Chapter 1

E-text prepared by Al Haines

LEVELS OF LIVING

Essays on Everyday Ideals

by

HENRY FREDERICK COPE

Author of "The Modern Sunday-School in Principle and Practice"

New York ---- Chicago ---- Toronto Fleming H. Revell Company London And Edinburgh Copyright, 1908, by Fleming H. Revell Company New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street

To My Wife

Not in the sentiment of dedication alone, offering to you what I may have done, but in simple acknowledgment of obligation to you

Elizabeth

best gift of God and inspiration of man

Under the title of "A Sermon For To-day" these short essays, on the art of every-day living in the light of eternal life, were published by _The Chicago Sunday Tribune_, through a series of years, and were regularly printed in the Sunday editions of a group of the great dailies. The short sentences were also published with the Sermons under the head of "Sentence Sermons." The courtesy of _The Chicago Daily Tribune_ in permitting the publication of these "sermons," with such changes as have seemed best, is gratefully acknowledged.

CONTENTS

I. THE HIGHER LEVELS The Real and the Ideal--The Bread of Life--Life's Unvarying Values.

II. INVISIBLE ALLIES More than a Fighting Chance--The Unseen Hand--The One in the Midst.

III. THE SOVEREIGNTY OF SERVICE Self and Service--My Soul or My Service?--The Satisfaction of Service.

IV. THE RIGHT TO HAPPINESS The Power of Happiness--The Secret of Happiness--The Folly of Anxiety.

V. THE CURRICULUM OF CHARACTER The Great School--The Purpose of the Course--The Price of Perfection.

VI. THE AGE-LONG MIRACLE The Sufficient Sign--Behold the Man--The Life that Lifts.

VII. SEEING THE UNSEEN The Sense of the Unseen--The Brook in the Way--That Which Is High.

VIII. SOURCES OF STRENGTH AND INSPIRATION Strength for the Daily Task--The Sense of the Infinite--The Great Inspiration.

IX. FINDING FOUNDATIONS The Passing and Permanent--Facing the Facts--The Real Foundation.

X. THE PASSION FOR PERFECTION The Great Search--The Hunger of the Ages--The Sole Satisfaction.

XI. THE PRICE OF SUCCESS The Law of Selection--The Fallacy of Negation--The Secret of All.

XII. DIVINE SERVICE The Ideal Service--The Orthodox Service--The Heavenly Service.

XIII. OUR FATHER AND OUR FELLOWS The Primary Reconciliation--Faith in Our Fellows--The Law of Forgiveness.

XIV. MEN AND MAMMON Riches and Righteousness--Religion and Business--The Moral End of Money-Making.

XV. THE EVERY-DAY HEAVEN The Beauty of Holiness--The Gladness of Goodness--The True Paradise

XVI. TRUTH AND LIFE Religion of a Practical Mind--The Head and the Heart--New Truths for New Days.

XVII. THE FRUITS OF FAITH Root and Fruit--The Orthodox Accent--The Business of Religion.

XVIII. THE FORCE OF FAITH "The Victory that Overcometh"--Fear and Faith--Faith for the Future.

XIX. HINDRANCES AND HELPS FROM WITHIN Worry--A Cure for the Blues--The Gospel of Song.

XX. DOES HE CARE? The One at the Helm--The Shepherd and the Sheep--The Father's Care.

I

The Higher Levels

_The Real and the Ideal_ _The Bread of Life_ _Life's Unvarying Values_

_The ideal is the mold in which the real is cast._

_Half of success is in seeing the significance of little things._

_He finds no weal who flees all woe._

_You do not make life sacred by looking sad._

_Sympathy is a key that fits the lock of any heart._

_Soul health will not come by taking religion as a dose._

_Many a cloud that we call sorrow is but the shadow of our own selfishness._

_To live wholly for possessions is to paralyze the life to the possibility of permanently possessing anything._

_It takes more than willingness to be nothing to make you amount to something._

_This is never a wrong world to him who is right with its heart._

THE REAL AND THE IDEAL

It is probable that from the age of sixteen up to thirty Jesus of Nazareth spent His life in mechanical toil; He made wooden plows, ax handles, and yokes; He served as a carpenter. Then for three years He gave Himself to the ministry of ideal things, exclusively to the service of the spirit.

There is a wonderful satisfaction in making things, in looking over some concrete piece of work accomplished when the day ends. It is a satisfaction that belongs to the artisan. Is it not probable that many said that it was a great pity when Jesus gave up so useful a trade as His? To them He seemed to be but chasing the rainbow.

But to-day who possesses a single one of the things that young carpenter made? And did we possess them all what better off would the world be? Yet, on the other hand, how ill could this world afford to lose what He gave it by those three years of the service of the ideal.

