The Life Radiant Part 1

The Life Radiant.

by Lilian Whiting.

"_I am Merlin Who follow the Gleam._"

_Know well, my soul, G.o.d's hand controls Whate'er thou fearest; Round Him in calmest music rolls Whate'er thou hearest._

_What to thee is shadow, to Him is day, And the end He knoweth.

And not on a blind and aimless way The spirit goeth._

WHITTIER.

THE GOLDEN AGE LIES ONWARD.

"The Golden Age lies onward, not behind.

The pathway through the past has led us up: The pathway through the future will lead on, And higher."

The Life Radiant is that transfiguration of the ordinary daily events and circ.u.mstances which lifts them to the spiritual plane and sees them as the signs and the indications of the divine leading. Every circ.u.mstance thus becomes a part of the revelation; and to constantly live in this illuminated atmosphere is to invest all experiences with a kind of magical enchantment. Life prefigures itself before us as a spiritual drama in which we are, at once, the actors and the spectators.

The story of living goes on perpetually. The days and the years inevitably turn the pages and open new chapters. Nothing is ever hopeless, because new combinations and groupings create new results. The forces that determine his daily life are partly with man and partly with G.o.d. They lie in both the Seen and the Unseen. We are always an inhabitant of both realms, and to recognize either alone and be blind to the other is to deprive ourselves of the great sources of energy. The divine aid, infinite and all-potent as it is, capable at any moment of utterly transforming all the conditions and transferring them to a higher plane, is yet limited by the degree of spiritual receptivity in the individual. As one may have all the air that he is able to breathe, so may one have all the aid of the Holy Spirit which he is capable of receiving. Man can never accept so gladly and so freely as G.o.d offers; but in just the proportion to which he can, increasingly, lift up his heart in response, to that degree G.o.d fills his life with a glory not of earth.

"Man may ask, and G.o.d may answer, but we may not understand, Knowing but our own poor language, all the writing of His hand."

Science has discovered the existence of that incalculable energy, the ether, interpenetrated in the atmosphere. Electro-magnetic currents of power beyond all conception are revealed, and when intelligently recognized by some happy genius, like that of Marconi, they begin to be utilized in the service of human progress. Now as this ethereal energy which is only just beginning to be recognized can be drawn upon for light, for heat, for motor power, for communication, just as this. .h.i.therto undreamed-of power can be drawn upon for the fundamental needs of the physical world, so, correspondingly, does there exist the infinite reservoir of spiritual energy which G.o.d freely opens to man in precisely the proportion in which he recognizes and avails himself of its transforming power. And in this realm lies the Life Radiant. If this transfiguration of life could only be experienced by the aid of wealth and health and all for which these two factors stand, it would not be worth talking about. We hear a great deal of the "privileged cla.s.ses"

and of "fortunate conditions," as if there were certain arbitrary divisions in life defined by impa.s.sable boundaries, and that he who finds himself in one, is unable to pa.s.s to another.

Never was there a more fatally erroneous conception. In the spiritual world there are no limits, no boundaries, no arbitrary divisions. Just so far as the soul conquers, is it free. Conquer ignorance, and one enters the realm of education, of culture; conquer vice, and he enters into the realm of virtue; conquer impatience and irritability and bitterness, and their result in gloom and despondency, and he enters into the realm of serenity and sweetness and exaltation with their result in power of accomplishment. The Life Radiant can be achieved, and is within the personal choice of every individual. One may place himself in relation with this infinite and all-potent current of divine energy and receive its impetus and its exhilaration and its illumination every hour in the day. The toiler in manual labor may lead this twofold life.

