It would be fearful to think that anything, however small in
appearance, could happen to us without the will of God. If you
admit the idea of chance or unmeaning events anywhere, the whole
organisation of our life in God is broken to pieces. We are we
don't know where, unless we rest in God and give Him praise for all
things. We must trust in Him whether he sends us joy or sorrow.
If he sends us joy let us be careful. Happiness is often sent to
try us, and is by no means a proof of our having deserved it. Nor
is sorrow always a sign of God's displeasure, but frequently, nay
always, of His love and compassion. We must each interpret our
life as best we can, but we must be sure that its deepest purpose
is to bring us back to God through Christ. Death is a condition of
our life on earth, it brings the creature back to its Creator. The
creature groans at the sight of death, but God will not forsake us
at the last, He who has never forsaken us from the first breath
of our life on earth. If it is His will we may live to serve Him
here on earth for many happy years to come. If He takes either of
us away, His name be praised. We live in the shadow of death, but
that shadow should not darken the brightness of our life. It is
the shadow of the hand of our God and Father, and the earnest of a
higher, brighter life hereafter. Our Father in heaven loves us more
than any husband can love his wife, or any mother her child. His
hand can never hurt us, so let us hope and trust always.
_Life._
Our lives are in the hands of a Father, who knows what is best for
all of us. Death is painful to the creature, but in God there is
no death, no dying; dying belongs to life, and is only a passage
to a more perfect world into which we all go when God calls us.
When one's happiness is perfect, then the thought of death often
frightens one, but even that is conquered by the feeling and the
faith that all is best as it is, and that God loves us more than
even a father and mother can love us. It is a beautiful world in
which we live, but it is only beautiful and only really our home
when we feel the nearness of God at each moment and lean on Him and
trust in His love.... When the hour of parting comes, we know that
love never dies, and that God who bound us closely together in this
life will bring us together where there is no more parting.
_MS._
Our meeting here on earth with those we loved was not our doing. We
did not select our father and mother, and sisters and brothers. We
did not even explore the whole world to discover our friends. They
too were more or less given us, the choice was given us, and the
sphere of choice was determined and limited. Hence we seem to have
a right to say that they were meant for us, and we for them, and
unless we believe in accident, who is there by whose will alone they
could have been meant for us? Hence, if they were meant for us once
by a Divine, not by our own will, that will can never change, and we
have a right to hope and even to believe that _what has been will
be_, and that we shall again meet and love those whom we met and
loved here. This is faith, and this is comfort, but it is greater
faith, and greater comfort still, if we close our eyes in the firm
conviction that whatever will be, will be best for us.
_MS._
WONDER
There are few sensations more pleasant than that of wondering. We
have all experienced it in childhood, in youth, in manhood, and
we may hope that even in our old age this affection of the mind
will not entirely pass away. If we analyse this feeling of wonder
carefully, we shall find that it consists of two elements. What we
mean by wondering is not only that we are startled or stunned--that
I should call the merely passive element of wonder. When we say 'I
wonder' we confess that we are taken aback, but there is a secret
satisfaction mixed up with our feeling of surprise, a kind of
hope, nay, almost of certainty, that sooner or later the wonder
will cease, that our senses or our mind will recover, will grapple
with these novel expressions or experiences, grasp them, it may
be, know them, and finally triumph over them. In fact we wonder at
the riddles of nature, whether animate or inanimate, with a firm
conviction that there is a solution to them all, even though we
ourselves may not be able to find it. Wonder, no doubt, arises from
ignorance, but from a peculiar kind of ignorance, from what might be
called a fertile ignorance; an ignorance which, if we look back at
the history of most of our sciences, will be found to have been the
mother of all human knowledge.
_Chips._
WORDS
What people call 'mere words' are in truth the monuments of the
fiercest intellectual battles; triumphant arches of the grandest
victories won by the intellect of man. When man had formed names
for body and soul, for father and mother, and not till then, did
the first art of human history begin. Not till there were names for
right and wrong, for God and man, could there be anything worthy of
the name of human society. Every new word was a discovery, and these
early discoveries, if but properly understood, are more important to
us than the greatest conquests of the kings of Egypt and Babylon.
Not one of our greatest explorers has unearthed more splendid
palaces, than the etymologist. Every word is the palace of a human
thought, and in scientific etymology we possess the charm with which
to call these ancient thoughts back to life.
_Chips._
Cannot a concept exist without a word? Certainly not, though in
order to meet every possible objection we may say that no concept
can exist without a sign, whether it be a word or anything else.
And if it is asked whether the concept exists first, and the sign
comes afterwards, I should say no: the two are simultaneous, but in
strict logic, the sign, being the condition of a concept, may really
be said to come first. After a time, words may be dropt, and it is
then, when we try to remember the old word that gave birth to our
concept, that we are led to imagine that concepts came first, and
words afterwards. I know how difficult it is to see this clearly. We
are so accustomed to think without words, that we can hardly realise
the fact that originally no conceptual thought was possible without
these or other signs.
_Gifford Lectures, I._
WORK
If you have found a work to which you are ready to sacrifice the
whole of your life, and if you have faith in yourselves, others will
have faith in you, and, sooner or later, a work that must be done
will be done.
