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Title: Levels of Living
       Essays on Everyday Ideals


Author: Henry Frederick Cope



Release Date: June 29, 2006  [eBook #18712]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LEVELS OF LIVING***


E-text prepared by Al Haines



LEVELS OF LIVING

Essays on Everyday Ideals

by

HENRY FREDERICK COPE

Author of "The Modern Sunday-School
in Principle and Practice"







New York ---- Chicago ---- Toronto
Fleming H. Revell Company
London And Edinburgh
Copyright, 1908, by
Fleming H. Revell Company
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street




  To My Wife

  Not in the sentiment of dedication alone,
  offering to you what I may have done, but
  in simple acknowledgment of obligation
  to you

    Elizabeth

  best gift of God and inspiration of man




Under the title of "A Sermon For To-day" these short essays, on the art
of every-day living in the light of eternal life, were published by
_The Chicago Sunday Tribune_, through a series of years, and were
regularly printed in the Sunday editions of a group of the great
dailies.  The short sentences were also published with the Sermons
under the head of "Sentence Sermons."  The courtesy of _The Chicago
Daily Tribune_ in permitting the publication of these "sermons," with
such changes as have seemed best, is gratefully acknowledged.




CONTENTS


     I.  THE HIGHER LEVELS
         The Real and the Ideal--The Bread of Life--Life's
         Unvarying Values.

    II.  INVISIBLE ALLIES
         More than a Fighting Chance--The Unseen
         Hand--The One in the Midst.

   III.  THE SOVEREIGNTY OF SERVICE
         Self and Service--My Soul or My Service?--The
         Satisfaction of Service.

    IV.  THE RIGHT TO HAPPINESS
         The Power of Happiness--The Secret of
         Happiness--The Folly of Anxiety.

     V.  THE CURRICULUM OF CHARACTER
         The Great School--The Purpose of the
         Course--The Price of Perfection.

    VI.  THE AGE-LONG MIRACLE
         The Sufficient Sign--Behold the Man--The
         Life that Lifts.

   VII.  SEEING THE UNSEEN
         The Sense of the Unseen--The Brook in the
         Way--That Which Is High.

  VIII.  SOURCES OF STRENGTH AND INSPIRATION
         Strength for the Daily Task--The Sense of
         the Infinite--The Great Inspiration.

    IX.  FINDING FOUNDATIONS
         The Passing and Permanent--Facing the
         Facts--The Real Foundation.

     X.  THE PASSION FOR PERFECTION
         The Great Search--The Hunger of the Ages--The
         Sole Satisfaction.

    XI.  THE PRICE OF SUCCESS
         The Law of Selection--The Fallacy of
         Negation--The Secret of All.

   XII.  DIVINE SERVICE
         The Ideal Service--The Orthodox Service--The
         Heavenly Service.

  XIII.  OUR FATHER AND OUR FELLOWS
         The Primary Reconciliation--Faith in Our
         Fellows--The Law of Forgiveness.

   XIV.  MEN AND MAMMON
         Riches and Righteousness--Religion and
         Business--The Moral End of Money-Making.

    XV.  THE EVERY-DAY HEAVEN
         The Beauty of Holiness--The Gladness of
         Goodness--The True Paradise

   XVI.  TRUTH AND LIFE
         Religion of a Practical Mind--The Head
         and the Heart--New Truths for New Days.

  XVII.  THE FRUITS OF FAITH
         Root and Fruit--The Orthodox Accent--The
         Business of Religion.

 XVIII.  THE FORCE OF FAITH
         "The Victory that Overcometh"--Fear
         and Faith--Faith for the Future.

   XIX.  HINDRANCES AND HELPS FROM WITHIN
         Worry--A Cure for the Blues--The Gospel of Song.

    XX.  DOES HE CARE?
         The One at the Helm--The Shepherd and
         the Sheep--The Father's Care.




I

The Higher Levels

  _The Real and the Ideal_
  _The Bread of Life_
  _Life's Unvarying Values_


_The ideal is the mold in which the real is cast._

_Half of success is in seeing the significance of little things._

_He finds no weal who flees all woe._

_You do not make life sacred by looking sad._

_Sympathy is a key that fits the lock of any heart._

_Soul health will not come by taking religion as a dose._

_Many a cloud that we call sorrow is but the shadow of our own
selfishness._

_To live wholly for possessions is to paralyze the life to the
possibility of permanently possessing anything._

_It takes more than willingness to be nothing to make you amount to
something._

_This is never a wrong world to him who is right with its heart._


THE REAL AND THE IDEAL

It is probable that from the age of sixteen up to thirty Jesus of
Nazareth spent His life in mechanical toil; He made wooden plows, ax
handles, and yokes; He served as a carpenter.  Then for three years He
gave Himself to the ministry of ideal things, exclusively to the
service of the spirit.

There is a wonderful satisfaction in making things, in looking over
some concrete piece of work accomplished when the day ends.  It is a
satisfaction that belongs to the artisan.  Is it not probable that many
said that it was a great pity when Jesus gave up so useful a trade as
His?  To them He seemed to be but chasing the rainbow.

But to-day who possesses a single one of the things that young
carpenter made?  And did we possess them all what better off would the
world be?  Yet, on the other hand, how ill could this world afford to
lose what He gave it by those three years of the service of the ideal.

In our age of things we so easily forget how large is the place of the
ideal and the spiritual.  Ever estimating our assets in the concrete,
we fail to recognize that our real wealth lies in thoughts and things
abstract.  The permanent possessions of humanity are spiritual.  Not
acres nor armies, not banks nor business make a nation, but mighty,
compelling ideals and traditions.

Jesus, Shakespeare, Browning, Lowell, Emerson left no goods and
chattels, no bonds and mortgages; they left inspirations; they
bequeathed ideals; living first for the soul, their souls survive and
remain to us all.  The truly great who still stand after the test of
the years are those who have lived for the spirit.

This is as true of the worker and the warrior as of the philosopher and
poet.  All were inspired by glowing visions; they set their affections
on things above the trifles for which we struggle and spend ourselves.
They endured as seeing glories to us invisible; therefore their names
endure.

The great undertakings of our own day are possible only under spiritual
inspirations.  No rewards of money only can induce a man to steadfastly
conduct affairs of great moment and enterprise; he is buoyed up by a
great hope; often the very greatness of the task and the sense of
serving great ends carry him on; always he sees the worth in the ideal
rather than the wage.

We must learn to measure life with the sense of the infinite.  We must
not think that a man has failed because he has not left burdened
warehouses and bonds.  We must cease to think that we can tell whether
work be high or lowly by the size of the wage.  We need eyes to see the
glory of the least act in the light of the glowing motive.

A new estimate is placed on each act when it is measured not by bread
alone but by the things of the soul.  The mother's care of the
children; the father's steady humble toil for them, the faithful
watching over the sick, the ministry of the lowly, all have a new glory
in the light of the love that leads the way and the spirit that guides
those who do the least of these things.

We need to learn for ourselves what is the work that endures.  It is a
good thing to lay a course of bricks so that it shall be true, but of
greater value to the world than the wall that stands firm is the spirit
that forces the man to build aright.  No man can do even this without
an ideal set in his heart, and when the wall shall have fallen the
world shall still be enriched by his ideal.

Too many of us are fretting because we are not getting on in the world.
Seeing the apparent ease with which some acquire fortune, we become
discontented with our small gains.  We talk as though fortunes and
follies, money and lands were the only things worth while.  Yet we know
better, for we all find our real joys in other things.



THE BREAD OF LIFE

There are lives that have bread in abundance and yet are starved; with
barns and warehouses filled, with shelves and larders laden they are
empty and hungry.  No man need envy them; their feverish, restless
whirl in the dust of publicity is but the search for a satisfaction
never to be found in things.  They are called rich in a world where no
others are more truly, pitiably poor; having all, they are yet lacking
in all because they have neglected the things within.

The abundance of bread is the cause of many a man's deeper hunger.
Having known nothing of the discipline that develops life's hidden
sources of satisfaction, nothing of the struggle in which deep calls
unto deep and the true life finds itself, he spends his days seeking to
satisfy his soul with furniture, with houses and lands, with yachts and
merchandise, seeking to feed his heart on things, a process of less
promise and reason than feeding a snapping turtle on thoughts.

It takes many of us altogether too long to learn that you cannot find
satisfaction so long as you leave the soul out of your reckoning.  If
the heart be empty the life cannot be filled.  The flow must cease at
the faucet if the fountains go dry.  The prime, the elemental
necessities of our being are for the life rather than the body, its
house.  But, alas, how often out of the marble edifice issues the poor
emaciated inmate, how out of the life having many things comes that
which amounts to nothing.

The essential things are not often those which most readily strike our
blunt senses.  We see the shell first.  To the undeveloped mind the
material is all there is.  But looking deeper into life there comes an
awakening to the fact and the significance of the spiritual, the
feeling that the reason, the emotions, the joys and pains that have
nothing to do with things, the ties that knit one to the infinite, all
constitute the permanent elements of life.

Because man is a spirit his life never can consist wholly in things; he
must come into his heritage of the soul wealth of all the ages; he must
reach out, though often as in the dark, until across the void there
come voices, the sages and the seers, the prophets, and the poets
speaking the language of the soul.  In these he finds his food nor can
his deeper hunger be assuaged until it thus is fed.

Because man is a spirit and gradually is coming into the dominant
spirit life in which things shall count for less and thought and
character for more, he seeks after his own kind.  The deeps of life
have their relationships.  The spirit of man cries out after the father
of spirits.  By whatever name men have called the most high they ever
have sought after Him, the eternal, who would be one with them in soul,
in all that is essential and abiding in being.

Every religion, every philosophy, every endeavour after character and
truth is but the cry of humanity for word with God.  Hearing His word
on any lip the heart of man answers with joy.  The words of eternal
truth have been the food of the great in all ages.  Fainting in the
fight the message from the unseen, the echo of everlasting verities,
has revived their spirits; they have fought the fight that despises
things and seeks truth.

Who would not exchange a mess of pottage for the benediction from a
father's lips?  Who is so dead he no longer finds more satisfaction in
truth and love and beauty than in food or furniture?  And why are we so
foolish as to seek to satisfy ourselves with things that perish, while
down to the least blade of creation earth is laden with unfading riches
and God is everywhere?

If we might but learn this lesson, we people of the laden hand and the
empty heart, that since life is more than digestion and man more than
beast or machine, since determining all is the spiritual world, they
only are wise who set first things first, who use the garnered
experience of the past and the opportunities of the present to the
enriching of the soul, who listen among all the voices of time for the
words that proceed from the lips of Him who inhabiteth eternity.



LIFE'S UNVARYING VALUES

Life is the business of learning to use things as tools, the real as
the servant of the ideal, to make conditions even better that character
may grow the more, to serve in the making of things and the enduring of
things under the inspiration of the full and glorious purpose of life,
the realizing of the best for ourselves, the rendering of our best to
others.

Only an age that has lost both heart and intellect--the divinely given
measuring rods of life--will think of estimating a life by the money
measure.  It is a shallow world that knows a man as soon as and only
when it has scheduled his marketable assets; nor is it a happy augury
for a nation when it acquires the habit of estimating its men by the
length of the catalogues of their possessions.

A period of outer prosperity is always in danger of being one of inner
paralysis.  Luxury is a foe to life.  Character does not develop
freely, largely, beautifully in an atmosphere of commercialism.  A
moral decline that but presages enduring disaster is sure to succeed
the supremacy of the market.

The great danger is that we shall set the tools of life before its
work, that we shall make life serve our business or our ambitions
instead of causing ambitions, activities, and opportunities all to
contribute to the deepening, enriching, and strengthening of the life
itself.  In the details of making a living it is easy to lose sight of
the prime thing, the life; it is easy to forget that the great question
is not, what have you? but, what are you?

Life cannot consist in things any more than silk can consist of
shuttles, or pictures of brushes and palettes.  Life is both process
and product; but things and fame and power are no more than the tools
and machinery serving to perfect the product.  Life must consist in
thoughts, experiences, motives, ideals--in a word, in character.  A
man's life is what he is.

But what a man is will depend on what he does with the things he has or
may have.  Let him once set the possession of things as his loftiest
ideal, let this avarice of things enter the heart and speedily the love
of the good will leave.  To that god all honour, all truth loving, all
gentleness and humanity are sacrificed.  When possession becomes life's
ruling passion it doesn't take long for principle to be forgotten.

The danger to-day is not that our people will fail in the world's
contests because they lack either money, mind, or muscle.  We are in
little danger from illiteracy or from business incompetency; but we are
in danger from moral paralysis, due to undue pressure on the money
nerve.  We have talked before the youth in the home and amongst
ourselves on the street as though the only thing worth living for was
money, as though they alone were great who had it and they only to be
despised who had it not.

