Levels of Living / Essays on Everyday Ideals

by Henry Frederick Cope

THE TRUE PARADISE

The religion that has relations only to heaven and angels, or only to a supreme being remote and detached from daily life and from our families and friends, our business and affairs, issues in personal selfishness and is one of the causes of social disorganization and need.

It postpones to that dim future the problems that ought to be solved in the present. It promises those who are broken with the injustice and greed of their fellows a place where right would prevail and rest would be their portion in the future. It shifts to an imaginary and ideal world all the perplexities and wrongs of the real present world.

That kind of teaching ingrained in generations accounts for the dull patience, the stolid, brute-like content of the peasant in Europe; he is born a bearer of burdens, a tiller of the soil, to walk bent and never look up; it is all endurable because it is all so short; he some day will be better off than kings and emperors are now.

But as the generations are born the inspiring vision of that future loses its force; the ideals are gone and the children come into the world with their fathers content with their present condition, but devoid of aspiration and also devoid of their father's faith in the compensations of the future.

Then comes the reaction. Some daring spirits assert that if there is any good, if there is equity and rights, men ought to enter into and enjoy them here and now. And some who catch the vision of a God of real love are unwilling to believe that He keeps from His children the present joys of His home; they invite to a present heaven.

Then how easy it is to fall into the error of seeking only a material present-day paradise, to live as if the only things worth living for were food and clothes and pleasant circumstances. Better a worthy, beautiful ideal afar off than an unworthy and debasing one already realized. The heaven that so many are seeking will but bring all men to the level of the brute.

The danger is that we shall miss the real benefit of this great truth that whatever good is designed for man may be realized in large measure while he lives and shall make his good to consist only in goods. Better conditions of living easily become the foe of the best. Heaven is not meat and drink; it is the better heart.

Making houses and lands the supreme end of living is little better than looking forward to harps and crowns. It is easy, being freed from slavery to a superstition to relapse into slavery to our lower selves. We are in danger of living for a living instead of for our lives. We are "on the make" instead of being engaged in making manhood. We are digging the lead of commercial advantage with the gold shovels of character.

We may be measured by our own measurements. In sermons and orations we assure ourselves that we are a great people because we have here so many acres, so many millions of bushels of corn and of wheat, so high wages, so vast financial resources. We are living in the glut of things and setting these things as the end of living.

All this does not mean that prosperity is wrong; it does not mean that misery or poverty is a virtue. The danger is not in our many acres, our high wages, our millions of money; the danger is that these are the ends instead of the means; that we are existing for our living; that we make the man the tool of his money instead of the money being the making of the man.

Every man has in his breast the keys to his own heaven. If he will he may find the riches of character; he may enter into the paradise of a mind at peace; he may taste of the divine joys of serving his fellows; he may, in thought, commune with all the good and great; he may hear the morning stars sing together.

The eternal crown of glory is the crown of character. The streets paved with gold are the fair, clear ways of virtue. The harps of whose music we never weary are the strings of sympathy and love and pain; these make the heavenly harmony. The angels are in the faces we learn to love. These make heaven when we see them in the light of the presence of eternal love.