Chapter VI: Part 6

Surely everything is ordered, and ordered for our true interests. It would be fearful to think that anything, however small in appearance, could happen to us without the will of God. If you admit the idea of chance or unmeaning events anywhere, the whole organisation of our life in God is broken to pieces. We are we don't know where, unless we rest in God and give Him praise for all things. We must trust in Him whether he sends us joy or sorrow. If he sends us joy let us be careful. Happiness is often sent to try us, and is by no means a proof of our having deserved it. Nor is sorrow always a sign of God's displeasure, but frequently, nay always, of His love and compassion. We must each interpret our life as best we can, but we must be sure that its deepest purpose is to bring us back to God through Christ. Death is a condition of our life on earth, it brings the creature back to its Creator. The creature groans at the sight of death, but God will not forsake us at the last, He who has never forsaken us from the first breath of our life on earth. If it is His will we may live to serve Him here on earth for many happy years to come. If He takes either of us away, His name be praised. We live in the shadow of death, but that shadow should not darken the brightness of our life. It is the shadow of the hand of our God and Father, and the earnest of a higher, brighter life hereafter. Our Father in heaven loves us more than any husband can love his wife, or any mother her child. His hand can never hurt us, so let us hope and trust always.

_Life._

Our lives are in the hands of a Father, who knows what is best for all of us. Death is painful to the creature, but in God there is no death, no dying; dying belongs to life, and is only a passage to a more perfect world into which we all go when God calls us. When one's happiness is perfect, then the thought of death often frightens one, but even that is conquered by the feeling and the faith that all is best as it is, and that God loves us more than even a father and mother can love us. It is a beautiful world in which we live, but it is only beautiful and only really our home when we feel the nearness of God at each moment and lean on Him and trust in His love.... When the hour of parting comes, we know that love never dies, and that God who bound us closely together in this life will bring us together where there is no more parting.

_MS._

Our meeting here on earth with those we loved was not our doing. We did not select our father and mother, and sisters and brothers. We did not even explore the whole world to discover our friends. They too were more or less given us, the choice was given us, and the sphere of choice was determined and limited. Hence we seem to have a right to say that they were meant for us, and we for them, and unless we believe in accident, who is there by whose will alone they could have been meant for us? Hence, if they were meant for us once by a Divine, not by our own will, that will can never change, and we have a right to hope and even to believe that _what has been will be_, and that we shall again meet and love those whom we met and loved here. This is faith, and this is comfort, but it is greater faith, and greater comfort still, if we close our eyes in the firm conviction that whatever will be, will be best for us.

_MS._

WONDER

There are few sensations more pleasant than that of wondering. We have all experienced it in childhood, in youth, in manhood, and we may hope that even in our old age this affection of the mind will not entirely pass away. If we analyse this feeling of wonder carefully, we shall find that it consists of two elements. What we mean by wondering is not only that we are startled or stunned--that I should call the merely passive element of wonder. When we say 'I wonder' we confess that we are taken aback, but there is a secret satisfaction mixed up with our feeling of surprise, a kind of hope, nay, almost of certainty, that sooner or later the wonder will cease, that our senses or our mind will recover, will grapple with these novel expressions or experiences, grasp them, it may be, know them, and finally triumph over them. In fact we wonder at the riddles of nature, whether animate or inanimate, with a firm conviction that there is a solution to them all, even though we ourselves may not be able to find it. Wonder, no doubt, arises from ignorance, but from a peculiar kind of ignorance, from what might be called a fertile ignorance; an ignorance which, if we look back at the history of most of our sciences, will be found to have been the mother of all human knowledge.

_Chips._

WORDS

What people call 'mere words' are in truth the monuments of the fiercest intellectual battles; triumphant arches of the grandest victories won by the intellect of man. When man had formed names for body and soul, for father and mother, and not till then, did the first art of human history begin. Not till there were names for right and wrong, for God and man, could there be anything worthy of the name of human society. Every new word was a discovery, and these early discoveries, if but properly understood, are more important to us than the greatest conquests of the kings of Egypt and Babylon. Not one of our greatest explorers has unearthed more splendid palaces, than the etymologist. Every word is the palace of a human thought, and in scientific etymology we possess the charm with which to call these ancient thoughts back to life.

_Chips._

Cannot a concept exist without a word? Certainly not, though in order to meet every possible objection we may say that no concept can exist without a sign, whether it be a word or anything else. And if it is asked whether the concept exists first, and the sign comes afterwards, I should say no: the two are simultaneous, but in strict logic, the sign, being the condition of a concept, may really be said to come first. After a time, words may be dropt, and it is then, when we try to remember the old word that gave birth to our concept, that we are led to imagine that concepts came first, and words afterwards. I know how difficult it is to see this clearly. We are so accustomed to think without words, that we can hardly realise the fact that originally no conceptual thought was possible without these or other signs.

