My second assertion as to the social aspect of causes is this. Sometimes men have indeed sought to serve God in an actually unsocial way, and have been devoted to a world of unseen and superhuman beings. But such beings, if they are real and are worthy of a moral devotion at all, are worthy of the devo tion of all mankind; and in such devotion, if it is indeed justified, all men may be blessed. The worship of the gods, even when a lonely worshipper has expressly tried not to think of his fellows, has therefore always implied a loyalty to the cause of one's own people, or else of mankind at large. The Christian's devotion to God is inseparably bound up with his loyalty to the mystic union of the faithful in the church. The non-social aspect of genuine worship is therefore but apparent. Religion seeks a certain fulfilment of the purposes of the moral life, — a fulfilment which we are hereafter to study. On the other hand, loyalty itself, as a devotion to a cause which unifies many human lives, is, as we shall see, profoundly religious in its spirit. For men, viewed merely as natural phe nomena, are many, and mutually conflicting creatures. Loyalty aims at their unity, and such unity, as wre shall see, is always some thing that has its supernatural meaning. In brief, then, to worship divine powers in a genuinely ethical spirit, is always to serve a cause which is also, in the human sense, social, — the cause of the state, or of the church, or of humanity; while, on the other hand, loyally to serve causes is to aim to give hu man life a supernatural, — an essentially divine meaning.
And these are the reasons why I have in sisted upon the social aspect of loyalty.
Bear, then, I pray you, with my too often repeated term; accept its apparently too narrow definition. We are on the way towards a view of the spiritual unity of all human life, — a view which may serve to justify this technical usage of a term, this long dwelling upon the details of the moral life, these seemingly commonplace com ments upon social problems.
II How shall individuals be trained for a loyal life? That is the question of the present lecture. In trying to answer this question I shall first dwell, briefly, and very inadequately, upon the place that a training for loyalty should occupy in the education of the young. Then I shall speak of the way in which ma ture people are trained for such forms of loy alty as belong to the actual business of the social world.
Whether you like my use of terms or not, you will agree that training the young for a willing and thoroughgoing devotion of the self to a social cause, must be a long and manifold task. Before true loyalty can ap pear in any but rather crude and fragmen tary forms in the life of a growing human being, a long discipline of the whole mind must have preceded. One must have become capable of conceiving what a social cause is. One must have learned decisiveness and fidelity through an elaborate general prepara tion of the will. Therefore, while the begin nings of loyalty extend far back into the life of childhood, its full development must be long to mature years. Affection, obedience, a gradually increasing persistence in whole some activities, a growing patience and selfcontrol, all these, in the natural growth of a human being, are preliminaries to the more elaborate forms of loyalty. By themselves they are not loyalty. In accordance with the general trend of modern educational theory, we therefore naturally point out that, in train ing children for future loyalty, teachers must avoid trying to awaken any particular sort of loyalty before its fitting basis is laid, and before a sufficient age has been reached. The basis in question involves a rich development of social habits. The age for true and system atic loyalty can hardly precede adolescence. One must obtain the material for a moral personality before a true conscience can be won. Conscience, as we have seen, is the flower and not the root of the moral life.
But there is one contribution which child hood early makes to a possible future loyalty, — a contribution which we sometimes fail to take sufficiently into account. That con tribution is the well-known disposition to idealize heroes and adventures, to live an imaginary life, to have ideal comrades, and to dream of possible great enterprises. I have for years insisted, along with many others who have studied our educational problems, that these arts of idealization which childhood so often and so spontaneously practises, are not only in themselves fascinating and joyous, but are also a very important preliminary to that power to conceive the true nature of social causes upon which later loyalty depends. If I have never been fascinated in childhood by my heroes and by the wonders of life, it is harder to fascinate me later with the call of duty. Loyalty, as we have already seen, and as we have yet further to see, is an idealizing of human life, a communion with invisible aspects of our social existence. Too great literalness in the interpretation of human relations is, therefore, a foe to the develop ment of loyalty. If my neighbor is to me merely a creature of a day, who walks and eats and talks and buys and sells, I shall never learn to be loyal to his cause and to mine. But the child who plays with ideal comrades, or who idealizes writh an unconscious wisdom our literal doings and his own, is, in his own way, getting glimpses of that real spiritual world whose truth and whose unity we have hereafter more fully to consider. It is in his fantasies, then, that a child begins to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Such fantasies may need to be carefully guarded. They may take a dangerous or even a disastrous turn in the life of one or another child. But in their better phases they are not mere illu sions and are great blessings. They are prophecies of the coming of conscience, and of a possible union with the world of an actually divine truth.