On the visible side he is pus.h.i.+ng onward in the excavation of a tunnel; he is laying the track of a new railroad; he is engaged in building a house; he stands at his appointed place in a great factory,--but is this all? His real work lies both in the visible and in the invisible. On the one hand he is contributing to the material resources of the world, and he is earning his wage by which to live; on the other hand he is developing patience, faithfulness, and judgment,--quant.i.ties of the spiritual man and possessions of the spiritual life which extend the spiritual territory. Faithfulness to the immediate duty creates a larger theatre for duty. There are not wanting examples that could be named of statesmen,--senators, governors, and others in high places, to say nothing of the supreme example of a Lincoln; there are not wanting examples of professional men in high and important places who initiated their work by any humble and honest industrial employment that chanced to present itself at the moment. Conquering this rudimentary realm, they pa.s.sed on to others successively. Integrity is a spiritual quant.i.ty, and it insures spiritual aid. The cloud of witnesses is never dispersed. The only imprisonment is in limitations, and limitations can be constantly overcome. The horizon line of the impossible recedes as we advance. In the last a.n.a.lysis nothing is too sublime or too beautiful to be entirely possible. Its attainment is simply a question of conditions.

These conditions lie in entering into this inner realm of spiritual energy in which the personal will is increasingly identified with the will of G.o.d.

Like an echo of celestial music are these lines by Sully-Prudhomme:--

"The lilies fade with the dying hours, Hushed is the song-bird's lay; But I dream of summers and dream of flowers That last alway."

Nor is this only the day-dream of a poet. The summers and flowers that last alway are a very immediate treasure which one has only to perceive, to grasp, to recognize, and to realize. "Surely," exclaimed the Psalmist, "goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever." This dwelling in "the house of the Lord" is by no means a figure of speech. Nor is it to be regarded as some ineffable privilege to be--possibly to be--enjoyed after that change we call death. Its real significance is here and now.

One must dwell in "the house of the Lord" to-day, and every day. The "house of the Lord" is a beautiful figurative expression for that spiritual atmosphere in which one may perpetually live, and in which it is his simple duty both to live and to radiate to all around him.

In these summer days of 1903, in this golden dawn of the twentieth century, the world is echoing with wonder in the discovery of a new and most mysterious force in nature,--radium. Science is, at this date, powerless to a.n.a.lyze or explain its marvellous power. The leading scientists of the world of learning--Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Professor Curie (who, with Mme. Curie, has the honor of being its discoverer)--believe that in radium will be found the true solution of the problem of matter. Radium gives off rays at the speed of one hundred and twenty thousand miles a second, and these rays offer the most extraordinary heat, light, and power. Yet with this immense radiation it suffers no diminution of energy; nor can any scientist yet discern from what source this power is fed. A grain of it will furnish enough light to enable one to read, and, as Professor J. J. Thomson has observed, it will suffer no diminution in a million years. It will burn the flesh through a metal box and through clothing, but without burning the texture of the garments. The rays given out by radium cannot be refracted, polarized, or regularly reflected in the way of ordinary light, although some of them can be turned aside by a magnet.

Professor Curie has reported to the French Academy of Science that half a pound of radium salts will in one hour produce a heat equal to the burning of one-third of a foot of hydrogen gas. This takes place, it must be remembered, without any perceptible diminution in the radium. It emits heat maintaining a temperature of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above its surroundings. It evolves sufficient heat to melt more than its own weight of ice every hour. Radium projects its rays through solid substances without any perceptible hindrance and burns blisters through a steel case. The light is pale blue. Down in the deepest pitchblende mines, where particles of radium have been hidden away since the creation of the world, they are still found s.h.i.+ning with their strange blue light. The radium electrons pa.s.s through the s.p.a.ce which separates every molecule in a solid body from another. The scientific theory is that no two molecules in any body, however dense, actually touch. The relative power of radium to the X-ray is as six to one. The rays of radium have one hundred thousand times the energy of those of uranium and over one hundred times the energy of barium radiation. The scarcity of the metal will be understood when it is stated that there is far less radium in pitchblende than gold in ordinary sea water. Radium colors gla.s.s violet; transforms oxygen into ozone, white phosphorus to red; electrifies various gases and liquids, including petroleum and liquid air.

Professor Sir William Crookes, the world's greatest living physicist and experimental scientist, said of radium in the June of this 1903:--

"In total darkness I laid a piece of pitchblende--the ore from which radium is extracted--face down upon a sensitized plate, and let it act with its own light for twenty-four hours. The result was a photograph, where the black pitchblende appeared light owing to the emanations from the radium contained in it. The photograph also shows these going off into s.p.a.ce from the sides of the specimen.

