The American Ideal
Honor all men. — 1 Peter 2:17
WHEN John Brashear, roller-mill workman and astronomer of Pittsburgh, affectionately known to the people as “Uncle John,” was offered an honorary degree by the University of Pennsylvania with the request that he select the title, this plain philanthropist replied: “I do not know whether you confer such degree, but, if so, I would like the degree, Doctor of Humanity.”
On presenting to the Continental Congress a resolution directing that the sessions be opened with daily prayers to almighty God, Benjamin Franklin said: “If a sparrow can not fall without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?”
A tablet marking the ruins of Jamestown, the cradle of the Republic, bears the inscription: “In honor of Chanco, the Christian Indian boy, whose warning saved the colony of Virginia from destruction in the massacre of 22nd March, 1622.”
Lincoln at Gettysburg molded the sentiment in immortal language: “Our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Emerging from the heroic Colonial background, taking form in the covenant of constitutional government, developing in strength and beauty through seven-score years of national history, the American ideal—honor all men—rises like a tower of universal hope, “bathed all in light, with open gates of gold.”
I.
Underlying the doctrines of human liberty is the grand conception of human worth. The Venus de Milo, though broken, is still priceless and immortal.
But the eyes of the multitudes have been holden. The veil of materialism covers the heart and obscures the greatness of human nature. Time and circumstance, the accident of birth or station, and degraded worldly standards, vitiate the popular judgment. “The greatest man I ever knew,” remarked an eminent journalist, “I indifferently passed, or feigned some condescension, and hesitated to know socially.” This is the most pitiable aspect of our fallen race. Few minds are willing to pay the price of investigation, of going behind external trappings and defying the social verdict in search of the invisible and timeless beauties of the soul of the common man. Lord Morley’s characterization of Voltaire describes the cult of unbelief: “He has no ear for the finer vibrations of the spiritual voice.” Content with hearsay evidences, we miss the essential glory of human life. “And hast thou not known me?” is man’s inarticulate cry to man.
Inhumanity is the rock on which mighty nations have been broken and ground to powder. It is the crude and hateful opinion of the materialist that might makes right, that the strong should prevail over the weak, that the fit must climb to dominion over the bodies of the unfit—this falsehood of the so-called scientist, this doctrine of the unlearned educator, this philosophy of the cult of paganism—it is from this polluted fountain that all oppression flows. Moved by such spirit, a nation may rise to the peak of worldly power by the spoils of tyranny, by inhumanity to man; but disaster will at last overtake that people which sacrifices the human element and subordinates personality to property. Even Plato’s ideal state, conceived in the atmosphere of the most enlightened nation of antiquity in the height of its splendor, proposed a government by elect souls who do no work while depending on craftsmen and slaves for all menial labor.
The progress of the race has waited upon those shining souls who lift all men above the price-labels of the marketplace; who value a man more than a sheep; who despise the sophistry of the self-seeker, be his brutality the soft voice of the conceited scholar or the iron hand of the pillaging warrior; who know that a human being is worth more than all the piled-up material riches of an empire, and who are willing to die for their faith. The thin, red line of liberty comes up unbroken through the centuries, traced by the sacrifice of the lonely martyrs, who chose death rather than the dishonor of oppression. Christiana and her children came to the scene of Christian’s combat with Apollyon. “There are footprints on the path. Pilgrims have gone this way before us.” “Look,” said Greatheart, “did not I tell you? Here is some of your husband’s blood upon these stones! Verily Christian did here play the man.”
Says Mommsen: “The grandest system of civilization has its orbit and may complete its course; but not so the human race, to which, just when it seems to have reached its goal, the old task is ever set anew with a wider range and with a deeper meaning.”
The old task took its wider range and deeper meaning in the Declaration of Independence, whose good tidings of human worth and freedom we honor in our hearts to-day.
The nation has upheld its faith unstained and at utmost cost from Saratoga to Sedan. We hate war, but we hate tyranny more; we love peace, but we love righteousness more. Writing of the American soldiers’ part in the battles of the final campaign against Kaiserism, a London editor said: “These troops, but newly trained, inheriting no long military tradition and molded by no iron-bound system, have overcome the pick of the German legions.” These troops were sprung from a people trained in the school of self-government, inheriting the holy tradition of human rights, safeguarded under the majesty of equitable law and molded by the system which honors all men and which gives to the world its Washington and Lincoln and Roosevelt.
The awe experienced by Bayard Taylor when first looking up at the colossal arch of marble and gold of St. Peter’s must be felt by all true Americans when walking amid the splendors of the invisible temple of our national faith, whose foundation is the supreme valuation of man, made in the image of God, whose corner-stone is freedom, and whose superstructure is the fellowship of righteousness and the fraternity of peace and good will. We feel exalted, ennobled. “Beings in the form we wear, planned the glorious edifice, and it seems that in godlike power and perseverance they were indeed but a little lower than the angels.”
II.