Yet since loyalty involves conduct, such fantasies of childhood are indeed but a prep aration for loyalty. And higher loyalty be longs later. But in normal childhood there do indeed appear, in a fragmentary way, forms of conduct which already include a simple, but, so far as it goes, an actual loy alty to the causes the child already under stands. You all know some of these forms. The members of a gang of boys, sometimes of bad boys, show a certain loyalty to the cause represented by the gang. School children develop the code of honor that forbids the telling of tales to the teacher. Truthfulness becomes a conscious virtue early in normal childhood, and has its own childish casuistry, — often an amusing one.
The rule, of course, regarding all such childhood beginnings of loyalty is that we should always respect whatever is in the least socially tolerable about the expressions of even the crudest loyalty. The parent or teacher who trifles with the code of honor of children by encouraging the talebearer, or by even requiring that a child should become, an informer, is simply encouraging disloyalty. He outrages the embryonic conscience of his young charges.
For the rest, children appreciate the loy alty or disloyalty of our conduct towards them sooner than they can define their own duty. And the one who would train for loyalty must therefore be, in his dealings with children, peculiarly scrupulous about his own loyalty.
Ill But after all, whatever be the best train ing of childhood for a coming moral life, the rapid development of loyalty itself belongs to adolescence, just as the outcome of that development is reached only in mature life. Upon the importance of youth as the natural period for training in more elaborate forms of loyal conduct, our recent authority regarding adolescence, President Stanley Hall, has in sisted. In normal youth various forms of loyalty, of a highly complex character, appear with a great deal of spontaneity. Two of these forms have become important in the life of the youth of many nations, and certainly in the life of our own American youth to-day. The one form is loyalty to the fraternal or ganization, — very generally to a secret fra ternity. The other form is loyalty to one's own side in an athletic contest, or to one's college or other institution, viewed as an athletic entity.
Both of these forms of loyalty have their excesses, and lead to well-known abuses. The secret fraternities may become organizations for general mischief and disorder; the ath letic contests may involve overmuch passion, and may even do harm to the general loyalty by fostering the spirit of unfair play. Now, it is notable that both of these sorts of abuses increase when the fraternities and the athletic organizations are imitated in the lower schools by the children. The resulting dangers show that loyalty ought not to be a prematurely forced plant. It should grow, in its various forms, in its due time. Hence those in charge of our secondary schools should not be misled by their knowledge of the preciousness of loyally into encouraging an overhasty develop ment of secret fraternities and of fully formed athletic organizations amongst those who are not old enough to reap the fruits of such forms of loyalty. The coming of true loyalty may be seriously hindered by the too early organiza tion of the perfectly natural gang of boys into some too elaborate social structure. Harm has been done of late years by too much aping of athletic and fraternity life in connection with the lower grades of schools.
