My "Little Bit"

What is the most urgent need of the world? What would stop war and ensure peace? What would push forward all that is highest and best in our civilisation, and cause men and women to realise that they are not created to brutalise, degrade, and destroy each other in sordid struggles for place and power, but that their purpose in living at all is to educate and uplift each other to noble aims and ends? The great Need stares us in the face at every point of social law and political government; it clamours in our ears and pushes its problem to the front of every question. What is it the world demands in every form of policy, legislation, and statesmanship? A simple thing—one would imagine it to be a natural thing—yet almost undiscoverable in any period of history—Sanity! Sanity, which means health of both brain and body; Sanity which recognises self only as a portion of the greater Whole; Sanity which knows instinctively that mankind must obey the laws of God or else suffer extinction; Sanity, which combines with reason and judgment a comprehensive sympathy for every unit of the human race in its struggle upward from the brute period to the highest realisation of intellectual and spiritual worth.

Judged from this point of view one may doubt, when reading history from its known or traditional beginnings, whether Man, taken in bulk, has ever been entirely sane. Something of the freak, the monster, or the only half human, seems to taint his blood, displaying itself in follies and excesses of the most violent or pitiful nature, which, when dispassionately narrated in the chronicles of centuries, show him to be a crank or a fool at the very time when wisdom might most be expected of him. Some few individuals, notable examples to the race, have stood out in splendid isolation as sane and self-sacrificing teachers and helpers of humanity; but, in the aggregate, from the very beginnings of what we are pleased to call “progress” down to the present day, the desire to trample upon each other and wallow in blood and slaughter seems to prevail with more force over the minds of men than the clearest arguments of reason. Nevertheless this desire is an insane impulse, and if we had any true perception of the laws of right and wrong, we should check it in its very first beginnings. Any man, any body of men, seeking to violate the peace and progress of the world should be dealt with by combined international forces of the Law and Medicine, not by armies—and should either be shot like mad dogs as incurable and dangerous, or imprisoned for life in asylums for the criminally insane. No one man or group of men can be considered in sound mental condition if their actions imperil the existence of their fellow-creatures.

Certain natural laws have been discovered, and proved by physiologists who make the subject their study, as to persons who may marry, and those for whom, through consanguinity or inherited disease, marriage is nothing less than a crime. In the “arranged” unions of royal houses these laws have been deliberately set aside with deplorable results. The mad dog of Europe, William of Hohenzollern, is the diseased product of several royal intermarriages, where human convenience and popular complaisance ignored the divine natural law; and as this law is one which prevails “unto the third and fourth generation” we have now a Monster-Abortion of conscienceless cruelty raging loose in the world, who ought to have been smothered in his cradle. There are plain rules of health and sanity which are for ever being disobeyed by civil and social convention; but because they are so disobeyed, we must not flatter ourselves that they do not recoil in vengeance upon the rebels. The Designer of this wonderful and complex universe is proved to be a vastly Mathematical Intelligence; everything great or small, down to a grain of dust, is balanced to the nicety of a hair’s breadth, and do what we will or may, we cannot alter the balance. Our futile efforts in such directions merely display insanity, of the type of an uncontrolled temper in a child which screams itself hoarse because it cannot reach fruit on a tree too high for it to climb. If, therefore, we would have sane peoples, with sane rulers to govern them, we should see to it that they are born and bred sanely, according to the laws of health and mentality which have existed among the “lower” animal creation since the foundation of the world. Every crime is an insane impulse. No healthily organised brain could contemplate the murder of a single individual, much less the wholesale slaughter of millions.

The Almighty has for ever had one gate of Heaven set ajar for humanity to peer within and push open a little wider with each succeeding generation—a gate opening to that fair pleasaunce of wisdom and beauty which we call Science. A great logician has written “The basis of all science is the immutability of the laws of nature.” Would that we remembered that “immutability” more often! Yet, while sane pioneers in medicine and surgery are patiently and devoutly following as best they can these complex but beneficent “laws of nature” for the saving of human life and the healing of human injuries, the insane section of the community have been and are still employing all their distorted energies of brain and hand in fiendish ingenuities of invention for weapons of war that shall destroy human life more quickly than it can be saved. And while thus engaged, other insane persons shout in the press and the market place wild warnings about “declining birth-rate,” reproaching unhappy women for their lack of duty in not producing sons for some future slaughter! The Car of Juggernaut was scarcely worse than this! To appeal for a multitude of births during the making of a multitude of guns, which mow down the flower of young manhood like corn, is an insult to bereaved mothers, making their vocation appear less valuable than that of the beasts of the field. For why should they bring forth and rear sons, only that they may go to their deaths at the bidding of this or that Government? The very proposition is an exhibition of stark staring lunacy, combined with a brutish lust of degradation and reckless destructiveness which could only emanate from deficient mental organisms.

