The Chief End of Man Part 3

In our social existence we come in touch with other souls, each with its actual or potential wealth of being, and each inviting our sympathetic response.

These--order, beauty, conscious existence--are the impact on us of the universe. The right apprehension of these and the active response to them const.i.tute the true exercise of our own nature; and it is through that exercise that we know Life,--the one Life,--and know it to be divine.

These three aspects,--order, beauty, our fellow-lives,--let us dwell for a moment on each in turn.

An amazing stimulus to man's powers has come in the discovery that he may penetrate and follow to an indefinite extent the actual procedure of the Universe. We are only on the threshold of our discoveries. We are just beginning to see where they have their highest application.

We have been harnessing the steeds of power to the service of our physical wants. We are just beginning to understand that they are to be made the ministers of building up a complete manhood. The theologian has sought to demonstrate that all natural processes work in the service of a divine righteousness. In place of any such demonstration, we are finding the true exercise of knowledge in applying for ourselves the processes of nature to the fulfillment of our n.o.blest purposes.

We are just now at the transition point between the old and the new conception of divine Power. The old conception was: "The Almighty is a merciful father. If his children ask anything, he will give it: the weapon of desire is prayer." The new perception is: "The Almighty moves in lines which we can partly discern. By putting ourselves in line with that Power, we make it helpful: the weapon of desire is intelligent effort. Through our wills works the divine Will."

"With the great girdle of G.o.d, go and encompa.s.s the earth!"

It is moral fidelity which apprehends the true application and significance for man of that regular procedure of nature which environs and conditions him. And this Natural Order, in turn, requires the moral sense to humbly and obediently go to school to it. "You want to be good?" says Nature. "You dare to believe that even I in my mightiness am set to help you to be good? Then study my processes, and conform to them!" A new set of commandments is being written in the sight of men,--commandments learned but slowly and often transgressed, even by those whose wills are pure and whose hearts are loving. _Thou shalt sufficiently rest_! How perpetually in these days is that commandment broken, and with what woeful penalty! The practical basis of all religion is the religion of the body. The body politic, too, the social organism, has its code of natural laws, intelligible, imperative. And every new discovery yields guidance and utters command. "Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened!"

Only through moral fidelity is the higher meaning of Beauty won. It is the pure in heart who see G.o.d. The beauty of the human form is, on the one side, uplifting to the soul, sacramental, as if it were the shrine of a divinity. On the other side, it blends with the instincts which when unchecked in their play degrade humanity. Plato pictures the two mingled elements as two steeds yoked together, the one black, unruly, down-plunging, the other white, celestial, up-mounting, while Reason, the charioteer, strives to rule them. The n.o.bler interpretation is slowly acquired by mankind. There are great, sometimes catastrophic, lapses; there are periods when art and literature become the servants of the earthly instead of the heavenly Venus. We still look far forward to

"The world's great bridals, chaste and calm."

Yet, little by little, the enn.o.bling aspect of human beauty becomes a familiar perception, is wrought into a habit, is transmitted as an inheritance. Whoever achieves in himself the victory of personal purity is helping to open the eyes of mankind.

The material world becomes instinct with majesty and with sweetness to the eyes that can see. It is a revelation of which Wordsworth and Emerson are the prophets in literature, but which is written no less in many a heart quite untaught of books. The face of Mother Earth is the book in which many a man and woman and child read lessons of delight, spelled in letters of rock and fern, of brook and cowslip, of maple leaf and goldenrod. Such lessons mean little save to the pure and humble.

The distinctive voice of nature's gospel is a voice of joy. Mixing freely with humanity, we encounter the almost perpetual presence of trouble. But turning to forest and mountain and sea and sky, we are confronted with gladness ineffable. Still "the morning stars sing together and the sons of G.o.d shout for joy." Can our religion find no other emblem than the cross,--the instrument of torture? Mankind has pondered long the lesson of sorrow: dare it enter the whole inheritance of sons.h.i.+p, and taste the fullness of joy? Reality which thought and word cannot convey is bodied forth to us in music and in natural beauty. Music is the deepest voice of humanity, and beauty is the answering smile of G.o.d. When the poet-philosopher has crowded into verse all that he can express of life's meaning,--of the subservience of evil to good, the "deep love lying under these pictures of time,"--he invokes at the last the very look of earth and sea and sky as the best answer:--

"Uprose the merry Sphinx, And crouched no more in stone; She melted, into purple cloud, She silvered in the moon; She spired into a yellow flame; She flowered in blossoms red; She flowed into a foaming wave; She stood Monadnoc's head.