But when youth is fairly reached, and the secret fraternity and the athletic organization become spontaneously prominent, it is plain that our efforts to train our youth to a higher life must recognize these natural types of loyalty, but must do so without overempha sizing their cruder features. We must always build upon what we have; and therefore any unnecessary hostility to the fraternities and to the athletic life is profoundly objectionable. But the most unhappy features of the athletic, and in some measure of the fraternity, life in our colleges and universities are due to the false social prominence which the public opin ion of those who have nothing to do with college life often forces upon our youth. The athletic evils, such as they are, of our academic world, are not due to the college students themselves nearly so much as to the absurd social promi nence which the newspapers and the vast modern crowds give to contests which ought to be cheerful youthful sports, wherein a natural loyalty is to be trained, but wherein a national prominence of the games and the con testants is utterly out of place. It is as absurd to overemphasize such matters as it is wicked to interfere unnecessarily with any other aspect of youthful moral development. It is the extravagant publicity of our intercollegiate sports which is responsible for their principal evils. Leave wholesome youth to their natural life, not irritated and not aroused to unwise emotions by the exaggerated comments of the press, and our athletic organizations would serve their proper function of training the muscles as well as the souls of our youth to loyalty. As for the fraternities, — the false social prominence which their graduate mem bers sometimes force upon them is a distinct hindrance to the work that they can do in train ing youth for a loyal life.
Fair play in sport is a peculiarly good instance of loyalty. And in insisting upon the spirit of fair play, the elders who lead and who or ganize our youthful sports can do a great work for the nation. The coach, or the other leader in college sports, to whom fair play is not a first concern, is simply a traitor to our youth and to our nation. If the doctrine of these lectures is right, we can see with what stupendous hu man interests he is trifling.
As to other ways in which the loyalty of our youth can be trained, we still too much lack, in this country, dignified modes of celebrating great occasions. Once the Fourth of July was a day for training patriotic loyalty; it has now degenerated, and is probably irretrievably lost to the cause of true loyalty. Memorial Day and our national Thanksgiving Day are our best holidays for expressing loyalty to the community and to the nation. Let us cherish them, and preserve them from desecration. But with us both holidays and public cere monials have a certain democratic tendency to degeneration. We need more means for sym bolizing loyalty, both in public monuments and in ceremonials, as well as in forms of common public service to our community. European nations glorify the army as a prac tical teacher of loyalty to the youth. The loyalty thus won is mingled with the war-spirit, and is therefore dear bought. But we unques tionably need substitutes for military service as a means of training for a loyal life. It be longs to the task of our social leaders to invent and to popularize such substitutes. Herein lies one of the great undertakings of the future.
IV The true sphere of a complete loyalty is mature life. We constantly need, all of us, individual training in the art of loyalty. How is this work accomplished in the social order? In answering this question, let history and our daily social experience be our guides.
The main lessons that these guides teach us, as I think, are three: First, our loyalty is trained and kept alive by the influence of personal leaders. Secondly, the higher forms of train ing for loyalty involve a momentous process which I shall call the Idealizing of the Cause. Thirdly, loyalty is especially perfected through great strains, labors, and sacrifices in the ser vice of the cause.
Of the three factors here mentioned, the first and second are inseparable and universal. If we are to be made loyal, we want personal leaders, and highly idealized causes. In ex ceptional cases a man may seem to be his own sole leader in loyalty. But this is rare. Al ways, to be sure, a loyal man uses his own leadership, since, as we saw in our fourth lec ture, his conscience is his leader. But usually he needs the aid of other personal leaders be sides himself. As for the idealizing of the cause, — I have called it a momentous process. How momentous we shall soon see. For it is by this process that we are introduced into the true spiritual world.
Let me illustrate my theses. We are all familiar with the history of clubs and of sec tarian social organizations generally. Now how are these social enterprises, good or evil, made to succeed?
You all know that if a club or a sect is to be begun, or if a political or social movement is to be rendered effective, two things are neces sary: first, a leader, or a group of leaders, eager, enthusiastic, convinced, or, at the worst, capable of speaking as if they were convinced, -leaders persistent, obstinate, and in their own fitting way aggressive; and, secondly, a cause that can be idealized so that, when the leaders talk of it in their glowing exhortations, it seems to be a sort of supernatural being, in one sense impersonal, but in another sense capable of being personified, an exalted but still per sonally interesting spiritual power. The two aspects of loyalty, the personal and the seem ingly superpersonal, must thus be emphasized together.
