VIII. THE STEPS OF LIFE
IT is an old and obvious fancy, that of dividing the inner life into a series of steps, or of describing it in the allegorical form of a pilgrimage with its various stages and halts and hindrances of one sort or another. Yet I do not know of any such description that suits the needs of our own day, especially the needs of people of culture; indeed, it is, and has ever been, a fault of most sermons that while they depict life’s attainable ideal with more or less exactness, they are noways able to give as plain an account of the way thither. Yet this is just the service (and the directions should be quite specific, too) which the church, it would seem, is called upon to perform for the present generation. What is known by the somewhat distasteful name of “the cure of souls,” so far as it exists at all, has become too professional (not to say too commercial) a matter with the churches: in the things of the spirit there is nothing if not freedom and individuality; yet it is just here that a kind of rigid technical nomenclature has been devised, with expressions that once may have been justified, but are now meaningless to many men and at some future time will have to be replaced, perhaps, by others.
Of the writings we possess on the unfolding of the inner life by steps, only one has come down to us from classical times; this is an essay of Plutarch, the Greek professor of philosophy (as we should now call him), who was born at Chæronea in Bœotia about 50 A.D., and died between 120 and 130 A.D. at Rome, where, among other things, he is said to have been the teacher of the future emperor Hadrian. Of his hundred and more writings, some shorter, some longer, the “Parallel Lives” are now almost the only ones read, and even these are less read in the schools than is perhaps proper. Of the rest, which are usually comprised under the general title of “Plutarch’s Ethical Writings,” one of the most readable is that dedicated to Sosius Senecio, consul under Trajan,—“How One may be Conscious of his Progress in Goodness.” On the whole, it exhibits the Eclectic view (in the sense of Ciceronian Eclecticism) as contrasted with the teachings of the Stoics, who only recognize the perfect wise man who observes their principles, on the one hand, and on the other, the man addicted to vice, without intervening transitional grades. In this treatise, as each reader will at once notice, there is a special lack of the depth which first came into morals through Christianity (then but little known as yet), and which will always come into morals only by that path; but it possesses in considerable degree a sound and natural human good sense, which is directed toward the nobler things of life, and whose development in youthful temperaments is an indispensable purpose in so-called classical culture.
Of the later writings of this kind the best are Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” a book from the great Puritan days in England, and the “Homesickness” of Jung-Stilling, written about a hundred years ago. In reality, the biographies of distinguished men should render this service of pointing out the way to their contemporaries and successors; but there are, unhappily, but few good and really true writings of this sort. For the biographers do not always understand the inmost experiences of those whose lives they are describing, many of which experiences really can not be made comprehensible to them in their full significance, since they were small occurrences with great consequences. Yet the autobiographies, which could tell all this, are usually marred with vanity and are sometimes the least true of biographies. It will therefore be well, on the whole, to recognize that in all these writings the individual character preponderates and that there is no “method” that reveals the proper course of life. The most useful thing about them, perhaps, is the very practical observations that might serve to encourage the wanderer on this much-travelled, yet universally unknown, way when he is likely to become weary, or to enlighten him when the continuation of the journey appears too uncertain or too much deflected from the presumably proper direction.
It is first of all to be said that every life has steps, and that no life runs from beginning to end in unchanging uniformity like a clear, murmuring meadow-brook, or in a straight direction, like an artificially contrived canal. But no life perfectly resembles another in its course, and even the apparently most natural steps often happen in the reverse order, so that there are men who in their youth are preternaturally wise, and have their youthful qualities only when old.
Yet there is never an inwardly healthy human life that shows no visible development at all, or that has spurts or pauses in it that are wholly arbitrary. A life that proceeds in a perfectly normal way is just as rare, but in every life there are mistakes that could have been avoided, and gaps that later it is no longer possible to fill out.
For every period in life has its purpose and its task. In spring the tree must do little more than grow and blossom, but not bear fruit as yet. The fruits one produces on the modern dwarfed trees, purposely hindered in their natural growth and designed merely for a speedy production of fruit, acquire neither the good quality nor, apparently, the soundness of fruits ripened on trees that have attained their natural full growth.
