nothing better to say to make men use their powers rightly than to
tell them that they will lose their powers some day, the answer will
always be, "Well, I will wait until that losing day comes before
I worry." If you tell a young man that his life is short, the old
bacchanalian answer is the first one, "Live while we live." You must
somehow get hold of that, you must persuade him that the true life now
is the holy life, that life, this same life that he prizes, ought to
breed humility and faith, not arrogance and pride, or else you
must expect to talk to the winds. It surely is important that the
conversion of the pride of life must come not by the putting-out of
life but by making it a source of humility instead of pride.
The humbleness of life. How can it come? By clearer and deeper
truthfulness to let us see what the real facts of the case are, that
is all; but that is very hard, so hard that it can be brought about by
no other than the Almighty Holy Ghost. Let me see that this physical
life of mine, having no true character of its own, is made to be a
great machinery for simply conducting the knowledge and the love of
God into my life; let all my study of the exquisite adaptations of
the physical organs for their work be sanctified with this idea, this
ever-pervading consciousness that eye and ear and hand are doors for
the knowledge and the love of Him to enter by, and that all their
marvelous mechanism is only the perfecting of hinges and bolt that He
may enter more impressively and lovingly and entirely; let me learn
that every bright taste or fine instinct or noble appetite is a ray of
sunlight, not the sun, is the projection into my life of some force
above, outside of me, which I can find only by climbing back along the
ray that is projected, up to it; let me see all animal life a
study and preparation for this final life of man, sensations and
perceptions, growing clearer and clearer as we rise in the scale until
in man they are fit to convey this knowledge which man alone can have,