The man who makes wealth his god instead of his servant, who is determined to get rich, rich at any cost, and who is willing to sacrifice honesty, honor, loyalty, character, family—everything he should hold dear—for the sake of a mere stack of money-bags, is, despite his robes of ermine, only a rich pauper living in an air-castle.
The man of ultra-conservatism, the victim of false content, who has no plans, no ideals, no aspirations beyond the dull round of daily duties in which he moves like a gold-fish in a globe, is often vain enough to boast of his lack of progressiveness, in cheap shop-worn phrases from those whom he permits to do his thinking for him. He does not realize that faithfulness to duties, in its highest sense, means the constant aiming at the performance of higher duties, living up, so far as can be, to the maximum of one's possibilities, not resignedly plodding along at the minimum. A piece of machinery will do this, but real men ever seek to rise to higher uses. Such a man is living in an air-castle.
With patronizing contempt he scorns the man of earnest, thoughtful purpose, who sees his goal far before him but is willing to pay any honest price to attain it; content to work day by day unceasingly, through storm and stress, and sunshine and shadow, with sublime confidence that nature is storing up every stroke of his effort, that, though times often seem dark and progress but slight, results must come if he have but courage to fight bravely to the end. This man does not live in an air-castle; he is but battling with destiny for the possession of his heritage, and is strengthened in character by his struggle, even though all that he desires may not be fully awarded him.
The man who permits regret for past misdeeds, or sorrow for lost opportunities to keep him from recreating a proud future from the new days committed to his care, is losing much of the glory of living. He is repudiating the manna of new life given each new day, merely because he misused the manna of years ago. He is doubly unwise, because he has the wisdom of his past experience and does not profit by it, merely because of a technicality of useless, morbid regret. He is living in an air-castle.
The man who spends his time lamenting the fortune he once had, or the fame that has taken its winged flight into oblivion, frittering away his golden hours erecting new monuments in the cemetery of his past achievements and his former greatness, making what he was ever plead apology for what he is, lives in an air-castle. To the world and to the individual a single egg of new hope and determination, with its wondrous potency of new life, is greater than a thousand nests full of the eggs of dead dreams, or unrealized ambitions.
Whatever keeps a man from living his best, truest and highest life now, in the indicative present, if it be something that he himself places as an obstacle in his own path of progress and development, is to him an air-castle.
Some men live in the air-castle of indolence; others in the air-castle of dissipation, of pride, of avarice, of deception, of bigotry, of worry, of intemperance, of injustice, of intolerance, of procrastination, of lying, of selfishness, or of some other mental or moral characteristic that withdraws them from the real duties and privileges of living.
Let us find out what is the air-castle in which we, individually, spend most of our time and we can then begin a re-creation of ourselves. The bondage of the air-castle must be fought nobly and untiringly.
As man spends his hours and his days and his weeks in an air-castle, he finds that the delicate gossamer-like strands and lines of the phantom structure gradually become less and less airy; they begin to grow firm and firmer, strengthening with the years, until at last, solid walls hem him in. Then he is startled by the awful realization that habit and habitancy have transformed his air-castle into a prison from which escape is difficult.
And then he learns that the most deceptive and dangerous of all things is,—the air-castle.