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About this Episode
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Transcript
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A Christmas sermon.
By the time this paper appears, I shall have been talking for 12 months.
And it is thought I should take my leave in a formal and seasonable manner.
Validictory eloquence is rare.
And deathbed sayings have not often hit the mark of the occasion.
Charles II, wit and skeptic, a man whose life has been one long lesson in
human incredulity.
An easygoing comrade, a maneuvering king, remembered and embodied all his wit and skepticism
along with more than his usual good humor in the famous, I'm afraid, gentlemen.
I'm an unconscionable time, a dying one, an unconscionable time, a dying.
There's a picture.
I'm afraid, gentlemen, of your life and of mine.
The sands run out and the hours are numbered and imputed.
And the days go by and when the last of these finds us, we have been a long time dying.
And what else?
The very length is something if we reach that hour of separation undissonored and to have
lived at all is doubtless in the soldierly expression to have served.
There is a tale and tacitess of how the veterans' mute need in the German wilderness of how
they mob Germanicus clamoring to go home and of how, seizing their generals' hands,
his old war-warned exiles passed his finger along their toothless gums.
Soon lacrimay rarum.
This is the most eloquent of the songs of Simeon.
And when the man has lived to a fair age, he bears his marks of service.
He may have never been remarked upon the breach at the head of the army.
At least he shall have lost his teeth on the camp bread.
The idealism of serious people in this age of ours is of a notable character.
It never seems to them that we have served enough.
They have a fine impatience of their virtues.
It were perhaps more modest to be stingily thankful that we are no worse.
It is not only our enemies, those desperate characters.
It is we ourselves who know not what we do.
Then springs the glimmering hope that perhaps we do better than we think, that to scramble
through this random business with hands reasonably clean, to have played the part of a man
or a woman with some reasonable fullness, to have often resisted the diabolic and at
the end to be still resisting it.
Is for the poor human soldier to have done right well, to ask to see some fruit of our
endeavor is but a transcendental way of serving for reward?
And what we take to be contempt of self is only greed of higher.
And again, if we require so much of ourselves, shall we not require much of others?
If we do not genuinely judge our own deficiencies, is it not to be feared we shall be even stern
to the trespasses of others?
And he who, looking back on his own life, can see no more than that he has been uncomfortably
long a dying?
Will he not be tempted to think his neighbor uncomfortably long of getting hanged?
It is probable that nearly all who think of conduct at all think of it too much.
It is certain we all think too much of sin.
We are not damned for doing wrong, but for not doing right.
Christ would never hear of negative morality, thou shalt whatsoever his word, with which
he superseded thou shalt not, to make our idea of morality center on forbidden acts is
to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow men a secret
element of gusto.
If a thing is wrong for us, we should not dwell upon the thought of it, or we shall
soon dwell upon it with introverted pleasure.
If we cannot drive it from our minds, one thing of two.
Either our creed is in the wrong, and we must more indulgently remodel it.
Or else if our morality be in the right, we are criminal lunatics, and should place our
persons in restraint.
A mark of such unholsimly divided minds is the passion for interference with others.
The fox without the tail was of this breed.
That had, if his biographer is to be trusted, a certain antique civility now out of date.
A man may have a flaw, a weakness, that unfits him for the duties of life, that spoils
his temper, that threatens his integrity, or that betrays him into cruelty.
It has to be conquered, but it must never be suffered to engross his thoughts.
The true duties lie all upon the farler side, and must be attended to with a whole mind,
so soon as this preliminary clearing of the decks has been affected.
In order that he may be kind and honest, it may be needful he should become a total
abstainer.
Let him become so then, and the next day let him forget the circumstance.
Trying to be kind and honest will require all his thoughts.
A mortified appetite is never a wise companion.
Insofar as he has had to mortify an appetite, he will still be the worst man.
One of such and one a great deal of cheerfulness will be required in judging life, and a great
deal of humility in judging others.
And may be argued again that dissatisfaction with our lives endeavor springs in some degree
from dullness.
We require higher tasks, because we do not recognize the height of those we have.
Trying to be kind and honest seems an affair too simple and too inconsequential for gentlemen
of our heroic mold.
