is the habit of taking what is called an objective or Impersonal View of
our personal relations. This is especially important as helpful to
self-control. We are at best but tyros in the art of living, so long as
we continue to give effect in our dealings with others to our mere
personal antipathies and sympathies. As soon as we learn to speak and
act medicinally, not from personal resentment or under the impulse of
personal attraction, but with a view to promoting just the good in
others, the whole atmosphere in which we breathe changes; a kind of
perpetual sunshine illuminates our inner world, the clouds of hate and
the mists of passionate feeling dissolve and peace reigns within the
borders of the soul.
A fourth token of the higher life is Wisdom. Wisdom is situated at the
junction of the intellectual and the moral faculties. It consists in the
highest use of the intellect for the discernment of the largest moral
interests of humanity. It is the most perfect willingness to do the
right combined with the utmost attainable knowledge of what is right,
and with the clearest perception of what, in a given situation, is
feasible. Wisdom is the attribute of one who works toward the most
sublime ends imaginable, but who at the same time realises the
limitations due to existing conditions and who, free from impatience at
the unavoidable imperfections of man’s estate, seeks to achieve the
better as a step leading in the direction of the best. Wisdom consists
in working for the better from the love of the best. The world is full
of reformers who thunder at the gates of the Impossible, seeking to
force an entrance, and who injure their causes, as well as themselves,
by the inevitable reaction which ensues when their schemes are found to
be impracticable. Wisdom teaches that it is possible to lead the higher
life, even now.
But the crowning grace of all is Humility, in the sense in which it
implies and presupposes dignity. Dignity is based upon the
consciousness of a divine element in human nature, of an infinite aim, a
boundless destiny. Humbleness is due to a sense of the incalculable
distance which still separates us from the goal. These two, inseparably
combined, are the invariable accompaniment of moral greatness wherever
met with. Self-righteousness and a cynical contempt of human nature on
the other hand are the two chief enemies of moral progress. These
monsters must be slain if we would hope to continue in the upward path.
The higher life cannot be attained without rigorous self-discipline, and
self-discipline always involves pain, but the end in view is worthy of
the sufferings we are called upon to endure, the prize is worthy of the
price exacted of us.
SPIRITUAL PROGRESS
By what sort of experience are we led to the conviction that spirit
exists? On the whole, by searching, painful experience. The rose
Religion grows on a thorn-bush, and we must not be afraid to have our
fingers lacerated by the thorns if we would pluck the rose. For
instance, a person who endures great bodily suffering with fortitude
will discover that there is something in him which physical agony cannot
overcome, something not of the senses, which all the assaults of the
senses are powerless to affect.
Why in this world of ours there should be so much suffering no one
knows. But this we know; that, evil existing, the world being such as
it is, we can win from evil, if we choose, an inestimable good,
namely--the conviction that there is in us a power not of the senses,
the conviction that spirit exists, and exists in us.
A sceptic may say that in a world ideally conceivable we might have
secured this precious conviction without the necessity of undergoing the
ordeal of pain. To which the reply is: that in a world ideally
conceivable what he says may be true; but in the world as it is, with
which alone we are concerned, we have ample cause for gratitude that we
can turn suffering to such far-reaching account, that we can distil from
the bitter root this divine elixir; that by manfully bearing the pains
of the senses, inexplicable though they be, we are able to gain the
certainty that a power not born of the senses exists in us, operates in
us. It is this effect of pain that accounts for the serenity and peace
of many patient sufferers, a peace and a serenity which surround their
bed of misery with a kind of halo.
The same is true of moral pain. The experience of Guilt, for instance,
if it leads us to pitilessly honest self-scrutiny and self-judgment,
will at the last disclose the marvellous fact that even in the most
desperate cases there remains a part of our nature unspoiled by the
guilt. We become aware of a power within us, to slough off the guilt as
the serpent sloughs off its skin; to triumph over the evil we have done
as well as over the evils we suffer. We realise that there is in us a
fount of inexhaustible moral rejuvenation.
