This may not be a scientific classification, but it suffices for my purpose. I have not put the most important first, but observation is the one man most relies upon.
1. Observation is God's method of filling up the inner supply of man's knowledge through the senses. He sees, feels, hears, smells, tastes, and through these avenues receives mental impressions. One can observe the lower things or the higher. Every day as I ride on the train or street cars, I observe men reading their newspapers. As a rule I can tell in a few minutes what a man's mental hunger is by watching him read. He chooses the pink sheet and devours with avidity the stories of prize fights. He turns to the pages devoted to courts and reads the accounts of murder trials or of scenes where lawyers quarrel or jangle and where witnesses testify to disgusting and loathsome things. Another man is interested in clean athletics and reads with interest of college football, Marathon games, and the like. Still another is absorbed in the news of a higher nature, a meeting of the Hague Peace Conference, the endeavors of statesmen to bring about a better understanding between the North and the South, between nations. In other words, a man takes what his appetite craves out of the newspaper. Just so it is with all life. Men take whatever their appetites crave. If the appetite is false, unnatural, abnormal, they take injurious food. Only when the depraved appetite becomes changed into natural, normal hunger, is the right kind of food sought and found. Yet there is immeasurably more of the pure, good food to satisfy the perfect, normal hunger, than there is of the carrion which the vulture instincts in us crave.
2. Reading. While I have put this under a separate head, it really belongs under the head of observation, for the reading of books is but observation of the observations of other men. Yet, as I shall show later, this is a special field which one should endeavor to glean with care.
3. Intuition. To the really normally hungry soul, this is the chief, indeed, the only source of spiritual food. It is what Emerson called the "Oversoul," and what Doctor Buck meant when, in speaking of Walt Whitman, he said he possessed the "cosmic conscience." It is receptiveness to universal truth, Divine truth, that truth which knows no time, no place, no boundaries of nationality, no difference in creed, in sect, in sex, in color, but that, like the sun, shines alike upon all, whether bond or free, rich or poor, learned or unlearned, black, white, brown, or red, savage or civilized. It is the spirit that possessed—in varying degrees—Gautama, Buddha, Confucius, Mahomet, Jesus, Joan of Arc, Emerson, Browning, Whitman, all great souls who have seen the truth universal and recorded it for the uplift and ennobling of mankind.
May I here suggest a few ideas as to how you should begin to absorb the good things of God in order to get the fullest benefit from them, and then let us go out together and absorb some of the things that will make one a newer, fuller, more vigorous and truly radiant being.
Get into the habit of looking out of your bedroom window at the skies each night before you retire to rest. Is it clear? Study that brilliant scheme of stars and planets. What grander sight could you ask for? Yet every common man and woman may see it from the smallest attic or hall-bedroom window. Is the moon in the heavens dimming the stars but flooding the earth with dream-light? Can you see the great wonderful clouds floating about in the night's silences away up under the light of the moon or against the sparkling of the far off stars? Or is the sky dark and lowering with black clouds so that you can see nothing as yet? What a wonderful thing that cloud screen is; that soft, moist vapor piled in great billows above us, shutting out the heavens and their wonders from our gaze. How dark it seems on the earth beneath. How shut away from the brightness and serenity of the stars. Yet we know that the clouds are but temporary, that they will soon pass over, and that we are perfectly safe nestling here on the quiet bosom of mother earth.
Look up to the heavens every night for some intellectual and spiritual food, just as you go to the dining-room, only more so. Form the habit!
Study the stars as David did. They are as free to you as they were to him. The poorest beggar and the most degraded sot have as much claim to the stars as the king on his throne or the most divine man that ever lived. What a wonderful drama is being nightly played in the skies. How much more interesting and attractive to the seeing and understanding eye than the puppet shows of the theater, where there is so much of the glare, the tinsel, the sham, the shoddy.
The Passion Play of Oberammergau is well worth seeing. To witness and hear the dramas of Wagner is worth while, especially soul-stirring Parsifal, but here in the heavens is the great mystery of the Creator, watched over, guarded, protected by these bright armored knights,—the stars and the planets, the comets, the nebulæ, the milky way,—with a vigilance which is as keen as it is eternal.
A thoughtful girl once wrote me to the effect that after she first began to realize the glories of the stars, she prayed to a different God from the God she had always associated with formality, churches, prayer books, creeds, and the communion service. She said, in effect, that her prayer became less glib, less wordy, less ready, for the stars inspired her with the sense of majesty and awe of the Great Creator, so that she came before Him with words that meant more even though they came with less smoothness of utterance. Awe will take the place of smug self-satisfaction; the obeisance of the soul to mere bending of the knees; an all-sweeping passion for uplift rather than vain repetitions and selfish cries for more of the baubles of life to play with. There is no doubt whatever that Tennyson had some such thoughts in mind when he wrote in Locksley Hall: