dranath, who teaches that "the deity. . . always dwells in the heart of man as the supreme soul," and who in an article entitled "The Appeal of Christ to India" asks, "Who else has glorified man in every way as he has done?" may perhaps be said to hold a view of the divinity of Christ not widely different from that of liberal Christianity. But a truce to theological definitions. Sir Rabindranath Tagore belongs to that increasing number of spiritual souls who, whatever their ecclesiastical affiliations, cannot be classified. Like Henry Ward Beecher, who was a Congregationalist-and more; like Phillips Brooks, who was an Episcopalian-and more; like Edward Everett Hale, who was a Unitarian-and more; Rabindranath Tagore is a member of the Brahmo Somaj-and more. In such natures the abounding spiritual life spills over the appointed boundaries of theological and ecclesiastical systems.

In what follows I shall not attempt to describe to Western readers the opinions of this representative Eastern sage. I shall con

tent myself with describing the impression which he has made upon me by his personal conversation and by some of his published writings.

Like other leaders of Indian thought, he recognizes the value of British rule. It protects persons and property, and is in the main a just rule, very different from that which Lord Macaulay so graphically describes in his articles on Lord Clive and Warren Hastings. But it is unsympathetic. British officials not only do not understand the East Indian mind, they make no attempt to understand it. Their calm assumption of superiority, which irritates at times one who is as fond of the mother country as I am, is unbearable to this ancient race. The very things of which we Anglo-Saxons are so proud are distasteful, almost abhorrent, to the cultivated Hindu. Our big cities, our sky-scrapers, our crowded subway trains and trolley cars, our great factories, our assembly halls crowded with two or three thousand auditors, our great religious meetings where ten thousand give vent to their enthusiasm in singing heard several blocks away, our great newspapers which invade our quiet breakfast-room with all the added rush and bustle of the wide world from all this he turns away wearied and perplexed. What is the good of it all? We think we save time. We are wasting time; for our remorseless hurry to do some

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thing and get somewhere leaves us no time to think. Meditation is a lost art. must realize the wholeness of his existence, his place in the infinite." What chance to realize his place in the infinite has the laborer who works ten hours a day in a perpetually clanging factory, or the capitalist who takes his account-books to bed with him and wakes in the night to wonder one night how he can double his capital, another night how he can save himself from bankruptcy? "Man must know that when man shuts himself out from the vitalizing and purifying touch of the infinite and falls back upon himself for his sustenance and his healing, then he goads himself into madness, tears himself into shreds, and eats his own substance." Is this what we are doing? This is what the Eastern sage thinks we are doing. His message is at least worth our consideration.

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What," I hear the Westerner ask, impatiently," would this sage have? Does he want me to imitate the East Indian devotee— take up my begging bowl, sit by the roadside, beg my food of those more industrious than myself, and absorb the infinite and be absorbed by it through meditation?" No, replies Sir Rabindranath. "It will never do the least good to attempt the realization of the infinite apart from the world of action." And again: The more man acts and makes actual what was latent in him, the nearer does he bring the distant Yet-to-be." Insistence in the doing and becoming gives in the West" the intoxication of power." Insistence on meditation as the only means of spiritual development gives in the East "the intoxication of the spirit." In this I agree with Sir Rabindranath. Not till we learn how to make the end of our action not merely bigger factories but bigger men, not merely bigger houses but sweeter homes, not merely the creation of things that perish with the using but the development of imperishable spirits worthy to be sons and companions of the All Father-not till thus East and West do meet shall we find the solution of life's tragic mystery.

This profound conviction that modernperhaps I should say Western-civilization is sacrificing reality for illusion, the spiritual for the material, man for things, underlies the Eastern hostility to Western life. I do not think Ruskin ever visited the East or was ever familiar with Oriental thought, but his abhorrence of the ugliness of modern civilization is thoroughly Oriental. "Formerly the

Canges was a beautiful river. But great factories with their smoking chimneys have been planted along its banks, and now its beauty is gone. . . . You can cut down a tree and burn it, and it will give you warmth. But it will no longer give you blossoms and fruit." We are tardily beginning to learn this truth in America. Our municipal, State, and National park systems are a result of our awakening to the value of beauty.

