By J.R. Miller
"'To-day' unsullied comes to thee--newborn,
To-morrow is not thine;
The sun may cease to shine
For thee, ere earth shall greet its morn.
"Be earnest, then, in thought and deed,
Nor fear approaching night;
Calm comes with evening light,
And hope and peace. Thy duty heed 'to-day.'"
--RUSKIN.
If people's first thoughts were but as good and wise as their after-thoughts, life would be better and more beautiful than it is. We can all see our errors more clearly after we have committed them than we saw them before. We frequently hear persons utter the wish that they could go again over a certain period of their life, saying that they would live it differently, that they would not repeat the mistakes or follies which had so marred and stained the record they had made.
Of course the wish that one might have a second chance with any past period of time is altogether vain. No doubt there ofttimes is much reason for shame and pain in our retrospects. We live poorly enough at the best, even the saintliest of us, and many of us certainly make sad work of our life. Human life must appear very pathetic, and ofttimes tragical, as the angels look down upon it. There are almost infinitely fewer wrecks on the great sea where the ships go, than on that other sea of which poets write, where lives with their freightage of immortal hopes and possibilities sail on to their destiny. We talk sometimes with wonder of what the ocean contains, of the treasures that lie buried far down beneath the waves. But who shall tell of the treasures that are hidden in the deeper, darker sea of human life, where they have gone down in the sad hours of defeat and failure?
"In dim green depths rot ingot-laden ships,
While gold doubloons, that from the drowned hand fell,
Lie nestled in the ocean-flowers' bell
With love's gemmed rings once kissed by now dead lips;
And round some wrought-gold cup the sea-grass whips,
And hides lost pearls, near pearls still in their shell
Where sea-weed forests fill each ocean dell,
And seek dim sunlight with their countless tips.
"So lie the wasted gifts, the long-lost hopes,
Beneath the now hushed surface of myself.
In lonelier depths than where the river gropes,
They lie deep, deep; but I at times behold,
In doubtful glimpses, on some reefy shelf,
The gleam of irrecoverable gold."
Glimpses of these lost things--these squandered treasures, these wasted possibilities, these pearls and gems of life that have gone down into the sea of our past--we may have when the reefs are left bare by the refluent tides, but glimpses only can we see. We cannot recover our treasures. The gleams only mock us. The past will not give again its gold and pearls to any frantic appealing of ours.
There is something truly startling in this irreparableness of the past, this irrevocableness of the losses which we have suffered through our follies or our sins. About two centuries ago a great sun-dial was erected in All Souls' College, Oxford, England, the largest and noblest dial, it is said, in the whole kingdom. Over the long pointer were written, in large letters of gold, the Latin words, referring to the hours, "Pereunt et imputantur." Literally, the meaning is, "They perish, and are set down to our account"; or, as they have been rendered in terser phrase, "They are wasted, and are added to our debt."
It is said that these words on the dial have exerted a wonderful influence on the boyhood of many of the distinguished men who have received their training at Oxford, stimulating them to the most conscientious use of the golden hours as they passed, and bearing fruit in long lives of earnestness and faithfulness. The lesson is one that every young person should learn. In youth the hours are full of privileges. They come like angels, holding in their hands rich treasures, sent to us from God, which they offer to us; and if we are laggard or indolent, or if we are too intent on our own little trifles to give welcome to these heavenly messengers with their heavenly gifts, they quickly pass on and are gone. And they never come back again to renew the offer.
On the dial of a clock in the palace of Napoleon at Malmaison, the maker has put, the words, "Non nescit reverti"; "It does not know how to go backward." It is so of the great clock of Time--it never can be turned backward. The moments come to us but once; whatever we do with them we must do as they pass, for they will never come to us again.
Then privilege makes responsibility. We shall have to give account to God for all that he sends to us by the mystic hands of the passing hours, and which we refuse or neglect to receive. "They are wasted and are added to our debt."
The real problem of living, therefore, is how to take what the hours bring. He who does this, will live nobly and faithfully, and will fulfil God's plan for his life. The difference in men is not in the opportunities that come to them, but in their use of their opportunities. Many people who fail to make much of their life charge their failure to the lack of opportunities. They look at one who is continually doing good and beautiful things, or great and noble things, and think that he is specially favored, that the chances which come to him for such things are exceptional. Really, however, it is in his capacity for seeing and accepting what the hours bring of duty or privilege, that his success lies. Where other men see nothing, he sees a battle to fight, a duty to perform, a service to render, or an honor to win. Many a man waits long for opportunities, wondering why they never come to him, when really they have been passing by him day after day, unrecognized and unaccepted.
