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[Illustration: Book Cover]
THE LIFE RADIANT
by
LILIAN WHITING
Author of "The World Beautiful," "The Spiritual Significance"
"The World Beautiful in Books," "Kate Field, a Record,"
"Boston Days," etc.
"Follow it, follow it,
Follow the Gleam."
Boston
Little, Brown, and Company
1903
TO
ARVILLA DELIGHT MEEKER
(MRS. NATHAN COOK MEEKER)
IN WHOSE BEAUTIFUL LIFE PATIENCE HAS DONE HER
PERFECT WORK, AND WHOSE UNFALTERING AND
JOYFUL FAITH IN GOD REVEALS IMPRESSIVE
TRUTH IN THE LIFE RADIANT OF
HOLY LIVING
THESE PAGES ARE INSCRIBED WITH
THE DEVOTION OF
LILIAN WHITING
CONTENTS.
PAGE
THE GOLDEN AGE LIES ONWARD.
THE SUPREME ILLUMINATION 24
CREATING THE NEW WORLD 26
ELIMINATING ANXIETIES 33
HEAVEN'S PERFECT HOUR 37
LOVE AND GOOD WILL 46
THE DIVINER POSSIBILITIES 51
THE WEIGHT OF THE PAST 64
DISCERNING THE FUTURE.
A DETERMINING QUESTION 85
IN PROPORTION TO POWER 99
THE ETHEREAL REALM.
A SCIENTIFIC FACT 124
A GLORIOUS INAUGURATION 136
FINER COSMIC FORCES 149
HEALTH AND HAPPINESS 158
A NEW FORCE 172
THE SERVICE OF THE GODS 174
THE POWER OF THE EXALTED MOMENT.
OBEY THE VISION 192
THE OPEN DOOR 201
INTERRUPTIONS AS OPPORTUNITIES 204
THE CHARM OF COMPANIONSHIP 214
A SUMMER PILGRIMAGE IN ARIZONA 226
A TRAGIC IDYL OF COLORADO 237
A REMARKABLE MYSTIC 254
THE MOMENTOUS QUESTION 261
THE NECTAR OF THE HOUR.
A PROFOUND EXPERIENCE 285
THE LAW OF PRAYER 299
CONDUCT AND BEAUTY 313
THE DIVINE PANORAMA 321
ALSO THE HOLY GHOST, THE COMFORTER 331
THE LIFE RADIANT.
"_I am Merlin
Who follow the Gleam._"
* * * * *
_Know well, my soul, God's hand controls
Whate'er thou fearest;
Round Him in calmest music rolls
Whate'er thou hearest._
_What to thee is shadow, to Him is day,
And the end He knoweth.
And not on a blind and aimless way
The spirit goeth._
WHITTIER.
THE GOLDEN AGE LIES ONWARD.
"The Golden Age lies onward, not behind.
The pathway through the past has led us up:
The pathway through the future will lead on,
And higher."
The Life Radiant is that transfiguration of the ordinary daily events
and circumstances which lifts them to the spiritual plane and sees them
as the signs and the indications of the divine leading. Every
circumstance thus becomes a part of the revelation; and to constantly
live in this illuminated atmosphere is to invest all experiences with a
kind of magical enchantment. Life prefigures itself before us as a
spiritual drama in which we are, at once, the actors and the spectators.
The story of living goes on perpetually. The days and the years
inevitably turn the pages and open new chapters. Nothing is ever
hopeless, because new combinations and groupings create new results. The
forces that determine his daily life are partly with man and partly with
God. They lie in both the Seen and the Unseen. We are always an
inhabitant of both realms, and to recognize either alone and be blind to
the other is to deprive ourselves of the great sources of energy. The
divine aid, infinite and all-potent as it is, capable at any moment of
utterly transforming all the conditions and transferring them to a
higher plane, is yet limited by the degree of spiritual receptivity in
the individual. As one may have all the air that he is able to breathe,
so may one have all the aid of the Holy Spirit which he is capable of
receiving. Man can never accept so gladly and so freely as God offers;
but in just the proportion to which he can, increasingly, lift up his
heart in response, to that degree God fills his life with a glory not of
earth.
"Man may ask, and God may answer, but we may not understand,
Knowing but our own poor language, all the writing of His hand."
Science has discovered the existence of that incalculable energy, the
ether, interpenetrated in the atmosphere. Electro-magnetic currents of
power beyond all conception are revealed, and when intelligently
recognized by some happy genius, like that of Marconi, they begin to be
utilized in the service of human progress. Now as this ethereal energy
which is only just beginning to be recognized can be drawn upon for
light, for heat, for motor power, for communication, just as this
hitherto undreamed-of power can be drawn upon for the fundamental needs
of the physical world, so, correspondingly, does there exist the
infinite reservoir of spiritual energy which God freely opens to man in
precisely the proportion in which he recognizes and avails himself of
its transforming power. And in this realm lies the Life Radiant. If this
transfiguration of life could only be experienced by the aid of wealth
and health and all for which these two factors stand, it would not be
worth talking about. We hear a great deal of the "privileged classes"
and of "fortunate conditions," as if there were certain arbitrary
divisions in life defined by impassable boundaries, and that he who
finds himself in one, is unable to pass to another.
