Stronger by weakness, wiser men become,
As they draw near to their eternal home.
Let the scientists worry about our origin—slime, monkeys, what not; let the prophets worry about our future—“the decline of western civilisations,” and what not. Some people are alarmed because in nine thousand billion years the sun’s fuel may give out. Instead of chagrin over our past, and alarm over our future, suppose we consider our opportunity.
Listen to Emerson: “Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has earned anything rightly until he knows that every day is doomsday. Today is a king in disguise. Today always looks mean to the thoughtless, in the face of a uniform experience that all good and great and happy actions are made up precisely of these blank todays. Let us not be deceived, let us unmask the king as he passes.”
Our Lord, in his daily conversations, was always drawing the attention of his listeners away from vague speculations, to the present moment and the present opportunity. To such absurd enquiries as, “Whose wife shall she be in heaven?” he said, “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” To the man who said that he must postpone action until he had attended a funeral, the Master replied crisply, “Let the dead bury the dead and come and follow me.” And after an enumeration of the various worries about the future with which men and women torment their minds, he said, “Take no thought for the morrow.” Do not worry about the future. He added, significantly, that if we are determined to look for trouble, we can find it today without waiting for tomorrow.
X
CITY AND COUNTRY
It is generally assumed that the country is more romantic, more poetical than the city; but it would not be so easy to prove this, if one were put to the test. “God made the country and man made the town,” said William Cowper, which meant simply that he preferred rural life. It is rather amusing to consider that in our age, which is so often called the age of machines, and when many people are afraid that simplicity and individuality will be lost, country places, mountain scenery, and the wilderness are more popular than ever before.
Now there are fashions in outdoor nature just as there are fashions in clothes. Today everyone must profess a love for mountains whether one really likes them or not; for mountains are very fashionable. Switzerland is the playground of the world; and the inhabitants make a larger income off their barren rocks than most communities make off fertile and productive plains.
But it is only within two hundred years that mountains have been generally admired. Before that time they were usually regarded as ugly excrescences, both disagreeable and dangerous; and at the best they were no more to be regarded as objects of beauty than pimples. English gentlemen who made the Grand Tour in the seventeenth century thought the Alps were disgusting; they were a monstrous and abominable barrier that must be crossed before the traveller could reach the smiling landscape of Italy.
When Addison wrote home from his travels in 1701, he said that he had had “a very troublesome journey over the Alps. My head is still giddy with mountains and precipices; and you can’t imagine how much I am pleased with the sight of a plain!” Such a remark would injure the reputation of a modern pilgrim; but Addison made it in perfect good faith, and with no apology.