We had rather set ourselves to something bold, arduous and conclusive.
We had rather found a schism or suppress a heresy, cut off a hand or mortified appetite,
but the task before us, which is to co-endore with our existence, is rather one of microscopic
fineness.
And the heroism required is that of patience.
There is no cutting of the Gordian knots of life.
Each must be smilingly unraveled.
To be honest, to be kind, to earn a little and spend a little less, to make upon the
whole a family happier for his presence.
To renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered.
To keep a few friends but these without capitulation above all.
On the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself.
Here is a task for all that a man has afforditude and delicacy.
He has an ambitious soul who would ask more.
And he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful.
There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can contravert.
Whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed.
Failure is the fate allotted.
It is so in every art and study.
It is so above all in the continent, art of living well.
Here is a pleasant thought for the years end and for the end of life.
Only self-deception will be satisfied.
And there need be no despair for the despairer, too.
But Christmas is not the only mile mark of another year moving us to thoughts of self-examination.
It is a season from all its associations whether domestic or religious, suggesting thoughts
of joy.
A man to satisfy with his endeavors is a man tempted to sadness.
And in the midst of the winter when his life runs lowest and he is reminded of the empty
chairs of his beloved.
It is well he should be condemned to this fashion of the smiling face.
Noble disappointment, noble self-denial, are not to be admired, not even to be pardoned
if they bring bitterness.
It is one thing to enter the kingdom of heaven-mame, another to mame yourself and stay without.
And the kingdom of heaven is of the childlike.
Of those who are easy to please, who love and who give pleasure.
Mighty men of their hands, the smiders and the builders and the judges have lived long
and done sternly and yet preserved this lovely character, and among our carpet interests
and two penny concerns, the shame were indelible if we should lose it.
Gentleness and cheerfulness, those come before all morality.
They are the perfect duties.
And it is the trouble with moral men that they have neither one nor the other.
It was the moral man, the Pharisee, whom Christ could not away with.
If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong.
I do not say give them up, for they may be all you have, but conceal them like a vice,
lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.
A strange temptation attends upon man to keep his eye on pleasures even when he will not
share in them, to aim all his morals against them.
This very year, a lady, singular iconoclast, proclaimed a crusade against dolls and the
racies sermon against lust is a feature of the age.
I venture to call such moralists insincere.
At any excess or perversion of a natural appetite, their lyre sounds of itself with relishing denunciations,
but for all displays of the truly diabolic envy, malice, the mean lie, the mean silence,
the columnious truth, the backbiter, the petty, tyrant, the peevish poisoner of family life,
their standard is quite different.
These are wrong, they will admit.
Yet somehow not so wrong, there is no zeal in their assault on them.
No secret element of gusto warms up the sermon.
It is for things not wrong in themselves that they reserve the choices of their indignation.
A man may naturally disclaim all moral kinship with the reverend Mr. Zola or the hobgoblin
old lady of the dolls, for these are gross and naked instances.
And yet in each of us, some similar element resides.
The sight of a pleasure in which we cannot or else will not share moves us to a particular
impatience.
And maybe because we are envious, or because we are sad, or because we dislike noise and
romping, being so refined, or because being so philosophic, we have an overweighing sense
of life's gravity.
At least as we go on in years, we are all tempted to frown upon our neighbor's pleasures.
People are nowadays so fond of resisting temptations, here is one to be resisted.
They are fond of self-denial.
There is the propensity that cannot be too preemptorially denied.
There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbors good.
One person I have to make good myself.
But my duty to my neighbor is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him
happy, if I may.
Three.
Happiness and goodness, according to canting moralists, stand in relation of effect and cause.
There was never anything less proved or less probable.
Our happiness is never in our own hands.
We inherit our constitution.
We stand buffet among friends and enemies.
We may be so built as to feel a sneer or an aspursion with unusual keenness, and so circumstance
as to be unusually exposed to them.
We may have nerves very sensitive to pain, and be afflicted with a disease very painful.
Virtue will not help us.
And it is not meant to help us.
It is not even its own reward, except for the self-centered, and, I had almost said,
the unamiable.
No man can pacify his conscience.