"Thorough a thousand voices Spoke the universal dame, 'Who telleth one of my meanings Is master of all I am.'"

Yet is the chief exercise of our life through relation with our fellow-lives. If the sublime joy of nature's companions.h.i.+p could be made constant, at the price of isolation from our kind, the price were a thousand-fold too great. And it is through true and sympathetic relation with other lives that we chiefly come into conscious harmony with the universe. It is in a right interplay with mankind that we get closest to the heart of things.

"G.o.d is love." So I am told: how shall I interpret it in my experience? Is it a proposition to be believed about some being throned above my sight? If I exercise my mind in that direction, if I weigh and balance and sift the intellectual evidence, I may toil to a doubtful conclusion. But let me, issuing forth from my ponderings, put myself into kindly relations with my fellow beings,--let me so much as pat affectionately the head of the honest dog who meets me on the street,--and a thrill like the warmth of spring touches my chilled intellect. Let me, for a day only, make each human contact, though but of a pa.s.sing moment, a true recognition of some other soul, and I feel myself somehow in right relation with the world. "He that loveth knoweth G.o.d, and is born of G.o.d."

At the heart of all love is an instinct of reciprocity. It may or may not get a return from its immediate object, but somehow it opens the fountains of the universe. The heart that loves finds itself, it scarce knows how, beloved.

Such, then, is the process, and such the revelation. The first step, the constant requirement, the unsparing hourly need, is obedience to the known right. The sequence is an ever-widening sense of a sweet and celestial encompa.s.sment.

The man rightly practiced in all n.o.ble exercises of life--in moral fidelity, in reverence and sympathy, in observation and conformity to the actual conditions of the world about him--will find pouring in upon him a beauty, a love, a divinity, which fill the soul with a heavenly vision. And that soul, in whatever of extremity may come to it, has under its feet the eternal rock.

Through the serious literature of to-day runs a bitter wail,--the cry that life is sad and dark and cruel. Sad and dark and cruel it is, until one meets it sword in hand. The great Mother will have her children to be heroes. She tests them, frightens them, masks herself sometimes in terror. Face the terror, drive straight at the danger, and the mask dissolves to show the celestial smile, the "all-repaying eyes."

The road is an arduous one. The aged philosopher, you remember, was asked by a youthful monarch, "Tell me if you please in a few words what is the final fruit and outcome of philosophy?" The philosopher answered him, "Cultivate yourself diligently in all virtue and wisdom for thirty years, and then you may be able to partly understand the answer to your question."

It is an arduous road, but it leads to reality. All short and easy answers to the supreme question dissatisfy after the first flush. The confidence of the dogmatic answer, we soon discover, has no sufficient authority to back it. The glib theoretical answer leads us, after all, to a Balance of Probabilities. That is the best G.o.d that theoretic philosophy can give us. It may be better than nothing. But who can love a Balance of Probabilities? Who can feel the hand of such a deity as that when his hand gropes for support in face of temptation, disaster, heartbreak?

We are told, "It may suffice for the strong and saintly to bid them 'Prove for yourself that the universe is good;' but what kind of gospel is this for the weak, for the child, for the average man and woman?"

The answer is: The vast majority of mankind always have lived and always will live largely by reliance on some person or some body of persons or some social atmosphere of opinion. That authority of the church which has availed so much is just the confidence of a crowd in the leaders.h.i.+p of certain men to whom they are accustomed to look up.

In the order of nature, always the leaders will lead. What the strong and saintly receive with vivid impression and profound a.s.surance, the ma.s.s who feel their influence will accept a good deal on their authority. The child will catch the faith of its father and mother.

But, further, in its very nature, that method of approach to the highest reality which requires only goodness and open-heartedness and love is available to the little child and to the simplest mind. When Jesus said, "Blessed are the meek, the merciful, the peace-makers, the pure in heart, they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness,"

every one understood him.

