The Life Radiant Part 13

Yesterday not a bird peeped; the world was barren, peaked, and pining: to-day 't is inconceivably populous; creation swarms and meliorates."

The speculative idea that immortality is an achievement rather than a gift is not new, but whenever it is formulated, as in a recent sermon by Rev. Doctor Parkhurst, it startles many people and arouses antagonism, so far as it is not truly understood. Yet it has its deepest aspects of spiritual truth, and it is the idea constantly, persistently, and most impressively taught by Saint Paul throughout the entire gospels. We are constantly besought to _lay hold_ on the eternal life; to press forward toward immortal things; to be renewed in the spirit; to "put on the new man, which after G.o.d is created in righteousness and true holiness; to follow Him, who is the Life, the Truth, the Way." The entire teaching of the gospels is one forcible system of active and unfaltering endeavor in the growing achievement of spirituality, which determines Immortality.

It is the exact accountant--measure for measure. So much spirituality, so much immortality. Nor does this a.s.sertion partake in the slightest degree of the nature of a metaphysical problem, to be comprehended only by the theologian and the philosopher. It is the most simple, clear, and direct of propositions. We all accept Saint Paul's a.s.sertion that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven. So far as one lives only in the processes of the physical life he is not living the life of those spiritual energies which alone lay hold on immortality. There is a certain degree of intelligent consciousness that is inseparable from this physical life; an intelligence that buys and sells, and bargains and calculates on the physical plane, and is sufficient to produce a certain rational status of life. There are not wanting individuals who never rise above this plane. They may, and often do, acquire possessions and even power on the limited plane of the outward life; they may even have some formal and ceremonial religious observances which they mistake for Christianity, but which are the framework ready and able to inspire them if filled with the spirit, but which, to them, remain empty and dead. The man whose body, simply, occupies his church pew on Sunday, and who on Monday proceeds to cheat his neighbor, is not, we will all agree, the man who has really entered into the true privileges offered by the Church. The sacrament of Sunday must become the consecration of Monday.

Unless this be true the man has not _laid hold_ on Immortality. So we see that this lower plane of considerable intelligence and consciousness, related exclusively to the visible and the tangible, must be eliminated from our conceptions of Immortality. There is nothing at all in this that can possibly survive death. Doctor John Fiske gives a fine and comprehensive definition of that degree of achievement which is above the level of death when he says:--

"In the highest of creatures the Divine immanence has acquired sufficient concentration and steadiness to survive the dissolution of the flesh, and a.s.sert an individuality untrammelled by the limitations which in the present life everywhere persistently surround it."

Here we have the initial truth. The acquirement of "sufficient concentration and steadiness to survive the dissolution of the flesh,"--_and_ "to a.s.sert an individuality untrammelled by the limitations of the present life,"--when man has progressed so far as this, then, and then alone, has he _achieved_ immortality. He has laid hold on its initial phase. For immortality is infinite beyond conception. It is as infinite as s.p.a.ce, and as the idea of G.o.d. To have achieved enough of this "concentration and steadiness"--which is merely another phrase for spirituality--to survive death, is no more achieving immortality, in its wholeness and completeness, than learning the alphabet is the achievement of scholars.h.i.+p in its infinite resources. It cannot be conceived of as complete, but, instead, as an endless chain of infinite possibilities, of ever new and ever widening vistas.

One of the n.o.blest men and loftiest thinkers of the day, referring, in a private letter, to this sermon of Doctor Parkhurst that inspired such wide discussion, thus wrote:--

"That paragraph from Doctor Parkhurst expresses my idea regarding immortality. There must be a master (good) thought or pa.s.sion. It is the angel with wings that wafts the soul where the man most longed to be in life,--with the purest and best. 'As one thinks, so he shall be,' is sound doctrine. All this embodies what I once read of Sappho, who counselled her pupils to cultivate their thoughts and grow, or they would have nothing to carry with them, nothing to make a soul of, nothing to survive the grave.

"I believe that on this idea rests the scheme of life through faith in Christ. As He is the highest, the ideal, the supreme, the soul finds rest in Him, and there grows into a life that death cannot annihilate. In the presence of the great master pa.s.sion, with the soul thrilling with n.o.bleness, as when dying for another, burned at the stake for righteousness' sake, the spirit goes straight to G.o.d, into the infinite bosom, an angel fit for only heaven.

"If the soul hungers and thirsts for G.o.d it will reach him. If, at the last moment, a man's whole nature cries longingly in faith to Christ,--that will save him, waft him, draw him into the divine abode. And this explains the Christian plan of so-called salvation.

