Helen Keller, page 51
We are not free unless the men who frame and execute the laws represent the interests of the lives of the people and no other interest. The ballot does not make a free man out of a wage slave. There has never existed a truly free and democratic nation in the world. From time immemorial men have followed with blind loyalty the strong men who had the power of money and of armies. Even while battle fields were piled high with their own dead they have tilled the lands of the rulers and have been robbed of the fruits of their labor. They have built palaces and pyramids, temples and cathedrals that held no real shrine of liberty.
As civilization has grown more complex the workers have become more and more enslaved, until today they are little more than parts of the machines they operate. Daily they face the dangers of railroad, bridge, skyscraper, freight train, stokehold, stockyard, lumber raft and mine. Panting and straining at the docks, on the railroads and underground, and on the seas they move the traffic and pass from land to land the precious commodities that make it possible for us to live. And what is their reward? A scanty wage, often poverty, rents, taxes, tributes and war indemnities.
The kind of preparedness the workers want is reorganization and reconstruction of their whole life, such as has never been attempted by statesmen or governments. The Germans found out years ago that they could not raise good soldiers in the slums, so they abolished the slums. They saw to it that all the people had at least a few of the essentials of civilization—decent lodging, clean streets, wholesome if scanty food, proper medical care and proper safeguards for the workers in their occupations. That is only a small part of what should be done; but what wonders that one step toward the right sort of preparedness has wrought for Germany! For eighteen months it has kept itself free from invasion while carrying on an extended war of conquest, and its armies are still pressing on with unabated vigor. It is your business to force these reforms on the Administration. Let there be no more talk about what a government can or cannot do. All these things have been done by all the belligerent nations in the hurly-burly of war. Every fundamental industry has been managed better by the governments than it was managed by private corporations.
It is your duty to insist upon still more radical measures. It is your business to see that no child is employed in an industrial establishment, or mine, or store, and that no worker is needlessly exposed to accident or disease. It is your business to make them give you clean cities, free from smoke, dirt and congestion. It is your business to make them pay you a living wage. It is your business to see that this kind of preparedness is carried into every department of the nation, until every one has a chance to be well born, well nourished, rightly educated, intelligent and serviceable to the country at all times.
Strike against all ordinances and laws and institutions that continue the slaughter of peace and the butcheries of war. Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought. Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder. Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings. Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in an army of construction.
January 6, 1916
From My Religion
VI
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RELIGION HAS been defined as the science of our relations to God and to our fellow men and what we owe to ourselves. Surely Christianity, rightly understood, is the Science of Love. When the Lord dwelt upon earth visible to mortals, He declared that on the two commandments, Love of God and Love of the Neighbour, “hang all the Law and the Prophets.” Who could know the Scriptures, and all human thought for that matter, as profoundly as did the gentle Nazarene charged with His divine mission? He emphasized the divine necessity of love all through the Gospels. “God is Love, God is Love, God is Love!” was the invariable meaning of such phrases as these, “If ye love me, keep my commandments”; “This is Life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent”; “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things [happiness and material blessings] shall be added unto you”; “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” He always visualized hatred as the opposite of God in every detail, great or small, and His teaching about hell was not as of punishment by God, but the inevitable law of evil recoiling upon those who cast themselves into hate and the burning lust and the cruel miseries of wounded pride and thwarted egoism. No matter from what angle He started, He came back to this fact, that He entrusted the reconstruction of the world, not to wealth or caste or power or learning, but to the better instincts of the race—to the nobler ideals and sentiments of the people—to love, which is the mover of the will and the dynamic force of action. He turned His words every conceivable way and did every possible work to convince the doubters that love—good or evil—is the life of their life, the fuel of their thoughts, the breath of their nostrils, their heaven or their destruction. There was no exception or modification whatever in His holy, awful, supreme Gospel of love.