We live in an age of great organizationscommercial, industrial, political, educational, religious. They are our pride. They are an object of dread to Sir Rabindranath Tagore. He sees the individual lost in the corporation, the labor union, the Nation, even in the Church. What he dreads finds its expression in our saying that "corporations have no souls." To lose our souls and get a great corporation is a poor bargain. When I read his Carnegie Hall speech I said to myself, "This is individualism pure and simple." And then I took up my copy of “Sādhanā” and read these pregnant sentences:

Children, when they begin to learn each separate letter of the alphabet, find no pleasure in it, because they miss the real purpose of the lesson; in fact, while letters claim our attention only in themselves and as isolated things, they fatigue us. They become a source of joy to us only when they combine into words and sentences and convey an idea. Likewise, our soul when detached and imprisoned within the narrow limits of a self loses its significance. For its very essence is unity. It can only find out its truth by unifying itself with others, and only then it has its joy.

6.

But this principle of unity which man has in his soul" and which "is ever active, establishing relations far and wide through literature, art, and science, society, statecraft, and religion," must be a spiritual unity, a real brotherhood, not a democratic absolutism. It must be a natural expression of the spirit of fellowship which we have for one another, not a forced and formal organization created and maintained for the purpose of making money or winning battles. The difference between the two is well illustrated by the difference between the organization of France and Germany in the present war. Such at least is my reading of the Eastern sage's conception of what organization should be. How to secure the efficiency of organization and preserve and promote the liberty and development of the individual is one of the unsolved problems of our time, and light

from any quarter on this problem we may well eagerly welcome.

When I turn from Sir Rabindranath Tagore as a teacher on social and political themes to his religious teaching the difficulty of interpreting him in terms of Western thought becomes insuperable. It is in the religious realm that the difficulty of bringing about even an intellectual meeting between the East and the West is greatest. All that I can here do is to indicate the radical difference between these methods of thought.

We Westerners attempt to make all our mental processes scientific. We want a reason for everything and an exact definition of everything. We are not content with a feeling of awe in the presence of a Power greater than our own in nature, and a pervasive spirit of justice and mercy animating and so uniting humanity in a common brotherhood, in States, churches, moral reform movements, and humanitarian endeavors for the relief of those in distress-a Spirit greater than ourselves, in us and yet beyond and above us; we must define it and catalogue its attributes. We are not content with a belief that this Power in ourselves and yet not ourselves shares in our pains and sorrows and feels a sympathetic remorse for our sins as a father feels the sins of his son as though they were his own, but, with the nearness to this Great Spirit which this faith brings, we must explain the how and why, and so formulate out of our experiences of friendship a doctrine of the atonement. We are not content with the faith that the Great Spirit is brought near to us through human experience, our own experiences of repentance for errors and sins in the past, and our own experience of aspirations for a higher and purer and better life in the future, and by the observed experiences of such higher and purer and better life in others, and pre-eminently in Jesus of Nazareth, the highest, purest, best life that either history or fiction has put before us; but we must organize this experience of ours into a doctrine of the Trinity. We treat our spiritual experiences as scientific facts or mathematical formulæ, and try to define them as we define chemical substances or geometrical symbols.

All this is foreign to the Oriental. He is not scientifically inclined. He has no wish for exact definitions. They are to him unmeaning. These experiences transcend definitions. They belong to a different world. A triangle is always a triangle, and oxygen

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is always oxygen. But no two experiences of reverence, or repentance, or aspiration, or love are the same. The Oriental is quite content to express his own spiritual experiences in his own way, or even merely to possess them without expressing them, and the Oriental teacher appeals directly to these spiritual experiences, endeavoring not to teach them as one teaches algebra or physics, but to arouse them in others by his own selfexpression, and then leave them to take such form in his hearers' lives as they may. Strictly speaking, the Oriental has no theology, he has only a religion. Sometimes the Occidental has had no religion, only a theology. I cannot better illustrate this difference

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than by taking a part of the definition of God given in the Westminster Confession of Faith and the experience of God quoted by Sir Rabindranath Tagore in " Sādhanā :”

"There is but one only living and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute."

"Listen to me, ye sons of the immortal spirit, ye who live in the heavenly abode. I have known the Supreme Person whose light shines forth from beyond the darkness."

I am enough of a mystic to prefer the experience of God to the definition of God.