Consider, in particular, the process of mak ing almost any new club succeed. Some group of persons, sometimes a single leader, must be found, willing to devote time and energy to directing the new organization. The leader or leaders must believe the enterprise worth while, must proclaim its importance in vigor ous terms, and must patiently stand by the club through all the doubtful first period of its existence. But the personal influence of these leaders cannot be enough to arouse any genuine loyalty in the members of the club, unless the organization itself can be made to appear as a sort of ideal personality, of a higher than merely human type. If the leaders impress their companions as being people who are concerned merely with their own private im portance, they in vain persist in their propa ganda. In that case the club is nicknamed as their particular pet or as their fad; one makes light of their energy, one maligns their motives, and the club crumbles into nothing. In order to succeed, the leaders must give to the club the character of a sort of ideal entity, often of an improvised mythological goddess, who is to be conceived as favoring her devotees, as bestowing upon them extraordinary social or spiritual benefits. Even the convivial festi vals of the club, if such festivals there be, must have some sort of ceremonial dignity about them, — a dignity such as suggests the impersonal or superpersonal rank of the club as an ideal. The club must become a cause, in whose service the members are one. If it is a reform club, or other body engaged in a propaganda, then social interests that lie out side of the boundaries of the club's separate being serve to define this cause; the club is then merely an instrument to further a loyalty that is intelligible apart from the existence of this very instrument; and in such a case the leaders of the club have mainly to insist effec tively upon the importance of this already exist ing loyalty. But if the club is to be an end in itself, — an organization that exists for its own sake and for the sake of its own members, — the process of learning to ascribe to the new club the ideal dignity of a common cause is sometimes a difficult process. The devices used by the leaders are, upon occasion, very direct. One simply calls the club an ideal; one personifies it in various poetical ways; and one praises it as a sort of superhuman being. Or, more practically still, one incor porates the club, endows it with a legal per sonality, and makes it a property owner. But other devices are more indirect. Club ceremonials and festivals, some more or less rudimentary club ritual, perhaps also the various familiar devices of the secret societies, the air of mystery, club emblems and symbols, — all serve to give to the club the appearances, at least, of a fitting cause for the exercise of loyalty. Another indirect device consists in naming the club after famous or beloved peo ple, now dead, whose honor and whose mem ory idealize the new organization. Or, again, one arbitrarily calls the club ancient and dig nifies it by a more or less conscious myth about its past. All such devices serve to call out loyalty in ways that may be comparatively trivial, but that may also be of a very profound significance, if the new organization is actually a fitting object of loyalty.
With proper changes the foregoing account applies to the plans that are useful in estab lishing a new religious sect. Always you find the same union of personal enthusiasm on the part of leaders with a disposition to define the ideal of the new organization in terms that transcend the limits of individual human life. Man, even when he is a member of a purely convivial social body, is prone to try to con ceive both his own life, and also that of this social body, in superhuman terms. Expe rience thus shows that a procedure of the sort just described does succeed, in many cases, in training people — sometimes small groups, sometimes great bodies of men — to new forms of loyalty.
The plans whereby an actually ancient institution is kept in possession of the loyalty of its own natural servants do not in their essence differ from the ones just characterized. The loyalty of a body of alumni to their university is a classic instance of a loyalty kept alive by the union of an institution with the personality of its living leaders. Even so, the loyalty of the sons of a subjugated nationality, such as the Irish or the Poles, to their country, is kept alive through precisely such an union of the influence of individual leaders with the more impersonal reverence for the idealized, although no longer politi cally existent nationality.
You see, so far, how the personal leaders and the superhuman cause are inseparable in the training of loyalty. The cause comes to be idealized partly because the leaders so vigor ously insist that it is indeed ideal. On the other hand, the leaders become and remain personally efficacious by reason of the dignity that the cause confers upon them. Were they considered apart from their cause, they would seem to be merely ambitious propagandists, seeking gain or notoriety. To those without the range of their personal influence, they often seem such. Yet if they did not speak for the cause, and so give to it the life of their personal enthusiasm, nobody would be taught to regard their cause as ideal. The cause thus needs to become incarnate, as it were, in the persons of the leaders; but the leaders get their personal influence through the fact that they seem to be incarnations of the cause.