The various periods of life, then, must deposit and store away in the human being each a product peculiar to itself; in childhood the childlike nature, without which a man never becomes a well-rounded man, exerting a kindly influence upon other men; in youth that freshness and enthusiasm of spirit which begets the power of doing things; in manhood and womanhood the fulness and ripeness of all the thoughts and feelings, and the firmness that springs from a character steeled by deeds already achieved. Only thus can age also do its worthy task, not in falling into disconsolate decay, but in the quiet possession and contemplation of what life was and should be, and in the preparation for a greater and broader development.
Whoever skips any such period, or, as is more frequently the case, hastens over it and makes no use of its peculiar advantages, will seldom or never be in a position to retrieve it later, but will always have a very perceptible deficiency in his make-up.
To prevent this in younger years is a matter of education, of which I will not speak here, but in later life it is one of the chief aspects of that self-training to which a man is indebted for the real acquisitions of life more than to all the things that others can do for him.
In reference to its general character, in the aspect which one usually calls happiness or unhappiness, or a hard or easy lot, experience shows (and in most cases very plainly) that every life consists of three divisions, of which the first and the third are alike and the second unlike. Whoever has had a hard, unhappy youth is more likely to have a more favorable and successful manhood, but scarcely a cloudless end. On the other hand, when the days of youth are golden, they are almost always the precursor of exertions and storms in the middle part of life, on which there follows a quieter evening of age. Oftentimes this distinction also holds good for the minor steplike subdivisions of these three great divisions.
Which is the happier case may well be doubtful. Very energetic men fond of activity, who are substantially minded not to let “the vestiges of their earthly days vanish in the æons,” will be disposed to lay the greater value upon a successful manhood; but sunny-natured men need an untroubled youth and likewise a rougher middle period, if they are to be strong enough to exhibit in their age the pattern of a fully ripened life, perfected in every direction, so far as lies in the power of man. Once in his life, at any rate, a man must have it hard and heavy if he is to attain to the right way himself and to gain an understanding of the burdens of others; and on the whole a strong old age is best suited for that. And if the childhood days have been joyous, they afford an afterglow for the whole life, and in the reverse case, a bitter feeling of wrong. It is likewise difficult to be obliged, for the first time, to bear the hardest lot of all in old age.
One can not change the form of this lot; in this respect, at least, a man is surely not the moulder of his own happiness; only, he is not the inert slave of a blind Fate either. That is, if a hard youth predestines him to an old age not quite without care, he can make the best of this destiny by a clear and conscious submission and a courageous endurance; or if he has a beautiful childhood behind him, he can be thankful that it did not continue on thus into that stormy period of later life which is necessary for the steeling of his character. Thus conceived, even in these destinies the bold saying turns out to be exactly true, that to those who love God all the events of life, of whatever sort they may be, must turn out to their advantage. But in the lives of all thinking men the question to be decided is this: whether to choose much sorrow with much help from God, or much sorrow without such help, but with the temporary forgetfulness of momentary pleasure. The impotent Nietzschean revolt against such a fate for men helps nothing.
Finally, one can not make of himself something quite different from the native stuff that is in him. It is not proper that every one should be able to become everything; a very extended many-sidedness comes often only at the expense of depth. At the proper time rightly to criticise oneself in order to correct the many errors of education, which only very rarely estimates a human being quite correctly—this is the chief task of the most decisive point of life. This point, if life has proceeded quite normally, is at the beginning of the thirties, when the man has the last step of education behind him, and now, “in the midway of this our mortal life,” begins his self-training, for good or for bad. At this moment of life some recognize, with deep pain of soul, that they can not become all that to which the dreams of youth or the advantages of birth and education seemed to destine them, and they turn in despair to pleasure or to pretence. But others resolutely seek the point whence they may conquer their special world, and henceforth pursue a destiny which, perhaps, was not sung to them at their cradle, but which shows itself, nevertheless, to be the right one.
On the whole, however, the dreams of youth are not to be despised. In most cases they point to an unconscious native ability and so likewise to the dreamer’s destination, which expresses itself at first in fantastic pictures of the future; that is, in so far as they really come from within and are not the products of a false education or of a mistaken belief in the inheritance of talents. For it is only quite rarely that talents are inherited and that the sons of great men are themselves great. This is, to be sure, often made difficult for them because of comparison with their fathers, and not less because of the jealousy of men, who do not willingly suffer intellectual dynasties to rule among them; in this they are all republicans. On the other hand, men of much consequence seldom have or take the time to busy themselves intently with the bringing up of their children, and in such families, much oftener than in far simpler ones, the children fall into neglect, unless a mother of sufficient intelligence steps in, and is not herself too much busied with her celebrated and often very exacting husband.
