What Is Man? and Other Essays
Infidel that it dissolved his harshness toward the boy’s religion and
made him come to regard it with tolerance, next with kindness, for the
boy’s sake and the mother’s. Finally he found himself examining it.
From that moment his progress in his new trend was steady and rapid. He
became a believing Christian. And now his remorse for having robbed the
dying boy of his faith and his salvation was bitterer than ever. It
gave him no rest, no peace. He _must_ have rest and peace—it is the law
of nature. There seemed but one way to get it; he must devote himself
to saving imperiled souls. He became a missionary. He landed in a pagan
country ill and helpless. A native widow took him into her humble home
and nursed him back to convalescence. Then her young boy was taken
hopelessly ill, and the grateful missionary helped her tend him. Here
was his first opportunity to repair a part of the wrong done to the
other boy by doing a precious service for this one by undermining his
foolish faith in his false gods. He was successful. But the dying boy
in his last moments reproached him and said:
“_I believed, and was happy in it; you have taken my belief away, and
my comfort. Now I have nothing left, and I die miserable; for the
things which you have told me do not take the place of that which I
have lost_.”
And the mother, also, reproached the missionary, and said:
“_My child is forever lost, and my heart is broken. How could you do
this cruel thing? We had done you no harm, but only kindness; we made
our house your home, you were welcome to all we had, and this is our
reward_.”
The heart of the missionary was filled with remorse for what he had
done, and he said:
“_It was wrong—I see it now; but I was only trying to do him good. In
my view he was in error; it seemed my duty to teach him the truth_.”
Then the mother said:
“_I had taught him, all his little life, what I believed to be the
truth, and in his believing faith both of us were happy. Now he is
dead—and lost; and I am miserable. Our faith came down to us through
centuries of believing ancestors; what right had you, or any one, to
disturb it? Where was your honor, where was your shame_?”
The missionary’s anguish of remorse and sense of treachery were as
bitter and persecuting and unappeasable, now, as they had been in the
former case. The story is finished. What is your comment?
Y.M. The man’s conscience is a fool! It was morbid. It didn’t know
right from wrong.
O.M. I am not sorry to hear you say that. If you grant that _one_ man’s
conscience doesn’t know right from wrong, it is an admission that there
are others like it. This single admission pulls down the whole doctrine
of infallibility of judgment in consciences. Meantime there is one
thing which I ask you to notice.
Y.M. What is that?
O.M. That in both cases the man’s _act_ gave him no spiritual
discomfort, and that he was quite satisfied with it and got pleasure
out of it. But afterward when it resulted in _pain_ to _him_, he was
sorry. Sorry it had inflicted pain upon the others, _but for no reason
under the sun except that their pain gave him pain_. Our consciences
take _no_ notice of pain inflicted upon others until it reaches a point
where it gives pain to _us_. In _all_ cases without exception we are
absolutely indifferent to another person’s pain until his sufferings
make us uncomfortable. Many an infidel would not have been troubled by
that Christian mother’s distress. Don’t you believe that?
Y.M. Yes. You might almost say it of the _average_ infidel, I think.
O.M. And many a missionary, sternly fortified by his sense of duty,
would not have been troubled by the pagan mother’s distress—Jesuit
missionaries in Canada in the early French times, for instance; see
episodes quoted by Parkman.
Y.M. Well, let us adjourn. Where have we arrived?
O.M. At this. That we (mankind) have ticketed ourselves with a number
of qualities to which we have given misleading names. Love, Hate,
Charity, Compassion, Avarice, Benevolence, and so on. I mean we attach
misleading _meanings_ to the names. They are all forms of
self-contentment, self-gratification, but the names so disguise them
that they distract our attention from the fact. Also we have smuggled a
word into the dictionary which ought not to be there at
all—Self-Sacrifice. It describes a thing which does not exist. But
worst of all, we ignore and never mention the Sole Impulse which
dictates and compels a man’s every act: the imperious necessity of
securing his own approval, in every emergency and at all costs. To it
we owe all that we are. It is our breath, our heart, our blood. It is
our only spur, our whip, our goad, our only impelling power; we have no
other. Without it we should be mere inert images, corpses; no one would
do anything, there would be no progress, the world would stand still.
We ought to stand reverently uncovered when the name of that stupendous
power is uttered.
Y.M. I am not convinced.
O.M. You will be when you think.
III
Instances in Point
Old Man. Have you given thought to the Gospel of Self—Approval since we
talked?
Young Man. I have.
O.M. It was I that moved you to it. That is to say an _outside
influence_ moved you to it—not one that originated in your head. Will
you try to keep that in mind and not forget it?
Y.M. Yes. Why?
O.M. Because by and by in one of our talks, I wish to further impress
upon you that neither you, nor I, nor any man ever originates a thought
in his own head. _The utterer of a thought always utters a second-hand
one_.
Y.M. Oh, now—
O.M. Wait. Reserve your remark till we get to that part of our
discussion—tomorrow or next day, say. Now, then, have you been
considering the proposition that no act is ever born of any but a
self-contenting impulse—(primarily). You have sought. What have you
found?
Y.M. I have not been very fortunate. I have examined many fine and
apparently self-sacrificing deeds in romances and biographies, but—
O.M. Under searching analysis the ostensible self-sacrifice
disappeared? It naturally would.