SANITY IN RELIGION

Here we touch the vital centre of the whole. On no subject does man ever show himself so violently crazed as on religion. The gods of the past, created by his fanatical imagination, were more or less the deified types of his own vices, or symbols of such virtues as he feebly strove to attain, but he had no real faith in their power to aid or to circumvent his designs. Yet, in lunatic fashion, he behaved as if he thought them omnipotent, though conscious all the while of the silly comedy he was playing with himself. Now, after two thousand years of the pure and beautiful Gospel of Christ which teaches how “god-in-man” might be realised, a lesson to which has been added the strong affirmation of Science, emphasising the fact that “God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth,” Man still plays the crazed crank with dogma, and refuses to realise the Actual Alive Intelligence behind creation, which, from the delicate fluff of a small bird’s feather or moth’s wing, up to the height of solar systems, works in perfection and balance to the exactitude of a pin’s point. This living, loving Presence the dogmatists wellnigh ignore, preferring to move in their own small orbit of creed rather than risk the broader spaces of assured glory. The narrow spirit of self-absorption not only limits their outlook, but holds them bound in a condition of deplorable egotism, like that of an “unco guid” Scotch body who, after accepting many useful kindnesses from a friend to whom she “gushed” affection, changed her sentiments as soon as a slight difference arose between them, and with much unctuous piety let it be known that she was obliged to leave that once “precious” friend’s name “out of her prayers”! The monstrous conceit that could imagine God capable of noticing a name left out of a Scotchwoman’s prayers, or out of any prayers whatsoever, would be ludicrous if it were not so pitifully expressive of barbaric ignorance—and who shall count the thousands of similar narrow mind and heart who have a lurking hope that heaven is for them alone, and that their “dear friends” will all be left out in the cold!

Sanity in religion would mean sanity in everything. A sane acceptance of the actual Motive Force of things,—a Force, tenderly embodied to us by Christ’s teaching as the “Our Father” of us all, would do more for our souls and bodies than all the Churches; an intelligent study and comprehension of the minute and careful work of creation, showing us that nothing is wasted, nothing lost—but that all tends in an onward direction to “some far-off divine event,” would help us to find and keep the balance of our brains. We must be brought to realise that Evil, persisted in, works its own recoil on the evil doers, whether they be nations or individuals—the movement of things being always towards Good. “I and my Father are one”—said Our Lord, for which He was stoned. The failure of the Churches is the insanity of dogma, which has supplanted the sanity of Christ.

BRAIN BALANCE

The brain, as all physiologists know, is a complex and marvellous mechanism—so amazing in its movements, so miraculous in the result of these movements, that no scientist has yet been able entirely to probe its powers or foresee its progressive possibilities. Some there are who declare that all impulses, good and evil, are primarily started by the brain—others, more subtly accurate, aver that the brain itself is impelled or “pushed” to action by an influence stronger than itself, mysterious, unnameable, but nevertheless all-potent, which we call “free-will,” but which may more justly be termed “free-spirit”; that is to say the “free” and deathless force which the Creator gives to each human being to use according to the laws He has ordained, but which, turned aside from these, can be debased as surely as exalted. This untrammelled power is bestowed on every man and woman born into the world, and its mode of action is frequently swayed by impressions, sometimes pre-natal, and sometimes by the “afterwards” of early surroundings. If the material brain of a child is sound and healthy, the impulses which move that brain should be sane and pure—but, unhappily, through the physical mentality of irresponsible persons who recklessly take the divine responsibility of parenthood upon themselves, it often chances that a brain, perfectly organised in the matter and placement of its cells, conceives ideas and actions which are little short of devilish in their ingenuity of evil and mastership of cunning. How is this? It is not the forty pairs of nerves which convey sense and feeling to the brain that are guilty of criminal suggestion—they are merely the telegraph wires on which messages are sent. But Who is the sender? Who or what is responsible for the messages which prompt wicked deeds? We feel that we do not have to inquire as to the source of Good, inasmuch as that Divine Manifestation is everywhere about us. One thing, however, is certain—that evil propensities corrupt and obstruct the blood-vessels of the brain and distort its images and impressions, so that its powers become perverted—and instead of creating helpful work for the welfare of humanity it dwells on what shall harm and terrorise and destroy. But we must and should realise the fact that an obstructed brain is a more or less insane brain. Its channels do not run clear. From these blocked passages inhuman thoughts are generated as weeds from slime; and fiendish or vicious ideas take shape and action like noxious vermin bred from a stagnant pool. Therefore, if we would have regard to sanity in the race, it should be our business to see to the “Brain-Balance” of our social, ethical, political, and religious conditions, and eliminate from our lives such things as tend towards incipient lunacy. “Crazes” for this or that particular person or fashion are painfully common, and always ludicrous, accompanied as they frequently are by a didactic obstinacy resembling the pompous assertiveness of poor madmen who conceive themselves to be exiled kings. Men and women run about jabbering and gesticulating on the “preciousness” of this or that form of art, when it is utterly opposed to truth and nature, and in this sort of spirit they have held up the “Futurists” and “Cubists” as something worthy to be looked at, much as a child might hold up for admiration a dirty rag doll. Insane themselves, they seek to lead others into the chaos of their own insanity, and this trend towards a warped mentality has of late displayed itself in all the arts, such as the sculpture of Epstein, the crotchets and quavers of De Bussy, and the large output of revoltingly sexual fiction and coarse verse. The “pose” of a supreme and scornful egotism marks these devotees of sham and ineptitude, and though they may, in mere numbers, be a negligible quantity, they spread infection, just as one fever-stricken person may infect a whole neighbourhood. From an unsanitary mental outlook no good can come, and the moral filth in which Germany has wallowed for years has so poisoned the German brain that it can devise nothing but treachery and evil. It is a brain that is choked with miasma—and it may be centuries before it is cleansed and restored to sanity.

