Chapter V: Part 5

"Still more pregnant of results for good or evil are a man's
thought about other people, for in that case they hover not about
the thinker, but about the object of the thought. A kindly thought
about any person or any earnest wish for his good will form and
project toward him a friendly artificial elemental; if the wish be
a definite one, as, for example, that he may recover from some
sickness, then the elemental will be a force ever hovering over him
to promote his recovery, or to ward off any influence that might
tend to hinder it, and in doing this it will display what appears
like a very considerable amount of intelligence and adaptability,
though really it is simply a force acting along the line of the
least resistance--pressing steadily in one direction all the time,
and taking advantage of any channel that it can find, just as the
water in a cistern would in a moment find the one open pipe among a
dozen closed ones, and proceed to empty itself through that."

This train of speculation, which if one is to reject he must first confront, is demoralizing. It leads nowhere save into mental quagmires and quicksands. It leads into materiality and not into spirituality. Of course with all this the one question is as to whether such conceptions are true; but judged by intuition, which is the Roentgen ray of spirit--judged by the data reached by scholars and thinkers, by psychologists and scientists--it has no claim to recognition. That thought is the most intense form of energy, its potency far exceeding that of even electricity, is certainly true, and that one can think himself--or another person--into new and different outward phases and circumstances is most true.

Tesla, in a paper discussing the problem of how to increase the sum of human energy, considers the possibility of the existence of organized beings under conditions impossible for us. "We cannot even positively assert that some are not present in this, our world, in the very midst of us," he says, "for their constitution and life manifestation may be such that we are unable to perceive them."

This speculative possibility opens the gate to the scientific recognition of the truth that "all the company of heaven" may companion us, here and now, in the terrestrial life, invisible, intangible, inaudible to the perceptions of sense. It may largely be through their ministry and mediation that the unforeseen and unexpected opportunities, privileges, gifts fall upon man,--gifts that the gods provide.

Dreams, visions, and ideals are given that they may be realized. The vision is projected from the higher spiritual realm as the working model, the pattern of the life here. A dream is something to be carried out; not put aside and neglected and lost in over-lying and ever-accumulating stratas of experience. The dream, once clearly recognized, becomes a personal responsibility. It has been revealed for a purpose. It is the Divine revelation to the individual life, and these visions are given to the individual as well as to humanity, and they are the most significant occurrences in the entire experience of life. To once clearly recognize this divine ideal, this glorious vision of possibilities that shines once and for all upon the individual, and then to turn away from it and leave it unrealized in the outward life: to put it by, because the effort to transform the vision into external and visible conditions is surrounded with difficulties and invested with perplexities, is to wander into the maze of confusion. Difficulties are merely incidental. They are neither here nor there. If God give the dream He will lead the way. If He gives it, He means something by it, and its significance should be appreciated and taken into life as a working energy. It is the will of the Lord, and to pray sincerely that the Divine will be done, is also to accept the obligation of entering into the doing of it. Indeed, difficulties and perplexities in the way do not count and should not. Briars and brambles there will always be, but one's path lies onward all the same. Who would relinquish a right purpose because its achievement were hard? All the more should he press on and gain the strength of the obstacles that he overcomes.

Doctor William T. Harris says, "Realize your ideals quickly." That is, an ideal is a responsibility; it is the working model that God has set before the individual; the pattern after which and by which he shall shape his life. If he accept and follow it with fidelity and energy; with that energy born of absolute faith in the Divine leading,--he will find himself miraculously led; he will find that the obstacle which appears so insurmountable in perspective vanishes as he comes near; that a way is made, a path appears.

It chanced to the writer of these papers to take a long day's stage drive one summer through the Colorado mountain region. For a distance of forty-five miles the solitary road wound on and on, ever ascending through the dreamy, purple mountains. The entire route was a series of vistas that apparently came to an abrupt end at the base of an insurmountable height. The mountain wall seemed to utterly arrest progress, as it rose across the ascending valley through which the driver urged his "four-in-hand," and no way to pass beyond the next mountain ahead could possibly be discerned. But as the stage drew near, a way, unseen before, revealed itself, and the winding road found its outlet and onward course in another valley opening by a natural pass between the hills, and one that apparently in its turn was as inevitably blocked at its end by another mountain range. It was a constant interest to watch the changing landscape and discover the new ways that constantly came in sight as fast as the need for them came. That day amid the dreamy purple of the Colorado mountains was one to translate itself into renewed trust in the Divine guidance on the journey of life. Some wonderful words of Phillips Brooks seemed to write themselves on the air:--

"Look up, poor soul, out of the valley and know that on the top of
yonder shining mountain lies folded safe the secret of your life,
the oracle which would, if you could read it, solve all your
mysteries and tell you just exactly how you ought to live. Look up
out of the valley and know that it is there; and then turn back
again into the valley, for in the valley is the home where you must
live, and you can never read the oracle which you know is there
upon the mountain top."

