THE SURPRISES OF LIFE.

Evening Star, Issue 14162, 11 September 1909, Page 2

THE SURPRISES OF LIFE.

.The discovery by Dr Cook and Commander Peary of the North' Polo is full of suggestiveneas. Though it was not quite simultaneous, yet the news reached us about tho same time, and so wo have another illustration of what often has happened in the history of science—viz., explorers lighting npon truth simultaneously. The story of Daiwin and A. R. Wallace relative to evolution will be familiar. Many similar coincidences might be quoted. Another thing which this discovery emphasises is the surprises of life. Wo venture to say that to the average man the name of Dr Cook was utterly unknown. Not one in a thousand knew that there was such a person in existence, much less that he was in the hunt for tho North Pole. Yet it is this unknown man that outdistances all competitors, and startles the world with the successful accomplishment of that which had been the dream of and death of hundreds. Though there is apparently some doubt oi Dr Cook’s bona tides, there can bo no doubt of tho fact that tho revolutionary thought and deed often spring out of totally unexpected quartern. So frequently lias this been seen that it has passed into proverb. We say “It is the unexpected that happens.” No doubt it is a tendency of the mind to note exceptions, and pass lightly over tho usual and tho ordinary. A night’s toothache blots out years of freedom from pain. The memory of a lifetime's good health is drowned out by a month’s acute suffering. Still, when we make every abatement of this tendency to mark negatives instead of positives, exceptions rather than rales, it still remains true, wo think, that the great, movements in tho history of thought and deed are sot in motion by forces that no one was suspecting. ******* John Ruskiu writes; If we cast a glanco over the pages of history wo may note that the monarch, tho statesman, the financier, and the philosopher continually contrive to bring the world to the verge of ruin, and that it is only saved from utter destruction by the peasant's blood, by his hard-won ■ earnings, and his patient" toil. Is not this the story of nations in a few words? The men who broke the hack of the Stuart tyranny in England came from places where nobody dreamed they existed. John Hampden and Oliver Cromwell made discoveries in politics and conscience that have been the wonder and praise of history ever since. When Franklin took to kite-ilying, sober people thought him cranky. But wo now know that ho was the discoverer of a new era in the world’s progress. In a hook just published, ‘The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire,’ by Professor Glover the author points out how blind wore even the most educated to the significance of the beginning of Christianity. No one deemed it possible that a new religion was to emerge from the death of a criminal on the Cross. It seems inconceivable now that it should be so. But thus it was. Everybody believed that tho Christians would shortly share tho end of their founder and bo exterminated. The wholo thing was vulgar, unpatriotic, irrational, and absurd. “ These poor creatures,” writes a philosopher of the time of Lucian, “ have persuaded themselves that they are immortal,” and he speaks with contempt of them and of their “sophist who was gibbeted.” Succeeding history gives endless illustration oi a simihr kind. No one dreamed that the saving of Britain from the horrors that fell upon France in 1789 was being wrought out by a despised and pereecuted preacher, John Wesley; or that the revolution wrought in the Anglican! Church during the last halfcentury was to come out of the comminiings of throe young men in the commonftroont of an Oxford College. When fifty yeais ago. General Booth began his work, who could have supposed that this man, pelted then with mud on the streets, and in the newspapers, should ,receive the honor of Royalty, and became tho founder of world-wide beneficent organisation. But so it has turned out. History is often ignorant of its secret springs. And its makers arise in places w here no one dreamed of their appearance. ******* It is the same on a narrower scale. The surprises in the individual life are even more startling. We are always tending to drop down to the commonplace. But there is always some hidden force bursting through to arouse, and startle us. Wo never can calculate a day ahead with any degree of certainty. Science has been extending tho reign of law. But a now fact, Hko tho discovery of radium, may alter all its calculations. So it is with man himself. Tie is always endeavoring to establish his going on a basis of calculable certainty, and he is always discovering that it is impossible to do so. Ho is ever being surprised by the inrush of some novel fact, some now adventure from the unseen and unconsidered. Sometimes the surprise tomes out of Iris past. Ho is startled to discover the significance of what seemed at tho time noteless or trifling. A woid or a deed that ho had forgotten starts up in conscience or memory to sting or gladden. Sometimes the surprise conics out of a saying that had been worn thin ns a coin, or a poem or book that had grown dull and drab in our recollection. “ When a follow-monk." says Luther. “ one “day repeated the words of tho Greed, 'I “believe in the forgiveness of sins,’ I saw “the Scripture in an. entirely new light; “ straightway I felt as if I had been “ bom anew. It was as if 1 had found tho “door of Paradise thrown wide open.” Sometimes the surprise may emerge out ol the discovery that our past has given us before, not as a. shaming reminder, but as an enriching experience. Fields of the past becomes to us no more The burial-ground of friendship once in bloom, But seed-plots of a harvest ns before, And prophecies of life with larger room For things that are behind. Sometimes the to-morrow that we expected lo bo like the dull to-day brings with it tho surprise of a solution of problems that had worried us, or an explanation of words of another that had seemed to us harsh aud inexplicable. Or tho morrow comes with the offer of an opportunity that we thought would never return. One recalls Mareton Moor, when at first the day seemed lost for the Puritans ; or Washington at Valley Forge; or Napoleon at Marengo, when hi's army were three-parts beaten, retrieving the day with his fourth ; or his great.rival at Waterloo, in his racy account of the battle to Crcevey at Brussels; “ It has “been the nearest-run thing you ever saw “in your life. Blucher lost fourteen thou“sand men on Friday night, and got so “ licked that I could not find him on “ Saturday.” Or, again, to the sick and ailing who have settled down to a condition of hopelessness, a door of escape is suddenly opened. Either a cure is found or a new light given that makes trouble more easily borne. They discover that the inside of a catastrophe is quite different from the outside. Or_ the surprise may arrive from an opposite direction. Wo had been calculating that in our strength we would do

