I Was a Pagan

At twenty, life looked like a high adventure—intriguing and indecorous. At thirty, it looked like a high endeavor—socially and economically important. By forty, however, I grew highly dubious. Life seemed to have lost flavor on both counts. It was then that I met the Oxford Group.

At this time, I think, I would have described myself as “white, married and a Christian.” Actually I was somewhat tarnished and discolored, married in name only, and very much of a pagan. A pagan is a man who spends his time chasing false gods. And I had spent forty years of my time in chasing “Pleasure,” “Possessions, “Power,” “Position” and “Applause.”

I now call these pagan goals my unfortunate five “P’s.” One or more of them seems to have played a part in my life for as long as I am able to remember. My very first ambition, for example, was to be the captain of a tug boat. This, I believed, would enable me to cruise about the harbor much as my fancy pleased me and it would bring not only pleasure but applause from all my friends.

Being a New Yorker, the tug-boat idol formulated in a Hudson River ferry which noble craft, in turn, gave birth to my next ambition. Tending the ferry-boat engines, I thought, must be rather an heroic and exciting job, and I decided to become an engineer.

How I ever passed examinations for an engineering institute I do not know. Once there, however, I discovered that engineering was less a matter of heroics than of mathematics, for which I happened to possess a singular distaste. Long hours over the drafting board were equally tedious. A draught of beer was much more to my liking so that, when Christmas vacation came around, I found myself some fifty eight hours behind in mechanical drawing. From then on I became more intimate with bar-keepers than with my professors, and cheerfully flunked out with seven conditions out of a possible eight.

After several months, futilely spent at a business college, my father grew impatient and faced me with the question of what I really wanted to do in life. I thought it all over, trying to be honest, and decided that I really wanted to write.

My next misadventure was to attend a leading School of Journalism—then in its first year. They offered a most liberal education covering a wide range of subjects, in the theory, I believe, that a newspaper man should know a little bit of everything.

This scattering of knowledge eventually “scattered me all over the lot.” There was no course in college to weave these strands together in a new and connected philosophy

of life. I came to the conclusion then that life was going to be nothing but a jolly struggle for existence—a survival of the fittest and devil take the hindmost.

Very well, I thought, if life is going to be a struggle, I will show them how to struggle. I will land on the top of a pile of money with a bigger and better home than my neighbors, with membership in more exclusive golf clubs and ownership of more resplendent automobiles. Possessions thus hooked up with pleasure, applause, power and position and became one of my five pagan gods.

To clinch my decision, the editor of one of the New York dailies came up and made the student journalists a speech. “Boys,” he said, “if I had to do it again I would go into the business end of a newspaper. Outside of Arthur Brisbane, who makes more money than the President of the United States, we of the editorial staff are lucky to draw $5,000 or $6,000 a year.” To my recently acquired eyes of avarice these meager figures held no lure. I let go my former aim for a position in the literary world and sought a position in an advertising agency.

That was twenty years ago. I have been an advertising agent ever since and have spent many weary hours writing what people paid me to write instead of what I wanted to say. I hope I may be forgiven for some of the things that I wrote—for the girls I led to believe that a lost lover could be recaptured through a drop of judiciously placed perfume—for the bad bargains I pressed on unsuspecting people as good buys—for forcing on the public countless non-essential articles that have helped to swamp their lives—and for many other forms of shoddy thinking and shabby writing which I considered just “part of the game.”

At the time, however, I regarded all of this as high adventure—as part of life’s exciting contest to outwit the other fellow and come out on top of the heap. I came out on top fast enough—in fact, a little bit too fast for my own good. I had held my first job for scarcely two weeks when the boss offered me a contract at a rising scale of salary which turned old-timers in the office green with envy. That rather turned my head. I was showing them how to struggle from the very first gun, and I soon—too soon—had all the possessions most any single man could want.

This early rise in fortune turned me early to possession of a wife. A wife, I felt, should prove a great convenience around the house. I had been much annoyed by the fact that my parents went away for the summer. Having become a working man

I could no longer accompany them and found it most irritating in their absence to run out of soap. I also wanted to be able to throw wide open cocktail parties in my own home instead of having to sneak out for a drink. At one and the same time I was tired of seeing too much of women I could not respect and not enough of girls I really liked. Besides, for the sixth or seventh time in my philandering existence, I fell seriously in love.

Marriage thus became a new adventure to me—an adventure in devising and demanding comforts that I had not found in the midst of a somewhat strait-laced and old-fashioned family—an adventure in the freedom of doing what I jolly well

pleased behind the doors of my own home.

Drinking also seemed like an adventure at that time. Playing the drums or leading the orchestra at a cabaret, delivering a drunken lecture on temperance from the bar of a night club, arguing with the doorman who didn’t want you to carry off the box trees from in front of his establishment, waking up the neighbors as you came home with the milkman—these somehow seemed to make up for the slightly flat flavor I was beginning to find in the “adventure” of business and the growing lack of zest I experienced in the new “adventure” of the home.

Where once, however, alcohol appeared to “make lights brighter, music sweeter, colors fairer, women more beautiful and men more companionable,” I began to find that I had to drink not simply to heighten the pleasure of lights and music and the companionship of men and women but in order to stand for them at all. I began to get my first suspicions that something must be out of gear in the commonly accepted scheme of things. A friend of mine recalls that when he and his family stood up in church and sang “Like a mighty army moves the church of God,” he—even as a child—could see that there was something wrong with that picture. And I, even as a tyro among business men, benedicts and drunks, began to feel there might be something wrong with plunging along year after year simply to pile up as many possessions as possible, to possess a wife of whom I was growing steadily more neglectful, and to possess a thirst which gradually was ripening into insatiability.

Was there going to be nothing to look forward to except, perhaps, the making of still more money, the acquisition of still more wives—perhaps some other fellow’s or, perhaps, another of my own—the whole engulfed in the drinking of still more liquor? I began to feel, in short, that the pagan aims and purposes did not and could not represent complete success in life.

I tried to figure out that really to succeed in life a man should succeed not only in business—not only in marriage—not only in holding his liquor—but in doing something with himself. He should, let us say, develop in character. I felt that my character possessed many negative attributes such as fear, anger, revenge and pride, and that it also held many positive potentialities such as poise, good nature, |sympathy and understanding. I tried to make a chart of these things, showing which qualities fell on the positive side and which on the negative. This was accompanied by a scoring system through which one could measure progress in developing the positive side of personality. As an old tutor of mine once said, however, “My boy, never try to write anything till after you are forty. You won’t know what life is all about till then.” He was right. I soon gave up my effort and I turned to see if, in actual practice, there was not something more worth while I could do with my business, my home, and my drinking.

I began, for instance, to look upon the advertising business not just in its selfish aspects—as a jolly racket through which one could make a rather large amount of
money rather easily—but in its social aspects as a “necessary link in the mighty

chain of American merchandising.” The industrial machine tool, I could see, had multiplied the efforts of the individual worker and given rise to mass production.

Advertising, I declared, was the machine tool necessary to multiply the efforts of the modern salesman and enable him to move this mass of goods through the modern channels of distribution. It did not occur to me, however, just why it was necessary either to make or to move this “mass” of goods or what, if anything, that did for human beings?

The home I began to look upon not simply as a comfortable, free-drinking and legalized love nest but as an “institution”—a “bulwark” in the eddies of a freethinking society. I began to think it a duty that “we of the better and more intelligent classes” should bear larger quantities of children to offset the influx of uneducated immigrants. It did not occur to me that a self-centered snob might prove no safer for the future of civilization and my particular brand of society than a self-centered communist.

Even drinking I began to socialize, idealize and ennoble. Life, I argued, is unnaturally |strained at best. Like an over trained football team we go stale in sticking to the same old round and we become “emotionally repressed and nervously over stimulated.”

To relieve this strain we need to go on a good party, dance on some restaurant table or kick a policeman who isn’t looking. I elevated my periodic debauches to the status of a social safety valve and more. The approach to a man’s inner and finer thoughts, I declared, comes only with the breaking through of his reserve, and five or six slugs of whisky are necessary to release his flow of soul. I represented alcohol

in other words, as necessary not only to the stability of society but to its uplift.

Unless one is a hopeless moron, however, one cannot live long under a pretence like this. One cannot go on indefinitely gilding the cabbages of life and pretending they are lilies. Another ten years or so and I was ready to admit that the home was nothing but an overstuffed barracks, representing a great waste and duplication of effort in its support, pandering to a man’s pride and little else, and enslaving him all day in the struggle for money so that he might sleep there at night and paint it at least as frequently as his next-door neighbor.

Then, too, despite my early rise in business, I also went through early losses, and the business prospect soon dwindled into the certainty that I was not going to be able to accumulate a fortune enabling me to retire within twenty years. As for the social and economic value of the advertising profession, I could see that it had degenerated into nothing but an effort to stretch markets and to stretch them again and again in the utterly selfish, utterly childish and utterly hopeless belief that we could make and keep them big enough to soak up all the junk our manufacturers wanted to pour into them. My work, in other words, lost all color as a gay and exciting adventure in the romantic struggle of life. It was stripped of all false pretence as a valuable and necessary instrument of modern distribution. It became rather an unpleasant means of keeping myself in golf clubs and cars and an occupation in which I might

escape from other thoughts and obligations. Religion has been called an escape.

So has alcohol. But make no mistake. They are nothing as compared with work.

Work—especially in those countless needless hours—is the universal escape from thought and from facing the reality of living.

Drink too, of course, is an escape—an escape from work or lack of it—and I finally was ready to admit it. My home, in other words, became something to escape from.

My office became something to escape into. My alcohol became the alley of escape I chose when both home and office got so unspeakably upon my nerves that I turned to cocktails as knock-out drops in order to forget the whole sorry business.

I had reached that crisis in life when we question the value of all human effort.

John Stuart Mill once said, “Suppose all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And with John Stuart Mill I had to answer “No!” As far as my selfish interests were concerned all of the pleasures, possessions, powers, positions and applause I ever achieved had turned to dust in my fingers. Looking into the lives of other self-ruined ‘‘successes’’-men who had pushed along these avenues much farther than I had — I could still see nothing to want. Gilding these efforts and achievements with the pretext that I was reviving American industry, upholding the American home or drinking to withstand the onslaughts on American freedom, added nothing to my satisfaction. And, if the truth must be known, it added nothing to the satisfaction of the other fellow.

In the modern world, in short, I had found and could find no sign whatever of a satisfying answer to the question—”Is this all there is to living?” And I found no greater satisfaction in the social, political or economic ideas and ideals of modern thinkers. In an impressive symposium entitled “Living Philosophies,” for example,

Theodore Dreiser wrote that, “I catch no meaning at all from all I have seen and I pass quite as I came, confused and dismayed.” James Truslow Adams admitted that he was “floundering in a dismal swamp.” Albert Einstein was certain only that “Man is here for the sake of other men.” And, in a book of his own, so keen an analyst as Walter Lippmann could offer no better prescription than the advice of Confucius “to follow what the heart desires without transgressing what is right.”

