Levels of Living | Page 2

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