Never was there a more fatally erroneous conception. In the spiritual
world there are no limits, no boundaries, no arbitrary divisions. Just
so far as the soul conquers, is it free. Conquer ignorance, and one
enters the realm of education, of culture; conquer vice, and he enters
into the realm of virtue; conquer impatience and irritability and
bitterness, and their result in gloom and despondency, and he enters
into the realm of serenity and sweetness and exaltation with their
result in power of accomplishment. The Life Radiant can be achieved, and
is within the personal choice of every individual. One may place himself
in relation with this infinite and all-potent current of divine energy
and receive its impetus and its exhilaration and its illumination every
hour in the day. The toiler in manual labor may lead this twofold life.
On the visible side he is pushing onward in the excavation of a tunnel;
he is laying the track of a new railroad; he is engaged in building a
house; he stands at his appointed place in a great factory,--but is this
all? His real work lies both in the visible and in the invisible. On
the one hand he is contributing to the material resources of the world,
and he is earning his wage by which to live; on the other hand he is
developing patience, faithfulness, and judgment,--quantities of the
spiritual man and possessions of the spiritual life which extend the
spiritual territory. Faithfulness to the immediate duty creates a larger
theatre for duty. There are not wanting examples that could be named of
statesmen,--senators, governors, and others in high places, to say
nothing of the supreme example of a Lincoln; there are not wanting
examples of professional men in high and important places who initiated
their work by any humble and honest industrial employment that chanced
to present itself at the moment. Conquering this rudimentary realm, they
passed on to others successively. Integrity is a spiritual quantity, and
it insures spiritual aid. The cloud of witnesses is never dispersed. The
only imprisonment is in limitations, and limitations can be constantly
overcome. The horizon line of the impossible recedes as we advance. In
the last analysis nothing is too sublime or too beautiful to be
entirely possible. Its attainment is simply a question of conditions.
These conditions lie in entering into this inner realm of spiritual
energy in which the personal will is increasingly identified with the
will of God.
Like an echo of celestial music are these lines by Sully-Prudhomme:--
"The lilies fade with the dying hours,
Hushed is the song-bird's lay;
But I dream of summers and dream of flowers
That last alway."
Nor is this only the day-dream of a poet. The summers and flowers that
last alway are a very immediate treasure which one has only to perceive,
to grasp, to recognize, and to realize. "Surely," exclaimed the
Psalmist, "goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever." This dwelling in
"the house of the Lord" is by no means a figure of speech. Nor is it to
be regarded as some ineffable privilege to be--possibly to be--enjoyed
after that change we call death. Its real significance is here and now.
One must dwell in "the house of the Lord" to-day, and every day. The
"house of the Lord" is a beautiful figurative expression for that
spiritual atmosphere in which one may perpetually live, and in which it
is his simple duty both to live and to radiate to all around him.
In these summer days of 1903, in this golden dawn of the twentieth
century, the world is echoing with wonder in the discovery of a new and
most mysterious force in nature,--radium. Science is, at this date,
powerless to analyze or explain its marvellous power. The leading
scientists of the world of learning--Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver
Lodge, and Professor Curie (who, with Mme. Curie, has the honor of being
its discoverer)--believe that in radium will be found the true solution
of the problem of matter. Radium gives off rays at the speed of one
hundred and twenty thousand miles a second, and these rays offer the
most extraordinary heat, light, and power. Yet with this immense
radiation it suffers no diminution of energy; nor can any scientist yet
discern from what source this power is fed. A grain of it will furnish
enough light to enable one to read, and, as Professor J. J. Thomson has
observed, it will suffer no diminution in a million years. It will burn
the flesh through a metal box and through clothing, but without burning
the texture of the garments. The rays given out by radium cannot be
refracted, polarized, or regularly reflected in the way of ordinary
light, although some of them can be turned aside by a magnet.
Professor Curie has reported to the French Academy of Science that half
a pound of radium salts will in one hour produce a heat equal to the
burning of one-third of a foot of hydrogen gas. This takes place, it
must be remembered, without any perceptible diminution in the radium. It
emits heat maintaining a temperature of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above its
surroundings. It evolves sufficient heat to melt more than its own
weight of ice every hour. Radium projects its rays through solid
substances without any perceptible hindrance and burns blisters through
a steel case. The light is pale blue. Down in the deepest pitchblende
mines, where particles of radium have been hidden away since the
creation of the world, they are still found shining with their strange
blue light. The radium electrons pass through the space which separates
every molecule in a solid body from another. The scientific theory is
that no two molecules in any body, however dense, actually touch. The
relative power of radium to the X-ray is as six to one. The rays of
radium have one hundred thousand times the energy of those of uranium
and over one hundred times the energy of barium radiation. The scarcity
of the metal will be understood when it is stated that there is far less
radium in pitchblende than gold in ordinary sea water. Radium colors
glass violet; transforms oxygen into ozone, white phosphorus to red;
electrifies various gases and liquids, including petroleum and liquid
air.