This inability to see what we were living for—this lack of knowledge and confusion on the part of individuals—was clearly reflected in the confusion of the larger world.

I looked not only into my own life and into the lives of other men but into life as a whole and saw that many lives as blind and selfish as my own had fused to make up a self-ruined world. It was a world “inflexible in the face of fact.” Parents in that world were wondering what lay ahead for their children. Children, as they looked at the fruitless and befuddled lives of their parents, wondered what lay ahead for themselves. Husbands and wives, poisoned by the live-your-own-life theory and an exaggerated sense of self, were drawing ever more sharply apart and it seemed

almost as if half the married couples that we knew were either in the throes, or on the verge, of a divorce. Business relationships were based on the principle, not of earning one’s daily bread, but of snatching as much bread as possible out of the mouth of some other fellow. And it was a shocking mess that business men had made of business. Newspaper editors, politicians, reformers and trouble makers of all types hurled in thousands of crack-potted schemes to make the confusion worse.

We were led every way by the “destructive cross currents of idealism,” and men, torn by internal conflict to a point of hair-trigger temper, took vindictive potshots at almost everything in sight.

All of this, I felt, was because so many “self-made” men—actually self-ruined like myself—had spent their lives as I had in chasing false gods. And when, in 1929 the stock market went down and all five of my false gods rose up and deserted in one body, I determined to seek the real meaning and purpose of life before I again took up the business of living. If my old aims of pleasure, possessions, power, position and applause could be won and permanently held by no man—if all of these supposed friends could so easily be put to rout by a mere business panic—if all desire for these aims ended with their fulfillment and they became no longer desirable—if their pursuit by hundreds of other men for hundreds of years had resulted only in chaos come again—what gods of a more faithful nature and enduring value could one live for? What are we here for? Where do we go from here? I determined to answer these perplexing questions once for all and I sat down to think it through and write a book.

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CHAPTER II

THIS BUSINESS OF THINKING THINGS OUT

PHILOSOPHY

There must, I figured, as I wrote my book, be some purpose in living. “But why?” as a man once asked me. “Why can’t we just live along without any purpose?” “Maybe you can,” I replied, “but I couldn’t. If I thought that never again could I possibly squeeze any kind of fun or satisfaction out of life for myself—if I thought that never again could I be of any help whatever to my family or to any other people—if, failing fun for myself or help for others, I thought that I could in no way serve some process of nature or some God that stands above self and society, I would lose no time in jumping out of the window. If I live for any of these things—in the hope of getting a little more fun—in the hope of being a little more help—or in the hope of serving some higher purpose which I do not understand—I would, whether I admitted it or not, be living for a purpose.”

If I guessed at the wrong purpose, as I had in my own life, I would, of course, miss most of the fun, prove of mighty little use in the world and, probably, fail entirely to render any higher service. And, if men as a whole were equally bad guessers, the world as a whole would miss out in exactly the same way.

Education, as I wrote, for instance, is or should be a preparation for the business of living. And if nobody knows what that business really is, none of us have a chance either to give or get a worth-while education. If, again, we do not know what we are living for when we get married, we cannot be expected to make a very wise choice of our life partner. In choosing or pursuing a business or vocation we are likely to make just as serious mistakes while, in the larger affairs of economy, politics, sociology and religion, people must continue in a complex muddle unless some definite idea of what they are living for can be found and applied to give these various affairs a purpose and direction.

Belief in and desire for the five unfortunate “P’s,” for instance, was the plan which and most of the world had been following. It is a plan—a “design for living”—in which, as Jay Franklin suggests, “Our job is to have as pleasant a time as possible, to enjoy life to the full, to experience as much as we can, and to take our pleasure as we find it, because trouble will find us anyhow.” With no further purpose or aim this plan must be described as “Egoism.” And since egoism had left me and most other people that I know with a great big unfilled gap in our lives—since century after century and generation after generation it had brought the world to recurring states of chaos—was it not likely that some other untried or less-tried plan would prove to be the right one?

Was it not possible, for instance, that—as Einstein suggests—man is here only to help other men? Was it not possible that I, as an individual, was headed nowhere

but that the human race was going to work out? If so, nothing that I did mattered except as it contributed to the progress of society. Here was a plan with some sort of socialism or communism as its goal—a plan where the individual sacrifices self-interest for the good of the whole—a plan which, reduced to one word, I will refer to as “Humanism.”

Again it seemed possible that the ecclesiastics might be right and that there might be some kind of an all-powerful God Who created man for some purpose of His own.

In that case our only real purpose in life would be to obey the will of God wherever that might lead and for whatever known or unknown purpose. At the age of fifteen I had acknowledged this sort of a belief in God. I had done so because my Sunday school teacher was a successful Wall Street man whom I admired and I was ready to say that I subscribed to anything that he did. I enjoyed thereafter a sort of pink glow of self-approval which lasted for about three days and which formed the total of my “religious” experience. I was willing to admit, however, that there might be something in this plan which, from now on, I will describe as “Theism.”

There might, of course, be other ways to live and other things to live for. But these three seemed most likely and, in my book, I decided that the third or “Theistic” scheme seemed most likely of all. We were living to serve God.

So far, I had read no reference books on these or related subjects. I did not want either past or current opinion to intrude on what I thought was an original line of research. At this stage, however, I decided to check up and I found my reasoning supported at almost every turn by philosophical thought.

I found, in fact, that, through out the ages, philosophy followed far enough had led and could lead only to God. Plato with his speculative theory of ideas, Aristotle with his logic, Descartes with his ontology, Spinoza with his world of eternal verities, Berkeley with his idealism, Hegel with his trinity and the great V. C. Kitchen with his neo-pragmatism had but come to the same ultimate conclusion. And so had modern thought, following a break from God found only in the early socialistic and scientific philosophies.

In the evolutionary theory of my college days, for instance, nature had been cruel, and blind and red of tooth and claw. I found, however, that to-day such beliefs had largely given way to the emergent evolution of Alexander, the creative evolution of Bergson or the cosmic evolution of Boodin. All admitted or presupposed the likelihood of the creative work of God. Even in pure science, among leaders such as Millikan, Eddington and Jeans, I found acceptance of such likelihood. Millikan, for instance, said that scientists were now almost universally agreed that nature was, at bottom, benevolent. And he added that the practical teaching of modem science was extraordinarily like the preaching of Jesus. This view certainly would set up soul growth as the prime objective of existence. The trend was reaffirmed by biologists who, in the person of Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn, stated that evolution was unquestionably proceeding in moral directions. Still other scientists stated that there was unquestionably a force in the universe working to produce or modify human

personality and many did not hesitate to call this force the “power of God.”

Philosophy both past and present, in short, seemed to support my finding that we were living primarily to develop a personality or soul in the life school God provides for such a purpose. And this being so, I had not only been bungling life but had made an even worse guess about it than I first supposed. Life was intended to grow souls, not fortunes—to make character, not whoopee—to gain depth of understanding, not eminence in business or social circles—to seek the will of God, not the praise of the public. I certainly had been living the wrong way to accomplish these results. Well, it would be different now. Knowing what I was living for, I at last could begin to do something about it. And I, at last, could begin to do something for other people. After reading my book, in fact, I was sure that the burdened world could immediately arise from its ashes. Proudly, therefore, I wrapped my manuscript up and carried it to a publisher.

This publisher, happily for me, was a personal friend. He broke the news to me quite gently. “This part—this ‘Life and Why,’” he said, “is fine as far as it goes. Now write the second part and call it ‘Life and How.’”

“But ‘Life and Why’ is the whole book,” I protested. “What more does anyone need to know when he has learned what he is living for?”

“What,” he replied, “is the use of telling anyone why they are living, if you cannot tell them how to live that way!”

With indignation I carried the manuscript home again and sought consolation by taking the matter up with my chief drinking pal and with my business partner. They, however, gave me small comfort. “What,” said one, “do you mean by growing a soul?” “And,” said the other, “how do you grow it?”

Impatient with such petty minds I laid the book at last before my old professor of philosophy. He furnished some balm for my wounds. “In your own mind,” he said, “you have been thinking along the lines of some half-dozen of the leading living philosophers. But, to sharpen up your thought, try taking the high spots and boiling them down into short, helpful articles with particular attention to the application of your philosophy as a guide to self-management in business, at home and in all other departments of practical everyday living.”

I followed his advice but nothing happened. I wrote, in fact, a whole series of short articles on “What Else Can We Do in Education?”; “What Else Can We Do for Business?”; “What Else Can We Do about Marriage?”; “What Else Can We Do to Snap Out of the Depression?” and, finally, “What Else Can We Do to be Happy?” I tried, as I wrote, to show just how the knowledge that we are living to grow souls could and should affect our happiness. I tried to show how such a viewpoint should and would affect our relations at home, revise the conduct of our business, revolutionize the methods and aims of education, solve the world’s economic problems, straighten out our crooked politics, give new direction to ineffective forms of social service and put new life into dying religion. But still nothing happened. My articles came back from the magazines just as my book came back from the publisher. People, apparently, did

not appreciate this sort of work or—and a horrible suspicion began to dawn—perhaps my writing did not really help them.

Then the full truth burst upon me. My new philosophy not only failed to help others but failed to help me. Despite my new assurance that I was living to grow a soul,

I continued to live much as I had always lived—much as in the days when, in my ignorance, I believed that I was living to grow a fortune, a family and a thirst. There was actually no difference in my daily conduct. And I wasn’t any different as a man.

Despite my fine article on “What Else Can We Do to be Happy?” I myself was actually no happier than I had been before. I was, if any-thing, even more discontented. Despite the recognition that marriage was a relationship for helping men, women and their children grow in soul, no new growth (excepting out of last year’s clothes) could be noted in any member of my family. I found no new attitude and obtained no new results in business. I began to read no different type of book and made no change

in my self-prescribed and somewhat casual course in late-life education. I voted the Republican ticket and hoped for the best as usual. I was just as helpless about helping other people as I always had been. This living for God’s service should, finally, have somehow awakened a new interest in church but I found myself continuing to play golf or sleeping off a Saturday-night hangover on Sunday morning. There was no stirring in my soul. My new philosophy of life, in short, did not seem to show itself at all in any new way of living.

I then looked back once more at Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza and the rest.

