A Man's Value to Society Part 3
Fire comes in to burn man's fingers and teach him how to make the fire smite vapor from water. Cold comes in to nip his ears and pinch his cheeks until he learns the economy of ice, snow and rain. Steel cuts his fingers and the blood oozes out. Thenceforth he turns the axe toward the trees and the scythe toward the standing grain. The stone falling bruises him, compelling a knowledge of gravity and the use of trip-hammer, weights and pulleys. Looking downward the eye discerns the handwriting on the rocks and the mind reads earth's romantic story. Looking upward, the vision runs along the milky way for measuring the starry ma.s.ses and searching out their movements. The ear strains out sweet sounds, and St. Cecilia hears melodies from the sky.
Bending over the cradle, the parent marvels at G.o.d's bounty in the face of a babe. When the little one goes away the parent copies its face in rude colors, or carves its form in marble. Thus all the arts, sciences and inventions are gifts of the body to man's mental and moral life.
There is a beautiful story of a company of celestial beings, who, in disguise, entered an ancient city upon a mission of mercy. Departing hurriedly, in some way a fair young child was left behind and lost. In the morning when men came upon the streets they found a sweet boy with sunny hair sitting upon the steps of the temple. Language had he none.
He answered questions with streaming eyes and frightened face. While men wondered a slave drew near, carrying a harp. Then the heavenly child signaled for the instrument, for this language he could speak.
He threw his arms about the harp as the child about its mother's neck.
He touched one string. Upon the hushed air there stole out a note pure, clear, and sweet as though amethysts and pearls were melted into liquid melodies. It was music, but not such music as mortals give to mortals. It was such a song as spirit would sing to spirit, signaling across the streets of heaven. It was a hymn to the mother whom he had loved and lost. With tearful eye and smiling face the little stranger and the harp together wept, and laughed, and sobbed out their grief and song. It was the speech of a child homesick for heaven. What that harp was to the silent boy, the human body is to man's soul within.
The soul teemed with thoughts. Fancies surged and thronged within.
Then G.o.d gave the soul a body, as a harp of many strings. Through it the soul finds voice and pours forth its rich thoughts and varied emotions.
Consider, also, how nature has ordained the body as a system of moral registration. Nature has a record of all men's deeds, keeping her accounts on fleshly tablets. The mind may forget, the body never. The brain sees to it that the thoughts within do immediately dispose of facial tissue without. Mental brightness gives facial illumination.
The right act or true thought sets its stamp of beauty in the features; the wrong act or foul thought sets its seal of distortion.
Moral purity and sweetness refine and beautify the countenance. The body is a show window, advertising and exhibiting the soul's stock of goods. Nature condenses bough, bud and shrub into black coal; compacts the rich forces of air and sun and soil into peach and pear. In the kingdom of morals, there are people who seem to be of virtue, truth and goodness all compact. Contrariwise, every day you will meet men upon our streets who are solid b.e.s.t.i.a.lity and villainy done up in flesh and skin. Each feature is as eloquent of rascality as an ape's of idiocy. Experts skilled in physiognomy need no confession from impish lips, but read the life-history from page to page written on features "dimmed by sensuality, convulsed by pa.s.sion, branded by remorse; the body consumed with sloth and dishonored with selfish uses; the bones full of the sins of youth, the face hideous with secret vices, the roots dried up beneath and the branches cut off above." It is as natural and necessary for hidden thoughts and deeds to reveal themselves through cuticle as for root or bud in spring to unroll themselves into sight and observation. Here and now everything tends to obscure nature's handwriting and to veil it in mist and disguise. But the body is G.o.d's canvas, and nature's handwriting goes ever on. Each faculty is a brush, and with it reason thinks out the portrait. Even the wolf may give something to the features, and also the snake and scorpion. Soon will come an hour when men will hear not the voice of the sirens singing praises in the ear, nor the plaudits of men of low deeds and conscience, but an hour when men shall stand in the presence of the all-revealing light and see themselves as they are and review the life they have embodied and emportraited. Happy, thrice happy, those who have traversed all life's pathway and come at last to the hour when they stand face to face with themselves, then to find therein a divine image like unto the comeliness and completion of Him whose face was transfigured and shone as the light.
