THE BLESSING OF A BURDEN.
"Then welcome each rebuff,
That turns earth's smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand nor go.
Be our joys three parts pain!
Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!"
--ROBERT BROWNING.
It is not always the easiest things that are the best things. Usually
we have to pay for any good thing about its full value. In all markets
commodities that cost little may be set down as worth but little. All
our blessings may be rated in the same way. If they come easily,
without great cost of effort or sacrifice, their value to us is not
great. But if we can get them only through self-denial, tears,
anguish, and pain, we may be sure that they hide in them the very gold
of God. So it is that many of our best and richest blessings come to
us in some form of rugged hardness.
Take what we call drudgery. Life is full of it. It begins in
childhood. There is school, with its set hours, its lessons, rules,
tables, tasks, recitations. Then, when we grow up, instead of getting
away from this bondage of routine, this interminable drudgery, it goes
on just as in childhood. It is rising at the same hour every morning,
and hurrying away to the day's tasks, and doing the same things over
and over, six days in the week, fifty-two weeks in the year, and on and
on unto life's end. For the great majority of us, there is almost no
break in the monotonous rounds of our days through the long years.
Many of us sigh and wish we might in some way free ourselves from this
endless routine. We think of it as a sore bondage and by no means the
ideal of a noble and beautiful life.
But really, much that is best in life comes out of this very bondage.
A recent writer suggests a new beatitude: "Blessed be drudgery." He
reminds us that no Bible beatitude comes easily, but that every one of
them is the fruit of some experience of hardness or pain. He shows us
that life's drudgery, wearisome and disagreeable as it is, yields rich
treasures of good and blessing. Drudgery, he tells us, is the secret
of all culture. He names as fundamentals in a strong, fine character,
"power of attention; power of industry; promptitude in beginning work;
method, accuracy, and despatch in doing work; perseverance; courage
before difficulties; cheer under straining burdens; self-control;
self-denial; temperance"; and claims that nowhere else can these
qualities be gotten save in the unending grind and pressure of those
routine duties which we call drudgery. "It is because we have to go,
morning after morning, through rain, through shine, through headache,
heartache, to the appointed spot and do the appointed work; because,
and only because, we have to stick to that work through the eight or
ten hours, long after rest would be so sweet; because the school-boy's
lessons must be learned at nine o'clock, and learned without a slip;
because the accounts on the ledger must square to a cent; because the
goods must tally exactly with the invoice; because good temper must be
kept with children, customers, neighbors, not seven times, but seventy
times seven; because the besetting sin must be watched to-day,
to-morrow, next day; in short, . . . it is because, and only because,
of the rut, plod, grind, hum-drum in the work, that we get at last
those self-foundations laid," which are essential to all noble
character.
So there is a blessing for us in the commonest, wearisomest task-work
of our lives. "Blessed be drudgery" is truly a beatitude. We all need
the discipline of this tireless plodding to build us up into beautiful
character. Even the loveliest flowers must have their roots in common
earth; so, many of the sweetest things in human lives grow out of the
soil of drudgery. "Be thou, O man, like unto the rose. Its root is
indeed in dirt and mud, but its flowers still send forth grace and
perfume."
Take again life's struggles and conflicts. There are, in the
experience of each one, obstacles, hindrances, and difficulties, which
make it hard to live successfully. Every one has to move onward and
upward through ranks of resistances. This is true of physical life.
Every baby that is born begins at once a struggle for existence. To be
victorious and live, or to succumb and die? is the question of every
cradle, and only half the babies born reach their teens. After that,
until its close, life is a continuous struggle with the manifold forms
of physical infirmity. If we live to be old it must be through our
victoriousness over the unceasing antagonism of accident and disease.
The same is true in mental progress. It must be made against
resistance. It is never easy to become a scholar or to attain
intellectual culture. It takes years and years of study and discipline
to draw out and train the faculties of the mind. An indolent,
self-indulgent student may have an easy time; he never troubles himself
with difficult problems; he lets the hard things pass, not vexing his
brain with them. But in evading the burden he misses the blessing that
was in it for him. The only path to the joys and rewards of
scholarship is that of patient, persistent toil.
