Читать книгу The Life Radiant - Lilian Whiting - Страница 5
ОглавлениеEliminating Anxieties.
A large percentage of the anxieties and perplexities of daily experience could be eliminated at once and struck off the balance, never to return again, if life were but viewed aright, and held in the scale of true valuations. Nothing is more idle than to sell one's soul for a mess of pottage; for the pottage is not worth the price. Seen in the most practical, every-day light, it is a bad bargain. Not only is it true that a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things that he possesseth, but, conversely, as a rule, the greater the mass of things the less the life. The spiritual energy becomes clogged and fettered and strangled amid its entanglement with things. The very power of finance, that might and that ought to insure its possessor a certain peace of mind, a liberation from petty anxieties, and a power to devote himself to higher aims, too often reverses this and chains him as to a wheel. Recently there arrived at a fashionable hotel a family whose command of finance might have redeemed every day from the sordid and from any anxious efforts, and enabled them to live in the realm of high thought, of generous and beautiful expressions of sympathy and love to all. Their visit might have made the time a glorified interlude to every one with whom they came in contact by its radiation of hope and happiness and sympathy and good cheer. Instead, each and all, individually and collectively, were entangled in possessions—weighted down with things, and quite illustrating the terse little couplet of Emerson—
"Things are in the saddle
And ride mankind."
The things which rode these unfortunate beings—for the multi-millionaires may not unfrequently be so classed—were masses of jewels, that could not be worn and enjoyed because too elaborate to be suitable, and so must be instantly consigned to the safe. Such part of these treasures as were in use, and left in rooms, suffered from losses or theft. They caused more or less vexation, anger, discord, and fret in general to the owners and every one concerned, until the onlooker was ready to exclaim, "If this is the price of diamonds and rubies and pink pearls, and rich and rare gems in general, let one escape the tyranny of purple and fine linen, and take simplicity and its accompanying peace of mind." After a certain limit of ordinary comfort, great possessions seem to enslave rather than to liberate. If the price of costly jewels is peace of mind, as well as a cheque of imposing figures, then, indeed, let one keep his peace of mind, and go without the necklace. It is often curious to see how little imagination goes into the spending of colossal fortunes. The possessors simply build more houses than they can live in; each one has more space and more impedimenta than he knows what to do with, and the multiplication of all these possessions results in perpetual anxieties, and fret, and worry, until one would prefer a crust and a garret, and his spiritual freedom, to any such life as that entailed by the golden shower of fortune.
"Are you rich? rich enough to help somebody?" There is the test. The diamond and ruby necklace, whose chief use seems to be to incite anxieties, would give some aspiring youth or maiden a college course. The costly ring left carelessly on the bureau, tempting theft, would give a gifted young girl just the study in a musical conservatory that she needs, or would make a young artist happy and encouraged by buying his picture, and some one else might be made happy and helped on to new endeavor by having the gift of the picture. Money can be transmuted into spiritual gifts, and only when thus used is it of much importance in promoting any real comfort or enjoyment or stimulus to progress. The event, the thing, is purely negative, and only when acted upon by force of spirit does it become positive.
Let one go on through the days doing the beautiful thing in every human relation. Life is a spiritual drama, perpetually being played. The curtain never goes down. The actors come and go, but the stage is never vacant. To inform the drama with artistic feeling, with beauty, with generous purpose, is in the power of every one. It depends, not on possessions, but on sympathy, insight, and sweetness of spirit. These determine the Life Radiant.
"I will wait heaven's perfect hour
Through the innumerable years."
Heaven's Perfect Hour.
