REST IN TRUTH
The timely dew of sleep.
MILTON.
It is not our work that wears us, but the way we take it. So long as
we think of rest as meaning only inactivity, just so long will the
activities of life exhaust us. Goethe said:
“Rest is not quitting the busy career,
Rest is fitting oneself for one’s sphere.”
When we do that, we find rest. But we may ask what is one’s sphere and
how may one fit one’s self for it? If we wish to answer that truly,
we must be willing to have some common misconceptions brushed away.
The sphere of any individual is limited only by the possibilities of
his own body, mind, and spirit. Our sphere is not a small circle of
activities whose boundaries any man may mark. It widens as our inner
nature expands, and what was the horizon line yesterday will be but
a tiny hillock near at hand to-morrow. It includes all that has been
achieved, and all that may be attained by the race.
The best standard of our life is not only what the race as a whole
has achieved in the way of development, but the highest and best that
any person has yet taught or lived; this is the true measure of man’s
sphere to-day. Ordinarily, we talk of man’s sphere and woman’s sphere
as if there were a clear line of separation between them, and each were
continued in its own little space. This could not be, for, so long as
men and women have the same three natures—bodily, mental, spiritual—so
long as we have similar needs, aims, and aspirations, the larger sphere
of man, whether male or female, is the same, and is bounded only by the
possibilities of the life of all three natures.
To fit one’s self for such a sphere should bring rest while we are
doing it, because that fitting means becoming harmonious with the
purposes of the larger life; and rest is simply harmony, at-one-ness
with the Universe.
The possibilities of the life of all three natures are inexhaustible.
We have never touched the limit of even the physical man. Man at one
time had only his hands for tools, and so was limited in his powers.
But he used his mind to increase the power of his hands, and reached
out for sticks and stones to help him. In time his thought devised
implements that increased his physical power a thousandfold, until now
he has harnessed not only steam, but the very currents of the air, and
is making himself all-powerful.
He does not wholly understand the forces he tries to control, but he
studies them, experiments upon them, and makes servants of them as far
as he has grasped their laws. Had he insisted upon considering his mind
and his physical powers as entirely separate and refused to use them
together, he might still have claws for hands, and might still be a
mere burrower in the earth. Moreover, his mind would not have developed
as it has. Steam and electricity might have aroused his curiosity, but
he would not have known how to make them to do his will.
Further, if man had been able to keep his intellect apart from his
spirit, he would not have developed the qualities that lift him above
the more intelligent animals. Sympathy and justice and love would not
have come into his relations with his fellow-men.
These moral feelings expressed in our bodies, our minds, and our hearts
are some of the possibilities of the life of all three natures, and
to endeavor to know and harmonize them, thus “fitting one’s self for
one’s sphere,” would bring us the happiness that follows action and the
rest that flows from selfless purpose or harmony.
If we consider what the true object of life is, we cannot help trying
to see the connection between the three natures of man. It does not
seem possible that the life of any thinking being was intended to be a
purposeless jarring jumble, or, as poor Stephen Blackpool said, “a’ a
muddle.” We find such harmony in the life of the material world that
we may expect to find a similar harmony in the life of man. So soon as
we discover this, we see also that there must be harmony between the
life of the material world and the life of man, and further harmony
between both the material and the human life, and the Source of all
life. Seeing this, and living it, is fitting ourselves for our sphere,
preparing ourselves to take our destined places in the Universe as Men
and Women.