At length has dawned the day when science strengthens the argument for immortality. The dream of the prophet and seer is confirmed in the light of modern knowledge. "Each new discovery," says John Fiske, "but places man upon a higher pinnacle than ever, and lights the future with the radiant color of hope." Leaving his body behind, man journeys on toward an immortal destiny. Science has emptied a thousand new meanings into the words of Socrates: "The destruction of the harp does not argue the death of the harpist." Nature decrees that the flower must fall when the fruit swells. If the winged creature is to come forth and increase, the chrysalis must perish and decrease. When the long journey is over it is natural that the box in which the richly carved and precious statue is packed should be tossed aside. Swiftly youth goes on toward maturity, age toward old age, and the scythe awaits all. But sickness and trouble can do nothing more than dim the eye, dull the ear, weaken the hand. Dying and death avail not for injuring reason, affection, or hope, or love.
At the close of a long and arduous career the famous Lyman Beecher pa.s.sed under a mental cloud. The great man became as a little child.
One day after his son, Henry Ward, had preached a striking sermon, his father entered the pulpit and beginning to speak wandered in his words. With great tenderness the preacher laid his hand upon his father's shoulder and said to the audience: "My father is like a man who, having long dwelt in an old house, has made preparations for entering a new and larger home. Antic.i.p.ating a speedy removal, he sent on beforehand much of his soul-furniture. When later the day of removal was postponed the interval seemed so brief as to render it unnecessary to bring back his mental goods." Oh, beautiful words describing those whose strength is declining, whose spirit is ebbing and senses failing, because G.o.d is packing up their soul-furniture that they may be ready for the long journey that awaits us all. But man's journey is not unto the grave. Dying is trans.m.u.tation. Dying is not folding of the wings; but pluming the pinions for new and larger flight. Dying is not striking an unseen rock, but a speedy entrance into an open harbor. Death is no enemy, letting the arrow fly toward one who sits at life's banquet-table. Death is a friend coming on an errand of release and divine convoy. For G.o.d's children "to be death-called is to be G.o.d-called; to be G.o.d-called is to be Christ-found; to be Christ-found is hope and home and heaven."
FOOTNOTES:
[3] See Symposium on Evolution, Homiletic Review, May, 1894.
THE MIND: AND THE DUTY OF RIGHT THINKING
"All ye who possess the power of thought, prize it well!
Remember that its flight is infinite; it winds about over so many mountain tops, and so runs from poetry to eloquence, it so flies from star to star, it so dreams, so loves, so aspires, so hangs both over mystery and fact, that we may well call it the effort of man to explore the home, the infinite palace of his heavenly Father."--_Swing._
"Men with empires in their brains."--_Lowell._
"'Tis the mind that makes the body rich."--_Taming of the Shrew._
"Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof That they were born for immortality."--_Wordsworth._
"Neither years nor books have yet availed to extirpate a prejudice then rooted in me that a scholar is the favorite of heaven and earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of men."--_Emerson._
"Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, for the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold."--_Solomon._
V
THE MIND; AND THE DUTY OF RIGHT THINKING
With fine imagery the seer of old likened the mind unto a tree. The tree shakes down its fruits, and the mind sheds forth its thoughts.
The boughs of the one will cover the land with forests; the faculties of the other will sow the world with harvests that blight or harvests that bless. The measure of personal worth, therefore, is the number and quality of thoughts issuing from man's mind. For all the doing called commerce, and all the speaking called conversation and books, begin with the thinking called ideas. Each thing was first a thought.
A loom is Arkwright's thought dressed up in iron clothes. Books are the scholar's thoughts caught and fastened upon the white page. As our planet and the harvests that cover it are the thoughts of G.o.d rushing into visible expression, so all houses and ships, all cities and inst.i.tutions, are man's inner thoughts, taking on outer and material embodiment.
