We live in an age of discontent. Discontent has been deified. It has
been called divine; and unrest, the seal as well as the sign of
progress. Doubtless there is a time and a place even for discontent,
for there is no faculty that has not its function. But discontent,
which is a sacred fire when it burns within and is kept for home use,
is a mischievous and destroying element when it is widely distributed
and unthinkingly-employed by ignorance and short-sightedness.
[Footnote 1: _The Cycle_.]
Then it is certain that if discontent is good, content is far better,
and thankfulness better yet. If time teaches us anything, it is to
work and wait and trust; to be thankful for what is--for the digging
and seeding time as well as for the harvest; for one must come before
the other.
Time brings only one regret--that we had not more joy in the things
that were; more belief, more patience, more love; more knowledge of
the way things work out; more willingness to help toward the final
result. The preparation, the planting, the laying foundations, must be
done in the dark; usually done with blind eyes as well, which see not
what may or will be, but anticipate a harvest of pain from a
spring-time of rain. Yet these showers may have been indispensable to
the ground, and the seed may have expanded and sent its shoots up to
the surface in consequence of them.
But why use symbols? The days that are;--the days that are with us are
the good days. Suppose it is hard work, and only the prospect of hard
work? Work is the best thing we have got: it is salvation. It is the
means by which we struggle up out of the darkness into the light. It
is the law of life. It is the ministry of all that is good in the
world; and the better it is the better for us, the better for every
one. It is only those who do not know how to work that do not love it;
to those who do, it is better than play--it is religion.
But this is the mere influence of work itself. Suppose, besides your
work, you have the blessing of a family to be cared for, and your work
provides for them? This consecrates every part of it. It makes every
movement of the hand a benediction, every heart-throb an unuttered
prayer. Are not these days so full of labor best days? For about you
are those you love. They are under the roof you provide; their voices
furnish the music, their presence the sunshine of your life. Sometimes
that which your discontent craves will come to you. The freedom from
toil, the absence of "troubles" that now loom up so large to you; but
with your troubles your joys will have vanished, and you will sit in
the twilight waiting for the end, and wishing that you had cultivated
the sweetness instead of the bitterness of the beginning, that you had
not allowed the thorns to cover up your roses.
Wisdom seems to have been the same always, but each one has to learn
its lessons for himself. That is the reason why there is so little
apparent progress in essential truths. There are always those who have
grown into their realization; there are always those who are at the
threshold, and who must travel over the same paths, for we can none of
us acquire true wisdom for another; it must become a part of
ourselves, of our own moral and spiritual consciousness.
"It is all very well for you," says one; "you have never known the
pinch of poverty." How do you know that? We none of us know how and
where the shoe has pinched another person's foot. It is not our
business to know, but it is our business to prevent our soreness from
becoming sourness and bitterness. It is our business to make the
pathway of others as pleasant as we can, so that their unseen corns
shall irritate them as little as possible. All the wisdom of the days
that have been, and the days that are, will be found in the following
lines from Goethe's "Tasso":
"Would'st thou fashion for thyself a seemly life?
Then fret not over what is past and gone;
And spite of all thou mayest have lost behind,
Yet act as if thy life were just begun.
What each day wills, enough for thee to know,
What each day wills, the day itself will tell.
Do thine own task, and therewith be content;
What others do that shall thou fairly judge.
Be sure that thou no mortal brother hate,
Then all beside leave to the Master Power."