Books: Lessons in Life
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Timothy Titcomb >> Lessons in Life
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Think how nature has risen grandly up to meet every occasion for
new resources. The revolution wrought by steam in the business of
the world created great wants, every one of which was filled as
soon, as felt. Quicker modes of communicating thought were needed
to give us all the advantages of the increased facility of
carriage, and Mr. Morse was permitted to uncover the telegraph.
More money was wanted for the increased business of the world, and
the gold fields of California and Australia were unveiled. It has
always been so. In the march of the human race along the track of
history, nature has pulled aside the veil in which she hides her
treasures, to display that which she has kept in store for every
epoch. In all the future I have no doubt that whenever oil shall
be wanted, oil will be had for the boring. The world is fitted up
with supplies for all the probable and possible wants of the human
race. We are treading every day upon the lids of great secrets
that await the wants of the larger style and finer type of life
that lie before us. Discovery has but just begun, and will, I
doubt not, be as rife in future ages as in this. There is no end
of it: yet the world is a thing to be weighed and measured. It is
so many miles around it, and so many miles through it. Never mind;
it has more in it than humanity can exhaust.
When we talk of the material world, especially in its relation to
the constantly developing wants of man, we talk simply of the
kitchen and larder of humanity. We have not ascended into the
drawing-room, or conservatory. The moment we step out of the
consideration of manifested nature, we come into a world which may
neither be weighed nor measured--the world of thought. I suppose
that no author has ever entered a large library and stood in its
alcoves and studied its titles long without asking himself the
question: "what is there left for me to do?" It seems as if men
had been reaching in all directions for the discovery of thought
since time began, and as if there were absolutely nothing new to
be said upon any subject. Yet every age has always demanded its
peculiar food, and every age has managed to get it. Certain great
and peculiarly fruitful subjects, blowing in the sea of thought,
have attracted whole fleets of authors for many years, and they
are doubtless chased away no more to return; but, here and there,
while time shall last, strong men will bore down to deposits of
thought unsuspected by any of the preceding generations of men,
and there will gush up streams to light the nations of the world.
For the world of thought is, by its nature, exhaustless. The world
of thought is the world in which God lives, and it is infinite
like himself. We reach our hands out into the dark in any
direction, and find a thought. It was God's before it was ours;
and on beyond that thought, lies another, and still another, _ad
infinitum_. If our arms were long enough, we should be able to
grasp them as well as the first. All that it wants is the long arm
to give us the command of deposits that would astonish the world.
Authors have become eminent according to their power to reach
further than others out into the infinite atmosphere of thought
which envelops them.
Authors, like inventors, are rarely more than discoverers. If God,
who is omniscient, sees all truth, and apprehends the relations of
every truth to every other truth, all an author can do is, of
course, to find out what God's thoughts are. And every age is
certain to find out the thought that is essential to it. When the
world had exhausted Aristotle, and the wide school of philosophers
who embraced him in their systems, Bacon, self-instituted, stepped
before the world as its teacher. He came when he was wanted, and
his age gave him audience, and took the better path which he
pointed out to it. It was in the golden age of the drama--the age
in which the drama was what it never was before, and will never be
again--a great agent of civilization--that Shakspeare appeared. We
call his plays creations, but surely they were not his. He no more
than discovered them. The reason why they stir us so much is that
God created them. His age wanted them, and he had the insight into
the world of thought which enabled him to enter in and lead them
out. The reason why we have not had any great dramatist since, is,
that succeeding ages have not needed one. The great men of later
ages have not recognized the drama as a want of their particular
time. I am aware that there is nothing in this to feed human
pride, but I do not recognize food for human pride as a want of
any age.