In our age of things we so easily forget how large is the place of the ideal and the spiritual. Ever estimating our assets in the concrete, we fail to recognize that our real wealth lies in thoughts and things abstract. The permanent possessions of humanity are spiritual. Not acres nor armies, not banks nor business make a nation, but mighty, compelling ideals and traditions.

Jesus, Shakespeare, Browning, Lowell, Emerson left no goods and chattels, no bonds and mortgages; they left inspirations; they bequeathed ideals; living first for the soul, their souls survive and remain to us all. The truly great who still stand after the test of the years are those who have lived for the spirit.

This is as true of the worker and the warrior as of the philosopher and poet. All were inspired by glowing visions; they set their affections on things above the trifles for which we struggle and spend ourselves. They endured as seeing glories to us invisible; therefore their names endure.

The great undertakings of our own day are possible only under spiritual inspirations. No rewards of money only can induce a man to steadfastly conduct affairs of great moment and enterprise; he is buoyed up by a great hope; often the very greatness of the task and the sense of serving great ends carry him on; always he sees the worth in the ideal rather than the wage.

We must learn to measure life with the sense of the infinite. We must not think that a man has failed because he has not left burdened warehouses and bonds. We must cease to think that we can tell whether work be high or lowly by the size of the wage. We need eyes to see the glory of the least act in the light of the glowing motive.

A new estimate is placed on each act when it is measured not by bread alone but by the things of the soul. The mother's care of the children; the father's steady humble toil for them, the faithful watching over the sick, the ministry of the lowly, all have a new glory in the light of the love that leads the way and the spirit that guides those who do the least of these things.

We need to learn for ourselves what is the work that endures. It is a good thing to lay a course of bricks so that it shall be true, but of greater value to the world than the wall that stands firm is the spirit that forces the man to build aright. No man can do even this without an ideal set in his heart, and when the wall shall have fallen the world shall still be enriched by his ideal.

Too many of us are fretting because we are not getting on in the world. Seeing the apparent ease with which some acquire fortune, we become discontented with our small gains. We talk as though fortunes and follies, money and lands were the only things worth while. Yet we know better, for we all find our real joys in other things.

THE BREAD OF LIFE

There are lives that have bread in abundance and yet are starved; with barns and warehouses filled, with shelves and larders laden they are empty and hungry. No man need envy them; their feverish, restless whirl in the dust of publicity is but the search for a satisfaction never to be found in things. They are called rich in a world where no others are more truly, pitiably poor; having all, they are yet lacking in all because they have neglected the things within.

The abundance of bread is the cause of many a man's deeper hunger. Having known nothing of the discipline that develops life's hidden sources of satisfaction, nothing of the struggle in which deep calls unto deep and the true life finds itself, he spends his days seeking to satisfy his soul with furniture, with houses and lands, with yachts and merchandise, seeking to feed his heart on things, a process of less promise and reason than feeding a snapping turtle on thoughts.

It takes many of us altogether too long to learn that you cannot find satisfaction so long as you leave the soul out of your reckoning. If the heart be empty the life cannot be filled. The flow must cease at the faucet if the fountains go dry. The prime, the elemental necessities of our being are for the life rather than the body, its house. But, alas, how often out of the marble edifice issues the poor emaciated inmate, how out of the life having many things comes that which amounts to nothing.

The essential things are not often those which most readily strike our blunt senses. We see the shell first. To the undeveloped mind the material is all there is. But looking deeper into life there comes an awakening to the fact and the significance of the spiritual, the feeling that the reason, the emotions, the joys and pains that have nothing to do with things, the ties that knit one to the infinite, all constitute the permanent elements of life.

Because man is a spirit his life never can consist wholly in things; he must come into his heritage of the soul wealth of all the ages; he must reach out, though often as in the dark, until across the void there come voices, the sages and the seers, the prophets, and the poets speaking the language of the soul. In these he finds his food nor can his deeper hunger be assuaged until it thus is fed.

Because man is a spirit and gradually is coming into the dominant spirit life in which things shall count for less and thought and character for more, he seeks after his own kind. The deeps of life have their relationships. The spirit of man cries out after the father of spirits. By whatever name men have called the most high they ever have sought after Him, the eternal, who would be one with them in soul, in all that is essential and abiding in being.

Every religion, every philosophy, every endeavour after character and truth is but the cry of humanity for word with God. Hearing His word on any lip the heart of man answers with joy. The words of eternal truth have been the food of the great in all ages. Fainting in the fight the message from the unseen, the echo of everlasting verities, has revived their spirits; they have fought the fight that despises things and seeks truth.

Who would not exchange a mess of pottage for the benediction from a father's lips? Who is so dead he no longer finds more satisfaction in truth and love and beauty than in food or furniture? And why are we so foolish as to seek to satisfy ourselves with things that perish, while down to the least blade of creation earth is laden with unfading riches and God is everywhere?

