Practical Religion: Being Plain Papers on the Daily Duties, Experience, Dangers, and Privileges of Professing ChristiansRyle, J. C. (John Charles)
Religion
Practical Religion: Being Plain Papers on the Daily Duties, Experience, Dangers, and Privileges of Professing Christians
Ryle, J. C. (John Charles)
Christian life -- Anglican authors
It is an utter mistake to suppose that _learning and science alone_ can
give happiness. They may occupy a man's time and attention, but they
cannot really make him happy. They that increase knowledge often
"increase sorrow:" the more they learn, the more they discover their own
ignorance. (Eccles. i. 18.) It is not in the power of things on earth or
under the earth to "minister to a mind diseased." The heart wants
something as well as the head: the conscience needs food as well as the
intellect. All the secular knowledge in the world will not give a man
joy and gladness, when he thinks on sickness, and death, and the grave.
They that have climbed the highest, have often found themselves
solitary, dissatisfied, and empty of peace. The learned Selden, at the
close of his life, confessed that all his learning did not give him such
comfort as four verses of St. Paul. (Titus ii. 11--14.)
It is an utter mistake to suppose that _idleness alone_ can give
happiness. The labourer who gets up at five in the morning, and goes out
to work all day in a cold clay ditch, often thinks, as he walks past the
rich man's door, "What a fine thing it must be to have no work to do."
Poor fellow! he little knows what he thinks. The most miserable
creature on earth is the man who has nothing to do. Work for the hands
or work for the head is absolutely essential to human happiness. Without
it the mind feeds upon itself, and the whole inward man becomes
diseased. The machinery within _will_ work, and without something to
work upon, will often wear itself to pieces. There was no idleness in
Eden. Adam and Eve had to "dress the garden and keep it." There will be
no idleness in heaven: God's "servants shall serve Him." Oh, be very
sure the idlest man is the man most truly unhappy! (Gen. ii. 15; Rev.
xxii. 3.)
It is an utter mistake to suppose that _pleasure-seeking and amusement
alone_ can give happiness. Of all roads that men can take in order to be
happy, this is the one that is most completely wrong. Of all weary,
flat, dull, and unprofitable ways of spending life, this exceeds all. To
think of a dying creature, with an immortal soul, expecting happiness in
feasting and revelling,--in dancing and singing,--in dressing and
visiting,--in ball-going and card-playing,--in races and fairs,--in
hunting and shooting,--in crowds, in laughter, in noise, in music, in
wine! Surely it is a sight that is enough to make the devil laugh and
the angels weep. Even a child will not play with its toys all day long.
It must have food. But when grown up men and women think to find
happiness in a constant round of amusement they sink far below a child.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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