The full rose, blushing, to the frosts of death—
As autumn flowers to the winter snows;
And now, dear heart, O now I love you so,
I love you yet, altho’ ’twas long, so long ago.
John Trotwood Moore.
THE PROBLEM OF LIFE
The problem of life is not so strange when taken in its relation to things around us. The things which to us seem incomprehensible are often so merely from our own ignorance or failure to look at them in the light of existing environments. The questions of life and death, could we grasp them with the myriad of causes before and after, which go with and are a part of them, might even themselves be understood. Of death we know one thing which should rob it of all fear, and that is that, as our coming into the world was painless and unconscious to us, so shall our going out be; and that as we had no choice in the matter of our coming in, so shall we have none in the matter of our going out, and that as we are a link in the cause of events, we should accept our position with the cheerful fortitude of one upon whom a task has been placed by an unseen Creator, relying upon the justice of His wisdom to see that it is not greater than we can bear. For in the bearing of it lie all our growth and all the strength and nobility which shall fix our place in the life to come.
It seems a paradox, indeed, to us to think that we must die to live; yet if we look around us we may see where this same principle is carried out in all the relations of the world; that we grow not by what we get, but by what we give; that we are developed not through pleasure and play, but through hard knocks and hard work; that we are softened and ripened not through happiness, but through pain and sorrow; that use is growth, and idleness is decay, and that from stone to star and from plant to planet, disintegration is the law of God, that greater things may be built upon the ashes of the past, and a grander life evolved from the crucifixions of the present.
The reason we fail to properly understand the workings of God in our lives and the lives around us is because we take too narrow a view of life. We do not look far enough ahead, and so we fail to harmonize things because of the narrowness of the scope. We see a child born, open its eyes upon the world, suffer a little pain and pass away as if it ne’er had been, and we wonder why all of this for nothing. We see injustice elevated and the wicked people prosper and thrive, and things that are great come to naught, and things that are little become great, and in our short-sightedness we complain and doubt, and rush after the short cuts and practice the bad because, for the time being, it seems more profitable than the good. These, indeed, would seem paradoxes, and well might we doubt, and do, if we look at it only from the transitory standpoint of temporal life. Nay, the very fact that such seeming injustice can live, that a young life should be taken, that fraud and envy should prosper, is our strongest evidence that this life is but a link in a chain, and a very short link at that; that there is one grand principle of recompense in all nature and all law, and that as surely as God lives, and the universe lives, and this law lives, so surely will all things be adjusted and evened up. With this view of it, then, we can readily see how the young life that is taken here has that much more to its credit in a land and living a life that is nobler, and that wrong and injustice may grow gray-headed here; but so sure as the great laws of centrifugal and centripetal force act in unison to balance and adjust, there shall be a balancing in which the gray head of every wrong shall pay back, with interest and to the last farthing, in another life, the over-drawn account it made in this.