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Page 53
"So, likewise, in his business in the kitchen (to which he had naturally
a great aversion), having accustomed himself to do everything there for
the love of God, and with prayer upon all occasions, for his grace to do
his work well, he had found everything easy during fifteen years that he
had been employed there."
"That he was very well pleased with the post he was now in, but that he
was as ready to quit that as the former, since he was always pleasing
himself in every condition, by doing little things for the love of God."
"That the goodness of God assured him he would not forsake him utterly,
and that he would give him strength to bear whatever evil he permitted
to happen to him; and, therefore, that he feared nothing, and had no
occasion to consult with anybody about his state. That, when he had
attempted to do it, he had always come away more perplexed."
The simple-heartedness of the good Brother Lawrence, and the relaxation
of all unnecessary solicitudes and anxieties in him, is a refreshing
spectacle.
* * * * *
The need of feeling responsible all the livelong day has been preached
long enough in our New England. Long enough exclusively, at any
rate,--and long enough to the female sex. What our girl-students and
woman-teachers most need nowadays is not the exacerbation, but rather
the toning-down of their moral tensions. Even now I fear that some one
of my fair hearers may be making an undying resolve to become
strenuously relaxed, cost what it will, for the remainder of her life.
It is needless to say that that is not the way to do it. The way to do
it, paradoxical as it may seem, is genuinely not to care whether you are
doing it or not. Then, possibly, by the grace of God, you may all at
once find that you _are_ doing it, and, having learned what the trick
feels like, you may (again by the grace of God) be enabled to go on.
And that something like this may be the happy experience of all my
hearers is, in closing, my most earnest wish.
II. ON A CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS
Our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on
the _feelings_ the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be
precious in consequence of the _idea_ we frame of it, this is only
because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we were
radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind could
entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be
unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable
or significant than any other.
Now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat,
is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the
feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.
We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to
perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own
duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth.
But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with
which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in
their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity
and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance
of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they
presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons'
conditions or ideals.
Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate
than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly
fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant
for the other!--we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of
trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. As you
sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a
judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good will
toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his
comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be
taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What queer
disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and
staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and
vacant of all conscious life? The African savages came nearer the truth;
but they, too, missed it, when they gathered wonderingly round one of
our American travellers who, in the interior, had just come into
possession of a stray copy of the New York _Commercial Advertiser_, and
was devouring it column by column. When he got through, they offered him
a high price for the mysterious object; and, being asked for what they
wanted it, they said: "For an eye medicine,"--that being the only reason
they could conceive of for the protracted bath which he had given his
eyes upon its surface.
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