What, then, are the compensations of Sin? In the first place, a truer
insight into the moral order of the universe, a more adequate
realisation of the authority of those holy ordinances against which we
have offended; and then the conviction that the soul can ever rise again
by its own efforts. The tree may fall, but the root remains
indestructible; the spring of moral endeavour may appear to be dried up,
but there are hidden subterranean streams from which it can ever be fed
anew.
The stages of the progress of mankind may be compared to a series of
mountain ranges. First the foothills, then the higher hills, then
mountain range on mountain range beyond them. As we gain the loftier
eminences we see the snowy summits before us, touched by the light of
the moral ideal, transforming themselves before our eyes into what
appear to be the ramparts and the spires of the Golden City. We climb
still higher, and the vision travels with us, lighting on the next
succeeding range. And so, on and on, as we ascend.
We live in our activities, in our influence. The success or failure of
life is determined, not by our conditions, but by the effort we put
forth despite our conditions. A man who, though himself poor, labours to
keep alive the higher life in his fellows, to inspire them with the
courage to strive for the better, and with patience to bear the evils
which are for the time being unavoidable, is a spiritual hero and a
nobler benefactor than many of the so-called benefactors who invade the
slums.
When human nature fights in the last ditch, when it is pressed against
the wall, when the clutch of circumstances is about its throat and
threatens to choke it, then human nature, by way of reaction, exhibits a
power which we call spiritual. This is rarely displayed in prosperous
circumstances. It is the compensation of adversity that it elicits in
manifold ways this spiritual power and makes man’s life in a spiritual
sense a success.
SUFFERING AND CONSOLATION
Let the Stoics say what they will, so long as we remain human we shall
always open our breasts to those warm loves that make the sweetness of
existence, if also they make its bitterest pain.
It is written that the last enemy to be vanquished is death. We should
begin early in life to vanquish this enemy by obliterating every trace
of the fear of death from our minds. Then can we turn to life and fill
the whole horizon of our souls with it, turn with added zest to all the
serious tasks which it imposes and to the pure delights which here and
there it affords.
There are hours of great loneliness, when the frost of desolation
penetrates into the very soul, when the burden seems too heavy to bear,
and the draught of life too bitter to swallow. But the very keenness of
the ordeal begets the strength to bear it, and patience and unselfish
resignation will come as with the rustling of angel’s wings to dry our
scalding tears.
When the light of the sun shines through a prism it is broken into
beautiful colours, and when the prism is shattered, still the light
remains. So does the light of life shine resplendent in the forms of our
friends, and so, when their forms are broken, still their life remains;
and in that life we are united with them; for the life of their life is
also our life, and we are one with them by ties indissoluble.
They say that it is a blessed relief in times of grief to shed tears.
But a more blessed relief than to shed tears is to wipe away the tears
from others’ eyes.
In hours of great sorrow we turn in vain to Nature for an inspiring
thought. We question the sleepless stars; they are cold and distant. The
winds blow, the rivers run their course, the seasons change; they are
careless of man. Only in the human world do we find an answering echo to
our needs.
The body is incapable of supporting for longer than a few brief years
the weight of the life that dwells within it. The vehicle cannot sustain
the content. The instrument falls short of the demands upon it, and
crumbles into ruins. But in its ruin it sets off, in tragic contrast,
the grandeur of the power which, for a time, employed it for its uses, a
power greater than itself, greater than any instrument, whose glory
rises above the ruins and gilds them with unearthly splendour in
departing.
We are soldiers fighting a good fight. The call that awakens us out of
despair in times of affliction is the trumpet-call of duty, summoning us
back to the battle.
The experience of progress in the past, the hope of progress toward
perfection in the future, is the redeeming feature of life; it is the
one and only solace that never fails.
It is the nature of the noble and the good and the wise that they impart
to us of their nobility and their goodness and their wisdom while they
live, making it natural for us to breathe the air they breathe and
giving us confidence in our own untested powers. And the same influence
in more ethereal fashion they continue to exert after they are gone.
