RIGHT HUMAN LIFE.
What do we gather hence but firmer faith
That every gift of noble origin
Is breathed upon by Hope's perpetual breath;
That virtue and the faculties within
Are vital, and that riches are akin
To fear, to change, to cowardice, and death?
WORDSWORTH.
What is so delightful as spring weather? To it, whatever mystery life
can make plain, it reveals. There is universal utterance. Water leaps
from its winding sheet of snow; the streams spring out to wander till
they find their source; the corn sprouts to receive the sun's warm kiss;
the buds unfold, the blossoms send forth fragrance, the heavens weep for
joy; the birds sing, the children shout, and the fuller pulse of life
gives, even to the old, fresh thoughts and young desires. Now, what is
all this but a symbol of the soul, which feels the urgency of God
calling upon it to make itself alive in him and in his universe of truth
and beauty?
But the season of growth is also the time of blight. A hundred germs
perish for one that ripens into wholesome fruit; a hundred young lives
suffer physical or moral ruin for one that develops into some likeness
of true manhood. And upon what slight causes success or failure seems to
depend!
As a mere word, a glance, will bring the blood to a maiden's cheek, so
may it sow the germ of moral death in the heart of youth. How helpless
and ignorant the young are in their seeming strength and smartness: how
self-sufficient in their unwisdom, how little amenable to reason, how
slow to perceive true ideals. What patient, persevering effort is
required to form character, and what a little thing will poison life in
its source! How easy it is to see and understand what is coarse and
evil, how difficult to appreciate what is pure and excellent. How
quickly a boy learns to find pleasure in what is animal or brutal; but
what infinite pains must be taken before he is won to the love of truth
and goodness. Caricature delights him, and he has no eyes for the chaste
beauty of perfect art. The story of an outlaw fills him with enthusiasm,
and the heroic struggles of godlike souls are for him meaningless. He
gazes with envious awe upon some vulgar rich man, and finds a
philosopher, or a saint, only queer. He studies because he has been sent
to school, where ignorance will expose him to ridicule and humiliation,
and possibly too, because he is told that knowledge will help him to win
money and influence. However great his proficiency, he is in truth but a
barbarian, without wisdom, without reverence, without gentleness. He has
been brought only in a vague way into communion with the conscious life
of the race; he has no true conception of the dignity of souls, no sense
of the beauty of modest and unselfish action. He mistakes rudeness for
strength, boastfulness for ability, disrespect for independence,
profanity for manliness, brutality for courage.
And to add to his misfortune, he is blind to his own weakness and
ignorance. A sneer or a jest is his reply to the voice of wisdom, as
with a light heart he walks in the road to ruin; and thus it happens
that for one who becomes a true and noble man, a hundred go astray or
sink into an unintelligent and vulgar kind of life. This fact is
concealed from the eyes of the young, from the eyes of the multitude,
indeed. As we hide the dead in the earth that we may quickly forget our
loss, so society buries from sight and thought those who fail. Their
number is so great that the oblivion which soon overwhelms them is
needful to save even the brave from discouragement. Of a hundred college
boys the lives of twenty-five will be ruined by dissipation, by sensual
indulgence; twenty-five others will be wrecked by unhappy marriages,
foolish financial schemes, dishonesty and indolence; of the remaining
fifty, forty, let us say, will manage to get on without loss of
respectability, while the ten (who are still left) will win a sort of
notoriety by getting rich or by getting elected to office. Of the
hundred will one become a saint, a philosopher, a poet, a statesman, or
even a man of superior ability in natural knowledge or literature? And
if this estimate is rightly made they all fail; and the emergence of a
high and noble mind is so improbable that it may almost be looked upon,
like the birth of a genius, as an accident, so impossible is it, with
our limited view, to bring such cases within the domain of law. These
hundred college boys have been taken from a thousand youths. The nine
hundred have remained outside the doors which open into the halls of
culture, away from the special influences which thought and ingenuity
have created to develop and perfect man's endowments. As they are less