When thoughts compacted into habits have determined character and destiny for the individual, they go on and secure their social progress. When G.o.d would order a great upward movement for society, He drops a great idea into the mind of some leader. Such energies divine have these thoughts that they create new epochs in history. Through Luther the thought of liberty in church and state set tyrants trembling and thrones tottering. Through Cromwell the thought of personal rights became a weapon powerful enough utterly to destroy that citadel of iniquity named the divine right of kings. It was a great moral thought called the "Golden Rule" that shotted the cannon of the North for victory and spiked the cannon of the South for defeat. Measureless is the might of a moral idea. It exceeds the force of earthquakes and the might of tidal waves. The reason why no scholar or historian can forecast the events and inst.i.tutions of the next century is that none can tell what great idea G.o.d will drop into the soul of some man ordained to be its voice and prophet.
Now the omnipotence of thoughts is not without reason. Man is the child of genius because he is the child of G.o.d. Those beautiful words, "made in His image," tell us that the human mechanism is patterned after the divine. Reason and memory in man answer to those faculties in G.o.d, as do conscience and the moral sentiments. In creative genius man alone is a sharer with G.o.d. As the Infinite One pa.s.sing through s.p.a.ce leaves behind those shining footsteps called suns and stars, glowing and sparkling upon planets innumerable, so man's mind, moving through life, leaves behind a pathway all shining with books, laws, liberties and homes. Of all the wonderful things G.o.d hath made, man the wonderer is himself the most wonderful. No casket owned by a king, filled with gems and sparkling jewels, ever held such treasure as G.o.d hath put into this casket of bones and sinew. The imagination cannot paint in colors too rich this being, who is a miniature edition of infinity. It is not fiction, but fact, to say that reason is a loom; only where Jacquard's mechanism weaves a few yards of silk and satin, reason weaves conversation, sympathy, songs, poems, eloquence--textures all immortal. And memory is a gallery; only where the Louvre holds a few pictures of the past, memory waving her wonder-working wand brings back all faces, living and dead, causing mountains and battle-fields, with all distant scenes, to pa.s.s before the mind in solemn procession.
The Bank of England has indeed a mechanism that tests coins and throws out all light weights. But judgment is an instrument testing things invisible, weighing arguments and motives, testing principles and characters. And the desires, are they not like unto the richly laden argosies of commerce? And fancy, hath it not the skill of artist and architect? Imagination, working in the realm of the useful, turns iron into engines. Imagination, working in realms of the beautiful, turns pigments into pictures. Imagination, working in the realms of thought, can turn things true into sciences, and things good into ethical systems. Well did the philosopher say that the greatest star is the one standing at the little end of the telescope, the one looking, not looked at nor looked for. When some Aga.s.siz dredging the Atlantic tells us what animals lived there a million years ago, the scientist's mind seems an abyss deeper than the sea itself; and when Tyndall, climbing to the top of the Matterhorn, reads on that rock-page all the events of the ancient world, the mountain is dwarfed to an ant hill and becomes insignificant in the presence of the mountain-minded scholar. Hunters tell us that when crossing a swamp they leap from one hummock of gra.s.s to another. But Herschel and Proctor, exploring the heavenly world, step from star to star. The husbandman, squeezing a cl.u.s.ter of grapes in his cup, does but interpret to us the way in which the scholar squeezes planets and suns to brim the cup of knowledge for man's thirsting soul. This vast and wondrous world without is matched by man's rich and various mind within! Well did Emerson exclaim, "Man, thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the nights and mornings, the summers and winters; carrying in thy brain the geometry of the City of G.o.d, in thy heart all the bowers of love, and all the realms of right and wrong."