It is true also in spiritual life. We enter a world of antagonism and
opposition the moment we resolve at Christ's feet to be Christians, to
be true men or women, to forsake sin, to obey God, to do our duty.
There never comes a day when we can live nobly and worthily without
effort, without resistance to wrong influences, without struggle
against the power of temptation. It never gets easy to be good.
Evermore the cross lies at our feet, and daily it must be taken up and
carried, if we would follow Christ. We are apt to grow weary of this
unending struggle, and to become discouraged, because there is neither
rest nor abatement in it.
But here again we learn that it is out of just such struggles that we
must get the nobleness and beauty of character after which we are
striving. One of the old Scotch martyrs had on his crest the motto,
_Sub pondere cresco_ ("I grow under a weight"). On the crest was a
palm-tree, with weights depending from its fronds. In spite of the
weights the tree was straight as an arrow, lifting its crown of
graceful foliage high up in the serene air. It is well known that the
palm grows best loaded down with weights. Thus this martyr testified
that he, like the beautiful tree of the Orient, grew best in his
spiritual life under weights.
This is the universal law of spiritual growth. There must be
resistance, struggle, conflict, or there can be no development of
strength. We are inclined to pity those whose lives are scenes of toil
and hardship, but God's angels do not pity them, if only they are
victorious; for in their overcoming they are climbing daily upward
toward the holy heights of sainthood. The beatitudes in the Apocalypse
are all for over-comers. Heaven's rewards and crowns lie beyond
battle-plains. Spiritual life always needs opposition. It flourishes
most luxuriantly in adverse circumstances. We grow best under weights.
We find our richest blessings in the burdens we dread to take up.
The word "character" in its origin is suggestive. It is from a root
which signifies to scratch, to engrave, to cut into furrows. Then it
comes to mean that which is engraved or cut on anything. In life,
therefore, it is that which experiences cut or furrow in the soul. A
baby has no character. Its life is like a piece of white paper, with
nothing yet written upon it; or it is like a smooth marble tablet, on
which, as yet, the sculptor has cut nothing; or the canvas, waiting for
the painter's colors. Character is formed as the years go on. It is
the writing,--the song, the story, put upon the paper. It is the
engraving, the sculpturing, which the marble receives under the chisel.
It is the picture which the artist paints on the canvas. Final
character is what a man is when he has lived through all his earthly
years. In the Christian it is the lines of the likeness of Christ
limned, sometimes furrowed and scarred, upon his soul by the divine
Spirit through the means of grace and the experiences of his own life.
I saw a beautiful vase, and asked its story. Once it was a lump of
common clay lying in the darkness. Then it was rudely dug out and
crushed and ground in the mill, and then put upon the wheel and shaped,
then polished and tinted and put into the furnace and burned. At last,
after many processes, it stood upon the table, a gem of graceful
beauty. In some way analogous to this every noble character is formed.
Common clay at first, it passes through a thousand processes and
experiences, many of them hard and painful, until at length it is
presented before God, faultless in its beauty, bearing the features of
Christ himself.
Spiritual beauty never can be reached without cost. The blessing is
always hidden away in the burden, and can be gotten only by lifting the
burden. Self must die if the good in us is to live and shine out in
radiance. Michael Angelo used to say, as the chippings flew thick from
the marble on the floor of his studio, "While the marble wastes, the
image grows." There must be a wasting of self, a chipping away
continually of things that are dear to nature, if the things that are
true, and just, and honorable, and pure, and lovely, are to come out in
the life. The marble must waste while the image grows.
Then take suffering. Here, too, the same law prevails. Every one
suffers. Said Augustine, "God had one Son without sin; he has none
without sorrow." From infancy's first cry until the old man's life
goes out in a gasp of pain, suffering is a condition of existence. It
comes in manifold forms. Now it is in sickness; the body is racked
with pain or burns in fever. Ofttimes sickness is a heavy burden. Yet
even this burden has a blessing in it for the Christian. Sickness
rightly borne makes us better. It unbinds the world's fetters. It
purifies the heart. It sobers the spirit. It turns the eyes
heavenward. It strips off much of the illusion of life and uncovers
its better realities. Sickness in a home of faith, prayer, and love,
softens all the household hearts, makes sympathy deeper, draws all the
family closer together.