The danger is neither in our market, our commerce, nor our laws; the
danger is in our own hearts.  No matter how world-potent our
merchandise, how marvellous our mechanical and material powers, how
brilliant our business strategy, all will not avail to silence the
voice, "Thou fool, this night thy soul is required of thee."  Then
whose shall these things be?

We need, not fewer things, not the return to an age of poverty or
dreary destitution; we need more power over things; to let the man, so
long buried beneath the money and the lands and houses, come to the
top; to set ourselves over our things; to make them serve us, minister
to our lives and our purposes in living.

There must be an elevation of standards, the institution of new
valuations, clearer, nobler conceptions of what living means.  Boys and
girls must be taught from the beginning that life is more than
self-serving, more than fame or glory; it is the service of humanity.
A passion for humanity will cure the passion for gold, will teach the
true value of life as something that only the infinite can estimate and
will give to the heart those true riches that do not tarnish and that
cannot be stolen.




II

Invisible Allies

  _More Than a Fighting Chance_
  _The Unseen Hand_
  _The One in the Midst_



_Logic may illumine, but love leads._

_The religion that produces no sunshine is all moonshine._

_Imaginary evils have more than imaginary effects._

_He who lays out each day with prayer leaves it with praise._

_Light from above is for the path below._

_Singing of heaven gives no certainty of singing in heaven._

_It is better to have your bank in heaven than your heaven in a bank._

_The burdens of earth demand that our hearts be nourished with the
bread of heaven._

_There are too many hungry for love for any ever to talk of suffering
from loneliness._

_The man who lives with God does not have to advertise the fact._


II

MOKE THAN A FIGHTING CHANCE

Who has not cried out, in haste but still in anguish: "Alas!  All
things are against me; foes are many and friends there are none!"  The
roads to pessimism are many; but surely this is the shortest one, to
get to think that life is but a conflict waged single-handed against
great odds, a long story of struggle, difficulties, pains,
disappointments, temptations, failures, wounds, ending only in death.

Even though you escape that chronic jaundiced view of life there are
seasons of depression when it seems easy to get out of bed on the wrong
side and to plow all day into stumps instead of in the good, clear
ground.  Ever we need the vision that Elisha of old gave to his young
man, to see the hills about us alive with our allies.  Otherwise it is
easy to conclude the fates fight against us.

How slight is the evidence on which men base their gloomy conclusions!
The pessimist always argues from a single instance to a general law.
If he strikes a poor peach on top he throws the whole basket away--or
sells them as soon as he can.  He insists on sitting square on the
cactus bunch when there is only one on the whole bench-land.  He then
becomes an authority on cactus.  If he can discover a few foes on the
horizon he is blind to a regiment of friends close at hand.

But the seers, our poets and teachers, have a wider vision; they seek
the glory rather than the gloom and they tell us that every man has
more friends than foes.  This is the song of those who told us long ago
of Providence, the one who backs a man up and fights on his side and
furnishes him in the hour of need.  This is the song of Lowell,
Tennyson, Whittier, and Browning.  Life is not a lone-handed fight
against unnumbered foes; it is not a losing fight to any who will fight
it well.

Every force in this world works with the man who seeks the good.  This
is a right world and only he who fights the right faces the
unconquerable.  A man may meet rebuffs, battle's tides may sweep back
and forth, but in the end, as it has ever been in all the long story of
man's conflict with nature, so in the conflict with every other foe, he
is bound to win.  This is as true in the individual life of every
fighter as nature and history show it to be in universal life.

On our side there is the great world of the unseen.  Little do we know
of it, but still that little gives us confidence to believe it is
peopled with our allies.  Our fairest hopes of good angels may be
delusions as to details, but they are essentially true, being born of
an eternal verity.

The gospel of good hope declares there is One over all, the friend of
all; greater is He that is with you than any against you; greater is He
than your temptations, your adversaries, your difficulties, and your
sorrows.  This was what the great Teacher came to tell men, that God
was on their side, seeking to help them, loving, caring, cooeperating,
leading them into the life of victory over every enemy.

Let a man face life in this confidence and he is invincible.  He goes
forth and an unseen army goes with him.  He gains the seer's vision to
see even the plotting of the enemy and the forces that fight against
him all working for his good.  From many combats he gains strength for
the decisive struggle.  All things work together for good.  He serves
the right, the truth, the things that are eternal; he fights for
character, for manhood, and the good; and the eternal forces that rule
the universe fight by his side.  He beholds the hills full of the hosts
of heaven; though he has no time to enjoy the vision he knows they are
there, his allies, his assurance of ultimate victory.



THE UNSEEN HAND

The mightiest and the eternal forces fight ever on the side of the
right.  True, things do not always look that way.  Sometimes Napoleon's
sneer about God being on the side of the largest battalions seems to
have truth in it.  But ere long we see the large battalions swept away
before the strange, unaccountable, and irresistible power of an
insignificant body having truth and God on its side.

The man who takes up the struggle for truth, who puts his hand to the
sword for the oppressed, for the right, finds himself holding a
two-handled weapon, and if he grasps firmly the one hilt it is as
though there were an omnipotent hand grasping the other.  He who fights
worthily, in fitting battle, never fights alone.

It is not that some omnipotent person steps down from a throne in the
heavens and plunges into the battle; it is that every time a man steps
out for right and truth he places himself in accord with eternal
spiritual forces that give themselves to him and his work.  It is not
that God comes to fight for a man so much as that a man finds himself
fighting beside God; entering this battle, he sees that where he
thought none had been serving heaven had long been waging the contest.

It is so easy, like old Elijah, to think that you alone are left to
witness for truth, to feel the loneliness of standing for things noble
and worthy, to become oppressed with the hopelessness of the minority
in which you find yourself.  When real and concrete things press upon
us and their uproar is in our ears we become deaf and blind to the
greater forces that from the beginning of time have been working for
the best.

Every great reform has looked like a losing movement; it has begun with
most insignificant minorities; it has met with violent and
well-organized opposition; its supporters have often been
faint-hearted, and yet ultimately it has overcome always.  As men have
fought on they have found an unseen hand grasping the sword beside
theirs.

We all need this sense of God with us, helping us in our lives.  This
gives courage and confidence.  It does not mean weak reliance upon
heaven to do things for us; it means entering on the things that look
impossible because we know that, if they are right, every great force
in the universe will cooeperate with us.

This is the fine sense in which the human enters into partnership with
the heavenly.  This determines whether we may call our work divine or
not.  It is to be judged, not by whether it is pleasant or looks
respectable, but by whether it is the work in which we know the Lord of
all can lay His hand to the tool or weapon alongside of our hands.

With a consciousness like this, one attempts anything.  The practical
question is not, "Can this be done?" but "Ought this to be done?"  "Is
it such a task as will enlist the cooeperation of the eternal spirit of
truth and right?"  With the cry of Gideon on their lips, men have fared
forth facing fearful odds; their hands have fallen from their swords,
but the unseen hand has carried them on until the cause has won.

The Almighty, who would have love and peace and righteousness to
prevail, needs your hand for His sword; the sword of the Lord is vain
without Gideon.  Ideals and spiritual forces may exist, but men must be
their realizations, their visible hands.  God's work waits for you to
put your hand to the sword; you will find His already there.

This helping hand is always unseen; spiritual things are often
apparently unreal.  God cannot be reduced to figures nor to material
elements.  This hand that works with ours may mean one thing to one and
another to another.  What we all need is to simply grasp the great fact
of the spiritual forces that strengthen every good resolve, that give
vigour in every good work, and give victory at last to the right.



THE ONE IN THE MIDST

There are always a thousand blind men to one who can see.  All have
eyes, but not all have vision.  The things we most need and the things
for which we most long are often nearest to us, while we, with eyes
fast shut, grope our way to the place where we think they ought to be.
The best things are the things we miss.  The crowd by the fords of the
Jordan was longing to see the Messiah; yet of them all there was only
one, the son of the desert, who saw that He was actually with them
already.  John had eyes that pierced the husk of things.  He looked on
this son of the carpenter and a thousand years of prophecy sank into
insignificance beside its fulfillment; the multitude became as nothing
beside the all glorious Son of Man.  He alone knew his Lord, because he
alone looked with eyes of love.

John announced the sublime central truth that all the world's great
seers have declared; God is in His world.  Man is an animal who seeks
God; he finds Him when his eyes are opened.  Some are looking for Him
in the records of His ways with men; many are hoping to see Him in some
other world; a few see Him by their side.

Some, priding themselves on their spiritual vision, and boastingly
describing God as He was or God as He will be, have eyes of stone when
it comes to seeing God as He is.  They do not stop to think that we
want a God in the present tense--a God in our homes, on our streets, in
our affairs.  And others say, this thing is unthinkable, for, if you
say that this is a spiritual presence, you at once remove the whole
question from touch with real things.

They forget that the most real things lie beyond the senses.  Who ever
saw mother-love?  Yet who will not believe in it?  Ambition, affection,
pity, memory, hope; these are the real things, the lasting things;
these are the spiritual things.  No one ever saw these things, and yet
they can be seen everywhere; it only needs the vision; we all have seen
them at times.

There are the selfish, gross, and sensual who tell us there is no love
in the world; and there are those to whom every common bush is aflame
with God.  So hearts that have forsaken the good see nothing but a
God-forsaken world; and, in this same world, hearts that are lifted up
find Him everywhere, they see Him in the movements of history, in the
forces of nature, they hear Him in the hum of commerce and in the
silence of the fields, in every human voice they catch His tone.  He is
ever in the midst.  He is more than a force, a dream, a thought.  He is
to men to-day what He was to men when He walked their streets and
touched their sick; all that we think He would have been in that long
ago He is to-day.

Personal?  Yes, that He may reach persons, for we cannot know
impersonal love or impersonal help.  His personality turns the universe
from an institution into an organism.  Yet more than personal; this one
in the midst is infinite; He is the whole where we are but fractions.
But He does not hide Himself in His infinity; He is "among you," with
men.  Not by descent into the grave of the past, nor by ascent into
heaven do we find Him; He is here, on every hand.  This it is that
transforms individual character, to know that He is by my side; this it
is that solves our problems, to see Him linking my fellow to me; this
it is that gives strength, to hear His voice; this it is that gives
hope, to know He is working with us; this it is that makes burdens
bearable, to know that He is sympathetic and strong.  This one in the
midst explains suffering, inspires heroism, is the promise and the
potency of all the possibilities of the sons of men.




III

The Sovereignty of Service

  _Self and Service_
  _My Soul or My Service_
  _The Satisfaction of Service_


_The fruits of sacrifice become the roots of love._

_A tin halo makes a fine trap for a man to tangle himself in._

_It takes the base line of two worlds to get a correct elevation of any
life._

_Life is always a dull grind to the man who thinks only of the grist._

_Knocking the saints will not open the doors of paradise._

_Capacity for that heaven comes from creating this one._

_Another man's burden is the Christian's best badge._

_The only way to lift life is to lay life down._

_It doesn't take long to choose between a sinner who swears once in a
while and a saint who makes every one swear all the while._

_You cannot lift folks while you are looking down on them._


III

SELF AND SERVICE

There is such a thing as supremely selfish self-denial.  A man retires
into the monk's pietic seclusion; he isolates himself from interest in
the world battles; he shuts himself from sympathy with the struggles of
business, civil, and even social life.  To him these things are carnal.
He is engrossed with the complication of interpretations of languages
long dead, or with visions of an unknown heaven, and this, he thinks,
is living the life of self-denial.

The denial of self is not the death of self; it is the leading of the
best self into larger life.  It is not the dwarfing of the life; it is
its development into usefulness.  It is not the emasculation of
character; it is the submission and discipline of the life to new and
nobler motives.

He best denies himself who best develops himself with the purpose of
serving his fellows.  What Jesus meant was that if any man would be one
of His he must cease to make his own selfish pleasures, ambitions, and
passions the end of his living; he must make the most of himself that
he might have the more to give to the service of mankind; he must make
the one motive and end of his life the benefit and help of every other
man.

That kind of a life means a change of centre.  Instead of regarding the
universe as revolving about itself it sees that self as but part of the
great machinery of life, planned and operating for the good of all.  A
man begins to deny himself as soon as he begins to love another.  Even
a yellow dog may act to deflect the heart from its old self-centre.
The love of kin and family, of friends, and associates all serve to
strengthen the habit of self-denial.

