Newspaper Page Text
12
THE LITERATURE OT LIVING
By C. A. Ridley.
“ What is Your Life ? ”
IFE is very much of a mystery, but the
fact is greater than the mystery. There
may be some fascination in pondering
over the mystery, but when we face the
fact, we hear such questions as these
ringing in our ears: “What am I?
From whence came I? And whither am
I going?” To answer these, robs the
fact of its romance.
L
Life is by far the most comprehensive word of
human speech. Inside its four letters are compassed
the earliest echoes and the parting pangs of human
existence. As play actors we enter it on one side
from the secret realms of silence and after play
ing our parts, step off the stage at the other end
to return no more forever.
It is a School.
It is a sort of school where we are disciplined by
experience, the most merciless of all masters, and
where we learn to frame our purposes, arrange our
resolutions, oil up our weapons and buckle on the
armor for serious warfare. It is here we meet our
enemies, greet our friends, foil our foes, suffer our
sorrows, ripple our laughter and weep the tears
of bitterness. And yet, with all its heartaches we
cling to it like vines to an old castle. We are all
in love with it, and whether saint or sinner, we look
not with longing eyes for the antechamber nor the
shroud where in the white silence we are to move
gently out to meet the matchless mystery of death.
Personality is greater than mystery, and life is
greater than any series of surroundings that may
affect it. And the greatest success in life consists in
following the possibilities of personality.
This life must ever be largely what we make it.
In the loom of our lives we are weaving a robe of
royal purple or a gown of “hodden grey.” If we
lay our plans according to the science of good
cheer, work them out through deeds of love, and
color them with the red blood of human kindness,
the whole warp and woof will be a pattern worthy
to be worn by kings and counsellors. On the other
hand we may spoil the pattern by our greed, wrin
kle and ruin it with selfishness and scheming, patch
it with envy, dye it dark with ill temper, until it
cramps as it clings to our selfish forms.
God never intended that life should be selfish or
sad. It is meant for service and song. Life’s duties
are not deeper than its delights. To be alive is
sufficient grounds for rejoicing. It is ingratitude
that will not acknowledge the pleasure of this price
less gift. The whole world is a pleasure-park, cre
ated for no other purpose than our happiness, with
sculptured crags, and emarald hills, and perfumed
meadows and spray-crowned seas, and vocal woods
all joining in one great chorus calling us away from
gloom to gladness.
The Roseate Hue.
For every shadow there are a dozen gleams of
light. The days are shot through with the lances
of the sun, and the stars and moonbeams spangle
the darkness of night. Every midnight is followed
by a dawn, when rosy-fingered Aurora flushes the
East with her smile and flings open the door of day.
The clouds are all tipped with amber and gold, and
from their pondrous folds fall the refreshing rain.
Every tempest has been stilled in time, every sha
dow lined with silver, and across the face of every
storm has bent the bow of promise. Every sad
hour is bordered with rejoicing, every day of gloom
must give way to the benedictions of sleep, from
the ashes of blasted fortunes beautiful palaces rise,
and even above the new-made graves of buried love
there is lifted the shining finger of Eternal hope.
It is our duty to be glad. Low do you take life
anyhow? “What is your life,” in what does it con
sist? Is it measured by days or dollars, or does it
The Golden Age for April 5, 1906.
Teach into the eternities? What is the horizon?
It is more important that we live a life, than that
we make a living. Success is not gain, but living
worthy of the vocation wherein we are called. And
the word vocation applies to every life, which neces
sitates our erasing from our vocabularies the
words “great” and “small.” Upon the smallest
details may rest the mightiest issues. Three min
utes rain may turn the tide at Waterloo. The vote
of one man on the Athenian hill overlooking the
plains of Marathon, changes the destiny of the
western world. The Apostle Paul, great as he was,
turned aside and made tents, showing how men may
lift up their vocations to a level with themselves.
Daniel refuses to eat the king’s meat—a little thing
you say—but to touch that meat meant the sacri
ficing of a principle dearei’ to him than life. An
apple falling at a Newton’s feet is a great event in
science. A piece of driftwood, if seen by a Colum
bus, points to a new world. A bull’s eye flashed in
the face of the right man means the making of a
telescope. A boiling kettle, if a Watt is present,
sings the song of an engine. A cackling goose is a
figure in Roman history, and a tiny thistle turns
the tide of battle for Scotland. An idea can har
ness the wind, a microbe can stay an ox, a look can
save a life.
Now since every life is given a vocation of its
own, and since success is fulfilling that vocation,
and since one essential is the observance of the
minutest details, the responsiblity is upon the in
dividual. No matter what the surroundings, life is
greater than these. No matter how dark the mys
terv, the fact remains and w T e must fact it. Accord
ing to our capabilities will we be held responsible?
God’s only call to each of us will be “Mine own
with usury.”
