Part 4

But a friendship that is true cannot flee; it is, by its very quality and nature, abiding. It may be silent forever; it may be invisible, inaudible, immaterial, impersonal; but once forged it is of the heavenly life, the heavenly language, and the Word of the Lord abideth forever!

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The stress and storm of life, however, fade away very largely before the power of simple love and good will, which is the key to all situations and the solution of all problems. "How shall I seem to love my people?" asked a French king of his confessor. "My son, you must love them," was the reply. When there is genuineness one does not need to engage in the elaborate and arduous labor of counterfeiting qualities and manufacturing appearances, and it is really easier--to say nothing of its being a somewhat more dignified process--to be what one wishes the world to regard him, than it is to endeavor to merely produce the effect of it.

Doctor Holmes had a bit of counsel for those who were out at sea,--that they should not waste any energy in asking how they looked from the shore; and the suggestion is not an infelicitous one in its general application to life. It is quite enough for one to keep his feet, as best he may, set on the upward and onward way, without concerning himself too much as to the effect of his figure in the landscape. The energy that goes towards attitudinizing is always wasted, while that which expends itself on the legitimate fulfilment of tasks contributes something of real importance to life.

And so, any significance of achievement seems to be exactly conditioned by the degree of energy involved--the finer the energy, the more potent the achievement. It would seem as if all the noble order of success hinged on two conditions,--the initial one of generating sufficient energy, and the second that of applying it worthily.

The present age is characterized as that in which new forms of force appear,--in both the physical and the spiritual realms of life. What a marvel is the new chemical force, thermite, of which the first demonstration in America was made in 1902, by the Columbia University Chemical Society in New York. Here is a force that dissolves iron and stone. An extremely interesting account of this new energy appeared in the "New York Herald," in which the writer vivifies the subject by saying of thermite:--

"Under its awful lightning blaze granite flows like water and big steel rails are welded in the twinkling of an eye.... The interior of Mount Pelee, whose fiery blast destroyed St. Pierre in a moment and crumbled its buildings into dust, would be cool compared with this temperature of 5400 deg. It would melt the White Mountains into rivers of liquid fire. Nothing could withstand its consuming power.... And what makes this stupendous force? The answer seems incredible as the claims for the force itself. It is produced by simply putting a match to a mixture of aluminum filings and oxide of chromium, both metallic, and yet, as by magic, a mighty force is instantly created."

The writer describes the discovery and processes at some length, and adds:--

"Such are the wonders of chemistry suggesting Emerson's claim, 'Thought sets men free.' By a simple process--flame applied to metal filings--prison bars melt and vaulted dungeons flow like water."

The article closes with this wonderful paragraph:--

"By chemistry the pale-faced modern Faust, working in his laboratory, makes metals out of clay and many marvellous combinations. What they will do when skilfully proportioned and exposed to heat, the story related gives a hint,--accounting, as it were, for the forces at work in space, creating heat and electricity, making suns burn with indescribable fury, colliding with peaceful planets, mixing their metals in a second of time,--and new worlds seem to leap into vision, balls of molten fire sweeping through space; vast cyclones of flame, making Pelee a cold-storage vault by comparison. All this seems simple enough as explained by modern chemistry, giving men unlimited power, making them gods, as it were, to first master themselves and then the universe."

This description of the new force, whose intensity is almost beyond realization, is hardly less remarkable than is the energy described; and it lends itself, with perfect rhythm of correspondence, to analysis on the side of the spiritual forces of life. "Cast thyself into the will of God and thou shalt become as God" is one of the most illuminating of the mystic truths. The "will of God" is the supreme potency, the very highest degree of energy, in the spiritual realm, which is the realm of cause, while the outer world is the realm of effects. Now if one may so ally himself to the divine will as to share in its all-conquering power, he partakes of creative power and eternal life, now and here, just in proportion to the degree to which he can identify his entire trend of desire and purpose with this Infinite will. This energy is fairly typified in the physical world by the stupendous new force called "thermite," and it is as resistless as that attraction which holds the stars in their courses and the universe in their solar relations.