Professor Sir William Crookes, the world's greatest living physicist and
experimental scientist, said of radium in the June of this 1903:--
"In total darkness I laid a piece of pitchblende--the ore from
which radium is extracted--face down upon a sensitized plate, and
let it act with its own light for twenty-four hours. The result was
a photograph, where the black pitchblende appeared light owing to
the emanations from the radium contained in it. The photograph also
shows these going off into space from the sides of the specimen.
"Radium is dangerous to handle. Once I carried a tiny piece of
radium in my waistcoat pocket to a soiree at the Royal Society, and
on reaching home found a blister in my side. The blisters from
radium may take months to get well, as the injurious effect goes so
deep. Now I carry a thick lead box just large enough to hold the
little brass case in which I keep the radium itself. There it
lies--a little, tawny, crystalline patch. There would hardly be a
larger quantity together in one box anywhere in England.
"There are several kinds of emanations from radium. Photographs
similar to those produced by the Roentgen ray tube and induction
coil can be got by means of the emanations from a small quantity of
radium. I took a screen made of zincblende, which will phosphoresce
when the emanations of radium fall upon it. I then painted upon it,
in a solution of radium, the word 'Radium.' In the dark this screen
(about three inches by four inches) gives off sufficient light to
read by. But the most striking way of showing the emanations is by
the little contrivance I call a Spinthariscope. In this a zinc
sulphide screen is fitted at the end of a short brass tube, with a
speck of radium about a millimeter away from it. Looking in the
dark through the lens at the other end one sees a regular
bombardment of the screen by the emanations. The phenomena of
radium require us to recast many of our ideas of matter,
electricity, and energy, and its discovery promises to realize what
for the last hundred years have been but day-dreams of philosophy.
"Although the fact of emission of heat by radium is in itself
sufficiently remarkable, this heat is probably only a small portion
of the energy radium is constantly sending into space. It is at the
same time hurling off material particles which reveal their impact
on a screen by luminous scintillations. Stop these by a glass or
mica screen, and torrents of Roentgen rays still pour out from a
few milligrams of radium salt in quantity to exhibit to a company
all the phenomena of Roentgen rays, and with energy enough to
produce a nasty blister on the flesh, if kept near it for an hour."
It is hardly possible to contemplate this remarkable element in the
world of nature without recognizing its correspondence in the world of
spirit. If an element radiates perpetual light, heat, and power with no
loss of its own inherent energy, so the spirit can radiate love,
sympathy, sweetness, and inspiration with no diminution of its own
quality. Science may be unable to recognize the medium from which
radium is fed; but religion recognizes the medium from which the spirit
draws its sustenance in the power of God. The human will merged in the
divine will is invincible. There is no ideal of life which it may not
realize, and this realization is in the line of the inevitable and is
experienced with the unerring certainty of a mathematical demonstration.
Yet, when one comes to examine the actual average attitude of humanity
toward this subject of the divine will, one finds it is largely that of
a mere gloomy and enforced resignation, even at its best, and, at its
worst, of distrust and rebellion to the will of God. It seems to be held
as the last resort of desperation and despair, rather than as the one
abounding source of all joy and success and achievement.
The average individual holds a traditional belief that he ought,
perhaps, to be able sincerely to wish that God's will be done, but as a
matter of fact he far prefers his own. The petition is, in his mind,
invariably associated with seasons of great sorrow, disaster, and
calamity, when, having apparently nothing else to hope for, a prayer is
offered for the will of God! It is somewhat vaguely held to be the
appropriate expression for the last emergency, and that it implies
resigning one's self to the most serious and irreferable calamity. There
is also a nebulous feeling that while the will of God may be entirely
appropriate to the conditions and circumstances of the aged, the poor,
the unfortunate, and the defective classes, it is the last thing in the
world to be invoked for the young, the gifted, the strong, and the
brilliant orders of society. It is tacitly relegated to a place in some
last hopeless emergency, and not to a place in the creative energy of
the most brilliant achievement.