The fewer people a man takes into his plan of life the more likely is
he to be selfish.  But some lives are but the more selfish because they
take in all mankind and look on them as designed to contribute to their
single enriching.  That kind of a life commits suicide; ever grasping
and never giving it dies of plethora.  It had never learned that
strange secret of the best self-development, sacrificing service.

We need to guard ourselves against the delusion that the denial of
oneself means the impoverishment of the life.  There can be no true
giving of the life in service unless there is a wise enriching of the
self, a thorough fitting for that service.  The more of a man you are,
the brighter your intellect, the broader your sympathies, the better
your service to the world may be.  The sloth that sinks the soul in
indifference to its own development is the most sinful of all forms of
selfishness.

This way of denial is more, the Master tells His disciples, than an
emptying of the life.  If some of the cares of self are cast out the
burdens of others more than take their place.  It is a full life,
overflowing with the interests, the fears, loves, hopes, and longings
of other lives.  It bears the cross, not of an ornamental,
vanity-serving glory, but the cross of a world's sin and sorrow.

Each man must carry his cross not on his breast but on his heart and
brain.  It is what he can do, what he can plan, suggest, undertake
towards saving this world.  The cross of discipleship will be to some
statesmanship, to others science, to others the daily service of a home
or the work in the shop; it is the kindly word, the cheering look, the
lift by the way; it is whatever is done in unselfish desire to make
life better, to bring men nearer to one another and to the Father of
all.

You have only to look at the great Teacher to know what self-denial and
cross bearing really mean, and you have only to follow Him to fully
carry out their principles.  To Him they meant the life of doing good,
of seeking the sorrowing, befriending the forsaken, helping the
helpless.  They who follow Him lead the world; they who seek to
minister instead of being ministered to are the world's masters.  The
value of every life must be measured at last not by what it has
gathered to itself but by what it has given for the enriching and help
of the whole life of the world.



MY SOUL OR MY SERVICE

There is no more subtle temptation than that which sets the soul as a
hindrance to the service we should render.  A surprise awaits him who
carefully will compare the emphasis laid upon the individual soul and
its salvation by the modern church with the place given this in the
teachings of the Bible.  Perhaps he will find in modern preaching, with
its insistent appeal to men to save their own souls, an explanation of
prevalent selfishness.  The moral effect of urging a man to save his
soul is not much better than that which comes from advising him to save
his skin at any cost.

The most serious objection ever made to religion is that it produces a
narrow, self-centred type of mind.  That type of religion cannot be
right, regardless of its doctrinal orthodoxy, which produces a wrong
type of men and women.  But may not failure here be accounted for by
the selfish basis on which men build the plea for what they call
personal salvation?

What could be more selfish than this continual appeal to fear, this
urging of men to escape from punishment, to make sure of a house in the
heavenly city, this offering of crowns and perpetual rest, plenty and
peace, this emphasis on the great object of saving your own soul?  It
is opposite directly to what the great Teacher told men.  Did He not
say that the man who would save his own life should lose it?

The concentration of mind on the self, whether in the name of religion
or in any other name, is but moral suicide.  People who have no other
object in life than that of saving their own souls are but little
better than those whose whole object is to fatten, protect, and keep
safe their bodies.

But Christianity must be perverted greatly to make it teach men to set
their own interests first.  It is the religion of the other man.  Its
appeal is not to the love of self, but to the love of society.  It
offers a way of salvation, not as a thing desirable for your exclusive
use, but as the pathway for all lives, for all the people.  Its tree of
life is not for a single pair, but for the healing of the nations.

True religion is not in self-centred culture, but in the culture of all
through the service of the single ones and the culture of the one
through his service for all.  Only in the atmosphere of service does
the soul grow, expand, and find itself.  To live in a circle is to die;
it is the centrifugal life that finds salvation.  They court death who
seek only their own lives; they find life who, disregarding death and
loss, seek only to make others live.

Religion is not simply a cure for my ills.  True, it does cure many of
them, but only that I may be better able to do its work.  It is a great
cause, a mighty project, commanding the noblest enthusiasms and the
highest efficiency of effort, the project of bringing this whole world
to salvation.  And that not the salvation of a mental condition but of
the perfection of its whole being, the realization of its highest
possibilities, the full noontide of the day of God.

Is not this enough to satisfy any man and to call forth the best in
him, that he should in some way serve this glorious ideal?  Is not this
man's purpose in this world even as it was the purpose of the one who
called Himself the Son of Man?  What nobler summary could any life have
than His, that He went about doing good?  How quickly would that
kingdom of heaven come if this were the program of every life!

Let but a man do his duty towards this shining ideal, let him but be
lifted up, carried along in the mighty enthusiasm it ought to engender,
and his own soul, his own development, his character perfection will
take care of itself.  No man ever did any great work without becoming
greater himself, and greatness never was found in any other way.  This
is an unvarying law.  Service is the secret of culture.

The pious hypochondriac is sure to be a sickly soul.  The best thing
you can do for your soul is to forget that you have one, just as the
healthy man forgets he has a heart or liver.  The self-forgetting
service is the secret of happiness, of full finding of self.  Freedom
in self-giving brings fullness in living.

In the right life the hour of prayer, the quiet thought, the search for
abstract truth, may all have their place; but it is only the place that
the wise workman gives to his meals.  He does not live for these
things; they are but ministrants to his work.  He uses everything that
will make him a better workman; but not because he sees the workman as
his end.  He forgets himself in the perfection of that he seeks to
make.  The saving of the soul, the culture of the self, as an end is
shame and suicide; as a means to service it is life and peace and
perfection.



THE SATISFACTION OF SERVICE

A man always thinks more of his work than of his wages.  He would never
be content to toil day in and day out but for the thought that somehow
to some one his work was worth while.  Neither wages, nor salary, nor
any other cash consideration would of itself be sufficient to satisfy
him.  The workman is proud of the product of his hands; his reward is
in that he has made; the good shepherd thinks more of the flock than of
their fleece or his pay.

Satisfaction in work can only come from service rendered.  Whether a
man be plowing or preaching, sweeping the streets or building empires,
his work is only worthy if his motive be the good he is doing, the
value of the work itself.  We call the man who preaches a minister, a
servant.  There is no more honourable title, but it belongs to every
one who seeks to do any worthy work in the world.

The purpose of living is service, therefore the business of religion
must be the cultivation of proficiency in service.  The work of
Christianity is to teach men how to be most valuable and useful as
children and parents, as neighbours and citizens, how to make the most
of their lives and to do the most with them.  It aims to bring the race
to its highest efficiency.

Religion reveals to man the worth-while object of all his endeavours,
to work as a servant for others.  Never was Jesus more glorious than
when He stooped to lift the palsied, to heal the sick, to feed the
hungry.  He found His right to rule men by His exercise of the
privilege of serving them.  The sheep belong to the good shepherd
because he gives his life to them.

This marks the true follower of the great Teacher to-day; his business
is to serve, he makes living an investment for humanity.  He is
commanded to lose his life, to be willing to give up, to sacrifice all
in self-denial, to take his cross and suffer persecution and loss in
this way of walking after his Master.

But he is not told to throw his life away as a worthless thing.  He is
to lose it as the seed is lost in the sowing, as the money in the
investing; to sacrifice it as the tool is sacrificed to that which it
is carving.  He who would be of real service to the world must
cultivate the best in himself.  If living is seed sowing, then the seed
must be good or the harvest will be thin.

True altruism finds right expression first in self-care.  It is a man's
business to be strong, healthy, sane, trained, developed; to be the
best kind of a man, complete in all his faculties, that he may have the
more to offer to the service of his fellows.  There is no merit in
offering the wrecked body and soured mind.  If you are going to give
your life to the world you must make it worth the giving.

Heaven's work demands the finest tools.  Nothing is too good for the
service of humanity.  There is a good deal more religion in the honest
attempt to make the most of yourself, to keep health, to secure
education and culture, in order that you may have the larger, better,
wealthier self to use in service than in unending ascetic exercises,
prayers, devotions, meditations, mumbling, or visions of things
spiritual.

The only way you can prove the genuineness of your religion is by your
gifts to the children of God, your own brothers about you.  There is no
gift that begins to compare in value with a well-trained,
well-equipped, strong and clean life.  We cannot all give gold or
lands, or even learning to men, but we can all give lives, and that
which heaven and earth both have a right to expect is that we shall
give the best lives we can.




IV

The Right to Happiness

  _The Power of Happiness_
  _The Secret of Happiness_
  _The Folly of Anxiety_


_Happy is that happy makes._

_Heaven leaves the heart when hatred enters._

_The man who is so wise that he never laughs is the greatest of fools._

_When your face spells failure it's no use talking of the glory of your
faith._

_To set a child towards gladness is to incline him towards God._

_The graces do not grow in gloom._

_There's no argument equal to a happy smile._

_Stealing sorrow is as much a sin as acquiring stolen joys._

_Life's music is never perfect without the chord of pain._

_Happiness is never found by dodging my neighbour's sorrows._


IV

THE POWER OF HAPPINESS

Instead of the strength of your faith being marked by the length of
your sighs, the genuineness of your religion is to be known by its
joyfulness.  The same God who gives the sunlight and the smiling
fields, who makes the brooks to laugh through the meadows and the stars
to sing at night, would rather see smiles than frowns on the faces of
His children.  His glory is not in gloom but in gladness.  He designed
this world for happiness, and religion is but the pursuing of His plans
for the good of His children.

That which is holy must be happy.  Artificial sadness is always sinful.
A church is not sacred because it looks like a sepulchre; music is not
sacred because all the spring is taken out of it.  You do not keep a
day sacred to divine ends by making it dismal.  It is a religious duty
resting on all to cultivate happiness, to make this world less sad.

No matter how sincere a man may be, if his sanctity results only in
sorrow to others its satisfaction to him must count for nothing.  There
is a great deal of piety that needs an operation to cut the bands that
bind its heart and reduce the inflammation of its spleen.  Happiness is
the very health of religion.  If religion does not give right relations
to those things that determine the tone and colour of life it is a
failure.

But true happiness can never be selfish.  It grows only by giving.  No
one can eat a feast by himself.  Happiness is not found on lonely
mounts of vision.  It is a fair, refreshing stream that flows through
the dusty ways of daily life.  Its waters are never so sweet and cool
to you as when you seek them for others.  None ever find it who go only
with their own pitchers.  The reason so many would-be saints are sad is
because they will not be other than selfish.

It is not strange that men who love this heaven-born life of ours
should turn away from the religion that represented every happy, joyous
human thing as an enormous offense against its God.  Once men gathered
together every dark and depressing thought and thing and said these
constitute the divine in this world; they looked out through the smoked
glasses of sanctimony and declared that every glad, generous hearty
impulse and action must be evil because such things gave happiness.

The old boundary line between the pain that was piety and the pleasure
that spelt perdition has almost passed away.  Men now know that there
is pain and loss in the way of sin, that the way of the transgressor is
hard; they learn by tasting that the fruits of righteousness are joy
and peace.  The age demands what the Lord of all has ever intended,
that religion should send men on their way with the vigour of happier
hearts, with the upwelling love for men that should drive the squalor,
misery, despair, and heart-aches of sin before it.

Life has its work and it has its sorrows; but they ought both to be for
its enriching.  The business of religion is to teach us that
understanding and adjustment of life which will make it a feast of fat
things, to teach us that the God of all desires the good of all.  The
more true piety--the seeking for the loving will of the all wise and
loving--there is in this world the more pleasure there will be in it.

This happiness is the cure for the madness that some call pleasure.
Life is a mockery indeed to those whose only hope is for the hours of
leisure in which to drink the deadening drafts of excitement, the
lethal cup that only hides life's misery by paralyzing the faculties
against the possibilities of real pleasure.  If men might only hear
again the call of Him who bade the weary and heavy laden to come; if
they might but know that His way of life can give strength, rest,
peace, joy, what an enriching life might have.

Make life happier and you will make it holier.  Make it full of
pleasure--not that of a fool's paradise--but that of peace with
heaven's plans, with the joy of knowing that over all is infinite love,
the strength that comes from knowing right is invincible, the tender
and sweet joys that spring up at the touch of human love.  Go your ways
to make them paths of gladness, to show love shining through sorrow, to
give love in the name of the Lord of love and yours shall be religious
service indeed.



THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS

How did your Puritan forefathers dispose of the text which in their day
read, "A merry heart is a continual feast."  Did they explain it away
by saying that the man was made anyway for fasting and not for
feasting?  Perhaps underneath their austere exterior they, after all,
knew something of deep joys and unfailing sources of refreshing
happiness.

In their teaching they made the mistake of insisting that it was
necessary to seem sad in order to please the Most High.  We make the
mistake of being sad in order to please ourselves.  Their misery at
least had the grace of a high motive; ours is born of a short-sighted
selfishness that grasps at the shadow of a fleeting satisfaction and
loses the substance of lasting joy.