That day, alone with the mountains and with God, was one to leave its impress forever upon life. It was a day of solutions as well as of impressions--of solutions of the problem of living. One has but to follow the path that God has revealed to him, and however insurmountable the difficulties that seem to hedge him in and to limit his progress, they vanish as they are drawn near, and a way is revealed.

[Sidenote: Obey the Vision.]

To forsake a dream as being impracticable and impossible of realization is to take the wrong turning in life, like one who leaves the mountain road,--which winds in and out of the passes, on and on, and leads to a definite place at last,--and, because he sees an apparently impassable mountain wall across the path, forsakes this and wanders off into some other valley and defile that looks more open, but in whose mazes he loses himself and makes no progress toward his true destination.

No,--when the vision shines suddenly upon one's life, it is God's call to him to realize in it outward expression. The difficulties that hedge it round about will vanish as he approaches them. A dream is given to be realized. It is the working model that God sends into one's life for that full expression which alone is at once his best service and truest success. It is the common daily work of fulfilling duties add meeting claims. "Not by the exceptional," says Maeterlinck, "shall the last word ever be spoken; and, indeed, what we call the sublime should be only a clearer, profounder insight into all that is perfectly normal." It is of service, often, to watch those on the peaks who do battle; but it is well, too, not to forget those in the valley below who fight not at all. As we see all that happens to these whose life knows no struggle; as we realize how much must be conquered in us before we can rightly distinguish their narrower joys from the joy known to them who are striving on high, then, perhaps does the struggle itself appear to become less important; but, for all that, we love it the more. This normal fulfilment of the due claims of ordinary life leads to that order of success which is a beautiful and desirable one, and which is almost a universal aim and purpose. Aspirations and energy are its factors, and these are of all various and varying degrees of excellence according to the specific aim in view. Success itself, therefore, is merely a representative term, and may be used regarding almost every variety of achievement, from the triumphant winning of a game of football, the making of a great fortune, the attainment of professional or political rank, the production of great art, the acquirement of world-wide fame, or the achievement of character that is potent for fine and ennobling influence. All these are typical of myriad forms of the thing the world calls success, and while it involves a vast amount of competition, of selfishness, of greed, of injustice, it is yet a matter of the progress of humanity that each individual should strive after the highest form of attainment that he is capable of conceiving. In the long run, and as a general principle, this is advantageous and desirable. It involves and indeed develops many of the lower and baser qualities; but these are the tares among the wheat, and the wheat is essential. The great enterprise that builds a railway across the continent, tunneling under mountains, or climbing the precipitous inclines; that inaugurates a new steamer line, or that exerts itself for the founding of institutions for culture or technical instruction; that concerns itself with municipal reforms and improvements,--all these expressions of energy are manifestations of successful effort, and are necessary to the onward march of civilization. Yet the visible achievement is not, after all, the realization of the highest ideal of success.

The conditions of success may best be approached by a clearly defined idea of what success itself means, what it stands for to us, what proportion of our real life it represents. Success is the watchword of American life--one might almost, indeed, say that it is made the test of our national life to a far greater degree than in any other country. The elements are well defined in Emerson's phrase of "the _flowing_ conditions of life." They are, indeed, more than merely plastic and malleable; they are fluid, flowing, and the constant advance into higher states of life is precisely in proportion to the mental and moral force of the individual brought to bear upon them. Even this assertion, however, is to hold in the light of the true conception of success itself. We see a man whose life is conspicuously that of mental and moral force, working faithfully and ably day by day, year by year, and yet never being free from certain financial anxieties, if not financial needs; while his neighbor, who is neither very learned nor able, nor yet in any wise remarkable in his moral development, is living much after the fashion of Midas, whose touch turned everything to gold. But is gold the test of success?

The panorama of life is a complicated one. It used to be the fashion of the novelists to represent the world of riches and fashion as the world devoid of sympathy and love, and often, indeed, as devoid even of moral principle; while the world of poverty and toil was held up as composed of men and women whose lives were all unselfishness and sacrifice, and as those who truly followed the example of Him who was meek and lowly of heart. But the panorama of actual life reveals no such sharply defined divisions as that. Virtue and vice are not checked off into special and separate regions; wealth has its greatness of mind and beneficence of sympathy and love, and poverty has its selfishness and cruelty and injustice. Other things being equal, the command of unlimited means may be so used as to make it one of the great blessings of life, and this fact is attended and illustrated by such an increasing array of evidence as to make the statement merely the trite one of every-day fact. Again, that prominence in affairs that we call position is good if rightly used, and to an increasing degree it is so used. _Noblesse oblige_ is the watchword of modern life.

"Success in thyself, which is best of all."

That line from a poem of Emerson's most clearly defines true success. The "power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power of social life and manners,"--to achieve such power as is thus enumerated by Matthew Arnold, and adding to it that which is greater than all, and that without which all else is useless and unvitalized, the power of the Divine energy received through prayer,--these are the powers and achievements that tend to the true and only success,--the success of character.

