The every day of life

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CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Every-Day of Life i

II. Our Debt to the Past 15

Chapter I. The Every-day Of Life

u Place a spray in thy belt, or a rose on thy stand, When thou settest thyself to a commonplace seam ; Its beauty will brighten the work in thy hand, Its fragrance will sweeten each dream.

When the task thou performest is irksome and long, Or thy brain is perplexed by doubt or by fear,

Fling open the window and let in the song God hath taught to the birds for thy cheer."

Perhaps the every-day of life is not so interesting as are some of the bright particular days. It is apt to be somewhat monotonous. It is just like a great many other days. It has nothing special to mark it. It wears no star on its brow. It is illumined by no brilliant event. It bears no record of any brave or noble deed done. It is not made memorable by the coming of any new experience into the life, — a new hope, a new friendship, a new joy, a new success. It is not even touched with sorrow, and made to stand out ever after among the days sad with the memory of loss. It is only a plain, common day, with just the same old wearisome routine of tasks and duties and happenings that have come so often before.

Yet it is the every-day that is really the best measure and test of life. Anybody can do well on special occasions. Anybody can be good on Sundays. Anybody can be bright and cheerful in exhilarating society. Anybody can be sweet amid gentle influences. Anybody can make a solitary self-denial for some conspicuous object, or do a generous deed under the impulse of some unusual emotion. Anybody can do a heroic thing once or twice in a lifetime.

These are beautiful things. They shine like lofty peaks above life's plains. But the ordinary attainment of the common days is a truer index of the life, a truer measure of its character and value, than are the most striking and brilliant things of its exalted moments. It requires more strength to be faithful in the ninety and nine commonplace duties, when no one is looking on, when there is no special motive to stir the soul to its best effort, than it does in the one duty, which by its unusual importance, or by its conspicuousness, arouses enthusiasm for its own doing. It is a great deal easier to be brave in one stern conflict which calls for heroism, in which large interests are involved, than to be brave in the thousand little struggles of the common days, for which it seems scarcely worth while to put on the armor. It is very much less a task to be good-natured under one great provocation, in the presence of others, than it is to keep sweet temper month after month of ordinary days, amid the frictions, strifes, and petty annoyances and cares of home-life, or of business life.

Thus it is that one's every-day life is a surer revealer of character than one's public acts. There are men who are magnificent when they appear on great occasions, — wise, eloquent, masterly, — but who are almost utterly unendurable in their fretfulness, unreasonableness, irascibility, and all manner of selfish disagreeableness in the privacy of their own homes, to those to whom they ought to show all of love's gentleness and sweetness. There are women, too, who shine with wondrous brilliancy in society, sparkling in conversation, winning in manner, the centre ever of admiring groups, resistless in their charms, but who, in their every-day life, in the presence of only their own households, are the dullest and wearisomest of mortals. No doubt in these cases the common every-day, unflattering as it is, is a truer expression of the inner life than the hour or two of greatness or graciousness in the blaze of publicity.

On the other hand, there are men who are never heard of on the street, whose names never appear in the newspapers, who do no conspicuous things, whose lives have no glittering peaks towering high, and yet the level plain of their years is rich in its beauty and its fruitfulness of love. There are women who do not shine in society, who are the idols of no drawing-rooms, who attract no throngs of admirers about them by resistless charms, but who, in their own quiet sheltered world, do their daily tasks with faithfulness, move in ways of lowly duty and unselfish serving with sweet patience and quiet cheerfulness, and pour out their heart's pure love, like fragrance, on all about them. Who will say that the uneventful and unpraised every-day of these lowly ones is not radiant in heaven's sight, though they

" Leave no memorial but a world made A little better by their lives " ?

It is in the every-day of life that nearly all the world's best work is done. The tall mountain peaks lift their glittering crests into the clouds, and win attention and admiration ; but it is in the great valleys and broad plains that the harvests grow and the fruits ripen, on which the millions of earth feed their hunger. So it is not from the few conspicuous deeds of life that the blessings chiefly come which make the world better, sweeter, happier; but from the countless lowly ministries of the every-days, the little faithfulnesses that fill long years.

" ' What shall I do to be forever known ? '

' Thy duty ever.* 1 * This did full many who yet sleep unknown.'

4 Oh, never, never !

Thinkest thou perchance that they remain unknown

Whom thou know'st not ?

