The distractions of life are every day's tragedy. The mutilation of purpose, the disintegration of time, the neutralization of all endeavor, which result from the perpetual occurrence of the unforeseen, cannot but prefigure itself as a theme for meditation to the worker who looks back on a day, a week, a month, an entire season, in which "the flighty purpose" has never been overtaken. The calendar has the inexorableness of fate. The day, the month, goes by, unrelenting. It may be shattered with feeble and inexpressive demands, but all the same it is gone, and it is unreturning. Whether freighted richly with the essential, or merely burdened with the ineffectual, it is equally irretrievable.
This involves a problem of life full of spiritual perplexity. Certainly, no man liveth to himself, or, if he does, his living is a selfish and worthless thing. Certainly a man is his brother's keeper—to a degree. The poet whose dream is about to crystallize in verse is assured that life is more than art, and that to sustain the spirits of the depressed caller who appears at that precise instant, with the unfailing instinct with which the depressed do invariably appear at a literary crisis,—he is assured that this act is a "nobler poem" than any he could write. And such is the tremendous impression that the gospel in the air of the service of humanity makes on us all, that he dare not disregard this possibility. He is not absolutely sure, it is true, that he is "serving humanity" in this individual instance, but he is not at all sure that it is not true; and he reflects that other days are coming, when, perhaps, by some divine dispensation, the depressed caller will not appear! But there are no days on which he, or his prototype, is not on hand, and so the problem ever remains a present, an immediate, and, alas! an insoluble one. For this is an age when the depressed, who have nothing to do, require, to sustain their drooping spirits, the sympathetic ministrations of those who are too busy to indulge in the languid luxury of gentle and romantic sadness. In fact, they feel a certain inalienable right to demand that current of sympathetic interest which otherwise would express itself in the specific work in which one is engaged. "You desire to 'serve humanity,' do you?" the depressed caller says, virtually, as he fixes the mere worker with his glittering eye. "Well, I am Humanity. What is a book compared to a human soul? Here, before you, in living personality, is a need. Can you forsake it for abstract literature?"
If the unfortunate worker has any species of the New England conscience he is at a disadvantage. He has nothing to say for himself. There are behind him more than two centuries of his ancestors who have preached and practiced self-sacrifice, generosity, love. In one sense he is even enfeebled by his ethical nature. It possesses him, rather than enables him to clearly and consciously possess it. He feels a certain magnetic attraction to the fulfilment of a definite purpose; but after all, the world is full of purposes and of far greater and abler persons than himself to carry them on; and perhaps this particular appeal is from one of those "little ones" whom the Christ he holds in reverence bids him care for first of all. Perhaps the immediate human need should take precedence over specific work. Perhaps it is a real human need. "Treat the people as if they were real," said Emerson; "perhaps they are so." And so he becomes the victim rather than the master of his own diviner life. He sees through a glass darkly. He is not in the least sure that he can do any good, but he is fearful he may do evil. And so he espouses what is really a negative side; a side of blind chance; a mere spiritual gambling, so to speak, and throws his stakes on the side of what may be useful, as he cannot prove to himself that it is not, and his life becomes a poor, mean, weak, ineffectual thing. He recalls Sir Hugo's counsel to Daniel Deronda: "Be courteous, be obliging, Dan; but don't give yourself over to be melted down for the tallow trade." He becomes sadly conscious that his entire time, purpose, energies are being simply, with his own dull consent, "melted down for the tallow trade," and that he himself is by way of being on a far more perilous margin than that of any one of the gently depressed spirits who devastate his days, and command him to create for them,—not energy, purpose, will,—but, instead, external conditions in which they may more luxuriously enjoy their romantic languor and their comforting consciousness of superior qualities.
Now is it not more than an open question that when temptation assumes the masque of "service," it is no less temptation, and that it is evil disguised as good? The woman who reads the infinitely uplifting sermons of Rev. Doctor Charles G. Ames; who solaces what she is pleased to call her soul in that marvelously great work, "The Expansion of Religion," by Rev. Doctor E. Winchester Donald; who is excited—and mistakes it for being aroused—by Rev. Doctor Philip Moxom's noble book called "The Religion of Hope;" or who entertains similar emotions over recent new and great and uplifting books by Rev. Doctor George A. Gordon or Rev. Doctor Lyman Abbott, or many another, often evolves the pleasing fantasy that all she requires for producing the same quality of work is the illumination of personal interviews or personal correspondence with them. "Surely," she reasons, "these men are servants of the Lord, and I am one of the least of these whose needs they are divinely commanded to serve. Is not the life more than meat? Should not the minister break off his morning meditation—an abstract thing, at best—to see me, who needs an immediate infusion of encouragement?"
And the tragedy of this is that the worker, who is true to his own purpose,—through good report or through ill report,—to the duties he is divinely commissioned to perform, is not infrequently entirely misunderstood. The woman who sends him a voluminous manuscript, accompanying pretty phrasings regarding his work, and modestly requesting that he shall read it, give his "views" on it, and decide just what editor or publisher will be rejoiced to issue it,—and who receives her pages of outpouring back by return mail with a note, however courteous, expressing his inability to fulfil this commission,—this woman becomes, as a rule, the enemy of the person who declines to be "melted down for the tallow trade." She may do no particular harm, but the antagonism is there. This, however, could be borne; but the nature sensitive to shades of human need is always liable to torture itself because of any failure to meet a specific demand. And this torture is disintegrating to that force of positive energy which a special work requires.
Is there not, then, a need for the gospel of one's own endeavor? that a given line of work, plainly revealed in hours of mystic communion with the Divine, indicated by the subtle trend of circumstance and condition,—is there not a need of realizing so clearly that it is the duty apportioned to the one fitted for it, that it shall inspire fidelity and reverence,—even at the risk of what the unthinking may describe as selfish absorption? For there are vast varieties of ministering for ministering spirits. The work of the social settlement is divine; but the poet and the painter, if they produce poems and paintings, cannot devote their time to its work. And the poems and the pictures have their value, as well as service in giving food and clothing to those in need. The special gift does require special conditions, and it is not selfish to insist on those conditions, when the special work is held as unto the Lord. It often requires more heroism, more faith, more love to deny than to accede to a given request. To yield is often easy; to be steadfast to one's own purpose, shining like a star upon the horizon, is not infrequently very difficult.
A Summer Pilgrimage in Arizona.
No pilgrimage of the Crusaders of old could be more impressive in its spiritual results than that which can be made to-day to the Grand Cañon of the Colorado in Arizona. The majesty and sublimity of the scene suggest another world, not, indeed, an "Inferno," but a "Paradiso." It is a sea of color, a very New Jerusalem, on which one looks down from the rim of this Titanic chasm. It is a vision not less wonderful than that beheld by Saint John in the Isle of Patmos.