"Radium is dangerous to handle. Once I carried a tiny piece of radium in my waistcoat pocket to a soiree at the Royal Society, and on reaching home found a blister in my side. The blisters from radium may take months to get well, as the injurious effect goes so deep. Now I carry a thick lead box just large enough to hold the little bra.s.s case in which I keep the radium itself. There it lies--a little, tawny, crystalline patch. There would hardly be a larger quant.i.ty together in one box anywhere in England.

"There are several kinds of emanations from radium. Photographs similar to those produced by the Roentgen ray tube and induction coil can be got by means of the emanations from a small quant.i.ty of radium. I took a screen made of zincblende, which will phosph.o.r.esce when the emanations of radium fall upon it. I then painted upon it, in a solution of radium, the word 'Radium.' In the dark this screen (about three inches by four inches) gives off sufficient light to read by. But the most striking way of showing the emanations is by the little contrivance I call a Spinthariscope. In this a zinc sulphide screen is fitted at the end of a short bra.s.s tube, with a speck of radium about a millimeter away from it. Looking in the dark through the lens at the other end one sees a regular bombardment of the screen by the emanations. The phenomena of radium require us to recast many of our ideas of matter, electricity, and energy, and its discovery promises to realize what for the last hundred years have been but day-dreams of philosophy.

"Although the fact of emission of heat by radium is in itself sufficiently remarkable, this heat is probably only a small portion of the energy radium is constantly sending into s.p.a.ce. It is at the same time hurling off material particles which reveal their impact on a screen by luminous scintillations. Stop these by a gla.s.s or mica screen, and torrents of Roentgen rays still pour out from a few milligrams of radium salt in quant.i.ty to exhibit to a company all the phenomena of Roentgen rays, and with energy enough to produce a nasty blister on the flesh, if kept near it for an hour."

It is hardly possible to contemplate this remarkable element in the world of nature without recognizing its correspondence in the world of spirit. If an element radiates perpetual light, heat, and power with no loss of its own inherent energy, so the spirit can radiate love, sympathy, sweetness, and inspiration with no diminution of its own quality. Science may be unable to recognize the medium from which radium is fed; but religion recognizes the medium from which the spirit draws its sustenance in the power of G.o.d. The human will merged in the divine will is invincible. There is no ideal of life which it may not realize, and this realization is in the line of the inevitable and is experienced with the unerring certainty of a mathematical demonstration.

Yet, when one comes to examine the actual average att.i.tude of humanity toward this subject of the divine will, one finds it is largely that of a mere gloomy and enforced resignation, even at its best, and, at its worst, of distrust and rebellion to the will of G.o.d. It seems to be held as the last resort of desperation and despair, rather than as the one abounding source of all joy and success and achievement.

The average individual holds a traditional belief that he ought, perhaps, to be able sincerely to wish that G.o.d's will be done, but as a matter of fact he far prefers his own. The pet.i.tion is, in his mind, invariably a.s.sociated with seasons of great sorrow, disaster, and calamity, when, having apparently nothing else to hope for, a prayer is offered for the will of G.o.d! It is somewhat vaguely held to be the appropriate expression for the last emergency, and that it implies resigning one's self to the most serious and irreferable calamity. There is also a nebulous feeling that while the will of G.o.d may be entirely appropriate to the conditions and circ.u.mstances of the aged, the poor, the unfortunate, and the defective cla.s.ses, it is the last thing in the world to be invoked for the young, the gifted, the strong, and the brilliant orders of society. It is tacitly relegated to a place in some last hopeless emergency, and not to a place in the creative energy of the most brilliant achievement.