The saving grace of life is the power to hold with serene and steadfast fidelity the vision, the ideal, that has revealed itself in happier hours; to realize that this, after all, is the true reality, and that it shines in the spiritual firmament as the sun does in the heavens, however long the period of storm and clouds that obscure its radiance. The tendency to doubt and depression is often as prevalent as an epidemic. In extreme cases it becomes the suicidal mania; in others it effectually paralyzes the springs of action and leaves its victim drifting helplessly and hopelessly with the current; and any such mental tendency as this is just as surely a definite evil to be recognized and combated as would be any epidemic of disease. To rise in the morning confronting a day that is full of exacting demands on his best energies; on his serenest and sunniest poise; that require all the exhilaration and sparkle and radiance which have vanished from his possession, and yet to be forced, someway and somehow, to go through his appointed tasks—no one can deny that here is a very real problem, and one that certainly taxes every conceivable force of will far more than might many great and visible calamities. For all this form of trial is invisible and very largely incommunicable, and it is like trying to walk through deep waters that are undiscerned by those near, but which impede every step, and threaten to rise and overwhelm one.
The poetic and artistic temperament is peculiarly susceptible to this form of trial. In work of an industrial or mechanical nature, a certain degree of will force alone will serve to insure its accomplishment whether one "feels in the mood" or not. The mood does not greatly count. But in work of any creative sort, the mood, the condition of mind, is the determining factor. And is it within human power, by force of will alone, to call up this working mood of radiant energy when all energy has ebbed away, leaving one as inert as an electric machine from which the current has been turned off?
And yet—and yet—the saving gift and grace of life and achievement comes, in that there is a power higher than one's own will, on which one may lay hold with this serene and steadfast fidelity.
Physicians and scientists have long since recognized that intense mental depression is as inevitably an accompaniment of la grippe as are its physical symptoms, and the more fully the patient himself understands this, and is thus enabled to look at it objectively, so to speak, the better it is for him. The feeling is that he has not a friend on earth, and, on the whole, he is rather glad of it. He feels as if it were much easier to die than to live—not to say that the former presents itself to him as far the preferable course. So he envelops himself in the black shadows of gloom, and, on the whole, quite prefers drawing them constantly deeper. And this is very largely the semi-irresponsible state of illness combined with ignorance of the real nature of the malady.
The knowledge of how to meet it with a degree of that "sweet reasonableness" which should invest one's daily living, is knowledge that can hardly come amiss. One must treat it as a transient visitation of those
"Black spirits or white, blue spirits or gray,"
which are to be exorcised by keeping close to beautiful thought—to something high, poetic, reverent. "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee" is one of the most practical aids in life. It can be relied upon more fully than the visit of the physician. From the Bible, from the poets, one may draw as from a sustaining fountain. As this intense depression is a mental feature of the disease it must be met by mental methods—of resolutely holding the thoughts to high and beautiful themes; by allying the imagination with serene and radiant ideals. Emerson is the greatest of magicians. His words will work marvels. His thought is as luminous as a Roentgen ray.
"Heaven's perfect hour" is sure to sometime dawn if one but keep his face turned toward the morning. "Heaven's perfect hour" is within one's own possibilities of creation, if he live aright and think aright; and with joy and radiance may he make it his perpetual experience; although it is the supreme anomaly in life that the social relations which are designed to offer the profoundest joy, the most perfect consolation for disaster or sorrow, and to communicate the happy currents of electrical energy, are yet those which not unfrequently make themselves the channel of the most intense suffering. There is something wrong in this. The friendships of life, all forms and phases and degrees through which regard and friendship reveal themselves, are the one divinest, perhaps it may be said are the only, part of life on earth that is absolutely divine, and the divine element should communicate perpetual joy. This is the ideal view of the entire panorama of social interchange and social relations, and being the purest ideal, it is also the most intensely and absolutely real. For nothing is real, in the last analysis, save that which is ideal; and nothing is ideal that is not a spiritual reality. Then the question recurs—how is it possible, how can it be accounted for that the one phase of suffering which seems past even trying to endure, comes through the sources which should radiate only joy and blessedness?
