a . 
 
 /s/ .^'-^ 
 
 ^c^ 
 
 M 
 
 
FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT 
 
Books by 
 
 ilamilton OTirigJjt JWabie 
 
 My Study Fire 
 
 Under the Trees and Elsewhere 
 Short Studies in Literature 
 Essays in Literary Interpretation 
 My Study Fire, Second Series 
 Essays on Nature and Culture 
 Essays on Books and Culture 
 Essays on Work and Culture 
 The Life of the Spirit 
 Norse Stories 
 Works and Days 
 The Great Word 
 Christmas To-day 
 Introductions to Notable Poems 
 Fruits of the Spirit 
 In the Forest of Arden. Illustrated 
 My Study Fire. Illustrated 
 Under the Trees. Illustrated 
 A Child of Nature. Illustrated 
 Norse Stories. Illustrated 
 Nature and Culture. Illustrated 
 
FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 BY 
 HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 LYMAN ABBOTT 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
 
 1917 
 

 Copyright. 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1909, 
 
 1910, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1915, 1916 
 
 By DODD. mead AND COMPANY, Inc. 
 
 / 
 
 MAY -2 1917 
 
 n!,A4G0561 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 These essays have appeared in the edi- 
 torial columns of The Outlook from time 
 to time for several years past. The 
 present volume is the result of a desire, 
 frequently expressed, that the timely mes- 
 sages so fully reflecting the author's loy- 
 alty to his country, and his love for his 
 fellow men in their highest destinies, 
 should be grouped in convenient form 
 in order to perpetuate the potent influ- 
 ence they are known to have exerted upon 
 the conduct and thought of many people. 
 Their wide range brings them into touch 
 with eager youth seeking inspiration; 
 with those weary in well-doing, needing 
 encouragement; with those bringing the 
 fruits of experience to enrich the activi- 
 ties of our busy age ; and with those who 
 face the sunset in serene quiet. Here 
 
Prefatory Note 
 
 all may find breadth of vision, renewed 
 courage, clearer insight into the com- 
 plexities of life, and profound spiritual 
 meanings. 
 
 It is significant that the latest essays, 
 written in 191 6, during a period of great 
 physical depression, are concerned with 
 the fundamentals of faith, action and 
 achievement. The titles seem to form 
 themselves into a triumphant progres- 
 sion, " Character First," *' Meeting Life 
 Squarely," "What Can I Do?" and 
 " The Test of Courage." They would 
 march steadily on vibrant with the belief 
 in the ultimate victory of good, and of 
 God, a belief that inspired every word 
 from the pen now laid down in the calm 
 assurance of perfect realization. 
 
 VI 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Truest Commemoration . . . i 
 
 Under the Aspect of Eternity . . 6 
 The Practice of Immortality . . .13 
 
 Who Are the Experts? .... 22 
 
 A Saint of To-Day 27 
 
 The Mask of the Years .... 34 
 
 Love and Work 42 
 
 A Text from Luther 49 
 
 The Escape from Fear 54 
 
 Praying and Waiting 59 
 
 The Bugle Call 62 
 
 The Upper Room 68 
 
 The Price of Immortality ... 73 
 
 Light in the Darkness .... 79 
 
 Stirring the Will 84 
 
 Life, Growth, and Heaven ... 88 
 
 The Ultimate Companionship . . 98 
 
 The Prophecy of Love 105 
 
 The Great Refusal iii 
 
Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Discredited Witnesses 119 
 
 " There Are No Dead " . . . . 126 
 
 The Larger Plan 132 
 
 Lovers Second Sight 137 
 
 The Child and the World . . .145 
 The Deepest Thanksgiving . . .153 
 
 Lodgings and Homes 157 
 
 Love and Law 164 
 
 The Best Service 172 
 
 A Secret of Youth 178 
 
 Make the Time You Want . . .184 
 
 A Tragedy OF THE Good 188 
 
 Simplicity of Life 193 
 
 By-Products in Life 202 
 
 The Value of Appreciation . . . 207 
 
 Immortal Love 212 
 
 The Wisdom of Youth .... 220 
 
 Making Opportunities 226 
 
 Face to Face 231 
 
 The Last Vigil 235 
 
 Light on the Way 241 
 
 The Loneliness of Life .... 245 
 The Credibility of Love . . . .251 
 The Easter Vision 259 
 
Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Plus Sign 268 
 
 Going Home 273 
 
 The Mystery of Heaven . . . .277 
 The Possibility of Great Giving . . 283 
 The Long View of Life .... 287 
 
 An Easter Thought 291 
 
 The Path to God 298 
 
 The Peace of Christ 304 
 
 Character First 309 
 
 Meeting Life Squarely . . . .314 
 
 What Can I Do? 318 
 
 The Test of Courage 322 
 
HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE 
 
 No one disciple of Christ can give all 
 that his Master gave. But each one of 
 us can by his life and teaching give to 
 his own circle some portion of the mes- 
 sage which the Master gave to the world. 
 I have a friend whose inexhaustible en- 
 ergy and enthusiasm of service always 
 says, though quite unconsciously, to every 
 one he meets: " Son, go to work to-day 
 in my vineyard." I had another friend, 
 not living now, whose serene temper and 
 reposeful spirit always said: *' Come ye 
 yourselves apart and rest awhile." Her 
 home was to every guest that entered it 
 like the arbor which Christian found In 
 his climb up the Hill Difficulty. The 
 message which Hamilton Wright Mable 
 brought to those who knew him with any 
 intimacy was, " I have come that they 
 xi 
 
Introduction 
 
 might have life and that they might have 
 it more abundantly." 
 
 Not that he was extraordinarily ac- 
 tive ; not that he was in the least character- 
 ized by that bustling energy which is at 
 once the virtue and the vice of the Ameri- 
 can. I do not recall that I ever saw him 
 in a hurry. On the contrary, if I were 
 to select a single word to indicate, not 
 perhaps his most distinguishing, but his 
 most apparent characteristic, I should 
 choose the word " reposeful." In one of 
 his essays he writes, " The man who Is 
 in haste is always out of relation to 
 things. . . . His haste Implies malad- 
 justment; It means that he has blundered, 
 or that he is inadequate to the task he 
 has assumed." Some scientist has ^old 
 us that there Is more power in an acre 
 of forest trees than in any ordinary man- 
 ufacturing town with all its bustle and 
 noise. I use the word life as Bergson 
 uses It, as Sir Oliver Lodge uses It, as 
 Mr. Mabie himself In another of his es- 
 says has used it. 
 
 xli 
 
Introduction 
 
 '' There is, therefore, in every bit of life, no- 
 ble or ignoble, beautiful or repulsive, great or 
 small, traces of a thought, evidences of an order, 
 lines of design. Every bit of life is a bit of 
 revelation; it brings us face to face with the 
 great mystery and the great secret. In every 
 such disclosure we are not only looking at our- 
 selves, but we are catching a glimpse of God. 
 All revelation of life has the spell, therefore, of 
 a discovery. We hold our breath when we 
 hear a great line on the stage for the first time, 
 or come upon it in a book, because we are dis- 
 covering something; we are awed and hushed 
 because we are looking into the mystery. There 
 is the thrill, the wonder, the joy of seeing an- 
 other link in the invisible chain which binds us 
 to the past and unites us to the future." 
 
 " In every bit of life " : that is a phrase 
 very characteristic of Mr. Mable's writ- 
 ing because It was characteristic of his 
 experience. 
 
 He lived In the world and rejoiced In 
 all that It had to give him. He had 
 neither the medlseval nor the Puritan 
 conscience; to him nothing was taboo. 
 He had no sympathy with the doctrine 
 of Thomas a Kempis that one must 
 xiii 
 
Introduction 
 
 choose between this world and the next. 
 He believed that the Father had made 
 both worlds and had given them both to 
 his children to enjoy. He believed with 
 Paul that " all things are yours; whether 
 Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the 
 world, or life, or death, or things pres- 
 ent, or things to come; all are yours'': 
 all teachers, all material things, all hu- 
 man faculties and activities, the present 
 world, death the gateway to a larger life, 
 and the world to come. 
 
 This fullness of life defined and de- 
 termined his literary judgments. 
 
 Talne has said that as behind the fossil 
 there was an animal so behind the folio 
 there was a life. It was this life behind 
 the printed page which Interested Mr. 
 Mable. Language was to him but the 
 tool by which thought and feeling are 
 expressed. He was skillful In the use 
 of this tool, and he had a mild Interest 
 In the skill with which other word art- 
 ists used their tool. But his vital Inter- 
 est was not in their tool but in their mes- 
 xiv 
 
Introduction 
 
 sage. Literature appealed to him be- 
 cause it was an interpretation of life — 
 not merely of the life of the author, but 
 the life of his age or, in the case of a 
 few of the greatest authors, the life of 
 all the ages. He himself was an inter- 
 preter rather than a critic, and was more 
 concerned to enable his readers to see life 
 through the author's eyes than to give 
 them a judgment on the question whether 
 the author had given his interpretation 
 skillfully. 
 
 Mr. Mabie was more than a literary 
 critic, and he was more than a literary 
 interpreter. He was Interested both in 
 nature and in humanity, because he saw 
 in both an expression of what he has 
 called " The Universal Life." Nature 
 is both a machine and a book. The scien- 
 tific mind is Interested In Nature's me- 
 chanical aspects and Its material values; 
 for example. In finding and realizing the 
 practical value of electricity as a means 
 of carrying our message and giving light 
 to our homes. Mr. Mabie was inter- 
 
 XV 
 
Introduction 
 
 ested In Nature as an interpretation of 
 that Infinite and Eternal Energy from 
 which all things proceed, and in detect- 
 ing the unity of man and nature, not by 
 interpreting man as a mechanical toy 
 but by interpreting nature as a body in 
 which dwells a life-giving spirit. God, 
 he sa-id, " is the force which permeates 
 Nature and gives her forms their mean- 
 ing and their beauty; and this also is the 
 force which lifts humanity out of the 
 dust and gives It its dignity and oppor- 
 tunity. ... So every bit of Nature, 
 stone, fish, bird, or leaf, becomes pre- 
 cious; they are all parts of a whole; they 
 are links in a chain. Seen in the light 
 of this sublime discovery all matter is 
 penetrated with thought. In like man- 
 ner, through human life In all its forms, 
 under all Its conditions. In all stages of 
 its unfolding, a great thought or order 
 is being wrought out." 
 
 It was this almost oriental faith In the 
 unity of life which gave Mr. Mable his 
 Interest in social problems. Economics, 
 xvi 
 
Introduction 
 
 sociology, politics, were interesting to 
 him mainly because they were human 
 problems, because In them, as seen in ac- 
 tual human conditions, they showed how 
 a great thought or order is being wrought 
 out. The goal which he saw and to 
 which he believed all transitions, all strug- 
 gles, all revolutions, are gradually lead- 
 ing the human race is a divinely predes- 
 tined human brotherhood. It was this 
 too that made him a universal friend. 
 He desired to help not merely the lame, 
 the halt, and the blind out of their handi- 
 cap; he desired to do what he could to 
 promote the gradual creation of an or- 
 derly world out of chaos. He was a 
 brother In this universal but imperfectly 
 developed brotherhood because " good or 
 evil, high or low, Illustrious or obscure, 
 ( all human lives disclose something above 
 and beyond them.'' ') 
 
 This same spirit of abundant life char- 
 acterized his religious experience. He 
 regarded all theologies, all liturgies, all 
 ecclesiastical organizations, as Instru- 
 Xvii 
 
Introduction 
 
 ments either to express or to promote the 
 spiritual life. He was always a loyal 
 member of the Episcopal communion and 
 In his later life active and influential in 
 the organization. But he never identi- 
 fied himself with any of the parties in 
 that communion.^ I have often heard 
 him say that the' Church of Christ ought 
 to be large enough to embrace men of all 
 opinions and all temperaments. ; He be- 
 lieved that the bond of union and the test 
 of fellowship should be, not agreement 
 upon a dogma, but loyalty to a Person, 
 not Intellectual nor emotional, but vital. 
 
 For nearly forty years Hamilton W. 
 Mable and I worked together as brothers 
 in an educational enterprise. We came 
 of different ancestry and possessed dif- 
 ferent temperaments. I was a child of 
 Puritan ancestry, he a son of the Church; 
 I was temperamentally philosophical, he 
 was temperamentally poetical. But a 
 mystical faith in the unseen united us in a 
 friendship which strengthened and deep- 
 ened with the passing years. We not 
 xviii 
 
Introduction 
 
 only shared In each other's work, we were 
 companions In each other's sorrows. 
 Each profoundly affected the other's life. 
 This etching Is of my friend as I under- 
 stood him. Doubtless It will seem er- 
 roneous to some, Inadequate to others. 
 But I hope It may serve to help many 
 readers to get from his pen something of 
 the Illumination and Inspiration which I 
 derived from him through a very sacred 
 personal friendship. 
 
 Lyman Abbott. 
 
 XiX 
 
FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 The Truest Commemoration 
 
 MEMORIALS of every kind in every 
 age and country bear witness to 
 the depth and tenderness of human love 
 and to its guardianship of the memory of 
 those who have passed beyond its care 
 into the keeping of the Eternal Love. 
 Passionate grief, despair, dumb submis- 
 sion, victorious faith, have found expres- 
 sion in every form that art could devise 
 — beautiful, stately, tender. Great lead- 
 ers, daring soldiers, saints, prophets, 
 poets, statesmen, women whose loveli- 
 ness made the air about them sweet and 
 warm, young girls in whose charm all 
 that was sweetest in nature and most ap- 
 pealing in prediction of the richer growth 
 to come, little children holding the pil- 
 grim's staff like a toy in their hands — 
 I 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 for each and all there are memorials 
 which record the wealth of achievement 
 or promise that went with them out of 
 the world. 
 
 To be surrounded by the visible me- 
 morials of those who have gone before 
 is to have continually present the sense 
 of the unbroken life of the race, of the 
 line of descent from parent to child in 
 continuous generations, of the unity of 
 those who have passed through the edu- 
 cation of earth and those who are learn- 
 ing its lessons as best they can, of the 
 fellowship of that invisible host of wit- 
 nesses which gives human struggle its im- 
 mense spiritual significance. As children 
 ought everywhere to read the story, not 
 of their country's wealth and power, but 
 of its heroes, its courage, Its achievements 
 In the emancipation of the human spirit, 
 so ought every child to come Into con- 
 sciousness of the ties that bind the latest 
 to the earliest men and women in vital 
 and unescapable relationship In the fa- 
 therhood of God and the brotherhood of 
 
The Truest Commemoration 
 
 Christ, by memorials on every side of 
 those who have made life great, rich, 
 pure, tender, and fruitful. If they whom 
 we call the dead have escaped out of 
 sleep and are now alive in a fullness of 
 life which " it hath not entered into the 
 mind of man to conceive," then, surely, 
 they who remain to endure and struggle 
 toward the light ought to be lifted up by 
 the companionship of the vast company 
 who have achieved freedom and harmony 
 of deed with thought and of reality with 
 vision. 
 
 There Is one form of memorial, how- 
 ever, that all love and sorrow must 
 take if they are to touch the heart of 
 this living relationship which death only 
 brings into clearer light, and which bears 
 the same relation to all forms of honor 
 to those who have gone before that rites, 
 ceremonies, splendor of structure, costli- 
 ness of gifts, bear to the complete service 
 of God: it is the honor that we express 
 in our own lives. The heroic are most 
 nobly commemorated by heroism in deed 
 3 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 rather than in stone; the pure are best 
 kept in mind by a new purity in the 
 hearts that remember; greatness of serv- 
 ice and nobility of nature by the quick- 
 ening of all that is unselfish and self-sac- 
 rificing in those who guard the memory 
 of a life once hidden by its very loveliness 
 and now hidden in the light of God. 
 It is the unbroken continuity of influence 
 and power that bears witness to the 
 vital family relationship of the present 
 with the farthest past; it is the bequest 
 not of rank or arms or property that 
 affirms the honorable descent of those 
 who remain from those who have gone; 
 it is rather the quickened sense of honor, 
 of loyalty, of the service due in all love 
 from the fortunate to the unfortunate. 
 This is the spiritual remembrance that 
 must be sweeter to those whom it com- 
 memorates than statues or tablets or 
 blazened windows; here, too, sorrow 
 finds the path to peace through action^ 
 Not often has this highest form of re- 
 membrance, this refuge for the sorrow- 
 4 
 
The Truest Commemoration 
 
 ful, been more simply and strongly 
 brought to mind than in this letter from 
 Charles Godfrey Leland to a friend: 
 
 ... It is truly with grief I learn that a great 
 loss has befallen you. As regards terrible be- 
 reavements there is but one thing to do wisely 
 — to draw nearer to those who remain or what- 
 ever is near and dear to us in life, and love 
 them the more, and become gentler and better 
 ourselves, making more of what is left. There 
 are people who wail and grieve incessantly and 
 neglect the living to extravagance. It seems 
 always as if they attracted further losses and 
 deeper miseries. Weak and simple minds grieve 
 most — melancholy becomes a kind of painful 
 indulgence, and finally a deadly habit. Work 
 is the great remedy. I think a great deal of the 
 old Northern belief that if we lament too much 
 the dead, they cannot rest in their graves and 
 are tormented by our tears. It is a pity that 
 the number of our years is not wTitten on our 
 foreheads when we are born. Keep up your 
 heart, work hard, live in hope . . . study — 
 there is a great deal in you. As in China, we 
 ennoble the dead by ennobling ourselves. 
 
Under the Aspect of Eternity 
 
 MEN suffer immense loss of reserve 
 power for dealing with the work 
 and problems of the time, and of deep- 
 flowing consolation in their sorrows and 
 anxieties, by reason of their intense 
 absorption in the interests of the hour 
 and their preoccupation with affairs. 
 Never before has this present life laid 
 hold upon conscience, thought and will 
 with such searching and compelling 
 forces. Those who are eager to deal 
 with life on the highest plane find it diffi- 
 cult to penetrate the multitude of details 
 that press upon attention with the sense 
 of a greater order in which all things 
 find their place and are moved to some 
 great end. Work of such magnitude 
 awaits capable men, and taxes thought 
 and strength to such a degree that many 
 men put such heroic labor into the day 
 that night overtakes them unawares, and 
 they awake with surprise to find that their 
 6 
 
Under the Aspect of Eternity 
 
 work Is only a part of a gigantic scheme 
 of construction. Their tasks have ab- 
 sorbed them so completely that they have 
 never realized their relations to a, spirit- 
 ual order. This Is a far more fruitful way 
 of life than that of the man who dreams 
 of purely spiritual activities but never sets 
 his hand to any real task or binds on his 
 shoulders any of the burdens which hu- 
 manity must carry in Its mysterious jour- 
 ney toward the unseen country. 
 
 To preach Idleness, withdrawal from 
 the world, escape from the manifold tasks 
 of modern society, to men who have be- 
 come heroic workers by virtue of the 
 inward force which makes them men and 
 the outward opportunities with which 
 God has encircled them to draw out 
 their power and evoke character on a 
 vast scale, Is as Idle as to command them 
 to go back to the Ptolemaic astronomy 
 or the geography that was studied before 
 Columbus enlarged the world by the dis- 
 covery of another continent. There Is 
 no solution of the problem of the soul 
 7 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 by taking it out of its normal relations in 
 human society; there can be no return 
 to the patriarchal days when men lived in 
 tents and watched their flocks and spent 
 their days in a vast leisure of mind; nor 
 to those middle years In the history of 
 the human spirit when they lived in 
 little walled towns and served their kings 
 and obeyed their spiritual rulers with 
 unthinking obedience. There must be 
 room for the spirit and time for its ripen- 
 ing, but these conditions must be secured 
 not by going back but by going forward. 
 It would be well if the preoccupied 
 men and women of to-day would take 
 time to read Dante's " Divine Comedy; " 
 to climb from time to time that great peak 
 which o'ertops the poetry of the world. 
 Probably no form of expression could be 
 further from the habitual thought and 
 speech of the day than this report of the 
 journey of the soul through the three 
 worlds; but no modern writing Is so clear 
 and authoritative in its setting of the life 
 that now is in definite and unescapable re- 
 8 
 
Under the Aspect of Eternity 
 
 latlon to the Hfe which is to come. In 
 this sublime epic of the soul of man in all 
 conditions there is no idle dreaming, no 
 vague and easy speculation concerning the 
 growth of the spirit and its union with 
 God; on the contrary, the poem stands 
 foursquare to all the winds of shifting 
 opinion, based on an eternal order, per- 
 vaded throughout by a vivid realism. The 
 poet escaped, by virtue of his genius, from 
 the tyranny of types and personifications 
 which gave unreality to much mediaeval 
 art, and built a world as solid as the 
 Florence which drove him Into exile. No 
 other poet of the heavenly vision has 
 dared to give his interpretation of the life 
 of man such massive reality and none has 
 touched it with such compelling power. 
 
 For this reason, among others, Dante 
 is a teacher at whose feet the men and 
 women of this busy age ought to sit; he 
 is no master of beautiful dreams, no 
 magician dexterously spinning a web of 
 iridescent words over the abysses; he 
 sees real things with clear and fearless 
 P 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 glance, and he teaches us not to evade, 
 to escape, to renounce, to comfort and 
 mislead ourselves with idle visions, but 
 to look at the great facts of life, to ac- 
 cept Its duties, do Its work, live in its 
 relations, in the light of the world to 
 come. He has, as Dean Church has 
 said, " too strong a sense of the reality 
 of this familiar life to reduce it merely 
 to a shadow and type of the unseen. 
 What he struggles to express in countless 
 ways, with all the resources of his strange 
 and gigantic power, is, that this world and 
 the next are both equally real, and both 
 one." In a word, Dante saw the world 
 " under the aspect of eternity." 
 
 In that attitude is found our escape 
 from the tyranny of the tremendous tasks 
 laid on the shoulders of modern men by 
 the growth of power within and without. 
 It is impossible to go back to the more 
 leisurely periods when interests were few 
 and simple; if it were possible we 
 should not win the victory and find the 
 peace which our souls crave. These 
 
 IQ 
 
Under the Aspect of Eternity 
 
 things are not gifts from God to be had 
 for the asking; they are achievements 
 which we must make by conquest of 
 ourselves and our conditions. The prob- 
 lem of life is never one of external 
 conditions; it is always one of inward 
 energy, purity, nobility. The way out 
 for those who would live the life of the 
 spirit in this age of tumultuous activity is 
 to realize hour by hour that the life that 
 now is and the life that is to come, how- 
 ever different in condition and occupation, 
 are parts of one indivisible and unbroken 
 life; It is to see the world steadily and 
 clearly " under the aspect of eternity." 
 
 It does not matter how vast the works 
 of the time are, If In accepting their 
 reality we understand how subordinate 
 they are in the spiritual order; it does 
 not matter how heavy the burdens of 
 society are if we carry them with the 
 conviction that they are part of that 
 spiritual discipline which Is the rational 
 and inspiring explanation of life. The 
 world that surrounds us Is not a mirage; 
 II 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 Is a deep-going and unescapable reality, 
 and woe to the man or woman who tries 
 to ignore it, to treat it as a figment of 
 the imagination, to escape from it. But 
 that which is visible Is only a little sec- 
 tion of the whole as the earth which 
 seems so vast to us is only a little star 
 in a universe of suns. When a man 
 sees through the material which piles 
 itself about him to the spiritual which is 
 Its master; when he rules all the works 
 of his hands by virtue of the sovereignty 
 of his soul; puts his hand to his task 
 and gives his whole strength to it because 
 It Is a reality In vital relation with a 
 greater reality; gains wealth with full 
 knowledge that money can buy many 
 things for his body, but nothing for his 
 spirit; organizes great enterprises, with 
 clear understanding that he Is the serv- 
 ant of an irresistible movement In human 
 affairs, he Is safe from the blindness, 
 corruption, deadness of mere material 
 activity and achievement; he has learned 
 to see life " under the aspect of eternity." 
 
 12 
 
The Practice of Immortality 
 
 THE gains which men and women 
 have made in self-control, under- 
 standing of life, beauty and nobihty of 
 character, have been secured by those who 
 have lived in advance of the standards of 
 their time. In most cases the separation 
 has not been so great as to involve the 
 tragedy of persecution, but sometimes it 
 has led straight to the hemlock, the block, 
 or the cross. In every generation and 
 in every country there has been a group 
 of those upon whom the light of the 
 morning rested and who have pressed on 
 into the new day. They were not re- 
 formers in the sense of aggressively at- 
 tacking the things in which they did not 
 believe; they were always so intent on 
 bringing into their lives the power of 
 higher ideals that they served their fel- 
 lows best, not by what they destroyed, 
 but by what they revealed and made 
 13 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 credible. To many who surrounded 
 them those eager seekers for the better 
 hfe seemed to be pursuing dreams as 
 evanescent as the rainbow and seeking 
 ends as unreal as the pot of gold that lies 
 concealed where the arch of radiant mist 
 rests on the ground. But the mountains 
 stand distinct and Immovable, though the 
 near-sighted do not see them; to the far- 
 sighted they are as real and solid as the 
 earth beneath their feet. 
 
 Men have followed dreams and fallen 
 In a vain though not always barren 
 pursuit of them; but those who see fur- 
 ther than their fellows and live In the 
 larger relations which their vision reveals 
 to them are of all men most rational. 
 One need not wait for the banishment 
 of greed from society to practice unself- 
 ishness; one need not wait for a clean 
 and civilized legal treatment of marriage 
 relations to keep the home pure and 
 sacred; one need not wait until public 
 life is cleansed from dishonesty to serve 
 his fellows with a heart that knows no 
 14 
 
The Practice of Immortality 
 
 treachery to the great interests of the 
 nation and with hands that have never 
 taken bribes; one need not wait until 
 war is abolished to live the life of peace 
 that rests on the love of God expressed 
 in the love of man. Society is made up 
 of those who live by the standards of the 
 day and of those who live by the stand- 
 ards of to-morrow; and the real dreamers 
 are those who accept things as they are; 
 the followers after the higher realities 
 are those who have wakened out of sleep 
 and have looked upon life as it is. To 
 these clear-sighted men and women the 
 standards they recognize are made more 
 definite and commanding by living as if 
 these standards were already univers- 
 ally accepted; and they gradually con- 
 form their aims and deeds to these higher 
 requirements, and are more alive than 
 their fellows because they are in touch 
 with a greater number of real things. 
 
 The discussion of the credibility of 
 immortality has its uses and becomes 
 imperative from time to time; but the 
 15 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 final demonstration of this great fact is 
 never made as the result of a process of 
 reasoning; it Is ultimately and convinc- 
 ingly revealed in the experience. Those 
 who do not know Immortality as a fact 
 of experience often have opinions about 
 it, but can never have knowledge of it; 
 and when that knowledge has been 
 attained, all the argument in the world 
 will disturb the faith which springs out 
 of it as little as the skepticism of the 
 short-sighted will disturb those who see 
 the mountains whenever they lift their 
 eyes. The fact that many good and true 
 men and women doubt the Immortality 
 of the soul has no more weight with those 
 who have learned it by experience than 
 has the inability of the good and true to 
 appreciate music power to disturb the 
 faith or destroy the joy of those who 
 know that Beethoven has as authentic a 
 voice as Shakespeare, and that the " Sym- 
 phony Pathetlque," has as real and sub- 
 stantial a cry from the soul of Russia 
 as was Dostoyevskl's '* Poor Folk." 
 i6 
 
The Practice of Immortality 
 
 Immortality is not a future state; it 
 IS a present condition. It is not a gift to 
 be conferred hereafter; it is power in- 
 herent in the human soul. It is not a 
 fact to be proved by logical demonstra- 
 tion any more than the reality of the life 
 of which we are now conscious ; it is not 
 a truth to be revealed in some remote 
 heaven; it is a fact to be accepted as 
 life is accepted, and to be lived as life 
 is lived in thought, emotion, and action. 
 If we would know immortality, we must 
 write it on our hearts that we are now 
 immortal; if we would get the peace 
 and joy of it, we must rest securely in it; 
 if we would have it become steadily more 
 real, commanding, and inspiring, we 
 must live as immortals. 
 
 For immortality is no more a dream 
 than are those higher realities which 
 have led aspiring souls in every genera- 
 tion step by step upward. We have 
 gone only a little way in the full unfold- 
 ing of the human spirit, but we have 
 gone so far that our commonplace reali- 
 17 
 
Fruits of the. Spirit 
 
 ties of the relations of man with man 
 would have seemed to our remote ances- 
 tors like the Idle dreams of children, to 
 be laughed to scorn by all men who 
 wished to deal with life as It is. They 
 have not discovered that life Is a differ- 
 ent matter to each succeeding genera- 
 tion; that, In the sense of a reality which 
 Is the same everywhere and to all, there 
 Is no such thing as "' life as It Is." Life 
 was one thing to Socrates and another 
 to Cleon; one thing to Judas and an- 
 other to the Christ; one thing to Lincoln 
 and another to Burr. Does any one 
 question which kind of life was the larg- 
 est and most real? 
 
 It Is Idle to tell the man who prac- 
 tices a virtue above the standard of his 
 time that he is a dreamer; he knows 
 what has actually happened In his own 
 experience; he knows that he Is living 
 In a larger world than the doubters and 
 skeptics; and he knows that the virtue 
 he strives to attain Is real because he 
 practices It. 
 
 i8 
 
The Practice of Immortality 
 
 In like manner, the men and women 
 who have dreamed what Dr. Gladden 
 has finely called " the practice of immor- 
 tality " are not dreaming of a possible 
 revelation to be made hereafter; they are 
 living now in a larger view of the world, 
 and acting day by day in the light of 
 present knowledge. They do not search 
 the books for arguments in support of 
 the truth of immortality, nor are they 
 disturbed by the fluctuation of opinion 
 regarding it; they are absorbed in the 
 practice of it. They think of themselves 
 always as immortal; they live day by 
 day in the immediate presence of that 
 spiritual order in this present stage of 
 life which, though invisible, constantly 
 and with increasing clearness bears wit- 
 ness to itself in current history; they 
 strive in all their intercourse with others 
 to bear themselves as immortals and to 
 reverence their fellows as sharers in the 
 great gift of life; they make immortality 
 credible by purity, helpfulness, and fer- 
 tility; by courage, calmness, and the 
 19 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 sweetness that streams from a great 
 vision become the feeder of character; 
 they think always of those who have 
 passed through the Gate of Death as 
 possessed of a more vital and tran- 
 scendent life; "it is the dead only 
 who really live, It is we who are dying; " 
 if It comforts and freshens their sense of 
 the reality of the one life elsewhere, they 
 pray for those who have gone on as 
 freely and confidently as for those who 
 remain; they think of the whole universe, 
 visible and invisible, as the home in 
 which God lives; of life as one and in- 
 divisible; of Immortality as a present 
 possession, and of its practice as its only 
 real evidence and demonstration; they 
 find no incredible mystery in the empty 
 tomb from which the Christ walked un- 
 harmed, because in thought, word, and 
 deed he lived as an immortal from the 
 hour of his birth to the hour of his as- 
 cension. 
 
 And in all this they are no more 
 dreamers than is the man In the little 
 20 
 
The Practice of Immortality 
 
 remote country village who by education 
 and travel has so widened his relations 
 that he lives in the world instead of the 
 place where he does his work, finds his 
 shelter, and takes his daily rest; than the 
 man who, in this present stage of war, 
 greed, and selfishness, lives in the reality 
 of a nobler age as surely coming out of 
 the travail of to-day as this age of spirit- 
 ual and moral striving has come out of 
 the age of barbarism, lust, and fear. 
 
 21 
 
Who are the Experts? 
 
 THE Christ story, which the world 
 loves even in its most skeptical 
 moments, curiously relates itself to the 
 highest moods of the spirit, and its sym- 
 bolism has an interior and convincing re- 
 lation with the aspirations and hopes of 
 men. One determining element in the 
 discovery of spiritual and moral truth is 
 strangely overlooked in our processes of 
 investigation, and that is purity of life 
 and harmony with its invisible order. In 
 every other field of knowledge we de- 
 mand the most sensitive and accurate 
 instruments of observation. The appli- 
 ances which equip our laboratories are 
 made with the nicest art and kept with 
 the most painstaking care. Mechanism 
 of exquisite delicacy of construction 
 registers the faintest perturbation of 
 earth or air; microscopes of the highest 
 power reinforce the eye; telescopes, 
 
 22 
 
Who Are the Experts? 
 
 planted where vibration is at the mini- 
 mum and clarity of air at the maximum, 
 record the movements of stars on the 
 far boundaries of space and analyze the 
 fires that burn in the suns; the authority 
 of the observer depends on the perfec- 
 tion of his vision; one of the foremost 
 astronomers of the time owes his emi- 
 nence to his extraordinary power of sight; 
 physicians build great reputations on the 
 intelligence which resides in their finger- 
 tips and the acuteness of their faculty 
 of hearing. In all other fields of knowl- 
 edge we insist on special qualifications 
 and peculiar gifts, and insist that the 
 expert shall keep the organs he uses in 
 the most perfect condition. If he vio- 
 lates the laws of health and his hand 
 loses its steadiness, his eye its clear- 
 sighted and far-sighted vision, his ear its 
 acuteness, we set him aside as we set 
 aside the instrument or mechanism that 
 has lost its perfect adjustment. When an 
 observer falls into this condition, his au- 
 thority departs, and he no longer counts 
 23 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 among the instruments of research. 
 When it comes to the world of spiritual 
 knowledge, however, where the most 
 delicate and sensitive instruments of 
 observation are required, we forget the 
 tests which science has taught us and 
 we in turn apply to science, and Hsten 
 to the reports of any man or woman who 
 lays claim to that gift of prophecy which 
 is the knowledge of invisible things, 
 without looking at his or her credentials. 
 The man in the street does not assume 
 to know astronomy, and if he did we 
 should give him small shrift of attention ; 
 but when the same man begins to speak 
 of things which involve rare qualities of 
 mind and character, we listen as to an 
 oracle. Spiritual things are spiritually 
 discerned; men and women of spiritual 
 genius and of moral achievements alone 
 speak with authority on these great 
 matters. The faculty of spiritual obser- 
 vation rests primarily on harmony with 
 those laws of health which are the 
 expression of right relations to the uni- 
 34 
 
Who Are the Experts? 
 
 verse. The man who violates these laws, 
 whatever his gifts of mind may be, is as 
 little entitled to credence when he speaks 
 of spiritual things as is the astronomer 
 when his sight has failed or the physician 
 when his hearing has become dull. The 
 only expert in the knowledge of the 
 spiritual order is the man who has kept 
 his faculty of observation in the highest 
 condition; but we take our views of life 
 from moral invalids, from the morally 
 insane, from those whose hands are 
 incapable of steadiness, whose sight is a 
 half blindness and whose hearing is a 
 partial deafness. 
 
 There are scores of books in our 
 libraries which assume to reveal the 
 invisible order of life to us, to interpret 
 that life, and to put the key to the mys- 
 tery in our hands, which are mere tran- 
 scriptions of temperament, reflections of 
 moods, revelations of abnormal individ- 
 ual experience; and we accept these 
 purely personal reports of moral and 
 spiritual phenomena as If they were 
 as 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 authoritative reflections of that vast 
 order which reveals itself only to the 
 sane, the humble, the pure in heart. 
 The work of a diseased man of genius 
 often possesses the fascination which 
 resides in pathology, and often imparts 
 the joy of art; but it is a personal mem- 
 orandum and not a record of universal 
 truth. The exaltation of personality, 
 which is one of the great notes of mod- 
 ern as contrasted with ancient literature, 
 and the immense emphasis on the au- 
 thority of individuality in a democratic 
 society, have given us a vast, rich litera- 
 ture which is of the highest importance 
 as a disclosure of what is in man, but 
 some of which has not authority as a 
 revelation of what life is in its fuUness, 
 nor of a man in the highest reaches of his 
 nature. A man of genius who is insane 
 is vastly more interesting than a com- 
 monplace lunatic, but they are both mad; 
 and the ravings and illusions of an entire 
 asylum do not count against the word of 
 one sane man. 
 
