Читать книгу Levels of Living - Henry Frederick Cope - Страница 13

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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.