They had held a somewhat similar philosophy. Yet they too had failed to produce any real change in themselves. And, while they were vastly more successful in presenting their philosophies to the whole of mankind, they too had somehow failed to change the world. Men always, it seemed, had been frustrated in their aims whether they believed they were living to grow a soul and planned to promote that end or whether, as in my case, they had simply given way to self-indulgence. Regardless of its various philosophies, moreover, the world had continued to run into wars, vice crusades, business depressions, dictatorships and disarmament conferences.

Had I then known what I now know, I might have seen that my entire philosophical fiasco was, at bottom, nothing but a further assertion of egoism parading under a mask of altruism. It was just another form of self-service disguised as a sort of a religious social-service—a desire to show off—a pretence that I was living and thinking nobly used to hide the ignoble way that I really thought and lived—an attempt to convert the world to my way of thinking in order that I, unperturbed and undisturbed, might continue with my own way of living. My “philosophical allegiance to God and consideration for society, in short was nothing but a subtle form of self-protection.

I might also have seen that, even if it were possible to think and reason disinterestedly, philosophy, at best, could be nothing more than a point of view about life. And a point of view does not, never has, and never can substitute for a point of contact with the power that makes philosophy applicable to living.

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CHAPTER III

THIS BUSINESS OF MEANING WELL AND DOING BADLY

MORALS

There comes a time to almost every man when he seems to die inside, and that time came to me, I think, when I found that this—my best guess about life—served neither me nor the other fellow any better than my first guess. I want to tell you that things looked pretty black to me right then. There seemed nothing much to do but go back to my dreary round of escapes from the home into the office and from the office into the speakeasy. I intended, of course, to go right on living. I would eat breakfast every morning as usual, suffering, also as usual, from my regular hangover. I would go to the office, as usual, play bridge when sober enough in the evenings, or interested enough, and let off steam between times on a party with the boys. I might even try an occasional but unenthusiastic fling at revising my book, though I felt that anything I wrote now would be just a lot of clap-trap—just a juggling of words—a building of illusions which had no place in the drab reality of life.

Then, through reading Herbert F. Standing’s book — “Spirit in Evolution” — a wholly new idea occurred to me. I had figured out three ‘plans—the egoistic, humanistic, and theistic. I had thought that, in deciding on the third of these—in deciding to do good and devote a larger portion of my life to service—I actually was following that plan and serving God. Standing’s book, however, suggested that to be spiritual one had to be far more than just well-meaning and intelligent.

I had always thought that “serving God” meant doing the best I knew in using the talents God gave me. And that was what I called “being creative in life.” My talents, I believed, were analytical, philosophical and literary.

As I read through Standing’s book, however, it occurred to me that soul qualities are not, after all, mental qualities. They are moral qualities. A big man spiritually is not made up, like a big man materially, of bank presidencies, directorships, influence, dominance and social prestige. He is not made up, like an intellectual giant, of doctors’ degrees and learned societies. He is made up of the simple moral qualities of honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. And he does not grow more honest or more pure through increasing knowledge of what is honest and pure.

He does not “get that way” through his intellect at all. Nor through his physical prowess and achievements.

All the material possessions I had ever acquired, for example, and all the intellectual knowledge I had ever gathered had not added a single cubit to my stature morally.

In fact, if anything, I had grown through the years more dishonest, more impure,

more selfish and more unloving than ever. The more I thought about it, therefore, the more I began to suspect that, before I could do anything to help other people — something would have to be done about it—inside of me.

But what?

I recalled the words of my publisher—”Write that second part—called ‘Life and How.’” And I recalled the words of my partner—”How do you grow a soul?”

Well—how?

It was here that Standing’s book helped me again. We grow physically, as he suggested, by response to a physical environment. And as the body adapts itself to use or survive its surroundings it grows not only in size, but evolves or changes in general character and quality.

The mind, I could see, would grow and evolve—not in response to its physical surroundings, but in response to an altogether different kind of environment—the environment of ideas in which it would find a sort of intellectual “food, air and exercise. And since this physical environment and this intellectual or psychological environment seemed to have no effect whatever on the growth of morality, I figured that—to grow morally—I would have to get in touch with some kind of moral environment, some set of conditions, some atmosphere of goodness, or some moral force which would feed, stimulate and exercise the honesty, purity, love and unselfishness in a man.

These qualities, as I well know, did not grow through self-indulgence. They did not grow through thinking. I could neither learn them nor teach them. But somehow, if they grew in me and became a part of me, I might pass them along to others by example, or a sort of a contagion—as one gives the measles.

They would not grow, as I now realized, however, unless I could lay hold of some kind of spiritual environment or moral form of “food, air and exercise.

And I did not know where to turn. While I was all too familiar with my physical environment or world of comforts, and was becoming more and more familiar with my psychological environment or world of ideas, I had never in all my life bumped up against any spiritual environment or world of goodness. If such a thing existed, it had never come within my ken. I had never sensed it in any way.

I knew, of course, that there may be the sudden emergence of something altogether new, novel and unique in nature—some species of plant or animal, let us say, which is not a hybrid of past forms—which did not grow, but just “emerged.” It just “pops’ ‘into existence, as Professor Lovejoy explains, who then goes on to say he has abundant reason to believe that “there have occurred genuine new births in time, a sheer increase, diversification and enrichment of the sum of things already there.”

This emergence or new birth has unquestionably taken place, not only in physical form but in the realm of man’s consciousness.

I, in my own career, seemed to have passed through two stages. First, I was conscious only of self and self-desire—reaching out instinctively for whatever I

wanted in my physical environment, and not caring what that did to other people and the world.

Then I began to think of what I ought to do for myself and others. Progressing from a sense of instinct to a sense of duty, I had reached, in my book, the intellectual or socially-conscious stage. I then found myself reaching for a still higher stage of consciousness. And since the emergent evolutionist, Alexander, says that “Deity is the next quality to the highest we know,” I believed that the thing I was reaching for might be no less than a consciousness of God.

But how was I to achieve this consciousness and form contact with the force that might help me grow a soul? Becoming aware of a spiritual environment, if any such thing existed, and getting in touch with God as a means of growing in soul, should, I felt, fall within the province of the Church. And, although I had never gained anything from the Church but that brief glow of self-approval the time I was baptized, I thought I might find something in religious literature. Here and there, as in the writings of G. A. Studdert Kennedy, I did run across passages which made me feel that the writer was in touch with some moral-creating force, inspiration or environment I did not know. But nowhere did I find any understandable suggestion which told me how I, too, might get in touch with this same force and experience the things that these occasionally inspired writers wrote of.

I could, of course, understand, as Edward S. Woods suggested, that a man might be no more able to create his own spiritual or moral life than “he is able to bring himself into the world at will.” I could see, as Drummond wrote, that, just as it is something outside the thermometer which produces a change in the thermometer, so it must be “something outside the soul of man that produces a moral change upon him.” I began, in other words, to see where the humanists might be wrong.

Professor Irving Babbitt, for example, had said that man is vile by nature and must make himself behave. But my excursion into religious literature, not to mention

my experience with broken New Year resolutions, began to show me that self-management as a corrective of behavior was entirely inadequate. There must indeed be some other environment or force, and I must find it if I wanted to gain any real and lasting satisfaction for myself in life or do anything creative in the world.

Still, however, these books did not say just what I was to do to form contact with that power and, much as I disliked and mistrusted them as a class, I decided at last to have it out in person with some intelligent minister. I selected one I believed to be spiritual by nature and who was, I felt, entirely sincere.

“What,” I asked this preacher, “do you think that we are living for?” To my pleased surprise he said he believed that we are living to grow a soul. There seemed to be real promise here. But when I put the question my professor, my partner, my pal and my publisher had thrown back at me—when I asked how you grow a soul—he, too, threw back the question. “Well,” he said, “How do you? If you could write a book on ‘How to Grow a Soul,’ it would be snapped up by every minister I know.” I had,

therefore, to add another “P”—the pastor—to the publisher, professor, partner and pal who had failed to furnish a solution to my problem. And I felt as though I had run against still another blockade of ‘‘Five P’s.’’

With my groping unanswered, I decided that the Church, with all its protest of modern knowledge and method, had not really risen from its ashes in the Dark Ages. The answer it held, if answer there be, might lie buried somewhere in the foundation of the Church, but, to me, it certainly did not appear in the twentieth century superstructure. I decided, therefore, to go back in history, and back, not simply to the beginnings of the Christian Church, but back to the beginnings of morality. I wanted to see if, throughout the ages, I could find any moralist, religious or otherwise, who had known, used and could convey to me the secret of applying his philosophy in the actual business of living.

A professor of philosophy from England once told me that for years he lectured upon morals to people all of whom were going to pieces morally under his very nose. His were moral words which brought no moral action. He was lecturing to people who, however well they might mean, were still doing badly. That fitted my own case exactly and, in fact, it seemed to characterize my entire age. Where then could I find a religion or philosophy that worked and what was the secret of its workings?

Beginning with one Ptah-hotep, an Egyptian moralist who lived some five thousand years before Christ and whose precepts appear in what is known as the “Oldest Book in the World,” I found a knowledge of right and wrong and a set of rules for moral conduct practically as complete as any that we know to-day. But I found no record that any of the ancient Egyptians, including Ptah-hotep himself, were practicing these precepts. His words, as far as I could judge, had no more effect on his hearers than those of the lecturer on morals mentioned above, and no more consequences in the course of world events than my own unpublished articles. People in those days, as now, were meaning well and doing badly. Through the history of all the moralists, in fact, I found a singular lack of moral application.

J. N. Larned seemed to sum up the whole story when he said, “…the knowledge of good and evil has been complete in the world from the beginnings of history, and…mankind has had nothing to learn since but the application of it.”

Here and there in history, of course, I could trace a partial application of morality.

This was true, for instance, in the case of Abraham, Moses, Confucius, Buddha, Mohammed, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Among them all, however, as I was now obliged to admit, there was but one—Jesus of Nazareth—who had lived out

His philosophy perfectly and completely. Lie alone meant well and did well in all departments of living. He alone sowed moral seed which had a universal rather than a limited spread. He alone was able to impart to His disciples the secret of application and the same power that He Himself possessed. But still I could not quite make out just what this secret or this power was. Was it the God-consciousness or contact

with a spiritual environment that I had now begun to grope for? Or was it simply a tremendous Personality coupled with an applied psychology beyond any known to-day? In either case, how did Jesus develop this personality or psychology? And how did He give His disciples the same command of power? Commentaries on the New Testament failed to say.

Tracing back the moralists, in short, I found a few partial appliers and one perfect and complete Applier. Yet nowhere could I seem to find just how this application was performed. If the Christian Church anywhere had preserved Christ’s secret of forming contact with God as a source of developing moral qualities of soul, they had by now pretty well concealed it, so far as I was concerned.

I was not, however, ready to admit that the state of “consciousness” I sought did not exist just because nobody had shown me how to find it. Christ Himself had stated that it was not an easy “way” to find, and I began to cast about for other means of “seeking.”