 26 
 
A Saint of To-Day 
 
 EVERY age has Its saints, but It 
 often happens that an age does not 
 recognize Its holy men and women until 
 the light of Immortality Interprets them. 
 This lack of discernment Is due, not to 
 any unwillingness to see, but to the ten- 
 acity of accepted forms and ways of ex- 
 pression. Sainthood Is still identified in 
 many minds with asceticism, and the 
 saint who appears among us, living In 
 all the great human relations, bearing 
 the common lot, speaking the universal 
 human speech, passes on her way un- 
 noticed because those who surround and 
 love her are looking for the mediaeval 
 dress, the withdrawal from the world, 
 the crossed hands, the downcast eyes. 
 Blessed are the saints who sought holi- 
 ness, In other times, In escape from the 
 world, and became types of the pure 
 and good In ages of violence, passion, 
 and corruption. In Its calendar of 
 27 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 saints, as in its tender and reverent 
 regard for the mother of Christ, the 
 Roman Cathohc Church has recognized 
 and responded to a deep and wholesome 
 human instinct. Men need the vision 
 of holy men and women walking stain- 
 less along the perilous ways of life, 
 indifferent to petty ambitions, lifted 
 above the pride of place and power, 
 consecrated to purity, to righteousness, 
 to sweetness, and to service; the beau- 
 tiful company of those whose lives are 
 revelations of the heart of the Infinite, 
 and upon whom, amid the shadows of 
 time, the light of Immortality visibly rests. 
 But these stainless and radiant spirits 
 have not ceased to walk among men 
 because Ideals of service have changed 
 their forms and the active modern age 
 has succeeded the meditative Middle 
 Age. The saint of to-day Is not less 
 saintly because she wears no distinctive 
 garb and seeks no refuge from the 
 storms of life. In all the ways of life 
 to-day, in every field of work, In a 
 38 
 
A Saint of To-Day 
 
 thousand obscure households, there are 
 saints who are loved, but who are not 
 recognized. To know the saint under 
 all garbs is, perhaps, to have something 
 in one's self which responds to holiness; 
 to possess something akin in its possi- 
 bilities, though not in its development, 
 to salntllness. In any event, to know 
 the saint when she comes among us is 
 not only to render what Is due of rever- 
 ence, but to receive most fully and 
 Intelligently what she has to give us. 
 
 This saint of to-day was known, as 
 saints are always known, by her beautiful 
 humility. When her friends addressed 
 her, as they sometimes did with perfect 
 sincerity but under the masque of 
 humor, as the saint, she always and with 
 kindred touch of humor spoke of her- 
 self as the sinner. Of the rare loveliness 
 of her nature, the beautiful and winning 
 sweetness of her life, she was as uncon- 
 scious as is the flower of Its delicate 
 coloring; and as the flower breathes Its 
 fragrance Into the air without knowing 
 29 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 that virtue has gone from It, so did she 
 exhale a rare and upHftIng Influence of 
 which she took no note. In all the 
 long and shining calendar of saints none 
 was more simple, unaffected, and child- 
 like in spirit than she; holiness clothed 
 her Hke a garment, but she was as free 
 from conventional pietism as the child 
 who knows his father intimately and loves 
 him with ^a perfect love Is free from 
 conventional phrases of formal affection. 
 Life was so deeply and wholly religious to 
 her that she had long ceased to think of 
 It as a form of faith, a kind of activity, a 
 field of endeavor. This childlike uncon- 
 sciousness made her the most delightful 
 of companions, the gentlest of teachers, 
 the most faithful of friends. She could 
 speak of the highest things without 
 affectation; she could touch the most 
 sensitive places without giving pain; 
 she could make the divlnest credible 
 without the aid of text or argument. 
 She was. Indeed, a beautiful version of 
 the Gospel In the most human speech. 
 30 
 
A Saint of To-Day 
 
 Like all true saints, she was intensely 
 and unaffectedly human. For more than 
 seventy years she had seen life in many 
 remote places, had known many kinds 
 of men, had done many kinds of work 
 with unfailing freshness of feeling and 
 with the strength and joy of perfect 
 health. Then came sickness, and for 
 seven years she lay helpless in her room, 
 watched over with tireless vigilance and 
 cared for with beautiful devotion; for 
 such as she evoke from others that which 
 they give freely from their own natures. 
 In that change from free activity to 
 helpless invahdism there must have been 
 a terrible spiritual struggle; and in those 
 long days and longer nights there must 
 have been hours of inexpressible weari- 
 ness; but no repining ever came from 
 her lips; in the time of most acute suf- 
 fering there was no touch of querulous- 
 ness. She always spoke of her suf- 
 ferings, if she spoke at all, in an imper- 
 sonal way; she was always well, though 
 her frail body was often sorely afflicted. 
 31 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 Her spirit, securely housed in undisturbed 
 and serene faith, was impregnable. 
 
 So deep was her faith that it gave 
 her a beautiful freedom in the world; 
 she lived joyously in her Father's house. 
 And because she was free she had one 
 great resource which some saints have 
 denied themselves — a delightful and 
 never-failing humor. This great gift, so 
 often misunderstood, is itself an evidence 
 of immortality. For the soul of humor 
 is the consciousness of the contrast 
 between the greatness of man's destiny 
 and the absurdity of some of his inter- 
 ests and occupations. It is pre-eminently 
 the resource of those who can play with 
 the incongruities of life because they know 
 its transcendent significance; of those who 
 can give themselves the liberty of the 
 house because they are at home in it. So 
 there came to her a vivacity, an ease, a 
 charm of disposition and of talk, which 
 made her room a place of peace and joy 
 and often of gayety. She was not afraid 
 to be happy, and her happiness per- 
 32 
 
A Saint of To-Day 
 
 vaded the place in which she suffered. 
 Among those who read these words 
 few will recognize the portrait; if it 
 were otherwise, even this slight sketch 
 could not have been written. The 
 record is made to remind the despond- 
 ent, the skeptical, the scoffing, and all 
 who bear heavy crosses, that in this age 
 of immense practical activity, of vast 
 enterprises, of absorbing pursuit of the 
 things that perish in the using, of haste, 
 tumult, and restlessness, holy men and 
 women still walk the earth as of old, 
 saintly lives still bear the fruit of peace 
 and love in quiet places, and the highest 
 virtues still have their eloquent wit- 
 nesses. Eighty-four years this saint of 
 to-day breathed the air of the modern 
 world, shared in its work and spoke its 
 language, and went out of life as stain- 
 less as she entered it; leaving behind 
 her a memory which has become part 
 of the imperishable wealth of all who 
 passed her way and felt the spell of her 
 radiant spirit. 
 
 33 
 
The Mask of the Years 
 
 THE sunlight has marked the hours 
 for centuries on old dials in Eng- 
 lish gardens, but there remains no record 
 of their number or their beginning. In 
 the heart of the earth there are ancient 
 memories which have been deciphered; 
 and men have kept, for a part of their 
 life in the world, a register of their 
 thoughts and deeds. But no one knows 
 when time began, nor does any one fore- 
 see its ending. So accustomed are we 
 to its divisions and sub-divisions that we 
 forget that it has no real existence out- 
 side our own minds. It is a universal 
 convention, but it is only a convention; 
 something agreed upon and accepted for 
 convenience; an accommodation to our 
 limited vision and knowledge. So long 
 has this convention been established and 
 so universal is its acceptance that we have 
 fallen into the habit of setting it in anti- 
 34 
 
The Mask of the Years 
 
 thesis with eternity; forgetting that it is 
 only a very imperfect attempt to bring 
 eternity within the range of our expe- 
 rience and to make it, if not comprehen- 
 sible, at least usable. Time is one way 
 of reckoning the bit of eternity which 
 our earth or our race remembers. There 
 is nothing outside ourselves which cor- 
 responds to it; it is a convenient and 
 necessary fiction; eternity is the only 
 reality. 
 
 The time-sense is of importance be- 
 cause it helps us to give our lives order 
 and to keep us in working relations with 
 our fellows; but it is the sense of eternity 
 which makes deep thinking and noble 
 living possible. Time is a little section 
 of the great whole which is eternity; it is 
 a detail in a great plan; to live as if it 
 were all of life, to see things as if their 
 time-relations expressed their real signifi- 
 cance, to value our opportunities and 
 tasks and burdens as if they were related 
 to the years which we number, is to put a 
 part in place of the whole and to miss the 
 35 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 meaning and glory of living. It has been 
 said of Dante that he saw life under the 
 aspect of eternity. When he looked at 
 the seed, the tree stood before him; when 
 he saw the sowing, he saw in the same 
 vision the harvesting; in every act he 
 discerned a cause whose effect was pres- 
 ent, in every deed he foresaw the fruitage 
 in power or in misery. He did not look 
 ahead; he simply looked into the heart of 
 things; he saw things through the sense 
 of eternity. The greatness and the ter- 
 ror of " The Divine Comedy " lies in the 
 fact that it destroys the fiction of time 
 and makes us suddenly aware that on 
 this very to-day, the hours of which are 
 registered on dials in sunny gardens, we 
 are in eternity. 
 
 In so far as art is noble and significant 
 it annihilates the sense of time and brings 
 us face to face with the beauty and the 
 terror of eternity. The Sistine Madonna 
 sets the mother in the light of eternity, 
 and all heads are uncovered and all voices 
 are hushed in the sudden discernment of 
 36 
 
The Mask of the Years 
 
 the meaning of motherhood in that lan- 
 guage of the spirit which is the speech 
 of eternity, when all disguises are torn 
 away and the divinity of true living is 
 revealed. The " Last Judgment " fills 
 us with awe, not because It is a picture of 
 a great event to come in some distant age, 
 but because it makes us aware that we 
 are sifted, tried, and judged hour by hour, 
 and that the great artist has dramatized 
 in a moment of time the eternal process. 
 There are portrait-painters who have 
 such power of divination, of penetrating 
 the mask of the countenance to the char- 
 acter, that their canvases are revelations 
 of the eternal elements in the nature of 
 the man or woman behind the touches 
 and moldings of time. Whenever the 
 soul comes into view, the man is seen 
 under the aspect of eternity. It is one 
 of the highest services of art that it shows 
 life under the aspects of eternity; the fic- 
 tion of time dissolves under the search- 
 ing glance of the great artist or thinker. 
 Shakespeare's genius lies in the unique 
 37 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 power with which he gives us the feature 
 of the time and the hidden soul which is 
 eternal behind it; the graphic dramatic 
 force with which he delineates the deed, 
 the masterful insight with which he re- 
 lates it to the man and his fortunes. 
 
 In this double power the Bible is 
 unique among the books of the world. 
 Concrete, pictorial, historic, it flashes 
 light at every turn on the ultimate re- 
 sults and conditions; picturing with mar- 
 velous vividness the sowing of the seed, 
 it instantly discloses the harvest. In this 
 lies its pervading, prophetic quality; its 
 steady discernment of the things that are 
 to come because at every stage it lays 
 bare the hidden process which, in the eye 
 of the prophet, is accomplished as joon 
 as it is set in motion. So the Christ 
 moves to his martyrdom with such cer- 
 tainty that long before the star shines 
 over Bethlehem the agony of the cross 
 is announced. 
 
 The years come out of the great silence 
 in unbroken succession because we need 
 38 
 
The Mask of the Years 
 
 their divisions in our endeavor to realize, 
 in daily experience, the continuity of 
 eternity. They give us something to 
 grasp and use; but they must not confuse 
 or blind us to the truth that the life we 
 now live is eternal, and that while we 
 number our years and distinguish them 
 one from another, we are already in 
 eternity. To-morrow is already in 
 to-day; the distant future is part of this 
 swiftly departing present. What we 
 think and do in this brief instant we are 
 and shall be in the far-off cycles to which 
 we move. Our deeds are not of the day; 
 they are of eternity. Below all the 
 shiftings and changes, the moods and 
 emotions, the depressions and exaltations, 
 something Indestructible Is shaping itself 
 as surely as below the bareness and icy 
 bondage of winter a vast life is organiz- 
 ing Itself. 
 
 Our sorrows are registered by the days, 
 
 but If the root of submission and faith Is 
 
 In them they are as certainly overpast as 
 
 If already the shadows were gone and the 
 
 39 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 heavens were soft and gracious over our 
 heads. So far as the righteous are able 
 to look through the mask of the years, 
 light is not only sown for them; it already 
 floods the skies. So far as the high pur- 
 pose is deep-rooted and loyally held, no- 
 bility and strength and freedom are al- 
 ready achieved. So far as love is pure, 
 unselfish, and sacrificial, it is already safe 
 against the ravages of death. Life is 
 not yet at the flood, but it is ours as truly 
 as if we were in full possession of its un- 
 bounded resources; the perfect stature is 
 yet afar off, but if the law of growth is 
 working in us, it is already ours as surely 
 as if we had completely attained. The 
 sorrows which the years bring the years 
 take away; they are of the time and the 
 place, and we are not the slaves of time 
 and place; but our joys, having their 
 source in the soul, are indestructible. In 
 the darkest night we know that the day is 
 below the horizon; the shadow on the 
 dial does not confuse us; we know that 
 the sun Is on the way. In our deepest 
 40 
 
The Mask of the Years 
 
 griefs, if we look into our souls, the joy 
 of eternal possession already stirs; it 
 needs but the ripening of our faith and 
 patience to bear its perfect flower. The 
 life of love is not counted by the years; 
 once born in the heart, it abides forever. 
 Sown in the furrows of time, it blooms in 
 those immortal fields where no shadows 
 wait to hide the sun and no chill of death 
 checks the eternal growth. 
 
 41 
 
Love and Work 
 
 IDEALISM as an interpretation of 
 life, a vision of ultimate ends and 
 conditions, has always won to itself the 
 ardent, the poetic, and the high-minded 
 — the great company of seekers after 
 light and love in every generation, who 
 rebel against the hardness and injustice 
 of the world, hate its noise and brutality, 
 its fierce competitions and its stolid indif- 
 ference to the defeated. Even in the 
 presence of the great purpose which runs 
 through the visible order of things and 
 the society in which men have arranged 
 themselves, and which has come to light, 
 as one of the most spiritual men of the 
 day has said, just in time to save some 
 of the best men and women from despair, 
 it is hard for the sensitive and aspiring 
 and tender-hearted to bear the sorrows 
 of the world and to sit with a cheerful 
 spirit while so many losses ravage the 
 42 
 
Love and Work 
 
 homes that are dear to them and de- 
 spoil the best fortunes of men. There 
 are hosts of men and women who go 
 through life with a noble discontent in 
 their hearts, a sense of loneliness and 
 isolation in their souls; they are home- 
 sick for a world in which men help 
 instead of smite, bind up instead of 
 wound, are quick to recognize the good 
 instead of eager to find the evil, stand 
 ready in all crises to rebuild the fallen, 
 are patient of spirit with the weak, love 
 the sinner while they loathe the sin, are 
 kindly in speech because kindly in 
 thought, are indifferent to external con- 
 ditions because conditions are the hap- 
 penings of life while the soul is its great 
 and enduring reality, are bound together 
 in a vast conspiracy to cheer, to aid, to 
 give heart and hope, to make the high- 
 ways of life bloom with spontaneous 
 kindnesses, and to make the lonely world 
 a warm, hospitable, many-windowed 
 home for all who pass this way on the 
 journey of life. 
 
 43 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 If the truth were told, what confes- 
 sions of sohtude, of heartache, of lone- 
 Hness of spirit, would come like a flood 
 from those whom men count happy 
 because they are intrenched against the 
 blows of disaster by all manner of mate- 
 rial possession ! " The heart knoweth 
 his own bitterness " Is one of the truest 
 and saddest of all the summlngs up of 
 experience In the Book of Proverbs; and 
 where there is no bitterness there is 
 always loneliness. In whatever circum- 
 stances men are born In this world, they 
 are all born In exile; and in exile pal- 
 aces are often as prison-like as hovels. 
 
 This is the penalty of immortality; 
 the price we pay for the birthright of 
 the divine In us. To have the power of 
 creating heaven in the imagination is to 
 bare one's heart to the coldness and 
 hardness of the world; to see Paradise 
 at a distance is to make the desert in 
 which we are traveling more barren and 
 lonely. As one who loves the sweetness 
 of the open meadow, the solitude of 
 44 
 
Love and Work 
 
 woods, and the cool musing of running 
 brooks finds the noise and odor and 
 crowding of the city almost intolerable, 
 so those who carry a vision of heaven In 
 their souls find the unkindness, the tu- 
 mult, and the hardness of this present 
 world almost unbearable. They have 
 often fled from It and sought refuge In 
 isolation; they have made homes for 
 themselves in the vast quiet of the Nile 
 valley, they have built monasteries on 
 almost Inaccessible heights, they have 
 buried themselves out of the sight and 
 sound of the world in all manner of 
 lonely refuges. But wherever they have 
 gone they have carried the passionate 
 human heart with them, and even when 
 they have found the peace which some- 
 times flows out of the heart of silence, 
 they have never found the perfect society, 
 the cloudless day of joy, the redeemed 
 world. 
 
 If Idealism were at bottom an explana- 
 tion of life as It reveals Itself within the 
 limits of time, It would often seem the 
 45 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 idlest of dreams, the most untenable of 
 philosophies; but it Is a solution of the 
 great problem only at the end of a 
 world-wide and an almost illimitable 
 process of growth and unfolding; it Is 
 the vision of an ultimate perfection, not 
 a statement of present conditions; It is, 
 at the heart, a glimpse into the great 
 mystery of education which makes this 
 life not only bearable but marvelously 
 spiritual and hope-Inspiring. 
 
 The Idealism which lies within every 
 man's reach and In every man's need Is 
 surrender to the urgent and passionate 
 desire to give his own spirit the shape 
 and quality of the divine spirit, and to 
 create in himself those traits and that 
 attitude which he yearns to find wrought 
 Into the fiber of society; to be In his 
 own soul that which he wishes all men 
 were. Conditions, whether easy or dif- 
 ficult, are secondary; the eternal element 
 of peace and happiness lies in every 
 man's soul, beyond the reach of acci- 
 dent. They who seek heaven must take 
 46 
 
Love and Work 
 
 refuge in their own spirits, not in some 
 solitary place at a distance; and they 
 must find it, not in more congenial cir- 
 cumstances, but in a freer and nobler 
 putting forth of the best in themselves. 
 The true Idealist is not a dreamer in a 
 world of realities which make his dream 
 incredible, nor is he a refugee escaping 
 from conditions which he cannot bear 
 to a more comfortable place; he is a 
 man who is patiently and often pain- 
 fully shaping his life in harmony with 
 an inward purpose; who is mastering 
 crude materials that he may make the 
 vision in whose light he lives shine 
 before the eyes of men whose sight is 
 less clear than his; who is doing com- 
 monplace things in a spirit which gives 
 them the beauty of a high purpose, as 
 the great architect redeems the mean- 
 ness of the hidden stone by the splendor 
 of the structure in which it finds its 
 place. 
 
 Men are made happy, not by the 
 things which surround them nor by the 
 47 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 things which they take to themselves, 
 but by the noble putting forth of the 
 soul in love and work; the two great 
 activities which are never divorced in 
 the harmonious and balanced life, the 
 two languages in which every true Ideal- 
 ist makes confession of his faith and 
 gives evidence of its reality. For love 
 is the ultimate expression of faith, and 
 without works faith is a vain shadow of 
 reality. 
 
 48 
 
A Text from Luther 
 
 LUTHER, who at his best had com- 
 mand of that kind of speech which 
 combines clearness of statement, beauty 
 of imagination, and warmth of heart, 
 whose words, as Carlyle has said, were 
 " half battles," has left an exhortation to 
 fraternal love and sacrifice which is a 
 noble sermon compacted into a para- 
 graph: "Every Christian should be 
 unto his fellow-man a willing servant, 
 willing to help and aid his neighbor, even 
 as God acts towards us through Christ. 
 Thus all of God's gifts must flow from 
 one into the other and be common to 
 all, flowing from Christ to us, from us 
 to our neighbor, who stands in need 
 thereof." These words might be taken 
 as a description of the fundamental ofiice 
 of the Christian Church, which is not 
 only to bear testimony to the Christ who 
 lived and died nineteen hundred years 
 49 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 ago, but to share with all men that truth 
 which he communicated, to divide with 
 all men the love of which his life was 
 the supreme expression, and to include 
 all men in the universal care of God. 
 
 For the individual man or woman who 
 Is trying to repeat the life of Christ these 
 words have the most searching signifi- 
 cance. Over the portal of every day's 
 life they ought to be written; for unless 
 the truth which they contain is practiced, 
 there is no real religion. The final evi- 
 dence of religion is always the fruit it 
 bears. No conformity to creed, no rigid- 
 ity of observation of ritual, no devotion 
 to any church as an organization, no 
 ritualistic act or service, can be the final 
 test of the love of Christ in a man's 
 heart. The final test of the presence of 
 that love is always the disposition to 
 treat others as Christ treats us, to do 
 unto others as Christ has done unto us, 
 and to illustrate in our relations with 
 others the charity, kindness, and sacri- 
 ficial spirit which gave the life of Christ 
 50 
 
A Text from Luther 
 
 and his death their beautiful and supreme 
 significance. In the clamor of contend- 
 ing interpretations of the Christian life, 
 in the tumult of antagonistic claims of au- 
 thority from this church or from that, 
 in all the uncertainty of thought, or prac- 
 tice, or of organization which prevails 
 throughout the world to-day, the spirit 
 of Christ manifested in our relations 
 with our fellows is the definite and fixed 
 thing which any man or woman may 
 learn and which every man and woman 
 ought to practice. Better a thousand 
 times heterodoxy of opinion than heter- 
 odoxy of spirit; better a thousand times 
 the imperfect ritual than the selfish heart. 
 It is best to think right and to worship 
 God wisely and nobly; but if the Bible 
 teaches anything definitely, it teaches the 
 great fundamental fact that what the In- 
 finite cares for supremely is not correct- 
 ness of opinion or of ritual, but the right 
 spirit, not only towards man, but to- 
 wards every creature He has made. 
 This is the test to which the Old Testa- 
 51 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 ment, through its great teachers, was con- 
 stantly bringing the Jewish people; and 
 it is one of the awful tragedies of the 
 race that those who were highest in the 
 Church, most orthodox in opinion, most 
 scrupulous in ritual, failed most com- 
 pletely to interpret and practice the spirit 
 of Christ. No man is saved by his or- 
 thodoxy, but any man may be saved by 
 his life; no man is saved by his church- 
 manship, but any man may be saved by 
 his character. 
 
 Men are not likely to undervalue the 
 importance of correct opinion and proper 
 ritual, but they have shown a constant 
 tendency to undervalue and obscure the 
 supreme importance of the right relations 
 toward their fellows; and Luther's words, 
 spoken in the sixteenth century, are as 
 applicable to the twentieth century as If 
 they had been written by a contemporary 
 prophet or teacher. In the exact degree 
 in which God's gifts in our keeping are 
 made common to all, in which the spirit 
 of Christ received by us is illustrated In 
 52 
 
A Text from Luther 
 
 our lives, In which the love of God, 
 accepted by us, is not only passed on, but 
 interpreted by our own attitude toward 
 others In thought, word, and deed, have 
 we a right to consider ourselves follow- 
 ers of Christ. 
 
 53 
 
The Escape from Fear 
 
 THE story of man in this world Is the 
 story of getting away from fear. 
 Fear was the universal shadow that 
 rested over the fore-fathers of the race. 
 They were afraid of everything, and they 
 had reason to be, because everything 
 seemed hostile to them. Even now, after 
 thousands of years of observation, ex- 
 perience, discovery, and obedience, there 
 are moments when nature seem^ to be the 
 enemy of man In spite of the fact that 
 science has taught us that nature is our 
 beneficent and wonderful friend of whose 
 services the achievements of the magi- 
 cians were faint symbols. The earliest 
 men were surrounded by perils which 
 must have sunk deep into their conscious- 
 ness and made life one prolonged and 
 painful watchfulness. The sun smote 
 them with fire; the winter froze them 
 with ice; the great storms, which they 
 54 
 
The Escape from Fear 
 
 could not predict and against which they 
 could not provide, destroyed them; wild 
 beasts, poisonous serpents and venomous 
 Insects devoured or poisoned them; tem- 
 pests swept their fragile homes out of 
 existence; the lightning blasted them; dis- 
 ease came out of the ground; and death 
 awaited them at every turn. 
 
 And when, In the crude beginnings of 
 thought, they felt the presence of a per- 
 sonal power behind all these forces, that 
 power was malignant and threatening. 
 The fear of God with early men was a 
 cowering and crushing fear. God was 
 pursuing them; their safety lay in escap- 
 ing his attention. He was angry with 
 them; they placated him. He was jeal- 
 ous of them; they concealed their good 
 fortune. He was envious of them; they 
 hardly dared to be happy. A man's life 
 was a long struggle to protect himself 
 from a God who beset him behind and 
 before, not to protect, but to blight and 
 destroy. 
 
 And to the first men their fellow-men 
 55 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 were as dangerous as nature and God. 
 The stranger was necessarily an enemy; 
 to meet him safely one must always be 
 ready with a weapon or with a blow. All 
 differences of race, of country, of lan- 
 guage, were the symbols of an aliena- 
 tion full of hatred and antagonism. Be- 
 fore the first Christmas fear was a uni- 
 versal emotion, and such happiness and 
 peace as man got out of life he snatched 
 with a fearful joy of escaping the re- 
 lentless bitterness of nature, the jeal- 
 ousies of the gods, and the antagonism 
 and hatred of his fellows. When the 
 shepherds saw the angels above their 
 flocks, their first feeling was not one of 
 exaltation and joy, but of fear; and the 
 first words the angels said were spoken 
 to calm those fears. Before the great 
 and beautiful hymn which heaven has 
 sung on earth, '* Peace and good will to- 
 wards men," could be heard the angels 
 had to say, ** Fear not! " 
 
 The fear of God in the old blasting 
 sense of the word ended when Christ 
 56 
 
The Escape from Fear 
 
 came to cast out fear and to write in its 
 place another word, *' Love." He came 
 to teach men that even the things that 
 seemed unfriendly were expressions of 
 the divine friendship, and the disasters, 
 sorrows, and hardships of life had be- 
 hind them the intelligence of an infinite 
 love. Ever since that message came 
 men have been slowly casting out fear. 
 Life long ago ceased to mean for them 
 an attempt to elude the anger of God 
 and has become an opportunity; not a 
 thing to run away from, but to run into, 
 so to speak; for, as Phillips Brooks once 
 said, " The way to escape from God is 
 to escape into him;" that is to say, to 
 accept the order of life as it is revealed 
 in our experience as a discipline of love 
 and not of anger. Fear makes men 
 cowards, and the coward is as brutal in 
 his panic as the savage. Fear turns civ- 
 ilized men into savages, and humanity 
 is never so base as when it is seeking in 
 a great crisis to protect itself instead of 
 seeking to protect others. For the spirit 
 57 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 of Christ Is the spirit of a love which 
 casteth out fear, not only because it 
 teaches that the order of life is divinely 
 fashioned, but because, by substituting 
 the love of others for the love of self, 
 it makes us Indifferent to personal danger. 
 
 There Is no place In the world for fear 
 if one's heart is set to deal justly, to 
 walk humbly, to help gratefully, and to 
 forget one's self. The greater the 
 danger, the greater the need for that 
 valiant spirit which enables a man to 
 walk quietly down to his own death be- 
 cause he is concerned not for himself but 
 for others. 
 
 The root of love is faith In the good- 
 ness of God, and faith Is to be used, not 
 when the skies are cloudless, but when 
 they are black; not when there Is light 
 on all the paths, but when darkness cov- 
 ers the whole face of the earth and the 
 paths are hidden in a vast confusion. 
 
 58 
 
Praying and Waiting 
 
 IT is easy to pray for things but hard 
 to wait for them; and we often rush 
 to the conclusion that because prayers 
 are not answered in a moment they are 
 not answered at all. A little thought 
 would end this kind of skepticism and 
 give us patience to wait on the Lord 
 without repining or sinking of heart. 
 Great blessings sometimes come sud- 
 denly, but none before they have been 
 prepared for by some kind of spiritual 
 training; great orators sometimes sud- 
 denly come to light in apparently com- 
 monplace careers, but not unless there 
 have been rich possibilities hidden be- 
 neath the routine of daily work. No 
 man, in any great crisis, shows a gift for 
 speech or action of heroism unless the 
 germs of those things were already in 
 him. Great moments do not put great 
 qualities into the souls of men; they sim- 
 ply reveal what is already there. 
 59 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 The fruits of character cannot be real- 
 ized until the seeds of nobility have had 
 time to grow; and education of some 
 kind must precede all forms of sustained 
 strength. Weak men have often, by 
 prayer, been made strong in critical 
 moments, but they acquire the habit of 
 strength only by exercise. The weak 
 arm does not become muscular by taking 
 thought, but by taking exercise; the 
 Irritable temper Is not made sweet by a 
 sudden act of will, but by patient repres- 
 sion of an unhappy tendency; the man 
 of unclean mind is not cleansed because 
 he resolves to be white, but because he 
 forms the habit of purity. We are con- 
 tinually asking God to give us the fruits 
 of character without the discipline of 
 training, not realizing that we are asking 
 him to do for us the work that alone 
 would strengthen our muscles and give 
 us the power we crave. We ask to be 
 fed by a miracle instead of tilling the 
 ground, sowing the seed, and reaping 
 the harvest with our own hands, and so 
 60 
 
Praying and Waiting 
 
 getting strength from the soil. He Is 
 ready to help us In any time of need, 
 but moral help must be secured by 
 moral exertion; we must not ask God ta 
 pauperize us. Men ought to pray every 
 day for sweetness of temper, since the 
 lack of it blights countless homes and 
 neutralizes many noble qualities; but 
 they ought to remember that sweetness 
 Is born out of the subjection of strength, 
 the mastery of temper, the control of the 
 tones of voice, and that to gain the 
 blessed gift one must wait on the Lord, 
 and let education give prayer its ultimate 
 effectiveness. 
 
 6i 
 
The Bugle Call 
 
 YEARS ago, in a foreign city, long 
 after midnight, a bugle rang out 
 clear and penetrating in the -darkness that 
 comes before dawn. It pierced the deep- 
 est recesses of sleep and sounded the 
 great note of action and adventure. To 
 what duty it summoned and whither it led 
 they only knew to whom it was a com- 
 mand; but a great company of those 
 who came out of their dreams to hear it 
 were shaken by its imperative call, and 
 must remember it as an impersonal sym- 
 bol of that divine voice which from time 
 to time rings in the innermost courts of a 
 man's soul with the music of great deeds 
 on noble fields. Hosts of men are para- 
 lyzed because they hear no voices save 
 those that weaken and betray them — the 
 voices of their weariness, indecision, 
 skepticism, weakness. They sleep on 
 their arms as If no fight were to be won, 
 no soul to be saved from its baser 
 6z 
 
The Bugle Call 
 
 passions, Its cowardly moods. If they 
 rouse themselves, it is to take account of 
 their discomfort; to note that the night 
 is dark, the air cold, the ground hard. 
 They lie bound hand and foot in a 
 stupor of uncertainty and discourage- 
 ment. They complain of their hard- 
 ships, repine at their inaction, waste their 
 courage and strength in hollow excuses 
 and evasions. So intent are they on their 
 deprivations that they forget the cause 
 which they set out to serve and curse 
 the leaders whom they no longer follow. 
 Again and again -the bugle rings out on 
 the night, but they sleep on and take 
 their rest even while the Master is be- 
 trayed into the hands of his enemies. 
 
 They drug themselves with the nar- 
 cotics of fatalism, of the irresistible 
 power of circumstances, of the over- 
 whelming force of the obstacles which 
 surround them; they lull themselves Into 
 sleep with a thousand excuses and eva- 
 sions. If they had been equipped with 
 different arms, been under another com- 
 63 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 mand, had another sort of drill, been 
 better cared for, received a larger meas- 
 ure of strength, they would have done 
 such heroic things and won victories on 
 such glorious fields ! And while they He 
 in a stupor of weakness the bugles ring 
 and a thousand men about them spring 
 to arms and march singing to the good 
 fortune of those dangers In which men 
 rise to sublime heights of self-forgetful 
 courage. The chance which Is the di- 
 vine opportunity of life comes to them 
 all, and they make that great refusal 
 which defeats the very ends for which 
 they were made and leaves them laggards 
 and deserters; while their fellows, who 
 carry the same weapons, are chilled by 
 the same air, and endure the same hard- 
 ness, arise and are gone before the dawn. 
 Among the pitiful tragedies of life there 
 is none more pitiful than that which over- 
 takes the man who is more Intent on his 
 discomforts and the things which are de- 
 nied him than on his opportunities of 
 work and self-denial and service. 
 
 64 
 
The Bugle Call 
 
 Savonarola was one of those whose 
 career Is beset with every sort of diffi- 
 culty, whose path is hard and solitary, 
 who is alone in a world of enemies. He 
 might have cried out to his Leader that 
 the task laid upon him was too great 
 for his strength, that the fight was against 
 overwhelming odds, that if he was to 
 win he ought to have had a thousand 
 things which were denied him. But he 
 thought not of his weakness but of the 
 strength of his cause, not of his danger 
 but of the greatness of the service to 
 which he was called, not of his hardships 
 but of his glorious chance to live and 
 die fighting the good fight of faith. To 
 him, as to all men, came the doubts, the 
 questionings, the weariness, the sense 
 of great weakness; and there is a little 
 poem of his in which he tells us how he 
 met them: 
 
 " Down by the road of evil 
 Wanders my spirit; 
 If it receive not succor, 
 It will die shortly. 
 
 65 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 The Devil he deceives it 
 
 With his false reasoning; 
 The senses they promise it 
 
 Every possible pleasure; 
 The world ever invites it 
 
 To indulge itself in iniquity: 
 My spirit thus tempted, 
 
 Who now will help it ? — 
 
 Help thyself, good-for-nothing, 
 
 With the gift that God gives thee; 
 
 Thou hast full power 
 
 To make thyself worthy. 
 • •••••• 
 
 Thou canst not be conquered 
 
 Save thou art willing. 
 Stronger is grace 
 
 Than every adversity." 
 
 There are times when a man must say 
 to his own spirit, '' Up, thou sluggard, 
 and away; the bugle calls; the day of 
 battle dawns." Let no man be de- 
 ceived; the fortunes of his soul are in his 
 own hands. He may beguile himself for 
 a time with the dream of fatalism, but 
 even while he dreams he knows in his 
 heart that he is deceiving himself. He 
 66 
 
The Bugle Call 
 
 may talk of his limitations, his difficulties, 
 his conditions, his temperament; but in 
 his heart he knows that these are mere 
 subterfuges; that he has bound himself 
 with imaginary fetters, and that if he 
 will arise and stand erect these illusive 
 bonds will fall from him. He may not 
 be able to do the work of some other man, 
 but he can do his own work, and that is 
 all that is required. Every man has the 
 strength to do his duty if he chooses to 
 put it forth, to be a man and not a dumb, 
 driven creature, the mere shape of a man 
 driven like a cloud of dust across the 
 field of life by the wind of destiny. He 
 may go to suffering, hardness, and death, 
 as Savonarola did; but these things are 
 mere Incidents; the great thing is that 
 he shall strive and not sleep. The prodi- 
 gal slept long, but he heard the call at 
 last, awoke, and became a man once 
 more when he turned from the beasts 
 and said, " I will go to my father." 
 
 67 
 
The Upper Room 
 
 WHEN the first day of unleavened 
 bread came, Jesus sent Peter and 
 John Into the city, and told them that 
 they would meet a man whom they were 
 to follow and who would show them a 
 room in which the passover could be 
 eaten. " He will show you a large upper 
 room furnished and prepared; there make 
 ready for us. . . . When the hour was 
 come, he sat down, and the twelve 
 apostles with him." No scene In his- 
 tory is more simple In Its setting, none 
 more memorable. It has been described 
 with beautiful and reverent eloquence; 
 it has been painted with supreme skill by 
 a master of the art; it has been rehearsed 
 times without number in many different 
 forms, according to the most diverse rit- 
 uals; it has been observed as a simple 
 breaking of bread and pouring of wine, 
 and it has been celebrated at blazing 
 68 
 
The Upper Room 
 
 altars by richly vested priests; but its 
 innermost significance can never be en- 
 tirely expressed in any worship nor form- 
 ulated in any creed. The beauty and 
 wonder of it lie on the further side of 
 any kind of language which men have 
 fashioned to give ease to their souls. 
 
 But one great fact stands out in this 
 wonderful scene: the upper room was 
 the place of meeting between the Christ 
 and his Apostles ! It will remain for- 
 ever the symbol of the communion be- 
 tween God and man; the quiet place, hid- 
 den from the world, where man meets 
 God and Is fed by the bread of life; that 
 food by which the soul lives, bestowed 
 only by the hand of God. The world is 
 full of men and women who have eaten 
 the fruit of every tree except the tree of 
 life, who partake of everything that gives 
 vigor to the body, but never sit at the 
 invisible table where that bread is spread 
 which makes one stronger than death. 
 Among all the manifold ironies of life 
 there is none so terrible as the well-nour- 
 69 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 ished body and the starving soul. As 
 there are beauitful faces in which no 
 spirit irradiates the mask of bones and 
 flesh, so there are prosperous men and 
 women whose lot awakens the envy of 
 their fellows whose outward success is 
 without spiritual dignity or meaning. 
 Men can exist without the words that 
 proceed from the mouth of God, but they 
 cannot live without them. They build 
 themselves palaces and lay the skill of 
 the world under contribution to make 
 them stately without and luxurious within, 
 but they provide no upper room. They 
 open their doors wide and entertain their 
 friends lavishly, but there is no place for 
 God under the roof. There are magnifi- 
 cent rooms where guests are welcomed 
 with royal splendor, there are great gal- 
 leries into which are gathered the treas- 
 ures of many ages and countries but there 
 Is no upper room. 
 