Happiness is the highest aim of life, higher than holiness or
usefulness, because it must include both.  To us it is so unfamiliar
that we do not know it from frivolity; we seek the excitement of some
pleasing sensation, and, rising to its stimulus, we fall afterwards
into the reaction of misery.  Happiness is the poise, calm, strength,
and spring of the life fully in harmony with all things good and true.

Nothing praises God better than a happy disposition.  Many have thought
to give Him glory by learned treatises on His majesty and mystery.  But
a little child, so happy that he only can kick and crow, praises the
Almighty more effectively and even devoutly than does the theologian
who only can offer his bloodless speculations.

The great Father gives His children a world brimming over with joy,
with laughing meadows, with smiling morns, with rippling bird song, and
to man He gives faculties of immeasurable happiness.  Life is learning
the law of happiness and practicing its use and service.

But what is the secret of happiness?  How can we learn to be happy when
life has so much to make us sad?  The praise of happiness does not take
away the fact of sorrow or solve its dark problem.  There remain the
million aching hearts and all the griefs of a world.  True.  God forbid
that we should lose our sorrows; that were to make this a sad world
indeed.  Our cares are but part of joy's curriculum.  Learning their
lesson, bearing their load is essential to deep, lasting happiness.

It is not the life of the butterfly experience that is firm, calm,
serene in times of storm and stress.  It is the life that by loads of
care has been forced to strike its roots down to the rocks.  There are
some lives that seem to run over with a happiness that is full of
refreshing to all who know them, and these have come out of great
tribulation.

At first the multiplication table is a burden; later, when mastered, it
becomes a wonderful bearer of burdens.  To wear a careworn, fretful
look, to go through life shedding misery, is to confess that we have
not learned our lesson, that we are dunces in life's school.

The secret of happiness is in grasping the significance of living, to
learn that we live for things other and higher than those mad follies
and fading prizes for which men sell their bodies and souls and fret
out their nerves and hearts.  No man can be happy whose heart is set on
the changing fashion of things or who looks for satisfaction in things.

The lover is happy because he has discovered his prize and is
enthralled by a pursuit that makes all other things seem mean and
paltry.  Men are happy in proportion as they yield themselves to the
best, as they tune their hearts to strike the highest key of their
lives.  Paul is happier in the dungeon, where he can be true to his
ideal, than Nero on the throne without one.

There is feast in days of famine for those who have the inner eyes for
the riches of life.  You always can find in this world what your heart
is looking for.  But you cannot satisfy your heart on everything you
may chance to find, and until the heart is satisfied and the deeper
needs of the life are met there is no happiness.

The search for happiness is not altogether selfish.  Few things can we
do that will help others more than the cultivation of serene strength
and cheer in ourselves.  Not the soulless, set smile, but the strength
and sympathy that flow from a life fixed in confidence in eternal right
and good and unfailing love.



THE FOLLY OF ANXIETY

The great Teacher does not say that we are not to be thoughtful, or
provident; but He insists that no event can be provided for by anxiety,
by fretting over it before it comes.  Half the people on our streets
look as though life was a sorry business.  It is hard to find a happy
looking man or woman.  Worry is the cause of their woebegone
appearance.  Worry makes the wrinkles; worry cuts the deep,
down-glancing lines on the face; worry is the worst disease of our
modern times.

Care is contagious; it is hard work being cheerful at a funeral, and it
is a good deal harder to keep the frown from your face when you are in
the throng of the worry worn ones.  Yet, we have no right to be
dispensers of gloom; no matter how heavy our loads may seem to be we
have no right to throw their burden on others nor even to cast the
shadow of them on other hearts.

Anxiety is instability.  Fret steals away force.  He who dreads
to-morrow trembles to-day.  Worry is weakness.  The successful men may
be always wide-awake, but they never worry.  Fret and fear are like
fine sand, thrown into life's delicate mechanism; they cause more than
half the friction; they steal half the power.

Cheer is strength.  Nothing is so well done as that which is done
heartily, and nothing is so heartily done as that which is done
happily.  Be happy, is an injunction not impossible of fulfillment.
Pleasure may be an accident; but happiness comes in definite ways.  It
is the casting out of our foolish fears that we may have room for a few
of our common joys.  It is the telling our worries to wait until we get
through appreciating our blessings.  Take a deep breath, raise your
chest, lift your eyes from the ground, look up and think how many
things you have for which to be grateful, and you will find a smile
growing where one may long have been unknown.

Take the right kind of thought--for to take no thought would be
sin--but take the calm, unanxious thought of your business, your
duties, your difficulties, your disappointments and all the things that
once have caused you fear, and you will find yourself laughing at most
of them.  In some you will see but friends in disguise, and in others
puny foes decked out as giants.  But begin to dread them, brood over
them, look at them with eyes prejudiced with fear, and the least
difficulties rise like mountains.  In winter some people worry
themselves into malaria over the mosquitoes they may meet next summer.

Mistaken ideas of religion are responsible for a great many of the
unnecessary wrinkles on the human face.  Too many have thought it would
be impossible to be happy in two worlds, and so, having elected
happiness in the one which they thought would last longest, they have
no choice but to be unhappy in this one.  In fact, some seem to suppose
that the greater their misery here the more intense will their bliss be
there.  If heaven is to be bought that way certainly many are paying
full price for it.

Burdens we all must bear; but they need not break us.  Sorrows we all
must share; but they need not unmake us.  They will not if we have
learned the Teacher's secret of living; He, the man of sorrows, was the
man who could bequeath to His friends His joy.  To Him life lost its
anxiety, because the chief things of life were not food or raiment, or
even social standing, but manhood and unselfishness to men, and the
possibilities of these were as easily realized in need and adversity as
in riches and prosperity.




V

The Curriculum of Character

  _The Great School_
  _The Purpose of the Course_
  _The Price of Perfection_


_A good many resolutions die of heart failure._

_No man possesses more religion than he practices._

_When men say "our faults" they usually mean yours._

_There are no delights in the worship that dodges duty._

_When fear gets into the pulpit faith goes out of the pews._

_It's not the man with a putty backbone who is most truly resigned to
the will of God._

_When a man buys a horse on its specifications he is likely to call his
folly faith and its consequences the dispensation of Providence._

_It is folly to hope to have a clean heart when you pay no attention to
what enters its doorways._

_Some folks think they have the house of character because they possess
the plans of virtue._

_It is folly to talk of being guided by the light of your conscience
when you take pains to keep it in the dark._


V

THE GREAT SCHOOL

With all our learning the greatest lesson before us is this one of
living right, of finding our full heritage and filling our places as
men and women in this world.  If our systems of education fail to teach
us how to live they fail altogether.

The great need of our day is that we shall train the conscience to
right moral judgment, that we shall educate all for the business of
living, and that we shall so educate all that we shall not only have a
generation of bright, smart, money-making or fame-making machines, but
that we may have clean, upright, truth-loving, self-reverencing,
God-fearing men and women.

There is little likelihood that America will fail for lack of business
ability.  The danger is that we shall fail at the point of character;
that we shall fail where failure is fatal to every other kind of
success.  This is the crucial point.

We do well to perfect the plans by which we teach men the encyclopedia
of their bodies, their country, the world and its history.  But we
cannot forget, and recent events have reminded us with a terrible note
of warning, that no amount of knowledge constitutes any sort, even the
feeblest kind, of guarantee as to rectitude of life.

If you neglect the heart, the will, and conscience, if you neglect the
knowledge of and training in right relations with men, reverence and
right relations to the most high, your culture of the intellect is
worse than waste; it is the perfecting of the poison of our social
life; it is the whetting of the edge of a man's villainy and grossness.

Above all other things, the most desirable is that men shall love truth
and hate a lie; that they shall love honour and truth so much more than
fame, power, or possessions that never for an instant will these weigh
in the scale against the former.  But for long it has been thought that
this choice flower of nobility grew by chance; the culture of the soul
was so mysterious as never to be brought under scientific law.

If a man grew up to be good it was due either to accident or to
miracle.  The realm of character has been the last to come under the
reign of law.  Now we recognize that we must learn to live as truly as
we must learn to read, and that the culture of the soul must profit by
the wondrous strides that all educational science has made; that all
our efforts to produce character must be so wisely directed that we
shall secure the best and most enduring results.

One message comes from the lips of every seer, from every page of
history.  It is that the man or the nation alone is wise, alone finds
enduring life, who sets before commercial supremacy or political power
or fame in learning the glory of righteousness, the beauty of practical
holiness.  Their wealth lies beyond corruption and their days know no
end who are wise and rich in the things within.

The greatest service we can render our day is by giving it the riches
of worthy living, by setting before ourselves the production of high
character through all life's processes of learning, and by bringing in
every way we may to an age engrossed in selfishness and commercialism
the significance of the call of character.

No wonder it sometimes seems to us that we have forgotten to smile;
that our faces are so drawn with the tense struggle of life that we
have lost sight of the meaning of happiness.  How can we be happy
unless we shall set our whole lives in harmony with the things that are
fundamental and eternal?

We must learn to order our lives, not as machines to be driven at the
top of their efficiency in the money mill, but as part of the great
life of the spiritual world, as inheritors of things divine, sublime,
and glorious, as possessors of the joy that made the morning stars sing
together and the beauty that paints the evening red.



THE PURPOSE OF THE COURSE

The early question of the old creeds, "What is the chief end of man?"
was conceived in a spirit more practical than academic.  It was the
voice of the constant inquiry as to the purpose of living.  But the
answer given by the creed lacks the assurance of a moral conviction; it
fails to find any response in us.  "To glorify God and to enjoy Him
forever" may be the portion of angels, but honest men have to confess
that they have no great desire to be angels, yet.

The emphasis of the creed with that as its basis practically was on
dying rather than on living; it owed whatever grip it had on men to the
promise it held, to those who were in the midst of the sordid round of
tasks or the dull, heavy grind of poverty, of a felicitude that knew
neither hunger, fear, nor pain; it offered a heaven forever to those
who could endure a hell for a short time.

The logical consequence was to make dying the chief end of living.  Who
cannot remember being told to despise the present, to consider how
brief it is, like a cloud before the dawn of the endless day?  It was
compared to the short waiting outside some door beyond which was
warmth, cheer, and unending bliss.  So that the pious soul thought of
life only in terms of waiting, watching, enduring.  Piety became
positive only in prospect, negative in the present.

To say to a man, be patient with wrong and oppression to-day and you
will be prospered tomorrow, is to teach him to compound a felony, to
wink at the despoiling of the earth by the iniquitous for the
consideration of a title to the riches of heaven.  It is to lose sight
of the fact that unless the life finds itself now it never will find
itself, that to dwarf a soul to-day is to dwarf it forever.

"Then," says the practical man, "this means that we can ignore the
future; we must make the most of the present; get all you can; keep all
you get; the whole purpose of life is to make a good living, to enjoy
yourself."  This is only the swing of the pendulum away from the old
thought.  The ideal of the present day is material advantage.  The
chief end of man is to make money.  If once he was the slave of an
unjust order, he now is the slave of an unworthy appetite.

Living only for wealth or for wages is not living at all.  Who knows
less of life than the slave of modern commercialism, the man who lifts
his eyes no higher than the pay roll, or the ticker tape?  It is better
to be the victim of a delusion that gives some happiness, that gives
some fortitude, and to live the simple life of the poor than to be the
slave bound to the wheel of modern social greed and money madness.

Life itself is the object of living; the chief end of man is to become
glorious as his ideal of God is glorious, to realize the highest that
comes to him in the song of poet, the vision of seer, the hope of his
own heart.  The money, the acres, the resources are the tools for the
development of life.  This world is a workshop; it has failed utterly
if it produces nothing but an array of machines and a heap of shavings;
it must turn out the finished product of men.

Are you living thus for life, or are you living to do no more than make
a living?  We need to educate our children to set honour, truth,
justice, a high life, before all things, to prize noble attainments so
that they shall not be content with the lesser prizes of prosperity in
things, so that whether we win or lose in the markets of the world we
shall stand rich and glorious in manhood, finding the ends of life in
the achievement of high character and finding in commerce but the
servant of character.



THE PRICE OF PERFECTION

Gold may depreciate, stocks rise or fall, and business values change so
as to leave the market in panic, but every man on the street or in the
store knows that one value forever remains permanent, unvarying, and
that is character.  Every other asset may be swept away and success
still achieved if this remain; every other aid may be at its best and
failure only await him who lacks the wealth of character.

Character is that of which reputation is but the echo, often mistaken
and misleading.  Character is the last, the ultimate, value of life.
It is the trend of the whole being towards the best.  It is the passion
and power that holds one true despite all persuasion.