We are in the habit of talking of the old authors; and we read
them as if we supposed them wiser than ourselves. We try to feed
on the thought which they discovered, but it is in the main very
innutritious fodder, and the world is learning the fact. We read
and reverence old books less, and read and regard newspapers a
great deal more. The thought which our own age produces is that
which we are learning to prize most. We buy beautiful editions of
Scott, but we read Dickens and Thackeray and Mrs. Stowe, in weekly
and monthly numbers. Milton, in half-calf, stands upon the shelves
of our library undisturbed, while we cut the leaves of "Festus;" and
Keats and Byron and Shelley are all pushed aside that we may
converse with Longfellow and Mrs. Browning. It is not, perhaps,
that the later are the greater, but, being informed with the spirit
of the age in which we have our life, moving among the facts which
concern us, and conscious of our want, they apprehend the true
relations of their age to the world of thought around them. They see
where the sources of oil are exhausted, and bore for new deposits.
It is a comfort to know that they can never bore in vain.
We may be sure that literature will always be as fresh as it has
been. It is possible that we may never have greater men than
Shakspeare and Milton, and Dante and Goethe; but there is nothing
to hinder our having men just as great. Those who are to come will
only bore in different directions, and find new deposits.
Shakspeare and Milton were great writers, but the fields they
occupied were their own. They do not resemble each other in any
particular. Dante and Goethe were great writers, but there are no
points of resemblance between them. When Scott was issuing his
wonderful series of novels, it seemed to his cotemporaries, I
suppose, that there was no field left for a successor; yet
Dickens, in the next generation, won as many readers and as much
admiration as he, in a field whose existence Scott never
suspected. Very different is the world of thought from the world
of matter, in the fact that its deposits are found in no
particular spot. The mind can go out in quest of thought in no
direction without reward; and every man receives from his age
motive and culture which peculiarly prepare him for the work of
supplying its needs. There are some who seem to think that the
golden age of literature is past--that nothing modern is worthy of
notice, and that it is one of the vices of the age that we discard
so much the teachings of the literary fathers. But the world of
thought is exhaustless, and we have only to produce a finer
civilization than the world has ever seen, to secure, as its
consummate flower, a literature of corresponding excellence.
What has been said of the world of matter and the world of
thought, may be said, and is implied, of the world of men. We are
accustomed to say that great emergencies make great men. But this
is not true. Great men are always found to meet great emergencies:
but God makes them, and leads them through a course of discipline
which prepares them for their work. It is one of the remarkable
facts of history, so patent that all have seen and acknowledged
it, that to meet every great epoch a man has been prepared. I mean
it in no irreverent or theological sense when I say that there has
been a series of Christs, whose appearance has denoted the
departure of old dispensations and the inauguration of new. Men
have arisen who have torn down temples, and demolished idols, and
swept away systems, and knocked off fetters, and introduced their
age into a freer, better, and larger life; and it will always be
so while time shall last. Men will arise equal to the wants of
their age wherever men are civilized. The causes which produce
emergencies are the agents which educate men to meet them; and
nature is prodigal of her material among men, as among the things
made for his service.
When, in the history of Christianity, it became necessary to re-assert
and emphasize the truth that "the just shall live by faith," Luther
was raised up; and nothing is more apparent to the student than that
the age which produced him demanded him--that he fitted into his
age, supplied its wants, and cut a new channel, through which the
richest life of the world has flowed for centuries. He found his country
tied up to formalism, scholasticism, and tradition; and by strokes as
remarkable for boldness as strength he set it free. He stands at the
head of a great historical epoch, which was prepared to receive and
crown him. In another field, we have, even in this day, a reformer
whom his age has called for, and who will surely do in the world of
art what Luther did in religion. No one can read Ruskin, and mark his
enthusiasm, his splendid power, his earnestness, his love of truth,
his reverence for nature, and above all, his love of God, without
feeling that he has a great mission to fulfil in the world. I bow myself
in homage before this man, and acknowledge his credentials. He
speaks with authority, and not as the common run of scribes, at all.
Fearlessly he tears the mask away from conventionalism and pretension,
sparing neither age nor nation, and scattering critics right and left
"Like chaff from the threshing-floor."