Now, as a matter of profoundest truth, this att.i.tude is as remote from the clear realization of what is involved in the will of G.o.d as would be the conviction that the flying express train or the swift electric motor cars might be suitable enough for the aged, and the weary, and the invalid, and the people whose time was of little consequence, but that the young, the radiant, the eager, the gifted, the people to whom time was valuable, must go by their own conveyances of horse or foot under their immediate personal control. This fallacy is no more remote from truth than is the fallacy that the will of G.o.d is something to be accepted with what decorum of resignation one may, only when he cannot help it! On the contrary, the will of G.o.d is the infinitely great motor of human life. Its power is as incalculably greater over the soul than that of radium over other elements, as it is higher in the scale of being; as spirit rather than substance; and the Life Radiant is really entered upon when one has come absolutely to merge all his longing and desire into the divine purposes. It is like availing one's self of the great laws of attraction and gravitation in nature. With the human will identified with the divine will, every day's experience becomes invested with the keenest zest and interest. The events that may arise at any moment enlist the energy and fascinate the imagination. The consciousness of union with G.o.d produces an exquisite confidence in the wise and sweet enchantment of life; the constant receptivity of the soul to the influence and the guiding of the Holy Spirit make an atmosphere ecstatic, even under the most commonplace or outwardly depressing circ.u.mstances. Celestial harmonies thrill the air. In this divine atmosphere--the soul's native air--every energy is quickened. The divine realm is as truly the habitat of the spiritual man--who, temporarily inhabiting a physical body that he may thus come into relations with a physical world, is essentially a spiritual rather than a physical being--as the air is the habitat of the bird, or the water of the fish.

When the divine statement is made, "Without Me ye can do nothing," it is simply that of a literal fact. The gloom, the depression, the irritation that so often prevail and persist in mental conditions, do not arise, primarily, from any outward trial or perplexity; they are the result--the inevitable result--of the soul's lack of union with G.o.d; the lack of that _rapport_ between the spirit of man and the divine spirit in which alone is exhilaration and joy. When this union is forged, when the human will rests perfectly in the divine will, one then absolutely knows, with the most positive and literal conviction, that "all things work together for good to them that love G.o.d." The a.s.surance is felt with the unchallenged force of a mathematical demonstration. Not merely that the pleasant and agreeable things work together for good, but _all_ things--pain, loss, sorrow, injustice, misapprehension. Then one realizes in his own experience the significance of the words, "We glory in tribulation, also." One has heard all one's life, perhaps, of "the ministry of sorrow," and similar phrases, and he has become a trifle impatient of them as a sort of incantation with which he has little sympathy. At the best, he relegates this order of ministry to the rank and file of humanity; to those whose lives are (to his vision) somewhat prosy and dull; and for himself he proposes to live in a world beautiful, where stars and sunsets and flames and fragrances enchant the hours, where, with his feet shod with silver bells, he is perpetually conscious of being

"Born and nourished in miracles."

He is perfectly confident that every life can be happy, if it will; and he regards sorrow as a wholly stupid and negative state which no one need fall into if only he have sufficient energy to generate a perpetual enchantment. Thus he dances down the years like the daffodils on the morning breeze, singing always his hymn to the radiant G.o.ddess:

"The Fairest enchants me, The Mighty commands me,"

pledging his faith at the Altar of Perpetual Adoration that one has only but to believe in happiness and make room for it in his life in order to live in this constant exhilaration. Then, one day, he awakens to find his world in ruins. Sorrow, pain, loss, have come upon him, and have come in the one form of all others that seems most impossible to bear.

If it were death, even of the one dearest on earth, he would be sustained by divine consolations. If it were financial deprivation, he could meet it with fort.i.tude and accept Goethe's counsel to "go and earn more." If it were any one of various other forms of trial, he reflects, there would be for his pain various forms of consolation; but the peculiar guise it has a.s.sumed paralyzes him with its baffling power, its darkness of eclipse. The element of hopelessness in it,--his own utter inability to understand the cause of the sorrow which is literally a thunderbolt out of a clear sky,--plunges him almost into despair. He had endeavored to give the best, but the result is as if he had given the worst; he had come to rely on a perfect and beautiful comprehension and sympathy, but he is confronted with the most inexplicable misapprehension of all his motives, the most complete misunderstanding of all his aspirations and prayers. This, or other combinations and conditions of which it may serve as a type, is one of the phases of human experience. If pain were only the inevitable result of conscious and intentional wrong-doing, then might one even learn to refrain from the error and thus avoid the result. But a deeper experience in life, a more profound insight into the springs of its action, reveal that pain, as well as joy, falls into experience as an event encountered on the onward march, rather than as being, invariably, conditions created by ourselves. In the final a.n.a.lysis of being, we may have created the causes sometime and somewhere; but in the immediate sense we fail to discern the trace of our own action. A joy, a radiance undreamed of, suddenly drops into a day, making it a memorable date forever; a joy that trans.m.u.tes itself into exaltation and a higher range of energy.

