Levels of Living: Essays on Everyday IdealsCope, Henry Frederick
Religion
Levels of Living: Essays on Everyday Ideals
Cope, Henry Frederick
Conduct of life
The concentration of mind on the self, whether in the name of religion
or in any other name, is but moral suicide. People who have no other
object in life than that of saving their own souls are but little
better than those whose whole object is to fatten, protect, and keep
safe their bodies.
But Christianity must be perverted greatly to make it teach men to set
their own interests first. It is the religion of the other man. Its
appeal is not to the love of self, but to the love of society. It
offers a way of salvation, not as a thing desirable for your exclusive
use, but as the pathway for all lives, for all the people. Its tree of
life is not for a single pair, but for the healing of the nations.
True religion is not in self-centred culture, but in the culture of all
through the service of the single ones and the culture of the one
through his service for all. Only in the atmosphere of service does
the soul grow, expand, and find itself. To live in a circle is to die;
it is the centrifugal life that finds salvation. They court death who
seek only their own lives; they find life who, disregarding death and
loss, seek only to make others live.
Religion is not simply a cure for my ills. True, it does cure many of
them, but only that I may be better able to do its work. It is a great
cause, a mighty project, commanding the noblest enthusiasms and the
highest efficiency of effort, the project of bringing this whole world
to salvation. And that not the salvation of a mental condition but of
the perfection of its whole being, the realization of its highest
possibilities, the full noontide of the day of God.
Is not this enough to satisfy any man and to call forth the best in
him, that he should in some way serve this glorious ideal? Is not this
man's purpose in this world even as it was the purpose of the one who
called Himself the Son of Man? What nobler summary could any life have
than His, that He went about doing good? How quickly would that
kingdom of heaven come if this were the program of every life!
Let but a man do his duty towards this shining ideal, let him but be
lifted up, carried along in the mighty enthusiasm it ought to engender,
and his own soul, his own development, his character perfection will
take care of itself. No man ever did any great work without becoming
greater himself, and greatness never was found in any other way. This
is an unvarying law. Service is the secret of culture.
The pious hypochondriac is sure to be a sickly soul. The best thing
you can do for your soul is to forget that you have one, just as the
healthy man forgets he has a heart or liver. The self-forgetting
service is the secret of happiness, of full finding of self. Freedom
in self-giving brings fullness in living.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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