New conceptions of the old watchwords of life are in the air. In "Culture" President Eliot of Harvard sees new points of view; he finds a new definition of the cultivated man, who is not, in this Twentieth-Century reading of the term, to be "a weak, critical, fastidious creature, vain of a little exclusive information or of an uncommon knack in Latin verse or mathematical logic; he is to be a man of quick perceptions, broad sympathies, and wide affinities, responsive but independent, self-reliant but deferential, loving truth and candor, but also moderation and proportion, courageous but gentle, not finished but perfecting."

"The situation that has not its ideal was never yet occupied by man," well said Goethe; and perhaps one of the greatest aids to both achievement and happiness would be to recognize this ideal as the standard placed before one, the model after which he is to fashion his life, because he is, now and here, in the Divine Presence, because now and here he "stands before God." Nor is this too sublime a test for the trivialities of every day. As a matter of truth, nothing is trivial that has to do with the life of the spirit. The petty irritations, impatience, vexations, and disappointments of life are things that affect one's spiritual quality, that make or mar his higher self, that accelerate or retard his progress in the upward way, according as these feelings are allowed to take control or are resolutely conquered. The occurrences that excite them are, to the life of the spirit, like the "gifts" in a kindergarten,--they are the object lessons by means of which growth and progress are attained. Now, if one can conceive of his life, every day, every hour, as lived in the very presence of the Divine; if he can realize himself at all times as "standing before God," how this recognition transforms all the conditions and circumstances! The drama of living is instantly lifted up to a higher plane. That which was hard becomes easy; that which was sad, or dull, or unattractive, becomes invested with interest. One is living, not unto himself, but unto God. He is living within that marvellous, all-enfolding charm and radiance. He is an actor in the great spiritual drama, and he feels the stimulus of playing his part nobly and well.

And they who have gone behind the curtain come forth and minister to him. He is aware of the courage of companionship.

"'Mortal,' they softly say,
'Peace to thy heart.
We, too, yes, mortal,
Have been as thou art.'"

Voices unheard by the outer ear speak to the soul; presences unseen by the eye are yet felt, giving their sympathy and stimulus.

It is good to remember that it is not only after death that the soul stands before God; that here and now is the heavenly test to which life must be held amenable; here and now must one make his thought and his acts those that know only the ideals of love and generosity and sweetness and courage. One may thus call up all his higher forces to meet misunderstandings with patience and with love: to meet adverse fortune with courage and with stronger and more intense endeavor; to live above the tide of jar or fret so as to dwell in perpetual radiance and sunshine of spirit. This is to "stand before God" here and now, through the days and the experiences of the life that is, as well as to anticipate standing before His Presence in that which is to come.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The Open Door.]

Visions and enthusiasms are the only true guides in life. To keep true to the ideal dream that in some rare and exalted moment falls upon the soul, is to set one's steps toward that success which lies in fulfilment. Such dreams may be obscured by passing clouds; they may become entangled with the transient and the trivial; but nothing that is temporary holds over them any power to disintegrate or to destroy, for they are made of heavenly revealings and illuminations.

The ideal that reveals itself in a sudden vision of the higher harmonies and achievements possible to human life is but another name for the Opportunity which Shakespeare defines,--the opportunity that, if one fail to accept it, vanishes, to leave all the remainder of life "bound in shallows and in miseries."

There is something about hesitation and reconsiderations that is curiously fatal to successful achievement. Good fortune is in going on,--not in going back. The parable of Lot's wife, who turned into a pillar of salt because she looked back, is by no means inapplicable to the life of to-day. Let one on whom the vision has shone look backward instead of forward and he becomes paralyzed and immovable. He has invoked inimical influences. He is impeded by the shallows and the miseries. He has withdrawn himself from all the heavenly forces that lead him on. The fidelity to the vision is the vital motor. It gives that exhilaration of energy which makes possible the impossible.

"The Americans have many virtues," said Emerson, "but they have not Faith and Hope. I know no two words whose meaning is more lost sight of. We use these words as if they were as obsolete as Selah. And yet they have the broadest meaning and the most cogent application. The opening of the spiritual senses," continues Emerson, "disposes men even to greater sacrifices, to leave their signal talents, their means and skill of procuring a present success, their power and their fame,--to cast all things behind in the insatiable thirst for divine communications. A purer fame, a greater power, rewards the sacrifice."

Each recurring New Year is an open door. However arbitrary are the divisions of Time, there is inspiration and exaltation in standing on the threshold of an untried year, with its fresh pages awaiting record. It is, again, the era of possibilities. The imaginative faculty of the soul must, indeed, be "fed with objects immense and eternal." Life stretches before one in its diviner unity,--even in the wholeness of the life that is and that which is to come. There is not one set of motives and purposes to be applied to this life, and another set to that which awaits us. This is the spiritual world, here and now, and it is the business of man to live divinely in it; to be responsive to the enthusiasms that enchant his thought; to be faithful to the vision that beckons him on. It is well to drop the old that one may seize the new. Progress lies in a successive series of new conditions. Let one give all and ask for nothing,--let him yield himself wholly to the overpowering enthusiasm; let him not look backward from his vision of the Morning Star and the Promised Land, and thus shall the New Year fulfil itself in ever widening glory and that enchanting loveliness which invests the higher fulfilments of life.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Interruptions as Opportunities.]