Such being the nature of the mind, consider its prodigious fruitfulness in thought. If all the processes of the mind were reduced to material volume, the thoughts of each moment would fill a page, the thoughts of each hour would fill a chapter, the thoughts of each day would fill a volume, the emotions of a year would fill a small library of many volumes. Value might be wanting, but not bulk. It is given to the eye to behold the harvests wrought by the secret force of roots and sunbeams. But if all the products of the soul could be made visible to the eye and ear, how marvelous would be these exhalations, rising and filling all the air. Were all the emotions and pa.s.sions and dreams of one single day fully revealed, what dramas would there be beyond all the tragedies man's hand hath ever indicated! Consider what fertility the mind hath! Consider how many trains of thought reason takes up each hour. Consider all that belongs to a man as an animal, his fears and pa.s.sions, defensory in nature. Consider his social equipment, with all the possible moods and combinations of affections. Consider the vast activities of his reason working outward, and the imagination working upward. Sometimes in the morning man's thoughts are for number and strength like unto the strength of armies. Sometimes in the night his aspirations exhale heavenward with all the purity and beauty of the clouds. Consider also how life's conflicts and warfare inflame man's faculties and hasten their process.
Consider how courage, despondency, hope and fear, friendship and enmity, increase the activities. Consider man's ambitions--steeds of the sun with incredible swiftness dragging forward the soul's chariot.
Consider the rivalries among men. What intensities of thought are induced thereby! Consider that toward one's friends the mind sends forth thoughts that are almoners of bounty and angels of mercy. But consider that man is over against his enemy, with a mind like unto a walled city filled with armed men. Consider how in life's conflicts, thoughts become the swords of anger, the clubs of envy, stings for hissing hatred. Consider that in times of great excitement the soul literally blazes and burns, exhaling emotions and thoughts as a planet exhales light and heat. Wondrous the power of the loom newly invented, that with marvelous swiftness weaves in silk figures of flowers and trees and birds. But the uttermost speed of those flying shuttles is slowness itself compared to the swiftness of the mental loom, that without noise or clangor weaves fabrics eternal out of the warp and woof of affection and thought, of pa.s.sion and purpose. Consider that every man is not simply two men, but a score of men. All the climatic disturbances in nature, all distemperatures through heat and cold, wet and dry, summer and winter, do but answer in number and variety to the moods in man's brain. Not the all-producing summer is so rich in bounty as the mind is rich in thought when working its regnant and creative moods. Vast are the buildings man's hands have reared; sweet are the songs man's mind hath sung; lovely the faces man's hand hath painted; but the silent songs the soul hears, the invisible pictures the mind sees, the secret buildings the imagination rears, these are a thousand-fold more beautiful than any as yet embodied in this material world.
The Spanish have a proverb that "He who sows thoughts will reap acts, habits, and character," for destiny itself is determined by thinking.
Life is won or lost by its master thoughts. As nothing reveals character like the company we like and keep, so nothing foretells futurity like the thoughts over which we brood. It was said of John Keats that his face was the face of one who had seen a vision. So long had his inner eye been fixed upon beauty, so long had he loved that vision splendid, so long had he lived with it, that not only did his soul take on the loveliness of what he contemplated, but the very lines of the poet's face were chiseled into beauty by those sculptors called thoughts and ideals. When Wordsworth speaks of the girl's beauty as "born of murmuring sound," the poet indicates his belief that the girl's long love of the sweet briar and the thrush's song, her tender care of her favorite flowers, had ended in the saturation of her own face with sweetness. Swiftly do we become like the thoughts we love. Scholars have noticed that old persons who have "lived long together, 'midst sunshine and 'midst cloudy weather," come at length to look as nearly alike as do brother and sister: Emerson explains this likeness by saying that long thinking the same thoughts and loving the same objects mould similarity into the features. Nor is there any beauty in the face of youth or maiden that can long survive sourness in the disposition or discontent in the heart.
Contrariwise, all have seen faces very plain naturally that have become positively radiant because the beautiful soul that is enmeshed in and stands behind the muscles has shone through and beautified all of the facial tissues. Two of our great novelists have made a special study of the architectural power of thoughts. d.i.c.kens exhibits Monks as beginning his career as an innocent and beautiful child; but as ending his life as a ma.s.s of solid b.e.s.t.i.a.lity, a mere chunk of fleshed iniquity. It was thinking upon vice and vulgarity that transformed the angel's face into the countenance of a demon. Hawthorne has made a similar study of Chillingworth, whose moral deterioration began through evil thinking when face and physique were fully matured.