The old proverb, "Save me from my friends," is founded on a certain basis of fact. "Twenty enemies cannot do me the mischief of one friend," rather cynically, but perhaps not wholly untruly, said Gail Hamilton. For it certainly is not the avowed enemy, or the person to whom one is indifferent, who has the power to greatly harm or pain him. So far as injury goes, Emerson is probably right when he says, "No one can work me injury but myself." Misrepresentation, misinterpretation, there may be, but in the long run truth is mighty, and will, and does, prevail. One need not greatly concern himself with misinterpretations, but, rather, only with striving to live the life of truth and righteousness.
Perhaps one cause of much of the unhappiness and suffering that not infrequently invests relations that should only be those of joy and peace and mutual inspiration, is an over and an undue emphasis on material things. Now, when viewed in the light of absolute truth, material things are of simply no consequence at all. They do not belong to the category of realities. Money, possessions—the mere goods and chattels of life—are, even at their best appraisal, a mere temporary convenience. As a convenience they fill a place and are all very well. As anything beyond that they have no place at all in one's consciousness. Whatever luxury they can offer is simply in using them to the best advantage, and human nature is so constituted that this best advantage is usually more closely connected with those who are dear to one than it is with himself. For himself alone, what does he want that money, mere money, can buy? He wants and needs the average conditions of life, in the "food, clothing, and shelter" line; he needs and requires certain conditions of beauty, of harmony, of gratification of tastes and enlargement of opportunities—all these are legitimate needs, and are part of the working conditions of life; of the right development and progress which one is in duty bound to make, both for his own personal progress and as the vantage ground of his efforts for usefulness. Beyond that, the luxury of life lies in doing what the heart prompts. The one heavenly joy of life is in the enlargement of social sympathies; it is in the offering of whatever appreciation and devotion it is possible to offer to those whose noble and beautiful lives inspire this devotion. To have this accepted—not because it is of intrinsic value, not because it is of any particular importance per se, but because it is the visible representation of the spiritual gift of reverence, appreciation, and devotion—is the purest happiness one may experience, and that which inspires him anew to all endeavor and achievement. To have it refused or denied is to have the golden portals close before one and shut him out in the darkness. Why, the heavenly privilege, the infinite obligation, is on the part of him who is permitted to offer his tribute of love and devotion, expressed, if it so chances, in any material way—and he is denied his sweetest joy if this privilege be denied him. There are gifts that are priceless, but they are not of the visible and tangible world. They are the gifts of sympathy, of intuitive comprehension, of helpful regard; and, curiously, these—the priceless and precious—are never regarded as too valuable for acceptance, while regarding the material and temporal, which, at best, are the merest transient convenience, there will be hesitation and pain. And this hesitation arises, too, from the most beautiful and delicately exquisite qualities, but it produces the pain that is
"——the little rift within the lute,
That by and by will make the music mute."
There is in life a proportion of pain and jarring that is inevitable, probably, to the imperfect conditions with which the experience on earth is temporarily invested; and because of this, all the range of friendship should be held apart as divine, and any interchange of material gifts should not receive this undue emphasis, but be regarded as the mere incidental trifle of momentary convenience, while all the regard and devotion that may lie behind should give its mutual joy as free and as pure as the fragrance of a rose. Of all that a friend may be Emerson so truly says:—
"I fancied he was fled—
And, after many a year,
Glowed unexhausted kindliness
Like daily sunrise there.
My careful heart was free again.
O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red;
All things through thee take nobler form."
That alone is what all the loves and friendships of life are for—that through their ministry life may take on nobler form.
"I fancied he was fled."
But a friendship that is true cannot flee; it is, by its very quality and nature, abiding. It may be silent forever; it may be invisible, inaudible, immaterial, impersonal; but once forged it is of the heavenly life, the heavenly language, and the Word of the Lord abideth forever!
Love and Good Will.
The stress and storm of life, however, fade away very largely before the power of simple love and good will, which is the key to all situations and the solution of all problems. "How shall I seem to love my people?" asked a French king of his confessor. "My son, you must love them," was the reply. When there is genuineness one does not need to engage in the elaborate and arduous labor of counterfeiting qualities and manufacturing appearances, and it is really easier—to say nothing of its being a somewhat more dignified process—to be what one wishes the world to regard him, than it is to endeavor to merely produce the effect of it.
