CHAPTER XXXIV THE SONGS OF THE NOBLE GREAT We may make our lives sublime.-Longfellow. EVERY noble life sings its song to the world, and to every personal soul that will listen. What a masterful, strong, purposeful song was that of Roosevelt, and how America and the best of the world missed his vibrant voice when it was hushed. In the main his was a Divinely ordered song, for every note in private and public was for purity, honesty, manliness, straightforwardness, sincerity, truth. His voice is seriously missed here, but the clairaudient can distinctly hear it yet, clear and strong, in God's great and glorious chorus. How the story of Joan of Arc has gone singing down the centuries for the heartening of weak and fainting men and women of all countries and climes, to be heard again with renewed vigor in our day when France and Belgium and England needed heartening in the days of their great testing. [And here let me interject, by the way, a question. Have you yet read Mark Twain's Joan of Arc? If you haven't, your education as an American, as an Internationalist, as a man, a woman, is incomplete. Go, get it at once and if you are not inspired to greater faith and nobler deeds, as well as delighted with the masterly way in which it is written, I shall miss my mark.] Thousands, hundreds of thousands, yea millions have sung new songs because of the maiden heroine of France. Truly she has been "calling to us"and our songs answered, from concert halls, drawingrooms, recruiting stations, lines of marching men, and men singing or humming under their breath in the trenches. Our soldiers and workers have answered by the noble devotion of their lives to the great work of Freedom for all Peoples. Another typical "mastersinger," was Darwin, the great naturalist, and I would include with him, Huxley, Tyndall and their great exponents, Herbert Spencer, John Fiske, and Joseph Le Conte. They sang the Song of Scientific Truth, of Intellectual Freedom, of daring to think for and be responsible for oneself. The church too long had endeavored to stultify man's thought, his reliance upon his own God-given faculties, by such assertions and teachings as: "He that doubteth is damned." Darwin and his co-workers dared damnation in their search after truth. Revealed religion could not conflict with any other kind of religion. All religions must agree, must harmonize, or they could not originate from the One Source the source that revealed religion itself emphatically asserted was the Only Source of all good and real things. Their song was a loud one. It penetrated the ears of the scientific and then the theological, and finally the common world. It sang freedom to many a soul, and gave a leap to the heart and a new thrill to the life of countless millions. For the song now is heard everywhere. Most men sing it unconsciously. Though many are still bound down by a meaningless and lifeless creed- -a creed that falls to ashes as soon as it is seriously studied they hear this song of freedom and it appeals to something within them that responds. Browning, in his Ring and the Book gives it to his noble character, the Pope, to state this responsibility for his belief and life that inheres to each man individually, that no church can relieve him of, no priest absolve him from: God, who set me to judge meted out So much of judging faculty, no more: In my list of the noble and great singers of the world I would place all the opponents, great and small, unsuccessful as well as successful, of the tyranny and oppression of kings. William Tell, Stephen Langton, Garibaldi, Kossuth, Cromwell, and all the unnumbered hosts who would not bow the knee to, or cringe before, Baal. How can anyone respect the arrogant and impudent assumption of kings, all kings, and kaisers, and czars, and emperors, and their attendant parasites and associate. thieves, the nobility, the aristocracy. They might truthfully be termed thieves of the land that really belongs to all the people; thieves of national privileges; dodgers of legitimate taxes; and, worse than all, thieves of the manhood, the womanhood of their nations. The bowing and scraping, tipping of the hat, curtseying, and general kow-towing to these "great ones"-how hateful it all is, for how despicable it makes the people that indulge in it. The "My lord-" ing and "my lady-" ing, and "your grace-" ing, and "your worship-" ing, ought to make the healthy stomachs of normal men and women turn. In the early days of the world's history there might have been some justification for chieftainship, the leadership of the strong-even as there is now,-and all intelligent men are willing to submit to such leadership. But this is a very different thing from the artificial "class system," based upon so-called "blood," and "wealth." The "class" of brains, of character, of goodness, of real useful power all intelligent men recognize. We gladly rank ourselves followers under the leadership of the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Roosevelts, Jim Hills, Gladstones, Lincolns, Lloyd Garrisons, Frances Willards, Anna Shaws, Clara Bartons, and the leaders of musical, literary, poetic, and artistic power, but why Godcreated men and women should demean themselves and their children by bowing and scraping to a group of people because they were born to a useless life of luxury and self-indulgence is more than I can com prehend. And the remarkable thing of this obsequient subserviency is that those who bend the neck and bow the knee have made this condition possible by their very subserviency, for they and their ancestors were robbed of their inherent rights by the very people who "lord and lady" it over them. Thank God the note has now gone forth of a new song: Let all autocracy perish. All men, in their inherent political rights, are born free and equal. No man, or class of men, should have more rights and privileges than any other. The era of kings and kaisers is past. Let man stand proudly upright in his manhood, his dignity and honor of character, his sonship to God. With a new song like this men and women can march together in triumphant glory far surpassing all the glory and pomp of war, with its false glamour and deceptive offers of fame, for this is the march of the world towards the highest achievements possible to mankind this side of heaven. So let this song abound, increase, rise higher in its all-conquering strains, and let everybody sing, so that its power will be all-embracing, all-absorbing, all-encompassing. Who is there, of civilized lands, that has not heard the strong note started two generations ago in the streets of London by William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army? Strong and robust at times to raucous vulgarity, now and again rising to uncouth shouting and ranting, or screeching and yelling, and accompanied by inconsequent jingling of tam |