lesson of not laying too much stress on the recognition of one's motives
or on any return of sympathetic consideration. "Let me not think," said
Doctor Brooks, "that I get nothing from the man who misunderstands all
my attempts to serve him, and who scorns me when I know that I deserve
his sympathy. Ah! it would be sad enough if only the men who understood
us and were grateful to us when we gave ourselves to them had help to
give us in return. The good reformer whom you try to help in his reform,
and who turns off from you contemptuously because he distrusts you,
seeing that your ways are different from his, he does not make you
happy,--he makes you unhappy; but he makes you good, he leads you to a
truer insight, a more profound unselfishness. And so (it is the old
lesson), not until goodness becomes the one thing that you desire, not
until you gauge all growth and gain by that, not until then can you
really know that the law has worked, the promise has been fulfilled.
With what measure you gave yourself to him, he has given himself--the
heart of himself,--which is not his favor, not his love, but his
goodness, the real heart of himself to you. For the rest you can easily
wait until you both come to the better world, where misconceptions shall
have passed away, and the outward forms and envelopes of things shall
correspond perfectly with their inner substances forever."
In the last analysis one comes to realize that happiness is a condition
depending solely on the relation of his soul to God; that neither life,
nor death, nor principalities, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor
any living creature can separate him from it, because happiness and the
love of God are one and identical, and it is not in the power of this
world to give, or to take away, this sense of absolute oneness with the
Divine life that comes when man gives himself, his soul and body, his
hopes and aspirations and ideals, in complete consecration to the will
of God.
For this alone is the Life Radiant. It may not be ease or pleasure, but
it is that ceaseless joy of the soul that may be the daily experience of
every human being. And to gain the deep inner conviction of this sublime
truth is worth whatever it may cost of tears or trial. It is the
threshold of joy. It is the initiation into a higher spiritual state
which one may gain in his progress while on earth as well as in heaven.
In fact, no one is really fitted for the highest privileges and
sweetness he may crave until he has learned to live well, to live
joyfully, without them. No one is fitted for joy until he can live well
_without_ joy. It is the law and the prophets.
One may tread,--not the "whole round of creation," as Browning phrases
it, but a minor segment of it, at least, and come back with added and
more profound conviction that happiness is a condition of the spirit;
that "the soul is ceaselessly joyful;" that the incidents and accidents
of the outward life cannot mar nor lessen that sense of higher peace and
joy and harmony which is the atmosphere of any true spiritual life. One
may recognize and affirm this truth by spiritual intuition, and he may
then be led through many phases of actual tests in actual life; he may
for a time lose his hold on it and come to say that happiness is a thing
that depends on so many causes outside one's own control; that illness,
death, loss of friends, adverse circumstances, failures and trials of
all kinds, may come into his experience, and that one is at the mercy of
all these vicissitudes. Can the individual be happy, he will ask, when
all that made happiness is taken away? Can he be happy if he has lost
all his worldly goods? or if death has taken those nearest and dearest
to him? or if the separations of life, far harder to bear than those of
death, have come to him? And yet, until he has learned to answer these
questions with the most triumphant affirmative, he has not learned the
measure nor sounded the depth of a true and noble order of Happiness.
The difference is that of being safely on board a great steamer when
wind and wave are tempest-tossed, or of being helpless in the raging
waters. The storm may be precisely the same; the tempest may rage as it
will, but safe and secure in the cabin or stateroom, the voyager does
not mind its fury. And truly may this analogy be held in life. It is
possible to emerge from the winds and waves; to enter so entirely into
the sense of security in the Divine; to hold so absolutely the faith in
the Divine leading, that even in the midst of trial and loss and
deprivation and sorrow, one shall come to _know_, through his own
experience, that "the soul is ceaselessly joyful." For it is one thing
to accept a truth theoretically, or believe it intuitively, and another
to prove it through experience that shall test the quality of faith and
conviction. Learning this supreme truth of life through outward
experiences as well as through inner revelation is a victory of the will
that may even make itself an epoch, a landmark, in spiritual progress.
It is the complete recognition of that invincible aid given to the soul
through the "ever-present" aid of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.