By angel trumps in heaven their praise is blown,

Divine their lot. 7 "

A tender and beautiful story of lowly faithfulness is told by a late writer. It was on one of the Orkney Islands where a great rock — Lonely Rock — dangerous to vessels, juts out into the sea. In a fisherman's hut on this island coast, one night long ago, sat a young girl, busy at her spinning-wheel, looking out upon the dark and driving clouds. All night she toiled and watched, and when morning came, one fishing-boat, her father's, was missing. Half a mile from the cottage her father's body was found, washed upon the shore. His boat had been wrecked on Lonely Rock.

The girl watched her father's body after the manner of her people, till it was laid in the grave. Then when night came she arose and set the candle in her casement, that the fisher-

THE EVERY-DAY OF LIFE. J

men out on the waves might see. All night long she sat in the little room spinning, trimming the candle when its light grew dim. After that, in the wild storms of winter, in the quiet calm of summer, through driving mists, illusive moonlight, and solemn darkness, that coast was never one night without the light of that one little candle. As many hanks of yarn as she had spun before for her daily bread she spun still, and one more, to pay for her nightly candle. The men on the sea, however far out they had gone, were sure always of seeing that quiet light shining to give them safe guidance. Who can tell how many hearts were cheered and lives saved from peril and death by that tiny flame which love and devotion and self-sacrifice kept there through the long years ? This is but a leaf out of the story of millions of faithful lives that yet go unpraised among men. The things they do are not the same in all, but the spirit is the same. These humble ones keep the light of love burning where it guides and cheers and blesses others. By the simple beauty of their own lives, by their quiet deeds of self-sacrifice, by the songs of their cheerful faith, and by the ministries of their helpful hands, they make one little spot of this sad earth brighter and happier.

Lowell's picture of womanly grace and faithfulness is very beautiful, and illustrates the glory of the commonplace : —

" She doeth little kindnesses

Which most leave undone or despise ; For naught that sets our heart at ease, And giveth happiness or peace, Is low esteemed in her eyes.

She hath no scorn of common things, And though she seems of other birth,

Round us her heart entwines and clings,

And patiently she folds her wings To tread the humble paths of earth.

Blessing she is. God made her so.

And deeds of week-day holiness Fall from her noiseless as the snow ; Nor hath she ever chanced to know

That aught were easier than to bless."

We could lose out of this world's life many of its few brilliant deeds and not be much the poorer, but to lose the uncounted faithfulnesses of the millions of common lives would leave this world a cold and dreary place indeed in which to live.

There ought to be both cheer and instruction in these glimpses of the glory and blessing of the every-day of life. Most of us can expect to do only plain and commonplace things. Only a few people can become famous. Only a rare deed now and then can have its honor proclaimed from the hilltops. Only a day or two in a lifetime, at the most, can be brightened by the light of popular praise. It is a comfort to reflect that it is the common life of the every-day that in God's sight is the truest and best, and that does the most to bless the world. Many of us need the inspiration which comes from this revealing. The glamour of the conspicuous is apt to deceive us. There is so much glorifying of the unusual and the phenomenal in life, that we come to think the common as of but small importance. People whose days are all alike in their dull routine, feel that their life is scarcely worth living. If only they could do something startling or sub-

IO THE EVERY-DAY OF LIFE.

lime, or even sensational, to lift them out of the dreary commonplace of their every-days, they would feel that they were living nobly and worthily. But if they could realize that it is by its moral value that life's worth is measured, they would know that ordinarily there is ten times more true glory in long unbroken years of simple faithfulness, without distinction or conspicuousness at any point, than there is in any unusual brilliancy in an occasional day or hour.

The every-day of God's care and revealing is also more to us than his day of wonder-working. The miracles of Christ were not half so rich in blessing for men as his common days with their sweet life, their simple teachings, their ceaseless ministries of good, their compassion, their thoughtf ulness, comfort, and helpfulness. Daily providence, with its unrecognized wonders of sunshine and air and rain and snow and heat and cold, and its unfailing gifts of food and raiment and beauty and comfort, is more glorious than the occasional startling events that seem to unveil the very throne of God.