 The activities and rewards of the time 
 are so engrossing that many high-minded 
 and pure-hearted people find no time for 
 70 
 
The Upper Room 
 
 meditation and communion in the upper 
 room. Many of them are so bent on 
 helping their fellows that they forget 
 whence cometh their help; they are so 
 eager to share the sorrows of their fel- 
 lows that they forget Him who bore the 
 cross up the steep way to Calvary; they 
 are so drained by the duties they take up 
 that they lose the inspiration which makes 
 duty the channel through which love 
 pours itself out; they listen with such 
 passionate attention to the cries for help 
 that come from the world around them 
 that they no longer hear the still, small 
 voice of the Father of all men. In the 
 house of the generous and self-sacrificing, 
 as in the houses of the selfish and hard- 
 hearted, there is no upper room. 
 
 And yet no man can live without God ! 
 It is true, he comes in a thousand forms 
 and speaks many languages; but it is also 
 true that men must make ready the room 
 in which they can meet him face to face. 
 Where there is no upper room, the 
 house, however nobly appointed and dedi- 
 71 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 cated, may remain a place of courage and 
 arduous endeavor, but It ceases to be a 
 place of contagious hope, of that vision 
 which enables men to look at the sorrows 
 of the arid lives without losing heart In 
 the Infinite love. For those who give 
 themselves to works of mercy and stand 
 ready to help In the highways, no less 
 than for those who feed their bodies and 
 starve their souls, the upper room Is not 
 only a place of refuge, It Is a necessity of 
 the higher nature ; and the more exacting 
 the work becomes, and the greater Its 
 Interest and reward, the more pressing Is 
 the need of the upper room where the 
 tumult of the world dies into silence and 
 the ambitions of the world shrink into the 
 rewards of a passing hour, and man talks 
 with his God. 
 
 
 72 
 
The Price of Immortality 
 
 SHAKESPEARE gives Polonius a 
 prominent place in the early part of 
 " Hamlet," and then allows him to be ig- 
 nominiously mistaken for a rat and killed. 
 This end was due to Polonius; but Shake- 
 speare must have found great satisfaction 
 in bringing it about. For Polonius was 
 essentially a coward and an atheist. He 
 was always warning people to beware of 
 life; he proposed to put everybody In a 
 chain armor of selfish caution. The sub- 
 stance of his advice to his son and to all 
 the others to whom he talked was : " Get 
 money; avoid friends; beware of life! " 
 George Macdonald said that Polonius 
 would have been right if the devil had 
 been God. But in a universe In which 
 the devil Is the devil and God Is God Po- 
 lonius was tragically wrong. His atti- 
 tude made It Impossible for him to be- 
 lieve anything, and he was therefore In- 
 capable of understanding anything. 
 73 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 The only man who greatly succeeds is 
 the man who believes. The unbelieving 
 man tries to conduct the business of life 
 alone; he refuses to enter into partner- 
 ship with the great force behind life. He 
 suspects that force, fears it, and tries to 
 protect himself from it. He makes, 
 therefore, the smallest possible invest- 
 ment of his affections, his convictions, his 
 energy. Instead of taking possession of 
 the great House of Life and living in it 
 like an heir to whom it has come by hon- 
 orable inheritance, he bolts the doors and 
 bars the windows, locks his treasures in 
 the innermost room, watches for thieves, 
 and dreads earthquakes and tempests. 
 He never takes the privileges of an heir 
 of the world or of a son of God. No 
 man can really make a success in the su- 
 preme business of living unless he goes 
 into partnership with the force behind 
 life, invests everybody that he is and has, 
 and commits himself gladly and boldly 
 to that force which some people call 
 righteousness and others call God. 
 74 
 
The Price of Immortality 
 
 The phrase '' growing up with a com- 
 munity," which is often heard in this 
 country, is significant of one great element 
 of success. Those men who foresee the 
 growth of a locaHty, identify themselves 
 with it, and make investment in it are 
 lifted often on a rising tide of prosperity 
 to great wealth. They are not specula- 
 tors; for the speculator is a gambler. 
 They are far-sighted men, with the 
 prophetic instinct; they have faith enough 
 to commit themselves to the larger for- 
 tunes of a community; and so they found 
 great fortunes on insight, observation, 
 and faith. 
 
 Browning was the prophet of those 
 who take God at his word; who believe 
 that the invisible forces behind life are 
 friendly and bear one forward. Those 
 who yield to these forces are carried to 
 great prosperities of soul. Men and 
 women of the Polonius type of mind 
 never make great ventures; they never 
 put their talents out at interest, but bury 
 them in a napkin^ In the great House 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 of Life they lie awake at night because 
 they think they hear burglars or smell 
 smoke. They never hoist sail and put 
 boldly out to sea; they keep within sight 
 of the shore. But the sea captain fears 
 no storm, however violent, If he has 
 plenty of sea room; the wrecks line the 
 shore. Of course life Is full of danger; 
 and many things may happen to bring 
 pain and sorrow to those who are bold 
 because they believe profoundly in the 
 power behind hfe. But the man who 
 greatly loses Is a nobler man than he who 
 ignomlnlously succeeds. As a rule, the 
 bold men who act on their faith make the 
 great achievements; but even when they 
 fall to command eternal success they gain 
 nobility of soul. " He makes noble ship- 
 wreck who is lost In seeking worlds." 
 
 If the devil were God, caution would 
 be a supreme duty; but because God Is 
 God the supreme duty Is courage. Op- 
 portunity is never separated from danger, 
 and love always evokes the possibility of 
 sorrow; but he would be a dull man who 
 76 
 
The Price of Immortality 
 
 would avoid adventure because peril Is 
 bound up with it; and he would miss the 
 whole beauty and meaning of life who 
 would never permit himself to make a 
 great venture of his affection because 
 death may go with love. It is the mor- 
 tal part that fears, it is the immortal part 
 that dares; and the great trials are the 
 price we pay for our immortality. If, 
 to-day, Dante, far on In the paradise of 
 which he dreamed cares for the fame 
 which shines like a light over the whole 
 world, he does not count those weary 
 years of exile from Florence too great a 
 price to have paid. Lincoln, looking 
 down on a reunited family bound to- 
 gether for the first time in a household of 
 love, does not feel that his martyrdom 
 was too great a price to have paid for 
 such a result. The great things are al- 
 ways to be greatly paid for. An Immor- 
 tal spirit cannot be put Into a mortal body 
 to live a mortal life without exposure 
 to the changes, sorrows, and shadows of 
 death which are a part of mortality. But 
 77 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 the brave man does not shrink from the 
 toll and danger to which his very great- 
 ness calls him in some noble task, and the 
 Immortal spirit ought to be willing to 
 face, to pay the price of. Its own immor- 
 tality. 
 
 The choice between following the mor- 
 tal or the Immortal nature is laid upon 
 us all. Happy are those who dare to be- 
 lieve In God and to act, not as if Immor- 
 tality were coming to them, but as if it 
 were already theirs. 
 
 78 
 
Light in the Darkness 
 
 MY faith holds, but I cannot see 
 my way," writes a man who Is 
 trying to live In the spirit of Christ. 
 The experience Is neither uncommon nor 
 unhappy; for a secure anchorage of the 
 soul Is the main thing In life. To see 
 one's way has a great deal to do with 
 happiness, but nothing to do with safety; 
 to be able to follow the path step by step 
 through fog and storm brings one to the 
 end of the journey as certainly as to 
 follow It In the sunshine. Some men see 
 farther than others, but no man sees the 
 whole course from start to finish; the 
 greatness of the way makes that Impos- 
 sible. The essential thing In the life of 
 faith is not sight, but faith; in faith lies 
 the discipline of the spirit, the firm and 
 final setting of the will, the deep spiritual 
 education that is born of patience, of 
 waiting in hope, of the slow strengthen- 
 ing of the habit of trust. 
 79 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 Clearness of vision, the constant sense 
 of divine guidance, the joy of cloudless 
 faith, are the possession of few men and 
 women; for this radiancy of belief is a 
 kind of religious genius, and genius is the 
 possession of a little group out of count- 
 less millions. They are many who, in 
 lesser degree, walk in the light; some be- 
 cause they are buoyant by temperament, 
 some because the experiences that drive 
 the spirit back on itself pass them by; a 
 few because prosperity shields them from 
 the knowledge of the tragic facts of life, 
 from the shock of contact with the misery 
 of the world. But these exceptionally 
 comfortable men and women are counted 
 fortunate only by those who do not 
 see the tremendous significance of life. 
 Prosperity is not a matter of easy condi- 
 tions, but of large opportunity; to live in 
 a palace, shut away from sorrow and 
 care, is one of the supreme misfortunes 
 of a life that is planned, not for ease, but 
 for education; and the unluckiest boy in 
 the world is the boy who is allowed to 
 80 
 
Light in the Darkness 
 
 play during the years when he ought to 
 be at school. 
 
 The faith that holds one securely when 
 the mists cover the earth or the storms 
 sweep over it is a matter, not of tempera- 
 ment or fortunate conditions, but of deep 
 and enduring conviction. The gates of 
 hell, which are sometimes opened on a 
 man and let loose a stormy mob of temp- 
 tations or doubts, cannot prevail against 
 it; and he who possesses it is impreg- 
 nably intrenched against their attacks. 
 He is never caught unawares or in am- 
 bush; for his strength does not lie in his 
 moods or his clearness of vision; it lies 
 in himself. If he is plunged in the thick 
 darkness of that depression in which men 
 of weaker faith throw down their arms 
 in despair, he stands steadfast and im- 
 movable; it is not his to choose the light 
 or the darkness; his duty is to stand res- 
 olutely where he is placed, and there he 
 holds his post like a soldier. If doubts 
 gather thick around him and shut all the 
 doors of hope, he waits, hopeless for 
 8i 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 the moment, but incorruptlbly loyal to 
 his Master. It was in this temper that 
 Childe Roland passed unfaltering through 
 the horror of desolation, the slung horn 
 at his lips, until he came to the dark 
 tower, undaunted by visible and Invisible 
 terrors, never for a moment in danger 
 of any power outside himself. 
 
 It Is in such darkness that the soul 
 grows strong and faith justifies itself by 
 the Inward strength that Increases un- 
 awares In the man and makes great deeds 
 easy; and great deeds In turn breed great 
 natures and open the paths to those ulti- 
 mate heights whence a world stretches in 
 unbroken sunshine and the heavens are 
 cloudless from horizon to horizon. To 
 a few men the pilgrimage of life leads 
 through unbroken light; to most men the 
 light Is Intermittent and there are long 
 leagues of journeying through bleak and 
 shadowy countries; but that man is happy 
 whose course takes him where steadfast- 
 ness waits on courage and light comes 
 not as a gift, but as an achievement. 
 82 
 
Light in the Darkness 
 
 There Is a peace that comes to him 
 whose fight has been lonely and at times 
 without hope of victory that gets its depth 
 and sweetness from the fierceness of the 
 struggle through which It Is won ; there Is 
 a purity that Is the cleansing of fire; there 
 Is a final certainty that Is victory snatched 
 from a thousand doubts. The very 
 throne of God Is set round with clouds 
 and darkness, and the last venture of 
 faith across the river of death is not 
 made on a massive highway over the 
 flood, but on stepping-stones receding In 
 mist as faith passes calmly Into the dark- 
 ness that comes before the day breaks 
 and the night Is gone forever. 
 
 83 
 
Stirring the Will 
 
 THE familiar prayer In the Episco- 
 pal Prayer-Book for the Sunday 
 before Advent, " Stir up, we beseech 
 thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful 
 people; that they, plenteously bringing 
 forth the fruit of good works, may by 
 thee be plenteously rewarded; through 
 Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen," goes to 
 the very heart of the religious life; for 
 the root of that life is not in the emo- 
 tions, nor in the intellectual convictions, 
 but in the will. This prayer, recited for 
 many generations, has given its name to 
 the day on which It is used, and *' StIr-up 
 Sunday " is a phrase which conveys a 
 challenge. 
 
 Most men, when they feel deeply, give 
 their emotions some form of expression; 
 but expression is largely a matter of tem- 
 perament. It is not a test of religious 
 experience, nor is it, as it has sometimes 
 been thought to be, the conclusive evi- 
 84 
 
Stirring the Will 
 
 dence of a changed nature. It is often 
 the accompaniment of the change, but it 
 is not the change itself. For this reason 
 the dramatic and spectacular repentance 
 of the criminal or the man of evil life is 
 always looked upon with more or less 
 suspicion. There is a sound instinct in 
 the demand that a great sinner shall 
 prove the reality of his repentance by his 
 full and sincere recognition of the enor- 
 mity of his offense; and when a man feels 
 profoundly rather than dramatically the 
 enormity of his sin, he is likely to flee 
 from the public gaze and to seek in silence 
 and solitude a place of penitence. The 
 great sinner who takes the newspapers 
 into his confidence when he makes an 
 " about-face " is often sincere: but he is 
 rarely a man of deep feeling or of a 
 clear-cut conscience. The transition from 
 a life of moral anarchy to one of submis- 
 sion to the Divine Will is sometimes dra- 
 matic in its suddenness, but it is rarely 
 used as dramatic material by a man of 
 deep experience and sincerity. 
 85 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 Many people are troubled because the 
 
 life of faith does not lie before their feet f 
 
 defined by sunshine; others doubt the { 
 
 reality of their surrender to the Divine i 
 
 Will because their emotions are not | 
 
 touched and life does not become in- j 
 
 stantly " one grand sweet song." This ' 
 
 means generally that emotion is not the i 
 
 natural expression of their temperament, f 
 
 Religion is not a reality in a man's life i 
 
 until it takes hold of his will; and a man ! 
 
 becomes a Christian, not when he says, | 
 
 " I feel " or " I believe," but when he } 
 
 says " I will."; For it is only as a man 1 
 
 wills to make his belief a part of his life | 
 
 that he passes out of the region of in- * 
 
 tellectual assent into the region of vital | 
 
 religion. jl 
 
 \ He who Is doing the will of God per- |' 
 
 sistently in the face of uncertainty and, : 
 
 for long periods, without joy, is the kind ,; 
 
 of Christian of which this world stands l\ 
 in sore need. He will never betray his 
 
 trust, nor faint by the way, nor lose him- j 
 
 self in the mists and fogs of changing '| 
 
 86 : 
 
Stirring the Will 
 
 opinion. He has the virtue of a soldier 
 — he obeys orders. It Is never a ques- 
 tion with him whether orders are agree- 
 able or not; whether he is getting the 
 recognition he deserves; whether he Is 
 passed over and other men are promoted. 
 It Is only a question of his understand- 
 ing his orders and obeying them. 
 
 In these agitated and critical times 
 Christians may well pray for the descent 
 of the Spirit on all the churches, and for 
 the coming of one of those great waves 
 of devout feeling which sometimes pass 
 through society. But the emphasis of its 
 prayer ought to be on the words, " Stir 
 up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of 
 thy faithful people." 
 
 87 
 
Life, Growth, and Heaven 
 
 WHEN people thought of the Hfe 
 of man as the expression of a di- 
 vine purpose mysteriously frustrated, and 
 of the earth as a great ship which had 
 drifted onto the rocks and from which a 
 few fortunate souls were saved by super- 
 natural lifeboats, Heaven was a harbor 
 for those who survived the great dis- 
 aster. The supreme effort was to save 
 one's self In a lost world; and to land in 
 safety was to be in a state of bliss — a 
 fixed condition of perpetual thanksgiving 
 for rescue. 
 
 There were always those to whom a 
 vision of the divine nature brought a di- 
 vine thought of Heaven, and for whom, 
 behind the most literal and rigid concep- 
 tion, there was a glory like a golden 
 sunset behind a sharply defined land- 
 scape. In the ordered world of Dante, 
 the static world of the Middle Ages, 
 Heaven was a place of Ineffable beauty 
 88 
 
Life, Growth, and Heaven 
 
 bathed in the white Hght of perfect holi- 
 ness. But it was still primarily a place 
 of safety; the very whiteness testified to 
 the blackness of the world. That world 
 had been succeeded by a Heaven in which 
 those who had escaped the great con- 
 demnation chanted their gratitude in un- 
 ending songs of praise. Heaven was a 
 static state of bliss. 
 
 The Middle Ages differed funda- 
 mentally from the modern age in the om- 
 nipresence of the thought of death and 
 the absence of the idea of progress. 
 The mediaeval imagination was obsessed 
 with the thought of death ; it haunted the 
 happiest hours; its shadow fell on the 
 noblest companionship; it lay in wait at 
 every turn of the road; art made it ter- 
 rible by a ghastly realism; Everyman 
 was always moving, reluctant and shrink- 
 ing, to his open grave ; the symbols on the 
 tombs were the symbols of mortality; the 
 image of the crucified Christ faced one on 
 all sides, the risen Christ was seen only 
 over a few great altars. 
 89 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 And the mediaeval world was sta- 
 tionary; men stood In fixed ranks and 
 expected to remain In the state in which 
 they were born. Society was arranged, 
 so to speak, In tiers, like the audience In 
 a great opera-house. Rank rose above 
 rank, and the doors between the ranks 
 were closed. Now and again a great 
 man broke through the barriers and made 
 his way from the lower to the higher 
 places; but, outside the priesthood, the 
 fixed order seemed to mark the perma- 
 nent structure of society. Of the for- 
 ward movement of humanity, of a divine 
 Intention enfolding all things and bearing 
 them onward, of an " Increasing pur- 
 pose " running through the ages and 
 making history significant, there was no 
 thought save In a few prophetic minds. 
 
 To-day the thoughts of men are dom- 
 inated by life, and death has become an 
 Incident In the unbroken life of the spirit; 
 an incident enveloped in mystery, but still 
 an Incident, not a final, decisive event. 
 We accept no obstacles to life as in- 
 9© 
 
Life, Growth, and Heaven 
 
 surmountable; the insane are no longer 
 given over to hopeless madness; the lepers 
 are not driven away with stones and 
 curses and compelled to proclaim them- 
 selves unclean; punishment for crime is 
 no longer torture — it is corrective, like 
 the surgeon's knife; blindness is no longer 
 a state of helplessness — the blind are 
 taught to see with their minds; defective 
 children are educated; and society, ac- 
 cepting no defect or degradation as final, 
 is becoming a great organization for over- 
 coming disease with health and death 
 with life. The memorials of those 
 whom we call dead are no longer the 
 skull and crossbones, the hour-glass and 
 the skeleton; they recall great moments 
 thrilling with life — Farragut with his 
 field-glass in his hand, Sherman riding to 
 victory, Lincoln erect and commanding 
 in the majesty of his noble simplicity. 
 Even the mysterious figure in the Wash- 
 ington cemetery, from the hand of the 
 most distinguished of American sculp- 
 tors, Is charged with vitality as it stands, 
 91 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 baffled for the moment, but with unspent 
 
 power. The figure which dominates the j 
 rehgious imagination of the world is not 
 the dying but the living Christ, who 
 
 brought life and immortality to light, and * 
 
 who came that men might have life more j 
 
 abundantly. I 
 
 And to a static has succeeded a dyna- i 
 
 mic world; a world that was not made j 
 
 but has grown and still grows like the j 
 
 living thing it is; not a noble piece of j 
 
 mechanism finished by the hand of God ; 
 
 and sent whirling into space to move by J 
 
 an impulse imparted once for all in the ii 
 pre-beginning of things, but the thought 
 
 and purpose of the Infinite taking form I 
 
 and motion, sustained moment by mo- | 
 
 ment by the power of God, the witness of ^ 
 
 his constant presence, the imitation of his ; 
 
 thought, growing hour by hour under his j 
 
 hand. And society is no longer station- J 
 
 ary, but becomes more and more a living \\ 
 
 and growing organism, enlarging its ^a 
 
 vision of opportunity, opening its doors, i 
 
 , adapting its institutions to. the. needs of i 
 
 S.2 I 
 
Life, Growth, and Heaven 
 
 its deepening and widening life. For 
 that which is divine and immortal in the 
 world is not social and political institu- 
 tions, but the human spirit; and that 
 which is permanent and fundamental is 
 not the order of society, but the will and 
 purpose and power of God behind the 
 confusion of change and the restlessness 
 of movement. " In Him we live and 
 move and have our being." 
 
 More and more the thoughts of men 
 turn to the future of the race; more and 
 more they realize that they have only a 
 life interest in the treasures of civiliza- 
 tion which God has placed in their hands, 
 and that these things must be used not 
 selfishly, but passed on to those who are 
 to come after them; more and more they 
 realize their duty to children; more and 
 more they see that the earth ought not 
 to be primarily a workshop and incident- 
 ally a home, but primarily a home and 
 incidentally a worlcshop. They believe 
 in the upward movement of the race, and 
 they stand ready to help it. The mod- 
 9^ 
 
Fruits of the Spirit |i 
 
 ern mind Is dominated by the thought of i 
 Life; and the Inspiration of the modern 
 world Is Its faith in Progress, which isj' 
 the social application and expression of^l 
 the thought of Life. | 
 
 The life of the world Is still full off 
 pain and strife; and Heaven Is a refuge! 
 in the thought of those upon whom crush- 
 ing burdens have been laid and to whom 
 the breath of life has meant sorrow and 
 anguish. Heaven must always be a 
 refuge; but It must be Infinitely more. 
 Eternity Is too long for rest after the 
 struggle of earthly life; and the fatlgueJ 
 of the body Is not the fatigue of the spirit. 
 The sorrows of childhood overspread the 
 whole sky and blot out the sun; but they 
 are forgotten the next day. It may be 
 that the first breath In the next stage of 
 life will make disease and sorrow a faint 
 memory. j 
 
 Nor will the chief thought of the state 
 
 of being we call Heaven be a sense of' 
 
 rescue from a great peril; It will be aj 
 
 sense of joy in a glorious vision of the| 
 
 94 
 
Life, Growth, and Heaven 
 
 possibilities of the fuller life. Of those 
 possibilities no man has yet dreamed; 
 though sometimes there come moments 
 of rapture when, for a second of time, 
 one feels the capacity of immortal joys 
 within him. As earth was a place of 
 stationary orders, so was Heaven, in the 
 thoughts of many noble souls in the Mid- 
 dle Ages, a place of stationary bliss, 
 where choirs ceaselessly thank God for 
 deliverance. 
 
 But there Is, here on earth, a nobler 
 expression of thanksgiving than the giv- 
 ing of thanks. Far sweeter to a noble 
 father is his son's noble use of the op- 
 portunities put in his way than any words 
 of gratitude; far sweeter that son's 
 growth in mind and character, in useful- 
 ness and influence, than any expression 
 of thanks. Love finds its supreme re- 
 ward In the fulfillment of its highest hopes 
 for child or friend. 
 
 Heaven must always be a place of 
 refuge; but that will be only the begin- 
 ning of the happiness it offers, only the 
 95 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 look backward at the starting-point of a 
 glorious liberation of the spirit. And 
 Heaven must always be a place of grati- 
 tude; but the sweetest praise of the In- 
 finite must be the fulfillment in His chil- 
 dren of the divine possibilities He has 
 wrought into their natures. 
 
 Life and growth, the divine elements 
 in the life of man on this earth, must be 
 the elements of man's life in all worlds, 
 and the supreme bliss which we call 
 Heaven must be not only escape from the 
 limitations of earth and from the evil 
 in the world, but complete liberation of 
 the spirit, strength of heart for all serv- 
 ice, vigor of mind for all truth, purity of 
 nature for the vision of God. Heaven 
 is not the backward but the forward look, 
 not skirting the shore in gladness that the 
 perils of the voyage are over, but spread- 
 ing the sail with confident gladness and 
 seeking port after port in the sublime ad- 
 venture of the spirit seeking God. In 
 that adventure Heaven will become an 
 ineffable joy in the fulfillment of the po- 
 96 
 
Life, Growth, and Heaven 
 
 tencles of life; not in rest, but in flight 
 without fatigue; not in folding of the 
 arms, but in tireless growth, will be the 
 bliss which we call Heaven. 
 
 97 
 
The Ultimate Companionship 
 
 BORN in the kindhng of the im- 
 agination and sinking its roots 
 deep in those instincts which are the rec- 
 ords of the primitive nature and earHest 
 education of men in this world, love rises 
 steadily through desire, passion, posses- 
 sion, to a companionship so intimate and 
 so complete that it includes and draws 
 nourishment from every interest and oc- 
 cupation. This perfect companionship Is 
 not always realized even by those who 
 love greatly and wisely; for It is the latest 
 of the many stages through which this 
 master passion passes, the ultimate 
 phase In this supreme experience. For 
 love has Its appointed ways and degrees 
 of growth, and the most tender and de- 
 voted hand cannot pluck at will those 
 ripe fruits which attain perfection only 
 on the westward reaches of life, when 
 the afternoon sun lies warmest and lln- 
 98 
 
The Ultimate Companionship 
 
 gers longest. After the passion of youth 
 and the deep-moving tides of maturity 
 there comes, in the fulfillment of the 
 promise of love, a wide, rich, reposeful 
 harmony born in the long years of ad- 
 justment, of mutual knowledge, of fellow- 
 ship in the ways and works of the days 
 as they come with their gifts and depart 
 with hands emptied by those who have 
 recognized the princely possessions borne 
 In humblest guise. As In the later 
 autumn there falls on the world of toll 
 and strife a peace so deep that It seems 
 to sink to the roots of things In the 
 earth, and so wide that all worlds seem 
 to be folded In it — the sudden emer- 
 gence of the poetry or soul of the fields 
 out of the secret places where life is 
 nourished; so after the vicissitudes and 
 tumults of the years of action there 
 comes a deep and tranquil happiness In 
 which all things partake, and In partak- 
 ing catch the light of the spirit which 
 hides within all material forms and 
 shapes. 
 
 99 
 
Fruits of the Spirit | 
 
 This complete surrender of personal- 
 ity to personality, in which the self- 
 fulfillment of the Western idealist is ac- i 
 compllshed by the self-effacement which ; 
 the Eastern idealist pursues as the end I 
 of the earthly hfe, is not secured between i 
 strong natures without the breaking of i 
 bars and the forcing of locks. It is a 'i 
 natural instinct, when one Is stricken, to ; 
 seek silence and solitude; and the finest 
 and best are those whose desperate de- j. 
 sire, when wounds are deep, is not only : 
 to escape from the sight and sound of ^ 
 the world, but to take refuge from those i 
 who are nearest and dearest. In the i 
 closest of all relations this Instinct some- ^ 
 times asserts itself most powerfully. I 
 The garrulous; the seekers after sym- I 
 pathy — of whom there are many — I 
 those who cry out when they are struck, I 
 not only find It easy to confide, but to j 
 get nourishment for egotism by the very | 
 recital of their sorrows. But those ; 
 whose suffering cuts deeper, who have | 
 that higher reverence for themselves 
 
 lOO 
 
The Ultimate Companionship 
 
 which breeds reticence, whose habit it is 
 to bear for others instead of asking others 
 to bear for them, who are so repelled 
 by the corruption of self-pity that they 
 would rather endure torture than be cor- 
 rupted by it, are driven back upon them- 
 selves, and by the very measure of their 
 love are held back from speech. When 
 Brutus was bringing his pure if some- 
 what narrow spirit to the point of con- 
 spiring against 
 
 . . . one 
 
 That unassailable holds on his rank, 
 
 Unshaked of motion, 
 
 he kept his own counsel, and held apart 
 from the noble woman who was Cato's 
 daughter, and whom " Lord Brutus took 
 to wife." It was the supreme night of 
 his life, in the long hours of which his 
 fate was as surely accomplished as it 
 was later unfolded to the sight of men 
 at Philippi; terrors and prodigies of sight 
 and sound in the streets of Rome por- 
 tended doom; but Brutus, in the awful 
 hour of fate, was alone in his orchard. 
 
 lOI 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 The note of indignant remonstrance 
 which vibrates in Portia's passionate 
 assertion of her right to share the last 
 secret of his fate, to drink with him the 
 final cup of experience, rings true to the 
 highest ideal of love that had passed on 
 to perfect companionship: 
 
 Am I yourself 
 But as It were, in sort or limitation, 
 To keep with you at meals, comfort your bed, 
 And talk to you sometimes? Dwell I but in 
 
 the suburbs 
 Of your good pleasure? If it be no more, 
 Portia is Brutus' harlot, not his wife. 
 
 There Is but one reply to words of such 
 self-revealing authority as these, and 
 Brutus, who Is compact of all nobility, 
 flashes back the answer : 
 
 O ye gods, 
 Render me worthy of this noble wife! 
 
 ... by and by thy bosom shall partake 
 The secrets of my heart. 
 
 All my engagements I will construe to thee. 
 All the charactery of my sad brows. 
 
 It Is the office of love not to spare but 
 1 02 
 
The Ultimate Companionship 
 
 to share; to divide not only the utter- 
 most joy but the ultimate sorrow; to 
 stand bound by the divinest of ties, not 
 only when bells are rung and the sweet- 
 ness of flowers is in the air, but when 
 the Great Intruder has passed the door 
 and stands in the room, and mortality 
 waits helpless and dumb on the majestic 
 presence which comes to all, and comes 
 by higher compulsion than human invita- 
 tion. It is the supreme privilege of 
 love to share not only life but death; to 
 stand unshattered when the foundations 
 are broken up. 
 
 And this perfect companionship, of 
 which Browning grasps the final glorious 
 vision in the imagery of " Prospice," 
 
 And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that 
 rave, 
 
 Shall dwindle, shall blend, 
 Shall change, shall become first a peace out of 
 pain, 
 
 Then a light, then thy breast, 
 O thou soul of my soul ! I shall clasp thee again, 
 And with God be the rest! 
 
 103 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 is not gained in a day; it is the rich 
 and indestructible result of a lifelong 
 habit of keeping the heart bare and the 
 soul open and the conscience in one 
 another's view. They alone climb the 
 last heights of happiness who share the 
 perils and toils of the way as completely 
 as they share its inspirations, its ex- 
 hilarations, its joy of arching sky and 
 expanding earth. For love is not only 
 tender and delicate and to be cherished 
 with infinite care; it is also hardy, vigor- 
 ous, fashioned for all tasks, capable of 
 all resistance; the only immortal posses- 
 sion in a world which is but a symbol of 
 mutability and perishableness. And in 
 its perfection it belongs to those only 
 who keep nothing back, but give their 
 treasures of weakness as well as of 
 strength, their wealth of care and anxiety 
 as well as of peace and joy. 
 
 104 
 
The Prophecy of Love 
 
 THE beginnings of life are always 
 hidden in mystery; for there is 
 something divine in all births. At the 
 starting-point of Hfe, as at its finish, there 
 are clouds and darkness. Out of the 
 mystery of infinity and eternity we come, 
 and into the mystery of infinity and 
 eternity we go, and there is neither be- 
 ginning nor end within the range of our 
 vision. When the light first rests on us, 
 we are already shaped and fashioned; the 
 mystery of birth has been accomplished; 
 the mystery of growth remains. 
 
 When the slender blade breaks the 
 soil and lifts its fragile stem to the sun, 
 the protecting darkness, which enfolded 
 its escape from the hardness of the seed 
 and the faint stirring of its first instinc- 
 tive endeavor toward the light, has van- 
 ished. For a little time it lives and 
 thrives and ripens in the open, with the 
 i05 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 free heavens above It and the searching 
 winds cherishing its sweetness or beating 
 its fiber into strength arvd comehness; and 
 then, yielding up its life in the multiply- 
 ing of lives like its own, it sinks back into 
 the darkness and the earth receives it 
 again into the mystery from which it 
 emerged. And so the tide of beauty and 
 fertility perpetually ebbs and flows from 
 the unseen to the unseen, and the miracle 
 of life hastening to death and death sow- 
 ing the seeds of life is wrought under the 
 chill of the wintry stars and the soft 
 splendor of the summer skies. 
 
 We, too, have our roots hidden in the 
 soil of life; for us, as for the flower, 
 there is the warm nourishing of the sun 
 and the stern wrestling with the wind, j 
 and then comes the silence and the ; 
 mystery. Like the bird in the legend, 
 we suddenly emerge from the night Into 
 the hall where there is the blaze of fire ; 
 and the glow of lights, and then we van- 
 ish again Into the refuge of darkness, and 
 nothing remains save a brief memory of 
 1 06 
 
The Prophecy of Love 
 
 delicate or vigorous wings and a song 
 that throbbed for an hour and died into 
 silence. Out of mystery, across a little 
 space of brightness, into mystery: that 
 is the story of earthly life. It is a leaf 
 in a book which we read by the glow of 
 a brief candle; a story of which a single 
 chapter is legible; a journey of which but 
 one stage is accomplished in our sight; 
 a drama without a prologue, and the 
 epilogue of which is spoken on a vaster 
 stage. 
 
 As the beauty of the tree, in the 
 strength of its symmetry and the knit- 
 ting together of Its structure, in the 
 reach and delicacy of its foliage. In the 
 sweetness of Its brief flowering and the 
 richness of Its fruitage, has its source 
 and fountain in the hidden beginnings 
 of its life and Is but the unfolding of 
 that which lay unrevealed In the secret 
 place of its birth, so the strong and ten- 
 der and powerful forces of our nature, 
 the capacities for devotion, sacrifice, 
 heroism, the passion for purity and 
 107 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 peace, the divine energy of growth, which 
 give the brief record of life here its un- 
 speakable pathos and splendor, have their 
 roots far back in the divine world out of 
 which we come and to which we go. 
 
 No searching, however ardent and 
 tireless, has laid bare the sources of life; 
 no accuracy or delicacy of instrument has 
 done more than carry the light a little 
 further back and uncover a little more 
 of the mystery that becomes ever more 
 mysterious. If by searching God can- 
 not be found, neither by searching can 
 the birth of the soul be uncovered. Be- 
 cause we are His children, born of His 
 will, bearing His image, partakers of His 
 thought, educated in His school to enter 
 into His life, no hand will ever b^ laid 
 on the place where we were born, and 
 the sacredness of our souls will be pro- 
 tected forever by an impenetrable mys- 
 tery of light; for there is a privacy of 
 light as well as of darkness, and the glory 
 of the Lord is as baffling to the irreverent 
 eyes that search without love as in the 
 io8 
 
The Prophecy of Love 
 
 clouds and darkness which surround His 
 throne. 
 
 When we come into the light, a thou- 
 sand prophecies come with us, witnesses 
 of our royal birth and forerunners of 
 our royal fortunes. There, at the first 
 dawning of our mortality. Love suffers 
 and waits. Before we came Love was; 
 we heard its call, though we have no 
 memory of the hour and the place where 
 it found us. But the call of human love 
 was but a faint, far cry compared with 
 the summoning of the love of the Infi- 
 nite, whose thoughts we are, whose uni- 
 verse is our home, whose fathomless 
 passion for our likeness to Himself willed 
 our being and prepared the way for us 
 by planting the passion of love in human 
 souls, as the consummation of experience 
 and the fulfillment of life, and the per- 
 petual witness of His heart toward men. 
 Against the background of the mystery 
 of His being the worlds are but things 
 of yesterday, and Love is as old as He; 
 for He is Love. Before all worlds this 
 109 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 divine energy of the soul, forever seeking 
 its highest good in the good of its mate, 
 its supremest joy in the happiness of its 
 fellow, its perfect growth in the growth 
 of its kin, the fulfillment of itself in the 
 completeness of another, had its birth; 
 and, when the worlds have been resolved 
 back into the elements of which they were 
 formed, it will still be seeking its perfect 
 expression in devotion and service and 
 immortal companionship. Disguised un- 
 der all manner of obscure garbs, rejected 
 and cast out in hours of blindness, com- 
 pelled to bear company with all unclean- 
 ness, touched but never stained by all 
 defilement. Love walks the earth in the 
 image of God and bearing perpetual wit- 
 ness to His unseen presence. As all life 
 comes into visible being at its call, so all 
 life culminates and is fulfilled in its un- 
 folding. All life predicts its coming and 
 all life is the witness of its presence. 
 
 no 
 
\ 
 
 The Great Refusal 
 
 THE great refusal Is the refusal to 
 accept the gift of life, which is the 
 supreme gift of God to man. Without 
 that gift all other gifts would have been 
 impossible either of bestowal or of ac- 
 ceptance. Men and women come into 
 life without their own volition, but they 
 are not compelled to accept the gift of 
 life; many do not accept it; instead of 
 taking it with gratitude and using It with 
 the courage of Insight Into Its splendid 
 possibilities, they strive to protect them- 
 selves from It as If it were a menace to 
 their ease, a danger to their comfort. It 
 is and ought to be both, for ease and com- 
 fort are perilous and despicable If one 
 seeks them. There are many things of 
 real value if they come to a man as the 
 by-products of living, but enervating and 
 corrupting If pursued as ends In them- 
 selves. Popularity is an excellent and 
 III 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 useful possession if one does not seek it 
 and is not afraid of it when it has been 
 secured. Social influence and position are 
 valuable if they come without seeking, 
 but the woman who works for them de- 
 grades her soul; there is no meanness of 
 snobbery to which the social " climber " 
 will not descend, no personal indignity 
 to which she will not submit, on the igno- 
 ble path which she has chosen. Even 
 happiness, if put before honor, duty, or 
 service, betrays the soul. N 
 
 A man may live and yet refuse the gift 
 of life. To exist is not to live ; they only 
 live who take life with all its experiences 
 with courage and joy, who not only put 
 aside the fear of living but welcome the 
 opportunities of living as a brave man 
 welcomes a perilous chance to help or 
 inspire or lead in a moment of danger. 
 The fear of living is the source of that 
 cowardice which empties the lives of 
 many people of spiritual meaning and hu- 
 man dignity. They may be blameless so 
 far as external morals are concerned, and 
 
 112 
 
The Great Refusal 
 
 yet they are guilty of refusing the su- 
 preme gift which God puts Into their 
 hands. The pure In heart are not those 
 who have never known temptation, but 
 those who, fiercely tempted, have as 
 fiercely resisted; or who, having fallen, 
 have risen again and through purification 
 made themselves clean. The heroes are 
 not those who have kept away from dan- 
 ger, but have faced it, suffered, and tri- 
 umphed. 
 
