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directed their prayer and effort to the salvation of the village. God answered prayer, and men, women, and children, were converted. Moralists, harlots, all types of unbelievers and sinners, came into the kingdom. One Sabbath morning, the pastor had requested general prayer on the part of all, for the special manifestation of God at the evening service. The evening service opened and progressed without any apparent impression; yet at the simple invitation, given with little confidence of response, ten adults came to the altar. At one Sunday evening service one hundred people testified in thirty minutes. One feature characterizing the village services is deserving of special mention. The pastor had a preconceived idea of those who would first be reached, yet the first expected were last in fact. It was expected that the work would begin at the top but it started at the bottom; four immoral women were the first to come. Truly God is no respecter of persons. One case of many direct answers to prayer may be noted. A young German, about thirty years of age, keen, well educated, skeptical, had been the subject of special interest and prayer. One Sunday evening he had promised to come to hear a sermon on "Nicodemus." Circumstances kept him at home. After the service the pastor passed his house and, standing upon the hill, prayed, in faith, that there might be unrest in that man's mind. The following morning he met the man, who said at once, "Mr. D., I could not come last night, but I know about the sermon, Mr. S. (his employer), related it to me. I could not sleep. At two o'clock I arose and searched the New Testament until I found the account of Nicodemus." As an outcome, the man was saved from drunkenness, and from suicide which had been planned.

Now, during these months the question of "No License" had been kept to the front and vigorously, fearlessly, presented by the minister. The whole town was in a commotion, stirred to the deeps. By very many the pastor was misrepresented and maligned. A saloonkeeper threatened his life; menacing letters were received and one attempt made to waylay him on a lonely road was foiled. The man who attempted violence was afterward nearly killed in a fight. The saloonkeeper who threatened was himself murdered by a man who drank his whisky and stabbed him behind his own

bar. The day for the town meeting arrived. Enemies laughed to scorn the possibility of the town being carried for "No License." Many of the friends of the movement, which had developed into a battle, despaired of success. But God was in the battle. Many things instigated apparently by the devil were divinely manipulated and utilized for victory. One old man who had been saved on Potter Hill was induced and even forced to drink. This plot was so diabolical that not only were Protestants stirred but the Roman Catholics also vowed vengeance and worked for "No License." As one has said, "The devil makes a razor and with the same razor God cuts his throat." Other events, among them a disgraceful quarrel, scandalized public opinion. One caucus in which the license question became the dividing issue was a public disgrace. All these things with a multitude of minor events were so many coördinated engagements in the great campaign. The high ideals that shone in the light of that winter's religious work put to greater shame the arguments advanced by license advocates. On the day of fate the conflict was intense. Opinion as to outcome was divided at the close of day, but the main workers had a faith undaunted even by numerous cases of illegal voting. The evening scene at the polls is forever engraved upon the pastor's mind. On one side of the town hall sat the justices counting the ballots. Lined up opposite were scores of men who had worked for "No License." In another section of the hall were the "rummies," dark-visaged, grim, and fearful. Their leader, a man of county and state reputation, a man of magnetism and influence who had defied the law and its officers, stood with beads of perspiration on his brow, awaiting the result. At last the vote was announced. To the gladness of all who had hoped for deliverance, to the chagrin of all opposers, to the amazement of the outside world, "No License" had been carried by over one hundred majority. "This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith."

Arthur Robert Wavies

ART. X. PRACTICAL LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY

THE common interests, the common values, or those which are believed to be essentially related to them, are what you refer to when you speak of the practical life. If your interests and mine do not agree, you speak of our practical life or of the practical life only as you neglect our differences. The man who thinks as no one else believes is the impractical man. The insane person, though intensely practical within his own world of thought, is impractical to the world beyond because he will not do as his fellows propose. The practical thus is an abstraction. It is a neglectful attitude. It is always less than concrete experience, for the common is but one phase of life. Experience, as we get it, is unique. Indeed, so full is life of differentiation that each new attempt to quantify the world reveals in clearer light the unalterable reality outside all quantity. Personality, the citadel of the real, is a bundle of special interests. Shall we say, then, that the unique purpose or interest, the unique value, is impractical? In a different sense to that previously expressed, the unique has its practical side. As a means fulfilling some end the unique may be termed practical to that end.

