Moving the Mountain

mostly of the nature of disobedience⁠—wrong only because we were told not to do it. Sin as a personal offense against somebody, and somebody very much offended; that was it. We were beginning to see something of social values, too, but not clearly. Our progress was in what we called ‘the natural sciences’; and we did not think with the part of our minds wherein we stored religion. Yet there was very great activity and progress in religious thought; the whole field was in motion; the new churches widening and growing in every direction; the older ones holding on like grim death, trying not to change, and changing in spite of themselves; and ethics being taught indeed, but with no satisfying basis. That’s the kind of atmosphere you and I grew up in, John. Now here was I, an ill-assorted team of impulses and characteristics, prejudiced against religion, ignorant of real ethics, and generally going to the devil⁠—as we used to call it! You know how far down I went⁠—or something of it.”

“Don’t speak of it, Frank!” I said. “That was long ago; forget it, old man!” But he turned toward me a smile of triumph.

“Forget it! I wouldn’t forget one step of it if I could! Why, John, it’s because of my intimate knowledge of these down-going steps that I can help other people up them!”

“You looked decidedly miserable just now, all the same, when you were thinking them over.”

“Oh, bless you, John, I wasn’t thinking of myself at all! I was thinking of the awful state of mind the world was in, and how it suffered! Of all the horror and misery and shame; all that misplaced, unnecessary cruelty we called punishment; the Dark Ages we were still in, in spite of all we had to boast of. However, this new perception came.”

I interrupted him.

“What came? Who came? Did you have a new revelation? Who did it? What do you call it? Nobody seems to be able to give me definite information.”

He smiled broadly. “You’re a beautiful proof of the kind of mental jumble I spoke of. Knowledge of evolution did not come by a revelation, did it? Or did any one man, or two, give it to us? Darwin and Wallace were not the only minds that helped to see and express that great idea; and many more had to spread it. These great truths break into the world-mind through various individuals, and coalesce so that we cannot disconnect them. We have had many writers, preachers, lecturers, who discoursed and explained; this new precept as to the relation between man and God came with such a general sweep that no one even tries to give personal credit for it. These things are not personal⁠—they are world-percepts.”

“But every religion has had its founder, hasn’t it?”

“I don’t call it a religion, my dear fellow! It’s a science, like any other science. Ethics is The science of human relation. It is called applied sociology⁠—that’s all.”

“How does a thing like that touch one, personally?” I asked.

“How does any science touch one personally? One studies a science, one teaches a science, one uses a science. That’s the point⁠—the use of it. Our old scheme of religion was a thing to ‘believe,’ or ‘deny’; it was a sort of shibboleth, a test question one had to pass examination in to get good marks! What I’m telling you about is a general recognition of right behavior, and a general grasp of the necessary power.”

“You leave out entirely the emotional side of religion.”

“Do I? I did not intend to. You see, we do not distinguish religion from life now, and are apt to forget old terms. You are thinking, I suppose, of the love of God, and man, which we used to preach. We practice it now.

“That energy I spoke of, when perceived by us, is called love. Love, the real thing we had in mind when we said ‘God is love,’ is beneficent energy. It is the impulse of service, the desire to do, to help, to make, to benefit. That is the ‘love’ we were told to bestow on one another. Now we do.”

“Yes; but what made you do it? What keeps you up to it?”

“Just nature, John. It is human nature. We used to believe otherwise.” He was quiet for a while.

“One of these new doctors got hold of me, when I was about as near the bottom as one can go and get back. Not a priest with a formula, nor a reformer with an exhortation; but a real physician, a soul-doctor, with a passionate enthusiasm for an interesting case. That’s what I was, John; not a lost soul; not even a ‘sinner’⁠—just ‘a case.’ Have you heard about these moral sanitariums?”

“Yes⁠—but not definitely.”

“Well, as soon as this view of things took hold, they began to want to isolate bad cases, and cure them if they could. And they cured me.”

“How, Frank⁠—how? What did they tell you that you didn’t know before? What did they do to you?”

“Sane, strong, intelligent minds put themselves in connection with mine, John, and shared their strength with me. I was made to feel that my individual failure was no great matter, but that my social duty was; that the whole of my dirty past was as nothing to all our splendid future, that whatever I had done was merely to be forgotten⁠—the sooner the better, and that all life was open before me⁠—all human life; endless, beautiful, profoundly interesting⁠—the game was on, and I was in it.

“John⁠—I wish I could make you feel it. It was as if we had all along had inside us an enormous reservoir of love, human love, that had somehow been held in and soured! This new arrangement of our minds let it out⁠—to our limitless relief and joy. No ‘sin’⁠—think of that! Just let it sink in. No such thing as sin.⁠ ⁠… We had, collectively and privately, made mistakes, and done the wrong thing, often. What of it? Of