 Among the miserable throng of those 
 who are bearing the pains of Purgatory 
 there are none of whom Dante speaks 
 with such scorn as " those Inert ones who 
 are pleasing neither to God nor to his ene- 
 mies." These wretched ones have made 
 the great refusal; they have lived with- 
 out praise or blame; their offense Is that 
 they have been neither faithful to God 
 nor rebellious. They have existed for 
 themselves only. When opportunity In- 
 terfered with ease, they chose ease; when 
 duty came companioned by danger, they 
 bolted the door and kept themselves safe; 
 113 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 when, in the night and storm, the cry for 
 help rose above the tumult, they re- 
 mained comfortable by the fire; when life 
 offered great enterprises, with the toil 
 and peril which make success a matter of 
 character as well as of opportunity, they 
 stayed securely at home. 
 
 The fear of living prompts men to ac- 
 cept narrow positions without outlook on 
 the future for the sake of security against 
 the vicissitudes of business; to accept a 
 small fixed income because it provides im- 
 mediate comfort, rather than take those 
 longer chances of fortune which impose 
 patience, self-denial, and the training of 
 experience at the start. Marriage brings 
 heavy responsibilities; it Interferes with 
 the freedom to be selfish without protest 
 or criticism; it means many surrenders of 
 small comforts which are dear to those 
 whose idea of life Is to keep clear of 
 obligations; it forces a man to think some- 
 times of another when he wishes to think 
 all the time and only of himself. 
 
 The making and keeping of a home 
 114 
 
The Great Refusal 
 
 necessitates self-sacrifice, work, and the 
 expenditure of time and strength. It in- 
 terferes with that opportunity to do at 
 any moment whatever you want to do 
 which many unfortunate people call 
 '' freedom of life," and who therefore 
 avoid the complications of home-making 
 and home-keeping. The people who 
 make this great refusal do not know what 
 the words " freedom of life " mean; they 
 put ease of condition in place of some of 
 the supreme joys of living. To bring 
 children into life is to tie one's self with 
 many bands of duty, to limit one's ability 
 to spend money freely on pleasure, to 
 limit one's freedom in the matter of time 
 and place, to Invoke a thousand cares and 
 burdens; the coming of a child is the 
 most insidious form of teaching unself- 
 ishness which the Heavenly Father has 
 yet discovered. To refuse the gift of 
 children is to close the door In the face 
 of a great, enduring, and wonderful hap- 
 piness. It is to avoid the noblest chance 
 of education which life offers. And yet 
 115 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 thousands of people do this simply to 
 escape being "bothered;" men want to 
 keep clear of all relations which bring 
 any obligations with them in order that 
 they may be free to be perfectly selfish; 
 women want to be free from the cares of 
 maternity in order that they may devote 
 themselves entirely to social life or to 
 what they call a " career," as if the ful- 
 fillment of the oldest, most fundamental, 
 and divinest of all human functions was 
 not the richest, most influnential, and 
 happiest career open to men and women, 
 the only really creative function com- 
 mitted to them. No people are more to 
 be pitied than the young men and women 
 who marry as a further step in selfish- 
 ness; who live in hotels or take their 
 meals at restaurants in order to escape 
 the responsibilities of having a home; 
 who profane a noble relationship and de- 
 feat one of the great ends of marriage 
 by agreeing not to have children because 
 children are " such a bother." 
 
 These unfortunate people blight their 
 ii6 
 
The Great Refusal 
 
 souls at the very start, cut all the deeper 
 roots of life, and condemn themselves to 
 a thin, narrow, superficial life, in order 
 to escape the very things they were sent 
 into life to achieve. They make the 
 great refusal before they know what they 
 are refusing; they shut the door in face of 
 happiness in the vain endeavor to make 
 comfortable for their bodies a world 
 which was framed to liberate and inspire 
 their spirits. They fall into one of the 
 most insidious forms of sensualism and 
 one of the most devitalizing forms of 
 skepticism. 
 
 Without a strain of heroism life is 
 poor and mean. Cowardice is fatal to 
 nobility. Those who want life without 
 paying for it not only fail to get it but do 
 not know what they are losing; that is 
 the penalty of cowardice. By work life 
 becomes an achievement, by surmounting 
 obstacles and facing dangers men and 
 women become the masters of them- 
 selves; by self-denial and glad acceptance, 
 by greeting the " Unseen with a cheer," 
 117 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 they make the great acceptance and be- 
 come worthy of God^s great gift to his 
 children. 
 
 In the hour of sorest trial, poor, lonely, 
 ill, Beethoven faced life with unflinching 
 courage, and life poured into him the 
 wealth of knowledge and feeling which 
 enriched all time in the " Ninth Sym- 
 phony." " From the brink of the grave," 
 said a noble Frenchman recovering from 
 a perilous illness, " I measured not the 
 vanity of life, but its importance." 
 
 ii8 
 
Discredited Witnesses 
 
 SITTING before an open fire in a pri- 
 vate library not long ago, a man of 
 distinction, whose artistic skill is matched 
 by a conscience as sensitive and exacting, 
 told the story of his escape from hard and 
 narrow conditions, his education by a se- 
 ries of apparently casual contacts with 
 trained artists, his final success and per- 
 sonal happiness coming like a sudden 
 burst of sunlight through dense clouds; 
 adding, half to himself, " What a fairy 
 story!" It was more wonderful than 
 any fairy tale, for it was a chapter out of 
 the great adventure of life. From the 
 earliest times men have been trying to 
 dramatize this adventure in all manner 
 of legends, myths, dramas, and stories. 
 However hard their conditions, some- 
 thing within them has always borne wit- 
 ness to a great destiny; and In their worst 
 estate of degradation and misery there 
 119 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 has been a mystery about them, as of 
 heirs of a kingdom become for the mo- 
 ment tenders of swine. 
 
 It is true, there have always been 
 those who insisted that the herding of 
 swine, the heartbreaking toil in the field, 
 the wretchedness and hunger, are the 
 whole of life, and that the dreams of 
 happiness which make the night tolerable 
 are mere fancies of visionary minds. 
 "Away with such anodynes!" they 
 have said; " let us be men and face the 
 facts." And in every time there have 
 been those who succumbed to the blight 
 of this teaching and have eaten their 
 hearts out in bitterness of despair, or 
 wasted their fortunes in a vain attempt to 
 make a sleeping potion of pleasure and 
 drown their misery in unconsciousness. 
 
 But there have been those also who 
 have rejected this teaching because it was 
 not the doctrine of men and because it 
 did not face the facts, and have commit- 
 ted their hearts to the keeping of their 
 highest visions; not because their visions 
 1 20 
 
Discredited Witnesses 
 
 were beautiful or comforting, but be- 
 cause they made life explicable by bring- 
 ing into view the truth within as well as 
 the truth without the soul; because they 
 have accepted the reality of the mind as 
 well as of the brain, of the affections as 
 well as of the passions, of the intuitions 
 as well as of the instincts, of the imagina- 
 tion as well as of the eye. 
 
 These believers in visions, moreover, 
 have refused to accept all witnesses as of 
 equal credibility in the court of reason; 
 and have insisted on an examination of 
 the credentials of those who came to tes- 
 tify concerning the facts of life. They 
 have applied the test of character and 
 have challenged those whose record has 
 given ground for suspicion of their com- 
 petency and veracity. Shall the evidence 
 of the lawless be counted of equal author- 
 ity with that of those who hold them- 
 selves obedient to the law? Shall the re- 
 port of the drunkard count with that of 
 the clear-eyed man of integrity? Shall 
 the man of ungovernable passions have 
 
 121 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 equal weight with the man who rules him- 
 self? Shall he who sinks to the animal 
 speak with the authority of him who 
 rises to the saint and hero? Shall the 
 liar and thief and sensualist have the 
 weight of the truthful, the honorable, the 
 pure In heart? 
 
 In the great court in which life is on 
 trial these witnesses are Incompetent. 
 Their testimony often has the thrilling 
 interest of tragedy, the beauty of delicate 
 art, the impressiveness of ruined great- 
 ness; it is profoundly Interesting and sig- 
 nificant as throwing light on the reactions 
 of lawlessness on mind and body, on 
 morbid conditions of psychology, on 
 diseases of mind and soul; but It has no 
 weight in interpreting the facts of life and 
 penetrating to the meaning of the vast 
 order of things by which men are sur- 
 rounded. Only the sound in body and 
 mind, the clear-eyed, those to whom 
 obedience to the law of life has brought 
 the knowledge of life, are entitled to 
 credence In the court where life is on trial, 
 
 122 
 
Discredited Witnesses 
 
 the judgment place where its nature and 
 meaning are demanded and must be re- 
 vealed. 
 
 In that august place only the sane 
 have a right to be heard; but it is a pa- 
 thetic and significant fact that the insane 
 crowd the place of judgment and pour 
 out their woes as if they were the sor- 
 rows of mankind Instead of the misery 
 they have brought on themselves; as if 
 the uncovering of disease in their own 
 minds and bodies were the uncovering of 
 the health of the race. 
 
 Only those protest against the injustice 
 of the moral order of life who have never 
 obeyed it and do not know what wonders 
 of strength and peace are wrought in the 
 hearts of men by obedience. They bare 
 their self-inflicted wounds and say, " Be- 
 hold the blows of fate ! " They drama- 
 tize the tragedies of sin of which they 
 have made themselves the victims, and 
 cry aloud, *' Behold the misery, of the 
 world ! " They tell appalling stories of 
 their defeated hopes, their ruined careers, 
 123 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 their bHghted genius, and say, " This is 
 life." 
 
 Is it? Is the beauty of love and self- 
 sacrifice and purity to be found behind 
 prison bars? Are the clear insights, the 
 penetrating glimpses, the far-ranging 
 visions of the possibilities of the human 
 spirit to be sought in the places where the 
 insane are protected from themselves? 
 Many things are to be learned among 
 criminals and the insane; they witness to 
 the inevitableness of the punishment that 
 follows swift-footed on the broken law. 
 But of the vast order which lies behind 
 the law and is protected by it nothing is 
 to be learned in these places of restraint 
 or punishment. The lawbreakers of ge- 
 nius can make an awful picture of the 
 misery that follows the doing of evil; but 
 he has no power to depict the sweetness 
 of purity, the peace of integrity, the joy 
 of love. The destroyers of life know 
 nothing of the exceeding great rewards of 
 life. They fill the air with their outcries 
 and protests, and many are imposed upon 
 124 
 
Discredited Witnesses 
 
 by the volume of sound that comes from 
 them; but if they were multiplied a thou- 
 sandfold, they would still be impotent 
 witnesses to the nature and meaning of 
 life, because they have disqualified them- 
 selves from understanding it. They are 
 the witnesses to the tragedy of blinding 
 the eyes and stopping the ears in a world 
 of great visions and noble harmonies. 
 
 125 
 
'' There Are No Dead '' 
 
 WE have done much to Christianize 
 our farewells to those who have 
 gone before us into the next stage of life. 
 We no longer darken the rooms that 
 now more than ever need the light and 
 warmth of the sun; we no longer close 
 the windows as if to shut out Nature at 
 the moment when we are about to give 
 back to Mother Earth all that was mor- 
 tal in the earthy career now finished; we 
 no longer shroud the house in black, we 
 make it sweet with flowers, for the hymns 
 of grief we are fast substituting the 
 hymns of victory; for words charged with 
 a sense of loss we listen to words that 
 hold wide the door of hope and faith; 
 and on the memorials which we place 
 where they lie who have vanished from 
 our sight we no longer carve the skull 
 and cross-bones, the hour-glass and the 
 scythe — we recall some trait or quality or 
 126 
 
" There Are No Dead " 
 
 achievement that survives the body and 
 commemorates the spirit. 
 
 We have done much to Christianize 
 our treatment of what we call death, to 
 emphasize our faith in the immortal life; 
 but we do not take to ourselves the im- 
 mense helpfulness, the radiancy of joy, in 
 the sublime truth which Christ brought 
 to light. There is still too much of the 
 shadowy vagueness of the early pagan 
 thought of the future ; and many are miss- 
 ing not only an hourly comfort, but a 
 deep peace of spirit and a glorious ex- 
 pectation. 
 
 We confuse ourselves by the forms of 
 speech we use when we talk of this life 
 and of the future life as if they were two 
 lives, of our mortal life as if it were 
 different in kind from the immortal life. 
 There is only one life, and that is im- 
 mortal, here and now. The life of the 
 body is not our life any more than we are 
 the houses we live in. The house may 
 be destroyed or may decay, but we are 
 not imprisoned in it, and its fate is not our 
 127 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 fate. We can go out of it when we 
 choose and make ourselves another 
 house. Our bodies are the servants of 
 our spirits; after a time they may cease 
 to obey us, but because the eyes refuse to 
 see, the sense of vision is not impaired; 
 because the feet refuse to walk, the mind 
 does not cease to travel. When an in- 
 jury befalls us, we do not say, *' I am 
 broken; " we say, " My arm is broken." 
 In speech and in action we habitually dis- 
 sociate ourselves from our bodies and af- 
 firm our superiority to them. Shattered, 
 broken, tortured with pain, we remained 
 undismayed and unsubdued. Ney, who 
 was called the lion of the French army, 
 was of highly sensitive physical organiza- 
 tion. On one occasion, when he was 
 directing a battle from an eminence under 
 heavy fire, he noticed that his aides were 
 smiling. Looking down, he saw that his 
 knees were rattling against his saddle. 
 " You poor knees," he said, " how you 
 would rattle if you knew where I am go- 
 ing to take you in a minute ! " 
 128 
 
" There Are No Dead " 
 
 The bravest men are not those who are 
 Insensible to physical fear, but those who 
 master It by courage of spirit, the purest 
 and noblest are not those who have never 
 felt the temptations of the body but those 
 who have resisted them. There Is no 
 body In the sense of something fixed and 
 complete apart from the spirit; the body, 
 like the earth to which It returns. Is never 
 the same two days In succession. It Is 
 always changing, and the man of seventy- 
 five has already lived In seven or eight 
 bodies. It Is literally true that we " die 
 dally " In the only sense In which we ever 
 die; that Is to say, we change; which Is 
 what death really means. 
 
 When the boy In ^' The Blue Bird" 
 goes with fear and trembling Into the 
 burying ground, he finds It a sunny mea- 
 dow, and cries out to his frightened sis- 
 ter, "There are no dead!'' The ques- 
 tion Is sometimes asked, " Does death 
 end all? " Death ends nothing; It Is sim- 
 ply a change. There are no dead In the 
 sense In which the phrase Is commonly 
 129 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 used; there are only the hvlng in the vast 
 mystery of life which enfolds us all, on 
 the fathomless stream of life which bears 
 us all forward. We are here for a little 
 time, as we are often in inns where we 
 make friends who are dear to us, and then 
 we leave them and go on to another stage 
 in our journey, we miss them and they 
 miss us, and neither their places nor ours 
 are ever taken by others. But we see 
 new landscapes and pass through new ex- 
 periences into a larger world, and they 
 presently follow us. We are separated 
 and are often lonely, but we look forward 
 joyfully to new sights and sounds, and to 
 the hour when, further on in the journey 
 we shall look into their eyes and hear 
 their voices. 
 
 To think of life as one and indivisible, 
 of immortality as our possession, here 
 and now, of death as normal change in an 
 eternal process of growth, of those whom 
 we call dead as more intensely alive than 
 when we saw them, is to transform the 
 experience which has overshadowed the 
 130 
 
'' There Are No Dead " 
 
 world for centuries as the end of hap- 
 piness into a larger freedom and joy, and 
 to make immortality not a vague expecta- 
 tion but a glorious opening of the doors 
 and windows of the house of life. 
 *' While we poor wayfarers still toil, with 
 hot and bleeding feet, along the highway 
 and the dust of life," writes Dr. Martin- 
 eau, " our companions have but mounted 
 the divergent path, to explore the more 
 sacred streams, and visit the divine vales, 
 and wander amid the everlasting Alps of 
 God's upper provinces of creation. And 
 so we keep up the courage of our hearts, 
 and refresh ourselves with the memories 
 of love, and travel forward in the ways 
 of duty, with less weary step, feeling ever 
 for the hand of God, and listening for 
 the domestic voices of the immortals 
 whose happy welcome awaits us. Death, 
 in short, under the Christian aspect, is 
 but God's method of colonization; the 
 transition from this mother country of 
 our race to the fairer and newer world of 
 our emigration." 
 
 131 
 
The Larger Plan 
 
 IN those years which we call prosper- 
 ous because our plans are successfully 
 carried out, and our fields are fertile, 
 and the shadow of sorrow does not fall 
 athwart the sunshine, we have a sense of 
 being at ease in the world, of mastery of 
 the conditions of life. There steals into 
 our minds the belief that we have learned 
 the secrets of success, and into our hearts 
 the feeling that God is watching over us 
 in a special sense, and that we are trusted 
 with the shaping of our lives; and this 
 confidence in ourselves is reinforced by 
 the deference which is always paid, not 
 so much to the character as to the 
 judgment of those to whom success seems 
 to have become a matter of habit. In 
 the warm air of outward prosperity the 
 direction of life seems to have been put 
 in our hands and our will takes the place 
 of the will of God. 
 
 132 
 
The Larger Plan 
 
 But sooner or later this seeming se- 
 curity is disturbed; plans go awry; dear 
 hopes are blasted; defeat comes late and 
 brings an added bitterness with it; over 
 the happy circle apparently strongly in- 
 trenched against misfortune sorrow hangs 
 like a cloud ominous with disaster. 
 
 Then comes the crisis in our spiritual 
 life; we have become accustomed to re- 
 gard our will as the will of God; can we 
 make the will of God our will? We 
 have thought of Providence as a warm 
 light making our path a line of bright- 
 ness; can we walk through storm and 
 disaster, encompassed with darkness, and 
 still feel that " we cannot drift beyond 
 His love and care"? Can we cease to 
 plan each step into the unknown future 
 apd accept His plan? 
 I This is a strength beyond the strength 
 or the man who is strong in himself: the 
 strength of the man who is strong in his 
 faith in God. There is a higher wisdom 
 than that which plans with clear-sighted 
 prevision for the future: the wisdom 
 133 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 which accepts the plan of God and loyally 
 works with it, without repining or dis- 
 couragement or paralysis of energy. 
 There is a truer prosperity than the fer- 
 tility of our fields and the increasing re- 
 turns of our investments: the prosperity 
 of growing integrity, of deepening love, 
 of widening sympathy, of that calm 
 strength of soul which takes a man from 
 under the dominion of things and puts 
 him under the dominion of God; which 
 transfers him from servitude to things 
 that surround him to that loyalty to the 
 things of the spirit which sets his soul 
 erect above the changes of his mortal 
 condition. 
 
 " The soul ceases to weary itself with 
 planning and foreseeing," wrote Jean 
 Nicolas Grou, " giving itself up to God's 
 Holy Spirit within, and to the teachings 
 of his providence without. He is not 
 forever fretting as to his progress, or 
 looking back to see how far he is getting 
 on; rather he goes steadily and quietly on, 
 and makes all the more progress because 
 134 
 
The Larger Plan 
 
 It IS unconscious. So he never gets 
 troubled and discouraged; if he falls, he 
 humbles himself, but gets up at once, and 
 goes on with renewed earnestness." 
 
 The burden of shaping an Immortal 
 life with so slight a knowledge of its pos- 
 sibilities and of the outcome of events Is 
 too heavy to be borne. We all move 
 about in " worlds half realized; " we do 
 not know at the moment what happenings 
 are fortunate and what are unfortunate. 
 The years that seem prosperous to us are 
 often barren of real happiness of that 
 growth of the spirit which is the end of 
 all living; while the years that seem bleak 
 and unfertile often enrich us beyond our 
 dreams. No man has the knowledge of 
 the future, the Insight Into events, the 
 wisdom of experience, to plan his life 
 completely and carry his plans into execu- 
 tion. God alone knows how the human 
 spirit can fulfill Its great destinies. Our 
 part is to work with him; to recognize 
 our Ignorance and his knowledge, and 
 consciously to hold our plans In subjec- 
 ts 
 
■' I 
 
 Fruits of the Spirit | 
 
 tion to his will. Then when our best-laid J 
 
 and most cherished plans go awry we jj 
 
 shall have no sense of failure, but the fj 
 consciousness of a vaster design being 
 wrought out through us and for us. 
 
 136 
 
Love's Second Sight 
 
 AMONG the maxims which have 
 their roots in confusion of thought 
 none is more misleading than the ancient 
 and well-worn aphorism that love is 
 blind. The fable of Psyche has been tra- 
 ditionally interpreted as a pathetic in- 
 stance of that curiosity which opened 
 Pandora's box and let a swarm of evils 
 fly over the world, and which drove Elsa 
 to put the fateful question to Lohengrin 
 at the very moment when her joy was at 
 its consummation. The beautiful story, 
 so weighted with the deeper meaning of 
 things, bears another higher interpreta- 
 tion; for the soul cannot surrender until 
 it understands, nor drain the cup of the 
 deepest experience until it sees clearly the 
 figure in whose hands it is held. 
 
 If love were blind, life would sink into 
 
 chaos; for love Is the force that creates, 
 
 the power that sustains, the principle that 
 
 governs. It is the love of his art which 
 
 137 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 draws the artist, unwearied by heroic 
 apprenticeship, into the very heart of 
 his art and makes his passion one with 
 insight, skill, the final mastery of the 
 line. If love were blind, those forms in 
 which the visions and ideals that bear 
 with them the fortunes of the race, be- 
 cause they are the symbols of its spirit- 
 ual insights and achievements, would 
 never have been set in temples and on 
 highways by those who counted no toil 
 too heavy, no sacrifice too great, that 
 celebrated the marriage of love and art. 
 To him only who loves with a consuming 
 passion the final veil is lifted and the 
 ultimate skill conveyed; for knowledge 
 and love are one at the heart of things, 
 and art, which is the record of the crea- 
 tive spirit working with and through men, 
 touches perfection only when passion and 
 Intelligence are so blended that out of 
 this commingling another word is spoken 
 In the revelation of the divine to the 
 human. 
 
 Love is never blind; those who love 
 138 
 
Love's Second Sight 
 
 are often blind, and to their passion is 
 charged that which belongs to lack of 
 faculty. Love does not open new senses 
 or convey new faculties; it vivifies, clari- 
 fies, intensifies the senses and faculties 
 which already exist. In its first day- 
 break the world lies half concealed in a 
 mist which poetizes rather than distorts 
 or falsifies proportions, relations, quali- 
 ties; when the light grows clear, per- 
 spectives are corrected, outlines become 
 distinct, hidden lovelinesses come into 
 view, hidden defects disclose themselves; 
 not because the light and warmth are less, 
 but because they are greater. To 
 measure the depth of love by its blindness 
 would be to appraise the splendor and 
 fertilizing power of the sun by the rays 
 which shine level from the horizon rather 
 than by those which fall upon the soil and 
 search its secret places for every potency 
 of life. 
 
 The blindness of love is a measure of 
 its inadequacy, an evidence that it has 
 yet to work its miracle of knowledge as 
 139 
 
Fruits of the Spirit \ 
 
 well as of surrender. The mother who ■ 
 
 sees no fault in her child is blinded, not ; 
 
 by her love, but by her dullness of per- ' 
 
 ceptlon; the wife who finds no defect in j 
 
 her husband may make him comfortable | 
 
 but cannot make him great; the friend \ 
 who finds only content in his love for his 
 
 friend Is denied the highest service of : 
 
 friendship; for, as Emerson said, "our \ 
 
 friends are those who make us do what i 
 
 we can." The faithful mothers, wives, j 
 and friends who accept us as we are as 
 
 often harm as help us; they live with us j 
 
 only on the lower levels of being; they * 
 neither climb nor stir us to climb. Love 
 that is content robs us of the best it has 
 
 to bestow, and is satisfied with gifts of : 
 bread and wine when It might bestow 
 
 upon us vision, inspiration, character. ; 
 
 They love noblest who see clearest, and , 
 they bind us with bands of steel who so 
 
 awaken the best In us that when at last j 
 
 we put forth our hands to grasp the ' 
 
 highest things, behold I our hands are \ 
 
 clasped in theirs. j 
 140 
 
Love's Second Sight 
 
 The beginning of love is often a brief 
 madness; the end of love is perfect sanity, 
 between the dawn and the full day lies 
 the long, gradual illumination. Irony, 
 satire, and cheap cynicism must not make 
 us blind to the beauty of the illusion in 
 which love begins — the illusion of per- 
 fection. For love seeks perfection be- 
 cause In perfection alone its possibilities 
 are perfectly realized. There Is an hour 
 of prophecy In all noble beginnings. The 
 artist dreams the dream of beauty before 
 he enters on the long path of toil and 
 anguish of spirit which must be traveled 
 to the bitter end before that dream be- 
 comes his possession. First In every 
 great career comes an hour of vision; 
 then years of toil and discipline when the 
 vision seems to have vanished utterly; 
 then Its gradual disclosure In the work of 
 a lifetime as the work nears Its com- 
 pletion and Its lines come into view. 
 (Ideals are Idle dreams unless they are 
 wrought Into character by the routine, 
 drudgery, and toil which seem at times 
 141 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 to remove them to an inaccessible 
 distance. } 
 
 Love begins with a vision: it passes 
 through the travail of the years; the dis- 
 illusions which are part of the waking 
 day; the monotony of daily duty; the 
 wearing away of the flush of the morn- 
 ing, the fading of the earliest bloom; 
 and then at the end, behold! the vision 
 is there again, no longer lying like a 
 bloom diffused from the sky, but like a 
 loveliness rising from the depths of life. 
 Between the vision and its realization lies 
 the training in clear sight, the education 
 in full knowledge, which the blind call 
 disillusion but which the clear-sighted call 
 the divine opportunity of love; and the 
 realization of the vision depends, net on 
 the early glow, but on the high, clear, 
 later light. Not to the blind, the in- 
 dulgent, the slothful lovers come the 
 great realizations of the final growth, but 
 to those whom love has made wise in 
 severity, resolute in demand,i heroic in 
 loyalty to the highest in the beloved. 
 142 
 
Lovers Second Sight 
 
 Perfection of character, entire harmony 
 of nature, instant adjustment of mood 
 with mood, if they were possible at the 
 beginning, would defeat the highest serv- 
 ice and joy of love, which is to see in 
 the Imperfect the promise of the perfect 
 as the deep-sighted see in man the image 
 and nature of the divine. 
 
 It is the second sight of love which 
 makes it the joy of life as well as its 
 inspiration ;(^behlnd the present Imper- 
 fection which it clearly sees, rises always 
 the image of that beauty which is to be 
 when all the ends of mortal life have 
 been fulfilled. It Is to the blind that 
 clear sight seems disillusion; to the 
 open-eyed it is the beginning of the 
 realization of the vision; It is the first 
 sight which prepares for the second 
 sight. : Love can neither offer nor de- 
 mand perfection; for perfection in this 
 mortal Hfe would be as abnormal, unwel- 
 come and repellent as a child with the 
 knowledge and experience of a man. It 
 is in the search for perfection that love 
 143 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 finds its highest opportunity and its 
 deepening joy; in its vision that the sky 
 above it kindles with a glory which does 
 not fade when the sun sinks to the west, 
 but glows as if an immortal morning were 
 breaking. 
 
 144 
 
The Child and the World 
 
 Christmas, 1903 
 
 THE Child born in Bethlehem nine- 
 teen hundred years ago came into 
 a world ruled by force, under the domin- 
 ion of a race notable among the races for 
 its organizing and governing genius and 
 for its lack of spiritual ideas. It has been 
 said of the Romans that they borrowed 
 their religion and their philosophy and 
 stole their art. No one of the supreme 
 interests of life, save that of conduct, 
 was supreme with the best of them; in no 
 one of the highest fields of endeavor did 
 they produce works of the highest genius. 
 So capable a race could not utterly lack 
 religious ideals, and the charm of their 
 most intimate feeling for the divine Is 
 found in their domestic deities and wor- 
 ship. In the sweet familiarities with spirits 
 of localities, so sympathetically described 
 in the early chapters of " Marlus the 
 145 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 Epicurean." Such a race could not, and 
 did not, lack noble-minded and noble- 
 hearted men; but when all the poetry and 
 piety of the Romans is generously 
 measured, how far the sum of these 
 things falls below their unparalleled vigor 
 of action, their marvelous power of or- 
 ganization ! 
 
 It was a hard, brutal world, in spite 
 of the beauty and refinement of certain as- 
 pects of its civilization, into which Christ 
 was born. He came, the incarnation of 
 helplessness, into a society in which the 
 strongest ruled by virtue of the power of 
 destruction; he came, the Child of divine 
 tenderness and love, into a world in 
 which men held power more precious 
 than love, and the ability to strike ibove 
 the ability to bear. There could not 
 have been a more appalling disparity than 
 that which existed between the Child in 
 the cradle and the ideals and order of the 
 society Avhich that Child was sent to 
 transform. The task laid upon the Child 
 seemed impossible of achievement. To 
 146 
 
The Child and the World 
 
 set a Child to destroy the rule of force 
 seemed like the wild dream of some fana- 
 tic who knew neither the power with 
 which he worked nor the power which he 
 would destroy. 
 
 But Rome has gone long ago, and the 
 chief association of the name to the 
 modern world is its worship of the Child. 
 On Christmas Eve, in all the Western 
 world, and wherever men or ideas of 
 Western birth are found in the East, the 
 face of the Child will look out of the mist 
 of years as the divinest vision which has 
 ever lightened the darkness of the world; 
 and on Christmas morning there will be 
 a pealing of bells that will follow the sun 
 round the globe announcing again the 
 glad tidings that Christ is born in 
 Bethlehem. 
 
 In that wonderful story many great 
 truths are looted; supreme among them 
 the blessed fact that all the best things 
 of which the noblest men and women 
 have dreamed are true; that no thought 
 of life can be too great, and no hope of 
 147 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 the future too bhssful. If the most 
 thoroughgoing pessimist of to-day could 
 be put back into the social, political, and 
 industrial conditions into which Christ 
 came, so as to see them close at hand and 
 feel the weight of them in his heart, he 
 would break into a psalm of thanks- 
 giving. We have gone but a little way 
 towards the establishment of the King- 
 dom of Heaven on earth, but we have 
 gone far enough to change the whole 
 moral landscape of life, and to light a 
 thousand fires of hope and cheer where 
 the night lay chill and black when the 
 Child was laid In the manger at Bethle- 
 hem. 
 
 To-day that Child Is born again In a 
 world ruled by greed rather than by 
 force; a world In which men have gone 
 far towards learning the great lessons of 
 tolerance, forbearance, and peace, but In 
 which they have still to learn the great 
 lesson of mutual responsibility for and 
 to one another. The struggle for wealth 
 was never so keen and bitter; never were 
 148 
 
The Child and the World 
 
 so many men absorbed in it to the exclu- 
 sion of all interest in the things that make 
 money worth having when it has been 
 gotten. The rush and tumult of the 
 struggle are sometimes almost unbearable 
 to those who know what life is and what 
 it means; the heartlessness and needless- 
 ness of the fight are sometimes so re- 
 volting that one longs to get where no 
 sound or sign of it can penetrate; the 
 vulgarity and sham of it fill rational men 
 and women with loathing. The brutal 
 indifference to the rights of others; the 
 relentless crushing of the weak by the 
 strong; the coarse setting aside of the 
 sanctities of marriage and the multipli- 
 cation of legalized adulteries by means 
 of cheap and easy divorce; the shoddy 
 splendor and coarse manners of much 
 miscalled society; the push of men whose 
 only object is to " get there," the strident 
 voices of women who have given up the 
 old refinements of womanhood without 
 gaining any real power or efficiency in 
 exchange — all the noise and confusion 
 149 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 and crudity and vulgarity of the modern 
 world at times almost blight the hopes 
 and blast the spirits of those who love 
 the best things. 
 
 There are many side-lights to be 
 
 thrown on this depressing condition of J 
 
 things which greatly change its charac- i 
 
 ter and give It a different and a far ( 
 
 brighter aspect. At the very worst it Is I 
 
 a far kindlier, more human, more unself- U 
 
 ish world than that In which Christ was -j 
 
 born. But, passing all those things by, | 
 
 the season brings one great and unshak- ^^ 
 
 able hope to our hearts: The Child who ! 
 transformed the World of Force will 
 
 also transform the World of Greed! \ 
 
 The task seems to many to-day almost ; 
 
 Impossible of accomplishment, so great : 
 
 Is the disparity between the invisible \ 
 
 power of love and the organized force ; 
 
 of selfishness. But love and greed are \ 
 
 far more nearly matched to the eye of ; 
 
 the most superficial observer than were j 
 love and power. The World of Greed 
 
 is already penetrated by the Influences ; 
 
 150 ' 
 
The Child and the World 
 
 that flow from the heart and mind of 
 the Child. Intent as that world is on 
 its own success, it already pays love the 
 respect of a decent regard for appear- 
 ances; vulgar as it is, it is stirred by an 
 uneasy consciousness that there are better 
 things than it possesses; eager and brutal 
 as it is in pursuit of its ends, it is smitten 
 with the growing knowledge that it is 
 being mocked by that to which it has 
 given its heart, and that there is some- 
 thing at work in society which defeats its 
 final and perfect satisfaction with its 
 gains. 
 
 The bells of Christmas-tide ring out 
 the ultimate doom of greed as they long 
 ago rang out the ultimate doom of force. 
 Men may think and say what they choose, 
 but there is a power in the Child which 
 silently and steadily saps all evil or 
 lower powers; a wisdom in the Child 
 which shines more and more above the 
 wisdom of the wisest; a beauty which 
 sinks deeper and deeper into the con- 
 sciousness of the world; an ideal which 
 151 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 relentlessly judges all lesser ideals and 
 rejects them. It may be that two 
 thousand years more must pass before the 
 Kingdom of Greed follows the Kingdom 
 of Force ; but every year the power of the 
 Child gains on the base and brutal forces 
 which oppose It, and every year the love 
 which the Child came to reveal lights the 
 dark skies with a kindling promise of day. 
 
 IS2 
 
The Deepest Thanksgiving 
 
 FRANCIS OF SALES, a saint in na- 
 ture and life as well as in name, in 
 enumerating some causes of thanksgiving 
 in the quaint language of the seventeenth 
 century, uses these very suggestive words : 
 
 Consider the bodily gifts which God has 
 given you; what a body, what conveniences to 
 maintain it, what health and lawful comforts 
 for it; what friends and assistances. And con- 
 sider all this in comparison with the lot of so 
 many other persons, much more worthy than 
 yourself, who are destitute of all these blessings; 
 some defective in body, health, and limbs; oth- 
 ers subjected to reproaches, contempt, and dis- 
 honor; others weighed down with poverty; and 
 God has not suffered you to be so miserable. 
 
 Consider your gifts of mind. How many 
 are there in the world stupid, mad, foolish ; and 
 why are you not among them? God has fa- 
 vored you. How many are there who have 
 been brought up coarsely and in gross igno- 
 rance? And by God's providence you have 
 been well nurtured and educated, 
 153 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 Consider your spiritual graces. . . . God has 
 given you a knowledge of Himself even from 
 your youth. How often has He given you His 
 sacraments? How often inspirations, interior 
 illuminations, and warnings for your amend- 
 ment? How often has He pardoned you your 
 faults? How often has He delivered you from 
 occasions to sin to which you have been exposed ? 
 And have not your past years been so much time 
 and opportunity to advance the good of your 
 soul? Consider in detail how good and gra- 
 cious God has been to you. 
 
