in all its changing 
 states, its varied phenomena and processes, is 
 found to be a manifestation of personal volition 
 and the action of that Guiding Mind without 
 which there can be no pressure, effort or direc- 
 tion. As, then, we have to suppose that this 
 Guiding Mind and energizing Will pervade the 
 cosmos wherever energies act, of whom else 
 can they be the attributes than of the One only 
 Infinite — the Omnipresent God? 
 
122 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 "Ever fresh^ the broad creation, 
 A divine improvisation, 
 From the heart of God proceeds; 
 A single will, a million deeds." 
 
 When, then (In the light supplied by this 
 profounder view into the secret depths of 
 Nature) , we look with its help at those trouble- 
 some world-enigmas that we have been trying 
 to solve, how wondrously are they transformed ! 
 Matter is no longer a wall, barring us from 
 God. It is the ever-changing, scintillant 
 moving-picture that shows that he is here; and 
 all the brave spectacles and captivating forms 
 of beauteous nature are but dye and lace-work 
 in those glorious draperies by which the In- 
 visible One makes himself visible to our eyes. 
 The laws of the world do not prove God's ab- 
 sence, but rather that his steady will maintains 
 its customary habits. When we trace the seam- 
 less webs of evolution from the first filmy 
 mistiness of the gathering nebula up to the 
 "sea and continent girdled globe," we are but 
 tracing the process by which the Unseen One 
 weaves, thread by thread, "the garment we see 
 him by." In flashing sun he throws out some 
 sparkle of his glory, in thunder and earth- 
 quake some dim semblance of his power. And 
 so, as we follow up the process of gradual de- 
 velopment, watching it climb by insensible 
 
GOOD THE FINAL GOAL 123 
 
 gradations, first to the primal life cell and from 
 that through higher and higher vegetal and 
 animal species up to man, we but track the 
 steps by which God further unfolds his divine 
 attributes and moulds, feature after feature, his 
 mask of clay. 
 
 Thus, we never need to fear that God forgets 
 his children or Is deaf to their cry or answers 
 not their supplications. For however neces- 
 sarily connected with its natural antecedent 
 any event Is and however unchanged by our 
 prayer It may be. It Is God's direct doing; and, 
 therefore, the devout heart must serenely ac- 
 cept It as the Divine answer and the good an- 
 swer to the petition. However naturally and 
 historically the truth may come to us, It should 
 be reverently adopted as God's own speech and 
 revelation. The infinitude of God is not 
 that which removes him from us to a mist3> 
 remoteness, but that which enables him to 
 be equally present In every part of the 
 world. In the moulding of a tear or the 
 exquisite markings of the minutest shells there 
 is the same perfect finish as in the punctual re- 
 turn of the huge planet to its appointed place 
 in the heavens on its astronomic date. "The 
 hand that moves the world" is not merely di- 
 rected by a greater power and a more far- 
 sighted wisdom than any prayer of ours can 
 claim, but it is guided by a more thorough 
 
124 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 good-will and we may not hesitate to say even 
 by a warmer and truer love than any human 
 criticism exhibits. And one of the clearest 
 signs of that love is its divine voice in the hu- 
 man heart — that divine voice which in every 
 hour of affliction sounds forth in the compassion 
 and self-sacrifice of our fellowmen. Every 
 human tear is a lens through which God's sun- 
 shine sparkles for our consolation. Who else 
 but this Divine Father of all has bound heart 
 to heart with such responsive chords of love 
 and pity? What is more incredible than that in 
 the Maker of man there is an ignoble ab- 
 sence of those noblest traits with which 
 he has distinguished his children — those very 
 traits which instinctively we call, in the same 
 breath, at once the divinest and yet the most 
 characteristically human of our endowments.'* 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 FATE OR CHOICE 
 
 An old friend once told me of an abandoned 
 boat that he had watched in an idle hour at 
 the beach, drifting in an equally idle fashion, 
 to and fro ; and he feelingly spoke of the mel- 
 ancholy symbol it furnished in illustration of 
 many a life. 
 
 No longer steered by a master's hand to some 
 definite point, such a derelict floats fruitlessly 
 this way and that, at the mercy of the strug- 
 gling forces of wind and current. Now driven 
 out to sea by the off shore gust ; now, as the 
 zephyr dies, swept in towards land by the rising 
 tide; now in the channel, now out of it, keep- 
 ing to no constant course ; it is a helpless vic- 
 tim of the elements. In course of time, to be 
 sure, it will fetch up somewhere. But that 
 somewhere is pretty certain to be no safe 
 haven, but some fatal rock or shoal, where its 
 ribs are crushed to fragments and its mourn- 
 ful skeleton lies wasting away, a grim v/arning 
 to every mariner. 
 
 Of such an abandoned boat are we often re- 
 minded, as we look about us in human society 
 
 and see the lives that, unloosed from their 
 
 125 
 
126 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 anchors, without any moral compass-needle and 
 without resolute will for pilot, drift to and fro, 
 as the winds of circumstance carry them. 
 
 He who has had any considerable experience 
 of the sea of life forebodes too well the fate of 
 these human derelicts. He knows that how- 
 ever safe and pleasant their condition may 
 seem under a smiling sky, they are powerless; 
 and when the billows rise and pound the poor 
 vessel, as with loose helm and flapping sail it 
 lies in the trough of the sea, and when anon, 
 the storm drives the passive thing upon the 
 cruel rocks, there is no power any longer to 
 save it from destruction. On the waves of 
 life, as on the billows of Atlantic or Pacific, 
 whoever would win the happiness and success 
 of which he dreams, whoever would preserve 
 unwrecked that moral treasure that has been 
 entrusted to him must keep his own hand on 
 the helm of his ship and with fixed purpose 
 steer for the mark of the prize of his high 
 calling. 
 
 At the present day, however, such a straight- 
 forward course, resolutely adhered to, is one 
 beset with many difficulties. The immense com- 
 plexity of modern life tends to distract a man's 
 thoughts and dissipate his energies as never 
 before. And both religion and science subtly 
 combine their forces to rob men and women of 
 any earnest conviction of self-governing ability. 
 
FATE OR CHOICE 127 
 
 The older and sterner forms of Christian 
 theology, by their dogmas of predestination 
 and man's natural inability, have been ter- 
 ribly discouraging to human efforts, at least 
 in the moral field. According to this super- 
 stitious doctrine, the saints and the reprobate, 
 the chosen ones elected to Paradise and the 
 non-elect who have been passed over by God 
 and doomed to eternal misery, to the "glory 
 of his eternal justice," have been selected by 
 the Omniscient One ages beforehand. Man is 
 unable to work out his own salvation. All his 
 efforts are frustrated by the fall of human 
 nature in Adam and the consequent moral in- 
 ability and total depravity of the race. All 
 that any one can do is submissively to wait for 
 the miracle of some descent of the Holy Ghost 
 to redeem those whom God chooses to rescue. 
 
 For many long generations these theological 
 dogmas lay like iron fetters on the mind of 
 man, chaining the will and hardening the heart. 
 Though in many quarters they still remain, 
 happily they are now fast dissolving beneath 
 the sunlight of modem thought. 
 
 But as these bonds are losing their power, 
 modern science and philosophy are forging 
 new chains, subtler still. From all sides, 
 descend about us the steel wires inscribed: 
 "Circumstances make the man." Every act we 
 are told, is the inevitable outcome of its pre- 
 
128 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 ceding condition. Every seeming choice is the 
 compulsion of the stronger motive. Free-will 
 is an illusion, exploded now by science. Crime 
 and vice have their averages calculated by the 
 statistician. There were so many hundred 
 murders, so many thousand cases of arson or 
 embezzlement in each of the last ten years. 
 There will be again the same number on the 
 average in the next ten years. Virtue and 
 vice are therefore subject to fixed laws and 
 physical causes, like the return of winter and 
 summer. They are "merely products of 
 Nature," as Taine says, "just like sugar and 
 vitriol." 
 
 The corroding influence of this growing Ma- 
 terialism affects all the departments of life. It 
 dissolves the sense of obligation and snatches 
 the crown from virtue to put it on the heads 
 of fact and force. It degrades literature and 
 art to voluptuous sensuousness. It makes 
 luxury, money, position and worldly success 
 the sine-qua-non of happiness ; and to attain 
 this success the pull of some friend or the push 
 of lucky chance is the determining factor. Man 
 is the victim of his environment. Crime is 
 made poetical. Tears are drivelled over 
 poisoners and wife murderers ; and those who 
 yield to unlawful passions and violate their 
 marriage vows are made the saints upon whom 
 popular novelists pour forth their laudation 
 
FATE OR CHOICE 129 
 
 and melodramatic sympathy. That a woman, 
 when piqued, should betray her lover's secret is 
 "just what is to be expected," says an eminent 
 university professor, "of the cleverest of her 
 sex." If, when importuned by a libertine, she 
 surrenders her chastity as to an unavoidable 
 fate, this is held up in the mirror of our 
 realistic fiction as but the natural course of 
 things. That a politician should not sacrifice 
 moral principle as an iridescent dream, when- 
 ever a point in the game of politics is to be 
 made by disloyalty to honesty and truth, this 
 is regarded by practical men of the world as 
 Quixotic folly. In short, the assault of tempta- 
 tion is presented as always an irresistible as- 
 sault and an all-sufficient excuse for any crime 
 or vice. Even our ethical philosophers tell us 
 that ideal conduct is not possible in the midst 
 of men otherwise constituted. Conduct that is 
 alien to the prevailing modes of action is some- 
 thing in which we cannot successfully persist. 
 Such is the melancholy teaching of the popular 
 writers of the day. 
 
 Against this reduction of humanity to a 
 helpless victim of circumstances every virile 
 human being ought vigorously to protest. 
 The soul of man is more than its conditions.. 
 The human will is the helm of every human 
 course. 
 
 Do not, however, misunderstand me. I 
 
130 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 do not mean that human volition, even the 
 most resolute, can do anything that it de- 
 sires. Our will is by no means wholly free. 
 The term "free will" describes clumsily and 
 inexactly the great truth that it aims to ex- 
 press. The truth would be better described as 
 the mastership of the mind in choosing and 
 willing. To a very great extent, of course, 
 we are in the hands of an over-ruling Power 
 from which we cannot escape. For this we 
 ought to thank God. I shudder to think of 
 the consequences to the world, were its destiny 
 entirely committed to our blind human will, 
 unguarded by the great balance wheels of 
 Providence. It is a good thing, I believe, that 
 no Alexander or Napoleon has ever so influ- 
 enced the course of history as has the annual 
 local rainfall or the most commonplace of hu- 
 man senses and desires. It is by these guid- 
 ing forces, environing us and sweeping us 
 steadily toward certain Providential goals, that 
 the grand evolution of society is kept on its 
 safe and beneficent course. Much as human 
 effort may make the pendulum of progress vi- 
 brate back and forth and from side to side, the 
 constant gravitation of the social world keeps 
 every erratic movement within certain bounds 
 and balances the temporary oscillations toward 
 one extreme by speedy reactions in a contrary 
 direction. 
 
FATE OR CHOICE 131 
 
 Nevertheless, I maintain that our personal 
 choice is ever more determinative of our des- 
 tiny than our external surroundings are. 
 Every manly virtue conquers temptation and 
 rises upon it, instead of being necessarily com- 
 pelled to surrender to it whenever it confronts 
 it. 
 
 Human personality is related to material 
 conditions and organic heredities very much as 
 Commodore Parry was situated when upon a 
 great Arctic ice-floe. He could not help being 
 borne southw^ards at a certain speed by irre- 
 sistible ocean currents. But by his personal 
 exertions and those of the dogs whom he guided 
 he could travel east or w^est or north, accord- 
 ing to the route that he selected. It is, of 
 course, a mere truism to say that a man in- 
 evitably follows the stronger inclination within 
 him and must do so. But to interpret that as 
 meaning that he has nothing to do with de- 
 termining w^hat that greater inclination shall 
 be, that is a bare-faced begging of the question. 
 His greater inclination is not solely determined 
 by forces without himself but chiefly by his 
 own selection. A multitude of desires and 
 images and thoughts of all kinds, good, bad 
 and indifl^erent, throng into every active mind, 
 out of the environing sea of sensations and 
 physical conditions and out of the deeps of his 
 inherited nature and subconscious being. The 
 
132 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 man does not call them, nor can he prevent 
 their coming, nor even understand them often- 
 times, any more than the sea-captain brings to 
 himself or understands the billows and storms 
 that beat on his vessel. The man is no more 
 responsible for the arrival of his thoughts, fan- 
 cies and longings than the sea-captain for the 
 winds and waves. What he is responsible for 
 is how he trims his sails and turns his rudder 
 so as to take him to shipwreck or a safe har- 
 bor. God has given to every normal human 
 being a power of choice such that he need never 
 do what his conscience tells him to be wrong; 
 and that power of moral choice, limited though' 
 it be, includes that which most concerns our 
 happiness, our success and above all, our vir- 
 tue and righteous character. 
 
 The truth I believe to be that temptation 
 overcomes men and women, in ninety-nine cases 
 out of a hundred, not because of its irre- 
 sistible coercion, but because of the weakness 
 of our defence. It is because of the traitor 
 heart within, which, for the enticing bribe of 
 some coveted enjoyment or ambition, willingly 
 opens the gates to the besieging forces. The 
 real difficulty is with our own feeble wills and 
 sensuous nature, siding with the invaders. The 
 radical defect is our poor and sleazy character. 
 That is why the circumstances that hardly ex- 
 cite the smallest tremor in one man's scnsi- 
 
FATE OR CHOICE 133 
 
 bility are, to another, irresistible forces, sweep- 
 ing him entirely off his feet. 
 
 That, indeed, is the difficulty, — our own 
 weakness of character. I grant it ; and I 
 grant it, too, knowing perfectly well what our 
 modern determinists will say when I do grant 
 it. They will urge at once, "You have sur- 
 rendered your own case. For this inner na- 
 ture, this mental and moral constitution is 
 something over which people have no control. 
 It is a result of heredity and education — a 
 product, therefore, of the environment, only 
 one step removed." No child can choose his 
 parents, nor his early training. His character 
 is therefore, in great measure, fixed before he 
 has the chance to will or choose ; and whatever 
 he wills or chooses has been determined upon 
 beforehand by that inherited character in con- 
 nection with the preponderant mass of sensa- 
 tions and motives that at any given time are in- 
 cident upon his mind. All that any mind can 
 do is to yield to that motive which its own 
 weight, the pressure of circumstances, and the 
 pull of our susceptibilities, derived from hered- 
 ity and education, make "the path of least re- 
 sistance." Such is the argument of the de- 
 terminists. 
 
 Now, of course, our inherited character 
 limits and conditions all our conduct. But, 
 however much narrower the domain of our self- 
 
134 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 government may be than we had thought, nev- 
 ertheless, I maintain, there is a circle within 
 the mind where we have a power of choice. The 
 proof of it is that most direct and incontest- 
 able of proofs — the testimony of consciousness. 
 We know by daily experience that we can direct 
 the current of our thoughts ; we can allow our 
 fancy to wander freely from subject to sub- 
 ject or we can guide our thoughts steadily 
 along a given line of reasoning or calculation 
 or action. We can turn the light of attention, 
 now upon this, now upon that portion of the 
 mental field. Without this mastery of the 
 mind over the direction of attention and upon 
 the subject of our psychic concentration, no 
 thinker could follow out a syllogism or make 
 a mathematical calculation. Without this 
 power, no judge could weigh evidence and 
 decide a legal problem ; no business man 
 could reasonably deliberate upon and con- 
 clude a complicated financial proposition. The 
 ability to do these things depends on our 
 power to hold one chosen idea fixedly be- 
 fore us and dismiss all other thoughts for 
 awhile. We can see that the motives in one scale 
 pull down harder than in the other mental scale, 
 and yet we can say — "I will not decide to-day. 
 I will wait till to-morrow." A man can check 
 the immediate action which is prompted by 
 some natural but wrongful impulse. He can 
 
FATE. OR CHOICE 135 
 
 give the excited impulse time to subside and 
 the better second thought of reason and con- 
 science time to be heard, and at a selected hour 
 he can pull the trigger of the will and dis- 
 charge the chosen purpose into action through 
 the muscular mechanism. 
 
 These are facts of which we are directly con- 
 scious. They are also necessary implications 
 of the universal sense of personal duty and our 
 inescapable feeling of responsibility for our 
 moral choices and actions. All our instinctive 
 feelings of remorse for our own wrong acts and 
 all our impulses of indignation at careless, base 
 and cowardly conduct assume and express 
 (consciously or unconsciously) this power of 
 moral choice as a self-evident truth. For if 
 men are only automata, why should we be in- 
 dignant at the assassin or the despot any more 
 than at a torpedo ; or blame the liar for his 
 lie any more than an ill-regulated watch for 
 pointing its hands at the wrong figure on the 
 dial? 
 
 If a man has consciously yielded to a temp- 
 tation or deliberately chosen to commit an act 
 of injustice, because selfish advantage is 
 thereby to be gained, he feels altogether dif- 
 ferently^ about his act than he does when, ac- 
 cidentally and without intent, he has injured 
 himself or another. For the latter sort of 
 conduct we do not hold ourselves culpable. 
 