"To work, to help and to be helped, to learn sympathy through suffering, to learn faith by perplexity, to reach truth through wonder,--behold! this is what it is to prosper, this is what it is to live," said Phillips Brooks. When Herbert Spencer produced his great "Data of Ethics" he did not consider in it the ethics of interruptions which sometimes assume a formidable place in the strenuous life. One is perhaps exceptionally patient and tolerant when it is a question of great trial or calamity, and not infrequently very impatient with the trifling annoyances and demands and interruptions that occur. Yet, is there not just here a richness of opportunity in the aim to "do good to all men" that may often be unrecognized? A writer who may be pressed for time finds in his mail-matter a number of personal requests from strangers. One package contains manuscripts, perhaps, which a woman in Montana entreats shall be read and returned with advice or suggestion. Some one in Texas wants a paragraph copied that he may use it in compiling a calendar. An individual in Indiana has a collection of autographs for sale and begs to know of the ways and means for disposing of them. And an author in Arizona desires that a possible publisher be secured for her novel; and so the requests run on. Strictly speaking, perhaps, no one of these has any real right to thus tax the time and energy of a stranger; but is there not another side to it? Here are an array of interruptions, but why not give them another name--that of opportunities? One has, perhaps, his theories and his convictions regarding the service of humanity. He holds it to be a duty,--a privilege. He believes that it is through entering into this service that he may even co-operate with God in the onward progress. To "help humanity" is a very attractive and high-sounding term. But what is humanity? Is it not, after all, composed of individuals? And here are individuals to be helped; here they are, with their several individual requests, and the injunction of the apostle suggests itself, "_As ye have therefore opportunity_, ... do good unto all men." Do not the interruptions assume a new form, and are they not, thereby, transfigured into glad and golden opportunity?

And it is the will of God,--that great, resistless, and unceasing force, working underneath all our human wills--it is the will of God manifesting itself in small things as well as in those that seem outwardly more important, that has grouped all these special things together and sent them on an especially busy morning. Shall not one rejoice and recognize that the need of another is brought as a privilege to himself? The blessedness of giving is not limited to cheques and bank-bills. There are gifts that far transcend these,--gifts of patience, sympathy, thought, and counsel, and (such is the blessedness of the Divine Law) these are gifts that the poorest can give. The need on the one side may be the luxury on the other, for it invites sympathetic comprehension and the enlargement of friendly relations. And as for one's time,--even in a full and busy life,--it is not so much time that one requires as it is right conditions. An hour will do the work of a day, when the conditions are harmonious; and nothing so increases the degree of spiritual energy as the glow and ardor and joy of doing some little service for another. In this lies the real blessedness, the real luxury of life, and one reads the profound significance in the words of Maeterlinck: "It is well to believe that there needs but a little more courage, more love, more devotion to life, a little more eagerness, one day to fling open wide the portals of joy and truth." These qualities redeem the temporal to the immortal, for immortality is a condition of the soul, not a definite period in time. The soul, now and here, may put on immortality. Life is, after all, an affair of the immortal self, and it is the invisible powers which are its stay, its guide, and its inspiration. We live and move and have our being on the divine side of things. We only live--in any true sense--as we are filled with the heavenly magnetism. "Thou hast made known to me the ways of life; thou shalt make me full of joy with thy countenance," says the apostle. Here is the true gospel to live by. There _are_ "ways of life;" even through toil and trial they shall be reached. The one is eternal, the other temporal. It is unwise to lay too much stress on the infelicities of the moment. Exaltation alone is real; depression is unreal. The obstacle before one is not intended to stop progress, but to stimulate new energies to the overcoming.

"By living so purely in thought and in deed as to prevent the
interposition of any barrier between his phenomenal and substantial
self; and by steadfastly cultivating harmonious relations between
these two,--by substantiating the whole of his system to the Divine
Central Will, whose seat is in the soul,--the man gains full access
to the stores of knowledge laid up in his soul, and attains to the
cognition of God and the universe."

Among the "devastators of a day" there is encountered, however, a vast army of persons who advertise themselves vociferously as being wonder-workers of human life. According to their insistent proclamations, poverty is a "disease," and is to be cured by a course of correspondence lessons; beauty, address, gifts and graces and power, are secrets of which they hold the key; even death, too, is but another mental malady and is easily to be overcome by their recipes. All these fraudulent representations--as absurd as they are false--are but the gross distortion of the underlying truth that thought creates conditions and controls results. Thought cannot transform poverty into wealth by means of six lessons; but the right quality of thought can set in motion the causes which, carried on to fulfilment, result in an increasing prosperity and welfare. One may thus achieve the top of his condition through serenity and poise of spirit, and thus be enabled to see events and combinations in their true perspective. He is not overwhelmed and swept into abysses of despair because some momentary disaster has occurred, but he regards it in its relative significance to the general trend of matters, and thus remains master of the situation.

