Still, Not by Bread Alone

I

EVERY Sunday morning Billy, aged thirteen, gets up sua sponte, dresses himself immaculately in his best clothes, voluntarily polishes his shoes, brushes his hair and his teeth without being reminded, and, with or without his breakfast, departs to a nine-thirty Sunday school. Francis, eleven, has brought the question of Sunday school to an open issue. He will go only if he is absolutely commanded to do so, and then only after a scene. Instead he prefers an hour’s work around the house. This arrangement has endured six months instead of the three weeks which I mentally allowed it when Francis’s growing reluctance to attend at last reached the stage of open rebellion. John Robert, at eight an avowed though regretful atheist, occasionally goes to Sunday school under protest; when he is actually there he always seems more interested in it than either of the other two.

This hit-or-miss attitude toward my children’s religion satisfies no one, least of all myself. Rationalists condemn me for sending the children at all, and conservatives criticize me for not insisting that all three attend regularly. My attention was first called to the weakness of my laissez-faire policy by a young couple who, with their thoroughly uninhibited three-year-old daughter, lived for some time next door to me. When, during a discussion of religion, I admitted that all three of the boys regularly attended Sunday school (which at that time they did), their expressions would have seemed appropriate on the face of a missionary learning that a Hindu mother had just flung her children to the crocodiles of the Ganges. Finally Mrs. Modern said: —

‘Are n’t you afraid that Sunday school will make the children terribly emotional ? ’

My hesitations about Sunday school have never been upon that score, and I replied that, in our church at least, Sunday school was no more emotional than a class in American history — an unfortunate comparison, since both parents instantly inquired if I accepted the Bible as historically accurate. When I answered that I did not so consider it, nor were the children so taught, they wanted to know what, then, was my object in sending the children to Sunday school at alt? Up to that moment I had taken it for granted that my reasons were both adequate and definite, but when I attempted to formulate them they evaded me so completely that all I could think of was the incredible: —

‘Because nearly all the nice people here send theirs.’

Instantly realizing that I was more to be pitied than blamed, the Moderns considerately changed the subject.

This incident made me think. I knew that I had real reasons for sending the boys to Sunday school, but before I could determine definitely what they were I was forced to consider, first, exactly what I wanted ‘religion’ to mean to them, and second, how far their Sunday-school experience was developing that meaning for them. From the specific instance of this Episcopalian Sunday school and its relation to my three boys, I began to consider what part the church as a whole was playing in the lives of the children of to-day, whether it was taking its proper place — and still further, what that place ought to be. At once it became evident that these questions are as important to the church as they are to the children, for the church’s very existence depends on what it comes to mean to Billy, Francis, John Robert, and their contemporaries. There seems very little question that either the church has failed my generation or my generation has failed the church, but the gap between our parents and our children is not too wide to bridge if only the church can discover the method by which that bridge can be built. One thing is certain. My children’s world will differ greatly from that of my parents, and the church will have to find some method of adapting itself to this new world, since the children will never find adequate the beliefs which sufficed for the old.

II

Going back to my own specific problem, I finally worked out three reasons for sending the boys to Sunday school, two of them superficial, but the third of supreme importance. And since my problem confronts most parents, it is, perhaps, worth while to discuss these reasons. I have already said that my first reason for urging Sunday school upon the boys is superficial. It is perhaps a little worse than that, and I was surprised and somewhat disgusted when I uncovered it. Nevertheless, I imagine that it is at the bottom of a good deal of Sunday-school attendance. Since the influential members of our small community are largely of the generation preceding mine, they nearly all belong to some church. As the school membership grows up, the boys who still hold to the church come in contact with the locally powerful older group as they certainly would not otherwise, unless, perchance, they were tennis aces or golf stars. When the time comes for these boys to look for jobs, they will be acquainted with the older business men to an extent which should prove helpful — at least to the boys. This reasoning is certainly not lofty, and would not in itself impel me to send the children to Sunday school, but I must admit that it does play its part.

