Levels of Living
H >> Henry Frederick Cope >> Levels of LivingLEVELS OF LIVING
Essays on Everyday Ideals
by
HENRY FREDERICK COPE
Author of "The Modern Sunday-School
in Principle and Practice"
New York ---- Chicago ---- Toronto
Fleming H. Revell Company
London And Edinburgh
Copyright, 1908, by
Fleming H. Revell Company
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street
To My Wife
Not in the sentiment of dedication alone,
offering to you what I may have done, but
in simple acknowledgment of obligation
to you
Elizabeth
best gift of God and inspiration of man
Under the title of "A Sermon For To-day" these short essays, on the art
of every-day living in the light of eternal life, were published by
_The Chicago Sunday Tribune_, through a series of years, and were
regularly printed in the Sunday editions of a group of the great
dailies. The short sentences were also published with the Sermons
under the head of "Sentence Sermons." The courtesy of _The Chicago
Daily Tribune_ in permitting the publication of these "sermons," with
such changes as have seemed best, is gratefully acknowledged.
CONTENTS
I. THE HIGHER LEVELS
The Real and the Ideal--The Bread of Life--Life's
Unvarying Values.
II. INVISIBLE ALLIES
More than a Fighting Chance--The Unseen
Hand--The One in the Midst.
III. THE SOVEREIGNTY OF SERVICE
Self and Service--My Soul or My Service?--The
Satisfaction of Service.
IV. THE RIGHT TO HAPPINESS
The Power of Happiness--The Secret of
Happiness--The Folly of Anxiety.
V. THE CURRICULUM OF CHARACTER
The Great School--The Purpose of the
Course--The Price of Perfection.
VI. THE AGE-LONG MIRACLE
The Sufficient Sign--Behold the Man--The
Life that Lifts.
VII. SEEING THE UNSEEN
The Sense of the Unseen--The Brook in the
Way--That Which Is High.
VIII. SOURCES OF STRENGTH AND INSPIRATION
Strength for the Daily Task--The Sense of
the Infinite--The Great Inspiration.
IX. FINDING FOUNDATIONS
The Passing and Permanent--Facing the
Facts--The Real Foundation.
X. THE PASSION FOR PERFECTION
The Great Search--The Hunger of the Ages--The
Sole Satisfaction.
XI. THE PRICE OF SUCCESS
The Law of Selection--The Fallacy of
Negation--The Secret of All.
XII. DIVINE SERVICE
The Ideal Service--The Orthodox Service--The
Heavenly Service.
XIII. OUR FATHER AND OUR FELLOWS
The Primary Reconciliation--Faith in Our
Fellows--The Law of Forgiveness.
XIV. MEN AND MAMMON
Riches and Righteousness--Religion and
Business--The Moral End of Money-Making.
XV. THE EVERY-DAY HEAVEN
The Beauty of Holiness--The Gladness of
Goodness--The True Paradise
XVI. TRUTH AND LIFE
Religion of a Practical Mind--The Head
and the Heart--New Truths for New Days.
XVII. THE FRUITS OF FAITH
Root and Fruit--The Orthodox Accent--The
Business of Religion.
XVIII. THE FORCE OF FAITH
"The Victory that Overcometh"--Fear
and Faith--Faith for the Future.
XIX. HINDRANCES AND HELPS FROM WITHIN
Worry--A Cure for the Blues--The Gospel of Song.
XX. DOES HE CARE?
The One at the Helm--The Shepherd and
the Sheep--The Father's Care.
I
The Higher Levels
_The Real and the Ideal_
_The Bread of Life_
_Life's Unvarying Values_
_The ideal is the mold in which the real is cast._
_Half of success is in seeing the significance of little things._
_He finds no weal who flees all woe._
_You do not make life sacred by looking sad._
_Sympathy is a key that fits the lock of any heart._
_Soul health will not come by taking religion as a dose._
_Many a cloud that we call sorrow is but the shadow of our own
selfishness._
_To live wholly for possessions is to paralyze the life to the
possibility of permanently possessing anything._
_It takes more than willingness to be nothing to make you amount to
something._
_This is never a wrong world to him who is right with its heart._
THE REAL AND THE IDEAL
It is probable that from the age of sixteen up to thirty Jesus of
Nazareth spent His life in mechanical toil; He made wooden plows, ax
handles, and yokes; He served as a carpenter. Then for three years He
gave Himself to the ministry of ideal things, exclusively to the
service of the spirit.