Capacity is a great word. It not only means the
instrument with which we work, but the power by
which the work may be accomplished. Heaven’s
first law is order and its method variety. In the
green field that unfolds its acres across the hill
side, no two blades of grass are alike. Os all the
myriad leaves that marshal to the music of wind,
each has its own individuality. In the whirling
whiteness of the snow storm each flake differs from
all the rest. And among men there are no two
exactly alike in form and feature.
Some are endowed with artistic faculties, and see
the lines and blendings of beauty, hear the rolling
rythm of truth, and in their souls harbor the har
monies of life. Others live inside the syllogism,
and with scientific regularity consider, contrive and
construct. But most of mankind fall easily in be
tween these two extremes, and illustrate the hero
ism of toil. They walk the same path, and do the
same things over and over again till the staff and
crutch fall from the dying grasp. But each indi
vidual is possessed of personality, and according to
his capabilities must at last make final settlement.
Were all our gifts artistic, then we should sigh
and dream our lives away, leaving only the fading
colors of the picture or the passing harmonies of
the song. Only the imagination would be of ser
vice to us, and ere long it would bankrupt our
thinking. On the other hand we rejoice that all are
not mathematicians. Then we should dream no
dreams at all, soar on no wings of song, and all of
the glitter and green and gold of life would fade
into a dreary dullness. Monotony would at last
make life drudgery. The gift of song and seeing
redeems the throb and clank of machinery and pours
a stream of sunshine and music along the path of
daily toil; while the perfect poise of man’s mechan
ism arrests the imagination and holds it in due
bounds.
And so who knows which is greater—the paint
ing of the landscape or the plowing of the field; the
writing of the poem or the setting of the type; the
composing of the song or the singing of it? It
matters not. In every life there is some capacity,
and to find and fulfill it is the sum total of living.
Capacity means power. Inspiration is energy. Men
are void of gifts who have no power. It is first the
vision then the song. It is first the dream and then
the trembling canvass blossoms like the rose. It
is first the power to conceive, then the shapeless
marble grows into forms of love and awe.
The Vicarious Life.
There comes to us through an English author the
story of an old “apple woman” which makes that
of kings and queens contemptible. Events over
which she had little or no control appointed her to
poverty, hunger, cold and two bare rooms in a
tenement house. There she found three orphan
boys sleeping in an ashbox, whose lot was worse
than hers. She dedicated and consecrated her life
and heart to the task of their uplifting. During the
years of her life thus spent she mothered and
reared twenty of those waifs, teaching them all she
knew, and placing them in the best positions pos
sible. This is life. The dark and dingy room of
such a woman is a vestibule of heaven. She knew
her capacity and fulfilled it. She felt a responsi
bility for others, and love’s ear listening, caught
the mournful melody of the orphan’s cry.
No man liveth unto himself, and to himself no
man shall die. When each of us is called to enter
the shadows single-handed and alone, and grapple
with the monster death while the darkness deepens
about us, think ye we will be asked no questions
about those whose life we might have blessed but
did not? It is by divine arrangement that our lives
are linked to others. Heart to heart and hand to
hand is the line-up for life’s duties. “Helpful
ness” is whispered by the greensward at our feet
and echoed back by the laughing stars. The hus
bandman ploughs the field and from the wounded
soil the harvest springs. The rain drops feed the
rills; and these rush playfully on into rivulets, and
laughing brooks, and rolling rivers that bear their
beneficient burdens to the grand and surging sea;
and then the “deep-voiced laboring ocean” lifts up
its vapors to the beckoning sun which bears them
back in misty whiteness to bless again the harvest
home. And so in nature as in grace, the divine law
is helpfulness. I am my brothers keeper whether
I will or not.
Life consists in deeds, not dollars; in work, not
words. A cyclone may sweep the country and with its
death-coils and poisonous breath devastate our
homes and destroy our property, but has it touched
our life? Nay, along the path of its desolation; and
upon the ruins left behind, the manhood of the
country will build other and better homes. This
is life illustrating itself in action. Let the ocean
pass its bounds and sw’eep a Galveston from every
corner of our great country; comes not words of
sympathy alone, but bills with which to buy blank
ets and bread. It is only God’s law of helpfulness
being obeyed.
If Christendom could for one short day feel for
the heathen across the sea as they felt for stricken
Galveston—a feeling of kinship which guaranteed
help—it would not be long until the glad message of
God would be given to every home and every heart.
I long to see the day when a man’s value to society
will be based upon what he does to bless the race,
rather than upon what he has wrung from the rest
of mankind.
When that lawyer and layman from Rome, Ga.,
stood up in the Georgia Baptist Convention the
other day and declared that he had some of God’s
money and would give $5,000 to Foreign Missions
and the same amount to Higher Education, it was, I
trust, the beginning of an era when men of means,
throughout the South are going to feel their respon
sibility to God, and under the pressure of that feel
ing give back to God His own with usury. “What
is your life?”