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It is a fallacy to suppose that it is a hardship and a trial to live the more divine and uplifting life, and that ease and pleasure are only to be found in non-resistance to the faults and defects of character. The truth is just the opposite of this, and the twentieth century will reveal a fairly revolutionary philosophy in this respect. Heretofore poet and prophet have always questioned despondently,--

"Does the road wind up hill all the way?"

as if to wind up hill were the type of trial, and the "descent of Avernus" were the type of joy.

Does the road wind up hill? Most certainly, and thereby it leads on into the purer light, the fairer radiance, the wider view. Does one prefer to go down hill into some dark ravine or deep mountain gorge? It is a great fallacy that it is the hardship of life to live in the best instead of in the worst. It is the way of the transgressor which is hard--not of him who endeavors to follow the divine leading. The deeper truth is that the moment one commits all his purposes and his aspirations into the Divine keeping he connects himself by that very act with a current of irresistible energy; one that reinforces him with power utterly undreamed of before.

There is no limit to the power one may draw from the unseen universe. "It is possible, I dare to say," says a thoughtful writer, "for those who will indeed draw on their Lord's power for deliverance and victory, to live a life on which His promises are taken as they stand and found to be true. It is possible to cast every care on Him daily, and to be at peace amidst the pressure. It is possible to see the will of God in everything, and to find it not a sigh but a song. It is possible in the world of inner act and motion to put away all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and evil speaking, daily and hourly. It is possible, by unreserved resort to divine power, under divine conditions, to become strongest at our weakest point; to find the thing which yesterday upset all our obligations to patience, an occasion to-day, through Him who loveth us and worketh in us, for a joyful consent to His will and a delightful sense of His presence. These things are divinely possible."

One very practical question that cannot but confront the world at the present time is as to whether there is any relation between religion, in its highest and most inclusive and spiritually uplifting sense, and the possibility of communication between those in this life and those who have passed through the change we call death and have entered on the next round of experience. It is a fact--albeit a rather curious and unaccountable one--that organized religion, as a whole, has been largely opposed to the idea of possible communication between what is currently termed the living and the dead. Yet when one focusses the question to a matter of personal individuality, it does not stand the test. Take, for instance, the revered name of a man who was universally recognized as one of the greatest spiritual leaders the world has known,--Phillips Brooks. When he was the rector of Trinity Church, or the Bishop of the Massachusetts diocese, no one who sought his companionship or counsel would have been regarded as being wrong to do so. Now,--always provided that there is full conviction of immortality,--why should it be wrong to seek his companionship or counsel from the unseen life? Death has no power over the essential individuality. Indeed, in being freed from the physical body, the spiritual man becomes only more powerful, and with his power acting from a higher plane of energy. Regarding ourselves as spiritual beings,--and if we are not that we are nothing,--regarding ourselves as temporarily inhabiting a physical body, but in no sense identified with it save as we use this body for our instrument of communication with the physical world; what more logical or natural than that the spiritual being, not yet released from his physical body, should hold sweet and intimate communion with the spiritual being that has been released from this physical environment? Telepathy has already become a recognized law. That mind to mind, spirit to spirit, flashes its messages here in this present life, is a fact attested by too great an array of evidence to be doubted or denied. Now the spiritual being who is released from the physical body is infinitely more sensitive to impression, more responsive to mental call, than was possible in conditions here. The experimental research and investigation in psychology, as shown in such work as that of Professor Muensterberg of Harvard in the university laboratory, reveals increasingly that the brain is an electric battery of the most potent and sensitive order; that it generates electric thought waves and receives them. Does it lose this power by the change called death? Is this power only inherent in the physical structure? On the contrary, Professor William James has demonstrated with scientific accuracy in his book called "Human Freedom," that this is not the case. If, then, intellectual energy survives the process of death,--and if it does not then there is no immortality,--the communication between those in the Unseen and those in the Seen is as perfectly natural as is any form of companionship or of social life here.

