Part 16

"Can the divine will err?" questions Pere De Caussade. "Can anything that it sends be amiss? But I have this to do; I need such a thing; I have been deprived of the necessary means; that man thwarts me in such good works; this illness overtakes me when I most need my health."

The answer is: "No; the will of God is all that is absolutely necessary to you, therefore you do not need what He withholds from you—you lack nothing. If you could read aright these things which you call accidents, disappointments, misfortunes, contradictions, which you find unreasonable, untimely, you would blush with confusion, but you do not reflect that all these things are simply the will of God."

The life of faith, that perfect faith which is perfect peace, consists in this ever-present recognition, and, tested by its results,—tested by the absolute peace and the larger energy which is liberated by the cheerful and believing rather than the sad and distrusting state of mind,—tried by all those tests of actual experience, this attitude of perfect faith is the attitude most favorable to progress and achievement.

[Sidenote: A Profound Experience.]

Renunciation is a word that stands for a great experience, and it is, perhaps, too often conceived of as relating to the material rather than to the spiritual life. The question as to whether one shall give up this or that article, or practice, during Lent, for instance, is sometimes in the air,—always with the saving clause that the renunciation is merely temporal, and if given up for forty days in the year, is to be fully enjoyed and revelled in on the other three hundred and twenty-five,—a clause that degrades a religious theory to a purely material plane. If it is better for one's command of his higher powers not to take coffee, for instance, during Lent, then it is better not to take it for the greater proportion of the year aside from Lent. If it is better to be gentle, tolerant, forgiving, and generous for forty days, it is still better to be so for three hundred and sixty-five days. There is really something absolutely absurd as well as repellent in the apparent acceptation that to live the higher, sweeter, fuller, nobler life is a penitential affair,—to be endured but not enjoyed, and limited chiefly to Lenten periods and the special holy days of the Christian Church. For religion is the life, the continual life of every hour and moment, and consists in the quality of that constant life. The offices of religion, the ceremonial forms, are quite another matter. They have their place, and a most important one. The gathering together at stated hours and periods for the devotions of religious worship is so great an aid to the Christian life as well to be ranked indispensable to the community and the nation; and while it is true that the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life, yet the letter, rightly interpreted, is filled with the Spirit, and conveys it to us. The cry of certain reformers (?) that society has outgrown the Church, has little claim to consideration, for the Church itself is a progressive institution, and moves forward and enlarges itself with still larger revelations of the Divine Truth. The great opportunities for renunciation come not in the guise of temporal and material things; whether one shall eat or drink this thing or the other; whether he shall forego the theatre, or deprive himself of music, or array himself in sackcloth and ashes, or in purple and fine linen. The real question comes in the guise of the spiritual problems.

One comes to know, for instance, of an act of his neighbor's which is really one of treachery and betrayal of trust. Circumstances arise in which he could put his finger upon the evidential chain revealing this lapse from integrity. Shall he do it? Perhaps in the spiritual vista three ways open to him. The one would be to reveal the affair publicly; but this is crude if not cruel, and to touch the spring that precipitates discord and controversy is hardly less disastrous than to precipitate war. Discord only engenders evil, and it never produces good results. Evil things must, of course, be resisted, and combat inevitably results,—but discord for the sake of revealing some one's inadvertences is invariably disastrous as well as morally wrong. Then there is the method of seeking the person directly, and laying before him his error, thus giving him the opportunity of any extenuating explanation, and protecting his reputation in the genuineness of true friendship, from the world. And this course is often the wisest as well as the noblest, and really requires more heroism than the former one. Yet, after these there is still another, and it is absolutely the most potent, the most successful in its results, the most truly uplifting for all concerned. Has one been wronged, or misrepresented, or in any way injured? Let him commit it all, unreservedly, to the very immediate, the very real, the infinitely potent power of the divine world. Let him, as his own form of personal renunciation, absolutely forgive whatever annoyance or injury he has received, and let him pray, not for any vengeance against the wrong-doer, but that the Divine Love and Light would so envelop and direct the one who has erred as to enable him to free his own spirit from whatever fault he had been led into, and to rise into such regions of spiritual life that never again would he repeat it. How beautiful is the counsel given by Whittier:—

