: By the Christmas Fire by Crothers Samuel McChord - Essays Christmas

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eceive nobody else. Everybody knows that we are showing off, and if we do it well they give us credit for that.

A scholar has a considerable amount of sound learning, and he is afraid that his fellow citizens may not fully appreciate it. So in his conversation he allows his erudition to leak out, with the intent that the stranger should say, "What a modest, learned man he is, and what a pleasure it is to meet him." Only the stranger does not express himself in that way, but says, "What an admirable pedant he is, to be sure." Pedantry is a well-recognized compound, two thirds sound learning and one third harmless vanity.

Sometimes on the street you see a man whom you take for an old acquaintance. You approach with outstretched hand and expectant countenance, but his stony glare of non-recognition gives you pause. The fact that he does not know you gives you time to perceive that you do not know him and have never seen him before. A superficial resemblance has deceived you. In the dictionary you may find many instances of such mistakes in the moral realm.

One of the most common of these mistakes in identity is the confusion of the Idealist and the Doctrinaire. An idealist is defined as "one who pursues and dwells upon the ideal, a seeker after the highest beauty and good." A doctrinaire may do this also, but he is differentiated as "one who theorizes without sufficient regard for practical considerations, one who undertakes to explain things by a narrow theory or group of theories."

The Idealist is the kind of man we need. He is not satisfied with things as they are. He is one

Whose soul sees the perfect Which his eyes seek in vain.

If a more perfect society is to come, it must be through the efforts of persons capable of such visions. Our schools, churches, and all the institutions of a higher civilization have as their chief aim the production of just such personalities. But why are they not more successful? What becomes of the thousands of young idealists who each year set forth on the quest for the highest beauty and truth? Why do they tire so soon of the quest and sink into the ranks of the spiritually unemployed.

The answer is that many persons who set out to be idealists end by becoming doctrinaires. They identify the highest beauty and truth with their own theories. After that they make no further excursions into the unexplored regions of reality, for fear that they may discover their identification to have been incomplete.

The Doctrinaire is like a mason who has mixed his cement before he is ready to use it. When he is ready the cement has set, and he can't use it. It sticks together, but it won't stick to anything else. George Eliot describes such a predicament in her sketch of the Reverend Amos Barton. Mr. Barton's plans, she says, were, like his sermons, "admirably well conceived, had the state of the case been otherwise."

The Doctrinaire, when he has conceived certain ideals, is not content that they should be cast upon the actual world, to take their chances in the rough-and-tumble struggle for existence, proving their right to the kingdom by actually conquering it, inch by inch. He cannot endure such tedious delays. He must have the satisfaction of seeing his ideals instantly realized. The ideal life must be lived under ideal conditions. And so, for his private satisfaction, he creates for himself such a world into which he retires.

It is a world of natural law, as he understands natural law. There are no exceptions, no deviation from general principles, no shadings off, no fascinating obscurities, no rude practical jokes, no undignified by-play, no "east windows of divine surprise," no dark unfathomable abysses. He would not allow such things. In his world the unexpected never happens. The endless chain of causation runs smoothly. Every event has a cause, and the cause is never tangled up with the effect, so that you cannot tell where one begins and the other ends. He is intellectually tidy, and everything must be in its place. If something turns up for which he cannot find a place, he sends it to the junk shop.

When the Doctrinaire descends from the homogeneous world which he has constructed, into the actual world which, in the attempt to get itself made, is becoming more amazingly heterogeneous all the time, he is in high dudgeon. The existence of these varied contradictorinesses seems to him a personal affront.

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