Yet for two thousand years, so-called believers have repeated “God is Love” without sensing the universe of truth contained in these three momentous words or feeling their stimulating power. As a matter of fact, ever since men began seriously to philosophize about life, there has been a sinister silence on this noblest of all subjects. In the history of love as a doctrine is a revelation of the tragedy of how God verily comes to seek His own, and His own know Him not. In the Fifth Century B. C., Empedocles, the Greek philosopher who held the atomic theory, took to himself the credit of being the first to understand the nature of love and to recognize its true place in human affairs. He was trying to find out the elements of which the world was composed, and by what processes it was held together. In his list of elements he named fire, water, earth, air, and then went on to say, “and love among them, their equal in length and breadth, her do thou fix in mental vision, nor sit with dazed eyes. She it is who is also thought to be implanted in the mortal members, making them think kindly thoughts and do friendly deeds. They call her Joy and Aphrodite. Her has no mortal yet observed among the elements of the world.” A century afterward, in the most brilliant period of philosophy in Greece, Plato’s soul was kindled to generous indignation by Empedocles’s words, and with a burst of eloquence he protested against the heartlessness of the wisdom of his age: “What a strange thing it is that whereas other gods have poems and hymns made in their honour, the great and glorious god Love has no encomiast! The wise have descanted in prose on the virtues of Hercules and other heroes, and have even made the utility of salt the theme of eloquent discourse, and only to think that there should have been an eager interest created about such things, and yet to this day no one has ever yet dared worthily to hymn Love’s praises, so entirely has this great Deity been neglected.” I think it was in his discourse on courage, “Lachesis,” that he said that to injure anyone, even the most despised slave, was an affront to the holy bond which united gods and men and things in friendship. Then, except for the Voice of Divine Love speaking its message to the hate-dulled ears of men, more than twenty centuries passed with only here and there a mind brave enough to heed those heavenly accents and attempt to translate them into the harsh speech of earth. St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, À Kempis (whose “Meditations” I have read with joy), Spinoza, Jacob Boehme, and some other mystics and Francis Bacon stood valiantly on the outskirts of their time and gazed deeply into the vast, unknown sea of feeling which rolls forever beneath the darkness of words not understood. They had penetrating insight into the ways and works of love, love of others and self-love. It was Boehme who called the gnawing, burning appetites and desires of the selfish “the dark worm of hell”; of which the Scripture says, “their worm dieth not, and their fire is not quenched.”
But only when Swedenborg arose out of the cold age of reason called the Eighteenth Century, did love as a doctrine again shine forth as the centre and life, the beauty and the preserver of all things. With the Bible for his authority, he developed this doctrine to some extent in his “Arcana Cœlestia” and more completely and systematically in his “Divine Love and Wisdom.” He interpreted the whole world of human experience in terms of love—states of love—the activities, powers, and functions of love, the constructive, preventive, and courage-stirring dictates of love. Moreover, the seer discovered that love in the eminent sense is identical with the Divine itself, “that the Lord flows into the spirits of angels and men,” that the material universe is God’s Love wrought into forms suitable to the uses of life, and that the Word of God, rightly understood, reveals the fulness and the wonder of His Love toward all the children of men. Thus at last a faint ray, travelling through infinity from the Divine Soul, reached the mind of deaf, blind humanity, and lo, the second coming of the Lord was at hand.
Swedenborg’s teachings about life can best be understood if we carefully differentiate between life and existence. The Lord bestows existence upon each of us for the express purpose of imparting life to us. His infinite Love impels Him to be a Creator, since love must have objects to which it can give its wealth of good-will and beneficence. In the Love which is the life of the Lord, we find the origin of creation. His infinite want cannot be satisfied with anything less than the existence of beings who can be finite recipients of His own happiness. At the same time such beings must have freedom and that rationality which accompanies true freedom. That is, His gift of life to men must be received voluntarily and thoughtfully by them if it is to be their own. That is why human beings pass through two distinct experiences—the birth into existence and the birth into life.