My second motive is more creditable. I am most anxious that the boys should have something more than a speaking acquaintance with the King James Version of the Bible. Laying aside for the moment the value of its ethical or spiritual teachings, one must admit that some knowledge of this ancient literature is absolutely essential to any real education. I am far from being a Biblical expert, but what knowledge of the Bible I have is as integral a part of my background as my knowledge of the A B C’s. There are certain facts one assimilates so unconsciously that one cannot remember when one did not know them: as, for instance, that fire burns, that water is a prime necessity of life, that night and day follow each other. Some familiarity with the Bible had always seemed to me one of these primal facts until a few years ago. I was teaching ‘English’ to four boys in their third year of college preparatory work. One of the required books was Selections from the Old Testament. I supposed that a week, or at the most ten days, spent in refreshing their memories would be ample to enable them to pass any examination on it. To my amazement I found that these four boys — each from a family with at least three generations of education and cultivation behind it — knew less about the Old Testament than I do about diathermy.

I honestly believe that Adam and Eve were the only two characters whom all four could place with accuracy and assurance. Three of them knew nothing of the story of Cain and Abel. None had ever heard of the ‘still small voice,’ the Seven Plagues of Egypt, the Tower of Babel, or Sodom and Gomorrah. Three of them knew nothing of Samson and Delilah; the fourth, being musically trained, had gleaned something of the story from his acquaintance with the opera and was surprised and charmed to learn whence it originated! They had ideas, vague and mostly erroneous, about Noah, David, and Goliath. Their only knowledge of Moses seemed to be the old riddle about Moses and the light. One or two of them had heard of Daniel in the lions’ den, but not one of them had ever heard of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego — nor did they ever get these names correct. All four constantly confused Isaac and Isaiah; Josiah, Hosea, and Jeremiah; Esau and Ishmael; Jezebel and Jael.

Their acquaintance with the Greek and Roman myths, though sufficiently sketchy, was far wider than their knowledge of the religious history of their own era. It really appalls me when I think of the wealth of literary allusion that must still pass over their heads. For even in this day of skepticism, books, magazines, and newspapers are filled with references to Biblical characters and events, and with turns of phrase taken directly from the Scriptures. Not to be able to catch these allusions is to be, in a way, intellectually color-blind; it must take a great deal of vividness out of the literary landscape.

This second reason for sending the children to Sunday school, though still superficial, I consider valid, and if I had no deeper motive I should still urge attendance upon the boys in the hope that they might come upon some knowledge of the Bible. I can, of course, teach them myself and make sure of what they learn, but there are advantages in having them receive the same teaching as their friends. Natural and easy membership in a group is a necessity to a child, and anything that increases his security in his group is of value to him. Not all of Billy’s friends go to his Sunday school, but most of them do attend one, and this community of Sunday-school experience helps to give Billy the feeling of his own quite definite place in the social system and goes far to make him the happily adjusted child that he is.

And now I come to my real reason for sending the children to Sunday school. As the kindergarten prepares the child for the larger and more disciplined world of school, so the Sunday school is intended to prepare the child for the larger and more disciplined world of the church. And since the Sunday school should lay the foundation on which the church will afterwards build, I shall use the terms ‘Sunday school’ and ‘church’ as synonymous. If the church is, as it should be, the logical agent to develop in the children some form of that spiritual life without which their social relationships and their intellectual background will count for little, I am anxious to have it an integral part of their lives.

It seems to me that the life of every individual focuses around two centres, one objective and one subjective. Fifteen or twenty years ago, the objective centre was the home and the family; the subjective centre was religion. Since the lives of the majority focused around the same two centres, life possessed a stability which to-day it lacks. Home was the core around which the family life revolved, and even where the house or the style of living changed, the home remained true to type. Nowadays family life is eccentric instead of concentric, and the fundamental stability of objective life is weakened. Worse still, subjective stability has for the most part been demolished. The discoveries of science have destroyed belief in the validity of the Biblical universe, and since most people seem unable to recognize that the existence of a Supreme Being does not necessarily depend upon the truth of any book, religious faith as the subjective core of life has tended to disappear almost completely.