favored, we demand less of them, and are content to have them reinforce
the unenlightened army of laborers and money-getters. But when we come
among those to whom leisure and opportunity are given that they may
learn to think truly and to act nobly, and find that they fail in this,
as nearly all of them do fail, we are disappointed and saddened. The
thoughtless imagine that those who provide food and shelter do the most
important work; but such work is the most important only where there is
no intellectual, moral, or religious life. That is most necessary which
nourishes the highest faculty, and wherever civilization exists,
enlightened minds and great characters are indispensable. The animal and
the savage, without much difficulty, find what satisfies appetite; but
God appoints that only living souls shall provide what keeps souls
alive. Now this soul-life, which manifests itself in thought, in
conduct, in hope, faith, and love, makes us human and lifts us above
every other kind of earthly existence. It is our distinctive attribute,
the godlike side of our being, which, under penalty of sinking to lower
worlds, we must bring out and cultivate. The plant is alive. By its own
energy it springs from darkness, it grows, it waves its green leaves
beneath the blue heavens; but it is blind, deaf and dumb, senseless,
dead to the world of sight and sound, of taste and smell. The animal too
is alive, and in a higher way: for all the glories of Nature are painted
upon its eye; all sounds strike upon its ear; it moves about and has all
the sensations of physical pleasure of which man is capable; but it is
without thought, without sense of right and wrong, without imagination,
without hope and faith. It is plain then that human life, in its highest
sense, is life of the soul,--a life of thought and love, of faith and
hope, of imagination and desire; and men are high or low as they partake
more or less of this true life. By this standard, and by no other,
reason requires that we form an estimate of human worth. To be a king,
to have money, to live in splendor, to meet with approval from few or
many,--is accidental, is something which may happen to an ignorant, a
heartless, a depraved, a vulgar man. The most vicious and brutal of men
have, again and again, held the most exalted positions, and as a rule
cringing and lying, trickery and robbery, or speculation and gambling,
have been and are the means by which great fortunes are acquired.
Position, then, and money are distinguishable from worth; and they may
be and often are found where the life of thought and love, of faith and
hope, of imagination and desire, is almost wholly wanting. Now, it is
this life--the only true human life--which education should bring forth
and strengthen; and the failure to lead this life, of those who pass
through our institutions of learning, is a subject of deep concern for
all who observe and reflect; for among them we look for the leaders who
shall cause wisdom and goodness to prevail over ignorance and appetite.
If those who receive the best nurture and care remain on the low plains
of a hardly more than animal existence, what hope is there that the
multitude shall rise to nobler ways of living?
There is question here of the most vital interests; and if we discover
the causes of the evil, a remedy may be found. These causes of failure
lie partly in our environment and partly within ourselves. In the home,
in which we receive the first and the most enduring impressions, true
views and noble aims are frequently wanting; and thus false and low
estimates of life are formed at a time when what we learn sinks into the
very substance of the mind, and colors and shapes all our future seeing
and loving. This primal experience accompanies us, and hangs about us
like a mist to shut out the view of fairer worlds. Enthusiasm for
intellectual and moral excellence is never roused, because our young
souls were not made magnetic by the words and deeds of those whom we
looked up to as gods. Fortunate is he who bears with him into the
life-struggle pure memories of a happy home. When I think of the bees I
have seen coming back to the hive, honey-laden, in the golden light of
setting suns, when I was a boy at home, a feeling comes over me as
though I had lived in paradise and been driven forth into a bleak
world. When one is young, and one's father and mother are full of health
and joy; when the roses are blooming and the brooks are laughing to
themselves from simple gladness, and the floating clouds and the silent
stars seem to have human thoughts,--what more could we ask of God but to
know that all this is eternal, and is from him?
