“God Is Not Dead of Old Age”
It is a pleasant literary speculation, and not without its moral bearings, to inquire whether the disorder and discontent and chaos now ominous among men may not arise from the fact that the world has grown too large for us to manage—like a lion cub which can no longer be played with or like another mechanical monster which indeed we have created but which refuses to do our bidding any longer. A man of affairs, a financier certainly not acclimated to philosophic despair and certainly accustomed to govern wherever his hand turns, lately ventured such an explanation. It may be, he said, that there is no solution which our reason can arrive at. We look about us for authentic leaders and see none; we pass in review hundreds of counsels but find none that seem in all ways to suit—unless we are doctrinaires; assuredly of all the schemes we have tried no one has been successful. By what right do we assume that some such device for salvation exists? Plagues have come before for which there was no cure. Our crisis may be one of them. It may be that the day of solutions is over. H. G. Wells would have us search history to find our future there—or at least some track pointing to a future we can reasonably confide in. But perhaps he was just as near the truth in his younger scientific days when he gave us vivid pictures of men who travelled beyond the known areas of our kind, no longer the engineers of their own destiny but drifting about at the convenience of fate. We think of Anatole France, voluptuously contemplating the age when our earth shall have grown too cold for human habitation and men have gradually died away among the ice hummocks of a universal frozen sea. Or, bitterest of all, we remember Thomas Hardy’s fancy of the delegate sent up to God to ask about the direful state of the planet, only to learn that God had utterly forgotten us and but dimly recollects that He had made us so long ago and had meant to destroy His experiment when He saw how contemptible it was. Beyond Hardy on that path of reflection lies merely such madness as drove Swift to his Yahoos and Houyhnhnms. And if we dare the path the only escapes from madness are some Asiatic discipline of the will to the peace of acquiescence or some sleek optimism shutting its eyes to all the evidences of horror and chattering and eating and wooing merrily among them.
Along that path lies madness—but we need not take that path. Nor is it a trivial optimism alone that can hold us back. Without doubt too many men and women in the world are too optimistic. After the excessive and artificial strain imposed upon them by the war their spirits have relapsed, their consciences have grown dull, and they have sat down for a vacation among the ruins. This is one of the innumerable prices which mankind pays for the mad luxury of war. But it is still too early to conclude that civilization is a wreck. Civilization is very old, and every new exploration among its ancient monuments makes clear that it is older than we thought before. The Mousterian, the Aurignacian, the Solutrian, the Magdalenian, the Azilian, the Neolithic ages must each have seen in its particular downfall the end of mankind; and yet thousands of years were still to elapse before there followed what we have till recently called the dawn of civilization. The destruction of the great Minoan city of Cnossus, Havelock Ellis maintains, may have been a more memorable event in the history of human affairs than the catastrophe from which we are trying to recover. To certain types of mind a view of history so extensive as this is like a first realization of the vastness of the physical universe. If time is so long and space so wide we are but momentary and infinitesimal insects whom it is scarcely worth any one’s efforts, even our own, to preserve. Yet the advances of civilization have been largely effected through just this enlarging vision of our natures and our cosmic residence. After the first despair, not unlike that of a child strayed from the nursery into a crowd, comes a sense of greater dignity at being part of a structure so vast, a new hopefulness that what has endured from everlasting will still endure. The Spanish peasants have a proverb with which they console themselves when there seems no other consolation: “God is not dead of old age.” In such a saying Sancho Panza touches Aristotle. Aristotle could think of a universe without beginning or end, moving indeed toward no definite point but moving always through successions of being. Less metaphysical, the peasant knows as truly that rain follows sunshine and harvest the time for planting, and that in each new season the old labours come back to be done again.
In the midst of our worst distresses we have need of some such cooling wisdom. It is, of course, the faith of men who have not hoped for too specific a mortal or immortal career. We do not hasten to console the lover who has lost his mistress by telling him that for ages there will still be love and mistresses. We do not hasten to assure the man who has just failed of a fortune that though he is poor the sum of the world’s wealth is still the same. And yet both these things are true. The truth to be remembered is that in the very world where thrive the ardours of the lover and the seeker of his individual fortune, and where tragedy goes with defeat, there exist also such perennial processes as the patience of the grass and the slow healing of time. There is a spacious rule of life which has rarely been formulated but which is probably held by most enlightened men and which better than any other combines ardour with ripeness of reflection—a rule which in effect says that though we should work at our appointed tasks as if everything hung upon success we should afterwards regard each success or failure as something which really does not matter. Thus only can we advance with our fullest power; thus only can we free ourselves from the past when we are done with it, not moaning too loudly over defeat or being too vainly elated by some little victory. To extremists such an attitude will seem a frivolous compromise. It is the solemn hallucination of the hopeful that by ardour and by ardour alone can the world be saved, and that each defeat of each plan he follows will mean disaster. It is the cheerful prejudice of the desperate that in spite of temporary oscillations here and there nothing is really to be gained by ardours, for when they have cooled the world will continue its decreed procession down a road paved with ardours flattened under its solid tread. But between them is that temperate zone where men are continually warmed by the fires that keep mankind alive and yet draw from the long records of civilization the wisdom that shows them how to keep the fire within its bounds, that it may do its work without waste and destruction.