Facts of this sort are familiar. You can observe them whenever you attend an anni versary meeting, or other such ceremonial, of your own club, and whenever you listen to those who represent any successful propa ganda. But how vastly significant such facts may be in determining the lives of whole generations and nations and races of men, you can only judge if you read the general history of humanity in the light of the principles now pointed out. If our philosophy of loyalty has any truth, the history of human loyalty con cerns whatever is most important in the annals of mankind. And the whole history of loyalty is the history of the inseparable union of the personal influence of leaders with the tendency to idealize causes.
V But the idealization of the cause, although never possible without the aid of living persons, may also depend upon still other factors than the direct personal influence of leaders. When we consider the general history of loyalty amongst men, our attention is soon attracted to a deeply instructive process whereby, in certain cases, — some of them very great and wonderful cases, — causes have been ideal ized not only by the personal influence of the leaders, but also by certain deeply pathetic motives to which the leaders could constantly appeal. I refer to the process illustrated by the history of lost causes.
I referred a moment ago to the loyalty of the Irish and of the Poles to their own lost nationalities. Now such loyalty to a lost cause may long survive, not merely in the more or less unreal form of memories and sentiments, but in a genuinely practical way. And such loyalty to a lost cause may be some thing that far transcends the power of any mere habit. New plans, endless conspiracies, fruitful social enterprises, great political or ganizations, — yes, in the extreme case, — new religions, may grow up upon the basis of such a loyalty to a cause whose worldly fortunes seem lost, but whose vitality may out last centuries, and may involve much novel growth of opinion, of custom, and of ideals.
The most notable religious development which the world has ever seen, the religion of Israel, together with its successor, Christian ity, — this whole religious evolution, — is, as we must here point out, the historical result of a national loyalty to a lost cause. The political unity of all the tribes of Israel, attained but for a moment, so to speak, under David and Solomon, and then lost from the visible world of history, survived as an ideal. Only as such a lost ideal could this conception of what Israel once was and ought again to be inspire the Old Testament prophets to speak the word of the Lord regarding the way of righteousness whereby, as the prophets held, the prosperity of Israel was to be restored. Only this same lost political ideal, and this resulting discovery of the prophetic theory of the divine govern ment of human affairs, could lead over to that later religious interpretation and to that rewriting of the whole ancient history of Israel, which we now read in our Old Testament. Only upon the same basis could the Messianic idea come to be defined; and only thus could the prophetic doctrine of the universal future triumph of righteousness come to be formu lated. And so through an historical process, every step of which depended upon a pathetic and yet glorious loyalty to a lost national cause, the ideals in question were at once universalized and intensified until, through Israel, all the nations of Christendom have been blessed. In consequence, to-day, in speaking of its own hopes of the salvation of mankind, and in describing its coming king dom of heaven, Christianity still uses the fa miliar terms: Zion, the throne of David, Jerusalem, — terms whose original application was to places and to persons first made notable in their own time merely by reason of the petty tribal feuds of an obscure province. Thus loyalty, steadfast and yet developing through centuries, gradually transformed what were once seemingly insignificant matters of local politics into the most sacred concerns of a world religion.
Loyalty to lost causes is, then, not only a possible thing, but one of the most potent influences of human history. In such cases, the cause comes to be idealized through its very failure to win temporary and visible suc cess. The result for loyalty may be vast. I need not remind you that the early Christian church itself was at first founded directly upon a loyalty to its own lost cause, — a cause which it viewed as heavenly just because here on earth the enemies seemed to have triumphed, and because the Master had departed from human vision. The whole history of Chris tianity is therefore one long lesson as to how a cause may be idealized through apparent defeat, and how even thereby loyalty may be taught to generation after generation of men, and may develop into endlessly new forms, and so may appeal to peoples to whom the cause in question was originally wholly strange. This history shows us how such a teaching and such an evolution of an idea may be furthered by what seems at first most likely to discourage loyalty, that is, by loss, by sorrow, by worldly defeat.