"My heart was heavy, for its trust had been Abused, its kindness answered with foul wrong. So, turning gloomily from my fellow-men, One summer Sabbath day I strolled among The green mounds of the village burial-place; Where, pondering how all human love and hate Find one sad level, and how, soon or late, Wronged and wrong-doer, each with meekened face, And cold hands folded over a still heart, Pass the green threshold of our common grave, Whither all footsteps tend, whence none depart, Awed for myself, and pitying my race, Our common sorrow, like a mighty wave, Swept all my pride away, and trembling I forgave!"

Forgiveness,—forgiveness in love, and in readiness to aid and to rejoice in all future success of the one who had erred,—is not this the highest renunciation of the Christian life? Is it not this which is set before us in the progress of spirituality? Mutual forgiveness, mutual aid, mutual trust and sustaining, realizing that we all err and need to be forgiven even as we need to forgive,—shall we not in these touch the blessedness of sacrifice rather than its barren husk, and find in it that "soul of happiness" which should be the perpetual atmosphere of the higher life? For "this is the life eternal—to know Thee, the only true God," and humanity knows God just in proportion to the degree in which it is able to partake of the Divine Spirit and translate its religious aspiration into practical guidance for the affairs of the day.

Probably the one solution of the problem of life in all its intricacies and its perplexing and baffling experiences lies in that trust in God which is the soul's absolute surrender to the Divine will. Even in this solution, however, perplexities not unfrequently lie, from the fact that it is not always easy to separate that inevitableness which runs through human affairs from the results that we, ourselves, produce by our own series of choices and our habitual currents of thought. "A good will has nothing to fear," says Pere De Caussade; "it can but fall under that all-powerful hand which guides and sustains it in all its wanderings. It is this divine Hand which draws it toward the goal when it has wandered therefrom, which restores it to the path. The work of the divine action is not in proportion to the capacity of a simple, holy soul, but to her purity of intention; nor does it correspond to the means she adopts, the projects she forms, the counsel she follows. The soul may err in all these, and this not rarely happens; but with a good will and pure intention she can never be misled. When God sees this good disposition He overlooks all the rest, and accepts as done what the soul would assuredly do if circumstances seconded her good will."

Nevertheless, as things go in this world, the good will may encounter the most peculiarly trying experiences. The most entire and absolute devotion of thought and interest, of love, friendship, regard,—whatever may be,—pouring itself out lavishly, asking nothing but to give of the best the soul conceives, meets the experience of total indifference in return. Had it given coldness instead of ardent regard, selfish scheming instead of infinite and vital interest and absorbing devotion, the result could not be less devoid of response or recognition. Nor is this, perhaps, as life goes, an exceptional experience, though the multiplication of instances does not tend to make any single one less bitter or less tragically sad. Loss is common, but that statistical truth does not make one's own losses less disastrous or less difficult to bear.

Yet, accepting all these experiences that are encountered as absolute facts in life, facts from which there is no appeal, and for which, alas, there is no mitigation, what remains? One may feel as if he would gladly give up the whole business of trying to live at all, but that is not a matter that is optional with the individual. One has to live out his appointed days in this phase of being, and it is only the person of defective intellect as well as defective moral power who will not take the gift of life and make the best—not the worst—of it. Mr. Longfellow's familiar lines,

"Not enjoyment and not sorrow Is our destined end or way; But to act, that each to-morrow Find us further than to-day,"

have often been pronounced trite, but they contain a vital philosophy. It is not enjoyment, or the reverse, which is the aim; but development. And the culture of the soul lies in these mingled experiences; in the baffled efforts, the devotion that gives itself without return or response,—it lies in the doing and the giving, and not in the receiving. Nor does one fare onward uncompanioned by the friends and helpers unseen, as well as by those in this visible world.

"'Mortal,' they softly say, 'Peace to thy heart! We, too, yes, mortal, Have been as thou art,

Hope-lifted, doubt-depressed, Seeing in part; Tried, troubled, tempted, Sustained as thou art.'"

