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The

 

Open Door

 

 

 

 

BY HELEN KELLER

 

 

 

 

 

 

Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

hen one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.

ruly I have looked into the very heart of darkness, and refused to yield to its paralyzing influence, but in spirit I am one of those who walk the morning. What if all dark, discouraging moods of the human mind come across my way as thick as the dry leaves of autumn? Other feet have traveled that road before me, and I know the desert leads to God as surely as the green, refreshing fields and fruitful orchards. I, too, have been profoundly humiliated, and brought to realize my littleness amid the immensity of creation. The more I learn, the less I think I know, and the more I understand of my sense-experience, the more I perceive its shortcomings and its inadequacy as a basis of life. Sometimes the points of view of the optimist and the pessimist are placed before me so skillfully balanced that only by sheer force of spirit can I keep my hold upon a practical, livable philosophy of life. But I use my will, choose life and reject its opposite—nothingness.

f there were no life beyond this earth-life, some people I have known would gain immortality by the nobility of our memory of them. With every friend I love who has been taken into the brown bosom of the earth a part of me has been buried there; but their contribution of happiness, strength, and understanding to my being remains to sustain me in an altered world.

ertainly I believe that God gave us life for happiness, not misery. Humanity, I am sure, will never be made lazy or indifferent by an excess of happiness. The order of nature will always necessitate pain, failure, separation, death; and these will probably become more menacing as the complexities and dangerous experiments of a vast world civilization increase. The delicate task will remain ours to ensure God’s gift—joy—to His children. Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose. Happiness should be a means of accomplishment, like health, not an end in itself. Every human being has undeniable rights which, respected, render happiness possible—the right to live his own life as far as may be, to choose his own creed, to develop his capabilities; but no one has a right to consume happiness without producing it or to lay his burden upon other shoulders merely to fulfill a personal desire.

ecurity is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. God Himself is not secure, having given man dominion over His works! Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold. Faith alone defends. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.

Serious harm, I am afraid, has been wrought to our generation by fostering the idea that they would live secure in a permanent order of things. It has tended to weaken imagination and self-equipment and unfit them for independent steering of their destinies. Now they are staggered by apocalyptic events and wrecked illusions. They have expected stability and find none within themselves or in their universe. Before it is too late they must learn and teach others that only by brave acceptance of change and all-time crisis-ethics can they rise to the height of superlative responsibility.

he highest result of education is tolerance. Long ago men fought and died for their faith; but it took ages to teach them the other kind of courage—the courage to recognize the faiths of their brethren and their rights of conscience. Tolerance is the first principle of community; it is the spirit which conserves the best that all men think. No loss by flood and lightning, no destruction of cities and temples by the hostile forces of nature, has deprived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his intolerance has destroyed.

simple, childlike faith in a Divine Friend solves all the problems that come to us by land or sea. Difficulties meet us at every turn. They are the accompaniment of life. They result from combinations of character and individual idiosyncrasies. The surest way to meet them is to assume that we are immortal and that we have a Friend who “slumbers not, nor sleeps,” and who watches over us and guides us—if we but let Him. With this thought strongly entrenched in our inmost being, we can do almost anything we wish and need not limit the things we think. We may help ourselves to all the beauty of the universe that we can hold. For every hurt there is recompense of tender sympathy. Out of pain grow the violets of patience and sweetness, the vision of the Holy Fire that touched the lips of Isaiah and kindled his life into spirit, and the contentment that comes with the evening star. The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome. The hill-top hour would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valley to traverse.

t is beyond a doubt that everyone should have time for some special delight, if only five minutes each day to seek out a lovely flower or cloud or a star, or learn a verse or brighten another’s dull task. What is the use of such terrible diligence as many tire themselves out with, if they always postpone their exchange of smiles with Beauty and Joy to cling to irksome duties and relations? Unless they admit these fair, fresh, and eternal presences into their lives as they can, they must needs shut themselves out of heaven, and a gray dust settles on all existence. That the sky is brighter than the earth means little unless the earth itself is appreciated and enjoyed. Its beauty loved gives the right to aspire to the radiance of the sunrise and the stars.

am too happy in this world to think much about the future, except to remember that I have cherished friends awaiting me there in God’s beautiful Somewhere. In spite of the lapse of years, they seem so close to me that I should not think it strange if at any moment they should clasp my hand and speak words of endearment as they used to before they went away.

t is amazing how prodigiously men have written and talked about regeneration and yet how little they have said to the purpose. Self-culture has been loudly and boastfully proclaimed as sufficient for all our ideals of perfection. But if we listen to the best men and women everywhere, they will answer with a decided negative. Some of them have amassed vast treasures of knowledge, and they will say that science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all—the apathy of human beings.

old out your hands to feel the luxury of the sunbeams. Press the soft blossoms against your cheek, and finger their graces of form, their delicate mutability of shape, their pliancy and freshness. Expose your face to the aerial floods that sweep the heavens, “inhale great draughts of space,” wonder, wonder at the wind’s unwearied activity. Pile note on note the infinite music that flows increasingly to your soul from the tactual sonorities of a thousand branches and tumbling waters. How can the world be shriveled when this most profound, emotional sense, touch, is faithful to its service? I am sure that if a fairy bade me choose between the sense of sight and that of touch, I would not part with the warm, endearing contact of human hands or the wealth of form, the mobility and fullness that press into my palms.

know what evil is. Once or twice I have wrestled with it and for a time felt its chilly touch on my life; so I speak with knowledge when I say that evil is of no consequence, except as a sort of mental gymnastic. For the very reason that I have come in contact with it, I am more truly an optimist. I can say with conviction that the struggle which evil necessitates is one of the greatest blessings. It makes us strong, patient, helpful men and women. It lets us into the soul of things and teaches us that although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to co-operate with the good, that it may prevail. I try to increase the power God has given me to see the best in everything and every one, and make that best a part of my life. The world is sown with good; but unless I turn my glad thoughts into practical living and till my own field, I cannot reap a kernel of the good.

nyone who, out of goodness of his heart, speaks a helpful word, gives a cheering smile, or smooths over a rough place in another’s path knows that the delight he feels is so intimate a part of himself that he lives by it. The joy of surmounting obstacles which once seemed unremovable, and pushing the frontier of accomplishment further—what joy is there like unto it? If those who seek happiness would only stop one little minute and think, they would see that the delights they really experience are as countless as the grasses at their feet or the dewdrops sparkling upon the morning flowers.

hen the sun of consciousness first shone upon me, behold a miracle! The stock of my young life which had perished, steeped in the waters of knowledge grew again, budded again, was sweet again with the blossoms of childhood! Down in the depths of my being I cried, “It is good to be alive!” I held out two trembling hands to life, and in vain silence would impose dumbness upon me henceforth! The world to which I awoke was still mysterious; but there were hope and love and God in it, and nothing else mattered. Is it not possible that our entrance into heaven may be like this experience of mine?