As all kinds of people live, so all kinds of people die, and the mere fact of death is not a transforming process, spiritually. He who has not developed the spiritual faculties while here; who has lived the mere life of the senses with the mere ordinary intelligence, or without it, but never rising to the nobler intellectual and moral life--is no more desirable as a companion because he has died than he was before he died. And the objection to any of the ordinary seance phenomena is, that whatever manifestations are genuine proceed very largely, if not entirely, from this strata of the crude and inconsequential, if not the vicious, with whom the high-minded man or woman would not have associated in life, and after death their presence would be quite as much to be deplored. Granted all these exceptions. One may sweep them off and clear the decks. Then what remains? There remains the truth of the unity of the spiritual universe; of the truth that the mere change of death is not a revolutionary one, transforming the individual into some inconceivable state of being and removing him, in a geographical sense, into some unrevealed region in space; there remains the truth that life is evolutionary in its processes; that there is no more violent and arbitrary and instantaneous change by the event of death, than there is in the change from infancy into childhood, from childhood into manhood. There remains the truth that the ethereal and the physical worlds are inter-related, inter-blended; that man, now and here, lives partially in each, and that the more closely he can relate himself to the diviner forces by prayer, by aspiration, by every thought and deed that is noble and generous and true, and inspired by love, the more he dwells in this ethereal atmosphere and is in touch with its forces and in companionship with his chosen friends who have gone on into that world. There is nothing in this theory that is incompatible with the teachings of the Church, with all that makes up for us the religious life. On the contrary, it vitalizes and reinforces that life. This life of the spirit must be in God. Let one, indeed, on his first waking each day, place his entire life, all his heart, mind, and faculties, in God's hands; asking Him "to take entire possession, to be the guide of the soul." Thus one shall dwell hourly, daily, in the divine atmosphere, and spirit to spirit may enjoy their communion and companionship. The experience of personal spiritual companionship between those here and those on the next plane of life is included in the higher religious life of the spirit while living here on earth. It vivifies and lends joy to it; for the joy of sympathetic companionship is the one supreme and transcendent happiness in life. And to live in this atmosphere requires one absolute and inevitable condition, the constant exercise of the moral virtues,--of truth, rectitude, generosity, and love. The life held amenable to these, the life which commits itself utterly into the divine keeping, is not a life of hardship; the "road that winds up hill" is the road of perpetual interest and exhilaration. It is a fatal fallacy to invest it with gloom and despair. It is the only possible source of the constant, intellectual energy of life, of sweetness, of joy, of happiness.

The only standard which is worthy for one to hold as that by which he measures his life is the divine one illustrated in the character of Jesus. To measure one's quality of daily life by this is always to fall short of satisfactory achievement; and still there is always the realization that its achievement is only a question of persistence and of time. It is the direction in which one is moving that determines his final destination. There is the deepest inspiration to the soul in taking for one's perpetual watchword, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." Not that this divine state is attained; but there is perpetual aid in the conviction that one's self--his spiritual self--can "press on to the high calling of God." Man is a divine being; the divine life is his only true life.

