| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 24 |
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What are some of the elements of this divine philosophy of living?
One is patient submission to ills and hardships which are unavoidable. No lot is perfect. No mortal ever yet found a set of circumstances without some unpleasant feature. Sometimes it is in our power to modify the discomforts. Our trouble is often of our own making. Much of it needs only a little energetic activity on our part to remove it. We are fools if we live on amid ills and hardships which a reasonable industry would change to comforts, or even pleasures.
But if there are inevitable ills or burdens which we cannot by any energy of our own remove or lighten, they must be submitted to without murmuring. We have a saying that “What cannot be cured must be endured.” But the very phrasing tells of an unyielding heart. There is submission to the inevitable, but no reconciliation. True contentment does not chafe under disappointments and losses, but accepts them, becomes reconciled to them, and at once looks about to find something good in them. This is the secret of happy living. And when we come to think of it, how senseless it is to struggle against the inevitable! Discontent helps nothing. It never removes a hardship or makes a burden any lighter or brings back a vanished pleasure. One never feels better for complaining. It only makes him wretched. One bird in a cage struggles against its fate, flies against the wire walls, and beats upon them in efforts to be free till its breast and wings are all bruised and bleeding. Another bird shut in accepts the restraint, perches itself upon its bar and sings. Surely the canary is wise than the starling.
Then we would get far along toward contentment if we ceased to waste time dreaming over unattainable earthly good. Only a few people can be great or rich; the mass must always remain in ordinary circumstances. Suppose all our forty millions were millionaires; who could be found to do the work that must be done? Or suppose all were great poets. Imagine forty million people in one country writing poetry! Who would write the prose? A little serious reflection will show that the world needs only a very few great and conspicuous lives, while it needs millions for its varied industries, its plain duties, its hard toil. And yet a large amount of our discontent arises from our envy of those who have what we have not. There are many who lose all the comfort of their own lives in coveting the better things that some other one possesses.
There are several considerations that ought to modify this miserable feeling which brings so much bitterness. If we could know the secret history of the life that we envy for its splendor and prosperity, perhaps we would not exchange for it our lowlier life with its homely circumstances. Certain it is that contentment is not so apt to dwell in palaces or on thrones as in the homes of the humble. The tall peaks rise nearer the skies, but the winds smite them more fiercely.
Then why should I hide my one talent in the earth because it is not ten? Why should I make my life a failure in the place allotted to me, while I sit down and dream over unattainable things? Why should I miss my one golden opportunity, however small, while I envy some other one what seems his greater opportunity? Countless people make themselves wretched by vainly trying to grasp far away joys, while they leave untouched and despised the numberless little joys and bright bits of happiness which lie so close to their hand. As one has written, “Stretching out his hand to catch the stars, man forgets the flowers at his feet, so beautiful, so fragrant, so multitudinous and so various.” The secret of happiness lies in extracting pleasure from the things we have, while we enter no mad, vain chase after impossible fancies.
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