Viewers and Regarders

...The prospect of a generation in the near future, very largely pagan, not in the sense that religion has been learned and discarded, but in the sense that a large proportion of human character has been molded without its help at all, is far from being fantastic...

...They do not begin where we leave off, as we want them to do...

...Mather A. Abbott, headmaster of the Law-rcnceville School for Boys, who emerged from academic seclusion recently to give the Rotary Club of Trenton, New Jersey, his views upon the coming generation, is, quite obviously, a optimist of the first water, but of the second category...

...A generation selfish and quite cunning enough, for all its beardless chins, to realize that, in faith, love, subscription to any ideal—in Dr...

...Till now the scission between belief and unbelief has been masked by the survival of Christian tradition— in other words, religious motives for action have been disliked, but their force has been appreciated...

...They would grossly underestimate the faculty for optimism latent in the Dr...

...The Doctor's words are too deliberate, they register too clearly a stage which contemporary thought bas reached, not to deserve somewhat textual quotation...

...It will be all the more meritorious and efficacious for better things if it is tinctured with that charity of which Father Martindale, in his article upon pagan morality, gives us some idea when he tells us that "it is easily conceded that pagans constantly lived better than their creed," so far better, indeed, that Augustine could say of them that they "saw the road from the hill-top...

...At another time the facts will be so patent that they must, perforce, be admitted...

...Consider it a moment...

...A day may well be at hand, and nearer than optimism cares to admit, when even this tribute to what the Christian considers first values will not be conceded, and when believer and unbeliever, perhaps through no fault of the latter, will be speaking incommunicable languages...

...phrases to express the two states of mind...

...Should this day ever arrive (and it is our business to see that it never does) it is obvious that professing Christians will have to call, not only upon their fortitude, but upon their indulgence...

...As reported in the press, what the head of Lawrenceville School has to say is that belief of any kind in the unseen world, so far as an observation of thirty years has given him a chance to note, is becoming a thing of the past...

...But, in the sphere of intimate and personal relations, which law and order do not touch, it may well be a different matter...

...The methods of the prophet of fair things are as various as the basic reasons for his optimism...

...If there be one thing upon which "viewers" and "regarders" seem agreed, it is that what we are watching today, in its virtues no less than its vices, is a return to pagan habits of thought, and that this return, as Charles Peguy warned the world shortly before his spectral end upon the western front, is coming to us through the generation who will be the mature men and women of tomorrow...

...These were misinformed, or led into error by their apprehensions...

...Abbott is speak60 THE COMMONWEAL November 24, 1926 ing of the youths of pre-college age committed to his care] is that they must prove everything by experience...

...They take nothing for granted...

...They must go through every experience for themselves...

...Their greatest characteristic [Dr...

...Abbott to say that his personal significance as a champion of youth, great as it may be, vanishes in the' very far-reaching implications of what he tells us...

...Americans, who are a practical race, apt to consider wisdom of any sort as the poor relation of common sense, have coined two telling...

...Not willing to face the deep questions of life, they try to seek happiness in the material...

...In an article which The Commonweal noticed a few weeks ago, M. Decout, of the Revue Apologetique, noted a "contempt" for all branches of knowledge not to be turned into immediate monetary gain, and the "fascination" of material success among the pupils, even in Catholic colleges, who would correspond in age and social class roughly to the 540 young Americans at Lawrenceville...

...In this case, it is upon the conclusions that optimism brings its rosy light to bear...

...Abbott was striving to draw for the Trenton Rotarians would be termed a dark one...

...In his own impressive words, "the pagan blood is flowing back...

...So, though the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, the modern generation are practically without the fear of anyone whom they cannot see...

...Nothing is gained by taking a catastrophic view of what a world largely un-Christian might mean...

...We talk* currently, of "regarders with approval" and of "viewers with alarm...

...Abbott's admissions arc of that comprehensive order which, in traditional language, cut the ground from under the feet of opponents, and necessitate a smart side-jump away from the perfunctory rejoinders that might tell against a less frank antagonist...

...The crisis now raging in the religious world of France over the condemnation of 1'Action Franchise, is nothing more than a sharp clash between the older Catholic tradition and many thousands of French Catholic youths who follow Maurras in his neo-pagan ideology...

...You cannot prove the other world and you cannot prove God, and the modern generation won't accept anything you cannot prove...

...Abbots who from time to time lift reassuring voices in public...

...It is no slur upon Dr...

...There is no need to labor testimony when even those who try to extract a cheerful moral admit it...

...An adolescent generation, sent to school to acquire wisdom, yet abjuring the very element their headmaster admits is its beginning...

...A generation to which all the experience of ages is offered in text-books and manuals, contemptuously determined, in the very act of learning it by rote, that they will take "nothing for granted," but, so soon as academic restrictions are removed, will "go through every experience" themselves...

...A deep and abiding trust in physical nature, the encouragement of the ages, which has notoriously brought humanity through successive shocks and cataclysms down to the only world we know, the sheer intolerance of the healthy human organism for the germ of pessimism which finds a voice in the familiar saw that "every day is another day"—no chip is too light and no trunk too heavy for the beacon that the optimist can light at those tragic moments when the world has doubts of its endurance along the paths that faith and familiarity have endeared to it...

...Who reading an indictment so sweeping and so unflattering, would not see in it the prelude to a positive cry of alarm, a summons to the youth of the nation to set its spiritual house in order while time was left it...

...I have been in the business of teaching boys for thirty years," declares the Lawrenceville executive, "and I have at the present moment under my charge 540 boys collected from nearly every state in this God-given Union of ours, and I have never known a more truthful, clean-living, honorable set of young gentlemen, different from the boys of my youth as the sun is from the moon, full of nonsense, full of passion, full of the 'old Harry,' but five times [the precision is worth noting] as decent, as truthful and as manly as the boys of my youth...

...It is no less evident in the old world than in the new, perhaps more so...

...Now, viewed from any angle that deserves the name of ethical, the picture Dr...

...Dr...

...It should never be forgotten that it was incomprehension of the Christian attitude toward worship of the emperors, rather than hatred or suspicion, that led to the earlier persecutions...

...Sometimes his end seems best secured by a forthright denial of facts as observed and commented upon by his gloomier brethren in the province of vaticination...

...Abbott's own five words "the deep questions of life," unhappiness and personal discomfort may lurk, so resolved to confine their "experiments" to the physical and material order...

...There has been no period of the world's history so black with gathering clouds, in the material or spiritual order, that men whose temperament invited them to the sunnier solution would not inject some of the opsonins of their cheerfulness into the general low-spiritedness...

...No really sane person believes that society will let go of all it has achieved through the Christian tradition merely because its faith in the tradition has weakened...

...A measure of self-sacrifice of which our own generation has no idea, may lie before the Christian generation still unborn...