The Sense of the Unseen
The Brook in the Way
That Which is High The song of sympathy never comes until the singer has been to the school of sorrow. True spirituality can see the altar in the cookstove and the washtub. People who are always off the key are never content out of the choir. The only version of the Bible authorized by heaven is that on two feet. Every life must have days in the desert but it does not need to build its house there. Many a man thinks he is patient with pain when he is only perverse in eating pickles. No man knows how much religion he has until he goes of fishing alone where mosquitoes are many. There are too many people to whom God has given wings who are complaining of corns. It is some consolation to know that when you aim at nothing you are sure to hit it. If you have large reserves of religion you will not be without the small change of kindness. THE SENSE OF THE UNSEEN
When the practically-minded man Paul writes of looking at the things which are not seen his words sound like either fantasy or folly. Yet it is plain fact, practical, and certainly essential to any success. He is blind who can see only with his eyes, and he only is sensible who knows there are many things beyond his senses. Practical men consider all the factors to every problem, and things are not less real to them because they may chance to be intangible.
The unseen things are imminent to us always. There are many things not yet pigeonholed by our science nor catalogued by our philosophies. You can dissect a daisy and enumerate its parts; but you never know a daisy until you have seen the unseen things thereof, until you have felt the subtle appeal of its beauty. Bobbie Burns saw more of the daisy than the greatest botanist without his spiritual eyes.
The danger is that in our hard workaday we shall forget the reality of the unseen, we shall get to think that gold and steel and land are the only real things, and we shall shape ourselves by the blind and base creed of gold, and steel, and land. How easy it is to measure every man by his possessions in tangible things. How easy to make these our chief end in life, to slight the real prizes, the unseen wealth that lies so close at hand or already possessed, while we rush and strive for the rainbow of riches.
Deep within us we know that he is rich, and he alone, who has wisdom, love, patience, who possesses friends, who creates kindly thoughts, whose life with simple joy abounds. Once again and often do we need to see Bunyan's picture of the man bending over his refuse, gathered with the muck rake, and heedless of the angel holding the crown that only waits his taking.
A man is wealthy according to what is within him. His greatness is of the things that are unseen. There are limits to the possession and the use of the things that are seen; but who shall set a limit to a man's possible wealth in love and honour, in wisdom and integrity, in all the things that make up the soul of man? Few are the things that a man may hold for his own all the days of his life, and fewer still are those he may grasp with pleasure when the hands are falling helpless by his side. But many are the riches he may have to hold forever in the things of the unseen. Many a man walks through the fields penniless and yet richer far than their owner; to him the birds sing, for him the flowers bloom, to his eyes there are beauties in the blue beyond all words, and all the loveliness of the fair land lifts his heart within him. The other man who holds the title deeds sees nothing beside them. Possession is wholly a matter of appreciation. The earth is the Lord's and He gives it to those who have eyes to see.
It is the eye to see the unseen that gives wealth to the seen. Values depend on vision. Appreciation does not prevent possession; it makes the possession actual. And the vision of the realities behind things keeps a man from the sense of destitution when all things are taken from him. He cannot be destitute. He may lose all his fellows, but he cannot be friendless; the Father of Spirits cannot lose him, nor can he be cut off from fellowship with those who die no more.
The seeing eye is the stimulus to the worth while endeavour. The inventors who have enriched the world endured derision seeing the things invisible to others. The truth is that it is the unspiritual world that makes the least progress in things material. The men of faith and vision are back of all advance. They have endurance, patience, and strength. The sense of another world where motives are rightly measured, the sense of a great cloud of worthy witnesses to other eyes invisible, the sense of reward in the very service itself, rewards intangible yet most real, the joy of sacrifice and service; these all enable one to push on, to toil, to endure. Then, long afterwards, the dull, weary world sees and understands.
THE BROOK IN THE WAY
Alongside every highway runs the brook whereof a man may drink often if he will and drinking lift up his head. Its little song we scarce hear in the rush of our businesses; its refreshing we forget even though our throats be parched with the dust of our petty affairs. Yet it is ever there, cool, refreshing, this world of spirits and ideals.
Nature has a prodigal way of scattering rivulets down the hillside and along the pathways, little heeding whether men walk there or not. The practical eye sees waste; these streams might have been made to turn wheels; the needs of the traveller, weary with the way, might be met by faucets at regular intervals.
It is well for us all that the power of the practical man finds its limitations, else all poetry would have gone from the world, and great and glorious as might have been our physical perfections our bodies would be but the empty habitations whence souls had long since fled. The utilitarian would have stolen from us the bliss of the deep draft from the pebbly brook.
The man who is proud of being practical tells us we are wasting time and nervous energy in stopping to think of ideal things; we must take the world as we find it, he says, forgetting how fair and poetic we once found it and how bleak and ugly we are likely to leave it. But to him trees are always lumber, grass and flowers but hay, bird songs spell poultry, wind and waters energy. Many are too busy making things ever to enjoy anything that is made.
In this steel age it may seem folly and waste to stop and think of sacrifice and courage and love, to admire and answer to the thrill of human passions; but alas for him who never sees the light of heaven in another's tear, nor hears the brush of angels' wings when men and women fly to their fellow's aid.