mpatient with frustration, we ask ourselves why terrible obstacles should be placed in our path! We cannot but wonder at times why we cannot have smooth sailing instead of being compelled always to fight against adverse winds and rough seas. No doubt the reason is that character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved. Most of the men and women honored in history for their service to mankind were acquainted with “the uses of adversity.” They triumphed because they refused to be turned aside by difficulties or opposition. These obstructions called forth their latent energies and the determination that carried them far beyond any goal to which they would otherwise have aspired.

or years to come the debris of a convulsed world will beset our steps. It will require a purpose stronger than any man and worthy of all men to calm and inspirit us. A sane society whose riches are happy children, men and women, beautiful with peace and creative activity, is not going to be ordained for us. We must make it ourselves. Our destiny is our responsibility, and without faith we cannot meet it competently. Long enough have we been told that faith is impracticable, that we must trim our sails to whatever winds that blow. Now the truth is burning in us that indifference and compromise are chaos.

hen I was a young girl at college I wrote my creed thus: “I believe in God, I believe in Man, I believe in the power of the spirit. I believe it is a sacred duty to encourage ourselves and others; to hold the tongue from any unhappy word against God’s world, because no man has any right to complain of a universe which God made good, and which thousands of men have striven to keep good.” It is many years since I wrote these words, and I have suffered many a bereavement and many a sorrow, but I see no reason to change my creed. Any human being who believes in God, in Man, and in the spirit is fundamentally, I think, an optimist. No matter what pain comes to him, he knows that good is the dominant power of the universe and feels himself surrounded by it and by God’s love.

hat earthly consolation is there for one like me, whom fate has denied a husband and the joy of motherhood? At the moment my loneliness seems a void that will always be immense. Fortunately I have much work to do—more than ever before, in fact—and while doing it I shall have confidence as always that my unfulfilled longings will be gloriously satisfied in a world where eyes never grow dim nor ears dull.

e invite needless suffering when we entertain an exaggerated idea of our own suffering. Why should we be spared the chastening rod which all mortals pass under? Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.

s selfishness and complaint pervert and cloud the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision. It gives the delicacy of perception to see wonders in what before seemed dull and trivial. It replenishes the springs of inspiration, and its joy sends a new river of lifelike blood through the matter-clogged faculties.

iberty not joined to faith is already half dead. Americans have for the most part not had faith enough in themselves to demand a decisive share in rearing the structure of the government. Rarely have they gone to the trouble of choosing men of high politics who would truly represent their interests. They have shirked their responsibility, and faith, the friendly, unitive force, has been left to preachers, “dreamers,” and invalids when it should have been communicated throughout society.

y learning the sufferings and burdens of men, I became aware as never before of the life-power that has survived the forces of darkness, the power which, though never completely victorious, is continuously conquering. The very fact that we are still here carrying on the contest against the hosts of annihilation proves that on the whole the battle has gone for humanity. The world’s great heart has proved equal to the prodigious undertaking which God set it. Rebuffed, but always persevering; self-reproached, but ever regaining faith; undaunted, tenacious, the heart of man labors toward immeasurably distant goals. Discouraged not by difficulties without, or the anguish of ages within, the heart listens to a secret voice that whispers: “Be not dismayed; in the future lies the Promised Land.”

e hear on all sides a summons to return to religion. There is an encouraging ring of sincerity in the cry, but is it not a bit confusing to say “return to religion” when religion means “return to faith”? Religion is the fruit of faith, and to ask for religion without faith is like asking for the flower without the seed. Many religions have spread inspiring hope upon earth, but one Faith has been their tree, just as good will is the one root of all truly beneficent activities. It has crossed my mind that religion may perhaps be man’s despair in not finding God, while faith is hope—God’s searching for man.

aily I place implicit faith in my friends with eyes and ears, and they tell me how often their senses deceive and lead them astray. Yet out of their evidence I gather countless precious truths with which I build my world, and my soul is enabled to picture the beauty of the sky and listen to the songs of birds. All about me may be silence and darkness, yet within me, in the spirit, is music and brightness, and color flashes through all my thoughts.

o the hand of the world belongs the best, the noblest, the most stupendous task, the subjection of all the forces of nature to the mind of man, the subjection of physical strength to the might of the spirit. We are still far from this loftiest of triumphs of the hand. Its forces are still to be disciplined and organized. The limbs of the world must first be restored. In order that no limb may suffer, and that none may keep the others in bondage, the will of the many must become self-conscious and intelligently united. Then the hand—the living power of man, the hewer of the world—will be laid with undisputed sway upon the machine with which it has so long been confounded. There will be abundance for all, and no hands will cry out any more against the arm of the mighty. The hand of the world will then have achieved what it now obscurely symbolizes—the uplifting and regeneration of the race, all that is highest, all that is creative, in man.

t has been said that life has treated me harshly; and sometimes I have complained in my heart because many pleasures of human experience have been withheld from me, but when I recollect the treasure of friendship that has been bestowed upon me I withdraw all charges against life. If much has been denied me, much, very much has been given me. So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart I shall say that life is good.

trust, and nothing that happens disturbs my trust. I recognize the beneficence of the power which we all worship as supreme—Order, Fate, the Great Spirit, Nature, God. I recognize this power in the sun that makes all things grow and keeps life afoot. I make a friend of this indefinable force, and straightway I feel glad, brave, and ready for any lot Heaven may decree for me. This is my religion of optimism.

ow I am as much up in arms against needless poverty and degrading influences as anyone else, but, at the same time, I believe human experience teaches that if we cannot succeed in our present position, we could not succeed in any other. Unless, like the lily, we can rise pure and strong above sordid surroundings, we would probably be moral weaklings in any situation. Unless we can help the world where we are, we could not help it if we were somewhere else. The most important question is not the sort of environment we have but the kind of thoughts we think every day, the kind of ideals we are following; in a word, the kind of men and women we really are. The Arab proverb is admirably true: “That is thy world wherein thou findest thyself.”

ven more amazing than the wonders of nature are the powers of the spirit. Instead of having dumb thoughts or conventional phrases about another world, why can we not take unto ourselves wings of imagination and traverse unafraid vast immensities of the unknown into the joyous, human yet divine warmth that is heaven?

love my country. To say that is like saying I love my family. I did not choose my country any more than I chose my parents, but I am her daughter just as truly as I am the child of my southern mother and father. What I am my country has made me. She has fostered the spirit which made my education possible. Neither Greece nor Rome, nor all China, nor Germany, nor Great Britain has surrounded a deaf-blind child with the devotion and skill and resources which have been mine in America.

