CHAPTER XVIII
THE SABBATH OF FREEDOM.
"Let not the son of the stranger that hath joined himself to the Lord, say, The Lord hath utterly separated me from His people; for thus saith the Lord: The sons of the stranger, that join themselves to the Lord to serve Him, every one that keepeth the sabbath and taketh hold of My covenant; even them will I bring to My holy mountain, and make them joyful in My house of prayer."
If we visit a well-conducted Gymnasium in a school, we find rhythmic pulsation exhibited in the exercises in more than one form. In some, a limb is sharply thrown out from the body, and immediately and rapidly withdrawn. In others, the pupils assume slowfy some extreme and even exaggerated position; usually one which would be condemned in the class-room as disorderly. Now it does not occur to the Lady Principal to reprove the teacher for thus reversing the orders given by her, nor to bring an accusation of defying her commands and teaching the pupils to set her authority at naught. On the contrary, all parties concerned know that the very object of School-Gymnastic is to undo the cramping effect of class-room discipline. For a young child, or a wild beast, which spends many hours daily in exercise, no gymnastic is so good as the free play of all its limbs; but as soon as the business of life imposes the necessity for a cramping specialization, mere play, during the short hours allowed for relaxation, is no longer sufficient to give freedom and elasticity to the frame; the exercise must be specially adapted to counteract whatever forms of specialization may be imposed during the hours devoted to work. Every one knows this, and nobody objects. Every teacher knows that unity among the staff, so far as physical education is concerned, implies, not agree- ment in opinion as to the best position for girls to place themselves in, but what may be called a "consensus of reverence for the harmony produced by organized antithesis." Life means not this position or that, but alternation of position. No faculty or organ is properly fitted for its appointed work till it has trained itself, or been trained, into a possibility of rhythmic action; and education means chiefly the bringing one faculty after another into subjection to this cosmic law.
Long before this principle had been clearly seen to apply to physical education, Philosophers knew that it was the principle of healthy mental action. Laws of Thought are discovered far earlier in the world's history than Laws of things; for the reason given in Chapter XI., viz., that every man who is capable of thinking can, if he will, state the Laws of Thought with absolute exactness and certainty; whereas Laws of things are only arrived at after centuries of observation of phenomena; and even then, as Mr. Boole explains, the statement is, to the last, a hypothetical and probable one (until we have succeeded in Algebraizing the Law of the becoming of the things). It was known that the principle of contradiction (or free pulsation) is the life of the mind, many centuries before medical men had discovered that in it consists the life of the muscles. Logic should be to the mind what gymnastic is to the body; a practice in reversal of attitude. Yet, for some singular reason not yet explained, the mass of teachers and statesmen, while they encourage the application to the physical life of the principle of rhythmic alternation, either deny, or more frequently ignore, that it has any place in the moral life.
The reason appears to be this:—Parents, teachers, and governments wish that children should develop the power to assume at will any physical position. Teachers and governments are content with such control of the physical as enables them to secure the public safety and order. But few teachers or governors are content with safety and order in moral affairs; they wish to retain in their own hands a far greater control of mental and moral action than this. The more healthily developed the frame is, the easier it is to preserve a statuesque repose during certain specified hours; but only a cramped and sickly organization can be kept continuously in one position. Healthy mental gymnastic makes children willing law-abiders and docile pupils during the hours of lessons; but it emancipates them, by making impossible continuous interference with their mental freedom. Now a privileged class can better maintain its power over a sickly and vicious population than over a population of orderly free-thinkers.
A detestable practice prevails in Christian England, and is, I regret to say, on the increase, of teaching in Sunday-school after the same method as is found on week-days to answer the purpose of preparing children to pass Examinations successfully. The material of the lessons is changed on Sundays, the attitude is not; for the History of Rome or France is substituted that of Palestine; for the Logic of Aristotle that of Paul; for the Poetry of Shakspere that of Isaiah; the change is apparent, the monotony is terribly real. The children are subject, throughout their teaching, to the same grinding pressure. Surely religious people of all sorts might join in trying to put a stop to this hideous prostitution of the Blessed Sabbath to the purposes of making children slavish and helpless; and claim it for the purpose for which it was originally instituted,—the cultivation of freedom by reversal of attitude.