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CHAPTER IV

THIS BUSINESS OF “MAKING CHARACTER”

SCIENCE

Finding that schools of philosophy offered nothing but an endless merry-go-round of sterile thinking and futile debate, feeling that the Church had either ceased to have an effective message or had lost the art of passing it on, I — like so many of |this age—turned to the school of science.

Scientifically, I knew that, on the physical level, the body has to absorb violet rays in order to grow. On the psychological level the growing mind has to take m rays, let us say, from a student’s reading-lamp. To grow morally and thus really begin to live in my third, or theistic, scheme of life, I felt that I needed some kind of a spiritual ray to stimulate my dormant soul. It was clear that this spiritual light was not shining into my soul. Science, I thought, might show me why.

It occurred to me, for instance, that sunlight could not penetrate a dense body—that the rays from a student’s light could not penetrate a dense mind—and that, perhaps, a spiritual “light” (if any such thing existed) could not penetrate a dense character.

My pagan nature was, perhaps, too coarse—too sullied, selfish and sinful—to be sensitive to any spiritual environment—or to let the “light of truth” shine through. I could “see” more, I believed, if, somehow, I could clear myself up, much as I would clean a dirty window. And even though, like Drummond’s thermometer, I might have to rely on some outside force to send my moral mercury up to the new level, I would still, I thought, have to undertake a course in self-improvement—I would still have to clean the glass—before those rays of outside force could reach me.

Here, I was sure, science could be of great help to me, for scientific books on “self-improvement” could be counted by the score.

The first step in clearing oneself up, I thought, and especially in clearing up society, was to clean up one’s physical surroundings. If a man were born into an atmosphere of cleanliness, fresh air and loving, intelligent care, all other things being equal, he should have a better chance to develop refinement and clear moral vision than if his seed had fallen in the filth, neglect and darkness of the slums. Sociological control of the environment supplemented, if possible, by eugenic control of the seed itself, would be the first requirements in my scientific course of soul-culture.

The growing principle as well, I believed, should be strongly stimulated, and this stimulation, I decided, could come through the inspiration received from good books, good schools, good churches and good men. Especially essential seemed the inspiration of example—the example of some full-grown soul we could look and work towards as we move along the line of growth. As the books on “How to Succeed” would say, “Set a goal—desire it with all your heart—work towards it

with all your energy,” I would have to have a definite goal to desire and work for, and, despite my previous disdain for churchmen, I felt that the moral-scientists could well borrow their example and set up the goal of Jesus Christ.

I next considered the separate steps by which I must refine my nature in order to grow in the direction of a Christ-like character. This called, as I could see, for a very considerable stride—from a nature ruled to a large degree, as mine was, by lusts, and selfishness, and jealousies and hates, to a nature lighted up by love and charity and kindness. Despite the emergent possibilities of evolution this new character, I felt, represented too big a jump to “pop” into existence full-born. It called rather for an evolution by slow and gradual stages. I had heard, of course, of “overnight conversions,” but I did not think that such sudden leaps from slime to the sublime were likely to endure. And even if they did, I was quite sure that transformations of this kind must be the result of a long warming up before the boiling-point was reached.

This whole process, I believed, could be greatly aided and speeded up by our modern knowledge of psychology. The “laws of association” would help us to catch a Christ-like character while “sublimation of the libido” into higher and more
creative activities

—elimination of my baser desires through “the expulsive power of a higher affection”—these and other methods of applied psychology would aid in the climb from mere selfish consciousness, through the stage of social-consciousness, and up to the sublime God-consciousness of a man in the Spirit, which might prove to be the most real one of all.

My whole scheme, in short, reduced itself to the following formula: I was to raise myself, and the rest of the world with me, from the existing and chaotic state of (1) egoism, through the higher but equally futile plan of (2) humanism, and into the highest and only creative plan of (3) theism, passing, as we went, through the three evolutionary stages of (1) self-consciousness, (2) social-consciousness, and (3) Godconsciousness.

This clarification, evolution or growth would be accomplished by:

(1) preparation through eugenic control of stock and social control of environment; (2) stimulation through books, schools, churches, men, and especially through the high example of Jesus of Nazareth; (3) progress from present stages through gradual evolutionary steps; (4) acceleration through the methods of applied psychology. It seemed, on the whole a sensible and effective programme. The great mind of a certain V. C. Kitchen, advertising man, I thought, was now attaining something where the comparatively feeble minds of philosophers, ecelesiasts and scientists had failed.

After a little reflection, however, the plan did not seem quite so excellent. It would take many years and far more than my paltry powers to convince the world that it should adopt eugenic and sociological control. Such “remote control” might benefit my great-great-grandchildren, but could scarcely be used to help me apply my philosophy of life.

When, moreover, I came to apply the stimulating influence of Christ’s example nothing more resulted than before. The fact that I knew Jesus to be honest and loving and unselfish and pure did not make me honest or loving or unselfish or pure.

The truth is that, deep down, I did not even want to be. I could not, therefore, follow the advice of the success books. While I had “set a goal,” I did not “desire it with all my heart,” and, failing this, I could not “work towards it with all my energy.”

Jesus’ moral and spiritual qualities were admirable—very admirable indeed—but the only things I seemed to desire with all my heart were to be left largely alone, to find plenty of cocktails when I got home at night and, somehow, to fall heir to about twenty million dollars.

How could I grow from these desires into Jesus’ way of rising above material matters? Through my gradual evolutionary steps, of course? But what were the next steps that I should take? Dante, describing the progress of a pilgrim soul, wrote, that to such a soul, at first, small goods seem great. “Wherefore, he continues, “we see children desire exceedingly an apple; and then, proceeding further, desire a little bird; and further still a beautiful dress; and then a horse; and then a woman; and then riches, not great, and then greater, and then as great as can be. And this happens because in none of these does she find what she is seeking, and trusts to find it further on…” These, indeed, are evolutionary steps. And that, indeed, has been my own soul’s evolutionary history. But, having chased my pleasure, and possessions, and power, and position, and applause, in none of which had I found what I was seeking, and then seeming to see a greater good in philosophy, and then in the possibilities of the church, and then in science, and still not finding what I sought, what should my next step be?

There was still, of course, a further step in science. I had, as yet, applied no psychology, and men, said psychologists, could sublimate their desires and expel their baser aims through the power of a higher affection. But that was just the point.

I saw no further affection towards which I could turn.

Recently, for instance, a friend of mine went through a psychological cure for drinking. It did not last, and the psychologist excused himself by saying that his patient did not really want to stop drinking. He had tried to interest the drinker in hobbies—golf, stamp-collecting, and what not. This was on the theory, I suppose, that desire to do right can be strengthened if the sufferer is led into some other form of self-expression associated with a new pleasure-experience. Turn the experience of abstinence into fun and a psychologist can make us want it. But try to convince a man whose fun is alcoholic, and who finds expression in dancing on a table, that he will find greater fun in going dry combined with stamp-collecting, and, as in the case of the friend I mention, you will find that he very soon falls off the wagon. In his whole bag of tricks the non-Christian psychologist has no “high affection” to compare with the alcoholic’s love for alcohol, nor, in most cases, with the ordinary man’s plain love of self. Even if psychologists could and should learn the laws by which desires are shaped, unless they found a way to put their subjects

in conscious touch with God they would still lack the genius to change the pagan’s deep conviction that “it’s no fun to be good.”

I, as I now could see, had been making the same mistake. I had been telling people that they were living to grow a soul without elevating this growth into the position of a “higher affection” and making them really want to grow. I had been trying to offer the public a cure for educational failure, marriage difficulties, business troubles, social injustice, political corruption and religious ineffectiveness without first selling readers on the idea of wanting to take the cure. As an advertising man I should have known much better than that. “Arouse desire” is the first commandment of our trade. I had, of course, done what I could to arouse this desire. I had written in entire book of what we call “reason-why copy.” I had presented all the reasons

I could think of to prove that people really are living to grow a soul and will find no true success in life at anything else. But since I myself did not know how to put them in touch with God’s approval, I could not infect them with the pleasure of his act. Since I myself, moreover, did not know the pleasure of God’s approval, I myself did not look forward to being good with any great zest. I could see, at last, that on my whole’ proposition I had failed really to convince myself. I could see that growing a soul in God’s service was something that I ought to live for. But it was not, as yet, what I wanted to live for and that, I felt, was why I could not find or take my next evolutionary step.

Science says that we evolve by adaption to environment. But it does not say just how you adapt yourself to an environment with which you have never come in touch. And, if such exists, it does not say how you get in touch with a spiritual environment. As yet, in short, science seems to have confined itself to a study of the world of form. It has not begun to explore in the world of significance. It has not evolved a science of the spirit, though many scientists believe that some day they must and will find the existence of a spiritual domain.

Thomas A. Edison said before his death for instance, that he believed we had gone ahead about as far as we could materially without taking time to catch up spiritually. And, as Charles Steinmetz declared: “Spiritual power in the twentieth century is as dormant as was electrical power when Franklin flew his famous kite…

The next great discoveries will lie in the domain of the spiritual.”

Science may make these discoveries in the spiritual domain. The scientific discovery and application of spiritual power at some dim and distant date may benefit my children’s children’s children. Like the adoption of eugenic or sociological control of birth and environment, however, that could scarcely come to pass in time to start me growing my own soul. It would not fit me in this life to apply my own philosophy of living. And I had just begun to see that, until I myself was straightened around—until I had solved the problems of my own life—there was really nothing I could do to unravel the tangles of the other fellow.

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CHAPTER V

THIS BUSINESS OF THE SUPERNATURAL

METAPHYSICS

Science had promised some future excursion into the spiritual domain. But present results—however thin and shadowy—seemed more inviting than a mere promise of future discovery. “Dubious whispers” from “another world” intrigued me vastly more than the utter silence which appeared to reign in this world of sterile philosophy, stand-offish science and stuffy religion. And to get into touch with this “other world” I began experiments in that form of motor automatism known as the “Ouija Board.”

Do not, however, misunderstand me. The very genuine discovery, the complete and satisfactory solution to life’s problems that I have hinted at throughout these early chapters is not and never was a Ouija Board. In fact I would advise my readers to let this eccentric toy strictly alone.

Most of the “messages” that I obtained with this device were utter nonsense.