But my love for America is not blind. Perhaps I am more conscious of her faults because I love her so deeply. Nor am I blind to my own faults. It is easy to see that there is little virtue in the old formulas, and that new ones must be found, but even after one has decided this, it is not easy to hold a steady course in a changing world.

s my experiences broadened and deepened, the indeterminate, poetic feelings of childhood began to fix themselves in definite thoughts. Nature—the world I could touch—was folded and filled with myself. I am inclined to believe those philosophers who declare that we know nothing but our own feelings and ideas. With a little ingenious reasoning one may see in the material world simply a mirror, an image of permanent mental sensations. In either sphere self-knowledge is the condition and the limit of our consciousness. That is why, perhaps, many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves—and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves, either.

e betray ourselves into smallness when we think the little choices of each day are trivial. Drama and risk are needed to vitalize every commonplace act or lesson or posture. The personalities which heal and urge forward are the beautiful quintessence of this daily, hourly practice grown natural like breathing. Every day we should do a little more than is required. If we exert ourselves at some task we would rather not perform, provided we are not overworked horses going around in a blind circle, we shall find that soon or late our trained personalities will leap exultantly to the test. Inuring ourselves each day to resolute volition and spontaneous self-expression is like a plunge into the brine. Its benefits may not show at the time, but the salty-sweet virtue soaks into our fibers and is stored for the coming victory.

poet once said I must be happy because I did not see the bare, cold present, but lived in a beautiful dream. I do live in a beautiful dream; but that dream is the actual, the present—not cold, but warm; not bare, but furnished with a thousand blessings. The very evil which the poet supposed would be a cruel disillusionment is necessary to the fullest knowledge of joy. Only by contact with evil could I have learned to feel by contrast the beauty of truth and love and goodness.

e who does not see that joy is an important force in the world misses the essence of life. Joy is a spiritual element that gives vicissitudes, unity and significance. Belief in the triumph of good vitalizes a race; enlightened optimism fosters in man a constructive purpose and frees him from fears which fetter his thought. Pessimism or passive resignation weakens the spirit and topples society to ruin, while determined resignation is a force. The first is but a regret; the other is a possession, for it is faith, a motive power. Optimism is Jehovah’s lightning, clearing a fate-befogged atmosphere.

ometimes, it is true, a sense of isolation enfolds me like a cold mist as I sit alone and wait at life’s shut gate. Beyond there is light, and music, and sweet companionship; but I may not enter. Fate, silent, pitiless, bars the way. Fain would I question his imperious decree; for my heart is still undisciplined and passionate; but my tongue will not utter the bitter, futile words that rise to my lips, and they fall back into my heart like unshed tears. Silence sits immense upon my soul. Then comes hope with a smile and whispers, “There is joy in self-forgetfulness.” So I try to make the light in others’ eyes my sun, the music in others’ ears my symphony, the smile on others’ lips my happiness.

t need not discourage us if we are full of doubts. Healthy questions keep faith dynamic. In fact, unless we start with doubts we cannot have a deep-rooted faith. One who believes lightly and unthinkingly has not much of a belief. He who has a faith which is not to be shaken has won it through blood and tears—has worked his way from doubt to truth as one who reaches a clearing through a thicket of brambles and thorns.

nother fact I do not forget is the tendency of the beliefs which fire one generation to grow chill in the next. As enthusiasm cools the spontaneity and joy of communing with the Divine are lost. Ideas of life and conduct are accepted without investigation. True religion is obscured by sects, rites and legal codes. The dead weight of the letter killeth, and faith, the song that “turns a stone and starts a wing,” ceases at the approach of dull-eared orthodoxy. Revolt is needed to rekindle the spirit that giveth life. But this very ebb and flow shows how unsubduable are faith and the freedom it reincarnates. In all ages faith renews man’s impulse to penetrate the splendors of creation; it reveals a power working within him and apart from him and directs him toward new objectives.

ace your deficiencies and acknowledge them; but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight. True education combines intellect, beauty, goodness, and the greatest of these is goodness. When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.

hen we are born of the flesh, we are utterly helpless and dependent, while in the spiritual birth we are active, and in a sense creators. We have nothing to do with our birth into existences; for we must exist before we can make anything of ourselves. On the other hand, our birth into life is a matter of choice, we have a very direct share in it; for no real spiritual life can be thrust upon us against our will.

This is the meaning of the Lord’s constant, loving invitation through His Word to all of us, to come unto Him and choose life, and be ever on our guard against the evils which would rob us of the chosen life. Only by exercising our powers of thought and keeping our hearts always warm and pure do we become truly alive. But this beautiful work of re-creation cometh not by observation, it is wrought in the quiet depths of the soul. For, as the Lord says, “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit.”

hat is so sweet as to awake from a troubled dream and behold a beloved face smiling upon you? I love to believe that such shall be our awakening from earth to heaven. My faith never wavers that each dear friend I have “lost” is a new link between this world and the happier land beyond the morn. My soul is for the moment bowed down with grief when I cease to feel the touch of their hands or hear a tender word from them; but the light of faith never fades from my sky, and I take heart again, glad that they are free. I cannot understand why anyone should fear death. Life here is more cruel than death—life divides and estranges, while death, which at heart is life eternal, reunites and reconciles. I believe that when the eyes within my physical eyes shall open upon the world to come, I shall simply be consciously living in the country of my heart. My steadfast thought rises above the treason of my eyes to follow sight beyond all temporal seeing! Suppose there are a million chances against that one that my loved ones who have gone are alive. What of it? I will take that one chance and risk mistake, rather than let any doubts sadden their souls, and find out afterward. Since there is that one chance of immortality, I will endeavor not to cast a shadow upon the joy of the departed. I sometimes wonder who needs cheer most, the one who gropes on here below or the one who is perhaps just learning truly to see in God’s light. How real is the darkness to one who only guesses in the shadows of earth at an unseen sun! But how well worth the effort it is to keep spiritually in touch with those who have loved us to their last moment upon earth! Certainly it is one of our sweetest experiences that when we are touched by some noble affection or pure joy, we remember the dead most tenderly, and feel powerfully drawn to them. And always the consciousness of such faith has the power to change the face of mortality, make adversity a winning fight, and set up a beacon of encouragement for those whose last support of joy seems taken from them. There is no such thing as “other worldliness” when we are convinced that heaven is not beyond us, but within us. We are only urged so much the more to act, to love, to hope against hope and resolutely to tinge the darkness about us with the beautiful hues of our indwelling heaven, Here and Now.

here is no occasion for trepidation at the word “crisis.” It is not necessarily a tragic finality. It may be a choice between lesser and greater light or between outworn values and progressive good. The courage to decide remains always the royalty of man. Ordinary choices are critical; simple words are decisive. Each time we break bread one with another has the appealing humanity of the last time if we look at it discerningly. Herein when someone dies lies the cause of self-reproach for appreciation held back and failure to help. Our joy is too limited to squander on the low planes of mediocrity when we are endowed sufficiently to stay at our best every day. Vicissitudes are too numerous and disorganizing for us to be perfunctory or careless about our inner defenses.