 On Thanksgiving Day, honored now 
 by the usage of many generations, em- 
 phasis is generally laid on those occa- 
 sions for gratitude which have a common 
 claim on all the Nation; those obvious, 
 general blessings which, because they 
 take on National aspects, seem to have 
 the most Impressive significance. For 
 peace, health, freedom, prosperity, the 
 large yield of the soil, and widespread 
 ease of condition, there cannot be too 
 much gratitude. For these material and 
 physical prosperities are also spiritual 
 signs of well-being; when the Nation 
 154 
 
The Deepest Thanksgiving 
 
 prospers in field and flock and ship, it is 
 because the Nation has been industrious 
 and frugal and has not held back its 
 hand from danger and toil. 
 
 But there are other and deeper causes 
 for thanksgiving, and these are clearly 
 seen only when behind the general 
 thanksgiving men offer up to God their 
 heartfelt thanks for those conditions 
 which provide for the growth of the 
 spirit In freedom and power. " Consider 
 in detail," writes St. Francis, " how good 
 and gracious God has been to you." 
 Deeper than all other reasons for thanks- 
 giving is the nature of God. Since He 
 is what He is, all life takes on a joyful 
 meaning. In the light of which hope 
 shines through sorrow, and trial becomes 
 a way of strength, and work a spiritual 
 opportunity, and death holds in its hands 
 the lamp of immortality. Because God 
 is love, every man's sins are punished; 
 because God Is merciful, the easy road 
 to corruption Is set thick with dIfHcultles; 
 because God watches over them, men 
 155 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 who have gone astray are suddenly dis- 
 covered in their iniquities; because God 
 will accept nothing ultimately but the best 
 in every human soul, the discipline of life 
 is searching, the burdens of life heavy, 
 the disappointments of life manifold. 
 Because God would make us like himself, 
 life is one long, severe, exacting educa- 
 tion. Because we are Immortal, we are 
 never permitted to rest in mortal con- 
 ditions, to find satisfaction with mortal 
 possessions, to secure content In this 
 mortal life. 
 
 Above and below gratitude for pleas- 
 ant paths and fertile fields and surcease 
 of great anxieties there ought to be joy 
 unspeakable In that gift of spiritual life 
 which transforms this changing life, 
 turns Its apparent adversities Into bless- 
 ings, Its burdens into sources of strength, 
 Its bitter partings Into prophecies of bliss- 
 ful reunions. Let every man search his 
 heart and his life and " consider in detail 
 how good and gracious God has been." 
 
 156 
 
Lodgings and Homes 
 
 THE restlessness of the age shows 
 Itself In nothing more dlsastrou^y 
 than in the substitution of lodgings for 
 homes. Lodgings have an Important 
 place in the economy of modern life; 
 they are often extremely comfortable; 
 they afford greatly needed rest and 
 change; they make privacy and family 
 life possible In foreign countries; they are 
 admirable places of refuge In prolonged 
 or exhausting travel. But they are tem- 
 porary and provisional; they provide 
 shelter for short periods, In times of 
 change, in vacations; but they are not, 
 and they cannot be, solid foundations of 
 repose, growth, the full and free life. 
 
 The child misses things of inestimable 
 value If he is not born In a home; and 
 childhood loses Immeasurably if the word- 
 home does not gain from its daily experi- 
 ence a wealth of sweetness, trust, associa- 
 tion, sense of security. 
 157 
 
Fruits of the Spirit | 
 
 In youth, when the " year of wander- i 
 ing " — which is so rich in the flowering of \ 
 the imagination and the opening of the [ 
 spirit to the beauty and wonder of the ^ 
 world — comes, the home is a rich and | 
 potent background of pure memory, of i 
 steadying impulses, of anchorage of the 
 affections. 
 
 When the work of life is at the flood, 
 the home is a refuge from the disheart- 
 ening influences which sap the strength 
 of the most aspiring, a place of peace 
 where the vision grows clear and cour- 
 age returns and the armor is put on 
 with new heart; and neither for man nor 
 for woman can any kind of success, in- 
 fluence, or power compensate for its loss. 
 Sometimes the home must be sacrificed 
 for some high duty; but nothing in con- 
 temporary life is sadder than the sur- 
 render of the home for those lesser ends 
 which appeal so strongly in youth to men 
 and women, and which, as time goes on, 
 yield so little lasting reward or satisfac- 
 tion. To exchange a home for what is 
 158 
 
Lodgings and Homes 
 
 called a " career " Is, in most cases, to 
 invite at the end of the years loneliness, 
 heart-sickness, and a deepening sense of 
 having missed the best things in life. 
 
 For the home is not only the sacred 
 inclosure in which the finest and deepest 
 affections are nourished, the tenderest 
 sympathies developed, the truest and 
 most fruitful impulses confirmed and 
 strengthened; it is also the place of the 
 most searching and liberating education. 
 No later teacher has such access to the 
 spirit, such approaches to the heart, as 
 those who enfold the young life in an 
 atmosphere of which it is unconscious, 
 but which penetrates and gives color to 
 its most secret thoughts. The vast ma- 
 jority of the fundamental ideas come to 
 the child while he is still unaware of 
 their significance and unable to give them 
 expression. As Titian, painting with the 
 stir and movement of the vast energies of 
 Venice about him, and under the spell of 
 her superb vitality expressed in such 
 splendor as no other city has ever been 
 159 
 
Fruits of the Spirit ,! 
 
 clothed with, put his childhood at Pieve , 
 da Cadore into his pictures in a long i 
 succession of mountain backgrounds, so j 
 every man and woman of imagination i 
 constantly recalls the " long, long ; 
 thoughts " of youth, and draws upon the j 
 inexhaustible capital of ideas, dreams, 
 visions, and divinations which were part \ 
 of life in the quiet places and hours of ^ 
 home; and in maturer life this silent edu- | 
 cation is more profound, more spiritual, j 
 more illuminating than that which is fur- [ 
 nished by the Church or the State, the * 
 other great institutional schools of so- ] 
 ciety. We are so dominated by purely j 
 academic ideals that our conceptions of j 
 education are often as superficial as they I 
 are arrogant and positive; and in our de- 
 votion to methods and instruments, to 
 mere acquisition, to the trade-marks of 
 education, we lose sight of its great reali- \ 
 ties : the awakening of the spirit, the ^ 
 quickening of the affections, the libera- i 
 ting of the Imagination, the deliverance 
 from the dominion of names and forms, '. 
 1 60 ' 
 
Lodgings and Homes 
 
 the birth into freedom and power. 
 Goethe's mother did more for the train- 
 ing of his genius than the University of 
 Strassburg; Ruskin drew more inspira- 
 tion from the beauty and nobility of those 
 early readings of the Bible with his 
 mother than from his studies at Oxford; 
 the atmosphere of the quiet rectory at 
 Somersby left a deeper impress on the 
 sensitive mind of Tennyson than the years 
 at Cambridge. 
 
 There is no spectacle in life more pa- 
 thetic than homeless old age. At the end 
 of the working years, when the final pe- 
 riod of ripening comes, the clearing of 
 the air after the dust of the highway Is 
 laid, the opening of the windows of the 
 soul to the tranquil sunset light, the home 
 becomes a temple as well as a refuge. 
 There is gathered up and kept with pious 
 care the remembrance of the fragrance 
 of the deeds which the world so soon 
 forgets; there Is preserved the memory 
 of the long Integrity, the gracious court- 
 esy, the old-time helpfulness; there wait 
 i6i 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 those dehcate ministries, those tender 
 services, that reverence which distills its 
 perfumes in watchful and unforgetting 
 care, which are sweet and satisfying when 
 fame has lost its magic, applause its in- 
 toxication, and the rush and tumult of 
 work and strife have become a faint, far 
 sound on the horizon. 
 
 And these deep and permanent influ- 
 ences which, more than any others, shape 
 the character; these sweet and spiritual 
 consolations and rewards over .which 
 time has no dominion; this rich and lib- 
 erating education which colleges and uni- 
 versities only amplify and clarify — 
 these rarest and most sacred things are 
 lightly put aside by hosts of men and 
 women for the sake of convenience, lux- 
 ury, the chance to spend more on pleas- 
 ure, freedom to go and come as they 
 please ! There is nothing sadder in 
 modern life than this exchange of homes 
 for lodgings, under the fatal delusion 
 that the home confines and the lodging 
 liberates; that the home is commonplace 
 162 
 
Lodgings and Homes 
 
 and the lodging full of novelty and in- 
 terest; that the home is old-fashioned and 
 out of date, and the lodging a step for- 
 ward in emancipation; that the home 
 means drudgery and the lodging leisure; 
 that the home involves anchorage in the 
 harbor and the lodging the free course 
 over the open sea ! To a few men and 
 women come those imperative commands 
 to give up home and kindred for some 
 great service which must be accepted as 
 the will of God; but among all the chil- 
 dren of folly none are more blind than 
 those who voluntarily choose the lodging 
 instead of the home. 
 
 163 
 
Love and Law 
 
 THE most sublime divination ever 
 made by men is the declaration that 
 God is Love. The audacity of it in a 
 world devastated by sorrow and a so- 
 ciety ruled by force is evidence of its 
 truth. Through clouds of ignorance, 
 amid cries of anguish, in the presence of 
 victorious crimes and enthroned and 
 sceptered wrongs, compassed about with 
 apparently overwhelming evidences of 
 moral chaos and spiritual wreck, the ge- 
 nius that is in the soul of the race flashed 
 a sudden light on the very heart of the 
 mystery and found Love seated there, 
 Immortal, invincible, omnipotent. Since 
 that heroic word of faith was spoken 
 there have been two thousand years of 
 strife and misery and confusion; society 
 has been shaken again and again by de- 
 structive forces and rebuilt only to be 
 wrecked afresh; the old order has passed 
 164 
 
Love and Law 
 
 and the new has come only to become old 
 itself and yield to the pressure of the 
 later need; the world has been lifted for 
 the first time into a light of knowledge 
 of its races and their conditions well-nigh 
 complete; and men are appalled by the 
 work to be done before human conditions 
 are made wholesome and safe. 
 
 Through all the confusion without and 
 within, the vision of Love enthroned has 
 never faded from the thought and faith 
 of the spiritually-minded. Not only have 
 all other explanations of the universe 
 seemed incredible, but to reason itself 
 have come great confirmations of the 
 truth of the sublime divination, as 
 through clouds and darkness science has 
 discerned the outlines of an order, not 
 fixed and abitrary, but vital, ascending, 
 passing on through the passion for self 
 to the passion for others, and predicting 
 the other great truth that love and law 
 are spirit and method in a sublime pro- 
 gression of creative energy. 
 
 The apparent antithesis between law 
 165 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 and love has not only led to numberless 
 confusions of thought, but Is due to a 
 confusion of thought. Law has been set 
 before the mind of the race as austere, 
 Inflexible, divinely Inexorable; the very 
 structure of the moral order, the very 
 fiber of the moral nature, something so 
 august and sovereign that the gods have 
 bowed before It; a force behind all forces 
 as the Fates or Norns watched In deep 
 shadows behind Zeus and Odin, and 
 measured their span of life with relent- 
 less fingers. Love, on the other hand, 
 has been pictured as a beautiful emotion, 
 a divine Impulse, a cherishing tenderness, 
 a yearning over men which forgot their 
 offenses in Its passion for helping them, 
 but lacking divine rigor of righteousness. 
 Law commanded, but love persuaded; 
 law punished, but love pardoned; law en- 
 forced obedience by terrible penalties, 
 love stood beside the culprit and bore the 
 penalties with him. Good men of logical 
 mind have not only failed to understand 
 the nature of Love, but have been dis- 
 i66 
 
Love and Law 
 
 trustful of Its integrity and doubtful of its 
 power to govern. 
 
 There have been a thousand misappre- 
 hensions of Love because its lower have 
 been so often mistaken for its higher man- 
 ifestations. Those who love are often 
 blind, but Love is never blind; those who 
 love are always weak through ignorance, 
 but Love is open-eyed and strong. The 
 mother who defeats the growth of her 
 child by releasing it from a distasteful 
 discipline Is not devoted but ignorant; the 
 father who shields his son from the pen- 
 alties that might arrest the downward 
 tendency Is not tender but cruel. Love 
 neither evades nor conceals, because it 
 seeks only the best, not the easiest or the 
 most comfortable way for one upon 
 whom It lavishes Its wealth. Law ap- 
 prehends the offender If It discovers him, 
 brings him to the bar and punishes him. 
 It sees only the deed and can punish only 
 the doer; its vision and Its power are 
 wholly external. Love discerns what Is 
 In the heart, commands the offender to 
 J 67 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 confess the offense which is still undis- 
 covered, because by confession alone can 
 the spirit be set right; forces the sinner 
 whom it loves into the hands of law, 
 stands beside him in the dock, bears with 
 him the awful words of judgment, and 
 goes with him to the prison which is the 
 only way back to honor and peace. Be- 
 fore law moved, Love saw the offense 
 and gathered its awful sternness; after 
 law has forgotten, Love bears the dis- 
 grace and carries the badge of shame and 
 endures because it punishes only to save. 
 Law takes the culprit to the cell and locks 
 the door, Love goes into prison and 
 shares the humiliation and misery. 
 
 For if Love is the most beautiful thing 
 in the world, it is also the most terrible; 
 God is Love because in his presence no 
 evil can live; to all who are out of right 
 relation with him he Is a consuming fire. 
 Hell, whatever form it take, is not the 
 measure of his wrath, but of his passion 
 for purity; not the process by which he 
 punishes, but by which he purifies. Even 
 i68 
 
Love and Law 
 
 If it were only a place of torment he must 
 be in it, for wherever the spirits of men 
 cry out unconsciously in the bitterness of 
 misdirected energy, lost opportunity, in- 
 fidelity to the highest in them, there he 
 must be; and where he is, there may be 
 suffering but there cannot be the torment 
 of despair. Law regulates the conduct, 
 but Love cleanses the very springs of be- 
 ing; law punishes, but Love compels the 
 rebuilding of the nature. The return to 
 life is often far more painful than death; 
 and the power which banishes death im- 
 poses the agony of rebirth. Love cannot 
 pause until it has brought out the highest 
 nobility In the spirit to which it gives 
 itself; cannot rest until it has made final 
 happiness sure by perfect purification: 
 
 " Love Is incompatible 
 With falsehood, — purifies, assimilates 
 All other passions to itself." 
 
 Because God Is Love the universe must 
 finally be cleansed to its outermost edge ; 
 because he loves men, there must come 
 169 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 the suffering, denial, punishment, which 
 constitute the education of the spirit into 
 freedom and power. 
 
 If a man would live at ease, let him 
 beware of Love. If he loves a country, 
 it may call him suddenly to hardship and 
 death; if he love Art, it will set him 
 heart-breaking lessons of trial and self- 
 surrender; if he love Truth, it will call 
 him to part company with his friend; if 
 he love men, their sorrows will sit by his 
 fire and shadow its brightness] if he love 
 some other soul as the life or his life, he 
 must put his happiness at the hazard of 
 every day's chances of life and death; if 
 he give himself to some great devotion, 
 he must be ready to be searched through 
 and through as by fingers of fire, to be 
 called higher and higher by a voice which 
 takes no heed of obstacles, to live day 
 by day In the presence of an ideal which 
 accepts nothing less perfect than itself. 
 
 For Love Is a more terrible master 
 than law, and they who follow must 
 stand ready to strip themselves of all 
 170 
 
Love and Law 
 
 lesser possessions. Dante looked at the 
 terrors of Hell and heard the groans of 
 Purgatory before he found Beatrice wait- 
 ing to walk beside him In the Ineffable 
 sweetness and peace of Paradise; for the 
 keys of the heavenly place were in the 
 hands of Love. 
 
 m 
 
The Best Service 
 
 MARCUS AURELIUS, who had 
 many serious things to say about 
 the most serious crises in life, and whose 
 high virtue and loyalty to noble ideals of 
 duty have reinforced and strengthened 
 some of the best men and women in all 
 subsequent ages, had much to say also 
 along the lines of the every-day practice 
 of humble virtues; for he was eminently 
 a wise man and knew that greatness is 
 built up, not by single efforts in striking 
 crises, but by the repetition of small acts 
 in every-day experiences. He wrote: 
 " Begin the morning by saying to thyself, 
 I shall meet with the busybody, the un- 
 grateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, un- 
 social. All these things happen to them 
 by reason of their ignorance of what is 
 good and evil. But I, who have seen the 
 nature of the good that it is beautiful, 
 and of the bad that it is ugly, and the 
 172 
 
The Best Service 
 
 nature of him who does wrong, that it is 
 akin to me, not only of the same blood or 
 seed, but that it participates in the same 
 intelligence and the same portion of the 
 divinity, I can neither be Injured by any 
 of them, for no one can fix on me what 
 is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kins- 
 man, nor hate him." 
 
 This is a paragraph from what might 
 be called the working philosophy of an 
 independent and gracious life — the life 
 of the man or woman who meets freely 
 the disagreeable things of the world, the 
 ungracious, repellent, and mean persons 
 of whom society contains so many, but 
 refuses to be affected by them. It is a 
 part of a gracious and beautiful life to 
 turn the edge of gossip, of cynicism, of 
 envy, and of hatred by keeping resolutely 
 out of the mood in which these motives 
 and feelings are possible. The busybody 
 who has evil things to hint and base 
 things to tell of others succumbs to the 
 rebuke of silence, and the stream of mis- 
 representation dries up in the atmosphere 
 173 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 of unspoken condemnation. The en- 
 vious find the air which surrounds a gen- 
 erous soul uncongenial, and the ungrate- 
 ful and arrogant are driven back upon 
 themselves In the presence of those to 
 whom gratitude, humility, and generosity 
 of judgment are habitual. One may go 
 through life almost silent and yet change 
 the atmosphere of the road along which 
 he travels; for to express one's nature 
 it is often unnecessary to speak. Kind- 
 ness, generosity, and a spirit of unselfish- 
 ness escape from some men and women 
 in their most silent moods and pervade 
 the places In which they are. It is mat- 
 ter of no consequence to us that those 
 about us are ungenerous, envious, and 
 bearers of false tales. There Is no rea- 
 son why we should descend from the hill- 
 sides on which we live Into the swamp 
 because other men and women like the 
 miasma. No man need be Ignoble In this 
 world because the world is full of Igno- 
 ble people; for, as Marcus Aurellus 
 points out, those who love the higher 
 174 
 
The Best Service 
 
 things love them because they have seen 
 how beautiful they are, and those who 
 stand for the baser things stand for them 
 because they have not seen their ugliness. 
 The man who looks at a beautiful view 
 from the side of a mountain ought to be 
 very tender of the blind man who finds 
 nothing but the roughness of the road 
 and the bitterness of his lack of vision. 
 There are many people to whom life is 
 mean and small because they have never 
 seen the nobler side of It. Such men and 
 women are to be pitied even more than 
 they are to be condemned, and the way to 
 serve them is to open their eyes. 
 
 The eyes of the blind are never opened 
 by violence, and the best way to persuade 
 other men to cease bearing tales, using 
 envious speech, and forgetting the debt 
 of gratitude is to show forth day by 
 day the beauty of appreciative speech, of 
 generous recognition, and of that kindly 
 interpretation which puts the best light 
 on character and deeds. If it be true 
 that a good deed shines like a light In 
 175 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 the world, it is much more true that a 
 beautiful character is like a beacon; it 
 not only illuminates, but it also warns and 
 guides. It shines brightest when the 
 clouds are black about it and the earth 
 is hidden from view by the darkness. 
 The most profound influence exercised by 
 the loving and the devoted is uncon- 
 sciously put forth. They serve others 
 when they are unaware that any virtue 
 passes from the hem of their garments; 
 and the chief concern of a man or woman 
 should be, not to correct others, but to 
 keep the stream of influence which flows 
 from them pure at the source; for an 
 example is ten times more persuasive and 
 searching than any reproof or direct sug- 
 gestion. In a corrupt society a good man 
 or a pure woman stands out with mar- 
 velous brightness, and the worse society 
 society Is, the less excuse is there for cor- 
 ruption. Those who charge their faults 
 upon their environment, and who miti- 
 gate their judgment of themselves by the 
 reflection that the standards of those 
 176 
 
The Best Service 
 
 about them are low, fail to see that they 
 are passing the severest condemnation 
 upon themselves. To have seen the 
 light and not to live by it is to sin, not 
 only against the light, but against one's 
 less fortunate fellows. It is nothing to 
 us that others are envious, malicious, de- 
 ceitful, and ungrateful; our concern is 
 with ourselves. So long as we are gen- 
 erous, appreciative, truth-loving, we may 
 let the world take care of itself; we shall 
 have rendered it our best service. 
 
 177 
 
A Secret of Youth 
 
 ONE of the good signs of the time is 
 the fact that people no longer con- 
 ceive of life as arbitrarily divided into 
 periods of time. The women of forty 
 to-day do not follow the habit of their 
 ancestors, and put on caps and take to 
 knitting, under the impression that hence- 
 forth- for them there is laid up nothing 
 but the profound respect which children 
 ought to pay to advanced years, peace 
 after toil, and the making of an endless 
 series of small garments for newcomers. 
 A recent writer in The Atlantic expressed 
 the hope that some day the dear old lady 
 of silvery hair and quiet gown and the 
 ripening and mellow charm of advancing 
 years will return to us. Something un- 
 doubtedly has been lost, but very much 
 has been gained. The old-age limit was 
 absurdly premature from Shakespeare's 
 time to the time of our immediate ances- 
 178 
 
A Secret of Youth 
 
 tors. Emerson somewhere recalls the re- 
 mark of an old gentleman who said that 
 he had been born at a most unlucky time 
 of transition; when he was a boy the 
 greatest respect was paid to old age, and 
 now that he was old the greatest respect 
 was paid to children. 
 
 There has been a great extension of 
 the time of activity for men and women 
 since the middle of the last century. Peo- 
 ple are no longer ashamed to be about 
 and doing their work at eighty. They 
 no longer feel compelled to apologize to 
 their young descendants for standing in 
 the way. They have discovered that old 
 age is a relative term, and that, unless 
 serious physical disablements or crippling 
 disease come, at eighty one may be ac- 
 tive without being disrespectful to the 
 younger generation or lacking in respect 
 for one's own contemporaries. There 
 was a great deal of truth in the statement 
 of a French writer that the gods made us 
 all immortal and that old age is a volun- 
 tary matter. 
 
 179 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 Age is largely a matter of habit; and 
 most people who grow old, in the sense 
 of losing their interest and their working 
 power, fall insensibly into the slough of 
 inactivity because they do not understand 
 how to feed their spirit and nourish their 
 bodies. ( Youth is not a matter of years; 
 it is a nlatter of spiritual condition.) It 
 does not consist simply in young muscles 
 and arteries that have not yet begun to 
 harden; the root of it is freshness of feel- 
 ing, vitality of interest, and joy in one's 
 work. Men and women become old by 
 involuntary mental process; by thinking 
 themselves old. They dwell so much on 
 the mortal side that they forget their im- 
 mortality. Disuse of muscle in any part 
 of the body speedily means stagnation 
 and hardening; giving up Interest in life, 
 going into voluntary retirement, commg 
 to anchor with the intention of never put- 
 ting to sea again, is Insensibly followed 
 by spiritual and physical acceptance of de- 
 clining energy and fading interests. The 
 mortal must be kept alive by the immor- 
 i8o 
 
A Secret of Youth 
 
 tal; the body kept young by the mind; 
 the mind fed by constant contact with 
 fresh ideas. The conservatism of old 
 age lies chiefly in closing the doors, shut- 
 ting the windows, and barring the house 
 against the new ideas of a new time. It 
 has come to be almost a tradition that 
 old people are pessimists, bewailing the 
 degeneracy of the later times, and hold- 
 ing constantly before the eyes of their 
 younger contemporaries the charm and 
 beauty of a past age. A little intimate 
 knowledge of history speedily cures all 
 this. If one is not willing to keep up 
 his interest in acting history, if one has 
 an open door only for old friends and 
 never makes new ones, if one has no com- 
 panionship with the later world and the 
 rising ideas which are always coming into 
 it, his house becomes desolate and he 
 falls into melancholy. When the years 
 begin to multiply, one must fasten back 
 the shutters and leave the latch-string 
 out; one must insist on his immortality. 
 Elderly people must keep at the head 
 i8i 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 of the procession In their hospItaHty to 
 new Ideas. 
 
 Variety and charm and Interest lie In 
 the preservation of freshness. Robert 
 Louis Stevenson wrote: " Cling to your 
 youth. It Is the artist's stock In trade. 
 Do not give up that you are aging, and 
 you won't age." In this familiar and 
 homely advice Is hidden the secret of 
 the artist's power and charm. He never 
 grows old; things never become common- 
 place to him ; the colors do not fade. As 
 a matter of fact, they never fade; It Is 
 the perceptions which become duller, the 
 Interest which becomes less keen. A 
 good many men and women have discov- 
 ered that It Is a good thing to associate 
 Intimately with persons younger than 
 themselves. This Is one refuge against 
 old age, but the real refuge Is within. It 
 Is the assertion of one's Immortality, the 
 consciousness day by day, in all relations 
 and occupations, that one is going for- 
 ward and not backward; that the world, 
 which grows sadder because one's com- 
 182 
 
A Secret of Youth 
 
 panlons go out of It, Is growing brighter 
 because one Is pushing toward the dawn 
 and not toward the sunset. There Is a 
 great mass of misleading and cynical phi- 
 losophy about old age. Poetry Is full of 
 images of disenchantment created for the 
 greater part by disenchanted men. There 
 was a profound truth In the old Greek 
 picture of the spirit beginning Its life In a 
 strongly built house, protected from all 
 the elements; finding presently that the 
 house begins to be less secure; discover- 
 ing at last that It begins to crumble, and 
 at the end that It falls In ruins — only to 
 leave the man free under the open sky. 
 
 183 
 
Make the Time You Want 
 
 IF the census-takers went into such 
 matters, the return of men and 
 women who are anxious to do certain 
 things but " cannot find the time " would 
 run into large figures. There is no more 
 prevalent or pathetic illusion, no more 
 delusive excuse and evasion, than inabil- 
 ity to find time to do real things in a 
 strong way. For time is not found; it is 
 made. What we call time, meaning the 
 flight of hours recorded by the clock, is 
 simply the raw material of which time is 
 made. It is mere duration; time is dura- 
 tion turned to account, used, directed to 
 definite ends. We make all the time we 
 really use, and we make it by using it. It 
 is a fallacy that men kill time; they can- 
 not kill what does not exist for them; 
 they simply miss the opportunity to make 
 time; they kill their chances. In vaca- 
 tion days busy people rest by not making 
 time; they hang up the receiver, so to 
 184 
 
Make the Time You Want 
 
 speak, and no call of work or duty reaches 
 them; they shut off connection with the 
 raw material which, In working hours, 
 runs through their looms and becomes 
 time; that Is, duration made significant, 
 fruitful, Intelligent, beautiful. 
 
 Races that have made no progress for 
 centuries are often spoken of as old races, 
 and men and women whose years have 
 been many and Idle are described as old 
 people; with the Implication that age of 
 itself entitles races and people to a certain 
 authority. The feebleness that comes 
 with the burden of years demands the ut- 
 most courtesy and the tenderest care; but 
 there Is nothing in age of itself which car- 
 ries authority or enforces respect. Mere 
 duration has nothing in It that claims the 
 reverence of men; time, which Is dura- 
 tion made significant and fruitful, alone 
 wears the crown of that authority which 
 rests on ripe thought, deep experience. In- 
 ward growth. A man may have length 
 of years and be as devoid of wisdom as 
 a child of y^st^rday; a race may have 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 counted thirty centuries and remain where 
 it was when the years began to fly over 
 it, as the birds pass over the fields and 
 leave no trace behind. It is duration 
 transformed into time that counts. 
 
 There is an abundance of this raw 
 material if one knows how to change it 
 into time. This is not accomplished by 
 the rattle of machinery, by rushing about 
 from point to point as if one had great 
 undertakings on all sides, by breathless 
 haste and many lamentations that there 
 is no chance to get things done; that is 
 as much a waste of the opportunity of 
 making time as sitting idle and, with 
 folded hands, letting the days slip down 
 the western slope of the sky without care 
 or thought. It is as easy to waste the 
 raw material of time noisily as silently; 
 to be idle in a tumult as in a dream. 
 Some of the most useless people in the 
 world are the most vociferous; some of 
 the greatest makers of time are the quiet- 
 est. To turn duration into time and not 
 let the threads run into a meaningless 
 (86 
 
Make the Time You Want 
 
 tangle, one must have a design, some skill 
 in working, and a steady purpose. A 
 host of those whose looms never start 
 have a mass of designs in mind; the trou- 
 ble is that they never decide which pleases 
 or interests them most. Another host 
 start a design only to tire of it and begin 
 another. And a still larger number let 
 things go as they may, and " take what 
 comes." Nothing comes, because every- 
 thing must be made; that is the beneficent 
 law of life. Nature takes care that no 
 man gets morally, intellectually, or spirit- 
 ually rich by sitting still and letting things 
 pour Into his lap. Wealth In these Im- 
 perishable things Is a matter of time for 
 every man and woman; and time is not 
 given ; it must be made. If you want time 
 for great tasks, for fine growth, for beau- 
 tiful accomplishments, for rich resources 
 of all sorts, do not wait for it; It will 
 never come to you; make It by selection 
 of design, concentration of effort, the vital 
 skill that Is born of devotion, Intelligence, 
 putting one's heart into one's work. 
 187 
 
A Tragedy of the Good 
 
 THE figure of a man appointed to 
 die on a certain day and begging 
 for a little more time was very familiar 
 to the mediaeval imagination, and ap- 
 peared in many variations of a story 
 whose pathos and meaning even the way- 
 faring man could not fail to read. In 
 our day thoughtful men pray, not to be 
 saved from death, but from what many 
 call life. They are so overloaded with 
 responsibilities and compassed about with 
 what they regard as duties that they have 
 become mere automatic machines. They 
 keep their engagements and do the work 
 assigned them on the hour; they are mod- 
 els of punctuality and often miracles of 
 executive fidelity; but they are selling 
 their birthright of time as if they held 
 it by absolute ownership and not in trust. 
 A great deal has been said of late about 
 the absence of the sense of responsibility 
 i88 ^ 
 
A Tragedy of the Good 
 
 In those who are trustees charged with 
 the care of other people's interests, and of 
 the tendency of men who control great 
 properties to give away that which is not 
 their own. This is precisely what a host 
 of good men and women are doing 
 through a mistaken notion that life Is 
 wholly a matter of action, and that the 
 measure of service is the number of ac- 
 tivities to which one gives a hand. It 
 would be just as rational to say that the 
 wisest man Is he who has read the great- 
 est number of books, and the most learned 
 woman she who has taken the greatest 
 number of post-graduate courses ;\ when, 
 as a matter of common knowledge, the 
 omnivorous reader and the omnivorous 
 taker of special courses are never wise 
 and seldom educated. 
 
 It Is very easy to drift Into devouring 
 activities, and many discover too late that 
 they have mortgaged themselves for more 
 than their value; they have pledged their 
 entire capital of strength, time, and abil- 
 ity, and have parted with their most 
 189 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 precious possession — the power of in- 
 ward growth. To such men and women, 
 depleted by the Incessant drain on re- 
 sources which they have no chance to 
 build up, and deadened In body and soul 
 by the merciless strain of unrelieved ac- 
 tivity, the prayer for time becomes a cry 
 of acute suffering. Those who are con- 
 tent to be machines and are satisfied with 
 " keeping things going " will not under- 
 stand this experience; but many heroic 
 workers know the sense of utter failure 
 which comes In the midst of successful 
 work; the longing of the soul for time 
 to be by Itself with nature and with God; 
 to get the meaning out of experience by 
 meditating upon It; to He fallow until the 
 earlier and the later rains have fertilized 
 the soil to the point where life Is ready 
 to rise out of It In a great rush of joyous 
 energy. 
 
 Men were not made to become ma- 
 chines; they were made living creatures, 
 and they needi^the nourishment of reflec- 
 tion, observation, reading, leisure, pleas- 
 igo 
 
A Tragedy of the Good 
 
 ure. The time that comes to them is a 
 gift from God; they are to make free 
 use of it, but they can neither sell it nor 
 give it away. They must enrich it, mul- 
 tiply its earning power, put it out at in- 
 terest; they cannot divide it between a 
 number of beneficiaries and have done 
 with it. It Is for the use of their souls 
 as well as of their brains and hands; It 
 belongs to the Giver, and it must be used 
 subject to the condition which He Im- 
 poses. To work so hard that one has 
 no time to think of Him is a tragic folly,' 
 "no matter how honorable the work may 
 be; to give one's self so entirely to ac- 
 tivities that one has no time for his soul, 
 no leisure for Inward growth, no oppor- 
 tunity to let the springs of life fill and 
 fertilize the spirit, Is to make a dismal 
 failure of life, no matter how unselfish 
 the activities may be. In this world men 
 are held as rigidly responsible for the 
 use of good sense, wise judgment, clear 
 Intelligence, as for the moral qualities 
 of their actions. Their blunders and fol- 
 191 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 lies are punished as certainly as their 
 sins. The man who makes a machine 
 of himself by giving to activity the por- 
 tion of time which belongs to his soul 
 becomes as metallic and barren as the 
 selfish drudge; the woman whose days 
 are unbroken successions of engagements 
 loses the finer quality, the higher power, 
 of her nature, as Inevitably as If she were 
 given up to frivolity. There are trag- 
 edies of the good as well as of the bad; 
 there are failures among those who mean 
 well, as among those who mean 111. The 
 man who sells his birthright for a good 
 cause sells It just as truly as he who parts 
 with It for a mess of pottage; and (there 
 are few things more pitiful than a man 
 become such a slave to good works that 
 he starves in the midst of plenty. ) 
 
 192 
 
Simplicity of Life 
 
 THOSE who read the daily news- 
 papers, monthly magazines, and 
 current books detached from the older lit- 
 erature, the earlier histories, and the rec- 
 ords in other forms of the past, must 
 feel that this is the worst of all possible 
 times, and that the whole world is rapidly 
 going to the bad. As a matter of fact, 
 looking at the situation in the perspective 
 of history, and taking all sides of life into 
 consideration, there probably never was 
 a more humane, generous, and open- 
 hearted period than the present. The 
 age does not fundamentally differ, except 
 In the scale on which things are done, 
 from the ages which preceded it, and 
 where it differs it generally registers an 
 advance. One radical difference between 
 this period and earlier periods is in the 
 extension and thoroughness of our knowl- 
 edge of social conditions. We know the 
 193 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 world with a minuteness and accuracy of 
 which our forefathers did not dream. 
 We know our own country almost as 
 familiarly as they used to know their 
 towns. We know social conditions al- 
 most as well as they knew family condi- 
 tions. The result is that we are con- 
 fronted by a host of problems which are 
 neither new nor more numerous than the 
 problems of earlier times, but which, in 
 their extent and fundamental character, 
 are brought Into clear light for the first 
 time. 
 
 One of the prime difficulties of modern 
 life Is Its complexity. In this respect It 
 stands In striking contrast to many pre- 
 ceding ages. But complexity of condi- 
 tion Is a very different matter from com- 
 plexity of mind. It is a great mistake 
 to Imagine that the two are synonymous; 
 that simple conditions necessarily create 
 the simple life, and that complex condi- 
 tions create complex habits of life. As 
 a matter of fact, the simple life Is inward, 
 not outward; It Is a matter of the spirit, 
 194 
 
Simplicity of Life 
 
 and only to a limited extent a matter of 
 outward conditions and habits. It can 
 be achieved as easily and it has been 
 lived as nobly in palaces as in the most 
 unpretentious and obscure homes. There 
 has probably never been a more conspicu- 
 ous example of the simple life than that 
 which was furnished by a Roman Em- 
 peror; and any one who has a large 
 knowledge of men knows how often the 
 complex life — that Is to say, the life of 
 confusion — is led by people of the great- 
 est obscurity and the smallest means. 
 
 No man or woman need live a com- 
 plex life because the age is complex. 
 Confusion of thought is an inward con- 
 dition, not the result of outward circum- 
 stances. An ignorant man is perplexed 
 and confused, and, If he has imagination, 
 almost overpowered, by the immense 
 number of articles In a single room In a 
 museum; the curator, on the other hand, 
 is perfectly at home in the whole collec- 
 tion because the lines of his knowledge 
 run through the vast space and range the 
 195 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 myriad objects in clear and definite or- 
 der. That they are numbered by the 
 thousands is of no possible consequence 
 when one understands where to place 
 them and what they signify. The New 
 York Medical Journal prints a very In- 
 teresting article by Dr. Clement A. Pen- 
 rose, of Baltimore, on a class whom this 
 physician calls the *' mind-weary; " peo- 
 ple who have lost the faculty of thinking 
 for themselves, or the desire to do so, 
 and are looking about for some ready- 
 made remedy for an Inward condition, 
 some outward path as a means of escape 
 from intellectual confusion. *' How 
 many thousands of these poor, mind- 
 weary wretches are on the lookout for 
 some simple, plausible, easy solution of 
 the problems of life that will get them 
 out of all Its responsibility! " Nothing 
 exhausts the mind like confusion; and 
 there are vast numbers of men and 
 women who are suffering to-day from 
 weariness of mind because they lack or- 
 ganizing Ideas of life. This is the ex- 
 196 
 
Simplicity of Life 
 
 planation for the singular prosperity of 
 quacks and spiritual pretenders of all 
 sorts, and for the flourishing of occult- 
 ism, which always reappears when men 
 lose their grip on clear, definite, and 
 powerful religious convictions. Instead 
 of convents and monasteries, society is 
 full to-day of all kinds of refuges from 
 the weariness of life and from its per- 
 plexities and cares; shelters devised some- 
 times by half-educated, well-meaning en- 
 thusiasts, sometimes by persons of un- 
 usual clairvoyant or hypnotic gifts, who 
 start honestly and then become humbugs 
 when they discover the financial possibili- 
 ties of their unusual gift, or by out-and- 
 out deceivers and begullers who under- 
 stand how to prey upon the credulous, 
 and who know how easy it is to collect 
 a crowd if one will only stand and look 
 steadfastly Into the sky. 
 
