PHILISTINES ANCIENT AND MODERN.

“The Ancient Philistines.—The enemies of the children of light.”—International Cyclopedia.

“Philistine.—A term of contempt applied by prigs to the rest of their species.”—Leslie Stephen.

A tiny spot on the map is the Philistia of Old Testament days—a way station on the path of commerce between alphabet-building Phœnicia to the north, and Canaan and predatory Arabia on the south. But long before those hardy neighbors plagued Israel and made a hostage of the Ark of the Covenant there were Philistines in the world, influencing its destinies.

Tradition has been unkind to Philistinism as to many other good things. The Serpent in the Garden is the earliest embodiment of the genius of protest, unless we follow John Milton farther back to the rebellion in the Court of Heaven, organized by the Sons of the Morning. Omnipotence that founded order set in motion change also. The unrest that is the electro-motor of progress is in nature as in man, and evolution is its perpetual law.

Human society was ripe for Philistines when Noah launched his ocean palace inland. Scarce a century later the egotism of man sought to scale high heaven from a tower of brick and asphalt. Matter was deified with the usual result, and a discordant medley of alien labor was all the product of the giant enterprise.

Down through the patriarchal ages the conservative men who builded cities and the sons of progress who balked established order and moved on kept up the alternation of forces. Jacob wrung from an angel his divine endowment and won his brother’s primogeniture when Esau, the conservative, gave all the future for the good things near by. Joseph, the dreamer, peddled like old clothes to a rag man, showed his thrifty brothers a bunco trick worth learning when he had come, a stranger of a despised race, to be all but a Pharaoh in the capital of civilization. The trumpet blasts that felled Jericho, the vanquishing shouts of Gideon, the sling of the shepherd stripling that freed a nation, tell of seemingly inadequate means out of the conservative order that changed history. Moses, prophet and lawgiver and priest, killed his man and was a fugitive a generation before he abandoned his princely rank in Egypt to lead a nation of slaves into the evolution of independence and mastery of the world’s spiritual thought.

The ancient monarchies went to wreck when the social order had become stationary—encrusted with custom and caste. But a few Philistines, destroyers of arbitrary ranks, recreated the world in the democracy of Chivalry, and that in turn went down when its vital purpose had been achieved and its orders had become set and stifled progress.

It was a Philistine, a despised player and holder of horses, who gave the modern world its literature. It was a heretic monk who threw ink-stands, not only at Satan, but at embodied and enthroned religion, who gave the modern world its impetus to freedom. The imaginative authors who most strongly sway mankind today are Philistines. Thackeray smilingly lifted the mask from aristocracy and exposed its sordid servility. Dickens threw down the idols of pretentious respectability. Hugo taught the democracy of virtue. Tolstoi dethroned convention in religion. Ibsen divorced morality from law.

The note of protest resounds throughout history. Every age seeks in material gratifications the realization of its destiny. Everywhere genius becomes conservative and sterile; art grows self-conscious and measures achievement by technical difficulties; ceremonial binds social life; law protects artificial privilege; religion is refined into theology or materialized into idolatry; hospitality becomes an exchange, and the humanities are buried alive under their own machinery. They who protest, who exalt purpose and measure achievement thereby, are called Philistines.

They realize the finiteness of all created things. They see evolution in all, and hold naught that is finite to be final.

Philistinism is the world’s perpetual crusade. It reveres tradition, but it despises commonplace in purple.

William McIntosh.