The deepest loyalty to the divine ideal involves, however, not only the striving after perfection, but the charity for imperfection. To denounce evil is a part of rectitude; to condemn sin is a moral duty; but to condemn the sinner is not infrequently to be more deeply at fault than is he who thus offended. An illustration of this point has recently been before the public. A New York clergyman preached on Easter Sunday a sermon that was not his own. He gave no credit to its writer. The sermon was published, and a minister of another church, recognizing it, at once proceeded to "expose" the matter in the daily press. Not only did he call public attention to the error, but he did it in a manner that seemed to rejoice in the opportunity; a manner so devoid of sorrow or sympathy as to fill the reader with despair at such an exhibition. Rev. E. Walpole Warren fittingly rebuked the evident malice with which the fault was exposed, and quoted the words of Saint Paul in the injunction: "Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye who are spiritual restore such an one in the spirit of meekness, considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted." To have gone, in a spirit of love, privately and quietly, and pointed out the error, would have been Christian-like; to exult in it must be described by a very different term. Devotion to truth is good, but it is "speaking the truth in love" that is the ideal. It is even possible to convey questioning, counsel, encouragement, or reproach without the spoken word; to send the message by the law of suggestion from mind to mind. The mental intimation will reach the one to whom it is sent if the conditions for telepathy are observed, for thought is far more penetrative than the Roentgen ray, and the atmosphere is magnetic, and carries it as the wire does the electric current. All these finer conditions are beginning to make themselves felt as practicable forces. Humanity is becoming "plastic to the spirit touch;" sensitive to those vibrations too fine to be registered by the outward ear.

"Thought is the wages For which I sell days,"

said Emerson. Thought is the motor of the future. "As a man thinketh, so is he," is one of the most practical and literal truths.

It is only by the divine law that one can measure the ethics of companionship. The frequent experiences in life of broken friendships; of those alliances of good will, of mutual sympathies and mutual enjoyment, that, at last, some way became entangled amid discords and barriers, and thus come to a disastrous end,--such experiences could be escaped were life lived by the diviner standards. Friendship need never deteriorate in quality if each lives nobly. If one conceives of life more nobly and generously than the other, it may become, not a means of separation and alienation, but a means and measure of just responsibility. There are friendships whose shipwreck is on the rock of undue encroachment on one side and undue endurance--which has not the noble and spontaneous character of generosity--on the other. One imposes, the other is imposed on,--and so things run on from bad to worse, till at last a crisis comes, and those who had once been much to each other are farther apart than strangers. In such circumstances there has been a serious failure,--the failure of not speaking the truth in love. The failure on the part of the one more spiritually enlightened toward the one less enlightened. One should no more consent that his friend should do an ignoble thing than he should consent to do an ignoble thing himself. He should hold his friend in thought to the divine standard. He should conceive of him nobly and expect from him only honor and integrity. "Those who trust us educate us," says George Eliot; and still more do they who hold us in the highest thought draw us upward to that atmosphere through which no evil may pass. Each one is his brother's keeper, and life achieves only its just and reasonable possibilities when it is held constantly amenable to the divine ideal,--when it is lived according to that inspiring injunction of Phillips Brooks: "Be such a man, live such a life, that if all lives were like yours earth would be Paradise."

Let one put aside sorrow and enter into the joy and radiance. "Omit the negative propositions. Nerve us with incessant affirmatives." If biography teaches any lesson, it is that the events which occur in life are of far less consequence than the spirit in which they are received. It is the attitude of mental receptivity which is the alchemy to transmute events and circumstances into experience, and it is experience alone which determines both the quality and the trend of life. It is in activity; in doing and giving and loving, that the joy of life must be sought. And it is joy which is the normal condition rather than depression and sadness, as health and not illness is the normal state. Disease and sadness are abnormal, and if one finds himself "blue," it is his first business to escape from it, to change the conditions and the atmosphere. The radiant life is the ideal state, both for achievement as well as for that finer quality of personal influence which cannot emanate from gloom and depression. "Everything good is on the highway," said Emerson, and the first and only lasting success is that of character. It may not be, for the moment, exhilarating to realize that one's ill fortune is usually the result of some defect in his selection, or error in his judgment, but, on the other hand, if the cause of his unhappiness lies in himself, the cause of his happiness may also lie with himself, and thus it is in his power to so transform his attitude to life as to reverse the gloom and have the joy and sweetness rather than the bitterness and sadness of life. Everything, in the last analysis, is a matter of temperament. Nothing is hopeless, for life is infinite, and new factors can be evolved whose working out will create the new heaven and the new earth.

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Here, in the earth life, we have it in our power to seize our future destination.--FICHTE.