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such that we shall never keep a straight line of direction — which is the shortest line, and the only one on which we shall " obtain " — unless we know very distinctly where we want to go, and have a good strong will that has learned to say u No ! " when the temptations come.
If It is not enough to have earned our livelihood. Either the earning itself should have been serviceable to mankind, or some- thing else must follow. To live is sometimes very difficult, but it is never meritorious in itself ; and we must have a reason to allege to our own conscience why we should continue to exist upon this crowded earth. If Thoreau had simply dwelt in his house at Walden, a lover of trees, birds, and fishes, and the open air and virtue, a reader of wise books, an idle, selfish self-improver, he would have managed to cheat Admetus, but, to cling to metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end. Those who can avoid toil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of private means, and even those who can, by abstinence, reduce the necessary amount of it to some six weeks a year, having the more liberty, have only the higher moral obligation to be up and doing in the interest of man.1
Doth life resemble clouds that come and go ? Or fitful sparks that but a moment glow?
Not so ! Man's life is vast and deeper than the sea, His purpose giveth birth to destiny, He moulds and carves his own futurity.
Is life a senseless weary wail of woe ?
A glittering bubble such as babes might blow?
Not so! Life's meaning is as lofty as the sky, It stirs the heart to action pure and high, It thrills the human breast with ecstasy.
Is life a noxious weed which whirlwinds sow ? A useless flint o'er which the waters flow ?
Not so ! A life well spent has not its weight in gold, It is the clearest crystal earth doth hold, A gem beside which suns seem dull and cold.2
1 R. L. Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and Books. 8 Gustav Spiller.
270 FOR THE CROWN
II.
The Keward.
Christianity is sometimes charged with being a long-sighted worldliness. We are told that the enjoyment many Christians expect is just as worldly as the enjoyments which they now reject. The only difference between such Christians and worldly folk is not in the character of the crowns they seek but in the season when they wear them. The crowns are the same ; but the worldly man wears his now, the Christian hopes to wear it here- after. Now is that accusation entirely ill-founded ? Are our conceptions of the future weighted and coloured by the worldli- ness which we have professed to reject ? How are our thoughts of the future shaped? How do we talk about it? We some- times speak of the unfairness with which things are distributed in this life. Wealth seems to be showered upon the undeserving. The deserving seem often to be kept in straits. From this we argue that there must be a future life to make this fair. If there be no future life, then the constitution of the world is mon- strously unjust. Let us look at that. Let us assume that in this world the good always became the rich, and the wicked always became the poor; would the arrangement be perfectly fitting and just? If goodness were always paid for by money would you consider the traffic conducive to moral and spiritual health ? This worldly and materialistic conception of crowns and rewards eats away the very strength and sweetness of our religion. We are wanting material crowns as a reward for saintliness, and they will not be given in this world or in the world to come. God has other crowns more precious and incor- ruptible, and He is lavish in the bestowal of them.
Tf The prize system has frequently been denounced as unworthy and degrading, and there is a grain of truth in the charge. The danger is that the child may work solely for the prize, and not for the sake of knowledge. We have the same danger in the religious sphere when rewards, of any kind are promised. Certain it is that rewards for well-doing are wrong and hurtful when they are of such a nature as to evoke a greedy or mercenary spirit, and it is equally certain that no man or woman should do right simply for the sake of reward. The higher we go in the sphere of rewards, the more spiritual they become, until they
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cease altogether to be mercenary. The soldier values the Victoria Cross far more than any pecuniary reward. The artist values your admiration more than the price you give for his pictures. No amount of money, however great, can ever be an equivalent of a brave deed or a great work of art.1
If If a religion were revealed to us to-morrow, proving, scientifically and with absolute certainty, that every act of goodness, of self-sacrifice, of heroism, of inward nobility would bring us, immediately after our death, an indubitable and unim- aginable reward, I doubt whether the proportion of good and evil, of virtues and vices amid which we live would undergo an appreciable change. Would you have a convincing example ? In the middle ages there were moments when faith was absolute and obtruded itself with a certainty that corresponds exactly with our scientific certainties. The rewards promised for well- doing, the punishments threatening evil were, in the thoughts of the men of that time, as tangible, so to speak, as would be those of the revelation of which I spoke above. Nevertheless, we do not see that the average of goodness was raised. A few saints sacrificed themselves for their brothers, carried certain virtues, selected from among the more contestable, to the pitch of heroism ; but the bulk of men continued to deceive one another, to lie, to fornicate, to steal, to be guilty of envy, to commit murder. The mean of the vices was no lower than that of to-day. On the contrary, life was incomparably harsher, more cruel and more unjust, because the low- water mark of the general intelligence was less high.2