industry, compelling economy and thrift, and promoting all the basal
moralities. It contains the springs of all material civilization. If
we go back to the dawn of history we find that hunger and the desires,
associated with the body, have been the chief stimulants toward
industrial progress. Indolence is stagnation. Savages in the tropics
are torpid and without progress. Hunger compels men to ask what food
is in the river, what roots are in the ground, what fruits are on the
trees, what forces are in the air. The body is peremptory in its
demands. Hunger carries a stinging scourge. Necessity drives out the
evil spirits of indolence and torpidity. The early man threading the
thickets in search of food chanced upon a sweet plum, and because the
bush grew a long way from his lodge he transplanted the root to a vale
near his home. Thence came all man's orchards and vineyards. Shivering
with cold, man sought out some sheltered cave or hollow tree. But soon
the body asked him to hew out a second cave in addition to the one
nature had provided. Fulfilling its requests, man went on in the
interests of his body to pile stone on stone, and lift up carved
pillars and groined arches. Thence came all homes. For the body the
sower goes forth to sow, and the harvester looks forward to the time
of sheaves and shoutings. For strengthening the body the shepherd
leads forth his flocks and herds, and for its raiment the weaver makes
the looms and spindles fly. For the body all the trains go speeding in
and out, bringing fruits from the sunny south, and furs from the
frozen north. All the lower virtues and integrities spring from its
desires. As an engine, lying loose in a great ship, would have no
value, but, fastened down with bolts, drives the great hull through
the water, so the body fastens and bolts the spirit to field, forest,
and city, and makes it useful and productive. Material life and
civilization may be said to literally rest upon man's bones and
sinews.
The body is also the channel of all the knowledges. How scant is the
child's understanding of the world-house in which he lives! There are
shelves enough, but they are all empty. In the interest of
intelligence his mind is sheathed in this sensitive body and the world
forces without report themselves to this sensitive nerve mechanism.
Fire comes in to burn man's fingers and teach him how to make the fire
smite vapor from water. Cold comes in to nip his ears and pinch his
cheeks until he learns the economy of ice, snow and rain. Steel cuts
his fingers and the blood oozes out. Thenceforth he turns the axe
toward the trees and the scythe toward the standing grain. The stone
falling bruises him, compelling a knowledge of gravity and the use of
trip-hammer, weights and pulleys. Looking downward the eye discerns
the handwriting on the rocks and the mind reads earth's romantic
story. Looking upward, the vision runs along the milky way for
measuring the starry masses and searching out their movements. The ear
strains out sweet sounds, and St. Cecilia hears melodies from the sky.
Bending over the cradle, the parent marvels at God's bounty in the
face of a babe. When the little one goes away the parent copies its
face in rude colors, or carves its form in marble. Thus all the arts,
sciences and inventions are gifts of the body to man's mental and
moral life.
There is a beautiful story of a company of celestial beings, who, in
disguise, entered an ancient city upon a mission of mercy. Departing
hurriedly, in some way a fair young child was left behind and lost. In
the morning when men came upon the streets they found a sweet boy with
sunny hair sitting upon the steps of the temple. Language had he none.
He answered questions with streaming eyes and frightened face. While
men wondered a slave drew near, carrying a harp. Then the heavenly
child signaled for the instrument, for this language he could speak.
He threw his arms about the harp as the child about its mother's neck.
He touched one string. Upon the hushed air there stole out a note
pure, clear, and sweet as though amethysts and pearls were melted into
liquid melodies. It was music, but not such music as mortals give to
mortals. It was such a song as spirit would sing to spirit, signaling
across the streets of heaven. It was a hymn to the mother whom he had
loved and lost. With tearful eye and smiling face the little stranger
and the harp together wept, and laughed, and sobbed out their grief
and song. It was the speech of a child homesick for heaven. What that
harp was to the silent boy, the human body is to man's soul within.
The soul teemed with thoughts. Fancies surged and thronged within.
Then God gave the soul a body, as a harp of many strings. Through it
the soul finds voice and pours forth its rich thoughts and varied
emotions.