Naturally, we count such an experience divine, and offer our grat.i.tude to G.o.d, the giver of all blessings. But a tragedy of sorrow, a darkness of desolation impenetrable and seemingly final, also falls suddenly into a day, and inexpressible amazement and incredulity that it can be real are added to the pain. But it is real. The suns.h.i.+ne has vanished; the stars have hidden their light; the air is leaden where once it was all gold and rose and pearl; one is alone in the desert, in a loneliness that no voice sounds through, in an anguish that no human sympathy can reach or sustain. All that made life worth the living has been inexplicably withdrawn; and how, then, shall he live? And _why_ shall he live? he may even question. The springs of energy are broken and his powers are paralyzed. Whatever he has. .h.i.therto done, whatever he has tried or hoped to do in the joyous exaltation of the days that have vanished from all save memory, he can do no longer. It is not a question of choice, not a decision that he would not still continue his efforts; but it is the total impossibility of doing so that settles down upon him like a leaden pall. The blind cannot see, the deaf cannot hear, the dumb cannot speak, the paralyzed cannot walk,--no matter how gladly they would fulfil these functions. So he looks at his own life. His world is in ruins, and he has no power to ever rebuild it again. In such conditions the problem of suicide may arrive like a ghastly spectre to confront the mind. It is a spectre that, according to statistics, is alarmingly prevalent. The statisticians talk of periods of it as "an epidemic." Both science and religion take note of it, discuss its bearing upon life, its tendency and its possible prevention. It is seen as the result of both great and of trivial causes. It is seen to follow a great sin, and to be the--terribly mistaken--refuge of a great sorrow.

And the remedy lies,--where? It can hardly lie elsewhere than in a truer understanding of the very nature of life itself. The only remedy will be found in the larger general understanding that life cannot be extinguished. One may destroy his physical _body_,--he can do that at any moment and by an infinite variety of methods. But he cannot destroy _himself_. He may deprive himself of the instrument that was given to him for use in the physical world; he cannot escape from the duties that he should have fulfilled when he had the means of doing so in the use of this instrument we call the body. If science and religion could clearly teach the awful results that follow suicide, the terrible isolation and deprivation in which the spiritual being who has thrown away his instrument of service finds himself, it would be the one effective cure for a demoralizing tendency. If one has sinned, sometime and somewhere must he meet the consequences. He cannot escape them by escaping from his body, and the sooner he meets them, in repentance and atonement, the sooner will he work out to better and brighter conditions. If one encounters disaster or great personal sorrow, what then? One does not throw away all his possibilities of usefulness because he is himself unhappy. If he does do this he is ign.o.ble. Life is a divine dream. It is a divine responsibility, primarily between each soul and G.o.d. It is one's business to live bravely, with dignity, with faith, with generosity of consideration and good will, with love, indeed, which is the expression of the highest energy. Yet, with his personal world in ruins, what shall he do? He must learn that supreme lesson of all time and eternity,--the lesson to accept and to joyfully embrace the will of G.o.d as thus revealed to him, in an inscrutable way.

[Sidenote: The Supreme Illumination.]

Until he shall learn to accept this experience as divine, and offer his grat.i.tude to G.o.d for pain as sincerely as he offered it for experiences of joy and of beauty, he cannot enter upon the Life Radiant. For the radiant life is only achieved through these mingled experiences as all equally accepted from the Divine Power.

"Ah, when the infinite burden of life descendeth upon us, Crushes to earth our hopes, and under the earth in the graveyard, Then it is good to pray unto G.o.d, for His sorrowing children Turns He ne'er from the door, but He heals and helps and consoles them.