The spiritual faith and that courage and persistence of energy which is the fruition of faith,—and which are both results of the recognition and acceptance of the great truth so luminously revealed by Bishop Brooks when he says, "Jesus never treated his life as if it were a temporary deposit of the divine life on the earth, cut off and independent of its source; he always treated it as if it lived by its association with the Father's life, on which it rested,"—this faith and courage go forward to complete themselves in exhilaration, in firmness of purpose, and in actual achievement. One finds that he not only gains the strength of that which he overcomes, but that he gains a higher plane of life altogether, a more exalted view and a purer atmosphere by accepting cheerfully and lovingly the discipline of denial and limitation, and using the experience as a stepping-stone, and not as an obstacle to his endeavors. There are three ways of meeting the disappointments and denials that are—for the most part—somewhat inevitable to every human life: one of sheer despair, of the relinquishing of every effort, and, in the extreme degree of this feeling, resorting to the apparent extinction of life by suicide; the second, of resignation, that is still, however, a hopeless and passive and negative state, in which the man anchors himself to some mere platitudes of submission to the Divine Will, misunderstanding and misinterpreting and misapplying the great and sublime law of obedience and translating it into conditions of spiritual and mental inactivity that are only a degree less degrading than the cowardice and ignorance that rushes into suicide; and the third, of learning the great lesson involved in the disappointment. Submission to the Divine Will is all very well; it is one of the sublimest of the divine laws; but it is not fulfilled by a hopeless and inert evasion of all the duties and demands of life,—it is, instead, in its integrity and its deep significance, fulfilled by the joyful acceptance of the leading, the willing surrender that opens a still wider view and a still more vital faith in the divine wisdom.

Another way in which denial and defeat and thwarted desires or plans can be met is one still higher and greater, and is that path by which true spiritual advancement is made. This is, not despair and hopelessness because an apparently impassable wall arises across the pathway; not even mere content, and cordial or joyful submission however noble that attitude may be; but there is a loftier state in which the denial can be met; it is not merely an acceptance of God's manifest leading that is so informed with faith that it becomes ceaselessly joyful, but it is to even discern in limitation, in denial, new and sublime opportunities.

One's dearest hopes are suddenly, by circumstances and conditions entirely outside his control, totally cut off. What then? At that moment an entire world of new possibilities opens, and it rests with the man himself to develop these into something far greater than the scope of his former hope or expectation could reveal. He can bring to bear a power of spiritual energy that shall transform the very ill-fortune itself into one transcendently beautiful and even angelic. He can lift all the factors of his individual problem to the divine plane of love. For love is the spiritual alchemy,—not merely the love for friends and for those near and dear to us; not merely the love for those who are agreeable and winning and whose high qualities inspire it,—but love, love and good will for all. The command to love one's enemies is not an idle nor even an impossible one. The whole law—the whole philosophy, it may be—of life can be read in the counsel, "As ye have therefore opportunity, do good unto all men." Do good,—do the right thing, the kind, the generous thing, regardless of return (for which one usually cares little or not at all), or even of recognition (for which one usually cares a great deal), regardless of the recognition,—let the good be done. Let one, finding himself suddenly confronted by disaster or defeat, resolve: All that has been, every factor and every circumstance that has led up to this moment, shall be for good and never for evil. It shall be for good to each and all and every one involved in it. Even loss or sadness shall be transmuted into gain and joy on a higher than the mere earthly plane. For life "shall be kept open, that the Father's life may flow through it." Always may one realize the profound truth that "the going down of the walls between our life and our Lord's life, though it consisted of the failure of our dearest theories and the disappointment of our dearest plans,—that, too, could be music to us if through the breach we saw the hope that henceforth our life was to be one with His life, and His was to be ours."

