Juventus Christi

‘THE spring has gone out of the year,’ said Pericles, in speaking of young men who had died in battle for Athens. Always it is the death of the young which brings the greatest gloom. As the war goes on, we think with stark horror of the sacrifice of youth, the frustration of promise and of hope. The war-god, indeed, is not the only Moloch which devours the spring of the year, the flower of the nations. Disease, whether born of our ignorance or imposed upon us by Nature, the arch-vivisectionist, never stays its hand as the generations come and go. Young men and women in their bloom, boys and girls in their first burgeoning, and tender little children die on every day through the relentless centuries. But, except when our own are taken, we are apt to obliterate the consciousness of a tragedy enacted in silence. Now our minds are shocked into attention by the roar of guns. The war has made eternal topics current. We feel impelled to try to answer the questions which are raised by this perennial catastrophe, the death of youth.

‘Yours is a wholesome sorrow, of God’s own laying-on.’ This was written to one whose mother had just died, full of years and beauty and honor. Only the ignorant or the stupid feel any bitterness when old age exchanges life for death. The old who have lived rightly go willingly, and those who have loved them rightly feel only a grief which brings understanding to the mind and health to the soul. But when the young die, a drop of poison embitters the cup of sorrow. We ask, ' Why?’ Through rebellion the soul sickens. Not God but the Devil lays his hand upon us. In trying to throw off this evil weight, let us understand clearly wherein our bitterness consists.

Impulsive rebellion, when youth dies, is tripartite. We deem it cruel that the young should lose life; that their fathers and mothers, or their young brides and lovers, should be frustrated of hopes; and, finally, that by their death we all lose the poems, the music, or the pictures which they might have created, the inventions which they might have devised, the discoveries by which they might have illuminated our darkness. But if we slowly think the matter out, only the first element in our anger abides to torture us. For if it should prove not to be a bitter thing that the young must surrender years of living, then those who love them rightly will in time forget their own frustration and find the waters of sorrow sweetened. And if we cease to think of individuals and survey the course of history, we perceive that our poetry and music and science will not die with these lips and ears and hands. Their poems, their violins, their machines — ah, others will take their place. ‘Though we are all killed, there will be songs again,’ the Irish poet, departing for the front, has bidden us remember.

humanity arises and builds it again. And so we are brought back to the injustice done to the young themselves as the origin of our anguished and rebellious, ‘Why?’

The frequency of this question is a proof of the deep-seated optimism of the race. In poetry and philosophy, from time to time, we play with the idea of life as the City of Dreadful Night and death as the Great Deliverer; but when our young die we feel that they have been betrayed. A man who had been convinced both of the evil of this world and of the goodness of a world beyond the grave, when his children died within one year, exclaimed, ‘They have been cheated out of happiness, to which they had a right.’ This cry is probably echoed by almost every father and mother who loses children. Pessimism rolls from us. We know that if our children are deprived of life they are deprived of something good.

There is, indeed, a beautiful and familiar story which seems to congratulate youth on an escape from life. It is told by Herodotus, that prince of story-tellers, whose golden magic resolves psychological abstractions into vivid personalities. Crœsus and Solon are discussing happiness, and the millionaire is hoping that the sage will at least allot him the second place among happy mortals. But no, that belongs to two quite ordinary Argives, Cleobis and Biton, who died young.

‘There was a great festival in honor of the goddess Hera at Argos, to which their mother must needs be taken in a car. Now, the oxen did not come home from the field in time; so the youths, fearful of being too late, put the yoke on their own necks, and themselves drew the car in which their mother rode. Five-and-forty furlongs did they draw her, and stopped before the temple. This deed of theirs was witnessed by the whole assembly of worshipers, and then their life closed in the best possible way. Herein, too, God showed forth most evidently, how much better a thing for man death is than life. For the Argive men stood thick around the car and extolled the vast strength of the youths; and the Argive women extolled the mother who was blessed with such a pair of sons; and the mother herself, overjoyed at the deed and at the praises it had won, standing straight before the image, besought the goddess to bestow on Cleobis and Biton, the sons who had so mightily honored her, the highest blessing to which mortals can attain. Her prayer ended, they offered sacrifice, and partook of the holy banquet, after which the two youths fell asleep in the temple. They never woke more, but so passed from the earth.’¹

The story is so exquisite that we yield to its persuasion. We say that even in the bright optimism of the Greeks experience wove a strand of ‘divinest melancholy’; that they, too, after all, questioned the joy of life and perceived the kindliness of death. ‘Whom the gods love die young’ became a proverb among a people profoundly convinced of this world’s glory and profoundly uncertain of another world’s charm. Statues of Cleobis and Biton were set up by the Argives at Delphi. There, preserved in a museum, we may see them yet, perhaps on a spring day when poppies and mallows are to be found among the ruins of Apollo’s holy city, and new green leaves cover the trees in the valley below Parnassus. In them the spring is eternalized.

