That is to every thing created pre-eminently useful, which enables
it rightly and fully to perform the functions appointed to it by its
Creator. Therefore, that we may determine what is chiefly useful to
man, it is necessary first to determine the use of man himself.
Man's use and function is to be the witness of the glory of God,
and to advance that glory by his reasonable obedience and resultant
happiness.
Whatever enables us to fulfill this function is, in the pure and first
sense of the word, useful to us. Pre-eminently, therefore, what sets
the glory of God more brightly before us. But things that only help
us to exist are, in a secondary and mean sense, useful, or rather, if
they be looked for alone, they are useless and worse, for it would
be better that we should not exist, than that we should guiltily
disappoint the purposes of existence.
And yet people speak in this working age, when they speak from their
hearts, as if houses, and lands, and food, and raiment were alone
useful; and as if sight, thought, and admiration were all profitless,
so that men insolently call themselves Utilitarians, who would turn,
if they had their way, themselves and their race into vegetables:
men who think that the meat is more than the life, and the raiment
than the body; who look to the earth as a stable, and to its fruit as
fodder; vine-dressers as husbandmen, who love the corn they grind, and
the grapes they crush, better than the gardens of the angels upon the
slopes of Eden; hewers of wood and drawers of water, who think that
the wood they hew and the water they draw, are better than the pine
forests that cover the mountains like the shadow of God, and than the
great rivers that move like his eternity. And so comes upon us that
woe of the preacher, that, though God "hath made every thing beautiful
in his time, also he hath set the world in their hearts, so that no
man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the
end."
This Nebuchadnezzar curse, that sends us to grass like oxen, seems
to follow but too closely on the excess or continuance of national
power and peace. In the perplexities of nations, in their struggles
for existence, in their infancy, their impotence, or even their
disorganization, they have higher hopes and nobler passions. Out
of the suffering comes the serious mind; out of the salvation, the
grateful heart; out of the endurance, the fortitude; out of the
deliverance, the faith; but now, when they have learned to live under
providence of laws, and with decency and justice and regard for each
other, and when they have done away with violent and external sources
of suffering, worse evils seem rising out of their rest--evils that
vex less and mortify more, that suck the blood though they do not
shed it, and ossify the heart though they do not torture it. And deep
though the causes of thankfulness must be to every people at peace
with others and at unity in itself, there are causes of fear also, a
fear greater than the sword and sedition: that dependence on God may
be forgotten, because the bread is given and the water is sure; that
gratitude to him may cease, because his constancy of protection has
taken the semblance of a natural law; that heavenly hope may grow
faint amidst the full fruition of the world; that selfishness may take
place of undemanded devotion, compassion be lost in vainglory, and
love in dissimulation; that innovation may succeed to strength, apathy
to patience, and the noise of jesting words and foulness of dark
thoughts, to the earnest purity of the girded loins and the burning
lamp.--_Ruskin._