CHAPTER 17 THE ULTIMATE COMPANIONSHIP Born in the kindling of the imagination and sinking its roots deep in those instincts which are the records of the primitive nature and earliest education of men in this world, love rises steadily through desire, passion, possession to a companionship so intimate and so complete that it includes and draws nourishment from every interest and occupation. 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 devoted 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 lingers 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 adjustment, of mutual knowledge, of fellowship 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 born in the humblest guise. As in the later autumn there falls on the world of toil and strife a peace so deep that it seems to sink to the roots of things in the earth, and so wide that all world seem to be folded in it, the sudden emergence 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 partaking catch the light of the spirit which hides within all material forms and shapes. This complete surrender of personality to personality in which the self-fulfillment of the Western idealist is accomplished by the self-effacement which the Eastern idealist pursues as the end of the earthly life, is not secured between strong natures without the breaking of bars and the forcing of locks. It is a natural instinct when one is stricken to seek silence and solitude, and the finest and best are those whose desperate desire, when wounds are deep, is not only to escape from the sight and sound of the world, but to take refuge from those who are nearest and dearest. In the closest of all relations this instinct sometimes asserts itself most powerfully, the garrulous, the seekers after sympathy of whom there are many, those who cry out when they are struck, not only find it easy to confide, but to get nourishment for egotism by the very recital of their sorrows, but those who's suffering cuts deeper, who have that higher reverence for themselves 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 a torture than be corrupted by it, are driven back upon themselves, and by the very measure of their love are held back from speech. When Brutus was bringing his pure, if somewhat narrow spirit to the point of conspiring 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 a 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, for tended doom. But Brutus, in the awful hour of fate, was alone in his orchard. 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.  By and by thy bosom shall partake the secrets of my heart, all my engagements I will construe to thee, all the character of my sad brows. It is the office of love, not to spare but to share, to divide not only the uttermost joy but the ultimate sorrow, to stand bound by the divinest of ties, not only when bells are rung and the sweetness of flowers is in the air, but when the great intruder has passed the door and stands in the room, immortality waits helpless and dumb on the majestic presence which comes to all, and comes by higher compulsion than human invitation. 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 Prosperus, 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. 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 accelerations, 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, vigorous, fashion for all tasks, capable of all resistance, the only immortal possession 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. CHAPTER XVIII THE PROPHESY OF LOVE The beginnings of life are always hidden in mystery, for there is something divine in all births. At the starting point of life, 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 beginning 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 instinctive endeavor toward the light, has vanished. For a little time it lives and thrives and ripens in the open with the free heavens above it and the searching winds cherishing its sweetness or beating its fiber into strength and comeliness, and then yielding up its life in the multiplying 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 sowing 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, 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 vanish again into the refuge of darkness, and nothing remains save a brief memory of 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.  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 knitting together of its structure, in the reach and delicacy of its foliage, in the sweetness of its brief flowering and the richness of its frutage, 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 tender and powerful forces of our nature, the capacities for devotion, sacrifice, heroism, the passion for purity and peace, the divine energy of growth which give the brief record of life here its unspeakable 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 cannot be found, neither by searching can the birth of the soul be uncovered. Because we are his children, born of his will, bearing his image, for takers of his thought, educated in his school to enter into his life, no hand will ever be laid on the place where we were born, and the sacredness of our souls will be protected forever by an impenetrable mystery 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 clouds and darkness which surround his throne. When we come into the light a thousand 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 Infinite, whose thoughts we are, whose universe 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 perpetual 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 divine energy of the soul, forever seeking its highest good in the good of its mate, its supremus 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 under all manner of obscure garbs, rejected and cast out in hours of blindness, compelled to bear company with all uncleanness, touched but never stained by all defilement. Love walks the earth in the image of God and bearing perpetual witness to his unseen presence. As all life comes into visible being at its call, so all life culminates and is fulfilled in its unfolding. All life predicts its coming, and all life is the witness of its presence. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. 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 acceptance. 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 themselves 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 comfort are perilous and despicable if one seeks them. There are many things of real value if they come to a man as the byproducts of living, but enervating and corrupting if pursued as ends in themselves. Popularity is an excellent and 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 degrades 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 ignoble path which she has chosen. Even happiness, if put before honor, duty, or service, betrays the soul. 