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An essay by Henry Frederick Cope |
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The Passion For Perfection |
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Title: The Passion For Perfection Author: Henry Frederick Cope [More Titles by Cope] The Great Search
Marking time leaves no mark on time. The proof of love is loving the unlovely. Truth never is found by twisting the facts. Wings come not to those who refuse to walk. An ideal usually is what we want the other man to be. There is no righteousness without some self-respect. You cannot lead men to the divine by crawling in the dust. The real saints have no time to write their autobiographies. When a man boils over quickly you soon find out what is in him. True piety simply is the prosperity of the eternal things in a man. The world never will be won from the love of evil until we make the good lovely.
The cry, "How may I be right?" is the cry of the ages. Human history is the record of our attempt to answer it. Man is naturally a truth seeker, and this is the search of all truly great souls. The enduring monuments of literature are those that have in some measure answered this question. All things that have been worth while have helped us to know and to realize the right. Health, happiness, freedom, morality, all are but parts of the right; all are but sections of the sublime whole for which man ever seeks. The search manifests itself in different ways; it may be as science, the passion for the knowledge of the right relations of things; as justice, for right relations amongst men; as philosophy, as ethics, as religion. Back of all our life is the instinct of progress; we push towards the perfect. And perfection we now know rests not in more things but in bringing all the things that are into right relations with one another. The idea that any man can be right regardless of others we scout as absurd. The ideal civilization we work for here, even the heaven we long for, is simply a condition of living where the things that separate, despoil, and introduce discord are no more. The hope of the race is to be in right relations with all things. All the great religions are as the footprints of peoples who have sought the truth that would lead them to be right and just with one another, with the world, and with the great unseen powers behind all being. Our universal sense of wrongness is but part of our passion for rightness. The sense of imperfection and the desire for improvement have marked all religions that have influenced men. In the Jew this desire for righteousness was supreme. Job is but a type. Coming to himself amongst the ruin of all the things he counted most precious, he forgets their loss in his desire to solve the great problem, What is right and how may I reach it? Somewhere he knows there is a solution to all the riddles of his friends and the questions of his own heart. An orderly universe is not crowned by a being whose life must ever remain an unsolved riddle. Men are not adrift in a fog with no hope of taking bearings. If men have marked the natural world with lines of latitude and longitude for the guidance of its travellers, the moral world is not without its markings. Job's very question contains the only answer that has ever satisfied man. God Himself is the great meridian of all morality. From Him we may measure all relationships and get them right. That is the essential message of the Bible; it strikes that first of all in "In the beginning God----" Every life is right in the measure that it adjusts itself to the unvarying will; amongst the nations they have the kingdom who do His will. The world has made progress in precisely the proportion that this will has been realized. The promise of the present is that this great standard, this universal law by which all may find the right, has been made known to all through a life. One of our own has set forth God. One has lived who has shown us how to live. For every problem there is now an example of its solution. For every difficulty there is something better far than a declaration of duty; there is the great Doer of the deed. He has come near to man that men might come near to one another. He reveals the right. Yet we must not allow His perfection to make Him unapproachable. He is only an example as long as His example is attainable. His divinity does not depend on His distance from us but on the degree in which He lifts us, inspires us towards the height He has gained.
THE HUNGER OF THE AGES "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled," is the central beatitude; in a measure it embraces all the others, for every virtue they inculcate is included in righteousness. But it is often rejected as impracticable because fanciful teachers who substitute subtle definitions for simple duties have twisted its plain words until righteousness is made something so unreasonable as to be repulsive to a right mind. As a matter of fact, it means no more than rightness; the hunger and thirst for righteousness is but the earnest, supreme desire and endeavour to be right and to do right at all times, the appetite for the right. Theological righteousness may mean some strange imputed quality laid on a man like a cloak to cover his real condition or a bill of health given to a sick man. But men who live next to real things care nothing one way or the other for theoretical rightness; they want the real article. And a right man will not be satisfied to have even the Most High think of him as being perfectly right when he knows he falls far short of it. He would rather be the faltering pursuer of actual rightness than the possessor of a hypothetical, ascribed perfection. The great Teacher cares nothing about imaginary virtues; He praises those who ardently seek the real ones. He knows that in the market of character cash alone is currency; here you cannot draw checks on some other person's deposits. To Him it is better by far to die facing the right than to live in smug content with borrowed merits. This world will never be content with a gospel that offers only vicarious virtues; at its heart it knows too well its need of the genuine usable ones; it has at least the dormant faculties of an appetite for rightness. And all this world story is but a record of the struggle for rightness. All human progress is but its fruitage. In every age there have been glorious souls who have made this passion