ften when the heart is torn with sorrow, spiritually we wander like a traveler lost in a deep wood. We grow frightened, lose all sense of direction, batter ourselves against trees and rocks in our attempt to find a path. All the while there is a path—the path of Faith—that leads straight out of the dense tangle of our difficulties into the open road we are seeking.

hen I think of all the wonders that the hand of man has wrought, I rejoice, and am lifted up. It seems the image and agent of the Hand that upholds us all. We are its creatures, its triumphs, remade by it in the ages since the birth of the race. Nothing on earth is so thrilling, so terrifying, as the power of our own hands to keep us or mar us. All that man does is the hand alive, the hand manifest, creating and destroying, itself the instrument of order and demolition. It moves a stone, and the universe undergoes a readjustment. It breaks a clod, and new beauty bursts forth in fruits and flowers, and the sea of fertility flows over the desert.

ncient philosophy offers an argument which seems still valid. There is in the blind as in the seeing an Absolute which gives truth to what we know to be true, order to what is orderly, beauty to the beautiful, touchableness to what is tangible. If this is granted, it follows that this Absolute is not imperfect, incomplete, partial. It must needs go beyond the limited evidence of our sensations, and also give light to what is invisible, music to the musical that silence dulls. Thus mind itself compels us to acknowledge that we are in a world of intellectual order, beauty, and harmony. The essences, or absolutes of these ideas, necessarily dispel their opposites which belong with evil, disorder, and discord. Thus deafness and blindness do not exist in the immaterial mind, which is philosophically the real world, but are banished with the perishable material senses. Reality, of which visible things are the symbol, shines before my mind. While I walk about my chamber with unsteady steps, my spirit sweeps skyward on eagle wings and looks out with unquenchable vision upon the world of eternal beauty.

ow, limitations of all kinds are forms of chastening to encourage self-development and true freedom. They are tools put into our hands to hew away the stone and flint which keep the higher gifts hidden away in our being. They tear away the bandage of indifference from our eyes, and we behold the burdens others are carrying, and we learn to help them by yielding to the dictates of a pitying heart.

et pessimism once take hold of the mind, and life is all topsy-turvy, all vanity and vexation of spirit. There is no cure for individual or social disorder, except in forgetfulness and annihilation. “Let us eat, drink and be merry,” says the pessimist, “for tomorrow we die.” If I regarded my life from the point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone. I should seek in vain for the light that does not visit my eyes and the music that does not ring in my ears. I should beg night and day and never be satisfied. I should sit apart in awful solitude, a prey to fear and despair. But since I consider it a duty to myself and to others to be happy, I escape a misery worse than any physical deprivation.

do not pretend that I know the whole solution of the world’s problems, but I am burdened with a puritanical sense of obligation to set the world to rights. I feel responsible for many enterprises that are not really my business at all, but many times I have kept silence on issues that interested me deeply through the fear that others would be blamed for my opinions. I have never been willing to believe that human nature cannot be changed; but even if it cannot, I am sure it can be curbed and led into channels of usefulness. I believe that life, not wealth, is the aim of existence—life including all its attributes of love, happiness, and joyful labor. I believe war is the inevitable fruit of our economic system, but even if I am wrong I believe that truth can lose nothing by agitation but may gain all.

ur will to act becomes vigorous in proportion to the frequency and definiteness of our actions, and the brain grows to its exercise. Then truly it implements faith. When we let a resolution or a fine emotion dissipate without results, it means more than lost opportunity; it actually retards the fulfillment of future purposes and chills sensibility. There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract but not enough for the concrete, because we allow our daily bits of bravery to evaporate.

or three things I thank God every day of my life—that He has vouchsafed me knowledge of His Works, deep thanks that He has set in my darkness the lamp of faith, deep, deepest thanks that I have another life to look forward to—a life joyous with light and flowers and heavenly song.

he infinite wonders of the universe are revealed to us in exact measure as we are capable of receiving them. The keenness of our vision depends not on how much we can see, but on how much we feel. Nor yet does mere knowledge create beauty. Nature sings her most exquisite songs to those who love her. She does not unfold her secrets to those who come only to gratify their desire of analysis, to gather facts, but to those who see in her manifold phenomena suggestions of lofty, delicate sentiments.

he old precept—and who can improve upon it?—is, “Depart from evil, and do good.” Anyone who looks into himself can see which of his desires tend toward his own well-being and that of his fellow creatures. Some people know this intuitively, but regrettably many people lack intuition. Still, patient scrutiny will reveal to them their imperfections, faults, vices—call them what you will—and they will find motives and methods for removing these shackles upon their freer and happier life.

hose are red-letter days in our lives when we meet people who thrill us like a fine poem, people whose handshake is brimful of unspoken sympathy, and whose sweet, rich natures impart to our eager, impatient spirits a wonderful restfulness which, in its essence, is divine. The perplexities, irritations, and worries that have absorbed us pass like unpleasant dreams, and we wake to see with new eyes and hear with new ears the beauty and harmony of God’s real world. The solemn nothings that fill our everyday life blossom suddenly into bright possibilities. In a word, while such friends are near us we feel that all is well. Perhaps we never saw them before, and they may never cross our life’s path again; but the influence of their calm, mellow natures is a libation poured upon our discontent, and we feel its healing touch, as the ocean feels the mountain stream freshening its brine.

ccording to all art, all nature, all coherent human thought, we know that order, proportion, form are essential elements of beauty. Now order, proportion, and form are palpable to the touch. But beauty and rhythm are deeper than sense. They are like love and faith. They spring out of a spiritual process only slightly dependent upon sensations. Order, proportion, form cannot generate in the mind the abstract idea of beauty, unless there is already a soul-intelligence to breathe life into the elements. Many persons, having perfect eyes, are blind in their perceptions. Many persons, having perfect ears, are emotionally deaf. Yet these are the very ones who dare to set limits to the vision of those who, lacking a sense or two, have will, soul, passion, imagination. Faith is a mockery if it teaches us not that we may construct a world unspeakably more complete and beautiful than the material world. And I, too, may construct my better world, for I am a child of God, an inheritor of a fragment of the Mind that created all worlds.

ook where we will, we find the hand in time and history, working, building, inventing, bringing civilization out of barbarism. The hand symbolizes power and the excellence of work. The mechanic’s hand, that minister of elemental forces, the hand that hews, saws, cuts, builds, is useful in the world equally with the delicate hand that paints a wild flower or molds a Grecian urn, or the hand of a statesman that writes a law. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of thee.” Blessed be the hand! Thrice blessed be the hands that work!