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 human dignity. They may be blameless so far as external morals are concerned, and yet they are guilty of refusing the supreme 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 danger, but have faced it, suffered, and triumphed. 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 enemies. These wretched ones have made the great refusal. They have lived without praise or blame. Their offense is that they have been neither faithful to God nor rebellious. They have existed for themselves only. When opportunity interfered with ease, they chose ease. When duty came companioned by danger, they bolted the door and kept themselves safe. When in the night and storm the cry for help rose above the tumult, they remained 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 accept 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 immediate 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 sometimes of another when he wishes to think all the time and only of himself. The making and keeping of a home necessitates self-sacrifice, work, and the expenditure of time and strength. It interferes 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 oneself 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 unselfishness 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 happiness. It is to avoid the noblest chance of education which life offers. And yet thousands of people do this simply to escape being bothered. Man 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 fulfillment of the oldest, most fundamental, and divinest of all human functions was not the richest, most influential, and happiest career open to men and women. The only really creative function committed to them. No people are more to be pitied than the young men and women who marry as a further step in selfishness, 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 defeat one of the great ends of marriage by agreeing not to have children because children are such a bother.  They make the great refusal before they know what they are refusing.  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 themselves. By self-denial and glad acceptance, by greeting the unseen with a cheer they make the great acceptance and become worthy of God's great gift to his children. In the hour of Thoros' 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 symphony. 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. End of Chapter 19 The Great Refusal Chapter 20 Of Fruits of the Spirit This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Bruce Kachuk. Fruits of the Spirit by Hamilton Wright, maybe. Chapter 20 Discredited Witnesses Sitting before an open fire in a private 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 series of apparently casual contacts with trained artists, his final success and personal 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, something within them has always borne witness to a great destiny, and in their worst estate of degradation and misery there has been a mystery about them, as of heirs of a kingdom become, for the moment, 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 anodines, they have said, let us be men and face the facts, and in every time there have been those who succumb 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 committed their hearts to the keeping of their highest visions, not because their visions were beautiful or comforting, but because they made life explicable by bringing 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 imagination 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 testify 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 competency and veracity. Shall the evidence of the lawless be counted of equal authority with that of those who hold themselves obedient to the law? Shall the report of the drunkard count with that of the clear-eyed man of integrity? Shall the man of ungovernable passions have equal weight with the man who rules himself? 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 greatness. It is profoundly interesting and significant 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 surrounded. 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, the judgment place where its nature and meaning are demanded and must be revealed. In that august place only the saint have a right to be heard, but it is a pathetic and significant fact that the insane crowd the place of judgment and pour out their woes as if they were the sorrows 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 bear their self-inflicted wounds and say, Behold the blows of fate! They dramatize 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, their blighted genius, and say, This is life! Is it? Is the beauty of love and self-sacrifice and purity to be found behind prison bars or 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 genius 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 by the volume of sound that comes from them, but if they were multiplied a thousandfold, they would still be impotent witnesses to the nature and meaning of life, because they have disqualified themselves 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. 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 mortal 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 crossbones, the hourglass and the scythe. We recall some trait or quality or 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 immense 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 missing not only an hourly comfort, but a deep peace of spirit and a glorious expectation. 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 immortal 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 made decay, but we are not imprisoned in it, and its fate is not our fate. We can go out of it when we choose and make ourselves another house. Our bodies are the servants of our spirit. 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 injury befalls us, we do not say, I am broken. We say, my arm is broken. In speech and in action we habitually dissociate ourselves from our bodies and affirm 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 organization. 