S

INCE the election the mails have brought

us many letters from all over the United States; letters both commending and criticising our interpretation of the results. We have been glad to receive those which commend our interpretation, but perhaps even gladder to receive those from our subscribers who differ with us in their view of the election results. Sometimes we have been moved to accept the letters which criticise us as excellent testimony in proof of our own position; witness one which came to us on the stationery of the Kansas Senate. The writer complained because we referred to his State as "comfortable Kansas" and because we said that Kansas did not understand the issues of the election. He then gives five reasons why Kansas voted for President Wilson. Here are two of the reasons which he gives :

The people of Kansas are peace-loving, and not in favor of war. They believe a vote for Hughes meant trouble.

Republican campaign speakers and Republican newspapers in times past gave McKinley and the Republican party credit for one-dollar wheat. The voters, many of them, took the Republicans at their word and gave President Wilson and the Democrats credit for two-dollar wheat and one-dollar corn. The Republicans simply overtrained us.

Certainly if Kansas is to be judged by this

witness she did not understand the issues of the election. Two-dollar wheat and fear of trouble had nothing to do with the problems confronting the American people for solution.

Among the letters which have come to us from Ohio is one which disagrees with The Outlook's interpretation of the election as emphatically as did the letter from this citizen of Kansas, part of which we have just quoted. We certainly find ourselves, however, in much closer sympathy with the point of view of this writer than with the point of view of our Kansas correspondent. Mr. Charles Kirkwood Alexander, of Rushsylvania, Ohio, commends The Outlook for the speed and completeness of its election news, and then continues :

You do us grave wrong, my friend, when you say we have not the National spirit. I assure you our first thought was for our Nation's honor and influence. I live in the great State of Ohio. I belong to the lower classes, who have most of the votes, and I am certain that our motives were not unworthy. We resent your classification in a group of "States which demonstrated their inability to think Nationally, which were ready to sacrifice National candidates and policies to local quarrels." If there are any local quarrels in Ohio, we, the common people, are ignorant of the fact, and we give proof of our interest in National candidates by rolling up a plurality of eighty thousand for

Wilson, while State candidates poll only from fifteen to thirty thousand. . . .

As we talked to our Republican friends, the reason they gave when they got down to rock bottom was the selfish one of a high tariff to protect their own industries. No Nationalism in that, surely. And that was what the campaign orators that the Republican Committee sent to us in these rural counties appealed to our own selfish interests. We are inclined to suspect, moreover, that the pluralities in the industrial States of the East were due largely to this same selfish interest, while those who valued the Nation's honor voted largely with the President. Of course we may be wrong, but there are several hundred thousand more of us than there are of you, and we feel that our position deserves some consideration in any fair "interpretation."

From Walla Walla, Washington, we have received a letter from a professor in the Department of History of Whitman College, Mr. W. D. Lyman, who also resents the imputation that the West cannot think Nationally. We believe that Mr. Lyman somewhat misunderstands The Outlook's position. The West can, and does, think Nationally; but in the recent election we believe that it thought the choice was between Nationalism without progressivism and progressivism with Nationalism as a possibility for future development. There is much in Mr. Lyman's letter to bear out this view. We quote only in part:

While your statement of the need of a true Nationalism is worthy of all acceptance, I am venturing to express the conviction that you are mistaken in attributing the result of the election to a failure on the part of the supporters of Wilson in the West (that is the implication though not the words of your interpretation) to possess that National consciousness. I have lived during my entire life, with the exception of college years, in Oregon, Washington, and California, and I may claim modestly to know something of the spirit and sentiments of this section. I believe that a thorough acquaintance with the people of the West, particularly of the Pacific States, would confirm my own impression that these States are the most American and most National of all this Union.

If I may venture to offer the opinion which I think prevails here for the tremendous increase in President Wilson's support west of the Mississippi, I would say that it was due to two large, positive opinions which have gained force during the past six months. The first of these is the belief that Wilson is a truer exponent of progressive principles than his opponents, and that both his foreign and domestic policies

with some acknowledged errors of judgmentrepresent a genuine constructive effort to attain world peace and a united America; or, in other words (just opposite to your interpretation), that Wilson's Administration is headed to a real Nationalism and a new internationalism.

The second great positive opinion has been that Wilson's Administration represents a revolt of the rank and file of workers against the predatory financial interests directed by capitalism and bossism. In brief, Wilson was reelected because the West thought that he was the true Progressive and that he was against "Wall Street." That the Progressives voted for him is obvious from the most cursory glance at the returns.

No matter how any section of the country voted, apparently the best way to arouse a protest from that section is to accuse it of having voted for un-National reasons. It is a healthy sign, and one which promises well for the future.

