Indeed, personality is essentially the most unlimited reality with
which we deal; in comparison a solar system is a little thing.
Consider _memory_, by which we can retrace our youthful days, build
our shanties once again at brooksides, replay our games, and
recapitulate the struggles and the joys of the first days at school.
Nothing in all the universe can remember except persons. Were we not
so familiar with this element in human greatness, we would more often
pause to exclaim, as did Augustine, fifteen centuries ago, "Great is
the power of memory. Amazement overcomes me when I think of it. And
yet men go abroad to gaze upon the mountains, the broad rivers, the
wide ocean, the courses of the stars, and pass themselves, the
crowning wonder, by!" Consider _imagination_, by which, sitting still
in body we can project ourselves around the world, can walk down
Princes Street in Edinburgh, or stand in mingled awe and condemnation
before the tomb of Napoleon in Paris, or rise uncovered before the
majesty of the Matterhorn. Nothing in all the universe can do that
except persons. Were full power to act wherever we can _think_ added
to our gifts, we should come so near to incipient omnipresence as to
be in dread of our responsibility. Consider _love_, by which we live
not so much where our bodies are as where our friends and family may
be. Love expands the individual until his real life is independent of
geography. Says one lover to another:
"The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double."
Many a mother in America has _lived_ in the trenches of France;
many a man has found that what might happen to him where his body was
could not be compared with what might happen to him where his
friendships were; and as we grow in love and loyalty we find ourselves
scattered all over creation. How far such an expansion of life may go
our Lord revealed when he said, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of
these, my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me." (Matt.
25:40.) Nothing in heaven above or on the earth beneath can so extend
itself in love save persons.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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