In such a mood, how easy it is to turn the childlike soul to the world
of spiritual and immortal things. With what efficacy then a mother's
soft voice teaches us that we were born upon this earth for no other
purpose than to know truth, to love goodness, to do right, that so,
having made ourselves godlike, we may forever be with God. And if these
high lessons blend in our thought with memories which make home a type
of heaven, how shall they not through life be a spur to noble endeavor
to accomplish the task thus set us? When great-hearted, high-souled boys
go forth to college from homes of intelligence and love, then is there
well-founded hope that they shall grow to be wise and helpful men, who
know and teach truth, who see and create beauty, who do and make others
do what becomes a man. Of hardly less importance is the neighborhood in
which our early years are passed, and next to the companionship of the
home fireside, a boy's best neighbor is Nature. Well for him shall it
be, if, like colts and calves, and all happy young things, he is
permitted to breath the wholesome air of woods and fields, to drink from
flowing streams, to lie in the shade of trees on the green sward, or to
stand alone beneath the silent starlit heavens until the thought and
feeling of the infinite and eternal sink deep into his soul, and make it
impossible that he should ever look upon the universe of time and space,
or the universe of duty's law within his breast, in a shallow or
irreverent spirit. Little shall be said to him, and little shall he
speak, and to the unobservant he shall seem dull; but he is Nature's
nursling, and she paints her colors on his brain and infuses her
strength into his heart. She hardens him and teaches him patience; she
shows him real things, fills him with the love of truth, and makes him
understand that sham is shame.
His progress may be slow; but he will persevere, he will have faith in
the power of labor and of time, and when in after years we shall look
about for a man with some Diogenes' lantern, there are a thousand
chances to one that when we find him we shall find him country-born, not
city-bred. Too soon is the town-boy made self-conscious; he is
precocious; all the tricks and devices of civilization are known to
him; all artifices and contrivances he sees in shop-windows; the street,
the theatre, the newspaper are the rivals of the home, and they quickly
teach him irreverence and disobedience. He loses innocence, experience
of evil gives him flippant views. He becomes wise in his own conceit;
having eyes only for the surfaces of things, he easily persuades himself
that he knows all. Of such a youth how shall any college make an
enlightened, a noble, and a reverent man? But the home and the
neighborhood are not our whole environment. As we are immersed in an
atmospheric ocean, so do we swim in the current of our national life. To
praise this life is easy. We all see and feel how vigorous it is, how
confident, how eager. Here is a world of busy men and women, active in
many directions. They found States, they build cities, they create
wealth, they discuss all problems, they try all experiments, they hurry
on to new tasks, and think they have done nothing while aught remains to
do.
They live in the midst of the excitement of ever-recurring elections, of
speculation, of financial schemes and commercial enterprises. It is an
unrestful, feverish, practical life, in which all the strong natures are
thinking of doing something, of gaining something,--a life in the
market-place, where high thought and noble conduct are all but
impossible, where the effort to make one's self a man, instead of
striving to get so many thousands of money, would seem ridiculous. It is
a life of inventions and manufactures, of getting and spending, in which
we bring forth and consume in a single century what it has taken Nature
many thousand years to hoard. Our aim is to have more rather than to be
more; our ideal is that of material progress; our praise is given to
those who invent and discover the means of augmenting wealth. Liberty is
opportunity to get rich; education is the development of the
money-getting faculty. Our national life may, of course, be looked at
from many sides, but the general drift of opinion and effort is in the
direction here pointed out. Nine tenths of our thought and energy are
given to material interests, and these interests represent nine tenths
of our achievements. This may be true of men in general, it may be true
also that material progress is a condition of moral and intellectual
growth; but none the less is it true that right human life is a life of
thought and love, of hope and faith, of imagination and desire.
Consequently in a well-ordered society, the chief aim--nine tenths of
all effort, let us say--will have for its object the creation of
enlightened and loving men and women, whom faith and hope shall make
strong, whom imagination shall refresh, and the desire of perfection
shall keep active. The aims which the ideals of democracy suggest are
not wholly or chiefly material. We strive, indeed, to create a social
condition in which comfort and plenty shall be within the reach of all;
but the better among us understand that this is but an inferior part of
our work, and they take no delight whatever in our great fortunes and
great cities. If democracy is the best government, it follows that it is
the kind of government which is most favorable to virtue, intelligence,
and religion. It is faint praise to say that in America there is more
enterprise, more wealth, than elsewhere. What we should strive to make
ourselves able to say, is, that there is here a more truly human life,
more public and private honesty, purity, sympathy, and helpfulness; more
love of knowledge, more perfect openness to light, greater desire to
learn, and greater willingness to accept truth than is to be found
elsewhere. It should be our endeavor to create a world of which it may
be said, there life is more pleasant, beauty more highly prized,
goodness held in greater reverence, the sense of honor finer, the
recognition of talent and worth completer than elsewhere.