Trouble comes in many other forms. It may be a bitter disappointment
which falls upon a young life when love has not been true, or when
character has proved unworthy, turning the fair blossoms of hope to
dead leaves under the feet. There are lives that bear the pain and
carry the hidden memorials of such a grief through long years, making
them sad at heart even when walking in sweetest sunshine.
Or it may be the failure of some other hope, as when one has followed a
bright dream of ambition for days and years, finding it only a dream.
Or it may be the keener, more bitter grief which comes to one when a
friend--a child, a brother or sister, a husband or wife--does badly.
In such a case even the divine comfort cannot heal the heart's hurt;
love cannot but suffer, and there is no hand that can lessen the pang.
The anguish which love endures for others' sins is among the saddest of
earth's sorrows.
There are griefs that hang no crape on the door-bell, that wear no
black garments, that close no shutters, that drop no tears which men
can see, that can get no sympathy save that of the blessed Christ and
perhaps of a closest human brother, and must wear smiles before men and
go on with life's work as if all were gladness within the heart. If we
knew the inner life of many of the people we meet, we would be very
gentle with them and would excuse the things in them that seem strange
or eccentric to us. They are carrying burdens of secret grief. We do
not begin to know the sorrows of our brothers.
There is no need to try to solve that old, yet always new, question of
human hearts, "Why does God permit so much suffering in his children?"
It is idle to ask this question, and all efforts at answering it are
not only vain, but they are even irreverent. We may be sure, however,
of one thing, that in every pain and trial there is a blessing folded.
We may miss it, but it is there, and the loss is ours if we do not get
it. Every night of sorrow carries in its dark bosom its own lamps of
comfort. The darkness of grief and trial is full of benedictions.
"The dark hath many dear avails;
The dark distils divinest dews;
The dark is rich with nightingales,
With dreams, and with the heavenly muse.
"Of fret, of dark, of thorn, of chill,
Complain thou not, my heart, for these
Bank in the current of the will."
The most blessed lives in the world are those that have borne the
burden of suffering. "Where, think you," asks James Martineau, "does
the Heavenly Father hear the tones of deepest love, and see on the
uplifted face the light of most heartfelt gratitude? Not where his
gifts are most profuse, but where they are most meagre; not within the
halls of successful ambition, or even in the dwellings of unbroken
domestic peace; but where the outcast, flying from persecution, kneels
in the evening on the rocks whereon he sleeps; at the fresh grave,
where, as the earth is opened, heaven in answer opens too; by the
pillow of the wasted sufferer, where the sunken eye, denied sleep,
converses with the silent stars, and the hollow voice enumerates in low
prayer the scanty list of comforts, the easily remembered blessings,
and the shortened tale of hopes. Genial, almost to a miracle, is the
soil of sorrow, wherein the smallest seed of love, timely falling,
becometh a tree, in whose foliage the birds of blessed song lodge and
sing unceasingly."
The truly happiest, sweetest, tenderest homes are not those where there
has been no sorrow, but those which have been overshadowed with grief,
and where Christ's comfort was accepted. The very memory of the sorrow
is a gentle benediction that broods ever over the household, like the
afterglow of sunset, like the silence that comes after prayer.
In every burden of sorrow there is a blessing sent from God, which we
ought not to thrust away. In one of the battles of the Crimea, a
cannon-ball struck inside a fort, gashing the earth and sadly marring
the garden beauty of the place. But from the ugly chasm there burst
forth a spring of water, which flowed on thereafter, a living fountain.
So the strokes of sorrow gash our hearts, leaving ofttimes wounds and
scars, but they open for us fountains of rich blessing and of new life.
"Then Sorrow whispered gently: 'Take
This burden up. Be not afraid.
An hour is short. Thou scarce wilt wake
To consciousness that I have laid
My hand upon thee, when the hour
Shall all have passed; and gladder then
For the brief pain's uplifting power,
Thou shall but pity griefless men.'"
These are hints of the blessings of burdens. Our dull task-work,
accepted, will train us into strong and noble character. Our
temptations and hardships, met victoriously, knit thews and sinews of
strength in our souls. Our pain and sorrow, endured with sweet trust
and submission, leave us with life purified and enriched, with more of
Christ in us. In every burden that God lays upon us, there is a
blessing for us, if only we will take it.