The Law of Selection
The Fallacy of Negation
The Secret of All No life is lost that is lived for love. The only wealth you can possess is that you have in the heart. Love never knows hardship, even when it meets it. When men pray for harvest they often get a plow. A man's holiness is to be measured by the happiness he creates. The only way to reach heaven is by attempting to realize heaven now. Whatever is saved by selfishness is lost to the true self. One of the worst offenses against humanity is the pretense of divinity. Weapons that fly off the handle have little effect on the walls of sin. Many a man thinks that taking a lease on a front pew gives him a freehold on a corner lot in heaven. Success is not in an endeavour to do a great things but in repeated endeavours to do greater things. THE LAW OF SELECTION
Jesus said, "If thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee," but this age finds it hard to accept that saying. It asks, If we are to throw life away why should it have been given to us? Why this selfhood with its passions, its surging desires, its great longing to be untrammelled and free if all is to be restrained and the passions are to be perpetually denied? If religion means, as some plainly have said, doing the things you don't want to do and leaving undone those you desire, then it is a mockery, a contradiction of our lives and natures.
Therefore there exists another philosophy which says, boldly: Live out all that is in you; do all the things you want to do; your passions in themselves are sufficient justification for their gratification. They say man is free; therefore, let him realize himself by giving free and full expression to every thought, inclination, appetite, and possibility within him.
When the average man puts the two philosophies in contrast he is likely to conclude that the path of self-denial, of stern repression, is the mistaken one; for, he will say, does it not contradict nature?--does it not involve the repression of natural instincts and make all life a perpetual fight against ourselves, a waste of forces, instead of, as it should be, a plan by which a man might find success through the realization of the best in himself?
But let another test be put to this philosophy--the test of life. How does it work out? What are the best lives, the lives that are richest and that have most enriched the world? Are they those that have given free rein to every fancy, that have nurtured and brought to fruitage every growth of the heart's garden, whether it be thistle, brier, or poison root, or fair, nutritious product? Are they those that have given the tiger and the beast of prey free and full range of the life?
There is striking unanimity in the answer. The rich and the enriching lives have been those that have come by the path of the cross; they have learned repression, practiced denial, and suffered death. In every sphere the lights that have illumined the way of man's advance have not been the dancing flames of selfish, sensual passion but the consuming of the bodies of the martyrs and heroes, either burning in their passion for others or denying and losing all rather than denying truth and light.
The law runs through all; if you would have a perfect flower you must deny existence to many weeds, you must repress the rank growth, you must pluck off many a leaf and nip many a bud that the one may come to the fullness of its beauty. Through the grain of character goes the wise husbandman, and death is in his hand--the death of the less worthy, the harmful, and the enemy that life may abound yet more and more in that which is worthy.
In those fields where all things grow in their own way the weeds become the standard for all; license brings all down to the level of the lowest. But life is not license--it is choice, selection, sacrifice, death. Pain is the only price at which perfection may be purchased. Self-realization comes not by permitting all things to have their way but by subjecting all parts to the securing of that high end.
It is but cowardice that cries for the so-called natural outworking of everything within man; it seeks to save the labour of weeding, the pain of cutting here and pruning there. It asks only to be left alone. But that way lies the deepest pain of all, the pain of a life where there is nothing but tangles of weeds--no flowers, no capacities for joy, no power to will, no eye to see the good and true and beautiful.
No; the great Teacher was right when He called for self-denial and self-victory. He only is great, he alone has found life who has learned to bring all his parts and faculties into service, who brings all his body and self into subjection that all may be keen and well kept tools in the work he is doing as a servant of his brothers and his age. This service gives the supreme and sufficient motive for the suppression and elimination of all things that might hinder; the development of the best self for the best service by means of the cutting off of anything that might hinder or thwart the high and holy service purposes of a life.
THE FALLACY OF NEGATION
The ancient law that nature abhors a vacuum holds true in the moral realm. The heart of man is never long empty. And yet the whole scheme of modern ecclesiastical regulation of life is built on the plan of making a man holy by emptying him of all evil and stopping there, leaving a negative condition, without a thought of the necessity of filling the void.
So long have we been trained in this that we are all a good deal more concerned about the things we ought not to do than about the things we ought to do. We spend our days nipping off the buds of evil inclinations, pulling up the weeds of evil habits, wondering how it happens they multiply so fast, forgetting altogether the wiser plan we would adopt with weeds and briers in our gardens.
There are many who still think of the pious man as one who succeeds in accomplishing the largest number of repressions in his life, the ideal being the colourless life, never doing a thing that is wrong or subject to criticism. The energy of many a life is being spent in a campaign against a certain list of proscribed deeds. Blessed is the man--according to their beatitudes--who has the largest number of things he does not do.
But if rightness is abstinence from evil, then a lamp-post must always be better than a man, for it justly can lay claim to all the negative virtues. What an easy way of life is this, simply to find out the things we know other people like to do and to determine that if we only can leave them undone we are holy in the sight of heaven.