As for the manner in which reversal of attitude may be induced, that must depend on the subject which is occupying attention during work-hours. If a boy be engaged in weeding, the teacher of his Sabbath-school should point out to him that crops and weeds belong equally to the vegetable kingdom, and have many characteristics in common; that the Parsnip even belongs to the same class as Hemlock, and the Turnip to the same class as the weed Shepherd's Purse; that the plants are equally good in the sight of God, and equally interesting from the point of view of Science; that the fact of some plants being fit for human food, and others useless or harmful to man, is due to an accident of the human organization. The weeder should be exhorted to make a practice of preparing for repose by reflecting a moment on these truths as he comes home from work in the evening. He should be told, too, that the amount of blessing which he can thus draw down on himself by meditating on The Unity of plant-life, will be commensurate with the completeness of his attention, during work-hours, to the business of discriminating crop from weeds.
This lesson forms a good preparation for the great climax of all unification. The pupil should be told that the business of our life on earth consists in weeding Good from that which, for man, is Evil; and that we should prepare for the Sabbath, by which the strain of life is relieved, by thinking of Him of Whom it is written:
"I make Peace, and I create evil, saith the Lord."
For a kitchen-maid, a suitable unification would be to reflect on the fact that the potato and its peel,—or the cabbage and its outer leaves,—grew as one.
For a class in History, the unification might consist in reflecting that the Nation whose exploits they have been admiring, and whose triumphs they have been sharing, is but a part of Humanity; that every victory it has won, in war,has injured some other Nation; whereas every achievement it has made in Science or Art has, sooner or later, enriched the whole human race. This act of sympathy with Mankind as a whole will be more productive of vigour, in proportion as the pupils have, during the History lesson itself, thrown themselves more unreservedly into the emotions of the particular people of whom they are reading.
At Queen's College I tried for some years the experiment of holding, on Sunday evenings (the only available time; but the eve of Sabbath would have been more suitable), a true logic-class for the resident pupils. That I made many mistakes I need not say; the whole subject was, at that time, entirely in the condition of pure theory; and I had, as I went on, to find out what were the practical difficulties. Moreover, the College was under clerical management, and of all the staff, including the council and committee, only two members ever had the faintest idea what I was trying to find out, or why I went to the place at all. I had therefore to be very careful not to suggest doubts of the wisdom either of clerical authorities generally, or of our own in particular. The position was difficult, but I tried to find out whatever I could. On week-days the girls had, of course to attend to one subject at a time, and to look at each from a prescribed point of view. On Sundays I read to them any book, or allowed them to talk of any subject, that seemed to interest them, and encouraged the free play of their minds; but I took care to lead the conversation into the channel of finding what light one subject of study throws on another. The characteristics of the week-day lessons being submission and specialization. I made those of the Sunday lessons free expansion and unification.
Old pupils assure me that they never discovered any jarring contradiction between my views and those of our clerical heads. The substance of their comments is much as follows:—"I didn't know you were teaching us anything on those happy Sunday evenings; I thought we were being amused, not taught. But after I left College I found you had given us a power. We can think for ourselves, and find out what we want to know." Now what was Sabbath instituted for, and what was Logic made for, except to create free-thinkers, free men and women, intellectual athletes, Prophets, and, in the best sense of the word, priests? Moses wished that all the Lord's People should be Priests and Prophets, even as he was.
