Yet, accepting all these experiences that are encountered as absolute facts in life, facts from which there is no appeal, and for which, alas, there is no mitigation, what remains? One may feel as if he would gladly give up the whole business of trying to live at all, but that is not a matter that is optional with the individual. One has to live out his appointed days in this phase of being, and it is only the person of defective intellect as well as defective moral power who will not take the gift of life and make the best--not the worst--of it. Mr. Longfellow's familiar lines,
"Not enjoyment and not sorrow Is our destined end or way; But to act, that each to-morrow Find us further than to-day,"
have often been pronounced trite, but they contain a vital philosophy. It is not enjoyment, or the reverse, which is the aim; but development. And the culture of the soul lies in these mingled experiences; in the baffled efforts, the devotion that gives itself without return or response,--it lies in the doing and the giving, and not in the receiving. Nor does one fare onward uncompanioned by the friends and helpers unseen, as well as by those in this visible world.
"'Mortal,' they softly say, 'Peace to thy heart! We, too, yes, mortal, Have been as thou art,
Hope-lifted, doubt-depressed, Seeing in part; Tried, troubled, tempted, Sustained as thou art.'"
The spiritual faith and that courage and persistence of energy which is the fruition of faith,--and which are both results of the recognition and acceptance of the great truth so luminously revealed by Bishop Brooks when he says, "Jesus never treated his life as if it were a temporary deposit of the divine life on the earth, cut off and independent of its source; he always treated it as if it lived by its association with the Father's life, on which it rested,"--this faith and courage go forward to complete themselves in exhilaration, in firmness of purpose, and in actual achievement. One finds that he not only gains the strength of that which he overcomes, but that he gains a higher plane of life altogether, a more exalted view and a purer atmosphere by accepting cheerfully and lovingly the discipline of denial and limitation, and using the experience as a stepping-stone, and not as an obstacle to his endeavors. There are three ways of meeting the disappointments and denials that are--for the most part--somewhat inevitable to every human life: one of sheer despair, of the relinquishing of every effort, and, in the extreme degree of this feeling, resorting to the apparent extinction of life by suicide; the second, of resignation, that is still, however, a hopeless and passive and negative state, in which the man anchors himself to some mere platitudes of submission to the Divine Will, misunderstanding and misinterpreting and misapplying the great and sublime law of obedience and translating it into conditions of spiritual and mental inactivity that are only a degree less degrading than the cowardice and ignorance that rushes into suicide; and the third, of learning the great lesson involved in the disappointment. Submission to the Divine Will is all very well; it is one of the sublimest of the divine laws; but it is not fulfilled by a hopeless and inert evasion of all the duties and demands of life,--it is, instead, in its integrity and its deep significance, fulfilled by the _joyful_ acceptance of the leading, the _willing_ surrender that opens a still wider view and a still more vital faith in the divine wisdom.