 Chapter 33 of Fritz of the Spirit. This is LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Chad Horner from Baliglare, Northern Ireland. Fritz of the Spirit by Hamilton Wright, maybe. Chapter 33 by Products in Life. One of the prime sources of modern wealth is the saving of by-products. In the days before science came to the aid of business, everything was sacrificed to turn out one major product. And nobody realised the enormous waste of materials that went on in almost every factory. Today, as a result of larger knowledge and of more skillfully devised machinery, a thousand things which once went to the refuse heap are turned to account and made almost as profitable as the chief product of the factory. In many cases by-products have become so valuable that they have been transformed into major products and the scrap heap has been converted into salable property. A good many people are still going on in the old way and conducting the business of life as if only one or two results could be secured. They set out to be strong and therefore they live as if the process of getting strength excluded the gaining of all the other virtues. In this way they throw away the by-products and miss great chances of wealth. In getting strength it is easy to get sweetness as well. The same process which makes men and women strong will also make them sweet if they will bring intelligence to bear on what they are doing. Many people have a highly commendable purpose to become truth tellers but because they discard the by-products of tact and sympathy they lose the kind of prosperity which makes a man a great capitalist for his friends in time of need. The world is full of people who work so hard to do their duty that they do nothing else and make the friends of good causes as unhappy as their enemies. The by-products of duty doing are good sense, feeling for others and the flexibility which arms high purpose and great integrity with the contagious kindness of temper. In morals the by-products are as productive of ease and comfort as in business. Many men and women are persuaded that order is nature's first law and strive to obey that law by putting everything with which they are concerned into its place and keeping it there. This is the secret of effectiveness on a large scale. It is also one of the secrets of comfortable living. Only the orderly man or women can handle great affairs with ease and dispatch or be thoroughly comfortable in a life of busy and many-sided activities. Unfortunately, in becoming orderly, some people make themselves the rigid incarnation of a single principle, the living embodiment of a single method and are transformed into slaves instead of servants. Few people are more terrible to their associates than those who have imbibed the passion for order. Who cannot see anything out of place without internal misery and external action in whose hands the spirit of a home is sacrificed for the sake of an immaculately clean and orderly house. Who becomes so absorbed in pursuing method that the spirit of any enterprise with which they are connected is often throttled. Order like every other method ought to be generously and comfortably enforced and one of the byproducts in making oneself orderly is a certain adaptability to conditions. Order was made for man, not man for order and those who are well trained in keeping things in their place will have the good sense and graciousness to lie things to be out of their place and when conditions make that state of affairs either excusable or necessary. Like everything else, order must sometimes yield to more immediate necessities. There is a still larger host of people who are bent on being useful no matter what it costs themselves or their friends. Now usefulness is the characteristic of all people who achieve anything either in themselves or in society. In an order of life which necessitates cooperation, activity and thoughtfulness the qualities which make one useful to be an idler is to fail in one's primary duty but one ought to be useful agreeably and with a certain charity towards others. The fact that one drives oneself with the spirit of conscience does not empower one to drive everybody else. Many excellent people go through life like Albarich cracking a long lash over the heads of the unfortunate Nibelogen there are many homes in which the demon of usefulness drives out the spirit of joyful consecration to work and jury and goodness is so violent that it becomes a kind of disorder and virtue so aggressive that it takes on the aspect of a destroying angel. In order to be useful it is not necessary to become a slave driver. The byproducts of the struggle to be useful are patients, the spirit of cooperation, the habit of recognising good work the desire to stimulate and persuade rather than to go to narrate blessed are the good with whom it is pleasant to live. End of section 33, recording by Chad Horner from Balikler, Northern Ireland Chapter 34 of Fruits of the Spirit This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Maria Fatima the Silver Fruits of the Spirit by Hamilton Wright maybe Chapter 34, The Value of Appreciation Many men and women underestimate the value of expression. They take too many things for granted. They assume that their affection or their gratitude or their sense of obligation is understood without words. Such people are often surrounded by those who are craving some expression of affection, some word of approval, some kind of recognition. The best work is sometimes done with shut teeth and a fixed purpose in dead silence so far as the world is concerned without a murmur of applause or a word of thanks. But this is not the way in which work ought to be done among intelligent men and women and it is not the way in which, as a rule, the best work is evoked from the greatest number of people. The majority of men and women get the best out of themselves when they are in a congenial atmosphere. This is particularly true of those finer kinds of work which express individuality, quality and personal gift. A man may do a piece of mechanical work in arctic coldness. He may do it