The instinct that the shadow is the servant of the light, that seeming disorder, ugliness, sin are but veiled instruments of good,—this seems one of the truths which flash upon mankind in gleams, and which as the race rises actually into nobler life tend to become clear and steadfast conviction.
It is the vastness of the Divinity that overwhelms us. Suppose a man, simple-hearted and imaginative, who, in a distant country, has read of America, and has fashioned her in his thoughts as a heroic female figure,—a kind of goddess. He has taken as literal reality such poetic descriptions as those in Lowell's "Commemoration Ode" and Emerson's "Boston Hymn,"—
"Lo! I uncover the land
Which I hid of old time in the West,
As a sculptor uncovers the statue
When he has wrought his best."
And he comes to you and says, "Show me America!" And you show him a little of this country, its mountains and lakes and rivers, its shops and farms and people. He is interested and gratified. Yet this is not what he expected; and he says, "But show me America,—that radiant, heroic form, that goddess to charm the eyes and the heart." And you tell him: "But America is too great to be taken in so, at a glance. You have just begun to see it. You have seen New England's hill-farms, but you have not seen the prairies of the West. You have seen the Penobscot and Kennebec, the Connecticut and Hudson; but you have yet to see the Mississippi and Niagara. I have taken you to Katahdin and Monadnock and Mount Washington, but you have yet to behold the Alleghanies and the Rockies and Tacoma. Our people you have just begun to see: our armies of free toilers, our happy households, our strong men and lovely women,—these you are only beginning to know." And he says, perhaps: "But all this is so diffuse, so various, so difficult to comprehend! I had fancied America as some one beautiful, some one to love. How can one love such a scattered, immense, diversified thing as this you describe to me?" Well, you tell him: "You may not understand it yet awhile; but this country which you say is not a thing to love was in peril of its life a few years ago, and it was so loved that men by hundreds of thousands left home, and risked life and all for it, and their mothers and wives and sisters sent them forth. That is how America can be loved!"
In some such fashion as this do we grope after a God whom we can comprehend at a glance; and, lo! his presence fills the universe. "Say not, Who shall ascend into heaven to bring him down, or who shall descend into hell to bring him up? for he is nigh thee, before thy eyes and in thy heart."
The chief revelation we need is the education of our own perceptive powers. Sir John Lubbock has pointed out, in a very striking passage, that the material world may convey itself through other senses than the five which we possess, that there may be innumerable other senses, and that some of these may perhaps be already developed in other creatures than man. Such a suggestion stirs our curiosity and desire; but how few of us have learned to rightly use the five senses we have! And of the moral perceptions we have but a most rudimentary development. We are unconscious of most of the world we live in, unconscious even of what many of our fellow-men discern. Did you ever happen to be in the presence of a sunset, flooding the heavens with glory, with a companion who showed no sign of perceiving the splendor? Ah! perhaps he was blinded to it by some secret grief or care, some trouble which you might have discovered in him and comforted, had your sympathy been as acute as your sense of beauty. But did his blindness, whatever its cause, suggest to you that you perhaps were at that moment in the presence of sublime realities, to which your consciousness was closed as his was to the sunset?
To recognize consciously the spiritual elements in the universe belongs partly to a right cultivation of character, and partly it is due to natural endowment, to an intellectual faculty. It is not, after all, of so much account that we see the divine in life as that we have it in ourselves. In this one sentence, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," Jesus puts spiritual vision as the result of a moral quality. But it is the moral quality itself on which, in one form and another, his blessing is constantly pronounced. So, if you say, "I cannot see,—God is in no sense visible to me," yet there remain still most precious gifts, if you will take them. Blessed are the gentle, the peacemakers, the merciful, they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness; blessed are the sympathetic, the stout-hearted, the open-eyed, the open-handed; plain and simple and sure are these benedictions.
The presence of Divinity which it is most essential that we recognize is the choice perpetually presented to us between a higher and a lower course of action. Whether one has the joyful, uplifting vision is of small consequence in comparison with whether he steadily chooses and follows the right.
No one can be reasoned or persuaded into any living faith in God or immortality, any more than reason and persuasion can draw from the cold April furrow the field of waving wheat. The faith grows in the individual and in the race, under that culture to which the higher powers subject us,—a culture in which the elements are experience and fidelity, thought and action, love and loss, aspiration and achievement. Love and Loss, the sweetest angel and the sternest one, join their hands to give us that gift of the immortal hope.
If one asks, How shall I gain faith in God and hope of immortality? what better answer can we give him than this: Be faithful, live, and love! Work and love press their treasures on you with full hands. Open your eyes to the glory of the universe. Watch the world's new life quickening in bud and bird-song. Get into sympathetic current with the hearts around you. Be sincere; be a man. Keep open-minded to all knowledge, and keep humble in the sense of your ignorance. Seek the company that ennobles, the scenes that ennoble, the books that ennoble. In your darkest hour, set yourself to brighten another's life. Be patient. If an oak-tree takes a century to get its growth, shall a man expect to win his crown in a day? Find what word of prayer you can sincerely say, and say it with your heart. Look at the moral meanings of things. Learn to feel through your own littleness that higher power out of which comes all the good in you. Join yourself to men wherever you can find them in that noblest attitude, true worship of a living God. Know that to mankind are set two teachers of immortality, and see to it that you so faithfully learn of Love that Sorrow when she comes shall perfect the lesson.