And, when occasionally they were more coherent, the “advice” imparted was no |more helpful to me than the strictly human advice I sometimes asked for and then proceeded to disregard. On one occasion, for example, what was supposedly the spirit of my maternal grandmother “advised” me that, since my father’s death, I had not been sufficiently attentive to my mother and that she needed my comfort and love. I realized that this was so and did nothing about it. I continued to be just as aloof, disinterested and embarrassed in her presence as I had always been—and just as ashamed to let her know that I, the son of a Women’s Christian Temperance Union treasurer, had started drinking without her knowledge or consent at the tender age of about fifteen. When, however, I received spiritual advice and power of the kind I am going to describe throughout the balance of this book, I knew exactly what to do about my mother, and I did it. And I was brought closely into her affections for the first time in many years. I am now, in other words, receiving supernatural aid—not through a nonsensical Ouija Board nor any other spiritualistic “instrument”—but through God-consciousness—through direct personal contact with the third environment—the spiritual environment I had so long been seeking.

I had previously failed to receive this aid for the very simple reason that I had been trying to supply all the power myself—even after I learned that power for moral growth would have to come from the outside. I believed that the Lord helps those who help themselves. I was keen on self-management—a self determinist— the captain of my own soul (if not of a tugboat). And there is the real secret of all human difficulty.

Since I now know the answer to these difficulties, and did before I slipped the first sheet of this book into my typewriter, you may ask why I have taken five chapters

just to recount my failures. It is because other people—people by the million—are making those same mistakes and going through the same failures over and over again. They think they have found the answer to life, as I did, when they, too, have chased and momentarily caught up with pleasure or possessions or some other of the five false “P’s.” Perhaps, passing by this unsatisfactory stage of immature development, they have sought, as I did, the sterile comfort of philosophy. Perhaps then, as I did, they have faced the dreary prospect of an unwanted morality or tried to force a stodgy ethical culture on a reluctant humanity. Perhaps, again, they have lived, with me, in that fool’s paradise which believes that science can do anything — little witting, as Robert H. Lowie says, that “Scientists are led astray by tradition, by timidity, and by the unchecked play of fancy and emotions” just like other people.

Perhaps, with all this “thinking,” they too have formed a beautiful ideal of what might happen for themselves, and especially for society, could their particular philosophy, or system of ethics or theory of science be applied to the uplift of humanity as a whole. Perhaps they have slaved in some branch of world improvement while harboring the lurking fear that their sacrifice is futile. Undoubtedly, at some time, they have regarded mankind as a fine, upstanding, self-determining body, able to work out its own salvation, once it got rid of the superstition of “religion” and other out-dated “traditions,” and began to live “under the rule of reason.”

Perhaps, in briefer outline, the reader is still living in the cramping confines of a self-centered egoistical Plan No. I. Perhaps he has moved on into the larger, but still narrow and abortive, socially-centered, humanistic Plan No. 2. Perhaps, again, he is still leading nothing but a Church-centered life, fondly imagining that he has attained the God-conscious “life abundant” of theistic Plan No. 3. Perhaps, in short, still groping his way through these dark places, he is still trying futilely, as I was, to solve not only his own personal and family problems but the problems of the whole world by means of a totally inadequate vision and insufficient power.

I would like, in such cases, to rescue him from unavoidable frustration and inevitable failure in life—just as, through the witness of the Oxford Group, God has rescued me. And I would like to introduce him to this disciplined army of life-changers who first gave my life real meaning and direction.

I, excepting for my one brief baptismal glow, had never had a real religious experience in my life. And yet, as I soon found, I had to have religious experience before the veil lifted from my eyes and allowed me to see the supra-sensible light of the spiritual domain. I had, in other words, actually to become God-conscious before I could see what lay behind my previous failure to do so. I had to gain supernatural insight before I could see the true nature of my own and other men’s natural mistakes. The Oxford Group, however, has a most natural way of introducing one to the supernatural and, in their skillful hands, God’s miracle of changing lives seemed no more unnatural than the many natural or physical phenomena we are accustomed to observe.

With this change—but not before—could I see the reason for my former failures.

It was as if I had stepped all at once from the ordinary world of three dimensions into a fourth-dimensional sphere.

It is difficult to describe such matters to those who have not yet gained spiritual insight, just as it would be difficult to explain colors to a man who is color blind.

Moral blindness is much the same thing, and it is a blindness which clears away only when you become sensitive to the light of the spiritual realm.

In ordinary terms, therefore, I can only say that I had been unable to see light because I stood in my own way. I had, as you may remember, suspected that there might be some supra-sensible kind of spiritual light, just as there were ultra-violet rays of sunlight and invisible beams of knowledge which flow into our minds. I now found that this was so and found, also as I suspected, that the coarseness of my own nature obscured this light to a degree which made me unable to “see” it. Powerful as is this light of God, man’s own shadow will blot it out of consciousness. I had buried my nose so deeply in my own coat collar and was so eminently conscious of my own desires in life that I could not, at the same time, be conscious of anything else. When later I occupied my mind with the troubles of the world, these did not, by any means, squeeze out my self-absorption. They simply added to absorption as a whole—absorption away from God. A burning candle is not seen in a room already illuminated. And God cannot be heard in a mind busy with other and coarser
matters.

I also had been wrong in thinking that I would have to emerge from my self-absorbed state by slow and gradual evolutionary degrees. Despite my former suspicion of “sudden conversions,” I found that a man had simply to step out of his own light to become immediately and keenly conscious of the presence of God. As W. Elsworth Lamson says of St. Paul: “He did not climb by any laborious Platonic stairway to the heights whereon God stood. He was there.” I, too, was there. As the emergent evolutionists might say, I “emerged” into God-consciousness all at once and, as another member of the Oxford Group has said, “There could be no question of it. I knew that God was there.”

I seemed, in other words, to reach a “critical point” in sensibility. On the one side was self and social-consciousness and moral blindness. On the other side stood God-consciousness and moral vision. And I passed from one to the other as suddenly and definitely as water brought to the critical point passes into steam. Even the steps which lead up to this leap do not seem to be evolutionary or progressive steps in the usual sense of the word. Evolution commonly denotes a process of organization, of accretion and of building up. It is a filling up with new and additional things brought together and organized in the mind and body. My spiritual growth, however, and especially that sudden leap into God’s light, seemed to result from an entirely opposite process. It was a process of breaking-down—of disorganization—of emptying out—a matter of deflation in my own self-esteem until self-approval and concern for the approval of others had shrunk to a point where I was willing to step entirely aside and give God a chance to shine.

I do not mean that, with this sudden emergence, I suddenly became perfect in character nor rose to any real height of spiritual understanding. A spiritual babe has to grow spiritually after he is born just as any other babe has to grow. I mean only that such birth can and does take place suddenly. One moment I was blind. The next I could see.

This sudden stepping out of the darkness is difficult—and particularly difficult for a man who does not realize that he is blind to start with. Blind fish who swim in subterranean caves cannot imagine such a thing as sunlight. Neither could the wholly selfish “blind” man I am about to describe.

This portrait of a man was drawn by his wife—not built up from her own opinions of him—but derived from the things which he himself has said that he likes, or hates, or cannot stand. She simply took down notes of his own utterances which ran somewhat as follows:

HE HATES:
Prohibition.
Marriage.
The routine of his existence.
Responsibility.
Duty to his family.
Drunken parties (for other people; with his own gang they are grand).
Having to live with his wife.

HE CANNOT STAND:
Crooners.
Religion of any kind.
Having to visit his mother.
Sitting still—resting in bed.
Censure of any kind—particularly of himself.
Selfishness in others—though not in himself.
Unkindness—also in others, but not in himself.
Restraint of any kind.
Moral “movies.”

HE LIKES:

Shorts.
Liquor for himself, when and as desired.
Freedom to do as he pleases.
The world—as he is having it.
Himself, as he is.
Being let alone to go to hell in his own way, which he describes as just wanting others to be “tolerant” towards him.

Admiration from others—especially other women.

Having his own way in all things—he could not imagine giving up self-will.

This man is so vividly conscious of these likes, aversions and dislikes that he literally cannot become conscious of any outside attitude. They make so much “noises’ within him that he cannot hear any other “voice.” If his wife, for instance, should resent his attention to other ladies, he cannot possibly grasp that point of view. He puts it down as “intolerance” towards him and is totally unconscious of her real needs and feeling in that matter. When selfishness stands between a man and his wife to such an impassable degree—when he is so insensible to the needs and wishes of a person he sees every day—how can he be sensitive to the needs and wishes of a God he has never seen and will not even admit?

I have given an extreme case, you may say. Well, read over this list again and see how many of these likes, dislikes and hates you yourself may possess. This crass form, moreover, is by no means the only form of selfishness. There are many subtler ones.

I know, for instance, a sweet old lady full of what some people call “good works.”

Described as a saint, she was to me a devil in disguise for, year after year, her “good works” in my behalf consisted in telling me what a clever chap I was, when what I needed to be told was that I was a conceited ass. I remember that she kept telling another woman what a splendid wife and mother she was, when this splendid “wife and mother” was selfishly doing more to ruin her husband and spoil her children than almost any woman I have ever met.

This liking to be nice to other people so that they will like you may be an unconscious form of selfishness. But it is selfishness nevertheless, and a form of selfishness which lets the other fellow down far more than would a blunt assertion of indifference. In my own case, in fact, I found that self crept into almost everything, whether subtly and subconsciously or whether in crass defiance of good taste and other people. And whether insidious or gross, this selfishness had as surely shut me off from a true consciousness of God.

Not only that, but self-interest—even under the guise of social benevolence—had been dragging me further and further back towards the brute. Even when I had set myself a high ideal and purpose, my life was almost entirely lacking in moral effort.

And when, as the Rev. Dr. Bernard Iddings Bell has said, “…the moral endeavor slackens, then an epoch ends, a civilization goes to pieces, and men, subsiding once more to levels essentially animal, carry out their task of mutual self-destruction.”

Moral endeavor slackens, I know, as soon as self-interest quickens, and that, I think, is what has brought the modern world into the sorriest plight it has ever known.

How, then, does one reverse this process? How did I accomplish self-deflation instead of continuing the advancement of self-interest?

Since this is a chapter about metaphysics, I might as well say that I believe the forerunners of science—the alchemists of old—had a better grasp of this problem

than do many of our modern scientists. It is said that these alchemists were mystics who were not merely trying to turn lead into gold. They realized the glorious results that might be attained through the transmutation of man’s soul into spiritualized gold. They thought this could be done by “an awakening of the inner conscience” which, in order to achieve this magnum opus, must first be free from all ambition, hypocrisy and vice, and from all faults such as arrogance, boldness, pride, luxury, world vanity, oppression of the poor and similar iniquities. I once put this down as a simple minded superstition. But now I know, from personal experience, that the alchemists were right.

I also know that these ambitions, hypocrisies and vices were not drained out when I transferred my belief in one plan or philosophy of life to another. They were not drained out by making New Year’s resolutions and they were not disposed of by going to psychoanalysts or by going to church. They were drained out by stopping the self-effort to get rid of them—by letting God take hold to do the job, and by putting God first in life.

