Motor-cars carry a little dynamo on board and generate their own electric current as they travel, and after dark, with the great headlights glowing, they travel pleasantly and safe. A contented mind is a dynamo we can carry with us, and it generates its own happiness as we travel. It illumines the journey of life and makes it pleasant to ourselves and agreeable to friends travelling in our company.
Do not grizzle over chances missed in life and "might have beens" which sprinkle your past like gravestones dotting a churchyard, inscribed "sacred to the memory of cherished griefs still hugged and spasmodically wept over." Convert the mossy tombstones into wayside shrines which loving hands garland with fresh flowers, while grateful hearts fondly linger there, recalling pleasant things and sweet companionship which gladdened your pilgrim way. Do not erect mural tablets to dead ambitions in the little sanctuary of your memory; build altars there instead whereon you can offer acceptable oblations of praise for evils escaped and for the crown of loving-kindness with which the Everlasting Arms encircle you.
If we only had the gift of humour on us it would make "life more amusing than we thought." Our eyes would open to a new world wherein kinder people dwell and where brighter sunshine warms the heart's red blood and chases down the gloom we anticipate to-morrow that may never come.
III
THE LURE OF SELF-DENIAL
Self-denial is not the highest form of virtue, nor is it a permanent condition of life for man to live in; yet it is a lure that draws men to martyrdoms as the flame collects moths to the burning. Man was not predestinated to a life of self-abnegation. Self-denial is a compromise between misery and happiness. Human nature does not thrive on compromise; it does not develop in austerities. Self-denial has its value in the scheme of moral education. Training is good for man if he does not carry it too far. You can overtrain. The scholar trains; he discreetly withdraws from gay life and inflicts on himself long hours of lonely study that he may rank in the list of University honours. The jockey trains, and punishes himself in so doing that he may ride to win. It is the same the world over: pain is joy in the making. Where self-denial is the driving power in religious life it leads, not to happiness, but to asceticism: to the lonely cell of the misanthropic monk, the pedestal of St. Simon Stylates, or the self-torture of the Indian fakir. Deluded people these, who build up life on self-denial as the pinnacle virtue to which man can soar while on earth. None of these people set self-denial in its proper place in the human economy--viz., a means to an end. It is the end-all in their vision of life, and so their life is dismal in the living and disappointing in its purpose.
Self-denial is necessary and serves a healthy purpose. It is necessary to man's spiritual welfare as medicine or the surgeon's knife may be necessary to his physical health.
Man is of twofold nature: the animal and the spiritual, the good and the bad, the superior and the inferior--label it as you please. Self-denial is putting the inferior quality under the superior one; self-denial is following the higher inspiration at the expense of the lower instincts. "Self-denial": the very word implies, repressing desires, renouncing pleasures, suffering pain. It means living from choice on the shady, dank side of the street rather than basking in the open sunny piazza when only a few steps place you there, where the children play and the old men foregather deep in the hallowed sunshine. Self-denial is not the crowning virtue--it is just the market price we pay that we may garner a harvest of happiness in the recompensing days of autumn.
The Divine purpose in man is growth, not repression of growth; it is to expand, to unfold, to develop character. To pass from bud to flower in moral and spiritual excellence, not to stunt manhood till its fairest features are arrested in growth, and moral atrophy sets up a canker in the bud, and ugliness usurps the seat of beauty in a man's character. Ugliness everywhere may be left to the devil as his monopoly. Self-denial is the grubby chrysalis; happiness is the golden butterfly on the wing.
Not self-denial, but enjoyment, is the highest good and the truest test of character. Enjoyment; rejoicing in that which ought to delight us in this our earthly life--this is a finer attainment than self-denial. Enjoyment means a full life, living upon our whole nature, and well-balanced withal in the living. It seems an attractive and sinless programme to subscribe to, yet it is difficult to draw a boundary-line between enjoyment and excess. This is where the crux comes in. This is verily the fire that tries every man's work of what sort it is. It is cruel punishment to crush your passions and pleasures out of existence--that is self-denial. It is splendid discipline to give them play and at the same time hold them in control--that is enjoyment. Success in this great endeavour brings the victor into marching-line with the angels, and yields a finer exaltation and a larger recompense than trampling on the lilies.