The condition of all progress is experience. We go wrong a thousand
times before we find the right path. We struggle, and grope, and hurt
ourselves until we learn the use of things, and this is true of things
spiritual as well as of material things. Pain is unavoidable, but it
acquires a new and higher meaning when we perceive that it is the price
humanity must pay for an invaluable good.
The consolations of the moral ideal are vigorous. They do not encourage
idle sentiment. They recommend to the sufferer action. Our loss, indeed,
will always remain loss, and no preaching or teaching can ever make it
otherwise. But the question is whether it shall weaken and embitter, or
strengthen and purify us, and lead us to raise to the dead we mourn a
monument in our lives that shall be better than any pillared chapel or
storied marble tomb.
The criterion of all right relations whatsoever is that we are helped by
them. And so, too, the criterion of right relations to the dead is that
we are helped, not weakened and disabled, by them. Does the remembrance
of our departed beloved ones have this effect upon us? Does it make us
better and purer men and women than we should otherwise have been,
stronger if not happier? Do they come to us as gentle monitors in silent
hours of thought? Does their approving smile stimulate us to greater
bravery for the right, to more earnest self-conquest? Does the pressure
of their invisible hands guide us in the better way? If so, then truly
blessed is their memory. Then will the pain which is associated with the
thought of them gradually be diminished; the wild regrets, the
unappeasable longings which, at times, assert themselves gradually be
pacified. Then will the bitter sense of the loss we have sustained be
overborne by the consciousness of the treasure of their influence which
still remains to us, and which can never be taken from us.
Activity is our great resource. To be active is to live. The glow that
comes with activity supplies the heat that supports our mental and moral
energies. Activity is the antidote to the depressions that lower our
vitality, whether they come from physical or psychical causes.
Those whom we love are not given to us merely for our joy or our
happiness. Their truest ministry consists in being to us revealers of
the divine. They quicken in us the seed of better thoughts, help us to
estimate rightly the things that are worth trying for and the things
that are not worth trying for; help us to become more equal to the
standard of our own best insight, and grow into our truer selves. And
this influence abides when they are gone.
Let us learn from the lips of death the lessons of life. Let us live
truly while we live, live for what is true and good and lasting. And let
the memory of our dead help us to do this. For they are not wholly
separated from us, if we remain loyal to them. In spirit they are with
us. And we may think of them as silent, invisible, but real presences in
our households.
In a storm at sea when the peril is extreme, the captain lashes himself
to the mast in order that he may bring the vessel safely through the
raging seas. So, in times of great affliction, we should lash ourselves
to the mast of the ship of life, by the cord of duty.
The bitter, yet merciful, lesson which death teaches us is to
distinguish the gold from the tinsel, the true values from the worthless
chaff.
The terrible events of life are great eye-openers. They force us to
learn that which it is wholesome for us to know, but which habitually we
try to ignore--namely, that really we have no claim on a long life; that
we are each of us liable to be called off at any moment, and that the
main point is not how long we live, but with what meaning we fill the
short allotted span--for short it is at best.
The wine of pleasure which once we quaffed so passionately, where is it
now? The cup is empty and only the lees remain, and they are as wormwood
to the taste. The flowers which we wove into chaplets at our feasts to
wreathe ourselves withal, they are withered and noxious. But the good
deeds we have done, the nobler traits of character we have
developed--these are imperishable.
As in every battle, so in the great battle of Humanity, the fallen and
wounded, too, have a share in the victory; by their sufferings they have
helped, and the greenest wreaths belong to them.
We conceive of ourselves as somehow identical in being with those who
are to come after us; for it is in the nature of spirit that its
separate members, dispersed though they be in space and time, are still,
in essence, one. So that we may say concerning those who come after us,
and who will reap the benefit of our labours, that we ourselves shall
attain to increasing perfection in them.
All of us have felt after some great bereavement the beneficent
influence of mere work. Even the mechanical part of our daily tasks
affords us some relief. The knowledge that something must be done
prevents us from brooding over our griefs, and forces us back into the
active currents of life.