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 going to take you in a minute. The bravest men are not those who are insensible to physical fear, but those who master it by courage of the 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 75 has already lived in seven or eight bodies. It is literally true that we die daily, 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 bluebird goes with fear and trembling into the burying ground, he finds it a sunny meadow and cries out to his frightened sister, there are no dead. The question is sometimes asked, does death end all? Death ends nothing. It is simply a change. There are no dead in the sense in which the phrase is commonly used. There are only the living 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 ends 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 experiences 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 world for centuries as the end of happiness into a larger freedom and joy, and to make immortality not a vague expectation, 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. Martino, our companions have but mounted the divergent path to explore the more sacred streams and visit the divine veils 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. End of Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Of Fruits of the Spirit. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Bruce Kachuk. Fruits of the Spirit by Hamilton Wright, maybe. Chapter 22 The Larger Plan In those years which we call prosperous because our plans are successfully carried out and our fields are fertile and the shadow of sorrow does not fall a thwart 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. But sooner or later this seeming security 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 entrenched against misfortune sorrow hangs like a cloud, ominous with disaster. Then comes the crisis in our spiritual life. We have become accustomed to regard 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 brightness. 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 and accept his plan? This is a strength beyond the strength of 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 provision for the future. The wisdom which accepts the plan of God and loyally works with it without repining or discouragement or paralysis of energy. There is a truer prosperity than the fertility of our fields and the increasing returns 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 Gruu, 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 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 possibilities and of the outcome of events is too heavy to be born. 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 unfertil 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 execution. 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 subjection to his will. Then when our best laid and most cherished plans go awry, we shall have no sense of failure but the consciousness of a vaster design being wrought out through us and for us. End of Chapter 22 The Larger Plan Chapter 23 Of Fruits of the Spirit This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Bruce Kachuk. Fruits of the Spirit by Hamilton Wright Mayby Chapter 23 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 traditionally interpreted as a pathetic instance 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 fate for question to Lowengrin 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 interpretation. 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 a force that creates the power that sustains the principle that governs. It is the love of his art which draws the artist unwirried 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, because they are the symbols of its spiritual 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 of the heart of things and art which is the record of the creative spirit working with and through Touch is perfection only when passion and intelligence are so blended that out of this co-mingling another word is spoken in the revelation of the divine to the human. Love is never blind. Those who love 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, clarifies, intensifies the senses and faculties which already exist. In its first daybreak the world lies half concealed in a mist which poetizes rather than distorts or falsifies proportions, relations, qualities. When the light grows clear perspectives 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 well as of surrender.  The wife who finds no defect in 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 we can. The faithful mothers, wives and friends who accept us as we are as often harm as help us. They live with us only on the lower levels of being. They neither climb nor stir us to climb. Love that his content rubs 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 nobleness to see clearest and they bind us with bands of steel who so awaken the best in us that when at last we put forth our hands to grasp the highest things, behold, our hands are clasped in theirs. 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 perfection. For love seeks perfection because 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 becomes 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 completion 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 to remove them to an inaccessible distance. Love begins with a vision. It passes through the travail of the years, the disillusions which are part of the waking day, the monotony of daily duty, the wearing away of the flush of the morning, 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 not on the early glow, but on the high, clear, later light, not to the blind, the indulgent, the slothful lovers, come the great realizations of the final growth, but to those whom love has made wise in severity, resolute in demand, heroic in loyalty to the highest in the beloved, perfection of character, entire harmony of nature, instant adjustment of mood with mood, if they were possible at the beginning would defeat the highest service 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, behind the present imperfection 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 demand perfection, for perfection in this mortal life would be as abnormal, unwelcome, and repellent as a child with the knowledge and experience of a man. It is in the search for perfection that love 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. CHAPTER XXVIII. THE CHILD IN THE WORLD. CHRISTMAS 19.3. The child born in Bethlehem 1900 years ago came into a world ruled by force under the dominion 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 worship, in the sweet familiarities with spirits of localities, so sympathetically described in the early chapters of Marius the 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 organization. It was a hard brutal world in spite of the beauty and refinement of certain aspects 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 above 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 in order of the society which that child was sent to transform. The task laid upon the child seemed impossible of achievement. To set a child to destroy the rule of force seemed like the wild dream of some fanatic 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 of 