Consider, also, how nature has ordained the body as a system of moral
registration. Nature has a record of all men's deeds, keeping her
accounts on fleshly tablets. The mind may forget, the body never. The
brain sees to it that the thoughts within do immediately dispose of
facial tissue without. Mental brightness gives facial illumination.
The right act or true thought sets its stamp of beauty in the
features; the wrong act or foul thought sets its seal of distortion.
Moral purity and sweetness refine and beautify the countenance. The
body is a show window, advertising and exhibiting the soul's stock of
goods. Nature condenses bough, bud and shrub into black coal; compacts
the rich forces of air and sun and soil into peach and pear. In the
kingdom of morals, there are people who seem to be of virtue, truth
and goodness all compact. Contrariwise, every day you will meet men
upon our streets who are solid bestiality and villainy done up in
flesh and skin. Each feature is as eloquent of rascality as an ape's
of idiocy. Experts skilled in physiognomy need no confession from
impish lips, but read the life-history from page to page written on
features "dimmed by sensuality, convulsed by passion, branded by
remorse; the body consumed with sloth and dishonored with selfish
uses; the bones full of the sins of youth, the face hideous with
secret vices, the roots dried up beneath and the branches cut off
above." It is as natural and necessary for hidden thoughts and deeds
to reveal themselves through cuticle as for root or bud in spring to
unroll themselves into sight and observation. Here and now everything
tends to obscure nature's handwriting and to veil it in mist and
disguise. But the body is God's canvas, and nature's handwriting goes
ever on. Each faculty is a brush, and with it reason thinks out the
portrait. Even the wolf may give something to the features, and also
the snake and scorpion. Soon will come an hour when men will hear not
the voice of the sirens singing praises in the ear, nor the plaudits
of men of low deeds and conscience, but an hour when men shall stand
in the presence of the all-revealing light and see themselves as they
are and review the life they have embodied and emportraited. Happy,
thrice happy, those who have traversed all life's pathway and come at
last to the hour when they stand face to face with themselves, then to
find therein a divine image like unto the comeliness and completion of
Him whose face was transfigured and shone as the light.
At length has dawned the day when science strengthens the argument for
immortality. The dream of the prophet and seer is confirmed in the
light of modern knowledge. "Each new discovery," says John Fiske, "but
places man upon a higher pinnacle than ever, and lights the future
with the radiant color of hope." Leaving his body behind, man journeys
on toward an immortal destiny. Science has emptied a thousand new
meanings into the words of Socrates: "The destruction of the harp does
not argue the death of the harpist." Nature decrees that the flower
must fall when the fruit swells. If the winged creature is to come
forth and increase, the chrysalis must perish and decrease. When the
long journey is over it is natural that the box in which the richly
carved and precious statue is packed should be tossed aside. Swiftly
youth goes on toward maturity, age toward old age, and the scythe
awaits all. But sickness and trouble can do nothing more than dim the
eye, dull the ear, weaken the hand. Dying and death avail not for
injuring reason, affection, or hope, or love.
At the close of a long and arduous career the famous Lyman Beecher
passed under a mental cloud. The great man became as a little child.
One day after his son, Henry Ward, had preached a striking sermon, his
father entered the pulpit and beginning to speak wandered in his
words. With great tenderness the preacher laid his hand upon his
father's shoulder and said to the audience: "My father is like a man
who, having long dwelt in an old house, has made preparations for
entering a new and larger home. Anticipating a speedy removal, he sent
on beforehand much of his soul-furniture. When later the day of
removal was postponed the interval seemed so brief as to render it
unnecessary to bring back his mental goods." Oh, beautiful words
describing those whose strength is declining, whose spirit is ebbing
and senses failing, because God is packing up their soul-furniture
that they may be ready for the long journey that awaits us all. But
man's journey is not unto the grave. Dying is transmutation. Dying is
not folding of the wings; but pluming the pinions for new and larger
flight. Dying is not striking an unseen rock, but a speedy entrance
into an open harbor. Death is no enemy, letting the arrow fly toward
one who sits at life's banquet-table. Death is a friend coming on an
errand of release and divine convoy. For God's children "to be
death-called is to be God-called; to be God-called is to be
Christ-found; to be Christ-found is hope and home and heaven."