thoroughly in the face of distinct disapproval but it is very difficult to do the work into which one puts his heart and which is the expression of the finest elements in one unless there is some warmth in the atmosphere, something which summons out of their hiding places the most delicate and beautiful possibilities of one's nature. It is true a man like Dante can do a sublime piece of work with no other approval than his own conscience, with no other reward than his own consciousness of having done his work with a man's integrity and an artist's thoroughness. But men of Dante's temperament are few and there are a great many other kinds of work as important as that which Dante did which could not possibly be done under such conditions. It is the duty of every man not only to do his work as thoroughly as possible but to create the atmosphere in which other men and women can do their work thoroughly and well. It is the duty of every man not only to unfold his own character freely and completely but to create the atmosphere in which other people are able to develop their best qualities. There are hosts of men and women who depend absolutely on others for their finest growth, who have to be drawn out, whose sweetness and charm never find expression unless they are evoked by warm affection or by generous approval. The world is full of half-starved people whose emotions are denied their legitimate expression, who are hungry for an affection which they often have but the possession of which they do not realize because it never finds expression, who have latent possibilities of achievement of a very high order but whose possibilities are undeveloped because nothing in the air about them summons them forth. Such people need a summer atmosphere and they are often compelled to live in a winter chill. Many of those who diffuse the chill instead of the cheer are unconscious of the influence for repression which they put forth simply from lack of thought about the delicate adjustments of life. They have never studied themselves or those about them and so there are thousands of homes that are without cheer not because they are without love but because they are without the expression of love and there are thousands of offices, workshops and schoolrooms that are without inspiration not because they are lacking in earnestness or in integrity but because the habit of recognition has never been formed and there is none of that spiritual cooperation which not only gives but evokes the best. There is in life no more pathetic feature than the hunger for the love which exists but never expresses itself and therefore so far as comfort, warmth or inspiration is concerned is as if it were not. The capital of affection and good intention in the world sufficient to warm the whole atmosphere if it were used but there are hundreds of capitalists of this kind who leave their names untouched and who enrich neither themselves nor others because they do not know how to give currency to their wealth. Love is not to be hoarded but to be spent it is great in the exact measure in which it is given it returns in the exact measure in which it is sent away and society needs nothing today so much as the use of this unused capital. If men of integrity and good intentions in the world of business would manifest their real feeling towards their associates and their employees by constant recognition of work well done by the words spoken almost at random which show that a piece of work is valued and that credit is rendered to the worker a large percentage of the social unrest would disappear for love is the only solvent of the social problems. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by J. Reader Fruits of the Spirit by Hamilton Wright Maybe Chapter 35 Immortal Love On the horizon of human thought three great ideas rise from the solid earth into the clouds like vast mountain summits. For many generations whenever men have lifted their eyes from the little space of ground on which they were working they have seen these sublime lifts of the common soil skyward. For dim and remote as these reaches of upland have looked they have somehow seemed to be of the same substance of which human life is compounded. Every inch of common earth predicting the mass and majesty of the hills. At the beginning these distant peaks were so remote that they were almost indistinguishable from clouds. So unsubstantial and visionary did they appear dreams sent to give a sense of space and range to the dwellers in the narrow house of life. As time brought that experience which is the deposit of truth in the heart by the process of living the massive outlines became more distinct and the dream slowly took on the aspect of reality. Generation after generation lifted its eyes and the vague forms drew nearer and warm more familiar forms until they have become in very truth the hills of God. Eternity, infinity and mortality are for those who look up to the hills whence cometh their help no longer vague and visionary dreams of men tossing restlessly in the darkness of a night which does not bring repose. They are the solid realities of a life which finds in them the assurance of the full fruition of its divinations and possibilities of growth. The world is haunted by these sublime visions whether it opens or closes its eyes. All thought and action lie visibly within the circle of these encompassing hills. The sense of the infinite is planted deep in the heart of modern men. The passion for the infinite consumes them. They have found in music a language subtle enough and spiritual enough not to express but to suggest the infinite and eternal as their spirits reach out to fulfill and possess themselves. And all art is a symbol of the perfection that immortality brings within reach of the soul. The mechanical appliances which lengthen the range of the eye and carry the voice over half a continent are crude symbols of the immense reach of the spiritual nature which has infinity, eternity and immortality before it. Infinity, room in which to bring out all the power, beauty and fruitfulness of the soul. Eternity, boundless