It is the one thing worth having, because upon it all other values
depend.  The wealth of the whole world still leaves poor him from whom
the soul, the power to appreciate, the purity of heart which sees God
and the good, the peace and quietness of a good conscience, have fled.
When we turn away from our fighting for fame and our grinding for gold
long enough to think, then we know that the things within determine
wholly the value and reality of all things without.

The wise ever have set this treasure above all others.  Happy the
people that love righteousness more than revenue, the way of virtue,
the clear eye, the upward look, and the approval of a good conscience
above all other prosperity or advantage.  The days of national
greatness ever have been those when the things that make manhood bulked
far above all other considerations.  Alike to people and individuals,
the imperishable value ever has been that of character.

This asset comes not to a man by accident.  He who is rich in
character, whose success in many ways is built upon his resources in
this way, does not just simply happen to be good, true, and square.
There is a price to character; it costs more than any other thing, for
it is worth more than all other things.  Essentially it never is
inherited, but always acquired by processes often slow and toilsome and
at great price.

If you would be perfect you must pay the price of perfection.   Unless
the passion of life is this perfection it never will be your
possession.  Dreams of ideal goodness only waste the hours in which it
might have been achieved.  No man ever finds character in his sleep.
The education of the heart is a thing even more definite than the
education of the head.  The school of character has an infinite variety
of courses and an unending curriculum.

Folks who are sighing for goodness usually go away sorrowful when they
learn what it costs.  But life ever is putting to us just such tests as
the wise teacher put to the rich young man.  You say you desire
character, the perfection of manhood or womanhood above all other
things; do you desire this enough to pay for it your ease, your coveted
fame, your cherished gold, perhaps your present good name and peace of
mind?  Is the search for character a passion or only a pastime?

This does not mean that this prize of eternity falls only to those who
devote themselves wholly to self-culture, to the salvation of their own
souls.  The best lives have thought little of themselves, but they have
lived for the ends of the soul, to help men to better living, to save
them from the things that blight and damn the soul.  Like the Leader of
men they have found the life unending by laying down their lives,
paying the full price, selling all in order that right and truth and
honour and purity, love and kindness and justice might remain to man.

The world's wealth depends not on what we have in our hands, nor even
on what we can carry in our heads.  It depends on the things that we
have and the beings we are in our hearts.  Fools we are who live only
to make a living, houses, shelter, food, rags, and toys, who might live
to make a life, and to mold lives, to earn the riches and honour
enduring; who have not learned the gain of all loss that leads the
heart to look up, the joy of all sorrow that sweetens the soul, and the
profit from every sacrifice that is a paying of the price of perfection.




VI

The Age-Long Miracle

  _The Sufficient Sign_
  _Behold the Man_
  _The Life that Lifts_


_Silent goodness speaks loudest._

_Our loads lift us up to strength._

_Life grows as love is given._

_From the grind of drudgery comes at last the glorious divine spark._

_The spirit of the father never works separation in the family._

_That day best fulfills its purpose which is a preparation for the
next._

_The proof of a faith is not in its prestige, but in its present power._

_Things divine are not defended by dodging._

_It is the heart that gives ease to any work._

_The door of truth never opens to the key of prejudice._

_Love never knows how much it gives nor what it costs._


VI

THE SUFFICIENT SIGN

The scribe and the Pharisee are still with us.  "Establish the
credibility of the miracles of Jesus, or, better still, let Him work a
miracle to-day, and we will believe," they say.  This age is credulous;
it hungers to believe the extraordinary.  Yet, while it is running
after folly, it is blind to the most extraordinary fact, the most
stupendous miracle that ever took place, although it goes on right
before its eyes and is open to every kind of proof.  It cannot see the
miracle of Jesus in the world to-day, the miracle beside which all the
works He did in His lifetime sink into insignificance.

Here is the sign to-day offered to the skeptic: Once, nearly twenty
centuries ago, a young preacher travelled and taught through the
villages and by the wayside in an obscure oriental country.  He
addressed a subject race, insular in their prejudices, lacking in
political genius and in artistic culture.  He lived in days calculated
to chill the most fervid religious enthusiasm.  He was at first ignored
and then hated by His own people; the religious leaders became His
implacable foes.  His work ended in apparent failure, in a death of
shame.

But that was not the end.  It is strange that the world remembers
anything about that young preacher; but stranger still is the fact that
to-day He influences more than half the population of the globe,
surpassing all other teachers, more people are under His sway now than
the whole world held when He lived.  These millions make Him the object
of their worship and devotion; in His name they gather regularly all
over the world, without regard to language or race.

More than this, this one whom the wise men of His day ignored has been
the inspiration of the works of genius and art, of the deeds of
heroism, of the lofty endeavours of the world since He died.  He has
changed the mind.  He has changed the appearance of the world; by Him
nations have fallen and risen.  The humble, the despised, the rejected
has become the world's hero, the mightiest of all the sons of men, the
saviour of His race.

Once He touched a few who were blind and lame and they were healed;
to-day in His name, in every city, a thousand suffering ones are made
whole.  Science does the work; but the opportunity for its development
and the inspiration for its application came from Him.

Nor is this all.  He made the world to see; He touched the blind eyes
of the people, as they groped in superstition, and has given them
sight; He has made the ages, once limping and halting, to arise and
march forward with magnificent tread; He found the world a babel of
jarring voices and fretting purposes, and His touch gave peace and
singleness of purpose until men could discern that "through the ages
one unceasing purpose runs."  He did for man and mind what was first
done for matter, brought the cosmos out of chaos.  This is the miracle
indeed.

It goes right on before our eyes.  They take His name to a dead people,
and soon there is life there.  Light, and love, and larger life spring
up everywhere in His name.  From this modern miracle of the power, the
growing authority, the kingship of the once despised Jesus we cannot
escape; we are perforce participants in its benefits; it conditions all
our lives.

If all the gospel stories could be proved myths and the miracles but
inventions, there would still remain the greater, the insuperable
miracle of the world's picture of the perfect and all glorious
personality of Jesus and the fact of His preeminent power in the world
to-day.  This is the sign He gives this age, and to this the open mind
answers: "Thou art the Christ, the saviour of the world."



BEHOLD THE MAN

The two words, "Ecce homo," contemptuously spoken by the cynical Roman
governor contained the highest tribute that had been given to Jesus.
How empty appear all the high sounding titles, such as king and
emperor, beside this significant one of Man.  How sad and self-damning
the bitter railing of His enemies in the light of that serene dignity.
How puerile the bickering over words and ways of worship, and all the
wrangling that blinded them to the heavenly radiance of that all
glorious manhood.  The wonder of Jesus is not in the deeds He did, but
in the being He was.  And the wonder of His being is not in that it
offers elements for arguments as to a divine personality, but it is
that of a simple, clear, sublimely perfect manhood.  It is upon this
perfection of personal character that His abiding claim to divinity
must rest; it depends not on His birth but on His being.

There is something strange about the perversity with which the church
has emphasized the least attractive aspects of its master's person.
The preachers have scolded men for not coming to church, and when they
did come they offered them pictures of an emaciated, effeminate being
for their adoration.  With them the painters have conspired to set on
canvas and in church window representations from the reality of which
we would turn with repulsion or on which we would look with pity.

If Jesus is to be the leader of men He must go before them.  He must
stand in the front, not set there by artificial arguments as to His
right to rule over men, but there because He belongs there, first
because He is first in all that makes manhood; He is king because He
can, and because He has overcome in life's great conflict.

If He is to show us the way we should go He must walk in that way; He
must be flesh of our flesh, true man, knowing the full fellowship of
our lives.  If He was born with a halo; if He lived on angel's fare; if
somehow He belongs to another world and His perfections are not those
of our nature, then, almighty as He may be as a leader for beings of
another world, He has no value to us.

But men have ever set aside the weavings of minds so absorbed in the
wonder of their speculations that they could not see the truth.  They
have seen through the dreamings of poets, painters, and preachers, who
pictured only their sickly ideals.  And, instead of their caricatures,
men have held in their hearts a man, one of their own.  And this true
fellow, brother and friend, has spurred them to noble deeds and lofty
living.

Perfection is seen in strength, not in weakness, in virility and not in
tears, in majesty, the majesty truly of meekness, but not of a maudlin,
mooning etherealism.  The revelation of the perfect man cannot come in
a form that a child will pity; it will be admirable from all points of
view.  It is the heroic rather than the esthetic we must admire.

The men who followed that one long ago did so not because they had
heard arguments as to His divine claims, but because they were drawn by
the heavenly power of His manhood.  This it is that wins men ever, the
magnetism of manhood.  The force of a great life is mightier than any
of the things it does.  There is about this leader, Jesus, that which
compels us to greatness, spurs us to strife for our better selves,
strengthens to sacrifice and to service for our fellows.

It matters little whence a life like this has come; the greater
question is where does it lead us.  Childish minds spend time on the
genealogical trees of the giants; the wise men follow them.  The value
of the life of the great Teacher does not depend on our ability to
comprehend it biologically or arrange it chronologically, but on our
vision of its moral and manly perfections and on the power these
attributes have over our lives.

This world will be little helped by the most irrefutable syllogism
concerning the peculiar nature and separate exclusive divinity of its
great religious Teacher.  But lives will be lifted everywhere in the
measure that they see the man in Him who taught us of God.  For men
need not so much a God who has come down as a man who has attained to
God, not a descent, but an ascent, one who is the life and the truth
because He is the way which they may tread up to the glory that is
their heritage and the God who is their own.



THE LIFE THAT LIFTS

To any save the few in the group of His friends that statement of Jesus
that being lifted up He would draw all men to Him must have sounded
like the ravings of one deluded.  It has taken the centuries to show
that He was right.  He was right in His estimation of His life's end;
it was a lifting up.  His enemies thought it a casting down, a defeat;
He knew it to be a triumph.  Sorrow, injustice, oppression, hatred, the
things that seem to crush are the things that elevate.  Only by
opposition has any life discovered power.  The fiercer blow these winds
the firmer grows the tree.  Out of the petty persecutions, the
countless meannesses, the littleness of those who oppose him the great
soul builds its greatness.  It is, and ever has been by a cross that
men are lifted up.  History abounds with prisons, gibbets, and crosses
which have become thrones of eternal glory.

Whether we shall be cast down or lifted up depends upon ourselves;
neither enemies nor adverse circumstances have the power to do this.
The soul that seeks the stars builds its staircase out of the stones
flung by the persecutor, out of the rocks of difficulties.  If your
heart is great, my brother, nothing can keep you from greatness; if it
is mean, no amount of o'ervaulting ambition can make you other than a
little, obscure man, as truly lost on the peak as you would be at the
base.

Jesus died a failure; His friends were few, and the best of them
thought His life a mistake.  It takes more than the span of our lives
to measure their size.  It is better that a great soul should be called
a failure than that it should die a shrivelled success.  Earth measures
by what the hands hold; heaven by the heart.  The hands at last lose
their grasp, but the heart wealth goes on from more to more.  This it
is that is worth while.

Jesus was right when He said that He would draw all men to Him.  Then
it sounded like folly; to-day it demonstrates His divine insight.
Lifted up in shame the riches of His life were revealed.  After all,
the best in us answers to the best; it is love that leads.  In the end,
goodness, truth, gentleness, sincerity have the greatest attraction for
men.  Jesus is known and loved by millions who never heard of Nero or
of Augustus.  Their glory was that of circumstance; His that of
character.  His life lifts.

This it is that most helps the world; not learning, but a life; not
power or position, but simple passion for men; not riches, but wealth
of the inner life.  You may not found a university or build libraries
or hospitals, or even write books or preach sermons.  But every one may
do the principal thing that Jesus did.  That was to live a life amongst
men of love for them, of simple kindnesses, of God-seeking aspiration,
of white sincerity.  The race needs not so much men who will shake it
with their power or dazzle it with their learning as it needs men and
women who will lift it with the quiet earnestness and sincerity of
their lives.  Herein is lasting greatness and true power, to live as He
lived, to love as He loved, true to God, to yourself, and to your
fellows, seeking the best and giving of your best.

Service and sacrifice are the things that lift to the supreme places;
the lower you stoop in helpfulness the higher you are lifted in lasting
glory.  And they are lifted to heaven, they achieve immortality, they
can never die who were willing to die if death lay in the path of duty,
to be sacrificed if sacrifice was part of their service.