136 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 And this clear distinction between the two 
 classes of conduct (the bad things we choose to 
 do and are to blame for, on the one side, and 
 the unintended evils, on the other side, for 
 which we are not to blame nor called to repent) 
 is confirmed by the judgment of our fellows, 
 the verdicts of courts and the customary 
 discriminations of all modem legislation. In 
 fact, it is confirmed by the universal judg- 
 ment of mankind. Yet if determinism be 
 true, both classes of acts were equally exempt 
 from self-condemnation or regret. The uni- 
 versal human instinct, however, that the self- 
 chosen act is a proper subject for censure and 
 the unintended one is not thus censurable, 
 clearly implies in the human being, who feels 
 his responsibility, a power of choice. Until 
 men shall feel that an attack of heart disease 
 or a steamboat accident is as blameworthy a 
 thing for its victim as the commission of a 
 theft is for its perpetrator, human reason 
 must grant to normal men some power of moral 
 choice and refuse to accept all human acts, 
 without distinction, as equally inevitable re- 
 sults of circumstance. This dominance of 
 mental and moral choice over our natural dis- 
 positions or external circumstances is a fact 
 admitted by leading psychologists and by 
 cautious scientific writers. Authorities of the 
 first order in both domains, such as Professors 
 
FATE OR CHOICE 137 
 
 Cope and William James, Rudolf Eucken and 
 Sir Oliver Lodge, acknowledge this power of 
 self-direction and option amongst the inclina- 
 tions urging themselves upon the self. B3/ 
 fixing our attention on that class of remem- 
 bered things that call up a particular motive, 
 that motive may be made to prevail. But if 
 we divert our attention and fix it upon an op- 
 posite set of considerations, the former in- 
 clination may be overshadowed and subdued. 
 Even one who was so inclined to the automaton 
 theory of human nature as Prof. Huxley was 
 obliged, nevertheless, to admit, that "our vo- 
 lition counts for something as a condition in 
 the course of events." "This is a belief," he 
 says, "which we can verify experimentally just 
 as often as we wish to try; and it therefore 
 stands on the strongest foundation on which 
 any belief can rest." If there are those who 
 will accept neither logical demonstration nor 
 moral inferences nor the testimony of human 
 consciousness, but demand visible observation 
 of the mind's control over matter before they 
 will believe it, there is an interesting scientific 
 experiment by Prof. Mosso that well illustrates 
 how thought can move matter. In a large 
 and very delicate balance, a man is stretched 
 out in an horizontal position in exact equi- 
 librium. Now let him give loose rein to the 
 lower fancies or passions or empty his mind 
 
138 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 of thought as entirely as he can, and the blood, 
 passing downward, lowers perceptibly the end 
 of the scale where the lower part of the body 
 is. But now, on the contrary, let the man's 
 mind be concentrated intensely on some logical 
 argument or profound calculation, and the end 
 of the balance where the brain lies is now de- 
 pressed, as the blood is summoned by the mind 
 to that opposite end of the scale. The ocular 
 demonstration of the soul's control of its or- 
 ganism is a striking one. But in daily life, 
 the principle is almost momently in action. 
 The simple explanation of that fact which the 
 determinist so persistently emphasizes, viz., 
 that the act of volition follows the preponder- 
 ant motive is this, that this motive, in any case 
 of moral indecision, only becomes preponder- 
 ant when the self has put its casting vote into 
 the mental balance. 
 
 I am well aware that it has been ob- 
 jected that a violation of the law of the 
 conservation of energy is involved in thus 
 supposing the psychic self to lift a given 
 desire or thought into the field of attention 
 where it becomes a source of nervous and 
 muscular action. But in point of fact, noth- 
 ing is thereby either added to or taken from 
 the sum total of physical energy, and however 
 mysterious the process is, it does not violate 
 any physical law. A mechanical analogy is 
 
FATE OR CHOICE 139 
 
 furnished by the law that when a directing 
 energy acts at right angles to a moving body, 
 it may deflect its course without altering the 
 stock of energy in the body acted upon. So 
 the self may alter the direction of the nervous 
 and muscular currents without conflicting at 
 all with the law of the conservation of energy 
 or other mechanical principle. 
 
 As to this materialistic objection, so often 
 urged, that a selective superintendence by the 
 mind over the impulses pressing upon it, con- 
 flicts with the laws of cause and eff'ect ruling 
 everywhere in the physical world, there is a 
 direct and sufficient answer. It does not con- 
 flict with them for this plain reason: namely, 
 that the selective control does not occur within 
 the material chain of antecedents and conse- 
 quents. It is an option exercised and a direc- 
 tion given wholly within the psychic world, the 
 realm of consciousness. It does not occur un- 
 der material laws nor under physical coercion, 
 but under mental laws and through moral 
 forces. The laws of matter and of mind are 
 radically diverse. Even if we look at the mat- 
 ter from the standpoint of Monism and only 
 permit speech of the objective and material as- 
 pects of the brain in distinction from the subjec- 
 tive aspects of the psychic activity, these two 
 sets of laws, the objective and the subjective, 
 are radically dlff"erent. In the material or ob- 
 
140 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 jective realm changes occur along the line of 
 least resistance, according to laws of quantita- 
 tive continuity and connection. In the mental 
 realm, on the contrary, we have laws of selec- 
 tion according to association of ideas, moral or 
 logical worth and pleasure and pain. We have 
 conformity to ideals, adherence to purpose, in- 
 telligent choice and rational harmony. Mate- 
 rial energies add themselves into a sum of the 
 constituents, or, if opposite in direction, neu- 
 tralize each other in mean resultants. In 
 the mental world, on the contrary, sensa- 
 tions and thoughts, once felt as distinct, re- 
 main as distinct and when recalled do not re- 
 appear as a sum or as an average, but reap- 
 pear as distinct feelings or ideas. Contrasted 
 sensations do not fuse into a neutral sensation, 
 but emphasize each other. All our mental life 
 — memory, judgment, comparison, deduction 
 and induction — all depend on this retention in 
 the mind of those contrasts and variations 
 which enable clear perception and reasoning to 
 be carried on. In all the higher activities of 
 the mind the laws that govern physical ener- 
 gies are reversed. Through this radical dif- 
 ference between the psychic laws of conscious- 
 ness and the objective laws of matter and phys- 
 ical energy it is evident how perfectly pos- 
 sible it is for the self to give a preference to 
 one idea over another, keeping it first in the 
 
FATE OR CHOICE 141 
 
 field of attention and then, by an act of vo- 
 lition, releasing the nervous discharge in 
 muscular action so as to act on the outer world 
 and initiate changes there, independent and un- 
 determined by circumstances and in no way 
 inconsistent with physical law and the scien- 
 tific conservation of energy. Nevertheless, 
 through the mysterious connection of the mind 
 with the body, this change, originated by the 
 conscious self, in the act of willing, moves out- 
 ward from the field of consciousness with 
 mighty effect into the social and material 
 world. 
 
 Among living savants the one of profoundest 
 grasp of the philosophical bearings of modern 
 science is the distinguished English Professor 
 of Physics, Sir Oliver Lodge. In his book on 
 "Life and Matter" he has emphatically en- 
 dorsed this view of the mastery of the choos- 
 ing self over circumstances. "Guidance and 
 control," he well points out, "are not forms of 
 energy, and their superposition on the mate- 
 rial and dynamic currents need perturb neither 
 physical nor mechanical laws, and yet it may 
 profoundly affect the consequences." While 
 mental associations and influences stand out- 
 side the material chain of causation and have 
 quite different laws, yet through that mystic 
 intimacy with the cerebral organism (which 
 some explain as a constant parallelism and 
 
142 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 others as a double aspect), the physical is 
 made amenable to spiritual control and 
 the daily miracle occurs, by which, as 
 Browning says, "Nor soul helps flesh now 
 more than flesh helps soul." This dominance 
 of the self over its inclinations and acts 
 is a scientific as well as a psychic and moral 
 fact. 
 
 These spiritual forces are, indeed, not things 
 that are tangible or visible to eye of flesh. 
 Nevertheless, they are facts, demonstrated by 
 experiences similar to those that authenticate 
 many of the energies affirmed by science. 
 Though a man cannot grasp or handle them, 
 let him violate their sacred authority and how 
 they take hold of him ! In the remorse of the 
 transgressor, and in the melancholy and dis- 
 satisfaction of the cynic heart, what exhibition 
 do we see of the forces that are denied! From 
 Dr. Thomas Hill I once received a striking 
 electrical illustration of this moral power. "If 
 you have watched a dynamo as it is getting to 
 work, you have doubtless observed how easily 
 the core of balanced magnets revolves, before 
 the current begins to flow. A child could set 
 the core turning. But when the light begins 
 to flash out at the breaks in the circuit, then 
 a powerful steam engine finds that it has all it 
 can do to keep the magnets revolving. The 
 energy is invisible. But its existence is shown 
 
FATE OR CHOICE 143 
 
 by the tremendous resistance required to over- 
 come it." 
 
 So the anguish and piercing stings of the 
 heart which sets up its unscrupulous selfishness 
 against the sacred laws of righteousness, — this 
 suicidal wrestle of men with conscience and this 
 fatal scorching of self-respect and honorable 
 joy in the secret fires of moral retribution, — 
 how tragically do these experiences of over- 
 ambitious men (all too common as they are) 
 exhibit the mighty power of unseen realities in 
 the human soul ! 
 
 Through this sovereign power of the self the 
 reformed drunkard keeps his thirst for liquors 
 in check; through this the martyr holds his 
 hand unmoved in the burning flames ; through 
 this the decision of a critical hour makes or 
 mars the career of the genius. By this moral 
 choice we not only can keep at bay the temp- 
 tations to vicious indulgence, carry into exe- 
 cution our nobler aspirations and maintain our 
 moral character, uncontaminated by the pres- 
 sure of the world about us, but we can do more 
 than this ; we can elevate and ennoble our own 
 characters. We can, by persisting in our self- 
 restraint and our generous aspirations till they 
 become habits, alter even that legacy that 
 heredity has left us ! By fixing our attention 
 upon our sense of duty, we can give it, if 
 weak, enhanced power; by steadily repressing 
 
144 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 our sensual inclinations, we wither them up, at 
 length, close to the root. By strengthening 
 every virtuous effort and turning our thoughts 
 more and more from the low plane of self-in- 
 terest to the heavenly visions of disinterested 
 devotion to God and humanity, we can, little 
 by little, make this life of the spirit a second 
 nature, and lift ourselves up into spheres of 
 high thought and purpose, where low and 
 sensual pleasures no longer even attract us. 
 As John Stuart Mill, although he had severely 
 criticised the ordinary presentation of the 
 theory of free-will, nevertheless at length ad- 
 mitted, "we have real power over the formation 
 of our characters." " Our will," the great 
 English philosopher acknowledged, "by influ- 
 encing some of our circumstances, can modify 
 our future habits and capacities of willing." 
 
 Through this self-modification of our cus- 
 tomary conduct and companions, and espe- 
 cially by the altered choice of our prefer- 
 ences and resolutions and by the change 
 in the respective kind of stimuli and inclina- 
 tions that are either repressed or indulged, 
 our whole mental and moral environment is 
 altered. The great world about us may best 
 be likened to an echo cliff, that gives back to 
 us (according as we give to it) music or dis- 
 cord, and songs of joy or groans and mur- 
 murings of discontent, magnified into long 
 
FATE OR CHOICE 145 
 
 reverberating waves that make not only our 
 own weal and woe, but the weal and woe of our 
 neighbors and associates. Happiness begets 
 happiness. If you "would have the best come 
 back to you," then you must "give the world 
 your best." 
 
 "Give love — and love to your life will flow; 
 
 A strength in your utmost need; 
 
 Have faith; and a score of hearts will show 
 
 Their faith in your word and deed. 
 
 Give pity and sorrow to those that mourn; 
 
 You will gather^ in flowers again 
 
 The scattered seeds from your thought out-borne. 
 
 Though the sowing seemed but vain." 
 
 The supreme fortune teller is not destiny 
 but character. Every great man who has 
 towered high above his generation has been no 
 pleasant drifter with the tide, but a man nota- 
 ble for his resolute will — a man who has 
 laughed to scorn that word that cows the 
 multitude, "Impossible." "Talk not to me of 
 that word," said Mirabeau (when it was pre- 
 sented as a final bar to something which he was 
 determined upon). "Talk not to me of that 
 blockhead of a word." Before men of such 
 determined spirit mountains crumble to mole- 
 hills. 
 
 The key that unlocked the door of success 
 for Wagner was forged of the same metal. 
 
146 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 It was in the darkest of dark days in Paris, 
 when he was bankrupt, starving, and every 
 leading director to whom he appealed for a 
 chance to be heard was icy marble to his pray- 
 ers, that Wagner wrote in his journal "Sic 
 itur ad astra," and by his indomitable will won 
 his way to the operatic throne of the musical 
 world. 
 
 In the life of Frederick Douglass a similar 
 triumph of determined will over opposing cir- 
 cumstances was splendidly exhibited. Here 
 was a man born in bondage, not owning as a 
 youth his own body, nor allowed to learn the 
 alphabet, except by stealth ; pledged before his 
 birth for his master's debts. But though de- 
 nied all chance of education, he somehow 
 learned to read and write, and, secreted on 
 shipboard at imminent risk of death, he es- 
 caped to a free state, and before many years 
 became a famous lecturer and editor and the 
 peer of any man in the country. 
 
 Or to take a more recent instance, recall the 
 account that Thomas A. Edison has given of 
 the origin and conditions of his remarkable 
 scientific inventions. When "the modern 
 wizard" was asked if their source was in bril- 
 liant intuitions that came to him indirectly or 
 through accident, he stated that almost never 
 had he made a discovery in that way. "When 
 I have finally decided that a result is worth get- 
 
FATE OR CHOICE 147 
 
 ting, I go ahead on it and make trial after 
 trial until it comes. Anything I have begun 
 is always on my mind and I am not easy while 
 away from it until it is finished." 
 
 Prof. Ehrlich, perhaps the greatest medical 
 discoverer of modern times, has accomplished 
 his remarkable achievements in a similar way. 
 One of his famous chemical compounds that 
 w^orks unprecedented cures is called 606. But 
 the number of experiments that preceded its 
 discovery is said to have been nearer 6,000. 
 As it was once so expressively said by Charles 
 Darwin, who labored forty years on his noted 
 book, "The Origin of Species," forcing himself 
 unremittingly through days of constant suffer- 
 ing to do work from which men of the strong- 
 est constitutions would have shrunk: "7^5 
 dogged that does it,'' 
 
 Every reader who looks into the career of the 
 great men of the United States finds that the 
 university where almost every one of these 
 noted men was educated was the little red dis- 
 trict school, and the home in which he was born 
 was a log cabin or some equally humble shelter. 
 
 The believer in luck lazily waits for some- 
 thing fortunate to turn up. The believer in 
 the power of will gets up at dawn, turns up the 
 hidden ore with industrious hand and forges it 
 into precious metal. 
 
 For months Delsarte had daily besought the 
 
148 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 theatrical managers for just one opportunity 
 to appear before a public audience, but only 
 to be angrily rebuffed. At length, one stormy 
 night, the manager thought he would end his 
 importunities by granting him the chance for 
 which he had begged. Pointing to the drop 
 curtain, he told Delsarte that in a minute it 
 would go up and he might try what he could 
 do. On its rising, a beggar in ragged garb 
 advanced to the footlights with the air of a 
 prince and began his role. His sweet and 
 clarion voice, his graceful bearing, his ex- 
 pressive and dramatic gestures, his moving play 
 of features and wonderfully inspiring person- 
 ality soon elicited an extraordinary admiration 
 and the audience listened spell-bound until, at 
 the magnificent crescendo of the dramatic ef- 
 fort, the appreciative hands instinctively 
 united in enthusiastic applause. When Del- 
 sarte left the theatre that night it was with a 
 fine engagement which showed that he had, to 
 use the French phrase, "clearly arrived." 
 
 If a nearer instance, amidst the more in- 
 sidious and less romantic moral dangers of our 
 own land, be desired, we may turn our eyes to 
 the oozy slums of New York City that engulf 
 thousands every year. Yet even here, in such 
 a career as that of Jere McCauley, the founder 
 of that most beneficent institution, the old 
 "Water Street Mission," we can see a truly 
 
FATE OR CHOICE 149 
 
 magnetic illustration of the power of a re- 
 generated will to overcome the down-drawing 
 power not only of squalid environment but also 
 of wretched heredity and companionship. For 
 Jere McCauley had been the companion of 
 thieves, an inmate of prisons and a man so dis- 
 couraged at the obstacles in his way to leading 
 a decent life that he had become quite hopeless 
 of his power to reform himself until the sympa- 
 thy and aid of a true friend nerved him to 
 one more effort. Sustained, however, by this 
 brotherly faith and help, he turned to a life 
 of honesty, and not only gained the white 
 plume of virtue for himself, but established a 
 splendid philanthropic asylum for the fellow- 
 men, beset by similar temptations and adversi- 
 ties. This Water Street Mission House has 
 now become world-famous, and there is not a 
 ship that sails out of New York harbor, it has 
 been said, which does not have on it some man 
 who has felt its influence and been lifted more 
 or less to a cleaner life by the example of this 
 former jail-bird, Jere McCauley, and by the 
 equally devoted work of those men of the peo- 
 ple who have been his successors in rousing the 
 latent manhood of the lowest of the low in 
 America's huge maelstrom of temptation. 
 
 Circumstances, doubtless, supply the mate- 
 rial to the loom of life ; and if they give no 
 silk or velvet, only rough wool or cotton, we 
 
150 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 can onlj do our best with such means as we 
 have. But the pattern in which the web is 
 woven, coarse or chaste, tawdry or beautiful, 
 lies with each. 
 
 Society's commonest failures are the weather- 
 cock folk. The psychic dynamite that clears 
 the pathway of life is concentrated energy. A 
 resolute heart can turn adversity and pain into 
 the scarlet robe that fittingly adorns a princely 
 soul. It can transform the miry environment 
 of temptation, vice and tyranny into the fruit- 
 ful fertilizer of virtue's spotless lilies. 
 
 As Epictetus demonstrated how virtue wins 
 a brighter grace from a Nero's foul rule, so 
 Marcus Antoninus has shown us (what per- 
 haps was even a more diflScult achievement) 
 that even in a Roman palace "life may be well 
 led." So far from a Christian life being an 
 impossibility among the degraded and the 
 ferocious, as Herbert Spencer once asserted, 
 it has been precisely among these, even amidst 
 the most savage and cannibal, that the mission- 
 aries of the Gospel, from the time of Ulfilas 
 and Boniface to that of Livingstone, Pateson, 
 and the heroic saints who converted the Fijians 
 from cannibalism to Christianity, have ex- 
 hibited the most lustrous examples of fidelity to 
 Christian principle. 
 
 It is, to be sure, no child's play to achieve 
 these moral victories. The walls of our mod- 
 
FATE OR CHOICE 151 
 
 ern Jerichoes need sometlimg more than the 
 blowing of rams' horns to make them tumble 
 down. To save the souls of fellowmen, or even 
 to save one's own soul in the slimy underworld 
 of a great modern metropolis is not a case of 
 slippered ease. It requires faith in God's 
 world, faith in the dominant soul within the 
 most degraded and faith in the Fatherly Good- 
 will toward all the children of the human race. 
 "It takes some fighting to win a fray." And to 
 win a spiritual battle every human being must 
 be able to bear blows of adversity. Men and 
 women have got to use their wits. They have 
 got to control their passions ; they have got 
 to sacrifice pride and vanity ; and pay virtue 
 its price by giving up oftentimes ease, com- 
 fort and worldly advantages, if they would 
 come off unscathed. But any man that values 
 honesty and self-respect more than money or 
 the world's favor can be honest and clean in 
 life. 
 
 In the pathetic story of the loss of the mag- 
 nificent steamship Titanic on her first voyage 
 across the Atlantic, one of the most dramatic 
 incidents was the noble conduct of the ship's 
 musicians. Instead of deserting their posts to 
 get early seats in the life-boats, the men of 
 the steamer's band loyally stood shoulder to 
 shoulder in their accustomed places, manfully 
 playing the devotional or encouraging hymns 
 
152 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 that might cheer fearful minds or console the 
 sad hearts of the passengers. In firm and un- 
 broken ranks, and with heroic spirit, they con- 
 tinued the music till the fatal end drew near. 
 
