IDEALS OF CITIZENSHIP.

Evening Star, Issue 17312, 27 March 1920, Page 2

IDEALS OF CITIZENSHIP.

Eecbtti/T we wrote on the Doctor. It has occurred to us that he is only one 6f '& great number of members of the community. Each is doing his or her part as citizens. This or that profession or occupation may seem more honorable than another. Bub all legitimate workers are essential to the city. Those who work with ■ the hand cannot do without those who work wifJi th© head, or vice versa. We have spoken of the doctor's place and power in the community, but we have been thinking that we might .do something similar with other trades and professions a<s well. . So we propose to write an article now and again on Ideals of Citizonship, selecting certain types of as representative of the community. We will begin to-day with Ideals. * * * * - * # * The distinctive character of man ia His power to frame ideals. It is has gained his present position. The bee and the beaver build their homes now as they did thousands of years ago. But man does not. He is busy planning new cities and new souls, new methods of work, new achievements in thought and life. "What 13 your best picture?" a great artist was asked. "The next," he replied. It is this innate idealism that has lifted man above everything. It has dug tho graves of kings and kingdoms in the past, and itis busy testing, demobilising, and reconstructing Governments and States today. And so it will be till the last syllable of recorded time, unless man reels back again into the mud from which he has so toilsomely emerged. Perhaps we might carry it further than even this present world, fitavenson iB reported to have said when he heard of Mathew Arnold's death: "Poor Mathew; heaven will not please him." Who knows? It is difficult to conceive of a place or a character in which growth will stop, for it will stop when ideals end. Content, satisfaction, who wins them? Look down; They are held without theught by the dolts and the drones; 'Tis the slave who in carelessness carries the • crown, And the hovels have kinglier men than the throne. No. Satisfaction is death. It is the end of growth, the negation of progress. Not dissatisfaction, but unsatisfaction must ever be the characteristic for developing life. "Better," says John Stuart Mill, "a man unsatisfied than a pig satisfied." ******* Not a little curious, too, as one of our great writers has pointed out, that man persists in framing ideals in spite of repeated rebuffs and failures. " Ordinarily," the darker the actual, the brighter shines the ideal. The writer in question calls as evidence the fact that the wonderful apocalyptic visions of later Judaism wero given when the political outlook was of the blackest. The Divinest Man that ever trod our earth spoke His highest words and drew His loftiest visions the night before He went to the Cross. And His early followers caught His spirit and temper, it was when the fires of persecution blazed about them that they lifted up their eyes and "saw Heaven opened," and spoke of things that seem even -yet to dullards as the stuff of which dreams were made. St. Augustine sat down to write his ' City of God' when the greatest city of his time was in the midst of overthrow. Methodism's earliest fervor and its intensest joys were in the days of its hardship and poverty. The well-to-do Wesleyan manufacturer of to-day knows a I thousand things and a thousand pleasures. I What he does not know is the ecstatic

joy with which his predecessors, the weavers of Yorkshire and the fishers of Cornwall, sang that triumphant strain of Wesley—the apocalypse of the poor— Come on, my partners in distress, My comrades in this wilderness, Who Btill your bodies feel. Awhile forget your griefs and fears, And look beyond this vale of tears To that Celestial Hill. The sublimest of man's idealisms is his religion, and religion ia never so real and 60 fruitful as in the days when trials and suffering are greatest. ******* The power to frame ideals belongs largely to youth. As wo grow older we tend to become conservative, prudent, cautious. Such people have their value. They are useful chiefly in holding youth in check and making them think, malting them reconsider their ideals. When Lord Houghton (then Mr Moncton Milnes), in a letter to Carlyle, was finding fault with Sir Robert Peel for not giving him a place in the Government, Carlyle wrote back: "It seems to me the chief thing for you to do is to look clearly into yourself and try to find out what it was that precluded him from promoting you." It is good for youth to he compelled sometimes to go back on its ideals and discover why they are not accepted and obeyed. But, on the other hand, it must not allow itself to be bullied by ags. It will he well for both old and young to remember that the great reformers of Society have nearly all been young men—men rarely on the heavenly side of forty. The man who revolutionised the Western World finished His work before He was thirty-three. And not a golden hair was grey