 The New York Tribune^ In comment- 
 ing on Dr. Penrose's paper, says very 
 truly that many people are struggling 
 vainly to piece together into a rational 
 197 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 system the alleged discoveries of psy- 
 chology and medicine; that they are 
 swamped by a flood of unorganized facts. 
 During the last quarter of a century 
 information of all sorts touching the 
 structure of the universe and the organ- 
 ization of the human spirit has rolled in 
 like a tide; new vistas of knowledge have 
 opened up on all sides; popular reports 
 of every form of religion are at hand; 
 every esoteric philosophy has its man- 
 uals; all the arts and sciences are rep- 
 resented on the book-shelves of the 
 libraries in a vast number of easily writ- 
 ten volumes; political economy and 
 sociology are studied by children barely 
 out of their infancy under the tuition of 
 well-meaning but half-educated men and 
 women. When one considers the vol- 
 ume of misinformation now distributed 
 through society, and the mass of ill- 
 digested thinking to which the average 
 man and woman are exposed, it is aston- 
 ishing that there is not more brain- 
 weariness, and that a greater number of 
 198 
 
Simplicity of Life 
 
 people do not fall prey to the delusions 
 of the moment — those easy-going solu- 
 tions of the problems of life which push 
 aside responsibility and settle all ques- 
 tions out of hand. Many men and 
 many women are bewildered by the num- 
 ber of gates through which they can pass 
 into different fields of knowledge, and 
 try first one path and then another, only 
 to come back to the point of departure 
 and start afresh, with a constantly deep- 
 ening confusion of thought. They are 
 eager to understand all the sciences, to 
 master the technique of all the arts, to 
 know the ritual of all religions and to 
 worship all the gods; and the result is 
 that they become mere encyclopaedias of 
 popular misinformation, but encyclopae- 
 dias without order, definition, accuracy, 
 illumination. 
 
 The remedy for this confusion is a 
 clear recognition that no human being 
 can settle all questions, master all knowl- 
 edge, or try all experience; that every 
 man must select the things which belong 
 199 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 to him and leave the other things alone; 
 that to do anything strongly and com- 
 petently involves leaving many other 
 things undone; that before each human 
 soul lies one path, and that by keeping 
 to that path salvation is secured. One 
 definite and commanding idea of life, 
 resolutely and patiently worked out and 
 followed, brings one to wisdom and 
 power, while a great number of ideas 
 which touch only the circumference of 
 one's experience bewilder and confuse. 
 He who can be efficient and fruitful 
 if he stays where he belongs, becomes 
 a mere cumberer of the ground when 
 he strays into places where he has no 
 real ties. The question for men and 
 women to-day Is not whether they will 
 understand everything and use every- 
 thing, but what they shall resolutely cut 
 off; it Is not a question of taking things 
 on, but of leaving things out. The ge- 
 nius of the simple life lies In accepting a 
 fundamental conception of what one Is 
 here for. If one has such a conception, 
 200 
 
Simplicity of Life 
 
 it will impose order on the outward con- 
 fusion, give one peace in outward tur- 
 moil, preserve one from the temptations 
 of a thousand voices calling tumultuously 
 and discordantly from all quarters, and 
 bring that quiet unfolding, that inward 
 growth, which is the business of life. 
 
 20I 
 
By-Products in Life 
 
 ONE of the prime sources of modern 
 wealth is the saving of by-products. 
 In the days before science came to the aid 
 of business everything was sacrificed to 
 turn out one major product, and nobody 
 reaHzed the enormous waste of materials 
 that went on in almost every factory. 
 To-day, as the result of larger knowledge 
 and of more skillfully devised machinery, 
 a thousand things which once went to 
 the refuse heap are turned to account 
 and made almost as profitable as the 
 chief product of the factory. In many 
 cases by-products have become so valua- 
 able that they have been transformed Into 
 major products, and the scrap-heap has 
 been converted Into salable property. 
 A good many people are still going on 
 In the old way and conducting the busi- 
 ness of life as If only one or two results 
 could be secured. They set out to be 
 202 
 
By-Products in Life 
 
 strong, and therefore they live as if the 
 process of getting strength excluded the 
 gaining of all the other virtues; In this 
 way they throw away the by-products 
 and miss great chances of wealth. In 
 getting strength It Is easy to get sweet- 
 ness as well. The same process which 
 makes men and women strong will also 
 make them sweet If they will bring Intel- 
 ligence to bear on what they are doing. 
 
 Many people have a highly commend- 
 able purpose to become truth-tellers; 
 but because they discard the by-products 
 of tact and sympathy they lose the kind 
 of prosperity which makes a man a great 
 capitalist for his friends in time of need. 
 The world is full of people who work so 
 hard to do their duty that they do noth- 
 ing else and make the friends of good 
 causes as unhappy as their enemies. The 
 by-products of duty-doing are good sense, 
 feeling for others, and the flexibility 
 which arms high purpose and great integ- 
 rity with a contagious kindness of temper. 
 In morals the by-products are as produc- 
 303 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 tlve of ease and comfort as In business. 
 Many men and women are persuaded 
 that " Order Is Nature's first law," and 
 strive to obey that law by putting every- 
 thing with which they are concerned into 
 Its place and keeping it there. This is 
 the secret of effectiveness on a large 
 scale; it Is also one of the secrets of 
 comfortable living. Only the orderly 
 man or woman can handle great affairs 
 with ease and despatch or be thoroughly 
 comfortable in a life of busy and many- 
 sided activities. Unfortunately, In be- 
 coming orderly some people make them- 
 selves the rigid incarnation of a single 
 principle, the living embodiment of a 
 single method, and are transformed Into 
 slaves Instead of servants. Few people 
 are more terrible to their associates than 
 those who have imbibed the passion for 
 order; who cannot see anything out of 
 place without internal misery and ex- 
 ternal action; in whose hands the spirit of 
 a home Is sacrificed for the sake of an 
 immaculately clean and orderly house; 
 204 
 
By-Products in Life 
 
 who become so absorbed In pursuing 
 method that the spirit of any enterprise 
 with which they are connected is often 
 throttled. Order, like every other 
 method, ought to be generously and com- 
 fortably enforced; and one of the by-pro- 
 ducts in malcing one's self orderly is a 
 certain adaptability to conditions. Order 
 was made for man, not man for order; 
 and those who are well trained in keep- 
 ing things in their place will have the 
 good sense and graclousness to allow 
 things to be out of their place when con- 
 ditions make that state of affairs either 
 excusable or necessary. Like everything 
 else, order must sometimes yield to more 
 immediate necessities. 
 
 There is a still larger host of people 
 who are bent on being useful, no matter 
 what it costs themselves or their friends. 
 Now usefulness is the characteristic of 
 all people who achieve anything, either 
 in themselves or in society. In an order 
 of life which necessitates co-operation, 
 activity, and thoughtfulness — the quali- 
 205 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 ties which make one useful — to be an 
 Idler Is to fall In one's primary duty. 
 But one ought to be useful agreeably and 
 with a certain charity towards others. 
 The fact that one drives one's self with 
 the spur of conscience does not empower 
 one to drive everybody else. Many 
 excellent people go through life like 
 Alberlch cracking a long lash over the 
 heads of the unfortunate NIbelungen. 
 There are many homes in which the 
 demon of usefulness drives out the spirit 
 of joyful consecration to work and duty, 
 and goodness Is so violent that it becomes 
 a kind of disorder, and virtue so aggres- 
 sive that It takes on the aspect of 
 a destroying angel. In order to be use- 
 ful it Is not necessary to become a slave- 
 driver. The by-products of the struggle 
 to be useful are patience, the spirit of 
 co-operation, the habit of recognizing 
 good work, the desire to stimulate and 
 persuade rather than to goad and irritate. 
 Blessed are the good with whom It Is 
 pleasant to live ! 
 
 206 
 
The Value of Appreciation 
 
 MANY men and women underesti- 
 mate the value of expression; they 
 take too many things for granted; they 
 assume that their affection, or their grati- 
 tude, or their sense of obligation, is under- 
 stood without words. Such people are 
 often surrounded by those who are crav- 
 ing some expression of affection, some 
 word of approval, some kind of recogni- 
 tion. The best work is sometimes done 
 with shut teeth and a fixed purpose, in 
 dead silence, so far as the world is con- 
 cerned, without a murmur of applause or 
 a word of thanks; but this is not the way 
 in which work ought to be done among 
 intelligent men and women, and it is not 
 the way in which, as a rule, the best 
 work is evoked from the greatest num- 
 ber of people. The majority of men and 
 women get the best out of themselves 
 when they are in a congenial atmos- 
 207 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 phere. This is particularly true of those 
 finer kinds of work which express indi- 
 viduality, quality, and personal gift. A 
 man may do a piece of mechanical work 
 in arctic coldness; he may do it thor- 
 oughly In the face of distinct disap- 
 proval; but it Is very difficult to do the 
 work Into which one puts his heart, and 
 which Is the expression of the finest ele- 
 ments In one, unless there is some warmth 
 in the atmosphere, something which sum- 
 mons out of their hiding-places the most 
 delicate and beautiful possibilities of one's 
 nature. It Is true a man like Dante can 
 do a sublime piece of work with no other 
 approval than his own conscience, with 
 no other reward than his own conscious- 
 ness of having done his work with a 
 man's Integrity and an artist's thorough- 
 ness; but men of Dante's temperament 
 are few; and there are a great many 
 other kinds of work, as Important as that 
 which Dante did, which could not possi- 
 bly be done under such conditions. 
 
 It is the duty of every man, not only 
 208 
 
The Value of Appreciation 
 
 to do his work as thoroughly as posible, 
 but to create the atmosphere in which 
 other men and women can do their work 
 thoroughly and well. It is the duty of 
 every man, not only to unfold his own 
 character freely and completely, but to 
 create the atmosphere in which other 
 people are able to develop their best 
 qualities. There are hosts of men and 
 women who depend absolutely on others 
 for their finest growth, who have to be 
 drawn out, whose sweetness and charm 
 never find expression unless they are 
 evoked by warm affection or by gener- 
 ous approval. The world is -full of 
 half-starved people whose emotions are 
 denied their legitimate expression; who 
 are hungry for an affection which they 
 often have but the possession of which 
 they do not realize because It never finds 
 expression; who have latent possibilities 
 of achievement of a very high order, but 
 whose possibilities are undeveloped be- 
 cause nothing In the air about them 
 summons them forth. Such people need 
 209 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 a summer atmosphere, and they are often 
 compelled to live in a winter chill. 
 Many of those who diffuse the chill In- 
 stead of the cheer are unconscious of the 
 Influence for repression which they put 
 forth simply from lack of thought about 
 the delicate adjustments of life. They 
 have never studied themselves, or those 
 about them; and so there are thousands 
 of homes that are without cheer, not be- 
 cause they are without love, but because 
 they are without the expression of love; 
 and there are thousands of offices, work- 
 shops, and school-rooms that are without 
 Inspiration, not because they are lacking 
 In earnestness or In Integrity, but because 
 the habit of recognition has never been 
 formed, and there Is none of that spirit- 
 ual co-operation which not only gives but 
 evokes the best. 
 
 There Is In life no more pathetic fea- 
 ture than the hunger for a love which 
 exists but never expresses Itself, and 
 therefore, so far as comfort, warmth, or 
 inspiration Is concerned. Is as If It were 
 
 2IO 
 
The Value of Appreciation 
 
 not. There is a capital of affection and 
 good intention in the world sufficient to 
 warm the whole atmosphere, if it were 
 used; but there are hundreds of capi- 
 talists of this kind who leave their names 
 untouched, and who enrich neither them- 
 selves nor others because they do not 
 know how to give currency to their 
 wealth. Love is not to be hoarded, but 
 to be spent. It is great in the exact 
 measure in which it is given; it returns 
 in the exact measure in which it is sent 
 away; and society needs nothing to-day 
 so much as the use of this unused capi- 
 tal. If men of integrity and good inten- 
 tions in the world of business would 
 manifest their real feeling towards their 
 associates and their employees by con- 
 stant recognition of work well done, by 
 the words spoken almost at random 
 which show that a piece of work is valued 
 and that credit is rendered to the worker, 
 a large percentage of the social unrest 
 would disappear; for love is the only 
 solvent of the social problems. 
 
 211 
 
Immortal Love 
 
 ON the horizon of human thought 
 three great Ideas rise from the solid 
 earth Into the clouds like vast mountain 
 summits. For many generations, when- 
 ever men have lifted their eyes from the 
 little space of ground on which they were 
 working, they have seen these sublime 
 lifts of the common soil skyward. For, 
 dim and remote as these reaches of up- 
 land have looked, they have somehow 
 seemed to be of the same substance of 
 which human life is compounded every 
 inch of common earth predicting the mass 
 and majesty of the hills. At the begin- 
 ning these distant peaks were so remote 
 that they were almost indistinguishable 
 from clouds, so unsubstantial and vision- 
 ary did they appear — dreams sent to give 
 a sense of space and range to the dwellers 
 in the narrow house of life. As time 
 brought that experience which is the de- 
 
 212 
 
Immortal Love 
 
 posit of truth in the heart by the process 
 of living, the massive outlines became 
 more distinct, and the dream slowly took 
 on the aspect of reality. Generation 
 after generation lifted its eyes, and the 
 vague forms drew nearer and wore more 
 familiar forms, until they have become 
 in very truth the hills of God. 
 
 Eternity, infinity, immortality, are, for 
 those who look up to the hills whence 
 Cometh their help, no longer vague and 
 visionary dreams of men tossing rest- 
 lessly in the darkness of a night which 
 does not bring repose; they are the solid 
 realities of a life which finds in them the 
 assurance of the full fruition of its divina- 
 tions and possibilities of growth. The 
 world is haunted by these sublime visions 
 whether it opens or closes its eyes; all 
 thought and action lie visibly within the 
 circle of these encompassing hills. The 
 sense of the infinite is planted deep in 
 the heart of modern men; the passion 
 for the infinite consumes them. They 
 have found in music a language subtle 
 213 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 enough and spiritual enough not to ex- 
 press, but to suggest, the infinite and 
 eternal as their spirits reach out to fulfill 
 and possess themselves; and all art is 
 a symbol of the perfection that immor- 
 tality brings within reach of the soul. 
 The mechanical appliances which lengthen 
 the range of the eye and carry the voice 
 over half a continent are crude sym- 
 bols of the immense reach of the spir- 
 itual nature which has infinity, eternity, 
 and immortality before it: infinity, room 
 in which to bring out all the power, 
 beauty, and fruitfulness of the soul; 
 eternity, boundless time added to bound- 
 less space, so that all the processes of 
 growth may fulfill themselves in endless 
 progression of flower and fruit; immor- 
 tality, the unwasted vitality w^hich flows 
 with increasing volume through deepen- 
 ing channels and gives the soul the power 
 to possess the vastness of space and 
 illimitable time for growth. 
 
 These great fields which open on all 
 sides of the life of the hour and certify 
 214 
 
Immortal Love 
 
 to the soul its Incalculable richness, the 
 illimitable reach of room and time, as of 
 a structure not built by hands but rising 
 by processes of growth which becomes 
 more and more marvelous as they pass 
 from stage to stage, are not matters of 
 faith and vision for prophets and poets 
 only; every man carries within himself, 
 not only the evidence of the reality of 
 these sublime ideas, but the consciousness 
 of the power to possess all that life and 
 time, immortality and eternity, offer him. 
 So in that mysterious. Indefinable, mea- 
 sureless power of devotion, self-sacrifice, 
 and consecration which we call love, that 
 deep-rooted genius which harmonizes 
 Idealism and service, and In the Imper- 
 fection of the moment foresees the per- 
 fection of the future, lies the present 
 evidence of the reality of the great 
 visions, the source of the power that 
 possesses and uses them. God has set 
 eternity In the heart of man; In that heart 
 he has also set Infinity; for love Is with- 
 out measure of time or magnitude. 
 ai5 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 Prophets and poets have strained the 
 resources of all the languages to de- 
 scribe and define it, and have been con- 
 tent to suggest a depth and power which 
 they can neither sound nor measure; for 
 love is as limitless as eternity and as 
 boundless as infinity. It Is not a symbol 
 of immortality; It is Immortal. It strives 
 to bar the door against death as against 
 an enemy; but when the door has been 
 forced it keeps companionship with sor- 
 row and silently walks through invisible 
 paths with one who has vanished, but 
 with whom love travels undismayed 
 through unseen worlds. Every visible 
 thing crumbles, changes, and disappears, 
 for the hand of time Is on all things; but 
 love, which is winged for Immortal flight, 
 escapes the tombs in which the ashes of 
 the dead lie and the slow. Immutable pro- 
 cesses of decay which bring all things 
 made with the hands back to the earth 
 out of which they are built. It has no 
 fellowship with death save as death ful- 
 fills the mandates of life and breaks the 
 216 
 
Immortal Love 
 
 bonds of the spirit as it passes from one 
 form to another; it is of the very sub- 
 stance of life, and moves, noiseless and 
 indestructible, through the shadows and 
 mutations of the world. Loneliness is 
 often its portion and sorrow its compan- 
 ion; but death has no power over it. 
 
 In love the passion for the infinite finds 
 its outlet and channel, but never its per- 
 fect easement and satisfaction; for in- 
 finity can never find space for the sweep 
 of the wings of love under earthly skies. 
 There are no channels of finite service 
 deep enough to make room for its flood 
 tides. It pours itself out lavishly and 
 without measure, but its store remains 
 undiminished. In the exact degree in 
 which it gives itself as it increased, and 
 when it seems to bankrupt itself its wealth 
 is multiplied. It goes about in time and 
 the world like a child that has strayed 
 from home, seeking some one who speaks 
 its language, and never finding the free- 
 dom of speech which it craves. 
 
 For no language is adequate to the ex- 
 217 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 pression of love, though all the languages 
 which the soul uses have striven to match 
 its infinity of meaning with finite words. 
 All the arts have spoken for it, but the 
 heart of it remains without a voice. In 
 music it has found some easement of the 
 pain of emotion and passion and yearning 
 unexpressed, fof music is " love in search 
 of a word." , But all the resources of 
 music cannot'utter what is in the heart of 
 love; they can only suggest its untold 
 wealth of vision, devotion, service, and 
 bliss. As the beauty of the dawn may 
 for a moment here and there rapturously 
 sing in the notes of birds which it has 
 awakened and glow in the color of 
 flowers which it has summoned from 
 sleep, so music makes now and again a 
 brief pause in the tumult of the world, 
 and brings a sudden and wonderful si- 
 lence and peace of eternity In the unrest 
 of time; but there is only a sudden vision 
 of heaven, and then the earth fills space 
 again. 
 
 Love is the craving of the Immortal 
 az8 
 
Immortal Love 
 
 for its own speech; the passion of the 
 infinite bound about for the moment by 
 the finite; the Immortal soul seeking its 
 own and loyally waiting for it, walking 
 beside it, pouring out upon it its limitless 
 wealth, as it passes through the shadows 
 of mortality. 
 
 219 
 
The Wisdom of Youth 
 
 THERE is a wisdom born of long ex- 
 perience in the ways that are right 
 and in paths that are sweet which all men 
 honor and reverence, for there is some- 
 thing that comes to age which neither 
 youth nor maturity can command. But 
 there is another and so-called wisdom of 
 age which has its roots in the weaknesses 
 of men, not in their strength, in the fail- 
 ure of their endeavors, and in their 
 doubts; the wisdom of prudence, which 
 hugs the shore of comfort and holds back 
 from the great adventures of the spirit, 
 which doubts the realities of the higher 
 life because no longer in touch with them, 
 which challenges every generous impulse 
 and chivalrous experiment; which some- 
 times recognizes the beauty of high aims, 
 but always questions the possibility of 
 realizing them; which sees the long line 
 of failures, infelicities, disappointments, 
 and says to ardent Youth, " Be sensible, 
 220 
 
The Wisdom of Youth 
 
 give up your dreams, take life as you find 
 it; be content to be the average man and 
 the average woman in morals, efficiency, 
 and aims ; the others are only dreamers ! " 
 "Behold, this dreamer cometh! " has 
 been the cry of men and women who con- 
 tent themselves with this wisdom, since 
 the beginning of time. But the dreamer 
 comes, and once more the morning of 
 hope dawns on the world. A few months 
 ago in all parts of the English as in the 
 German speaking world there were com- 
 memorations of the hundredth anniver- 
 sary of the death of a man who was 
 scorned as a dreamer in his time, so 
 beautiful were his visions and so im- 
 practicable; but the men who scorned 
 him are forgotten, and all the world 
 loves Schiller, not because he did things 
 with his hands, but because he was con- 
 tent to walk through life dreaming the 
 noble things that were possible to men. 
 
 This miscalled wisdom of experience 
 is the old siren song of worldiness, sung 
 in the ears of the dwellers in Mesopo- 
 
 Z2l 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 tamia before there were sails on the 
 Mediterranean. It Is the philosophy of 
 the men and women who have exchanged 
 their ideals for their comfort, and, be- 
 cause their ideals no longer live with 
 them, believe that ideals have ceased to 
 exist for everybody else. Such a man 
 looks out of the window of his well-fur- 
 nished and comfortable room and shrugs 
 his shoulders as he sees youth storm past, 
 ardent. Impetuous, filled with great 
 hopes; and goes back to his fire and 
 thinks himself wise, and does not know 
 that he is the typical fool of whom the 
 Bible tells us, who said, " There is no 
 God! " This prudent, calculating, doubt- 
 ful attitude toward life would be sound 
 if it were not based on the fundamental 
 error that there is no God. In " Ham- 
 let " the cautious, prudent, careful Polo- 
 nius, warning his son against all man- 
 ner of danger and counseling him to 
 keep away from life, but never telling 
 him how to meet and master it, would be 
 right, George MacDonald once said, if 
 ^^^ 
 
The Wisdom of Youth 
 
 the devil were God. But because the 
 devil is not God it is the most short- 
 sighted policy in the world. The wis- 
 dom of youth, faith, hope, enthusiasm, is 
 based on the fundamental fact that there 
 is a God, that therefore the best things 
 are true, and that the best things belong 
 to men and are within their reach if not 
 their grasp. There is no dream which 
 does not fall short of the reality, because 
 there is a God. Youth trusts instinct- 
 ively the hidden forces Instead of fear- 
 ing them, marches boldly into life Instead 
 of intrenching Itself against life, risks 
 years, life, talent, heart, as great souls 
 have always risked these things. In be- 
 lieving that there are few things In life 
 worth getting but a host of things worth 
 being and a host of things worth doing; 
 that it is better to meet with shipwreck 
 seeking worlds than to rot In harbor- 
 safety! Where is safety, except in doing 
 the highest things possible to us and 
 going to the ultimate harbor where we 
 can cast anchor at last? 
 223 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 If this modern world Is to be saved, It 
 must deepen Its faith, must freshen Its 
 hope, must preserve Its enthusiasm. Its 
 problems are so perplexing, Its cares so 
 many. Its duties so difficult, that nothing 
 can save It but a great tide of spiritual 
 vitality. What Is needed In private and 
 in public life is not so much knowledge 
 of what ought to be done as strength to 
 do what we know Is waiting to be done. 
 Never has the fight between the things 
 of the body and the things of the spirit 
 been so sharply defined as on this con- 
 tinent to-day, because never anywhere 
 have the material prizes of life been so 
 great. It is Idle to preach poverty to 
 men; it is idle to tell them to stop get- 
 ting rich; they cannot help It. The 
 combination of the genius which God 
 has put into them, with the knowledge 
 of the modern world and the resources 
 of that world, compels men to be rich. 
 To preach poverty as It was preached In 
 the Middle Ages would be to preach 
 suicide to men. To say, " Arrest your 
 224 
 
The Wisdom of Youth 
 
 effort, curb your energy, stop your ac- 
 tivity," would mean going backward. 
 What ought to be said is not, " You must 
 become poorer," but, " You must become 
 stronger." The wealth of the world can 
 be carried if we only know its spiritual 
 possibilities. Wealth Is a merciless and 
 brutal tryant if it is a master; it is a 
 marvelous servant if it is under the hand; 
 and the one real question on this conti- 
 nent is whether we are to be the serv- 
 ants of our fortune or the masters of it 
 as well as its makers. 
 
 The real antagonist to the spirit of 
 materialism Is the spirit of youth — faith 
 in the things of the soul, joy in the work 
 of life, belief in its highest aims, enthu- 
 siasm In Its service. Nothing ages men 
 like complete absorption In affairs; 
 nothing keeps men young like freedom 
 of the spirit; it is the letter that killeth; 
 It Is the spirit that giveth life. 
 
 225 
 
Making Opportunities 
 
 IT cannot be too often said to men and 
 women of all ages, nor with too ample 
 illustration, that opportunities are never 
 to be waited for and that they come un- 
 awares. Great things are gained by In- 
 teUIgent and patient waiting; but the man 
 who stands beside the highway of life 
 waiting, not for something which he Is 
 prepared to receive but for something 
 which accident may throw In his way, 
 will never be overtaken by Fortune. 
 When Fortune comes his way she will 
 pass without any recognition from him. 
 It sometimes seems as if life were a great 
 game, and as if the Invisible player 
 against whom all men and women are 
 matched delighted In perplexing and con- 
 fusing his opponents. As a matter of 
 fact, life Is so saturated with the moral 
 quality that every step brings us face to 
 face with a new test. The great things 
 226 
 
Making Opportunities 
 
 are for the most part so humbly garbed 
 that, unless we penetrate their disguise, 
 we do not recognize them until they have 
 passed and are a long way off, when 
 we discern their majesty. In Emerson's 
 poem " The Days " are represented as 
 appearing with empty hands and in the 
 humblest dress; but if a man fails to 
 recognize them, he sees, after they have 
 passed, that they are queens in disguise 
 and that their hands are full of the 
 choicest gifts. 
 
 The difference between men and 
 women lies largely in the ability or the 
 lack of ability to penetrate the disguise 
 of the opportunity and detect its true 
 nature. As a rule, the great opportuni- 
 ties on which success turns come in un- 
 expected moments and ways; and the 
 great majority of men who have attained 
 marked success, as they look back, see 
 clearly that they passed the turning-points 
 in their career when they were quite un- 
 aware that they were on critical ground. 
 No one ever knows when his opportunity 
 227 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 will come; no one ever knows when the 
 decisive moment of his life will arrive. 
 The great crises are often like a bolt out 
 of the blue of a summer day; there is not 
 a moment for preparation. In such 
 crises all that a man has been doing in 
 the way of preparation suddenly bears its 
 fruit. He often acts instinctively; he 
 does that which he is in the habit of 
 doing; and, because he is in the habit of 
 doing his best and all his instincts prompt 
 him to put forth the best that is in him, he 
 seizes the golden moment and does not 
 discover until long afterwards that it 
 was golden. He meets his great crises 
 with clear intelligence and a resolute will, 
 and passes it successfully before he is 
 aware that it is upon him. 
 
 Opportunities are created by the devel- 
 opment of the power which deals with 
 them, and they come to men and women, 
 as a rule, in exact proportion to the abil- 
 ity to recognize and handle them. There 
 are of course vast differences of condition 
 and abihty between men, but opportuni- 
 228 
 
Making Opportunities 
 
 ties come to all. The difference lies in 
 the ability to seize the right moment and 
 make effective use of what is thrown in 
 one's path. Successful careers often read 
 like romances, so full do they seem of 
 the chances of life, so purely accidental 
 appear to be, at the first glance, the open- 
 ings of the gates of success. It is true 
 that Malibran happened to pass under 
 the window of the house when the young 
 violinist, Ole Bull, was practicing, and 
 that apparent accident gave the brilliant 
 young violinist the great opportunity for 
 which he longed; but Malibran would not 
 have paused, nor would Ole Bull have 
 been sent for, if the notes of the violin 
 had not, by their compelling beauty and 
 power, arrested her attention and made 
 the fortune of the player. It was not 
 Malibran who gave Ole Bull his chance; 
 it was his own magical skill. Malibran 
 furnished the opportunity, but the oppor- 
 tunity would have come in some other 
 way if the famous singer had not passed 
 under the window of the violinist. Men 
 229 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 and women who could help us are always 
 passing under our windows, but if there 
 is nothing in us which lays a spell upon 
 them, they do not know that they have 
 passed our way and we are never aware 
 of it. The streets are thronged with 
 those who could open the doors, and the 
 houses they pass are full of men and 
 women who long to have the doors 
 opened; but it Is only the man or woman 
 of skill, power, training, and discipline 
 who can arrest the attention and com- 
 mand the chance. The way to secure 
 opportunity Is to walk resolutely on the 
 pathway along which opportunity comes. 
 He who waits wastes his life. He who 
 takes his fate in his hand and goes for- 
 ward, sooner or later finds the time of his 
 deliverance and the place of his achieve- 
 ment. 
 
 230 
 
Face to Face 
 
 THE bitter outcry of Carlyle, " If 
 God would only speak again in 
 these days as he has spoken in other 
 days ! " has risen many times from many 
 hearts. God spoke to Abraham, to 
 Moses, to Elijah, to Paul, to Augustine, 
 to John Knox; why has he become silent 
 when the world so sorely needs guidance 
 and heartening? " If God would only 
 speak! " is the passionate cry of many 
 an overburdened man and woman at the 
 very moment when God is speaking. It 
 is so much easier to hear the still, small 
 voice in a past the tumult and turmoil of 
 which have died Into silence, than to hear 
 that voice in the uproar of the present; 
 to see the divine guidance when the long 
 path lies clear in history as an upland road 
 on a keen November morning, than to see 
 it as it unfolds step by step at our feet! 
 Moreover, God uses many languages, 
 231 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 and continually approaches new genera- 
 tions of men in view forms of speech; so 
 that each generation must master a new 
 tongue if it would understand the divine 
 message. Sometimes it is a sound like a 
 voice out of heaven, sometimes a vision 
 of an angel in the night, sometimes a 
 dream of a ladder reaching to the skies, 
 sometimes the burning of a bush which is 
 not consumed, sometimes the roar of 
 overwhelming waves and thundering 
 heavens, sometimes a breath of consum- 
 ing wrath, and sometimes a great peace. 
 In a thousand ways God speaks to men in 
 an intercourse and fellowship which is 
 never broken for an instant; in the circle 
 of which all men are included, whether 
 prophets, poets, kings, and saints, or fish- 
 ermen and outcasts; which includes the 
 good and the bad in the same infinite 
 compassion and love. 
 
 For God speaks as distinctly and 
 directly to the man in his sins as in his 
 holiest moments; and exposure, punish- 
 ment, and shame are as much and as 
 233 
 
Face to Face 
 
 truly evidences of his presence as honor 
 and influence and the happiest rewards 
 of the pure life. When sins are uncov- 
 ered and men brought to judgment, God's 
 voice is heard as distinctly as when the 
 same voice said, above the waters of 
 baptism, " This is my beloved Son." 
 When exposure and disgrace overtake 
 men of position and reputation, God's 
 voice says, "These are my children; I 
 will not suffer them to sink to the lowest 
 pit; they shall be saved as by fire." It is 
 the infinite tenderness no less than the 
 infinite justice that overtakes men who 
 have lost the way and are selling their 
 souls in the desert of greed and ambition 
 and love of power. Happy is the man 
 whose evil deed comes to the light and 
 confronts him on the highway before he 
 has gone over the final precipice into the 
 pit; and happy is the community when 
 its moral diseases reveal themselves; for 
 it Is better to be outwardly loathsome 
 for a time than to be inwardly vile and 
 no physician the wiser ! God Is speak- 
 233 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 ing in these recent years In no uncer- 
 tain sound, and herein, rather than any 
 prosperity of lands or factories or ships, 
 lies the good fortune of our time. 
 Through the deafening noise of ma- 
 chinery and trade and pleasure come once 
 more those divine tones which, whether 
 in righteous Indignation or in yearning 
 tenderness, are the precious evidence of 
 the sonship of man and the fatherhood 
 of God. The happy hour for the prodi- 
 gal was not that which found feasting 
 with his fellows, crowned with flowers 
 and lying In the arms of pleasure; but 
 that which came to him when he herded 
 with the swine, and his father's voice 
 suddenly called him from the far country 
 home. 
 
 234 
 
The Last Vigil 
 
 A WELL-KNOWN bas-relief repre- 
 sents an old man and woman re- 
 plenishing a torch. In the stir and ex- 
 hilaration of the lighting of the torches, 
 in the joy of bearing them swiftly 
 through the gloom, or watching them 
 as they shine in the mist which lies on 
 the highway of life, there is danger of 
 forgetting those who have run the race 
 and now, in weariness and often in 
 great loneliness, are silently waiting the 
 sinking of the fire of the torch. They 
 are out of sight and sometimes out of 
 mind; for there is always an eager in- 
 terest at the starting-point and an en- 
 grossing absorption in the running when 
 the day is at its height; and there were 
 once for these keepers of lonely vigils 
 shouts of praise, and there were later 
 the pain and strain of the race in its hard- 
 est stretches. For those whose faces are 
 a35 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 aglow with the earliest joy of the run- 
 ning, or are set with the stern resolution 
 of those who have forgotten the applause 
 and care now only to touch the goal, 
 there wait the same quiet vigil, the same 
 lonely watching of the sinking fire. 
 
 Tenderness and devotion to those who 
 no longer press along the course are due 
 not to age as a matter of time — the years 
 mean nothing unless they bear the har- 
 vests of true living and store the 
 granaries of experience — but to the race 
 well run, the work well done, the pain 
 and strife and sorrow bravely borne, the 
 allotted task finished in faith and purity 
 and loyalty. Blessed are they from 
 whose hands the torch has not fallen 
 nor the light failed in the long trial of 
 will and heart and nerve ! They have 
 not only made the highway easier for 
 those who come after, but they kept faith 
 and hope in the nobility of the race and 
 nourished the flame for those who are 
 waiting to leave the starting-post or are 
 questioning, in the bitterness of the long 
 236 
 
The Last Vigil 
 
 trial of strength, whether the race is 
 worth running. 
 
 Youth for dreams, maturity for put- 
 ting forth the spirit in the endeavor to 
 reahze them, age for the confirmation of 
 the hope of their reality! In all the 
 world there is nothing so beautiful as the 
 figure of the spent and weary runner 
 guarding with reverent and trembling 
 hands the torch received long ago and 
 borne with quiet faithfulness through the 
 joy and the pain of the years. In the 
 confusion of life, when men dash their 
 torches to the ground and rush about in 
 a frenzy of passion or a chllHng stoicism 
 or with denials of the noblHty and reality 
 of the race and the meaning of it on their 
 lips, the faithful runners not only keep 
 their own faith but the faith of others; 
 peace and joy are in their guardianship, 
 and they bear the common wealth of 
 humanity in their hands and hearts. So 
 One ran centuries ago and was derided 
 and scorned and buffeted, and the light 
 he bore was dashed to the ground; but 
 237 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 in the agony of death he held it aloft, 
 and, behold! the ends of the earth are 
 lighted by it ! 
 
 But when the race is over and the 
 throngs have passed and the runner 
 watches the sinking flame of the torch 
 in solitude, there often comes a great 
 loneliness. The other runners, whose 
 feet once trod the same way and whose 
 voices were friendly In the darkest gloom, 
 have vanished Into the great silence; 
 the younger runners belong to other times 
 and have other companions even when 
 they are most tender and reverential; It 
 Is another world than that In which the 
 torch was lighted, and there are no more 
 voices that share and speak from the 
 same depth of experience. 
 
 In the loneliest hour, however, the 
 torch remains, and from the torch 
 streams the light, however faint, In which 
 the past the present, and the future are 
 held secure against the environing dark- 
 ness. It Is the witness of memory; In 
 its radiance dear faces, now vanished in 
 238 
 
The Last Vigil 
 
 the morning Hght, shine as when the glow 
 of youth was upon them; hours of happi- 
 ness, moments by the way that were full 
 of anguish and are now fragrant with the 
 sweetness that comes out of sorrow borne 
 with patient trust; years of brave en- 
 deavor and quiet fidelity to tasks and 
 works; the peace which flows from serv- 
 ice and the joy of remembered sacrifices 
 all these hve within the circle of the 
 flame. 
 
