Lessons in Life; A Series of Familiar Essays

by J. G. Holland

"For you, my poor fellow-creature, I think with sorrow as I write here upon your head, there remains no such immortality as remains for me. What a difference between us! You to your sixteen or eighteen years here, and then oblivion!—I to my threescore and ten, and then eternity! Yes, the difference is immense; and it touches me to think of your life and mine, of your doom and mine. I know a house where at morning and evening prayer, when the household assembles, among the servants there always walks in a shaggy little dog, who listens with the deepest attention and the most solemn gravity to all that is said, and then, when prayers are over, goes out again with his friends. I cannot witness that silent procedure without being much moved by the sight. Ah! my fellow-creature, this is something in which you have no part! Made by the same hand, breathing the same air, sustained like us by food and drink, you are witnessing an act of ours which relates to interests that do not concern you, and of which you have no idea. And so here we are, you standing at the manger, old boy, and I sitting upon it; the mortal and the immortal, close together; your nose on my knee, my paper on your head; yet with something between us broader than the broad Atlantic."

Here we find one man pitying his poor, dumb, unconscious companion, and the little dog that trots in to attend the morning prayers, because their life is so brief, and, more particularly, because it is so insignificant. He recognizes the feeble likeness between himself and them, and appreciates also the tremendous difference. He does not think that he would be glad to exchange his lot of labor and care for their carelessness and content, but, reaching forward to grasp the hand of an immortal destiny, he sorrows that he must leave his dumb servants and companions behind him.

And this is the normal view of the question. We rise out of semi-conscious infancy into a life of the senses, which goes on to perfection in our childhood. We come into a state in which the mechanism of the body enjoys its freest play, in which the senses imbibe their sweetest satisfactions, and in which life either swells into irrepressible overflowings, or subsides into careless content. Looking at her children at this period of their life, many a mother has said, "Let them play while they can; let them be merry while they may; for they are seeing their happiest days." But this animal life is not all. In its perfection it is very beautiful, and it is good because God made it; but it is only the coarse basis upon which rises a shaft, whiter than marble—wrought with divine devices—crowned by the light of Heaven. It is only those who have failed to secure a distinct perception of the highest aspect of human life, and of that which makes it characteristically human life, who can say to a child that he is seeing his happiest days.

I remember with entire distinctness the moment when the consciousness possessed me that my childhood was transcended by initial manhood, and I can never forget the pang that moment brought me. It was on a bright, moonlight night, in midwinter, when my mates, boisterous with life, were engaged in their usual games in the snow, and I had gone out expecting to share in their enjoyment. I had not played, or rather tried to play, five minutes, before I found that there was nothing in the play for me— that I had absolutely exhausted play as the grand pursuit of my life. Never since has the wild laugh of boyhood sounded so vacant and hollow, as it did to me that night. In an instant, the invisible line was crossed which separated a life of purely animal enjoyment from a life of moral motive and responsibility, and intellectual action and enterprise. The old had passed away, and I had entered that which was new; and I turned my steps homeward, leaving behind me all my companions, to spend a quiet evening in the chimney-corner, and dream of the realm that was opening before me. Such a moment as this comes really, though not always consciously, to every man and woman. To-day we are children; to-morrow we are not. To-day we stand in life's vestibule; to-morrow we are in the temple, awed by the sweep of the arches over us, humbled by the cross that fronts us, and smitten with mysteries that breathe upon us from the choir, or gaze at us from the flaming windows.

Manhood and womanhood have their infancy entirely distinct from the infancy of childhood. The child is born into the world a simple, animal life—less helpful than a lamb, or a calf, or a kitten. There is no power in it, and but little of instinct. There is no form of life, bursting caul or shell, that awakes in vital air to such stupid, vacant helplessness, as a baby. It is out of this lump of clay, with its bones only half hardened, and its muscles little more than pulp, and its brain no more intelligent than an uncooked dumpling, that childhood is to be made. And this childhood consists of little more than a well-developed animal organism. Nature keeps the child playing—makes it play in the open air—impels it to bring into free and joyous use all the powers of its little frame—and when that is done, and the procreative faculty has crowned all, the child is born again, and comes into a new infancy—the infancy of manhood and womanhood. Here a new life opens. That which gave satisfaction before, gives satisfaction no longer. Love takes new and deeper channels. Ambition fixes its eye upon other and higher objects. Fresh motives address the soul, and urge it into new enterprises. Great cares and responsibilities settle slowly down upon its shoulders, and it braces itself up to endure them. It apprehends God and its relations to Him, and to its fellows; it confronts destiny; it arms itself for the conflicts of life; it prepares for the struggle which it knows will issue in a grateful success or a sad disappointment; in short, it grows from man's infancy into man's full estate.