The resources of the intellect, too, stand us in good stead in times of
trouble. The pursuit of knowledge is directed toward large impersonal
ends: into the calm and silent realm of thought the feelings can gain no
entrance. There, after the first spasms of emotion have subsided, we may
find at least a temporary relief--there for hours we drink in a welcome
oblivion. But mere plodding toil and mere intellectual preoccupation do
not suffice, the discharge of the moral duties in the light of the moral
perfection to which they point alone can really sustain and console us.
In alleviating the misery of others our own misery will be alleviated;
in healing there is cure.
When we endure some heavy affliction we are apt to say, “Oh, there is no
suffering like my suffering. There is no one who bears such a load as
mine.” This is a mistake--the guilty suffer more than the afflicted.
Better a thousand times death than shame. There are depths below depths,
abysses below abysses.
Poverty, Sickness, Sorrow, and the experience of Sin are the great
instrumentalities for moralising our natures. They are dark gateways
through which we pass into a temple of light--into the innermost
sanctuary of a truer life. Yes, for the guilty also there is consolation
and redemption. “Come ye that are heavy laden unto me, no matter how
heavily laden with sin,” says every religion, “and I will give you
rest.” For those who have transgressed the moral law realise more fully
than others do the sublime majesty of the power which they have
affronted. And in a sense greater than words can convey, those who have
had the profoundest experience of guilt are more capable than others of
a divine transfiguration of their natures.
We are not free to stand aside in idle woe, but should make for the
departed a memorial in our lives and complete their half-completed
tasks. The widowed wife shall be both mother and father to her children;
the afflicted husband both father and mother to his children.
Faith in the sublime ideal of humanity is the saving faith that will
work miracles to-day, as of old at Cana, that will change the waters of
earth’s grief and misery into the wondrous wine of life and joy.
Death and the dead should be associated with what is brightest and
purest in Nature, with glorious sunsets, with the dawn of summer
mornings, with the fragrance of Spring.
ETHICAL OUTLOOK
The right for the right’s sake is the motto which every one should take
for his own life. With that as a standard of value we can descend into
our hearts, appraise ourselves, and determine in how far we already are
moral beings, in how far not yet.
The supremacy of the moral end of life above all other ends, the
sufficiency of man for the pursuit of that end, the increase of moral
truth to be expected from loyalty in this pursuit--these are the three
tenets, if we may call them so, of an ethical creed.
The question what to believe is perhaps the most momentous that any one
can put to himself. Our beliefs are not to be classed among the
luxuries, but among the necessaries of existence. They become
particularly important in times of trouble. They are like the life-boats
carried by ocean ships. As long as the sea is smooth and there is every
appearance of a prosperous voyage, the passengers seldom take note of
the boats or inquire into their sea-worthiness. But when the storm
breaks and danger approaches, then the capacity of the boats and their
soundness become matters of the first importance.
Ethical religion affirms the continuity of progress toward moral
perfection. It affirms that the spiritual development of the human race
cannot be prematurely cut off, either gradually or suddenly; that every
stone of offence against which we stumble is a stepping-stone to some
greater good; that, at the end of days, if we choose to put it so, all
the rays of progress will be summed and centred in a transcendent focus.
Religion is concerned with the foreign relations of mankind, that is to
say, with our relations to the whole of outside nature. The mission of
religion is to convince us that the foreign power is friendly. The
non-ethical religions have represented the eternal outside power as
manifesting its friendliness by warding off unhappiness and ministering
to the temporal well-being of man. Ethical religion restricts itself to
affirming that the eternal power assures the fulfilment of our moral
aims. The non-ethical religions have based the belief that there is a
higher power on the testimony of supernatural revelations. Ethical
religion bases its belief solely upon the testimony of conscience, which
declares that progress ought to be achieved, hence inferring that it
will be.
That the moral obligation remains in force is the capital fact to which
we must hold fast, no matter what may be our theories of life and the
Universe. The recognition of this obligation, the hearty avowal of the
supremacy of the moral end above all other ends of life, is the first
article of a practical ethical creed.