Now, as a matter of profoundest truth, this attitude is as remote from
the clear realization of what is involved in the will of God as would be
the conviction that the flying express train or the swift electric motor
cars might be suitable enough for the aged, and the weary, and the
invalid, and the people whose time was of little consequence, but that
the young, the radiant, the eager, the gifted, the people to whom time
was valuable, must go by their own conveyances of horse or foot under
their immediate personal control. This fallacy is no more remote from
truth than is the fallacy that the will of God is something to be
accepted with what decorum of resignation one may, only when he cannot
help it! On the contrary, the will of God is the infinitely great motor
of human life. Its power is as incalculably greater over the soul than
that of radium over other elements, as it is higher in the scale of
being; as spirit rather than substance; and the Life Radiant is really
entered upon when one has come absolutely to merge all his longing and
desire into the divine purposes. It is like availing one's self of the
great laws of attraction and gravitation in nature. With the human will
identified with the divine will, every day's experience becomes invested
with the keenest zest and interest. The events that may arise at any
moment enlist the energy and fascinate the imagination. The
consciousness of union with God produces an exquisite confidence in the
wise and sweet enchantment of life; the constant receptivity of the soul
to the influence and the guiding of the Holy Spirit make an atmosphere
ecstatic, even under the most commonplace or outwardly depressing
circumstances. Celestial harmonies thrill the air. In this divine
atmosphere--the soul's native air--every energy is quickened. The divine
realm is as truly the habitat of the spiritual man--who, temporarily
inhabiting a physical body that he may thus come into relations with a
physical world, is essentially a spiritual rather than a physical
being--as the air is the habitat of the bird, or the water of the fish.
When the divine statement is made, "Without Me ye can do nothing," it is
simply that of a literal fact. The gloom, the depression, the irritation
that so often prevail and persist in mental conditions, do not arise,
primarily, from any outward trial or perplexity; they are the
result--the inevitable result--of the soul's lack of union with God; the
lack of that _rapport_ between the spirit of man and the divine spirit
in which alone is exhilaration and joy. When this union is forged, when
the human will rests perfectly in the divine will, one then absolutely
knows, with the most positive and literal conviction, that "all things
work together for good to them that love God." The assurance is felt
with the unchallenged force of a mathematical demonstration. Not merely
that the pleasant and agreeable things work together for good, but
_all_ things--pain, loss, sorrow, injustice, misapprehension. Then one
realizes in his own experience the significance of the words, "We glory
in tribulation, also." One has heard all one's life, perhaps, of "the
ministry of sorrow," and similar phrases, and he has become a trifle
impatient of them as a sort of incantation with which he has little
sympathy. At the best, he relegates this order of ministry to the rank
and file of humanity; to those whose lives are (to his vision) somewhat
prosy and dull; and for himself he proposes to live in a world
beautiful, where stars and sunsets and flames and fragrances enchant the
hours, where, with his feet shod with silver bells, he is perpetually
conscious of being
"Born and nourished in miracles."
He is perfectly confident that every life can be happy, if it will; and
he regards sorrow as a wholly stupid and negative state which no one
need fall into if only he have sufficient energy to generate a perpetual
enchantment. Thus he dances down the years like the daffodils on the
morning breeze, singing always his hymn to the radiant goddess:
"The Fairest enchants me,
The Mighty commands me,"
pledging his faith at the Altar of Perpetual Adoration that one has only
but to believe in happiness and make room for it in his life in order to
live in this constant exhilaration. Then, one day, he awakens to find
his world in ruins. Sorrow, pain, loss, have come upon him, and have
come in the one form of all others that seems most impossible to bear.
If it were death, even of the one dearest on earth, he would be
sustained by divine consolations. If it were financial deprivation, he
could meet it with fortitude and accept Goethe's counsel to "go and earn
more." If it were any one of various other forms of trial, he reflects,
there would be for his pain various forms of consolation; but the
peculiar guise it has assumed paralyzes him with its baffling power, its
darkness of eclipse. The element of hopelessness in it,--his own utter
inability to understand the cause of the sorrow which is literally a
thunderbolt out of a clear sky,--plunges him almost into despair. He had
endeavored to give the best, but the result is as if he had given the
worst; he had come to rely on a perfect and beautiful comprehension and
sympathy, but he is confronted with the most inexplicable
misapprehension of all his motives, the most complete misunderstanding
of all his aspirations and prayers. This, or other combinations and
conditions of which it may serve as a type, is one of the phases of
human experience. If pain were only the inevitable result of conscious
and intentional wrong-doing, then might one even learn to refrain from
the error and thus avoid the result. But a deeper experience in life, a
more profound insight into the springs of its action, reveal that pain,
as well as joy, falls into experience as an event encountered on the
onward march, rather than as being, invariably, conditions created by
ourselves. In the final analysis of being, we may have created the
causes sometime and somewhere; but in the immediate sense we fail to
discern the trace of our own action. A joy, a radiance undreamed of,
suddenly drops into a day, making it a memorable date forever; a joy
that transmutes itself into exaltation and a higher range of energy.