When we are born of the flesh, we are utterly helpless and dependent, while in the spiritual birth we are active, and in a sense creators. We have nothing to do with our birth into existences; for we must exist before we can make anything of ourselves. On the other hand, our birth into life is a matter of choice, we have a very direct share in it; for no real spiritual life can be thrust upon us against our will.
This is the meaning of the Lord’s constant, loving invitation through His Word to all of us, to come unto Him and choose life, and be ever on our guard against the evils which would rob us of the chosen life. Only by exercising our powers of thought and keeping our hearts always warm and pure do we become truly alive. But this beautiful work of re-creation cometh not by observation, it is wrought in the quiet depths of the soul. For, as the Lord says, “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but thou canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth; so is everyone that is born of the spirit.”
Therefore we should not think of conversion as the acceptance of a particular creed, but as a change of heart. It is the soul turning away from the ignoble instincts which tempt us to feel, think, speak, and act for mere self-interest and the good opinion of the world, and finding joy in the unselfish love of God and a life of usefulness to others above all things. Our choice of life is this delight—this sweet expansion of mind and heart without which no worth-while achievement is possible.
But we are not born again all of a sudden, as some people seem to think. It is a change which comes over us as we hope and aspire and persevere in the way of the Divine Commandments. For a long time we resolve like angels, but drop back into the old, matter-of-fact way of life, and do just what we did before, like mortals. We are already on the road to success, however, when we see that because we have always done something, and because everybody does it, and because our grandfathers did it, are not good reasons why we should do it. There is no plane of experience where, if we want to, we cannot enlarge our lives by caring about people outside ourselves, and seeking highest, most helpful ideas of Him who is the “Way, the Truth, and the Life.” When once we make up our minds to do this, and set out fearlessly, all outward circumstances and limitations give way before us. We take up our cross daily with a stronger heart and a fairer prospect of life and happiness.
Swedenborg’s own mind expanded slowly to the higher light, and with deep suffering. The theological systems of his day were little more than controversies, and so full of long-drawn-out hair-splittings that they seemed like caverns in which one would easily get lost and never find one’s way out again. Swedenborg had to define important keywords such as truth, soul, will, state, faith, and give new meanings to many other words so that he might translate more of spiritual thought into common language. For his doctrine of love he had to find a special vocabulary; indeed, it almost seemed as if he were himself learning a different language. He was baffled by habits of thought which any man accustomed to depend largely on his eyes would require great courage to break, so firmly are they entrenched in the sense. It was one thing for him to perceive as through a glass, darkly, the spiritual forces that sustain life, and quite another thing for him to trace them clearly back to their beautiful origin in the Heart of Love and communicate them to an age of cold reason, disputing creeds and skeptical inquiry. Trying to “think the thoughts of God after Him,” as Kepler said, was a superhuman task. The only way I know to give any idea of what Swedenborg was up against is to suggest the tremendous obstacles a blind man encounters when he wishes to help others handicapped like himself. He must spend his life trying more or less successfully to make the seeing understand the particular needs of the sightless, and the right method to repair their broken lives with friendship, work, and happiness. It is amazing what profound ignorance prevails even among fairly well-informed persons regarding the blind, their feelings and desires and capabilities. The seeing are apt to conclude that the world of the blind—and especially the deaf blind person—is quite unlike the sunlit, blooming world they know, that his feelings and sensations are essentially different from their own, and that his mental consciousness is fundamentally affected by his infirmities. They blunder still further, and imagine that he is shut out from all beauty of colour, music, and shape. They need to be told over and over innumerable times that the elements of beauty, order, form, and proportion, are tangible for the blind, and that beauty and rhythm are the result of a spiritual law deeper than sense. Yet how many people with eyes do take this truth to heart? How many of them take the trouble to ascertain for themselves the fact that the deaf-blind inherit their brain from a seeing and hearing race fitted for five senses, and the spirit fills the silent darkness with its own sunshine and harmony?