ife does not derive its whole vigor from the past. With the birth of each child nature lays aside all traditions, except those man imposes. There are no traditions according to which the child shall breathe or think or speak or strengthen his limbs in the struggle for existence. Let us find out if the traditions bewailed are crutches for indolent minds or wills grown soft, and if so, let us cease to bolster them. Our task is rather to leave behind us stimulating lives that shall nerve posterity to higher goals, sloughing off our imperfect vision, our half-knowledge and half-gods, our ailments of mind and body. Disappearing landmarks are not our chief peril, but propaganda backed by neither good will nor faith.

have an unshakable belief that mankind’s higher nature is on the whole still dormant. The greatest souls reveal excellencies of mind and heart which their lesser fellows possess—hidden, it is true, but there all the same. That inborn goodness renders it possible for most people to recognize nobility when they see it, as the latent poet in a reader enables him to appreciate a fine poem.

aith welcomes the thoughts and clasps the hands of other nations. No nation is wise enough to rule another. That is why empires have fallen and are still falling. Differences in language make it well-nigh impossible to understand an alien culture, which is a people’s way of thinking, especially when they try to communicate through prejudice, neither hearing nor wanting to hear the other’s mind. No two individuals are alike, and no two ever completely understand one another. Even the most intimate friends do not really know each other, but each gains from the other stimulating hints of potency and new varieties of truth. In the same way one nation can give to another whatever spiritual learning and culture it has, humbly receiving the other nation’s point of view, which is often a different kind of wisdom garnered from totally different experiences. Then the two nations can seek a harmony in which their faiths blend and ring true. This has already been done in some instances, and faith will spread this world Pentecost.

pring and autumn; seedtime and harvest; rain and sun; winter’s cold and summer’s heat—everything changes. Observing the transience of all things, why should we dwell on the ultimateness of death? Why should we not face life and death alike, unafraid?

thought has often hung round me, the truth of which I am surer as I read and listen. Our vocabulary is not commensurate yet with inner progress. It looks to me as if faults and evil propensities have a whole lexicon to themselves and positive qualities only a brief page. Perhaps the reason is that good refuses to be dissected and labeled as evil is. However the case may be, I have not come across a word for good-finding to offset fault-finding. To permit one helpful concept to go unidentified is as wasteful as losing the tiny yet powerful units of radio-activity. Faith must have more working words as well as the uncountable beauties within for the nascent world that is to emerge from our untapped resources.

ur blindness changes not a whit the course of inner realities. Of us it is as true as it is of the seeing that the most beautiful world is always entered through the imagination. If you wish to be something that you are not—something fine, noble, good—you shut your eyes, and for one dreamy moment you are that which you long to be.

e are heirs of the most magnificent mechanical equipment in history. Proudly bequeathing it to another age, we have forgotten that civilization is not human or humane unless it is rethought and relived with heart and soul. Implements can be handed down, not minds and personalities. Our latest blunder, which we must prevent from turning to a Balaklava, is to worship tools, deserting the One and Only that can draw the imponderable loveliness they conceal and lift them as vapor into His Firmament for stores of refreshing joy. We are spirits, not things—and for that matter “things” are another kind of spirit dumbly begging to rise again as ideas and impulses of creation. Poetry is their speech translated, their prayer. There are no deputies for our souls, and we are only mediators for a stupendous machine crying for a soul.

he legend tells that when Jesus was born the sun danced in the sky, the aged trees straightened themselves and put on leaves and sent forth the fragrance of blossoms once more. These are the symbols of what takes place in our hearts when the Christchild is born anew each year. Blessed by the Christmas sunshine, our natures, perhaps long leafless, bring forth new love, new kindness, new mercy, new compassion. As the birth of Jesus was the beginning of the Christian life, so the unselfish joy at Christmas shall start the spirit that is to rule the new year.

ow often the thought saddens me that my limitations prevent me from rendering larger service to the poor, the overladen, the ignorant! But why murmur over my bowl of longing, as the Japanese would say?

I realize that mortals are only tiny drops lost in an ocean of time. The most any race or individual can do is to enter a little more deeply into the purpose of the Divine Mind. That race, that individual, fulfills the highest destiny that is the best medium to transmit the current of good will through the ages.

There is another sustaining belief for me—that a watchful Providence guides equally the planet’s course and the flight of the sparrow, marks human affairs and strengthens endeavor. This faith that God is “personally” interested in us gives a fairer aspect to the weary old world where we live as strangers and enemies. It imparts to those who can believe a consciousness of power. It lets them be sure that mankind can prevail against the snares, machinations and greed of the wicked. Knowing that the hosts of the Lord encamp about them, they fear not armies or navies or lines of defense. Confidently they tell themselves that one day all men will be lovers and human calamities will vanish in the sunshine of peace and good will upon earth.

I am aware that this conception of the Creator seems antiquated to many. Occasionally I fail to hear His voice within me, and doubts overwhelm my mind; but I cannot let this belief go, for then I should have no light through the darkness of the world.

y life is “a chronicle of friendship.” My friends—all those about me—create my world anew each day. Without their loving care all the courage I could summon would not suffice to keep my heart strong for life. But, like Stevenson, I know it is better to do things than to imagine them.

tudy the hand, and you shall find in it the true picture of man, the story of human growth, the measure of the world’s greatness and weakness. Its courage, its steadfastness, its pertinacity make all the welfare of the human race. Upon the trustworthiness of strong, toil-hardened hands rests the life of each and all. Every day thousands of people enter the railway train and trust their lives to the hand that grasps the throttle of the locomotive. Such responsibility kindles the imagination! But more profound is the thought that the destiny and the daily life of mankind depend upon countless obscure hands that are never lifted up in any dramatic gesture to remind the world of their existence.

xperiencing a great sorrow is like entering a cave. We are overwhelmed by the darkness, the loneliness, the homesickness. Sad thoughts, like bats, flutter about us in the gloom. We feel that there is no escape from the prison house of pain. But God in His Loving-kindness has set on the invisible wall the Lamp of Faith—whose beams shall guide us back to the sunlit world where work and friends and service await us.

nowledge is power.” Rather, knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge—broad, deep knowledge—is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low. To know the thoughts and deeds that have marked man’s progress is to feel the great heart throbs of humanity through the centuries; and if one does not feel in these pulsations a heavenward striving, one must indeed be deaf to the harmonies of life.

he calamity of the blind is immense, irreparable. But it does not take away our share of the things that count—service, friendship, humor, imagination, wisdom. It is the secret inner will that controls one’s fate. We are capable of willing to be good, of loving and being loved, of thinking to the end that we may be wiser. We possess these spirit-born forces equally with all God’s children. Therefore we, too, see the lightnings and hear the thunders of Sinai. We, too, march through the wilderness and the solitary place that shall be glad for us, and as we pass, God maketh the desert to blossom like the rose. We, too, go unto the Promised Land to possess the treasures of the spirit, the unseen permanence of life and nature.

