“WHO SHALL BE THE GREATEST?”
No. 3.
Men are Ambitious of Distinction.
As the child with uplifted hand and eager look chases the bubble which its tiny lips have fashioned, only to find that it vanishes into thin air as soon as it is grasped, so does man, seemingly but a child in understanding, spend days and nights of laborious toil in pursuit of the bubble Distinction.
The heart of some youthful aspirant is fixed with a burning desire for the gaudy tinsel of distinction, with which the name of some hero in life’s battle is clothed. He abandons the cheerful fireside and genial society of home, and chooses for himself some arduous profession. Every energy is bent towards this one great object of his life. Every faculty of mind and body is rendered subservient to this “heart’s desire.” Hours which Nature has allotted to rest, are spent in unwearied application. He finds himself not only burning the oil of his midnight lamp, but the oil of the very lamp of life itself. He soon finds that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong—that “there is a Divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them as we may.”
As one competitor after another passes him, lean-faced Envy whispers words of malice in his ready ear, so that him whom he once loved he then despises.
As Themistocles could not sleep because of the deserved honors of Melviades, so do the deserved honors of his rivals drive peace from his side, repose from his couch.
Every laurel which crowns their brows becomes a thorn in his pillow. Anxiety for the future, dissatisfaction with the present, remorse for the past, embitter his lonely hours. Long-deferred hope makes his heart sick. And then he comes to the pass of death.
“Another followed fast,
And a book was in his hand,
Filled with the flashes of burning thought,