“We see by the light of thousands of years,
And the knowledge of millions of men;
The lessons they learned through blood and in tears
Are ours for the reading, and then
We sneer at their errors and follies and dreams,
Their frail idols of mind and of stone,
And call ourselves wiser, forgetting, it seems,
That the future may laugh at our own.”
Nearly all the precious things in our lives are made sacred to us by their cost. This is true even of material things. We cannot live a day but something must die to become food for the sustaining of our life. We cannot be warmed in winter but some miner must crouch and toil in the deep darkness, to dig out the fuel of our fires. We cannot be clothed but worms must weave their own lives into threads of silk, or sheep must shiver in the chill air, that we may have their fleeces to cover us. The gems and jewels which the women wear, and which they prize so highly as ornaments, are brought to them through the anguish and the peril of the poor wretches who hunt or dive for them in cruel seas. The furs we wrap about us in the winter cost the lives of the creatures, which first wore them, which have to die to yield the warmth and comfort for us. Think, too, of the sweet songbirds that must be captured and cruelly slaughtered to get wings and feathers for the women’s hats. Every comfort or luxury that we enjoy comes to us at the price of weariness and pain, sometimes of anguish and tears, in those who procure and prepare it for us.
In the higher spheres the same is true. The books we read, and whose pages give us so much pleasure and profit, are prepared for us, oftentimes, at sore cost to their authors. The great thoughts that warm our hearts and inspire us to noble living, are the fruit, many times, of pain and struggle. “Wherever a great thought is born,” says some one, “ there has been a Gethsemane.” Men had to pass through darkness and doubt to learn the lessons of faith and hope, which they have written in such fair lines for us. They had to endure temptations, and fight battles in which they well-nigh perished, that they might set down for us their bright inspiring story of victory and triumph. They had to meet sorrows in which their hearts were almost broken, to learn how to write the strong words of comfort, which so strengthen us as we read them in our times of grief. We do not know what some of the glad hymns of faith and hope, which lift up our hearts as on eagles’ wings, cost those who first sang them. They have learned in suffering what they teach in song.
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