It would be an incalculable gain to domestic happiness, if people would begin the concert of life with their instruments tuned to a very low pitch: they who receive the most happiness are generally they who demand and expect the least.
Ideality often becomes an insidious mental and moral disease, acting all the more subtly from its alliances with what is highest and noblest within us. Shall we not aspire to be perfect? Shall we be content with low measures and low standards in anything? To these inquiries there seems of course to be but one answer; yet the individual driven forward in blind, unreasoning aspiration becomes wearied, bewildered, discontented, restless, fretful, and miserable.
An unhappy person can never make others happy. The creators and governors of a home, who are themselves restless and inharmonious, cannot make harmony and peace. This is the secret reason why many a pure, good, conscientious person is only a source of uneasiness in family life. They are exacting, discontented, unhappy; and spread the discontent and unhappiness about them. They are, to begin with, on poor terms with themselves; they do not like themselves; they do not like their own appearance, manners, education, accomplishments; on all these points they try themselves by ideal standards, and find themselves wanting. In morals, in religion, too, the same introverted scrutiny detects only errors and evils, till all life seems to them a miserable, hopeless failure, and they wish they had never been born. They are angry and disgusted with themselves; there is no self-toleration or self-endurance. And persons in a chronic quarrel with themselves are very apt to quarrel with others. That exacting nature which has no patience with one's own inevitable frailties and errors has none for those of others; and thus the great motive by which Christianity enforces tolerance of the faults of others loses its hold. There are people who make no allowances either for themselves or anybody else, but are equally angry and disgusted with both.
Now it is important that those finely strung natures in which ideality largely predominates should begin life by a religious care and restraint of this faculty. As the case often stands, however, religion only intensifies the difficulty, by adding stringency to exaction and censoriousness, driving the subject up with an unremitting strain till the very cords of reason sometimes snap. Yet, properly understood and used, religion is the only cure for the evil of diseased ideality. The Christian religion is the only one that ever proposed to give to all human beings, however various the range of their nature and desires, the great underlying gift of rest. Its Author, with a strength of assurance which only supreme Divinity can justify, promises rest to all persons, under all circumstances, with all sorts of natures, all sorts of wants, and all sorts of defects. The invitation is as wide as the human race: "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest."
Now this is the more remarkable, as this gracious promise is accompanied by the presentation of a standard of perfection which is more ideal and exacting than any other that has ever been placed before mankind,—which, in so many words, sets up absolute perfection as the only true goal of aspiration.
The problem which Jesus proposes to human nature is endless aspiration steadied by endless peace,—a perfectly restful, yet unceasing effort after a good which is never to be attained till we attain a higher and more perfect form of existence. It is because this problem is insolvable by any human wisdom, that He says that they who take His yoke upon them must learn of Him, for He alone can make the perfect yoke easy and its burden light.
The first lesson in this benignant school must lie like a strong, broad foundation under every structure on which we wish to rear a happy life,—and that is, that the full gratification of the faculty of ideality is never to be expected in this present stage of existence, but is to be transferred to a future life. Ideality, with its incessant, restless longings and yearnings, is snubbed and turned out of doors by human philosophy, when philosophy becomes middle-aged and sulky with repeated disappointments,—it is berated as a cheat and a liar,—told to hold its tongue and take itself elsewhere; but Christianity bids it be of good cheer, still to aspire and hope and prophesy, and points to a future where all its dreams shall be outdone by reality.
A full faith in such a perfect future—a perfect faith that God has planted in man no desire which he cannot train to complete enjoyment in that future—gives the mind rest and contentment to postpone for a while gratifications that will certainly come at last.
Such a faith is better even than that native philosophical good sense which restrains the ideal calculations and hopes of some; for it has a wider scope and a deeper power.
We have seen in our time a woman gifted with all those faculties which rejoice in the refinements of society, dispensing the elegant hospitalities of a bountiful home, joyful and giving joy. A sudden reverse has swept all this away, the wealth on which it was based has melted like a fog-bank in a warm morning, and we have seen her with her little family beginning life again in the log cabin of a Western settlement. We have seen her sitting in the door of the one room that took the place of parlor, bed-room, nursery, and cheerfully making her children's morning toilette by the help of the one tin wash-bowl that takes the place of her well-arranged bathing- and dressing-rooms; and yet, as she twined their curls over her fingers, she had a laugh and a jest and cheerful word for all The few morning-glories that she was training over her rude porch seemed as much a source of delight to her as her former green-house and garden; and the adjustment of the one or two shelves whereon were the half-dozen books left of the library, her husband's private papers, and her own and her children's wardrobe, was entered into daily with a zealous interest as if she had never known a wider sphere.