Education and the Higher Life | Page 2

our lives. What in these
growing days we yearn for with all our being, is heaped upon us in old
age. All important, therefore, is the choice of an ideal; for this more
than rules or precepts will determine what we are to become. The love
of the best is twin-born with the soul. What is the best? What is the
worthiest life-aim? It must be something which is within the reach of
every one, as Nature's best gifts--air and sunshine and water--belong to
all. What only the few can attain, cannot be life's real end or the highest
good. The best is not far removed from any one of us, but is alike near
to the poor and the rich, to the learned and the ignorant, to the shepherd
and the king, and only the best can give to the soul repose and
contentment. What then is the true life-ideal? Recalling to mind the
thoughts and theories of many men, I can find nothing better than this,
"Seek ye first the kingdom of God." "Love not pleasure," says Carlyle,
"love God. This is the everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is
solved; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him."
To the high and aspiring heart of youth, fame, honor, glory, appeal with
such irresistible power, and appear clad in forms so beautiful, that at a
time of life when all of us are unreal in our sentiments and crude in our
opinions, they are often mistaken for the best. But fame is good only in
so far as it gives power for good. For the rest, it is nominal. They who
have deserved it care not for it. A great soul is above all praise and
dispraise of men, which are ever given ignorantly and without fine
discernment. The popular breath, even when winnowed by the winds of
centuries, is hardly pure.
And then fame cannot be the good of which I speak, for only a very
few can even hope for it. To nearly all, the gifts which make it possible
are denied; and to others, the opportunities. Many, indeed, love and win
notoriety, but such as they need not detain us here. A lower race of
youth, in whom the blood is warmer than the soul, think pleasure life's
best gift, and are content to let occasion die, while they revel in the
elysium of the senses. But to make pleasure an end is to thwart one's
purpose, for joy is good only when it comes unbidden. The pleasure we
seek begins already to pall. It is good, indeed, if it come as refreshment
to the weary, solace to the heavy-hearted, and rest to the careworn; but

if sought for its own sake, it is "the honey of poison flowers and all the
measureless ill." Only the young, or the depraved, can believe that to
live for pleasure is not to be foreordained to misery. Whoso loves God
or freedom or growth of mind or strength of heart, feels that pleasure is
his foe.
"A king of feasts and flowers, and wine and revel, And love and mirth,
was never King of glory."
Of money, as the end or ideal of life, it should not be necessary to
speak. As a fine contempt for life, a willingness to throw it away in
defence of any just cause or noble opinion, is one of the privileges of
youth, so the generous heart of the young holds cheap the material
comforts which money procures. To be young is to be free, to be able
to live anywhere on land or sea, in the midst of deserts or among
strange people; is to be able to fit the mind and body to all
circumstance, and to rise almost above Nature's iron law. He who is
impelled by this high and heavenly spirit will dream of flying and not
of hobbling through life on golden crutches. Let the feeble and the old
put their trust in money; but where there is strength and youth, the soul
should be our guide.
And yet the very law and movement of our whole social life seem to
point to riches as the chief good.
"What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these?
Every door is barred with gold, and opens but to golden keys."
Money is the god in whom we put our trust, to whom instinctively we
pay homage. We believe that the rich are fortunate, are happy, that the
best of life has been given to them. We have faith in the power of
money, in its sovereign efficacy to save us not only from beggary, from
sneers and insults, but we believe that it can transform us, and take
away the poverty of mind, the