Living for the Best

by James G. K. McClure

There is nothing in this world that more appeals to my admiration than a man who makes the best of himself under difficulties. Robert Louis Stevenson deservedly has many admirers by reason of his writings, but what in him most appeals to my admiration was the struggle he waged with difficulties. "For fourteen years," he wrote the year before his death, "I have not had a day's real health. I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary. I have written in bed, written in hemorrhages, written in sickness, written worn by coughing, written when my head swam for weakness. I am better now, and still few are the days when I am not in some physical distress. And the battle goes on—ill or well is a trifle, so as it goes. I was made for a contest, and the Powers have so willed that my battle-field should be this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle. I would have preferred a place of trumpetings and the open air over my head. Still I have done my work unflinchingly."

The story of many a strong and useful life is very similar to this story of Stevenson's.

Parkman wrote his histories in the brief intervals between racking headaches. Prescott struggled with blindness as he prepared his volumes. Kitto was deaf from boyhood, but he wrote works that caught the hearing of the English-speaking world.

It sometimes seems as though God never intended to bring the best out of us excepting through pain and pressure. The most costly perfume that is known is the pure attar of roses, and one drop of it represents millions of damascene roses that were bruised before the sweet scent they contained was secured.

"The best of men
That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer."

The sphere of difficulty is usually the sphere of opportunity. "I was made for contest," Stevenson said. We all are made for it. As we let the contest overpower us, we fail; as we overpower the contest, we succeed.

One particular personage of the Old Testament is in mind as illustrative of these thoughts, Jeremiah. He always reminds me of a violet I once saw growing on Mount St. Bernard in Switzerland. The snow was deep on every side, excepting on one little slope a few feet in width, exposed to the eastern sun. There, so close to the snow as almost to be chilled to death by the cold atmosphere about it, was a violet sweetly lifting its head and blooming as serenely as though it knew nothing of the struggle for life.

Jeremiah was a mere youth when the conviction came into his heart, "God wishes me to be his mouthpiece in teaching the people to do right." He lived at Anathoth, three miles from Jerusalem, the distance of an hour's easy walk. His father was a priest who probably in his turn served in the duties of the temple at Jerusalem. But though he came of religious ancestry, and though he heard much of the religious exercises of the temple, this call from God to be his mouthpiece in teaching the people to do right, broke in upon his life as a disturbing force. The times were worldly, and even wrong. Nobles and princes, merchants, scholars, and priests had put the fear of God away from their eyes, and were acting according to the selfish impulses of the hour. The general outward life of the nation was pure, but it was the pureness of mere formality. Beneath the surface ambitions and purposes were cherished that uncorrected would surely lead the people into selfishness, idolatry, and transgression.

It was no easy thing for Jeremiah to answer "yes" to this call of God. The call involved a lifetime of brave service. Matters in the nation were sure to go from bad to worse. Difficulties after difficulties therefore, as they developed, must be faced. He stood at what we name "the parting of the ways"; if he did as God wished, his whole life must be given to the work indicated; if he said "no" to God's call, he would drift along with the rest of the people, leaving them to their fate, he no better and perhaps no worse than they.

In some respects there is nothing better than to be forced to a decision on some important matter, particularly if that decision is a decision involving character. It was a choice with Jeremiah whether he would live unselfishly for God or selfishly for himself. That choice ordinarily is the supreme choice in every one's life. It is the supreme choice that the Christian pulpit is constantly presenting. Present character and eternal destiny are shaped according to that choice.