Doctor Holmes had a bit of counsel for those who were out at sea—that they should not waste any energy in asking how they looked from the shore; and the suggestion is not an infelicitous one in its general application to life. It is quite enough for one to keep his feet, as best he may, set on the upward and onward way, without concerning himself too much as to the effect of his figure in the landscape. The energy that goes towards attitudinizing is always wasted, while that which expends itself on the legitimate fulfilment of tasks contributes something of real importance to life.
And so, any significance of achievement seems to be exactly conditioned by the degree of energy involved—the finer the energy, the more potent the achievement. It would seem as if all the noble order of success hinged on two conditions—the initial one of generating sufficient energy, and the second that of applying it worthily.
The present age is characterized as that in which new forms of force appear—in both the physical and the spiritual realms of life. What a marvel is the new chemical force, thermite, of which the first demonstration in America was made in 1902, by the Columbia University Chemical Society in New York. Here is a force that dissolves iron and stone. An extremely interesting account of this new energy appeared in the "New York Herald," in which the writer vivifies the subject by saying of thermite:—
"Under its awful lightning blaze granite flows like water and big steel rails are welded in the twinkling of an eye. … The interior of Mount Pelee, whose fiery blast destroyed St. Pierre in a moment and crumbled its buildings into dust, would be cool compared with this temperature of 5400°. It would melt the White Mountains into rivers of liquid fire. Nothing could withstand its consuming power. … And what makes this stupendous force? The answer seems incredible as the claims for the force itself. It is produced by simply putting a match to a mixture of aluminum filings and oxide of chromium, both metallic, and yet, as by magic, a mighty force is instantly created."
The writer describes the discovery and processes at some length, and adds:—
"Such are the wonders of chemistry suggesting Emerson's claim, 'Thought sets men free.' By a simple process—flame applied to metal filings—prison bars melt and vaulted dungeons flow like water."
The article closes with this wonderful paragraph:—
"By chemistry the pale-faced modern Faust, working in his laboratory, makes metals out of clay and many marvellous combinations. What they will do when skilfully proportioned and exposed to heat, the story related gives a hint—accounting, as it were, for the forces at work in space, creating heat and electricity, making suns burn with indescribable fury, colliding with peaceful planets, mixing their metals in a second of time—and new worlds seem to leap into vision, balls of molten fire sweeping through space; vast cyclones of flame, making Pelee a cold-storage vault by comparison. All this seems simple enough as explained by modern chemistry, giving men unlimited power, making them gods, as it were, to first master themselves and then the universe."
This description of the new force, whose intensity is almost beyond realization, is hardly less remarkable than is the energy described; and it lends itself, with perfect rhythm of correspondence, to analysis on the side of the spiritual forces of life. "Cast thyself into the will of God and thou shalt become as God" is one of the most illuminating of the mystic truths. The "will of God" is the supreme potency, the very highest degree of energy, in the spiritual realm, which is the realm of cause, while the outer world is the realm of effects. Now if one may so ally himself to the divine will as to share in its all-conquering power, he partakes of creative power and eternal life, now and here, just in proportion to the degree to which he can identify his entire trend of desire and purpose with this Infinite will. This energy is fairly typified in the physical world by the stupendous new force called "thermite," and it is as resistless as that attraction which holds the stars in their courses and the universe in their solar relations.
The Diviner Possibilities.
It is a fallacy to suppose that it is a hardship and a trial to live the more divine and uplifting life, and that ease and pleasure are only to be found in non-resistance to the faults and defects of character. The truth is just the opposite of this, and the twentieth century will reveal a fairly revolutionary philosophy in this respect. Heretofore poet and prophet have always questioned despondently—
"Does the road wind up hill all the way?"
as if to wind up hill were the type of trial, and the "descent of Avernus" were the type of joy.
Does the road wind up hill? Most certainly, and thereby it leads on into the purer light, the fairer radiance, the wider view. Does one prefer to go down hill into some dark ravine or deep mountain gorge? It is a great fallacy that it is the hardship of life to live in the best instead of in the worst. It is the way of the transgressor which is hard—not of him who endeavors to follow the divine leading. The deeper truth is that the moment one commits all his purposes and his aspirations into the Divine keeping he connects himself by that very act with a current of irresistible energy; one that reinforces him with power utterly undreamed of before.
There is no limit to the power one may draw from the unseen universe. "It is possible, I dare to say," says a thoughtful writer, "for those who will indeed draw on their Lord's power for deliverance and victory, to live a life on which His promises are taken as they stand and found to be true. It is possible to cast every care on Him daily, and to be at peace amidst the pressure. It is possible to see the will of God in everything, and to find it not a sigh but a song. It is possible in the world of inner act and motion to put away all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and evil speaking, daily and hourly. It is possible, by unreserved resort to divine power, under divine conditions, to become strongest at our weakest point; to find the thing which yesterday upset all our obligations to patience, an occasion to-day, through Him who loveth us and worketh in us, for a joyful consent to His will and a delightful sense of His presence. These things are divinely possible."
One very practical question that cannot but confront the world at the present time is as to whether there is any relation between religion, in its highest and most inclusive and spiritually uplifting sense, and the possibility of communication between those in this life and those who have passed through the change we call death and have entered on the next round of experience. It is a fact—albeit a rather curious and unaccountable one—that organized religion, as a whole, has been largely opposed to the idea of possible communication between what is currently termed the living and the dead. Yet when one focusses the question to a matter of personal individuality, it does not stand the test. Take, for instance, the revered name of a man who was universally recognized as one of the greatest spiritual leaders the world has known—Phillips Brooks. When he was the rector of Trinity Church, or the Bishop of the Massachusetts diocese, no one who sought his companionship or counsel would have been regarded as being wrong to do so. Now—always provided that there is full conviction of immortality—why should it be wrong to seek his companionship or counsel from the unseen life? Death has no power over the essential individuality. Indeed, in being freed from the physical body, the spiritual man becomes only more powerful, and with his power acting from a higher plane of energy. Regarding ourselves as spiritual beings—and if we are not that we are nothing—regarding ourselves as temporarily inhabiting a physical body, but in no sense identified with it save as we use this body for our instrument of communication with the physical world; what more logical or natural than that the spiritual being, not yet released from his physical body, should hold sweet and intimate communion with the spiritual being that has been released from this physical environment? Telepathy has already become a recognized law. That mind to mind, spirit to spirit, flashes its messages here in this present life, is a fact attested by too great an array of evidence to be doubted or denied. Now the spiritual being who is released from the physical body is infinitely more sensitive to impression, more responsive to mental call, than was possible in conditions here. The experimental research and investigation in psychology, as shown in such work as that of Professor Münsterberg of Harvard in the university laboratory, reveals increasingly that the brain is an electric battery of the most potent and sensitive order; that it generates electric thought waves and receives them. Does it lose this power by the change called death? Is this power only inherent in the physical structure? On the contrary, Professor William James has demonstrated with scientific accuracy in his book called "Human Freedom," that this is not the case. If, then, intellectual energy survives the process of death—and if it does not then there is no immortality—the communication between those in the Unseen and those in the Seen is as perfectly natural as is any form of companionship or of social life here.