VII

Seeing the Unseen

  _The Sense of the Unseen_
  _The Brook in the Way_
  _That Which is High_


_The song of sympathy never comes until the singer has been to the
school of sorrow._

_True spirituality can see the altar in the cookstove and the washtub._

_People who are always off the key are never content out of the choir._

_The only version of the Bible authorized by heaven is that on two
feet._

_Every life must have days in the desert but it does not need to build
its house there._

_Many a man thinks he is patient with pain when he is only perverse in
eating pickles._

_No man knows how much religion he has until he goes of fishing alone
where mosquitoes are many._

_There are too many people to whom God has given wings who are
complaining of corns._

_It is some consolation to know that when you aim at nothing you are
sure to hit it._

_If you have large reserves of religion you will not be without the
small change of kindness._


VII

THE SENSE OF THE UNSEEN

When the practically-minded man Paul writes of looking at the things
which are not seen his words sound like either fantasy or folly.   Yet
it is plain fact, practical, and certainly essential to any success.
He is blind who can see only with his eyes, and he only is sensible who
knows there are many things beyond his senses.  Practical men consider
all the factors to every problem, and things are not less real to them
because they may chance to be intangible.

The unseen things are imminent to us always.  There are many things not
yet pigeonholed by our science nor catalogued by our philosophies.  You
can dissect a daisy and enumerate its parts; but you never know a daisy
until you have seen the unseen things thereof, until you have felt the
subtle appeal of its beauty.  Bobbie Burns saw more of the daisy than
the greatest botanist without his spiritual eyes.

The danger is that in our hard workaday we shall forget the reality of
the unseen, we shall get to think that gold and steel and land are the
only real things, and we shall shape ourselves by the blind and base
creed of gold, and steel, and land.  How easy it is to measure every
man by his possessions in tangible things.  How easy to make these our
chief end in life, to slight the real prizes, the unseen wealth that
lies so close at hand or already possessed, while we rush and strive
for the rainbow of riches.

Deep within us we know that he is rich, and he alone, who has wisdom,
love, patience, who possesses friends, who creates kindly thoughts,
whose life with simple joy abounds.  Once again and often do we need to
see Bunyan's picture of the man bending over his refuse, gathered with
the muck rake, and heedless of the angel holding the crown that only
waits his taking.

A man is wealthy according to what is within him.  His greatness is of
the things that are unseen.  There are limits to the possession and the
use of the things that are seen; but who shall set a limit to a man's
possible wealth in love and honour, in wisdom and integrity, in all the
things that make up the soul of man?  Few are the things that a man may
hold for his own all the days of his life, and fewer still are those he
may grasp with pleasure when the hands are falling helpless by his
side.  But many are the riches he may have to hold forever in the
things of the unseen.  Many a man walks through the fields penniless
and yet richer far than their owner; to him the birds sing, for him the
flowers bloom, to his eyes there are beauties in the blue beyond all
words, and all the loveliness of the fair land lifts his heart within
him.  The other man who holds the title deeds sees nothing beside them.
Possession is wholly a matter of appreciation.  The earth is the Lord's
and He gives it to those who have eyes to see.

It is the eye to see the unseen that gives wealth to the seen.  Values
depend on vision.  Appreciation does not prevent possession; it makes
the possession actual.  And the vision of the realities behind things
keeps a man from the sense of destitution when all things are taken
from him.  He cannot be destitute.  He may lose all his fellows, but he
cannot be friendless; the Father of Spirits cannot lose him, nor can he
be cut off from fellowship with those who die no more.

The seeing eye is the stimulus to the worth while endeavour.  The
inventors who have enriched the world endured derision seeing the
things invisible to others.  The truth is that it is the unspiritual
world that makes the least progress in things material.  The men of
faith and vision are back of all advance.  They have endurance,
patience, and strength.  The sense of another world where motives are
rightly measured, the sense of a great cloud of worthy witnesses to
other eyes invisible, the sense of reward in the very service itself,
rewards intangible yet most real, the joy of sacrifice and service;
these all enable one to push on, to toil, to endure.  Then, long
afterwards, the dull, weary world sees and understands.



THE BROOK IN THE WAY

Alongside every highway runs the brook whereof a man may drink often if
he will and drinking lift up his head.  Its little song we scarce hear
in the rush of our businesses; its refreshing we forget even though our
throats be parched with the dust of our petty affairs.  Yet it is ever
there, cool, refreshing, this world of spirits and ideals.

Nature has a prodigal way of scattering rivulets down the hillside and
along the pathways, little heeding whether men walk there or not.  The
practical eye sees waste; these streams might have been made to turn
wheels; the needs of the traveller, weary with the way, might be met by
faucets at regular intervals.

It is well for us all that the power of the practical man finds its
limitations, else all poetry would have gone from the world, and great
and glorious as might have been our physical perfections our bodies
would be but the empty habitations whence souls had long since fled.
The utilitarian would have stolen from us the bliss of the deep draft
from the pebbly brook.

The man who is proud of being practical tells us we are wasting time
and nervous energy in stopping to think of ideal things; we must take
the world as we find it, he says, forgetting how fair and poetic we
once found it and how bleak and ugly we are likely to leave it.  But to
him trees are always lumber, grass and flowers but hay, bird songs
spell poultry, wind and waters energy.  Many are too busy making things
ever to enjoy anything that is made.

In this steel age it may seem folly and waste to stop and think of
sacrifice and courage and love, to admire and answer to the thrill of
human passions; but alas for him who never sees the light of heaven in
another's tear, nor hears the brush of angels' wings when men and women
fly to their fellow's aid.

If you haven't time in your busy life to turn aside to drink of the
brook of human affection, to look deep into the eyes of friendship, to
sympathize, to comfort, to taste this strange sweet and bitter cup of
our common fellowship, then is your heart going dry and thirsty and
life becoming a whitened road that knows no wells or springs.

But something there is in man that calls for drafts at yet deeper
streams than these.  Foolish and unlearned he may be, ignorant of the
wise conclusions of philosophers who have looked into these things with
their lanterns, but through the ages he has been drinking eagerly at
the waters of eternity.  In every man there is a thirst after the deep,
immeasurable things divine; the deeper the nature of the man the
greater his necessity for drinking often here.

The consciousness of the great life that embraces all life, the sense
of its nearness to us all, has been a perennial refreshing to all great
hearts.  In some way to bring the life into touch with the infinite is
to take down its limitations, break its barriers, and give it a sense
of infinitude, to lift up the head in vision of the divinity of our
lives and of every life.  We who walk in the dust often need to be
filled with the divine lest we become ourselves but dust.

This world of things is hungry for the life that is more than things,
the life of the spirit; that is why so many love to sing of heaven and
dream of a fair world peopled by strange and glorious celestial ones.
Heaven is nearer than we think; like the brook by the way, the life of
the spirit flows beside this life; happy they who drink of its waters,
who already enter into eternity, who find strength for this life's way
and work by the contact with the life that is life indeed.

Is it any wonder that life is a wearisome thing, a dead drag, when you
are starving its very sources?  You neglect the soul at the peril of
all.  So anxious are you to run this race that you have no time to
allow him who rides in the chariot to drink of the water of life.  This
is not utilitarianism; this is suicide from the centre out.

The most practical common sense demands that you feed the inner places
of your life, the heart that has gone so long thirsty and longing for
love, for things too deep for words, for things that cannot be used and
cannot be quoted in dollars.  Give your inner life its deep drafts of
the infinite life and your outer life shall take its place and do its
work in the world.



THAT WHICH IS HIGH

There are two ways of viewing the oncoming years, as burdens or as
opportunities, with fear or with expectation.  The days of the new year
may loom up as a series of unwelcome tasks to be unwillingly done or as
so many invitations to attempt and achieve great things.  The
difference between these two points of view marks the difference
between enduring life and finding the life that endures.

The wise preacher of long ago caught sight of one of these distinctions
that cut clear through to the roots of things.  He says that the sign
of old age is that a man is "afraid of that which is high."  When
courage and ambition have gone old age and decrepitude have entered in,
no matter whether a man be eighteen or eighty.

He alone has youth, he alone has life before him, who can still catch
the vision of the ideal, of that which is high, who can lift up his
eyes beyond the horizon of practicabilities and precedents and see the
things not yet realized.  There is a time when men must dream dreams
and see visions, when they must feast on noble purposes or die so far
as the inner spirit and all that makes real living is concerned.

If you find the will becoming dull and listless, with no quickening of
the pulses, but only apathy or a sneer for the high purpose or the
great promise, it is but a sign of the approach of senility, of the
failure of the powers.  When the ambition can be satisfied with the
less while the greater is before it, when things low and base are
preferred to things high, afar off, and difficult to attain, the heart
is dying already.

Cherish as the spark of life the aspiration to have and do and be the
best.  Yet who is there does not know the paralyzing chill that the
sneer of the philistine or even the memory of our own many failures can
give when great possibilities offer themselves to us?  How easily enter
in the cold considerations that deaden our aspirations; how subtle the
temptation to be content with the condition that involves neither toil
nor pain.  How hard to realize that this is an invitation to death.

To all men comes the thrill of the passion to do some great thing, to
give to our world some worthy service.  To yield to this is to keep the
heart young, is to defy time, to conquer the years.  Whether the coming
days shall bend the back with their burdens or shall nerve and
strengthen the life does not depend on whether they have cares or joys
in them, but on whether they find us responsive to the call of noble
things.

No man can afford to let a pure and lofty impulse die, nor, for fear of
failure or of ridicule, to become afraid or ashamed of his ideals.
Living is more than a dull feeding at tables or troughs, more than
shelter and sleep; it is growing, climbing, becoming, finding higher
levels and seeing yet higher before.

Nor is this all; the spirit of greatness finds ample play in daily
duties.  The success of the year does not depend on whether you can do
things that shall amaze men to-day or make your name known forever, but
upon whether into all the things you do, lowly, humdrum, commonplace as
they may seem to be, the daily duties of home or shop or store, the
care of the baby, or the running of a typewriter, there shall enter the
great and high motive.

This is what we all need, the high vision of the lowly things, the
sight of the fact that the least piece of work is an essential part of
the service of the whole universe, that a man serves the Divine not by
wearing a black coat but by doing, as in God's name, with high motives
the least duties that may be his.  It is not place nor authority nor
wage that makes the work high or low; it is the spirit of the service
and the part it plays in the world's great business of perfecting
humanity.

Would you ward off old age, cherish vitality and give value to your
days, seek the things that are above, the life that serves some worthy
end.  One is young as long as his heart leaps responsive to a noble
call.  But he who lives to pleasure, to the satisfaction of self, who
has shut his eyes to the high things that call for self-denial, for
toil and loss, is dead already.




VIII

Sources of Strength and Inspiration

  _Strength for the Daily Task_
  _The Sense of the Infinite_
  _The Great Inspiration_


_Living heartily is one secret of living happily._

_Life is early blighted if it knows no clouds._

_You can tell the character of any age by the place it gives to
character._

_There is little danger in the discontent with conditions that is
equalled by discontent with character._

_Heart health never comes so long as the hand is kept on the pulse._

_Feed on garbage and you soon lose faith in good things._

_The fruitful life seeks showers as well as sunshine._

_It's hard for a man who has ground of his nose on the money mill to
smell a taint on anything._

_Many a man goes back by trying to put up a good front and nothing
more._

_Every life is worth the love it gives._


VIII

STRENGTH FOR THE DAILY TASK

It is the dull grind and monotony of life that makes it so hard to bear
for the ninety-nine per cent. of us.  Sometimes it seems as though we
spend all our days toiling, wearing strength, and hope, and heart away
for no other end than to gain just bread and shelter so as to keep the
machine in condition for further toil.

How hopeless is the outlook of many a life!  The mother with the weary
round of home duties day after day, the father who goes to the same
task year after year, seeing the same people, doing the same things,
and coming home at the day's end with the same weariness, only
augmented as age makes itself felt--all who toil feel at times these
depressing limitations.

Little wonder that lives snatch at every fleeting, alluring promise of
relief, through amusement, through anything that offers change and
excitement.  Little wonder that, robbed of opportunity for vision, they
foment blind discontent, so that we all feel there is a mighty
substratum of wretchedness and of menace lying under our social order.

Yet there are few lives, perhaps no worthy ones, without tasks that
often seem monotonous and become matters of dull grinding that bring
weariness and longing for relief.  All worth while work involves much
tediousness, painstaking exertion.  All great things stand for so much
life poured out, and life is never poured out without pain and loss.

The stern Puritan was doubtless wrong when he saw nothing in life but
repression and stern duty, but he was nearer right than he who looks
only for frivolity and amusement.  Life is too large a business to be
always light and trivial.  Yet we must not allow its high purposes to
be thwarted by robbing ourselves and our fellows of all joy and
brightness and converting life into dull, mechanical servitude.