There is a wonderful satisfaction in making things, in looking over
some concrete piece of work accomplished when the day ends. It is a
satisfaction that belongs to the artisan. Is it not probable that many
said that it was a great pity when Jesus gave up so useful a trade as
His? To them He seemed to be but chasing the rainbow.
But to-day who possesses a single one of the things that young
carpenter made? And did we possess them all what better off would the
world be? Yet, on the other hand, how ill could this world afford to
lose what He gave it by those three years of the service of the ideal.
In our age of things we so easily forget how large is the place of the
ideal and the spiritual. Ever estimating our assets in the concrete,
we fail to recognize that our real wealth lies in thoughts and things
abstract. The permanent possessions of humanity are spiritual. Not
acres nor armies, not banks nor business make a nation, but mighty,
compelling ideals and traditions.
Jesus, Shakespeare, Browning, Lowell, Emerson left no goods and
chattels, no bonds and mortgages; they left inspirations; they
bequeathed ideals; living first for the soul, their souls survive and
remain to us all. The truly great who still stand after the test of
the years are those who have lived for the spirit.
This is as true of the worker and the warrior as of the philosopher and
poet. All were inspired by glowing visions; they set their affections
on things above the trifles for which we struggle and spend ourselves.
They endured as seeing glories to us invisible; therefore their names
endure.
The great undertakings of our own day are possible only under spiritual
inspirations. No rewards of money only can induce a man to steadfastly
conduct affairs of great moment and enterprise; he is buoyed up by a
great hope; often the very greatness of the task and the sense of
serving great ends carry him on; always he sees the worth in the ideal
rather than the wage.
We must learn to measure life with the sense of the infinite. We must
not think that a man has failed because he has not left burdened
warehouses and bonds. We must cease to think that we can tell whether
work be high or lowly by the size of the wage. We need eyes to see the
glory of the least act in the light of the glowing motive.
A new estimate is placed on each act when it is measured not by bread
alone but by the things of the soul. The mother's care of the
children; the father's steady humble toil for them, the faithful
watching over the sick, the ministry of the lowly, all have a new glory
in the light of the love that leads the way and the spirit that guides
those who do the least of these things.
We need to learn for ourselves what is the work that endures. It is a
good thing to lay a course of bricks so that it shall be true, but of
greater value to the world than the wall that stands firm is the spirit
that forces the man to build aright. No man can do even this without
an ideal set in his heart, and when the wall shall have fallen the
world shall still be enriched by his ideal.
Too many of us are fretting because we are not getting on in the world.
Seeing the apparent ease with which some acquire fortune, we become
discontented with our small gains. We talk as though fortunes and
follies, money and lands were the only things worth while. Yet we know
better, for we all find our real joys in other things.
THE BREAD OF LIFE
There are lives that have bread in abundance and yet are starved; with
barns and warehouses filled, with shelves and larders laden they are
empty and hungry. No man need envy them; their feverish, restless
whirl in the dust of publicity is but the search for a satisfaction
never to be found in things. They are called rich in a world where no
others are more truly, pitiably poor; having all, they are yet lacking
in all because they have neglected the things within.
The abundance of bread is the cause of many a man's deeper hunger.
Having known nothing of the discipline that develops life's hidden
sources of satisfaction, nothing of the struggle in which deep calls
unto deep and the true life finds itself, he spends his days seeking to
satisfy his soul with furniture, with houses and lands, with yachts and
merchandise, seeking to feed his heart on things, a process of less
promise and reason than feeding a snapping turtle on thoughts.
It takes many of us altogether too long to learn that you cannot find
satisfaction so long as you leave the soul out of your reckoning. If
the heart be empty the life cannot be filled. The flow must cease at
the faucet if the fountains go dry. The prime, the elemental
necessities of our being are for the life rather than the body, its
house. But, alas, how often out of the marble edifice issues the poor
emaciated inmate, how out of the life having many things comes that
which amounts to nothing.