"Jesus, the Christ, this one perfect character, has come into the world
and lived in it; filling all the moulds of action, all the terms of
duty, and love, with His own divine manners, works, and charities,"
wrote Doctor Horace Bushnell. "All the conditions of our life are raised
thus by the meaning He has shown to be in them and the grace He has put
upon them. The world itself is changed and is no more the same that it
was; it has never been the same since Jesus left it. The air is charged
with heavenly odors, and a kind of celestial consciousness, a sense of
other worlds, is wafted on us in its breath. It were easier to untwist
all the beams of light in the sky, separating and expunging one of the
colors, than to get the character of Jesus, which is the real gospel,
out of the world."
The one deepest need of the world to-day; the one deepest need of each
individual, is the more actual realization of the personality of Christ.
The perspective of nineteen hundred years only brings more vividly
before the mind, more close to the spiritual apprehension, the personal
holiness of Jesus, and enforces the truth that shall redeem
humanity,--the practical possibility of the increasing achievement of
this personal holiness for every man and woman. "Because I live ye shall
live also," He said. But what is it to live? Certainly, something far
above and beyond mere existence. Life, in its true sense, is to know
God. This is the life eternal. No one can "know God" save in just the
degree to which he lives God's life,--the divine life,--and in the
degree to which he is living the divine life does he live the life
eternal. The life eternal may be lived to-day as well as after death, in
some vague eternity. The life eternal is simply the life of spiritual
qualities. It is the life in which truth, honor, integrity, sacrifice,
patience, and love abound, and in which all that is selfish and false is
cast out. Now, however exalted a definition of the present, daily life
this may seem to be, it is in no sense an impossible one. The more
exalted is one's standard for the perpetual quality of his life, the
more stimulating it becomes. The exalted ideal inspires; the low
standard depresses. An invincible energy sweeps instantly through the
atmosphere to sustain him who allies himself with his noblest ideals. A
force that disintegrates and baffles sweeps down upon him who abandons
his nobler ideals, and substitutes for them the mere selfish, the
commonplace, or the base. The "Choose ye this day whom ye will serve" is
no merely abstract phrase or trick of rhetoric. Every hour is an hour of
destiny. Every hour is an hour of choice. Legions of angels are in the
unseen world surrounding humanity. Not one thought, one aspiration, one
prayer, is unheard and unnoted. No conditions or circumstances are
sordid or material unless he whom they invest make them so by sordid and
material thought; by turning away from that life of the spirit whose
very reality is made and is tested by these circumstances. "All the
conditions of life are raised," says Doctor Bushnell, in the extract
quoted above, "by the meaning He has shown to be in them, and the grace
He has put upon them." Might not one, with profit, dwell for a moment
upon this statement?
There is a current sweeping through latter-day life and reflecting
itself largely in miscellaneous literature, to the effect that what the
writers are pleased to call "success in life" is achieved by
self-reliance; that a man must believe in himself; and the final triumph
is illustrated as that of the man who begins as an errand boy at two
dollars a week and ends as a multi-millionaire. Between these two points
in space the arc of success subtends, according to this order of
literature, and the word is: make a million, or a hundred millions of
dollars,--honestly if you can, dishonestly if you must, but, at all
events, the point is to "arrive." Now there is both a most demoralizing
fallacy and a strong and valuable truth mixed up in these exhortations.
"Trust thyself," said Emerson; "every heart vibrates to that iron
string."
"I thank whatever gods there be
For my unconquerable soul,"
sings William Ernest Henley, and he closes with the ringing lines,--
"I am the Captain of my fate,
I am the master of my soul."
And Emerson and Henley are right--so far as they go. And the man who has
been industrious, and economical, and has accumulated a fortune, has, at
all times, some elements that are right; and rigid economy is far better
than selfish indulgence. But whether a rigid economy is always a
virtue--depends. "There is that scattereth, yet increaseth." Whether it
is nobler to increase one's bank account at the expense of all the
personal expansion of life, through study, social life, travel,--all
that makes up a choice and fine culture, and at the expense of depriving
one's self of the untold luxury of service, as needs come in view,--is
certainly an open question, and one in which there is a good deal to say
for other uses of money than that of establishing an impressive bank
account; but leaving this aspect of the problem, one returns to that
phase of it represented by self-reliance. It is a great hindrance to the
infinite development of man to conceive of courage and self-reliance as
capacities or powers of his own rather than as fed from the divine
energy. A stream might as well cut itself off from its source, and from
its tributaries, and expect to flow on, in undiminished current to the
sea, as for man to regard courage and force of will as generated in
himself. Thus he dwarfs and hinders all his spiritual powers that are
found to lay hold upon God. Thus he stifles himself, rather than open
his windows into the pure air. "All the conditions of life are raised by
the meaning Jesus has shown to be in them."
