1 F. B. Meyer.
i CORINTHIANS in. 21-23 123
it, stare and shout round it, crowd after it up and down the streets ; build palaces for it, feast with it at their tables' heads all the night long ; your soul shall stay enough within it to know what they do, and feel the weight of the golden dress on its shoulders, and the furrow of the crown-edge on the skull ; — no' more. Would you take the offer, verbally made by the death-angel ? Would the meanest among us take it, think you ? Yet practically and verily we grasp at it, every one of us, in a measure ; many of us grasp at it in its fulness of horror. Every man accepts it, who desires to advance in life without knowing what life is; who means only that he is to get more horses, and more footmen, and more fortune, and more public honour, and — not more personal soul. He only is advancing in life, whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into living peace. And the men who have this life in them are the true lords or kings of the earth — they, and they only.1
•} We shall never learn from our Lord to look with an un- loving and cynical eye upon the common sights and ordinary ways of nature and of men. Who, if not He, has enabled us to read Divine philosophy in the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, in the transactions of the market, in the work of the farm, in the casting of a net, and the sweeping of a room ? Where, if not in His school, have we been taught that it was a good God who made the world, and sent us into it, not to withdraw ourselves from it, not to feel scorn for it, but to study it, toil in it, and help one another to profit by our stay in it? Are they not His lessons which have redeemed the life of the peasant from dulness, as they have deepened the insight of the artist, and strengthened the heart of the philanthropist ? It is inconceivable, wholly inconceivable, that He who lived and taught thus, could have meant us to understand that His truest followers were to be those who should pass through this earthly life unoccupied, uninterested, unstirred spectators, unfriendly critics, or active foes of its development and progress.2
2. He owns the world who turns it to the highest use of spiritual nourishment. All material things are given, and were created, for the growth of men; or at all events their highest purpose is that men should, by them, grow. And therefore, as the scaffolding is swept away when the building is finished, so
1 Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies ( Works, xviii. 99).
2 A. W. Robinson, TJce Voice of Joy and Health, 109.
i24 YET POSSESSING ALL THINGS
God will sweep away this material universe, with all its wonders of beauty and of contrivance, when men have grown by means of it. The material is less than the soul, and he is master of the world, and owns it, who has got thoughts out of it, truth out of it, impulses out of it, visions of God out of it, who has by it been led nearer to his Divine Master. If I look out upon a fair land- scape, and the man who draws the rents of it is standing by my side, and I draw more sweetness, and deeper impulses, and larger and loftier thoughts out of it than he does, it belongs to me far more than it does to him.
Tf Hazlitt, relating in one of his essays how he went on foot from one great man's house to another's in search of works of art, begins suddenly to triumph over these noble and wealthy owners, because he was more capable of enjoying their costly possessions than they were; because they had paid the money and he had received the pleasure. And the occasion is a fair one for self- complacency. While the one man was working to be able to buy the picture, the other was working to be able to enjoy the picture. An inherited aptitude will have been diligently im- proved in either case ; only the one man has made for himself a fortune, and the other has made for himself a living spirit. It is a fair occasion for self-complacency, I repeat, when the event shows a man to have chosen the better part, and laid out his life more wisely, in the long-run, than those who have credit for most wisdom.1
*[ Bead that touching book, The Story of a Scotch Naturalist ; or the life of Hugh Miller — only a workman in the Cromarty stone quarries, yet to whom that " Old Eed Sandstone " belonged more than ever it did to the men for whom he worked. Or think of Thoreau, one of that little group, with Emerson at their head, who made Concord famous — Thoreau, in his little shanty in the Walden woods, cultivating just enough for life's barest needs, and meanwhile making the wisdom and beauty of Nature and of books and men his own ; loving everything around him and loved by an — the birds perching upon him as he hoed his garden, the squirrels nestling up to him as he sat reading in his woodland nooks ; taking all that country-side into his mind and heart, and making it curiously his own. So that to-day, as people drive by it, they say " that is Thoreau's wood " ! 2