"Shall I be remembered by posterity?" asked the dying Garfield. In this eager, tremulous question the renowned and the obscure alike have a pathetic interest. For the deeply reflective mind oblivion is a thought all unendurable. The tool man fashions, the structure he rears, the success he achieves, not less than his marble monument, looks down upon the beholder with a mute appeal for recollection. To each eager aspirant for everlasting remembrance Christ comes whispering his secret of abiding renown. Speaking not as an amateur, but as a master, Christ affirms that he who would save his life must lose it, that he who would be remembered by others must forget himself, that the soldier who flees from danger to save his body shall leave that life upon the battlefield, while he who plunges his banner into the very thick of the fight and is carried off the field upon his shield shall in safety bear his life away. Hard seem the terms; they rebuke ease, they smite self-indulgence, they deny the maxims of the worldly wise. But in accepting Christ's principle and forsaking their palaces that they might be as brothers to beggars, Xavier and Loyola found an exhilaration denied to kings; while each Sir Launfal, in his ease denied the Holy Grail, has in the hour of self-sacrifice discerned the Vision Splendid. To each young patriot and soldier looking eagerly unto the tablets that commemorate the deeds of heroes, to each young scholar aspiring to a place beside the sages, comes this word: Life is through death, and immortal renown through self-renunciation.
This law of self-sacrifice is imbedded in nature. Minot, the embryologist, and Drummond, the scientist, tells us that only by losing its life does the cell save it. The new science exhibits the body as a temple, constructed out of cells, as a building is made of bricks. Just as some St. Peter represents strange marble from Athens, beauteous woods from Cyprus, granite from Italy, porphyry from Egypt, all brought together in a single cathedral, so the human body is a glorious temple built by those architects called living cells. When the scientist searches out the beginning of bird or bud or acorn he comes to a single cell. Under the microscope that cell is seen to be absorbing nutrition through its outer covering. But when the cell has attained a certain size its life is suddenly threatened. The center of the cell is seen to be so far from the surface that it can no longer draw in the nutrition from without. The bulk has outrun the absorbing surface. "The alternative is very sharp," says the scientist, "the cell must divide or die." Only by losing its life and becoming two cells can it save its life.
Later on, when each of the two cells has grown again to the size of the original one, the same peril threatens them and they too must divide or die. And when through this law of saving life by losing it nature has made sure the basis for bud and bird, for beast and man, then the principle of sacrifice goes on to secure beauty of the individual plant or animal and perpetuity for the species. In the center of each grain of wheat there is a golden spot that gives a yellow cast to the fine flour. That spot is called the germ. When the germ sprouts and begins to increase, the white flour taken up as food begins to decrease. As the plant waxes, the surrounding kernel wanes. The life of the higher means the death of the lower. In the orchard also the flower must fall that the fruit may swell. If the young apple grows large, it must begin by pushing off the blossom. But by losing the lower bud, the tree saves the higher fruit.
Centuries ago Herodotus, the Grecian traveler, noted a remarkable custom in Egypt. Each springtime, when the palms flowered, the Egyptians went into the desert, cut off branches from the wild palms and, bringing them back to their gardens, waved them over the flowers of the date trees. What was meant by this ceremony Herodotus did not know. The husbandmen believed that if they neglected it the gods would give them but a scanty crop of dates. It was reserved for the science of our century, through Drummond, to explain the fact that the one palm saved its dates because the other palm lost its fertilizing pollen. Should nature refuse to obey this law of losing life in order to save it, man's world would become one vast Sahara waste, an arctic desolation.