Loyalty to a lost cause, whatever the grade of dignity of the cause, depends in part, of course, upon the same motives which the simpler and more direct forms of loyalty employ.
But when a cause is lost in the visible world, and when, nevertheless, it survives in the hearts of its faithful followers, one sees more clearly than ever that its appeal is no longer to be fully met by any possible present deed. Whatever one can just now do for the cause is thus indeed seen to be inadequate. All the more, in consequence, does this cause demand that its followers should plan and work for the far-off future, for whole ages and aeons of time; should prepare the way for their Lord, the cause, and make his paths straight. Ac tivity becomes thus all the more strenuous, just because its consequences are viewed as so far-reaching and stupendous. Man's ex tremity is loyalty's opportunity. The present may seem dark. All the greater the work yet to be done. The distant future must be conquered. How vast the undertaking, — how vast, but therefore how inspiring!
All this larger and broader devotion of those loyal to a lost cause is colored and illuminated by strong emotion. Sorrow over what has been lost pierces deep into the hearts of the faithful. So much the more are these hearts stirred to pour out their devotion. Mean while, the glamour of memory is over the past. Whatever was commonplace about the former visible fortunes of the lost cause is now for gotten. For the memory of those who sorrow over loss is, as we all know, fond of precious myths, and views these myths as a form in which truth appears. In the great days that have passed away — in the days before the cause suffered defeat — there was indeed tragedy; but there was glory. Legend, often truer, — yes, as Aristotle said of poetry, more philosophical than history, — thus reads into that past not what the lost cause literally was, but what it meant to be. Its body is dead. But it has risen again. The imagination, chastened by all this grief, stirred by all this deep need, not only reforms the story of the past, but builds wonderful visions of what is yet to be. Loyalty for the lost cause is thus attended by two comrades, grief and imagination. Yet loyalty, always strenuous and active, is not enervated by these deep emotions, nor yet confused by the wealth of these visions; but rather devotes itself to resolving upon what shall be. Grief it therefore transforms into a stimulating sense of need. If we have lost, then let us find. Loyalty also directs its deeds by the visions that imagination furnishes; and meanwhile it demands in turn that the imagination shall supply it with visions that can be translated into deeds. When it hears from the imagination the story of the coming triumph, it does not become passive. Rather does it say: Watch, for ye know not the day or the hour when the triumph of the cause is to come.
Hora novissima Tempora pessima Sunt, vigilemus.
This wonderful awakening from the pros tration of grief to the stern but fascinating re solve to live and to be active for the lost cause, this freeing of the imagination through the very agony of missing the dear presence in the visible world, and this complete control both of such passion and of such imagination through the will to make all things work to gether for the good of the cause, — all this is the peculiar privilege of those who are loyal to a cause which the world regards as lost, and which the faithful view as ascended into a higher realm, certain to come again in re newed might and beauty. Thus may grief minister to loyalty.
And I may add, as an obvious truth of hu man nature, that loyalty is never raised to its highest levels without such grief. For what one learns from experience of grief over loss is precisely the true link between loyalty as a moral attitude, and whatever is eternally valuable in religion. One begins, when one serves the lost causes, to discover that, in some sense, one ought to devote one's highest loyalty precisely to the causes that are too good to be visibly realized at any one moment of this poor wretched fleeting time world in which we see and touch and find mere things, mere sensations, mere feelings of the moment. Loyalty wants the cause in its unity; it seeks, therefore, something essentially superhuman. And therefore, as you see, loyalty is linked with religion. In its highest reaches it always is, therefore, the service of a cause that is just now lost — and lost because the mere now is too poor a vehicle for the presentation of that ideal unity of life of which every form of loyalty is in quest. Loyalty to loyalty, that cause of causes upon which I have so much insisted in the foregoing, is indeed just now in far too many ways a lost cause amongst men. But that is the fault of the men, not of the cause. Let us rejoice that we can serve a cause of which the world, as it is, is not yet worthy.