Fancies such as this spring from our æsthetic sense. They are a part of our response to beauty in any form. We see the palpable loveliness of youth unmarred by age, of promise undisturbed by satiety. Death is an artist, like the maker of a Grecian urn, immortalizing his subject at the moment of perfection.

But in the critical hours of sorrow — hours now so constant with us — any such æsthetic evaluation of life and death seems to vanish. A subconscious belief in life’s goodness rises and immerses us. We want our young to have their three-score years. With all the labor and sorrow? Yes, even so.

If we turn back to the Greeks, we notice that the lovely story of the Argive boys was only an illustration of a happiness which surpasses the happiness derived from wealth and despotic power. Cleobis and Biton were, indeed, happier than Crœsus, but they held only the second place in a general rating of happy mortals. A certain Tellus of Athens was deemed by Solon to be the most happy. ‘First, because his country was flourishing in his days, and he himself had sons both beautiful and good, and he lived to see children born to each of them, and these children all grew up.’ Life piled on life was best of all. To live long and to beget goodly life in a flourishing state, this was in reality the highest blessing.

But the Athenian sage’s verdict is incomplete without his second reason for giving the palm to Tellus. Life cannot be judged except by adding death to it. A man’s achievement includes with the manner of his living the manner of his dying. Now, the end of Tellus was ‘surpassingly glorious. In a battle between the Athenians and their neighbors near Eleusis, he came to the assistance of his countrymen, routed the foe and died upon the field most gallantly.’

After the Platonic manner, let us for a time follow the argument whithersoever it leads. If the end is so important, constituting in itself one half of human happiness, then, it would seem, there must be comfort among those in Europe whose sons are dying gallantly for their countries upon the field. Such a death must be drawing the poison from sorrow, eradicating rebellion from bereaved hearts. It is a stupendous fact that until very late in history this logic would have remained unquestioned. Herodotus in his story of Tellus appealed to a universal popular belief. Æschylus, a spiritual prophet, when as an old man he wrote his own epitaph, omitted all mention of his poetry — his lifework— and commemorated the fact that forty years before he had risked his life at Marathon. Horace, a man of the world, used his incomparable language to perpetuate through centuries the sweetness and the ethical rightness of dying for one’s country: —

In journeying from paganism to Christianity the western world merely carried this sentiment with it as a vade mecum. With the Roman have agreed saints and sinners, idealists and materialists, serfs and citizens. And even today only a certain few would dispute him. With him still agree millions of men and women, of sons and parents, who are united in a willing sacrifice. ‘When your children die in battle, at least you do not have to ask why ’ — this is taken from a recent letter of a German mother who had lost her eldest and was sending forth her last son. Unsympathetic as the major part of our world is with the Prussian theory of the state, here is ground for a common, human understanding. Mothers in England and France and Russia, in Belgium and Serbia, are comforted by the same acquiescence. American mothers have been so comforted in the past, and would be again, were they brought to the test. All over Europe millions are undisturbed by the ‘ ethics ’ of war, as distinguished from other forms of patriotic service, and gladly make the sacrifice of life for their countries, on demand. For those who are left behind grief is unpoisoned by rebellion. Age-old comfort brings peace to their hearts.