Faith in Christ is the master pa.s.sion, and love the magnet that draws the soul to its own kind. It may be set down as true that vice and sin have no vitality. Wickedness is death. Virtue and love of G.o.d are life."

But the question recurs just here, Is there absolutely no possibility of immortality for him who does not advance beyond a certain conscious and partly automatic intelligence on the physical plane? Does the gate of possibilities, does the door of opportunity close with this brief mortal life? To that question science as well as faith answers "no." The law of Evolution is the law of eternal possibility and opportunity. The spark of immortality--the divine spark, implanted by G.o.d, when he made man in His image,--this is eternal in its nature, and unquestionably survives death. But immortality is the result of man's co-operation with the Divine. G.o.d has implanted the spark. He has placed man in an environment of discipline and of opportunity. The individual _may be_ whatever he, himself, decides and chooses to be. Not all in an hour, or in a year; not, perhaps, even in this entire lifetime; but sometime and somewhere he who is unfaltering in his allegiance to his ideal shall realize it at last. And the degree of immediateness and celerity with which he realizes it depends entirely on the degree of spiritual energy that he brings to bear on his purpose. The higher the potency, the swifter the result.

[Sidenote: Also the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.]

Science as well as ethics recognizes the reality of the unseen potencies. Science is, indeed, pointing the way. "The influence of the Holy Spirit, exquisitely called the Comforter," says Professor William James, "is a matter of actual experience, as solid a reality as that of electro-magnetism," and he adds:--

"The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely understandable world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as an ideal impulse originates in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing it in a way for which we cannot otherwise account); we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong. Yet the unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in the world. When we commune with it, work is absolutely done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change. But that which produces effects in another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal."

Not unreal. On the contrary, the unseen is the realm of that which is alone real and abiding. The positiveness of the divine life is a quality that has too little recognition from the world of philosophy and speculation. It is an infinite reservoir of infinite energy, from which may be drawn at any moment, peace, courage, and power. "Man can learn to transcend the limitations of finite thought at will. The Divine Presence is known through experience. The turning to a higher plane is a distinct act of consciousness. It is not a vague twilight, or semi-conscious experience. It is not an ecstasy. It is not a trance. It is not super-consciousness in the Vedantic sense. It is not due to self-hypnotization. It is a perfectly calm, sane, sound, rational, common-sense s.h.i.+fting of consciousness from the phenomena of sense perception to the phenomena of seer-s.h.i.+p, from the thought of self to a distinctively higher realm. For example, if the lower self be nervous, anxious, tense, one can in a few moments compel it to be calm. This is not done by a word simply. Nor is it done by hypnotism. It is by the exercise of power. One feels the spirit of peace as definitely as heat is perceived on a hot summer day. The power can be as surely used as the sun's rays can be focussed and made to do work, to set fire to wood."

In these words there is very clearly set forth a certain spiritual achievement of a definite nature. It is simply the act of liberating the spiritual self from entanglement with the lower self,--the summoning into ascendency of the higher powers. This intense degree of spiritual energy may be achieved with the force and suddenness of a special creation.

The physical universe in which man finds himself is not only surrounded by the spiritual universe, but the two are so absolutely interpenetrated that he may live in both, and, as a matter of fact, whoever lives the life of the spirit does live now and here, as an inhabitant of both these realms. The spiritual universe is the reservoir of energy. "The things that are seen are temporal, but those that are unseen are eternal," and faith, as _the substance_ of those things not seen, is a definite potency which is practically related to daily affairs. That is to say, it is an absolute power, by means of which one can fulfil the practical duties of every day. The degree of one's ability to draw from this energy and a.s.similate it into his life measures his degree of success.

Doctor Ostwald, a German scientist, claims that in energy he has discovered the actual bridge, the missing link, between mind and matter, between the spiritual and the physical worlds; that it is a bridge "which covers the chasm between force and substance," and "which is of a nature sufficiently manifest to embrace the totality of our experiences, the interior as well as the exterior." Doctor Ostwald claims that there is an immaterial factor, one endowed with neither weight nor ma.s.s, which in a quant.i.tative way is just as unchangeable as the ma.s.s and weight of material substances, and which, exactly like these, can undergo qualitative transformations of all kinds. He holds that energy may be converted from every one of its forms into every other, and its power of transformation is therefore unlimited, and that every change which takes place in the outer world, and every process, may be described by a statement of the kind and amount of energy that has undergone conversion.

