Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation

by Will Levington Comfort

When such ideals are held in mind, an adjustment of conduct follows at once. To be ready (I am not talking religiously) for a revered Guest, one immediately begins to put one's house in order. Indeed, there's a reproach in finding the need of rushed preparation, in the hastening to clear corners and hide unseemly objects; and yet, this is well if the reorganisation is more than a passing thought. To make the ordering of one's house a life-habit is a very valid beginning in morality.

We talk continually of the greatest of men; sometimes our voices falter, and sentences are not finished. We have found many things alike about the Great Ones. First they had mothers who dreamed, and then they had poverty to acquaint them with sorrow. They came up hard, and they were always different from other children. They suffered more than the others about them, because they were more sensitive.

They met invariably the stiffest foe of a fine child—misunderstanding; often by that time, even the Mother had lost her vision. Because they could not find understanding in men and women and children, they drew apart. Such youths are always forced into the silence.... I often think of the education of Hiawatha by old Nokomis, the endless and perfect analogies of the forest and stream and field, by which a child with vision can gain the story of life. Repeatedly we have discussed the maiden who sustained France—her girlhood in the forests of Domremy. It was a forest eighteen miles deep to the centre, and so full of fairies that the priests had to come to the edge and give mass every little while to keep them in any kind of subjection. That incomparable maiden did not want the fairies in subjection. She was listening. From the centres of the forest came to her the messages of power.... Once when the Chapel group had left, I sat thinking about this maiden; and queerly enough, my mind turned presently to something in St. Luke, about the road to Emmaus—the Stranger who had walked with the disciples, and finally made himself known. And they asked one to the other after He had vanished: "Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked with us by the way, and while He opened to us the Scriptures?"

... Returning from their silences, these torture-quickened youths found work to do—work that people could not understand. The people invariably thought there must be a trick about the giving—that the eager one wanted hidden results for self.... Invariably, they were prodigious workers, men of incredible energy. Thus they ground themselves fine; and invariably, too, they were men of exalted personal conduct, though often they had passed before the fact was truly appreciated.

First of all, they were honest—that was the hill-rock. Such men come to make crooked paths straight, but first they straighten out themselves. They stopped lying to other men, and what was greater still, they stopped lying to themselves. Sooner or later men all came to understand that they had something good to give—those closest to them, not always seeing it first....

You couldn't buy them—that was first established; then they turned the energies of their lives outward instead of in. The something immortal about them was the loss of the love of self. Losing that, they found their particular something to do. They found their work—the one thing that tested their own inimitable powers—and that, of course, proved the one thing that the world needed from them. As self-men they were not memorable. Self-men try to gather in the results to themselves. The world-man wants to give something to his people—the best he has from his hand or brain or spirit. That's the transaction—the most important in any life—to turn out instead of in.... Here I am repeating the old formula for the making of men, as if in the thrill of the absolutely new—the eternal verity of loving one's neighbour.

Each man of us has his own particular knack of expression. Nothing can happen so important to a man as to find his particular thing to do. The best thing one man can do for another is to help him find his work. The man who has found his work gets from it, and through it, a working idea of God and the world. The same hard preparation that makes him finally valuable in his particular work, integrates the character that finally realises its own religion. The greatest wrong that has been done us by past generations is the detachment of work and religion—setting off the Sabbath as the day for expressing the angel in us, and marking six days for the progress of the animal.

All good work is happiness—ask any man who has found his work. He is at peace when the task is on, at his best. He is free from envy and desire. Even his physical organs are healthfully active. The only way to be well is to give forth. When we give forth work that tests our full powers, we are replenished by the power that drives the suns. Giving forth, we automatically ward off the destructive thoughts. Our only safe inbreathing physically, mentally, and spiritually is from the upper source of things——not in the tainted atmospheres of the crowds. A man's own work does not kill. It is stimulus, worry, ambition, the tension and complication of wanting results for self, that kill.

Each man stands as a fuse between his race and the creative energy that drives the whole scheme of life. If he doubles this fuse in to self, he becomes a non-connective. He cannot receive from the clean source, nor can he give. What he gets is by a pure animal process of struggle and snatch. He is a sick and immoral creature. Turning the fuse outward, he gives his service to men, and dynamos of cosmic force throw their energy through him to his people. He lives. According to the carrying capacity of his fuse is he loved and remembered and idealised for the work he does.

A jar of water that has no lower outlet can only be filled so full before it spills, but open a lower vent and it can be filled according to the size of the outpouring. Now there is a running stream in the vessel. All life that does not run is stagnant.