Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/702

684 "dim religious light," having proved inadequate, suppose we try bible-reading in rooms with bare walls, relieved only by maps and drawings of animals. Commands and interdicts, uttered by a surpliced priest to minds prepared by chant and organ-peal, not having been obeyed, let us see whether they will be obeyed when mechanically repeated in school-boy sing-song to a threadbare usher, amid the buzz of lesson-learning and clatter of slates. No very hopeful proposals, one would say; proceeding, as they do, upon one or other of the beliefs, that a moral precept will be effective in proportion as it is received without emotional accompaniment, and that its effectiveness will increase in proportion to the number of times it is repeated. Both these beliefs are directly at variance with the results of psychological analysis and of daily experience. Certainly, such influence as may be gained by addressing moral truths to the intellect, is made greater if the accompaniments arouse an appropriate emotional excitement, as a religious service does; while, conversely, there can be no more effectual way of divesting such moral truths of their impressiveness, than associating them with the prosaic and vulgarizing sounds and sights and smells coming from crowded children. And no less certain is it that precepts, often heard and little regarded, lose by repetition the small influence they bad. What do public-schools show us?—are the boys rendered merciful to one another by listening to religious injunctions every morning? "What do universities show us?—have perpetual chapels habitually made undergraduates behave better than the average of young men? "What do cathedral-towns show us?—is there in them a moral tone above that of other towns, or must we from the common saying, "the nearer the church," etc., infer a pervading impression to the contrary? What do clergymen's sons show us?—has constant insistance on right conduct made them conspicuously superior, or do we not rather hear it whispered that something like an opposite effect seems produced. Or, to take one more case, what do religious newspapers show us?—is it that the precepts of Christianity, more familiar to their writers than to other writers, are more clearly to be traced in their articles, or has there not ever been displayed a want of charity in their dealings with opponents, and is it not still displayed? Nowhere do we find that repetition of rules of right, already known but disregarded, produces regard for them; but we find that, contrariwise, it makes the regard for them less than before.

The prevailing assumption is, indeed, as much disproved by analysis as it is contradicted by familiar facts. Already we have seen that the connection is between action and feeling; and hence the corollary, that only by a frequent passing of feeling into action is the tendency to such action strengthened. Just as two ideas often repeated in a Certain order become coherent in that order; and just as muscular motions, at first difficult to combine properly with one another and