Still, if there are spurious claims to the power of the magician, and if these claims, paraded by the idle, invade disastrously the realms of the industrious in a continual procession of interruptions, there is something, too, to be said on the side of another--and a very genuine sort of wonder-working,--to transmute these interruptions into opportunities.

Individuality is the incalculable factor in life, and it is one, too, that must be fully allowed for, if one would proceed as harmoniously as possible among the unseen brambles and pitfalls that may beset his onward pathway. A very large proportion of the discords of life arise from the failure to take into consideration the special qualities in their special grouping that determine the person with whom one has to do,--qualities which are, practically, unalterable, and must simply be accepted and borne with as best one may. There is the person, for instance, who is always and invariably behind time in every movement of his life. He leaves undone the things that ought to be done, until there is little use in doing them at all. He exhausts the patience and excites the irritability of his friend, who is, by nature, prompt and always up with the hour. There is the person who, from some latent cause in his character, always manages badly; who reduces all his own affairs to confusion; who contrives to waste more money, time, and energy than industry and energy can produce; whose normal condition is a crisis of disaster, and who, if extricated from this seventy times seven, will contrive to fall into it again. All these, and a thousand variations on characters of this type, we see around us, or within ourselves, constantly, and a liberal proportion of the trial or discord incident to family life, or to friendship and companionship, is simply in constantly demanding of another that which he cannot give, which he does not possess. To ask of the habitual procrastinator that he shall be prompt; or of the defective manager that he shall keep his affairs in order and make the most and the best out of his possessions, is totally useless. In the evolutionary progress of life, he will probably, sometime and somewhere, learn wisdom and do better; but habit and temperament are not liable to meet a sea change into something new and strange all in the flash of a moment, and it is worse than useless to demand this, or to be irritated, or impatient, or even too sorrowful, because of this fact. There are things that cannot be cured,--at least, not immediately. Therefore they must be endured. When one once makes up his mind to the acceptance of this theory it is astonishing to see how it simplifies the problem. The philosophy is merely to do one's own part, but not to make any superhuman effort to do the other person's part also. Let it go. There is no use in making a _casus belli_ of the matter. Nothing is ever helped by irritation over it,--even the irritation of generosity and love, which seeks only the good of the other.

There is, for instance, the procrastinating correspondent. You write, and you want a reply, and you want it straightway. On your own part you would make it with the promptness and despatch of the United States mail itself, but your correspondent is not constructed after the fashion of a galvanic battery, and although he means to respond at once, he doesn't. He has not the temperamental apparatus that works in that way. He has, perhaps, a thousand qualities that are better, finer, more important, but he does not happen to have that particular one. What then? Shall you make his life and your own a burden with complaint and reproach? By no means. Let it pass. It is a part of his individuality, and cannot--at the moment, at least--be altered. This one must frankly accept as the defect of his friend. But recognizing the defect need not blind one to the thousand virtues that his friend possesses.

In fact, as we have each and all our individual sins, negligences, and weaknesses, we may well limit our zeal for reform to our own needs, at least until we have achieved such perfection that we are entitled to require perfection on the part of our associates.

To the orderly, thrifty type of New England temperament nothing is more incompatible with sympathy than the bad management of the person not endowed with "faculty," as Mrs. Stowe well expresses it. And it must be conceded that a lack of the power essential to dominate the general affairs of life and keep them in due subordination and order, is an unmistakable draft on the affections. It is a problem as to just how far aid and sympathy do any good, and not infrequently the greater the real care and affection, the greater, too, is the irritation and the annoyance. But even the annoyance born of tender interest and love, it is better not to feel too keenly. Let one do what he can,--do all that is reasonable and right to assist in counterbalancing the ills that arise from defective management, and then let it pass, and not take it into his mind as a source of constant anxiety. We have all our lessons to learn, and every failure brings its own discipline as the inevitable result. "Regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer," as Emerson so well says; "if not, attend to your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired."

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The Charm of Companionship.]

Of society, in the true sense, social life offers comparatively little. In the midst of ceremonial assembling one is starved for companionship. One may live in the very heart of what is held to be a brilliant social season and be as unutterably lonely as if in a desert solitude. Indeed, the latter offers compensations which the former denies. There is a great deal of companionship, however unrecognized, in the cloud of witnesses that encompass us round about, and whose presence is less vividly felt in the gleam and glitter of ceremonial society. The more general assemblages of clubs, teas, and receptions are so incorporated into the social system that no one could cancel these if he would, nor would he if he could. They have their uses. All exchange of human sympathies is good, even if it be somewhat superficial and spectacular. The more exclusive dinners are not without their special charm as occasions when conversation becomes possible on a less unsatisfactory scale than the exchange of inanities in crowded receptions. Yet, with due recognition of the stimulus and the brilliancy that may flash from a select group of people, the deeper truth remains that it is only in a more personal companionship that is found the supreme luxury of life, and that companionship is a relation existing solely between two, refusing its spell when that number is increased.

