Читать книгу Lures of Life - Joseph Lucas - Страница 9

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Self-denial is not the highest form of virtue, nor is it a permanent condition of life for man to live in; yet it is a lure that draws men to martyrdoms as the flame collects moths to the burning. Man was not predestinated to a life of self-abnegation. Self-denial is a compromise between misery and happiness. Human nature does not thrive on compromise; it does not develop in austerities. Self-denial has its value in the scheme of moral education. Training is good for man if he does not carry it too far. You can overtrain. The scholar trains; he discreetly withdraws from gay life and inflicts on himself long hours of lonely study that he may rank in the list of University honours. The jockey trains, and punishes himself in so doing that he may ride to win. It is the same the world over: pain is joy in the making. Where self-denial is the driving power in religious life it leads, not to happiness, but to asceticism: to the lonely cell of the misanthropic monk, the pedestal of St. Simon Stylates, or the self-torture of the Indian fakir. Deluded people these, who build up life on self-denial as the pinnacle virtue to which man can soar while on earth. None of these people set self-denial in its proper place in the human economy--viz., a means to an end. It is the end-all in their vision of life, and so their life is dismal in the living and disappointing in its purpose.

Self-denial is necessary and serves a healthy purpose. It is necessary to man's spiritual welfare as medicine or the surgeon's knife may be necessary to his physical health.

Man is of twofold nature: the animal and the spiritual, the good and the bad, the superior and the inferior--label it as you please. Self-denial is putting the inferior quality under the superior one; self-denial is following the higher inspiration at the expense of the lower instincts. "Self-denial": the very word implies, repressing desires, renouncing pleasures, suffering pain. It means living from choice on the shady, dank side of the street rather than basking in the open sunny piazza when only a few steps place you there, where the children play and the old men foregather deep in the hallowed sunshine. Self-denial is not the crowning virtue--it is just the market price we pay that we may garner a harvest of happiness in the recompensing days of autumn.

The Divine purpose in man is growth, not repression of growth; it is to expand, to unfold, to develop character. To pass from bud to flower in moral and spiritual excellence, not to stunt manhood till its fairest features are arrested in growth, and moral atrophy sets up a canker in the bud, and ugliness usurps the seat of beauty in a man's character. Ugliness everywhere may be left to the devil as his monopoly. Self-denial is the grubby chrysalis; happiness is the golden butterfly on the wing.

Not self-denial, but enjoyment, is the highest good and the truest test of character. Enjoyment; rejoicing in that which ought to delight us in this our earthly life--this is a finer attainment than self-denial. Enjoyment means a full life, living upon our whole nature, and well-balanced withal in the living. It seems an attractive and sinless programme to subscribe to, yet it is difficult to draw a boundary-line between enjoyment and excess. This is where the crux comes in. This is verily the fire that tries every man's work of what sort it is. It is cruel punishment to crush your passions and pleasures out of existence--that is self-denial. It is splendid discipline to give them play and at the same time hold them in control--that is enjoyment. Success in this great endeavour brings the victor into marching-line with the angels, and yields a finer exaltation and a larger recompense than trampling on the lilies.

It is more difficult to hold steadily a full cup than to carry an empty flagon. It is a doleful religion that uproots every flower in the garden as a noxious weed until only the naked brown earth remains to gaze upon in the blessed sunshine. It is a scurvy trick of virtue to spill the heady liquor on the ground and then with a flourish place the empty chalice an offering on the altar. Abstinence is the morality of the weak, temperance is the morality of the strong.

A deep enjoying nature is one of God's best gifts to man. The happy man is generally the best of his breed. The good are usually happy, and the happy are usually good. There are no short cuts to being happy, you must be really good to win through. If our daily occupation is congenial to our taste and disposition, our mind dwells at ease and our nature mellows in the sunshine of agreeable surroundings. Our sense of contentment radiates good humour and makes us kindly and benevolent to others. We are not chafed and fretted by duties irksome to us, because uncongenial. We are fulfilling destiny, and fulfilling it with completeness of purpose. Those around us feel the warm, penetrating sunshine of our hearts, and they grow warm under the mystic touch of the sun. It is for this reason that happiness becomes a holy quest with us, for out of it spring the virtues which robe life in beauty and gladness. One of the most precious of human faculties is the power to enjoy.