_Gifford Lectures, I._

WORK

If you have found a work to which you are ready to sacrifice the whole of your life, and if you have faith in yourselves, others will have faith in you, and, sooner or later, a work that must be done will be done.

_Gifford Lectures, II._

What flimsy things the so-called pleasures of life are--how little in them that lasts. To delight in doing one's work is life--that is what helps us on, though the road is sometimes very stiff and tiring--uphill rather it would seem than downhill, and yet downhill it is.

_MS._

A distaste for work is only another name for a distaste for duty, a disregard for those commandments which hold society together, a disregard of the commandments of God. No doubt there is that reward in work that after a time it ceases to be distasteful, and like many a bitter medicine becomes liked, but that reward is vouchsafed to honest work only.

_MS._

Work is the best healer of sorrow. In grief or disappointment try hard work; it will not fail you.

_Autobiography._

No sensible man ought to care about posthumous praise, or posthumous blame. Enough for the day is the evil thereof. Our contemporaries are our right judges, our peers have to give their votes in the great academies and learned societies, and if they on the whole are not dissatisfied with the little we have done, often under far greater difficulties than the world was aware of, why should we care for the distant future?

_Autobiography._

Put your whole heart, or your whole love into your work. Half-hearted work is really worse than no work.

_Last Essays._

Much of the best work in the world is done by those whose names remain unknown, who work because life's greatest bliss is work, and who require no reward beyond the consciousness that they have enlarged the knowledge of mankind and contributed their share to the final triumph of honesty and truth.

_Chips._

True immortality (of fame) is the immortality of the work done by man, which nothing can make undone, which lives, works on, grows on for ever. It is good to _ourselves_ to remember and honour the names of our ancestors and benefactors, but to them, depend upon it, the highest reward was not the hope of fame, but their faith in themselves, their faith in their work, their faith that nothing really good can ever perish, and that Right and Reason must in the end prevail.

_Chips._

It is given to few scholars only to be allowed to devote the whole of their time and labour to the one subject in which they feel the deepest interest. We have all to fight the battle of life before we can hope to secure a quiet cell in which to work in the cause of learning and truth.

_Chips._

What author has ever said the last word he wanted to say, and who has not had to close his eyes before he could write _Finis_ to his work?

_Autobiography._

THE WORLD

There is no other Christian explanation of the world than that God thought and uttered it, and that man follows in life and thought the thoughts of God. We must not forget that all our knowledge and hold of the world are again nothing but thoughts, which we transform under the law of causality into objective realities. It was this unswerving dependence on God in thought and life that made Jesus what He was, and what we should be if we only tried, viz. children of God.

_Silesian Horseherd._

I cannot help seeing order, law, reason or Logos in the world, and I cannot account for it by merely _ex post_ events, call them what you like--survival of the fittest, natural selection, or anything else.

_Last Essays._

Think only what it was to believe in an order of the world, though it be no more at first than a belief that the sun will never overstep his bounds. It was all the difference between a chaos and a cosmos, between the blind play of chance and an intelligible and therefore an intelligent providence. How many souls, even now when everything else has failed them, when they have parted with the most cherished convictions of their childhood, when their faith in man has been poisoned, and when the apparent triumph of all that is selfish, ignoble, and hideous has made them throw up the cause of truth, of righteousness, and innocence as no longer worth fighting for, at least in this world; how many, I say, have found their last peace and comfort in the contemplation of the order of the world, whether manifested in the unvarying movement of the stars, or revealed in the unvarying number of the petals and stamens and pistils of the smallest forget-me-not. How many have felt that to belong to this cosmos, to this beautiful order of nature, is something at least to rest on, something to trust, something to believe, when everything else has failed. To us, this perception of law and order in the world may seem very little, but to the ancient dwellers on earth, who had little else to support them, it was everything because, if once perceived, if once understood, it could never be taken from them.

_Hibbert Lectures._

We must learn to see a meaning in everything. No doubt we cannot always see cause and effect, and it is well we cannot. It is quite true that we do not always get our deserts. And yet we must believe that we do--only if we knew it, the whole fabric of the world would be destroyed, there would be neither virtue nor vice in the whole world, nothing but calculation. We should avoid the rails laid down by the world because we should know that the engine would be sure to come and mangle us. In this way the world holds together, and it could not in any other way.

_Life._

There is to me a beauty and mystery and sanctity about flowers, and when I see them come and go, no one knows whence and whither, I ask what more miracles do we want,--what better, more beautiful, more orderly world could we wish to belong to than that by which we are surrounded and supported on all sides? Where is there a flaw or a fault? Then why should we fear unless the flaws are within us, and we will not see the blessing and the rest which we might enjoy if we only trusted to the Author of all that beauty, order, and wisdom about us. It is a perfect sin not to be happy in this world, and how much of the misery which there is, is the work of men, or could be removed by men, if they would but work together for each others' good.

_Life._

Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press.

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Transcriber's note:

Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as printed.

Page 81: "There no _chance_ in life ..." The transcriber has inserted "is".