FOOTNOTES:
[3] See Symposium on Evolution, Homiletic Review, May, 1894.
THE MIND: AND THE DUTY OF RIGHT THINKING
"All ye who possess the power of thought, prize it well!
Remember that its flight is infinite; it winds about over
so many mountain tops, and so runs from poetry to
eloquence, it so flies from star to star, it so dreams,
so loves, so aspires, so hangs both over mystery and
fact, that we may well call it the effort of man to
explore the home, the infinite palace of his heavenly
Father."--_Swing._
"Men with empires in their brains."--_Lowell._
"'Tis the mind that makes the body rich."--_Taming of the
Shrew._
"Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality."--_Wordsworth._
"Neither years nor books have yet availed to extirpate a
prejudice then rooted in me that a scholar is the
favorite of heaven and earth, the excellency of his
country, the happiest of men."--_Emerson._
"Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, for the
merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of
silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold."--_Solomon._
V
THE MIND; AND THE DUTY OF RIGHT THINKING
With fine imagery the seer of old likened the mind unto a tree. The
tree shakes down its fruits, and the mind sheds forth its thoughts.
The boughs of the one will cover the land with forests; the faculties
of the other will sow the world with harvests that blight or harvests
that bless. The measure of personal worth, therefore, is the number
and quality of thoughts issuing from man's mind. For all the doing
called commerce, and all the speaking called conversation and books,
begin with the thinking called ideas. Each thing was first a thought.
A loom is Arkwright's thought dressed up in iron clothes. Books are
the scholar's thoughts caught and fastened upon the white page. As our
planet and the harvests that cover it are the thoughts of God rushing
into visible expression, so all houses and ships, all cities and
institutions, are man's inner thoughts, taking on outer and material
embodiment.
When thoughts compacted into habits have determined character and
destiny for the individual, they go on and secure their social
progress. When God would order a great upward movement for society, He
drops a great idea into the mind of some leader. Such energies divine
have these thoughts that they create new epochs in history. Through
Luther the thought of liberty in church and state set tyrants
trembling and thrones tottering. Through Cromwell the thought of
personal rights became a weapon powerful enough utterly to destroy
that citadel of iniquity named the divine right of kings. It was a
great moral thought called the "Golden Rule" that shotted the cannon
of the North for victory and spiked the cannon of the South for
defeat. Measureless is the might of a moral idea. It exceeds the force
of earthquakes and the might of tidal waves. The reason why no scholar
or historian can forecast the events and institutions of the next
century is that none can tell what great idea God will drop into the
soul of some man ordained to be its voice and prophet.
Now the omnipotence of thoughts is not without reason. Man is the
child of genius because he is the child of God. Those beautiful words,
"made in His image," tell us that the human mechanism is patterned
after the divine. Reason and memory in man answer to those faculties
in God, as do conscience and the moral sentiments. In creative genius
man alone is a sharer with God. As the Infinite One passing through
space leaves behind those shining footsteps called suns and stars,
glowing and sparkling upon planets innumerable, so man's mind, moving
through life, leaves behind a pathway all shining with books, laws,
liberties and homes. Of all the wonderful things God hath made, man
the wonderer is himself the most wonderful. No casket owned by a king,
filled with gems and sparkling jewels, ever held such treasure as God
hath put into this casket of bones and sinew. The imagination cannot
paint in colors too rich this being, who is a miniature edition of
infinity. It is not fiction, but fact, to say that reason is a loom;
only where Jacquard's mechanism weaves a few yards of silk and satin,
reason weaves conversation, sympathy, songs, poems, eloquence--textures
all immortal. And memory is a gallery; only where the Louvre holds a
few pictures of the past, memory waving her wonder-working wand brings
back all faces, living and dead, causing mountains and battle-fields,
with all distant scenes, to pass before the mind in solemn procession.