The essential things are not often those which most readily strike our
blunt senses. We see the shell first. To the undeveloped mind the
material is all there is. But looking deeper into life there comes an
awakening to the fact and the significance of the spiritual, the
feeling that the reason, the emotions, the joys and pains that have
nothing to do with things, the ties that knit one to the infinite, all
constitute the permanent elements of life.
Because man is a spirit his life never can consist wholly in things; he
must come into his heritage of the soul wealth of all the ages; he must
reach out, though often as in the dark, until across the void there
come voices, the sages and the seers, the prophets, and the poets
speaking the language of the soul. In these he finds his food nor can
his deeper hunger be assuaged until it thus is fed.
Because man is a spirit and gradually is coming into the dominant
spirit life in which things shall count for less and thought and
character for more, he seeks after his own kind. The deeps of life
have their relationships. The spirit of man cries out after the father
of spirits. By whatever name men have called the most high they ever
have sought after Him, the eternal, who would be one with them in soul,
in all that is essential and abiding in being.
Every religion, every philosophy, every endeavour after character and
truth is but the cry of humanity for word with God. Hearing His word
on any lip the heart of man answers with joy. The words of eternal
truth have been the food of the great in all ages. Fainting in the
fight the message from the unseen, the echo of everlasting verities,
has revived their spirits; they have fought the fight that despises
things and seeks truth.
Who would not exchange a mess of pottage for the benediction from a
father's lips? Who is so dead he no longer finds more satisfaction in
truth and love and beauty than in food or furniture? And why are we so
foolish as to seek to satisfy ourselves with things that perish, while
down to the least blade of creation earth is laden with unfading riches
and God is everywhere?
If we might but learn this lesson, we people of the laden hand and the
empty heart, that since life is more than digestion and man more than
beast or machine, since determining all is the spiritual world, they
only are wise who set first things first, who use the garnered
experience of the past and the opportunities of the present to the
enriching of the soul, who listen among all the voices of time for the
words that proceed from the lips of Him who inhabiteth eternity.
LIFE'S UNVARYING VALUES
Life is the business of learning to use things as tools, the real as
the servant of the ideal, to make conditions even better that character
may grow the more, to serve in the making of things and the enduring of
things under the inspiration of the full and glorious purpose of life,
the realizing of the best for ourselves, the rendering of our best to
others.
Only an age that has lost both heart and intellect--the divinely given
measuring rods of life--will think of estimating a life by the money
measure. It is a shallow world that knows a man as soon as and only
when it has scheduled his marketable assets; nor is it a happy augury
for a nation when it acquires the habit of estimating its men by the
length of the catalogues of their possessions.
A period of outer prosperity is always in danger of being one of inner
paralysis. Luxury is a foe to life. Character does not develop
freely, largely, beautifully in an atmosphere of commercialism. A
moral decline that but presages enduring disaster is sure to succeed
the supremacy of the market.
The great danger is that we shall set the tools of life before its
work, that we shall make life serve our business or our ambitions
instead of causing ambitions, activities, and opportunities all to
contribute to the deepening, enriching, and strengthening of the life
itself. In the details of making a living it is easy to lose sight of
the prime thing, the life; it is easy to forget that the great question
is not, what have you? but, what are you?
Life cannot consist in things any more than silk can consist of
shuttles, or pictures of brushes and palettes. Life is both process
and product; but things and fame and power are no more than the tools
and machinery serving to perfect the product. Life must consist in
thoughts, experiences, motives, ideals--in a word, in character. A
man's life is what he is.
But what a man is will depend on what he does with the things he has or
may have. Let him once set the possession of things as his loftiest
ideal, let this avarice of things enter the heart and speedily the love
of the good will leave. To that god all honour, all truth loving, all
gentleness and humanity are sacrificed. When possession becomes life's
ruling passion it doesn't take long for principle to be forgotten.
The danger to-day is not that our people will fail in the world's
contests because they lack either money, mind, or muscle. We are in
little danger from illiteracy or from business incompetency; but we are
in danger from moral paralysis, due to undue pressure on the money
nerve. We have talked before the youth in the home and amongst
ourselves on the street as though the only thing worth living for was
money, as though they alone were great who had it and they only to be
despised who had it not.