Naturally, we count such an experience divine, and offer our gratitude
to God, the giver of all blessings. But a tragedy of sorrow, a darkness
of desolation impenetrable and seemingly final, also falls suddenly into
a day, and inexpressible amazement and incredulity that it can be real
are added to the pain. But it is real. The sunshine has vanished; the
stars have hidden their light; the air is leaden where once it was all
gold and rose and pearl; one is alone in the desert, in a loneliness
that no voice sounds through, in an anguish that no human sympathy can
reach or sustain. All that made life worth the living has been
inexplicably withdrawn; and how, then, shall he live? And _why_ shall he
live? he may even question. The springs of energy are broken and his
powers are paralyzed. Whatever he has hitherto done, whatever he has
tried or hoped to do in the joyous exaltation of the days that have
vanished from all save memory, he can do no longer. It is not a question
of choice, not a decision that he would not still continue his efforts;
but it is the total impossibility of doing so that settles down upon him
like a leaden pall. The blind cannot see, the deaf cannot hear, the dumb
cannot speak, the paralyzed cannot walk,--no matter how gladly they
would fulfil these functions. So he looks at his own life. His world is
in ruins, and he has no power to ever rebuild it again. In such
conditions the problem of suicide may arrive like a ghastly spectre to
confront the mind. It is a spectre that, according to statistics, is
alarmingly prevalent. The statisticians talk of periods of it as "an
epidemic." Both science and religion take note of it, discuss its
bearing upon life, its tendency and its possible prevention. It is seen
as the result of both great and of trivial causes. It is seen to follow
a great sin, and to be the--terribly mistaken--refuge of a great sorrow.
And the remedy lies,--where? It can hardly lie elsewhere than in a truer
understanding of the very nature of life itself. The only remedy will be
found in the larger general understanding that life cannot be
extinguished. One may destroy his physical _body_,--he can do that at
any moment and by an infinite variety of methods. But he cannot destroy
_himself_. He may deprive himself of the instrument that was given to
him for use in the physical world; he cannot escape from the duties
that he should have fulfilled when he had the means of doing so in the
use of this instrument we call the body. If science and religion could
clearly teach the awful results that follow suicide, the terrible
isolation and deprivation in which the spiritual being who has thrown
away his instrument of service finds himself, it would be the one
effective cure for a demoralizing tendency. If one has sinned, sometime
and somewhere must he meet the consequences. He cannot escape them by
escaping from his body, and the sooner he meets them, in repentance and
atonement, the sooner will he work out to better and brighter
conditions. If one encounters disaster or great personal sorrow, what
then? One does not throw away all his possibilities of usefulness
because he is himself unhappy. If he does do this he is ignoble. Life is
a divine dream. It is a divine responsibility, primarily between each
soul and God. It is one's business to live bravely, with dignity, with
faith, with generosity of consideration and good will, with love,
indeed, which is the expression of the highest energy. Yet, with his
personal world in ruins, what shall he do? He must learn that supreme
lesson of all time and eternity,--the lesson to accept and to joyfully
embrace the will of God as thus revealed to him, in an inscrutable way.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The Supreme Illumination.]
Until he shall learn to accept this experience as divine, and offer his
gratitude to God for pain as sincerely as he offered it for experiences
of joy and of beauty, he cannot enter upon the Life Radiant. For the
radiant life is only achieved through these mingled experiences as all
equally accepted from the Divine Power.
"Ah, when the infinite burden of life descendeth upon us,
Crushes to earth our hopes, and under the earth in the graveyard,
Then it is good to pray unto God, for His sorrowing children
Turns He ne'er from the door, but He heals and helps and consoles them.
Yet is it good to pray when all things are prosperous with us;
Pray in fortunate days, for life's most beautiful fortune
Kneels before the Eternal's gate, and with hands inter-folded,
Praises, thankful and moved, the only Giver of blessings."
The Life Radiant comes when one can as sincerely thank God for pain as
for joy; when, after long groping in the darkness, clinging, indeed, to
his faith in God (for without that he could not live an hour, though
that faith be totally without sight), he suddenly realizes how a great
sorrow has wrought in him a great result; that it has perfected and
crystallized all that was nebulous in his faith, and that it has
absolutely brought him into perfect rest in the Divine Will; that it has
forged that indissoluble link which forevermore identifies his will with
the will of God, and thus opens to him a realm fairer far than a "World
Beautiful"--even a World Divine. Only in this finer ether is revealed to
him the Life Radiant; in the atmosphere made resplendent and glorious by
this revelation of the soul's union with God. It is a life only
experienced after one who has seen before him the Promised Land is led
into the Wilderness instead, and who, standing there in the midst of
denial, and defeat, and desolation, can rejoice in the sea of glass
mingled with fire through which he must pass. Only in this supreme
surrender of the soul to God; only in this rapture of union with the
divine power, lies the Life Radiant. It is a glory not of earth; it is
the instant crystallization of an intense and infinite energy that pours
itself into every need of the varied human life. It is the igniting of a
spark that flashes its illumination on every problem and perplexity. It
is the coming to "know God" in the sense meant by Saint Paul, and thus
to enter into the eternal life. For the eternal life is not a term that
implies mere duration. It implies present conditions. The eternal life
is now. It is a spiritual state, and implies the profound and the
realized union with God, rather than a prolongation of existence through
countless ages. Only the eternal life can thus prolong itself. The life
of the spirit is alone immortal.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Creating the New World.]