There is a legend of an artist, who long sought for a piece of sandal-wood out of which to carve a Madonna. At last he was about to give up in despair, leaving the vision of his life unrealized, when in a dream he was bidden to shape the figure from a block of oak-wood, which was destined for the fire. Obeying the command, he produced from the log of common firewood a masterpiece.
In like manner many people wait for great and brilliant opportunities for doing the good things, the beautiful things, of which they dream, while through all the plain, common days, the very opportunities they require for such deeds lie close to them, in the simplest and most familiar passing events, and in the homeliest circumstances. They wait to find sandal-wood out of which to carve Madonnas, while far more lovely Madonnas than they dream of, are hidden in the common logs of oak they burn in their open fire-place, or spurn with their feet in the wood-yard.
Opportunities come to all. The days of every life are full of them. But the trouble with too many of us is that we do not make anything out of them while we have them. Then next moment they are gone. One man goes through life sighing for opportunities. If only he had this or that gift, or place, or position, he would do great things, he says; but with his means, his poor chances, his meagre privileges, his uncongenial circumstances, his limitations, he can do nothing worthy of himself. Then another man comes up close beside him, with like means, chances, circumstances, privileges, and he achieves noble results, does heroic things, wins for himself honor and renown. The secret is in the man, not in his environment. Mr. Sill puts this well in his lines:--
"This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream:
There spread a cloud of dust along a plain;
And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged
A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords
Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince's banner
Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes.
A craven hung along the battle's edge,
And thought, 'Had I a sword of keener steel--
That blue blade that the king's son bears--but this
Blunt thing.'--He snapt and flung it from his hand,
And lowering crept away and left the field.
Then came the king's son wounded, sore bestead,
And weaponless, and saw the broken sword,
Hilt buried in the dry and trodden sand,
And ran and snatched it, and with battle shout
Lifted afresh he hewed his enemy down,
And saved a great cause that heroic day."
With the blunt sword, broken now, which the craven had flung away as unfit for use, the princely hand won its great victory. Life is full of illustrations of this very experience. The materials of life which one man has despised and spurned as unworthy of him, as having in them no charmed secret of success, another man is forever picking up out of the dust, and with them achieving noble and brilliant successes. Men, alert and eager, are wanted, men with heroic heart and princely hand, to see and use the opportunities that lie everywhere in the most commonplace life.
There is but one thing to do to get out of life all its possibilities of attainment and achievement; we must train ourselves to take what every moment brings to us of privilege and of duty. Some people worry themselves over the vague wonder as to what the divine plan in life is for them. They have a feeling that God had some definite purpose in creating them, and that there is something he wants them to do in this world, and they would like to know how they can learn this divine thought for their life. The answer is really very simple. God is ready to reveal to us, with unerring definiteness, his plan for our life. This revealing he makes as we go on, showing us each moment one little fragment of his purpose. Says Faber: "The surest method of aiming at a knowledge of God's eternal purposes about us is to be found in the right use of the present moment. Each hour comes with some little fagot of God's will fastened upon its back."
We have nothing to do, therefore, with anything save the privilege and duty of the one hour now passing. This makes the problem of living very simple. We need not look at our life as a whole, nor even carry the burden of a single year; if we but grasp well the meaning of the one little fragment of time immediately present, and do instantly all the duty and take all the privilege that the one hour brings, we shall thus do that which shall best please God and build up our own life into completeness. It ought never to be hard for us to do this.
"God broke our years to hours and days, that hour by hour
And day by day
Just going on a little way,
We might be able all along
To keep quite strong.
Should all the weight of life
Be laid across our shoulder, and the future, rife
With woe and struggle, meet us face to face
At just one place,
We could not go,
Our feet would stop; and so
God lays a little on us every day,
And never, I believe, on all the way
Will burdens bear so deep,
Or pathways lie so threatening and so steep,
But we can go, if by God's power
We only bear the burden of the hour."
Living thus we shall make each hour radiant with the radiancy of duty well done, and radiant hours will make radiant years. But the missing of privileges and the neglecting of duties will leave days and years marred and blemished and make the life at last like a moth-eaten garment. We must catch the sacred meaning of our opportunities if we would live up to our best.