We have received from Mr. G. W. Cullison, of Harlan, Iowa, a letter which not only supplies an interesting interpretation of the past election, but some excellent portents for the future which political leaders of both parties should read with interest. We quote Mr. Cullison's letter at some length. own title for the letter which he sends us is—

His

"THE OUTLOOK'S ERROR" "In the Outlook of November 15, under the title The Meaning of the Election,' it is said: To the rural population, especially in the regions west of the Missouri River, the protection of Americans on the sea, and even American cities on the seaboard, has seemed a matter of indifference.' implication is that because the West failed to support Mr. Hughes and gave Mr. Wilson a small plurality it shows its indifference to the protection of 'Americans on the sea' and of the seaboard cities. The conclusion is not only erroneous but very unjust.

The

"Mr. Wilson is not popular in the West. He is regarded as a wabbler, either from a lack of knowledge or nerve, or an opportunist who uses questions of great importance to promote his own political ends. His foreign policy, especially his Mexican policy, would have been repudiated in the West if the Republicans had made that the issue. Colonel Roosevelt made, or developed, that issue, but the Republicans in the Eastern States repudiated Mr. Roosevelt and ran away from the issue in the West. When Mr. Hughes entered the political

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He

"It was unfortunate that the Republican party chose Mr. Hughes as its leader. was a good judge in a great and responsible position. He is a great lawyer, and had done excellent service in prosecuting the insurance companies. He embodied no issue. His mind seemed to be wandering. He, no doubt, was a good Governor of New York, but it must not be forgotten that New York is a small part of the United States and getting relatively smaller every year. It had much to do in nominating Mr. Hughes. It did not seem to concern itself much about finding a man who would measure up to the great issues pending. It appeared to busy itself greatly to find a man somewhere who could beat Mr. Roosevelt in the Convention and Mr. Wilson at the polls. Mr. Hughes was selected, not to represent great issues, but to win-' merely this and nothing more.'

"The West has for many years doubted whether either of the great parties in the East had sufficient vitality to generate its own motive power. It has noticed for quite a while that political machines in the East furnished the motive power and both great parties were merely trailers to their machines. Its experience four years ago in the Republican Convention taught the West how brutally a machine would, if occasion required, disregard the will of the people of the West. It was thoroughly mad in 1912. It has not cooled off yet. The West felt this year that what the machines did not boldly attempt they cunningly accomplished. Unfortunately for Mr. Hughes, he was suspected of being the tool of the plotters, notwithstanding his repeated assertion that there would be no invisible government if he were elected. These facts told against him in the campaign. The West abhors political machines and takes great delight in smashing

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them to smithereens.' In this campaign there was a little, squeaking political machine in California. It was really a transplant from New York and Massachusetts, but it did not long run smooth in that climate. It did its very little best to defeat the will of the people in that State, and especially to defeat Governor Johnson. It used Mr. Hughes on his visit to that State to further its own ends. Mr. Hughes appeared to be wholly unaware of the machine's designs. The people smashed the machine, and in so doing struck down Mr. Hughes, the innocent bystander, and elected Governor Johnson for Senator by something like three hundred thousand plurality.

"The people of the West had to decide whether they would longer continue as supporters of the old Eastern political machines or join with the Before-the-wah-sah South. They know that the South, which for the last fifty years has voted like a chain-gang, is dangerous. The closeness of the vote shows that they hesitated, but by narrow margin decided to unite with the South. These things, in my humble judgment, were the cause of Mr. Hughes's defeat.

"The writer regrets that Mr. Hughes was defeated. He would have been delighted at his success. He believes the country would have been in safer hands. The sentiments of the West in choosing a National candidate must in the future be regarded."

For a section to express itself Nationally something more than the desire is necessary; a State to be more than provincial must be educated on National lines. One of the reasons why the interior of the country has not been interested in a large navy, for instance, is that it has not realized the purpose and use of a large navy in protecting the country as a whole. The interior of the country has thought that the East was provincial in asking for battle-ships because of a mistaken idea that battle-ships were only of use to protect the seaport towns.

The international situation, which was the real issue of the last election, was ignored or misinterpreted by a large section of the country for the reason that the A B C's of our international relations were not made clear to the people at large.

From a State voting for Hughes by a reduced Republican majority comes a letter setting forth the difficulties which the Middle West had in gaining a clear conception of