But it may be asked, Does this att.i.tude bring man face to face with a personal G.o.d? Personal he will be to some: to many the only solid and adequate expression of a real being is a personal being. Nay, to many only a human personality means anything. A great preacher and poet of our day once said that he never thought of G.o.d except under the figure of Christ,--a human figure in some human occupation and att.i.tude. Let Divinity body itself as Christ to minds so const.i.tuted. Let others invoke "the G.o.d and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." But impose no constraint and lay no ban on those to whom, as Carlyle says, "the Highest cannot be spoken of in words. Personal! Impersonal! One!

Three! What meaning can any mortal, after all, attach to them in reference to such an object?" It is not these forms of thought that are essential. What is essential is a way of living access to the Highest.

The adequate conception--the keynote--must be one that is sufficient alike for the every-day mood, for the exalted hours, and for the emergencies. That keynote is given in this truth: that there is no moment so dull or so hard but one can ask himself, What is the best the situation allows? and conform to that; can open his eyes to some beauty close at hand; can enter sympathetically into some neighboring life.

We prescribe to ourselves certain att.i.tudes, and strive toward certain ideals. But the supreme hours are those in which there flow in upon our consciousness the ins.h.i.+nings and the upholdings of some unfathomed Power. We are led, we are carried. We feel, we know not whence nor how, a peace that pa.s.seth understanding and a love that casteth out fear.

This is the substance of that religious experience in which throughout the ages the heart of man has found its deepest support and encouragement. The experience has clothed itself to the imagination in the garb of this or that creed or climate. It is liable to debas.e.m.e.nts and counterfeits, but no more liable than all other n.o.ble emotions and experiences. Sometimes there is the culmination of a moral struggle, and the whole course of life receives a new direction. Sometimes there is an illumination and joy and peace. It is an exaltation of the soul in which gladness blends with moral energy. No chapter of human life is written in deeper letters than those which tell of victory over temptation, strength out of weakness, radiance beside the grave, through this divine uplift.

There is another experience, more common, less dependent on individual const.i.tution, which bears an inward message of soberer tone but of like import. It is the peace which attends the consciousness of right-doing. Wordsworth personifies it as the approval of Duty, "stern daughter of the voice of G.o.d:"--

"Stern Lawgiver! Yet thou dost wear The G.o.dhead's most benignant grace; Nor know we anything more fair Than is the smile upon thy face."

The faithful child of duty, whatever his creed, whatever his temperament, is naturally the possessor of a steady, calm a.s.surance.

Somehow, he feels, it is well.

Reasonings about immortality lead to little result. Convinced or unconvinced, we profit little by a mere opinion. We speculate, doubt, reject, or hope; and in either case the moral conduct of life is, perhaps, not much affected. But there come hours when to love and aspiration the heavenly vision opens, and the sense of its own eternity thrills the soul.

The crying need of the heart is always a present need. No promise of a far-away satisfaction is sufficient for it. And answering to just that need is the experience, sometimes given, that the human love once ours is ours still in its fullness,--some richer fullness even than that of days gone by. There are hours in which the heart's voice is,

"Though mixed with G.o.d and Nature thou, I seem to love thee more and more."

The highest state of consciousness to which we attain is expressed by the old phrase that man feels himself a child of G.o.d. His energy feels back of it an infinite energy. His desires rest peacefully in some all-sufficing good. All that is highest and purest in him mingles with its divine source. He sees new and higher interpretations of his own life and other lives. All the human love he has ever experienced he holds as an abiding possession. There comes to him not so much the premonition of a future state as the consciousness of some state in which past, present, and future blend. He is free from illusions, and serene. It does not disturb him even to know that the vision will pa.s.s, and he will return to earth's level. He sees the truth, he feels the divine reality; and the certainty and the gladness are such that not even the prevision of his own relapse into dimmer perception can depress him. The hour speaks with command to the hours that are to follow; it bids them to fidelity, to love, to highest courage.

When turning from contemplation we throw ourselves into the work and the battle, a pulse of divine energy blends with our n.o.blest effort, touches our joy with an ineffable sweetness, and hushes our sorrow like a child folded in its mother's arms.

The key of the world is given into our hands when we throw ourselves unreservedly into the service of the highest truth we know, "with fidelity to the right as G.o.d gives us to see the right." So it is that we may find ourselves

"Wedded to this goodly universe In love and holy pa.s.sion."

III