THINGS AND THOUGHTS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3102, 27 August 1913, Page 79

THINGS AND THOUGHTS.

By John Christie.

The Point of View.— Once upon a time an Indian farmer found, at a .clump of trees in one of his fields, three of his calves, newly killed, and a huge, gaunt tiger in the act of devouring one of them. Thereupon, in great wrath, he slew the tiger, but that poor beast, with its dying breath, piteously said: “ I was famishing, and was just having a bit of dinner.” Thus, is the philosophy of tigers not also the philosophy of men? It is the point of view that alters oases, and the man who is berich through grinding the faces of the poor or despoiling the widow and the fatherless probably regards the-humanist who denounces his practices as the destroyer of ills dearest happiness. The Right Ideal. — Not to exalt one’s self, but to excel, and help others to excel, with reverence and modesty, in all manly and humanising accomplishments and achievements, is the only ideal of mankind. She Sees It.— A man does not see the bald patch on the back part of the crown of his head ; but the young woman to whom he presumes to pay his addresses does, and her whimsiness with respect to it is more likely to be fatal to his hopes than the rivalry of twenty curled dandies. Never Too Old. — However old a man may be, he is hardly ever too old to be a fool, especially with respect to women. Will.— Strength of will is magnificent when it is qualified by judgment, and by consideration for others; when not so qualified it is the expression of a species of insanity. ' —A Cynic's Supposition. — To account for mankind (says a cynic to his friend) I think we. must suppose that, at a certain point in the process of creation, it flashed upon the Divine Intelligence that to make all things absolutely and endlessly perfect might result in monotony, and in want of diversion and employment even for Itself. '1 hen God, being* God, made man, saying: “It will take even Me to the end of eternity to teach this fool wisdom.” Strange Unconsciousness. — Just as there are millions of persons who are hardly conscious of the existence of the air they breathe, though without it they would nut exist for the fraction of a second, so is it also with goodness or the desire to do good ; it is practically everywhere, though untold numbers of people seem to be unaware of the fact. If this is due to ignorance, how small the minds of those people must be; if to lack of sympathy, how narrow and selfish their hearts. —Values. — After all, it is only the spiritual that is of permanent value. Even the value of material things can be rightly ascertained only by then- ethical results. For instance, what would be a philosophical historian’s chief generalisation with respect to India? That it had cradled or sustained this or that civilisation, witnessed the development or decadence of these or those races of men; or that its artistic sense—its yearning for immortal and perfect loveliness —had found expression in this or that poem, or culminated in the Taj Mahal as the Himalayas do ip Mount Everest? Would the generalisation not. rather, be that, in India, man had passed with certainty from the mortal to the immortal only in Buddha’s supreme saying : “ Never shall I seek or accept salvation for myself till every soul in every star is brought home to God ”? Something similar, too, might be said of that restless and strenuous race, the Norsemen. Disorder, yet also order, ensued upon their efforts; but surely the soul of their kind flowered at its fairest in the Hamlet Sana, when one hero said to the other: “Though we differ in opinion, yet we are at one in the interest of human nature.”

It might be shown that this principle ■with respect to values lias many applications, and very likely ever'’ one of these might be studied bv the persons imme dlately concerned with advantage to their good sense, and. especially to their sense of proportion, with.no siiedit gain to their modesty, and therefore the enhancement of their own spiritual value. The world’s wise Comic Spirit, too. would be likely to secure, through the process, greater opportunity for its genial exercise; and where this came to be the case nil people would smilingly see that the really important or permanently valuable person in this pr that place was not this or that millionaire or magnate, but some gifted unaccredited man —say a Robert Burns, in comparison with whom all the manorial lords or manufacturers of Scotland were as so many snap-bubbles to the morning star. And so on, throughout all the peopled spaces of the universe. —The Nature of Things.—

Sane people do not resort to violence, because they know the.;, in one way or another, all wrongs can be rectified without it. Therefore those who would reform society by violent means cannot be sane, and one of the most convincing proofs of this is that they never dream

of questioning their sanity, and would consider anyone who did so a madman or an impertinent ignoramus. Further evidence of their mental degeneracy or defectiveness is found in their inability to see that such profound sayings as “ Return ye good for evil” and ‘‘Vengence is mine, saith the Lord ” are not merely dogmatic declarations or mechanical maxims, but expressions of the philosophy of human nature and of the principles that underlie the government of the world. It is beyond their comprehension that the greatest human strength consists in sitting clothed and in a right mind at the feet of the Christ-t-the supreme Incarnation of Love and Reason. But until they see this truth and conform to it, they will b© as those who in olden times were said to be possessed of devils, but are now assuredly the possessors of those ill-balanced minds and neurotic natures which, in isolated instances, make for murder, and, in socalled philosophers, lead to theories and systems which make measureless selfregard the last word in human development. “But in a new commandment I give unto you that ye love one another ” ; this they, in their- pitiful madness, shriek at as the last word in imbecility. Yet, “By their fruits yo shall know them ’ : this surely is the last word with regard to them, poor things. Love an#l Reason are incarnate in Christ —these are the eternal lodestars of humanity; and so, how philosophically, how psychologically true is the unforgettable saying, “ Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”