 There, too, faint but clear, present 
 hope and task and reward abide; will- 
 ingness to wait as well as to run, to be 
 put aside as well as to be set at the front, 
 to cheer the passing runner as well as to 
 be cheered, to keep old loyalties fresh 
 and sweet and old love young and pure 
 in the daily renewal of memory, to stand 
 fast as the shadows gather and to guard 
 the sinking fire as loyally as one fed the 
 rising flame. 
 
 So the soft light of memory and the 
 narrowing glow within which duty re- 
 veals itself become the symbol of immor- 
 239 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 tality. The darkness deepens, the world 
 grows still, familiar sounds die into 
 silence, upon the watcher falls the sense 
 of isolation of those who wake while 
 others sleep; and, lo ! while the vigil is 
 kept the gloom is shot with light, for at 
 the closed window the light waits, and 
 over the hills come the dawn. The vigil 
 is at an end, and in the radiance of the 
 morning the torch is extinguished. 
 
 240 
 
Light on the Way 
 
 THE New Year finds men and women 
 everywhere patiently or impatiently 
 bearing heavy burdens and facing great 
 uncertainties of fortune. It finds many 
 more who are either accepting or rebel- 
 ling against limitations of situation and 
 conditions; it finds everywhere the pres- 
 ence of those austere teachers — care, 
 grief, and the necessity for work. These 
 great teachers, to whom all the race has 
 gone to school since the beginning of 
 time, wear veils over their faces; but so 
 imperative are they, so inexorable and of 
 such commanding attitude, that most men 
 have come to think of them as task- 
 masters rather than friends; as those who 
 drive and scourge and command, rather 
 than those who are seeking the best, and 
 who, in the final unveiling, will reveal 
 the faces of the truest because the most 
 stimulating friends; for, as Emerson said 
 241 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 with characteristic insight, " Our friends 
 are those who make us do what we can." 
 They serve us best who do not flatter, 
 but who make us aware of our real con- 
 dition, whose influence is to make us dis- 
 satisfied rather than satisfied with our- 
 selves, and who will not suffer us to fall 
 short of the highest of which we are ca- 
 pable. It is this divine element in the 
 education of men. In all the great rela- 
 tions of life and under all Its conditions, 
 that makes living so diflicult; for the 
 greatness of the art or the knowledge of 
 which one Is trying to secure command 
 is always measured by the severity of 
 the education, and the final destiny of 
 all who strive and bear and climb is evi- 
 denced by the severity of their training. 
 The man who has to do an easy bit of 
 mechanical work learns to do it In a 
 week, but Michaelangelo, Dante, and 
 Beethoven must serve long years of ap- 
 prenticeship before the final skill comes. 
 The shaping of a soul requires proc- 
 esses more prolonged, methods more se- 
 242 
 
Light on the Way 
 
 vere, tools at once more delicate and 
 finely tempered than the shaping of the 
 most exquisite or the most glorious piece 
 of art ever made by the hands of men. 
 The highest reach of art is the full ex- 
 pression of some experience, emotion, 
 hope, or thought of the human soul; the 
 highest that an artist can attain is to con- 
 vey, by a few symbols, some sense of 
 what is going on in the life of a human 
 spirit. To shape this spirit, to give it 
 its direction, to mold it to its highest uses, 
 to bring it to mastery and power and free- 
 dom, is, therefore, a far more difficult 
 matter than the training of an artist, how- 
 ever great, or the unfolding of any art, 
 however glorious. This is what the 
 school of life achieves; and because its 
 tasks are heavy, Its text-books difficult to 
 master, its discipline severe sometimes to 
 the point of agony, they who bear and 
 learn and grow may take from the very 
 severity of their training the promise and 
 the expectation of a development which 
 in its range, its resources, and the influ- 
 243 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 ences of beauty and of peace which it will 
 command, travels far beyond the vision 
 of the most audacious hope. 
 
 I 
 
 244 
 
The Loneliness of Life 
 
 THE experience of one man or 
 woman is always the experience of 
 many men and women. In the times 
 when the sense of loneliness and isola- 
 tion is sharpest and hardest to bear we 
 are surrounded by those who are shar- 
 ing the same loneliness and solitude. We 
 cannot speak to one another of experi- 
 ences which are shaking our spirits as a 
 tree is shaken by the tempest, but when the 
 silence is most Impenetrable we are shar- 
 ing the deep things of life. If it were 
 not so, life would be mere " sound and 
 fury, signifying nothing,'^ and individu- 
 ality would be the evidence of a broken 
 and dismembered humanity instead of the 
 realization of the vastness of life as it 
 touches the human spirit. 
 
 We are separated, not by differences of 
 trial and sorrow, but by our inability to 
 interpret trial and sorrow to ourselves. 
 245 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 What we clearly understand we can ex- 
 press to others; but while we are strug- 
 gling to understand we are silent, as chil- 
 dren are silent in the presence of things 
 which are real to them but which they 
 cannot understand. The child most ten- 
 derly loved and wisely cared for in mind 
 as well as in body is often pathetically 
 lonely, not because others fail to under- 
 stand him, but because he cannot under- 
 stand himself. In a world full of real 
 things and tangible happenings he is sur- 
 rounded by mysteries and haunted by 
 the sense of unseen things. The fairies, 
 giants, witches, and strange creatures 
 with whom children have always lived in 
 the half-light of childhood are creations, 
 not of their fears, but of their sense 
 of things hidden from them. To those 
 who love them most tenderly and are 
 most eager to understand and help, they 
 cannot speak of these things because 
 they are baffled by the mystery of it 
 all. The mother who sings to her child 
 the wonderful song of her tender and 
 246 
 
The Loneliness of Life 
 
 passionate love holds a little stranger 
 In arms. 
 
 We are kept apart not by differences 
 of experience; we are all sharing the 
 same life; It has many aspects and pre- 
 sents Itself In many forms, but It is made 
 up of a few deep, searching, fundamental 
 experiences. Sorrow comes by many 
 paths and wears many guises, but when 
 It walks with us It Is not as one sent to 
 us alone among all the sons of men; it 
 is the companion of all who live. Death 
 has many ways of approach and Is called 
 by many names, but when his hand falls 
 on us it Is the hand which has summoned 
 all who have gone before us and will 
 summon all who come after us. 
 
 In the later childhood which we call 
 maturity, although It has gone only a lit- 
 tle further In the education which we call 
 life, there Is the same sense of environ- 
 ing mystery, the same consciousness of 
 " moving about in worlds not realized." 
 We are only children of a larger growth, 
 and the reticence of childhood is upon us 
 247 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 when we pass through the lonely places 
 and wonder whither we are being led, 
 or sit In desolation and cannot understand 
 why the world, grown dear and familiar, 
 has fallen in ruins about us. 
 
 The loneliness of life comes from Its 
 vastness; we are Immortal in a world that 
 perishes about us; we are stirred by the 
 sense of greatness in our souls and weak- 
 ness In our bodies; we reach out to In- 
 finity In our desires and our hands fall 
 empty at our sides; we crave Imperisha- 
 ble love now and here, and death robs 
 us while we stand guard against him; we 
 are all learning the lessons of life, but 
 not In classes; each learns according to 
 the laws of his individuality, through his 
 own temperament. 
 
 The end Is common, the paths are Indi- 
 vidual. Sometimes these paths run par- 
 allel for a time; often they run far apart. 
 Sometimes we can talk by the way; often 
 there Is no speech between us because the 
 voice cannot carry across the distance that 
 separates us. 
 
 248 
 
The Loneliness of Life 
 
 But below all things that keep us apart 
 there is a fundamental unity which pre- 
 pares us for perfect companionship; as in 
 a thousand schools, pursuing a thousand 
 courses, we are receiving an education 
 which liberates us for the freedom in 
 which we shall possess ourselves and in 
 possessing ourselves possess one another. 
 ( The loneliness of Christ came from his 
 perfect knowledge of men and their igno- 
 rance of him. He had reached the goal, 
 and they were so far from it that they 
 saw it only as in rare moments they 
 caught far and faint glimpses of it in 
 his stainless and radiant life. He could 
 speak to them only in parables which they 
 but dimly understood, as children • get 
 baffling glimpses of great truths which 
 cannot be made plain to them; this made 
 his life a Gethsemane. His joy lay in 
 the knowledge that the disciples were 
 traveling his way and that the knowledge 
 that would reveal him to them was com- 
 ing day by day. The light came slowly 
 to them as It comes to us, and there were 
 249 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 many false dawns ; but the day will break 
 in which we shall look Into his face and 
 into the faces of one another and under- 
 stand. 
 
 aso 
 
The Credibility of Love 
 
 ^' /\ LL the world loves a lover" not 
 xJl only because he recalls a brief 
 ecstasy in the memory of the multitude 
 who are living in the light of common 
 day, but because he rounds out to its full 
 dimensions the passional and romantic 
 capacity of the race. For a host of men 
 and women life is a tracery, gradually be- 
 coming obliterated, of generous passions 
 and great hopes; a fading of the sky of 
 dawn into the dull arch of a gray noon. 
 It Is not the blackness In life that brings 
 weariness and repulsion, It Is the monot- 
 onous grayness; it Is not radical skep- 
 ticism that blights faith and takes the 
 bloom off the days — It is indifference, 
 disillusion, cynicism. The root of these 
 destructive forces which rob life of Its 
 romance, Its wonder. Its perennial fresh- 
 ness of Interest, Is in the man, not In the 
 order of things; and society has always 
 251 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 been full of those who, losing the mind 
 and heart of childhood, have not real- 
 ized the aging of their spirits and have 
 thought the world grown old. Now the 
 lover, wiser than the children of the 
 world, carries the fresh heart and keeps 
 his vision securely among the blind. 
 
 " Great men are the true men," writes 
 Amiel, " the men in whom nature has 
 succeeded. They are not extraordinary, 
 they are in true order. It is the other 
 species of men who are not what they 
 ought to be." The story of the rise of 
 men from the stone age has been a long 
 record of discovery — the continual find- 
 ing of unsuspected wealth and of unused 
 forces In earth and air; and It Is quite 
 certain that there are hidden from us 
 to-day, within our reach or the reach of 
 our children, a thousand uses of the 
 chemistry of the soil and air, of which 
 the marvelous divinations of the last two 
 decades have been only dimly prophetic. 
 If this inexhaustible treasury of uses and 
 adaptations, of force and material, were 
 252 
 
The Credibility of Love 
 
 not matched by a kindred capacity in men, 
 there would have been no history of 
 science, and the world would present the 
 ignoble paradox of an incalculable for- 
 tune in the keeping of an Imbecile. That 
 treasury never opens save at the touch 
 of intelligence, and the rarest things it 
 guards are accessible only to the insight 
 of genius, so that the story of discovery 
 is the story of the discoverer; his growth 
 has been registered in the uncovering of 
 the secrets of the world in which he lives. 
 From the beginning he has been slowly 
 or rapidly bringing out of the depths of 
 his nature great and heroic qualities; he 
 has, with Infinite labor, made a place for 
 himself not only with the work but among 
 the thoughts of God. And he Is still 
 in an early stage of his growth; despite 
 the forebodings of the faint-hearted or 
 the near-sighted, despite the apprehen- 
 sions of those who do not recognize the 
 multiplying signs that we are In a grow- 
 ing, not In a completed, universe, the fu- 
 ture holds more spiritual and subtle gift§ 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 in its hands, and men are unfolding more 
 and more the capacity to receive and use 
 these higher things. In the face of a 
 thousand discouraging outbreaks and 
 downfalls, men are rising in the scale of 
 spiritual living, and there are before the 
 race almost unsuspected possibilities of 
 greatness. 
 
 The unimaginative suspect the reality 
 of the conclusions of the man of insight, 
 and In every age the Cassandras who 
 have foreseen the approach of fate have 
 been rejected and scorned; but the man 
 of Imagination Is the only man who really 
 sees the world or knows what It holds for 
 men. Greatness has so far been incredi- 
 ble to small men, and from time to time 
 futile attempts are made to explain genius 
 as a form of disease; as if the early 
 stages of growth could be wholesome, 
 and the supreme stage, the final decisive 
 planting of the feet on the summit, ab- 
 normal! It is In greatness, not in little- 
 ness, that nature touches the goal of her 
 endeavor; and great spirits are neither 
 254 
 
The Credibility of Love 
 
 abnormal nor diseased; " they are in true 
 order." This does not involve a new 
 kind of men in the world; it involves a 
 higher development of the men now In 
 possession of the world. It may be sus- 
 pected that a vast amount of what ap- 
 pears to be mediocrity is in reality unde- 
 veloped intelligence and power, and that 
 society needs not so much a wider posses- 
 sion of intellect as a higher energizing of 
 the intellect It Is very inadequately using. 
 In like manner there are immense re- 
 serves of passion, devotion, chivalry, still 
 to be drawn on; the world is full of men 
 who might be great lovers if they knew 
 that love is an art as well as an ecstasy. 
 There are as many undeveloped resources 
 of love In the hearts of men as there are 
 undeveloped forces and qualities In the 
 world about and the soul within us. Un- 
 der the pressure of the tyranny of things, 
 in a critical age which distrusts the re- 
 ality of great spiritual superiorities and 
 is afraid of great passions, those who 
 might reap the uttermost harvests of love 
 255 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 are content with a few sheaves ; they look 
 at the glow in the sky of youth as a pa- 
 thetic promise of a day which never 
 dawned. The ecstasies reported by the 
 great lovers they regard as the poetic 
 or symbolic expressions of imaginative 
 men. To the literal-minded such an ex- 
 perience as that recorded in the '' Vita 
 Nuova " has no roots in reality; it is 
 an elaborate and somewhat morbid fic- 
 tion of a great poet. There are many 
 who accept the authenticity of Romeo's 
 consuming passion but reject utterly the 
 sustained passion transmuted into a great 
 idealism which has its classic examples 
 in Beatrice and Laura. In the preoccu- 
 pation of pressing affairs, the absorption 
 of vitality in dealing with things, the im- 
 agination Is undeveloped and becomes 
 atrophied, and the stunted spirit grows 
 skeptical of the reality and uses of po- 
 etry; and in like manner the failure to 
 unfold the power of love by the practice 
 of the art of loving makes the maimed 
 spirit incredulous of the ecstasies and 
 256 
 
The Credibility of Love 
 
 adoration of those who are possessed by 
 the genius of passion. Mercutio makes 
 sport of Romeo's intensity of emotion be- 
 cause the great passion has not touched 
 him; let the faintest breath rest on that 
 gallant nature and the scorn of a world 
 would not count a feather's weight 
 against its splendid devotion. To be- 
 lieve in great thoughts and deeds a man 
 must share In them; to believe In a great 
 passion a man must experience It; for to 
 every man come the things which belong 
 to him by reason of his alms, loves, faith. 
 To the commonplace the commonplace Is 
 always present; to those who have vision 
 as well as sight the world grows more 
 wonderful the further they penetrate Its 
 mysteries. To the nature that has never 
 known a great passion passing on Into 
 a secure and noble devotion the annals 
 of love belong to the literature of fiction; 
 to those who know what love may become 
 in the hearts of the pure and the lives 
 set apart to Its service, they are faint 
 transcriptions of an experience that lies 
 257 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 for the most part beyond the bounds of 
 speech. 
 
 There is a greatness in love as in mind, 
 a superiority which reveals without ex- 
 plaining itself, a genius which is as real 
 as it is inexplicable. The skepticism of 
 those upon whom this divine grace has 
 never rested, the cynicism of those who 
 have lost the power of love through in- 
 fidelities to its nature and laws, the in- 
 difference of those who work with their 
 hands and are content never to look at 
 the sky over their heads, count as little 
 as do the blind man's doubt of the reality 
 of painting, the deaf man's skepticism 
 of the spell of music, the bad man's de- 
 nial of virtue. In the art of love, as in 
 all things, life is full of the pathos of the 
 searching saying that " unto every one 
 that hath shall be given, and he shall have 
 abundance; but from him that hath not 
 shall be taken away even that which he 
 hath." 
 
 258 
 
The Easter Vision 
 
 SIGHT he had, but not vision. The 
 things about him stood out with the 
 utmost distinctness; every line was 
 sharply defined, every feature and shape 
 distinctly limned. So accustomed was he 
 to entire accuracy of perception, to per- 
 fect exactness of knowledge, that he was 
 impatient of any blur in another's sight, 
 any uncertainty in another's report or ac- 
 count of things. Confidence in his own 
 judgment had become second nature with 
 him; he acted as one who could make no 
 mistakes. And this was the impression 
 others received from him. All men 
 spoke of his clearness of judgment; of 
 the vigor and decision of his nature; of 
 the weight and authority of his character. 
 He was, in a word, the master of his 
 world. 
 
 But it was significant that, while men 
 went to him for advice in all practical 
 matters, no man ever sought his counsel 
 259 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 In any moral confusion or uncertainty; 
 no man struggling to his feet from the 
 mire in which he had sHpped ever turned 
 to him for help; no man compassed about 
 with sorrow and in the presence of the 
 supreme experiences of life ever so much 
 as thought of him. Exact, trustworthy, 
 keen, truthful, the man of clear sight 
 touched his fellows only in the world of 
 things; when the fortunes of the soul 
 were in the balance, he neither saw nor 
 felt nor understood. 
 
 To him all these intangible interests 
 were as if they were not. He managed 
 his acres with perfect judgment, but he 
 could not see the landscape which en- 
 veloped them; he saw the little section 
 of world in which he worked, but the 
 universe was Invisible to him. In his 
 sight men were born, grew Into child- 
 hood and youth, passed on Into manhood, 
 did their work, died and vanished from 
 sight, and that was the end. He saw 
 the outlines of their character with mar- 
 velous clearness; he knew where they 
 260 
 
The Easter Vision 
 
 were efficient and where they were weak; 
 he judged with exactness of their value 
 for practical service; but of their inner 
 experience, of their spiritual struggles, of 
 the forces and conflicts which give char- 
 acter its quality and life its meaning, he 
 knew nothing. He was a master of the 
 knowledge of things, but no ray of that 
 wisdom which gives a man understanding 
 of life ever penetrated the central dark- 
 ness of his mind. He had sight, but he 
 was without vision. 
 
 Now, all the wealth of this man's na- 
 ture was lavished on one whom he loved 
 not blindly but instinctively — with the 
 passion of the heart which gropes after 
 those things that It needs without know- 
 ing that it needs them. In this woman's 
 eyes the man who loved her saw, without 
 seeing, the reflection of that heaven which 
 was beyond his sight; and in her nature 
 he felt, without understanding, the play 
 and stir of those spiritual impulses and 
 forces which slowly fashion In a mortal 
 frame an immortal spirit; and In her life 
 261 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 he was aware of a wealth of tenderness, 
 of devotion, of self-surrender, which he 
 could neither measure nor compute. And| 
 she became as his own soul, for she wasi; 
 vision to him, and In her the mystery and 
 blessedness of life was present though 
 never revealed. 
 
 This woman died, and the man's heart i 
 broke within him, and the world of sight 
 lay in ruins about him; for he saw noth-, 
 ing save the beautiful garment which the : 
 spirit had laid aside; and that, too, wasi 
 put out of his sight. He was in a prison j 
 of hopeless misery; and many tried to' 
 speak to him, but he could not under- 1 
 stand them for the thickness of the walls 
 which surrounded him; and many strove; 
 to release him, but he could not be freed, \ 
 for he had locked the great doors from \ 
 within. 
 
 In the darkness the man no longer saw i 
 the old familiar things, and became as,; 
 one blind; groping for the accustomed • 
 places of rest and finding them not, for 
 the sweet ways and usages of love and; 
 262 
 
The Easter Vision 
 
 missing them. His outstretched hands 
 touched nothing, and his passionate long- 
 ings returned upon themselves and turned 
 to deepest pain; and in his solitude and 
 desolation nothing abode with him save 
 memory. 
 
 For a time he was as one dead, but one 
 dear memory kept companionship with 
 him; and In the silence and darkness one 
 image was always In his thought. As 
 the days went by, that Image seemed to 
 fill his soul, and grew more real, and 
 touched the hidden springs of life within 
 him, and his heart grew tender under the 
 spell of the great love with which he lived 
 alone in a night in which the earth seemed 
 to have vanished. 
 
 As his love deepened, a glimmer of 
 hope began to suffuse the night, like a 
 faint radiance from a light beyond the 
 horizon, and delicate tendrils began to 
 climb out of his heart to.ward that light; 
 and there came a breath of something 
 surpassingly sweet, like a fragrance from 
 invisible gardens. 
 
 263 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 And the spirit of the man softened and 
 stirred, and he lifted his face, and the; 
 dim outhnes of a new world slowly dis-1 
 closed themselves. As he looked with 
 wonder and awe and the yearning of a 
 child stretching out Its hands toward thej 
 light, this world became more distinct,^ 
 and spread around him a beauty such asj 
 he had never so much as dreamed of^ 
 before. There were familiar objects In; 
 that world, but they were no longer hard! 
 and rigid ; the outlines were lost in vaster, 
 designs and were tender with new andj 
 deeper meaning; the familiar acres were! 
 folded in a vaster landscape, whose far^ 
 horizons seemed to recede into luminous^ 
 distances suffused with a light that^ 
 streamed from the heart of things, andi 
 enveloped them in a splendor and beauty 
 which broke out of them like a mighty 
 flood of life. 
 
 The man went abroad once more with | 
 
 the heart of a child, and looked up to thei 
 
 heavens that had grown Infinitely tender! 
 
 and benignant, and across the landscape; 
 
 264 I 
 
The Easter Vision 
 
 that glowed and bloomed about his feet; 
 for love had unsealed his eyes, and the 
 power of sight had passed on into vision. 
 And as he walked he was not alone, for 
 one walked beside him whose presence 
 was peace and whose companionship 
 brought faith and trust and rest. The 
 perishing world which he had once seen 
 had widened to become the imperishable 
 world which love builded in the far 
 beginning, and which love enriches and 
 enlarges and makes more beautiful with 
 the coming of every soul that enters into 
 it through the gates of birth and of death, 
 for both are the gates of life. 
 
 And as he looked, behold, the places 
 where the dead lay were blossoming 
 fields ; for in all the reach and being of the 
 universe there was no death. Through 
 all things streamed the mighty tides of 
 life, and in the range of his vision the 
 barren places broke into bloom, and far 
 as his eager spirit traveled there were the 
 stirrings and strivings of tender and deli- 
 cate and mysterious things growing in 
 265 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 strength and beauty. And there was no 
 more night ; for in the darkness, as in the 
 hght, infinite love watched and waited 
 and cherished all things in its immortal 
 hands; and nothing was forgotten or lost. 
 And he saw the universe traversed by a 
 countless host to whom sight had become 
 vision; full of the repose of a great free- 
 dom and the deep joy of perfect strength- 
 fitted to imperishable ends. And in that 
 multitude he became aware of those who 
 had laid aside all care and sorrow and 
 entered into the fullness of life; and one 
 moved near him — no longer a memory, 
 but a visible presence — who had van- 
 ished in the darkness of his great sorrow; 
 who had gone out of his sight to live 
 henceforth stainless, radiant, and Immor- 
 tal In his vision; no longer hidden behind 
 the veil which she had worn In the days 
 before the revelation, but shining without 
 blur or dimness or shadow upon the 
 beauty of her unclouded spirit. And 
 after all the years of his love he knew 
 266 
 
The Easter Vision 
 
 that for the first time he saw her as she 
 was. 
 
 And the air was soft about him, and 
 the fragrance of the early flowers was 
 borne to him; and Hke a far music he 
 heard the bells of Easter ringing above 
 the churchyard. 
 
 S67 
 
The Plus Sign 
 
 THE preacher stood at the front of 
 the chancel without book or note — 
 a tall, vigorous figure with a strongly 
 molded face. Through the open win- 
 dows of the little rustic church came the 
 breath of the sea and the sweetness of the 
 pines. The day was fair and still, and 
 the sunshine, falling on the white birches, 
 was like the purity of heaven. Un- 
 troubled peace filled the wide sweep of 
 sky and enfolded the worshipers. There 
 was no faintest echo of far-off guns, no 
 hint in earth or air of unparalleled tem- 
 pest engulfing half the world; there was 
 the silence of a world asleep and radiant 
 with the bloom of midsummer. 
 
 But there was not an ear in which the 
 thunder of battle was not heard, not a 
 heart which was not heavy with a sense of 
 unspeakable grief; the worshipers had 
 entered into the experience of Gethsem- 
 268 
 
The Plus Sign 
 
 ane and were bearing, each in the meas- 
 ure of his capability, the sorrows of the 
 world. The sea was half veiled by a 
 mist that seemed an exhalation of light 
 drifting in and out; but beyond, darkness 
 rested on the face of the waters and 
 blackness of thick darkness lay like a pall 
 over the hopes and aspirations of men. 
 The earth that had seemed to be rolling 
 slowly heavenward had slipped back to 
 hell; when the day seemed to be at hand, 
 night had come sweeping back; how 
 could the world regain the beauty that 
 had been ravished, the strength that had 
 been poured out like water, the lost treas- 
 ures of faith and hope that had been pain- 
 fully gathered in the long ascent of the 
 race out of savagery? The waste of it 
 all was intolerable, incredible, blasting to 
 faith, and the preacher, facing the worst 
 and sounding the deeps of sorrow, held 
 the cross aloft, as St. Paul had held it, as 
 the glory of life. It was not the supreme 
 tragedy of life, but the supreme unveil- 
 ing of the heart of God. The Mountain 
 269 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 of the Beatitudes was beautiful with 
 promises of peace and purity, but it was a 
 foothill on the way to the Mountain of 
 the Cross. The sorrow of life, ex- 
 pressed In the cross, Is not a black shadow 
 on a lovely landscape; It brings out the 
 beauty of that landscape and gives mass 
 and power and terrible splendor to Its 
 structure. It Is not a subtraction from 
 the sum of living, but an eternal addition. 
 It strikes a deeper note and reveals 
 a more glorious destiny for men. 
 Through the dreams of ease and comfort 
 and security It lends a sudden vision of 
 things more precious than ease, more to 
 be desired than comfort. Infinitely more to 
 be prized than security. 
 
 The cross, the preacher said, put a halo 
 about courage and gave courage Its spirit- 
 ual meaning. It showed how transcend- 
 ent are spiritual and Invisible things. 
 Men have died by the million during the 
 past year; not grudgingly and unwillingly, 
 but gladly; they have met death, not with 
 shrinking, but with a cheer. In this 
 270 
 
The Plus Sign 
 
 country we are so much In love with life, 
 so eager to share its activities and grasp 
 its rewards, that we have forgotten how 
 slight a value life has simply as life, how 
 entirely its dignity and worth come from 
 what is put into and taken out of it. 
 " One crowded hour of glorious life " is 
 worth more than sluggish years. 
 
 Life gets its value from death, for 
 through death the infinite continually 
 breaks in upon the finite and the immortal 
 shines in upon the mortal. For death is 
 not interruption but fulfillment of life, 
 and the cross, the symbol of sacrifice and 
 death, is the supreme discloser of God 
 the Father. In the Old Testament he Is 
 the Almighty; on Calvary he is God the 
 Father Almighty; In the very heart of the 
 storm, In the thickest darkness, in the 
 most heartbreaking tragedy, the love of 
 the Father finds Its hour of supreme 
 revelation; and not the Mountain of the 
 Beatitudes but the Mountain of the Cruci- 
 fixion shines with a light above that of 
 the sun. 
 
 271 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 In the story with which the preacher 
 ended, the French peasant looks back 
 across the little village and sees the great 
 crucifix, from which the Lord had de- 
 scended to talk with him, and as it stands, 
 clearly defined against the evening sky, he 
 suddenly sees that it is the plus sign glo- 
 riously expanded to become the symbol of 
 the vastness and richness of life. 
 
 272 
 
Going Home 
 
 THERE is no picture which touches 
 the hearts of men more closely or 
 tenderly than the figure of the tired man 
 or woman going home at the end of the 
 day. The fierce heat of the sun has 
 passed, the intense high light of midday 
 has softened into a restful glow, the 
 strain of effort is over, and the passion 
 of work has given place to the peace of 
 deserted fields and streets. It was a 
 normal instinct which sent the worker 
 forth, eager and alert, in the morning; 
 it is the response to a deep craving which 
 sends him home at nightfall. The re- 
 ward of labor is the rest which it achieves, 
 and the joy of rest is the sense that it has 
 been earned. 
 
 The alternation of day and night is a 
 symbol of the order of life in which work 
 and rest succeed one another in a beau- 
 tiful and health-giving rhythm. The 
 273 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 worker goes out of himself when he takes 
 up his tools; he returns to himself when 
 he lays them down at the end of the day. 
 He pours out his vitality as the water 
 pours out of a hidden spring; if he is a 
 real worker and not a mere drudge, he 
 gives himself in the toil of his hand and 
 his brain, and when night falls his weari- 
 ness is not mere fatigue of body, it is de- 
 pletion of vitality. Before he can give 
 himself again he must find himself; and 
 when one goes home he finds himself. 
 
 To a vast multitude of men the thought 
 of going home makes the heaviest burdens 
 bearable, the most crushing responsibili- 
 ties a spur to effort, the most complete 
 surrender of ease and pleasure, not a sac- 
 rifice, but a price gladly paid for a happi- 
 ness which Is beyond price. The strain 
 of the day Is forgotten at the door which 
 opens into the peace of perfect under- 
 standing, the pressure of hours and tasks 
 Is relaxed by the sound of a voice which 
 is musical with love and faith and peace. 
 In such a homecoming there is not only 
 274 
 
Going Home 
 
 the supreme reward for the work of the 
 day that is ended; there is also the re- 
 newal of strength and courage for the 
 day that is to bring new strife and toil. 
 
 The joy of going home is not in the 
 ease and comfort that are waiting there; 
 it is in the peace that flows from love, the 
 stillness that follows the tumult of storm, 
 the clear atmosphere in which the dust of 
 the highway is laid and th6 worker sees 
 again the ends for which he is striving; in 
 the quietness of such a home the toil of 
 life is not only sweetened but its spiritual 
 meaning shines clear again after the con- 
 fusion of details has vanished. Under 
 the heat and burden of the day the strong- 
 est man sometimes wonders if life means 
 anything but prolonged strain of muscle 
 and brain; in the stillness of home its 
 blurred ends, its ultimate achievements, 
 shine like the stars above the highway 
 when the dust has been laid. 
 
 The home is not primarily a place for 
 work but for life ; work lies below and be- 
 yond it, but the companionship which 
 275 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 transforms a house into a home is a shar- 
 ing of the rewards of work: freedom, 
 repose, refreshment, vision. There are 
 houses full of conveniences and luxuries 
 in which no one Is at home; the men and 
 women who live In them are homeless. 
 To such men and women, as to the men 
 and women to whom marriage Is a mere 
 social contract and the family a mere so- 
 cial arrangement, there is no going home, 
 no refuge for the spirit, no place of un- 
 derstanding and vision. There are no 
 more pathetic figures in the world of to- 
 day than these homeless men and women; 
 restless, discontented, and unhappy, and 
 utterly blind to the tragedy of a life In 
 which there is no going home. 
 
 276 
 
The Mystery of Heaven 
 
 THE Imagination cannot go far ahead 
 of experience; It can travel simply 
 along routes only faintly marked by ad- 
 venturous explorers, but It always needs 
 a starting-point, and It cannot project 
 paths Into wholly unknown regions. The 
 word " unimaginable " suggests the limit- 
 ation of the creative, pictorial faculty 
 which has made progress possible and Is 
 the open door through which, as Dr. 
 Bushnell said, God finds access to men. 
 It Is significant that all attempts to de- 
 scribe Heaven end In a luminous vague- 
 ness, while Hell and Purgatory have been 
 not only suggested but pictured with 
 terrifying and convincing power. Dante 
 walks the awful paths of Hell with com- 
 manding authority; he not only sees and 
 understands, but he describes and In- 
 terprets, the world of punishment with 
 compelling power. And In the world of 
 277 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 purification, though less dramatic and 
 realistic, he is not less at home; he knows 
 whence flow the tears of Purgatory. But 
 when the gates of Paradise open to his 
 unaccustomed feet, the sight is too daz- 
 zling; he cannot see for the unfamiliar 
 brightness; he speaks as one in a half-re- 
 membered dream. His vision has trav- 
 eled far beyond his experience. Sin he 
 knows, and remorse and pain and tears 
 he understands, but he cannot grasp the 
 bliss of Heaven; he walks with faltering 
 step in " worlds not realized." 
 
 The Milton of " Paradise Lost " Is a 
 greater poet than the Milton of " Para- 
 dise Regained "; and the Bible, the most 
 concrete and definite of books In dealing 
 with the deep things of God and with the 
 mysteries of man's life. In the Infrequent 
 references to Heaven takes refuge In a 
 symbolism which the Western reader 
 often mistakes for pictorial Imagery, and 
 Is rather hindered than helped by what he 
 reads. In literature the great sinner Is 
 far more powerfully drawn than the great 
 278 
 
The Mystery of Heaven 
 
 saint, and the most pathetic and appealing 
 figures In the drama and In fiction are the 
 men and women who, by breaking the 
 law, have set In motion the tremendous 
 tragic forces. The great artist finds his 
 imagination reinforced and energized by 
 experience when he deals with Satan, 
 with Agamemnon, with Faust, with Rich- 
 ard III; but his skill falters when he tries 
 to paint a Saint John or a Galahad. Sin 
 we know, and all the tragic consequences 
 that follow it in inevitable companion- 
 ship; but the peace which flows from per- 
 fect purity, the radiance that shines, as 
 the old painters saw, from the faces of 
 the sinless, the bliss that waits for those 
 who stand at home in the presence of God 
 like happy children, lie beyond our ex- 
 perience; and, try as we may, we cannot 
 give them form or body. When we try, 
 we become irreverent and take refuge in 
 a kind of sentimental materialism, or the 
 Heaven we picture is a golden cloud on 
 the edge of the horizon or a shining dome 
 hanging unsupported In midair. 
 279 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 The world of punishment and of puri- 
 fication we know, but the world of bliss 
 we not only do not know, but it cannot 
 be revealed to us; that is the reason why 
 the longings of the heart are not met, 
 and the cry of the soul for power to 
 realize the surroundings of those who 
 have gone on into the next stage of life 
 is not answered : we are not told because 
 we could not understand. A description 
 of the heavenly life by one who was in the 
 heart of it would come to us in an un- 
 known tongue; nothing in our experience 
 would Interpret it to us. It does not lie 
 even in the power of the Heavenly Father 
 to make these mysteries plain to us, as it 
 does not lie In our power to make clear to 
 the little children we love the principles 
 of philosophy, the more abstract truths of 
 science, the revelations of ripe Christian 
 experience. 
 
 We can know the direction of the paths 
 which lead us to that highest plane of 
 living which we call Heaven, but we can- 
 not see the paths; we can know the ele- 
 280 
 
The Mystery of Heaven 
 
 ments out of which the heavenly happi- 
 ness is compounded, but we cannot visual- 
 ize the conditions in which that happiness 
 is shared; we can neither give power and 
 shape to the spirits of those who have de- 
 parted, nor dimensions and body to the 
 things which surround them. All the re- 
 ports of these things which credulous peo- 
 ple are asked to believe are crude, ma- 
 terialistic, or so vague that they have only 
 the substance of a dream. 
 
 Heaven is beyond our power of ima- 
 gination, not because it is unreal, but be- 
 cause it is a higher reality not yet grasped 
 by the mind. All life predicts it; punish- 
 ment and purification foretell and affirm 
 it; but it waits on our fuller experience to 
 reveal it. Mr. Beecher has somewhere 
 said that knowledge is given us in this 
 life, not to satisfy intellectual curiosity, 
 but to aid in the development of charac- 
 ter; and Heaven, which rests immovable 
 on character both divine and human, 
 comes at the end of a process not of think- 
 ing but of living; that is what makes it 
 281 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 more real than the things we know, more 
 substantial and enduring than the things 
 we paint and carve and describe. When 
 the scientist begins to experiment with a 
 short circuit of wire, he may dream of 
 the time when messages will travel under 
 great seas along thousands of miles of 
 cable; he cannot foresee the hour when 
 they will fly through the air itself. That 
 vision will come only when he has mas- 
 tered the resources of the wire and his 
 experience has given his imagination a 
 new vantage ground for further flight. 
 
 iS^ 
 
. The Possibility of Great Giving 
 
 THE best gifts are never things; the 
 best gift is always from within and 
 is charged with personality. In the case 
 of those who are able to make great gifts 
 for the highest purposes — for the teach- 
 ing of religion, the discovery of truth, 
 the opening of the doors to education — 
 It Is often true that the spirit behind the 
 gift is more valuable to the community 
 than the gift Itself, and the example far 
 more Influential In the long run than the 
 great sum of money bestowed. The 
 highest service a man can render to his 
 fellows Is some bestowal of himself In 
 sacrifice, work, Influence, Inspiration. 
 Phillips Brooks founded no college and 
 endowed no hospital, but he is to be 
 counted among the greatest givers of his 
 time. Other men poured out wealth lav- 
 ishly for good and great ends and are 
 worthy of all honor for their large- 
 283 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 minded and large-hearted recognition of 
 the mutuahty of all possessions, the com- 
 mon fortune of the race, held in trust by 
 the few for the liberation and education 
 of the many. It was the high privilege 
 of the great preacher to give himself with 
 the prodigality of a man possessed of a 
 vast treasure; to pour himself out year 
 after year on the spirits of confused, way- 
 ward, starving people, to whom he gave a 
 vision beyond the perplexities of the hour, 
 a clear view of the right path and 
 strength to walk in it, the bread which 
 feeds the soul. 
 
