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Man must struggle for his victory; he can win; he cannot win alone. We must then insist upon the doctrine of salvation, turning ourselves to the other side of the humanist's picture. Man cannot live by this more-than-natural law unaided. For not only has he the power to rise above Nature; the same thing gives him equal capacity to sink beneath her, and, when left to himself, he generally does so.
Speaking of one of them he says: "It is when we come across names connected with men who have acted an illustrious part in the world's history, that the fatigues of such a journey as I have undertaken are felt to be completely repaid." That is the humanist's spirit.
Is it to the penitence and confession, the public-mindedness, the identification of the fate of the individual with the fate of the whole group which is the religious impulse? Is it to a disinterested and even-handed justice, the high legalism of the Golden Rule, which would be the humanist's way?
Watchwords by themselves, if they remain vague generalities untranslatable into new directions of effort, will fail. What is necessary is a new goal, or else a pragmatic development of past dreams into programs which awaken loyalty and hope. But the center of gravity and endeavor of such a religion will lie within society. It will be, to all intents and purposes, a humanist's religion.
They assert, therefore, that the law of the group, the perfected and wrought out code of human experience, is all that is binding and all that is essential. To be sure, and most significantly, this authority is not rigid, complete, fixed. There is nothing complete in the humanist's world.
And society will need conversion as pressingly as scattered individuals in slums and tenements. Does it to-day stress the most important things? The State has been the servant of things as they are, not of things as they might be. A humanist's religion can admit no cunning division into the things which are God's and the things which are Cæsar's. Human values are as jealous as the Yahweh of Moses.
The sentimental idealizing of contemporary life, the declension of the humanist's optimism into that superficial complacency which will not see what it does not like or what it is not expedient to see, makes one's mind to chuckle while one's heart doth ache.
Like all his educated contemporaries, he learned to speak and write Latin with perfect fluency; but it was always with an idiom that showed he had none of the humanist's scruples regarding purity of language.
Yet does it not mean that, more than now and increasingly, selfish luxury will be scorned, property subordinated to welfare, economic fear lessened to the utmost, knowledge unenviously exalted, and art called into service? Loyalty to such an ideal will surely constitute the heart of the humanist's religion. The ideals of a religion can never be easy.
They feel acutely the "need of fresh readings in life, of fresh groupings in science, both now mainly from the humanist's side, as lately from the naturalist's side." In this University Settlement the publishing and writing department is to represent the scriptorium of the ancient monasteries.
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