As all kinds of people live, so all kinds of people die, and the mere fact of death is not a transforming process, spiritually. He who has not developed the spiritual faculties while here; who has lived the mere life of the senses with the mere ordinary intelligence, or without it, but never rising to the nobler intellectual and moral life—is no more desirable as a companion because he has died than he was before he died. And the objection to any of the ordinary seance phenomena is, that whatever manifestations are genuine proceed very largely, if not entirely, from this strata of the crude and inconsequential, if not the vicious, with whom the high-minded man or woman would not have associated in life, and after death their presence would be quite as much to be deplored. Granted all these exceptions. One may sweep them off and clear the decks. Then what remains? There remains the truth of the unity of the spiritual universe; of the truth that the mere change of death is not a revolutionary one, transforming the individual into some inconceivable state of being and removing him, in a geographical sense, into some unrevealed region in space; there remains the truth that life is evolutionary in its processes; that there is no more violent and arbitrary and instantaneous change by the event of death, than there is in the change from infancy into childhood, from childhood into manhood. There remains the truth that the ethereal and the physical worlds are inter-related, inter-blended; that man, now and here, lives partially in each, and that the more closely he can relate himself to the diviner forces by prayer, by aspiration, by every thought and deed that is noble and generous and true, and inspired by love, the more he dwells in this ethereal atmosphere and is in touch with its forces and in companionship with his chosen friends who have gone on into that world. There is nothing in this theory that is incompatible with the teachings of the Church, with all that makes up for us the religious life. On the contrary, it vitalizes and reinforces that life. This life of the spirit must be in God. Let one, indeed, on his first waking each day, place his entire life, all his heart, mind, and faculties, in God's hands; asking Him "to take entire possession, to be the guide of the soul." Thus one shall dwell hourly, daily, in the divine atmosphere, and spirit to spirit may enjoy their communion and companionship. The experience of personal spiritual companionship between those here and those on the next plane of life is included in the higher religious life of the spirit while living here on earth. It vivifies and lends joy to it; for the joy of sympathetic companionship is the one supreme and transcendent happiness in life. And to live in this atmosphere requires one absolute and inevitable condition, the constant exercise of the moral virtues—of truth, rectitude, generosity, and love. The life held amenable to these, the life which commits itself utterly into the divine keeping, is not a life of hardship; the "road that winds up hill" is the road of perpetual interest and exhilaration. It is a fatal fallacy to invest it with gloom and despair. It is the only possible source of the constant, intellectual energy of life, of sweetness, of joy, of happiness.
The only standard which is worthy for one to hold as that by which he measures his life is the divine one illustrated in the character of Jesus. To measure one's quality of daily life by this is always to fall short of satisfactory achievement; and still there is always the realization that its achievement is only a question of persistence and of time. It is the direction in which one is moving that determines his final destination. There is the deepest inspiration to the soul in taking for one's perpetual watchword, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." Not that this divine state is attained; but there is perpetual aid in the conviction that one's self—his spiritual self—can "press on to the high calling of God." Man is a divine being; the divine life is his only true life.
The deepest loyalty to the divine ideal involves, however, not only the striving after perfection, but the charity for imperfection. To denounce evil is a part of rectitude; to condemn sin is a moral duty; but to condemn the sinner is not infrequently to be more deeply at fault than is he who thus offended. An illustration of this point has recently been before the public. A New York clergyman preached on Easter Sunday a sermon that was not his own. He gave no credit to its writer. The sermon was published, and a minister of another church, recognizing it, at once proceeded to "expose" the matter in the daily press. Not only did he call public attention to the error, but he did it in a manner that seemed to rejoice in the opportunity; a manner so devoid of sorrow or sympathy as to fill the reader with despair at such an exhibition. Rev. E. Walpole Warren fittingly rebuked the evident malice with which the fault was exposed, and quoted the words of Saint Paul in the injunction: "Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye who are spiritual restore such an one in the spirit of meekness, considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted." To have gone, in a spirit of love, privately and quietly, and pointed out the error, would have been Christian-like; to exult in it must be described by a very different term. Devotion to truth is good, but it is "speaking the truth in love" that is the ideal. It is even possible to convey questioning, counsel, encouragement, or reproach without the spoken word; to send the message by the law of suggestion from mind to mind. The mental intimation will reach the one to whom it is sent if the conditions for telepathy are observed, for thought is far more penetrative than the Roentgen ray, and the atmosphere is magnetic, and carries it as the wire does the electric current. All these finer conditions are beginning to make themselves felt as practicable forces. Humanity is becoming "plastic to the spirit touch;" sensitive to those vibrations too fine to be registered by the outward ear.