 The Great Giver brought no money, 
 clothes, or food with him. No man ever 
 had less at his command of those things 
 of which men usually make gifts; he was, 
 during the wonderful years of his active 
 life, penniless and homeless; but he was 
 incomparably the greatest giver who has 
 appeared among men. No one of all 
 the great benefactors of mankind has 
 approached him in the reach, power, and 
 eternal value of his gifts. The secret of 
 284 
 
The Possibility of Great Giving 
 
 his divine generosity Is told in a sentence : 
 (he was himself a gift! ) It was not the 
 separate and detached gifts he made by 
 the way — the healing, the hearing, the 
 speech, the loaves and fishes — that 
 clothed him with compassion and benefi- 
 cence like a garment from the very hem 
 of which life and peace flowed; it was the 
 complete and perfect bestowal of himself 
 that has begun to fill the world with light 
 and health and love. 
 
 Here is the supreme reward of growth 
 In purity, unselfishness, the wisdom of 
 love: It so greatly enriches the spirit that 
 he who comes to possess these beautiful 
 and divine qualities gains the privileges 
 of a great giver. Many men and women 
 are perfectly sincere in desiring great 
 wealth that they might use It generously 
 for others. But great wealth comes to 
 few, while the Inward enrichment comes 
 to all who invite and hold themselves 
 open to It. Every man may become a 
 great giver if he chooses; for every man 
 may make himself rich In the vision, the 
 285 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 moral strength, the peace of spirit, which 
 are the supreme achievements of life, and 
 the most Inspiring, comforting, enduring 
 things which a man can bestow on his 
 fellows. 
 
 286 
 
The Long View of Life 
 
 A YOUNG man gets a position in a 
 business of some kind, and secures 
 his opportunity, which is all he has a right 
 to ask for. There are two ways in which 
 he can deal with it: He can do his work 
 honestly day by day for his wages at the 
 end of the week, filling up exactly the 
 measure of work assigned to him. This 
 will make him a trustworthy employee, 
 who can be counted on to do conscien- 
 tiously what he Is told to do ; he becomes 
 a good soldier In the army of workers. 
 Or (and this is the turning-point in his 
 career) he can fill the measure to over- 
 flowing, pouring all his Intelligence and 
 energy Into It, without much thought of 
 the amount he Is to be paid. If he 
 chooses this way, he presently gets out of 
 the ranks and becomes a leader, a cap- 
 tain In the army of workers. 
 
 He may be satisfied with doing well 
 
 287 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 what falls to him each day, or he may 
 push on by mastering the details of his 
 business, making himself familiar with 
 every part of it, and fitting himself for 
 steady advancement by keeping ahead of 
 the work required of him. Most men 
 are content with what comes to them, and 
 remain employees; a few make them- 
 selves masters of the secrets, methods, 
 and conditions of their business and be- 
 come employers. A man fixes his place 
 in life by the amount of time and work he 
 is willing to put into preparation for 
 larger tasks and greater responsibilities. 
 
 In this country few young men need to 
 be urged to work harder; for work al- 
 ready fills an immoderate and excessive 
 portion of the time of most Americans. 
 But young men and older men in this 
 country need to be urged to plan their 
 work on longer lines and to do it with 
 greater intelligence. One of the most 
 interesting directions which scientific ex- 
 periment is taking to-day is that of inten- 
 sive farming; this means, not adding acre 
 288 
 
The Long View of Life 
 
 to acre, but doubling and quadrupling the 
 yielding capacity of the acres under culti- 
 vation. And this is supplemented in the 
 business world, especially in the great in- 
 dustries, by the scientific management of 
 business, the end of which is, by more in- 
 telligent methods of work, to reduce the 
 labor and at the same time greatly in- 
 crease production. These two principles 
 every young man ought to study: how, 
 without additional work, he can get more 
 effective work out of himself; how, with- 
 out the expenditure of Increased force, he 
 can make himself more fruitful. 
 
 The vital defect of the young man who 
 plans his work for the day Instead of for 
 the decade is that he works like an arti- 
 san Instead of like an artist; he does what 
 is set before him and obeys orders Instead 
 of looking ahead and making himself an 
 expert. He does not apply Ideas to his 
 work, but pursues it In routine fashion, 
 without individuality of method. The 
 problem which the young man who Is to 
 be successful, not only In the practical 
 289 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 but in the fuller and nobler sense of the 
 term, must face, is to reduce the expendi- 
 ture of physical and nervous strain while 
 increasing his productivity and bringing 
 out of himself the finer fruits which scien- 
 tific methods have developed. There Is 
 an enormous undeveloped force In the 
 human race that some day, by more thor- 
 ough training and more Intelligent use of 
 faculties, will be at the service of human- 
 ity. As we are now drawing energy 
 from the air and the earth to do the work 
 and carry the burdens of humanity, so 
 some day we shall draw from the unused 
 and ill-directed capacity of men a finer 
 and greater eflliclency. The end of life 
 is not to toil like a slave, but to work like 
 a free man, with a vision of what one 
 means to do with one's life, with intelli- 
 gence of method, with concentration of 
 power. 
 
 290 
 
An Easter Thought 
 
 The Light of Life 
 
 THERE is no record of the earliest 
 appearance of the idea of immor- 
 tahty; it is older than the oldest history. 
 For many centuries men have known that 
 death was an illusion — somber, appal- 
 ling, often heartbreaking, but neverthe- 
 less an illusion; not the end of the drama, 
 but the darkening of the stage while the 
 scenes are shifted that another act may 
 begin under a fairer sky in a happier 
 country. In the far-off past, when men 
 were looking at the world for the first 
 time with conscious intelligence, they 
 knew that those who went out of their 
 homes did not go out of existence, but 
 waited, dim and shadowy, on the bound- 
 aries of human life, or haunted invisibly 
 the places they loved, or lingered, melan- 
 choly and hopeless, but still conscious, In 
 worlds as shadowy as themselves. In 
 the beautiful fancy of the Japanese, those 
 291 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 who have vanished from the ways of life 
 come back at times to their old homes, 
 bringing a deep and tender peace with 
 them. To them, as to the Chinese, the 
 worship of ancestors means that the dead 
 have not only not ceased to be, but have 
 gone over to join the greater and freer 
 spirits who live the larger and diviner 
 life. The Greek saw In every return of 
 spring, when the tide of life came flood- 
 ing back, the hint and sign of Immortality, 
 and treasured his great hope behind the 
 veil of the mysteries Into which only the 
 initiated were admitted. Savage and 
 highly developed races have shared alike 
 in the revelation of Immortality, and 
 every race, according to Its Insight and 
 culture, has given form and speech to this 
 sublime Idea. The belief In what the 
 scientists call the persistence of force Is 
 apparently instinctive; men do not con- 
 ceive of an end of the power they feel 
 within themselves until they have become 
 cynical or introspective or critical In their 
 attitude toward life. 
 
 292 
 
An Easter Thought 
 
 The pale figure which haunted the an- 
 tique imagination dimmed the Hght but 
 did not extinguish it; the living knew that 
 those who had parted from them, and 
 whose ashes were piously guarded in 
 memorial urns, could still be reached and 
 affected by the affection and devotion of 
 the living. Antigone, the type of sisterly 
 self-sacrifice, faced death that she might 
 give her brother's shade rest; and 
 Ulysses talked in the underworld with the 
 heroes who fell by his side on the plain of 
 Troy. The morbid and saddened ima- 
 gination of the Middle Ages saw death as 
 a grim and repulsive skeleton, the touch 
 of whose icy hand meant the passing of 
 earthly happiness, the solitary journey of 
 Everyman, the awful loneliness of the 
 descent into the grave, the judgment seat 
 beyond. 
 
 To the freer modern mind, in the , 
 fuller and richer modern life, death is 
 no pale ghost summoning the living to 
 leave the light and warmth of the sun 
 and wander disconsolate along the bound- 
 293 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 aries of being; no grim and ghastly skele- 
 ton coming unbidden to the feast and in 
 the happiest hour summoning the trem- 
 bling spirit to its last accounting. The 
 dim shadow and the terrible destroyer 
 have vanished, and in their place has 
 come the great, benignant, mysterious fig- 
 ure of Mr. Watts's " Love and Death." 
 The passionate defense of Love, wild 
 with grief, cannot hold the door against 
 the irresistible strength of the messenger; 
 but in that great form, towering above 
 the helpless defender, pressing upon the 
 door with a purpose that cannot be 
 stayed, there is no malice, no antagonism; 
 there is a noble dignity as of one come 
 from heaven, the minister of an authority 
 to which all doors must open, and of a 
 wisdom as tender as it is fathomless, by 
 which the immortal spirits of men are 
 forever guarded from harm. " You may 
 kill us," said an early Christian martyr, 
 *' but you cannot harm us." There is 
 often heartrending sorrow in death, for it 
 brings appalling loneliness with it; but 
 294 
 
An Easter Thought 
 
 there is peace, fulfillment, the joy of the 
 perfect life. 
 
 What men in the earliest stages dimly 
 divined, and men of a larger culture 
 hoped for and expressed in noble dreams, 
 Christ brought to light. Death was as 
 much of an illusion before as after his 
 resurrection; but that which was vaguely 
 felt or poetically conceived became, in his 
 triumph over the grave, a historical fact 
 which transformed a little group of weak, 
 vacillating men, who shared the moral 
 blindness of their race, into a company of 
 heroes eager to bear witness in all places 
 and ready to face death in all forms. 
 They hoped and dreamed no more; they 
 knew, and in the certainty of their knowl- 
 edge they spoke as those who had put 
 their fingers into the places where the 
 spear pierced and the nails were driven, 
 who had heard the voice speaking that for 
 three long days was silent, and had seen 
 him walking who was wrapped in grave- 
 clothes and laid in a sepulcher. 
 
 In their early conscious life men felt 
 295 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 that they were not born to die, and that 
 death was not an ending but a changing 
 of the course, because they were dimly 
 conscious of the indestructible force 
 within them. In every later age men 
 have been compelled to make the same 
 great inference to satisfy reason and to 
 appease the heart; for if we are but the 
 dust of the earth become conscious for 
 a time, life and the world are alike in- 
 comprehensible. In these later days a 
 deeper process of thought and a wider 
 observation have affirmed that no force 
 ceases to be. And One has lived who 
 died as all men die and was burled, and 
 came out of the sepulcher not only with 
 the light of life undimmed within him, 
 but so visibly holy and Immortal that they 
 who were most familiar with him feU at 
 his feet and worshiped him. 
 
 The light has come, and the faint stars 
 of early hope and dream have faded from 
 the sky; but mists and shadows still linger 
 about the places where men toil and suf- 
 fer, and many who sit in the darkness 
 296 
 
An Easter Thought 
 
 of closed rooms and silent homes cannot, 
 at the moment, see the brightness of the 
 sky above them. Not until the first long 
 hours of loneliness have passed will they 
 open the windows and doors and look up 
 at the heavens. On every Easter day 
 there is a new group of mourners, for 
 there are newly made graves over the 
 whole earth. To those who cannot hear 
 the notes of joy In the Easter bells for 
 memory of the recent sorrow these tones 
 bring with them, the Christ comes, not 
 with reproach, but with infinite patience 
 and tenderness. He knew not only the 
 victory at the tomb, but also the sadness 
 of Gethsemane; he remembers that 
 human hearts, with all their weakness, 
 have also the power of deathless affec- 
 tion. He knows that while to him the 
 hope of immortality is a massive cause- 
 way glowing with lights spanning the 
 blackness of the river, to us it is a crossing 
 of stepping-stones, of which we see but 
 one at a time as we pass down into the 
 darkness and mystery of the stream which 
 none save he has ever recrossed, 
 297 
 
The Path to God 
 
 THE endeavor to get the results of 
 rehgious hving without going 
 through the processes, to secure posses- 
 sion of the fruits of character without en- 
 during the discipHne, is renewed in every 
 generation; and the long and unbroken 
 history of defeats does not seem to ex- 
 haust the credulity of men and women. 
 We are willing to do everything except 
 work out our salvation. We want a 
 royal road to faith ; are not willing to take 
 the long, quiet path which is open to each 
 one of us. We long for a great and final 
 vision of God. We are eager for a com- 
 plete and permanent settlement of all our 
 doubts. At the beginning of the journey 
 we want the enlargement, liberation, and 
 certainty which can be found only at the 
 end. We forget the significance of the 
 divine commendation, '' Well done, good 
 and faithful servant." We change it to 
 298 
 
The Path to God 
 
 read, "Well thought," or "Well felt, 
 good and faithful servant ! " We want 
 to feel the presence of God. We want 
 to be able to think our way to him in per- 
 fect clearness. We are not willing, hour 
 by hour, day by day, year by year, with 
 Infinite patience, to so enlarge ourselves 
 by work and life that we shall be fitted to 
 stand In his presence and great enough 
 to realize him In our thought. We want 
 strength, but we are not willing to exer- 
 cise; we simply wish to pray for It. We 
 want peace, but we are not ready to set 
 our lives In order. We want trust and 
 that quiet faith which Is the source of 
 joy and happiness, but we are not willing 
 to gain faith in the one way In which it 
 can be gained — by patient continuance 
 in well doing. 
 
 It Is not by thinking or feeling, but by 
 doing — that Is to say, by actual experi- 
 ence — that we get the knowledge and the 
 command of ourselves. And there Is 
 no other way. We create ourselves by 
 translating our feeling Into thought and 
 299 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 our thought into action. There is noth- 
 ing more striking in hfe than the gather- 
 ing of hnes in a man's face as the result 
 of a great experience and a fine work well 
 done — the unformed face chiseled by 
 work into a strikingly significant counte- 
 nance. For a man's countenance is the 
 face which nature gave him, molded by 
 his own ideals and toil. The sculptor 
 does not more certainly evoke a face out 
 of stone by the tireless strokes of his 
 chisel than the man evokes his force, In- 
 telligence, and will out of himself by bear- 
 ing the burdens and doing the work of 
 life. You cannot tell him In advance 
 what he Is; he cannot know himself what 
 he is. He must find himself through 
 work. The aspiration of the boy who 
 dreams of the mastery of art Is a mere 
 desire until he learns the use of the brush, 
 the secrets of color, the control of his 
 hands. The half-conscious energy of the 
 youth who feels that the elements that 
 will make him a great man of affairs are 
 in him is a mere promise until he has 
 300 
 
The Path to God 
 
 taken hold of some kind of business and 
 measured himself against men. The 
 only road to self-knowledge and power 
 lies through feeling and thinking into 
 action. In action or experience only the 
 man is wrought; there, and there only, he 
 comes face to face with himself. 
 
 By action we not only create ourselves, 
 but we create God for ourselves. The 
 anchorite finds him in no other way; for 
 his seclusion is in itself an act. The 
 saint finds him in no other way; for self- 
 denial, purity, and consecration are deeds^ 
 not feelings or thoughts. Truth is slowly 
 distilled into men's hearts; for living is 
 not primarily an intellectual, but a vital, 
 process, and the greatest truths have 
 come Into the world, not through the door 
 of the brain, but through the door of the 
 heart. Love and loyalty, temptation and 
 sin, self-denial and redemption, entered 
 into the thoughts of men not by way of 
 the philosophers but by the path that runs 
 through every man's heart. We have 
 come to know the greatest things because 
 301 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 our hearts have been pierced by the great 
 and terrible facts of life. Carlyle and 
 Tennyson were once looking at the busts 
 of Dante and Goethe in a shop window in 
 London. ^' What is there in D'ante's 
 face that is not in Goethe's? " asked Car- 
 lyle. " The Divine," was Tennyson's 
 prompt answer. That sense of the pres- 
 ence of the Infinite in all human affairs 
 which gives Dante's face its wonderful 
 impressiveness came not through thought 
 only but through experience. It was 
 born of solitude, deprivation, isolation, 
 banishment. It came to him on the 
 lonely stairs in the houses of strangers; 
 it was revealed to him in the breaking of 
 bread in an alien land. So came to 
 Shakespeare the insight which, in the later 
 plays, brought into clear view the higher 
 processes of character and revealed such 
 a deep and beautiful vision of life; so 
 came Phillips Brooks's power of minis- 
 tering to men and women of all degrees 
 of experience and culture. 
 
 Life itself is the teacher of the proph- 
 302 
 
The Path to God 
 
 ets and poets, the saints and martyrs. 
 We cannot silence our doubts by thinking, 
 we cannot find God by searching; but 
 we can do his will, and then we shall know 
 his doctrine. We create God for our- 
 selves, and we create ourselves by action, 
 by passing through feeling to thought Into 
 the world of deeds. We keep In his 
 presence by doing the work and living the 
 life of faith. There Is no baffling mys- 
 tery about all this; for the clouds and 
 darkness which surround a man do not 
 make the path at his feet invisible or un- 
 certain; and that path leads through 
 rough places and smooth, sometimes in 
 light and sometimes in darkness, to the 
 summit. All that a man needs to do is to 
 keep his feet In It. The road Is as open 
 to the humblest as to the greatest; and the 
 most obscure often find themselves on 
 those higher peaks where the divine 
 vision Is most distinct. 
 
 303 
 
The Peace of Christ 
 
 THE peace of God is not only a 
 familiar but a comprehensible 
 phrase, for God is not only all-wise but 
 all-powerful, and Is therefore above all 
 the momentary storms, the passing strug- 
 gles, which sweep the world with a brief 
 fury or trouble the souls of men as they 
 pass from one stage of growth to another. 
 From the top of a hill on a summer day 
 one may often watch the clouds gather 
 and sweep across the landscape, black and 
 ominous, dropping bolts of fire as they 
 pass; while far behind the brief rage of 
 the tempest and far ahead of It He smil- 
 ing fields and men at work In them, and 
 overhead the heavens abide In undlmmed 
 splendor of light. So God abides above 
 the changes of tides and times, the forces 
 of air and earth striving for harmony 
 through continual readjustment of con- 
 ditions. 
 
 304 
 
The Peace of Christ 
 
 But the peace of Christ is more diffi- 
 cuh to understand. He was in the very 
 center of the storms ; again and again they 
 broke on his path; again and again they 
 found him sohtary and without visible 
 shelter. He dealt first, foremost, and al- 
 ways with the tempests that ravage the 
 world; with the awful blackness of sin, 
 the tragic source of half the devastating 
 storms that rage on the earth ; with those 
 temptations which bring mighty tossings 
 of the soul with them; with the miseries, 
 sorrows, and appalling pains of humanity 
 which often overshadow the sensitive and 
 sympathetic spirit with darkness like a 
 cloud. The shadow of a cross always 
 traveled before him. And yet, in the 
 center of the storm of life, in the very 
 path of oncoming tempests, the peace of 
 Christ remained unbroken. More than 
 this : his peace was not only sufficient for 
 himself, it was so deep and wide that he 
 was eager to share it with all men. In 
 the heart of the storm he could say, 
 " Peace I leave with you, my peace I give 
 305 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 unto you." If there is one scene in his 
 life which more dramatically than any 
 other interprets his attitude towards men, 
 it is his quiet sleep in the storm, his calm 
 hushing of its fury. 
 
 And he told the secret of his peace 
 when he promised to leave it behind him 
 in the world: "Let not your heart be 
 troubled, neither let it be afraid. ... I 
 go unto the Father." These words were 
 spoken to men who were only beginning 
 to understand the Master whose mighty 
 works and mightier words and still 
 mightier spirit they had been learning for 
 almost three years. He had told them 
 that he was in the Father and the Father 
 was in him, and they could get but a faint 
 glimmering of his meaning. If he had 
 said that he had never left the Father, 
 they would not have understood, though 
 it would have been simple truth. In all 
 the vicissitudes of his earthly life, alike 
 when he was in the fellowship of Martha 
 and Mary and when he stood beside the 
 woman taken in the very act of sin, Jesus 
 306 
 
The Peace of Christ 
 
 was with his Father; the vileness of the 
 world did not for a moment separate the 
 Son from the Father; rather it brought 
 them together, for where the need was 
 greatest there the Christ was most divine ; 
 where the blackness of the tempest was 
 most appalling there the Light of the 
 World shone most gloriously. 
 
 In all the storms through which he 
 passed there is no evidence that the heart 
 of Christ was ever troubled, but there is 
 evidence that it was sore and sorrowful; 
 in the presence of death he was not dis- 
 mayed, not even perplexed; but he wept! 
 The peace he left to those who believe in 
 him is not respite from the pains of loss 
 and sorrow; it is not freedom from uncer- 
 tainty, and the trial of waiting for light 
 in dark places, and for leading in the con- 
 fusion of the world. When peace comes 
 between warring nations, or between 
 groups of men whose interests seem to be 
 antagonistic, a deep sense of rest and se- 
 curity follows; but the pains and burdens 
 and perplexities of life are not at an end. 
 307 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 Peace does not mean a solution of all the 
 problems; it means the absence of con- 
 flict and the quietude In which those prob- 
 lems can be faced and solved. The peace 
 of Christ was not escape from anxieties 
 and pain; it was a companionship with the 
 Father which set at rest all fear, all 
 doubt, all conflict of wills. The Father 
 who was above the storms and the Son 
 who was in the heart of them were one in 
 spirit, purpose, nature; the clouds and 
 darkness did not hide either from the 
 other. The peace which Christ left for 
 us is not freedom from sorrow, from 
 pain, from uncertainty; It Is the ending of 
 conflict between God's will and our will, 
 deliverance from fear, rest in the love and 
 power of God. 
 
 308 
 
Character First 
 
 **OlAFETY first" is a sound maxim 
 O if the meaning of safety is 
 clearly understood. Where the care of 
 human life is the highest duty, the su- 
 preme responsibility, it must be taken at 
 its face value. On railways, trolley cars, 
 in the construction of buildings whether 
 permanent or temporary, in steam naviga- 
 tion, in the protection of water supplies, 
 in the regulation of traffic on the public 
 highways, the guarding of life is para- 
 mount to all other duties, and the words 
 " safety first," posted in places where life 
 is in peril from many kinds of danger, 
 form a sign that this happy-go-lucky coun- 
 try is beginning to awaken from its in- 
 dolence and carelessness. 
 
 But in guarding the higher interests of 
 life safety has a larger meaning than the 
 protection of the body; it may, and often 
 309 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 does, involve the utmost peril to the body. 
 It has become to many people a maxim 
 of spiritual degeneration. 
 
 Taken in an absolute sense, it becomes 
 a shield for meanness of spirit and the 
 cowardice which eats the heart out of 
 character. Too many Americans have 
 changed the maxim to read '' comfort 
 first; " they demand that the world shall 
 let them alone in the endeavor to make 
 life easy and pleasant; they resent any in- 
 terruption of what has become, as the re- 
 sult of a great prosperity, an irresponsible 
 " joy ride." So long as their business 
 is not endangered, their homes threat- 
 ened, their pleasures menaced, the rest of 
 the world may starve and suffer the tor- 
 tures of fire and the sword. Other peo- 
 ples may pour out their blood like water 
 and take up enormous burdens in defense 
 of the principles which have made Amer- 
 ica prosperous, but these things do not 
 concern the " safety-first " Americans. 
 Nothing touches them until it disturbs 
 their comfort. " Let us eat and drink 
 310 
 
Character First 
 
 and be merry," they seem to say, *' for 
 to-morrow we die." It is certain that we 
 must all die, but shall death be the tri- 
 umph of the spirit or the rotting of 
 the body? The comfort-first Americans 
 need not fear death, because they are al- 
 ready dead; they have sold themselves 
 for the mess of pottage. 
 
 The history of the human race in this 
 world has been one sweeping condemna- 
 tion of the " safety-first " conception of 
 life. In the sight of God, it Is evident, 
 the first principle of safety is contempt 
 for comfort and readiness to lay down 
 life for a hundred things that are a thou- 
 sand times more important. As it is re- 
 vealed in the structure of life the will of 
 God is expressed in the maxim, " Char- 
 acter first." There is no limit to the de- 
 mands of the Christ when character is at 
 stake; everything else is mere dross. 
 Life itself does not count in the balance 
 when character is In the other scale. 
 There are great joys by the way in this 
 life, but society will become safe only as it 
 311 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 becomes just and merciful and self-sacri- 
 iicing. 
 
 This is not a comfortable world in the 
 sense that men may take their ease in it, 
 and there is no prospect that it ever will 
 be. Until all men understand that char- 
 acter is the end and the justification of the 
 tremendous education which we call life, 
 ease and comfort will be Interrupted and 
 destroyed by danger, by trouble, by peril 
 of many kinds. To-day half the peoples 
 of Europe are fighting for liberty and the 
 privileges of spiritual manhood; they are 
 dying by the hundreds of thousands and 
 they are suffering calamities which leave 
 the Imagination aghast and helpless. It 
 is a fearful price to pay for the things at 
 stake, but it is not too great a price. 
 Those who see In the struggle only blind 
 fate and needless slaughter utterly fail to 
 see the moral grandeur of it, the divine 
 contempt which It pours on the safety-first 
 rule of living, the overwhelming authority 
 with which it asserts the " character- 
 first " rule of living. Until men are 
 312 
 
Character First 
 
 ready to forget ease, to hold comfort sub- 
 ordinate to right, to be unselfish as well as 
 just, the deeps of divine judgment will be 
 broken up from time to time and great 
 waves of disaster will roll over the fair 
 landscape of material prosperity. Safety 
 will come when character is attained, but 
 not before. 
 
 313 
 
Meeting Life Squarely 
 
 IT was recently said of a prominent pub- 
 lic man that if he could evade a prob- 
 lem he thought he had solved it. This is 
 the philosophy of many people whose en- 
 deavor seems to be, not to meet life 
 squarely, but to evade it; not to see diffi- 
 cult situations clearly nor to deal with 
 them strongly, but to shut the eyes to the 
 most ominous and perplexing aspects and 
 to find the easiest way out. This means, 
 of course, that the real end of living, the 
 education which experiences bring with 
 them is entirely missed, and the main pur- 
 pose of life is defeated. The student 
 who becomes expert in the various devices 
 by which the drudgery of learning is 
 evaded imagines that he is outwitting his 
 instructors, but discovers in later life that 
 he has cheated himself. The discipline 
 of education is not the attempt of the 
 school or the college to benefit itself. It 
 314 
 
Meeting Life Squarely 
 
 has been devised and is imposed for the 
 sole purpose of helping the student. 
 
 The cares and burdens and perplexities 
 of life were not devised to amuse an irre- 
 sponsible power. They are wrought into 
 the very structure of life, and are in- 
 volved in its most vital experiences, in or- 
 der that men and women may be taught 
 the great truths which are behind all liv- 
 ing, and in learning which the discipline 
 of living finds its splendid justification. 
 A proclamation of emancipation may set 
 slaves and serfs free from legal bondage; 
 but this is only the beginning of freedom. 
 It Is only an opportunity to become free, 
 for freedom Is not a gift and can never be 
 a gift; it must always be an achievement. 
 A man buys his freedom by restraint, self- 
 denial, and work. To the criticism of 
 an artist that he ought to have done his 
 work In another way. La Farge promptly 
 said: "That would have been impos- 
 sible. An artist, above all other men, 
 must work out his genius under laws." 
 Neither in the substance of his work nor 
 315 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 in its technique is he free. He must ex- 
 press his own temperament, and he must, 
 by rigorous discipline and tireless pa- 
 tience, master the method by which at last 
 he can freely express himself. " Grace," 
 said George Macdonald, " is the result of 
 forgotten toil." 
 
 The discipline of life, which many peo- 
 ple resent as an interference with their 
 right to the pursuit of happiness, is really, 
 if one bears it patiently and meets it 
 frankly, the only way to happiness. 
 
 This is especially true of such a tragic 
 period as that through which the world is 
 passing. The shadow of the struggle in 
 Flanders and the Balkans covers the land- 
 scape of the whole world, and even those 
 who are willing to buy peace at any price 
 cannot purchase It. Try as they may to 
 evade the great and terrible experience by 
 shutting their eyes to It, It faces them at 
 every turn, and the only escape from it is 
 to meet it bravely and to learn what it has 
 to teach. 
 
 People are trying to get away from the 
 316 
 
Meeting Life Squarely 
 
 tragedy by taking refuge in amusements 
 of many kinds. Miss Repplier has 
 pithily said that the gospel of amusement 
 " is preached by people who lack expe- 
 rience to people who lack vitality," and 
 she adds that there is an impression that 
 the world would be happy if it were 
 amused, and that it would be amused if 
 plenty of artificial recreation were pro- 
 vided for it. Play of all kinds is as neces- 
 sary and legitimate as work. Healthful 
 amusements and recreations are essentialto 
 physical and spiritual well-being; but they 
 must be taken as tonics, not as anodynes. 
 This country is not escaping the war by 
 standing apart and shutting its eyes to the 
 tragedy; on the contrary, the war over- 
 shadows every home and lays a tax on 
 every income, large or small. Whether 
 we will or not, we are our brother's keep- 
 ers, and the shadow of his calamity rests, 
 and ought to rest, on our homes. We 
 cannot stand apart and rejoice in our pros- 
 perity; in the long run his calamity must 
 be our calamity, and in some form we 
 are sharing, and must share, it with him. 
 317 
 
What Can I Do? 
 
 A DISTINGUISHED surgeon said 
 not long ago : ^' If there is an 
 accident in the srteet when I am passing, 
 I go at once and offer assistance. If I 
 can do anything, I stay, if I cannot, I 
 leave. If I can do anything, no amount 
 of blood or mutilation has any effect on 
 me. I seem not to see it if I am at 
 work; but if I can do nothing, I cannot 
 bear the sight of blood; it makes me ill.'^ 
 This is probably a not uncommon experi- 
 ence with sensitive people ; it is certainly a 
 significant experience. In great peril 
 nothing gives such poise and steadiness as 
 having something to do which must be 
 done on the instant. Very few men go 
 into action for the first time without nerv- 
 ous trepidation; but when the order comes 
 that sends them into the thick of the fight, 
 danger is forgotten. To be halted or to 
 stand at rest under a heavy fire tests the 
 nerves of veterans; but the signal to 
 
 318 
 
What Can I Do? 
 
 " move forward," even when it involves 
 every chance of death, releases an im- 
 mense and joyful energy. A man whose 
 courage is known the world over said that 
 he never had any sense of danger if he 
 could do something. 
 
 If living were a purely intellectual proc- 
 ess, the position of the onlooker who had 
 nothing to do would be ideal. Detached 
 from the turmoil and disturbance about 
 him, he could study his age and his coun- 
 try with clear eyes and at leisure. This 
 would be true if the eye were an organ 
 complete in itself; if to see were simply to 
 look. But nobody sees with his eyes 
 alone; we see with our whole bodies, so to 
 speak. Every use of the eye involves a 
 mental process into which memory, judg- 
 ment, experience, enter. The whole 
 mind sees with the eyes. 
 
 Life is not an intellectual process; It is 
 a vital process; no one can understand it 
 who does not take part in it. Henry 
 Ward Beecher once said that truth is not 
 revealed to us to satisfy the intellect; it is 
 319 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 given to us only so far as it is necessary to 
 develop character. We know very little 
 about the methods and ultimate designs of 
 God in dealing with us, but we know 
 enough to enable us to live upright, use- 
 ful, and intelligent lives. The vital 
 truths come to us as the result, not of 
 thinking, but of living. Deeper truth is 
 taught us by sorrow than by the reason; 
 what we call the heart opens life to us far 
 more deeply than does the mind. Words 
 which assume the division of our natures 
 into separate organs are necessary and 
 convenient, but they are misleading if they 
 give the impress that our natures are di- 
 visible and act through organs that are 
 independent of one another. We are in- 
 divisible, and whatever we do involves 
 mind and body, will, intellect, and heart. 
 To understand life we must live; and we 
 live, not in thought, emotion, and will 
 only, but in action. 
 
 It Is a deep Instinct which makes every 
 normal man and woman ask, " What can 
 I do? " and that question Is not left unan- 
 320 
 
What Can I Do? 
 
 swered. There is always something to 
 do if we are wiUing to do it and do not 
 insist on doing something else. Many 
 think there is nothing for them to do be- 
 cause they are more eager to choose their 
 work than to do it; as if the main thing 
 were the kind of work a man does rather 
 than the spirit in which he does it and the 
 character he gets out of doing it. There 
 is a share in life for every one; there is 
 work for every hand. If you think there 
 is nothing worth while for you to do, read 
 these words of Dean Stanley: 
 
 Do something worth living for, worth dying 
 for. Is there no want, no suffering, no sor- 
 rows, that you can relieve? Is there no act of 
 tardy justice, no deed of cheerful kindness, no 
 long-forgotten duty that you can perform? Is 
 there no reconciliation of some ancient quarrel, 
 no payment of some long-outstanding debt, no 
 courtesy, or love, or honor, to be rendered to 
 those to whom it has long been due ; no charita- 
 ble, humble, kind, useful deed by which you can 
 promote the glory of God or good will among 
 men, or peace upon earth? If there be any 
 such deed, in God's name, in Christ's name, go 
 and do it. 
 
 321 
 
The Test of Courage 
 
 IN all great crises phrases are born. 
 Real phrases are not manufactured; 
 they sum up and express great expe- 
 riences. Such a phrase is that which was 
 used by General Gallieni, quoted in The 
 Outlook of June 14 : '* Jusqu'au bout! '* 
 When a year ago he was attacked by a 
 grave illness which a slight operation and 
 a short but immediate rest would have 
 cured, he declined to drop his work, say- 
 ing, " A chief must set an example in war 
 time, and go ' jusqu'au bout! ' '' — that is, 
 to the very end. Unconsciously or in- 
 stinctively, as brave men do, the " savior 
 of Paris " not only struck a great note but 
 announced a great principle of life in 
 those words. It is the men who go " to 
 the very end " who are in every genera- 
 tion the saviors of society; they preserve 
 it from stagnation; they redeem it from 
 corruption. It is undeniable that there is 
 322 
 
The Test of Courage 
 
 a downward sag In society, that It Is Im- 
 possible to build society on so strong a 
 basis that It will automatically remain 
 pure and vigorous. Society must be 
 saved In every generation. It Is Impos- 
 sible to capitalize It so strongly that It can 
 rest safely on Its accumulated moral 
 strength. 
 
 It has been shown many times In the 
 commercial world that a business house 
 cannot be built so strongly that It will go 
 on by Its own momentum after the men 
 who have created It have passed away. 
 It will go on for a time, but with subsiding 
 energy, and ultimately, unless Its strength 
 is renewed in the newer generations. It 
 will end in bankruptcy. The attempt to 
 establish society so that It can rest on Its 
 oars, so to speak. Is doomed to failure; 
 because the " power not of ourselves 
 which makes for righteousness " seems 
 to take very little Interest In ease and 
 prosperity and an enormous interest in 
 the establishment of righteousness. 
 *' Morality," Lord Morley once said, " is 
 323 
 
Fruits of the Spirit 
 
 not in the nature of things ; it is the nature 
 of things " ; and morahty is a daily and 
 hourly reassertion, in definition and con- 
 duct, of righteousness. 
 
 The testing of courage is not the mo- 
 ment when the charge is made with ring- 
 ing bugles and the impetus and inspiration 
 of a great strain onward ; it Is when the in- 
 spiration of action has been lost; when all 
 the conditions are full of disillusion, and 
 few see clearly on account of the depres- 
 sion and monotony; and only they are 
 heroically strengthened who are steadfast 
 in the faith in which they began the fight 
 — loyal to the very end. No one who 
 reads the reports that come from the 
 battlefields of Europe can have the slight- 
 est idea of the stolid and almost despair- 
 ing loyalty with which millions of men are 
 now living In the mud, standing fast with 
 grim determination, though with hardly a 
 glimpse of victory. These are the real 
 heroes of the war; and these are Its black- 
 est hours. In every great struggle, na- 
 tional or individual, the crisis comes not 
 324 
 
The Test of Courage 
 
 when the danger seems most imminent, 
 but when the inspiration has ebbed; and 
 men stand fast, not because they see that 
 they are gaining ground, but because they 
 have pledged themselves to stand fast to 
 the very end. And no careers are more 
 inspiring than those of the men who like 
 Cavour, have stood year after year, 
 through long-continued and paralyzing 
 discouragements and defeats, resolutely 
 to the very end. Victory waits for such 
 men and rewards them. 
 
 325 
 
\