Prayer, in its relation to God and the divine laws; its practical effect upon the immediate events of life, and its power to transform the spiritual self, is one of the great problems of the intellectual and the scientific as well as of the religious life. One day a prayer seems absolutely and undoubtedly answered,—the relation between the prayer and the fulfilment being too direct to admit of classing it under coincidence; and again the purpose that is made a continual supplication perhaps recedes from the realm of the possible to that of the impossible, and the more fervent the entreaty, the more absolute and hopeless seems the denial. By means of which, it may be, one learns a very high spiritual lesson,—that of not desiring any specific event or fulfilment, but of praying, instead, to be kept in harmony with the divine laws, to be enabled to make his life a means of aid and true service to others, and to think as little as possible about any special conditions for himself. "He that loseth his life shall find it," is the affirmation of a very deep philosophy as well as of sacred truth. To entirely emancipate one's mind from thoughts of himself, and to fill it with the inspiration and the sweetness and exhilaration of making his life a quest after every good, and an increasing means for service to humanity, is the only way to find it in the truest and largest sense. So, for the most part, the highest use of prayer is not to ask for the specific gift or event.

In a work entitled "Esoteric Christianity" by Annie Besant there is a chapter on prayer in which we find Mrs. Besant saying:—

"In the invisible world there exist many kinds of Intelligences, which come into relationship with man,—a veritable Jacob's ladder, on which the Angels of God ascend and descend, and above which stands the Lord Himself. Some of these Intelligences are mighty spiritual Powers, others are exceedingly limited beings, inferior in consciousness to man. This occult side of Nature is a fact recognized by all religions. All the world is filled with living things, invisible to fleshy eyes. The invisible worlds interpenetrate the visible, the crowds of intelligent beings throng round us on every side. Some of these are accessible to human requests and others are amenable to the human will. Christianity recognizes the existence of the higher classes of Intelligences under the general name of angels, and teaches that they are 'ministering spirits;' but what is their ministry, what the nature of their work, what their relationship to human beings?—all that was part of the instruction given in the Lesser Mysteries, as the actual communication with them was enjoyed in the Greater, but in modern days these truths have sunk into the background. For the Protestant the ministry of angels is little more than a phrase."

[Sidenote: The Law of Prayer.]

Mrs. Besant notes that it seems almost impossible for the ordinary student to discover the law according to which a prayer is or is not productive. "And the first thing necessary in seeking to understand this law," she says, "is to analyze prayer itself." Mrs. Besant classifies prayers as: (1) those which are for definite worldly advantages; (2) those which are for help in moral and intellectual difficulties, and for spiritual growth; and lastly, those which consist in meditation on, and adoration of, the Divine Perfection; and then we find her saying:—

"In addition to all these man is himself a constant creator of invisible beings, for the vibrations of his thoughts and desires create forms of subtle matter, the only life of which is the thought or the desire which ensouls them; he thus creates an army of invisible servants who range through the invisible worlds seeking to do his will. Yet, again, there are in the world human helpers, who work there in their subtle bodies while their physical bodies are sleeping, whose attentive ear may catch a cry for help. And to crown all, there is the ever-present, ever-conscious life of God Himself, potent and responsive at every point of his realm,—that all-pervading, all-embracing, all-sustaining Life of Love, in which we live and move. As naught that can give pleasure or pain can touch the human body without the sensory nerves carrying the message of its impact to the brain centres, so does every vibration in the universe, which is His body, touch the consciousness of God, and draw thence responsive action. Nerve cells, nerve threads, and muscular fibres may be the agents of feeling and moving, but it is the man who feels and acts; so may myriads of intelligences be the agents, but it is God who knows and answers. Nothing can be so small as not to affect that delicate omnipresent consciousness, nothing so vast as to transcend it."

In the most literal sense we live and move and have our being in the realm of spiritual forces. "Our life is hid with Christ in God." That assertion is no mere mystic phase, but a plain and direct assertion of an absolute spiritual truth. Our real life, all our significant action, is in the invisible realm, and the manifestation in the physical sphere is simply the results and effects of which the processes and causes are all in the ethereal world. Prayer, in all its many and varied phases, is simply activity on the spiritual side, and because of this it is the motor of life. It is the key to that intense form of energy which is the divine life, and its highest development is reached when the soul asks only for one thing,—the one that includes all others,—that of union with God.