Now, the duty to go to war at the country’s call does not rest only upon a Spartan or a Roman or a Prussian basis. Its potential quixotic individualism might have found expression (had the subject been debatable in those days) in the theory of the state held by Socrates, a citizen of a pure democracy. He made this theory clear when he was facing another kind of sacrifice. Imprisoned and condemned to an unjust death, he was urged by his friends to escape. It is quite possible that the Athenian democracy would have connived at such a miscarriage of its hasty verdict. But to the idealist his life seemed of no importance in comparison with preserving those laws which are the breath of life to the state. Under the protection of laws he had been decently born, and educated, and initiated into every pleasure and privilege of his life. In an open trial he had had his chance to convince the laws that he ought to live. Since he had failed, it was his duty to die. What if, in his case, the verdict was wrong? Better than his life was obedience to the courts, the instruments of justice. ‘This, dear Crito,’ he said to his pleading friend, there in the stone prison in the early dawn, ‘this is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic; that voice, I say, is humming in my ears and prevents me from hearing any other. . . . Leave me, then, Crito, to fulfill the will of God and to follow whither he leads.’

Without doubt, if Socrates had been brought into contact with pacifists for conscience’ sake (a breed unknown in the pagan world), he would have used these same arguments of reasoned and voluntary obedience to laws which are merely asking a return for their fostering care. ‘Either persuade your country that she is wrong or obey her call to battle,’ he would say to a resistant of conscription. When the Quaker answered, ‘But I must, rather, obey God who forbids war’; and the modern Philosopher answered, ‘I must obey Reason which forbids war,’ what would have been the riposte of the Athenian who worshiped God as reverently and lived by Reason as consistently as any man in the world’s history?

Ah! between his imaginable answer and ours there lie the centuries in which, through storm and blight, there yet has fructified a theory of the state in relation to humanity calculated to obliterate war altogether. Whether they admit it or not, rationalists as well as defenders of a faith are subject to an idea of world-brotherhood which was promulgated, for the first time with consistency and passion, by the earliest Christians. We must acknowledge that they were men with no national life of their own. Jews and Greeks of that period had reason to give their deepest love to the New Jerusalem coming down from God, or to a city-state of the spirit, a commonwealth in heaven. Only when Romans — the masters of the world — became Christians, did patriotism take on the guise of a Christian virtue, a Christian emotion. But the vision of the conquered has outlived the power of the conquerors. Even among powerful modern nations have been found certain men and women who have looked beyond their countries to humanity, and whose first allegiance has been given to laws beyond those of the state.

Among these the most conspicuous and consistent have been the Quakers. Philosophers who have suffered for Reason what Quakers have suffered for God are too sporadic to concern us here. Or, rather, they may, for the purposes of the argument, be included with the band of Christians whose convictions and practice are written in history. In our own country Quakers sacrificed to God the political power which they possessed before the Revolution. In England to-day, as in the past, they will, at any moment, suffer obloquy and imprisonment rather than take part in war. They love their country and would thankfully convince her, but, since they fail, they must be true to God, rather than to her. Under no conditions whatsoever will they admit the ethical fitness of men killing each other. A patriotism or a justice which seems to demand this is illusory. They do not hold their own lives dear, but they believe that a man’s life ought never to be taken by a fellow man. This is a sin against the Holy Spirit. Rather than kill another man in battle, a Quaker will allow himself to be killed as a traitor. Like Socrates, he says that it is better to suffer injustice than to do injustice, and like Socrates he has proved to us that he means what he says.

This nobility of Quakerism is the completest antithesis to the noble patriotism of the millions who willingly march away from home to fight for mother-country or fatherland. Yet the two antipodal ideas involve equally a clear assurance of duty. In this they both lack a specifically modern quality of thought. The patriotic soldier has forebears from the dawn of history. The Quaker is as lucid and sure as a fifth-century Greek. A certain group of moderns, however, are not sure what their convictions are. Characteristic of our own day is an agonizing confusion of thought. Action, therefore, entails a peculiar torture of soul. Deep in the hearts of many burns a love of country, while bright in their souls glows a heavenly star. Reason expounds to some of them, Love pleads with others, that violence is wrong. And yet both Reason and Love seek to rid the world of evil. Is war a flail of God or a scourge of the devil? Does it beget righteousness or spawn fresh sin?

Men of this kind do not stay away from war. Conviction must be crystalclear and granite-strong to overcome the primitive call to join,

Yes, these men go to the front themselves or send their sons — but with an ever-deepening consciousness that the need is only apparent, the ethical rightness an illusion, the responsibility their own. They cannot believe with Lord Dunsany that ‘ war is no accident that man’s care could have averted, but is as natural though not as regular as the tides.’ Rather, even in the act of offering up their sons, they say to one another, ‘It is you and I who must stop these wars, these massacres of boys.’

