Part 1 (1/2)
Making the Most of Life.
by J. R. Miller.
A WORD OF INTRODUCTION.
Alexander was accustomed to say; ”Philip of Macedon gave me life, but it was Aristotle who taught me how to make the most of life.”
To have the gift of life is a solemn thing. Life is G.o.d's most sacred trust. It is not ours to do with as we please; it must be accounted for, every particle, every power, every possibility of it.
These chapters are written with the purpose and hope of stimulating those who may read them to earnest and worthy living. If they seem urgent, if they present continually motives of thoughtfulness, if they dwell almost exclusively on the side of obligation and responsibility, if they make duty ever prominent and call to self-renunciation and self-sacrifice, leaving small s.p.a.ce for play, it is because life itself is really most serious, and because we must meet it seriously, recognizing its sacred meaning and girding ourselves for it with all earnestness and energy.
If this book shall teach any how to make the most of the life G.o.d has entrusted to them, that will be reward enough for the work of its preparation. To this service it is affectionately dedicated, in the name of Him who made the most of his blessed life by losing it in love's sacrifice, and who calls us also to die to self that we may live unto G.o.d.
J. R. M.
PHILADELPHIA.
MAKING THE MOST OF LIFE.
CHAPTER I.
MAKING THE MOST OF LIFE.
”Measure thy life by loss instead of gain; Not by the wine drunk, but the wine poured forth; For love's strength standeth in love's sacrifice, And whoso suffers most hath most to give.”
--_The Disciples._
According to our Lord's teaching, we can make the most of our life by losing it. He says that losing the life for his sake is saving it.
There is a lower self that must be trampled down and trampled to death by the higher self. The alabaster vase must be broken, that the ointment may flow out to fill the house. The grapes must be crushed, that there may be wine to drink. The wheat must be bruised, before it can become bread to feed hunger.
It is so in life. Whole, unbruised, unbroken men are of but little use. True living is really a succession of battles, in which the better triumphs over the worse, the spirit over the flesh. Until we cease to live for self, we have not begun to live at all.
We can never become truly useful and helpful to others until we have learned this lesson. One may live for self and yet do many pleasant things for others; but one's life can never become the great blessing to the world it was meant to be until the law of self-sacrifice has become its heart principle.
A great oak stands in the forest. It is beautiful in its majesty; it is ornamental; it casts a pleasant shade. Under its branches the children play; among its boughs the birds sing. One day the woodman comes with his axe, and the tree quivers in all its branches, under his st.u.r.dy blows. ”I am being destroyed,” it cries. So it seems, as the great tree crashes down to the ground. And the children are sad because they can play no more beneath the broad branches; the birds grieve because they can no more nest and sing amid the summer foliage.
But let us follow the tree's history. It is cut into boards, and built into a beautiful cottage, where human hearts find their happy nest. Or it is used in making a great organ which leads the wors.h.i.+p of a congregation. The losing of its life was the saving of it. It died that it might become deeply, truly useful.
The plates, cups, dishes, and vases which we use in our homes and on our tables, once lay as common clay in the earth, quiet and restful, but in no way doing good, serving man. Then came men with picks, and the clay was rudely torn out and plunged into a mortar and beaten and ground in a mill, then pressed, and then put into a furnace, and burned and burned, at last coming forth in beauty, and beginning its history of usefulness. It was apparently destroyed that it might begin to be of service.
A great church-building is going up, and the stones that are being laid on the walls are brought out of the dark quarry for this purpose. We can imagine them complaining, groaning, and repining, as the quarry men's drills and hammers struck them. They supposed they were being destroyed as they were torn out from the bed of rock where they had lain undisturbed for ages, and were cut into blocks, and lifted out, and then as they were chiselled and dressed into form. But they were being destroyed only that they might become useful. They become part of a new sanctuary, in which G.o.d is to be wors.h.i.+pped, where the Gospel will be preached, where penitent sinners will find the Christ-Saviour, where sorrowing ones will be comforted. Surely it was better that these stones should be torn out, even amid agony, and built into the wall of the church, than that they should have lain ages more, undisturbed in the dark quarry. They were saved from uselessness by being destroyed.
These are simple ill.u.s.trations of the law which applies also in human life. We must die to be useful--to be truly a blessing. Our Lord put this truth in a little parable, when he said that the seed must fall into the earth and die that it may bear fruit. Christ's own cross is the highest ill.u.s.tration of this. His friends said he wasted his precious life; but was that life wasted when Jesus was crucified?
George MacDonald in one of his little poems, with deep spiritual insight, presents this truth of the blessed gain of Christ's life through his sacrifice and death:--
”For three and thirty years, a living seed, A lonely germ, dropt on our waste world's side, Thy death and rising, thou didst calmly bide; Sore compa.s.sed by many a clinging weed Sprung from the fallow soil of evil and need; Hither and thither tossed, by friends denied; Pitied of goodness dull, and scorned of pride; Until at length was done the awful deed, And thou didst lie outworn in stony bower-- Three days asleep--oh, slumber G.o.dlike, brief, For Man of sorrows and acquaint with grief, Heaven's seed, Thou diedst, that out of thee might tower Aloft, with rooted stem and shadowy leaf Of all Humanity the crimson flower.”