THE EVERY-DAY OF LIFE. II

Luther wrote one day in a dark period of the Reformation, when even the boldest were trembling : " I recently saw two miracles. You listen to hear of something startling, some great light burning in the heavens, some angelic visitation, some unusual occurrence ; but you hear only this : ' As I was at my window, I saw the stars, the sky, and that vast and glorious firmament in which the Lord has placed them. I could nowhere discover the columns on which the Master has supported this immense vault, and yet the heavens did not fall/ And here was the other miracle : ' I beheld clouds hanging above me like a vast sea. I could neither perceive ground on which they reposed, nor cords by which they were suspended, and yet they did not fall upon me/ '

If we had eyes to see the glory of the Lord in the every-day of divine providence, we should find light and comfort a thousand times where now we walk in darkness with sorrow uncomforted. The glory of the Lord is everywhere. It shines in the lowliest flower, in the commonest grass-blade, in every drop of dew, in every snowflake. It burns in every bush and tree. It lives in every sunbeam, in every passing cloud. It flows around us in the- goodness of each bright day, in the shelter and protection of every dark night. Yet how few of us see this glory. We walk amid the divine splendors, and see ofttimes nothing of the brightness. Says Mrs. Browning: —

" Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God ; But only he who sees takes off his shoes ; The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries."

We cry out for visions of God, when, if our eyes were opened, we should see God's face mirrored in all about us. There is a legend of one who travelled many years and over many lands, seeking God, but seeking in vain. Then, returning home, and taking up her daily duties, God appeared to her in these, showing her that he was ever close beside her. Whittier, in a beautiful poem, "The Chapel of the Hermits," represents one seeking the Holy Land, and at last learning that he needed not rock nor sand nor storied stream of morning-land, to reveal Christ : —

" The heavens are glassed in Merrimac ; What more could Jordan render back ?

We lack but open eye and ear To find the Orient's marvels here ; The still, small voice in autumn's hush, Yon maple wood the burning bush.

Henceforth my heart shall sigh no more For olden time and holier shore ; God's love and blessing, then and there, Are now and here and everywhere."'

So there is glory everywhere in life, if only we have eyes to see it. The humblest lot affords room enough for the noblest living. There is opportunity in the most commonplace life for splendid heroisms, for higher than angelic ministries, for fullest and clearest revealings of God. " Every day," says Goethe, " is a vessel into which a great deal may be poured, if we will actually fill it up ; that is, with thoughts and feelings, and their expression into deeds as elevated and amiable as we can reach to." The days are well enough : it is with ourselves whether we make them radiant and beautiful, whether we fill them with life. A mere dreary treadmill round — waking, eating, drinking, walking, working, sleeping — is not enough to make any life worthy ; we must put the glory of love, of best effort, of sacrifice, of prayer, of upward-looking, and heavenward-reaching, into the dull routine of our life's every-day, and then the most burdensome and uneventful life will be made splendid with the glory of God.

Chapter II. Our Debt To The Past

" 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 of 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 for 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 song-birds 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, ofttimes, 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

OUR DEBT TO THE PAST Ij

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.

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 he 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, the darkness, through which he had to pass before he 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, 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 lived 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 unhistoric 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 into 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 to 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 watchings, 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 ofttimes much of the good in our homes has come down from the past, — the fruit of the labor and 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.

Daniel Webster, referring to the early home of his parents in a log cabin, built amid the snow-drifts of New Hampshire, "at a period so early that, when the smoke rose first from its rude chimney and curled over the frozen hills, there was no similar evidence of a white man's habitation between it and the settlements on the rivers of Canada," uttered these noble words concerning this rude cabin, " Its remains still exist. I make it an annual visit. I carry my children to it, to teach them the hardships endured by the generations which have gone before them. I love to dwell on the tender recollections, the kindred ties, the early affections, and the touching narratives and incidents which mingle with all that I know of the primitive family abode. I weep to think that none of those who inhabited it are now among the living ; and if ever I am ashamed of it, or if ever I fail in affectionate veneration for him who reared it, and defended it against savage violence and destruction, cherished all the domestic virtues beneath its roof, and, through the fire and blood of a seven years' Revolutionary War, shrank from no danger, no toil, no sacrifice, to save his country, and to raise his children to a condition better than his own, may my name, and the names of my posterity, be blotted forever from the memory of mankind/' Or we may think of our country. We enjoy its liberties and prosperities. We look at our beautiful flag, and our hearts are filled with patriotic pride. We sit in peace beneath its sheltering folds. We think of our institutions, our beneficent government, our civilization, our schools, our churches, the peace and safety we enjoy. But we should not forget what all these national blessings cost those who procured them, and those who have preserved them for us. Our present Christian civilization is the growth of many centuries of fidelity, of sacrifice, of blood. The story of the struggle for human freedom is a story of tears and suffering and martyrdom. Every school-boy knows what it cost the colonists to lay the foundations of our nation ; how bravely they fought, how they suffered in maintaining the principles which enter into the Constitution, and are the basis of all that is noble in our country. Every thread of our flag represents a precious cost in loyalty to the truth, and to the cause of human rights. Our Civil War is not yet too distant for many of us to remember the price that was paid in those dark, sad days on battlefields and in prisons by brave men, to preserve the liberty that is so dear to us, and to wipe out the shame of human slavery that, till then, had still blotted our escutcheon. Thus everything that is noble and good in our country comes to us from sacrifice and blood, somewhere along the past centuries, and should be sacred to every loyal, patriotic heart.

