HERMAN HARRELL HORNE

Was born Nov. 22, 1874, at Clayton, N. C. Five great ideals have influenced his life: the Christianity of his mother; the traditions of the gentleman at the University of North Carolina, where he received the arts degree in 1895; the scholarship of graduate study at Harvard, where the doctor's degree was received in 1899; the qualities of manhood exemplified at Dartmouth College, where he taught philosophy and education for ten years; and the cosmopolitan life of New York City, where for nine years he has been professor of the history of education and philosophy in New York University. Author: The Philosophy of Education, 1906; The Psychological Principles of Education, 1906; Idealism in Education, 1910; Free Will and Human Responsibility, 1912; Leadership of Bible Study Groups, 1912; Story-Telling, Questioning, and Studying, 1916; The Teacher as Artist, 1917; Jesus Our Standard, 1918.

Published Monthly by Funk & Wagnalls Company, 354-360 Fourth Avenue, New York.

(Adam W. Wagnalls, Pres.; Wilfred J. Funk, Vice-Pres.; Robert J. Cuddihy, Treas.; William Neisel, Sec'y.)

VOL. LXXVII

JUNE, 1919

No. 6

The Moral Universe and The Individual

SOME years ago experts, by clever scientific devices, made an accurate calculation of the avoirdupois weight of Mount Schiehallion in Scotland. When this peak of rocks and earth was weighed as in the balances, it became a fairly easy problem to calculate from it the gross weight of the entire globe. Any good book on physical geography will now give this weight in billions of tons, but it is important to remember that the immense total was arrived at by first discovering the actual weight of one particular mountain.

Somewhat so the moral nature of the cosmic universe can be found only by a study of the moral nature of the individual man, for it is in fact here in this strange finite-infinite human being that the deepest moral meaning of the universe comes to revelation here or nowhere. Amos, the earliest literary prophet of Israel, was the first to insist upon the fundamental moral character of the universe. He announced the discovery of a universal law of moral gravitation as sweeping as Newton's law of physical gravitation. "I saw," this spiritual genius declared, "I saw the Lord holding a plumb-line in his hand." Every nation, according to the prophet's vision, had to meet this plumb-line test. Nothing could save or buttress a ramshackle moral structure, an unplumb life. The way of the transgressor was seen to be not only hard but impossible. The stars in their courses were allied against that nation which was not morally foursquare. But this stern old herdsman of Tekoa, with his plumb-line, had almost nothing to say of individual conscience. He thought of men in the mass. The nation was the unit. His law of moral gravitation was revealed in national catastrophes. By an insight which he could not have analyzed, he leaped to a general truth that the universe is morally constructed and that all the time men play their miserable games, the dice on the other side are always loaded-the universe is sensitive to all deviations from the moral perpendicular and it executes its own laws. It remained for later men to discover in their own souls the unescapable evidence that the universe at its highest peaks where life comes to self-consciousness does reveal a moral law which, like gravitation, is grounded in the eternal nature of things and can be verified.

There is no finer pre-Christian instance of this discovery, the cardinal one which the race has made, than that revealed in the life of Socrates. His exterior was uncouth. But the moral character of his soul was sublime. His deepest prayer was that he might be beautiful and harmonious within. He lived and died in constant awe of a voice in his own soul which always seemed to him to be from God.

"You have often heard me speak," said Socrates at his trial, "of an oracle or sign which comes to me as a divine thing. This sign I have had ever since I was a child. It is a voice which comes to me and always forbids me when I am going to do something wrong." "I am sent," he adds, "by God, to do the greatest possible service to the city of Athens. For I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your propties, but first and chiefly to care about the improvement of the soul." "A man who is good for anything," this moral leader concludes, "ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong-acting the part of a good or a bad man."

He awoke his greatest disciples and, through them, the world forever to the meaning of individual conscience as a moral guide and as a key to the real nature of the universe.

In the dramatic struggle between the later civilization of Greece and the Hebrew ideals, brought to its most acute stage in the Maccabean struggle against Antiochus Ephiphanes, the note of individual conscience was once more clearly sounded-as finely sounded as anywhere in literature, and forever afterwards made an essential part of the true Hebrew character. The moral issue is put in the form of a demand, made to selected individuals of the Hebrew race, to fall down and worship a golden image, embodying ideals foreign to their faith, or to be cast into a glowing red hot furnace. The answer is a thrilling one: "If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning, fiery furnace, and he will deliver us. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve the gods nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up."

The loftiest illustration, however, of individual loyalty to a guidance within the soul is to be found in the life of the great Galilean, and nowhere else in history has the ultimate moral nature of the universe been revealed through an individual conscience in such adequate measure. Not only at the opening of his ministry, but throughout the entire period of his public mission he was subject to peculiarly acute temptation in the choice of the means for the establishment of the kingdom, which it was his mission to inaugurate. He powerfully felt the popular patriotic appeal to be the Messiah of the nation's hope and to fulfil the age-long expectations of his people and his race. On the other hand he saw with an unparalleled clarity of insight what was involved in the essential nature of the spiritual life. He understood, as no one else has done, what are the ultimate forces which shape and fashion the moral world, and what constitutes the real goodness and blessedness of life. He came to realize that there could be no true kingdom of God that was not formed in the inner spirit and will of man, that love and grace and faith and good-will and patience and purity of heart are the essential qualities of the enduring kingdom of the spirit; that sovereign power and military triumph, and even miraculous achievements, are weak and futile as compared with the inherent power of gentleness, goodness, sacrifice of self, and dedication to the way of love. In the great test which came as the crisis developed, alone with his soul and God, he settled the momentous issue. The word conscience is never used in the gospels, but that inner tribunal which we name by that word is nowhere more clearly in evidence than in the stages of the decision that carried Jesus to the cross