This conception of energy is a very clear and remarkable one, placing it as the infinite power from which any form of force, spiritual or mechanical, can be derived.

In the moral universe the true expression of this energy upon which one may draw infinitely lies in service. It is in so enlarging the personal sphere of life as to include the widest possible range of sympathy and comprehension. The mystic spirit is full of value in reaching out into the realm of spiritual forces, but when these forces are gained they must be applied. The old religious idea used to include a great deal of discussion about saving the soul; but the larger spiritual enlightenment of to-day sees that the phrase "saving the soul" implies a present condition,--the state of love, sympathy, service, by which the soul is saved to-day, and not a vague condition to be only realized in some remote eternity. _Now_ is the day of salvation. The success of life lies not in possessions; it lies in keeping the harmonious and perfectly receptive relation with the spiritual realm of forces, and using these forces in every duty and need and opportunity that presents itself. As for always compa.s.sing desires, or achieving the possession of this thing or that, is in reality immaterial. The best things in life are often the things one does not have; but they produce effects in the visible world, and often, just in proportion as the things themselves remain in the ethereal realm, is the potency of the effects they produce in the physical realm. This other dimension of existence is one with which the final reckoning must be made. It is no longer length of days, but intensity of energy, that determines results. Not length of time, but intensity of purpose, energy of action,--in these lie the secret of achievement. The power that lies in brief moments is the power required for effective life and work. Emerson truly says that we talk of the shortness of life, but that life is unnecessarily long. Degree and not duration is the test of power in any work, and the application of this truth to the ordinary affairs of life would render it possible to have every day hold in itself the value of a week or a month as usually estimated. The entire trend of progress is toward that intensity of creative energy that fairly speaks things into being. A business man has now on his desk a long-distance telephone, connecting him with far-away cities; he answers his letters by speaking into the phonograph; his typewriting clerk copies them from this, and an hour of his morning represents as much accomplishment as by the old and slower methods would have required days; and thus time is constantly made more valuable.

The discoveries in nature are in a perfect correspondence with the advancing requirements of human life.

The deeper researches of science are revealing the absolute unity of the entire universe. The earth and the most remote stars are composed of the same matter. The wonderful discovery of spectrum a.n.a.lysis by Kirchoff and Bunsen in 1861 has shown that the whole stellar universe is made up of the same chemical materials as those with which we are familiar upon the earth. A part of the dazzling brilliance of the noonday sun is due to the vapor of iron floating in his atmosphere, and the faint luminosity of the remotest cloudlike nebula is the glow of just such hydrogen as enters into every drop of water that we drink....

"... The generalization of the metamorphosis of forces, which was begun a century ago by Count Rumford when he recognized heat as a mode of molecular motion, was consummated about the middle of the century, when Doctor Joule showed mathematically just how much heat is equivalent to just how much visible motion, and when the researches of Helmholtz, Mayer, and Faraday completed the grand demonstration that light and heat and magnetism and electricity and visible motion are all interchangeable one into the other, and are continually thus interchanging from moment to moment."

It is not a far cry from these scientific data to the recognition that force, in all its various forms of manifestation, proceeds from the same energy, and that the curious manifestation of it in radium is explained by the possibility that this substance is merely a remarkable conductor of this intense energy in the ether. The human organism may make itself increasingly a conductor and transmitter of this energy, and the secret of coming into perfectly harmonious relations with this energy is the secret of all achievement. "Life is a search after power," says Emerson, "and this is an element with which the world is so saturated,--there is no c.h.i.n.k or crevice in which it is not lodged,--that no honest seeking goes unrewarded.... All power," he adds, "is of one kind; a sharing of the nature of the world."

With his characteristically marvellous insight, Emerson has, in this paragraph, recognized the truth that, in these latter days, is a matter of absolute scientific discovery.

The "life that now is and that which is to come" are no more definitely separable than are the periods of childhood and youth, or youth and manhood. The advance is by evolutionary progress, with no sudden, or visible, change from day to day. The life that now is creates and determines the life that is to come. A man is what he is to-day because of the life he lived yesterday, and last year, and a decade, or several decades, ago. That which we call life--environment, circ.u.mstances, conditions--is the sum of the expression of all its past experiences, thought, aspirations, energy, or the lack of thought, aspirations, and energy. One's life is in his own hands; it is subject to his own will power, to his own energy of aspiration. He must aspire and go forward or he will degenerate. There is no possibility of an epoch that is stationary. Both in any form of work or art, as well as in mental and spiritual life, one must constantly go forward, or he will find himself going backward. Even a pianist as great as Paderewski must keep his fingers in practice on the keyboard every day. The painter cannot long absent himself from his canvas without losing in his art. The thinker, the student, must be forever conquering new realms.