If we might but learn this lesson, we people of the laden hand and the empty heart, that since life is more than digestion and man more than beast or machine, since determining all is the spiritual world, they only are wise who set first things first, who use the garnered experience of the past and the opportunities of the present to the enriching of the soul, who listen among all the voices of time for the words that proceed from the lips of Him who inhabiteth eternity.

LIFE'S UNVARYING VALUES

Life is the business of learning to use things as tools, the real as the servant of the ideal, to make conditions even better that character may grow the more, to serve in the making of things and the enduring of things under the inspiration of the full and glorious purpose of life, the realizing of the best for ourselves, the rendering of our best to others.

Only an age that has lost both heart and intellect--the divinely given measuring rods of life--will think of estimating a life by the money measure. It is a shallow world that knows a man as soon as and only when it has scheduled his marketable assets; nor is it a happy augury for a nation when it acquires the habit of estimating its men by the length of the catalogues of their possessions.

A period of outer prosperity is always in danger of being one of inner paralysis. Luxury is a foe to life. Character does not develop freely, largely, beautifully in an atmosphere of commercialism. A moral decline that but presages enduring disaster is sure to succeed the supremacy of the market.

The great danger is that we shall set the tools of life before its work, that we shall make life serve our business or our ambitions instead of causing ambitions, activities, and opportunities all to contribute to the deepening, enriching, and strengthening of the life itself. In the details of making a living it is easy to lose sight of the prime thing, the life; it is easy to forget that the great question is not, what have you? but, what are you?

Life cannot consist in things any more than silk can consist of shuttles, or pictures of brushes and palettes. Life is both process and product; but things and fame and power are no more than the tools and machinery serving to perfect the product. Life must consist in thoughts, experiences, motives, ideals--in a word, in character. A man's life is what he is.

But what a man is will depend on what he does with the things he has or may have. Let him once set the possession of things as his loftiest ideal, let this avarice of things enter the heart and speedily the love of the good will leave. To that god all honour, all truth loving, all gentleness and humanity are sacrificed. When possession becomes life's ruling passion it doesn't take long for principle to be forgotten.

The danger to-day is not that our people will fail in the world's contests because they lack either money, mind, or muscle. We are in little danger from illiteracy or from business incompetency; but we are in danger from moral paralysis, due to undue pressure on the money nerve. We have talked before the youth in the home and amongst ourselves on the street as though the only thing worth living for was money, as though they alone were great who had it and they only to be despised who had it not.

The danger is neither in our market, our commerce, nor our laws; the danger is in our own hearts. No matter how world-potent our merchandise, how marvellous our mechanical and material powers, how brilliant our business strategy, all will not avail to silence the voice, "Thou fool, this night thy soul is required of thee." Then whose shall these things be?

We need, not fewer things, not the return to an age of poverty or dreary destitution; we need more power over things; to let the man, so long buried beneath the money and the lands and houses, come to the top; to set ourselves over our things; to make them serve us, minister to our lives and our purposes in living.

There must be an elevation of standards, the institution of new valuations, clearer, nobler conceptions of what living means. Boys and girls must be taught from the beginning that life is more than self-serving, more than fame or glory; it is the service of humanity. A passion for humanity will cure the passion for gold, will teach the true value of life as something that only the infinite can estimate and will give to the heart those true riches that do not tarnish and that cannot be stolen.

II

Invisible Allies

_More Than a Fighting Chance_ _The Unseen Hand_ _The One in the Midst_

_Logic may illumine, but love leads._

_The religion that produces no sunshine is all moonshine._

_Imaginary evils have more than imaginary effects._

_He who lays out each day with prayer leaves it with praise._

_Light from above is for the path below._

_Singing of heaven gives no certainty of singing in heaven._

_It is better to have your bank in heaven than your heaven in a bank._

_The burdens of earth demand that our hearts be nourished with the bread of heaven._

_There are too many hungry for love for any ever to talk of suffering from loneliness._

_The man who lives with God does not have to advertise the fact._

II

MOKE THAN A FIGHTING CHANCE

Who has not cried out, in haste but still in anguish: "Alas! All things are against me; foes are many and friends there are none!" The roads to pessimism are many; but surely this is the shortest one, to get to think that life is but a conflict waged single-handed against great odds, a long story of struggle, difficulties, pains, disappointments, temptations, failures, wounds, ending only in death.

Even though you escape that chronic jaundiced view of life there are seasons of depression when it seems easy to get out of bed on the wrong side and to plow all day into stumps instead of in the good, clear ground. Ever we need the vision that Elisha of old gave to his young man, to see the hills about us alive with our allies. Otherwise it is easy to conclude the fates fight against us.