The danger is neither in our market, our commerce, nor our laws; the
danger is in our own hearts. No matter how world-potent our
merchandise, how marvellous our mechanical and material powers, how
brilliant our business strategy, all will not avail to silence the
voice, "Thou fool, this night thy soul is required of thee." Then
whose shall these things be?
We need, not fewer things, not the return to an age of poverty or
dreary destitution; we need more power over things; to let the man, so
long buried beneath the money and the lands and houses, come to the
top; to set ourselves over our things; to make them serve us, minister
to our lives and our purposes in living.
There must be an elevation of standards, the institution of new
valuations, clearer, nobler conceptions of what living means. Boys and
girls must be taught from the beginning that life is more than
self-serving, more than fame or glory; it is the service of humanity.
A passion for humanity will cure the passion for gold, will teach the
true value of life as something that only the infinite can estimate and
will give to the heart those true riches that do not tarnish and that
cannot be stolen.
II
Invisible Allies
_More Than a Fighting Chance_
_The Unseen Hand_
_The One in the Midst_
_Logic may illumine, but love leads._
_The religion that produces no sunshine is all moonshine._
_Imaginary evils have more than imaginary effects._
_He who lays out each day with prayer leaves it with praise._
_Light from above is for the path below._
_Singing of heaven gives no certainty of singing in heaven._
_It is better to have your bank in heaven than your heaven in a bank._
_The burdens of earth demand that our hearts be nourished with the
bread of heaven._
_There are too many hungry for love for any ever to talk of suffering
from loneliness._
_The man who lives with God does not have to advertise the fact._
II
MOKE THAN A FIGHTING CHANCE
Who has not cried out, in haste but still in anguish: "Alas! All
things are against me; foes are many and friends there are none!" The
roads to pessimism are many; but surely this is the shortest one, to
get to think that life is but a conflict waged single-handed against
great odds, a long story of struggle, difficulties, pains,
disappointments, temptations, failures, wounds, ending only in death.
Even though you escape that chronic jaundiced view of life there are
seasons of depression when it seems easy to get out of bed on the wrong
side and to plow all day into stumps instead of in the good, clear
ground. Ever we need the vision that Elisha of old gave to his young
man, to see the hills about us alive with our allies. Otherwise it is
easy to conclude the fates fight against us.
How slight is the evidence on which men base their gloomy conclusions!
The pessimist always argues from a single instance to a general law.
If he strikes a poor peach on top he throws the whole basket away--or
sells them as soon as he can. He insists on sitting square on the
cactus bunch when there is only one on the whole bench-land. He then
becomes an authority on cactus. If he can discover a few foes on the
horizon he is blind to a regiment of friends close at hand.
But the seers, our poets and teachers, have a wider vision; they seek
the glory rather than the gloom and they tell us that every man has
more friends than foes. This is the song of those who told us long ago
of Providence, the one who backs a man up and fights on his side and
furnishes him in the hour of need. This is the song of Lowell,
Tennyson, Whittier, and Browning. Life is not a lone-handed fight
against unnumbered foes; it is not a losing fight to any who will fight
it well.
Every force in this world works with the man who seeks the good. This
is a right world and only he who fights the right faces the
unconquerable. A man may meet rebuffs, battle's tides may sweep back
and forth, but in the end, as it has ever been in all the long story of
man's conflict with nature, so in the conflict with every other foe, he
is bound to win. This is as true in the individual life of every
fighter as nature and history show it to be in universal life.
On our side there is the great world of the unseen. Little do we know
of it, but still that little gives us confidence to believe it is
peopled with our allies. Our fairest hopes of good angels may be
delusions as to details, but they are essentially true, being born of
an eternal verity.
The gospel of good hope declares there is One over all, the friend of
all; greater is He that is with you than any against you; greater is He
than your temptations, your adversaries, your difficulties, and your
sorrows. This was what the great Teacher came to tell men, that God
was on their side, seeking to help them, loving, caring, cooeperating,
leading them into the life of victory over every enemy.