And yet the church has remained. To-day it is approximately what it was twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, and this sameness is at once its strength and its weakness. In this ever-changing world there is a sort of comfort in the church’s refusal to move with the times. It is always there in the background of our lives. ‘On the Rock of Ages founded, What can shake its sure repose?‘ When everything else fails us, we can always fall back on the church. Even if it, too, fails us, it is still the one unchanging thing in a fantastically shifting society. Its very conservatism makes a strong appeal to Billy and to those who, like him, enjoy regularity, formality, and the amenities of life.

III

To an increasing degree, however, I am forced to wonder whether the church is actually fulfilling its real function. It seems to be now only one of several objective centres — its place is on the outside of existence instead of at the very heart. Regularity and formality have their place in a wellbalanced life, but they are no substitute for belief in Some Thing or Some One so supremely important as to be at once the centre and the explanation of the universe.

In supplying this core, this faith in and understanding of the universe, the church seems to me to be failing the children exactly as it failed me. That is why I do not compel Francis and John to attend with Billy. If I thought that the church would solve for them some of the problems which perplex Francis and are an active trouble to John Robert, I should see to it that they went to Sunday school. But, and with pain I say it, to the questions that are so vital to a child’s conception of the underlying justice of the cosmos, the church has only formal and stereotyped answers.

A few weeks ago we hardened our hearts and killed the two worthless young roosters which we had carefully refrained from making into pets. Gladstone, a magnificent Rhode Island Red warrior, will undoubtedly live out his chicken’s threescore years and ten, and I thought it was understood that the other two should sooner or later be turned into dinner. Though the execution was accomplished in the very early morning, so that by the time Francis and John Robert came downstairs the victims had been plucked and dressed, and bore little resemblance to the living birds, the boys were very much distressed. The prospect of eating the fowls brought with it the question propounded by John: ‘Why do people have to eat meat anyway?’ He went on to say that the very fact of people’s eating meat was a proof that there was n’t any God. If there was, or if He was a good God, He would n’t let people kill animals just to eat them. I found out then that Francis’s distaste for meat was due to his feeling that meat eating was cruel rather than to a dislike of it.

Somewhat hesitantly I reminded the boys that animal life completely unchecked would increase far too rapidly and overrun the earth. This statement they both instantly took up, Francis asking why God fixed things that way, while John pointed out that that alone showed there could n’t be any God.

Years ago I, like most children, had been troubled by these same doubts. The orthodox relative to whom I voiced them assured me that God had made the animals for man’s use, so that man had a right to kill them and eat them, though not to be cruel to them. To my childish mind, as to John’s and Francis’s, it seemed as if killing and eating animals might be considered to constitute cruelty in its first form, and a feeling of some essential universal injustice has remained with me from that day to this. The eternal why of birth, death, cruelty, pain, and sorrow is as old as the mind of man, and as new as the agonized first breath of a baby. The church’s old formula, ‘It is the will of God,’ sufficed a generation which accepted the dictum that His will was neither to be understood nor to be questioned, but it has not sufficed my generation, and still less will it satisfy the coming one, partly, perhaps, because our children have had the beauty of love and of kindness more emphasized than the worth of the sterner virtues on which our parents were brought up. I do not believe that it is impossible to find a satisfactory answer to the persistent why, but I am positive that the old formula is worse than useless; yet, so far as I can learn, it is still all that the church has to offer. There are a few fortunate people to whom the universe presents no problem, and to this few Billy seems to belong. It is a little ironic that he, the only one of the three who has no need of the church, should be the only one who shows a real liking for it. But Billy asks nothing of the church save that it should be there, while Francis and John apparently demand more satisfactory answers to their doubts than the church is able to afford them. I do the best I can with their problems, since the responsibility for a satisfactory solution falls upon me as well as upon the church — but the latter is supposed to know the answers. In fact, its raison d’être is to solve such questions, — to adjust man to his universe, — and if it fails in this it fails to justify its existence.