Science is demonstrating the actual existence of another world, transcending, pervading, surrounding this one; a world which interpenetrates our own,--the ethereal in the atmospheric,--and there is one part of the personality of man that dwells continually on this ethereal side. The physical body only conveys a partial expression of the entire being. The spiritual self lived long before it tenanted this present body, and it will continue to live after it has discarded this body. The life that is constantly proceeds to create the life that is to come.

In this ethereal world,--which interpenetrates our atmosphere and in which the higher part of man's being continually dwells,--there are stored the finer forces which humanity is now discovering and learning to use. In this realm spirit speaks to spirit, telepathically. The power to thus communicate is an attribute of the spirit, and, whether in or out of the body, does not seem to affect the power. In this ethereal realm are the currents that make possible wireless telegraphy. The grouping and combination of these finer and more intense potencies result in great inventions. This realm is, in short, the miracle world; but a miracle is not something outside the laws of nature. Indeed, as Phillips Brooks truly said, "A miracle is an essential part of the plan of G.o.d." It is simply an occurrence under the higher laws, and on a higher plane. The great truths of spiritual life are pouring themselves out to this age with larger revelations of G.o.d. They teach the deepening necessity for constant love, for larger service, for a more complete consecration to the Divine life that may contribute more and more of usefulness to the human life. To achieve that "closer walk with G.o.d" that alone gives power, one must constantly seek larger fields of effort and endeavor, and bring himself face to face with great problems.

To live the higher life, the life of the spirit, is not to seek cloistered seclusion, but to enter into all the great opportunities, the difficulties, the privileges, or the penalties, that attend every real endeavor. In this, alone, does one find the life more abundant. In this, alone, lies the secret of making n.o.ble the life that now is and glorifying that which is to come.

The profound significance, and the illumination brought to the problem of living by simply giving one's self entirely, with belief, and love, and joy, to the will of G.o.d, is an experience that transcends human language. Too often has the acceptance of G.o.d's will been held to be a spirit of the abandonment of despair, or of the mere inertia that ceases from striving and from aspiration. On the contrary, it is the most intense form of action. It embodies the loftiest aspiration. It compels the highest degree of energy. It calls into play every intellectual faculty; it arouses and inspires. It is the regeneration of the individual. He does not know what life is; he does not even begin to live, at all, in any sense worth the name, until he lives and moves and has his being in the will of G.o.d. It is, indeed, as Professor Carl Hilty has said, a sense of initiative and power. "What is the happy life?"

questions Professor Hilty. "It is a life of conscious harmony with the Divine order of the world, a sense, that is to say, of G.o.d's companions.h.i.+p.... The better world we enter is, indeed, entered by faith and not by sight; but this faith grows more confident and more supporting, until it is like an inward faculty of life itself. To subst.i.tute for this a world of the outward senses is to find no meaning in life which can convey confidence. Faith in G.o.d," continues Professor Hilty, "is a form of experience, not a form of proof.... Here then, is the first step toward the discovery of the meaning of life. It is an act of will, a moral venture, a listening to experience. No man can omit this initial step, and no man can teach another the lesson which lies in his own experience. The prophets of the Old Testament found an accurate expression for this act of will when they described it as a 'turning,'

and they went on to a.s.sure their people of the perfect inward peace and the sense of confidence which followed this act. 'Look unto me and be ye saved,' says Isaiah; 'Incline your ear and come unto me; hear, and your soul shall live.' From that time to this, thousands of those who have thus changed the direction of their wills have entered into the same sense of peace; while no man who has thus given his will to G.o.d has ever felt himself permanently bewildered or forsaken.

"Here, also, in this free act of the will is attained that sense of liberty which is described as righteousness. It is a sense of initiative and power, as though one were not wholly the subject of arbitrary grace, but had a certain positive companions.h.i.+p with G.o.d.... This step once taken both the world in which one lives and one's own personal life get a clear and intelligible meaning."

Mrs. Browning has a line in "Aurora Leigh" that runs,--

"And having tried all other ways, to just try G.o.d's."

Ignorance and blindness may "try all other ways," and they prove unavailing. There is no success, there is no happiness, there is no progress, until there is the clear inner recognition and the profound and loving and joyful acceptance of the Divine will; of coming into such perfect acceptance of it as to make one's own will identified with its harmony.