Certainly, it was not for nothing that Christ came into the conditions
of the human life. His experience on earth comprehended every privation,
every limitation, known to the physical life. Not only these,--but He
experienced every phase of sorrow, of trial, of mental pain, of
spiritual anguish. He was misunderstood, He was misrepresented, He was
assailed and crucified. He understood the needs of the body as well as
of the spirit. He had no contempt nor condemnation for comfort,
prosperity, or wealth, in and of themselves. He simply regarded them as
means to an end, and if nobly used to noble ends, life was the better
for whatever phases and factors of power it possessed. But He taught the
truth that here we have no continuing city; that this temporary sojourn
on earth is designed as a period in which to develop qualities rather
than to heap up accumulations. "What shall it profit a man," He well
said, "if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"
So here was a man, living the earthly and physical life; comprehending
all the earthly and physical problems involved in relation with the
physical world; not ignoring or denying them like a mere fanatic, but
estimating them in the true scale of values,--here was a man who by his
experience and example proved that personal holiness of life is not
incompatible with personal attention to every detail of human affairs.
Jesus did not isolate Himself in a monastic cell in order to live the
life of the spirit. He practically taught that the very supreme test of
the life of the spirit is to live it in the heart of human activities.
It is in the resistless tide of daily affairs,--in the office of the
lawyer, the journalist, the physician, the architect; in the studio of
the artist, in the counting-room, the bank, the salesroom, and the
market-place, that the life of personal holiness is possible, and it is
possible to man because Jesus, taking upon Himself the human life, so
lived it in these very circumstances and under these conditions. Christ
and His all-quickening life remain in the world. They did not leave it
with His physical death. They remain as the incorruptible, the glorious,
the priceless possession of every man and woman to-day. To this divine
example of a perfect character revealed in the guise of the human life,
each individual in the world to-day can turn, as the most practical
ideal by which to shape his own life and to ultimately realize the
command, "Be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." If this
transcendent ideal were not a possibility for the soul, surely God would
not have given it as an idle command; but man, as a spiritual being, is
designed to live the spiritual life, and this life is that of perpetual
spiritual progress and ideal achievement; of entering into that golden
atmosphere in which he shall not only
"--dream of summers and dream of flowers
That last alway,"
but find, in an ever-increasing degree, that the dream is merged into
the profoundest reality of experience.
"Present suffering is not enjoyable," said the late Rev. Doctor Maltbie
Davenport Babcock, "but life would be worth little without it. The
difference between iron and steel is fire, but steel is worth all it
costs. Iron ore may think itself senselessly tortured in the furnace,
but when the watch-spring looks back it knows better. David enjoyed pain
and trouble no more than we do, but the time came when he admitted that
they had been good for him. Though the aspect of suffering is hard, the
prospect is hopeful.... The tests of life are to make, not break us. The
blow at the outward man may be the greatest blessing to the inner man.
If God, then, puts, or permits, anything hard in our lives, be sure that
the real peril, the real trouble, is what we shall lose if we flinch or
rebel."
Doctor Babcock's words suggest that there is perhaps nothing in all the
divine teachings that is less understood and less accepted than the
assertion of Saint Paul, "We glory in tribulation also." The general
reader of the gospels and epistles--even the prayerful and reverent
reader--relegates this expression to some abstract conditions, as
something that might do very well for Saint Paul and a rudimentary
civilization; as something that might be a very appropriate and decorous
sentiment for Saint Sebastian on his gridiron, or Saint Catherine
keeping her vigils in the vast and gloomy old church in Siena, but which
certainly can bear no relation and hold no message for the modern
reader. For the electric life of the hour,--full of color and vitality;
throbbing with achievement; the life that craves prosperity as its
truest expression, and finds adversity a poor and mean failure quite
unsuitable to a man of brilliant gifts and energy; the life that
believes in its own right of way and mistakes possessions for
power,--what has _it_ to do with "tribulation" except to refuse it? If
it comes it is met with indignant protest rather than as a phase of
experience in which to "glory;" it is evaded, if possible; and if it
cannot be evaded it is received with rebellion, with gloom, with
despondency, and perhaps, at last, an enforced and hopeless endurance,
which is not, by the way, to be mistaken for resignation. Endurance is a
passive condition that cannot, and does not even try, to help itself.
