| The Every Day of Life |
Chapter 2 |
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You read a book that helps you. Its words seem to throb with life. You are in sorrow, and it comforts you. You are in darkness, and its lines appear to be luminous for you with an Inner Light. You feel that the person who wrote the book has somehow understood your very experiences, and, like a most skilful physician, has brought to you just the healing your heart needs. But you do not know the pain, the anguish, the suffering, the struggle, and the darkness, through which he had to pass before they could write these living words.
In one of his epistles St. Paul tells us that all things are ours, whether Paul or Apollos or Peter, or the world, or life or death. That is, we are the inheritors of the fruits of all good lives in all past centuries. Every past age has contributed to the wealth we now have. David’s songs are ours, and so are Paul’s epistles, and Peter’s sermons and letters and lessons of failure and restoration.
“If there is anything good or true or beautiful in us, the saints and the poets and the sages have entered into our lives, and have helped to develop those qualities in us.”
We exult in our civilization, our advancement, our refinement, our knowledge, our culture, our arts, our wonderful inventions, our Christian society, and the many pleasant things of our modern life. Do we remember that all this comes to us from the toils and tears and sacrifices, the study, the thought, the invention, the sweat, and the pain of thousands who have gone before us? There has not been a true life anywhere in the past, however lowly, that has not contributed in some degree to the good and blessing we now enjoy. George Eliot says, “ The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistorical facts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who have lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest now in unvisited tombs.” Not a leaf has ever fluttered down intro the dust and perished there, but has helped to enrich the earth’s soil; and not a lowly life in all the past has been lived purely and nobly, but the world to-day is a little richer and better for it.
Look at our home life. We should not forget that, though they are ours without price, the good things of our homes have not been without cost to those whose love we are indebted for them. We have but to think of the untiring affection that sheltered our infancy, and guided our feet in our tender years, and of the self-denials and sacrifices, the toils and watching’s, the care and anxiety, the loss of rest, the broken nights, the planning, the praying, the weeping, and all the cost of love, – for love always costs, – along the days of childhood and youth. Thus oftentimes much of the good in our homes has come down from the past, -the fruit of the labor and the suffering of a long line of ancestors. Hence every comfort and joy and beauty should be sacred as a sacrament to us, because it has been gotten for us by hands of love, at cost of toil and saving, pinching economy and self-denial.
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