Let me urge this habit upon every young man! Put your own personal life under the power, not of some lower mood or some ill-advised impulse, but under the power of the best you have ever seen or heard or felt as in any wise possible to you. It was a man in a million, measured by character and achievement, who said, while he was still in the vigor and promise of his youth, “Wherefore I was not disobedient unto”—what? I was not disobedient unto the rules and regulations posted on the wall of my schoolroom or the door of the factory where I earned my bread—that would have meant little! No one can set up the way of life in type and print it to be nailed on a door. I was not disobedient to the usages and customs of the society where I moved—that, too, might have meant only a weak, cheap mode of life. “I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision!” I was true to the best I saw and heard and felt as possible to me!
That habit of putting the life deliberately and persistently under the power of some noble vision caught in an hour of spiritual privilege will mean advance. You may, if you will allow your attention to be diverted by the underbrush around you and never see the bush that burns with a strange fire, never see things absent, things historic, things possible but unattained. The small things, the ant-hills, and the gopher mounds, may, because they are near, shut out your view of Shasta and Whitney. It is one of the tragedies of life that the insignificant, the unimportant details have a way of crushing out the finer purposes, thus bringing defeat to interests which are vital.
When Abraham Lincoln had been unusually harassed by some professional politicians as to the bestowal of patronage, he said one day, half humorously and half sadly, “It is not the carrying on of the Civil War which is killing me; it is the work of deciding who shall be postmaster at the Four Corners. There is Mr. Blank”—naming a very troublesome office-seeker—“I never think of going to sleep at night without first looking under the bed to see if Blank is not there waiting to ask me for some office.”
It was one of the tragedies of those hard years in our history that the great president of the republic, who himself had caught the vision and heard the voice—“I have seen the affliction of my people which are in bondage; I have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters, and I am come down to deliver them”—it was one of the tragedies of that period that his eyes should be turned away from the bush which burned with fire to study the underbrush piled up round him by narrow-minded politicians. It is one of the tragedies of many lives in less exalted station that the great things suffer defeat by the multiplicity and insistence of the small things. Busied here and there with a thousand petty interests—what we shall eat, what we shall drink, what we shall put on, and, what other women will say about it when we get it on—the vital things are left undone. The whole wretched habit of life comes from the lack of the power of vision, the inability to put these matters in right perspective, the great things great and the small things small.
Your real life does not consist in what you have. Your real life does not consist in what you are actually able to do. Your real life does not consist even, as men often say, in what you are. Your real life consists in what you see as possible and desirable for you, and in that capacity you feel stirring within you to gain all that sometime! Not your possessions, not your outward achievements, not your inner acquirements, but your persistently cherished aspirations tell the story of your real life. It is what you hold in vision and steadily strive for which marks you up or down.
But suppose one feels his lack of this power of vision, how shall he gain more of it? How shall we cultivate our own meager share of this fine ability? You may recall that word of Paul, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive the things that God hath prepared for those that love him.” This does not mean merely that the things prepared for us are superior to anything that eyes have seen or ears heard in this world; it means rather that they are discerned in another way. They come to us through the power of spiritual perception. “Eye hath not seen,” not by physical sensation; “ear hath not heard,” not by hearsay or common report; God reveals them to us by his Spirit. It was not that Moses had better eyes or better ears than the Midianite shepherds upon the hillsides; he had within him a soul of sympathy for his fellows, a spirit of trust toward God, an attitude of personal aspiration for the highest, which enabled him to see and to hear what they failed to detect.
This power of vision grows like other powers, by right use. The soul sees and sees more as the man obediently translates his visions into deeds, his insights into actions. If any man, gifted or humble, will do his will he shall know, for “obedience,” as Robertson said, “is the organ of spiritual knowledge.” The power of vision grows through right use as each added insight becomes an effective impulse for noble action.
It is this power of vision which keeps men alive all the way up and all the way in. It is for you who stand on the slopes of Horeb, the mountains of God, by reason of the higher education you have received to cultivate this power by a spirit of obedient trust and by the habit of loving service. In every situation form the habit of turning aside from the commonplace shapes which engage your eyes that you may see some great and significant sight. Watch for the bush which burns with a mysterious fire! Listen for the voice which issues out of it, calling you to larger and higher service! Welcome these finer impulses which burn within your own breast, for they will aid you in building your personal life into that great, divine plan of which you have caught a far-off vision.
XII
“THE WAR AGAINST WAR”
In my selection of a theme I have ventured to break away from the conventional style of baccalaureate address. I bring you no word of counsel touching those moral values which are altogether private and personal. I would undertake rather to direct your minds to the consideration of a certain problem, vast and grave, whose scope is national and international.