Nothing is less considered by society than companionship. It is considered an unheard-of waste of time to devote an entire evening to one guest, when, indeed, five, ten, or fifty might be warmed, lighted, and fed in the same time. The fashionable hostess invites her friends to pay off her social debts. If she can pay off fifty or five hundred--in the time that she would give to one, she felicitates herself on her clever management. The idea of inviting her friends because she really wishes to talk with them would bewilder her. She does not converse; she "receives." She arrays herself in her smartest gown, and her social interchange with each guest consists in a graceful greeting and a no less graceful adieu, followed by an epoch of private gratitude that the required entertainment is over. She consults her visiting list and conscientiously arranges for her next reception, or dinner, or dance, in the fulfilment of what she is pleased to call her social duties. And all this, however superficial or spectacular it may be, has its place, and serves, with more or less success, to promote social meeting, preliminary acquaintance, out of which the choicest friendships sometimes spring. But it is quite possible to concede that certain formalities and ceremonial observances have their legitimate place without conceding that they monopolize the resources of social enjoyment. When one comes to that--it is quite another matter.

The supreme gift and grace and enchantment of life is in sympathetic companionship. And this, in its truer sense, is a relation of spirit, an elective affinity, rather than a mere concurrence of intellectual or artistic tastes. It is quite possible for two persons to like Sargent's pictures, or to draw the line at the inane "society" play without, after all, finding themselves in any relations of especial sympathy. "Only that soul can be my friend," said Emerson, "which I encounter on the line of my own march; that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline to me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience." Margaret Fuller defined this sympathy as that of beings born under the same star. But phrases are of little worth,--the experience eludes all definitions and defies all phrasings. It exists by divine right, or it does not exist at all. It is a law unto itself. It is a recognition that has to do with the inward springs of thought and action.

Companionship is the inflorescence of social life,--its finest result, its most exquisite and perfect ideal. But it requires a certain degree of fitness. It requires the choice organization, the nobler and the finer degree of spiritual development. The crude person can pass well enough in a social assemblage, but only the choicer individuality is fit for that finer and more subtle relation of companionship.

Yet this highest realization of social enjoyment is, for the most part, relegated to shreds and patches of time. The mornings must be given to lectures, readings, receptions, clubs, and teas; the evenings must be devoted to dinners, dances, opera, concerts, plays, or musicales. For communion of friend with friend, spirit with spirit, there is no time. The crowning joy of life, in its possibilities for sympathetic companionship, is ignored. For companionship is a spiritual joy, and society recognizes only the spectacular pleasures. The finer order of social life for which the world were well lost, awaits its evolution.

* * * * *

"The life a man lives and the life he ought to live belong together. The real and the ideal lie side by side in the thought of God."

The distractions of life are every day's tragedy. The mutilation of purpose, the disintegration of time, the neutralization of all endeavor, which result from the perpetual occurrence of the unforeseen, cannot but prefigure itself as a theme for meditation to the worker who looks back on a day, a week, a month, an entire season, in which "the flighty purpose" has never been overtaken. The calendar has the inexorableness of fate. The day, the month, goes by, unrelenting. It may be shattered with feeble and inexpressive demands, but all the same it is gone, and it is unreturning. Whether freighted richly with the essential, or merely burdened with the ineffectual, it is equally irretrievable.

This involves a problem of life full of spiritual perplexity. Certainly, no man liveth to himself, or, if he does, his living is a selfish and worthless thing. Certainly a man _is_ his brother's keeper--to a degree. The poet whose dream is about to crystallize in verse is assured that life is more than art, and that to sustain the spirits of the depressed caller who appears at that precise instant, with the unfailing instinct with which the depressed do invariably appear at a literary crisis,--he is assured that this act is a "nobler poem" than any he could write. And such is the tremendous impression that the gospel in the air of the service of humanity makes on us all, that he dare not disregard this possibility. He is not absolutely sure, it is true, that he is "serving humanity" in this individual instance, but he is not at all sure that it is _not_ true; and he reflects that other days are coming, when, perhaps, by some divine dispensation, the depressed caller will _not_ appear! But there are no days on which he, or his prototype, is not on hand, and so the problem ever remains a present, an immediate, and, alas! an insoluble one. For this is an age when the depressed, who have nothing to do, require, to sustain their drooping spirits, the sympathetic ministrations of those who are too busy to indulge in the languid luxury of gentle and romantic sadness. In fact, they feel a certain inalienable right to demand that current of sympathetic interest which otherwise would express itself in the specific work in which one is engaged. "You desire to 'serve humanity,' do you?" the depressed caller says, virtually, as he fixes the mere worker with his glittering eye. "Well, I am Humanity. What is a book compared to a human soul? Here, before you, in living personality, is a need. Can you forsake it for abstract literature?"