"The soul looketh steadily forward, creating a world before her, leaving
worlds behind her," and "the web of events is the flowing robe in which
she is clothed." That union of energy and will which we call the soul is
capable of creating a new world every day, and any adequate perception
of the life that now is, as well as that which is to come, suggests
consolation for the ills of the day and leads one into the atmosphere of
peace and joy.
When one comes into any clear realization of this life of the
spirit,--of its infinite outlook, its command of resources,--the
entanglement with trifles falls off of itself. Not unfrequently a great
deal of time and energy is totally wasted in endeavoring to combat or to
conquer the annoyances and troubles that beset one; that weight his
wings and blind his eyes and render him impervious and unresponsive to
the beauty and joy of life. Nine times out of ten it is far better to
ignore these, to put them out of sight and out of mind, and press on to
gain the clearer atmosphere, to create the new world. "The whole course
of things goes to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance
for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word. Why
need you choose so painfully your place, and occupation, and associates,
and modes of action and of entertainment? Certainly there is a possible
right for you that precludes the need of balance and wilful election.
For you there is a reality, a fit place and congenial duties. Place
yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates
all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to
right, and a perfect contentment. Then you put all gainsayers in the
wrong. Then you are the world, the measure of right, of truth, of
beauty. If we will not be marplots with our miserable interferences, the
work, the society, letters, arts, science, religion of men would go on
far better than now, and the heaven predicted from the beginning of the
world, and still predicted from the bottom of the heart, would organize
itself, as do now the rose, and the air, and the sun."
The poet declares that "sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier
things," but there is a certain morbidness in even the sensitive
delicacy and intensity of feeling that broods too deeply over the past.
It is a great art to learn to let things go--let them pass. They are a
part of the "flowing conditions." Even the pain and sorrow that result
from failures and changes in social relations; loss of friends, the
vanishing of friendships in which one had trusted,--even this phase of
trial, which is truly the hardest of all, can be best endured by closing
the door of consciousness on it, and creating a new world by that
miracle-working power of the soul. Friendships that hold within
themselves any permanent, any spiritual reality, come to stay. "Only
that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own
march, that soul to which I do not decline and which does not decline to
me, but, native of the same celestial altitude, repeats in its own all
my experience." Life has too many claims and privileges and resources to
waste it in lamentations. Let one look forward, not backward. Fairy
realms of enchantment beckon him on. These "flowing conditions of life"
are, really, the conditions of joy, of exhilaration, of stimulus to
energy rather than the reverse. They invest each day, each week, each
year, with the enchantment of the unknown and the untried. They produce
the possibility of perpetual hope, and continuity of hope is continuity
of endeavor. Without hope, faith, and courage, life would be impossible;
and courage and all power of energy and endeavor depend entirely upon
hope and faith. If a man believes in nothing and is in a state of
despair and not hope, his energies are paralyzed. But hope lends
wings,--hope and faith are creative, and can both control and change the
trend of events. Circumstances are but the crude material, which is
subject to any degree of transformation by the alchemy of faith. "When a
god wishes to ride, every chip and stone will bud and shoot out winged
feet to carry him," and it is hope and faith that give the power of the
gods.
There is, perhaps, no adequate realization on the part of humanity of
the enormous extent to which the forces in the Unseen mingle with the
forces of the Seen, and thus complete the magnetic battery of action.
Life approaches perfection in just the degree to which it can
intelligently and reverently avail itself of this aid which is a divine
provision. It is not only after death that the soul "stands before God."
The soul that does not stand before God, now and here, in the ordinary
daily life, does not even live at all, in any true sense. "I am come
that ye might have _life_," said Jesus, "and have it more abundantly." It
is only as one holds himself receptive to the divine currents that he
has life, and it rests with himself to have it "more abundantly" every
day and hour.
This constant communion with Jesus, this living in constant receptivity
to the divine energy, includes, too, the living in telepathic communion
with those who have gone on into the Unseen world. The spirituality of
life is conditioned on so developing our own spiritual powers by faith
and prayer and communion with God, that one is sensitive to the presence
and responsive to the thought of friends who have been released from the
physical life. Shall Phillips Brooks, the friend and helper and wise
counsellor when here, be less so now that he has entered into the next
higher scale of being? Shall the friend whom we loved, and who was at
our side in visible presence yesterday, be less our friend because his
presence is not visible to us to-day? Why is it not visible? Simply
because the subtle spirit-body is in a state of far higher vibration
than the denser physical body, and the physical eye can only recognize
objects up to a certain vibratory degree. It is a scientific fact.