Wealth and population should be considered merely as means, which, if we
ourselves do not sink beneath our fortune, we shall use to help us to
develop on a vast scale, a nobler, freer, and fairer life than hitherto
has ever existed. We Americans have a great capacity for seeing things
as they are. A thousand shams and glittering vanities have gone down
before our straight-looking eyes; and because such things fail to
impress us, we seem to be irreverent. We must look more steadfastly,
deeper still, until we clearly perceive and understand that to live for
money is to lead a false and vulgar life, to rest with complacency in
mere numbers is to have a superficial and unreal mind. To form a right
judgment of a people, as of individuals, we must consider what they are;
not what they have, except in so far as their possessions are the result
of work which at once forms and reveals character. And we must know that
work is good only in as much as it helps to make life human,--that is,
intelligent, moral and religious. And what we have the right to demand
of those to whom we give a higher education is, that they shall body
forth these principles in their lives and become leaders in the task of
spreading them among the multitude. We demand, first of all, that they
become men whose hearts are pure and loving, whose minds are open and
enlightened, whose motives are benevolent and generous, whose purposes
are high and religious; and if they are such men, it shall matter
little to what special pursuits they turn, for whatever their
occupation, honor, truth, and intelligence shall go with them, bearing,
like mercy, a blessing for those who give and a blessing for those who
receive. The spirit in which they work shall be more than what they do,
as they themselves shall be more than what they accomplish.
A right spirit transforms the whole man, and the first and highest aim
of the educator should be to impart a new heart, a new purpose, which
shall bring into play forces that may oppose and overcome those faults
of the young of which I have spoken, and which, if not corrected, lead
to failure.
And here we come to the causes of ill success which lie within
ourselves. We have our individual qualities and defects, and we have
also the qualities and defects of the people whence we are sprung, and
of the time-spirit into which we are born. It is the aim of education,
as it is the aim of religion, to lift us above the spirit of the age;
but in attempting to do this, they who lose sight of what is true and
beneficent in that spirit, commit a serious blunder. A national spirit,
too, is a narrow, and often a harsh and selfish spirit; but when culture
and religion strive to make us citizens of the world and universally
benevolent, a care must be had that we retain what is strong and noble
in the character we inherit from our ancestors.
The lover of intellectual excellence, however, is little inclined to
dwell with complacency either upon his own qualities, or upon the
greatness of his country or his age. The untaught optimism which leads
the crowd to exaggerate the worth of whatever they in any way identify
with themselves, he looks upon with suspicion, if not with aversion.
Self-complacency is pleasant; but truth alone is good, and they who
think least are best content with themselves and with their world. He
who seeks to improve his mind, neither boasts of his age and country,
nor rails at them; but tries to understand them as he tries to know
himself. The important knowledge here is of obstacles and defects; for
when these are removed, to advance is easy. The first lesson which we
must learn is that in the work of mental culture, time and patience are
necessary elements. The young, who are eager and restless, find it
difficult to work with patience and perseverance, especially when the
reward of labor is remote, and in the excitement and hurry of American
life, such work often seems to be impossible. But by this kind of work
alone can true culture be acquired. It is this Buffoon means when he
calls genius a great capacity for taking pains. When Albert Dürer said,
"Sir, it cannot be better done;" he simply meant that he had bestowed
infinite pains upon his work. Now, they who are in a hurry cannot take
pains; and they who work for money will take pains only in so far as it
is profitable to do so. We must live in our work and love it for its own
sake. To do work we love makes us happy, makes us free, and according to
its kind educates us; and whatever its kind, it will at least teach us
the sovereign virtue of patience, and give us something of the spirit of
the old masters who in dingy shops ceased not from labor, and kept their
cheerful serenity to the end, though the outcome was only the most
perfect fiddle, or a deathless head. But they themselves had the souls
of artists, and were honest men, who in their work found joy and
freedom, and therefore what they did remains as a source of delight and
inspiration. If we find it impossible to put our hearts into our work
and consequently impossible to take infinite pains with it, then this is
work for which we were not born. The impatient cannot love the labor by
which the mind is cultivated, because impatience implies a sense of
restraint, a lack of freedom. They are restless, easily grow weary or
despondent, find fault with themselves and their task, and either throw
off the yoke or bear it in a spirit of disappointment and bitterness.