 In the equally grave perils of the sea of life, 
 when the billows of sin and crime threaten to 
 engulf the lives of men and women, is there not 
 an equal call on every one to make his human 
 existence "one grand, sweet song," to play 
 the chivalric part of a true soldier of God to 
 the very end, to be ready to sacrifice life itself 
 to maintain clean hands and a pure heart? No 
 man determined to keep his fingers from steal- 
 ing and his tongue from lying need steal or 
 lie. No woman, firmly resolved to keep her- 
 self chaste, need be unfaithful to her mar- 
 riage vow. They are sophists and base de- 
 famers of womanhood, who say that such temp- 
 tations are so natural as to be irresistible. 
 
 Of course, the mere weak desire to be chaste, 
 if it does not cost much, such as Thomas 
 Hardy has portrayed in his "Tcss of the 
 D'Urbevilles" (that infamous libel on a really 
 "pure woman"), is a poor defence against the 
 pressure of fleshly passion. When a woman's 
 devotion to virtue is conditioned on easy terms 
 of service, exempt from such demands as the 
 sacrifice of her pride, or her jewels, or the en- 
 durance of a little poverty, such virtue, of 
 course, is not equal to resisting the temptations 
 of the world. This, however, is no genuine 
 
FATE OR CHOICE 153 
 
 purity. But when a woman is resolutely de- 
 termined to be pure, cost what it may, there is 
 always a way of escape from degradation. 
 Even a Pompey, unsupported by any Chris- 
 tian faith, could, for honor's sake alone, say, 
 as he sailed into the teeth of a devouring gale, 
 "It is necessary for me to go, — it is not neces- 
 sary for me to live." Is her purity of less 
 worth to a Christian woman than his honor was 
 to the pagan General? Or is it the revival of 
 that ignobler Paganism of classic days, that 
 materialistic and epicurean philosophy which, 
 at length, consumed the manhood of the Roman 
 race — is it this that leads so many to-day to 
 consider bodily comfort in this life the only 
 good and the new rule of right, and to regard 
 hunger and passion as justification for every 
 crime, and thus degrades our ideals of moral 
 responsibility far below the level of ancient 
 Stoicism ? 
 
 For my part, I am not ready yet to sur- 
 render either my higher estimate of the worth 
 of virtue, my faith in the human ability to 
 guard that virtue, or the Providential support 
 that is given to every struggling soul. I 
 rather say with loyal John Milton: 
 
 "So dear to Heaven is saintly chastity 
 That when a soul is found sincerely so 
 A thousand liveried angels lackey her 
 Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt." 
 
154 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 Let us remember, however, that m order to 
 receive such support the soul ought to get into 
 some intimate connection with the heavenly cur- 
 rents. The common human will needs a great 
 deal of electrification. 
 
 You have often seen a group of birds lazily 
 resting their bodies on the telegraph wires, 
 while under their horny claws, all unbeknown 
 to them, momentous messages were passing, 
 pregnant with joy or tears, the loss or gain of 
 fortunes, the tidings of life or death. 
 
 As I have sat amidst some gossiping throng 
 of travelers, while they sped through the 
 grandest of Alpine scenery with inattentive 
 eyes, or listened in some fashionable church to 
 solemn messages of eternal import and noticed 
 the wandering gaze of the auditors, interested 
 chiefly in the looks of the tardy incomers and 
 the display of surrounding millinery, I have 
 thought of these birds on the telegraph wires. 
 How insensible are average men and women to 
 the most inspiring beauties of Nature, to the 
 noblest functions of humanity and to the most 
 vital concerns of our life! 
 
 The secret of human power lies in secuinng 
 reinforcement to our own vacillating will from 
 the great spiritual forces. When the electrician 
 would secure for his wheels, his arclights or 
 dynamo a good supply of the magic electric 
 cnerg}^, he must first make connection with 
 
FATE OR CHOICE 155 
 
 the mysterious cosmic currents and then keep 
 that connection uninterrupted. So for the hu- 
 man soul to obtain co-operation with the im- 
 material energies that uplift life and character, 
 men and women must open their hearts to the 
 great streams of religious inspiration and de- 
 velopment which Nature, society and the 
 church are able to supply. As the piece of 
 soft iron placed within the electric coil may be- 
 come itself a magnet, so he who desires for him- 
 self an increase of spiritual power should mag- 
 netize himself by seeking the places and occa- 
 sions where this power descends. He should 
 vivify his heart through the elevating services 
 of the church, and the fortifying influences of 
 high-minded companions. He should cultivate 
 that trustful receptivity of mind that gives 
 free inflow to the spiritual influences, and he 
 should accumulate in the storage-battery of 
 his memory the lofty aspirations of the saints 
 and the grand thoughts of the prophets of all 
 the ages. 
 
 Let a man, especially, face his conscience un- 
 shrinkingly, let him aspire to be somewhat 
 better to-morrow than he is to-day and obey 
 the guidance of the heavenly vision, though it 
 take him far away from any popular road. 
 If there is one conviction above all others that 
 I would like to-day to instill into the minds of 
 our young people, it is this : "Do not yield to 
 
156 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 these popular sophisms which make you an *au- 
 tomaton' played upon by the fingers of chance." 
 "All that most ennobles life," it has wisely been 
 said, "is all your own." "All that would de- 
 base you, can hold you only by your own per- 
 mission." He who abandons his God-given 
 prerogative as helmsman and pilot of his ship 
 of life, to let the currents of circumstance drive 
 him as they chance, drifts inevitably toward 
 the fatal breakers. He, on the other hand, 
 who keeps his own hand on the tiller of his ship 
 of life not only advances daily nearer his de- 
 sired haven, but he makes the very head-winds 
 and cross-currents further his purposes. 
 Every year finds the electric searchlight of con- 
 science clearer and the helm of resolution more 
 easily guides his course. Every year the beams 
 of moral principle are stauncher and the 
 armor-plate of righteousness is more impreg- 
 nable. 
 
 Every victory of the will adds to the domi- 
 nant forces and habits of regnant character. 
 The volitional cords are no entangling bonds, 
 uncoiled by sinister Fates ; they are living mus- 
 cles, whose controlling and saving power grows 
 stronger by daily exercise. It may be that 
 to him who essays this life voyage across the 
 turbulent waves of the modern world, the rays 
 of the inner light seem at first as dim and shim- 
 mering as that of the aurora that pulses trem- 
 
FATE OR CHOICE 157 
 
 ulously in the winter sky. The eye of flesh 
 often calls these rays mere illusions. But the 
 moral vision that can turn away from the 
 glare of passion and befogging custom to 
 look upward in the sobering hours of grief, 
 meditation or tragic temptation, finds in them 
 the signals and attendants of eternal magnetic 
 currents that stream to us from the Divine 
 Sun of Righteousness. 
 
 As the wise Greek solved the old logical syl- 
 logism which proved that motion is impossible 
 by just '^getting up and walking," so he, who 
 is wise, will emancipate himself from the mod- 
 ern puzzles of thought and pressures of en- 
 vironment that would paralyze our will, by just 
 exerting his voluntary option, promptly and 
 vigorously. Whenever any one, however weak 
 he may feel himself to be, has any sincere long- 
 ing to have his nobler aspirations and better 
 thoughts reign over his life, let him believe 
 that, as they are the best and the noblest, they 
 must possess divine truth and reality, and there- 
 fore they must have God's power and all na- 
 ture's true instincts and forces behind them. 
 And so, as a loyal child of God and patriotic 
 member in the great brotherhood of humanity, 
 let him act up to these higher convictions. 
 
 The majesty of Eternal Righteousness is 
 above and behind each faithful soldier who an- 
 swers to the trumpet call of duty. As soon as 
 
158 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 a man steps above those insulating stools of 
 selfishness where his curious nerves only receive 
 useless and intermittent shocks or as soon as he 
 makes some effective connection with the grand 
 dynamic currents of the universe, then the Di- 
 vine electricities, by which mortal flesh lives and 
 moves, flow into and through him and carry 
 him onward and upward with an energy and in- 
 spiration vastly more than mortal. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 OUR SELF-MADE WORLD 
 
 I once heard James Freeman Clarke tell of 
 the startlincr contrasts he found on a Missis- 
 sippi steamer on which he was traveling. 
 
 At one end of the saloon were some profes- 
 sional gamblers and their pals, betting on their 
 cards and filling their conversation with oaths. 
 At the other end were some pious Methodist 
 men and women, singing their popular church 
 hymns. As he walked up and down the saloon 
 he would come now to the singers and catch a 
 few words of their songs of praise and trust ; 
 and then, at the other end of the room, he would 
 hear the cursing and coarse jokes and laugh- 
 ter of the gamblers ; and it seemed to him as 
 though he were walking to and fro between 
 heaven and hell. 
 
 How often, indeed, are heaven and hell thus 
 close together. Not only under the same roof 
 but in the same family and in the same circle 
 of circumstances. The place which seems to 
 one to be an Inferno, another turns into a 
 Paradise. 
 
 When the crabs and mussels, the nautili, 
 
 abalone and thousands of other sea-creatures 
 
 159 
 
160 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 built their houses of shell, they all drew from 
 one and the same ocean water and from one 
 and the same stock of materials. But how 
 widely different in color and shape the encas- 
 ing walls that the diverse species built. 
 
 So the life material for boys and girls, men 
 and women is very much the same. Each se- 
 lects that for which he has an affinity. Of 
 course there are diversities of inheritance and 
 accidents of poverty or privilege which at first 
 constrain us. But as life goes on, the power 
 of environment and fate grows less ; the power 
 of character grows more; and the coincidence 
 between our surroundings and our spirit, and 
 the mastery of fortitude over fate become more 
 complete. In the long run, each man fashions 
 his own world and incarnates in his life his se- 
 cret longings and ideas, his respective virtues 
 or infirmities. In the long run each fills his 
 home with the charm and sweetness of his own 
 personality or with the bitterness, weakness and 
 discords of his inner nature. For happiness 
 we do not need the luxurious furnishings, the 
 costly pictures and gorgeous apparel which to 
 many seem its sure and almost indispensable 
 sources. Neither can a life of leisure, free 
 from every duty, and an uninterrupted succes- 
 sion of gayeties and exciting pleasure-bouts, 
 where every day is a festal holiday, ensure it. 
 The excessive ostentation (as soon as its owner 
 
OUR SELF-MADE WORLD 161 
 
 gets accustomed to it) becomes a burden. The 
 more style there is, the more stiffness and 
 dearth of good fellowship. Chronic dissipa- 
 tion or steady pleasure seeking, draining the 
 animal vitality and closing the man's career to 
 earnest pursuits, dries up the sensibility and 
 stings the man with a consciousness of wasted 
 existence, until in the lower and lower whirl- 
 pools of sensual sensations, the vacuum yawns 
 again more drearily than ever and the whole 
 existence becomes a bore. Riches can no more 
 purchase happiness than they can purchase for 
 a school-girl "the capacity" which the rich 
 father ordered the academic principal to secure 
 for his daughter at any price. 
 
 Are there not hosts of men and women in 
 rude cabins in back alleys or in huts in lonely 
 wildernesses, living from hand to mouth, with- 
 out any of those pictures, books, entertain- 
 ments or comforts which make what you and I 
 call civilized and endurable life, yet who are 
 serene and cheerful, and sing the song of the 
 Lord every day as they walk their path of con- 
 tentment and peace? 
 
 And do you not know, dear reader, multi- 
 tudes of other men and women, cushioned with 
 softest comfort and encircled with every lux- 
 ury, their walls hung with trophies of art and 
 elegance from every quarter of the globe, a 
 retinue of servants at their beck and every 
 
16S THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 privilege that rank and place and fortune can 
 endow them with, who yet are fretful and sor- 
 did, chronic grumblers, a burden to themselves 
 and to all around? From their very childhood 
 they have been heaping up money. And yet 
 the bigger the pile grows, the poorer they feel, 
 the more close-fisted they become, the less they 
 can spare to help any worthy cause or suffer- 
 ing brother. It was a man of this type, many 
 times a millionaire, that once on a time, when 
 solicited to contribute to some great enterprise 
 that needed to be done, answered: "I cannot 
 possibly afford to give a cent. Just think of 
 it. I have a hundred thousand dollars idle in 
 the bank that is not drawing a cent of inter- 
 est." 
 
 Alas for the soul-starved creature, haunted 
 in his moneyed poverty with the fear that he 
 might yet die in the almshouse. What hum- 
 blest day laborer is not better off and daily 
 getting more of the true riches of existence? 
 
 No magic of thought, of course, can abolish 
 either disease or death. But excessive brood- 
 ing over the dark things of life certainly deep- 
 ens their shadows. He who thinks "hope, 
 cheer and health" will at least live in a sunnier 
 and more healthful way while he does live and 
 will, not unlikely, thereby decidedly prolong his 
 existence. Thought ought to become more of 
 a fine art. The sculptors and painters know 
 
OUR SELF-MADE WORLD 163 
 
 that if they keep their pupils' attention fixed 
 on rubbish, they will never carve or paint any- 
 thing but rubbish. The art teacher, who 
 should fill his studio with all the mis-shapen 
 statues and grotesque and badly drawn de- 
 signs which he could find and should keep his 
 pupils observing them all day long, would be 
 set down by every one as doomed to failure, if 
 he expected to get any good and harmonious 
 designs from his pupils. 
 
 But how many men and women, in the direc- 
 tion of their own attention, are just as unwise. 
 How many in their daily poring over sorry so- 
 cial scandals, in their tiresome recounting of 
 domestic trials or their melancholy dwelling on 
 all the maladies, past, present and prospective, 
 that have come or may come to themselves and 
 their friends, pursue just as harmful a course. 
 
 The way to destroy evil is not to keep it un- 
 der the microscope, trying to see all its horrid- 
 ness and so make it repulsive ; but, on the con- 
 trary, we should put it outside of consciousness, 
 superseding it by some suggestive picture of 
 the good. 
 
 One of the best remedies for many diseases, 
 as well as for the mistakes and stumblings of 
 our youth, is simple forgetfulness. Look for- 
 ward to the better day, and the old cramps and 
 congestions fade away. Too often we hear the 
 expression in regard to some wrong received: 
 
164* THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 "I can forgive it, but I cannot forget it." On 
 the contrary, not until you can forget it do 
 you really forgive it. You only say so ; but 
 the brand is on your mind. Only when with 
 the salve of love and pity we cleanse and heal 
 our memory, do we get rid of its moral inflam- 
 mation. 
 
 Similarly, one of the mistakes of our social 
 and political reformers Is their pessimism. 
 They fancy they must paint the whole sky 
 black, without one glimmering star of good in 
 sight, before the people can be roused to ac- 
 tion. But unless some star of hope does shine, 
 why should the people bestir themselves? Un- 
 less the very pessimist has a vision and a 
 prophecy of a possible better, why should he 
 revolt at the seamy side of things? Despair 
 and doubt are never creative. It is only faith 
 that moves the world forward. 
 
 The older Romantic writers dwelt so exclu- 
 sively on the ideal and the dramatic that their 
 roseate sketches seemed far removed from the 
 realities of common life. 
 
 The Naturalistic writers of to-day, on the 
 plea of getting the naked truth, strip the poor 
 victims, whom they study, of the very flesh, to 
 present us, in the bare bones, a picture quite 
 as arbitrary and misleading. 
 
 The pessimism which saturates a great deal 
 of modern art and letters is a defamation of 
 
OUR SELF-MADE WORLD 165 
 
 the race. It is an invitation to surrender. 
 He who goes to the battle of Hfe with no better 
 cry than : "All our leaders have been mistaken ; 
 the old faiths were lies ; and man's cause is al- 
 ready doomed," such a man will never win a 
 victory. Few things spread more contagiously 
 than cowardice. But when the brave are in 
 command, it is easy to charge the flaming line ; 
 it is easy even to die. More than royal shows 
 and riches or any social Utopia, men need 
 health, not merely health of body but the finer 
 health of mind, the sanity to know the deeper 
 realities which the surface only hides, and the 
 serene courage which such clear vision gives. 
 Look calmly at these sullen clouds of fate at 
 which we rail and how often we find that they 
 are no storm clouds, after all — only dust, fog 
 and smoke of our own raising. 
 
 There are those who, when misfortune or be- 
 reavement has come to them, have made it the 
 center of their landscape. They have magni- 
 fied it and become enshadowed by it, forgetting 
 the living and their needs, forgetting that any 
 others beside themselves have suffered. And 
 there are others who, through the same or 
 equally heavy afflictions, have been exalted and 
 ennobled. Li the deep waters of their bereave- 
 ment they have been cleansed of earthly ambi- 
 tions and worldly discontents ; and the cross 
 which they carry has become an inspiration of 
 
166 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 sympathy, help and tenderness to every fellow 
 sufferer to whom they could bring a gleam of 
 comfort or spiritual strengthening. What lot 
 so dark that in it there is no gleam of sun- 
 shine? "Put that gleam of sunshine in the 
 center," it has well been said, "as Rembrandt 
 did in his pictures, and the shadows shall be- 
 come subordinate to it." 
 
 Do you ever ask yourself why it is that the 
 things that seem to us hurtful are not kept by 
 Providence beyond our reach.? "It must be," 
 as Lowell said with as much wit as wisdom, 
 "that the framework of the universe is fire- 
 proof, or the Almighty would not have left so 
 many Lucifer matches lying around loose." 
 The fires that they light are wholesome cleans- 
 ers. No possession is so valuable as self- 
 possession. 
 
 In every town in which I have ever lived the 
 people who were most discontented and un- 
 happy were people who in worldly goods were 
 well-to-do and, in most cases, had hardly any 
 serious burdens to carry. Consequently they 
 had plenty of time to give themselves up unre- 
 strainedly to worrying over their own precious 
 selves. Such is the case with almost all pessi- 
 mists. Take their great modern apostle, 
 Schopenhauer, the man who maintained that 
 this world was "the worst possible world," for 
 if it had been any worse, it could not possibly 
 
OUR SELF-MADE WORLD 167 
 
 have held together and kept running. His 
 big philosophic tomes, his private letters and 
 his daily conversation were one continuous 
 growl against life. Human society, he de- 
 clared, is "an arena of agonized and tormented 
 beings who subsist only by devouring one an- 
 other — a hell surpassing Dante's in this: that 
 each one must be the Devil and tormentor to 
 some fellow sufferer." 
 