time added to boundless space so that all the processes of growth may fulfill themselves in endless progression of flower and fruit. Immortality, the unwaisted vitality which flows with increasing volume through deepening channels and gives the soul to possess the vastness of space and illimitable time for growth. These great fields which open on all sides of the life of the hour and certify to the soul its incalculable richness, the illimitable reach of room and time as of a structure not built by hands but rising by processes of growth which becomes more and more marvelous as they pass from stage to stage are not matters of faith and vision for prophets and poets only. Every man carries within himself not only the evidence of the reality of these sublime ideas but the consciousness of the power to possess all that life and time, immortality and eternity offer him. So in that mysterious, indefinable, measureless power of devotion, self-sacrifice and consecration which we call love, that deep-rooted genius which harmonizes idealism and service and in the imperfection of the moment foresees the perfection of the future lies the present evidence of the reality of the great visions, the source of the power that possesses and uses them. God has set eternity in the heart of man. In that heart he has also set infinity for love is without measure of time or magnitude. Prophets and poets have strained the resources of all the languages to describe and define it and have been content to suggest a depth in power which they can neither sound nor measure for love is as limitless as eternity and as boundless as infinity. It is not a symbol of immortality, it is immortal. It strives to bar the door against death as against an enemy, but when the door has been forced it keeps companionship with sorrow and silently walks through invisible paths with one who has vanished but with whom love travels undismayed through unseen worlds. Every visible thing crumbles, changes and disappears for the hand of time is on all things but love which is winged for immortal flight escapes the tombs in which the ashes of the dead lie and the slow immutable processes of decay which bring all things made with the hands back to the earth out of which they are built. It has no fellowship with death as death fulfills the mandates of life and breaks the bonds of the spirit as it passes from one form to another. It is of the very substance of life and moves noiseless and indestructible through the shadows and mutations of the world. Loneliness is often its portion and sorrow its companion but death has no power over it. In love the passion for the infinite finds its outlet in channel but never its perfect easement and satisfaction for infinity can never find space for the sweep of the wings of love under earthly skies. There are no channels of finite service deep enough to make room for its flood tides. It pours itself out lavishly and without measure but its store remains undiminished. In the exact degree in which it gives itself as it increased and when it seems to bankrupt itself its wealth is multiplied. It goes about in time in the world like a child that has strayed from home seeking someone who speaks its language and never finding the freedom of speech which it craves. For no language is adequate to the expression of love though all the languages which the soul uses have striven to match its infinity of meaning with finite words. All the arts have spoken for it but the heart of it remains without a voice. In music it has found some easement of the pain of emotion and passion and yearning unexpressed for music is love in search of a word. But all the resources of music cannot utter what is in the heart of love. They can only suggest its untold wealth of vision, devotion, service and bliss. As the beauty of the dawn may for a moment here and there rapturously sing in the notes of birds which it has awakened and glow in the color of flowers which it has summoned from sleep. Soul music makes now and again a brief pause in the tumult of the world and brings a sudden and wonderful silence and peace of eternity in the unrest of time. But there is only a sudden vision of heaven and then the earth fills space again. Love is the craving of the immortal for its own speech. The passion of the infinite bound about for the moment by the finite. The immortal soul seeking its own and loyally waiting for it walking beside it, pouring out upon it its limitless wealth as it passes through the shadows of mortality. End of Chapter 35 Chapter 36 of Fritz of the Spirit This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Chad Horner from Ballet Claire Northern Ireland. Fritz of the Spirit by Hamilton Wright maybe Chapter 36 The Wisdom of Youth There is a wisdom born of long experience in the ways that are right and in paths that are sweet which all men honour and reference where there is something that comes to age which neither youth nor maturity can command but there is another and so-called wisdom of age which has its roots in the weaknesses of men not in their strength, in the failure of their endeavours and in their doubts. The Wisdom of Prudence which hugs the shore of comfort and holds back from the great adventures of the Spirit which doubts the realities of the higher life because no longer in touch with them which challenges every generous impulse and chivalrous experiment which sometimes recognises the beauty of high aims but always questions the possibility of realising them which sees the long line of failures and felicities, disappointments and says to Ardent Youth Be sensible, give up your dreams take life as you find it Be content to be the average man and the average woman in morals, efficiency and aims The others are only dreamers Behold this dreamer cometh has been the cry of men and women who content themselves with this wisdom since the beginning of time but the dreamer comes and once more the morning of hope comes on the world a few months ago in all parts of the English as well as in the German speaking world there were commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the death