THINGS AND THOUGHTS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2722, 16 May 1906, Page 79

THINGS AND THOUGHTS.

B? John Chbistte.

—The Other Idea.—

When you persist in doing something which those who know you best and love you most think wil 1 be hurtful to you, and tell you so, yet you persist, foes your persistence prove you to be regardless of their love, or show that you have no love for them? Nc — not exactly so ; yet it shows that you care more for some id€a in your own mind than you do for their love ; or, rather, perhaps, that your loyalty to that other idea is essential to the integrity of your love itself. It is your fidelity to what you feel or balieve to be divine or right 'that dominates you. But if your nature is narrow, or meanly selfish, or bigoted, your determination nny be only a "pragmatical perversity ; while if you have real intellect and noble enthusiasm, it may mean that you are superior to all that is immediately* selfish ,in your circumstances and' feelings. More than the love of his mother or his brothers to him was Christ's missior to Christ. But a kindred fidelity of soul is often exhibited on Wer levels of experience ; such as that of which | Lovelace sings: - I cou'd not love thee. dear, so much, Lcved I not, honour more. Some natures are petulantly impatient of this in connection with love, but the love that is rr>t qualified by it. ts a poor shivering shadow — a miserable Lhing of shrsds a'ld patches. Indeed, without this p.inciple of devotion to the other idea, love itself vrould be impossible ; its very existence is due to it, in fact. If love were solely self-regardful it would not be love, which postulates an object -external to itself. Nothing can subsist by or for itself alone; and hence, even for love's sake, the nsvchological necessity of ideas that go beyond love, and yet also not only hark j back to it, but give rise to it. Therefore, they know not love who know only love, and not also service for the right, j sympathy with the ideal or other ideas ; j in other* words, loyalty to the duty of the soul in its other relationships. Fail in this loyalty, and love will cease to be possible, for that on which it depends will also have ceased ; you will have starved the very soul out of your life. But stand up firmly by it and for it, and then, whatever it exacts, you wiH be able to feel and to say -with Wordsworth : Stern lawgiver! Yet Thou dost wear The Godhead's most benignan* grace; 2u>r know we anything so fait As is the .Btnile upon Thy iace. F.owers laugh before Thee on thejr beds, Ard fragrance in Thy footing treads ; Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, And the most ancient heavens, through thee, axe iresh and. strong. — Questions. — You are= travelling in a railway train or on' a tramcar : but that does not matter. What matters is that, on one side of you, there is a mother with a chubby .chirrupIng child on her knee ; and on the other, a muddy-eyed broken-nc&ed man, who smells more or k§s disgustingly of stale beer. Now. was the man ever like the j child, or will the child ever become like j the man? If so, would it not be an act j of justice to apply an indeterminate sentence on the man. and an act of humanity to deprive the child of its liberty immediately it became old enough to enter on the , downward coarse — the man for having disgraced human nature, and the child, to save it fiom becoming a disgrace to its kind? Here be questions for casuists, dialecticians and other learr-ed Thebans. — The Way of the Human. — He was an inoffensive old man. giv~n to platonic gallantries with girls young •enough to be his granddaughters. '" Ah," said he to one of these. "Ah, Princess Bimbo, you grow taller and lovdier every day. If only you -were 50, or I only one-and-twenty : vrhich would you prefer?" : " Neither," was the tart reply ; "neither, if either meant that you would make love to me." * j From which it wouM seem that good looks and good nature do not invariably go together and that an ancient joker cannot count upon being met always in his own humour, even by "the 2'retfiest girl of j his acquaintance. I. know thoe not, -old. man ; inll to thy prayers; IJow ill white hairs become a fool and jester! Thus cruelly, thus pharisaically,- speaks j Henry V to poor Falstaft, when he obtrudes himself upon the King's attention in the press of peers and prelates and other courtly flim-flammeries. Perhaps the pressure of these made the royal heart forget itself; or was it. after all, a real, natural hard worldly selfishness that ran out into the deadly exclamat'on? Anyway, in extenuation of poor Princess Bimbo's tartness, be it observed that she had just seen her newest admirer flirting furiously with another girl two Tears older than herself, j and wrtb eyes as blue as hers were brown, < and hair as golden as hers was raven. O. the wav of the human — what a way it is for little humours by the way ! —Life to the Soul.— Life is Tike a wall on one side of which children may be plaj'ing, lovers courting, roses blowing ->r peaches ripening in the sun, while on the other a stricken deer or wounded bird may be dying, or the heart of some wayworn human wanderer ebbing out its last pulsations of weariness and woe. To the soul, however, life consists in enjoying the loveliness on the one &ide of the wall, an-d in softening the suffering on the other. Otherwise the soul is dead : or, at least, it would be better so, if it loves not joy for the sake of itself, or is without sympathy for the sake of others. — A Gospel's Crowning Proof. — Is it fair to judge religions and philosophies by their authors and apostles? | For if what is specially professed and | propounded by certain people does not elevate and beautify the character, the conduct, and the conversation of thosp people, is it unfair to question its efficacy? Ji is ail v^ry well for the eirant sage tc

say.- "Do not act as I act, but act as I advise" ; but this is no recommendation of his gospel. If the professed proficient of wisdom and goodness is not wise and good in his own conduct and heart, surely, after all, his gospel is essentially lacking in saving grace. If a gospel does not save its own author or avowed apostle, how can it be expected to truly redeem the outer barbarian? The author's or apostle's want of grace is surely a damning proof of the : nefficacy of the Gospel. In such a case it were surely not unwise to mistrust the philosopher and his philosophy. The man who professes to preach a perfect doctrine of life should surely be in himself a witness to its perfection. In short, the crowning proof of Divine efficacy in a religion or system of morals cannot consist in any outward sanction, natural or supernatural ; the all-sufficing evidence of its power to salvation — of its regenerative, fructifying, fortifying, value to the soul — should be looked for in the character and conduct of its founder. If this proof is not established the religion, as a means of regenerating mankind, will be more or less a matter of moonshine. But apply this test to Christianity, and how does it answer it? Decs it not do so with such moral beauty, such inviolable integrity, such Divine thoroughness, that all" other proofs look like the trumpery abracadabra of superstition? The best of men That e'erwoie earth about him was a sufferer ; A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit, The first true gentleman that evei breathed. The verdict of all history and of the whole world is thus secularly expressed through the lips of the dramatist ; but can the same testimony be borne of any other revealer or announcer of the spiritual relationship which, in the very weft and woof of Nature, subsists between man and his Maker? How they err, how they blunder even intellectually, who say that Christianity is played * out : all the machinery irhereoy it is misexpressed is assuredly played out ; but Christianity itself is yet, so to speak, hidden in the clouds of its morning. Consider what it did for its .founder ; what it was it imparted to his character and conduct, all through, from first to last, and under the most tremendous trials ; for all that — and perhaps more, because the onditions will be different — it will yet do, under the larger and more luminous interpretations of the future, for all men. When this can be postulated of Christianity, as it is seen in the light of philosophy, as well as in its own light, surely there is a high and a deep -ethical sense — a scientifically psychological sense — in which it may yet be said with the profoundest confidence, as it was of old time : "Arise, O God. and judge Thou the earth : for Thou ehalt take ail heathen to Thine inheritance."