Philosophy is practical in the two senses in which we have used the term. It fulfills our deeper purposes, and in so doing touches life commonly in all its varied forms. It is hard for a mechanic to see the practical side of literature, or for the exclusive student of literature to find very much of worth in the mechanic's art. "A geologist's purposes fall short of understanding time itself. A mechanic need not know how action and reaction are possible to all. A psychologist has enough to do without asking how both he and the mind which he studies are able to take cognizance of the same outer world. But, though it be true that the special interests of a field may determine what is of practical worth for that purpose, it is obvious that problems irrelevant from one standpoint may be essential from another. And as soon as one's purpose is the attainment of the maximum of possible insight into the world as a whole the metaphysical puzzles become the most

urgent ones of all." "The special sciences all deal with data that are full of obscurity and contradiction, but from the point of view of their limited purposes these defects may be overlooked." They may be overlooked just because to the confined purpose at hand they are irrelevant and therefore impractical. The more our view is restricted so much the more do we assert the special interests we handle to be the only practical life. However, when my purpose is to acquire the deepest insight, and to attain rational consistency among the various notions I hold as constituting the world, then, because of that purpose, in order to realize my aim, I am in duty bound to grapple with those very inconsistencies or subtle forms of analysis which my more restricted purpose chooses to neglect or scorns to touch. For every special interest is a hermit which withdraws from the windows of its own home and so often refuses to look out upon the glory of the world of purpose that encompasses and supports its own being. Only as we come to realize that no purpose is its own creation, but that its present glow and warmth is a part of a larger structure, or that it attains its value because of other values beyond it, do we come to believe that also is practical which ultimately affects our immediate interests. And thus it comes to be that not only the special, not only the immediate interest which alone constitutes the practical life of the common man, but also whatever changes, alters, or determines these interests is included in the practical. The special interest of the wider view which touches life commonly is the practical. Philosophy is practical because it is the great framework into which you build your pieces of daily experience or your fragmentary purposes. To this framework the common man seldom directs his attention except momentarily, as he examines some isolated beam or section of the structure; except as he is interested, say momentarily, in the problem of free will or material existence. He never goes far in his examination nor sees the structure, the framework, as a whole. On the other hand, it is this framework to which the philosopher specifically directs his attention, and it is his purpose to see it as a whole; to realize how each part fits

into the other.

Let us interpret more in detail the meaning and purpose of

philosophy. To some laymen the term often stands for an unmeaning and misapplied effort toward the solution of the insolvable and a reaching after that which shall forever remain a mystery. It is for this reason that men of this type refer to those problems which they do not understand, or which appeal to them as mysteries, as philosophical problems. The stock reference is usually matter, the unknowable. Men do not strive long even at intellectual labor when they feel no genuine reward. If the philosopher saw no more, felt no more, solved no more than the critic, and if his problems remained in mystery as sometimes supposed, his efforts would soon cease. It is because he wins back reality that he is ever willing to pursue farther. After all, the test of the fruitfulness of philosophic endeavor is found in the real pursuit of its methods. Few indeed are there who, once entering its realm, are ever willing to return. To most, it may be said, philosophy stands for the general and marginal knowledge one is conscious of. A prominent authority has described metaphysics as "an unusually obstinate attempt to think clearly and logically." Both views are real aspects, but, technically, philosophy has quite a distinct meaning from either notion. Technically philosophy stands for a connected and logically arranged way of looking at the totality of things. Not that its purpose is to get an acquaintance with all fact, but rather that it endeavors to present the universal and necessary conditions of fact. Its method, therefore, is largely that of revealing the presuppositions of any system of thought, of any field of science, or of any type of experience, and that of inquiring into the nature of these concepts and of their necessary relation to each other and to the world at large. Philosophy thus implies certain precise attitudes toward reason, faith, mysticism and science. It is opposed to faith in so far as faith ever arbitrarily restricts one's questions, though it can hardly be said to be more than reservedly opposed. Faith has two fundamental aspects: (1) The aspect of the given, the granted, the datum, a something upon which you act without proof, something of which you are convinced without inference. In this sense philosophy is not always opposed to faith, for reason is dependent on the given, the granted, the accepted. Reason is regulative and, at best, is only imperfectly creative.

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