CONCERNING PATIENCE

Evening Star, Issue 19044, 12 September 1925, Page 2

CONCERNING PATIENCE

Patience is the last fruitage of life. It is also the sweetest, the noblest, the divinest. It is the centre of the cluster of passive virtues; and it is the passive virtues that conquer in the long run. It is mainly by them that Christianity won its most enduring conquests. Patience is not’ popular, because it is not showy. It slums the limelight. It has no trumpet of its own to blow. So the world passes it by, though later on it comes back to pay it homage. It “ immortalises chivalry, heroism, ostentations martyrdom, with a spice of devilry in it.” Yet history, when it understands its business, puts its crown upon the voluntary cross and clasps its wearers closest to its heart. If a general sends out Ids picked regiments to win some position on a battlefield we may conclude that lie thinks it oi immense importance, otherwise he would -not risk the flower of his army to capture it; and if the Christian religion has been created and consummated by the passive virtues, of which patience is the flower, then wo may inter that its Author puts the very highest value upon them. So we may have the best sanction for referring to this lowliest but mightiest of the virtues. * » » » AVo .may begin by disentangling it from some of its counterfeits. Wo shall best- detect those by first determining what we mean by patience. Wo get on the track of it by the derivation of the word. It comes from the active participle of the verb “ .suffer,” as passion does from the passive participle of the same verb. Patience, therefore, signifies suffering or endurance from an active principle, a, determination to suffer. This gives us the touchstone by which wo can detect emotions and attitudes that get the name of patience, but do not deserve it. For instance, people are sometimes called patient who take life and its problems easily. What over comes docs not put them out. And it does not do this because they have not vitality to drive them to dare difficulties or take sides in a given cause. Tlds is often seen in the old. We say they are patient, but not seldom their resignation is merely to the inevitable, just because they have no longer the vira to resist. They have become too worn and wizened to protest. But, though this is often characteristic of the old, it comes not seldom in earlier years. This is not patience, but one of its counterfeits. Then, again, there is the form which it assumed in the Stoics of old and their descendants in modern times. The ancient Stoics nerved themselves to endure without suffering at all. The patience they inculcated “was that of the will, not that of trust and love. It was, in fact, obstinacy, without any consent to pain—a will hardening itself into flint, a sensibility deadened by assumed apathy.” This, again, was not true patience. Equally spurious is that form of it that is busied in its own affairs, and thinks them the only things worth considering. As for the rest, if It told its secret feeling it would say with Carlyle that most people arc fools, and it is the part of wisdom not to bother one’s head about thorn. Tins is not patience. It is contempt or cynicism. Patience, we sometimes suppose, is a banking up or watering out of the emotions. But that- is not so. “It is a kind of elasticity and hopefulness of the human soul. Its true opposite is not impatience or heat of the spirit, for patience manifests itself, when it is at its finest, not in damping, but iu keeping hot and eager some central fire of moral confidence. Its true opposite is cowardice, bitterness, weariness, despondency, resignation, contempt of man.” * There arc obviously three directions or spheres in which the exercise of patience is imperative if life is to go on successfully. A’/o must bo patient with ourselves. Wo may begin with ourselves, though in actuality that is not the starting point. Wo are always inclined to be impatient with ourselves. We learn it iu childhood, aud then at school. When we are young wo want things done at once. Wc can’t wait. Time is running ont quickly, and wo want to run with it. The schoolboy aud schoolgirl are eager to get through with their lesson and escape from the drudgery of books and class I'ooms. They want to grow like a mushroom in a a night. Nature does produce mushrooms that way. But she takes her time in maturing an oak. And the oak is worth millions of mushrooms. And after we have left school and passed into the school of life most of us show the same impatience with ourselves. That is the significance of suicide, which is increasing everywhere in onr day. Wc need to lay to heart that the higher the faculties the slower they mature. Those that come soonest to completion are the first to decay. The higher you rise the slower the growth, and the slower the growth the greater the worth. So we must learn not to expect rapid development in the most enduring ot onr faculties. “ Deal tenderly with yourselves,” says St. Francis. It is a wise counsel. We must not get disheartened if wo fail often in our efforts to be better; to break bad habits and form new ones ; to overcome a temper, a lust, a passion; to /build up a love of truth, integrity, unselfishness, and other moral aud spiritual virtues. We are only in the process of being made. “1 wonder why God made us,” says one of the characters in ‘Haul Faber.’ “I’m sure I don’t know what was the use in making me.” ‘‘Perhaps not much yet,” replied the person addressed, “ but then Ho has not made you. Ho hasn’t done with you yet. He’s makingyou now, and you don’t like it.” And so that may bring us to the nest point. » » * *