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 divinous vision which has ever lightened the darkness of the world. And on Christmas morning there will be appealing 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 the future too blissful, if the most thoroughgoing pessimist of today 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 thanksgiving. We have gone but a little way towards the establishment of the kingdom 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 Bethlehem. Today 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 so many absorbed in it to the exclusion 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 needlessness of the fight are sometimes so revolting 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 multiplication 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 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 sidelights to be thrown on this depressing condition of things which greatly change its character and give it a different and a far brighter aspect. At the very worst it is a far kindlier more human more unselfish world than it was in which Christ was born. But passing all those things by the season brings one great unshakable hope to our hearts. The child who transformed the world of force will also transform the world of greed. The task seems to many today 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 love and power. The world of greed is already penetrated by the influences that flow from the heart and mind of the child. Intent as the world is on its own success, it already pays love and respect of a decent regard for appearances. 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 something 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 seeks deeper and deeper into the consciousness of the world. An ideal which 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. End of Chapter 24. Chapter 25 of Fritz of the Spirit. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Chad Horner from Valle Claire in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. Fritz of the Spirit by Hamilton Wright maybe. Chapter 25. Francis of Salle. A saint in nature and life as well as a name. In enumerating some causes of Thanksgiving in the quaint language of the 17th 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 assistants is. And consider 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. Others subjected to reproaches contempt and dishonour. Others weighed down with poverty and God has not suffered you to be so miserable.  And why are you not among them? God has favoured you.  And by God's providence you have been well nurtured and educated. Consider your spiritual graces. God has given you knowledge of himself even from your youth. How often has he given you his sacraments. How often inspirations, interior illuminations and mornings for your amendment. 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 gracious God has been to you. On Thanksgiving Day honoured now by the usage of many generations. Emphasis is generally laid on those occasions for gratitude which have a common claim for 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, the widespread ease of condition, there cannot be too much gratitude. For these material and physical prosperity are also spiritual signs of well-being. When the nation 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 and freedom and power. Consider in detail, writes Saint Francis, how good and gracious God has been to you. Deeper than all other reasons for Thanksgiving 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 figment difficulties. Because God watches over them men who have gone astray are suddenly discovered 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 education because we are immortal we are never permitted to rest in mortal conditions to find satisfaction with mortal possessions to secure content in this mortal life above and below gratitude for pleasant paths and fertile fields and surseys of great anxieties there ought to be joy unspeakable in that gift of spiritual life which transforms this changing life turns its apparent diversities into blessings its burdens into sources of strength its bitter partings into prophecies of blissful reunions let every man search his heart and his life and consider in detail how good and gracious God has been. End of chapter 25 recording by Chad Horner from Ballycler in County Andrew, Northern Ireland. Chapter 26 of fruits of the spirit this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Chad Horner from Ballycler, Northern Ireland. Fruits of the Spirit by Hamilton Wright maybe. Chapter 26 the restlessness of the age shows itself in nothing more disastrously 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 temporary 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 experience a wealth of sweetness trust association sense of security in youth when the year of wandering 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 steadying impulses of anchorage of the affections when the work of life is at the flood the home is a refuge for the disheartening influences which sap the strength of the most aspiring a place of peace where the vision grows clear and courage returns and the armor is put on with new heart and neither for man nor for woman can any kind of success influence or power compensate for its loss sometimes the home must be sacrificed for some high duty but nothing in contemporary life is sadder than the surrender 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 satisfaction to exchange a home for what is 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 enclosure in which the finest and deepest defections 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 success to the spirit such approaches to the heart as those who unfold the young life in an atmosphere of which it is unconscious but which penetrates and gives color to its most secret thoughts the vast majority of the fundamental ideas come to the child why 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 closed with put his childhood a pievede cadore into his pictures in a long succession of mountain backgrounds so every man and woman of imagination constantly recalls the long long thoughts of youth and draws upon the inexhaustible capital of ideas dreams visions and divinations which were part of life in the quiet places and ours of home and in mature life this silent education is more profound more spiritual more illuminating than that which is furnished by the church or the state the other great institutional schools of society we are so dominated by purely academic ideals that our conceptions of education are often as superficial as they are arrogant and positive and in our devotion to methods and instruments to mere acquisition should the trademarks of education we lose