It seems to me that the sight of this single, unsupported man,
plunging boldly into a fight with a whole world full of liars and
lies, thrusting right and left, anxious only for the triumph of
truth, and everywhere devoutly recognizing God and his glory, and
Christ and his honor, as the ultimate end of true art, is one of
the most striking and beautiful the world has ever seen. Was there
not need of him? Had not art become superstitious and infidel and
missionless? Had it not faded to little more than the repetition
of old inanities, traditional mannerisms, stereotyped lies? Ruskin
came to tell his age that art was doing nothing toward making the
world better--that, instead of lifting the heart toward God, and
enlarging the field of human sympathy, it was only ministering to
the vanity of men--that nature was dishonored that men might win
the applause of vulgar crowds by falsehood and trickery. Nobly
has he done and nobly is he still doing his work; and the world is
reading him. It matters not that critics carp, and scold, and
whine--the world is reading, and will regard him. The eternal
truth of God and nature is on his side; and we are to see, as I
firmly believe, resulting from his noble labors, a beautiful
resurrection of art from the grave in which its friends have laid
it. It shall come forth, though now bound hand and foot, and be
restored to the sisterhood whose happiness it is to serve and sit
at the feet of Jesus Christ.
But time and space would fail to give illustrations of the truth
that God has always a man ready for an emergency. It is not
necessary to speak of Washington. It would not be wise, perhaps,
to speak of the first Napoleon, because men differ so widely in
their estimate of his work. But of the last Napoleon, it may be
said that he furnishes one of the most notable instances the world
has ever seen of a man prepared for his age. I suppose that no one
believes that there is another man in existence who could have
done for France, and would have done for Europe, under the
circumstances, what Louis Napoleon has done. Never did the central
figure of an elaborate piece of mosaic fit more nicely into its
place, than did Louis Napoleon into the complicated affairs of his
age. They were made for him, and he for them.
Shall the world of matter never fail--shall the world of thought
be exhaustless--shall men be found for all the emergencies of their
race, and, yet, shall divine truth be contained in a nut-shell?
Must the human soul lack food--fresh food--because a generation
long gone has decided that only certain food is fit for the human
soul? I believe that the Bible is a revelation of divine truth to
men, and, believing this, I believe that its most precious deposits
have hardly been touched. I believe that in it, there is special food
prepared for all the wide variety of human souls, and that, as
generation after generation passes away, new deposits will be struck,
so rich in illuminating power that their discoverers will wonder
they had never been seen before. I know that just before me, or
somewhere before me, there is a generation of men who will think
less of being saved, and more of being worth saving, less of dogma,
and more of duty, less of law, and more of love; whose worship will
be less formal, and more truthful and spiritual, and whose God will
be a more tender and considerate father, and less a lawgiver and a
judge. For such a generation, there exists a deposit of divine truth
almost unknown by Christendom. Only here and there have men gathered
it, floating upon the surface. The great deposit waits the touch of
another age.
LESSON XI.
GREATNESS IN LITTLENESS.
"This earth will all its dust and tears
Is no less his than yonder spheres;
And rain-drops weak and grains of sand
Are stamped by his immediate band."
STERLING.
"There is a power
Unseen, that rules the illimitable world;
That guides its motions, from the brightest star
To the least dust of this sin-tainted world."
THOMSON.
Infinity lies below us as well as above us. There is as much
essential greatness in littleness as in largeness. Mont Blanc--
massive, ice-crowned, imperial--is a great work of nature; yet it
is only an aggregation of materials with which we are thoroughly
familiar. It is only a larger mountain than that which lies within
sight of my window. A dozen Monadnocks or Ascutneys or Holyokes,
more or less, make a Mont Blanc, with glaciers and avalanches and
brooding eternity of frost. Such greatness, though it impresses me
much, is not beyond my comprehension. It can be reckoned by cubic
miles. So with the sea: it is only an expanse of water larger than
the river that winds through the meadows. It is great, but it is
only an aggregate of numerable quantities that my eyes can
measure, and my mind comprehend. These are great objects, and they
are great particularly because they are large. They are above me,
and they lead me upward toward creative infinity.