The Bank of England has indeed a mechanism that tests coins and throws
out all light weights. But judgment is an instrument testing things
invisible, weighing arguments and motives, testing principles and
characters. And the desires, are they not like unto the richly laden
argosies of commerce? And fancy, hath it not the skill of artist and
architect? Imagination, working in the realm of the useful, turns iron
into engines. Imagination, working in realms of the beautiful, turns
pigments into pictures. Imagination, working in the realms of thought,
can turn things true into sciences, and things good into ethical
systems. Well did the philosopher say that the greatest star is the
one standing at the little end of the telescope, the one looking, not
looked at nor looked for. When some Agassiz dredging the Atlantic
tells us what animals lived there a million years ago, the scientist's
mind seems an abyss deeper than the sea itself; and when Tyndall,
climbing to the top of the Matterhorn, reads on that rock-page all the
events of the ancient world, the mountain is dwarfed to an ant hill
and becomes insignificant in the presence of the mountain-minded
scholar. Hunters tell us that when crossing a swamp they leap from one
hummock of grass to another. But Herschel and Proctor, exploring the
heavenly world, step from star to star. The husbandman, squeezing a
cluster of grapes in his cup, does but interpret to us the way in
which the scholar squeezes planets and suns to brim the cup of
knowledge for man's thirsting soul. This vast and wondrous world
without is matched by man's rich and various mind within! Well did
Emerson exclaim, "Man, thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy
senses the nights and mornings, the summers and winters; carrying in
thy brain the geometry of the City of God, in thy heart all the bowers
of love, and all the realms of right and wrong."
Such being the nature of the mind, consider its prodigious
fruitfulness in thought. If all the processes of the mind were reduced
to material volume, the thoughts of each moment would fill a page, the
thoughts of each hour would fill a chapter, the thoughts of each day
would fill a volume, the emotions of a year would fill a small library
of many volumes. Value might be wanting, but not bulk. It is given to
the eye to behold the harvests wrought by the secret force of roots
and sunbeams. But if all the products of the soul could be made
visible to the eye and ear, how marvelous would be these exhalations,
rising and filling all the air. Were all the emotions and passions
and dreams of one single day fully revealed, what dramas would there
be beyond all the tragedies man's hand hath ever indicated! Consider
what fertility the mind hath! Consider how many trains of thought
reason takes up each hour. Consider all that belongs to a man as an
animal, his fears and passions, defensory in nature. Consider his
social equipment, with all the possible moods and combinations of
affections. Consider the vast activities of his reason working
outward, and the imagination working upward. Sometimes in the morning
man's thoughts are for number and strength like unto the strength of
armies. Sometimes in the night his aspirations exhale heavenward with
all the purity and beauty of the clouds. Consider also how life's
conflicts and warfare inflame man's faculties and hasten their
process.
Consider how courage, despondency, hope and fear, friendship and
enmity, increase the activities. Consider man's ambitions--steeds of
the sun with incredible swiftness dragging forward the soul's chariot.
Consider the rivalries among men. What intensities of thought are
induced thereby! Consider that toward one's friends the mind sends
forth thoughts that are almoners of bounty and angels of mercy. But
consider that man is over against his enemy, with a mind like unto a
walled city filled with armed men. Consider how in life's conflicts,
thoughts become the swords of anger, the clubs of envy, stings for
hissing hatred. Consider that in times of great excitement the soul
literally blazes and burns, exhaling emotions and thoughts as a planet
exhales light and heat. Wondrous the power of the loom newly invented,
that with marvelous swiftness weaves in silk figures of flowers and
trees and birds. But the uttermost speed of those flying shuttles is
slowness itself compared to the swiftness of the mental loom, that
without noise or clangor weaves fabrics eternal out of the warp and
woof of affection and thought, of passion and purpose. Consider that
every man is not simply two men, but a score of men. All the climatic
disturbances in nature, all distemperatures through heat and cold, wet
and dry, summer and winter, do but answer in number and variety to the
moods in man's brain. Not the all-producing summer is so rich in
bounty as the mind is rich in thought when working its regnant and
creative moods. Vast are the buildings man's hands have reared; sweet
are the songs man's mind hath sung; lovely the faces man's hand hath
painted; but the silent songs the soul hears, the invisible pictures
the mind sees, the secret buildings the imagination rears, these are
a thousand-fold more beautiful than any as yet embodied in this
material world.