Self-denial is either a tyranny or a virtue, and should be praised with circumspection. Many feverishly religious people debase its moral currency. They hinder their own happiness and thwart the happiness of others as far as in them lies, and fancy in so doing they keep the whole ten commandments of God.

Self-denial for the sake of self-denial is a pagan rite: cold, pitiless, sterile. Renunciation and suffering prove nothing. Men have renounced and suffered for the greed of gold, for the lust of ambition, for the honour of a blood-stained idol, and lost moral stamina in so doing. The experience of ages brands deep the flaming truth upon us that sacrifice must be valued according to the object for which the sacrifice is made. Sacrifice for its own sake weaves no crown of glory for the martyr's brow. It is a form of amiable suicide. If you starve yourself for the sake of showing mastery over self, what thank have ye? The heathen do even the same--and do it better. It is an act of self-torture, and ministers to your pride of purpose. But to give up a meal when hungry that one you love may have it puts a better complexion on the deed. To bear pain for the grim joy of bearing it brings no reward. Do not even the Stoics the same? But to bear pain rather than surrender truth or to cover a suffering friend is a loving and heroic act, meriting a V.C. when spiritual honours are distributed.

The old painters pictured in glowing witchery of colour the ordeal by suffering as the master-key that opened the gates of paradise to macerated mortals. The old writers drove home the same insidious error with all the pious fervour of their fluent pen, and thus men became fascinated with the doctrine of self-immolation as the highest good. In mediæval times the via dolorosa was the well-trodden public way travelled by sainted pilgrims seeking a better country.

Meritorious misery won through, for it was aureoled with the Church's benediction and rendered attractive by her promise of eternal rewards. Surely this daily human life of ours was not ordained to be a pageant of austerity reaching from the cradle to the grave. The Creator, having given this beautiful world as a temporary home for His children to dwell in, expects agreeable people to occupy its furnished splendours for a space of three score years and ten, more or less. If not, then the Creator's gift is wasted bounty flung to dull and unappreciative mortals.

Brighter and healthier views of life emerge out of the crude misconceptions which enveloped the past in religious gloom, although there yet remain amongst us people who revel in the luxury of self-denial as in a feast of fat things, while the genial side of their nature remains dormant, starved, stunted. I have seen such-like in the flesh, spoken with them and touched their cold hands. They are unattractive people to know, and not companionable to travel with. They are faultless, methodical, patient, but they have no endearing friendships, no entwining intimacies by which you can fasten on them and love them. They are isolated and self-contained, lacking the charm of some little human weakness which makes us all akin. They may have a warm heart, but chilled blood circulates round it. Their eyes glitter like glaciers at the call of duty. They hurry from committee meeting to committee meeting, and forget to lunch between engagements. They shine in the performance of self-imposed errands of mercy, and live by rule relentlessly at any cost to pocket, health, or reputation. They minister to the sick and poor assiduously, and mother a class of poor factory girls in the evening, but their home is shivery to enter as a cold storage. A cold storage is a curious place to visit, but an impossible place to dwell in, except for frozen goods.

It is possible to make the best of both worlds without an uncomfortable sense of sin nagging you like toothache; it is possible to work for others and yet tend your own vineyard with whole-hearted joy garnered from the wonder and beauty and sunshine of this our earthly home. The man is not a miscreant who laughs heartily and often: the person is not a saint who starves his body to save his soul.

The harassing question is, How can we make the best of life as it comes to us a day at a time, and yet sail on an even keel? It is the problem that prophets, savants, and theologians have hammered at through the ages, but have not yet forged in fine gold the key that unlocks the mystery; thus there is an opening for us to cut in before the final word is uttered and the discussion battens down under a unanimous show of hands, which crowning mercy will be the last far-off result of time. The question agitating the moment is, What shall we do with the fair flower of our earthly life? Shall we enjoy it as we would the beauty and fragrance of a rose, thanking the good God for a gift so sweet and precious, or shall we with peevish fingers pick the rose to pieces petal by petal and crush it under foot, fearing its beauty may seduce our virtue and its perfume poison our soul?