"Thought is the wages
For which I sell days,"
said Emerson. Thought is the motor of the future. "As a man thinketh, so is he," is one of the most practical and literal truths.
It is only by the divine law that one can measure the ethics of companionship. The frequent experiences in life of broken friendships; of those alliances of good will, of mutual sympathies and mutual enjoyment, that, at last, some way became entangled amid discords and barriers, and thus come to a disastrous end—such experiences could be escaped were life lived by the diviner standards. Friendship need never deteriorate in quality if each lives nobly. If one conceives of life more nobly and generously than the other, it may become, not a means of separation and alienation, but a means and measure of just responsibility. There are friendships whose shipwreck is on the rock of undue encroachment on one side and undue endurance—which has not the noble and spontaneous character of generosity—on the other. One imposes, the other is imposed on—and so things run on from bad to worse, till at last a crisis comes, and those who had once been much to each other are farther apart than strangers. In such circumstances there has been a serious failure—the failure of not speaking the truth in love. The failure on the part of the one more spiritually enlightened toward the one less enlightened. One should no more consent that his friend should do an ignoble thing than he should consent to do an ignoble thing himself. He should hold his friend in thought to the divine standard. He should conceive of him nobly and expect from him only honor and integrity. "Those who trust us educate us," says George Eliot; and still more do they who hold us in the highest thought draw us upward to that atmosphere through which no evil may pass. Each one is his brother's keeper, and life achieves only its just and reasonable possibilities when it is held constantly amenable to the divine ideal—when it is lived according to that inspiring injunction of Phillips Brooks: "Be such a man, live such a life, that if all lives were like yours earth would be Paradise."
Let one put aside sorrow and enter into the joy and radiance. "Omit the negative propositions. Nerve us with incessant affirmatives." If biography teaches any lesson, it is that the events which occur in life are of far less consequence than the spirit in which they are received. It is the attitude of mental receptivity which is the alchemy to transmute events and circumstances into experience, and it is experience alone which determines both the quality and the trend of life. It is in activity; in doing and giving and loving, that the joy of life must be sought. And it is joy which is the normal condition rather than depression and sadness, as health and not illness is the normal state. Disease and sadness are abnormal, and if one finds himself "blue," it is his first business to escape from it, to change the conditions and the atmosphere. The radiant life is the ideal state, both for achievement as well as for that finer quality of personal influence which cannot emanate from gloom and depression. "Everything good is on the highway," said Emerson, and the first and only lasting success is that of character. It may not be, for the moment, exhilarating to realize that one's ill fortune is usually the result of some defect in his selection, or error in his judgment, but, on the other hand, if the cause of his unhappiness lies in himself, the cause of his happiness may also lie with himself, and thus it is in his power to so transform his attitude to life as to reverse the gloom and have the joy and sweetness rather than the bitterness and sadness of life. Everything, in the last analysis, is a matter of temperament. Nothing is hopeless, for life is infinite, and new factors can be evolved whose working out will create the new heaven and the new earth.
Here, in the earth life, we have it in our power to seize our future destination.—Fichte.
The Weight of the Past.
One of the most inspiring injunctions of Saint Paul is that in which he bids us to "lay aside every weight." Poet and prophet have always recognized the weight of the past as a serious problem. One has made all sorts of mistakes; he is entangled in the consequences of his "errors and ignorances," if not in his sins, and how can he enter on a Life Radiant with this burden? Well does Sidney Lanier express this feeling in the stanzas:—
"My soul is sailing through the sea,
But the Past is heavy and hindereth me,
The Past hath crusted cumbrous shells
That hold the flesh of cold sea-mells
About my soul.
The huge waves wash, the high waves roll,
Each barnacle clingeth and worketh dole,
And hindereth me from sailing!
"Old Past, let go and drop i' the sea
Till fathomless waters cover thee!
For I am living, but thou art dead;
Thou drawest back, I strive ahead
The day to find.