There may be, and there ought to be, progress in the moral sphere. The
moral truths which we have inherited from the past need to be expanded
and re-stated.
In times of misfortune we require for our support something of which the
truth is beyond all question, in which we can put an implicit trust,
“though the heavens should fall.” A merely borrowed belief is, at such
time, like a rotten plank across a raging torrent. The moment we step
upon it, it gives way beneath our feet.
Good deeds remain good, no matter whether we know how the world was made
or not. Vile deeds are vile, no matter whether we know or do not know
what, after death, will be the fate of the doer. We know, at least, what
his fate is now, namely, to be wedded to the vileness.
The question for any one to decide, who hesitates between good and evil,
is whether he aspires to be a full-weight man, or merely the fragment,
nay, the counterfeit of a man. Only he who ceaselessly aims at moral
completeness is, in the true sense, a human being.
There is a universal element in man which he can assert by so acting as
if the purpose of the Universe were also his purpose. It is the function
of the supreme ordeals of life to develop in men this power, to give to
their life this distinction, this height of dignity, these vast
horizons.
Life has ever seemed to me a task. It has its interludes of joy. But, on
the whole, it is an arduous, often a desperately arduous task. I think
of the dead as of those who have finished their task, who have graduated
from this exacting school, who have taken their degree--and some of
them, surely, with honour.
We need to feel that no effort is ever wasted, that no honest reaching
out toward the good is vain, that the great All is pressing forward
toward a transcendent goal. And there is but a single way to obtain this
conviction. It is not possible to enter into the nature of the Good by
standing aloof from it--by merely speculating upon it. Act the Good, and
you will believe in it. Throw yourself into the stream of the world’s
good tendency and you will feel the force of the current and the
direction in which it is setting. The conviction that the world is
moving toward great ends of progress will come surely to him who is
himself engaged in the work of progress.
By ceaseless efforts to live the good life we maintain our moral sanity.
Not from without, but from within, flow the divine waters that renew the
soul.
The ethical element of religion has ever been its truly vital and
quickening force. It is this which lends such majesty to the speeches of
the Prophets, which gives such ineffable power and sweetness to the
words of Jesus. Has this ethical element become less important in our
age? Has the need of accentuating it become less imperative?
To-day, in the estimation of many, science and art are taking the place
of religion. But science and art alike are inadequate to build up
character and to furnish binding rules of conduct.
We need also a clearer understanding of applied ethics, a better insight
into the specific duties of life, a finer and a surer moral tact.
It is the business of the preacher, not only to state moral truths, but
to inspire his hearers with a realising sense of their value, and to
awaken in them the desire to act accordingly. He can do this only by
putting his own purpose as a yeast into their hearts. The influence of
the right sort of preachers cannot be spared. The human race is not yet
so far advanced that it can dispense with the impulses that come from
men of more than average intensity of moral energy.
Let us produce, through the efficacy of a better moral life and of a
deeper moral experience, a surer faith in the ultimate victory of the
good.
Let us found religion upon a basis of perfect intellectual honesty.
Religion, if it is to mean anything at all, must stand for the highest
truth. How then can the cause of truth be served by the sacrifice, more
or less disguised, of one’s intellectual convictions?
To those who are longing for a higher life, who deeply feel the need of
religious satisfactions, we suggest that there is a way in which the
demands of the head and the heart may be reconciled. Religion is not
necessarily allied with dogma, a new kind of faith is possible, based
not upon legend and tradition, not upon the authority of any book, but
upon the moral nature of man.
Theologians often say that faith must come first, and that morality must
be deduced from faith. We say that morality must come first, and faith,
to those whose nature fits them to entertain it, will come out of the
experience of a deepened moral life as its richest, choicest fruit.
Precisely because moral culture is the aim, we cannot be content merely
to lift the mass of mankind above the grosser forms of evil. We must try
to advance the cause of humanity by developing in ourselves, as well as
in others, a higher type of manhood and womanhood than the past has
known.