t is not possible for civilization to flow backward while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it will advance its allotted length. Through the ages in the battle with the powers of evil—with poverty, misery, ignorance, war, ugliness, and slavery, youth has steadily gained on the enemy. That is why I never turn away from the new generation impatiently because of its knowingness. Through it alone shall salvation come.

xperiments in the enrichment of the heritage of the human mind are only just beginning. The utmost faith at our command is needed to carry them out. As matters now stand, we are too near the abyss of a returning dark world to let such experiments lapse through want of faith. If we keep gazing into the abyss it will gaze back into us and we shall be engulfed. This pernicious habit must be broken. It prolongs mind-blighting traditions and prevents the worshiper from being a participant in the whole of his own faith. Generous risks must be taken for progress.

f the higher ideals we pursue are threatened with repression or extinction they can be obscured only locally and for a time. They will grow through the ineradicable might of the Divinity which transformed a few timid, unknown, simple disciples into a constructive power for good that made history both in the ideals and the temporal affairs of the race. I believe it is because these very ideals are pushing their way to the front harder than ever that the world is in such commotion. They are rousing fiercer opposition in the forces they are to cast out—greed and hate, fear and prejudice and intolerance. Today it is as in the beginning—Darkness is upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God is moving upon the face of the water. In time the light shall shine more and more into a true Easter, and in that light we shall behold a heaven-upon-earth civilization. . . .

urely we would not weep if some beloved friend had the good fortune to move from a humble and uncomfortable house to a mansion into which the sunlight streamed, and whose grounds are a never-ending maze of beauty and wonder and delight. We would say that that was a fortunate friend, and, a bit wistfully, we would look forward to the time when we too might leave the burden of our daily tasks and join him in his house of beauty and light.

he poets have taught us how full of wonders is the night; and the night of blindness has its wonders, too. The only lightless dark is the night of ignorance and insensibility. We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond our senses.

t is necessary for the endurableness of life that we should believe that the uncertainty, the darkness in which we are struggling, shall one day be illumined by the light of solution; and even now we possess signs and traces of the knowledge which shall come when we see that Light face to face.

cience itself, which to the unthinking may seem far removed from faith, is a constant challenge to us not to live like pygmies. For what is science but faith staking everything on imaginative hypotheses so that it may retrieve larger hopes for the race from the unknown? Its courage and activity in piling up inventions and benefits, its implacable war upon ill-health are among the most inspiring records of man’s struggle upward. If simple faith can thus spur science to open up one immensity after another of natural truth, how much more can a thoughtful, all-round faith win great dominions in the soul of man!

Yet how are we moderns behaving toward such annals of faith? Moping and despairing on the shore of a continent upon which we are just setting foot. I did not think I would live to see such nervous collapse of a people—such utter breakdown of fundamentals. Spiritual helplessness is unworthy of us who feel ourselves men and companions equally with the stars and the atoms.

ince we are all too prone to live selfishly, it is necessary that there should be something within us to offset this tendency. The choice of a better life which we are to make involves some previous knowledge of such a life. What could save us from becoming more and more like animals, if there were not present with us other tendencies of a nobler kind? We cannot freely and wisely choose the right way for ourselves unless we know both good and evil.

am blind and have never seen a rainbow, but I have been told of its beauty. I know that its beauty is always broken and incomplete. Never does it stretch across the heavens in full perfection. So it is with all things as we know them here below. Life itself is as imperfect and broken for every one of us as the span of a rainbow. Not until we have taken the step from life into Eternity, shall we understand the meaning of Browning’s words: “On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.”

ears and regrets have no place in the vocabulary of youth, whose spirit sets its white and shining wings toward the purple shores of the Promised Land. Be happy, talk happiness. Happiness calls out responsive gladness in others. There is enough sadness in the world without yours. Rebel against the hardness and injustice of things as much as you like. It is always well to keep your fighting edge keen to smite wrongs wherever you meet them. But never doubt the excellence and permanence of what is yet to be. Never doubt that this is God’s world, and that it is brought nearer to Him by the right work of the least of His children no less than by the mighty works of genius. You are no less necessary to the world’s uplifting than Luther and Lincoln.

Join the great company of those who make the barren places of life fruitful with kindness. Carry a vision of heaven in your souls, and you shall make your home, your college, the world correspond to that vision. Your success and happiness lie in you. External conditions are the accidents of life, its outer trappings. The great, enduring realities are love and service. Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow. Work without joy shall be as nothing. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.

he process of the emancipation of mankind from old ideas is very slow. The human race does not take to new ways of living readily, but I do not feel discouraged. Personally, I am impeded by physical difficulties which generate forces powerful enough to carry me over the barriers. This is true of the world’s problems, too. It is for us to work with all our might to unite the spiritual power of good against the material power of evil.

It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers, but for powers equal to our tasks, to go forward with a great desire forever beating at the door of our hearts as we travel toward the distant goal.

t is seldom now that I think of my deprivations, and they never sadden me as they once did when I had bitter moments of rebellion because I must sit at life’s shut gate and fight down the passionate impulses of my nature. I know that a great many people pity me because I can show so little visible proof of living. They are often supercilious and sometimes contemptuous of the “poor thing” who is so shut out from everything they know. Meeting me in one of the noisy arenas of commerce, they are as startled as if they had encountered a ghost on Broadway. At such times I smile inwardly and gather my dreams about me. My reason for living would be lost if the reality they think they see did not hide her cruel face from me under a veil of pleasant illusions—if they are illusions. One will not quarrel over definitions if one has the substance, and I feel that, since I have found existence rich in happiness and interest, I have the substance.

aith does not oblige us to be unusually endowed, but receptive. To say others may have it but we cannot is wanton self-limitation. To be alert for whatever surprises may glow within us is to have at our command a zest for living which outweighs all material possessions. Stepping inward softly so as not to crush shy dreams and impulses, we shall marvel as our minds little by little disclose the completeness and oneness we potentially are. We shall, as I can testify after fifty years’ unbroken experience, grow longer wings as we draw from superficial living into our happiness. To me the only satisfactory definition of happiness is wholeness—a blending in harmony of all one’s feelings, visions, skills with the world of unfoldment waiting to be scrutinized and claimed.

t is no use trying to reconcile the multitude of egos that compose me. I cannot fathom myself. I ask myself questions that I cannot answer. I find my heart aching when I expected to find it rejoicing, tears flow from my eyes when my lips were formed to smile. I preach love, brotherhood, and peace, but I am conscious of antagonisms, and lo! I find myself brandishing a sword and making ready for battle.