How may we find that proportion of toil and relief, that happy mixture
of duty and delight that shall make life not only endurable but also
useful, fruitful, and enjoyable?  For it is man's duty to be happy;
otherwise he can never be useful in any high or valuable sense.

It would be easy to try to give comfort by the philosophy which sees
the fine fruitage that is coming from to-day's stern discipline.  That
fair fruitage is coming, but the trouble is it is too far off to give
us much comfort now; we want something nearer and more easily
apprehended.  Then, too, the truth is no high fruitage will ever issue
from a life crushed by slavish subjection.

After all, what life is to every one of us depends not on the demands
of outer circumstances, but on the development of the life within.  The
heart determines the worth and beauty of life.  It makes all the
difference whether the physical determines its circumference or whether
you have an intellect that is reaching out to the things unmeasurable
and a soul that grows into glory indescribable.

You can tie a great soul down hand and brain to a loom or a machine and
he will still see his visions and dream his deep, refreshing dreams;
you can set the brutish being down in a gallery of the world's
treasures of art and beauty and he will think of nothing and see
nothing but bread and beer.

We must do our dull and heavy tasks, but we can do them and not be
crushed by them so long as within there are fragrant memories, high
aspirations, great thoughts; so long as the task does not set the
boundary of the life.  And it is the cherishing of these eternal riches
within that lifts any life and makes it worthy of higher tasks.

We need to seek out the springs of noble thoughts, to find in the
riches of the world's literature, in music, and in beauty of art the
food for that inner life in the strength of which, drawing often on its
secret resources, we can go many days through the desert of toil.

The wise life uses every opportunity of refreshing; it drinks of every
spring of the up-welling waters of life; it seeks communion with every
great soul.  Holidays and rest days are to it times of replenishing
when the eyes that ache from bending over the machine or desk lift
themselves to the eternal hills and the heart turns to the things that
are infinite.



THE SENSE OF THE INFINITE

One does not have to believe in the same kind of a god as did the seers
and singers of long ago in order to obtain the spiritual values which
they found in the thought of his nearness to them.  David and Browning,
Isaiah and Whittier, with all the centuries between them, still come to
the same thought--we know that Thou art near.

Through all ages and in all peoples this sense of that which is other
than ourselves, from which our highest good comes, towards which our
ideals and aspirations strain, the ultimate force of our being, this
feeling after the infinite is universal.  It is the essential and
determinative mark of every religion.

When those singers of long ago tried to express their sense of the
infinite life and love they used words which make it appear that they
thought only of some being larger, mightier, wiser than themselves,
yet, after all, like themselves, a great man deified because He was
great.  Perhaps that really was their conception; still, we use
precisely the same language, even though our ideas are entirely
different.

It makes relatively little difference what their conceptions were, so
far as ours are concerned.  Their words are not accurate, detailed pen
pictures of some being who can be described or photographed.  No man
has seen the infinite at any time.  The great thing is that ever and
everywhere men find themselves with a hunger after this sublime unseen.

One may use terms of personality and another terms of power; to one the
infinite may be but a local deity; to another, that which embraces all
spirit and being, and each may have all of the divine his heart is
capable of containing.   Here none may dogmatize for others.

Religion does not depend on uniformity of conceptions of the divine.
It depends more upon universality of consciousness of the infinite and
openness of mind and life to whatever we may feel and know, from any
source or through any means whatsoever, of that life or energy which
lies back of all life and energy, of that love and light which cheer
and lighten every son of man.

Definitions determine nothing, but they do work great damage when minds
capable of being stereotyped to them agree to impose those definitions
on their fellows as final, authoritative, and essential to their
welfare.  The divine is neither infinite nor sublime when you can say,
Here are His lineaments and He has no other likeness or appearance.

To the question, How shall we think of the divine? there can be but one
answer--in higher, wider, deeper, nobler, purer ways than yesterday.
The conception must be a developing one.  A man's spiritual capacities
develop as his inner vision becomes more keen.  The soul takes wider
flight, and in our deep thoughts we discover that which language cannot
compass.

There are those who think they must be atheists because they cannot
believe in the God of the Hebrews, the God of the Old Testament--a
limited personality.  But the genuine atheists are more likely to be
those who are without a sense of the divine, because they have taken
definitions and descriptions prepared by others instead of seeking
truth for themselves.

We are but poor learners of those ancient teachers if we have not
discovered that their greatest lesson to us is not truth, as they had
found it, but the blessing of the persistent search after truth.  To
cherish as final past presentations of truth is to be false to its
present possibilities.

We do not need to worry over definitions of the divine.  We do need to
cultivate the temper of mind and the sensitiveness of spirit that will
save us from blindness to the higher facts of life, that will save us
from the blasting whirlwind of materialism, with its sense of nothing
but a soulless world of things.

We need to avoid the mind that shuts the divine up in some far off
heaven to be reached only by formal telephony called prayer; that fails
to see the infinite in all things--in sunlight and flower, in
children's laughter, and in misery's wail, in factories and stores, as
well as in churches.  We need the mind that argues not about
omnipresence, but in duty and delight cries, Always and everywhere,
Thou art near.


THE GREAT INSPIRATION

Christianity is distinguished and dominated by the ideal of the life
and character of Jesus of Nazareth; it is a philosophy and a system of
individual and social ethics under the inspiration of a glowing ideal.
No matter how greatly its people may differ on other points, all are
agreed in recognizing in Jesus the fairest of the sons of men.

There never was a time when the thought of this life was more potent
than it is to-day.  Men think of Him as a fellow being, one who went
about doing good, who looked out on life with the windows of His soul
unsullied and who lived out ever the holiest and highest that came to
Him.

The thought of such a one has become so real to men that they do not
stop to argue about His existence, as once they did.  If it was
possible indisputably to disprove the historic Christ men still would
cherish, as highly as ever, the ideal, the vision of such a life, and
in their hearts would know that such a picture could only have been
born of such a person.

This goodly, glorious man no longer is one who now sits on the throne
of heaven.  Men are not particularly concerned as to whether He is
artistically glorified and perpetuated by some divine decree.  He has
crowned Himself in the glory of a pure and beneficent character; He has
perpetuated Himself in human loves and admiration.

Because He once showed Himself as the friend of all, the pure, high
souled friend of the down-trodden and the outcast, the strong,
invigorating friend of the rich and successful, He to-day walks by many
a man as His unseen friend, and in busy mart or office men feel the
presence of a heavenly guest.

Once men made that life the centre of dispute; they sought to prove His
divinity by His unlikeness to ordinary humanity.  But the facts
defeated them.  This man whom men so learned to love that they became
willing to die for Him was in all respects a man.  His life is worth so
much to us because He was so much like us.

It has come as a new revelation to the world that the supreme religious
soul of the ages should be so tenderly, naturally human.  We cry
"Father!" with a new sense of relationship and fellowship when we see
the likeness of the father in the face of such a son.

We are coming to believe that just what the great friend of mankind was
so is the great father of us all to us all, that just as the Son of the
most high moved amongst men seeking to help, cheering, comforting,
loving, so is the eternal spirit moving in our world, going about doing
good.

Once every effort of the theologian was bent to setting this majestic
figure apart from mankind to secure Him sovereignty over us by
separation from us.  How different is that from the simple pictures
drawn of Him, from the naturalness of His life, from the love which He
had for homes and human friendships, from the life which earned the
illuminating rebuke of being called a friend of sinners.

It is a good thing for us all often to remember that there has been
such a life, that one born in poverty and unknown, far removed from
centres of culture and wealth, living the hard life of a peasant,
knowing all our temptations and weaknesses, yet should open His life so
fully and completely to spiritual influences as to become to all the
ages the greatest of all spiritual leaders.

What one has done another may do.  What He has been we may be.  He but
shows the possibility of any life.  He had no advantage over us; we
know no disadvantages against which He did not have to strive.  The
divine heights have been scaled by human feet; His footprints beckon us
on.




IX

Finding Foundations

  _The Passing and Permanent_
  _Facing the Facts_
  _The Real Foundation_


_Things not right can never be religious._

_Bigotry puts blinders on the best of men._

_Submission is the first step to sovereignty._

_The principle of expediency expels all other principle._

_Quiet lives are often eloquent._

_The love of wealth steals wealth of love._

_It's the common virtues that make uncommon saints._

_Many a man is shouting his convictions to drown the voice of
conscience._

_A little learning is dangerous if you are planning to get to heaven by
degrees._

_When a man gets over anxious about the gnat it's time to hang on to
the camel._


IX

THE PASSING AND PERMANENT

When the walls are being rebuilt it is easy to imagine that the
foundations are being destroyed.  Old creeds pass away, but truth
remains; if they were true in their day they do but give place to the
larger truth of the new day.  We need to distinguish between the
turmoil attendant to the process of building and the beauty of the new
temple that arises.

The old folks hear the new truths and ask, where are the foundations
gone?  The young hear the discussion between the old and the new and
ask, is there anything settled, anything worth believing?  What are the
permanent elements in religion on which the life may build while the
things that are but temporary are adjusting themselves?

It would be the height of folly to assert that there is no change.
Some say that we must believe precisely the same things as our fathers
believed.  To do so would be to be false to our fathers, for they
refused to accept the traditions of their elders.  The landmarks we
leave behind once were far in front of the seekers after truth.

Truth never changes but our vision is ever enlarging.  The road
remains, but the traveller moves on.  With the living every day has
some new light.  Creeds are crystallized statements of truth; truth is
vital and cannot be contained in unchanging forms.  Credulity blindly
accepts yesterday's picture of truth; faith, with open eyes, seeks
to-day's truth itself.

Skepticism is much less sinful than credulity.  The sloth of the man
who will not examine things, will not prove them, who prefers to buy
his garments of truth ready made, results in what is worse than
unbelief, and that is blind belief in the false.  It is a religious
duty to question every teaching, to prove all things.

How may we find those things that are certain?  How may we discover the
truth for our day, the truth upon which we may build?  Surely there are
some things fixed and certain, there is somewhere pole star and
compass.  How may we find that truth which belongs to our day and in
which we may have the confidence that our fathers had in their truth?

The test of the vital truths is a practical one.  Only those truths are
vital which concern the present business of living in all its wide
sweep.

It is a matter of indifference what we may think of the colour of
angels' hair or the number of strings to their harps; it is a vastly
different matter what we may believe as to moral obligations, human
rights, and duties.

The test of creed is an ethical one.  What things work out best in
living, what are the ideals, doctrines, beliefs that make the noblest
characters and the most useful citizens, the best sons, and daughters,
and parents, and neighbours?  What are the things that help me most in
my life, the things that give me moral stimulus and bracing, the things
that lead me to covet the best?

The way to find the truth is to do the truth; only the truth that we
can do is worth discussing.  If you will give yourself to the business
of living the truth you have you soon will have the living truth for
this new day.

Too many people are holding up as saving doctrines matters of
philosophy and speculation, matters of childish curiosity, because it
is easier to hold these things theoretically than to hold living truth
practically.  The truths that save men are the ones that change their
characters; the great authorized and divine translation of the Bible is
its translation into present day lofty living.

Build your life on the belief in goodness, in eternal, infinite
goodness as the order of the universe, on the superiority of love to
hatred, on the final victory of love and goodness, on the ideal of this
great human family of ours that shall come to live in unity and
brotherliness, and so fulfill the will of the infinite father of all.
These things work well.



FACING THE FACTS

This is the age of the dominance of science.  When a man asks, What
shall I believe? only one answer can be returned: Believe the things
that are.  An age now past found it easy to believe that it believed
what it was told, even the things that it knew were not so.  But to-day
at least has the merit of finding no merit in that form of
self-deception.

The passion for absolute truth and rightness is one of the noblest that
can spring up in any breast; it is a ripe fruit of religion.  The
scientist, by his devotion to exact facts, to pure truth, is the
religious man of our day, and the schools become religious educators in
their power to instill a primary love for truth and to lift up ideals
of exactness and equity.

When we translate religion into terms of life, into actuality as
contrasted with imagination, we begin to discover the necessity for
foundations deeper than legend or romance.  So long as a man's religion
consisted in what he might picture in glowing colours of imagination on
the canvas of fancy about his past or future he did not need to take
his designs from facts.

But when religion becomes the science of right living, the process of
securing right social relationships and character as the expression of
ideal personal and individual character, it is evident that in such a
work religion must proceed on ascertained, indisputable verities.

We may be satisfied with myths as to the ordering of the first family,
and we may leave to the play of fancy the specifications of an ideal
heaven; but when we begin to order our own families and adjust our
social and civic affairs we are compelled to wait for principles based
on facts, for truth.  Religion thus becomes a science.

