The Theory of Education in the United States

XIV

BUT, sterile as this conclusion may be, sterile as in a sense all our conclusions may be, they tend neither to despondency nor to feebleness of endeavour. I may remind you—though I should not say that; let me rather say I may put into words what I know is in the consciousness of us all—that the Great Tradition will be no man’s debtor. When we speak of promoting it or continuing it, we are using a purely conventional mode of speech, as when we say that the sun rises or sets. We can do nothing for the Great Tradition; our fidelity to it can do everything for us. Creatures of a day, how shall we think that what we do or leave undone is of consequence to that which abides forever? Our devotion, our integrity of purpose, our strictness of conscience, are not exercised in behalf of the Great Tradition, but in our own behalf. Our recreancy cannot weaken it, our faithfulness cannot strengthen it; we alone are damaged by the one and edified by the other. The Great Tradition is independent of us, not we of it. We can not augment or diminish the force of its august and salutary laws; we can but keep to them, and therein find our exceeding great reward.

We have therefore no responsibility but the happy one of keeping our eye single to our own obedience. We need take no thought for the Great Tradition’s welfare, but only for our own; it asks no protection or championship from us, and any volunteer service of this kind is mere officiousness. We need not enter into the anxiety of the prophet who reported to Jehovah that things were in the very worst way possible, the cult of Baal triumphant, the true believers dispersed, their priests and prophets slain with the sword, “and I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life to take it away.” One is almost certain that behind this despairing speech lay the thought, “—and what would happen to the True Faith if they should catch me too?” You remember with what delicate and indulgent humour Jehovah took means to show him that the True Faith had resources of its own, that it could pretty well manage to worry along, and that he had better stop fretting about it, take a rest and get his nerves together, and then go on attending to his proper business.

We are called to be disciples, not energumens. The Great Tradition will go on because the forces of nature are on its side; it has on its side an invincible ally, the self-preserving instinct of humanity. Men may forsake it, but they will come back to it because they must; their collective existence cannot permanently go on without it. Whole societies may disallow it and set it at nought, as ours has done; they may try to live by ways of their own, by bread alone, by bread and buncombe, by riches and power, by economic exploitation, by intensive industrialism, quantity-production, by what you please; but in the end they will find, as so many societies have already found, that they must return and seek the regenerative power of the Great Tradition, or lapse into decay and death.

I leave you, then, with this reassurance. Seeing things as they are, we perceive that the phase of life which appears peculiar to our own little point of time and our little section of human society, is in a very real sense no concern of ours; it is nothing to discourage or distress us, or to distract us from our duty of diligent and trustful obedience. It is only what, from the long-time point of view, we should expect. Two years ago I was in the museum at Bonn, where I saw the skull and other bony vestiges of the Neanderthal Man. He would seem to have been a terrible fellow in his day; and it is since his day, I presume, that most of the qualities which we regard as distinctively social have been developed in our race. Probably before and during his period the humanisation of man in society had not got very far. What impressed me most was that this period, distant as it may seem in the immediate view, is yet so recent that these frail fragments of a human or semi-human osseous structure still remain, that I can see and handle them; they have even retained their form so well that men of science are able to make a pretty plausible reconstruction of our departed brother’s whole physique from the indications that they give. It is easy to run into a culpable cynicism in the expectations that we put upon humanity’s social development; yet the sight of our poor old relative’s remains suggests very forcibly the ease with which those expectations may run into an equally culpable extravagance.

I do not think that our American society will ever return to the Great Tradition. I see no reason why it should not go on repeating the experience of other societies, having already gone as far as it has along the road of that experience, and find that when it at last realises the need of transforming itself, it has no longer the power to do so. The terrible words of Persius are as applicable to the tyranny of ideas as to any other mode of grasping and ruthless dictatorship. But this is no concern of ours. The Great Tradition has not left itself without abundant witness in contemporary societies, and as I began by saying, the constitution of the republic of letters knows no such thing as political nationalism. Our fellow-citizens are ours where we find them; and where they are not to be found we may regard ourselves as citizens in partibus, uncommitted to an officious and ineffectual evangelism. Our allegiance is to the constitution of our republic; we are committed only to clear understanding and right thinking. If our present discussion has been of any avail in encouraging these, we may perhaps believe that the intention of this Lectureship has been in some degree fulfilled.