PAPERS FOR THE TIMES.

New Zealand Mail, 20 August 1902, Page 44

PAPERS FOR THE TIMES.

[All Rights Reserved.]

GREAT MEN AND NATiGNAL PROGRESS.

11.

(By Dean Farrar.)

Not national progross only, but the progress of the' whole race of man is in chief measure duo to great men. They are but as units in the millions, but tho millions beuelit immeasurably by the exceptional genius of the units. It would not tako very long to mention all the supremely great men who have influenced tho world, not in one, but in many regions of art, science, and the whole realm of human thought. Let us consider THE EXAMPLE OF CHRIST. It is summed up in the words— ‘ He went about, doing good.” The emphasis is on tho latter portion of the phrase. The going about is as much an accident of His ministry, as the special trade of carpenter of His life at Nazareth. But the doing good ought to be the acknowledged object and ideal of human life. The rule of conduct which we learn from our Lord is tills—"Bv love serve one another.” It is most necessary to insist on this, because the selfishness of human nature, invading even the sphere of religion, has too much concentrated the duties of life in individualism —‘‘ Ic’n dien.” lam among you as he that serveth —is the motto of every true life ; and there is much insight in the simple prayer which is daily offered in some religions communities. “O God, grant that this day I may be useful to someone.” Our life is dwarfed and maimed if we are only expanding selfishness to infinitude by confining our life to our personal interests and emotions. The lives of very many are useless, frivolous and egotistical ; the lives of very many are wasted and self-ruined by their own violent passions. The lives of some are like mere poison and pestilence to all about them. It is the lives of the few only which are noble and unselfish, just and merciful, generous and brave, pure and true. It is the main curse of most lives that they only think of seif and only live for self. But. wo are members one of another, we belong to a collective human brotherhood united in the immense solidarity of man. Everyone who has rightly used his special gifts is. in his measure. a benefactor of mankind. The human race owes to such men its eternal gratitude, and gladly places them among tho number “Of those immortal dead, who live again In minds made better by their presence: live In pulses stirred to generosity

In deeds of daring rectitude; in scorn For miserable aims that end with self So shall we join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world."

Think of the GREAT PAINTERS

Giotto designs his allegorical figures in the Chapel of Padua, and we still learn the lessons about vice and virtue he meant to learn. Fra Angelico fills his canvas with vernal colourings and angel wings, and as we gaze on them our soul is chastened by visions of innocence and elevated by glimpses of heaven. Raphael takes up his magic pencil and wo are illuminated with new conceptions of the divine ideal of motherhood and infancy. Turner, his imagination transfigured by the glory, the wonder, and the power, the shapes of things, their colour, light and shade, changes, surprises, events, to us the open secrets of the universe of God. and makes every common hush seem to flame with His Epiphanies. Or think of the GREAT IMMORTAL POETS, with their garlands and singing robes about them, and how they open for us the windows of heaven, and unseal the fountains of joy and tears. How much less should we have realised the awfulness of sin, the toil of penitence, aud the beatific splendours of eternity, if the feet of Dante had never trodden the burning marie of hell, and the wings of that wing-hearer had never soared into Heaven’s azure. How much poorer would have been various interests of life, if Shakespeare had never overawed ns with tlio stupendous tragedies of des'iny, or kindled for us Ins peals of unextinguishable mirth. How much would our sense of man’s inherent grandeur have been dwarfed if we had never listened to that “Mighty mouthed inventor of harmonies. God gifted voice of England, Milton, a name to resound for ages.” Think again what the STATESMEN AND ORATORS

have contributed to the ardour of national patriotism, from

“Those ancient, whose resistless eloquence Fulmined o’er Greece aud shook the ar-

senal To Macedon and Artaxerxes’ throne." down to Burke combating the unchained giant, of anarchy, and Chatham, with eaglo eye and outstretched hand bidding England be of good cheer and hurl defiance at her foes. Think of the great MUSICIANS —how Handel makes us hear tho morn-

iug stars singing together, and ail the sous of God shouting for joy;—how Haydn thrills'its with' the pulsing, melodious flood of ‘ primal light;—how Beethoven bids tho woods and uplands ring with sylvan melodies ;—how Mendelssohn shows us the golden dove hovering in blue air, and winnowing the dawn with the music of her beating wings. Think once again what the MEN OF SCIENCE

have done for us: how Copernicus and Kepler broke tho harriers of the starry universe; ho.V the telescope of Galileo first saw the phases cf the planet Venus; how Horrox first watched her passing like a black spot across the surface cf tho sun; how the spectroscope has told us the physical composition of stars, an;! comets, and rush: g meteorites. Think how man has put forth

“His pomp, his power, his skill Aud arts that make fire, flood and air The vassals of his will.”

How tho imprisoned vapour becomes the giant slave to bear Ills ships through wind and wave; how Benjamin Frankli evoked the all-shattering lightning fli>h. and with no better implement than a boy’s kite “Dashed the beauteous terror to the (pound

Smiling majestic;" and how hi- successors i:i elect riea’ knowledge having learnt its nature aid its laws, seized that fiery eagle of the storm by its wing of flame, and hade it innocuously girdle in one moment the rolling globe, and bear our messages of love and commerce ,-ven through the tempestuous’sees, thrilling and burning over “the cold green bones" of generations of the ship-wrecked in “the monstrous bottom of tlie deep.” Think how by his poppy and mandrogore, THE PHYSICIAN has found anodynes for raging pain, aud by his anaesthetics enabled the poor sufferer to lie as in dreamless sleep, while the fine hand of some skilled operator cuts a speck from tho unquivering nervework of ids eye. Are not all these, and countless other forms of the exercise of human faculty, specimens of priceless contributions to life’s common service, which benefactors, sometimes known and sometimes unknown, have laid silently at the gates of man ?