There is one other obvious application of this principle of the cost of all blessings. We have great joy in our Christian hopes. We are freed from sin's curse. We are children of God. We have Christ's peace in our hearts. We walk beneath the smile of God. We have comfort in our sorrow, guidance in our perplexities, help in temptation, the assurance of eternal life. We should never forget that all these priceless blessings, which yet are so free to us, come to us through the cross and passion of our Saviour. By his stripes we are healed. We have joy because he endured sorrow. We have peace in the midst of storm, because he faced the storm. We have forgiveness, because the darkness gathered about his soul on the cross. The hands that save us are pierced hands, pierced in saving us.

" I fall not on my knees and pray, But God must come from heaven to fetch that sigh, And pierced hands must take it back on high ; And through his broken heart and cloven side

Love makes an open way For me, who could not live, but that He died."

These are illustrations of this great law of the cost of all that is good. Past ages have sent down to us their fruits of pain and sacrifice and loss to enrich us. Our inheritances, others toiled to get them for us. The blessings of our homes and firesides come to us baptized with love's tears and blood. Everything that is beautiful in life has cost, somewhere, anguish and pain. Heaven is entered only by the way of the cross of Christ.

What is the lesson ? When three brave men brought to David, shut up in a cave, water from the well that was by the gate of Bethlehem, cutting through the lines of the Philistines to get it for him, he would not drink it, but poured it out unto the Lord. " Be it far from me, O Lord," he said, " that I should do this ! Shall I drink the blood of the men that went in jeopardy of their lives?" Its cost made the water too sacred to be used even for the gratification of his own natural thirst. It could be fitly used in no way but as an offering to the Lord.

If that cup of water was so sacred because brought by hands of love through peril, what shall we say of the blessings of our lives which have cost others so much ? Are they not all sacred ? This is one lesson. Nothing is common or unclean. Everything has been cleansed by its cost. How this thought transfigures all life, all our possessions and enjoyments !

Then a further lesson is, that these sacred things must not be used for common ends, for any mere selfish gratification. We should consecrate them to God. But how can we do this ? For one thing, we should never put anything of ours to any sinful or unholy use. We cherish heirlooms, mementoes, and memorials of friends who are gone. We hold them as sacred as life itself. We would not for the world desecrate a keepsake. A poor woman told the other day, how her husband had taken her ring, her dead mother's gift to her, and had pawned it to get a little money to buy drink. No wonder her heart was almost broken by his act. When we think of it, all the blessings of our lives are sacred memorials of love, because they represent the toil and sacrifice of those who have gone before us. To use even the commonest of them in any sinful way is to desecrate hallowed things.

Even to use our blessings solely for ourselves is also to dishonor them. David would not even quench his own sore thirst with the water which had cost so much. It is sacrilege to use our good things for ourselves alone. We employ them worthily only when we share them with others. This is the true way of giving them to God. This is what he wants us to do with them. We lay them on his altar, but they are not burned up there, as were the ancient offerings. God gives them back to us, that we may take them, and with them bless other lives.

If we would join the ranks of those who have lived worthily in the past, and have bequeathed blessing to the world, we must live worthily ourselves, must live unto God, standing faithfully in our lot, loyal to truth and to duty, withholding no price of love in serving others. And this obligation to the future, our own debt to the past lays upon us. Other men labored, suffered, and we have entered into their labors and sufferings. As we enjoy the fruits of the love and service and faithfulness of those who have gone before us, let us pay our debt to them by love and service and faithfulness that will bless those who come after us. Woe to the man who leaves a curse in the world instead of a blessing.

" O awful, sweetest Life of mine, That God and man both serve in blood and tears ! O prayers I breathe not but through other prayers ! O breath of life compact of others 1 sighs !