Thus, when Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life," He simply expressed a fact that cannot be negatived nor ignored. It is an actual, a positive law, as impossible to evade as the law of gravitation. One may refuse "the way, the truth, and the life," and wander in bewilderment and inaction; but he will never be able to achieve worthy work, or personal peace, until he accepts and lives by this law. As Professor Hilty so well says, this, alone, gives life an intelligent meaning. "As one follows the way, he gains, first of all, courage, so that he dares to go on in his search. He goes still further, and the way opens into the a.s.surance that life, with all its mystery, is not lived in vain. He pushes on, and the way issues into health, not only of the soul, but even of the body; for bodily health is more dependent on spiritual condition than spiritual condition is on bodily health; and modern medicine can never restore and a.s.sure health to the body if it limit its problem to physical relief alone. Nor is even this the end of the 'way' of Christ. Here alone is positive social redemption.... Finally, the way is sure to lead every life which follows it, and is willing to pay the price for the possession of truth, into the region of spiritual peace."

Thus, in the end, "out of the midst of evil, issues at last the mastery of the good." Thus moral progress itself is the witness of G.o.d.

Living by this faith, life becomes strong, serene, and radiant. "The Magi have but to follow their Star in peace.... The Divine action marvellously adjusts all things. The order of G.o.d sends each moment the appropriate instrument for its work; and the soul, enlightened by faith, finds all things good, desiring neither more nor less than she possesses."

One of the great discourses of Phillips Brooks had for its theme the lesson of not laying too much stress on the recognition of one's motives or on any return of sympathetic consideration. "Let me not think," said Doctor Brooks, "that I get nothing from the man who misunderstands all my attempts to serve him, and who scorns me when I know that I deserve his sympathy. Ah! it would be sad enough if only the men who understood us and were grateful to us when we gave ourselves to them had help to give us in return. The good reformer whom you try to help in his reform, and who turns off from you contemptuously because he distrusts you, seeing that your ways are different from his, he does not make you happy,--he makes you unhappy; but he makes you good, he leads you to a truer insight, a more profound unselfishness. And so (it is the old lesson), not until goodness becomes the one thing that you desire, not until you gauge all growth and gain by that, not until then can you really know that the law has worked, the promise has been fulfilled.

With what measure you gave yourself to him, he has given himself--the heart of himself,--which is not his favor, not his love, but his goodness, the real heart of himself to you. For the rest you can easily wait until you both come to the better world, where misconceptions shall have pa.s.sed away, and the outward forms and envelopes of things shall correspond perfectly with their inner substances forever."

In the last a.n.a.lysis one comes to realize that happiness is a condition depending solely on the relation of his soul to G.o.d; that neither life, nor death, nor princ.i.p.alities, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any living creature can separate him from it, because happiness and the love of G.o.d are one and identical, and it is not in the power of this world to give, or to take away, this sense of absolute oneness with the Divine life that comes when man gives himself, his soul and body, his hopes and aspirations and ideals, in complete consecration to the will of G.o.d.

For this alone is the Life Radiant. It may not be ease or pleasure, but it is that ceaseless joy of the soul that may be the daily experience of every human being. And to gain the deep inner conviction of this sublime truth is worth whatever it may cost of tears or trial. It is the threshold of joy. It is the initiation into a higher spiritual state which one may gain in his progress while on earth as well as in heaven.

In fact, no one is really fitted for the highest privileges and sweetness he may crave until he has learned to live well, to live joyfully, without them. No one is fitted for joy until he can live well _without_ joy. It is the law and the prophets.

One may tread,--not the "whole round of creation," as Browning phrases it, but a minor segment of it, at least, and come back with added and more profound conviction that happiness is a condition of the spirit; that "the soul is ceaselessly joyful;" that the incidents and accidents of the outward life cannot mar nor lessen that sense of higher peace and joy and harmony which is the atmosphere of any true spiritual life. One may recognize and affirm this truth by spiritual intuition, and he may then be led through many phases of actual tests in actual life; he may for a time lose his hold on it and come to say that happiness is a thing that depends on so many causes outside one's own control; that illness, death, loss of friends, adverse circ.u.mstances, failures and trials of all kinds, may come into his experience, and that one is at the mercy of all these vicissitudes. Can the individual be happy, he will ask, when all that made happiness is taken away? Can he be happy if he has lost all his worldly goods? or if death has taken those nearest and dearest to him? or if the separations of life, far harder to bear than those of death, have come to him? And yet, until he has learned to answer these questions with the most triumphant affirmative, he has not learned the measure nor sounded the depth of a true and n.o.ble order of Happiness.