How slight is the evidence on which men base their gloomy conclusions! The pessimist always argues from a single instance to a general law. If he strikes a poor peach on top he throws the whole basket away--or sells them as soon as he can. He insists on sitting square on the cactus bunch when there is only one on the whole bench-land. He then becomes an authority on cactus. If he can discover a few foes on the horizon he is blind to a regiment of friends close at hand.

But the seers, our poets and teachers, have a wider vision; they seek the glory rather than the gloom and they tell us that every man has more friends than foes. This is the song of those who told us long ago of Providence, the one who backs a man up and fights on his side and furnishes him in the hour of need. This is the song of Lowell, Tennyson, Whittier, and Browning. Life is not a lone-handed fight against unnumbered foes; it is not a losing fight to any who will fight it well.

Every force in this world works with the man who seeks the good. This is a right world and only he who fights the right faces the unconquerable. A man may meet rebuffs, battle's tides may sweep back and forth, but in the end, as it has ever been in all the long story of man's conflict with nature, so in the conflict with every other foe, he is bound to win. This is as true in the individual life of every fighter as nature and history show it to be in universal life.

On our side there is the great world of the unseen. Little do we know of it, but still that little gives us confidence to believe it is peopled with our allies. Our fairest hopes of good angels may be delusions as to details, but they are essentially true, being born of an eternal verity.

The gospel of good hope declares there is One over all, the friend of all; greater is He that is with you than any against you; greater is He than your temptations, your adversaries, your difficulties, and your sorrows. This was what the great Teacher came to tell men, that God was on their side, seeking to help them, loving, caring, coöperating, leading them into the life of victory over every enemy.

Let a man face life in this confidence and he is invincible. He goes forth and an unseen army goes with him. He gains the seer's vision to see even the plotting of the enemy and the forces that fight against him all working for his good. From many combats he gains strength for the decisive struggle. All things work together for good. He serves the right, the truth, the things that are eternal; he fights for character, for manhood, and the good; and the eternal forces that rule the universe fight by his side. He beholds the hills full of the hosts of heaven; though he has no time to enjoy the vision he knows they are there, his allies, his assurance of ultimate victory.

THE UNSEEN HAND

The mightiest and the eternal forces fight ever on the side of the right. True, things do not always look that way. Sometimes Napoleon's sneer about God being on the side of the largest battalions seems to have truth in it. But ere long we see the large battalions swept away before the strange, unaccountable, and irresistible power of an insignificant body having truth and God on its side.

The man who takes up the struggle for truth, who puts his hand to the sword for the oppressed, for the right, finds himself holding a two-handled weapon, and if he grasps firmly the one hilt it is as though there were an omnipotent hand grasping the other. He who fights worthily, in fitting battle, never fights alone.

It is not that some omnipotent person steps down from a throne in the heavens and plunges into the battle; it is that every time a man steps out for right and truth he places himself in accord with eternal spiritual forces that give themselves to him and his work. It is not that God comes to fight for a man so much as that a man finds himself fighting beside God; entering this battle, he sees that where he thought none had been serving heaven had long been waging the contest.

It is so easy, like old Elijah, to think that you alone are left to witness for truth, to feel the loneliness of standing for things noble and worthy, to become oppressed with the hopelessness of the minority in which you find yourself. When real and concrete things press upon us and their uproar is in our ears we become deaf and blind to the greater forces that from the beginning of time have been working for the best.

Every great reform has looked like a losing movement; it has begun with most insignificant minorities; it has met with violent and well-organized opposition; its supporters have often been faint-hearted, and yet ultimately it has overcome always. As men have fought on they have found an unseen hand grasping the sword beside theirs.

We all need this sense of God with us, helping us in our lives. This gives courage and confidence. It does not mean weak reliance upon heaven to do things for us; it means entering on the things that look impossible because we know that, if they are right, every great force in the universe will coöperate with us.

This is the fine sense in which the human enters into partnership with the heavenly. This determines whether we may call our work divine or not. It is to be judged, not by whether it is pleasant or looks respectable, but by whether it is the work in which we know the Lord of all can lay His hand to the tool or weapon alongside of our hands.

With a consciousness like this, one attempts anything. The practical question is not, "Can this be done?" but "Ought this to be done?" "Is it such a task as will enlist the coöperation of the eternal spirit of truth and right?" With the cry of Gideon on their lips, men have fared forth facing fearful odds; their hands have fallen from their swords, but the unseen hand has carried them on until the cause has won.

The Almighty, who would have love and peace and righteousness to prevail, needs your hand for His sword; the sword of the Lord is vain without Gideon. Ideals and spiritual forces may exist, but men must be their realizations, their visible hands. God's work waits for you to put your hand to the sword; you will find His already there.