sight of its great realities the awakening of the spirit the quickening of the affections the liberating of the imagination the deliverance from the dominion of names and forms the birth into freedom and power Guta's mother did more for the training of his genius than the university of Strasbourg Ruskin drew more inspiration from the beauty and nobility of those early readings of the bible with his mother thumb from his studies at Oxford the atmosphere of the quiet rectory at Summers Bay left a deeper impress on the sensitive mind of Tennyson than the years at Cambridge there is no spectacle in life more pathetic than homeless old age at the end of the working years when the final period 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 gallered 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 graces courtesy the old-time helpfulness there wait those delicate 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 intoxication and the rush and tumult of work and strife have become a faint fair sound on the horizon and these deep and permanent influences which more than any others shape the character these sweet and spiritual consolations and rewards over which time has no dominion this rich and liberating education which colleges and universities 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 luxury the chance to spend more on pleasure 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 and the lodging full of novelty and interest that the home is old fashioned and out of date and the lodging a step forward in emancipation that the home means drudgery and the lodging leisure that the home involves anchorage in the harbour 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 children of folly none are more blind than those who voluntarily close the lodging instead of the home end of chapter 26 recording by chat horner from baliclair northern arland chapter 27 of fruits of the spirit this is a livervox recording all livervox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit livervox.org recording by chat horner in baliclair northern arland fruits of the spirit by hamilton right maybe chapter 27 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 the society 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 sceptred wrongs compassed about with apparently overwhelming evidences of moral chaos and spiritual wreck the genius that is in the soul of the race flashed a sudden light on the very heart of the mystery and find 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 the destructive forces and rebuilt only to be wrecked afresh the old order has passed and the new has come only to become old self and yield to the pressure of the later need the world has been lifted for the first time into a light of knowledge and its races and their conditions well now complete and men are appalled by the work to be done before human conditions are made wholesome and safe through all the confusion without a 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 outlets of an order not fixed and arbitrary 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 or spirit and method in the sublime progression of creative energy the apparent antithesis between law and love has not only led to numerous 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 and the very structure of the moral order the very fibre 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 relentless 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 enforced 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 distrustful of its integrity and doubtful of its power to govern there have been a thousand misapprehensions of love because its lower have been so often mistaken for its higher manifestations 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 penalties that might arrest the downward tendency is not tender but cruel love neither evades or conceals because it seeks only the best not the easiest or the most comfortable way for one upon whom it lavishes its wealth law apprehends 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 confess the offense which is still undiscovered 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 before law moved love saw the offense and gathered its awful sternness after law has forgotten love bears the disgrace and carries the baggage of shame and endures because it punishes only to save law takes the culprit to the cell and locks the door love goes into the 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 the 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 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 discredited energy lost opportunity infidelity 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 being 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 imposes 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 uttermost edge because he loves men there must come 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 heartbreaking 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 of 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 devotion he must be ready to be searched three and three 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 himself for love is a more terrible master than law and they if you follow must stand ready to strip themselves of all lesser possessions Dante looked at the terrors of hell and heard the groans of purgatory before he found Beatrice waiting 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 end of chapter 27 recording by Chad Horner from Ballycler Northern Ireland chapter 28 of fruits of the spirit this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Chad Horner from Ballycler Northern Ireland fruits of the spirit by Hamilton Wright maybe chapter 28 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 everyday 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 everyday experiences he wrote begin the morning by saying to I shall meet with the busybody the ungrateful arrogant deceitful envious unsocial 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 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 kinsmen 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 with 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 the feelings 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 misrepresentation dries up in the atmosphere of unspoken condemnation the envious finds the air which surrounds a generous soul uncongenial and the ungrateful 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 kindness generosity and a spirit of unselfishness escape from some men and women in their most silent moods and pervade the places in which they are it is matter of no consequence to us that those about us are ungenerous envious and bearers of false tales there is no reason why we should descend from the hillsides on which we live into