of a man who was scorned as a dreamer in his time So beautiful were his visions and so impracticable but the men who scorned him are forgotten and all the world loves Schiller not because he did things with his hands but because he was content to walk through life noble things that were possible to men This miscalled wisdom of experience is the old siren song of worldliness sung in the ears of the dwellers in Mesopotamia before there were shales on the Mediterranean It is the philosophy of the men and women who have exchanged their ideals for their comfort and because their ideals no longer live with them believe that ideals have ceased to exist for everybody else Such a man looks out of the window of his well furnished and comfortable room and shrugs his shoulders as he sees youth storm past ardent and petious filled with great hopes and goes back to his fire and thinks himself wise and does not know that he is the typical fool of him the bible tells us who said there is no god This prudent calculating doubtful attitude toward life would be signed if it were not based on the fundamental error that there is no god In Hamlet the cautious prudent careful polonious warning his son against all manner of danger and counselling him to keep away from life but never telling him how to meet and master it would be right George McDonald once said if the devil were god but because the devil is not god it is the most short-sighted policy in the world the wisdom of youth, faith, hope, enthusiasm is based on the fundamental fact that there is a god that therefore the best things are true and that the best things belong to men and are within their reach if not their grasp there is no dream which does not fall shortly of the reality because there is a god youth trusts instinctively the hidden forces instead of fearing them marches boldly into life instead of entrenching itself against life risks years, life, talent, heart as great souls have always risked these things in believing that there are few things in life worth getting but a host of things worth being and a host of things worth doing that it is better to meet with shipwreck-seeking worlds than to rot in harbour safety where is safety? accepted doing the highest things possible to us and going to the ultimate harbour where we can cast anchor at last if this modern world is to be saved it must deepen its faith must freshen its hope must preserve its enthusiasm its problems are so perplexing its cares so many its duty so difficult that nothing can save it but a great tide of spiritual vitality what is needed in private and in public life is not so much knowledge of what ought to be done a strength to do what we know is waiting to be done never has a fight between the things of the body and the things of the spirit being so sharply defined as on this continent today because never anywhere have the material prizes of life been so great it is idle to preach poverty to men it is idle to tell them to stop getting rich they cannot help it the combination of the genius which God has put into them with the knowledge of the modern world and the resources of that world compels men to be rich to preach poverty as it was preached in the middle ages it is idle to decide to men to say arrest your effort curb your energy stop your activity with men going backward what ought to be said is not you must become poorer but you must become stronger the wealth of the world can be carried if we only know its spiritual possibilities wealth is a merciless and brittle tyrant if it is a master the hand and the one real question on this continent is whether we are to be the servants of our fortune or the masters of it as well as its makers the real antagonist to the spirit of materialism is the spirit of youth faith in the things of the soul joy in the work of life belief in its highest aims enthusiasm in its service nothing ages men like complete absorption in affairs everything keeps men young like freedom of the spirit it is the letter that killeth it is the spirit that giveth life end of chapter 36 recording by Chad Horner from Ballyclair, Northern Ireland chapter 37 of fruits of the spirit this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Marietta Fatima the Silver fruits of the spirit by Hamilton Wright maybe chapter 37 making opportunities it cannot be too often said to men and women of all ages nor with too ample illustration that opportunities are never to be waited for and that they come unawares great things are gained by intelligent and patient waiting but the man who stands beside the highway of life waiting not for something which he is prepared to receive but for something which accident may throw in his way will never be overtaken by fortune when fortune comes his way she will pass without any recognition from him it sometimes seems as if life were a great game and as if the possible player against whom all men and women are matched delighted in perplexing and confusing his opponents as a matter of fact life is so saturated with the moral quality that every step brings us face to face with the new test the great things are for the most part so humbly garbed that unless we penetrate their disguise we do not recognize them until they have passed and are a long way off when we discern their majesty in Emerson's poem the days are represented as appearing with empty hands and in the humblest dress but if a man fails to recognize them he sees after they have passed that they are queens in disguise and that their hands are full of the choistest gifts the difference between women lies largely in the ability or the lack of ability to penetrate the disguise of the opportunity and detect its true nature as a rule the great opportunities on which success turns come in unexpected moments and ways and the great majority of men who have attained marked success as they look back see clearly that they pass the turning points in their career when they were quite unaware that they were on critical ground no one ever knows when his opportunity will come no one ever knows when the decisive moment of his life will arrive the great crisis