Men in the Making

by Ambrose Shepherd

"That nothing walks with aimless feet,
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete."

When any man confronts me with the inequalities of our human lot, with the suffering many have to endure from causes they have not instituted, and circumstances over which they have no control, I may be, and often am, obliged to make him a present of much that he has to urge. But there are two things to be said, on the other side, which I can only briefly indicate, and ask you to work them out in your own mind.

I affirm as the first of the two, that the good in our life far outweighs the evil. When all is said, happiness is the rule of our normal experience, and not misery. We hear much, for example, about the suffering which is part of the order of the animal creation; how a stronger beast feeds upon a weaker, and is in turn the prey of another stronger still. While again we are told that the joys of these myriads of sentient creatures are immeasurably greater than their pains. They have pleasure more than sufficient to justify their call into existence, in spite of the drawbacks to their happiness incident to the conditions of their existence.

I am satisfied that the latter representation is true of the animal world, as I am convinced that it is true of the human. Let what may be said to the contrary, life is a mighty boon. When men bring in a verdict of unsound mind in a case of suicide, the instinct may have more to do with it than the order of evidence on which the verdict is based. We have to conclude that a man was insane before he could lay violent hands on himself. Look back upon our life, we who have travelled some distance into it, and let us say whether so far we do not account it a blessing to have lived and to be living. We have had our hard lines, and we have known the pleasant places; we have had our sorrows, and we have had our joys; we have been under the clouds, and we have lived in the sunshine. Nay, I dare go further and say, that for a day we have had of the former, we have had a week of the latter.

It is a narrow and unworthy conception of happiness to invest all our chances of it in the accident of circumstances. There is some force in the saying, that heaven is here or nowhere. If we have any thought of happiness worth turning into a fact, our life may be filled with it though the hardest possible circumstances be surrounding us. Not where we are, but what we are, makes our much or little whether of good or ill. It is an ungrateful proceeding to go through life consuming as much as possible of the fruits of a gracious present, and yet with only plaints and complaints about the legislation which tempers the blessings with the little severity needed to teach us what the blessings are.

Some one has remarked that it is the whole tragedy, and ultimately the whole power of the Christian religion, that it is attacked from every side. It is accused of faults that are hopelessly inconsistent with each other. One day it is charged with making man too responsible; the next, with not making him responsible enough. The truth is, that we need not try to make man too responsible in order to make him responsible enough. It has often been pointed out, that the Christian religion is by turns optimistic and pessimistic. St. Paul is pessimist enough where he says: "For I know that in me—that is, in my flesh—dwelleth no good thing." But who so optimistic as the same Apostle when he declares: "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me."

Much of the secret of it, under God, is in a cultivated and consecrated will. Every matter, says Epictetus, has two handles, and you can choose which handle you will take. Every man has in him some promise of the gradual supremacy of character over the accidents, happenings, forces and factors of circumstances. These may be his tests; they need not be his fate. "The real vital division of the religious part of our Protestant communities," says Wendell Holmes, "is into Christian optimists and Christian pessimists." I would rank myself among the former and say again, that the good in the conditions of our life far outweighs the ill. And while maintaining this position, I would also, as the second of the two things to be urged, have us face the question, Who is responsible for the ill there is?

George Meredith, in a reference to this subject, declares that no man can think, and not think hopefully. Whether or not this be true in the case of every man who thinks, this can be said—it ought to be true. Instead of multiplying words to no profit over the old question, Why all this misery and suffering? let us think for a moment in another direction, and we shall perchance be encouraged to think hopefully.

It has been said that human wisdom has arrived at no juster and higher view of the present state, than that it is intended to call forth power by obstruction; the power of a life that is perfect and entire, by the responsibility of choice between the things that make or mar it. If God can rank in us nothing higher than character, and if character on the man side can be achieved only out of right choice translated in its kindred action—then it must follow that the power to choose the right is the power to choose the wrong. Which means in the fewest words, that sin, and all the ills and suffering that proceed out of its selfishness, are the issue of this possibility of fatal choosing. If it be asked: "Why the possibility at all?" I answer that without it men would cease to be men and become something else; and what that something else would be need not enter into our speculation. It is because we can do wrong that we can do right; and if we think about this, may we not think hopefully?

It is the fashion in our day to write and talk as though heredity, and the effects of the accumulation of heredity, were somehow sinister enough to drape the heavens in black, and silence all the songs of the angels. This law, we are told, can have no moral interpretation consistent with freedom and responsibility. The more than tendency of much that is being written and said is to depress the mind with a sense of the relentless force of general laws and influences, and to diminish in the individual the conviction of his power to contend against them. I would avoid dogmatism about this matter and simply say that this seems plain to me: for one drawback we meet along the pathway of inheritances, we have a very legion of resource and help through the gains of time, and of the race. The penalties we have to pay for transgression against law are not a just indictment of the law, they are the penalty of its transgression; a by-product, which is always a decaying product as the character of the race heightens.