If the unfortunate worker has any species of the New England conscience he is at a disadvantage. He has nothing to say for himself. There are behind him more than two centuries of his ancestors who have preached and practiced self-sacrifice, generosity, love. In one sense he is even enfeebled by his ethical nature. It possesses him, rather than enables him to clearly and consciously possess it. He feels a certain magnetic attraction to the fulfilment of a definite purpose; but after all, the world is full of purposes and of far greater and abler persons than himself to carry them on; and perhaps this particular appeal is from one of those "little ones" whom the Christ he holds in reverence bids him care for first of all. Perhaps the immediate human need should take precedence over specific work. Perhaps it _is_ a real human need. "Treat the people as if they were real," said Emerson; "perhaps they are so." And so he becomes the victim rather than the master of his own diviner life. He sees through a glass darkly. He is not in the least sure that he can do any good, but he is fearful he may do evil. And so he espouses what is really a negative side; a side of blind chance; a mere spiritual gambling, so to speak, and throws his stakes on the side of what _may_ be useful, as he cannot prove to himself that it is not, and his life becomes a poor, mean, weak, ineffectual thing. He recalls Sir Hugo's counsel to Daniel Deronda: "Be courteous, be obliging, Dan; but don't give yourself over to be melted down for the tallow trade." He becomes sadly conscious that his entire time, purpose, energies are being simply, with his own dull consent, "melted down for the tallow trade," and that he himself is by way of being on a far more perilous margin than that of any one of the gently depressed spirits who devastate his days, and command him to create for them,--not energy, purpose, will,--but, instead, external conditions in which they may more luxuriously enjoy their romantic languor and their comforting consciousness of superior qualities.

Now is it not more than an open question that when temptation assumes the masque of "service," it is no less temptation, and that it is evil disguised as good? The woman who reads the infinitely uplifting sermons of Rev. Doctor Charles G. Ames; who solaces what she is pleased to call her soul in that marvelously great work, "The Expansion of Religion," by Rev. Doctor E. Winchester Donald; who is excited--and mistakes it for being aroused--by Rev. Doctor Philip Moxom's noble book called "The Religion of Hope;" or who entertains similar emotions over recent new and great and uplifting books by Rev. Doctor George A. Gordon or Rev. Doctor Lyman Abbott, or many another, often evolves the pleasing fantasy that all she requires for producing the same quality of work is the illumination of personal interviews or personal correspondence with them. "Surely," she reasons, "these men are servants of the Lord, and I am one of the least of these whose needs they are divinely commanded to serve. Is not the life more than meat? Should not the minister break off his morning meditation--an abstract thing, at best--to see me, who needs an immediate infusion of encouragement?"

And the tragedy of this is that the worker, who is true to his own purpose,--through good report or through ill report,--to the duties he is divinely commissioned to perform, is not infrequently entirely misunderstood. The woman who sends him a voluminous manuscript, accompanying pretty phrasings regarding his work, and modestly requesting that he shall read it, give his "views" on it, and decide just what editor or publisher will be rejoiced to issue it,--and who receives her pages of outpouring back by return mail with a note, however courteous, expressing his inability to fulfil this commission,--this woman becomes, as a rule, the enemy of the person who declines to be "melted down for the tallow trade." She may do no particular harm, but the antagonism is there. This, however, could be borne; but the nature sensitive to shades of human need is always liable to torture itself because of any failure to meet a specific demand. And this torture is disintegrating to that force of positive energy which a special work requires.

Is there not, then, a need for the gospel of one's own endeavor? that a given line of work, plainly revealed in hours of mystic communion with the Divine, indicated by the subtle trend of circumstance and condition,--is there not a need of realizing so clearly that it is the duty apportioned to the one fitted for it, that it shall inspire fidelity and reverence,--even at the risk of what the unthinking may describe as selfish absorption? For there are vast varieties of ministering for ministering spirits. The work of the social settlement is divine; but the poet and the painter, if they produce poems and paintings, cannot devote their time to its work. And the poems and the pictures have their value, as well as service in giving food and clothing to those in need. The special gift does require special conditions, and it is not selfish to insist on those conditions, when the special work is held as unto the Lord. It often requires more heroism, more faith, more love to deny than to accede to a given request. To yield is often easy; to be steadfast to one's own purpose, shining like a star upon the horizon, is not infrequently very difficult.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: A Summer Pilgrimage in Arizona.]

No pilgrimage of the Crusaders of old could be more impressive in its spiritual results than that which can be made to-day to the Grand Canyon of the Colorado in Arizona. The majesty and sublimity of the scene suggest another world, not, indeed, an "Inferno," but a "Paradiso." It is a sea of color, a very New Jerusalem, on which one looks down from the rim of this Titanic chasm. It is a vision not less wonderful than that beheld by Saint John in the Isle of Patmos.

The term "canyon" is a misnomer for this supreme marvel of earth. One journeys to it anticipating a colossal variation on Cheyenne Canon or the Royal Gorge. Instead, what does the tourist see?