With profound insight the founders of the Republic traced the American ideal to divine revelation, and, with precision, embodied in the national conscience their confession of faith in the Christian’s God.
The author of the Declaration bore witness that “the God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.” Guarded with reverent care, sheltering the national tradition, the tower of the old Christian church at Jamestown is a perpetual monument of our people’s faith in Jesus Christ—America’s first and best statue of liberty. The compact framed by the Pilgrims before leaving the “Mayflower” declared that the voyage had been undertaken “for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith.” According to the recital of the charter of William and Mary College, founded in Virginia in 1692, the institution was established “to the end that the church of Virginia may be furnished with a seminary of ministers of the gospel, and that the youth may be piously educated in good letters and manners, and that the Christian faith may be propagated among the Western Indians to the glory of almighty God.” The Patrick Henry pew is marked in St. John’s Church, Richmond, and that of Betsy Ross in old Christ Church, Philadelphia. Bancroft asserts that “every great American enterprise began from God.” Washington prayed at Valley Forge. Before assuming the duties of the Presidency, to his friends at Springfield, Lincoln said: “Without the assistance of that divine Being who ever attended him (Washington), I can not succeed.” Our Presidents take the oath of office with their lips pressed upon the pages of the open Bible. To his fellow-citizens at Marion, President-elect Harding thus pledged his faith: “I want you to know that there is an individual who believes in the reconsecration of a religious republic. I have for my inheritance a Christian belief, and I have in my veins the blood of Christian parentage.” In his inaugural he made this avowal: “I accept my part with singleness of purpose and humility of spirit, and implore the favor and guidance of God.” Andrew Jackson affirmed that “the Bible is the rock on which the Republic rests.” Grant exhorted his countrymen to “hold fast to the Bible as the sheet-anchor of their liberties.”
The Christian Scriptures are the spring and root of human happiness and progress. It is here we find the ennobling doctrines of man’s high origin, his god-like nature and his glorious destiny. “Honor all men” is the enlightened word of a once exclusive Jew now emancipated by Christian truth, truth incarnate in Jesus, the Son of God, the author of the parables of the prodigal son and the good Samaritan; whose beautiful words were fulfilled in benevolent deeds; who honored the lame and blind and halt, the broken and unfit and outcast; who stamped with divine worth the common man— the Redeemer and Liberator and Restorer of the fallen race.
The Pharisee forever hates the humanitarian. Celsus, to the end of time, will ridicule the advocate of spiritual values, who finds infinite possibilities and awakens infinite hope in the hearts of the lowly and obscure; but the Christ whom we adore keeps driving home the gospel of the sanctity of human life, the greatness of the soul.
By the great mountains the acacia forever burns, and from its inextinguishable flame God calls to him who has ears to hear and a heart to understand: “I will send thee that thou mayest bring forth my people” This is the faith of our fathers; this is America’s holy faith.
III.
Our national unity rests upon the conception of the worth of the common man, expresses itself in freedom under the discipline of democratic rule and is maintained and promoted by mutual service, which is the bond of perfectness.
“Honor all men” flowers in ministry to all men. “I am among you as one who serves” is the self-revelation of Him whose humane teaching is woven into the fabric of the American ideal.
An ancient seer thus describes the ideal state: “They help every one his neighbor, and every one saith to his brother, Be of good courage. So the carpenter encourageth the goldsmith, and he that smootheth with the hammer him that smiteth the anvil, saying of the soldering, It is good; and he fasteneth it with nails, that it should not be moved.”
The principle of equal rights has been variously and happily applied, in the privilege of public trust, in our jurisprudence, in professional and industrial opportunity, and in religion, where freedom is granted to every man to worship God in accord with his conscience. Our duty is to carry the principle, as a working reality, more and more into every department of life. But parallel with equal rights must be applied the principle of co-operative service. The perfection and extension of this principle, in the experience of the entire citizenship, must be the concern of all. “Come and comfort me” was Burns’ appeal to Cunningham. It is the common heart-cry of man to man. We must not, we can not, refuse to hear.
In an ancient Jewish city lived a man named Joseph. He became famous for helping people. One day some of his friends led this modest man to the front in a public assembly and invested him with knighthood. “Let him no longer be called Joseph, but Sir Barnabas,” said they; “Barnabas the Encourager.”
Ruthless self-interest is the law of the jungle. Competition, which sets at naught one’s neighbor, is on the same level. “We rise from the jungle life as we abandon the jungle law.
All men who have attained true eminence trace their success to the help which took its rise outside of themselves. Plutarch, the mild and humane philosopher, has left on record this testimony of all great souls: “Though fortune has, on many occasions, been favorable to me, yet I have no obligations to her so great as the enjoyment of my brother Timon’s invariable friendship and kindness.” “Greet Onesiphorus,” said Paul, “for he oft refreshed me.”
No dreamer can overcolor the prosperity and happiness in store for a nation true to this sacred view of life, a people who build each other up, who help forward one another worthily of God.