If I turn my eyes in the other direction, however, I lose myself
in infinity quite as readily. If I pick up a pebble at the foot of
Mont Blanc, and undertake the examination of its structure,--the
elements which compose it, the relations of those elements to each
other, the mode of their combination--I am lost as readily as I
should be in following the footsteps of the stars. If I undertake
to look through a drop of water, I may be arrested at first,
indeed, by the sports and struggles of animalcular life; but at
length I find myself gazing beyond it into infinitude--using it as
a lens through which the Godhead becomes visible to me. I can
dissect from one another the muscles and arteries and veins and
nerves and vital viscera of the human body, but the little insect
that taps a vein upon my hand does it with an instrument and by
the operation of machinery which are beyond my scrutiny. They
belong to a life and are the servants of instincts which I do not
understand at all.
These thoughts come to me, borne by certain memories. I know a
venerable gentleman of Buffalo--Dr. Scott--who did, and who still
does, very great things in a very small way. At the age of seventy
he
became conscious of decaying power of vision. Being professionally a
physician and naturally a philosopher, he conceived the idea that
the eye might be improved by what he denominated a series of
"ocular gymnastics." He therefore undertook to exercise his eyes
upon the formation of minute letters--working upon them until the
organs began to be weary, and then, like a prudent man, resting for
hours. By progressing slowly and carefully, he became, at last,
able to do wonders in the way of fine writing, and also became able
to read the newspapers without glasses. (Here's a hint for some
clever Yankee--as good as a fortune.) Now, reader, prepare for a
large story; but be assured that it is true, and that my hands have
handled and my eyes seen the things of which I tell you. At the age
of seventy-one, Dr. Scott wrote upon an enamelled card with a stile,
on space exactly equal to that of one side of a three-cent
piece,--The Lord's Prayer, the Apostles' Creed, the Parable of the
Ten Virgins, the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, the Beatitudes,
the fifteenth Psalm, the one hundred and twentieth Psalm, the one
hundred and thirty-third Psalm, the one hundred and thirty-first
Psalm, and the figures "1860." Every word, every letter, and every
point, of all these passages was written exquisitely on this minute
space; and that old man not only saw every mark he made, but had the
delicacy of muscular action and steadiness of nerve to form the
letters so beautifully that they abide the test of the highest
magnifying power. They were, of course, written by microscopic
aid.
Now who believes that it does not require more genius and skill to
execute this minute work than it does to bore a Hoosac tunnel, or
build a Victoria bridge, or put a dam across the Connecticut, or
construct an Erie canal? I do not speak of the relative importance
of the great works and the small, but of the relative amount and
quality of the power that is brought to bear upon them. In a very
important sense the greatest thing a man can do is the most
difficult thing he can do. The most difficult thing a man can do
may not be the most useful, or in any sense the most important;
but it will measure and show the limits of his power. Work grows
difficult as it goes below a man, quite as rapidly as it does when
it rises above him. It costs as much skill to make a dainty bit of
jewelry as it does to carve a colossal statue. It actually costs
more power to make the chain of gold that holds the former, than
it does to forge the clumsy links by which the latter is dragged
to its location. Thus, whether man goes down or up, he soon gets
beyond the sphere of his power. The further he can carry himself
in either direction the more does he demonstrate his superiority
over the majority of men. The more difficult the task which he
performs the further does he reach toward infinity.
In the town of Waltham there is a manufactory of watches which I
have examined with great interest. It is here undertaken to
organize the skill which has been achieved by thousands of patient
hands, and submit it to machinery; and it is done. Every thing is
so systematized, and the operations are carried on with such
exactness, that, among a hundred watches, corresponding parts may
be interchanged without embarrassment to the machinery. The
different parts are passed from hand to hand, and from machine to
machine, each hand and each machine simply doing its duty, and
when from different and distant rooms these parts are assembled,
and cunning fingers put them together, every wheel knows its
place, and every pivot and every screw its home, though it be
picked without discrimination from a dish containing ten thousand.
Yet among these parts there are screws of which it takes one
hundred and fifty thousand to make a pound, and shafts and
bearings which are so delicately turned that five thousand
shavings will only extend a lineal inch along the steel. This is
the way American watches are made, and this is the way in which
the highest practicable perfection is reached in the manufacture
of these pocket monitors.
Here we have small work, organized, and great elaboration of
related details. When Dr. Scott wrote his passages on the card,
his work was very simple. He did only one thing--he made letters.
