BY G. P. R. JAMES.
We always fail when we judge of the fate of others. Life is double—an internal and an external life; the latter often open to the eyes of all, the former only seen by the eye of God. Nor is it alone those material things which we conceal from the eyes of others, which often make the apparently splendid lot in reality a dark one, or that which seems sad or solitary, cheerful and light within. Our characters, our spirits operate upon all that fate or accident subjects to them. We transform the events of life for our own uses, be those uses bitter or sweet; and as a piece of gold loses its form and solidity when dropped into a certain acid, so the hard things of life are resolved by the operations of our own minds into things the least resembling themselves. True, a life of study and of thought may seem to most men a calm and tranquil state of existence. Such pursuits gently excite, and exercise softly and peacefully the highest faculties of the intellectual soul; but age brings with it indifference even to these enjoyments—nay, it does more, it teaches us the vanity and emptiness of all man’s knowledge. We reach the bounds and barriers which God has placed across our path in every branch of science, and we find, with bitter disappointment, at life’s extreme close, that when we know all, we know nothing. This I have learned, and it is all that I have learned in eighty years, that the only knowledge really worth pursuing is the knowledge of God in his word and his works—the only practical application of that high science, to do good to all God’s creatures.
The operation of man’s mind and of his heart are as yet mysteries. We talk of eager love; we speak of the warm blood of the South; we name certain classes of our fellow beings excitable, and others phlegmatic; but we ourselves little understand what we mean when we apply such terms, and never try to dive into the sources of the qualities or the emotions we indicate. We ask not how much is due to education, how much to nature; and never think of the immense sum of co-operating causes which go to form that which is really education. Is man or woman merely educated by the lessons of a master, or the instructions and exhortations of a parent? Are not the acts we witness, the words we hear, the scenes with which we are familiar, parts of our education? Is not the Swiss, or the Highlander, of every land, educated in part by his mountains, his valleys, his lakes, his torrents? Is not the inhabitant of cities subjected to certain permanent impressions, by the constant presence of crowds, and the everlasting pressure of his fellow men? Does not the burning sun, the arid desert, the hot blast, teach lessons never forgotten, and which become part of nature to one class of men; and frozen plains, and lengthened winters, and long nights, other lessons to the natives of a different region? Give man what instruction you will, by spoken words or written signs, there is another education going on forever, not only for individuals but for nations, in the works of God around them, and in the circumstances with which his will has encompassed their destiny.
BY J. G. WHITTIER.
THE WORSHIP OF NATURE.
The ocean looketh up to heaven,
As ’twere a living thing;