I had put God first in theory, yet still continued to mean well and do badly. That was because I was still trying to run my own life. I had not put Him first in living, but had kept my self-love uppermost and had built my scheme of things quite upside down.

When I turned things around, however, and put God at the head of the list—when I ceased struggling to pull myself up and stepped out of the way so that His light could shine down to me—when I let Him show me how to use the individuality

He had given me to accomplish for myself, for humanity and for Him, the things He wanted me to accomplish—then, for the first time in forty years, things of consequence began to happen in my life.

I came, at that time, not only into consciousness of God but into usefulness for God. I was able to do, through God’s help, what no man ever has been able or ever will be able to do for himself. I was able to supplement the all-important “Why” of life with the still more important “How” of living. I was able to begin really solving my own problems and, for the first time in my experience, was given the power to begin helping others. I no longer wished well to “myself alone.”

This, however, is jumping ahead in my story. I want to take you from the occasion on which I first met the Oxford Group down to the time when, through this book, I first met you. It is a sort of “Pagan’s Progress” which will show you how I and thousands of others have been led to the one great “emergence” in life which can solve either personal problems or the problems of an over-troubled world. It will show how, as we began to grow in this new life, we reached towards new heights of spiritual accomplishment and understanding.

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CHAPTER VI

THIS BUSINESS OF THE OXFORD GROUP

APPLICATION

Among the “P’s” I had turned to in life, it was my pal who came through in the pinch and put me on the track of five more “P’s”—the peace, plenty, purpose, progress, and new form of power I am finding in life now.

This pal, who was my room and drinking mate in college, had a brother. That brother, four or five years ago, had run off the track entirely. He had hooked up with some new-fangled religion and, as I understood, had become fanatic. Such a nice fellow, too!

My friend and I speculated over our highballs on the nature of this curious religion which the newspapers of that day referred to as “Buchmanism.” Its principal attraction, we had heard, was the “confession of sins.” Rumor had it, moreover, that these confessions were “shared” by sinners, and shamelessly gobbled up by an assortment of mixed guests at a so-called “house-party.”

I at once imagined a sort of exotic atmosphere—tiger-skin, firelight, bowls of roses. We tried to picture ourselves in such a session and there came to mind certain sins I might tell and others that I certainly would not.

We never, however, peeked behind the scenes of any of these “orgies” until one winter, when the Oxford Group held a dinner at the Hotel Plaza in New York. My friend’s brother did not invite me, which peeved me a bit. If they were trying to interest important people I felt that I was certainly one of their most likely prospects, and I told my friend I wished his brother would count me in the next time they held a “party” of that sort.

I will admit I felt more than a passing curiosity in the movement. I felt that they might have some “psychological” answer or some other stunt I could use in my book and, when an invitation finally came to attend an Oxford Group house-party at Briarcliff Lodge, N.Y., I was more than willing to run up there for the week-end.

Not knowing what it would be like, my friend and I, and another man, spent a couple of hours in a speakeasy which gave us a rollicking start. We also stowed some bottles in our bags and took a few “revivers” on the way to Briarcliff. By the time we sauntered into the dining-room we were quite perked up, though we soon discovered that, among the six hundred or so people there assembled, ours were probably the only fiery breaths.

Everybody, however, seemed to be having a wonderful time and they did not look at all like the anemic, chinless characters I had always associated with religious or non-drinking people. They were an astonishingly healthy and vivacious-looking lot, clear of skin and, what impressed me most, with a remarkably straightforward gaze

and a clarity and sparkle to the eye that I had rarely seen before in any company.

The company itself, I found, was made up of people of all kinds from various countries. A Chinese diplomat was there, an army officer from India and a count from Holland. The son of a Member of Parliament dined with the daughter of a pioneer statesman from South Africa. The rector of an Edinburgh church bore the same name and sat at the same table as an ex-leader in the Communist party in Scotland. A student of the Sorbonne broke bread with a former chaplain at Harvard.

An Assistant-Secretary of Agriculture, a member of the former retinue of Kaiser Wilhelm, the pastor of a fashionable New York church, a family which had motored all the way from California, an actress, an ex-bootlegger, a banker, a member of the New York Stock Exchange, a stenographer and a lady doctor were a few of the others I happened to meet.

My own dinner companion was an ex-soldier, business man and big game hunter from South Africa. I was advertising for the world’s foremost manufacturer of firearms at the time and my companion’s familiarity with big game rifles formed a common bond between us. It seemed, however, incredible to me that a man of this agreeable personality and two-fisted character did not drink. A lady I once dined with had observed that it seemed to her that “all the really nice men drank.”

I thought so too and eventually screwed up my courage to ask this fellow why he didn’t. He said simply that he “did not need it” and that he had “something else.”

During the first evening, to be sure, my friends and I did not gain a very clear idea of what that “something else” might be. From the various speakers who took the platform we judged they seemed to be enjoying what they all described as a “new quality of life.” In fact they did seem to have some unusual quality. There was that straightforward clarity of eye that I had noticed. There was a fellowship that was
not of the back-slapping order. There was a spontaneous sparkle and zest—not of social banter nor of alcohol-stimulated wit, but of genuine joy that seemed to well up from inside. They seemed to possess some inner wine, and of the stimulants I knew they had no need indeed.

The first man to speak that evening had long been executive secretary of one of our best known universities. He was, I could see, an intellectual of the highest type and said that he had plumbed intellectual depths to the bottom but had found no answer to life. Then he had come upon “this something”—this “new quality of life”—and had begun to find an answer to all human problems. This man’s experience set me thinking. His search had lasted much longer than mine and he had found, as I had, that the quest was barren of result. Yet he too had found “something else”—a something, whatever it was, that I myself very much wanted to find.

A little later in the evening another educational authority spoke. It was a lady this time—one who had been president of the National Education Association. Once, she said, when on the platform in Washington she had welcomed the President of the United States as her guest, she felt that the pinnacle of human achievement

had been reached. Yet now she knew that neither education nor top position in her profession had given her the real answer to life; nor, as she found, had legislation or organization work. Years as a lobbyist in Washington and Albany, and connection with or leadership in some forty-seven different organizations, had proved the futility of human effort along self-determined lines. At many points her experience coincided with mine. She too had that “something” that I wanted for myself.

There had been no tiger-skins or roses—no soft lights. There had not even been confession of the things that I called “sin”—nothing but a confession of inevitable failure under the old self-assertive ways of living and a declaration of glorious victory in this new God-empowered way of life.

I went to bed that night quite sober and with much to think about. I was still thinking the next morning and attended what these people called a “quiet time.”

They said they were “listening to God.” I listened as attentively as any of the rest, I thought, but “heard” nothing—nothing at all. Gradually as I attended more quiet times, services and witness meetings, however, I began dimly to sense what these people were driving at. They claimed they had gained what I had been trying to gain—a consciousness of the spiritual environment—a direct contact with God.

On the afternoon we had arrived, someone showed me an article by the celebrate Michael Pupin, electrical wizard of Columbia University. Its sense, as I remember it, was that this great electrician believed the power of God to be an actuality— something as real in the universe as the power of electricity. Man, he said, had been able to gain control of his physical environment only by using forces external to himself. He used the power of heat or the power of electricity without which, let us say, he could not fly into the air. Man similarly, Pupin added, would not be able to go anywhere in moral fields or rise in the spiritual environment until he had learned to tap and use the supplementary power of God in some what the same way. The Oxford Group, it seemed to me, had tapped that power and were using it in the business of living with the dexterity of a spiritual Thomas Edison.

Finally I got down to the point of questioning them. “You,” they said in answer, “believe that there is something going on in space. You, from what you tell us of your book, believe that God has some kind of a plan and method for developing the personality or soul of human beings. You naturally, therefore believe that it is everyone’s duty to enter into conscious and direct co-operation with that plan.

Rather than conflict with or kick against what is actually going on in the universe, you believe that people should enter consciously into the scheme of things and deliberately try to grow a soul. And yet you say you don’t know how to do it. You don’t know how to apply your beliefs. You don’t know how to get in touch with
God.”

These indeed were my beliefs and these indeed were my difficulties.

“You believe there’s a plan,” they continued. “Did it never occur to you to get in touch with the Author of that plan, asking Him directly what His plan is and what

He wants you to do about it?”

No—I was forced to admit—nothing as simple as that ever had occurred to me.

I had thought, from a casual survey of occult religions that, through a series of initiations, adaptations, or whatever you go through, one might somehow get in touch with a so-called “cosmic consciousness”—whatever that might be. And I had my own idea of exploring a “spiritual environment.” But the idea of getting directly in touch with God Himself—of asking Him questions and getting answers and directions for the conduct of my life—seemed to me an out-and-out absurdity.

Yet these people said it could be done. They said they were doing it themselves and that was what gave them the power to apply beliefs and carry out the plan of God—a power that I did not have. They said, however, that I could have it—just as they did—if I would pay the same price—comply with the same conditions—and go through the same series of exceedingly simple steps.

First, they said, that I would have to make clean contact—much as in forming an electrical connection. In setting up aerials for the family radio I had scraped the ends of copper wire often enough to know that. To get my contact points clean, they said, I would have to face up to my sins, and “sin” they defined as anything which came between me and any other person or stood between me and God. Then they said I would have to surrender my will and make it subject to the will of God. I would have to give up entirely the old life of self-assertion and self-determination.

There was, in other words, no use in clearing a telephone line to God if I was just going to sit back at my end of the wire and make up my own mind whether or not I wanted to do what He told me. They also said that, just as I would not trust a willful child with an automobile, God would not trust me with any of his dynamic spiritual power unless He knew that I was going to use it as Jesus Christ would use it—for purposes of absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness and absolute
love.

Here were posers for me, and I promptly tried to dodge the issue. This, as I found later, is what nearly everybody tries to do. No sooner is a person faced with the challenge of being absolutely honest and owning up to the kind of person he really is—no sooner is he faced with the idea of giving up his own sweet will in life—than he ducks hastily for cover and hunts up an alibi of some kind.

At precisely this point, for instance, I have heard person after person who has been challenged start to criticize the Oxford Group. “They’ve no business to wash their dirty linen in public,” says one. “I wouldn’t share for anything,” says another, adding that his or her religion is “too sacred to wear upon my sleeve.”

I know these dodgers by now. I know them well. Particularly wriggly are those who protest that there are “other ways to find God,” such as “looking for God in others,” through “nature, beauty, truth and goodness”—through anything but that ugly necessity of looking oneself in the face and really admitting one’s sins to God and man.

There are also the conservative-minded to whom the entertainment of a new idea of any kind is literally an agony. There are those who come to Oxford Group meetings just out of curiosity and form an unjust conclusion from an inadequate contact. There are the misinformed people who don’t know what it is all about and those who know only too well what it is about and are afraid they will be caught by it.