Meanwhile let us pull the beam out of our own eye before we try to cure other nations’ blindnesses. We have been mad enough in our disregard of honest warnings—we are pretty mad still. We have vied with the old-time “cities of the plain” in reckless orgies of vice and intemperance; but the great War has pulled us back on the road to ruin, and it seems we may be given another chance. Let us begin then by a good try for Sanity. In the first place let us make such laws for those who marry as shall compel them to submit to a searching health examination, so that union may be forbidden to the unfit. A diseased man or woman should no more be allowed to mate than any other diseased animal. The animals arrange this themselves, in a much more common-sense way than humans. They only rear healthy progeny. It is for us to do the same, and to see to it that the mentality of children is safeguarded and set on a sound basis. This cannot be done by forcing education at too early an age, or perplexing young brains with difficulties of learning almost too much for their elders to grasp. The brain in childhood records impressions as a disc prepared for the phonograph records sound, and the circles marked on it in early days are seldom or never effaced. Therefore care must and should be taken that such impressions are of the best. Corporal punishment should never be resorted to as a means of training. A blow to a sensitive child frequently means a lasting contempt for the parent or teacher who inflicts it, and excites a rebellious spirit towards life in general. A vicious impulse or an act of crass stupidity does not necessarily mean inherent wickedness or obstinacy—it only shows that there is some “clog on the wheel” in the brain, which a day’s fasting and cooling medicine may remove. At any rate, such a method of cure is better worth trying than the rod and angry threats which have no real effect on “insane impulse.” Sometimes—indeed often—a physical defect in the brain is the cause of evil thoughts and evil deeds, as in the recent case of a man whose warped mind always tended towards murder and mutilation, and who was found to have a thickening of a portion of the cranium which pressed heavily upon certain of the cells within. The operation of “trepanning” was performed by a surgeon who was scientifically interested in the case, with the result that the previously insane criminal is now a person of perfectly normal type and harmless disposition. Who that knows the history of the German Kaiser’s ancestry can doubt that his brain has been more or less diseased from his birth, and that with his approach towards the “grand climacteric” the incipient lunacy bred within him has become more active and less capable of control! No sane man would have acted as he has done, for, prior to the war, the trade of Europe was practically in Germany’s hands, and in the interests of his country a sane man would have realised the fulness and value of such a conquest, peacefully obtained without the sacrifice of millions of useful lives.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CHARACTER