The ridge of a vast mountain-chain over two hundred miles in length split asunder in a yawning chasm eighteen miles in width and over seven thousand feet deep; one in which a thousand Niagaras would be lost; in which a cliff that, relatively to the scene, does not impress one as especially lofty, yet which exceeds in height the Eiffel Tower in Paris; and another which does not arrest special attention, yet is taller than the Washington Monument. But the splendor of apparent architectural creations arrests the eye. "Solomon's Temple," the "Temple of Vishnu," and altars, minarets, towers, pagodas, colonnades, as if designed by architectural art, lie grouped in wonderful combinations of form and color.

"An Inferno, swathed in soft, celestial fires; a whole chaotic
underworld, just emptied of primeval floods, and waiting for a new
creative word; a boding, terrible thing, unflinchingly real, yet
spectral as a dream, eluding all sense of perspective or dimension,
outstretching the faculty of measurement, overlapping the confines
of definite apprehension. The beholder is at first unimpressed by
any detail; he is overwhelmed by the _ensemble_ of a stupendous
panorama, a thousand square miles in extent, that lies wholly
beneath the eye, as if he stood upon a mountain peak instead of the
level brink of a fearful chasm in the plateau whose opposite shore
is thirteen miles away. A labyrinth of huge architectural forms,
endlessly varied in design, fretted with ornamental devices,
festooned with lace-like webs formed of talus from the upper
cliffs, and painted with every color known to the palette in pure
transparent tones of marvellous delicacy. Never was picture more
harmonious, never flower more exquisitely beautiful. It flashes
instant communication of all that architecture and painting and
music for a thousand years have gropingly striven to express. It is
the soul of Michael Angelo and of Beethoven.

"The spectacle is so symmetrical, and so completely excludes the
outside world and its accustomed standards, it is with difficulty
one can acquire any notion of its immensity. Were it half as deep,
half as broad, it would be no less bewildering, so utterly does it
baffle human grasp. Something may be gleaned from the account given
by geologists. What is known to them as the Grand Canyon district
lies principally in northwestern Arizona, its length from northwest
to southeast in a straight line being about one hundred and eighty
miles, its width one hundred and twenty-five miles, and its total
area some fifteen thousand square miles. Its northerly beginning,
at the high plateaus in southern Utah, is a series of terraces,
many miles broad, dropping like a stairway step by step to
successively lower geological formations, until in Arizona the
platform is reached which borders the real chasm and extends
southward beyond, far into the central part of that territory. It
is the theory of geologists that ten thousand feet of strata have
been swept by erosion from the surface of this entire platform,
whose present uppermost formation is the Carboniferous; the
deduction being based upon the fact that the missing Permian,
Mesozoic, and Tertiary formations, which belong above this
Carboniferous in the series, are found in their place at the
beginning of the northern terraces referred to. The theory is
fortified by many evidences supplied by examination of the
district, where, more than anywhere else, mother earth has laid
bare the secrets of her girlhood. The climax in this extraordinary
example of erosion is, of course, the chasm of the Grand Canyon
proper, which, were the missing strata restored to the adjacent
plateau, would be sixteen thousand feet deep. The layman is apt to
stigmatize such an assertion as a vagary of theorists, and until
the argument has been heard it does seem incredible that water
should have carved such a trough in solid rock. It is easier for
the imagination to conceive it as a work of violence, a sudden
rending of earth's crust in some huge volcanic fury; but it appears
to be true that the whole region was repeatedly lifted and
submerged, both under the ocean and under a fresh-water sea, and
that during the period of the last upheaval the river cut its
gorge. Existing as the drainage system of a vast territory, it had
the right of way, and as the plateau deliberately rose before the
pressure of the internal forces, slowly, as grinds the mills of the
gods, through a period to be measured by thousands of centuries,
the river kept its bed worn down to the level of erosion; sawed its
channel free, as the saw cuts the log that is thrust against it.
Tributaries, traceable now only by dry lateral gorges, and the
gradual but no less effective process of weathering, did the rest."

In the innermost depths of this colossal chasm runs the Colorado River. Descending the stupendous crags and terraces by one of the two or three "trails," the traveller at last stands upon a sandy rift confronted by nearly vertical walls many hundred feet high, at whose base a black torrent pitches in a giddying onward slide that gives him momentarily the sensation of slipping into an abyss.

"With so little labor may one come to the Colorado River in the heart of its most tremendous channel, and gaze upon a sight that heretofore has had fewer witnesses than have the wilds of Africa. Dwarfed by such prodigious mountain shores, which rise immediately from the water at an angle that would deny footing to a mountain sheep, it is not easy to estimate confidently the width and volume of the river. Choked by the stubborn granite at this point, its width is probably between two hundred and fifty and three hundred feet, its velocity fifteen miles an hour, and its volume and turmoil equal to the Whirlpool Rapids of Niagara. Its rise in time of heavy rain is rapid and appalling, for the walls shed almost instantly all the water that falls upon them. Drift is lodged in the crevices thirty feet overhead."