"We would fill the hours with the sweetest things
If we had but one day; We should drink alone at the purest springs
In our upward way ; "We should love with a lifetime's love in an hour
If the hours were few; We should rest not for dreams, but for fresher power
To be and to do.
"We should waste no moments in weak regret
If the day were but one; If what we remember and what we regret
"Went out with the sun; We should be from our clamorous selves set free
To work and to pray, And to be what the Father would have us to be,
If we had but a day.1
2. But to seek the Kingdom first means more than this. It means an act of deliberate preference on the many occasions in life when counter claims come up. Again and again it may be that, in our inner life, in our family life, in our business life, in our public life, there come, and will come, times when the forces of the world, of self, of sense, of earthly affection, of taste, of ambition, pull one way, and the interests of the Kingdom of God the other, and for an hour, a day, a week, a month, perhaps, there is a struggle as to which is to be put first.
The major problem of life is that of its dominant note, its central issue, its great first thing. The one supreme business of living is to get that decisive emphasis on the thing that is first. The supreme tragedy of life comes to the man who gets the major emphasis on something else than the first thing. All life is then
1 Mary Lowe Dickinson.
1 68 THE FIRST THINGS FIRST
out of proportion, all experience a tangle, and all tasks in con- fusion. There are strong lives that stagger and sink because they have missed the course. There are men of genius who go out in despair because they have put the major emphasis on the wrong thing. It is no more possible to bring strength to a life with a false axis than to keep the solar system in order with some other body than the sun as its centre. Foe and Byron, and Burns and Shelley, and De Quincey and Napoleon, and Nero and Saul were men who got the emphasis in the wrong place, and their splendid lives crashed to inglorious ruin. Lesser men in le measure exhibit the same tragedy of misplaced emphasis and dis- ordered lives.
Tf The sister of Nietzsche tells us that, when the thinker was a little boy, he and she once decided to take each of them a toy to give to the Moravian Sisters in support of their missionary enterprise. They carefully chose their toys and duly carried them to the Sisters. But when they returned Nietzsche was restless and unhappy. His sister asked what ailed him. " I have done a very wicked thing," the boy answered. " My fine box of cavalry is my favourite toy and my best : I should have taken that ! " " But do you think," his sister asked, " do you think God always wants our best ? " " Yes," replied the young philosopher, " always, always ! " The lad was then, at least, following a true instinct. Professor William James, in his Lecture to Teachers on " The Stream of Consciousness," says that every object is either "focal" or "marginal" in the mind. That represents with psychological precision the difference between the sanctities of life as they appeared to my Syrian bushman [who made a god out of only " the residue " of the tree he had felled] and the sanctities of life as they appeared to the boy philosopher. In the one case they were merely marginal; in the other they were grandly focal. Surely, if they have a place at all, they should be in the very centre of the field — regal, transcendent, sublime. The whole matter is summed up there.1
3. Of course the ideals of Christ and the world are not opposed as good and bad, or as right and wrong, but as first and second. It is a total misapprehension of our Lord's words to say that He forbids His followers to think of getting the wealth of the world, or of securing " what they shall eat and drink or wherewithal they shall be clothed." Men's fault and folly lie in
1 F. W. Boreharu, Mountains in the Mist, 66.
ST. MATTHEW vi. 33 169
seeking them as if they were primary and essential ; in making them the treasures of the soul ; in thinking of them with anxious and absorbing care, as if they supplied the supreme need of life. The Kingdom of God is not set in opposition to the things of the world for which men seek ; it is set above them. It belongs to a realm that is higher than the physical and the material. It has to do with the essential life of man — a life that is more than existence, more than meat, more than riches. Man is a child of earth and time, but he is also a child of God — a spiritual being, made in His image, with power to think His thoughts and live in fellowship with Him. All thought and effort which are dominated by a lower conception of man's nature are misdirected. They leave him unsatisfied and undeveloped. The riddle of our life is never solved until we say, " Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee."