Patience

What is most to be envied in really religious people of the earlier type is their intellectual and moral peace.  They had obtained certain convictions, a certain conception of the Universe, by which they could live.  Their horizon may have been encompassed with darkness; experience sometimes contradicted their faith, but they trusted—nay, they knew—that the opposition was not real and that the truths were not to be shaken.  Their conduct was marked by a corresponding unity.  They determined once for all that there were rules which had to be obeyed, and when any particular case arose it was not judged according to the caprice of the moment, but by statute.

We, on the other hand, can only doubt.  So far as those subjects are concerned on which we are most anxious to be informed, we are sure of nothing.  What we have to do is to accept the facts and wait.  We must take care not to deny beauty and love because we are forced also to admit ugliness and hatred.  Let us yield ourselves up utterly to the magnificence and tenderness of the sunrise, though the East End of London lies over the horizon.  That very same Power, and it is no other, which blasts a country with the cholera or drives the best of us to madness has put the smile in a child’s face and is the parent of Love.  It is curious, too, that the curse seems in no way to qualify the blessing.  The sweetness and majesty of Nature are so exquisite, so pure, that when they are before us we cannot imagine they could be better if they proceeded from an omnipotently merciful Being and no pestilence had ever been known.  We must not worry ourselves with attempts at reconciliation.  We must be satisfied with a hint here and there, with a ray of sunshine at our feet, and we must do what we can to make the best of what we possess.  Hints and sunshine will not be wanting, and science, which was once considered to be the enemy of religion, is dissolving by its later discoveries the old gross materialism, the source of so much despair.

The conduct of life is more important than speculation, but the lives of most of us are regulated by no principle whatever.  We read our Bible, Thomas à Kempis, and Bunyan, and we are persuaded that our salvation lies in the perpetual struggle of the higher against the lower self, the spirit against the flesh, and that the success of the flesh is damnation.  We take down Horace and Rabelais and we admit that the body also has its claims.  We have no power to dominate both sets of books, and consequently they supersede one another alternately.  Perhaps life is too large for any code we can as yet frame, and the dissolution of all codes, the fluid, unstable condition of which we complain, may be a necessary antecedent of new and more lasting combinations.  One thing is certain, that there is not a single code now in existence which is not false; that the graduation of the vices and virtues is wrong, and that in the future it will be altered.  We must not hand ourselves over to a despotism with no Divine right, even if there be a risk of anarchy.  In the determination of our own action, and in our criticism of other people, we must use the whole of ourselves and not mere fragments.  If we do this we need not fear.  We may suppose we are in danger because the stone tables of the Decalogue have gone to dust, but it is more dangerous to attempt to control men by fictions.  Better no chart whatever than one which shows no actually existing perils, but warns us against Scylla, Charybdis, and the Cyclops.  If we are perfectly honest with ourselves we shall not find it difficult to settle whether we ought to do this or that particular thing, and we may be content.  The new legislation will come naturally at the appointed time, and it is not impossible to live while it is on the way.