Resignation, in its true reading, is wholly another matter; it is
active, it is alive, it is conscious and intelligent and in joyful
co-operation with the will of God. It is no poor and negative mental
state; it is rich in vitality and in hope, as well, for in its absolute
identification of itself, this human will with the divine will, it
enters into a kingdom of untold glory, whose paths lead by the river of
life to the noblest and most exalted heights of achievement and of
undreamed-of joy.
If this be true of resignation, what shall be said of tribulation,--of
glorying in tribulation? A man awakens to find himself in poverty
instead of in wealth; his possessions suddenly swept away; or from
health, he, or some one whose life is still dearer to him than his own,
prostrated with illness; or to find himself unjustly accused or
maligned, or misunderstood, or to encounter some other of the myriad
phases of what he calls misfortune and tribulation. How is he to endure
it? How is he to go on, living his life, in all this pain, perplexity,
trial, or annoyance, much less to "glory" in this atmosphere of
tribulation? One is engaged, it may be, in a work for which it would
seem that peace of mind and joy and radiance were his only working
capital; his essential resources; and suddenly these vanish, and his
world is in ruins. Clouds of misapprehension envelop him round about,
and he can neither understand, himself, what has produced them, nor can
he, by any entreaty or appeal, be permitted the vantage ground of full
and clear explanation. And his energies are paralyzed; the golden glory
that enfolded his days investing them with a magical enchantment, has
gone, and a leaden sky shuts him into a gloomy and leaden atmosphere. It
is not only himself, but his work; not only what he may feel, but what,
also, he may not accomplish. And his work is of a nature that is not
only his own expression, his contribution to the sum of living, but one
which involves responsibility to others, and some way,--well or ill, as
may be,--it must be done. Shall he, _can_ he, "glory" in this
paralyzing pain and torture that so mysteriously has fallen upon
him,--whose causes do not, so far as he can discern, lie in his own
conduct, but in some impenetrable mystery of misapprehensions and
misunderstandings; a tangled labyrinth to which he is denied the clue?
Can he, indeed, facing all this torture and tragedy, with all that made
the joy and light of life withdrawn,--can he encounter this form of
tribulation with serene poise, with unfaltering purpose, with an intense
and exalted faith? It is "not enjoyable," indeed, as Doctor Babcock, in
the quotation above, at once concedes; but that the experience has a
meaning,--a very profound meaning, one must believe; and believing this,
he must feel that the responsibility rests on himself to accept this new
significance that has, in an undreamed-of way, fallen into his life; to
read its hidden lesson; to transmute it, by the miracle of divine grace,
into something fairer and sweeter; to let its scorching fire make steel
of that which was only iron. To accept, to believe, to _feel_ this, in
every fibre of his nature, is to "glory" in the tribulation. It is to
extract its best meaning, and to go on in life better equipped than
before. "The tests of life are to _make_ and not _break_ us." Here is
the truer view, and one that reveals the divine significance in all
mysteries of human experience. Beyond all these views, also, is that
inflorescence of joy that springs from this more complete identification
of one's own will with that of the divine. One comes into the full glow
and beauty of that wonderful assurance of Jesus: "These things have I
spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy
might be full."
This fulness of joy is a condition freely offered for perfect
acceptance. The varied experiences are, as Browning has said, "just a
stuff to try the soul's strength on." The kingdom of heaven lies open to
all; it is _at hand_, not waiting afar in some vague futurity. Shall we
not enter to-day into this kingdom of heaven which is at hand? Shall we
not enter to-day into the very joy of the Lord? Pain and sorrow may
invest the conditions of the moment, but they are forces which are
transmuting the inconsequential into the significant; the common and
trivial into the exalted and the sublime. The discord is merged into
sublime harmonies that thrill the air; the glory of the Lord shines
round about, and we enter into its illumination; we are ascending the
Mount of Vision and the soul looketh steadily onward, discerning the
beauty of holiness, in whose transfiguration gleams the fairest ideal
revealed to humanity,--even the Life Radiant.