The brain is affected by “insane impulse” in the same way as the digestion is affected by improper food. An error in diet will cause pain and general malaise—so will an evil influence or suggestion disorganise the brain cells and create obstacle and confusion within their marvellous formation and movement. A child, from earliest years, needs watching—and those who have that duty to perform should be carefully selected persons who are particular as to general surroundings. A child’s mother or nurse should be a refined woman of soft voice and gracious manners, able to control her own moods as well as the moods of her young charge, so that distinct “character” may be formed and insisted upon. A “no” should be absolute—a “yes” equally so. Character “tells” from the very beginning. The youngest child understands a discipline of firmness conjoined with sweetness and affection—the smallest boy has an ineffable contempt for weakness and vacillation. From the “character” displayed by their elders, children draw their own conclusions. An impatient, hot-tempered father makes callous, indifferent, more or less contemptuous sons and daughters. Children invariably despise and laugh at “temper” in their fathers and “fuss” in their mothers. And the mocking, jeering spirit of scorn is a spirit that grows with years, and makes of the person it dominates an often spiteful and vicious influence in society, creating mischief and rejoicing in the unhappiness of others. One sweet, strong, independent character unconsciously forms the nucleus of many others, while one soured malcontent infects a whole community. We have only to consider the “character” of Prussian militarism—how from two or three blatant and braggart egotists it has spread its infection through an entire people, till the brain of the whole German nation has become clogged with thick and poisonous thought and has been driven by “insane impulse” to the committal of the greatest crime in history. If we would avoid such crimes for the future we must see to it first that the race is healthily and sanely born, and secondly that “character” is the only basis on which all education must be founded, or it will be merely a house of cards, toppling at a breath. And the corner-stone on which “character” itself must be reared is a high and reasonable faith in the Supreme Cause of all creation, coupled with an earnest and devout following of the divine order in which that great Force at the back of all things has ordained this Universe to move.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Religion is not what the Churches would have us accept as such. It is not man-made dogma. So far as Christianity is concerned, the saying is true that “There never was but one Christian and He was crucified.” No more uplifting faith was ever taught than that of Christ; but it has never been spiritually realised or fully practised. Read Christ’s own words in the New Testament, and then ask where shall we find His commands obeyed? In some exceptional cases there have been saintly lives and saintly deeds resulting from the sincere and devout application of the Gospel—but in dealing with this question we have to think of mankind in general, not in an individual sense. This horrible war with its riot of blood and carnage is a damnatory answer to professing Christianity. Man has made of himself his own god—and in the God as revealed or explained in all the conflicting religious “formulas” he has ceased to believe. Faith of any kind must be supported by reason. And Science is the door to the highest heaven of faith. Every new discovery, every new aid to man’s well-being on the planet, is a fresh proof of God. It has taken twenty centuries and more for us to begin learning the wonders of electricity, though the miraculous force, with all its component and divergent radiations, was with us always. It may take us twenty times twenty million centuries to discover God—nevertheless He is with us, notwithstanding our intellectual blindness and lack of Spiritual perception. Science is our peep-hole, through which we may, even now, glimpse Him, but which in time to come will not only be our window, but our open door, through which we may approach Him, full-eyed, without fear. But, to arrive at this, we should remember that Science, like every other power bestowed upon us, must be used sanely; and through “Free-Will”; that is to say, we may bend its force to either good or evil. It is good when we use it for the advantage of humanity—it is evil when we make of it an agent to injure or destroy humanity. The scientist who employs his abilities to discover means whereby he may remedy disease, eliminate pain, and assist his fellow-men to the betterment of life, is that “good and faithful servant” who, when God comes, He finds watching—but the scientist, equally brilliant, who devotes himself to the invention of fiendish instruments of destruction and death, whereby he may make the wholesome earth a terror, the sea a snare, and the sky a scourge, is a warped intellectuality, moved by “insane impulse,” which, combined with creative activity, makes of him a devil rather than a human being. Let any thoughtful person try to realise himself engaged day and night on the work of evolving some instrument of death more cruel than any old-time torture, will he maintain that such persistent concentration on the means of killing can mould him into a worthier or nobler individual? But reverse the position and let him imagine himself absorbed in finding out remedies for pain and suffering, aids to happier and more useful living for mankind in general, will he not admit that however difficult his work may be of accomplishment, he knows within himself that he is striving for constructive good, not destructive evil, and that his science is an output of clear sanity which must bring, not only deep contentment to his mind, but also the consciousness that his energies are moving in harmony with the Divine Spirit of law and order.

This is the true and only religion—to bring one’s soul into unison with the infinite beauty and reason which prevail everywhere in Nature. And the Christian Faith, could it but be relieved from ecclesiastical dogma, is the truest symbol we have of our spiritual and immortal destiny, for it teaches the possible god-in-man which should be born through the purity of woman. Carry the symbol further, and we find the Crucifixion of Love through selfishness and hypocrisy—yet another step, and we are shown the Resurrection from the grave—“the Light of the World” released from the stone and seal of priestcraft, breaking free from the cerements of prejudice, and ascending to the Father of us all! Search as we may through all the religions of the world, we shall never find a grander, simpler “Symbol” of eternal truth than this—the faith preached by Christ. But it must be divested of its clerical encumbrances. Like a glorious ship that has lain too long in harbour, it must be cleansed of weed and barnacle and launched unhindered into the open sea. And those who man the ship must be free from self-interest, from “cranks” and meddlesome theories and formulas—briefly, they must be sane, with the great sanity of nature and nature’s immutable laws. Without this neither Religion nor Civilisation can endure. They can only be crazed attempts to build that “house upon sand,” of which we have been told that “the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew and beat upon that house, and it fell; AND GREAT WAS THE FALL OF IT!”