"As the Church and society view Culhane, so they view all life outside
their own immediate circles. Culhane is in fact a conspicuous figure
among the semi-taboo. He has been referred to in many an argument and
platform and pulpit and in the press as a type of man whose influence is
supposed to be vitiating. Now a minister enters the sanitarium, broken
down by his habits of life, and this same Culhane is able to penetrate
him, to see that his dogmatic and dictatorial mental habits are the
cause of his ailment, and he has the moral courage to shock him, to drag
him by apparently brutal processes out of his rut. He reads the man
accurately, he knows him better than he knows himself, and he effects a
cure.
"This astonishing condition is certainly a new light for those seeking
to labor among men. Those who are successful gamblers, pugilists,
pickpockets, saloon-keepers, book-makers, jockeys and the like are so
by reason of their intelligence, their innate mental acumen and
perception. It is a fact that in the sporting world and among the
unconventional men-about-town you will often find as good if not better
judges of human nature than elsewhere. Contact with a rough and ready
and all-too-revealing world teaches them much. The world's customary
pretensions and delusions are in the main ripped away. They are bruised
by rough facts. Often the men gathered in some such café and whom
preachers and moralists are most ready to condemn have a clearer
perception of preachers, church organizations and reformers and their
relative importance in the multitudinous life of the world than the
preachers, church congregations and reformers have of those in the café
or the world outside to which they belong.
"This is why, in my humble judgment, the Church and those associated
with its aims make no more progress than they do. While they are
consciously eager to better the world, they are so wrapped up in
themselves and their theories, so hampered by their arbitrary and
limited conceptions of good and evil, that the great majority of men
move about them unseen, except in a far-away and superficial manner. Men
are not influenced at arm's length. It would be interesting to know if
some day a preacher or judge, who, offended by Mr. Culhane's profanity
and brutality, will be able to reach the gladiator and convert him to
his views as readily as the gladiator is able to rid him of his
ailment."
In justice to the preachers, moralists, et cetera, I should now like to
add that it is probably not any of the virtues or perfections
represented by a man like Culhane with which they are quarreling, but
the vices of many who are in no wise like him and do not stand for the
things he stands for. At the same time, the so-called "sports" might
well reply that it is not with any of the really admirable qualities of
the "unco guid" that they quarrel, but their too narrow interpretations
of virtue and duty and their groundless generalization as to types and
classes.
Be it so.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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