Levels of Living: Essays on Everyday IdealsCope, Henry Frederick
Religion
Levels of Living: Essays on Everyday Ideals
Cope, Henry Frederick
Conduct of life
We need to seek out the springs of noble thoughts, to find in the
riches of the world's literature, in music, and in beauty of art the
food for that inner life in the strength of which, drawing often on its
secret resources, we can go many days through the desert of toil.
The wise life uses every opportunity of refreshing; it drinks of every
spring of the up-welling waters of life; it seeks communion with every
great soul. Holidays and rest days are to it times of replenishing
when the eyes that ache from bending over the machine or desk lift
themselves to the eternal hills and the heart turns to the things that
are infinite.
THE SENSE OF THE INFINITE
One does not have to believe in the same kind of a god as did the seers
and singers of long ago in order to obtain the spiritual values which
they found in the thought of his nearness to them. David and Browning,
Isaiah and Whittier, with all the centuries between them, still come to
the same thought--we know that Thou art near.
Through all ages and in all peoples this sense of that which is other
than ourselves, from which our highest good comes, towards which our
ideals and aspirations strain, the ultimate force of our being, this
feeling after the infinite is universal. It is the essential and
determinative mark of every religion.
When those singers of long ago tried to express their sense of the
infinite life and love they used words which make it appear that they
thought only of some being larger, mightier, wiser than themselves,
yet, after all, like themselves, a great man deified because He was
great. Perhaps that really was their conception; still, we use
precisely the same language, even though our ideas are entirely
different.
It makes relatively little difference what their conceptions were, so
far as ours are concerned. Their words are not accurate, detailed pen
pictures of some being who can be described or photographed. No man
has seen the infinite at any time. The great thing is that ever and
everywhere men find themselves with a hunger after this sublime unseen.
One may use terms of personality and another terms of power; to one the
infinite may be but a local deity; to another, that which embraces all
spirit and being, and each may have all of the divine his heart is
capable of containing. Here none may dogmatize for others.
Religion does not depend on uniformity of conceptions of the divine.
It depends more upon universality of consciousness of the infinite and
openness of mind and life to whatever we may feel and know, from any
source or through any means whatsoever, of that life or energy which
lies back of all life and energy, of that love and light which cheer
and lighten every son of man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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