As they fail to make themselves strong and serene, their work bears the
marks of haste and feebleness, for work reveals character; it is the
likeness of the doer, as style shows the man. Then the young are blinded
by the glitter and glare of life, by the splendors of position and
wealth; they are drawn to what is external; they would be here and
there; they love the unchartered liberty of chance desires, and are
easily brought to look upon the task of self-improvement as a slavish
work. They would have done with study that they may be free, may enter
into what they suppose to be a fair and rich heritage. They cannot
understand that so long as they are narrow, sensual, and unenlightened,
the possession of a world could not make them high or happy. They do not
know that to have liberty, without the power of using it for worthy
ends, is a curse not a blessing. They imagine that experience of the
world's ways and wickedness will make them wise, whereas it will make
them depraved.
How can they realize that the good of life consists in being, and not in
having? that we are worth what our knowledge, love, admiration, hope,
faith, and desire make us worth? They will not perceive that happiness
and unhappiness are conditions of soul, and consequently that the wise,
the loving, and the strong, whatever their outward fortune, are happy,
while the ignorant, the heartless, and the weak are miserable. To know
ourselves, we should seek to discover the kind of life our influence
tends to create. Consider the kind of world college boys make for
themselves, the things they admire, the companions they find pleasant,
the subjects in which they take interest, the books that delight
them,--and one great cause of the failure of education will be made
plain; for though they are sent to school to be taught by professors,
their influence upon one another is paramount. Instead of helping one
another to see that their real business is to educate themselves, they
persuade one another that life is given for common ends and vulgar
pleasures. Hence they look with envy upon their companions who are the
sons of rich men, as they have not lived long enough to learn that the
fate of four fifths of the sons of rich men in this country, is moral
and physical ruin. If such is the public opinion of the world in which
they live; and if even strong men are feeble in the presence of public
opinion,--how shall we find fault with them for not being attracted by
the ideals of intellectual and moral excellence. For the trained mind
even to think is difficult, and for them independent thought is almost
impossible. They do not know the little less than creative power of
right education, or that as we are changed by action, we are
transformed by thought. What patient labor may do to exalt and refine
the mental faculties, until we become capable of entering into the life
of every age and every people, has not been shown to them; and hence
they are not inspired by the high hope of dwelling, in very truth, with
all the noble and heroic souls who have passed through this world and
left record of themselves. We bid the youth learn many things which he
cannot but find both useless and uninteresting. And yet unless we
discover the secret of winning him to the love of study, the educational
value of what he learns is lost; for what leaves him unmoved, leaves him
unimproved. His information and accomplishments are comparatively
unimportant. What he himself is, and what his real self gives us grounds
for hoping he shall become, is the true concern. To be able to translate
Æschylus or Plato is not a great thing; but it is a great thing to have
the Greek's sense of what is fair, noble and intellectual. To be able to
solve a complex mathematical problem may be unimportant; but to have the
mental habit of accurate, close, patient thinking is important. It is
easy to forget one's Greek or the higher mathematics; but an
intellectual or a moral habit is not easily lost.