INDEX.
Abbott, Rev. Dr. Lyman, 83, 223.
Academy of Science, 10.
Adams, Hon. Alva, his tribute to Nathan Cook Meeker, 248.
----, General, 250.
Africa, 230.
Albertson, Dr., his invention, 151, 152, 153.
Altar of Perpetual Adoration, 19.
Ames, Dr. Charles Gordon, his uplifting sermons, 223, 322, 324.
Andes, the, 125.
Arizona, 205, 226.
Armstrong, Gen. Samuel Chapman, 247.
Arno, the, 251.
Arnold, Sir Edwin, 65, 68.
----, Matthew, 198, 313.
Atlantic, the, 125.
---- cable, 116.
---- coast, 92.
"Aurora Leigh," 345.
Austrian, 135.
Avernus, 51.
Ayrton, Prof. W. E., 124, 126.
Babcock, Rev. Dr. Maltbie Davenport, his noble words, 359, 360, 363.
Balzac, Honore de, 103.
"Banquo," 253.
Baptist belief, 169.
Beethoven, 228.
Behmen, Jacob, 255.
Besant, Annie, her theories on Prayer, 298, 299, 300.
Bible, the, 126.
Bonus, John, 256.
Boston, 150, 234.
Brewster, Elder, 241.
"Bright Angel Trail, The," 233.
British Isles, 142.
Brooks, Rt. Rev. Dr. Phillips, 31, 53, 62, 183, 192, 204, 267,
268, 293, 347.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 345.
----, Robert, 265, 364.
Bunsen, Dr. Robert Wilhelm, 337.
Bushnell, Rev. Dr. Horace, 351.
Cache la Poudre, 244.
Carboniferous, 229.
Centennial Exhibition, the, 245, 246.
Chemical Society, 48.
Cheyenne, 240.
---- Canyon, 226, 232, 233.
Chicago, 93.
Christmas, 242.
"Clothed with the Sun," 255.
Colorado River, 230.
----, State of, 191, 237, 238, 239, 240, 242, 243, 244, 245,
246, 247, 248, 251, 252, 253.
Columbia University Chemical Society, 48.
Congress, 246.
Connecticut, 241.
Cooper Institute, 240, 243.
Copley Square, 169.
Cosmos, the, 140.
"Courier Journal," 238, 241.
Crookes, Sir William, 9, 11.
Crusaders, the, 226.
"Culture," 198.
Curie, Professor, Radium discovered by, 9, 10.
----, Madame, 9, 10.
Cushing, Frank, 235.
Daniel, Book of, 163.
"Daniel Deronda," 222.
Dante, 185, 309.
"Data of Ethics," 204.
Darwin, Dr. Charles, 83.
De Caussade, Pere, 275, 280, 281, 284, 290.
Denver, 240.
Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, 251.
Discovery of the Future, 81.
Donald, Rev. Dr. E. Winchester, 223.
Divine Creation, 171.
---- Love, 206, 288.
---- Perfection, 300.
---- Pressure, 199, 332.
---- Truth, 286.
---- Word, 314.
---- Will, 89, 294.
Echo Cliffs, 236.
Edison, Thomas, 116.
Edwards, Jonathan, 171.
Egyptian, 80.
Eiffel Tower, 226.
Electricity, 174.
Eliot, President Charles W., 198.
Elizabeth, 242.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 32, 40, 42, 45, 49, 61, 78, 81, 93, 175,
177, 196, 197, 202, 203, 214, 217, 221, 237, 241, 242, 309,
324, 339, 354, 355.
Empedocles, 78.
England, 256.
Episcopalian, 169.
Eros, 145.
"Esoteric Christianity," 298.
Europe, 137, 150.
"Evangeline," 250.
Evolution, 330.
"Expansion of Religion," 223.
Faraday, Michael, 338.
Faust, 49.
Fenelon, 302.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 68.
Field, Cyrus, 116.
Fiske, Dr. John, consummation of organic evolution, 113;
degree of achievement above the level of death, 327.
Flagstaff, 234;
cosmopolitan influence of, 235.
Florence, 251.
Foretelling of the future, 24.
Fort Steele, 249.
"Forum, The," article of Edward Everett Hale in, 79.
Fuller, Margaret, defines social sympathies, 217.