When he had made letter after letter until the little space was
filled, his work was done. It was not a part of some complicated
and inter-dependent whole, related to a thousand other parts in
other hands. I suppose it may be as delicate work to drill a jewel
with a hair of steel, armed with paste of diamond-dust, as to
write "Our Father" under a microscope; but when the jewel has to
be drilled with relation to the reception of a revolving metallic
pivot, the process becomes very much nicer. So here are a hundred
processes going on at the same time, in different parts of a
building, all related to each other, each delicate almost beyond
description, and effected with such precision that a mistake is so
much an exception that it is a surprise. I have seen the huge
steam engines at Scranton which furnish power for the blast of the
furnaces there, and their magnitude and power and most impressive
majesty of movement have made me tremble; yet as works of man they
are no greater than a Waltham watch.
It seems to me that man occupies a position just half way between
infinite greatness and infinite littleness, and that he can
neither ascend nor descend to any considerable degree without
bringing up against a wall which shows where man ends and God
begins. It seems, too, that that kind of human power which can
reach down deepest into the infinite littleness, is more
remarkable than that which rises highest toward the infinite
greatness. It is a more difficult and a more remarkable thing to
write the Lord's Prayer on a single line less than an inch long,
than it would be to paint it on the face of the Palisades, upon a
line a mile long, in letters the length of the painter's ladder. I
have heard of a watch so small that it was set in a ring, and worn
upon the finger; and such a watch seems very much more marvellous
to me than the engines of the Great Eastern.
We are in the habit of regarding God as the author of all the
great movements of the universe, but as having nothing to do
directly with the minor movements. Mr. Emerson becomes equally
flippant and irreverent when he speaks of a "pistareen Providence."
We kindly take the Creator and upholder of all things under our
patronage, and say, "it is very well for him to swing a star into
space, and set bounds to the sea, and order the goings of great
systems, and even to minister to the lives of great men, but when
it comes to meddling with the little affairs of the daily life of
a thousand millions of men, women, and children--pshaw! He's
above all that."
Not so fast, Mr. Emerson! The real reason why you and all those
who are like you do not believe in God's intimate cognizance and
administration of human affairs is, that you cannot comprehend
them. You have not faith enough in God to believe that he is able
to maintain this knowledge of human affairs, this interest in
them, and the power and the disposition to mould them to divine
issues. You are willing to admit that God can do a few great
things, but you are not willing to admit that he can do a great
many little things. It is well enough, according to your notion,
for God to make a mastodon, or a megatherium, but quite
undignified for him to undertake a mosquito or a horse-fly. It
would not compromise His reputation with you were you to catch Him
lighting a sun, or watching with something of interest the rise
and fall of a great nation, but actually to listen to the prayer
of a little child, and to answer that prayer with distinctness of
purpose and definite exercise of power, would not, in your
opinion, be dignified and respectable business for a being whom
you are proud to have the honor of worshipping!
I do not know how these people who do not believe in the intimate
special providence of God can believe in God at all. I can
conceive how God could rear Mont Blanc, but I cannot conceive how
He could make a honey bee, and endow that honey bee with an
instinct--transmitted since the creation from bee to bee, and
swarm to swarm--which binds it in membership to a commonwealth,
and enables it to build its waxen cells with mathematical
exactness, and gather honey from all the flowers of the field. It
is when we go into the infinity below us that the infinite power
and skill become the most evident. When the microscope shows us
life in myriad forms, each of which exhibits design; when we
contemplate vegetable life in its wonderful details; when
chemistry reveals to us something of the marvellous processes by
which vitality is fed, we get a more impressive sense of the power
and skill of the Creator than we do when we turn the telescope
toward the heavens. Yet Mr. Emerson would have us believe that the
Being who saw fit to make all these little things, to arrange and
throw into relation all these masses of detail, to paint the
plumage of a bird, and the back of a fly, as richly as he paints
the drapery of the descending sun, does not condescend to take
practical interest in the affairs of men and women! My God, what
blindness! Bird, bee, blossom--be my teacher. I do not like Mr.
Emerson's lesson.
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