Fineness of character must be recognized by sympathetic observation. There must be the watchful attentiveness, like that of the sculptor studying his subject, the hunter tracking his prey. And there must be in the observer himself some quality akin to that he would detect. Only the good see goodness, only the lover sees love. A mother would convey to her little daughter some full sense of the motherly feeling that yearns within her, but how can it be done? In just one way: let that daughter grow up and have children of her own, then she will know how her mother felt.
Would we know something of the Divine Mother-heart? We must first get in ourselves something of the mother-feeling. "Every one that loveth knoweth God and is born of God."
Perhaps there has been given to us some human friend,—parent or comrade, husband or wife,—in whom as nowhere else we see the beauty of the soul. Best, divinest gift of life is such a friend as that,—a friend who fills toward us a place like that to which our poet so nobly aspires:—
"You shall not love me for what daily spends,
You shall not know me on the noisy street,
Where I, as others, follow petty ends;
Nor when in fair saloons we chance to meet;
Nor when I 'm jaded, sick, anxious, or mean;
But love me then and only, when you know
Me for the channel of the rivers of God,
From deep, ideal, fontal heavens that flow."
Sometimes the friend whose goodness so touches us as with the very presence of God is one whom we have never seen. To millions of hearts that place has been filled by Christ.
These lines of Emerson—heroic idealist that he was—ask to be loved only when he is at his highest, and so is felt as a revelation of something higher than himself. But our best friends—comrade, mother, or wife—love the ideal soul in us, and love us no less when we are "jaded, sick, anxious, or mean," covering with exquisite pity our infirmities, and by their nobility lifting us out of our baseness. And in that affection which embraces our best and our worst, those human friends are the symbols—yes, and are part of the reality—of the Divine love.
And what is all beauty, all grandeur, but the manifestation, through the eye to the soul, of the one Supreme Being? The mountains, the sea, the sunset, touch us with more than pleasure: they stir in us some awe, some mystic delight, some profound recognition of sacred reality. How can we better frame the wonder in speech than by saying, "Just as my friend's face manifests to me my friend, so Nature is as the very face of the living God"?
In the processes of human life,—the life we live and the life we see,—there is discernible a significance which grows more impressive, more solemn, more inspiring, just as we learn to read it intelligently. What a wonderful drama is this play of human lives,—this perpetual tragedy and comedy, of which some slight and faint transcript finds expression in the pages of poet and novelist! We needs must continually see and feel something of it, but we are apt to miss its best significance. What fastens our attention most in our experience, or in what we sympathetically watch in others, is the element of enjoyment or suffering. Pain and pleasure are so very, very real! We ache, and we are sorry for another's ache; we are joyous, and glad in another's joy. And there it often stops with us. But all the while something is working under the pain and pleasure. Character is being made or marred. Yonder man bleeds, and you sigh for him,—ah! but a hero is being moulded there. And here one thrives and prospers, expands and radiates,—but a spiritual bankruptcy is approaching.
When we look closely and deeply at the world about us,—whether at this ordered world of nature, moving steadily in its unbroken and majestic course, or at the external aspect of grandeur and loveliness, or at the drama in which all men are actors, as it is disclosed to insight and sympathy, or at the inner world of each one's personal experience,—do we not find ourselves in the perpetual presence of Goodness, Order, Beauty, Love? Are not these the very presence of Deity?
"But," you say, "there is also confusion to be seen,—what does that signify?" Just so fast as human intelligence advances, it finds that what seemed disorder is really governed by strictest order. You say, "We see ugliness as well as beauty,—what does that mean?" Ugliness serves its purpose in aiding by repulsion to train the sense of beauty. Beauty, and man's delight in it, is the end; ugliness, and our repulsion from it, is but an incident and means. You say, "We see wickedness,—what of that?" May we not hope that wickedness, in the broad survey of mankind's upward progress, is the stumbling of a child over its alphabet?