We honor the drudge, but deplore his fate. And yet there are many who
believe that there is in fact no other fate for any man; that every
business is in the long run a belittling business; that whether you are a
hodcarrier or a poet, as you go on in your calling, "shades of the
prison-house" will close upon you and custom lie upon you "heavy as frost
and deep almost as life."
Let us look at this deep pessimism at its darkest. The imperfect, that is
everywhere. That is all that you can see or work at. That is the warp and
woof of all your occupations and institutions, your politics, your science,
your religion. They are all nearly as bad as they are good. Your science
has forever to disown its past. Your politics demands that you shall be
_particeps criminis_ in its evil as the price of a position in which you
can exert any influence. Your historic church is almost as full of Satan as
of Christ. And when you have spent your bit of life in any of these
institutions or occupations, they are not perfect as you had hoped.
You emancipate the slaves and the negro question still looks you in the
face. You invent printing and then must say with Browning's Fust, "Have I
brought man advantage or hatched so to speak a strange serpent?"
You establish a new brotherhood for the love of Christ, and presently they
are quarreling which shall be chief or perhaps haling men to prison in the
name of Him who came to let the oppressed go free.
And you, yourself, for reward will be filled with the Everlasting Imperfect
which your eyes have seen and your hands have handled.
The essential tragedy of life, according to this deep pessimism, is not in
pain and defeat, but in the emptiness and vanity of all that we call
victory.
Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the
labor that I had labored to do; and, behold, all was vanity and
vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.
V
I suppose that every man's faith is the outgrowth of his disposition, and
mine makes me believe that the truth embraces all the blackest of this
pessimism and also the victory over it. I admit and declare that our case
is as bad as anybody has found it to be. In a generation which soothes
itself with the assurance that there is no hell, I am one who fears that
its fire is leaping through every artery of society.
And yet I have never a doubt that there is a spirit which may lead a man
through any calling always into more of the life and freedom of the Kingdom
of God.
For one thing, it is necessary that your calling at its best, the best that
it has done, the best that it may do, should lay before you a program of
tasks, the first of them lying definitely before you and within your power,
the others stretching away into all that a man can do in that sort. This is
no treadmill. This is a ladder, resting on the ground, stretching toward
heaven.
For another thing, you must delight in your work. Your heart and body must
be in it and not tugging to be away at something else. You do not then deal
out to each bit of work its stingy bit of your attention. You delight in
the thing. You hover and brood over it like a lover and lavish upon it the
wealth of uncounted hours.
The sure consequence is that you are not doing the same things over and
over and grooving the same habits deeper and deeper. Habits cannot stand in
this heat. They fuse and flow together. They are no longer chains. They are
wings. They lift you up and bear you swiftly and joyfully forward.
This is indeed the life of joy. You have the joy of efficiency. You have
the joy of doing the best you had hoped to do. And it may be that once and
again you will be set shaking with delight because something within you has
turned out a better bit of work than you had thought possible.
And if, besides all this, the background of feeling and will in you is
wholly right; if, by the grace of God, you have learned to work in delicate
veracity, stern against yourself, loyal to the Perfection whose veils no
man has lifted; if the far vision of that Perfection touches you with
humility, mans you with courage, and makes you leap glad to meet the tasks
which are set for you,--what is this but entrance here and now into the
Kingdom of God?
And if this crowning grace comes to you, as it may in any calling--it came
to Uncle Tom--you will not, I think, believe that all your hands have
wrought is vanity. You will not believe that the Logos who has called our
race out of the earth to behold and share in his creation is a dream, a
mockery of our despair, as we make the last useless turns about the dying
sun. But you will see that He knew the truth of things who said:
My Father worketh hitherto and I work. The works that I do shall ye do
also and greater works than these shall ye do because I go to the
Father.