Chillingworth stood forth in middle life a thoughtful, earnest, and just man; but, during his absence, he suffered a grievous wrong. Not knowing the ident.i.ty of his enemy, the physician came to suspect his friend. By skillful questions he digged into Dimmesdale's heart as the s.e.xton might delve into the grave in search of a possible jewel upon a dead man's breast. When suspicion had strengthened into certainty, enmity became hatred. Then, for two years, Chillingworth tortured his victim as once inquisitors tortured men by tweaking the flesh with red-hot pincers. Soon the face of the physician, once so gentle and just, took on an aspect sinister and malign. Children feared him, men shivered in his presence--they knew not why. Once the magistrate saw the light glimmering in his eyes "with flames that burned blue, like the ghastly fire that darted out of Bunyan's awful doorway on the hillside and quivered in the Pilgrim's face." All this is Hawthorne's way of telling us how thoughts determine character and shape destiny. He who thinks of mean and ugly things will soon show mud in the bottom of his eye. Ugliness within soon fouls the facial tissues. But he who thinks of "things true and just and lovely" will, by his thinking, be transformed into the image of the ideal he contemplates, even as the rose becomes red by exposing its bosom to the sunbeams and soaking each petal in the sun's fine rays.
Not only are thoughts the builders of character for the individual; they are also the architects of states and nations. All this wonderful fabric lying over our land like a beautiful garment is a fabric spun and woven out of ideas. Each outer substance was builded by an inner sentiment. What the eye sees are stone and brick and iron united by masons and carpenters, but the forces that hold these material things together are not iron bands, but thoughts and beliefs.
Destroy the life-nerve running up through the tree, and the rings of wood will soon fall apart. Destroy the thoughts and beliefs of our people, and its homes, colleges and inst.i.tutions will decline and decay. Thrust a million Mohammedans into our land, and their inner thoughts will realize themselves in mosques, minarets, and harems. But thrust a million Americans into Asia Minor and straightway their thoughts will take on these visible shapes called houses and factories, temples of learning, altars of praise and prayer. For what we call Saxon civilization is only a magnificent incarnation of a certain mental type and a moral character. Not only individuals, but nations are such stuff as thoughts are made of.
In his famous story of archery Virgil represents Acestes as shooting his arrow with such force that it took fire as it flew and went up into the air all aflame, thus opening from the place where the archer stood a pathway of light into the heavens. Now it is given to man's thoughts to fulfill this beautiful story, in that they open up shining pathways along which the human steps may move. On the practical side, it is by the thinking alone that man solves his bread-winning problem.
Standing, each in his place, using his strongest faculty and working in the line of least resistance, each must conquer for himself food and support. To say that society owes us a living or to consume more than we produce is to sink to the level of pauper and parasite. The successful man is one whose thoughts about his bread-winning problem have been wise thoughts; paupers and tramps, with their hunger and rags, are men who have thought foolishly about how they could best earn a livelihood.
He who has one strong faculty, the using of which would give delight and success, yet pa.s.ses it by, to use a weaker faculty, is doomed to mediocrity and heart-breaking failure. The eagle has powerful muscles under the wings, but slender and feeble legs; the fawn lacks the weight of the draught horse, but has limbs for swiftness. Now, if an eagle should become a compet.i.tor in a walking race and if the fawn should enter the list of draught horses, we should have that which answers precisely to the way in which some men seek to gain their livelihood, by tying up their strongest gift and using their feeblest faculties. When it is said that only five merchants out of a hundred succeed we perceive that the great majority of men do not think to any purpose in choosing an occupation. Recalling his friends who had misfitted themselves, Sidney Smith once said: "If we represent the occupations of life by holes in a table, some round, some square, some oblong, and persons by bits of wood of like shapes, we shall generally find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular, while the square person has squeezed himself into the round hole." For lack of wise thinking beforehand, mult.i.tudes have died of broken hearts midst failure and misery who might have achieved great happiness and success had they used their thoughts in choosing their life-work. He who approaches his task with a leaden heart is out of the race before he is in it. Success means that the heart loves what the hand does. The bread-winning problem is the one that touches us first and most closely, and to wise thoughts only is it given to solve that problem.