Never in the nearly two thousand years of its history has that existence been so threatened as it is to-day. Our rector told me not long ago that the average age of his adult membership — or possibly it was his vestry — was seventy years. He said that as the older members died it became a more and more pressing problem to find others who would fill their places and carry on the work until the present Sunday-school generation was of an age to take it over. What is true of our parish is, I understand, true of others also. Now, as I have already said, unless the church manages through the Sunday school to make itself spiritually necessary to our children, — which it does not seem to be doing, — unless it can somehow open up before them the vision of the beauty and happiness of the life that is enriched and perfected by faith, its days are numbered, and this at a time when there never was greater need of something to lead the world out of the spiritual Slough of Despond into which it has fallen.

IV

Since my generation now recognizes that some form of spiritual life is a necessity, why do we not try to develop it through the organization which we already have? Why is there an increasing tendency to leave the church to its fate? Is it because, as we frequently see stated, the old teachings have turned out to be worthless, the old virtues have proved to be vices? Is it because the entire edifice of religious thought has been founded upon a quicksand and now lies in a ruin so utter that an entirely new philosophy of life must be built up? Is the flaw inherent in the ideal on which the church was founded, or is it a weakness in the working out of that ideal?

If any form of deism is only a fallacy due to wishful thinking, if all conceptions of survival are ‘escapist theories,’ then the church should, and will, perish. If the conception that there is some Supreme Intelligence working behind the universe is nothing but a mental crutch, too much dependence on which will keep my boys from attaining their full mental stature, then by all means let us throw away that crutch and devote our utmost energies to building up that new philosophy which our young disillusionists are demanding.

But if, on the other hand, the church represents man’s highest aspirations, man’s groping — at times feeble and blind, along closed alleys — toward a better working out of an immortal destiny; if any of the beliefs formulated by the church embody the best and most profitable of humanity’s experiences on the long upward march from the primeval slough, then for the sake of our children let us do what we may to waken the church from that ‘sure repose’ which has already held it too long, and, while there is yet time, rouse it to the tremendous opportunity confronting it. The church must go forward or perish.

Before we can determine how the church should advance, we must look back and see when and where it first began to lose step with the onward march of civilization. I think the trouble began somewhere in the late eighties or early nineties. The discoveries of science which more and more tended to prove the Hebrew cosmogony as erroneous as that of the Egyptians or the Greeks resulted in a general falling away from the church. Feeling that it was losing its people, the church, instead of endeavoring to alter its limited conceptions of the universe to agree with the new knowledge, fell into the mistake of trying to hold its congregations by demanding less of them. And, as is almost invariably the case in any human relationship, the less it demanded, the less it received.

Religion has been most vital and compelling in the lives of its adherents when belief and support were most difficult and dangerous. It cannot be denied that those churches of to-day which have the strongest hold on their followers are the ones which make the greatest demands. For human nature, and especially young human nature, is so constructed that it does not desire or hold dear the easy thing. It demands to be challenged, not to be reassured. It does not ask that the road to salvation shall be smoothed or that the spiritual life shall be also the easy one. It asks only that whatever goal it seeks shall be worthy. And it is the tragedy of my generation that the goals on which we have for the most part expended our best effort have proved not worth the attaining.