All in all they are a class who—whatever else they see—see clearly that the challenge to absolute honesty, purity, unselfishness and love is something that threatens their complacency in life, and something which is likely to destroy their self-approval. As a psychologist says, we will always stand at bay and fight to the bitter end to retain our self-approval. “We,” he goes on, “deny the accusation against us, we revile the accuser, we argue, we grow hot and red in anger, we bluff, we lie, to defend our reputation.

I, too, did all these things, or nearly all of them, when I first met the challenge of the group. I lied, for instance, by saying that I did not have any sins in particular.

I might have had some in my younger days—but not now. Drinking and smoking I did not consider sin. As for impurity—I would not, of course, like all my actions published, nor would I care to I throw my thoughts on a screen where all might
read.

Tell dirty stories—yes—funny ones. No harm in that. As for summer escapades with the family away—well, they were not as raw as they used to be and did not worry me at all. When, finally, it came to my business, social and amateur theatrical accomplishments—to my opinion of myself—to my brain and what I secretly considered was “intellectual giantism”—I felt I had good reason to be proud.

My conversations with the Group by now had simmered down to a two-man basis—in the lobby of the hotel. There were, as I have said, no tiger skins or shaded lights. There was no mixed company—not even a public confession. I was talking to one other man who, from his own story, had been as big a reprobate as I. And yet, as I talked, I stuck pretty closely to a rather hand-picked list of sins. I did not want to let him see the really nasty things inside of me—the things that I was most ashamed of. I did not want him to guess what a rotter I really had been and still was.

And so I wound up by saying that my sins were not really troubling me at all. My real trouble, I glibly lied, was simply confusion—inability to see what we are living for—inability to solve both the “why” and “how” of life.

I also squirmed a bit, both openly and mentally about that other challenging requirement—the surrender of my will. If I promised to do whatever God told me to do—if He could tell me to do anything which I still did not quite believe—He might tell me to do something that I couldn’t or jolly well did not want to do. If he told me to be absolutely honest, for example, that was clearly impossible in the advertising business. At least it would be most embarrassing, highly uncomfortable and probably unprofitable. God also, I thought, might lead me apart from my

family spiritually, geographically, or both. He might start me living on some higher spiritual plane, or send me to China as a missionary, while leaving my wife and children behind. I developed an unexpected fondness for my wife and children. If they were to be left behind or were on the road to hell, I, very nobly, would stay behind and go to hell with them.

Then, too, I argued to myself, God might tell me to stop drinking and smoking.

There were, I knew, no rules about anything like this in the Oxford Group. You did not have to “stop” anything when you surrendered your life to God. But after that—God might tell you to stop. And if, at any time, I was called upon to quit my tobacco and alcohol, there would, I was sure, be no more fun for me in life.

I had known before that my difficulty in bungling my Plan No. 3 lay in not wanting to lead the good life. Here apparently were people who did want to. They, in some way I did not quite understand, got fun out of being moral. They must be different from me and the good life might, therefore, be all right for them. Probably they had never known any other kind of life. But—no, sir, not for me. Not if it came to giving up drinks and smokes. No, sir, not for me.

That was the general conclusion I came to after a week-end at Briarcliff. They were an unusual and interesting lot of people. And they had some sound ideas. The “quality of life” they talked about would be good for quite a lot of other people that I knew, but I was sure that it would make my own life even more uncomfortable than it was already and so I did not want it for myself. I wanted something I could turn to for solace. I wanted, in short, to keep on with my cocktails and all my other comforts. And, while my friend and I talked the matter over with surprising animation and with much greater agreement than had been usual of late, we also finished up our gin as we drove home that night.

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CHAPTER VII

THIS BUSINESS OF BEING REBORN IN LIFE

TRANSFORMATION

It seems amazing that anyone whose life had grown as futile as mine should want to hang on to his fruitless pursuits and tasteless diversions. Doing what I wanted had never brought me any real fun, yet I thought that I would be a fool to give up these things. Despite what I had seen at Briarcliff, therefore, I decided that I, the great V. C. Kitchen, was a little different from other people and could continue to live outside the laws of self-denial.

I also had begun to suspect that, with all my acting and pretence, I was fooling comparatively few people. And whether I was fooling them or not I knew quite well that I was finding no real fellowship with them. Still, I reflected, what my wife did not know would not hurt her and it might prove very uncomfortable for me should she get wind of it. In my own family, as elsewhere, therefore, I—the self-sufficient V. C. Kitchen—would continue to live outside the law of fellowship.

At Briarcliff they had said that I must surrender my will, obeying God in all things, even if He told me to go to China, forsake my family, throw up my job or give up my friends. Clearly, however, I could not do that if I was going to go on doing what I wanted to do and pretending to be what I wanted people to think I was. I, the self-determining V. C. Kitchen, would continue to live outside the law of obedience.

I was fighting at that time, although I did not know it, to retain not only my “comfortless comforts” and the strong material affinities I had formed in life, but to keep some vestige of my self-approval and hold on to remnants of my pride.

This battle, however, only lasted a few days. I had at last met people who had more than arguments to fight with. They had experience to offer—an experience that I myself could taste. And it proved to be a pleasure-experience which, I very soon discovered, made me want to live that kind of life.

A powerless philosophy, a dry and dusty ethics, a pleasureless psychology and the lower reaches of a still-intellectualized metaphysics had failed to pry me loose from the affinities I found in my lawless pagan world. They offered no “higher affection” which could lure me out of my old life. But when, through contact with the Oxford Group, I actually began to find some satisfaction in self-denial, when I actually found fellowship instead of shame in honest sharing and when, through obedience to a higher law, I gained my first knowledge of true freedom, there began that change of feeling which culminated in the change of my entire life.

This change commenced a few days after my return from the group house-party.

My business took me to New Haven and, while on the train, I had ample time for reflection. It was then that I made my first experiments in self-denial.

The trip, for instance, was one I had always drowned in tobacco smoke, for I was an inveterate smoker and lit my pipe the first thing in the morning, putting it out the last thing at night. When, at times, I felt it threatening my heart and lungs, I had made the effort to cut down smoking. But that never lasted more than a few days and I had never succeeded in cutting it out. This time, however, I decided to see if the God the Oxford Group had talked about could and would assist me. I asked His help rather than attempt the thing myself and something unusual happened. I did not strike ii match all day and, to my surprise, felt no accompanying nervousness or discomfort.

It was the first time I had ever won a battle of this kind with what seemed to me an utter lack of struggle. I felt a strange sense of dependence on some power that was utterly dependable—a power within yet coming from outside myself—a power far stronger than I was. And even, as I tried to argue, if this power were only my “better self,” what a great relief it would always be to have that better self to depend on. There would be, in such a case, I thought, no more inner conflict in my life—no more uncertainty of mind—no more question of “Should I do this?” or “Should I do that?” There would be but one answer to every question—the one right answer for me—the clear unhesitating answer that this “other power” would always give me.

Release from tobacco was not the only freedom that I gained that day. I found, at the same time, a strange release from boredom. The trip had promised to be one of tedious routine. I had intended to hasten through the details of getting my “copy” approved and to catch the first train home with as little discussion as possible. I found, however, that I was reviewing my own “copy” with new interest. And I listened to the criticisms of my client—not with any thought of brushing them aside and being on my way—but with the thought of using them to write a more effective advertisement. So absorbed did I become in turning out a better piece of work that I not only failed to get away early but remained with my client after hours. And I not only missed the train I had hoped to catch but missed several trains thereafter.

It was, in fact, past six o’clock and I had nearly two hours to wait when I reached the railway station. Supper took scarcely half an hour and I was wondering what to do with the rest of my time when the train announcer beckoned to me. “There’s a New York train just ready to leave,” he said. “It’s the train you missed. It broke down in West Haven and has just backed up into this station.” I smiled, for this seemed most obliging of the train. It seemed, in fact, almost as if—in recompense for giving extra time myself—God had spared me the annoyance of boarding that train, had given me opportunity to enjoy a comfortable supper, and then saw to it that I had no further time to wait before resuming my journey. This, to say the least, had been a day of unusual occurrences and I decided that there might, after all, be some fun in living with my usual comforts and interests less at heart. I did not realize it then but I had already begun to live within the laws of self-denial.

Even before this trip, moreover, I had begun experiments in a new kind of

fellowship. While driving back from Briarcliff, for instance, I had noted a new interest and animation in my relationship with the man I had known most intimately for the last twenty years. We did not reach my house till three in the morning yet, so interested were we, that we routed my astonished wife out of bed, and sat up till five in order to tell her just what we thought about it. And there, as we talked, strange things began to come to mind. I actually imagined myself sitting beside her and telling her the things I was sure I never could or would tell her.

The outcome of these curious experiences was that, several days later, I went back to Briarcliff and she went with me. The Oxford Group house-party was still in full swing. This time we stayed but a day and a night, yet that was enough to water the seed already planted. We were not, as we thought, fully convinced, yet, oddly enough, as we drove home the second time, each was ready to defend the movement valiantly when anyone started to criticize what he had seen and heard.

Inwardly, I knew it was a step I would have to take some day. I hoped my wife would take it too. But neither of us guessed just then how close we really were to the brink of that new world.

The miracle, in fact, began to happen as soon as we reached home. I found myself sitting on the sofa by my wife—just as I had imagined. She started the conversation and then, without knowing exactly how or why, I found myself blurting out the whole story I was never going to tell anybody. My wife, to my amazement, had something to tell, too. We both were taken by surprise and then by a sense of great relief which, to me, proved even more surprising.

I could and would have sworn that the “sins” of my past life were not really bothering me. Though I was ashamed to let the rest of the world know my secret acts and desires, they were not, I thought, troubling my own conscience. And my wife—when I heard her story—seemed to have even less cause for uneasiness.

When, however, we told each other fully and freely the kind of people that we really were—the kind of things we really did and thought—when we took off the masks we had worn through seventeen years of married life and stopped pretending to each other to be something that we were not—we each distinctly felt an acute and actual sense of physical release, as though some forty thousand pounds had rolled from our shoulders.

This sensation of release and freedom is, I now know, an almost universal experience for all who face and confess their sins under the eyes of God and one other person. This is especially true if that other person is one who has suffered through your sins as, in my case, my own wife had suffered. It was the first time I had ever tried being “absolutely honest” with anybody. An entirely new bond sprang up between us and, although again I did not realize it, I had begun to live in touch with God, and without barriers of bluff between myself and my fellow human beings. I had, in fact, begun to live within the laws of fellowship.