The Spanish have a proverb that "He who sows thoughts will reap acts,
habits, and character," for destiny itself is determined by thinking.
Life is won or lost by its master thoughts. As nothing reveals
character like the company we like and keep, so nothing foretells
futurity like the thoughts over which we brood. It was said of John
Keats that his face was the face of one who had seen a vision. So long
had his inner eye been fixed upon beauty, so long had he loved that
vision splendid, so long had he lived with it, that not only did his
soul take on the loveliness of what he contemplated, but the very
lines of the poet's face were chiseled into beauty by those sculptors
called thoughts and ideals. When Wordsworth speaks of the girl's
beauty as "born of murmuring sound," the poet indicates his belief
that the girl's long love of the sweet briar and the thrush's song,
her tender care of her favorite flowers, had ended in the saturation
of her own face with sweetness. Swiftly do we become like the thoughts
we love. Scholars have noticed that old persons who have "lived long
together, 'midst sunshine and 'midst cloudy weather," come at length
to look as nearly alike as do brother and sister: Emerson explains
this likeness by saying that long thinking the same thoughts and
loving the same objects mould similarity into the features. Nor is
there any beauty in the face of youth or maiden that can long survive
sourness in the disposition or discontent in the heart.
Contrariwise, all have seen faces very plain naturally that have
become positively radiant because the beautiful soul that is enmeshed
in and stands behind the muscles has shone through and beautified all
of the facial tissues. Two of our great novelists have made a special
study of the architectural power of thoughts. Dickens exhibits Monks
as beginning his career as an innocent and beautiful child; but as
ending his life as a mass of solid bestiality, a mere chunk of fleshed
iniquity. It was thinking upon vice and vulgarity that transformed the
angel's face into the countenance of a demon. Hawthorne has made a
similar study of Chillingworth, whose moral deterioration began
through evil thinking when face and physique were fully matured.
Chillingworth stood forth in middle life a thoughtful, earnest, and
just man; but, during his absence, he suffered a grievous wrong. Not
knowing the identity of his enemy, the physician came to suspect his
friend. By skillful questions he digged into Dimmesdale's heart as
the sexton might delve into the grave in search of a possible jewel
upon a dead man's breast. When suspicion had strengthened into
certainty, enmity became hatred. Then, for two years, Chillingworth
tortured his victim as once inquisitors tortured men by tweaking the
flesh with red-hot pincers. Soon the face of the physician, once so
gentle and just, took on an aspect sinister and malign. Children
feared him, men shivered in his presence--they knew not why. Once the
magistrate saw the light glimmering in his eyes "with flames that
burned blue, like the ghastly fire that darted out of Bunyan's awful
doorway on the hillside and quivered in the Pilgrim's face." All this
is Hawthorne's way of telling us how thoughts determine character and
shape destiny. He who thinks of mean and ugly things will soon show
mud in the bottom of his eye. Ugliness within soon fouls the facial
tissues. But he who thinks of "things true and just and lovely" will,
by his thinking, be transformed into the image of the ideal he
contemplates, even as the rose becomes red by exposing its bosom to
the sunbeams and soaking each petal in the sun's fine rays.
Not only are thoughts the builders of character for the individual;
they are also the architects of states and nations. All this
wonderful fabric lying over our land like a beautiful garment is a
fabric spun and woven out of ideas. Each outer substance was builded
by an inner sentiment. What the eye sees are stone and brick and iron
united by masons and carpenters, but the forces that hold these
material things together are not iron bands, but thoughts and beliefs.
Destroy the life-nerve running up through the tree, and the rings of
wood will soon fall apart. Destroy the thoughts and beliefs of our
people, and its homes, colleges and institutions will decline and
decay. Thrust a million Mohammedans into our land, and their inner
thoughts will realize themselves in mosques, minarets, and harems. But
thrust a million Americans into Asia Minor and straightway their
thoughts will take on these visible shapes called houses and
factories, temples of learning, altars of praise and prayer. For what
we call Saxon civilization is only a magnificent incarnation of a
certain mental type and a moral character. Not only individuals, but
nations are such stuff as thoughts are made of.