IT is an old and obvious fancy, that of dividing the inner life into a series of steps, or of describing it in the allegorical form of a pilgrimage with its various stages and halts and hindrances of one sort or another. Yet I do not know of any such description that suits the needs of our own day, especially the needs of people of culture; indeed, it is, and has ever been, a fault of most sermons that while they depict life’s attainable ideal with more or less exactness, they are noways able to give as plain an account of the way thither. Yet this is just the service (and the directions should be quite specific, too) which the church, it would seem, is called upon to perform for the present generation. What is known by the somewhat distasteful name of “the cure of souls,” so far as it exists at all, has become too professional (not to say too commercial) a matter with the churches: in the things of the spirit there is nothing if not freedom and individuality; yet it is just here that a kind of rigid technical nomenclature has been devised, with expressions that once may have been justified, but are now meaningless to many men and at some future time will have to be replaced, perhaps, by others.
Of the writings we possess on the unfolding of the inner life by steps, only one has come down to us from classical times; this is an essay of Plutarch, the Greek professor of philosophy (as we should now call him), who was born at Chæronea in Bœotia about 50 A.D., and died between 120 and 130 A.D. at Rome, where, among other things, he is said to have been the teacher of the future emperor Hadrian. Of his hundred and more writings, some shorter, some longer, the “Parallel Lives” are now almost the only ones read, and even these are less read in the schools than is perhaps proper. Of the rest, which are usually comprised under the general title of “Plutarch’s Ethical Writings,” one of the most readable is that dedicated to Sosius Senecio, consul under Trajan,—“How One may be Conscious of his Progress in Goodness.” On the whole, it exhibits the Eclectic view (in the sense of Ciceronian Eclecticism) as contrasted with the teachings of the Stoics, who only recognize the perfect wise man who observes their principles, on the one hand, and on the other, the man addicted to vice, without intervening transitional grades. In this treatise, as each reader will at once notice, there is a special lack of the depth which first came into morals through Christianity (then but little known as yet), and which will always come into morals only by that path; but it possesses in considerable degree a sound and natural human good sense, which is directed toward the nobler things of life, and whose development in youthful temperaments is an indispensable purpose in so-called classical culture.
Of the later writings of this kind the best are Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” a book from the great Puritan days in England, and the “Homesickness” of Jung-Stilling, written about a hundred years ago. In reality, the biographies of distinguished men should render this service of pointing out the way to their contemporaries and successors; but there are, unhappily, but few good and really true writings of this sort. For the biographers do not always understand the inmost experiences of those whose lives they are describing, many of which experiences really can not be made comprehensible to them in their full significance, since they were small occurrences with great consequences. Yet the autobiographies, which could tell all this, are usually marred with vanity and are sometimes the least true of biographies. It will therefore be well, on the whole, to recognize that in all these writings the individual character preponderates and that there is no “method” that reveals the proper course of life. The most useful thing about them, perhaps, is the very practical observations that might serve to encourage the wanderer on this much-travelled, yet universally unknown, way when he is likely to become weary, or to enlighten him when the continuation of the journey appears too uncertain or too much deflected from the presumably proper direction.
It is first of all to be said that every life has steps, and that no life runs from beginning to end in unchanging uniformity like a clear, murmuring meadow-brook, or in a straight direction, like an artificially contrived canal. But no life perfectly resembles another in its course, and even the apparently most natural steps often happen in the reverse order, so that there are men who in their youth are preternaturally wise, and have their youthful qualities only when old.
Yet there is never an inwardly healthy human life that shows no visible development at all, or that has spurts or pauses in it that are wholly arbitrary. A life that proceeds in a perfectly normal way is just as rare, but in every life there are mistakes that could have been avoided, and gaps that later it is no longer possible to fill out.
For every period in life has its purpose and its task. In spring the tree must do little more than grow and blossom, but not bear fruit as yet. The fruits one produces on the modern dwarfed trees, purposely hindered in their natural growth and designed merely for a speedy production of fruit, acquire neither the good quality nor, apparently, the soundness of fruits ripened on trees that have attained their natural full growth.
The various periods of life, then, must deposit and store away in the human being each a product peculiar to itself; in childhood the childlike nature, without which a man never becomes a well-rounded man, exerting a kindly influence upon other men; in youth that freshness and enthusiasm of spirit which begets the power of doing things; in manhood and womanhood the fulness and ripeness of all the thoughts and feelings, and the firmness that springs from a character steeled by deeds already achieved. Only thus can age also do its worthy task, not in falling into disconsolate decay, but in the quiet possession and contemplation of what life was and should be, and in the preparation for a greater and broader development.
Whoever skips any such period, or, as is more frequently the case, hastens over it and makes no use of its peculiar advantages, will seldom or never be in a position to retrieve it later, but will always have a very perceptible deficiency in his make-up.
To prevent this in younger years is a matter of education, of which I will not speak here, but in later life it is one of the chief aspects of that self-training to which a man is indebted for the real acquisitions of life more than to all the things that others can do for him.
In reference to its general character, in the aspect which one usually calls happiness or unhappiness, or a hard or easy lot, experience shows (and in most cases very plainly) that every life consists of three divisions, of which the first and the third are alike and the second unlike. Whoever has had a hard, unhappy youth is more likely to have a more favorable and successful manhood, but scarcely a cloudless end. On the other hand, when the days of youth are golden, they are almost always the precursor of exertions and storms in the middle part of life, on which there follows a quieter evening of age. Oftentimes this distinction also holds good for the minor steplike subdivisions of these three great divisions.