knowledge, and which breed of mass-meetings he doesn’t attend,
except to refute its doctrines with brickbats. We are always
hearing of people who are around SEEKING AFTER TRUTH. I have
never seen a (permanent) specimen. I think he had never lived.
But I have seen several entirely sincere people who THOUGHT they
were (permanent) Seekers after Truth. They sought diligently,
persistently, carefully, cautiously, profoundly, with perfect
honesty and nicely adjusted judgment–until they believed that
without doubt or question they had found the Truth. THAT WAS THE
END OF THE SEARCH. The man spent the rest of his life hunting up
shingles wherewith to protect his Truth from the weather. If he
was seeking after political Truth he found it in one or another
of the hundred political gospels which govern men in the earth;
if he was seeking after the Only True Religion he found it in one
or another of the three thousand that are on the market. In any
case, when he found the Truth HE SOUGHT NO FURTHER; but from that
day forth, with his soldering-iron in one hand and his bludgeon
in the other he tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors.
There have been innumerable Temporary Seekers of Truth–have you
ever heard of a permanent one? In the very nature of man such a
person is impossible. However, to drop back to the text–
training: all training is one from or another of OUTSIDE
INFLUENCE, and ASSOCIATION is the largest part of it. A man is
never anything but what his outside influences have made him.
They train him downward or they train him upward–but they TRAIN
him; they are at work upon him all the time.
Y.M. Then if he happen by the accidents of life to be
evilly placed there is no help for him, according to your
notions–he must train downward.
O.M. No help for him? No help for this chameleon? It is a
mistake. It is in his chameleonship that his greatest good
fortune lies. He has only to change his habitat–his
ASSOCIATIONS. But the impulse to do it must come from the
OUTSIDE–he cannot originate it himself, with that purpose in
view. Sometimes a very small and accidental thing can furnish
him the initiatory impulse and start him on a new road, with a
new idea. The chance remark of a sweetheart, “I hear that you
are a coward,” may water a seed that shall sprout and bloom and
flourish, and ended in producing a surprising fruitage–in the
fields of war. The history of man is full of such accidents.
The accident of a broken leg brought a profane and ribald soldier
under religious influences and furnished him a new ideal. From
that accident sprang the Order of the Jesuits, and it has been
shaking thrones, changing policies, and doing other tremendous
work for two hundred years–and will go on. The chance reading
of a book or of a paragraph in a newspaper can start a man on a
new track and make him renounce his old associations and seek new
ones that are IN SYMPATHY WITH HIS NEW IDEAL: and the result,
for that man, can be an entire change of his way of life.
Y.M. Are you hinting at a scheme of procedure?
O.M. Not a new one–an old one. One as mankind.
Y.M. What is it?
O.M. Merely the laying of traps for people. Traps baited
with INITIATORY IMPULSES TOWARD HIGH IDEALS. It is what the
tract-distributor does. It is what the missionary does. It is
what governments ought to do.
Y.M. Don’t they?
O.M. In one way they do, in another they don’t. They
separate the smallpox patients from the healthy people, but in
dealing with crime they put the healthy into the pest-house along
with the sick. That is to say, they put the beginners in with
the confirmed criminals. This would be well if man were
naturally inclined to good, but he isn’t, and so ASSOCIATION
makes the beginners worse than they were when they went into
captivity. It is putting a very severe punishment upon the
comparatively innocent at times. They hang a man–which is a
trifling punishment; this breaks the hearts of his family–which