The difference is that of being safely on board a great steamer when wind and wave are tempest-tossed, or of being helpless in the raging waters. The storm may be precisely the same; the tempest may rage as it will, but safe and secure in the cabin or stateroom, the voyager does not mind its fury. And truly may this a.n.a.logy be held in life. It is possible to emerge from the winds and waves; to enter so entirely into the sense of security in the Divine; to hold so absolutely the faith in the Divine leading, that even in the midst of trial and loss and deprivation and sorrow, one shall come to _know_, through his own experience, that "the soul is ceaselessly joyful." For it is one thing to accept a truth theoretically, or believe it intuitively, and another to prove it through experience that shall test the quality of faith and conviction. Learning this supreme truth of life through outward experiences as well as through inner revelation is a victory of the will that may even make itself an epoch, a landmark, in spiritual progress.

It is the complete recognition of that invincible aid given to the soul through the "ever-present" aid of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.

"Jesus, the Christ, this one perfect character, has come into the world and lived in it; filling all the moulds of action, all the terms of duty, and love, with His own divine manners, works, and charities,"

wrote Doctor Horace Bushnell. "All the conditions of our life are raised thus by the meaning He has shown to be in them and the grace He has put upon them. The world itself is changed and is no more the same that it was; it has never been the same since Jesus left it. The air is charged with heavenly odors, and a kind of celestial consciousness, a sense of other worlds, is wafted on us in its breath. It were easier to untwist all the beams of light in the sky, separating and expunging one of the colors, than to get the character of Jesus, which is the real gospel, out of the world."

The one deepest need of the world to-day; the one deepest need of each individual, is the more actual realization of the personality of Christ.

The perspective of nineteen hundred years only brings more vividly before the mind, more close to the spiritual apprehension, the personal holiness of Jesus, and enforces the truth that shall redeem humanity,--the practical possibility of the increasing achievement of this personal holiness for every man and woman. "Because I live ye shall live also," He said. But what is it to live? Certainly, something far above and beyond mere existence. Life, in its true sense, is to know G.o.d. This is the life eternal. No one can "know G.o.d" save in just the degree to which he lives G.o.d's life,--the divine life,--and in the degree to which he is living the divine life does he live the life eternal. The life eternal may be lived to-day as well as after death, in some vague eternity. The life eternal is simply the life of spiritual qualities. It is the life in which truth, honor, integrity, sacrifice, patience, and love abound, and in which all that is selfish and false is cast out. Now, however exalted a definition of the present, daily life this may seem to be, it is in no sense an impossible one. The more exalted is one's standard for the perpetual quality of his life, the more stimulating it becomes. The exalted ideal inspires; the low standard depresses. An invincible energy sweeps instantly through the atmosphere to sustain him who allies himself with his n.o.blest ideals. A force that disintegrates and baffles sweeps down upon him who abandons his n.o.bler ideals, and subst.i.tutes for them the mere selfish, the commonplace, or the base. The "Choose ye this day whom ye will serve" is no merely abstract phrase or trick of rhetoric. Every hour is an hour of destiny. Every hour is an hour of choice. Legions of angels are in the unseen world surrounding humanity. Not one thought, one aspiration, one prayer, is unheard and unnoted. No conditions or circ.u.mstances are sordid or material unless he whom they invest make them so by sordid and material thought; by turning away from that life of the spirit whose very reality is made and is tested by these circ.u.mstances. "All the conditions of life are raised," says Doctor Bushnell, in the extract quoted above, "by the meaning He has shown to be in them, and the grace He has put upon them." Might not one, with profit, dwell for a moment upon this statement?

There is a current sweeping through latter-day life and reflecting itself largely in miscellaneous literature, to the effect that what the writers are pleased to call "success in life" is achieved by self-reliance; that a man must believe in himself; and the final triumph is ill.u.s.trated as that of the man who begins as an errand boy at two dollars a week and ends as a multi-millionaire. Between these two points in s.p.a.ce the arc of success subtends, according to this order of literature, and the word is: make a million, or a hundred millions of dollars,--honestly if you can, dishonestly if you must, but, at all events, the point is to "arrive." Now there is both a most demoralizing fallacy and a strong and valuable truth mixed up in these exhortations.

"Trust thyself," said Emerson; "every heart vibrates to that iron string."

"I thank whatever G.o.ds there be For my unconquerable soul,"