 "The greatest of misfortunes is birth." 
 "The only good is death, and the only truth 
 in the Old Testament — the one thing that has 
 redeemed the book — is the account of the Fall 
 of man and the ruin of Paradise." 
 
 One naturally infers that the life experiences 
 that reflected themselves in such hatred of ex- 
 istence must have been terribly tragic. On the 
 contrary, Schopenhauer was a man of comfort- 
 able fortune, fine social position and a good 
 appetite, who dined well every day at the best 
 hotel in Frankfort and had carefully avoided 
 the usual domestic cares and responsibilities, by 
 forswearing the sex whom he called "the un- 
 reasonable half of humanity," and devoting his 
 whole thought and income to promoting his own 
 bachelor comfort and personal enjoyment. 
 He had not a single necessary care nor had he 
 ever received any serious blow from fortune. 
 His unhappiness was due solely to his own 
 selfish indulgences and isolation and his bitter 
 
168 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 scorn of his fellows. It was the fault of his 
 imaginary suspicions, icy pride and the self- 
 inflicted wounds of his insatiable vanity. 
 
 Contrast with him another of the great fig- 
 ures of history. Let us take one on whom 
 cruel fortune really had poured its worst 
 blows, a man bom in the humblest rank of life, 
 sickly in constitution and deformed in person, 
 in early childhood sold into slavery to a tyran- 
 nical Roman master, his days passed in the 
 slave quarters where great gangs of wretched 
 creatures were crowded together, liable to the 
 most capricious punishments, subjected to the 
 most degrading influences and cut off^ from op- 
 portunities of knowledge and from all chance 
 of rising in the world. If misery is sure to 
 develop pessimism in its victim, if circum- 
 stances make or unmake the man, surely this 
 brutalizing environment should have forced this 
 poor suff*erer to a life of the saddest, lowest, 
 most animal and ignoble kind. 
 
 But history has quite a difl'erent story to 
 tell. History tells us that he was distin- 
 guished for his serene, cheerful, exalted, un- 
 movedly patient spirit — in fact, for his uncom- 
 plaining and grateful spirit. He was one whose 
 expressions of resignation and faith in God's 
 good Providence have a heartiness and lyric 
 beauty almost unparalleled in literature. This 
 was the man who wrote 'Hhe great world is not 
 
OUR SELF-MADE WORLD 169 
 
 made for my individual satisfaction. Must 
 my leg be lame? Slave — for the sake of one 
 miserable little leg do you find fault with the 
 universe? Will you not cheerfully assent to 
 this burden for the sake of Him who gave it? 
 *Great is God,' we ought to sing, because He 
 hath given us hands, and means of nourish- 
 ment and unconscious growth and breathing 
 sleep. And since the most of you are blinded 
 to these gifts, ought there not to be some one, 
 on behalf of all, to sing this hymn to God. 
 And what else can I do, who am an old man 
 and lame, than sing such hymns? Had I been 
 a nightingale, I should have sung the hymns 
 of a nightingale. But being a reasonable be- 
 ing, it is my duty to sing the hymns due unto 
 God. This is my task and I accomplish it ; 
 nor, so far as may be granted to me, will I ever 
 abandon this post, and I exhort you also to 
 this same song of praise." Think of that ! 
 A slave, maimed in body, a beggar in poverty, 
 yet thus "soaring aloft like a skylark in such 
 a melodious outburst of thanksgiving." Think 
 of that, ye Sybarites, fuming on your couches 
 of roses whenever you find one crumpled petal 
 beneath your irritable nerves. "No wonder," 
 it has well been said, "that they wrote for his 
 epitaph that this Epictetus, poor, maimed and 
 a slave, as he was, nevertheless is 'dear to the 
 immortal Gods.' " 
 
170 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 How could Epictetus, do you ask, thus ig- 
 nore all the hardships and miseries of his lot? 
 Because he had early come to see, as he him- 
 self said, that "he is a slave whose soul is 
 bound, though his body be free ; but he is 
 free whose soul is free, though his body be 
 bound." 
 
 It should be recognized, of course, that there 
 are abnormal specimens of humanity (or per- 
 haps we better say "animals in anthropomor- 
 phic guise") who seem to possess neither reason 
 nor conscience. With such "the Gods contend 
 in vain," as a German proverb says. But 
 wherever humanity is in its normal state it sees 
 the right. And where a man or woman sees an 
 act to be right and its converse to be wrong, 
 the moral power "to choose that right and to 
 do it," is present with him. This self-deter- 
 mining power changes to each man the whole 
 hue of the world and the whole weight of its 
 temptations, just as when one puts a rose- 
 tinted pane in the place of a blue sheet of glass 
 in looking on a landscape. 
 
 More than this, it remoulds character it- 
 self. History tells us how strong originally 
 was the sensual element in Socrates and how 
 fiery was the native temperament in Washing- 
 ton. History also tells us how in both of these 
 distinguished men these faults were restrained 
 and at length conquered by persevering self- 
 
OUR SELF-MADE WORLD 171 
 
 control. Even for the incipiently insane, mod- 
 ern phj^sicians urge, as the most important 
 measure for their recovery, that the patient 
 shall believe that he can control himself and 
 shall strive to the utmost to realize that faith. 
 By this voluntary self-restraint many in the 
 early stages of insanity are now recovered to 
 mental health. 
 
 Where there Is spiritual vitality it needs no 
 fat environment for its growth, but it will draw 
 life and succulence and beauty out of the stoni- 
 est field. When a man's will is firmly set on 
 the cleansing and refinement of his soul, even 
 censure and reproofs are things to be thankful 
 for. "I am a happy man," cries Confucius, 
 "for when I have a fault, men observe it ; and 
 so I get rid of it." Failure, pain, bereavement, 
 death become to him who seeks Divine light 
 but the emery wheels that polish the lens of his 
 soul to that clearness where the stars of Divine 
 truth and love shine on him full-orbed — a re- 
 ward worth all that it has cost. When the 
 noble martyr Perpetua was sent to prison for 
 engaging in Christian worship, she cried out: 
 "This dungeon is to me a Paradise." The 
 record of the unjust conviction of Socrates by 
 his fellow citizens for alleged impiety and his 
 consequent sentence to death is one of the 
 blackest pages in the history of Athens. But 
 It gave to the historic roll of immortal sayings 
 
172 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 that famous reply of the calm-minded philoso- 
 pher, "Wherefore, O Judges, be of good cheer 
 about death. Know this of a certainty, that 
 no evil can happen to a good man, either in 
 life or death. He and his are not neglected by 
 the gods. But I see clearly that to die and be 
 released is better for me. Therefore the ora- 
 cle gave no sign. For which reason I am not 
 angry with my accusers or my condemners. 
 They have done me no harm." 
 
 Or to quote a third and equally noble answer 
 by an equally noble spirit, let me recall the 
 serene words of that great philosopher and 
 savant of Rome, Giordano Bruno, when con- 
 demned to death by the Inquisition for the 
 crime of thinking for himself. Asked by his 
 Papal Judges at the close of the farcical trial, 
 through which he had passed, if he had any 
 plea to offer why sentence of death should not 
 be pronounced upon him, he boldly answered: 
 "I believe this sentence is more a cause of trem- 
 bling to you than it is to me." 
 
 What can fate with its worst blows avail 
 against such a spirit? Even the threat of hell 
 itself cannot daunt or turn a soul like that. 
 He who robes himself in sincerity and right- 
 eousness would pass through its fire and brim- 
 stone as Daniel and his companions passed 
 through the fiery furnace. To the Divine des- 
 pot whom Christian superstition makes the 
 
OUR SELF-MADE WORLD 173 
 
 jailer and torturer of the unorthodox believer 
 and the independent thinker, the soul that 
 knows its own purity can say, "I shall reach 
 my end and keep my peace of mind, despite 
 you and your eternal prison. In your lowest 
 hell I shall find opportunities of noblest life — 
 a chance there for patience, sympathy, noble 
 helpfulness and Christian charity. For even 
 down there in hell I can do two things, which 
 thou, dread God of superstition, aloft in thy icy 
 heaven, canst not do. / can pity and I can 
 pardon. Thou canst not forgive me, but / 
 can forgive even theeJ* And it will not re- 
 quire the presence of many such lofty souls in 
 hell (as Father Taylor suggested when Emer- 
 son was consigned there by the bigots of his 
 day) "to begin very materially to ameliorate 
 the climate and turn the current of emigration 
 that way." 
 
 But let us not so dishonor God as to tolerate 
 the thought that he can be, even for an hour, 
 the enemy of the righteous. For they are his 
 beloved children. He stands always as their 
 supporter and Almighty Ally. And he who 
 holds his hands, who fights under his banner, 
 shall surely conquer, soon or late. The con- 
 fidence of our American poet * who sang so 
 trustfully of the Eternal Will was not one whit 
 too great. 
 
 * Ella Wheeler Wilcox. 
 
174i THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 "There is no thing we cannot overcome. 
 
 Say not thy evil instinct is inherited. 
 
 Or that some trait in-born, makes thy whole life 
 
 forlorn, 
 And calls down punishment that is not merited. 
 Back of thy parents and grandparents lies 
 The great Eternal Will. That too is thine 
 Inheritance, — strong, beautiful, divine ; 
 Sure lever of success, for one who tries. 
 
 Pry up thy fault with this great lever — Will. 
 However deeply bedded in propensity, 
 However firmly set, I tell thee, firmer yet 
 Is that vast power that comes from Truth's im- 
 
 mensitv. 
 Thou art a part of that strange world, I say. 
 Its forces lie within thee; stronger far 
 Than all thy mortal sins and frailties are. 
 Believe thyself divine and watch and pray. 
 
 There is no noble height thou canst not climb. 
 All triumphs may be thine in Time's futurity. 
 If, — whatso'er thy fault, thou dost not faint or 
 
 halt 
 But lean upon the staff of God's security. 
 Earth has no claim the soul cannot contest. 
 Know thyself part of the Supernal Source, 
 And naught can stand before thy spirit's force. 
 The soul's divine inheritance is best." 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 PARTNERS IN WORLD-MAKING 
 
 When the making of the world is spoken of 
 the general understanding is that we refer to 
 a Divine work, long ago completed. The 
 Church, in accordance with the traditions of 
 the book of Genesis, has regarded Creation as 
 the tour de force of a few days of intense ac- 
 tivity on the part of God, at the close of which 
 the Maker of the earth and heavens rested from 
 his labors and reviewed what he had accom- 
 plished and pronounced all to be good. Many 
 religious people have, therefore, considered the 
 idea that man could do anything to improve 
 the world as a supposition showing disre- 
 spectful doubt of the perfection of God's 
 creation. When in the last century the 
 proposition to dig the Erie Canal was before 
 the public a devout member of a religious so- 
 ciety objected to it on the ground that such an 
 enterprise was a reflection on the Providence 
 of God. Even so acute a thinker as John Stu- 
 art Mill once characterized "the feeling of 
 helping God*^ as a feeling inconsistent with the 
 belief in the omnipotence of the Divine Good- 
 ness. Where faith in the All-Wise and All- 
 
 175 
 
176 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 Powerful has been strong, it has often thus been 
 so sure that God does not need us and that his 
 finished world can only be meddled with by 
 man to its injury, as to paralyze human effort 
 and to promote indolence, indifference to evil 
 and a fatalistic apathy. 
 
 In these latter days this unfortunate ten- 
 dency has been fortified by the popular scien- 
 tific ideas of the period, especially by the in- 
 discriminating and extreme assertions current 
 as to the invariability of Nature's order. 
 
 The fundamental verity which this scientific 
 phrase expresses has been exaggerated into 
 the fallacy that human beings cannot alter 
 the direction of their course or help or hinder 
 the mighty currents of Nature. With the 
 Persian poet, Omar Khayyam, men are viewed 
 as the puppets of destiny who 
 
 "Upon this checker-board of nights and days; 
 Hither and thither moves and checks and slays, 
 And one by one, back in the closet lays." 
 
 But this view of the irresistible fixity and 
 finality of Destiny and the consequent super- 
 fluousness of human activity is neither good 
 religion nor good science. There is not only 
 a Divine Providence, but there is a human 
 providence. Revering God, as we must, as the 
 first Creator, we ourselves have a task laid 
 upon us by the Author of our being as the 
 
PARTNERS IN WORLD-MAKING 177 
 
 second creator and finisher of the Divine handi- 
 work. 
 
 It is this sacred partnership of earth's Kv- 
 ing creatures with their Creator that I wish 
 to set forth in this chapter. Especially do I 
 wish to emphasize the important part that man 
 himself plays in the great drama of evolution. 
 I would like every one to feel that not only does 
 he need God, but God needs him to accomplish 
 in due season his grand designs. 
 
 Certainly, all the laws of matter and force, 
 of mind and society are constant. That is 
 to be acknowledged. But equally is it to be 
 acknowledged that they are all conditional. 
 In every case we must sow before we reap ; we 
 must seek before we find. The law itself is 
 constant, but the application of it has an in- 
 finite diversity of relations and corresponding 
 varieties of consequences. If we are to get 
 good and not evil from Nature's forces, we 
 must obey them ; but when we obey them wisely 
 and tactfully we become their masters. It is 
 impossible to alter the law of gravitation that 
 all bodies are drawn down toward the earth in 
 direct proportion to their respective masses 
 and in inverse proportion to the square of the 
 distance. But by enclosing in a silk bag a 
 sufficient quantity of hydrogen gas, this very 
 law becomes the means of lifting the aeronaut 
 into the skies. Confine superheated steam 
 
178 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 within a rigid enclosure and it becomes one of 
 the most destructive of forces. No most fer- 
 vent prayer of saint or priest will prevent it 
 from dealing ruin about it. But add to the 
 boiler a piston and suitable valves, and it be- 
 comes man's most useful of servants — hauling, 
 printing, sewing, reaping, doing whatsoever he 
 wills. Though we cannot destroy nor create 
 a single particle of matter nor set aside a sin- 
 gle one of the inexorable laws of the Universe, 
 we can thus, by skill and contrivance, so com- 
 bine them as to make them our slaves ; we can 
 compel the opposing winds to waft us to our 
 goal and twist the rectilinear waves of light 
 this way and that with our prisms and mirrors. 
 We can make the dividing seas our channels 
 of communication, the intangible ether our 
 messenger boy, and the very lightnings our 
 draft-horses and household candles. 
 
 There is a field, then, left by God himself 
 for man's moulding and creative powers. It 
 is a field in which man is needed, and in which 
 he continually intervenes either for good or for 
 evil. 
 
 "In the beginning," wrote the Hebrew bard, 
 "God created the heavens and the earth." The 
 essential thought of the ancient worshipper, as 
 he sang his noble psalm of creation in that' 
 grand first chapter of Genesis, was a true and 
 a noble one. In the light which modern science 
 
PARTNERS IN WORLD-MAKING 179 
 
 has thrown upon it, It is not less sublime than 
 in that simpler, child-like form in which the 
 fancy of the early singer depicted It. What 
 ancient hymn more beautiful, more poetical, 
 than this modern scientific story of the cosmic 
 genesis, whose universal and orderly processes 
 have evolved, not alone our own little satellite, 
 but all these other suns and attendant planets 
 that beam so kindly on us from the skies 
 through the silent watches of the night? 
 
 How, out of some formless sea of neubulous 
 matter, stretching out beyond the farthest 
 planetary orbits, was shaped each glowing 
 solar orb ! Through the long cycles of inor- 
 ganic transformation, the Creative Spirit, 
 brooding over the deep and shaping the majes- 
 tic outlines of mountain, continent and sea, 
 worked in a profound and mighty isolation. 
 But as soon as evolution mounted to the stage 
 of life, these animated creatures, however hum- 
 ble, began to take part In the creative work. 
 Darwin and his disciples have shown us what 
 an important influence on the soil, in lighten- 
 ing, enriching and preparing It for higher 
 vegetable forms, even the lowly earthworm has 
 exerted. 
 
 Modern botanists have demonstrated that 
 the humble rootlets of plants, shrubs, and 
 weeds, often from twenty to forty feet in 
 length, have been even more effective than 
 
180 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 the worms in fertilizing and preparing 
 the earth-mould for prosperous growth of flow- 
 ers and fruit trees. The huge chalk cliffs of 
 England and the immense limestone beds of our 
 Southern states are built out of the minute 
 shells of extinct multitudes of sea-creatures and 
 are imperishable monuments to the mighty 
 constructive power of these lowly forms of life. 
 
 Amongst the earliest contributions to the 
 making of our earth by living creatures was 
 the extraction from the atmosphere of its car- 
 bonic acid by the ferns and similar plants of 
 the Carboniferous and earlier epochs and the 
 deposit of great beds of graphite, coal, and 
 other forms of carbon in the ancient strata 
 where they are found. Quite as early per- 
 haps was the manufacture of petroleum and 
 similar deposits by the sea-algae; and, then, 
 later on, the pea and vetch family began to 
 extract from the atmosphere the nitrogen, 
 which, in so many compounds, is invaluable in 
 vegetable and animal growth. 
 
 As low do'WTi in the scale of life as the Micro- 
 organisms, there is (as Prof. Binet has 
 shown), "psychic life and choice" as to what 
 is liked or disliked, and there is effort to secure 
 what is wanted and to avoid what is not de- 
 sired. 
 
 The sensitive, active cell-nucleus is the divine 
 lever for moving and uplifting the animate 
 
PARTNERS IN WORLD-MAKING 181 
 
 kingdom. The intricacies and multiplicity of 
 the mechanisms, the delicate adjustments and 
 far-reaching dexterities of the living organ- 
 isms are amazing. But behind them all is the 
 energizing mentality, m.ore or less conscious 
 and selective. The hunger of the cell builds 
 and shapes its material organs. The craving 
 for continued Hfe repairs the organic ma- 
 chinery or precedes its anticipated dissolution 
 by creating fresh embryos, decking the plant 
 in floral attractions and the young girl in 
 womanly beauty, with prophetic adaptations, 
 such as are only to be ignored by the dullest 
 thought. Were it not for the co-working of the 
 healing cells with the surgeon, loyally rushing 
 like the watchmen on a levee to repair the dam- 
 age, no physician could successfully put a lancet 
 into the vital organism, nor could a fever victim 
 recover from the assaults of the devouring 
 hordes of bacteria within him. The automatic 
 processes of the body, which relieve the con- 
 sciousness from constantly watching the action 
 of lower bodily functions, are necessities of all 
 higher life. But the researches of our ablest 
 men of science, such as Prof. Hering, Cope, 
 and the younger Darwin, now resolve these 
 wonderfully adaptive processes, as well as most 
 animal instincts, into racial memories of the 
 species. They are subconscious operations 
 and inheritances in which the century-long 
 
182 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 previous experiences of the ant, bee, moth or 
 other family line is stored up. Although all 
 the claims of the Neo-Lamarckian School have 
 not yet been granted, yet the number of 
 eminent men of science, who are giving their 
 adherence to it, is rapidly growing and the 
 leading naturalists now acknowledge that 
 the "use and effort" by animals of their vari- 
 ous limbs, organs and functions, and es- 
 pecially the more or less conscious experience 
 of the species are, after all, most significant 
 factors, not to be denied or overlooked, in the 
 upward evolution of life. 
 
