The steps of life: further essays on happiness

by Karl Hilty

Glory is for many just as strong a fetter as mammonism—not only the excessive eagerness for the ordinary human and civic honors (exposed though they always are to the judgment of contemporaries or, in the greater instances, of posterity) but also the anxiety for respectability. As to the former, Paul, one of the most abused of men, has left us a very good statement in 1 Cor. iv. 3 ff.; and that any one loses the regard of his citizens quite without blame is really much rarer than is commonly supposed. On the other hand, God often enough makes one’s former enemies to be those who become the most satisfied with him, and the prophetic words of Isaiah come splendidly to take the place of the earlier underestimation: “And the sons of them that afflicted thee shall come bending unto thee; and all they that despised thee shall bow themselves down at the soles of thy feet.” But one must be able to endure things if he is to adopt Christianity; those too-sensitive Christians who crave the esteem of even those they do not themselves esteem only show that the world and its praise are still far from being enough a matter of indifference to them.

The real positions of honor are, after riches, the most dangerous thing there is for faith; on this point the Gospel leaves not the least doubt. Whoever runs into this danger quite of his own free will, even perhaps with eager zeal, quite commonly perishes therein, so far as concerns his better and only worthful life. But whoever, by his calling or by his lot, is compelled to accept such positions and yet would like to become or remain a Christian, has every cause to be watchful, and to be thankful for occasional humiliations, an article in which, happily, the world seldom lets him be lacking.

For the greater number of men in the ordinary situations of life the hardest part in the prolegomena of Christianity is perhaps the conquering of one’s desire for pleasure. The humbler classes often escape this desire with still less success than do the wealthy and the aristocratic, who may have learned, through experience, to place a better estimate upon the worth or worthlessness of the pleasures of the material life. One often finds in the lower classes a much more unrestrained passion for pleasure, which, joined with the atheistic mood they purposely cultivate, sometimes degenerates into a true savagery and makes them like animals, and animals not of the noblest sort, either.

But unfortunately the upper strata of society often enough lead the way by their own bad example. They often complain of the love of pleasure and the frivolity of the serving classes; but things would go better if the servants did not perceive in their masters the same propensities that restlessly agitate them.

Pleasure set up as a rule of life, sensuousness (taken in the widest sense) established as the controlling power in the life of a man—this is the infallible death of all faith in transcendent things. These two powers, pleasure and faith, do not long exist side by side in a man, but the one or the other must leave the field. Happy he in whom it is the power of the sensual element that retreats before that of the spiritual, vigorously striving for the mastery. For every victory over the love of pleasure (what is not otherwise always the case on the so-called path of virtue) brings at once its own reward in an increased vigor of the ideal life, and often in a broad spiritual progress in the wider sense. We can truthfully say that the most of the great advances in the inner life are ushered in by some renunciation which brings its own compensation.

That to the love of pleasure all sorts of attractive names are given and that it in truth assumes now finer, now coarser, forms, should not lead us astray. It is, nevertheless, under all circumstances, that trait in us which most resembles animal nature and forthwith reveals its ignoble character in the fact that it is always united with egotism and the exploitation of others for our own selfish inclinations. The partial naïveté of the ancient world is wanting in humanity now, for their eyes have been opened to its meaning; and a universal failure to conquer the love of pleasure through higher interests would, in these days, be an unprecedented and quite impossible relapse of humanity into an earlier age.

With the pursuit of pleasure dies the inclination for riches and honor, which are partly only means in that pursuit and not ends in themselves; and instead there springs up joy in work, the best salvation from all evil, that otherwise always surrounds and tempts a man in one way or another. For when the pursuit of pleasure disappears as a rule of life, then a man must work, or the world is too dreary. On the other hand, with the pursuit of pleasure as his innermost spring of action, a man will always look upon work as only a means, and a disagreeable one, to the attainment of pleasure.

That one may, nevertheless, find an artless enjoyment in the beauty of nature, in the serene succession of the days and the years, in one’s family and in true friendship, in uplifting art and science, in the life and welfare of his nation, even in the inoffensive animal and plant worlds, and, above all, in all the great and good activities that are going on in the whole realm of humanity—all this is to be taken entirely for granted. Indeed, a keen sensitiveness to such things is a sure mark of an unspoiled temperament, and especially of years of youth purely spent, a youth that has not, by poisonous pleasures, prematurely deadened its feeling for the true and harmless joys of life.

Furthermore, an excessive repression of the life of the body is certainly not advantageous for spiritual progress—still less is it a divine command, but it is rather, whenever it appears, merely a human device with no decisive value. On this point a thoughtful commentator of the oldest biblical records says, very truly, that men always have a tendency to heighten the commands of God, which are themselves properly meted and adapted to men’s capabilities; and that, in the Old Testament narrative of the first trial of obedience, God did not say that Adam and Eve should not touch the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but only that they should not eat of its fruit; it was Eve herself who added the further prohibition, “neither shall ye touch it,” and by so doing placed the Tempter in the desired position of making an alleged divine command manifestly untrue on its face, because the mere touch of the tree did not cause death. (Genesis ii. 17, and iii. 3, 4.)

Thus it is, indeed, with many exaggerated and unnecessary commands which parents lay upon their children or churches upon their adherents, the non-fulfilment of which they then with equal facility overlook.