Musicians and scientists know well that above a certain pitch the ear
cannot recognize sound; it becomes silence. But as Saint Paul says,
"there is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body," and the
spiritual body also has its organs of sight and hearing. Clairvoyance
and clairaudience are as natural, when the spiritual faculties are
sufficiently developed, as are the ordinary sight and hearing. Even when
there is no clairvoyance and clairaudience, in the way of super-normal
development, the mind kept in harmonious receptivity to the divine world
may be telepathically in more or less constant communion with those in
the unseen.
"The power of our own will to determine certain facts is, itself, one of
the facts of life," says Professor Josiah Royce. The power of our own
will is but another name for spiritual power--that positive force to
which all events and circumstances are negative.
* * * * *
"There never was a right endeavor but it succeeded," says Emerson.
"Patience and patience, we shall win at the last. We must be very
suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good
deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dollars, and a
very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the
light of our life. We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the
household, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week;
but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a
sanity and revelations which in his passage into new worlds he will
carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up
again, old heart!--it seems to say,--there is victory yet for all
justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize will be
the transformation of genius into practical power."
[Sidenote: Eliminating Anxieties.]
A large percentage of the anxieties and perplexities of daily experience
could be eliminated at once and struck off the balance, never to return
again, if life were but viewed aright, and held in the scale of true
valuations. Nothing is more idle than to sell one's soul for a mess of
pottage; for the pottage is not worth the price. Seen in the most
practical, every-day light, it is a bad bargain. Not only is it true
that a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things that he
possesseth, but, conversely, as a rule, the greater the mass of things
the less the life. The spiritual energy becomes clogged and fettered and
strangled amid its entanglement with things. The very power of finance,
that might and that ought to insure its possessor a certain peace of
mind, a liberation from petty anxieties, and a power to devote himself
to higher aims, too often reverses this and chains him as to a wheel.
Recently there arrived at a fashionable hotel a family whose command of
finance might have redeemed every day from the sordid and from any
anxious efforts, and enabled them to live in the realm of high thought,
of generous and beautiful expressions of sympathy and love to all. Their
visit might have made the time a glorified interlude to every one with
whom they came in contact by its radiation of hope and happiness and
sympathy and good cheer. Instead, each and all, individually and
collectively, were entangled in possessions,--weighted down with
_things_, and quite illustrating the terse little couplet of Emerson,--
"Things are in the saddle
And ride mankind."
The things which rode these unfortunate beings--for the
multi-millionaires may not unfrequently be so classed--were masses of
jewels, that could not be worn and enjoyed because too elaborate to be
suitable, and so must be instantly consigned to the safe. Such part of
these treasures as were in use, and left in rooms, suffered from losses
or theft. They caused more or less vexation, anger, discord, and fret in
general to the owners and every one concerned, until the onlooker was
ready to exclaim, "If this is the price of diamonds and rubies and pink
pearls, and rich and rare gems in general, let one escape the tyranny of
purple and fine linen, and take simplicity and its accompanying peace of
mind." After a certain limit of ordinary comfort, great possessions seem
to enslave rather than to liberate. If the price of costly jewels is
peace of mind, as well as a cheque of imposing figures, then, indeed,
let one keep his peace of mind, and go without the necklace. It is often
curious to see how little imagination goes into the spending of colossal
fortunes. The possessors simply build more houses than they can live in;
each one has more space and more impedimenta than he knows what to do
with, and the multiplication of all these possessions results in
perpetual anxieties, and fret, and worry, until one would prefer a crust
and a garret, and his spiritual freedom, to any such life as that
entailed by the golden shower of fortune.
"Are you rich? rich enough to help somebody?" There is the test. The
diamond and ruby necklace, whose chief use seems to be to incite
anxieties, would give some aspiring youth or maiden a college course.
The costly ring left carelessly on the bureau, tempting theft, would
give a gifted young girl just the study in a musical conservatory that
she needs, or would make a young artist happy and encouraged by buying
his picture, and some one else might be made happy and helped on to new
endeavor by having the gift of the picture. Money can be transmuted into
spiritual gifts, and only when thus used is it of much importance in
promoting any real comfort or enjoyment or stimulus to progress. The
event, the thing, is purely negative, and only when acted upon by force
of spirit does it become positive.
Let one go on through the days doing the beautiful thing in every human
relation. Life is a spiritual drama, perpetually being played. The
curtain never goes down. The actors come and go, but the stage is never
vacant. To inform the drama with artistic feeling, with beauty, with
generous purpose, is in the power of every one. It depends, not on
possessions, but on sympathy, insight, and sweetness of spirit. These
determine the Life Radiant.
* * * * *
"I will wait heaven's perfect hour
Through the innumerable years."
[Sidenote: Heaven's Perfect Hour.]
