When a given course of action is considered or a particular step of
progress is proposed, many people are in the habit of questioning whether
the thing is necessary. They do not inquire whether it is desirable,
whether it is helpful, or whether it is lovely. The only question raised
is as to its necessity.
The propounding of this question is not without its effect. The people who
ask it often rob a movement of its power and occasionally cause it to fail
completely. By its use a chill is often brought upon spirits which would
otherwise throb with warmth. The world is deprived of the influence of
many a cheerful song, helpful smile, gracious act, and kind word simply
because the person who might have given them stopped to make this
ever-recurring inquiry: “Is it necessary?”
The people who ask the question would themselves be the least willing to
have their own lives and fortunes subjected to its merciless test. They
know full well that it would remove from their little worlds many of the
things which now seem best and sweetest. Landscapes would lose the mystic
charm which now serves to lift them above the commonplace. Daily
experience would be robbed of the glamor which now makes life seem so
sweet and beautiful. The glory would fade from about the brow of
friendship, and even friendship itself perhaps would perish. Lovely as all
these things are, they do not belong to the list of things that are
absolutely necessary. They would pass away if life were denuded of all
that the world could manage to get along without.
As a matter of fact, many of the most blessed things we know lie on the
farther side of the line of necessity. If we were never to pass beyond
that line, then the world and all that it contains would be reduced to the
impoverished outlines of the barest actuality. There would be no place
left for hope, ambition, and dream. We should do no more work than is
necessary, and our labor could no longer be a daily progress toward the
summit of some mount of hope. We should have no more than is necessary,
and each would become less than a peasant. We should love, help, and serve
no more than is necessary, and all the joy of the unselfish and the
sacrificial would be taken from life. We should have no more friends than
is necessary, and one by one those who have been our greatest inspiration
would depart from our ken. How poor a thing it would soon be to live!
Life would indeed be soon reduced to the level of mere existence. We
should still be in the world, but the glow and the loveliness would have
departed. Our tables would be bare, because we should eat only what is
strictly necessary. Our clothing would be scant and poor, for we should
wear only what one must. Our lives would be solitary, for association is
a luxury and not a necessity. Kindness is unnecessary, therefore our souls
would shrivel and perish. A once cheerful world would have grown dull and
dead, and the once joyful privilege of living would have suddenly been
transformed into a grievous necessity.
It is the unnecessary that changes bare existence into throbbing and
purposeful life. A mere earth is changed into a lovely world by processes
which might have been dispensed with. A house is transformed into a home
by graces which are not the children of necessity.
Even Bethlehem and Calvary were not necessary. The glory of their meaning
comes rather from the fact that they sprang from good will alone. The
power of the Cross springs largely from the fact that it could have been
avoided. We appreciate it because the Master faced it willingly.
No one cares for the friend who is a friend under the pressure of some
necessity. We appreciate the friendship of those who are our friends
because they simply want to be. We do not care for the gift offered by
some one who felt the force of some compulsion. The impulse is to cast
it from us in disdain. We love the gift made by the impulse of a kindly
heart, not because it was a necessity but because it was a pleasure.
I once sat in a great gathering and heard a man with silver hair offer a
bit of advice which sprang from a life of rich experience. “Let us,” he
said, “during the week that we are together, make it a point to be a
little kinder to one another than is necessary.”
Life had taught him that the finer graces and the sweeter instincts are
not necessary things. They do not earn salary. They do not satisfy the
hunger of the body. They are even sometimes discounted in the calculations
of the shortsighted. They are, however, the beautiful things. They garland
life and make it lovely. If the men in that gathering were to be kind to
one another, it was desirable that they should be so for the sake of
kindness, and not for that of compulsion.
This was one of the first principles to engage the attention of the Great
Teacher. He said to a crowd of people one day that one gets no credit
either on the books of heaven or in the courts of his own conscience until
he has done a little better than was strictly necessary. It is a little
thing to give the coat that is asked for, but it is a worthy thing to give
the cloak which is not expected. It is insignificant to travel the mile
that is requested, but it is worth while to go the second mile unasked.
One deserves no thanks for having loved his friend, for that is easy, but
he who learns to love his enemies has achieved something really
worth while.
These points from the Sermon on the Mount simply state the old principle
of the beauty and value of the unnecessary. It is the second mile
traveled, the overflowing kindness offered, and the unnecessary act of
goodness that sweeten and glorify the years. These things make of life
more than a gloomy journey through a valley of trouble. They make it a
glad procession across the hills of joy.
There is a higher law than that of necessity. Necessity may supply a
skeleton for living, but we are not interested in skeletons until they
are clothed with flesh and vitalized with life. It represents a framework
for existence, but the framework of a building does not seem worth while
until it has added to it the complement of walls and the beauty of
decorations. It may represent the stage upon which the drama of life is to
be enacted, but the stage is empty and bare until the actors come upon it
and lend it the enchantment of thought and action. Beyond the line of
necessity lie the countless things which weave the web of splendor and
throw the magic of enchantment about things. Necessity supplies the
substance. The unnecessary adds the glory.
The proper question to ask about a course of conduct to be followed or a
thing to be obtained is not, then, that as to whether it is necessary. It
is that as to whether it is lovely and worth while. We need to remember
that if all the unnecessary acts were left undone and all the unnecessary
words were left unsaid, the world soon would cease to seem a fit place in
which to live. We need to remember that it is the will uncompelled that
tames the wilderness, that it is the hand unconstrained that reclaims the
desert, and that it is the kindness born of spontaneous impulse which
brings into life the uplifting and the helpful.
Of course we could get on without all these things. We do not have to have
the flowers; we could dispense with the moonbeams; our three meals a day
do not depend upon the singing of the birds; the world could no doubt
continue on its way if the wind never again whispered a lullaby among the
trees. But this is not the kind of world for which the heart longs. The
deeper hunger is satisfied only with a world made beautiful with the
things that were whispered only into the more sacred chambers of the heart
of man—the beautiful and the unnecessary things.