The number and value of our thoughts determine a man's value to society. No investments bring so high a rate of interest as investments of brain. Hand work earns little, but head work much. In a Western camp one miner put his lower brain into the pickaxe and earned $2.00 a day; another miner put his higher brain into the stamp-mill and soon was receiving a score of dollars daily for his work; a third youth, toiling in the same mine, put his genius into an electric process for extracting ore, and sold his invention for a fortune. It seems that wealth was not in the pick, but in the thoughts that handled it. Had G.o.d intended man to do his work through the body, man's legs would have been long enough to cover leagues at a stride, his biceps would have been strong enough to turn the crank for steamships, his back would have been Atlantean for carrying freight cars across the plains.
But, instead of giving man long legs, G.o.d gave him a mind able to make locomotives. Instead of telescopic eyes, he gave man mind to invent far-seeing gla.s.ses. Instead of a thousand fingers for weaving, he gave man five fingers and genius for inventing a thousand steel fingers to do his spinning. Wealth is not in things, but in the brain that shapes raw material. Vast was the sum of gold taken out of California, but this nation might well pay down a hundred Californias for a man to invent a process to make coal drive the engine without the intervention of steam. That inventor would enable the street cars for one cent to carry the people of the tenement-house district ten miles into the country in ten minutes, and thereby, through sunshine and fresh air and solitude, would solve a hundred problems that now vex the statesman and the moralist. A young botanist in Kansas has just announced his purpose to cross the milkweed and the strawberry, so that hereafter strawberries and cream may grow upon the same bush. His task may be doomed to failure, but that youth at least understands that thought turned the wild rice into wheat; thought turned the sweet briar into the crimson rose; brains mixed the pigments for Paul Veronese, and gave the canvas worth a few florins the value of tens of thousand of dollars. Already wise thoughts have turned the barbarian into a gentleman and citizen, and some glad day thoughts will crown man with the attributes and qualities of G.o.d.
Of old, the Greek philosopher described the origin of man. One day Ceres, in crossing a stream, saw a human face emerging from the soil.
It was the face of a man. Standing by this earth-born creature, the G.o.ddess extricated his head and chest; but left his legs fastened in the soil. Now, the invisible friends that free man from his earth fetters are those divine visitors called ideas and thoughts. G.o.d hath made thoughts to be golden chariots, in which the soul is swept upward into the heavenly heights.
When thoughts have sown man's pathway with happiness and peace they go on to determine character and futurity. Each life memorable for goodness and n.o.bility has for its motive power some n.o.ble thought.
Each hero has climbed up to immortality upon those golden rounds called good thoughts. Here is that cathedral spirit, John Milton. In his loneliness and blindness his mind was his kingdom. He loved to think of things true and pure and of good report. Oft at midnight upon the poet's ear there fell the sound of celestial music, that afterward he transposed into his "Paradise Regained." Dying, it was given him to proudly say: "I am not one of those who have disgraced beauty of sentiment by deformity of conduct, nor the maxims of the freeman by the actions of the slave, but by the grace of G.o.d, I have kept my soul unsullied." Here is the immortal Bunyan, spending his best years in Bedford jail because he insisted on giving men the message G.o.d had first given him; but he, too, opened his mind only to good thoughts.
For him, also, dawned the heavenly vision. As the prison doors opened before Peter and the angel, so the dungeon walls parted before his thoughts. Walking about in glad freedom, he crossed the portals of the Palace Beautiful. From its marble steps he saw afar off the Delectable Mountains. Hard by ran the River of the Water of Life. The breezes of the hills of Paradise cooled his hot temples and lifted his hair. His regal thoughts crowned the Bedford tinker and made him king in English literature.