Now Swedenborg had a multitude of similar difficulties in conveying his impressions as a seer to the matter-clogged, mirage-filled senses of his generation. Who knows—perhaps the limitations of the blind who have eyes and the deaf who have ears may yet be a means of carrying God’s messages down into the darkest places of man’s ignorance and insensibility. Without wishing to be the least bit presumptuous, I hope I may have some skill to use helpfully my experience of life in the dark, as Swedenborg used the experiences of two worlds which he said were granted him to elucidate the hidden meanings of the Old and the New Testaments. It is a peculiar happiness to me to bear record of the potency of God’s Love and its creature, man’s love, which stand between me and utter isolation, and make my misfortunes a medium of help and good-will to others. It is an ever-new sorrow to me to realize the tragedy of Swedenborg’s opening words in the “Divine Love and Wisdom”: “Man knows that there is such a thing as love; but he does not know what love is. . . . And because one is unable, when he reflects upon it, to form to himself any idea of thought about it, he says either that it is not anything, or that it is merely something flowing in from sight, hearing, touch, or intercourse with others, and thus affecting him. He is wholly unaware that love is very life; not only the common life of his whole body, and the common life of all his thoughts, but also the life of all their particulars. This a man of discernment can perceive when it is said; if you remove the affection which is from love, can you think anything or do anything? Do not thought, speech, and action grow cold in the measure in which the affection which is from love grows cold? And do they not grow warm in the measure in which this affection grows warm? But this a man of discernment perceives only by observing that such is the case, and not from any knowledge that love is the life of man.”
The trouble is, people mistake the utterances, smiles, glances, and gentle deeds of love for love itself. It is just as if I should make the mistake of supposing that the brain thinks from its own power, or the body acts of its own accord, or the voice and tongue cause their own vibrations, or my hand recognizes anything independently of me, when really all these parts of the body are acted upon by the will and mind. Or as if I might place my hand on a beautiful lily and inhale its fragrance, and insist that the senses of touch and smell were in the flower, when in reality the skin by which I feel produces these sensations. That is the kind of appearances that should be guarded against when love, life, and mental activities are discussed. The common idea of love is that it is something outside of man—an entity floating about—a vague sentiment—one of the abstractions that cannot be talked about, because it cannot be distinctly thought about. But Swedenborg teaches that love is not an abstraction without cause, subject, or form. It does not float through the soul or come into being at the touch or sight of an object. It is the inmost essence of man out of which his spiritual organism is formed, and what we perceive as love is only a sign of that substance. Love actually keeps his faculties alive, as the atmosphere gives the senses of touch, smell, taste, sight, and hearing their sentient life.
I may illustrate the distinction between love and its tokens, for which it is so often mistaken. For, unless we have a vivid sense of love’s reality, we cannot reach it and change or deepen or purify it, so that our affections may be higher, and our joy increased. We simply go round and round it in a vicious circle trying to change our tendencies, reconstruct ourselves and others, while love weeps at being left out—or if it be evil, it scoffs at us and hugs itself complacently. From my own struggle with imperfect speech I have this example of a wrong, roundabout, indirect method of making over what is marred. It would be absurd to attempt to improve my voice by operating on the sounds it emits as they float through the air. No, I must practise on my vocal organs, and that is of no use either until I improve my inner, or mental, concepts of speech. Voice is not essentially physical, it is thought making itself audible. It is literally shaped, tinted, and modulated by the mind. My supreme effort in practising is to get true images of sounds and words as it were in my internal ear, since my bodily ear is closed, and the nearer I approach the right use of mind as a speech instrument the better I shall be understood by others. This seems a far cry from voice to love; but the principle is exactly the same. Life, with all its emotions, likes, dislikes, and interests, flows, is moulded, coloured, and ultimately its vicissitudes are controlled, by the inmost love of man. He should strive to form the true mental concept of love as an active, creating, and dictating power if he wishes to acquire nobler feelings, finer ideals, and satisfy his so pathetic yearning for happiness.