He who has right habits will go farther and rise higher than he who has
only brilliant attainments. It is an error, and a very common one, to
suppose that education is merely, or chiefly, a mental process, and
consequently that the best school is that in which the various kinds of
knowledge are best taught. Our whole being, physical, intellectual, and
moral, is subject to the law of education. We may educate the eye, the
ear, the hand, the foot; and each member of the body may be trained in
many ways. The eye of the microscopist has received a training different
from that of the painter; the sculptor's hand has been taught a cunning
unlike that of the surgeon; the voice of the orator is developed in one
way, that of the singer in another. And so the faculties of the mind may
be drawn forth, and each one in various ways. The powers of observation,
of reflection, of intuition, of imagination, are all educable. One of
the most important and most difficult lessons to learn is that of
attention. We know only what we are conscious of, and we are conscious
only of that to which we give heed. If we but hold the mind to any
subject with perseverance, it will deliver its secret. The little
knowledge we have is often vague and unreal, because we are heedless,
because we have never taught ourselves to dwell in conscious communion
with the objects of thought. The trained eye sees innumerable beauties
which are hidden from others, and so the mind which is taught to look
right sees truths the uneducated can never know. We may be taught to
judge as well as to look. Indeed, once we have learned to see things as
they are, correct opinions and judgments naturally follow. All faculty
is the result of education. Poets, orators, philosophers, and saints
bring not their gifts into the world with them; but by looking and
thinking, doing and striving, they rise from the poor elements of
half-conscious life to the clear vision of truth and beauty. Natural
endowments are not equal; but the chief cause of inequality lies in the
unequal efforts which men make to develop their endowments. The lack of
imagination in the multitude makes their life dull, uninteresting, and
material, and it is assumed that we are born with, or without,
imagination, and that there is no remedy for this misery. And those who
admit that imagination is subject to the law of development, frequently
hold that it should be repressed rather than strengthened. Doubtless the
imagination can be cultivated, just as the eye or the ear, the judgment
or the reason, can be cultivated; and since imagination, like faith,
hope, and love, helps us to live in higher and fairer worlds, an
educator is false to his calling when he leaves it unimproved. The
classics, and especially poetry, are the great means of intellectual
culture, because more than anything else they have power to exalt and
ennoble the imagination. To suppose that this faculty is one which only
poets and artists need, is to take a shallow and partial view. The
historian, the student of Nature, the statesman, the minister of
religion, the teacher, the mechanic even, if they are to do good work,
must possess imagination, which is at once an intellectual, a moral, and
a religious faculty. It is the mother and mistress of faith, hope, and
love. It is the source of great thoughts, of high aspirations, and of
heavenly dreams. Without it the illimitable starlit expanse loses its
sublimity, oceans and mountains their awfulness and majesty, flowers
their beauty, home its sacred charm, youth its halo, and the grave its
solemn mystery.
Those powers within us which are directly related to conduct, the
impulses to self-preservation, and to the propagation of the race, are
subject to the law of education, not less than our physical and
intellectual endowments. And the importance of dealing rightly with
these powers is readily perceived if we reflect that conduct is the
greater part of human life, which is a life of thought and love, of hope
and faith, of imagination and desire.
As we can educate the faculties of thought and imagination, so can we
develop the power to love, to hope, to believe, and to desire. When
there is question of the intellect, teachers seek to impart information
rather than to strengthen the mind, and when there is question of the
moral nature, they have recourse to precepts and maxims instead of
striving to confirm the will and to direct impulse. It is generally
held, in fact, that will is a gift, not a growth, and the same view is
taken of all our moral dispositions. We are supposed to receive from
Nature a warm or a cold heart, a hopeful or a despondent temper, a
believing or a skeptical turn of mind, a spiritual or a sensual bent.
Now as I have already admitted, endowments are unlike; but what has this
to do with the drift of the argument? Minds, though by nature unequal,
may all be educated; and so wills may be educated, and so that which
makes us capable of faith, hope, and desire, may be drawn forth,
strengthened, and refined. Emerson, whose thought is predominantly
spiritual, takes a low and material view of the moral faculties,
confusing strength of will with health. "Courage," he says, "is the
degree of circulation of the blood in the arteries.... When one has a
plus of health, all difficulties vanish before it." But will is a moral
rather than a constitutional power; and in so far as it is moral, it
may be cultivated and directed to noble aims and ends. And if the
teacher perform this work with fine knowledge and tact, he becomes an
educator; for upon the will, more than upon the intellectual faculties,
success or failure depends. Whatever we are able to will, we are able to
learn to do; and the best service we can render another is to rouse and
confirm within him the will to live and to work, that he may make
himself a complete man, that thus he may become a benefactor of men and
a co-worker with God. The rational will, which is the educated will,
should give impulse and guidance to all our thinking, loving, and doing.