But not only is this a way of folly, it is a way of positive harm, a way fatal at last to the true life. To do no more than to turn out one set of devils only is to invite other and worse devils into the heart. To seek emptiness only is to invite yet more iniquity. An empty heart is as dangerous as an empty hour.
Emptiness is not holiness, it is idiocy. There cannot be an empty heart. To take a bad thing away from a man gives an opportunity for a worse thing to enter unless you simply choke the bad by implanting the good. Some of the most dangerous people are those who feel pious because they can say, We never did any harm.
Religion often has come to mean only a multitude of repressive regulations, apparently a scheme for making others abstain from those things for which we have no appetite. Little wonder that children feel only repulsion for a church which seems to take delight in finding impiety in every natural pleasure; that men turn from a path which, according to its prospectus, promises nothing but pain, privation, and emptiness.
We do not object to the pain and privation provided they have their purpose. But all nature objects to a course of life that maims, pinches, and restricts without corresponding and compensating development and liberty somewhere. We fight against every law of life and court the ways of death so long as we endeavour to develop character by putting it into bandages, leading strings, and legal restrictions.
There is evil to be eliminated; there are thousands of things we ought not to do. But the best way to get rid of the tares is to sow good wheat in abundance. The way to avoid the things we ought not to do is to do the things that ought to be done. The empty life is a standing invitation to temptation; the busy man seldom finds the devil's card left at his door.
Live the life above the things you would overcome. It never has been found necessary to pass a law prohibiting the president from playing marbles; larger interests fill his life so that these things do not even occur to him. Give a man a great work to do and you will save him from a thousand temptations to do small and unworthy things. Do not allow the modern conception of religion as gloom and denial to keep you from that which is your right as a spiritual being, the strength, joy and beauty of the divine life.
Holiness of life is not in innocence of evil but in positive forcefulness for good; not in doing as little harm as we can, but in filling the whole life with worthy, helpful, uplifting deeds. The good life not only has no debts--it has large assets, deep and lasting value; it enriches all life. It offers to the world not barren land claiming the virtue of freedom from the thorn and the brier, it crowns all with the abundance and glory of fir and myrtle.
THE SECRET OF ALL
The words hold a large place in every alert life: Happiness, Health and Heart; some may put them Success, Strength and the Soul. It is easy to recognize the importance of the first two; that of the third is more remote. Some have imagined that religion emphasizes the last alone and ignores the other two.
Evidently it is a legitimate thing for the Christian to pray for prosperity; and it is right for him to try to answer his own prayers. Poverty is no proof of piety. Nothing about God is or can be poverty-stricken. He gives us a rich and glorious world, prolific in its resources; its life is rich and prosperous. Nature is running over, fairly rioting in splendour and wealth. The Creator has given man this garden of glory that he might enjoy it. It is a sin not to enter into its possession; he is dead already who does not desire prosperity, who no longer seeks success in life. It is an easy matter for the man who has made an all around failure to talk about the dispensations of Providence and the compensations of the future. Prosperity is always a sin to the man who lacks the pluck to secure it.
Yet many who seem to have failed may have succeeded best of all. Prosperity often comes in strange packages; it may even be labelled Adversity. Not all will succeed according to popular standards. Many will be more fortunate; they will win the riches of influence, friendship, family, thought, knowledge, love, character. It is not the things we have that make us rich; it is the amount of life we are capable of enjoying. The soul determines prosperity. It is the energizing spirit of man, stirring him out of the ignoble dust, creating the desire for more of the things of life and then for more of life itself. It determines values. It has a way of reversing things so that one man gets more out of a dollar book than another gets out of a million dollar bond. It alone gives appetite and appreciation, and, without these, though there may be many possessions, there is no prosperity.
What is true of prosperity is true also of health. Happily the days are gone when sickness passed for saintliness. No longer is red blood counted a foe of righteousness. We are getting back to the simpler, earlier thinking. It is not only right to seek health; it is wrong not to. The haggard face no longer indicates the holy heart; it is likely to evidence the opposite. We are getting over the notion that God is glorified by ruining the fair temple He has given us. Men no longer count on being beautiful angels in the skies because they have looked like walking sepulchres on our streets. It is an imperfect holiness that does not have health. Health, that is physical prosperity, is a duty.
And here, also, the soul is central. The clean heart, pure thoughts, controlled appetites, aspiring hopes, these make health. Evil temper, lust, worry, care, envy, these are the soul processes that disturb the life and destroy health. Happiness is health, and happiness is wholly of the heart. The soul is but the sum of all the things within, the force that moves all things in life; if within the man looks up, then he lives up; if the soul droops, he decays. What you are within determines what you are without; he who is poor in heart, in this inner life, will be poor in prosperity and weak in health, no matter how much he possesses. But he who with his soul takes in the world of beauty, of love, of joy, who reaches out to heaven and God, all these things are his and he is rich and strong indeed.
[The end]
Henry Frederick Cope's essay: Price of Success