I think that every honest belief should be treated with fairness, yet I cry out against people who uphold the empire of gold. I am aware of moods when the perfect state of peace, brotherhood, and universal love seems so far off that I turn to division, pugnacity, and the pageant of war. I am just like St. Paul when he says, “I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind. . . .” I am perfectly sure that love will bring everything right in the end, but I cannot help sympathizing with the oppressed who feel driven to use force to gain the rights that belong to them.

he facts which equip most lives for labor and learning are as numerous as the sands of the sea, but it is faith which lights us into sustaining realities beyond those perceived by the physical senses. Faith, like philosophy, endows me with a unity I miss in the chaos of material experience devoid of sight or hearing. But like everyone else I have eyes in my soul. Through faith I create the world I gaze upon; I make my own day and night, tint the clouds with iridescent fires, and behold! a midnight is strewn with other stars.

Proof is not my concern. Can anything really be proved—goodness or beauty or joy? You cannot define happiness any more than you can define health, but you know them when you feel them. What I want is to live. Not letting faith breathe in me would be death.

efeat is a gateway to mental adventure that makes humdrum days piquant, causes the blood to sing, and may even invest drudgery with grace. That is the meaning of Walt Whitman’s song that victory is great, but defeat, if necessary, is greater.

he eye grows by learning to see more in particular objects. To man’s physical sight the earth looks flat, and the stars are the same to us that they were to the ancients. Yet science has opened up infinite new wonders and glories in these phenomena! A child sees in the things about him only what he wants or does not want, but when a Newton recognizes the falling of the apple as the expression of a universal force in Nature, he sees far beyond ordinary sight. It is the same with our spirits. We grow as we discern more fully the possibilities of new life wrapped up in daily contacts. But when we forget or ignore this vital fact, the senses lead us astray. That is why limitations are necessary to bring before us the greatness of inner life offered us in the circumstances of our lives, and show us our God-given opportunities.

ll the aeons and aeons of time before we were born, before the spirit awoke to its present consciousness—where were we then? All the aeons and aeons of time after we are dead, after the spirit has sunk again to sleep from its present consciousness, where then shall we be? Vain questions; vain wondering. But if the spirit is eternal, we have no more reason to dread the future of the spirit than to shudder at its past. Rather, it is better to consider this, our life, merely as “a gleam of time between two Eternities,” and to believe that most of the truth, most of the beauty, most of the real splendor and fulfillment lies rather in those eternities than in the here-and-now.

know there are people who are bored with spiritual ideas. They are bored because they do not know their own capacities and consequently miss the multitude of bright, illuminating interests that would come if they learned to think inwardly. A bored person is one who is unacquainted with himself and God. God is never a bore to those who know and love Him.

he seeing are apt to conclude that the world of the blind—and especially the deaf-blind person—is quite unlike the sunlit, blooming world they know, that his feelings and sensations are essentially different from their own, and that his mental consciousness is fundamentally affected by his infirmities. They blunder still further, and imagine that he is shut out from all beauty of color, music, and shape. They need to be told over and over innumerable times that the elements of beauty, order, form, and proportion are tangible for the blind, and that beauty and rhythm are the result of a spiritual law deeper than sense. Yet how many people with eyes do take this truth to heart? How many of them take the trouble to ascertain for themselves the fact that the deaf-blind inherit their brain from a seeing and hearing race fitted for five senses, and the spirit fills the silent darkness with its own sunshine and harmony?

ower, not comfort, is my demand upon faith. Living faith is discomforting to the last degree. It does not offer an escape from life and its evils, but it gives a more abundant life despite all obstacles and all hardships. Faith, rightly understood, is active, not passive. Passive faith is no more a force than sight is in an eye that does not look or search out. Active faith knows no fear. It denies that God has betrayed His creatures and given the world over to darkness. It denies that men are to be judged after the appearance of race, color and opinion instead of according to the Law of Life. It denies that a society in which good will shall replace hate and intelligent co-operation supplant armed force is unattainable. It denies despair. Defeat is simply a signal to press onward. Reinforced by faith, the weakest mortal is mightier than disaster. The God within braces him against the universe; his soul is whole and equal to any emergency.

ometimes I wish these too, too solid limitations would melt; I feel positively bruised with their impacts! Day and night, in torrents of letters, under an avalanche of compliments I am reminded that I cannot see or hear when I know perfectly well that in the eternal sense I do. The spirit, like the sea, is greater than any island or continent of sense-experience within its waters. It has an infinite horizon of ideas that bring new facts and a way of living in accordance with them. My deep-rooted feeling that I am not deaf or blind is like the feeling that I am in the body but not of it. Of course I know that outwardly I am a “deaf and blind” Helen Keller. That is a transitory ego, and the few dark, silent years I shall be here do not matter. I use my limitations as tools, not as my real self. If others are helped through them that is the seventh heaven of happiness for me. The rub comes with the everlasting absorption in problems of deafness and blindness that keeps me from oftener looking out upon the universe through book windows or listening to the many-voiced course of things. . . .

ick or well, blind or seeing, bond or free, we are here for a purpose and however we are situated, we please God better with useful deeds than with many prayers or pious resignation. The temple or church is empty unless the good of life fills it. It is not the stone walls that make it small or large, but the brave soul’s light shining round about. The altar is holy if only it represents the altar of our heart upon which we offer the only sacrifices ever commanded—the love that is stronger than hate and the faith that overcometh doubt.

t is often said that usefulness is the end of life; and so it is. But happiness creates and inspires usefulness. If you have many gifts and the power to understand, even if you meditate night and day how to promote the welfare of the world, it shall all profit you little if you have not joy.

n days like these to believe that Good is the dominant principle is an ordeal as by fire, but for me it would be much harder to surrender that faith. All too well do I realize that the bitterest fears of modern thinkers did not envisage the ruin into which we are now being hurled. So much more then is faith imperative to pour healing upon blinding anguish and deafening fear. Heaven and earth, it has been affirmed, are mirages rising from the deserts of man’s despair. Picturesque indeed would despair be if it could perform such a miracle. But to everyone with faith his own world is real, no matter what it may appear to be to others, and happiness—its fundamental meaning is a free breathing of the soul—has also a share in the mirage. From the delight of young animals in simply being alive, from children at play, from youth risking all for love, from the triumphs that follow long effort—from all these, faith gathers materials for her Temple to form a bulwark against the storm.

wonder why farewells, even for a short time, are depressing? The emotion, I imagine, is akin to the regret when first love’s celestial dream fades, the mother’s wistfulness, recalling the joyous moment when she sees her baby taking its first steps or hears his first word. Few pleasures there are indeed without an aftertouch of pain, but that is the preservation which keeps them sweet.

