Introducing the American Spirit. Edward Alfred Steiner
in the public schools.
This was rather amusing to me, for just prior to that statement he had told me of one of his nephews who, upon approaching his final examinations, said: “If it were not for this accursed religion I could get through without trouble;” and I called his attention to the fact that although I had no difficulty with my “exams” in religion, invariably having an “Ausgezeichnet” which is equivalent to an A, I was always “Schlecht” in conduct.
I had found religious instruction a very irreligious procedure, for the man who taught it was irreligious enough to whip me so that I could not lie upon my back for a week, the cause being that I would not say yes to his credo. Moreover I told the Herr Director I thought all religious instruction irreligious which did not teach the child its whole duty to society, but taught religion from only the narrowing racial or sectarian standpoint.
Religion, I pointed out to him, can after all not be taught; it has to be caught. It is a contagion which comes from a spiritual personality, and our public schools are not religious or irreligious because certain subjects are found or not found in their curricula, but because the teachers have this spiritual personality or lack it. I am convinced that this ethical quality predominates in our public schools, not only because so many of our teachers are women, but because we are fundamentally a religious people.
At this point I became conscious that the attention of the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin had flagged; for their response to my homily was an eloquent tribute to the tenderness of the breast of a Long Island duck, which they had been enjoying while I talked. As they were consequently in a lenient mood towards the whole world and therefore the United States, I renewed my laudable and difficult effort, and, as is often best, through the medium of a story.
At the time the elective system was introduced into Harvard University, attendance upon chapel was made voluntary. “I understand,” said a severe critic of this procedure, “that you have made God elective in your college.”
“No,” replied the astute president, “I understand that God has made Himself elective everywhere.”
The point of my story was lost upon both my guests. When I paused, the Frau Directorin asked me how it was possible to serve so lavish a bill of fare for so little money, and the Herr Director asked the waiter why they called this a Long Island duck when the portions were so short. Thus the conviction was forced upon me that our environment was not conducive to the discussion of the American Spirit and that I must await a more auspicious occasion.
Late in the afternoon that occasion came; not on Fifth Avenue but on one of those streets where churches are fewest and humanity thickest; where Sunday brings liberation from toil, where cleanliness and godliness have an equally difficult task in coming or abiding; where nations and races must mingle and cannot easily blend, where the America which is to be is in the making, and where the Spirit must manifest itself if we are to be a nation with common ideals.
I like to take my friends to the East Side of New York City. I glory in its self-respect, its brave struggle against poverty and disease, its bright children filling all the available space and asserting their childhood by playing in the busy street, defying its noisy traffic. They make of each hurdy-gurdy the center of a great festival, dancing as the elves are said to dance, because it is their nature to.
I like to point out the faces of Patriarchs, Prophets and Madonnas—faces seamed by care and sorrow, yet lighted by a divine radiance and as unconscious of it as were those upon whom it shone in such fullness on that great East Side of the Universe which we now call the Holy Land.
I like to have my friends meet my East Side friends, the young working girls, who dress in good taste, help support a family, and maintain an unstained character in spite of small wages and the temptations of a great city. I like them to meet the growing boys who are hungry for the best the city holds, and who dream the dream of making the East Side in particular, and New York in general, a better place in which to live.
I am never ashamed to take my friends into the tenement houses, except as I am ashamed that they exist at all, with their stenches and the dearly bought space with twenty-four hours of darkness and no free access of air. Of the people who live within I am never ashamed, for they are the brave ones, to whom labor is prayer, and living a sacrifice. I like best to show off the East Side of New York on Sunday, for here it is most welcomed with its respite from labor, its chance at clean clothes, its opportunity to visit and be again something more than a machine.
On Fifth Avenue the Sabbath is made for the few, on the East Side it is made for the many; on Fifth Avenue God seems hard to find, on the East Side He comes down upon the street. They are indeed worse than infidels who do not feel His Spirit brooding over the crowd, and His guardian angels watching over those children—else how could they survive? Best of all I know where those Angels live, and it is there I took the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin; I was sure they would never leave the place doubting that we are a religious people. Evidently the children also knew where their Angels live for the place was in a state of siege. It is not strange that they knew, for their ancestors had walked and talked with angels, and they were not yet old enough to have lost the faith of their fathers. Troops of children there were; mere children carrying children, and where there was an only child, which is rare on the East Side, it was brought by a grandfather and grandmother, children themselves now, and old enough to again believe in angels.
There were flowers in the room and they were for the children; bowers of roses, red roses, wafting their incense and driving out the mouldy, tenement house air which clung to the little ones. There was music, and they sang—sang as I know God wanted them to sing—gay, happy songs, which seem to be denied the children who sing in the churches.
How I wished that the picturesque little choir boys on Fifth Avenue, who sang sixteenth century music and Augustinian theology, might have had a chance to sing as those East Side children sang—full throated, lustily, joyously; songs which made them shiver from very joy, and which made the Frau Directorin weep copiously.
How I wished that the priest who chanted Psalms in Latin, and the other priest who intoned them in English as dead as Latin, could have been there and have heard those children recite the same Psalms, in East Side English. Yes, I have often wished that David himself might hear them; I am sure he would be proud that he had a share in writing them, even as the priests might be ashamed that they had never known just what precious reading they are.
No one preached to the children although they heard the good tidings, and no one told them to be good although they were given a chance to know how good God is, when men give Him a chance.
There was a sacrament, a holy one; roses were given the children, and the Angels who gave them shed their blood, for the roses had thorns. The next week the children were to be taken where the roses grew, and they would see that
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