are often like a bolt out of the blue of a summer day there is not a moment for preparation in such crisis all that a man has been doing in the way of preparation suddenly bears its fruit he often acts instinctively he does that which he is in the habit of doing and because he is in the habit of doing his best and all his instincts prompt him to put forth the best that is in him he seizes the golden moment and does not discover until long afterwards that it was golden his great crisis with clear intelligence and the resolute will and passes it successfully before he is aware that it is upon him opportunities are created by the development of the power which deals with them and they come to men and women as a rule in exact proportion to the ability to recognize and handle them there are of course vast differences in the ability between men but opportunities come to all the difference lies in the ability to seize the right moment and make effective use of what is thrown in one's path successful careers often read like romances so full do they seem of the chances of life so purely accidental appear to be at the first glance the openings of the gates of success it is true that Mali Bran happened to pass under the window of the house when the young violinist old bull was practicing and that apparent accident gave the brilliant young violinist the great opportunity for which he longed but Mali Bran would not have paused nor would old bull have been sent for but the opportunities of the violin had not by their compelling beauty and power arrested her attention and made the fortune of the player it was not Mali Bran who gave old bull his chance it was his own magical skill Mali Bran furnished the opportunity but the opportunity would have come in some other way if the famous singer had not passed under the window Mali Bran would not have paused the opportunity of the young violinist men and women who could help us are always passing under our windows but if there is nothing in us which lays a spell upon them they do not know that they have passed our way and we are never aware of it the streets are thronged with those who could open the doors and the houses they pass are full of men and women of skill, power training and discipline who can arrest the attention and command the chance the way to secure opportunity is to walk resolutely on the pathway along which opportunity comes he who waits wastes his life he who takes his fate in his hand and goes forward sooner or later finds the time of his deliverance and the place of his achievement End of Chapter 37 by Hamilton Wright Mayby Chapter 38 Face to Face The Bitter Outcry of Carlisle If God would only speak again in these days as he has spoken in other days has risen many times from many hearts God spoke to Abraham to Moses to Elijah to Paul to Augustine to John Knox why has he become silent when the world so sorely needs guidance and heartening If God would only speak is the passionate cry of many an overburdened man and woman at the very moment when God is speaking it is so much easier to hear the still small voice in a past the tumult and turmoil of which have died into silence than to hear that voice in the uproar of the present to see the divine guidance when the long path lies clear in history as an upland road on a keen November morning than to see it as it unfolds step by step at our feet Moreover God uses many languages and continually approaches new generations of men in view forms of speech so that each generation must master a new tongue if it would understand the divine message sometimes it is a sound like a voice out of heaven sometimes a vision of an angel in the night sometimes a dream of a ladder reaching to the skies sometimes the burning of a bush which is not consumed sometimes the roar of overwhelming waves sometimes a breath of consuming wrath and sometimes a great peace in a thousand ways God speaks to men in an intercourse and fellowship which is never broken for an instant in the circle of which all men are included whether prophets poets, kings and saints or fishermen and outcasts which includes the good and the bad in the same infinite compassion and love for God speaks as distinctly and directly to the man in his sins as in his holiest moments an exposure punishment and shame are as much and as truly evidences of his presence as honor and influence in the happiest rewards of the pure life when sins are uncovered and men brought to judgment God's voice is heard as distinctly as when the same voice said above the waters of baptism this is my beloved son when exposure and disgrace overtake men of position and reputation God's voice says these are my children I will not suffer them to sink to the lowest pit they shall be saved as by fire it is the infinite is the infinite tenderness no less than the infinite justice that overtakes men who have lost the way and are selling their souls in the desert of greed and ambition and love of power happy is the man whose evil deed comes to the light and confronts him on the highway before he has gone over the final precipice into the pit and happy is the community when its moral diseases reveal themselves for it is better to be outwardly loathsome for a time than to be inwardly vile and no physician the wiser God is speaking in these recent years in no uncertain sound and herein rather than any prosperity of lands or factories or ships lies the good fortune of our time through the deafening noise of machinery and trade and pleasure come once more those divine tones which, whether in righteous indignation or in yearning tenderness are the precious evidence of the sonship of man and the fatherhood of God the happy hour for the prodigal was not that which found feasting with his fellows crowned with flowers and lying in the arms of pleasure but that which came to him when he herded with the swine the boy suddenly called him from the far country home End of Chapter 38 Chapter 39 of Fruits of the Spirit this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Chad Horner from Ballet Claire in County Antrim Northern Ireland Fruits of the Spirit Chapter 