this tomorrow and that the day after, and something else , the week following* And sickness or accident lays its airest upon ns, and all our plans fall in like a house of cards. ******* Sometimes, again, men look forward to old age with fear and trembling. One gets to think that as life mores on tho emprises decrease. It tends to harden into habits and customs. Many drift towards a dull content. The fight is not finished, but the enthusiasm is. Emotions become phlegmatic. The craving for high joy ceases. The expectation of any great surprise in the future is over. People settle down towards a passionlees calm—. to the jog-trot of work that must be done for a living. And strange and vain the earthly turmoil grows, And near and real the charm of night’s repose, And Death as welcome as a friend we call. That is the vision which, ba the yearn increase, gathers about mid-lifo and old age. Yet it is constantly being belied. What men hop© or dread about the days when tho grasshopper becomes a burden very often is unfulfilled. Tho surprises of age are often not less than those of youth. The grey, monotonous days that were anticipated turn out to have a mellow sunshine, richer even in its afterglow than the wild freshness of morning. Hundreds did their best work after they had reached what would now be reckoned old age. They surprised both themselves and thoir friends by their buoyancy and bravery. Names like Lincoln, Handel, Cervantes, Burke, Dante, Defoe, Milton, Palmerston, Von Moltko, and hundreds more that might be quoted ~11 go to prove that age as well as youth lias-its surprises. Events turn up that contradict all calculations. The soft, calm evening or tho rough and troubled sunset that wo anticipated hardly over comes as w© dreamed or dreaded. Surprises lurk in tho shadows that deepen towards night. ******* Wo may push on this law of surprise beyond the boundaries of sense and time. Possibly the greolost of all surprises will bo that which lies on the other side of the bourno of life. So it has shaped itself to the thought of many. People have seen on tho face of the nowly-dead a look of wonder and awe. It may be the flush of farewell of tho soul to its servant the body, or it may bo tho surprise of the soul itself us it disentangles itself from th* fleshy veils and gets an unobstructed loot into tho Elysian fields. Life all the way along is filled with prophecies. _ What is our body itself but a fulfilled prediction expressed in fish and ape? And so life through all its preceding years had its pro* phecics of death Tho illnesses, the slow passing of sight and sense, of strength and health, prefigured the grand collapse. But if they did, tho grand collapse itself may bo only a surprise on a new and moro won-, drous scale. Tile vision that made cold the blood of Sir Launcolot and Gareth in Tennyson’s ‘ Idyll ’ was terrifying enough ;; High on a night-black horse in uightblack arms, With while breastbone and barren ribs of Death, And crowned with fleshiest? laughter. Yet, when Sir Gareth’s sword clave helm and skull of Death, out from this “ issued the bright face of a blooming boy.” That may bo moro than poetry. And tho law that orders life surprises all tho way up from the cradle may not fail in the unexplored regions beyond tho grave. It is curious to think what a slight change is needful to change tho whole world for a man. .111 that is required is an intonsor life within—an enlarged consciousness. Writers are constantly telling us that wo are ridiculously ignorant of most of our own powers. We are organs, most of whoso stops arc yet untried. Tho outside world has innumerable unknown quantities. Wo have not yet fathomed tho mysteries even, of an atom. And that man possesses in himself elements which answer to the infinite without him is more than a. poetic conceit. This thought opens up a tremendous vista. Chemistry can show us separate elements combining in a product which bears no resemblance to its progenitors. Glycerine, for instance, is ono of the most innocent of substances, but in one of its combinations becomes the most terrific of explosives. And so neither the present nor tho future is likely to be humdrum. It needs only an altera-, lion of consciousness within us to create new worlds without us. Tims the surprises of life are produced. They axe so constant and so unexpected as to defy, all calculable certainty. And so existence gathers about it the aspect of a neverending drama, the movements of which awe or amuse the audience; but its evolution, from start, to finish, is known only to tho directing Intelligence behind tho curtain.