W© must be patient with others. Wo are social beings, and tlio larger part of our education comes through contact with our follow-men. It begins in the home, and wo aro set in relationships there that are intended to sandpaper us. The only virtue of sandpaper is to polish things, and that is the final purpose of the family. Every day young married couples—and older ones, too—make shipwreck of the home through lack of patience with one another. It takes rare tact and forbearance to steer the matrimonial ship through the shoals and rocks of its early voyaging. The proof of this lies in the fact that most of the divorces take place within the first five or ten years of the married life. Family disruptions are due to the impatience of parents and children. For lack of this homes are broken up, or become pocket copies of hell. Then what a fund of patience is required .both when we go to school and, still

more, if wc teach in, a school. There are many things that go to const ituto a successful teacher. Is there a more needful gift than that of patience? Wc cannot name it if there be. And then, in our relationships to others generally, what scope there lor the exercise of this virtue? It is needed when wc have to do with the positively had. But still more when wo arc placed in relationship to the negatively good. There is a large class of people who may bo called the uninteresting. Nature lias denied them the fresh and forcible qualities oi character—wit, humor, energy, intelligence. They are not brilliant enough Iu fascinate- nor devilish enough to tight. They excite no alarm nor make any importunate appeal. They are simply the dull, the ignorant, the unattractive. They are to tie found in families, in schools in society, in labor —everywhere. They put the heaviest tax on patience, and there are few equal to the strain. How to overcome this and the other trials of patience is a largo question. All wo can offer hero and now are suggestions ; first, to remind ourselves that but for some happy fortune wo might have been of this crowd of the uninteresting. That may help us to humility, which is the twin sister of patience. Next to remember, that they are for our education, and we are to be their helpers. They are part of the sandpaper of life. And then—well, wc may put the next suggestion in a legend told of Abraham. One evening, sitting at bis tent door watching the shades of evening come down, two wayworn travellers saluted him and begged for refreshment and lodging for the night. Abraham asked them if they believed in Jehovah. They said No. And he turned down their request, and they went sadly on. After their departure God appeared and inquired who the travellers wore. Abraham told Him. Then He asked why lie did not grant their petition. Abraham replied because they did not believe in Yon. “Well, I have borne with them all their lives; it was surely not too much for you to have put up with them for a night.” The application is obvious. And from the story we may make transition to our next point.

Among the others with whom we are to be patient is the One that figures in this ancient legend; the One whom Tennyson calls the “Nameless with a hundred names.” The One by which we westerners know him best is the familiar one of God. Behind all the shows and screens of Nature and lile there is a Power that perplexes us often. It defeats onr plans, it brings to naught our ambitious. It says No to our Yes, and Yes to our No. Sometimes it seems to grant onr prayers; other times it turns our heavens into brass, and is silent as the grave. Occasionally wo are tempted to doubt if there be any such; or, if there he, is it intelligent, or merely some kind of an ironical deity making sport of us? Wo ask;

WhaL Rower? Aught akin to Mind— The mind in me and yon? Or power ns of the gods gone blind, Who .see not what they do? The slowness with which this Power or Person works is a sore tax on the patience of many. “ God’s not in a hurry,” said Carlyle to Fronde, “ and J am.” No; what millenniums he has taken to get man erect on the earth, and, when erect, to produce a. Paul, a Luther, a Socrates, a Shakespeare, or a Shaftesbury I Nature, which is one of the names of the Nameless, how marvellous is her unhurrying and untiring patience. And how marvellous, too, is the endurance of man’s waywardness and wickedness by the Eternal Father. A child said: “I asked God for a tricycle. If he does not give it to mo I will worship idols.” And the child is father to the man and the woman. During the war a mother said: 11 I prayed every day for six months that my sou might bo spared. lie was not. And now he is gone 1 have no move use for God.” Thus across the ages Job’s wife, with her ‘‘curse God and die,” and this modern one in her rejection of Him, join hands in their impatience of his slowness or refusal of their prayers. And wo .are all more or less the same. The got-rich-quick principle obsesses us not only in the business world, but in the moral and spiritual sphere as well. Disaster follows on its heels in both, only in the latter the results are more irretrievable. Wo forget that we are children of Eternity, and are only as yet in the primary class in the school time. If wo realised all this more it would enable us to adjust ourselves to tho delays and denials that are often so perplexing and vexatious. •So it will he good to pray: Sweet patience! other angel bands On angel errands sweep the skies; To-day let me hut hold thy hands And gaze inta thy steadfast eyes.