It is almost needless to remark that the result indicated is due to the observance of a Sabbath of Freedom, sharply contrasted with week-day discipline. No such good effects follow the practice of leaving girls to think at random, and to study what they choose (or not study at all), all the week long. I would never again try to teach under similar circumstances. The logician should not be a servant of a clerical body. If any true mode of teaching Logic became general, it would gradually modify all religious teaching, and make it tend to become a training in order and reverence, not an inculcation of opinions or prejudices. Few clergymen would preach such sermons as they now do, if they knew that their arguments were subjected each week to a careful logical analysis, and all the reasons for the contrary opinion to their own were pointed out before the younger members of their flock. In fact, the same change would pass over religious and moral teaching as has passed over the teaching of physical deportment. A mother or governess now has to be content with forbidding certain attitudes as unsuited to the drawing-room or class-room; she cannot go through the solemn farce of forcing on the child her prejudices about certain attitudes being in the abstract "unladylike," when she knows that the child will presently be made to assume those attitudes by order of the Gymnast. So a clergyman would, if Logic were properly taught, be obliged to content himself with inducing in Church an attitude of reverence and devotion; he could not, with a grave countenance, attempt to inculcate his own opinions or prejudices as essential truths.
The command that children should honour their own parents by no means implies that they are not, once a week at least, to be put into an attitude of sympathy with the ideas of other people. This teaching of true Logic in no way tends to interfere with the submission due, in matters of fact, to parents or other lawful authorities. On the contrary, it makes submission seem less harsh. Disobedience in a child is usually the result either of unsatisfied craving for that reversal of physical posture which is the life of the muscles, or of unsatisfied longing for that antithesis of mental position whick constitutes the life of the brain. When we attribute naughtiness in a child to the natural depravity of his own heart, we often might more truly attribute it to the unnatural depravity of some adult, who has made him ill by trying to prevent his reversing either the physical or mental attitude in which she placed him.
Religious writers are expected to have something to say on the subject of Incarnation. The present writer mentions it here, only in order to show that she is not afraid of it.
Incarnation is, necessarily, phenomenalization; for it is the manifestation of somewhat. The Incarnation believed in by Christians is ecessarily one-sided; for it is the manifestation of Good—of those qualities, in a perfect form, which, in an imperfect condition, constitute what we call human goodness, without any admixture of the fierceness and lust which God created in brutes, but which, in man, are evil. Neither the existence nor the value of such a crowning of all phenomenalization has been denied by our great mathematical Logicians. Babbage and De Morgan, Gratry and Boole, concurred in thinking the subject of Singular Solution worthy their profoundest study. But its value is as a type-model for us, an intellectual and moral guide for our working-hours. The notion of substituting, on Sabbath, prostrate adoration of a Manifestation of one side of God, for meditation on the Ineffable and Inconceivable Union of polar attributes, is one which Logic cannot take seriously into account, and which Logicians can find no words to characterize.
The earliest Christians kept Sabbath as Jews, and consecrated the working-week by a First-day communion with Jesus; which shows that they took a logical and sane view of their relation to their Master. Whatever excuses priests may afterwards have made to the conscience for ignoring altogether the main purpose of Sabbath, the latent motive for it must have been the same which had prompted all similar perversions. As Boulanger says,[1] no inefficient government can possibly maintain its place, unless the masses can be induced to adopt some form of idolatry; for the worship of The Inconceivable Unity confers such elastic strength, that a people accustomed to it would at once shake off any government which no longer represented its own highest Ideals. And every inefficient government instinctively has recourse, if it can, to the device of using as tools for the brutalizing of the masses, those very priests whose original function was to vitalize the masses. "Priests were appointed to lead man in the right road; but in all ages they have feared lest he should find it and walk in it. … Men have believed that they could, without degradation, behave as the slaves of Him Who set us free; and" (as the true God retires before such unworthy homage) "they have only succeeded in becoming slaves to His hypocritical Ministers." Thus does Boulanger sum up the History of Religion; and thus may be summed up all that Logic can have to say about any teaching of so-called Religion which aims at preparing pupils for Examinations, or which adopts methods found useful in preparing for examination in "secular" subjects.
- ↑ Origine du Despotisme Oriental.