If quiet be what he want, he shall do better to let the organ perish from disuse.
And to avoid the penalties of the law and the minor capitals dim in youcho of social
ostracism is an affair of wisdom of cunning, if you will, and not of virtue.
In his own life, then, a man is not to expect happiness only to profit by it gladly when
it shall arise.
He is on duty here.
He knows not how or why, and does not need to know.
He knows not for what higher, and must not ask.
Somehow or other, though he does not know what goodness is, he must try to be good.
Somehow or other, though he cannot tell what will do it, he must try to give happiness
to others.
And no doubt there comes in here a frequent clash of duties.
How far is he to make his neighbor happy?
How far must he respect that smiling face so easy to cloud, so hard to brighten again?
How far on the other side is he bound to be his brother's keeper and the prophet of his
own morality?
How far must he resent evil?
The difficulty is that we have little guidance.
Christ sayings on the point being hard to reconcile with each other, and the most of them
hard to accept.
But the truth of his teaching would seem to be this.
In our own person and fortune, we should be ready to accept and to pardon all.
It is our cheek, we are to turn.
Our coat, we are to give away to the man who has taken our cloak.
But when another's face is buffeted, perhaps a little of the lion will become us best,
that we are to suffer others to be injured and stand by is not conceivable and surely
not desirable.
Revenge says Bacon is a kind of wild justice.
Its judgments at least are delivered by an insane judge.
And in our own quarrel, we can see nothing truly and do nothing wisely.
But in the quarrel of our neighbor, let us be more bold.
One person's happiness is as sacred as another's.
When we cannot defend both, let us defend one with a stout heart.
It is only in so far as we are doing this, that we have any right to interfere.
The defense of B is our only ground of action against A. A has as good a right to go to
the devil as we to go to glory and neither knows what he does.
The truth is that all these interventions and denunciations and militant mongerings of
moral have truths, though they be sometimes needful, though they are often enjoyable, do
yet belong to an inferior grade of duties.
Ill temper and envy and revenge find here an arsenal of pious disguises.
This is the playground of inverted lusts, with a little more patience and a little less
temper.
A gentler and wiser method might be found in almost every case.
And the knot that we cut by some fine, heady quarrel seen in private life, or in public
affairs by some denunciatory act against what we are pleased to call our neighbor's
vices, might yet have been unwoven by the hand of sympathy.
To look back upon the past year, and to see how little we have striven into what small
purpose, and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarius and rust unwisely
in, and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness.
It may seem a paradox, but the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation
resides.
Life is not designed to minister to a man's vanity.
He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time
like a blind child.
Full of rewards and pleasures as it is, so that to see the day break where the moon rise
or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising
joys.
This world is yet for him no abiding city.
Friendships fall through, health fails.
Weariness assails him, year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of his
own weakness and folly.
It is a friendly process of detachment, when the time comes that he should go.
There need be few illusions left about himself.
There lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much.
Surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.
Nor will he complain at the summons, which cause a defeated soldier from the field, defeated,
I.
If he were Paul or Marcus Aurelius.
But if there is still one inch of fight in his old spirit, undis honored.
The faith which sustained him in his life-long blindness and life-long disappointment will
scarce even be required in this last formality of laying down his arms.
Give him a march with his old bones.
There, out of the glorious sun-colored earth, out of the day and the dust and the ecstasy,
there goes another faithful failure.
From a recent book of verse where there is more than one such beautiful and manly poem,
I take this memorial piece.
It says better than I can, what I love to think.
Let it be our parting word.
A late-lark twitters from the quiet skies and from the west, where the sun, his days
work ended, lingers as in content.
There falls on the old gray city and influence luminous and serene, a shining piece.
The smoke ascends in a rosy golden haze, the spires shine and are changed in the valley
shadows rise, the dark sings on.
The sun closing his benediction sinks and the darkening air thrills with a sense of the
triumphant night, night.
With her train of stars and her great gift of sleep, so be my passing.
My task accomplished in the long day done, my wages taken and in my heart some late-lark
singing.
Let me be gathered to the quiet west, the sundown splendid and serene, death.
End of a Christmas sermon.
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