 From this lowest grade of living creature 
 upward, that struggle for life and for indi- 
 vidual pleasure and success, which Darwin so 
 emphasized, exists and is influential in the de- 
 velopment of living species. But a thing that 
 is far more potent is that "struggle for the 
 life of others" which Prof. Drummond pointed 
 out, and that mutual aid which Kropotkin has 
 so well expounded. While competition weeds 
 out the unfit in the prolific crop, it is the over- 
 flow of healthy life and the complex influences 
 connected with gregarious life and mutual co- 
 operation that are far more potent in evolving 
 new and higher forms of vital species. 
 
 Those low kinds of living creatures, where 
 there is only one cell or a few cells and no dis- 
 tinction of male and female, and where strug- 
 
PARTNERS IN WORLD-MAKING 183 
 
 gle in persistent selfishness for each one's 
 separate advantage predominates, continue, 
 after millions of years, on the same low level 
 of existence. The bacteria and the diatoms 
 remain on the same rudimentary stage of life 
 as their Eozoic ancestors. But as soon as the 
 one-celled organisms united themselves to- 
 gether in many-celled organisms it soon came 
 about that higher forms of life appeared on 
 the staircase of evolution. And when the male 
 creature differentiated itself from the female 
 and then combined and co-operated with its 
 mate, a still greater variation and ascent in 
 vital potency was acquired. A bacterium in 
 the twelfth generation has only twelve an- 
 cestors, almost identical. But in the twelfth 
 generation of a creature sexually reproduced, 
 there would be over two thousand ancestors, 
 bringing in an immense diversity of hereditary 
 influences to converge within the ofl^spring and 
 to promote organic variation and evolution. 
 As the cells divide into colonies, their various 
 functions diff^erentiate and each part assists 
 and serves the other parts. Through these 
 group-instincts, the higher plants and animals 
 lift themselves up. Not only plants of the 
 same species, but also plants of diff^erent 
 species and even symbiotic couples, in which a 
 plant and an animal live together, unite in 
 friendly and mutually beneficent life partner- 
 
184 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 ships. Especially noticeable in this connection 
 are those interchanges of good service between 
 the blossoms of the higher plants and their in- 
 sect visitors, to which has mainly been due the 
 beauty and fragrance of the higher types in 
 the floral kingdom. The primitive flowers 
 were very small and their colors not at all 
 conspicuous. For the conveyance of the fer- 
 tilizing pollen to the stigma of the ovaries the 
 only means, in the archaic epochs, were the 
 winds and waters, currents evidently uncer- 
 tain in their operation and attended with im- 
 mense waste of the precious pollen. When, 
 however, insects and humming birds began to 
 visit the flowers for honey or pollen, their 
 rough-coated heads or bodies would carry off^ 
 more or less of the precious impregnating dust 
 to the stigmas of the blossoms which next they 
 visited. Thus were produced eff*ective cross 
 fertilizations, improved forms and breeds, 
 priceless nectars and odors and an infinite 
 variety of curious shapes and lovely hues. 
 The brighter the petals became, the oftener the 
 bees or moths visited the blossoms. The more 
 steadily the insect go-betweens transported the 
 pollen, the more that species of flower multi- 
 plied. 
 
 Similarly, the great family of birds have 
 been most industrious in helping on the evolu- 
 tion of life on our globe. Positively they have 
 
PARTNERS IN WORLD-MAKING 185 
 
 been most serviceable in transporting pollen 
 and diffusing seeds, and negatively they have 
 been indispensable in destroying, or at least 
 holding in check, the millions of v/orms, larvse, 
 insect pests, fungi, moulds, bacteria and sim- 
 ilar foes that prey upon the fruits, vegetables 
 and trees most useful to men. The birds have 
 been well called "Nature's Militia," constantly 
 at work without charge, to aid the farmer and 
 the nurseryman. 
 
 Those members of our race who, to gratify 
 foolish and ephemeral vanities, promote the 
 destruction of these most exquisite of Nature's 
 masterpieces, these best coadjutors with man- 
 kind for the health, balance and progress of 
 Nature, display both a short-sighted selfish- 
 ness and a base ingratitude to their dumb bene- 
 factors that is a disgrace to humanity. 
 
 At length, in the upward climb of life, the 
 human species appears, and at once man be- 
 comes a still more influential factor in the 
 evolutionary progress than either plants or 
 animals are. Henceforth, as has well been 
 said : "God works not only in man but through 
 man, for man and with man. Conversely, man 
 works through God, with God and for God." 
 
 In the first place, let us notice man's co- 
 working with God in the physical world. That 
 man would be audacious who would assert that 
 God might not have finished the earth before 
 
186 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 ever man was created. But he would be even 
 more audacious and reckless of facts who 
 should assert that he did finish it. 
 
 The immense modifications of the earth due 
 to human agency are known to every scholar. 
 The surface of our globe, as primeval man 
 found it, — with its tangled forests, its oozy 
 swamps, undredged streams, sand-bar-block- 
 aded harbors and barren sand-dunes — was a 
 very different earth from what it is to-day. 
 With axe and hoe and shovel man has sub- 
 dued the wilderness, drained the morasses, 
 opened highways, constructed harbors out of 
 open roadsteads and made the desert to 
 blossom as the rose. He has changed the 
 course of rivers ; he has made the parched 
 ground a pool and the thirsty land springs of 
 water. He has said unto the mountain "be 
 thou removed and cast into the sea"; and his 
 faith (when expressed in patent steam dredg- 
 ers and dynamite explosives) has not been in 
 vain. Manchester, an inland city thirty 
 miles from the ocean, has been turned into a 
 sea port. At Suez the bridge which nature 
 had left between Asia and Africa has been cut 
 in two and the waters of the Mediterranean 
 poured into the Red Sea. At Panama a truly 
 Herculean feat of human industry is about to 
 connect the long separated oceans of the 
 Eastern and Western hemispheres. In Hoi- 
 
PARTNERS IN WORLD-MAKING 187 
 
 land the extensive territories which the Dutch 
 have added to their country, by diking out the 
 sea and draining the shallow lakes and fens, 
 have furnished territorial additions which 
 comprise more than a million of acres and 
 form a tenth part of that brave little king- 
 dom. These are a few among the more not- 
 able feats which the human creator has ac- 
 complished. 
 
 This co-operation of man with God, in build- 
 ing and finishing "The Great World's Farm," 
 has been most notable. But when we turn 
 from the inanimate to the animate realm, when 
 we look up from the soil and scenery of the 
 earth to its denizens and crops, then man's 
 share in the husbandry is still more signifi- 
 cant. How many of our fruits or flowers 
 would Preadamite man be able to recognize as 
 old friends, if he should be summoned back to 
 earth to testify? Comparatively few. The 
 pine-apple in its primitive stage was so acrid 
 that its juice bit the skin of lip and tongue. 
 The ancestral citrons, from which our sweet 
 and luscious oranges came, were not at all in- 
 viting fruits. The savage forefather of the 
 plum was the sloe of the wlldwood ; and as for 
 the original apple, as God made it, it was al- 
 together too sour a crabapple to have tempted 
 either Adam or Eve to a second bite. How 
 strange to a modern eye would Italy look with- 
 
188 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 out its myrtles, olives and oranges, to say 
 nothing of its maize, tobacco and tomatoes. 
 Yet the first set of these garden favorites was 
 unknown to the early Romans, and the second 
 set was introduced only since the discovery 
 of America. That general diffusion which 
 we see at present of the most useful 
 plants throughout the civilized world is al- 
 together a result of human travel and com- 
 merce. Each plant grew originally in some re- 
 stricted district, from whence it has been car- 
 ried by man across mountain-chains and oceans 
 to the most retired nooks of the earth. Thus 
 the potato has travelled from South America, 
 the buckwheat from Siberia and the Amoor, 
 the barley from Asia, and the peach-tree from 
 China. From Egypt the lily was brought to 
 beautify the gardens of Europe ; and from 
 India, rice has been diffused through all the 
 warm countries of the globe. From Armenia 
 the Romans conveyed the first cultivated 
 cherry-trees to Italy, and it was by the 
 Saracens that the date palm, the orange and 
 lemon-tree, the horse chestnut, the tulip and 
 a host of ornamental plants were introduced 
 into Southern Europe and from thence spread 
 to the American continent. While ships and 
 travellers thus brought, in the lapse of 
 centuries, most of the plants, fruits and flow- 
 ers of the Orient to the lands at the west, on 
 
PARTNERS IN WORLD-MAKING 189 
 
 the other hand no sooner had Columbus dis- 
 covered the New World than a counter current 
 set in, and the returning explorers carried 
 back to the old country such now well-ac- 
 climated plants and trees as the tobacco, the 
 tomato, maize, prickly pear, haricot beans and 
 many others, formerly unknown in Europe, 
 but which are now amongst the most familiar 
 inhabitants of our gardens. The imports of 
 strange flowers and shrubs from China and 
 Japan in recent years have almost transformed 
 the appearance of our florists' windows and 
 greenhouses. Under man's fostering tillage, 
 grafting and cross-breeding, there have come 
 forth those marvels of modern husbandry at 
 which familiarity alone has made us cease to 
 wonder. In recent years the hundreds of 
 scientific agriculturists who have been working 
 at the Bureaus of Plant Industry, the Agri- 
 cultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, 
 have added thousands of millions to the value 
 of the farm products of our nation. They 
 have shown how, by irrigation to make arid 
 lands fertile, by chemical treatment of soils 
 to enrich lands which had become impover- 
 ished, by proper rotation of crops, vastly to 
 increase the out-put of soils, and by scientific 
 remedies to banish the diseases of plants, trees 
 and domestic animals. The trained explorers 
 who have recently searched the obscure corners 
 
190 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 of distant islands and continents have multi- 
 plied a hundred fold the number of useful 
 plants and beautiful flowers, now common in 
 field and garden. Especially amazing has 
 been the way in which the expert plant breed- 
 ers, such as Luther Burbank and his associates 
 and imitators, by magical manipulation of the 
 vital forces, have transformed multitudes of 
 commonplace plants and obnoxious vegetable 
 pests into serviceable and luscious fruits and 
 lovely flowers. 
 
 Thus wonderfully in both the realm of mat- 
 ter and of vegetable life has man multiplied 
 and improved the original stock of things with 
 which God started evolution on its way. In 
 some respects, the transmutations that man 
 has made have been almost miraculous. 
 
 In the higher realm of human life our race 
 has made almost equally remarkable improve- 
 ments. God has furnished man with the raw 
 material of intellectual and spiritual develop- 
 ment. But, in his wisdom, he left the legacy 
 in man's hands to care for and complete it. 
 God gave man a noble endowment of possi- 
 bilities and faculties. The Creator set him 
 in the midst of environing opportunities of the 
 fairest promise. But it was left for man to 
 polish and shape the crude materials, to ap- 
 ply, utilize and improve that original inherit- 
 ance. And the history of civilization is the 
 
PARTNERS IN WORLD-MAKING 191 
 
 history of man's progress in this Divine Co- 
 operation. The earlier stages of man's evo- 
 lution and the perfecting of his physical or- 
 ganism were stages through which he went un- 
 consciously, under the guidance of imperative 
 instincts. But when he had reached the up- 
 right attitude and found himself bereft of the 
 hairy coats and destructive fangs and claws of 
 the beast (compelled as he was to make his way 
 in that fierce, early struggle for life against 
 the stronger and better armed animals around 
 him) he must make up for his other deficiencies 
 by his nimbler wit and his keener brain. His 
 course of development rose to a higher stage — 
 the intellectual and social. It became a con- 
 scious one and all the powers of thought and 
 resolution and mutual fidelity must be sum- 
 moned to carry it through successfully. 
 
 When we look around the earth we see an 
 astonishing diversity of character and range 
 of attainment in the various races. What 
 caused the difference between the Bushman and 
 the Egyptian ; between the Australian savage 
 and the subtle Hindu? Was it due simply to 
 more favorable soil or climate or other in- 
 equality in the distribution of Nature's 
 favors? It does not seem to have been due 
 to these things, but rather to the respective 
 fidelity, social helpfulness and loyalty to truth, 
 in the different peoples. Its source is to be 
 
192 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 found in the industry, ambition and courage 
 to break the bonds of routine and mouldy tra- 
 dition, that distinguished the successful races. 
 Human nature is not that rigid iron bar that 
 traditionalists have represented it to be ; but 
 it is a vital growth, ever plastic to the inner 
 moulding power, however hard the outer shell 
 may seem. Even in a matter where so little 
 change is to be expected as that of size and 
 length of life, statisticians have shown that man 
 has made notable increase within historical 
 time. Few of the mediaeval suits of armor are 
 large enough for a representative Englishman 
 to get into them. The average of human life 
 has nearly doubled within two centuries. 
 The knowledge and observance of hygienic 
 laws are rapidly getting the control of 
 deadly diseases ; and the discoveries of chem- 
 istry will probably, before long, enable us 
 to manufacture food directly from the ele- 
 ments in any quantity desired. Thus all our 
 skillful scientists and physicians are co-work- 
 ing with God to make man more completely in 
 his image than any denizen of Eden was. And 
 if we must recognize these as co-laborers with 
 the Divine, who can overlook the contribution, 
 to the same high end, of the social reformer, 
 the preacher, the teacher, the statesman, the 
 moralist? One might fill libraries with the 
 moving chronicles of the work achieved in each 
 
PARTNERS IN WORLD-MAKING 193 
 
 of these departments. But I have only time 
 to touch upon one or two salient illustrations. 
 Recall e. g., what a mighty spiritual renova- 
 tion of humanity was wrought by that great 
 uprising of the heart and conscience of Ger- 
 many which we call the Lutheran Reformation. 
 Or see how the whole moral and religious life of 
 eighteen centuries has been affected by that 
 pregnant decision of a young Hebrew car- 
 penter, that come what might, odium, poverty, 
 persecution, crucifixion — he must proclaim 
 that larger law of God fuller than all that 
 Moses spake, which he discerned in his own 
 soul. He must deliver to his people the eter- 
 nal truths of love and righteousness that God 
 had given to him and he must establish a king- 
 dom of heaven on earth, wherein Jew and Gen- 
 tile might sit down together. 
 
 Think back over the great providential 
 movements and the famous national crises 
 of history, such as the founding of the He- 
 brew nation, the defeat of the Persians at 
 Marathon, the Discovery of America, the set- 
 tlement of New England by the Puritans or 
 the conversion of the Classic World by the 
 Gospel. Take whatever instance you please 
 among these and will not a moment's consid- 
 eration show that in each of them the Provi- 
 dential step was made in and through the 
 strain of human effort .^^ God and man worked 
 
194 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 together and must have worked together. If 
 Alexander had died in his cradle, if Paul had 
 disobeyed the heavenly vision and gone on 
 persecuting the Christians, if Luther had 
 been as timid as Erasmus, how different would 
 have been the course of history ! If Wash- 
 ington had been governed by the same dis- 
 loyal selfishness that ruled Benedict Arnold, if 
 Miles Standish had been a "quitter," if Abra- 
 ham Lincoln had been such a trimmer as 
 Buchanan or Douglas, the march of Ameri- 
 can civilization would have been far less ad- 
 vanced and noble than it is to-day. 
 
 Let us turn next to the practical lessons of 
 these facts. In the first place, they have an 
 important message of explanation and en- 
 couragement to us. God's world is not yet 
 finished. Let us not judge it then, as if to- 
 day it were the complete world, fulfilling God's 
 plan. In John Stuart Mill's "Three Essays 
 on Religion" and in Prof. Huxley's "Evolu- 
 tion and Ethics," there may be read terrible 
 indictments of the cruelties, the pitiless 
 slaughters and torturings to be found in 
 Nature ; indictments that, from the standpoint 
 of the old theology, according to which God 
 completed his creation 6,000 years ago, seem 
 difficult to answer. But when we recollect that 
 the cosmic evolution is still progressing and 
 that God in his wisdom has purposely left 
 
PARTNERS IN WORLD-MAKING 195 
 
 much for man himself to do, — this bitter in- 
 dictment is seen to fall wide of the mark. It 
 is as irrelevant as would be the condemnation 
 of the magnificent cathedral at Cologne which 
 a traveller, who visited it fifty years ago, 
 might have uttered. If, at that time, he had 
 criticised as "inartistic finalities" the incom- 
 plete structure before him, the arrested tow- 
 ers, the half-finished traceries, the lacking 
 transept, the heaps of rubbish lying all about 
 and the great stagings obscuring the walls, 
 how inapplicable at that time would have been 
 his censures, founded, as they were, upon the 
 imperfections then observed. How natural 
 and even necessary were these apparent de- 
 fects while the work was still going on! 
 
 So it is in judging this far grander temple 
 of Nature. We are to look not at its scaf- 
 foldings and its chips. We should think of the 
 magnificent design of its Divine Architect, 
 that grand consummation toward which all 
 things are moving, that indubitable sweep of 
 every line and part toward something better 
 and higher, toward an end too good and too 
 noble for us fully to understand as yet. 
 
 "His purposes will ripen fast; 
 Unfolding every hour; 
 The bud may have a bitter taste 
 But sweet wilt be the flower.** 
 
196 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 In recognizing this share of man in the 
 world's evolution, we thus find light shed upon 
 many of our perplexities. 
 
 And in the next place we find hope and en- 
 couragement for our endeavors. 
 
 As we look back on the course of evolution 
 before it rose to the level of humanity, it seems 
 in great degree accidental — the result of cer- 
 tain fortunate chances in the struggle of 
 rival species and in the lucky commingling of 
 heredity, environment and variability. 
 
 What assurance is there (the scientific 
 speculator is led to ask) that the human race 
 — lucky as it has been hitherto — will be able 
 continuously to go forward? Why may not 
 the evolution of humanity be arrested, as that 
 of the ants and bees has been? Why may it 
 not retrogress to some lower degraded state, 
 as the polyps, sloths and barnacles have? 
 Or, if men are held fast in an invariable 
 frame of laws, of what use is it for them to 
 try and alter it? 
 
 If we are the result of our environment, why 
 are we so foolish as to spend strength in the 
 vain effort to better that environment? 
 