Thy shells unbind! Night comes behind,
I needs must hurry with the wind
And trim me best for sailing."
There is no question but that the past is heavy and hindereth every one. Its "cumbrous shells" cling like dead weights around man, and keep him from the larger, freer life. "Man is not by any means convinced as yet of his immortality," says Sir Edwin Arnold; "all the great religions have in concert more or less positively affirmed it to him; but no safe logic proves it, and no entirely accepted voice from some farther world proclaims it."
The one proof, of course, so far as absolute evidential demonstration goes, lies in the communication from those who have passed through death. There unfolds an increasingly impressive mass of logical probabilities that point to but one conclusion to every student of science and of spiritual laws. Biology offers its important testimony. The law of the conservation of forces—of motion and matter—which is definitely proven by actual demonstration, suggests with a potency which no one can evade that intellect, emotion, and will—the most intense and resistless forces of the universe—can hardly be extinguished when the forces of matter persist. The study of the nature of the ether alone pours a flood of illumination on the theory of an ethereal world—a theory with which all the known facts of science and psychology accord, and with which they range themselves. Rev. Doctor Newman Smyth says that the facts disclosed by a study of biology, as well as the theories advanced by some trained biologists, fairly open the new and interesting question whether death itself does not fall naturally under some principle of selection and law of utility for life? "It is of religious concern as well as of scientific interest," he continues, "for us to learn, as far as possible, all the facts and suggestions which microscopic researches may bring to our knowledge concerning the minute processes or most intimate and hidden laws of life and death. For if we, children of an age of questioning and change, are to keep a rational faith in spiritual reality—strong and genuine as was our fathers' faith according to their light, ours must be a faith that shall strike its roots deep down into all knowledge, although light from above alone may bring it to its perfect Christian trust and sweetness. … The least facts of nature may be germinal with high spiritual significance and beauty."
The twentieth century leads faith to the brink of knowledge. The deepest spiritual feeling must perpetually recognize that faith alone—Christ's words alone—are enough for every human soul; but faith grows not less, but more, when informed by knowledge. When man measures and weighs the star and discovers their composition; when he sends messages without visible means, then he may believe with Fichte, that "here, in the earth life, we have it in our power to seize our future destination." Mr. Weiss objected to any (possible) evidential demonstration of immortality, because (as he said), "If you owe your belief in immortality to the assumed facts of a spiritual intercourse, your belief is at the mercy of your assumption. … It is merely an opinion derived from phenomena." But this reasoning would not hold good regarding any other trend of knowledge; the vital necessity of the soul to lay hold on God and immortality is not lessened, but rather deepened and reinforced by understanding, when knowledge goes hand in hand with faith. And the one supreme argument of all is that a truer knowledge of man's spiritual being—now and here—with a truer conception of his destiny in the part of life immediately succeeding the change of death, would make so marvellous a difference in all his relations on earth, in all his conceptions of achievement, and would, as Sir Edwin Arnold says, "turn nine-tenths of the sorrows of earth into glorious joys and abolish quite as large a proportion of the faults and vices of mankind."
The Past is heavy with misconceptions of the simple truths of life and immortality as Jesus taught them. The Present seeks to throw off these "cumbrous shells." Death is the liberator, the divinely appointed means for ushering man into the more real, the more significant life, whose degree of reality and significance depends wholly on ourselves; which is simply the achievement—better or poorer—which man creates now and here, in the same manner in which the quality of manhood and womanhood depends wholly on the degree of achievement in childhood and youth. We do not "find," but instead, create our lives. As we are perpetually creating, we are perpetually making them anew. If we must, this year, live out the errors that we made last year, there is an encouragement rather than a penalty in the fact, as this truth argues that if we now enter on a loftier plane and realize in outward life a nobler experience, we shall, next year, or in some future time, find ourselves entirely free from the weight of the errors we have abandoned, the mistakes we have learned not to make, and the entanglements that our "negligences and ignorances" created. If we have caused our own sorrow, we can cause our own joy. For the Golden Age lies onward.
