Lessons in Life; A Series of Familiar Essays

by J. G. Holland

In the town of Waltham there is a manufactory of watches which I have examined with great interest. It is here undertaken to organize the skill which has been achieved by thousands of patient hands, and submit it to machinery; and it is done. Every thing is so systematized, and the operations are carried on with such exactness, that, among a hundred watches, corresponding parts may be interchanged without embarrassment to the machinery. The different parts are passed from hand to hand, and from machine to machine, each hand and each machine simply doing its duty, and when from different and distant rooms these parts are assembled, and cunning fingers put them together, every wheel knows its place, and every pivot and every screw its home, though it be picked without discrimination from a dish containing ten thousand. Yet among these parts there are screws of which it takes one hundred and fifty thousand to make a pound, and shafts and bearings which are so delicately turned that five thousand shavings will only extend a lineal inch along the steel. This is the way American watches are made, and this is the way in which the highest practicable perfection is reached in the manufacture of these pocket monitors.

Here we have small work, organized, and great elaboration of related details. When Dr. Scott wrote his passages on the card, his work was very simple. He did only one thing—he made letters. When he had made letter after letter until the little space was filled, his work was done. It was not a part of some complicated and inter-dependent whole, related to a thousand other parts in other hands. I suppose it may be as delicate work to drill a jewel with a hair of steel, armed with paste of diamond-dust, as to write "Our Father" under a microscope; but when the jewel has to be drilled with relation to the reception of a revolving metallic pivot, the process becomes very much nicer. So here are a hundred processes going on at the same time, in different parts of a building, all related to each other, each delicate almost beyond description, and effected with such precision that a mistake is so much an exception that it is a surprise. I have seen the huge steam engines at Scranton which furnish power for the blast of the furnaces there, and their magnitude and power and most impressive majesty of movement have made me tremble; yet as works of man they are no greater than a Waltham watch.

It seems to me that man occupies a position just half way between infinite greatness and infinite littleness, and that he can neither ascend nor descend to any considerable degree without bringing up against a wall which shows where man ends and God begins. It seems, too, that that kind of human power which can reach down deepest into the infinite littleness, is more remarkable than that which rises highest toward the infinite greatness. It is a more difficult and a more remarkable thing to write the Lord's Prayer on a single line less than an inch long, than it would be to paint it on the face of the Palisades, upon a line a mile long, in letters the length of the painter's ladder. I have heard of a watch so small that it was set in a ring, and worn upon the finger; and such a watch seems very much more marvellous to me than the engines of the Great Eastern.

We are in the habit of regarding God as the author of all the great movements of the universe, but as having nothing to do directly with the minor movements. Mr. Emerson becomes equally flippant and irreverent when he speaks of a "pistareen Providence." We kindly take the Creator and upholder of all things under our patronage, and say, "it is very well for him to swing a star into space, and set bounds to the sea, and order the goings of great systems, and even to minister to the lives of great men, but when it comes to meddling with the little affairs of the daily life of a thousand millions of men, women, and children—pshaw! He's above all that."

Not so fast, Mr. Emerson! The real reason why you and all those who are like you do not believe in God's intimate cognizance and administration of human affairs is, that you cannot comprehend them. You have not faith enough in God to believe that he is able to maintain this knowledge of human affairs, this interest in them, and the power and the disposition to mould them to divine issues. You are willing to admit that God can do a few great things, but you are not willing to admit that he can do a great many little things. It is well enough, according to your notion, for God to make a mastodon, or a megatherium, but quite undignified for him to undertake a mosquito or a horse-fly. It would not compromise His reputation with you were you to catch Him lighting a sun, or watching with something of interest the rise and fall of a great nation, but actually to listen to the prayer of a little child, and to answer that prayer with distinctness of purpose and definite exercise of power, would not, in your opinion, be dignified and respectable business for a being whom you are proud to have the honor of worshipping!