Forming a clean contact with God, however, does no good unless God then

chooses to release His power. And God, as I have said before, will not do so unless He knows that He can trust you with that power. He will not give you power to use just as you wish, but only as He wills, and only for as long as you surrender your own will in absolute obedience. If you admit you need His advice and then decline to take or follow God’s guidance as it is given, you might just as well continue to blunder along “on your own” from the very beginning.

By God’s grace, however, my wife and I had no sooner taken the very necessary step of sharing and confessing our sins to each other, than we were led to take the second and crucial step of self-surrender. “I feel,” she said, “that we should have a little prayer together”—something we had not done or even thought of doing since, seventeen years ago, we had knelt before the altar. Now, however, we prayed—out loud. And we meant it.

I do not remember the actual words of my first genuine prayer. In general, however, it ran very much like this: “I surrender Thee my entire life, O God. I have made a mess of it, trying to run it myself. You take it—the whole thing—and run it for me, according to Your will and plan.”

According to earliest recollections I began my pagan life by wanting to be captain of a tugboat. I ended it by resigning the captaincy of everything I was, knew or possessed. “I am the master of my fate” gave way to “Thine is the kingdom and the power.” “Thy will be done” was substituted for “I am the captain of my soul.” As we thus tossed aside “Invictus” and took up the Lord’s Prayer, we stood together out of our own light and began, as a united team, a joyous and adventurous exploration of the third or spiritual realm. We were reborn into life and began, for the first time, to live under the laws of obedience.

As we emerged into this new environment we felt ourselves responsive to new stimuli. We gained, as it were, new senses like a man who, paralyzed through life, had awakened to his first definite sense of sunshine, and heat and cold, and taste, and touch, and smell and hearing. Like such a man, we found ourselves in a wholly new relationship with the world in which we were living. It was, in fact, a wholly new world—a world in which Jesus Christ Who had been to me a dead historical character, became a vital living Presence Who could actually be “felt.” With the inspiration of this Presence, it was a world in which the moral and spiritual qualities of human beings, or their lack, were as clearly discernible as their mental and physical qualities had been in the world of our former understanding.

“Now,” said my wife, “I know what is meant by ‘The Peace that Passeth all Understanding.’” And it passed understanding indeed.

Never had I known, guessed or imagined anything like this within the range of human experience. I was in a world of which I possessed no former knowledge.

“Nonsense,” said some of my friends. “It is just new to you. We, for our part, have known religious experience all our lives and it’s an old, old story.”

I knew, however, what most of them meant. They meant the self-appreciative

kind of “pink glow” I had experienced when baptized. They meant the occasional cold chills that sometimes chase along your spine when you hear a beautifully played organ.

They meant the “being in tune with nature”—the reverence and awe you may feel sitting on a sand dune and looking out at the ocean or in sitting alone on the top of a high mountain.

I too had felt those things. But I can assure my readers, and so can thousands of others in the Oxford Group and elsewhere, that they are nothing—nothing at all— compared with the deep, vital, life-changing experience of facing your sins honestly and of then surrendering your life to God, wholly and without reserve. I had not lived at all until I began that new quality of life—a life which is lived within the laws of self-denial, fellowship and obedience. It is then, and then only, that a “self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong, inferior and unhappy becomes unified and consciously right, superior and happy” according to the famous definition of William James. It is then and then only that the luminous vision, abundant life, integration of character, power of helpfulness and creativeness in living come to those who confess, not merely their faith but their sins, and who profess not merely a belief in God but begin to practice absolute obedience to Him.

What a difference all this made in the actual business of living. Instead of finding myself surfeited with the stale delights and ever-deadening throwback of self-indulgence,

I found myself open to and refreshed by the kind of fun you find in God’s approval. It is fun which is ever so much keener and more zestful than any I had ever experienced from self or public approval. Instead of the pretences of society—a cloying intimacy with women, a shallow friendship with men, utter boredom with most people and a self-seeking eye to all—I found the deep and joyful fellowship of a communion of saints. Instead of the sourness of “my own sweet way”—instead of the self-promotive plans and their inevitable frustration and disappointment—instead of rigid programmes leading nowhere and vainglorious ideals—I found the “energy pattern” of God, as free and rhythmic as a bird and as different from the slow and stupid mapped-out plans of men.

It was thus that I found the “higher affection” which my false gods, philosophies, ethics and psychology could not supply. I came upon it not by hearsay but through actual personal experience. I learned to want to live this higher quality of life through actually tasting the only love in the world that surpasses man’s love of self and gives to him the power of regeneration.

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CHAPTER VIII

THIS BUSINESS OF GETTING NEW BEARINGS

ORIENTATION

I had long believed that “you can’t change human nature.” It was no use, I thought, trying to clean up politics, straighten out business or untangle marriage because “men aren’t built that way.” Then I found that men aren’t built at all. They are building. And it is not only possible to start a new building in life but to reshape the entire old structure. Human nature, in short, can be changed and changed very roundly. I have seen it not only in my own life but in hundreds of others. And I have seen that it is changed—not by any method I had formerly imagined—but through application of what, to me, has proved a wholly new and unfamiliar power.

I had believed with certain scientists, for instance, that, while self-improvement would suffice in my own case, the level of humanity as a whole could be raised only through a “prolonged and intelligent and humane birth selection aided by humane birth control.” I now know that self-improvement is no good either in my case or any other. It is rather a matter of self-displacement—a putting of self out of the way so that God can step in to do the work. It is a matter of re-birth controlled by the Holy Spirit—a matter of the spirit which has nothing whatever to do with eugenics.

Nor is this change, I found, a matter of psychology. I once believed that I could think my way out of all difficulties. To pump up the pressure of desire to a point where I would really want to grow a soul and serve a God, for instance, I thought I would only have to think up enough good reasons for so living. And I thought that when I had given enough of these good arguments to other people they too would undergo a change in thought which would work towards a change in our social, economic, marital, educational, political and religious systems. Now I see, of course, that it is not a change in thought or in system which produces a change in man. The change in the man must come first—a change brought about by God and God alone—a change which will then be reflected in new and creative thought and new and creative systems.

Finally, in this work of orientation, I found I had to abandon not only my own physical-biological theories, not only my old psychological-social theories, but my old metaphysical and spiritual theories as well. I had believed, as P. D. Ouspensky writes, that “The possibility of the appearance or development of cosmic consciousness belongs to the few.” I had thought it was a change which could come only to highly developed, supersensitive or highly privileged characters among which I was not included. I have found, however, that it is a change which can come to everybody in the world. With some it may be a somewhat slow process as was

the conversion of St. Peter. With others it may be a more immediate change as was the case with St. Paul. All human beings, however, can be changed and brought into wholly new relations with the world of physics we respond to through our senses, with the world of people we respond to through our minds and with the world of God that I, until now, had not responded to at all.

In my physical world, for instance, I had been governed largely by the law of reciprocity—the physical law which says that to every action there must always be an equal and opposite reaction. My reactions were fixed and inevitable. I never saw a foaming glass of beer, for instance, without wanting it. I never saw an attractive woman without wanting her. I never saw a comfortable couch without wanting to lie down.

Physically I found only two ways to handle these desires. One was to satisfy the desire which, however, always ended that desire and gave me no real satisfaction in the end. The other way was to restrain the desire which proved even more unsatisfactory. As I got my bearings in the new life, however I found that God had a far wiser and altogether different way of dealing with desire. He satisfied unsound desire by removing the desire itself and that has given me the only genuine satisfaction I have ever found.

After surrendering my life, for instance, I felt such peace and joy that my reciprocal, instinctive physical desire was to “celebrate as usual” by pouring out a generous libation of alcohol. I had actually started for a bottle in the pantry when God stopped me with my first real bit of guidance and told me that I could not serve Him as long as I was a slave to gin. I then and there admitted my inability to quit of my own will and asked God to take charge of the matter. He did. I looked at the bottle and felt a distinct sensation of nausea. I was revolted at the very thought of a drink and the desire for alcohol has never come back. God simply lifted that desire entirely out of my life, and I have found this freedom far more desirable than any satisfaction or repression of desire I have ever experienced.

In somewhat the same way God swept my mind free from the impure and desirous thinking which had so largely filled it. And where once I had concealed the nature of this thought life—even from my most intimate companions in sin—I would not hesitate today to project my flow of thoughts upon a screen where my own children could read them. God also tackled my lazy fondness for soft couches. Where I used to drag myself out of bed somewhere between eight and ten, it is seldom now that I am not up by six, and sometimes by four or five, eager to spend an hour alone with God and to start the day right, under His guidance. Where, moreover, I grudgingly gave eight hours a day to my business, and seldom put in a full day at that, I now quite often put in eighteen hours at the work God directs and find that day not too long.

This release from desire might seem at first to be a rather dreary matter. But God never seems to take anything away without putting something far happier in its

place. For example, I thought I had found fun in the stimulation of alcohol. But real fun has only come to me in the exaltation of spiritual living. I find myself filled with a kind of outrageous joy, and not just while on a spree, but from morning till night, day after day, month after month. To replace sensuous lusts I find a sublimated and ever-deepening love for people—the kind of love that is concerned, not with multiplying the number of human beings but with the far keener joy of remaking the quality of human nature. And to replace what I once thought was the luxury of laziness I now find deep-seated calm and peace—a peace inside as unruffled by what goes on outside as the depths of the sea are unmoved by surface storms.

These, moreover, are only a few of the changes that have taken place in my nature and they are all so far in the physical or self-indulgent areas of living. There is also that whole range of psychological or socially-conscious life and of spiritual God-conscious life where the change is even more pronounced and the results still more
enjoyable.

If it were not for other people in the world, I suppose that a self-indulgent man would go through the whole of his life on the physical level, responding reciprocally to every incitement in his environment. Other people, however, make it necessary to control his desires to some extent and here, instead of the reciprocal response of man to nature, we find the psychological response of one individual to another.

Instead of just drinking when and where I wanted, for example, I often retired to the pantry for a secret drink in order not to run foul of my wife’s felt or expressed disapproval. The fear of running into conflict with what other people thought confined many of my feminine conquests to the realm of the imagination. And, instead of indulging laziness by stretching out on every inviting couch, I resorted sometimes to daydreams at my desk where I gave the semblance of working. These, I feel, were worse than out-and-out indulgence which would, at least, have been honest.

Even when I sincerely wanted to help other people, this fear of what others would think crept in to distort things. I sincerely wanted to help my own sister, for example, but did not want to let her or other people see that, with my mighty mind, I had no real answer for her problems. Like the would-be helpers who have nothing but a ton of coal to give the poor, I had nothing but a tome of philosophy to give my sister. To cover up this dearth I started “talking down” to her, pretending to be on a level I had never myself attained. Nobody, naturally, was helped—least of all my sister.

God dealt with this social pretence much in the same way that He had dealt with physical desire. Where my way in the physical world had been to indulge or to restrain, God’s way was to remove. It proved