All the great men whom we have hitherto mentioned have been men endowed with consummate gif.s in some special direction. But there are many other great men who have conferred benefits on tho human race, through all generations, who have not been men of genius in tho ordinary sense, but who have obeyed some special call of God to serve and elevate their brethren in one particular direction. Think ol THE REFORMERS:

how, in their sovereign devotion to the truth they faced a lying world and corrupted churches, and. not holding their lives dear to themselves, stood, like Huss, and Savonarola, and Luther before king.; and priests, and have not been ashamed. Think how they proved by their lives, and by their glad willing deaths, that

“Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again, The eternal years of God are hers; But error wounded writhes in pain * And dies amid her worshippers.”

Or think of THE PHILANTHROPISTS

—of Vincent de Paul, calling into activity his missiouers, and opening for womanhood so sweet an achievement in his sisterhoods of charity;—of Howard, visiting all Europe,—not “to survey the sumptuousness of palaces or the stateliness of temples;” but to visit.the mansions of sorrow, and take the gauge of depression and contempt;—of Lord Shaftesbury, taking up the cause of the children in the factories, and the women in the mines, and the little ragged waifs and strays in the densely-crowded street:—of "William Lloyd Garrison, little more than a boy, living in a garret, on bread and water, with only one black lad to help him at his printing-press, setting himself the colossal task of proving to twenty millions of his countrymen that they were horribly in the wrong with their immemorial slave trade ; —think of him—denounced by society, lowered at by the whole nominal church, the dagger of the assassin flashing daily about his path,—yet loving to achieve his mighty purpose, turniug those icebergs all around him into flame, until the very hand which, almost in boyhood, had formulated the demand of righteousness, inscribed it in declining years upon the statute book of a regenerated land. Or think once again of the great, beloved 7 MISSIONARIES, —poor hectic, consumptive Brainerd, toiling among his Red Indians; —poor worn Adonirain Judson, in nis Burmese prison;—poor William Carey, the “consecrated cobbler” of Sydney Smith’s unhallowed wit; —plain John Williams, the martyr of Erromango;—Reynard, wo?king with his laughing, shivering little boy in the intense frost up the Fraser River at Cariboo.

Scarcely one of these servants of the Most High God was great as man counts greatness, but because they loved their fallow-men and turned many to righteousness, they shall shine a? the stars for ever and ever.

And under this head we may count living benefactors of their race like Dr Barnardo, General Booth,, and the .Rev Benjamin Waugh, who, simply obeying the impulse of love, have rescued tens of thousands of men, women and children from, ignorance, misery and degradation. 1 '

Onee a little girl at a flower show, having no costly exotic or lovely blossom to offer, walked up timidly and laid ou the altar step a single daisy. It is enough that men should offer to God and to their brethren the best they have and “High Heaven rejects the store Of nicely calculated, less or more.” Portraits shows us the broad, home.v, bourgeois features of Vince?it de Paul, and the middle-class mediocrity -A Lloyd Garrison. The bright young martyr— Bishop Hannington—could only take a poll degree at a small Oxford College; and 'William Carey could never so much as make one pair of shoes hat. fitted properly. What they did we certainly in our measure can do, for it has often happened that men and women, o h.r wise utterly unknown, and without a particle of what the. world calls •'

ness, have* yet. for one moment cf their lives, emerged into actions immer,: worth. It is an unknown eastern mm l St. Telemaclius; he springs info tV arena: he thrusts himself between gladiators amid the yells of the ponnloco. and ho is martyred. The cindlatorial games cease for ever, and St. Telemaclius has bought his etm-nitv vitii a little hour. It is a poor Russian slave : on the track cf his master and his children, tlie wolves hewi in the snow; the slave springs out amid the yelling pack, and is torn to pieces, .and his master’s children are saved, and his deed thrills through the world. It is a humble ungifted. Belgian priest, who goes*!-- dia leper among the hapless lepers cf the Pacific. Isles; and the world cares more for him than for Emperors. It is the pilot on Lake Erie, in the burning ship; but he will cling on to the tiller, and the vessel shad be safely steered to thi“ttv.though lie drop a blackened corpse and Christ will not turn His back on a man who died for men. It is Anne Ayres, the poor little maid cf all work the house i< in flames; the rooms are filled with blinding, suffocating smoke: but at all costs she will save that lost child. Rue does save it. and is killed; and tho poor East End slavey has laid at the haughty palace gate of Humauitv a service and an example worth cartloads of diamonds, and the lives of thousands of selfish and arrogant grandees. As I have endeavoured to show in the foregoing paragraphs, there is no one. however humble, however obcuro. or however ungifted, who cannot

buto at least bis infinitesimal quota to the progress and well-being cf the world. Anyone in any position can at least strive to spend his life in rim service of his fellow-men: and as Dr Priestley used to say. “the greatest ha opines of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislature.” Tlro-o or two things which every man and woman in the world can do. They can preserve the wealth of noble thoughts and purposes. which is our chief heritage from the great ones of the past: and thev can aim at the continuous usefulness of setting a high and pure example, so that they may be ready at any moment, if the sudden call of God should come to them, to do deeds which will leave behind them an aroma of immortal memory. It is only thus—first, by the mighty achievements of great men. and next-, by the steadfast faithful "ess of the undistinguished, that the true progress of nations and of the-whole world is carried on.