Much eloquence was spilled over the conflict between religion and
science.  It was only a conflict between the old religion and its new
form, between the gray dawn and the growing day.  Our fathers were not
wilfully false, holding on to darkness when the light came; but they so
long had held sacred the pictures seen in twilight they were loath to
give them up for those of the full day's printing.

The most damaging infidelity is the lack of faith in truth, the fear
that it might not be safe to allow all the facts to be known.  He who
in the name of religion seeks to prevent our seeing and accepting the
full facts is religion's greatest foe.  Only the full truth can set us
fully free, intellectually, spiritually, morally.

Why should we fear the light of investigation on the things of
religion?  There is more sacredness in simple truth than in secrecy.
It were better to be lost forever seeking truth than saved by
sophistry.  How foolish to attempt to adjust our lives by laws built
out of speculation, to attempt to steer by a compass when there is no
pole of truth?

In to-day's changing tides of thought, when the old faiths seem
slipping away, when we wonder why we have lost the simple faith of our
own youth or our father's, looking for some firm ground for our feet,
we do well to set them down on nothing but facts, to discriminate among
the sands of time and the alluvial deposits of tradition till we find
the rock of truth.

But facing the facts we find everywhere one writ large, over all one
great principle of unchanging law, one great purpose moving through all
nature and all history, and what we once only dared to hope and dream,
that back of all there throbs infinite love and there rules infinite
wisdom, now is attested by the impressive array of the witnesses of
science.

Truth always is safe.  The holiest error must be born of hell.  We can
make no mistake in refusing to go beyond truth, and we will find that
she leads to the ordering of life according to eternal laws, to the
doing of duties and finding of sweet joys as old as the hills and as
unchanging; she will lead in the paths of rightness.

Some day our race will know all the alphabet of nature and be able to
read the story of the unchanging goodness; some day we shall comprehend
the wavering handwriting of history; some day we shall catch the
harmony of love and law; we shall know the full truth that is religion;
shall know things as they are and be what we should be.



THE REAL FOUNDATION

A good many thousand sermons have been preached on the parable of the
houses built on sand and on rock, probably nearly all of them with the
intent to prove that the way to build the life on a rock foundation is
to pass through the experience known as conversion, obtain saving faith
and join the church.  This is typical of a popular way of interpreting
the scriptures: First, determine what you wish them to mean and then
make them mean that.  The purpose being to persuade people to join the
church, then by hook or crook that duty must be discovered in every
divine precept.

But this is simply to ignore the plain words of the great Teacher.   It
would be impossible to clarify His statement: "If any man hears and
does the things I have been teaching he is like one who builds on a
rock."  One thing marks the rock founded life, the doing of Christly
deeds.  The course of conduct, the kind of character He has just
outlined in the sermon on the mount gives the established staple
character.

The enduring life is not built on dreams.  Many people think that their
lives are rock founded because they have a nebulous admiration for the
moral teachings of Jesus.  On the whole they admire the sermon on the
mount; having taken the trouble to say as much as this they sit back
with the comfortable feeling that they have set themselves right with
the universe, that the Almighty will be delighted with their
indorsement.

One of the most dangerous hypocrites is the easy-going, thoughtless
being who fancies that the indorsement of a duty is equivalent to the
doing of it.  He evaporates his convictions into compliments instead of
crystallizing them into conduct.  So far from being built on a rock he
floats around like a wisp of hay in a high wind.  A butterfly might
better hope to drill and quarry out a foundation than he.  Besides
this, his hypocritical praise of right precepts makes them only
offensive to those who might desire to practice them.

Others imagine that an intellectual assent to certain statements
concerning the church or the Bible or Jesus is sufficient to fix the
life in stability.  But the great Teacher does not place the emphasis
so much on what men may think of His character or mission, nor even on
their honest opinions on the theories of the past and the future, which
have delighted mental gymnasts since the world was young, to Him the
great differentiating fact touches those dynamic convictions that are
determining your conduct this day.

He places conduct before creed.  He long ago took that method of
teaching which modern pedagogy approves.  He taught religion by the
manual method.  Instead of saying, as theologians do, first comprehend
these doctrines and then you will be able to do them, He says, first do
these things, practice My precepts, and they will ere long become plain
to you.  Men learn religion by doing.  Begin to do the right and you
will get the reason; get the rule through the example.  Deeds are the
solvents of doctrines.

The house of life is built differently from any other; we get the plans
by erecting the structure.  In the realm of character it is houses
rather than architecture we need.  Build but one hour's conduct
squarely on the plain, cogent teachings of the man of Nazareth and you
will serve the world better than if you gave a lifetime to the
explanation of His words.

Doctrines are but teachings intended to be done into deeds.  Doing them
you gain a larger peace of mind and sense of stability of life than in
any other way.  If you want the equilibrium of faith you will find it
by simply laying life's daily details on the plain foundation of His
principles.  Nothing could be plainer; there are no hair-splitting
metaphysics, no subtle questions of policy here; do these things and
the heart finds calm, the life certitude, the soul satisfaction.




X

The Passion for Perfection

  _The Great Search_
  _The Hunger of the Ages_
  _The Sole Satisfaction_


_Pain is the parent of power._

_Marking time leaves no mark on time._

_The proof of love is loving the unlovely._

_Truth never is found by twisting the facts._

_Wings come not to those who refuse to walk._

_An ideal usually is what we want the other man to be._

_There is no righteousness without some self-respect._

_You cannot lead men to the divine by crawling in the dust._

_The real saints have no time to write their autobiographies._

_When a man boils over quickly you soon find out what is in him._

_True piety simply is the prosperity of the eternal things in a man._

_The world never will be won from the love of evil until we make the
good lovely._


X

THE GREAT SEARCH

The cry, "How may I be right?" is the cry of the ages.  Human history
is the record of our attempt to answer it.  Man is naturally a truth
seeker, and this is the search of all truly great souls.  The enduring
monuments of literature are those that have in some measure answered
this question.  All things that have been worth while have helped us to
know and to realize the right.  Health, happiness, freedom, morality,
all are but parts of the right; all are but sections of the sublime
whole for which man ever seeks.  The search manifests itself in
different ways; it may be as science, the passion for the knowledge of
the right relations of things; as justice, for right relations amongst
men; as philosophy, as ethics, as religion.  Back of all our life is
the instinct of progress; we push towards the perfect.  And perfection
we now know rests not in more things but in bringing all the things
that are into right relations with one another.

The idea that any man can be right regardless of others we scout as
absurd.  The ideal civilization we work for here, even the heaven we
long for, is simply a condition of living where the things that
separate, despoil, and introduce discord are no more.  The hope of the
race is to be in right relations with all things.  All the great
religions are as the footprints of peoples who have sought the truth
that would lead them to be right and just with one another, with the
world, and with the great unseen powers behind all being.  Our
universal sense of wrongness is but part of our passion for rightness.

The sense of imperfection and the desire for improvement have marked
all religions that have influenced men.  In the Jew this desire for
righteousness was supreme.  Job is but a type.  Coming to himself
amongst the ruin of all the things he counted most precious, he forgets
their loss in his desire to solve the great problem, What is right and
how may I reach it?  Somewhere he knows there is a solution to all the
riddles of his friends and the questions of his own heart.  An orderly
universe is not crowned by a being whose life must ever remain an
unsolved riddle.  Men are not adrift in a fog with no hope of taking
bearings.  If men have marked the natural world with lines of latitude
and longitude for the guidance of its travellers, the moral world is
not without its markings.

Job's very question contains the only answer that has ever satisfied
man.  God Himself is the great meridian of all morality.  From Him we
may measure all relationships and get them right.  That is the
essential message of the Bible; it strikes that first of all in "In the
beginning God----"  Every life is right in the measure that it adjusts
itself to the unvarying will; amongst the nations they have the kingdom
who do His will.  The world has made progress in precisely the
proportion that this will has been realized.  The promise of the
present is that this great standard, this universal law by which all
may find the right, has been made known to all through a life.  One of
our own has set forth God.  One has lived who has shown us how to live.
For every problem there is now an example of its solution.  For every
difficulty there is something better far than a declaration of duty;
there is the great Doer of the deed.  He has come near to man that men
might come near to one another.  He reveals the right.

Yet we must not allow His perfection to make Him unapproachable.  He is
only an example as long as His example is attainable.  His divinity
does not depend on His distance from us but on the degree in which He
lifts us, inspires us towards the height He has gained.



THE HUNGER OF THE AGES

"Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for
they shall be filled," is the central beatitude; in a measure it
embraces all the others, for every virtue they inculcate is included in
righteousness.  But it is often rejected as impracticable because
fanciful teachers who substitute subtle definitions for simple duties
have twisted its plain words until righteousness is made something so
unreasonable as to be repulsive to a right mind.  As a matter of fact,
it means no more than rightness; the hunger and thirst for
righteousness is but the earnest, supreme desire and endeavour to be
right and to do right at all times, the appetite for the right.

Theological righteousness may mean some strange imputed quality laid on
a man like a cloak to cover his real condition or a bill of health
given to a sick man.  But men who live next to real things care nothing
one way or the other for theoretical rightness; they want the real
article.  And a right man will not be satisfied to have even the Most
High think of him as being perfectly right when he knows he falls far
short of it.  He would rather be the faltering pursuer of actual
rightness than the possessor of a hypothetical, ascribed perfection.

The great Teacher cares nothing about imaginary virtues; He praises
those who ardently seek the real ones.  He knows that in the market of
character cash alone is currency; here you cannot draw checks on some
other person's deposits.  To Him it is better by far to die facing the
right than to live in smug content with borrowed merits.  This world
will never be content with a gospel that offers only vicarious virtues;
at its heart it knows too well its need of the genuine usable ones; it
has at least the dormant faculties of an appetite for rightness.

And all this world story is but a record of the struggle for rightness.
All human progress is but its fruitage.  In every age there have been
glorious souls who have made this passion a thing that glowed in their
lives and became a light to their day.  In every man the divine
discontent that divides him from the animal is the sign of this desire
in some form; it shows man seeking to find more perfect, more nearly
right relations with the things about him.  As the things about him
come to include God and heaven and things unseen so will his search for
rightness become wider and deeper and more spiritual.  Every form of
spiritual aspiration, every religion, no matter how uncouth and
strange, is still the soul of man seeking right relations to the
infinite.

What a glorious thing is this passion for the right; what visions it
has seen, what strength it has given to their realization.  It is the
great tide that, moving restless and resistless in our bosoms, has
carried us on towards God.  We cannot but believe it is born of him.
It does not originate in him, for it disturbs his peace, it stirs him
from sloth, it spurs him to new and often unwelcome endeavours.  It
ever holds before him the shining possibility of a perfect being in a
perfect world.

No wonder Christ used the figure of hunger and thirst.  Literal
appetites have been the motives back of the world's struggle for
physical rightness; yet these cravings have not been more general or
more forceful than those of the soul.  But for hunger and thirst man
would have lived in perfect content with the form and facts of life as
he found them; progress, all that we call civilization, would not have
been.

Man is happy in proportion as necessity compels him to heed these
cravings.  So is it in the moral world; the struggle has been our
salvation.  To cease to strive for rightness is to cease to live.
Individually and nationally they are happy who accept the rigorous
climate of lofty ethical ideals, who are not content to take life as
they find it, but who seek to cultivate flowers and fruits of paradise
on the sterile, rocky soil of the human heart.  This is the life that
Jesus shows, the life that seeks and finds the truth, that with
passionate ardour seeks right relations both with His fellows and with
His Father.  Out of the fullness of experience, in the midst of His own
struggle He encourages all who strive; they shall be satisfied.  No
ideal, no noble passion, no glorious sacrifice, no honest endeavour for
the right was ever in vain; the soul finds itself in seeking the
supreme good.



THE SOLE SATISFACTION

Through the ages men have waited for voices to speak from out the great
unknown.  Answering to this universal longing for larger light, to this
search for truth, there has been the conviction that, where our own
scanty knowledge ended, there something akin to revelation would give
us light.  We have been listening for voices that would speak with an
authority transcending that given to our fellows.

Cold reason may mock at revelation, but the soul struggling in
darkness, baffled by its problems, lost in the night, still looks up
and hopes.  For what awaits us but despair if the mysteries of the
universe are forever sealed, our questions forever unanswered, and no
higher appeal to be known than that to our own selfish interests?  It
is not strange that men have heeded those who, though often mistaken or
but impostors, have cried, "Thus saith the Lord!"

It would be strange if in a world of spirits there might be no
communication of spirit.  If the fairest thought of our era is that
which was given us when man was taught to think of the omnipotent as
father, it would be strange if there should be no way by which such a
father might speak to his children.  Such a world would contradict all
our best instincts.  Such a world would