Renunciation is a word that stands for a great experience, and it is, perhaps, too often conceived of as relating to the material rather than to the spiritual life. The question as to whether one shall give up this or that article, or practice, during Lent, for instance, is sometimes in the air,—always with the saving clause that the renunciation is merely temporal, and if given up for forty days in the year, is to be fully enjoyed and revelled in on the other three hundred and twenty-five,—a clause that degrades a religious theory to a purely material plane. If it is better for one's command of his higher powers not to take coffee, for instance, during Lent, then it is better not to take it for the greater proportion of the year aside from Lent. If it is better to be gentle, tolerant, forgiving, and generous for forty days, it is still better to be so for three hundred and sixty-five days. There is really something absolutely absurd as well as repellent in the apparent acceptation that to live the higher, sweeter, fuller, nobler life is a penitential affair,—to be endured but not enjoyed, and limited chiefly to Lenten periods and the special holy days of the Christian Church. For religion is the life, the continual life of every hour and moment, and consists in the quality of that constant life. The offices of religion, the ceremonial forms, are quite another matter. They have their place, and a most important one. The gathering together at stated hours and periods for the devotions of religious worship is so great an aid to the Christian life as well to be ranked indispensable to the community and the nation; and while it is true that the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life, yet the letter, rightly interpreted, is filled with the Spirit, and conveys it to us. The cry of certain reformers (?) that society has outgrown the Church, has little claim to consideration, for the Church itself is a progressive institution, and moves forward and enlarges itself with still larger revelations of the Divine Truth. The great opportunities for renunciation come not in the guise of temporal and material things; whether one shall eat or drink this thing or the other; whether he shall forego the theatre, or deprive himself of music, or array himself in sackcloth and ashes, or in purple and fine linen. The real question comes in the guise of the spiritual problems.
One comes to know, for instance, of an act of his neighbor's which is really one of treachery and betrayal of trust. Circumstances arise in which he could put his finger upon the evidential chain revealing this lapse from integrity. Shall he do it? Perhaps in the spiritual vista three ways open to him. The one would be to reveal the affair publicly; but this is crude if not cruel, and to touch the spring that precipitates discord and controversy is hardly less disastrous than to precipitate war. Discord only engenders evil, and it never produces good results. Evil things must, of course, be resisted, and combat inevitably results,—but discord for the sake of revealing some one's inadvertences is invariably disastrous as well as morally wrong. Then there is the method of seeking the person directly, and laying before him his error, thus giving him the opportunity of any extenuating explanation, and protecting his reputation in the genuineness of true friendship, from the world. And this course is often the wisest as well as the noblest, and really requires more heroism than the former one. Yet, after these there is still another, and it is absolutely the most potent, the most successful in its results, the most truly uplifting for all concerned. Has one been wronged, or misrepresented, or in any way injured? Let him commit it all, unreservedly, to the very immediate, the very real, the infinitely potent power of the divine world. Let him, as his own form of personal renunciation, absolutely forgive whatever annoyance or injury he has received, and let him pray, not for any vengeance against the wrong-doer, but that the Divine Love and Light would so envelop and direct the one who has erred as to enable him to free his own spirit from whatever fault he had been led into, and to rise into such regions of spiritual life that never again would he repeat it. How beautiful is the counsel given by Whittier:—
"My heart was heavy, for its trust had been
Abused, its kindness answered with foul wrong.
So, turning gloomily from my fellow-men,
One summer Sabbath day I strolled among
The green mounds of the village burial-place;
Where, pondering how all human love and hate
Find one sad level, and how, soon or late,
Wronged and wrong-doer, each with meekened face,
And cold hands folded over a still heart,
Pass the green threshold of our common grave,
Whither all footsteps tend, whence none depart,
Awed for myself, and pitying my race,
Our common sorrow, like a mighty wave,
Swept all my pride away, and trembling
I forgave!"
Forgiveness,—forgiveness in love, and in readiness to aid and to rejoice in all future success of the one who had erred,—is not this the highest renunciation of the Christian life? Is it not this which is set before us in the progress of spirituality? Mutual forgiveness, mutual aid, mutual trust and sustaining, realizing that we all err and need to be forgiven even as we need to forgive,—shall we not in these touch the blessedness of sacrifice rather than its barren husk, and find in it that "soul of happiness" which should be the perpetual atmosphere of the higher life? For "this is the life eternal—to know Thee, the only true God," and humanity knows God just in proportion to the degree in which it is able to partake of the Divine Spirit and translate its religious aspiration into practical guidance for the affairs of the day.
Probably the one solution of the problem of life in all its intricacies and its perplexing and baffling experiences lies in that trust in God which is the soul's absolute surrender to the Divine will. Even in this solution, however, perplexities not unfrequently lie, from the fact that it is not always easy to separate that inevitableness which runs through human affairs from the results that we, ourselves, produce by our own series of choices and our habitual currents of thought. "A good will has nothing to fear," says Père De Caussade; "it can but fall under that all-powerful hand which guides and sustains it in all its wanderings. It is this divine Hand which draws it toward the goal when it has wandered therefrom, which restores it to the path. The work of the divine action is not in proportion to the capacity of a simple, holy soul, but to her purity of intention; nor does it correspond to the means she adopts, the projects she forms, the counsel she follows. The soul may err in all these, and this not rarely happens; but with a good will and pure intention she can never be misled. When God sees this good disposition He overlooks all the rest, and accepts as done what the soul would assuredly do if circumstances seconded her good will."
Nevertheless, as things go in this world, the good will may encounter the most peculiarly trying experiences. The most entire and absolute devotion of thought and interest, of love, friendship, regard,—whatever may be,—pouring itself out lavishly, asking nothing but to give of the best the soul conceives, meets the experience of total indifference in return. Had it given coldness instead of ardent regard, selfish scheming instead of infinite and vital interest and absorbing devotion, the result could not be less devoid of response or recognition. Nor is this, perhaps, as life goes, an exceptional experience, though the multiplication of instances does not tend to make any single one less bitter or less tragically sad. Loss is common, but that statistical truth does not make one's own losses less disastrous or less difficult to bear.
Yet, accepting all these experiences that are encountered as absolute facts in life, facts from which there is no appeal, and for which, alas, there is no mitigation, what remains? One may feel as if he would gladly give up the whole business of trying to live at all, but that is not a matter that is optional with the individual. One has to live out his appointed days in this phase of being, and it is only the person of defective intellect as well as defective moral power who will not take the gift of life and make the best—not the worst—of it. Mr. Longfellow's familiar lines,
"Not enjoyment and not sorrow
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us further than to-day,"