a thing that glowed in their lives and became a light to their day. In every man the divine discontent that divides him from the animal is the sign of this desire in some form; it shows man seeking to find more perfect, more nearly right relations with the things about him. As the things about him come to include God and heaven and things unseen so will his search for rightness become wider and deeper and more spiritual. Every form of spiritual aspiration, every religion, no matter how uncouth and strange, is still the soul of man seeking right relations to the infinite. What a glorious thing is this passion for the right; what visions it has seen, what strength it has given to their realization. It is the great tide that, moving restless and resistless in our bosoms, has carried us on towards God. We cannot but believe it is born of him. It does not originate in him, for it disturbs his peace, it stirs him from sloth, it spurs him to new and often unwelcome endeavours. It ever holds before him the shining possibility of a perfect being in a perfect world. No wonder Christ used the figure of hunger and thirst. Literal appetites have been the motives back of the world's struggle for physical rightness; yet these cravings have not been more general or more forceful than those of the soul. But for hunger and thirst man would have lived in perfect content with the form and facts of life as he found them; progress, all that we call civilization, would not have been. Man is happy in proportion as necessity compels him to heed these cravings. So is it in the moral world; the struggle has been our salvation. To cease to strive for rightness is to cease to live. Individually and nationally they are happy who accept the rigorous climate of lofty ethical ideals, who are not content to take life as they find it, but who seek to cultivate flowers and fruits of paradise on the sterile, rocky soil of the human heart. This is the life that Jesus shows, the life that seeks and finds the truth, that with passionate ardour seeks right relations both with His fellows and with His Father. Out of the fullness of experience, in the midst of His own struggle He encourages all who strive; they shall be satisfied. No ideal, no noble passion, no glorious sacrifice, no honest endeavour for the right was ever in vain; the soul finds itself in seeking the supreme good.
THE SOLE SATISFACTION Through the ages men have waited for voices to speak from out the great unknown. Answering to this universal longing for larger light, to this search for truth, there has been the conviction that, where our own scanty knowledge ended, there something akin to revelation would give us light. We have been listening for voices that would speak with an authority transcending that given to our fellows. Cold reason may mock at revelation, but the soul struggling in darkness, baffled by its problems, lost in the night, still looks up and hopes. For what awaits us but despair if the mysteries of the universe are forever sealed, our questions forever unanswered, and no higher appeal to be known than that to our own selfish interests? It is not strange that men have heeded those who, though often mistaken or but impostors, have cried, "Thus saith the Lord!" It would be strange if in a world of spirits there might be no communication of spirit. If the fairest thought of our era is that which was given us when man was taught to think of the omnipotent as father, it would be strange if there should be no way by which such a father might speak to his children. Such a world would contradict all our best instincts. Such a world would mean that man was better than his maker. The divine voice speaks, but we too often listen in the wrong direction. It falls not from the skies; it comes not in strange, unusual ways of visions and portents. But it is ever speaking through the things of daily life; it is ever revealing truth and beauty to the inner ear, for it comes not from without but springs up within; heard by the heart rather than by the ear. The best things have not dropped down; they have grown up. Life is not from without, but from within. God speaks not in thunders, but in the hopes and the longings of hearts. Even the voice we hear in the sighings of the wind or the message we read in the rays of setting sun must be in us before it means aught to us. The ten commandments owe their force not to any writing on stone but to their writing on our hearts; to them the soul of man answers affirmatively. The only moral code we can follow is that which speaks with the authority of a conscience convicted. That does not mean that man is his own God, nor that he knows no law higher than himself; it does mean that by the laws of spiritual development the law is being written on every heart. Every real revelation is a divine revelation, since all truth is divine. Once we thought the scientist the enemy of religion; now we know that whenever science lays bare one of the facts of the universe we do but look on what the finger of the Infinite has written. When religion fights truth simply because truth speaks an unfamiliar tongue or fails to respect her traditions, she is fighting against God Himself. Our need is not some strange, awe-inspiring voice that shall break the silence of the midnight sky; our need is an ear trained to hear, a spirit to understand and reverence the sublime voices that are ever speaking in our world, the voices of the beauty of nature, the joy of living, the stories of every-day divine heroism, the forces that are making a new world to-day as truly as ever one was made long ago. The life of our day has not less of the divine than the life of long ago; but the message is harder to read; it is for an educated race; it is spiritual rather than merely material; it is from within; it is found in every good impulse, in every outgoing sympathy, in the kindling of eye as friend greets friend, in the good that men are doing, in the toleration that is becoming wider, the love stronger between man and man. God speaks to men now as He spoke to Moses or to David, though the manner may have changed. But the poor in spirit, those with whom pride of the past has not served to make them unwilling to learn, these hear the voice; the pure in heart see Him; the seekers after truth find Him, and to all He comes in the thrilling moment or in the quiet hour when the voice of the heart makes itself heard. [The end] GO TO TOP OF SCREEN |