Levels of Living / Essays on Everyday Ideals

by Henry Frederick Cope

The ancient law that nature abhors a vacuum holds true in the moral realm. The heart of man is never long empty. And yet the whole scheme of modern ecclesiastical regulation of life is built on the plan of making a man holy by emptying him of all evil and stopping there, leaving a negative condition, without a thought of the necessity of filling the void.

So long have we been trained in this that we are all a good deal more concerned about the things we ought not to do than about the things we ought to do. We spend our days nipping off the buds of evil inclinations, pulling up the weeds of evil habits, wondering how it happens they multiply so fast, forgetting altogether the wiser plan we would adopt with weeds and briers in our gardens.

There are many who still think of the pious man as one who succeeds in accomplishing the largest number of repressions in his life, the ideal being the colourless life, never doing a thing that is wrong or subject to criticism. The energy of many a life is being spent in a campaign against a certain list of proscribed deeds. Blessed is the man—according to their beatitudes—who has the largest number of things he does not do.

But if rightness is abstinence from evil, then a lamp-post must always be better than a man, for it justly can lay claim to all the negative virtues. What an easy way of life is this, simply to find out the things we know other people like to do and to determine that if we only can leave them undone we are holy in the sight of heaven.

But not only is this a way of folly, it is a way of positive harm, a way fatal at last to the true life. To do no more than to turn out one set of devils only is to invite other and worse devils into the heart. To seek emptiness only is to invite yet more iniquity. An empty heart is as dangerous as an empty hour.

Emptiness is not holiness, it is idiocy. There cannot be an empty heart. To take a bad thing away from a man gives an opportunity for a worse thing to enter unless you simply choke the bad by implanting the good. Some of the most dangerous people are those who feel pious because they can say, We never did any harm.

Religion often has come to mean only a multitude of repressive regulations, apparently a scheme for making others abstain from those things for which we have no appetite. Little wonder that children feel only repulsion for a church which seems to take delight in finding impiety in every natural pleasure; that men turn from a path which, according to its prospectus, promises nothing but pain, privation, and emptiness.

We do not object to the pain and privation provided they have their purpose. But all nature objects to a course of life that maims, pinches, and restricts without corresponding and compensating development and liberty somewhere. We fight against every law of life and court the ways of death so long as we endeavour to develop character by putting it into bandages, leading strings, and legal restrictions.

There is evil to be eliminated; there are thousands of things we ought not to do. But the best way to get rid of the tares is to sow good wheat in abundance. The way to avoid the things we ought not to do is to do the things that ought to be done. The empty life is a standing invitation to temptation; the busy man seldom finds the devil's card left at his door.

Live the life above the things you would overcome. It never has been found necessary to pass a law prohibiting the president from playing marbles; larger interests fill his life so that these things do not even occur to him. Give a man a great work to do and you will save him from a thousand temptations to do small and unworthy things. Do not allow the modern conception of religion as gloom and denial to keep you from that which is your right as a spiritual being, the strength, joy and beauty of the divine life.