 Such are the depressing questions and 
 paralyzing influences that a half-comprehen- 
 sion of the philosophy of evolution suggests. 
 But a fuller understanding illuminates the sky 
 with the roseate tints of good cheer. Since 
 
PARTNERS IN WORLD-MAKING 197 
 
 in man, development has become a conscious 
 process, then, as Edward P. Powell has well 
 said, "the eyes of evolution are in its forehead." 
 
 Progress depends no longer on the chance 
 of a fortunate variation, combining with 
 favorable circumstances. The superintending 
 man, by purposed inter-crossings and foster- 
 ing care, diversifies the pigeon and orchid, al- 
 most at will. His own future he has taken into 
 his own hands. Reason has gained in him the 
 mastery over instinct. Will is able to control 
 passion. Intelligence and foresight are be- 
 coming the common property of mankind. 
 Morality has been elevated and enlarged. In 
 the best men and women justice is becoming a 
 second nature. Man is no longer a mere 
 creature of the social environment. He is a 
 living, active factor in it ; and when it does 
 not suit him, then, through steam-engine, 
 printing-press, platfonn and ballot-box, he re- 
 constructs the environment. 
 
 Whatever character or privilege we have in- 
 herited is neither our glory nor our shame. 
 The circumstances that have shaped our lives 
 in the past we cannot alter ; and for them we 
 are not responsible. But just as surely as that 
 ancestry and that environment influence us, 
 so may we, by the physical and spiritual leg- 
 acies which we transmit, by the circum- 
 stances that we mould and by the quickening 
 
198 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 or corrupting atmosphere which we exhale 
 about us, — so, I say, may we shape the lives 
 of those who are to follow us. We cannot 
 alter our inherited character. But the noblest 
 part of every man's inheritance is the mind to 
 see the two courses, the upward or the down- 
 ward, which lie before each soul, and the will 
 to choose that one of the two which brings his 
 soul to life and not to moral death. 
 
 If our environment has made us, now that 
 we are here on the electric car of life, we sit 
 in the driver's seat, and we make the environ- 
 ment and we shift annually the landscape for 
 our neighbors, for our children and for our chil- 
 dren's children. Circumstance may be strong, 
 but iNTER-stance, that which stands within the 
 control of the vital reaction and the moulding 
 power of the resolute will, is stronger still. 
 
 Still another thing is plain. This is that 
 the message of the world's continuing evolu- 
 tion is not simply a message of hope but a 
 counsel of duty. If the world is to become 
 what God intended it to be, we must be faith- 
 ful workmen at the post where he has stationed 
 us. If we are not, his world moves down to 
 ruin, not up to glory. 
 
 What a rich mine of treasure does science 
 show our earth to be ! What a vast granary 
 stocked with all the elements of well-being — a 
 natural store so ample that with judicious use 
 
PARTNERS IN WORLD-MAKING 199 
 
 man may live on it for countless centuries. 
 But "the sons of civilization" have only too 
 truly been characterized as the prodigals, "the 
 Coal-Oil Johnnies," of their race, that squan- 
 der their inherited stores in boastful tumult 
 and riotous living. 
 
 With hideous wastefulness we devastate our 
 forests and exhaust the soil, till lands, once 
 among the most fertile, have become barren 
 wastes. We drain the earth of oil, gas and 
 coal ; we exterminate the buffalo, the sardine, 
 the mackerel. We slaughter for decoration 
 to our headdresses, man's best ally against the 
 insect pests, the birds, and then we wonder 
 why the crops of the farm and the fruits of 
 the garden begin to fail. 
 
 Is it not time that we should ask ourselves 
 "what will become of us when we have squan- 
 dered our capital for good?" Shall we not 
 then be adding another installment of magnifi- 
 cent wrecks to the sad catalogue of history? 
 
 We are the heirs of all the ages past. We 
 are trustees for the ages to come. For the 
 sake alike of our ancestry behind us and all 
 their struggles and prayers, and for the pos- 
 terity still to come, whos& future (mean or 
 magnificent) is in our hands, we are under 
 bonds to fulfill faithfully our part to-day. 
 
 I know, indeed, that there are plenty of men 
 who sneer at the idea that we owe anything 
 
200 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 to our posterity and who regard the conser- 
 vation policy as to our forests, mines or the 
 animal species so valuable for national pros- 
 perity in the coming ages, as a foolish senti- 
 mentality, "What has posterity done for 
 me?" is the hard utilitarian query of such peo- 
 ple. "Let the coming ages take care of them- 
 selves, as we have taken care of ourselves." 
 
 This is the short-sighted attitude of the 
 small politician, considering only transitory 
 advantage ; it is not the broad and far-sighted 
 view of a statesman. Even in the utilitarian 
 scales, what priceless debts do we owe to the 
 thought of posterity and the self-denials which 
 past ages have made, not simply for the imme- 
 diate welfare of our generation but for the wel- 
 fare of the generations ahead of us. When 
 we boast of the achievements of our century, 
 we forget how small a part of its success, com- 
 paratively, it could have accomplished had it 
 not stood on the shoulders of the whole past. 
 And those past centuries worked not merely 
 for themselves or ourselves, but for the chil- 
 dren and children's children still to come. It 
 is the grand idea of succeeding generations 
 which, when the present workers be gone, 
 shall enter into the enjoyment of the glorious 
 harvest, which has given us such magnificent 
 enterprises, such enriching inventions and 
 beneficent sacrifices, such tireless industry and 
 
PARTNERS IN WORLD-MAKING 201 
 
 grand intellectual triumphs. Our present 
 civilization has been purchased for us at an 
 incalculable price in self-denials and martyr- 
 doms by those to whom, personally (now long 
 ago laid in their graves, as they are), we can 
 never repay it. It is only common decency for 
 us to make such acknowledgment of our obli- 
 gation as we can by doing some similar gener- 
 ous service for the benefit of the generations 
 yet unborn. 
 
 "God needs strong men to help him," well 
 said Luther. Yes, and he needs the help, too, 
 of the weakest and the obscurest. The 
 grimiest hand that turns a switch or sews a 
 harness ; the obscurest mistress of the village 
 school or the mother who, in the rudest log- 
 cabin, trains her little one to honesty and love ; 
 each of them by his or her faithfulness or un- 
 faithfulness makes or wrecks precious human 
 lives. Each of them unfolds or suppresses 
 divine possibilities. The indolent optimist sits 
 still with folded hands and says: Why push 
 and sweat for progress? The "spirit of the 
 times" will attend to that. But what else is 
 "the spirit of the times" but the thought and 
 effort of the earnest minds who sacrifice their 
 own comfort for the common weal? Let them 
 stop their work and "the spirit of the times" 
 will have quite another complexion. 
 
 One of Robert Browning's noblest poems 
 
202 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 tells the simple life-faith of the old violin- 
 maker, Stradivarius, whose instrumental master- 
 pieces have become world-famous. In reply to 
 one who told him that he was foolish to be so 
 painstaking in the making of his instruments 
 and that another could make violins as good 
 as he, Stradivarius replies : 
 
 May be. They are diiFerent. But were his best 
 He could not work for two. My work is mine; 
 And heresy or not, if my hand slacked 
 I should rob God, since He is fullest good, 
 Leaving a blank instead of violins. 
 I say, not God himself can make man's best 
 Without best men to help him. He could not 
 Make Antonio Stradivari's violins 
 Without Antonio. 
 
 And in making a good pen, a good needle 
 or hammer, it is the same: If we are ever 
 tempted to feel proud because we are the ter- 
 minable bud, — the century flower which crowns 
 all this patient toil and struggle of the ages 
 behind us, let us ask ourselves : "Are we living 
 so as to show ourselves worthy of what we have 
 received.'^" And how can we be worthy, un- 
 less we, in our turn, convert this wealth of in- 
 herited nutriment into its destined fruit and 
 by our faithful stewardship provide for the fu- 
 ture, as the past has provided for us.^^ 
 
 But is it not derogatory to God to suppose 
 
PARTNERS IN WORLD-MAKING 203 
 
 him thus needing man's help? Does the praise 
 really belong to man for all these wonderful 
 achievements of civilization? 
 
 Let not man take to himself any exclusive 
 glory therein. His work has ever been that 
 simply of junior partner. Neither soil, nor 
 sun, nor root, nor smallest living cell has man 
 ever made or could have made alone. His 
 capital stock — his material — must be furnished 
 him by the Maker of all ; and he can but polish 
 it a trifle, and round off the corners a little, 
 here and there. 
 
 "Nature is made better by no mean 
 But Nature makes that mean: Even that art 
 Which, you say, adds to Nature, is an art 
 That Nature makes." 
 
 All our human dissatisfactions with nature 
 and strivings to improve it are gifts of the 
 Divine Creator. Who can doubt but that it 
 would have been a thousand times easier for 
 God to have finished the world in the begin- 
 ning than to watch man's slow and bungling 
 efforts at completing it? This self-limitation, 
 which nature shows, was for man's sake, not 
 for God's. It is the very imperfection of the 
 world and of our own souls, that enables this 
 human life to fulfill its high end, that of a 
 divine training school for service, patience, 
 
204 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 wit and righteousness. The supreme end of 
 evolution, in all its varied forces and processes, 
 is to produce character. As Humboldt has 
 said: "Property, government, society, books, 
 religion — all are but scaffolding to build a 
 man." "Fierce winds make the sturdiest oaks ; 
 and rough seas the best sailors." So in the 
 moral world, it is amidst the conflict of ele- 
 ments that one learns firmness of will and 
 steadiness of soul. To disengage the pure 
 gold, the fire must purge out the dross. So 
 to lift man from his animalism and refine his 
 spirit he must pass through the discipline of 
 suffering and trial. Man, as a spiritual being,- 
 is incomplete and ever must be incomplete. A 
 lily, an oyster, or coral polyp might be com- 
 plete and finished. But such finite finish does 
 not make a perfect world. Better than any 
 complete world is the striving of the ever in- 
 complete towards the fleeing ideal, the noble 
 life-purpose of to-day ever creating a nobler 
 to-morrow. By this voluntary co-operation 
 with the Supreme purpose and by conscious 
 obedience to it, that Divine Will becomes 
 progressive within us. It is no small thing 
 to control the forces of Nature, But to con- 
 trol these eternal forces of the spirit and to 
 tune them into harmony with the heavenly 
 choirs, here is a work far grander. We have 
 been privileged to help beautify the earth. 
 
PARTNERS IN WORLD-MAKING 205 
 
 But a higher task, a nobler privilege has been 
 given to man, — to beautify and develop the hu- 
 man character ; to become a co-laborer with the 
 Holy Spirit in the blossoming and ripening of 
 the soul. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 SEARCH THE DEEP THINGS 
 
 If it were possible to embody in a single 
 phase the dominant characteristic of our age, 
 what words would perhaps most aptly sum 
 it up? I fancy they would be "The age of 
 the superficial." 
 
 We live in externals, absorbed in questions 
 of dress, display, wealth or etiquette. The 
 gossip of the society columns delights to tell 
 how much this man is worth or spends and 
 what that woman wears. What a thin varnish 
 is our civilization, covering up, under polite 
 cosmetics and fashionable fictions, semi-barbaric 
 crudities of passion and superstition. The suc- 
 cessful men in the scientific world are the hasty 
 popularizers of unmastered researches, dis- 
 tinguished chiefly by the confidence with which 
 they turn the cautious conjectures of the ex- 
 perts into the sweeping assertions of fresh 
 scientific dogmatisms. 
 
 So in art and literature, what a host of 
 
 dabblers in china-painting and Kensington 
 
 embroidery pose as representatives of artistic 
 
 taste ' How the people who assume the role 
 
 of culture, instead of reading the books them- 
 
 206 
 
SEARCH THE DEEP THINGS 207 
 
 selves, read about them in the magazines in or- 
 der to be able to talk volubly concerning them 
 to those who know still less ! 
 
 Our realism finds its highest achievement, in 
 painting in the most elaborate style the out- 
 side of things and people — the robe, the man- 
 nerism, the petty detail; but it prudently 
 avoids the deeper task of portraying the char- 
 acter. Our culture labors to obtain more 
 foreign words into which to translate each idea, 
 not more ideas or facts for each word. Our 
 politics substitute machines for principles, and 
 our generals give us bulletins for victories. 
 "We keeps a poet" was the ingenuous admis- 
 sion of Day and Martin's Blacking Company 
 forty years ago. "We keep a reporter" 
 would be the truthful explanation of the rise 
 and growth of many a modern celebrity, 
 not only in the dramatic field but equally so 
 in the political and literary fields. The mod- 
 ern press-bureau makes fame as mechanically 
 as a furnace generates hot air. Even in 
 morals and religion there is the same wretched 
 hollowness ; — the husks of rite and ceremony, 
 and the mockeries of substitute salvation in 
 stead of personal reform and genuine spiritual 
 life. Tradition and authority usurp the place 
 of moral insight and first hand convictions. 
 The forcing processes of revivalism, in a week 
 or two of sensational services, produce their 
 
208 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 crop of religious mushrooms ; but not infre- 
 quently we search in vain for the substance of 
 Christian manhood, for any of that deeper re- 
 generation that reaches the soul's center and 
 thrills the throbbing pulse to nobler life and 
 more helpful service. 
 
 In this tendency to mere superficial re- 
 sults lies one of the great dangers of modern 
 life. 
 
 In any domain of existence to find the reali- 
 ties that alone nourish and sustain and abide, 
 we must go down beneath the surface show 
 and costume to the inner core of things. 
 
 To achieve strong and enduring success, to 
 elevate our art and give solidity to our science, 
 to escape from the selfishness and pharisaism 
 that so honeycomb our moral and religious 
 life we must look on the deep things. The 
 world's secret lies in the life within all, that 
 moulds every cell, propels every globule of 
 blood and directs the ideal architecture of 
 every embryotic organism as surely as that of 
 every evolving species or full developed civi- 
 lization. 
 
 In the first place, in our business and in- 
 dustrial pursuits, what else is the greatest mis- 
 chief but the prevalence of shams? And what 
 else is the cure for these shams but deeper 
 work? When a reputable engineer starts to 
 build one of these lofty thirty or forty story 
 
SEARCH THE DEEP THINGS 209 
 
 buildings that are now the fashion, what does 
 he do as the first and most necessary thing? 
 What else but excavate downward as much far- 
 ther than usual as his sky-scraping towers soar 
 upward? If he does not, he knows it will not 
 be long before those lofty walls will be toppling 
 over in ruins. 
 
 At the great World's Fair at Chicago, 
 everybody admired the wonderful fountains, 
 the splendid and complicated machines that 
 were exhibiting themselves to the eye, and the 
 magnificent electrical displays on every hand 
 that shone forth so brilliantly when the even- 
 ing spectacles opened. They were, indeed, 
 superb — a wonderful fairy-land, magically 
 materialized. 
 
 But more marvelous, to the thoughtful eye, 
 was that underworld from which all those 
 upper spectacles received their power — the 
 hundred miles of huge water pipes, the one 
 hundred and fifty miles of gas-piping, the 
 thirty miles of telephone cables, the two hun- 
 dred and fifty miles of wire for the electric 
 lights, and all the complicated subterranean 
 appliances and arrangements by which the 
 comforts and displays above were achieved. 
 
 So he who would rear aloft the towers of 
 great commercial or financial successes, he who 
 would acquire a brilliant professional or artis- 
 tic prestige must secure it by exceptional under- 
 
210 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 ground preparations. It is only crude scholar- 
 ship, as it is only a crude civilization, that 
 has little subterranean work going on. The 
 student must dig and the lawyer delve and the 
 author grind and polish his style through ob- 
 scure years, with unflagging patience, before 
 the intellectual radiance can shine out that is 
 to captivate the world's admiration. 
 
 When Sir Joshua Reynolds was asked how 
 he attained to such excellence in his profession, 
 he replied, "By observing one simple rule, — to 
 make each picture the best." Something of 
 this quality is found in every successful man. 
 David Maydole, it is said, never advertised — 
 never pushed his business. But he made the 
 very best hammer in the market. Every time 
 he made one it was equally excellent, and that 
 gave him all the business and wealth he wanted. 
 
 When James Parton said to him, ''By this 
 time you ought to be able to make a pretty 
 good hammer," Maydole replied — "No, I can- 
 not make a pretty good hammer. I make the 
 best that's made." Whether it is manufactur- 
 ing, medicine, painting, farming or financier- 
 ing, the secret of permanent achievement is 
 found in thoroughness. 
 
 It is these subtle elements of character which 
 lie so much more than skin-deep that determine 
 not merely the fortunes of individuals but the 
 welfare of societies and the destiny of nations. 
 
SEARCH THE DEEP THINGS 211 
 
 "All the shows of social life," it has been 
 well said, "are manifestations of a secret and 
 impalpable substance. Every house, work- 
 shop, church, schoolroom, theater is the repre- 
 sentation of an opinion. What the eye sees 
 of them is built of bricks, iron, wood, and mor- 
 tar ; but the forces by which they are upheld 
 are ideas, affections, conceptions of utility, 
 sentiments of w^orship !" 
 
 What a difference it makes even in the phys- 
 ical development and aspect of a country, 
 what sort of ideas or faith you diffuse there ! 
 Suppose some magician could exchange bodily 
 the inhabitants of two areas of land, such as 
 Germany or New England with an equivalent 
 territory along the Zambesi in Africa. What 
 changes, what alterations, even in the physical 
 features of the soil, would occur. How would 
 grains and fruit trees succeed to weeds ; what 
 artistic and noble structures would take the 
 place of shapeless huts ! Orchestral music 
 soon supersedes the tom-toms. Electric lights 
 illuminate forest glooms, and irrigation works 
 fecundate the barren fields or drain and make 
 healthy the malarial swamps. The idle cata- 
 racts whirl the spindles of factories. Tele- 
 phones and wireless currents enable scattered 
 settlers to talk together. The fetish and the 
 witch-resorts give place to the church, and 
 comfort, refinement, orderly freedom and 
 
212 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 security supersede lawlessness, slavery and 
 poverty. 
 
 When the spirit of civilization breathes 
 across a land, then, as Starr King once said: 
 "The iron can no longer sleep in its hiding- 
 places ; the coal (the only black slave whose 
 labor the white man may rightfully impress) 
 must bring its hot temperament to human 
 service; the streams are compelled to pour 
 their strength upon busy wheels that weave 
 fabrics of comfort and luxury ; valleys are ex- 
 alted and mountains bend their necks; steam 
 hurries with monstrous burdens ; magnetism 
 shoots thoughts along its slender veins ; and 
 mighty tribes that stand for justice, law and 
 equal government overlook a thousand cities." 
 
 In any such transformation as modern civi- 
 lization brings about, the altered physical con- 
 ditions are not the cause but the effect. The 
 cause is to be found in the personal and psy- 
 chical differences. It is this battery of spirit- 
 ual forces that makes the strength of any 
 people. When two great nations meet in the 
 grapple of war, it is not merely, as is often 
 thought, the relative population of the rivals, 
 or the comparative number of guns, forts, and 
 warships that settle which is the superior 
 power, but the respective skill, valor, hardi- 
 hood and moral and mental soundness of the 
 two that decide the struggle. Only when we 
 
SEARCH THE DEEP THINGS 213 
 
 can see and compare the inward forces behind 
 the armor and the muscle, and discern what 
 new power is given to gun and ball when brains 
 and discipline are behind to direct, are we at 
 all in position to forecast the issue. 
 
 Our legislators are most unhesitating in 
 voting away millions to equip forts and armies, 
 build huge and still huger Dreadnoughts for 
 a few years' boastful exhibition before they go 
 to the scrap-heap. But only miserly and re- 
 luctant appropriations can usually be ob- 
 tained to conserve forests or guard health, to 
 harness wasteful water-powers into useful elec- 
 tric workers, or for the still more important 
 enterprises of civilization, such as Bureaus of 
 National Health, Pure Food, Race Betterment, 
 and for the higher branches of education and 
 scientific research on which the progress of 
 civilization so directly depends. Yet could 
 the minds and dispositions of our law-makers 
 be so transmuted that they might cease to 
 waste the national income so lavishly upon 
 these destructive programs of popular Jingo- 
 ism and instead, divert the resources and ef- 
 forts of the state into beneficent channels of 
 constructive industries and social enterprises 
 (such as are the real agents of the comfort, 
 wealth and culture of happier and higher hu- 
 manity), what a better future might mankind 
 enjoy! 
 
214 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 The current plea against such practical 
 diversion of national expenditures into more 
 profitable channels is that militant activities and 
 martial ambitions are necessary means for main- 
 taining among a people the spirit of manly 
 courage and are also the only security against 
 subjection by rival states or hostile races. The 
 plea is a fallacious one. The real test in modern 
 war is not that supplied by the preponderance 
 of military habits and expertness but by the 
 scales of self-sacrificing patriotism and by the 
 mental and moral forces that give national 
 efficiency and endurance. Napoleon, we are 
 often reminded, declared that "God is on the 
 side of the strongest battalions." But the his- 
 toric records have many an opposite testimony 
 to give. When Charles Martel in front of 
 Tours, gathering together the scanty ranks of 
 his Frankish soldiers in defense of their Chris- 
 tian homes, routed the Saracenic invaders who 
 would have saddled on European life the curse 
 of Oriental polygamy, the strongest battalions 
 had to yield to the intenser power of patriotic 
 devotion and superior manhood. So when, 
 ten centuries later, our ragged Continentals, 
 untrained farmers and backwoodsmen, faced 
 the trained professional soldiers from Britain 
 and the Hessian Duchies, even a more notable 
 historic example testified that there were other 
 and more Providential factors of victory than 
 
SEARCH THE DEEP THINGS 215 
 
 those supplied by the stronger battalions of the 
 military experts. That which gave Napoleon 
 himself his brief hour of triumph was just the 
 patriot devotion of French republicanism, re- 
 belling against the outgrown despotisms of 
 Europe ; and when that work was accomplished 
 and Napoleon attempted to transfer that moral 
 indignation to the gratification of his own 
 selfish ambition and found a new dynasty of 
 imperial masters, the same irresistible power 
 hurled him from his throne into the dust. 
 
 Again, half a century later, when the third 
 Napoleon, after diverting the generous aspira- 
 tions for liberty into a tool for his personal 
 aggrandizement, had sapped the morals of the 
 French nation by the poison of his demoralized 
 court and his own low example, the result was 
 that the people who had been claiming to walk 
 at the very head of civilization, suffered the 
 most humiliating of defeats. When the warn- 
 ing notes of "The Watch on the Rhine" rang 
 out their clarion call to the German people, 
 there came forth to battle a nation trained to 
 respect authority and do their duty manfully. 
 The French youth arrayed against them had 
 plenty of physical courage. But they were, for 
 the most part, young fellows devoid of moral 
 stamina or religious principles, unaccustomed 
 to obey any one or respect any one and whose 
 physique, in too many cases, had been sapped 
 
216 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 by the most weakening of social vices. In 
 such a conflict the victory of the Germans was 
 fore-ordained. As a remarkable official re- 
 port, made soon after the close of the Franco- 
 Prussian War by a keen-sighted Frenchman, 
 has affirmed: "Discipline in the army depends 
 on the discipline of society and private families. 
 But how can this discipline exist in the French 
 army when it does not exist in French families? 
 Moreover, look beyond the family circle, at our 
 schools and our colleges. Is anything done to 
 develop among our young people respect for 
 their parents, regard for duty, obedience to 
 authority and the law and, above all, belief 
 in God? Nothing or next to nothing. And 
 yet there are people who pretend that we can 
 accustom these untrained youths, devoid of 
 principles, to good discipline as soon as they 
 are called into the army." 
 
 In the light of such testimony from men of 
 their own nation there is no doubt to what the 
 failure of the French when brought into col- 
 lision with the German soldiers was due. It 
 was a stern but needed lesson to France. And 
 it is a lesson that our own "Young America," 
 with whom liberty — and I might even say 
 license — is too often the popular idol, may well 
 take to heart. Magnetic as is the attraction 
 to the average citizen of expanding our ter- 
 ritorial longitude on school atlases, there is a 
 
SEARCH THE DEEP THINGS 217 
 
 more profitable goal for national ambition. It 
 is found in the less noisy but far more useful 
 sphere of intensive development. 
 
 Physical things can be enlarged by external 
 aggregation. But to enlarge living organisms 
 there must be growth and union within. Every 
 coherent nation is such a social organism. It 
 integrates and enlarges by mutual services and 
 voluntary co-operation into a living whole, in 
 which each member of the social hive has an op- 
 portunity for the development of his faculties, 
 and an interest in the product of his own in- 
 dustry. The strong and enduring government 
 is one braced by the voluntary union of those 
 intersecting circles of the common welfare that 
 make them hoops of steel to hold each other 
 up. 
 
 The government of alien peoples by rulers in 
 whose choice they have no part is not merely 
 unrepublican but a retrogression to the meth- 
 ods of semi-civilized times. That consent of 
 the governed demanded by our Declaration of 
 Independence is an essential basis of healthy 
 social life. But as the American citizen prop- 
 erly feels that he has rights that are not to be 
 invaded by his neighbor, and that he who 
 thinks he has a grievance against him should 
 be able to establish his claim before impartial 
 judges, so each should restrain himself from 
 taking the law into his private hands and de- 
 
218 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 claring industrial war on the majority, when 
 through the channels of properly constituted 
 authorities, that majority-rule orders measures 
 and customs that do not suit him. If the re- 
 former, the progressive, the temperance advo- 
 cate, the suffrage agitator or the representa- 
 tive of labor has a natural right to resort to 
 violence to obtain what the minority group, 
 sympathizing with him, deem their fair share 
 of life's goods and pleasures, then also the 
 gambler, the anarchist, the brewer and the 
 free-lover have similar justification in resort- 
 ing to bricks and dynamite and revolvers in an 
 industrial and social war upon the classes that 
 are arrayed against them. Law and order can 
 not be varied to accommodate themselves to the 
 caprices and motives of individuals. In civ- 
 ilized society one class-section has no right to 
 seek its welfare by other means than those le- 
 gal and peaceable methods open to all. Re- 
 sort to violence is a return to barbarism, 
 however good the motives that prompt it. 
 When political passion or racial prejudice 
 sweeps away in its blind fury the sacred 
 bulwarks of order and justice and the citi- 
 zens' liberties; or when the greed for easing 
 one's self of the load of debt or winning a polit- 
 ical victory would break down those invisible 
 ties of credit that pervade the mercantile world 
 and, in order to gain a temporary advantage, 
 
SEARCH THE DEEP THINGS 219 
 
 would tarnish our financial honor and destroy 
 the confidence with which city and coun- 
 try, east and west, lean upon one another, 
 then, every clear-sighted observer sees in 
 such violations of principle the most sinister 
 of omens for our national honor and safety. 
 Many reputable citizens, to be sure, hug the il- 
 lusion that the lawless aggression or high- 
 handed confiscation that would be abhorred as 
 dishonorable in dealings between individuals 
 are quite legitimate in a nation if the deed will 
 be a profitable one for the people. It is for- 
 gotten however, that while individuals may die 
 too soon for "the mills of the gods" to execute 
 their mission of moral retribution, nations are 
 too long lived to escape the consequences of 
 unrighteous conduct. 
 
 A well-known New York lecturer, awakening 
 in that imperial mood which the exhilarating 
 atmosphere of our mountains sometimes ex- 
 cites, opened his inmost heart to a companion 
 with this exultant bit of confidence: "I believe 
 that this morning God himself is afraid of me." 
 When this megalocephalic vertigo seizes a man 
 it is just as well for him to try the sobering 
 effect of reading over several times James Rus- 
 sell Lowell's warning in his Bigelow Papers: 
 
 "YouVe got to get up airlee 
 If you want to take in God." 
 
£20 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 The Divine Commandments prescribing fair- 
 dealing, mercy and pity to the highest as to the 
 lowest of the great human family are not to 
 be broken without eventual retribution. But 
 if the invisible dynamism of normal manli- 
 ness and righteousness be active and unde- 
 cayed among the common people, then the 
 statesman is little disturbed when the hour 
 of peril comes. He feels sure that the he- 
 roes and patriots, needed to defend the na- 
 tional existence, will rally promptly out of 
 every little hamlet to meet the call of the oc- 
 casion, as they did at the opening of our Civil 
 War in 1861. The latent but potent inspira- 
 tion, which in olden days moved the sires and 
 grandsires of America to such noble struggles 
 and successful victories, will again nerve the 
 sons, and as the hour for devoted sacrifice 
 comes again, the uplifting memories of our 
 Revolutionary soldiers and the more recent 
 heroes of our Civil War will resume their 
 sovereignty over the American people and with 
 their sublime vision of the earth's grandest 
 constitutional temple of impartial justice and 
 all inclusive religious freedom, will rally the 
 true and the brave to triumphant defense of 
 this Providential asylum of the oppressed and 
 altar of humanity's hope. 
 
 Yes — it is these invisible tides of the spirit, 
 those lofty national ideals of the past and fu- 
 
SEARCH THE DEEP THINGS 221 
 
 ture that constitute the best part of America's 
 force and enthusiasm. 
 
 It is, in fact, in these spiritual forces that 
 the sources of political power or social health 
 in every body politic are to be found. It is 
 evident, then, how puerile are those popular 
 remedies that would cure the present evils of 
 society by incontinently suppressing the symp- 
 toms. Does intemperance or gambling rage? 
 Let the legislature, we are advised, simply pass 
 a prohibitory law and go home to their ease. 
 Are the legislators corrupt or servile or blindly 
 partisan? Vote out, at the next election, every 
 politician who is in, and put those now out in 
 their places. Does money still rule, do in- 
 equality and poverty blight the land, — then, 
 by drastic legislation let us have a new eco- 
 nomic system ; take from every landlord or rich 
 man his surplus profits and divide up 
 the total national income in nearly equal 
 portions, and happiness shall reign in every 
 home— at least, one will have no more to 
 enjoy or less to suffer from than any other. 
 Such are the easy panaceas of scores of theo- 
 rists. Their varied errors all rest on one fun- 
 damental mistake — that the real sources of sin 
 or crime or unhappiness are outward and ma- 
 terial, not inward and spiritual. They all for- 
 get that society is but a union of individuals, 
 and that no reorganization that does not re- 
 
^22 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 mould the personal character of those individu- 
 als can produce any permanent effect on the 
 social aggregate. 
 
 As we look about on the fierce struggle 
 of business competition, class feuds, social 
 emulations and political ambitions, it seems 
 almost as if this nobler manhood was looked 
 upon, not so much as the one thing needful, 
 but as the one thing negligible. It is a 
 very easy way of excusing ourselves for all the 
 political abuses of the hour by laying them on 
 the shoulders of two or three "bosses" and busi- 
 ness "Captains of Finance" as if they caused 
 it all. But it is about as logical as the reason- 
 ing of the Irishman who smashed the ther- 
 mometer, proudly declaring that "now he had 
 killed the ''baste' that made the weather so 
 hot." What gives the boss his power.? What 
 else but the people's indifference and blind 
 partisanship .f^ Are our legislators and post- 
 office officials wasteful, self-seeking, disregard- 
 ful of duty and public responsibilities? Is it 
 not because the millions behind them are also 
 wasteful, self-seeking and disregardful of their 
 plain obligations? We must turn the scoun- 
 drels out from more than the public office — 
 we must turn the scoundrel out of our own 
 coats and hearts. To rejuvenate society we 
 need more than a change of circumstance or a 
 revision of the laws or new boards of officials. 
 
SEARCH THE DEEP THINGS 2S3 
 
 We need new manhood all through the state. 
 We need something more than even a brand- 
 new economic system with "Socialistic politi- 
 cians" managing the great business syndicates 
 instead of the able capitalists now at their 
 head. We need a greater devotion to knowl- 
 edge and justice, more vital embodiment of the 
 Golden Rule, not only in business but in all 
 the circles of social activity. 
 
 Unreflective orators have warmly applauded 
 the surprising paradox of the professor who 
 has so roundly asserted that sin is the result of 
 misery, misery the result of poverty, and pov- 
 erty and all its accompanying vice, crime and 
 unhappiness may readily be remedied by an in- 
 crease in the income of the unprosperous, such 
 as may be ordained by government. 
 
 Deeper thinkers in the most diverse classes 
 of society find more profound causes for our 
 industrial troubles. For a solution of the 
 social problem they would find it nearer the 
 truth to reverse absolutely Prof. Patten's dic- 
 tum and say that vice and crime rarely fail to 
 produce misery and inefficiency ; misery and 
 inefficiency produce poverty ; and the only 
 remedy for poverty that is more than tempo- 
 rary is better personality and more efficient, 
 clean, intelligent and forceful character. 
 
 That veteran philanthropist, Mr. Sidney 
 Webb, whose natural sympathies are all with 
 
224 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 the submerged tenth, nevertheless has admitted 
 that it is idle to regard the extremes of chronic 
 poverty as having any connection with the con- 
 current existence of wealth. The astonishing 
 increase in riches among certain classes in the 
 present generation has not come by subtrac- 
 tion from the wealth of the rest of the com- 
 munity, but it is an addition that has given to 
 the laboring classes of to-day more abundant 
 comforts and an increased standard of living 
 such as formerly was only enjoyed by their 
 social superiors. For the average man to get 
 a larger income there must be more to divide ; 
 and for the nation to have more to divide it 
 must have healthier and more efficient work- 
 men, more thrifty users of deserved earnings, 
 more enterprising and skillful managers and 
 more able experts in those scientific researches 
 that so transform society and produce the 
 veritable miracles of modern progress. 
 
 As Frederick Harrison has so strongly and 
 wisely urged : "The solution of the social prob- 
 lem is a moral, social and religious question." 
 No mere rearrangements of the material condi- 
 tions and economic and political machinery are 
 more than temporary makeshifts. The bot- 
 tom trouble is that of the unlimited indulgence 
 of self-interest, uncontrolled by the sense of 
 social duty. While selfishness is left rampant, 
 the most ideal laws will be twisted by the cun- 
 
SEARCH THE DEEP THINGS 225 
 
 ning and powerful to their advantage and to 
 the thrusting down of the dull and feeble. 
 Both capital and labor, mlllionarles and pro- 
 letariat must be moralized. The Golden Rule 
 should inspire new considerateness and gener- 
 ous reward in the employer and new faithful- 
 ness and effectiveness in the employed. The 
 supremely desirable thing is to put the human 
 interests of the health, comfort and character 
 of our fellows above the gaining of dollars or 
 our thoughtless self-gratifications ; it is to be 
 loyal to the genuinely democratic spirit of true 
 Americans that honors a man for himself, not 
 for his property, and that arrays the citizens 
 of the United States, not in jealous and hostile 
 classes, horizontally estranged, but in a union 
 of good-will, in which high and low, black and 
 white, foreign blood and native born, co-ope- 
 rate under the inspiration of a living bond of 
 conscious obligation for the common welfare. 
 
 The supreme need, then, for our country is 
 that of a better humanity, better physique, 
 more thorough knowledge and purer morals. 
 The loss to the national wealth every year 
 from preventable diseases is estimated at some 
 three thousand millions of dollars. It is the 
 application of scientific researches by ingenious 
 machines and processes, to harnessing Into the 
 service of man the vast powers of the natural 
 forces, steam, water, gas and electricity, that 
 
226 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 has multiplied tenfold the riches and power of 
 civilized communities. The additions to hu- 
 man riches made by an Arkwright, a Bessemer 
 and an Edison exceed all the treasures ex- 
 tracted from the mines of Rhodesia or the 
 Klondike. The contributions to human com- 
 fort and the saving of life effected by a 
 Lister, an Ehrlich, a Marconi and an Alex- 
 ander Bell constitute a golden list which in 
 value and glory exceeds all the devastations of 
 the world conquerors such as Alexander, Na- 
 poleon or Ghengiz Khan. The prime and 
 direct method for the improvement of civiliza- 
 tion, therefore, is that of profounder investiga- 
 tion into Nature's secrets and a more wide and 
 accurate diffusion of the information obtained. 
 It is well to notice that I did not say more 
 popularizing of knowledge. That is one of the 
 particularly irritating nuisances of the time. 
 As a keen humorist of our day has said, "It is 
 better not to know so many things than to 
 know so many things that ain't so." Every 
 reader of the magazines and books that flood 
 the market is aware what a veritably morbid 
 appetite there is to-day for turgid phrases, 
 pretentious fallacies and the merest smatter- 
 ing of sociology, theology, psychology and all 
 the rest of the Greek-named branches of learn- 
 ing. Instead of trying to see how many sec- 
 ond-rate books you can skim and then say 
 
SEARCH THE DEEP THINGS 2^7 
 
 something about them at the next meeting of 
 your club, it is far better to see how well you 
 can master a few of the great authors whose 
 noble books adorn our literature. To save 
 ourselves and our neighbors from the large and 
 varied assortment of misinformation floating 
 about on every hand, the remedy is a diligent 
 effort to know the things themselves, not the 
 mere names of things, whether popular or 
 technical. It is much better, as Robert Lowe 
 once said, to understand the functions of the 
 liver than to know that it is called jecur in 
 Latin and something else in Greek. 
 
 Of the three great branches of modern 
 knowledge, viz., research to obtain solutions of 
 the great hygienic and economic problems, aca- 
 demic discipline and equipment for our pro- 
 fessional classes, and the industrial training of 
 our common people for useful service, it is the 
 second that receives the greatest attention. 
 But it is the first and the last that are pre- 
 eminently the most important for the improve- 
 ment, comfort and efficiency of the human race. 
 