Let us preserve the rose inviolate. Its role is to be joy-giver on the earth. I would sooner sit with Jesus Christ at the marriage feast in Cana of Galilee and drink with Him wine of the best vintage that ever flowed on festive board than sup with John Baptist in the wilderness on his menu of locusts and wild honey. The exquisite scene my imagination quaintly pictures is Jesus Christ and John the Baptist sitting together at the banquet, and each enjoying the meal with equal zest.

The Renaissance which fascinated half Europe in the fifteenth century, like a carillon of joy-bells ringing through the land, stirring the dull pulses of the people and reviving generous and graceful ideals of life, was just open rebellion against the crabbed austerities of the Church, practised in the name of religion falsely so called. The people threw off the galling yoke of forced asceticism and found liberty of spirit and peace of mind in literature and art, and in the spontaneous and natural flow of healthy human life. Unfortunately, there was a fly in the amber; the people borrowed most of their new pleasures from pagan Greece, and the old Greek gods came tripping back from fairyland hand in glove with Greek culture, which was embarrassing.

The advent of the light-hearted Cavaliers in England, flinging colour and warmth and gaiety over the land, was a sharp recoil from the drab severity of Puritan rule. The Puritans were men of strong personality: half soldiers and half preachers. They were honest without charm; strong-minded without pose; mighty in conscience, but mean in heart qualities. They were clean livers, but as they aged their visage grew hard and sour as unripe fruit, and their geniality of temper withered like a winter apple. They forgot to smile; the solemnities of life crushed them. They were grave and sagacious citizens lacking vivacity and humour, with plenty of flavour, but no sweetness. They dreamed of invisible kingdoms and fought for eternal verities. They command our admiration, but do not win our love. Their God was of the best theology mechanically constructed at Geneva by John Calvin, built up in parts composed of Righteousness, Justice, Holiness. Beauty was barred as a Divine attribute. The dismal meeting-house where they worshipped was the whitewashed prison in which the captured Deity dwelt. The burning light of this dread Presence enraptured the elect souls and intimidated the uncovenanted and graceless sinners, while the vast multitude of the nation held aloof, dreading contact with a religion so fierce and yet so gloomy, and they waited patiently through the shivering night of Roundhead rule, like watchmen on the city walls, for the coming of the king to set English homes once again humming with joy.

These two strong currents of life--Self-denial and Enjoyment--are flowing side by side in our midst to-day, dividing men in thought and purpose, driving men into open collision, only to relax their strangle-hold on one another to get firmer grip and fight again another day. These two different ideals of life represent two antagonistic sides of a man's nature that clash with each other, and the man has a stand-up fight with himself, which is an experience fiery temperaments often plunge into. Each side carries a half-truth and half an error. Blend the two half-truths into an intimate and harmonious whole and sink the errors into the bottomless pit from whence they came, and you discover human nature touching its highest and ripest form, approaching the Christlike in character, which combines the two elements in true and everlasting union.

Jesus of Nazareth, whose knightly character embodied all that the sweet romancists of the Middle Ages dreamed of and pictured in the faultless knight-errant of their day which won their hearts' devotion and consent (preux chevalier sans peur et sans reproche), and all that our own age typifies and holds dear in modern character of good repute when in a single phrase it proclaims the man a perfect gentleman--Jesus Christ means all that and more to us. Christ is not a withered flower on a broken stem torn from the Tree of Life; He is not a damaged idol of an effete civilization which modern progress sweeps aside in its forward march; He is not the Lord of an ancient faith whom the fires of scientific criticism have burnt up and left only His ashes in a cinerary urn reposing on the altar of our heart. He is the world's one fulfilment of the faultless and the ideal in human nature, blending all that is beautiful and enjoyable with all that is holy and vigorous.