The law of sacrifice is also industrial law. Great is the power of wealth. It buys comfort, it purchases travel, it secures instruments of culture for reason and taste, it is almoner of bounty for sympathy and kindness. Flowing through man's life, it seems like unto some Nile flowing through Egypt with soft, irrigating flow, bearing man's burdens upon its currents, giving food to bird and beast. But the story of each Peter Cooper, each Peabody, each Amos Lawrence, is the story of the ease of life lost to-day that the strength of life may be saved to-morrow. Each young merchant loved luxury and beauty, but in the interests of thrift he denied the eye its hunger, the taste its satisfaction. When pride asked for dress and show, the youth rebuked his vanity. When companions scoffed at the young merchant as a niggard he subdued his sensitiveness and inured himself to rigid economy. When increasing wealth began to lend influence, and society urged him to give his evenings to gayety, the young merchant denied the social instinct and gave his long winter evenings to broadening his knowledge and culture. Having lost the lower good, at last the time came when the American merchant and philanthropist had saved for himself universal fame. Having lost ease and self-indulgence during the first half of his life, he saved the higher ease and comfort for the second period of his career.
Similarly of the young men in Parliament who to-day have charge of the destinies of the English empire, it may be said that they have saved their lives, because the fathers lost theirs. One hundred years ago these fathers made exiles of themselves in the interests of their sons and daughters. The East India merchant exiled himself into the tropic land where heat and malaria made his skin as yellow as the gold he gained. Others braved the perils of the African forests, dared the dangers of Australian deserts, endured the rigor of the arctic cold. Losing the lower and present happiness, they saved the higher ease and comfort for their sons. The self-denial of yesterday brought the influence of to-day. Upon this principle God has organized the industrial world. Man must take his choice between ease and wealth, either may be his but not both.
Sacrifice is also the secret of beauty, culture and character. Selfishness eats sweetness from the singer's voice as rust eats the edge of a sword. St. Cecilia refused to lend the divine touch to lips steeped in pleasure. He who sings for love of gold finds his voice becoming metallic. In art, also, Hitchcock has said: "When the brush grows voluptuous it falls like an angel from heaven." Fra Angelico refuses an invitation to the Pitti palace, choosing rather his crust and pallet in the cell of the monastery. The artist gave his mornings to the poor, his evenings to his canvas. But when the painter had worn his life away in kindly deeds, men found that the light divine had been transferred to the painter's canvas. Eloquence also loves sincere lips. The history of oratory includes few great scenes—Demosthenes' plea for Athenian liberty that resulted in his death, Luther's single challenge to the hosts of Pope and Emperor, Wendell Phillips' at Faneuil Hall, Lincoln's at Gettysburg. All these risked life for a cause, and were baptized with eloquence, their words being tipped with fire, their minds hurling thunderbolts.
Sacrifice also is the secret of beauty. After a little time the life of pleasure and selfishness will make the sweetest fact opaque and repellent, while self-sacrificing thoughts are cosmetics that at last make the plainest face to be beautiful. In the calm of scholarship men have given up the thought that culture consists of an exquisite refinement in manners and dress, in language and equipage. The poet laureate makes Maud the type of polished perfection. She is "icily regular, splendidly null," for culture is more of the heart than of the mind. But as eloquence means that an orator has so mastered the laws of posture, and gesture and thought and speech that they are utterly forgotten, and have become second nature, so knowledge becomes culture, and physical perfection becomes beauty, only when it is unconscious.
In the moral realm also, the gains for the soul begin with loss. In the hour of temptation he who sacrifices the higher duty to the lower pleasure will find that ease has shorn away the strength of Samson.
Victor Hugo has pictured a man committing suicide through poverty, and deserting the duty and dwelling where God has placed him. But waking in the next world, the man perceives a letter on the way to himself announcing a large inheritance which would have been his had he but been patient. Therefore the great novelist affirms that God makes such a man begin over again, only under harder conditions, the existence that here he has willfully shattered. What a tragedy is his who, to save the present good, will lose the higher life. Whittier expressed the fear that Daniel Webster saved his life only to lose it. In his works the poet recalls the time when for genius of statesmanship and weight of mentality Webster's like was not upon our earth. But in an evil hour the statesman saw that the presidency was a prize that could be gained by giving the fugitive slave law as a sop to the South. In that hour his character suffered grievous injury. In the attempt to save men's votes he lost men's higher respect. In deepest sorrow his admirers, abroad and at home, cried out: "O, Lucifer, thou son of the morning, how art thou fallen!"