_Gifford Lectures, II._
What flimsy things the so-called pleasures of life are--how little
in them that lasts. To delight in doing one's work is life--that
is what helps us on, though the road is sometimes very stiff and
tiring--uphill rather it would seem than downhill, and yet downhill
it is.
_MS._
A distaste for work is only another name for a distaste for duty,
a disregard for those commandments which hold society together, a
disregard of the commandments of God. No doubt there is that reward
in work that after a time it ceases to be distasteful, and like many
a bitter medicine becomes liked, but that reward is vouchsafed to
honest work only.
_MS._
Work is the best healer of sorrow. In grief or disappointment try
hard work; it will not fail you.
_Autobiography._
No sensible man ought to care about posthumous praise, or posthumous
blame. Enough for the day is the evil thereof. Our contemporaries
are our right judges, our peers have to give their votes in the
great academies and learned societies, and if they on the whole
are not dissatisfied with the little we have done, often under far
greater difficulties than the world was aware of, why should we care
for the distant future?
_Autobiography._
Put your whole heart, or your whole love into your work.
Half-hearted work is really worse than no work.
_Last Essays._
Much of the best work in the world is done by those whose names
remain unknown, who work because life's greatest bliss is work,
and who require no reward beyond the consciousness that they have
enlarged the knowledge of mankind and contributed their share to the
final triumph of honesty and truth.
_Chips._
True immortality (of fame) is the immortality of the work done by
man, which nothing can make undone, which lives, works on, grows
on for ever. It is good to _ourselves_ to remember and honour the
names of our ancestors and benefactors, but to them, depend upon
it, the highest reward was not the hope of fame, but their faith
in themselves, their faith in their work, their faith that nothing
really good can ever perish, and that Right and Reason must in the
end prevail.
_Chips._
It is given to few scholars only to be allowed to devote the whole
of their time and labour to the one subject in which they feel the
deepest interest. We have all to fight the battle of life before we
can hope to secure a quiet cell in which to work in the cause of
learning and truth.
_Chips._
What author has ever said the last word he wanted to say, and who
has not had to close his eyes before he could write _Finis_ to his
work?
_Autobiography._
THE WORLD
There is no other Christian explanation of the world than that God
thought and uttered it, and that man follows in life and thought
the thoughts of God. We must not forget that all our knowledge and
hold of the world are again nothing but thoughts, which we transform
under the law of causality into objective realities. It was this
unswerving dependence on God in thought and life that made Jesus
what He was, and what we should be if we only tried, viz. children
of God.
_Silesian Horseherd._
I cannot help seeing order, law, reason or Logos in the world, and I
cannot account for it by merely _ex post_ events, call them what you
like--survival of the fittest, natural selection, or anything else.
_Last Essays._
Think only what it was to believe in an order of the world, though
it be no more at first than a belief that the sun will never
overstep his bounds. It was all the difference between a chaos and
a cosmos, between the blind play of chance and an intelligible and
therefore an intelligent providence. How many souls, even now when
everything else has failed them, when they have parted with the
most cherished convictions of their childhood, when their faith in
man has been poisoned, and when the apparent triumph of all that is
selfish, ignoble, and hideous has made them throw up the cause of
truth, of righteousness, and innocence as no longer worth fighting
for, at least in this world; how many, I say, have found their
last peace and comfort in the contemplation of the order of the
world, whether manifested in the unvarying movement of the stars,
or revealed in the unvarying number of the petals and stamens and
pistils of the smallest forget-me-not. How many have felt that
to belong to this cosmos, to this beautiful order of nature, is
something at least to rest on, something to trust, something to
believe, when everything else has failed. To us, this perception of
law and order in the world may seem very little, but to the ancient
dwellers on earth, who had little else to support them, it was
everything because, if once perceived, if once understood, it could
never be taken from them.
_Hibbert Lectures._
We must learn to see a meaning in everything. No doubt we cannot
always see cause and effect, and it is well we cannot. It is quite
true that we do not always get our deserts. And yet we must believe
that we do--only if we knew it, the whole fabric of the world would
be destroyed, there would be neither virtue nor vice in the whole
world, nothing but calculation. We should avoid the rails laid down
by the world because we should know that the engine would be sure
to come and mangle us. In this way the world holds together, and it
could not in any other way.
_Life._
There is to me a beauty and mystery and sanctity about flowers, and
when I see them come and go, no one knows whence and whither, I ask
what more miracles do we want,--what better, more beautiful, more
orderly world could we wish to belong to than that by which we are
surrounded and supported on all sides? Where is there a flaw or a
fault? Then why should we fear unless the flaws are within us, and
we will not see the blessing and the rest which we might enjoy if
we only trusted to the Author of all that beauty, order, and wisdom
about us. It is a perfect sin not to be happy in this world, and
how much of the misery which there is, is the work of men, or could
be removed by men, if they would but work together for each others'
good.
_Life._
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the
Edinburgh University Press.
* * * * *
Transcriber's note:
Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.
Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as
printed.
Page 81: "There no _chance_ in life ..." The transcriber has
inserted "is".