I do not know how these people who do not believe in the intimate special providence of God can believe in God at all. I can conceive how God could rear Mont Blanc, but I cannot conceive how He could make a honey bee, and endow that honey bee with an instinct—transmitted since the creation from bee to bee, and swarm to swarm—which binds it in membership to a commonwealth, and enables it to build its waxen cells with mathematical exactness, and gather honey from all the flowers of the field. It is when we go into the infinity below us that the infinite power and skill become the most evident. When the microscope shows us life in myriad forms, each of which exhibits design; when we contemplate vegetable life in its wonderful details; when chemistry reveals to us something of the marvellous processes by which vitality is fed, we get a more impressive sense of the power and skill of the Creator than we do when we turn the telescope toward the heavens. Yet Mr. Emerson would have us believe that the Being who saw fit to make all these little things, to arrange and throw into relation all these masses of detail, to paint the plumage of a bird, and the back of a fly, as richly as he paints the drapery of the descending sun, does not condescend to take practical interest in the affairs of men and women! My God, what blindness! Bird, bee, blossom—be my teacher. I do not like Mr. Emerson's lesson.

The logical sequence of disbelief in what Mr. Emerson calls a "pistareen Providence" is a belief in pantheism or polytheism. There is certainly nothing ridiculous in the faith that the Being who contrived and arranged, and adjusted the infinite littlenesses of creation, and ordained their laws, and who continues their existence, maintains an intimate interest in the only intelligent creatures he has placed in this world. The little bird that sings to me, the bee that bears me honey, the blossom that brings me perfume, all testify to me that He who created them will not neglect nor forget His own child. If I look up into the firmament, and send my imagination into its deep abysses, and think that further than even dreams can go, those abysses are strewn with stars; if I think of comets coming and going with the rush of lightning, and yet occupying whole centuries in their journey; or if I only sit down by the sea, and think of the waves that kiss other shores thousands of miles away, I am oppressed by a sense of my own littleness. I ask the question whether the God who has such large things in His care, can think of me—a speck on an infinite aggregate of surface—a mote uneasily shifting in the boundless space. I get no hope in this direction; but I look down, and find that the shoulders of all inferior creation are under me, lifting me into the very presence of God. I find that God has been at work below me, in a mass of minute and munificent detail, by the side of which my life is great and simple, and satisfyingly significant.

So, if I may not believe in a "pistareen Providence," I must make a God of the universe itself, or pass into the hands of many Gods the world's creation and governance. If the God that made the bee, and the ant, and the daisy, made me, then He is not above taking care of me, and of maintaining an interest in the smallest affairs of my life. The faith that lives in reason is never stronger than when it stands on flowers. There is not a fly that floats, nor a fish that swims, nor an animalcule that navigates its little drop of sea-spray, but bears a burden of hope to despairing humanity. "If God so clothe the grass which to-day is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven," then what, Mr. Emerson?

This subject is a very large one, and I can present only one more phase of it. A great multitude—the larger part, in fact—of the human race are engaged in doing small work. It may be a comfort for them to know that the Almighty Maker of all things has done a great deal of the same kind of work, and has not found it unworthy or unprofitable employment. Let them remember that it is just as hard to do a small thing well as a large thing, and that the difficulty of a deed is the gauge of the power required for its doing. Let them remember that when they go down, they are going just as directly toward infinity as when they go up, and that every man who works Godward, works in honor.

It was a very forcible reflection to which a visitor at Niagara Falls gave utterance, when he said that, considering the relative power of their authors, he did not regard the cataract as so remarkable a piece of work as the Suspension Bridge; and it may be said with truth that there is no work within the power of man—so small that God has not been below it in a work smaller and possibly humbler still,—certainly humbler when we consider the infinite majesty and the ineffable dignity of His character. My maid is too proud to go into the street for a pail of milk; my God smiles upon me in flowers from the very gutter. My neighbor thinks it beneath him to till the soil, working with his hands, but the Being who made him, breathes upon that soil, and works in it, that it may bear food to keep human dignity from starving. There are men who set themselves above driving a horse, no part of which the King of the universe was above making. Ah! human pride! Alas! human dignity! I do not know what to make of you.