Yet is it good to pray when all things are prosperous with us; Pray in fortunate days, for life's most beautiful fortune Kneels before the Eternal's gate, and with hands inter-folded, Praises, thankful and moved, the only Giver of blessings."

The Life Radiant comes when one can as sincerely thank G.o.d for pain as for joy; when, after long groping in the darkness, clinging, indeed, to his faith in G.o.d (for without that he could not live an hour, though that faith be totally without sight), he suddenly realizes how a great sorrow has wrought in him a great result; that it has perfected and crystallized all that was nebulous in his faith, and that it has absolutely brought him into perfect rest in the Divine Will; that it has forged that indissoluble link which forevermore identifies his will with the will of G.o.d, and thus opens to him a realm fairer far than a "World Beautiful"--even a World Divine. Only in this finer ether is revealed to him the Life Radiant; in the atmosphere made resplendent and glorious by this revelation of the soul's union with G.o.d. It is a life only experienced after one who has seen before him the Promised Land is led into the Wilderness instead, and who, standing there in the midst of denial, and defeat, and desolation, can rejoice in the sea of gla.s.s mingled with fire through which he must pa.s.s. Only in this supreme surrender of the soul to G.o.d; only in this rapture of union with the divine power, lies the Life Radiant. It is a glory not of earth; it is the instant crystallization of an intense and infinite energy that pours itself into every need of the varied human life. It is the igniting of a spark that flashes its illumination on every problem and perplexity. It is the coming to "know G.o.d" in the sense meant by Saint Paul, and thus to enter into the eternal life. For the eternal life is not a term that implies mere duration. It implies present conditions. The eternal life is now. It is a spiritual state, and implies the profound and the realized union with G.o.d, rather than a prolongation of existence through countless ages. Only the eternal life can thus prolong itself. The life of the spirit is alone immortal.

[Sidenote: Creating the New World.]

"The soul looketh steadily forward, creating a world before her, leaving worlds behind her," and "the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed." That union of energy and will which we call the soul is capable of creating a new world every day, and any adequate perception of the life that now is, as well as that which is to come, suggests consolation for the ills of the day and leads one into the atmosphere of peace and joy.

When one comes into any clear realization of this life of the spirit,--of its infinite outlook, its command of resources,--the entanglement with trifles falls off of itself. Not unfrequently a great deal of time and energy is totally wasted in endeavoring to combat or to conquer the annoyances and troubles that beset one; that weight his wings and blind his eyes and render him impervious and unresponsive to the beauty and joy of life. Nine times out of ten it is far better to ignore these, to put them out of sight and out of mind, and press on to gain the clearer atmosphere, to create the new world. "The whole course of things goes to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word. Why need you choose so painfully your place, and occupation, and a.s.sociates, and modes of action and of entertainment? Certainly there is a possible right for you that precludes the need of balance and wilful election.

For you there is a reality, a fit place and congenial duties. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment. Then you put all gainsayers in the wrong. Then you are the world, the measure of right, of truth, of beauty. If we will not be marplots with our miserable interferences, the work, the society, letters, arts, science, religion of men would go on far better than now, and the heaven predicted from the beginning of the world, and still predicted from the bottom of the heart, would organize itself, as do now the rose, and the air, and the sun."

The poet declares that "sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things," but there is a certain morbidness in even the sensitive delicacy and intensity of feeling that broods too deeply over the past.

It is a great art to learn to let things go--let them pa.s.s. They are a part of the "flowing conditions." Even the pain and sorrow that result from failures and changes in social relations; loss of friends, the vanis.h.i.+ng of friends.h.i.+ps in which one had trusted,--even this phase of trial, which is truly the hardest of all, can be best endured by closing the door of consciousness on it, and creating a new world by that miracle-working power of the soul. Friends.h.i.+ps that hold within themselves any permanent, any spiritual reality, come to stay. "Only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline and which does not decline to me, but, native of the same celestial alt.i.tude, repeats in its own all my experience." Life has too many claims and privileges and resources to waste it in lamentations. Let one look forward, not backward. Fairy realms of enchantment beckon him on. These "flowing conditions of life"