Now the reason why a mother looks with a sigh upon her children, and says that they are seeing the happiest days of their life, is that she has never become a true woman. She has never grown out of the infancy of her womanhood. She has never comprehended what a glorious thing it is to be a woman—she has not comprehended what it is to be a woman at all. What can be that woman's ideas of life, who thinks and declares that the happiest moments of her experience were those which were filled with the frolic of animal life? If I felt like this, I should wish that my children had been born rabbits, or squirrels, or lambs, or kittens, because they, having enjoyed the pleasures of the animal, will never awake to the woes of another type of life. The real reason why any man sings from the heart,

"O, would I were a boy again,"

is, that he is "stuck"—to use a homely but expressive word— between boyhood and manhood, and, not feeling up to his position, has a very strong disposition to back out of it. The man who really wishes he were a boy, is either painfully conscious of the loss of the purity of his boyhood, or he has the cowardly disposition to shirk the responsibilities of his life. The romantic regard which we all entertain for the simple animal content and joy of childhood, is a very different thing to this. It was Mr. Neal's loafer that really wished he were a pig; and it is a loafer always who would retire from man's duties and estate, into the content either of childhood or kittenhood.

It is very natural that a man should be blinded and pained by passing from a shaded room into dazzling sunlight. It is a serious thing to leap from a luxurious, enervating warm bath into cold water. All sudden transitions are shocking; and God has contrived the transitions of our lives so that they shall be mainly gradual. It is not to be wondered at that many men and women, by having the responsibilities of men and women thrust upon them too early, are shocked, and look back upon the shady places they have left, and long to rest their eyes there. It is not strange that men recoil from a plunge into the world's cold waters, and long to creep back into the bath from which they have suddenly risen. But that man or woman, having fully passed into the estate of man and woman, should desire to become children again, is impossible. It is only the half-developed, the badly-developed, the imperfectly nurtured, the mean-spirited, and the demoralized, who look back to the innocence, the helplessness, and the simple animal joy and content of childhood with genuine regret for their loss. I want no better evidence that a person's life is regarded by himself as a failure, than that furnished by his honest willingness to be restored to his childhood. When a man is ready to relinquish the power of his mature reason, his strength and skill for self-support, the independence of his will and life, his bosom companion and children, his interest in the stirring affairs of his time, his part in deciding the great questions which agitate his age and nation, his intelligent apprehension of the relations which exist between himself and his Maker, and his rational hope of immortality—if he have one—for the negative animal content, and frivolous enjoyments of a child, he does not deserve the name of a man;—he is a weak, unhealthy, broken-down creature, or a base poltroon.

Yet I know there are those who will read this sentence with tears, and with complaint. I know there are those whose existence has been a long struggle with sickness and trial—whose lives have been crowded with great griefs and disappointments—who sit in darkness and impotency while the world rolls by them. They have seen no joy and felt no content since childhood, and many of them look with genuine pity upon children, because the careless creatures do not know into what a heritage of sin and sorrow they are entering. I have only to say to them, that the noblest exhibitions of manhood and womanhood I have ever seen, or the world has ever seen, have been among their number. A woman with the hope of heaven in her eyes, incorruptible virtue in her heart, and honesty in every endeavor, has smiled serenely, a million times in this world, while her life and all its earthly expectations were in ruins. Patient sufferers upon beds of pain have forgotten childhood years ago, and, feeding their souls on prayer, have looked forward with unutterable joy to the transition from womanhood to angelhood. Men, utterly forsaken by friends— contemned, derided, proscribed, persecuted—have stood by their convictions with joyful heroism and calm content. Nay, great multitudes have marched with songs upon their tongues to the rack and the stake. The noblest spectacle the world affords is that of a man or woman, rising superior to sorrow and suffering— transforming sorrow and suffering into nutriment—accepting those conditions of their life which Providence prescribes, and building themselves up into an estate from whose summit the step is short to a glorified humanity.