These words will be recognized as Mr. Britling’s when, late at night, after his boy’s death, he was trying to write to the German father whose son also had been killed, a son who had lived in the Britling household, sat at the table, and clinked glasses with Hugh. Mr. Wells has immortalized for us the small group who to-day do ask, ‘ Why? ’ when their sons die in battle. Over against the other millions men like Mr. Britling are few in number. But their articulateness makes them significant. Their torn consciences affect ourselves, so that we both reverence the men who fight and curse the civilization which allows them to fight.

To this point has the argument brought us. Our riddle is still unsolved. Even when the young die ‘upon the field most gallantly,’ our first thought is not with Simonides, that glorious is their doom and beautiful their lot. ‘Can one write anything,’ asks a sensitive young American, himself a poet, ‘which could bring comfort to the friends of Rupert Brooke?’ In no other age would the soldier’s death of Brooke, at twenty-eight, have seemed even more tragic than the consumptive’s death of Keats, at twenty-six. From these two shining youths let the argument again lead us on.

The genius of the one has already been established by Time, the Inspector-General of men’s work; while the genius of the other has only to-day been brought home to us by his death. But each, in his swift passage here, had Beauty for his bride, and each now lies in a

In Rome, near the ancient wall and pyramid, under the tall Italian cypresses, the grave of Keats is one of our holy places, giving the lie to the shallow inscription on his tombstone, ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’ And Rupert Brooke lies buried, as befits a youth who in his person had the ‘ bloom and charm ’ of the Greeks, in a grave in Scyros, in the Ægean, ‘amid the white and pinkish marble of the isle, the wild thyme and the poppies, near the green and blue waters.’ Our thoughts of the two graves together bring us back from the war — a temporary episode for all its cataclysmic enormity — to the perennial, diurnal death of the young. War, as a cause, used to furnish an answer to the question, ‘Why?’ To-day it only intensifies the bitterness of a certain group of men and women. But in numbers this group is matched by those of us who assume the same grim responsibility for disease. Because we are either ignorant or dilatory, because our defenses are false or because we do not make enough haste with them, Charon drives the youths before him and ‘bears the tender little ones in a line at his saddlebow.’

But this way madness lies. It is sane and right for us to work, as a generation, in great organized movements, toward both peace and health. But for an individual to blame himself for the destruction that lays waste the world savors of megalomania, of a delusion of omnipotence. Vast forces are at work, beyond our will, beyond our ken. They take from us ‘ the inheritors of unfulfilled renown’ whom Shelley joined with Keats, and in whose ranks he, too, soon came to be numbered. War, disease, cruel accident, the mistakes or the hideous injustice of men — multiform tentacles of evil, they reach out and grasp the young of all ages. Eagerly we project our imagination toward a day when these powers and we shall be reconciled, when ‘there shall be no more curse.’ The strength of our desire for it, as an impulse to action, will hasten the coming of this dayspring. Chief among its glories, we feel, will be the freedom of all to sow and to garner the joys of living, to pass from youth to age and on to a tranquil and a timely death. Then there will be no violent slaying of the immature. But here and now falls the night of our sorrow.

Here and now, therefore, need we be rebellious? Is the death of the young poisonous to our faith in Life? We are not seeking for courage. The bitterest may display unconquerable souls within the pit that covers them. Nor are we seeking for mere acceptance, whether that of the ‘ believer ’ who abides by the Lord’s will, or that of the philosopher who identifies his will with the Universal. In our desolation we are in search of a warm, sweet intimacy with truth, a companionship with its realities, a comrade’s understanding.

We start out on our quest again, freed from some of our confusions. And here at our threshold, amazing in its simplicity, is revealed our own conviction of the valuelessness of calendar months and years. We cease talking around an assigned theme, and suddenly realize that we do not value the quantity of life as we supposed we did. All of us, learned and simple, rich and poor, militants and pacifists, agnostics and pietists, face to face with the question, would choose to have our children die good rather than live wicked. We may wish them to have the labor and sorrow of life, but never its sin.