the swamp because other men and women like the miasma no man need to be ignoble in this world because the world is full of ignorant people for as marcus aurelius points out those who love the higher 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 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 unconsciously 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 10 times more persuasive and searching than any reproof or direct suggestion in a corrupt society a good man or a pure woman stands out with marvellous brightness and the worst society society is the less excuse is there for corruption those who charge their faults upon their environment and who mitigate their judgment of themselves by the reflection that the standards of those 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 as to sin not only against the light but against one's less fortunate fellows it is nothing to us that others are envious malicious deceitful ungrateful our concern is with ourselves so long as we are generous appreciative truth loving we may let the world take care of itself we shall have rendered it our best service end of chapter 28 recording by Chad Horner from Ballet Claire in County Antrim Northern Ireland chapter 29 of fruits of the spirit this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Maria Fatima the Silver fruits of the spirit by Hamilton Wright Mavy chapter 29 a secret of youth one of the good signs of the time is the fact that people no longer conceive of life as arbitrarily divided into periods of time the women afforded today do not follow the habit of their ancestors and put on caps and take to knitting under the impression that henceforth for them there is laid up nothing but the profound respect which children ought to pay to advance tears 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 someday the dear old lady of silvery hair and quiet gown and the ripening and mellow charm of advancing years will return to us something undoubtedly 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 ancestors emerson somewhere recalls the remark 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 people are no longer ashamed to be about and doing their work at 80 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 80 one may be active 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 as all immortal and that old age is a voluntary matter age is largely a matter of a 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 is a matter 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 feeling 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 immortal side that they forget their immortality this use of muscle in any part of the body speedily means stagnation and hardening giving up interest in life going into voluntary retirement coming to anchor with the intention of never putting to sea again is insensibly followed by spiritual and physical acceptance of declining energy and fading interests the mortal must be kept alive by the immortal the body kept young by the mind the mind fed by constant contact with fresh ideas the conservatism of old age lies chiefly enclosing the doors shutting 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 holding 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 companionship 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 of the procession in their hospitality to new ideas variety and charm and interest lie in the preservation of freshness Robert Louis Stevenson wrote clean 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 commonplace to him the colors do not fade as a matter of fact they never fade it is the perceptions which become dollar the interest which becomes less keen a good many men and women have discovered 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 forward and not backward that the world which grows sadder because one's companions 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 philosophy 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 discovering 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 end of chapter 29 chapter 30 of fruits of the spirit this is a leperbox recording all leperbox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit leperbox.org fruits of the spirit by hamilton rite maybe 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 inability 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 duration 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 will kill time they cannot kill what does not exist for them they simply miss the opportunity to make time they kill their chances in vacation days busy people rest by not making time they hang up the receiver so to 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 fable-ness that comes with the burden of years demands the utmost courtesy and the tenderest care but there is nothing in age of itself which carries authority or enforces respect mere duration has nothing in it that claims the reverence of men time which is duration made significant and fruitful alone wears the crown of that authority which rests on ripe thought deep experience inward growth a man may have length of years and be as devoid of wisdom as a child of yesterday a race may have counted 30 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 is 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 this guy without care or thought it is 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 osiphorous some of the greatest makers of time are the quietest to turn duration into time and not let the threads run into a meaningless 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 trouble 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 everything must be made that is the beneficent law of life nature takes care that no man gets morally intellectually or spiritually rich by sitting still and letting things pour into his lap wealth in these imperishable 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 beautiful 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 end of chapter 30 chapter 31 of fruits of the spirit this is a labor box recording all labor box recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit labor box org fruits of the spirit by Hamilton Wright maybe 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 medieval imagination and appeared in many variations of a story whose pathos and meaning even the way faring man could not fail to read in one day thoughtful men pray not to be saved from death but from what many call life they are so overloaded with responsibilities encompassed about with what they regard as duties that they have become mere automated machines they keep their engagements and do the work assign them on the hour they are models of punctuality and often miracles of executive fidelity but they are selling their birth right 