Levels of Living: Essays on Everyday IdealsCope, Henry Frederick
Religion
Levels of Living: Essays on Everyday Ideals
Cope, Henry Frederick
Conduct of life
This is religion, such a consciousness of the reality of the Infinite
Spirit that you will steadily do the things that that spirit of love is
doing in this world, ministering to men, binding up the broken in
heart, lifting the lame, and leading the wandering, feeding the hungry
and clothing the naked, bringing light and love and cheer to those that
sit in darkness, you will become feet and fingers to God.
One does not need to wait for a special garb to do this religious work;
one does not need to wait for formal ordination; whoever loves men
already is divinely ordained to serve them. One does not need to wait
for a church or a special organization; the sufficient motive is deep,
sacrificing love; the method will be just what the Master's was, to go
where men are and help them.
After all, what this world needs is not so much that men shall go to
their fellows with money, with clothes, or even with employment; it
needs that they shall just go to them. The good mixer, who mingles
with men, who knows how they live, and what they think, how they
suffer, and what they feel, if, going amongst them, he carries a clean
heart, a love for his fellows, a firm faith in heaven, and hope for
men, is doing them more good by his presence than he who may send
carloads of goods.
Men did not need that Jesus should wear a label saying that the Most
High was with Him; the more He mingled with men, the more clearly they
saw He belonged to God. What He was willing to do for them showed that
they, too, were the children of the Most High. If any man would have
that infinite presence with him, if he desires the deep sense of the
spiritual, let him seek it not in closet or convent, but in the touch
of hand and in the sight of the face of friend and fellow being.
Many of us are worried at times because our lives seem wasted in doing
little things; we would become immortal by saving our powers for some
great deed. We need to remember Him whom the world most easily
remembers and most highly honours, the Man of Nazareth, whose life was
spent in trivial services, doing the next thing that came to hand,
helping ordinary people in every-day needs. Yet God was with Him, as
He ever is with those who love their fellows in sincere service.
THE HEAVENLY SERVICE
It seems easy to see something peculiarly holy, something deeply
religious in the occupations and acts of the priesthood or the
ministry. But thinking of these as religious and of such service as
divine we fall into the habit of thinking that they alone, in all the
world of action, are divine. We set on one side of life the religious
service limited to these formal acts and on the other side what we call
the secular life and service.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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