To state the case is to prove it. ‘Without controversy,’said Paul to the young Timothy, ‘great is the mystery of godliness.’ The incontrovertible mystery of our own preference for godliness over length of years is of searching import in our discussion. The prison statistics of America show that among the thousands who are incarcerated yearly the enormous majority are under thirty years of age. If we took time to look at the charts whose black fingers stretch accusingly up toward our boys of eighteen and twenty, our horror would transcend our despair over the ‘shambles of Europe.’ We are sleepless for thinking of unknown parents who await in dread news of a death at the front. We pay little attention to the fathers and mothers who are dreading to see a new manifestation of sin or weakness. And yet Mr, Britling (for all his perplexity about war) is happier when Hugh dies than is the father of a rake who wallows in the trough of life. ‘It was the right spirit,’ he said to his boy, who had enlisted a year and three good months before his country would have asked him to leave his father. The death of sons and daughters is not the worst calamity that can befall their parents. Perhaps in the crowd at Golgotha the mother of Judas envied Mary as she stood below her crucified son.

In a blinding flash, as if we ourselves stood at this place of a skull, the revelation comes. Through a glass darkly we have been peering at the meaning of the quality of human life. Now, as the man on the cross bows his head and gives up the ghost, we know that in his quality we arc shown God. ‘ Our sons who have shown us God ’ — so the father’s vigil of questioning sorrow ends. Quantity, months and years, is of men, temporal, measurable, coming to an end. Quality is eternal, unchangeable, without end and without death. Jesus himself was still young; not a boy, indeed, but far short of his meridian. As far as his work went, he had been busy for only three years. He seemed not even to have made a beginning when he was taken and slain. His mother had to give him up, not to war or to disease, but to the hatred of a few men in authority. His vigor, his charm, his pleasure in the friendly intimacies and common things of life, his loving-kindness which made him so beautiful to live with and was beginning to draw men to him, all the blossom and flower of his early manhood seemed, to her, lost. And yet from the day of his death are dated backward and forward the calendar years of history. This is because he and no other, in wholeness, revealed the divinity in humanity, the timelessness of the spirit’s life. The son whom Mary watched upon his cross incarnated the Christ of the soul, who was before Abraham, and who shall be even if the Christianity of men is consumed like the grass of the field.

Jesus endeavored to show to men that the quality of the soul is like a well of water springing up into everlasting life. ‘He that believeth on me hath eternal life’ — so a disciple who understood him quotes one of his sayings. In all language there is no such godlike present tense, heedless of the illusion we call time, oblivious of the incident of the flesh, the episode of the grave. Now, as Jesus moved about among men and women he found this manifestation of the spirit most often among the tenderly young. Once, when his grown followers were discussing points of the moral law, he asked them to make way for some children who were being brought to him. They were so little that he could take them up in his arms, and he pointed to them and said, ’Of such is the kingdom of heaven. ’ What greater glory could life have brought to those little boys and girls? All the wonderful or joyful things they might do hereafter would be non-essentials, quantitative elements in a temporal span. Already they were chalices of the Spirit. The young master who believed this of them had himself, when he was a boy of twelve, been about his Father’s business, and was soon to die while youth was still his. Yet ‘in him was life; and the life was the light of men.’

From him there falls a radiance, in human story, upon all the young who, whether they have known Christ by name or not, have had within them a well of water springing up into everlasting life. In the child it may be a spring of purity and love, in the youth a spring of courage and self-conquest— diversities of gifts, but the same God. What if such youth shall die? ' It is the Spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing.’ With these deathless words in our ears, we awake from our vision. The crowds at Golgotha are gone. Mary and her son are seen no longer. We walk back into our own brief day of sorrow.

And coming back purified, we understand, at last, amid our immediate and terrible experience of war, what our own young are saying to us. The few who have the gift of tongues say it in word as well as act; the inarticulate millions say it in brave deeds, from the unquestioning patriot to the Quaker who on errands of mercy exposes his body to the shot and shell of foe and friend alike. The war may be unjustifiable, unforgivable, but within its reality we must listen to-day for the current form of eternal topics. Indeed, in the matter of words, under no other conditions can youth so clearly show us its own heart lifted ‘above its mortal lair.’ Outside of war the brave young do not voluntarily surrender their lives, except in unforeseen heroic hours, allowing for no previous written meditation. Through this special way, therefore, of offering up their flesh, they tell us most distinctly what they believe about the spirit. Look at them! How gallantly, how brightly, they outride our stormy grief!

Juventus mundi, destroyed by death, forgotten in the grave, how bitter a thing is its transitoriness!

Juventus Christi— O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?