t is a day bright with sunshine. Then, from somewhere, unexpected, comes a veil of mist and then another, until the face of the sun is hid from us, and all is dark before our eyes. Yet we never doubt for a moment the sun is still there. Some poet has said that Life itself is “A wisp of fog betwixt us and the sun.” I think that is true; I think that we—that the spirit-part of us—is eternal, that the Sun of true love and happiness is eternal, and that life, with its hurry, its bustle, its materialism, comes between us and the Sun, like a wisp of fog, a veiling cloud.

omorrow!” What possibilities there are in that word. No matter how discouraging today, how gloomy with dark clouds, with terrors and illness and death, there’s always Tomorrow, with its promise of better things. Let us think then of Death as but one more tomorrow, filled with infinite promise and fulfillment.

othing has happened today outwardly; but for me there is never a dull day. There is in me an ego that observes, examines, and philosophizes constantly. I cannot look out of the window or see the expression of a face or catch the tone of a voice; and yet what a wealth of experience is within my reach! Every gesture of the hand, every footfall, every joy is examined and weighed and noted in my mind. Only when I have said as clearly as I can the best I discern in human beings am I satisfied.

nce affliction was looked upon as a punishment from God—a burden to be borne passively and piously. The only idea of helping the victims of misfortune was to shelter them and leave them to meditate and live as contentedly as possible in the valley of the shadow. But now we understand that a sequestered life without aspiration enfeebles the spirit. It is exactly the same as with the body. The muscles must be used, or they lose their strength. If we do not go out of our limited experience somehow and use our memory, understanding, and sympathy, they become inactive. It is by fighting the limitations, temptations, and failures of the world that we reach our highest possibilities.

hange may be the vitalizing wind blowing through the house of life, but it is not an abiding force. We need permanent things to soak peace into us as well as progress—the beauty of the earth, seedtime and harvest, the smiles of lovers, the joy of the young in being alive, pride in craftsmanship. Why, oh, why must we let ourselves forget these lasting treasures in an age of consuming ambition, speed-madness, and accumulated goods that leave us no chance to live? If we cannot be contented with a little no wealth will ever satisfy us. Only from simple beginnings can creation go on unchecked. . . .

hat we have once enjoyed we can never lose. A sunset, a mountain bathed in moonlight, the ocean in calm and in storm—we see these, love their beauty, hold the vision to our hearts. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us. Our beloved ones are no more lost to us when they die than if they were still laughing and loving and working and playing at our side. Truly, life is overlord of Death and Love can never lose its own.

ime invariably disintegrates the substance of most experiences and reduces them to intellectual abstractions. Many of the poignant details elude any attempt to restate them. It is not merely the difficulty of recapturing emotions, it is almost equally difficult to define attitudes, or to describe their effects upon others. They are, as it were, in solution, or if they do crystallize, they appear different to the persons concerned. It seems to me it is impossible to analyze honestly the subtle motives of those who have influenced our lives, because we cannot complete the creative process with the freshness of the situation clinging to it. Analysis is as destructive of emotion as of the flower which the botanist pulls to pieces.

believe in immortality as instinctively as the fruit tree in the seed and quite as growingly, but that is not faith, except as it shines among its aggregate of nerving truths. Without immortality faith would still count it a magnificent vision to look upon God’s face a brief while, to hold a beloved mortal’s hand, to receive a child’s kiss, and look through a glass millions of miles to other universes.

o one knows—no one can know—the bitter denials of limitation better than I do. I am not deceived about my situation. It is not true that I am never sad or rebellious; but long ago I determined not to complain. The mortally wounded must strive to live out their days cheerfully for the sake of others. That is what religion is for—to keep the hearts brave to fight out to the end with a smiling face. This may not be a very lofty ambition, but it is a far cry from surrendering to fate. But to get the better of fate even to this extent one must have work and the solace of friendship and an unwavering faith in God’s Plan of Good.

ew people are saints or geniuses; but there is always this much of hope in all men—every pure delight they cherish is a “focus of good will,” and every lovely scene they dwell on, every harmony they listen to, every graceful or tender thing they touch with reverent hand starts on the wing a flock of sweet thoughts which neither care nor poverty nor pain can destroy. Joy is the voice of the love and faith that shall at last pronounce the word of eternal life—“Well done!”

s I wander through the dark, encountering difficulties, I am aware of encouraging voices that murmur from the spirit realm. I sense a holy passion pouring down from the springs of Infinity. I thrill to music that beats with the pulses of God. Bound to suns and planets by invisible cords, I feel the flame of eternity in my soul. Here, in the midst of the everyday air, I sense the rush of ethereal rains. I am conscious of the splendor that binds all things of earth to all things of heaven—immured by silence and darkness, I possess the light which shall give me vision a thousandfold when death sets me free.

ot only are the senses deceptive, but numerous usages in our language indicate that people who have five senses find it difficult to keep their functions distinct. I understand that we hear views, see tones, taste music. I am told that voices have color. Tact, which I had supposed to be a matter of nice perception, turns out to be a matter of taste. Judging from the large use of the word, taste appears to be the most important of all the senses. Taste governs the great and small conventions of life. Certainly the language of the senses is full of contradictions, and my fellows who have five doors to their house are not more surely at home in themselves than I.

believe that we can live on earth according to the teachings of Jesus, and that the greatest happiness will come to the world when man obeys His commandment, that “ye love one another.”

I believe that every question between man and man is a religious question, and that every social wrong is a moral wrong.

I believe that we can live on earth according to the fulfillment of God’s will, and that when the will of God is done on earth as it is in heaven, every man will love his fellow men and act toward them as he desires they should act toward him. I believe that the welfare of each is bound up in the welfare of all.

I believe that life is given us so we may grow in love, and I believe that God is in me as the sun is in the color and fragrance of a flower—the Light in my darkness, the Voice in my silence.

I believe that only in broken gleams has the Sun of Truth yet shone upon men. I believe that love will finally establish the Kingdom of God on earth, and that the corner-stones of that Kingdom will be Liberty, Truth, Brotherhood, and Service.

I believe that no good shall be lost, and that all man has willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist forever.

I believe in the immortality of the soul because I have within me immortal longings. I believe that the state we enter after death is wrought of our own motives, thoughts, and deeds. I believe that in the life to come I shall have the senses I have not had here, and that my home there will be beautiful with color, music, and speech of flowers and faces I love.

Without this faith there would be little meaning in my life. I should be “a mere pillar of darkness in the dark.” Observers in the full enjoyment of their bodily senses pity me, but it is because they do not see the golden chamber in my life where I dwell delighted; for, dark as my path may seem to them, I carry a magic light in my heart. Faith, the spiritual strong searchlight, illumines the way, and although sinister doubts lurk in the shadow, I walk unafraid toward the Enchanted Wood where the foliage is always green, where joy abides, where nightingales nest and sing, and where life and death are one in the Presence of the Lord.

THE END

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