It should control appetite; it should nourish faith and hope; it should
lead us on through the illusory world of sensual delights, through the
hardly less illusory world of wealth and power, still bidding us look
and see that the world to which the conscious self really belongs, is
infinite and eternal, and that to seek to rest in aught else is to
apostatize from reason and conscience. Thus it would awaken in us a
divine discontent, a sacred unrest, which might urge us on through the
darkness of appetite and the unwholesome air of avarice and ambition,
whispering to us that our life-work is to know truth, to love beauty, to
do righteousness. To none is the education of the will so necessary as
to the lovers of intellectual excellence, for they who live in the world
of ideas are easily content to let the world of deeds take care of
itself. As the astronomer sees the earth lost like a grain of sand in
infinite space, so to the wide and deep view of one who is familiar with
the course of human thought and action, what any man, what the whole
race of man, may do, can seem but insignificant. From the vanity and
noise of actors who fret and storm for their brief hour, and then pass
forever from life's stage, he flies to ideal worlds where truth never
changes, where beauty never grows old, and lives more richly blest than
lovers in Tempe or the dales of Arcady. And then the habit of looking at
things from many sides leads to doubt, hesitation, and inaction. While
the wise deliberate, the young and inexperienced have won or lost the
battle. Thus the purely intellectual life tends to weaken faith, hope,
and desire, which are the sources whence conduct springs, the drying up
of which leaves us amid barren wastes, where high thinking, if it be not
impossible, brings neither strength nor joy; for the secret of strength
and joy lies in doing and not in thinking. It is a law of our nature
that conduct brings the most certain and the most permanent
satisfaction, and hence whatever our ideals, the pursuit should be
inspired by the sense of duty.
"Stern law-giver! yet thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face.
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds
And fragrance in thy footing treads."
Then only do we move with certain step when we hear God's voice bidding
us go forward, as he commands the starry host to fly onward, and all
living things to spring upward to light and warmth. When we understand
that he has made progress the law of life, we learn to feel that not to
grow is not to live. Then our view is enlarged; we become lovers of
perfection; we cherish every gift, and in many ways we strive to
cultivate the many powers which go to the making of a man. They all are
from him, and from him is the effort by which they are improved. We were
born to make ourselves alive in him and in his universe, and like the
setter in the field, we stretch eye and ear and nose to catch whatever
message may be borne to us from his boundless game park. We observe,
reflect, compare; we read best books; we listen to whoever speaks what
he knows and feels to be truth. We take delight in whatever in Nature is
sublime or beautiful, and fresh thoughts and innocent hearts make us
glad. Wherever an atom thrills, there too is God, and in him we feel the
thrill and are at home. Our faith grows pure; our hope is confirmed; and
our love and sympathy identify us with an ever-widening sphere of life
beyond us. The exclusive self passes into the larger movement of the
social and religious world around us, which, as we now realize, is also
within us, giving aims and motives to our love and self-devotion. We
understand that what hurts another can never help us, and that our
private good must tend to become a general blessing. Thus we find and
love ourselves in the intellectual, moral, and religious life of the
race, which is a type and symbol of the infinite life of God, the omen
and promise of the soul's survival. As we become conscious of ourselves
only through communion with what is not ourselves, so we truly live only
when we live for God and the world he creates,--losing life that we may
find it; dying, like seed-corn, that we may rise to a new and richer
life. Not what gratifies our selfish or sensual nature will help us to
lead this right human life; but that which illumines and deepens thought
and love, which gives to faith a boundless scope, to hope an everlasting
foundation, to desire the infinite beauty which, though unseen, is felt,
like memory of music fled. The unseen world ceases to be a future
world; and is recognized as the very world in which we now think and
love, and so intellectual and moral life passes into the sphere of
religion. We no longer pursue ideals which forever elude us, but we
become partakers of the divine life; for in giving ourselves to the
Eternal and Infinite we find God in our souls. The ideal is made real;
God is with us, and through faith, hope, and love we are one with him,
and all is well. Henceforth in seeking to know more, to become more, we
are animated by a divine spirit. Now we may grow old, still learning
many things, still smitten with the love of beauty, still finding
delight in fresh thoughts and innocent pleasures, and it may be that we
shall be found to be teachers of wisdom and of holiness. Then, indeed,
shall we be happy, for it is better to teach truth than to win battles.
A war-hero supposes a barbarous condition of the race, and when all
shall be civilized, they who know and love the most shall be held to be
the greatest and the best.