There are lives that have bread in abundance and yet are starved; with
barns and warehouses filled, with shelves and larders laden they are
empty and hungry. No man need envy them; their feverish, restless
whirl in the dust of publicity is but the search for a satisfaction
never to be found in things. They are called rich in a world where no
others are more truly, pitiably poor; having all, they are yet lacking
in all because they have neglected the things within.
The abundance of bread is the cause of many a man's deeper hunger.
Having known nothing of the discipline that develops life's hidden
sources of satisfaction, nothing of the struggle in which deep calls
unto deep and the true life finds itself, he spends his days seeking to
satisfy his soul with furniture, with houses and lands, with yachts and
merchandise, seeking to feed his heart on things, a process of less
promise and reason than feeding a snapping turtle on thoughts.
It takes many of us altogether too long to learn that you cannot find
satisfaction so long as you leave the soul out of your reckoning. If
the heart be empty the life cannot be filled. The flow must cease at
the faucet if the fountains go dry. The prime, the elemental
necessities of our being are for the life rather than the body, its
house. But, alas, how often out of the marble edifice issues the poor
emaciated inmate, how out of the life having many things comes that
which amounts to nothing.
The essential things are not often those which most readily strike our
blunt senses. We see the shell first. To the undeveloped mind the
material is all there is. But looking deeper into life there comes an
awakening to the fact and the significance of the spiritual, the
feeling that the reason, the emotions, the joys and pains that have
nothing to do with things, the ties that knit one to the infinite, all
constitute the permanent elements of life.
Because man is a spirit his life never can consist wholly in things; he
must come into his heritage of the soul wealth of all the ages; he must
reach out, though often as in the dark, until across the void there
come voices, the sages and the seers, the prophets, and the poets
speaking the language of the soul. In these he finds his food nor can
his deeper hunger be assuaged until it thus is fed.
Because man is a spirit and gradually is coming into the dominant
spirit life in which things shall count for less and thought and
character for more, he seeks after his own kind. The deeps of life
have their relationships. The spirit of man cries out after the father
of spirits. By whatever name men have called the most high they ever
have sought after Him, the eternal, who would be one with them in soul,
in all that is essential and abiding in being.
Every religion, every philosophy, every endeavour after character and
truth is but the cry of humanity for word with God. Hearing His word
on any lip the heart of man answers with joy. The words of eternal
truth have been the food of the great in all ages. Fainting in the
fight the message from the unseen, the echo of everlasting verities,
has revived their spirits; they have fought the fight that despises
things and seeks truth.
Who would not exchange a mess of pottage for the benediction from a
father's lips? Who is so dead he no longer finds more satisfaction in
truth and love and beauty than in food or furniture? And why are we so
foolish as to seek to satisfy ourselves with things that perish, while
down to the least blade of creation earth is laden with unfading riches
and God is everywhere?
If we might but learn this lesson, we people of the laden hand and the
empty heart, that since life is more than digestion and man more than
beast or machine, since determining all is the spiritual world, they
only are wise who set first things first, who use the garnered
experience of the past and the opportunities of the present to the
enriching of the soul, who listen among all the voices of time for the
words that proceed from the lips of Him who inhabiteth eternity.