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 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 activities to which one gives a hand it would be just as rational to say that the wisest man is he who has read the greatest number of books and the most learned woman she who has taken the greatest number of postgraduate 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 ability and have parted with their most precious possession the power of inward growth to such men and women depleted by the incessant train on resources which they have no chance to build up and didn't embody in soul by the merciless strain of unrelieved activity the prayer for time becomes a cry of acute suffering those who are content to be machines and are satisfied with keeping things going will not understand 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 lie fallow until the earlier and later reigns 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 machines they were made living creatures and they need the nourishment of reflection observation reading leisure pleasure 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 multiply its earning power put it out at interest 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 imposes to work so hard that one has no time to think of him as a tragic folly no matter how honorable the work may be to give oneself so entirely to activities that one has no time for his soul no leisure for inward growth no opportunity 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 follies are punished as certainly as their sins the man who makes a machine of himself by giving to activity the portion of time which belongs to his soul becomes as metallic and barren as the selfish strudge the woman whose days are on broken 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 tragedies of the good as well as of the bad there are failures among those who mean well as among those who mean ill 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 potage and there are a few things more pitiful than a man become such a slave to good works that he stars in the midst of plenty end of chapter 31 chapter 32 of fruits of the spirit this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org fruits of the spirit I Hamilton write maybe simplicity of life those who read the daily newspapers monthly magazines and current books detached from the older literature the earlier histories and the records and 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 in advance one radical difference between this period and earlier periods is in the extension and thoroughness of our knowledge of social conditions we know the 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 own towns we know social conditions almost as well as they knew family conditions the result is that we are confronted 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 preceding ages but complexity of condition is a very different matter from complexity 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 conditions create complex habits of life as a matter of fact the simple life is inward not outward it is a matter of the spirit 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 conspicuous example of the simple life than that which was furnished by a roman emperor and anyone 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 greatest obscurity and the smallest means no man or woman need live a complex life because the age is complex confusion of thought is an inward condition not the result of outward circumstances 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 collection because the lines of his knowledge run through the vast space and range the myriad objects in clear and definite order 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 interesting article by dr clement a penrose of bultemar on a class whom this physician calls the mind weary people 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 today from weariness of mind because they lack organizing ideas of life this is the explanation for the singular prosperity of quacks and spiritual pretenders of all sorts and for the flourishing of occultism which always reappears when men lose their grip on clear definite and powerful religious convictions instead of convents and monasteries society is full today of all kinds of refuges from the weariness of life and from its perplexities and cares shelters devised sometimes by half educated well-meaning enthusiasts sometimes by persons of unusual clairvoyant or hypnotic gifts who start honestly and then become humbugs when they discover the financial possibilities of their unusual gift or by out and out deceivers and beguilers who understand 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 commenting on dr penrose's paper says very truly that many people are struggling vainly to piece together into a rational system the alleged discoveries of psychology 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 organization 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 manuals all the arts and sciences are represented on the bookshelves of the libraries in a vast number of easily written 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 volume of misinformation now distributed through society and the mass of ill-digested thinking to which the average man and woman are exposed it is astonishing that there is not more brain weariness and that a greater number of people do not fall prey to the delusions of the moment those easygoing solutions of the problems of life which push aside responsibility and settle all questions out of hand many men and many women are bewildered by the number 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 deepening 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 encyclopedias of popular misinformation but encyclopedias without order definition accuracy illumination the remedy for this confusion is a clear recognition that no human being can settle all questions master all knowledge or try all experience that every man must select the things which belong to him and leave the other things alone that to do anything strongly incompetently 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 impatiently worked out and followed brings one to wisdom and power while a great number of ideas which touch only this 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 today is not whether they will understand everything and use everything but what they shall resolutely cut off it is not a question of taking things on but of leaving things out the genius of the simple life lies in accepting a fundamental conception of what one is here for if one has such a conception it will impose order on the outward confusion give one peace in outward turmoil 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 end of chapter 32