4ii AFTER THAT THE JUDGMENT
will to believe," as Professor James puts it so forcefully; it is this that constitutes the power of idealization.
What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me : A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.
^ Isaac D'Israeli said, " Almost everything great has been done by youth." "The first open look of young eyes on the condition of the world is one of the principal regenerative forces of humanity." One never knows what may come of a young man's thoughts and fancies and ideals. This idealizing faculty is also one of the richest sources of joy, whether it comes to play in love, friendship, work, or religion. And it is peculiarly a youthful joy. Therefore, said the Preacher, " Eejoice, 0 young man, in thy youth." 1
4. The sage recommends the young man to rejoice in his youth, because the opportunity will soon pass away. We are not listen- ing to a Christian moralist, nevertheless the sentiment is Christian. " Childhood and youth are vanity " ; that is to say, they are transient, fleeting. "Therefore," say a certain class of re- ligionists, "extinguish their natural instincts as summarily as possible. They are transient, therefore they are of no account. They are ' vanity,' therefore to enjoy them is dangerous, if it be not sinful." But the logic of the Preacher takes a different line. Childhood and youth, or youth and manhood, are fleeting ; there- fore " Banish sorrow from thy mind, and put away sadness from thy body." He evidently does not think the brevity and transitoriness of a thing is a reason for despising it.
^ The rose which you pluck in the morning withers before the next morning, but you delight yourself with its colour and perfume none the less while it lasts. A summer morning, with its dewy freshness, is a thing of only an hour or two ; but you do not, for that reason, shut yourself up in your chamber, and refuse to breathe the morning scents, and to look upon the sparkle of the ■ dewdrops. Youth and fresh manhood are things of only a few years ; but their brevity is, to the Preacher, the reason why they should be enjoyed. Those have done infinite damage who have set on foot the notion that youth, from the moment it turns to religion, surrenders all pleasure, lightness of heart, and robust enjoyment ; and such teachers have been betrayed into this
» E. Griffith-Jones,
ECCLESIASTES xi. 9 413
terrible and fatal mistake through their failure to see that God's training is not to stunt or to crush out human nature, but to develop and elevate it.^
^ It seems to me that the Gospel of the Transfiguration should be more widely proclaimed among us. The poets sing of it, the mystics show it, even the scientific men have some foreshadow- ings ; but in the common ways of men it is unheard. " God is Joy itself." Where is the man who shall preach with power to the multitude of the transfiguring of pleasure into joy, as well as of the like transfiguring of pain ? " Joy, then," says Myers, " I will boldly affirm, is the aim of the Universe ; that Joy which is the very bloom of Love and Wisdom ; and men's souls need attuning to that inconceivable delight." ^
^ What in Aurelius was a passing expression, was in [the Christian] Cornelius (Marius could but note the contrast) nature, and a veritable physiognomy. It was, in fact, we may say, nothing less than the joy which Dante apprehended in the blessed spirits of the perfect ; the outward expression of which, like a physical light upon human faces, from the land which is very far off, we may trace from Giotto, and even earlier, to its consumma- tion in the purer and better work of Raffaelle — the serenity, the durable cheerfulness, the blitheness of those who had been indeed delivered from death, of which the utmost degree of that famed Greek blitheness or Heiterkeit is but a transitory gleam, as in careless and wholly superficial youth.'
II.
The Sobering Sense of Responsibility.
« But know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgement."
The second part of the text is not meant to destroy or neutralize the concession of the first sentence, but only to purify and ennoble a gladness which, without it, would be apt to be stained by many a corruption, and to make permanent a joy which, without it, would be sure to die down into the miserable, peevish, and feeble old age of which the grim picture follows, and to be quenched at last in death.
^ M. R. Vincent, God atid Bread, 191. '■^ A Modern Mystic's Way.
■ Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean.
414 AFTER THAT THE JUDGMENT
1. God intends us to live for something better than pleasure. Pleasure as relaxation is right enough, but when we make it our chief business it becomes sin. A butterfly life of vain frivolity and amusement is to prostitute the purpose of our living. God has sent us into the living world to cultivate our spiritual nature by His service. We are created for God, and we answer the end of our being only when we consecrate our lives to His glory. Anything short of making God the supreme object of our rever- ence and affection is to miss the great end of life. We may in- dulge in no sinful pleasure, and in no pleasure that is in any degree questionable : but if we make pleasure our god, the thing for which we live, then it is sin. This is to disobey the first command of the law, " Thou shalt have none other gods before me."