SOMETHING TO LIVE FOR.

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1401, 8 September 1923, Page 7

SOMETHING TO LIVE FOR.

Living is not much fun unless you have something to live for. Bread is the staff of physical life, an aim is the staff of spiritual life. Without some goal, some object towards which your thoughts, energies, and hopes bend, your life gets flabby. It also gets either cold and useless or fevered and poisonous. By and by you hate yourself. And others are inclined to make it unanimous. Man is not an independent animal. He is by nature dependeut. He is essentially social. When lie tries to go it alone, to be sufficient unto himself, he goes crazy. There are some people who are unbalanced because they have taken up some absorbing ideal, such as religion, or patriotism, or moneymaking, or music. But for every one such there are twenty who are warped, morbid., and lopsided because they haven't any ideal at all. "Hitch your waggon to a star," said the philosopher. If you don't hitchi it to something it won't go. What shall I live for? You can answer that question by another: What is worth dying for? When you've found the thing worth dying for you've found the thing worth living for. There's more stimulus in a great aim than in any other intoxicant. It raises every faculty of you to the highest power. It clears your brain, fills your heart, and your happiness to flood tide. Do you notice how happy the child in the house is when he is made to realise he has something to do; how happy the man he feels that a family depends on him for support; how happy the woman when she sees that she is essential to some man's or child's happiness? A deep thrill is informing many a life that until now was full of self-contempt. The aimless young man is beginning to understand the dignity and glory ,of a soul, Avho—"lf he be called upon to face Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined Great issues, good or bad for humankind. Is happy as a lover."