 As a teacher of long experience, Ella 
 Frances Lynch, has forcibly said, "Whether 
 w^e go into the question of the prevailing mar- 
 ital unhappiness, of divorce, of cruelty to chil- 
 dren, of the saloon, of high prices, of the low 
 wages paid to the ordinary person or of the 
 social evil, the root of any one of these questions 
 
228 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 can be traced straight back to one point — in- 
 efficiency — the inefficient girl who does not 
 know how to run her home or to care for her 
 baby, the inefficient boy who, knowing no trade, 
 finds it either hard or impossible to get lucra- 
 tive work and becomes discouraged." In- 
 efficiency is to-day the chief curse of American 
 life ; and it is because the public school is turn- 
 ing out thousands of inefficient workers. Ac- 
 cording to the figures of the Commissioner of 
 Education, out of the nineteen million school 
 children in the United States over seventeen 
 million never get beyond the elementary 
 schools. Yet the schools where there is any 
 of that industrial training and domestic science 
 taught that would fit these millions of children 
 for practical life are, in almost every town, 
 above the elementary grade and the age of 
 fourteen or fifteen years when they go out to 
 earn a living. The result is that over ninety 
 out of every hundred children receive from our 
 schools no preparation for practical life. 
 
 The discoveries made in the last thirty years 
 by the great scientific investigators, such as 
 Koch, Pasteur, Galton, Pearson, Metschnikoff 
 and their associates in respect to just six of 
 our prevalent diseases, tuberculosis, pneumonia, 
 meningitis, typhoid fever, diphtheria and in- 
 fantile diseases, if generally diffused and if the 
 observance of the new medical knowledge as to 
 
SEARCH THE DEEP THINGS 229 
 
 such common matters as pure water, milk and 
 abundant fresh air, could be enforced, are so 
 epoch-making that they would add, according 
 to the medical experts, fifteen years to the av- 
 erage length of life. 
 
 Wisely did the French people, when asked 
 to name by ballot the one Frenchman who had 
 most benefited France, choose Louis Pasteur. 
 And if the German nation should ever try a 
 similar national referendum, they would, if 
 wise, put the name of Baron Von Stein, the 
 founder of their splendid system of universal 
 and thorough education and civil freedom, 
 above even such names as those of a Bismarck, 
 a Goethe or a Von Moltke. 
 
 Among modern steps in progress none is 
 more auspicious and epoch-making for a higher 
 civilization than the fresh interest in eugenics 
 that has just been marked by the assembly of 
 the First International Congress devoted to 
 that profound interest of the human race. As 
 has truly been said by Prof. Samuel G. Smith, 
 "There can be no adequate treatment of social 
 therapeutics without placing a little child in 
 the midst, considering his nature and his pos- 
 sibilities, the quality of his inheritance and 
 the social responsibility for his education and 
 his upbringing. But in the past, few things 
 have been more neglected by our political and 
 economic reconstructors of society." 
 
S30 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 The equipment, the adequate manning by 
 first-class experts, and the generous endow- 
 ment and support of the various bureaus of re- 
 search, whether scientific, medical, civic, eco- 
 nomical or statistical, that may give this pro- 
 founder knowledge in all departments of human 
 activity, is the need of needs for the advance of 
 civilization. 
 
 Especially in the province of religious faith 
 and practice has a similar superficiality of 
 thought been most mischievous. From what 
 else springs the greater part of the scepticism 
 and the materialism that to-day beset the cause 
 of faith than from just such shallowness of 
 understanding as to the great subjects upon 
 which they so glibly pass judgment? 
 
 For example, what is the source of the 
 agnosticism that in these recent days has mired 
 so many an ambitious mind, except the intel- 
 lectual confusion that befogs it so that it fails 
 to think through to the luminous end the train 
 of thought that begins with such thoughts as 
 infinity, divine absoluteness and the relativity 
 of substance and phenomena. To give up in 
 the face of these ideals, great and subtle as 
 they are, in despair of any practicable com- 
 prehension of the relation of the Infinite Self 
 to our finite selves, is either intellectual sloth 
 or spiritual cowardice. Either we must tor- 
 pidly suppress all our deeper feelings when we 
 
SEARCH THE DEEP THINGS 231 
 
 are brought close to the presence of pain and 
 death, or we must learn to think deeply enough 
 to solve in some practical way the insistent 
 problems of freedom, responsibility, God and 
 the great hereafter. Not only is this pro- 
 founder thought possible, but the minds well 
 posted in the masterly arguments set forth by 
 the eminent philosophic thinkers of modern 
 times, such as Martineau, Caird, Lotze and 
 John Fiske, know that it has already been 
 achieved ; and it only needs due diligence in 
 these morbid bewailers of the incompetency of 
 the human reason to dominate the problems 
 most crucial to modern faith. Those who have 
 conquered them are well aware that the chief 
 incompetence is to be found in the unreflect- 
 ing individual's own bewilderment of thought. 
 It does not lie in the inefficient mental equip- 
 ment provided by the Maker of all for the 
 human reason in the battle of life. 
 
 So, also, that recent charge against our 
 universe and the Divine Government which cer- 
 tain men of scientific reputation have indulged 
 in, as they have made amateurish exploring 
 trips into the field of religious philosophy, 
 viz : that Nature is an irrational and unmoral 
 realm and the only Force in it that we can 
 call Supreme and Creative is a blind and im- 
 personal one — what else does this disclose than 
 a superficiality of reflection? For it evidently 
 
232 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 forgets that which in the very next page it 
 usually boasts over — the law of evolution as a 
 steadily ascending progress, as a series in 
 which man is shown to be organically con- 
 nected with the domain of Nature, animal life 
 and the material environment below and about 
 man — a series that rises out of Nature as its 
 completed product and purposed end. But if 
 man be thus the destined crown of the develop- 
 mental order, that very fact supplies the 
 triumphant answer to these cynical criticisms. 
 For in man, an inseparable part of Nature and 
 its very acme, there emerge the very attributes 
 of rationality, personality, ethical and spiritual 
 attributes denied to the cosmos and its in- 
 forming, constructive Life. But it is plain 
 that nature could not give to man these traits 
 and faculties unless nature previously pos- 
 sessed them in her secret depths, with power to 
 give. The evolution of spirit in man implies 
 the original involution and residence of Spirit 
 within Nature. Nature is, therefore, not to be 
 regarded as a dead, unmoral mass, but as the 
 vital organism of an Omnipresent Spirit. The 
 infinitely outstretched cosmos is but the out- 
 ward body of an invisible and equally infinite 
 and eternal Life, whose deep mysterious at- 
 tributes cannot be lacking in the refulgent per- 
 fections that have burgeoned and bloomed so 
 wonderfully from their deep and fertile roots. 
 
SEARCH THE DEEP THINGS 233 
 
 Or take up any of the other points, such 
 as the benevolence of the Father of Spirits, the 
 question of miracles, the problem of evil, the 
 possibility and method of a survival of the 
 soul — almost any, in fact, of the burning issues 
 in natural theology — and it will in most cases 
 be found that the chief thing for their hopeful 
 settlement is this deeper and more thorough 
 inquiry. In order to vindicate to-day the 
 great realities of religious faith we should re- 
 member what Lord Bacon so well said of thq 
 doubters of the 17th century: "A little phi- 
 losophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but 
 profounder philosophy bringeth man's mind 
 back to religion." 
 
 As modern science finds that life originated, 
 not on the surface of the earth, but in the sea- 
 water, whose chemical composition is so close 
 to that of the human organism, so may a rea- 
 sonable faith be born again "de profundis," 
 and emerge triumphant like Aphrodite from 
 the ^gean waves. 
 
 Our preachers and theological writers 
 should delve in the depths. The pulpit that 
 would command respect in this age of free in- 
 quiry cannot ignore the grave problems that 
 assail thoughtful minds, albeit such discussions 
 do not entertain the children or the devotees 
 of fashion. The remedy for popular doubt is 
 not in fervid oratory or revival tricks that may 
 
234 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 titillate and dizzy the emotions, but in the shak- 
 ing off of that mental indolence that now shirks 
 serious reflection as a bore. Let him who longs 
 for light, gird up the loins of his mind, de- 
 termined to think problems through to the 
 end ; and his search shall not fail to find a 
 bridal dawn of truth and hope bright enough 
 to enable him to acquit himself as a loyal son 
 of God. 
 
 In profounder thought and truth, then, lies 
 the prime guide to scientific, social, personal 
 and religious progress. And the second great 
 source and impulsive agency is that of pro- 
 founder feeling. While the heart is cold the 
 words of the Golden Rule sound on the ear as 
 but the patter of meaningless syllables, and 
 social regeneration and vital religion are hope- 
 less quests. 
 
 But realize your neighbor, let him stand be- 
 fore you as one who has the same needs and 
 desires and sensitive feelings as yourself, as 
 one to whom hunger and cold bring the same 
 pain as to yourself; then those words, "Do 
 unto others as ye would that men should do 
 unto you," take on a fresh meaning and au- 
 thority. Let love to one's dear ones awaken 
 the desire and the subtle enjoyment in mutual 
 service and let it grow outwardly in the com- 
 munity in which you live until the recognition 
 that the most down-trodden member of that 
 
SEARCH THE DEEP THINGS 235 
 
 community is formed of the same aching flesh 
 and nerves as yourselves ; then a vibration of 
 compassionate helpfulness and social affection 
 will begin to move within with such urgency as 
 to make the Heavenly Father's love and care of 
 his human children and their gratitude and 
 loyalty to him become genuine spiritual neces- 
 sities of normal humanity. And in the next 
 place, if our awakened sympathy can stir still 
 deeper, so that at length the sealed fountains 
 of the heart open and we discern even dimly 
 the common divine image in all men, however 
 submerged and distorted, and become aware of 
 the infinite consequences of our earthly rela- 
 tions, then in what a blessed way will the hard- 
 ness, cruelty and self-seeking begin to melt 
 away. When this respect for the worth of 
 man as a brother and this tenderness for the 
 pangs of our fellows come to conscious realiza- 
 tion, no such unnecessary wastes and sufferings 
 as modern war now involves, with its two thou- 
 sand million financial cost and its monstrous 
 human wreckage, can be thought of without 
 repulsion. 
 
 They who have once experienced this trans- 
 muting stir of the latent humaneness in our 
 race recognize it with George Eliot as amongst 
 the greatest privileges of life. They welcome 
 even "the sad experiences that may have 
 brought it to them as worth all their personal 
 
236 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 share of pain and would no more return to the 
 old torpor and narrowness than the patient 
 who has had a cataract removed would return 
 to the dim shadows of his purblind days." 
 
 One of our poets has said of that pure and 
 exalted soul, Victoria Colonna, "She learned in 
 suffering what she taught in song." This has^ 
 indeed, been the school in which all the most 
 moving poetry of our literature has been 
 learned. As we watch some active helper of 
 her kind, going on her cheery and cheering 
 way with helpful hand and encouraging voice, 
 we are apt to fancy that it is because her own 
 lot is so bright that she bears thus easily the 
 burden of others. But if we are fortunate 
 enough to know her intimate experiences, we 
 often find that it was not because she has been 
 exempt from trial, but rather just because of 
 her own heart-aches and her consciousness of 
 the universality of sorrow and weakness in the 
 world, that she has gained this delicate art of 
 tender consolation. 
 
 He who would obtain the victories of the 
 spiritual life should, then, seek the strength 
 of the hidden things, the irresistible momentum 
 of the eternal principles whose potent indwell- 
 ing makes common clay a soul. 
 
 In regard to many and many a man whom 
 we meet in business or social intercourse we 
 somehow feel that, successful and important as 
 
SEARCH THE DEEP THINGS 237 
 
 he seems to be in the scales of the world's opin- 
 ion, yet he is only what Aristotle defined man 
 to be, "a political animal." He is neither a 
 social soul nor a spiritual being. He has 
 hardly caught a glimpse of the inner heart of 
 being, pulsing beneath the veil of visible things. 
 Such a man will never see but half the glory 
 in which the world is bathed. He will never 
 make a poet nor a composer nor in any 
 humbler, but equally effective fashion, will he 
 move the great world forward an inch out of 
 the dust of the actual toward the kingdom of 
 the ideal. He who would accomplish some- 
 thing on that higher plane must let character 
 weigh more with him than steel or gold, and he 
 must discern that the true essence of man lies 
 in that which allies him with his Maker, and 
 he should see how much more constructive 
 power and upward guidance in the destiny of 
 nations lie in the truths expressed in a single 
 verse of the Beatitudes than in all the cannon 
 and mines of Cherbourg, Woolwich or Fortress 
 Monroe. It is a fact, which the candid study 
 of history will abundantly prove, that the origin 
 and steady propulsion of the great historic 
 movements lie hidden in potencies of a more 
 subtle type than the masses suspect. They 
 are to be found in the intellectual and 
 moral vision of a few great leaders who discern 
 by a lofty and inexplicable instinct certain 
 
238 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 eternal principles of right and truth and 
 magnetic good-will. And as they coura- 
 geously adopt them, the infinite energies of the 
 cosmic Dynamo become connected with them 
 and reinforce the finite powers of the man with 
 the invincible co-operation of the Divine. To 
 the world of conventional time-servers and 
 trimmers, such seers and prophets seem rank 
 visionaries and their proposed steps of prog- 
 ress mere chimeras. But in reality they are 
 the sanest of men. They are wielding great 
 and real forces, though to ordinary men they 
 are as hidden and magical as the invisible 
 currents of a wireless station, speeding on the 
 undulations of the ether over miles of track- 
 less seas, are to semi-civilized tribes. While 
 inert traditionalists look with hopeless awe at 
 the massive and lofty walls of ecclesiastical or 
 institutional Jerichos, whose frowning battle- 
 ments seem to mock every assault of the 
 soldiers of reason and righteousness, the sap- 
 pers and miners of advancing public opinion, 
 guided by the light of spiritual insight, per- 
 severe steadily in pushing in their charges of 
 moral lyddite and intellectual dissolvents, until 
 at length, on some auspicious day, the irre- 
 sistible chemistry of higher public opinion, re- 
 leased in full force by the electric discharge of 
 some unusual wrong or contagious compas- 
 sion, lays low the frowning citadels and trans- 
 
SEARCH THE DEEP THINGS 239 
 
 figures the ruins of the dead past with the 
 circling bow of promise and the sunshine of the 
 happier future. 
 
 The eternal force inherent in every tiniest 
 electron of the whirling molecules is one that is 
 ever repairing the organic decay, transmuting 
 ooze and excrement into fragrant rose and 
 luscious orange and dimpling babe. The 
 energizing and subtle fluid that pulses through 
 the veins of our unwithering world is a vital 
 blood and therefore ever presses toward growth 
 and enlargement, toward ampler efficiency, to- 
 ward the reasonable, the more precious worth. 
 It is the same animating Divine Life that 
 circles in such orderly progress in the con- 
 densing nebulae and in the budding blossom 
 and at length in the soul of man reaches up- 
 ward in earth-spurning aspirations. So it is 
 the same eternal forces of growth that have 
 ripened the foremost spirals to happy worlds 
 that also ferment in the heart of man and in 
 the veins of every community that has not be- 
 gun to degenerate. The salvation and glory 
 of man is to ally himself with this Eternal 
 Reality that ever works for righteousness, il- 
 lumination, and widening love and harmony. 
 It is by this august alliance with the Soul of 
 our souls that the loyal individual's strength 
 and influence are multiplied tenfold. He who 
 would have the incomparable force of the 
 
240 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 cosmos flowing through and Invigorating him 
 must cultivate that faith that the Philistine de- 
 spises. This fortifying faith is no magical 
 password or blind and flimsy credulity, leaning 
 on the traditional assumptions of institutional 
 ignorance; it is the rational faith that trusts 
 the constant order of the universe and charges 
 its motor car with the invisible forces of God's 
 moral and spiritual realm. Though it may 
 have little sense basis in verifications by finger 
 and eye, it has back of it the record of Na- 
 ture's past, and the imperative assurances of 
 our rational intuitions and our righteous in- 
 stincts. 
 
 When Robert Ingersoll derisively expressed 
 the wish that Providence had made health as 
 infectious as disease, he overlooked the fact 
 that the Maker had made it more infectious, 
 though by the subtler, circuitous channels of 
 knowledge and compassion. Those righteous 
 laws are invincible; for 
 
 "In every nation 
 Every human heart is human." 
 
 In all normal communities the appeals of pity, 
 truth and conscience will receive deserved re- 
 sponse. The divine serums are always regen- 
 erative. The blood that in every century and 
 every nation renews the sympathetic Brother- 
 hood of Man is a liquid thicker and more 
 
SEARCH THE DEEP THINGS 241 
 
 quickening than water. Let us confide with- 
 out hesitation in the splendid radiation of 
 every patriotic earnestness, in the eternal in- 
 fluences of every righteous effort and in 
 
 "The sweet presence of a good diffused 
 And in diffusion ever more intense." 
 
 The counsel of the ages to the perplexed and 
 discouraged soul is this : "Root your life deeper 
 each day in the eternal things of God. Even 
 though the ways of Providence lead into 
 fathomless waters of care and bereavement, let 
 us walk forward into the depths with unswerv- 
 ing trust. How often in life is it the very loss 
 of prestige or friends or worldly goods that 
 gives a man back possession of himself .f' 
 
 Let us not murmur at the guiding Hand 
 which brings us into difficulties as if it aimed 
 thereby to mire us in them permanently. 
 Rather let us confide that through whatever 
 "covered way" we have to grope, it is a 
 way that will bring us through the gloomy 
 tunnel to a larger outlook, where with clearer 
 vision we may see the heaven-kissing heights, 
 before hid by the nearer and lower hillocks. 
 Onward and upward let the loyal child of God, 
 a stalwart soldier and pioneer, push on, to catch 
 through the mists and shadows, at each mile- 
 stone of life, new glimpses of the beneficent 
 sweep of the grand purposes of the Divine 
 
242 THE OPEN SECRET 
 
 Goodness, new assurances of the majestic bend 
 of that sky-bright dome of purer blessedness 
 and fuller real life, which God steadfastly 
 arches over the head of the poorest son of God 
 who looks upward with human eyes. 
 
 What still unfathomed wisdom lurks in the 
 lines of Ralph Waldo Emerson ! 
 
 *'Profounder, profounder^ man's spirit must dive. 
 
 His aye-rolling orbit at no goal will arrive. 
 
 The heavens that now draw him with sweetness 
 
 untold, 
 Once found, for new heavens he spurneth the old." 
 
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