Let a man face life in this confidence and he is invincible. He goes
forth and an unseen army goes with him. He gains the seer's vision to
see even the plotting of the enemy and the forces that fight against
him all working for his good. From many combats he gains strength for
the decisive struggle. All things work together for good. He serves
the right, the truth, the things that are eternal; he fights for
character, for manhood, and the good; and the eternal forces that rule
the universe fight by his side. He beholds the hills full of the hosts
of heaven; though he has no time to enjoy the vision he knows they are
there, his allies, his assurance of ultimate victory.
THE UNSEEN HAND
The mightiest and the eternal forces fight ever on the side of the
right. True, things do not always look that way. Sometimes Napoleon's
sneer about God being on the side of the largest battalions seems to
have truth in it. But ere long we see the large battalions swept away
before the strange, unaccountable, and irresistible power of an
insignificant body having truth and God on its side.
The man who takes up the struggle for truth, who puts his hand to the
sword for the oppressed, for the right, finds himself holding a
two-handled weapon, and if he grasps firmly the one hilt it is as
though there were an omnipotent hand grasping the other. He who fights
worthily, in fitting battle, never fights alone.
It is not that some omnipotent person steps down from a throne in the
heavens and plunges into the battle; it is that every time a man steps
out for right and truth he places himself in accord with eternal
spiritual forces that give themselves to him and his work. It is not
that God comes to fight for a man so much as that a man finds himself
fighting beside God; entering this battle, he sees that where he
thought none had been serving heaven had long been waging the contest.
It is so easy, like old Elijah, to think that you alone are left to
witness for truth, to feel the loneliness of standing for things noble
and worthy, to become oppressed with the hopelessness of the minority
in which you find yourself. When real and concrete things press upon
us and their uproar is in our ears we become deaf and blind to the
greater forces that from the beginning of time have been working for
the best.
Every great reform has looked like a losing movement; it has begun with
most insignificant minorities; it has met with violent and
well-organized opposition; its supporters have often been
faint-hearted, and yet ultimately it has overcome always. As men have
fought on they have found an unseen hand grasping the sword beside
theirs.
We all need this sense of God with us, helping us in our lives. This
gives courage and confidence. It does not mean weak reliance upon
heaven to do things for us; it means entering on the things that look
impossible because we know that, if they are right, every great force
in the universe will cooeperate with us.
This is the fine sense in which the human enters into partnership with
the heavenly. This determines whether we may call our work divine or
not. It is to be judged, not by whether it is pleasant or looks
respectable, but by whether it is the work in which we know the Lord of
all can lay His hand to the tool or weapon alongside of our hands.
With a consciousness like this, one attempts anything. The practical
question is not, "Can this be done?" but "Ought this to be done?" "Is
it such a task as will enlist the cooeperation of the eternal spirit of
truth and right?" With the cry of Gideon on their lips, men have fared
forth facing fearful odds; their hands have fallen from their swords,
but the unseen hand has carried them on until the cause has won.
The Almighty, who would have love and peace and righteousness to
prevail, needs your hand for His sword; the sword of the Lord is vain
without Gideon. Ideals and spiritual forces may exist, but men must be
their realizations, their visible hands. God's work waits for you to
put your hand to the sword; you will find His already there.
This helping hand is always unseen; spiritual things are often
apparently unreal. God cannot be reduced to figures nor to material
elements. This hand that works with ours may mean one thing to one and
another to another. What we all need is to simply grasp the great fact
of the spiritual forces that strengthen every good resolve, that give
vigour in every good work, and give victory at last to the right.
THE ONE IN THE MIDST
There are always a thousand blind men to one who can see. All have
eyes, but not all have vision. The things we most need and the things
for which we most long are often nearest to us, while we, with eyes
fast shut, grope our way to the place where we think they ought to be.
The best things are the things we miss. The crowd by the fords of the
Jordan was longing to see the Messiah; yet of them all there was only
one, the son of the desert, who saw that He was actually with them
already. John had eyes that pierced the husk of things. He looked on
this son of the carpenter and a thousand years of prophecy sank into
insignificance beside its fulfillment; the multitude became as nothing
beside the all glorious Son of Man. He alone knew his Lord, because he
alone looked with eyes of love.