Y.M. But here in this novel is one which seems to promise. In the
Adirondack woods is a wage-earner and lay preacher in the lumber-camps
who is of noble character and deeply religious. An earnest and
practical laborer in the New York slums comes up there on vacation—he
is leader of a section of the University Settlement. Holme, the
lumberman, is fired with a desire to throw away his excellent worldly
prospects and go down and save souls on the East Side. He counts it
happiness to make this sacrifice for the glory of God and for the cause
of Christ. He resigns his place, makes the sacrifice cheerfully, and
goes to the East Side and preaches Christ and Him crucified every day
and every night to little groups of half-civilized foreign paupers who
scoff at him. But he rejoices in the scoffings, since he is suffering
them in the great cause of Christ. You have so filled my mind with
suspicions that I was constantly expecting to find a hidden
questionable impulse back of all this, but I am thankful to say I have
failed. This man saw his duty, and for _duty’s sake_ he sacrificed self
and assumed the burden it imposed.
O.M. Is that as far as you have read?
Y.M. Yes.
O.M. Let us read further, presently. Meantime, in sacrificing
himself—_not_ for the glory of God, _primarily_, as _he_ imagined, but
_first_ to content that exacting and inflexible master within him—_did
he sacrifice anybody else_?
Y.M. How do you mean?
O.M. He relinquished a lucrative post and got mere food and lodging in
place of it. Had he dependents?
Y.M. Well—yes.
O.M. In what way and to what extend did his self-sacrifice affect
_them_?
Y.M. He was the support of a superannuated father. He had a young
sister with a remarkable voice—he was giving her a musical education,
so that her longing to be self-supporting might be gratified. He was
furnishing the money to put a young brother through a polytechnic
school and satisfy his desire to become a civil engineer.
O.M. The old father’s comforts were now curtailed?
Y.M. Quite seriously. Yes.
O.M. The sister’s music-lessens had to stop?
Y.M. Yes.
O.M. The young brother’s education—well, an extinguishing blight fell
upon that happy dream, and he had to go to sawing wood to support the
old father, or something like that?
Y.M. It is about what happened. Yes.
O.M. What a handsome job of self-sacrificing he did do! It seems to me
that he sacrificed everybody _except_ himself. Haven’t I told you that
no man _ever_ sacrifices himself; that there is no instance of it upon
record anywhere; and that when a man’s Interior Monarch requires a
thing of its slave for either its _momentary_ or its _permanent_
contentment, that thing must and will be furnished and that command
obeyed, no matter who may stand in the way and suffer disaster by it?
That man _ruined his family_ to please and content his Interior
Monarch—
Y.M. And help Christ’s cause.
O.M. Yes—_secondly_. Not firstly. _He_ thought it was firstly.
Y.M. Very well, have it so, if you will. But it could be that he argued
that if he saved a hundred souls in New York—
O.M. The sacrifice of the _family_ would be justified by that great
profit upon the—the—what shall we call it?
Y.M. Investment?
O.M. Hardly. How would _speculation_ do? How would _gamble_ do? Not a
solitary soul-capture was sure. He played for a possible
thirty-three-hundred-per-cent profit. It was _gambling_—with his family
for “chips.” However let us see how the game came out. Maybe we can get
on the track of the secret original impulse, the _real_ impulse, that
moved him to so nobly self—sacrifice his family in the Savior’s cause
under the superstition that he was sacrificing himself. I will read a
chapter or so.... Here we have it! It was bound to expose itself sooner
or later. He preached to the East-Side rabble a season, then went back
to his old dull, obscure life in the lumber-camps “_hurt to the heart,
his pride humbled_.” Why? Were not his efforts acceptable to the
Savior, for Whom alone they were made? Dear me, that detail is _lost
sight of_, is not even referred to, the fact that it started out as a
motive is entirely forgotten! Then what is the trouble? The authoress
quite innocently and unconsciously gives the whole business away. The
trouble was this: this man merely _preached_ to the poor; that is not
the University Settlement’s way; it deals in larger and better things
than that, and it did not enthuse over that crude Salvation-Army
eloquence. It was courteous to Holme—but cool. It did not pet him, did
not take him to its bosom. “_Perished were all his dreams of
distinction, the praise and grateful approval_—” Of whom? The Savior?
No; the Savior is not mentioned. Of whom, then? Of “his
_fellow-workers_.” Why did he want that? Because the Master inside of
him wanted it, and would not be content without it. That emphasized
sentence quoted above, reveals the secret we have been seeking, the
original impulse, the _real_ impulse, which moved the obscure and
unappreciated Adirondack lumberman to sacrifice his family and go on
that crusade to the East Side—which said original impulse was this, to
wit: without knowing it _he went there to show a neglected world the
large talent that was in him, and rise to distinction_. As I have
warned you before, _no_ act springs from any but the one law, the one
motive. But I pray you, do not accept this law upon my say-so; but
diligently examine for yourself. Whenever you read of a
self-sacrificing act or hear of one, or of a duty done for _duty’s
sake_, take it to pieces and look for the _real_ motive. It is always
there.
Y.M. I do it every day. I cannot help it, now that I have gotten