Levels of Living | Page 3

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