It is scarcely necessary to say further that the mothers are the deciding element of the family for the education and the formation of the character of the children, especially the sons, and that the sons, as a rule, take after them more than after the fathers. It is a less familiar fact that the sons often resemble the mother’s brothers in character and natural ability, and that the best though sometimes also the most dangerous moulders of one’s youth are the grandmothers on the mother’s side.
The promise of a curse upon families that have shown themselves egotistical for several succeeding generations surely comes true; and experience shows that a want of love towards one’s parents is avenged through one’s own children, and, vice versa, a peculiar blessing throughout life accompanies those who have shown their parents much love.
There is no need to be anxious about the proper time for entering upon new steps of life, if the earlier ones have been rightly used; they will then do their own announcing through first an inner summons, and finally a definite determination, to advance farther, and without this experience it could not be well for any one to be in a higher plane. We can not stand a task that is yet too great for us; such a task we feel to be too ethereal, and we long for the coarser elements of life. On the other hand, the divinely-led man does not as a rule know very long beforehand what he has to do next or to what he will be called; he could not commonly endure it. But any one who has already really experienced many such instances of being personally guided in life will at last be sure in his faith as to the existence of such a higher guidance even in the life of individual men, while others (by their own fault, to be sure) count only in the mass, not as individuals.
Finally, steps in the inner life are not, of course, for those to whom life means nothing else than eating and drinking and dying to-morrow. The steps of the inner life exist rather only for those who are resolved to struggle out of a merely natural existence common to many others, on through to a really spiritual life.
For these, Thomas à Kempis points out the safest way in the following dialogue:
My Son, the perfect freedom of the spirit thou canst not win nor keep, if thou press not through to the complete renunciation of thyself.
Slave-chains are borne by all who cling to something selfishly, who love themselves, who desire the outer world with eagerness and longing and curiosity, who seek the things that flatter the senses and not the things that further the Kingdom of Christ, who will always build and strengthen what yet hath no foundation; for everything falleth into nothingness that is not born of God.
Hold thyself to this short saying, for it meaneth much: Forsake all, and thou findest all.
Bid farewell to every desire; then enterest thou upon rest. Let this word never leave thy thoughts; bear it within thee day and night; and when thou hast brought it to fulfilment, then shalt thou understand all.
But this, O Lord, is not the work of a single day, nor is it child’s play. In this shell lies the whole kernel of the perfection of those who seek God.
Son, that must not frighten thee back, nor discourage thee, but rather draw thee to climb upward to the higher goal, or at the least to bear a longing thereto in thy heart. If thou wert already so far on the way that thou wert free from all blind love to thyself, and wert ready and prepared to obey every beck of thy fatherly superior whom I have set over thee, then might mine eye rest with pleasure upon thee, and thy whole life would flow along in peace and joy. For as soon as thou no longer wishest this or that in thine own self-conceit, but shalt have yielded thyself wholly to thy God without gainsay and from the innermost depth of thy heart, and shalt have laid down all thy wishes into the hand of God, from that moment onward shalt thou be at rest, and shalt find thyself at one with God, in that no other thing shall be to thee so agreeable and pleasing as God’s pleasure.
Whoever hath thus, in simplicity of heart, swung his thoughts upward to God, and hath loosed himself from the inordinate love or hate of any created thing, he alone shall be fit and worthy to receive the gift of devotion. For where the Lord findeth empty vessels, there He layeth in his blessing. And the more completely any one looseneth his heart from the love of that which perisheth, and the more completely he maketh his own self to waste away under deepest disregard, by so much the quicker cometh this mercy, by so much the deeper it presseth in, and by so much the higher the free heart of man is lifted up.
Then the eyes of man are opened, then standeth he amazed in rapture, then his whole heart is dilated, for the hand of the Lord is now with him, and he hath given himself wholly and for all eternity into His hand. Lo, thus is that man blest who seeketh God with his whole heart, and letteth his spirit no longer cling to the things that perish.