Upon His crucifixion day. Those who carried His faith abroad wore nearly all young men. Stephen, Paul, Timothy were famous long before they were bid. Alexander the Great had conquered the world at thirty-three. Bacon was making his great discoveries at nineteen. Keats, Shelley, Byron, Pascal, Gordon, Wesley, Pitt, Napoleon, Gladstone, Spurgeon, and a host wi.om no man could number had stepped into the front ranks long before they had come to the prime of life. "The history of heroes," said Lord Beaconsfield, "is the history of youth"; and the race from which lie sprung might have supplied him with illustrious examples. David, Joseph, Hezekiah, Samuel were great before they were twenty-five. And the reason of this is, of course, to be found in the natuTe of youth. As Dr Dawson puts it: There is a noble inconsideratenesß in its tempw which brings vision and action into more direct relation than usually happens in later life. For youth to see is to act, to believe is to affirm, to know is to do; and what works ruin in human life is to believe without doing. ******* That brings us .to our next point. There are two main things about ideals. In the first place, they need to be high ; in the next, to be obeyed. Wliat constitutes hifjh ideals? We shall endeavor to indicate *i->o first when later on we come to discuss .the various types of citizenship. Wo shall deal just now with the other point : the necessity of obedience to the ideal. There is nobody without ideals of some sort. In youth they are vivid, vital, manifold, and multitudinous. Over all pleasure, thought, and work there ever hovers a higher sort of pleasure, a nobler kind of work, or a better way of doing it. What might be is ever lifting itself before what is-. So Governments, politics, labor, art, and song are ever being superseded by something else. vSometimes it is better; sometimes it is not; for The spirit of man is not frozen in

ice, nor bound on a wheel of fire; rather it mores on a magic car through, the

forest,-of life, drawn by the team of instinot, habit, desire, and will; bound to the past, yet free of the future: proceeding from the brute, but tending to the god. So ideals become invitations; they are ever beckoning us on to larger public life. How they are wrought into us or where thev come from we need not now inquire. As have said, the point that we want to insist on at the moment is the need of loyalty to these. *******

It is no easy matter to do this. The ' higher and purer the idoals the greater the difficulty. So many things seem to crowd upon us when wo see the alluring vision to hinder ns from going out after j it;' we are tempted to think that it is im- | possible, or that it is moonshine or a will- j o'-the-wisp, leading to perils of mind and pocket or reputation or friendship, or what not. So men and women are scared away from the call of the ideal. There are few of ns who are not conscious of having missed or murdered ideals, lyiner on our ] post like the weight of broken wings that j can never be lifted. A keen observer has said that the English mind tends to regard all ideals as Utopian. It is the view of mid-die a"«, of people settled and ranged, of lawyers and shopkeepers, and too often of professors, teachers, and preachers. We are all too ready to be bullied by what is called "common sense." But if certain people had not rebelled against it, what would our progress be to-day? Common sense assures ns that it would be impossible to fly like a bird, or to induco a mysterious energy to write- our letters and talk to our friends at the other end of the world. A steam engine was once supposed common sens© to be a mad dream, aiiu a certain Lord Somebody or other declared that he would eat the first steamship that crossed tho Atlantic to America! Common sense has, no doubt, its rights and duties, but it is not the highest sense; and if we give heed to it only we shall sink in the scale of being. Seneca in a wise passage refers to the number of days and years that we have b«en robbed of by indolence and pillage of every kind; while Diderot says that he never can read it without blushing. "It is my history." It is'more ; it is the history of us all, or of most of us anyway. Ideals have lifted themselves before ns time and again, but we have dallied and disobeyed; and now they are only haunting memories of a might-have-been. We /understand only too well the experience which Sir "William Watson has put in his pathetic lines: So on our souls the visions rise Of that fair life we never led ; They flash a splendor past our eyes, Wo start, and they are fled. They pass and leave' us with blank gaze, Kesigned to our ignoble ways.