In that noble parchment, the Roman letter, Saul of Tarsus appropriately brings his stately argument to its climax, in the closing chapter, by the exhibit of a list of persons in whose hearts lived the great doctrine and in whose acts the great doctrine found avenues of practical expression—his friends, the princely line of fellow-helpers. The personal notes conclude with a salutation from “Quartus the brother,” a biography in three words, than which there is none nobler. A half-million words could not honor him more or reveal more glory to the discerning reader.
“Walking through a country churchyard last week,” wrote Walter Bagehot, “I saw the most delightful epitaph I ever remember. It was simply this: ‘George Phillip Tyson died Oct. 7, 1871. He was a helpful man.’ This is the only epitaph I ever envied.”
IV.
The privilege and responsibility of citizenship in a state which recognizes the principle—“honor all men”—can not be overemphasized. “The land we live in,” said Grover Cleveland, “seems to be strong and active. But how fares the land that lives in us?”
We miss the high summons if our hearts are set mainly on material things. The inspiration of the American ideal is in the ends at which we aim—the larger inner life, the liberty of spirit, the happiness of the soul. The test is spiritual. How fares the land that lives in us?
“The first warning of Rome’s ruin,” said Gibbon, “was not in the hostile armies mobilizing against her, but in the feasting and boasting and riotous living in her vicious capital.” America’s worst foes are they of her own household who find no place for reverence, who hold the unspiritual estimate of human life and who follow the low-set purpose of self-seeking and personal profit to the disadvantage of their fellow-citizens.
“Let not the wise man [or nation] glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches; but let him that glorieth, glory in this, that he under standeth and knoweth me, that I am the Lord who exerciseth mercy, judgment, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight.” Worldly wisdom can not make a people great, nor might, nor riches, nor scientific knowledge, nor progress in letters and art, nor efficiency in politics and industry. A nation’s life consisteth not in an abundance of things. Is the Government God-fearing, are its institutions humane, do our social and economic relations proceed from a common conviction of human worth and kinship, and operate in behalf of the public weal? Browning profoundly observes that “love with defective knowledge is of more spiritual worth than knowledge with defective love,” which is another way of saying that mutual esteem and affection and service are worth more than all the accumulated knowledge and fine-spun worldly wisdom of all the theorists.
Theodore Roosevelt said: “After a certain, not very high, level of material well-being has been reached, then the things that really count in life are the things of the spirit. Factories and railways are good up to a certain point; but courage and endurance, love of wife and child, love of home and country, love of lover for sweetheart, love of beauty in man’s work and in nature, love and emulation of daring and of lofty endeavor, the homely workaday virtues and the heroic virtues—these are better still, and if they are lacking, no piled-up riches, no roaring, clanging industrialism, no feverish and many-sided activity, shall avail either the individual or the nation. I do not undervalue these things of a nation’s body; I only desire that they shall not make us forget that besides the nation’s body there is also the nation’s soul.”
Americanization is a favorite term these days, but the trouble is the shallowness of its content to the popular mind. Naturalization papers do not make an American. The immigrant needs more than language-study and parrot-like knowledge of the Constitution. Free birth does not make an American. The homeborn need more than the soft inheritance of the rights of citizenship. To salute the flag, to buy Liberty bonds, to lustily sing “America” in the hour of the nation’s distress—this is not conclusive evidence of patriotism. The deeper “hyphenism” is a thing of the soul, which not only expresses itself in divided national allegiance, but which represents itself in antagonism to the things for which the flag stands, and holds contempt for “the subtle thing that’s spirit.”
We are blind to the plainest lesson of history if we fail to see, in the rising tide of materialism, the nation’s gravest peril. If we save our soul, we must fight, we must make war on the enemies within. The chief seat of danger, no doubt, is found in our schools and colleges where eighteenth century pedagogues plant the seeds of atheism, teach the jungle theory of life, and subordinate character to success. If, as Robert Louis Stevenson said, “mankind was never so happily inspired as when it built a cathedral,” how degraded humanity must be when it damages a cathedral.
To value every man, to walk humbly before God, to live the life of service, to elevate the spiritual above the material—this is the American ideal.
It was the custom of a good man to daily enter the family gallery and stand reverently before the portraits of his forefathers. When his son attained the age of twelve, the lad was permitted to accompany his father into this holy place, and was advised to make the custom his own. “These are our noble ancestors,” said he, “and their eyes watch over us. We can hear their voices still whispering to us, ‘Keep fresh the honor of the family name.’”
Each recurring anniversary of the nation’s independence should be the occasion of communion with its illustrious founders, and reaffirmation of the national principles and rededication of our lives to their perpetuity. The eyes of our forefathers watch over us. Their voices still whisper to us from the grave, “Keep fresh the honor of America’s good name.”
“Faith of our fathers, holy faith,
We will be true to thee till death.”
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The above article was written by Robert E. Elmore (1878-1968) and was originally published by Standard Publishing Company (1921) in a book titled Special Sermons, edited by E. W. Thornton.