The call to service: A commencement address
Parts 1 and 2 of John Erskine's essay, "The Call to Service" from his collection of essays, *The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent*.
As I feel for a moment the wholesome dizziness that is the penalty of mounting a platform above one's fellows, and as I look down at the young faces courteously lifted for my first words, I am aware of—what shall I call it?—of an enforced collaboration; suddenly I have a vision of other rooms filled with other young men, who wait, as you do, for the first words of the commencement speaker, and at once I feel a sudden sympathy with those other speakers, who desire, as I do, to translate the occasion into wise and appropriate words. I see our various schools and colleges keeping their commencements with a single mind—the audiences all expecting the same address, and the speakers, however original, all delivering it. You expect, every graduating class expects, to be told what to do with education, now you have it; your school or college owes it to itself, you think, to confess in public the purpose for which it has trained you. I can almost hear the speakers, from ocean to ocean, responding in unison to this expectation in the graduates they face; the simultaneous eloquence is so inevitable that I can follow it almost word for word; in fact, I almost join in.
The speech they are delivering is known as the Call to Service. The substance of it is that educated men should be unselfish; that learning is a vain and dangerous luxury if it is only for ourselves; that the following of truth, the reverent touching of the hem of her garment, is not, as we may have thought, a privilege, nor is even the love of truth a virtue, until it is converted into a responsibility toward others. Few of us care to challenge this teaching. We share in the will to serve, not merely as an annual attitude, but as a year-long passion, until it becomes our one authentic motive to good living—or, if we disobey it, a witness against us, incessant and uncomfortable. No wonder that at commencement time particularly, at a moment of success and hope, the instinct of the young graduate is to hear the call to service, and the instinct of the speaker is to sound it.
Yet some of us hesitate. So long as the mind is enclosed within the happy commencement scene, the circle of well-intending graduates, affectionate parents, and earnest teachers, it is easy to say "Come into the world now, young man, and begin your life-long service; your good fortune, your privileges, have set you apart, but other men, alas, are also set apart by the very lack of what you have enjoyed; now bring your plenty to their want." If our thought is centered, I repeat, on those whom we call into the world, this speech comes easy, but it sticks in our throat if we begin to think of those who, we say, are in need of service. Immediately a second and profounder vision rises before us—no cheerful reaction of commencement audience and commencement speakers, but a violent opposition between the fortunate who are preparing aid and the more numerous unlucky who presumably are preparing to accept it. What confounds us is the plain fact that only those who hope to render the service have the slightest enthusiasm for it. We might well expect also some due and ardent recognition, some rising to the moment, from those about to be served. Their need, to be sure, has no such focus, no such rallying-point, as the impulse to their rescue; no commencement address puts them in mind to receive, as you graduates are stimulated to give. But their need itself, we might think, should at first prepare in them, and experience year by year confirm, a receptive and a thankful heart. Yet those about to be served are silent. If there are distinctions in silence, theirs leans less toward humility than toward defence. Those who have already been served and who now hear again the summons to their benefit, break silence by gradations of reproach. They deprecate the ministrations of the educated. They invite the physician to heal himself. They intimate hypocrisy in their would-be rescuers, who, they say, instead of equalizing men's misfortunes once for all, so that no further rescue might be needed, actually prefer to patch up life's injustices from year to year, finding a moral satisfaction in being charitable, and craving, therefore, a supply of the unfortunate to exercise that virtue on.
These criticisms, it seems to me, have too much truth in them. They throw us back upon our conscience, and force us to examine the motives with which we call others to service or answer the call ourselves. Is service truly a rescue or a profession? Do we hope to cure our neighbor's misfortune or to live by it? Nothing could be more reasonable than that service should be judged by its value to the served, yet too often we practise this unselfishness as it were for our own good; we obey the call to service as an invitation to a salutary exercise of the soul. When the disturbing vision rises before us of half the race in need, and of the other half eager to help, we must withhold approval till we ask the eager helpers, "Do you look on the unfortunate as on your brothers, in temporary distress, or do you see in them objects of charity? Do you think your function is to serve, and their function is to be served? If by a miracle they should get on their feet, would you have lost your career?"
If these questions seem rhetorical and strained, let me put them in other terms to several of you who presumably desire to be in the truest sense serviceable. My object, frankly, is to show that the life of service is often exploited in such a way as to come fairly within the range of criticism, and that the men who sound the call to service nowadays and those who respond to it have often no right conception of what is serviceable. I should like to indicate what are the signs of true service and what are the signs of something else that masquerades in its name.
Some of you, doubtless, have decided to enter the Church. There was a time when the call to service was identical with a call to enter the religious life. Religion, the oldest, was once the broadest avenue to good works, so broad that for centuries it included those two other main paths, now become quite secular science and education; and with science and education it still provides the main opportunities for ministering to the soul, the body, and the mind of our fellows. Those of you, then, who contemplate the religious life, ought to be furnished out of antiquity with a definition of the service you would render; you ought to know the nature of the benefit the layman comes to religion for, and how to assist him to that benefit.
Perhaps you do not agree with me that you ought to know all this; perhaps, having felt a call to the ministry, you think the call justifies itself. As I speak, I see once more that ominous gulf between the server and the served. On one side I see you priests-to-be, loving your historical church, or your theology, or your revealed truth—loving, that is, certain gifts of God which you think you can prepare for by study, and receive by heavenly grace, and by your faithfulness transmit unimpaired to others after you; and your loyalty to theology or church or revelation you conceive to be service. On the other side of the gulf I see men waiting for real service at the hands of the Church, and not getting it. If there is hostility in the world to religion per se, at least that is not what I am talking about; I speak solely of those optimistic veterans in the pews who still expect the service of religion from the new arrival just out of the divinity school.
They have a pretty clear notion as to what religion promises, and they grow impatient for the promise to be kept. Religion promises, in the old words, a more abundant life, an immediate as well as a distant benefit, an enjoyment to be entered upon in this present world. It would provide at once an exercise to develop the spiritual faculties we now have into powers we but faintly imagine. "More abundant life," to the religious-minded, is the phrasing of an old battle-hope, a more than ancient faith in his own sufficiency to approach God, which individual man, in this sense forever Puritan, has never entirely let go. Even when the priest in his primitive function stood between the people and their deity, mediating by virtue of his superior gifts and training, the savage in his fear still had glimpses of a time when each heart should perform to God its vows and sacrifices, consecrated by the mere sharing in human life. "I will make him a nation of priests," promised Jehovah to Israel. The program of religion, therefore, is not to do away with the priest, but to bestow the priestly character more abundantly upon all men.
Must I qualify my words, and say that this is only the layman's program of religion? It seems to be different from the program of the loyal priest. He hopes to perpetuate his office for the good of more and more laymen; the layman hopes that the distinction between priest and layman will disappear. The priest looks upon his office as destined to serve perpetually, and upon the layman, therefore, as destined to be perpetually an object of service; but the layman hopes to need service less and less. How very disconcerting it would be for the Church, as it is at present organized, if all the laymen should become, in the truest sense, priests. Even if we grant that the organization conforms at present to a situation, yet we detect no wish on its part that the situation should be changed. In every denomination there seems to be a tendency to widen the gulf between priest and layman, honoring the first without ennobling the second. The very devotion which is the warrant of true religion, bids the layman look up, as to a higher order of being, to the holder of the priestly office. But when a man begins as it were to cherish holiness in another's life rather than in his own, the mischief is done; religion then robs him of the very thing it promises to give. If we cannot find the illustrations close at hand, the book of history opens at the very places. Whenever the priesthood has been exalted as a separate ideal of goodness or of wisdom, some integrity, some consecration, has been taken away from common men. In so-called Puritan moments, when the priesthood has been least remote, the conduct of the average man has been most nobly severe; but where the distinctive holiness of the priest has been most devotedly cherished, the average man has needed a system of pardons and indulgences. No doubt the priests were holy, and were eager to serve mankind, but was it service that they actually conferred? It appears that no man can be holy for his neighbors; or if he persuades them to submit to the experiment, the little holiness they have is taken away.
Perhaps you have not thought of the religious life as involving these problems. "Going into the ministry" has perhaps meant to you simply a process by which you dreamt of getting a parish to work in and people to serve. Yet even in the smallest parish the division I speak of, the opposition between priest and layman, between the serving and the served, will be awaiting you. Do you dream of a congregation to help.” Your congregation dream of rising beyond need of help. Do you expect to be consecrated above the layman.'' The layman, who nowadays has a dialectic of his own, will ask how your consecration manifests itself. If you explain that your superiority is not in you but in your office, he will press you to explain why the office, even if sacred, is necessary; he will ask whether a system of superiorities and inferiorities is vital to the religious life and whether, if all men were equally sanctified, the religious life would cease.
You understand that this is but a figure of speech. The layman will not argue with you in this fashion; he will stay away from your church on Sunday and avoid your society during the week. If empty pews mean anything, he is resolved to escape your benefits, but for old time's sake he prefers not to quarrel with the minister. With religion he still has no quarrel, but the Church seems to him actually irreligious—well-organized, yes, well-meaning and well-behaved, even indefatigable in distributing warm clothes and wholesome food to the needy, yet also in spite of her gifts increasingly re- mote, strangely indisposed or incompetent to share or impart the religious spirit. No wonder that, since it is spiritual development he craves, he will give his allegiance to other organizations than the Church. He sees that to join a parish for love of God comes to practically the same thing as joining it for love of the priest, to whose credit in a worldly sense an increase in the congregation is reckoned; he sees that against any criticism from the congregation the priest can and often does assert the authority of his office; he sees that though attendance at church will be counted as approval of the particular minister in charge, absence from church will be diagnosed as hostility to religion; and rather than accept the service of religion on terms so compromising to his self-respect, he retires from the field and cultivates indifference. From this mood he is roused only when a loud call to his rescue excites his wrath. The reform, he thinks, should begin elsewhere.
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