Here also is the carpenter's Son rising before each earthly pilgrim like a star in the night. A man of truly colossal intellect, incomparable as He strides across the realms and ages, yet always thinking the gentlest, kindliest thoughts; thoughts of mildness as well as of majesty; thoughts of humanity as well as divinity. His thoughts were medicines for hurt hearts; His thoughts were wings to all the low-flying; His thoughts freed those who had been snared in the thickets; His thoughts set an angel down beside each cradle; His thoughts of the incarnation rendered the human body forever sacred; His thoughts of the grave sanctified the tomb. Dying and rising, His thoughts clove an open pathway through the sky. Taught by Him, the people have learned to think--not only great thoughts, but good ones, and also how to turn thoughts into life.
Bringing their thoughts to G.o.d, G.o.d has turned thinking into character. Each spinner who in modesty and fidelity tends his loom, spins indeed, garments for others, but also weaves himself invisible garments of everlasting life. Each shipbuilder fastening his timbers together with honest thoughts will find that his thoughts have become ships carrying him over the sea to the harbor of G.o.d. Each worker putting integrity into gold and silver will find that he has carved his own character into a beauty beyond that of gems and sapphires. For his thoughts drag into futurity after them. So deeply was St. George Mivart impressed by this that he said: "The old pauper woman whom I saw to-day in the poorhouse, in her hunger saving her apple to give to the little orphan just brought in, and unraveling her stocking and bending her twisted old fingers to knit its yarn into socks for the blue feet of the child will, I verily believe, begin her life at death with more intellectual genius--mark the words, intellectual genius--than will begin that second life any statesman or prime minister or man famed in our day. For I know of none who hath been faithful in his much after the fashion of the pauper woman's fidelity with her little."
For intellect weighs light as punk against the gold of character.
Should G.o.d give us to choose between goodness and genius, we may well say, "Give genius to Lucifer, let mine be the better part." Intellect is cold as the ice-palace in Quebec. Heart-broken and weary-worn by life's battle, men draw near to some great-hearted men, as pilgrims crowd close to the winter's fire. Men neither draw their chairs close around a block of ice, nor about a brilliant intellect. Our quarrel with the foolish scientist is that he makes G.o.d out as infinite brain.
We rejoice at the revelation of Christ, because He portrays G.o.d as heart and not genius.
G.o.d be thanked for great thoughts, but a thousand times more, G.o.d be praised for good thoughts! They are fuel for the fires of enthusiasm.
They are rudders that guide us heavenward. They are seeds for great harvests of joy. They fulfill the tale of the fairies who in the night while men slept bridged chasms, builded palaces, laid out streets and lined them with homes, built the city around with walls. For every thought is a builder, every purpose a mansion, and every affection a carpenter. As the builders of the Cologne Cathedral were guided by the plan and pattern of Von Rile, so man's thoughts are builded after that matchless model, Jesus Christ. And while our thoughts work, His thoughts work, also adding beauty to the soul's strength. In the olden tale the artist pupil through very weariness fell asleep before the picture that disappointed him. While he slept his master stole into the room, and with a few swift touches corrected the errors and brought out the lines of l.u.s.trous beauty, kindling new hope within the boy's heart. And there are unexpected providences in life, strange influences, interventions and voices in the night. These events over which we have no control, these thoughts of the Master above, shape us not less than the thoughts that build from within. It seems that not one, but two are working upon the soul's structure. As one day in the presence of his master Michael Angelo pulled down the scaffolding in the Sistine Chapel, and the workmen cleared away the ropes and plaster and litter, and looking up men saw the faces of angels and seraphs, with their l.u.s.trous and immortal beauty, so some glad day will that angel named Death pull down life's scaffolding and set forever in the sunlight that structure built of thoughts, the stately mansion reared in the mind, the building not made with hands, the character, eternal in the heavens.