If you haven't time in your busy life to turn aside to drink of the brook of human affection, to look deep into the eyes of friendship, to sympathize, to comfort, to taste this strange sweet and bitter cup of our common fellowship, then is your heart going dry and thirsty and life becoming a whitened road that knows no wells or springs.
But something there is in man that calls for drafts at yet deeper streams than these. Foolish and unlearned he may be, ignorant of the wise conclusions of philosophers who have looked into these things with their lanterns, but through the ages he has been drinking eagerly at the waters of eternity. In every man there is a thirst after the deep, immeasurable things divine; the deeper the nature of the man the greater his necessity for drinking often here.
The consciousness of the great life that embraces all life, the sense of its nearness to us all, has been a perennial refreshing to all great hearts. In some way to bring the life into touch with the infinite is to take down its limitations, break its barriers, and give it a sense of infinitude, to lift up the head in vision of the divinity of our lives and of every life. We who walk in the dust often need to be filled with the divine lest we become ourselves but dust.
This world of things is hungry for the life that is more than things, the life of the spirit; that is why so many love to sing of heaven and dream of a fair world peopled by strange and glorious celestial ones. Heaven is nearer than we think; like the brook by the way, the life of the spirit flows beside this life; happy they who drink of its waters, who already enter into eternity, who find strength for this life's way and work by the contact with the life that is life indeed.
Is it any wonder that life is a wearisome thing, a dead drag, when you are starving its very sources? You neglect the soul at the peril of all. So anxious are you to run this race that you have no time to allow him who rides in the chariot to drink of the water of life. This is not utilitarianism; this is suicide from the centre out.
The most practical common sense demands that you feed the inner places of your life, the heart that has gone so long thirsty and longing for love, for things too deep for words, for things that cannot be used and cannot be quoted in dollars. Give your inner life its deep drafts of the infinite life and your outer life shall take its place and do its work in the world.
THAT WHICH IS HIGH
There are two ways of viewing the oncoming years, as burdens or as opportunities, with fear or with expectation. The days of the new year may loom up as a series of unwelcome tasks to be unwillingly done or as so many invitations to attempt and achieve great things. The difference between these two points of view marks the difference between enduring life and finding the life that endures.
The wise preacher of long ago caught sight of one of these distinctions that cut clear through to the roots of things. He says that the sign of old age is that a man is "afraid of that which is high." When courage and ambition have gone old age and decrepitude have entered in, no matter whether a man be eighteen or eighty.
He alone has youth, he alone has life before him, who can still catch the vision of the ideal, of that which is high, who can lift up his eyes beyond the horizon of practicabilities and precedents and see the things not yet realized. There is a time when men must dream dreams and see visions, when they must feast on noble purposes or die so far as the inner spirit and all that makes real living is concerned.
If you find the will becoming dull and listless, with no quickening of the pulses, but only apathy or a sneer for the high purpose or the great promise, it is but a sign of the approach of senility, of the failure of the powers. When the ambition can be satisfied with the less while the greater is before it, when things low and base are preferred to things high, afar off, and difficult to attain, the heart is dying already.
Cherish as the spark of life the aspiration to have and do and be the best. Yet who is there does not know the paralyzing chill that the sneer of the philistine or even the memory of our own many failures can give when great possibilities offer themselves to us? How easily enter in the cold considerations that deaden our aspirations; how subtle the temptation to be content with the condition that involves neither toil nor pain. How hard to realize that this is an invitation to death.
To all men comes the thrill of the passion to do some great thing, to give to our world some worthy service. To yield to this is to keep the heart young, is to defy time, to conquer the years. Whether the coming days shall bend the back with their burdens or shall nerve and strengthen the life does not depend on whether they have cares or joys in them, but on whether they find us responsive to the call of noble things.
No man can afford to let a pure and lofty impulse die, nor, for fear of failure or of ridicule, to become afraid or ashamed of his ideals. Living is more than a dull feeding at tables or troughs, more than shelter and sleep; it is growing, climbing, becoming, finding higher levels and seeing yet higher before.
Nor is this all; the spirit of greatness finds ample play in daily duties. The success of the year does not depend on whether you can do things that shall amaze men to-day or make your name known forever, but upon whether into all the things you do, lowly, humdrum, commonplace as they may seem to be, the daily duties of home or shop or store, the care of the baby, or the running of a typewriter, there shall enter the great and high motive.
This is what we all need, the high vision of the lowly things, the sight of the fact that the least piece of work is an essential part of the service of the whole universe, that a man serves the Divine not by wearing a black coat but by doing, as in God's name, with high motives the least duties that may be his. It is not place nor authority nor wage that makes the work high or low; it is the spirit of the service and the part it plays in the world's great business of perfecting humanity.
Would you ward off old age, cherish vitality and give value to your days, seek the things that are above, the life that serves some worthy end. One is young as long as his heart leaps responsive to a noble call. But he who lives to pleasure, to the satisfaction of self, who has shut his eyes to the high things that call for self-denial, for toil and loss, is dead already.
[The end]
Henry Frederick Cope's essay: Seeing The Unseen