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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?”