“It is with certain Good Qualities as with the Senses; those who are entirely deprived of them, can neither appreciate nor comprehend them.”—La Rochefoucauld. There are some natures like the orange-tree, upon which the blossom and fruit meet at the same time. In their capacity for joy they receive more from one glowing, self-forgetting impulse, than colder and more calculating persons are able to gather in a lifetime. With such are generally permitted on earth only glimpses of ecstatic happiness, far-off sights of their promised land, the eternal future, through the never ending ages of which their affections and intellect shall steadily advance towards infinite Love and Wisdom, each emotion a new bliss, and each thought a deeper current from the infinitude of divine knowledge.
Who are those that realize their hopes on earth; here find their homes, content with the present and its material gifts, without heart-yearnings for deeper, truer, and more satisfying affections; without soul-strivings to penetrate the mysterious Beyond? Who are such? Through the length and breadth of every land myriads respond, “Give us a sufficiency of treasure on earth, and we will not seek to scale[149] heaven. Our loves, our lands, our gold and our silver, our mistresses, our wives and our children; our well-garnished tables and our fine houses; the riches for which our hands and minds labor, and which our hearts covet; all that we can see, feel, weigh and compare; the honors by which we are exalted above our neighbors, the fame by which our names are in the world’s mouths; these are our desires. Give us abundantly of these that we may eat, drink, and be merry, and we ask not for more. This earth is good enough for us.”
Do they have their reward? Yea, verily! as they sow, so they reap. Few there are who steadily give themselves to the pursuit of these desires, but receive houses and lands, honor and fame, meats and drinks, handsome women or fine men, such children as such parentage can give birth to, stocks in all banks but that of Eternity. There is no lack of wealth like this to the earnest seeker.
God is a provident father. He has created everything good of its kind, and bestowed self-will upon man that he might himself elect his manner of life. The standard of enjoyment for his own soul is at his own option, whether he will discipline it here for its higher good hereafter, or whether he will enjoy here without reference to that hereafter, the knowledge of which is suggested in some way or other to all men. Man is highly distinguished. For is not creation made for him? There is neither gift nor discipline but can be made subservient to his moral growth; to his conquest of the kingdom of heaven. There is nothing, also, but[150] may be transformed by sensual, selfish, short sighted desire, by his weaknesses or passions; by his false logic or falser ambition, into a morass of error, into which he will ever plunge deeper and deeper, unless he resolutely bends his steps towards the firm land of hope and faith that is never wholly shut out of the gloomiest horizon.
Just in proportion to the quality of the treasure we seek, is the degree of enjoyment that springs from its realization. All that belongs solely to earth has incorporated with it change, decay, satiety, fear, and care. These are warning angels, to urge the spirit to temperance, that it may not mar its capacity for nobler enjoyments. As they are disregarded, and man seeks only that which is perishable, he finds his pleasures pall and his appetites wane. Abuse extinguishes gratification. Want of aspiration towards the perfect development of all man’s faculties leaves him a monotonous, abdominal animal, content with husks wherewith to fill his belly. There is no increase in store for him, because he can conceive of nothing better than what his feeble hands or vainglorious mind have gathered around him. Nature reads to him no moral lesson, because he uses her only as a slave, to administer to his material wants. He sees not that there is in all things a deeper principle than mere use for the body.
“A primrose by a river’s brim—
A yellow primrose is to him,
And it is nothing more.”
The vital element that pervades all nature, uniting[151] it in a chain of harmonious progression, the eternal laws of which even his stolid spirit cannot ultimately avoid, however much he now seeks to bury it beneath the grosser particles of matter, escapes his perception. Guided only by his finite, perishable sensorium, in vain attempt to grasp at once the entire treasure, he often plunges his suicidal knife into the ovary which daily laid him a golden egg. Thus man destroys his own birthright through brutal ignorance and sensual impatience. The truly wise count all things at their right worth, and find a sympathy in every natural object, in varied degree, according as it speaks to them the thought of a common Creator, and connects them in one common end. They have, therefore, a double enjoyment. First, that which springs from the right material use of every object or sense; secondly, the language which both speak to them of hope and faith in more refined enjoyments and more perfect conditions of existence. The very trials and incompleteness of present experiences are so many testimonies of future and nobler realizations. Thus God speaks as kindly through the so-called evils and disappointments of life, as through the more readily distinguished blessings; for if they see in the latter hope and happiness, so in the former they distinguish that chastening which, through paternal discipline, seeks to guide and strengthen.
Few situations could be more trying to moral firmness than the circumstances under which we left Olmedo and Beatriz. Free from all exte............