The saving grace of life is the power to hold with serene and steadfast
fidelity the vision, the ideal, that has revealed itself in happier
hours; to realize that this, after all, is the true reality, and that it
shines in the spiritual firmament as the sun does in the heavens,
however long the period of storm and clouds that obscure its radiance.
The tendency to doubt and depression is often as prevalent as an
epidemic. In extreme cases it becomes the suicidal mania; in others it
effectually paralyzes the springs of action and leaves its victim
drifting helplessly and hopelessly with the current; and any such
mental tendency as this is just as surely a definite evil to be
recognized and combated as would be any epidemic of disease. To rise in
the morning confronting a day that is full of exacting demands on his
best energies; on his serenest and sunniest poise; that require all the
exhilaration and sparkle and radiance which have vanished from his
possession, and yet to be forced, someway and somehow, to go through his
appointed tasks,--no one can deny that here is a very real problem, and
one that certainly taxes every conceivable force of will far more than
might many great and visible calamities. For all this form of trial is
invisible and very largely incommunicable, and it is like trying to walk
through deep waters that are undiscerned by those near, but which impede
every step, and threaten to rise and overwhelm one.
The poetic and artistic temperament is peculiarly susceptible to this
form of trial. In work of an industrial or mechanical nature, a certain
degree of will force alone will serve to insure its accomplishment
whether one "feels in the mood" or not. The mood does not greatly
count. But in work of any creative sort, the mood, the condition of
mind, is the determining factor. And is it within human power, by force
of will alone, to call up this working mood of radiant energy when all
energy has ebbed away, leaving one as inert as an electric machine from
which the current has been turned off?
And yet--and yet--the saving gift and grace of life and achievement
comes, in that there is a power higher than one's own will, on which one
may lay hold with this serene and steadfast fidelity.
Physicians and scientists have long since recognized that intense mental
depression is as inevitably an accompaniment of _la grippe_ as are its
physical symptoms, and the more fully the patient himself understands
this, and is thus enabled to look at it objectively, so to speak, the
better it is for him. The feeling is that he has not a friend on earth,
and, on the whole, he is rather glad of it. He feels as if it were much
easier to die than to live,--not to say that the former presents itself
to him as far the preferable course. So he envelops himself in the
black shadows of gloom, and, on the whole, quite prefers drawing them
constantly deeper. And this is very largely the semi-irresponsible state
of illness combined with ignorance of the real nature of the malady.
The knowledge of how to meet it with a degree of that "sweet
reasonableness" which should invest one's daily living, is knowledge
that can hardly come amiss. One must treat it as a transient visitation
of those
"Black spirits or white, blue spirits or gray,"
which are to be exorcised by keeping close to beautiful thought,--to
something high, poetic, reverent. "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace
whose mind is stayed on Thee" is one of the most practical aids in life.
It can be relied upon more fully than the visit of the physician. From
the Bible, from the poets, one may draw as from a sustaining fountain.
As this intense depression is a mental feature of the disease it must be
met by mental methods,--of resolutely holding the thoughts to high and
beautiful themes; by allying the imagination with serene and radiant
ideals. Emerson is the greatest of magicians. His words will work
marvels. His thought is as luminous as a Roentgen ray.
"Heaven's perfect hour" is sure to sometime dawn if one but keep his
face turned toward the morning. "Heaven's perfect hour" is within one's
own possibilities of creation, if he live aright and think aright; and
with joy and radiance may he make it his perpetual experience; although
it is the supreme anomaly in life that the social relations which are
designed to offer the profoundest joy, the most perfect consolation for
disaster or sorrow, and to communicate the happy currents of electrical
energy, are yet those which not unfrequently make themselves the channel
of the most intense suffering. There is something wrong in this. The
friendships of life, all forms and phases and degrees through which
regard and friendship reveal themselves, are the one divinest, perhaps
it may be said are the only, part of life on earth that is absolutely
divine, and the divine element should communicate perpetual joy. This is
the ideal view of the entire panorama of social interchange and social
relations, and being the purest ideal, it is also the most intensely and
absolutely real. For nothing is real, in the last analysis, save that
which is ideal; and nothing is ideal that is not a spiritual reality.
Then the question recurs,--how is it possible, how can it be accounted
for that the one phase of suffering which seems past even trying to
endure, comes through the sources which should radiate only joy and
blessedness?
The old proverb, "Save me from my friends," is founded on a certain
basis of fact. "Twenty enemies cannot do me the mischief of one friend,"
rather cynically, but perhaps not wholly untruly, said Gail Hamilton.
For it certainly is not the avowed enemy, or the person to whom one is
indifferent, who has the power to greatly harm or pain him. So far as
injury goes, Emerson is probably right when he says, "No one can work me
injury but myself." Misrepresentation, misinterpretation, there may be,
but in the long run truth is mighty, and will, and does, prevail. One
need not greatly concern himself with misinterpretations, but, rather,
only with striving to live the life of truth and righteousness.