All through history men have fought and died for the faith that was in them — and when they were most apt to be called on to die for their beliefs they were most apt to live by them, which is harder. If the leaders of the church could only have challenged my generation to be Christians instead of coaxing us, we should not so easily have slipped away. The life lived in accordance with Christ’s teachings is spiritually satisfying. It is also sufficiently difficult to arouse the soul most ardently desiring emprise, and, even though the church had maintained its Jewish universe, it might still have held us if it had only challenged us with its insistence on Christ’s teaching. But the church was insistent upon the word, and the spirit was overlooked. In fact, we became so sure that the spirit did not exist that we did not bother about it. The world was so full of a number of things to occupy our time and attention that we tried now this, now that. If we could not live by bread alone, there were cake and jam and all the fruits of the earth to go with it. We became rationalists, materialists, hedonists. We had but one life to live, and but one object of importance to attain — happiness, mostly through self-expression. There are some of us who still hold to this most cheerless of philosophies; there are more who, like a friend of mine, go through life as ’a person walking blindfold along a cliff — trying to hold on to my family and a few other individuals, never seeming to realize that something may hurl one of them or myself over the edge at any moment.’

Then there are those like myself, who realize that cake and jam suffice no more than bread alone to meet a spiritual crisis. We have learned that the complexes caused by too much repression of natural impulses are no worse than, and not so frequent as, the neuroticism and hysteria caused by our vaunted freedom. In short we have learned that, though the letter killeth, the spirit, nevertheless, liveth. Hoping to save our children from our groping, we are searching, more for them than for ourselves, for a faith around which the life of that spirit can centre — a faith difficult enough to present the challenge that youth demands, powerful enough to transfigure the world, and wide enough to include the knowledge afforded us by science. Before attempting to build up a new philosophy of our own, we are turning back to the churches of our fathers. But it seems to me that with a few notable exceptions — of whom justice compels me to say that our own brilliant and farsighted rector is one — the clergy, whose very existence depends on their taking the lead in religious thought, are trailing along in the rear of the procession. Like Lot’s wife, their heads are turned over their shoulders looking backward. Still, instead of the illimitable universe pointed out to them by science, they see only a world neatly bounded by the book of Genesis. If the heavens of the Old Testament declared the glory of God, how much more so do the microcosms and the macrocosms of the scientific textbooks of to-day. Though science may have altered our conception of the cosmos, it has in no wise detracted from the awe and mystery inherent therein.

A sense of that inherent awe and mystery is one of the things which, regardless of doctrines or of the Thirty-nine Articles, the church might give to the young. And this brings me to the question: what exactly do I think that the church should do for children? What have I a right to expect them to learn in Sunday school that I myself cannot teach them? To begin with, I think that the church might well ground them in the Bible, though if it prefers to leave such instruction to the parents and to the secular school I shall not complain, provided only that I know what to expect in this matter.

The second thing I should very much like to see the church undertake in the children’s behalf is a very simple historical study of religion, showing how and why it developed. If the church could only trace religious development, pointing out the good in each of the great faiths and showing how each fulfilled some need of some particular time and place, the children would come by a far better understanding of the part religion has played in the history of civilization than they are apt to acquire in any other way. It is easy enough for me to read the Bible to the children, but to trace for them the development of religious thought requires far more specialized knowledge than I possess, and for this teaching I shall have to rely on some outside agency, which might logically be the church.

But the church may teach the children no more of the Bible than it does of solid geometry; it may never even hint to them that there are faiths other than Christianity; and yet if it can only help them in a third direction, all else will be forgiven it. If it can only instill into my boys a belief in and a slight understanding of a spiritual world, if it can somehow make clear to them the real beauty which still lies in holiness, if it can help them to understand what constitutes a ‘good’ life, and to realize that the ‘good’ life is the only happy one, then its duty to them will have been nobly fulfilled.

To do this the church must develop a faith which this generation can accept, and around which they can centre their lives. If the church will only lay aside the primitive conceptions which it has inherited from the time of Ur of the Chaldees and emphasize the simple and lofty doctrines of Christ which do not conflict with our modern knowledge; if it will present the Christian life as the highest possible challenge and the worthiest possible goal, it may come to hold in our children’s lives an even higher place than it held in our fathers’. If the church will only accept the discoveries of science and turn them, as I believe they can be turned, to a loftier and more intellectually satisfying conception of deity than any we have yet known, then perhaps our children may at least be spared the bitterness of looking in anguish to God for help and finding only the night of eternal space and the blankness of despair.