39 The Last Vigil a well-known Barrelief represents an old man and woman replenishing a torch in the stir and exhilaration of the lighting of the torches in the joy of bearing them swiftly through the gloom or watching them as they shine in the mist which lies on the highway of life there is danger of forgetting those who have run the race and now in the weariness the singing of the fire of the torch they are out of sight and sometimes out of mind for there is always an eager interest at the starting point and an engrossing absorption in the running when the day is at its height and there were once for these keepers of lonely vigils shouts of praise and there were later the pain and strain of the race in its hardest stretches for those whose faces are a glow of the running or are set with the stern resolution of those who have forgotten the applause and care now only to touch the goal there we at the same quiet vigil the same lonely watching of the singing fire tenderness and devotion to those who no longer press along the course are due not to age as a matter of time the years mean nothing unless they bear the harvests of true living and store the granaries of experience but to the race well run the work well done the pain and strife and sorrow bravely born the allotted task finished in faith and purity and loyalty blessed are they from whose hands the torch has not fallen nor the light failed in the long trail of will and heart and nerve they have not only made the highway easier for those who come after but they kept faith and hope in the nobility of the race and nourished the flame for those who are waiting to leave the starting point or are questioning in the bitterness of the long trial of strength whether the race is worth running youth for dreams maturity for putting forth the spirit in the endeavor to realize them age for the confirmation of the hope of their reality in all the world there is nothing so beautiful as the figure of the spent and weary runner guarding and trembling hands the torch receiving long ago the born with quiet faithfulness through the joy and the pain of the years in the confusion of life when men dash their torches to the ground and rush about in a frenzy of passion or a chilling stoicism or with denials of the nobility and reality of the race and the meaning of it on their lips the faithful runners not only keep their own faith but the faith of others in their guardianship and they bear the common wealth of humanity in their hands and hearts so one ran centuries ago and was derided and scorned and buffeted and the light he bore was dashed to the ground but in the agony of death he held it aloft and behold the ends of the earth are lighted by it but when the race is over and the throngs have passed and the runner watches the sinking flames of the torch in solitude becomes a great loneliness the other runners whose feet once trod the same way and whose voices were friendly in the darkest gloom have vanished into the great silence the younger runners belong to other times and have other companions even when they are most tender and reverential it is another world than that in which the torch was lighted and there are no more voices that share and speak from the same depth of experience in the loneliest are however the torch remains and from the torch streams the light, however faint in which the past, the present and the future are held secure against the enviring darkness it is the witness of memory in its radiance, dear faces now vanished in the morning light shine as when the glow of youth was upon them, ours of happiness moments by the way that were full of anguish and are now frequent with the sweetness that comes out born with patient trust years of brave endeavour and quiet fidelity to task some works the peace which flows from service and the joy of remembered sacrifices all these live within the circle of the flame there too faint but clear present hope and task and reward abide willingness to wait as well as to run to be put aside as well as to be set at the front to cheer the passing runner as well as to be cheered fresh and sweet and no love young and pure in the daily renewal of memory to stand fast as the shadows gather and to guard the sinking fire as loyally as one fed the rising flame so the soft light of memory and the narrowing glow within which duty reveals itself become the symbol of immortality the darkness deepens the world grows still familiar sounds die into silence upon the watcher falls a sense of revelation of those who wake while others sleep and low why the vigil is kept the gloom is shot with light for at the closed window the light waits and over the hills come the dawn the vigil is at an end and in the radiance of the morning the torch is extinguished end of chapter 39 recording by Chad Horner from Ballet Claire in County Antrim Northern Ireland of Fruits of the Spirit this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Chad Horner from Ballet Claire Fruits of the Spirit by Hamilton right maybe chapter 40 light on the way the new year finds men and women everywhere patiently or impatiently it finds many more you're either accepting or rebelling against limitations of situation and conditions it finds everywhere the presence of those austere teachers care, grief and the necessity for work these great teachers to whom all the race has gone to school since the beginning of time where veils over their faces but so imperative are they so inexorable and of such commanding attitude that most men have come to think of them as task masters rather than friends and those who drive and scourge in command rather than those who are seeking the best and who in the final unveiling will reveal the faces of the truest because the most stimulating friends for as Emerson said with characteristic insight our friends are those who make us do what we can they serve us best who do not flatter but who make us aware of our real condition whose influence is to make us dissatisfied rather than satisfied with ourselves and who will not suffer us to fall short of the highest of which we are capable it is this divine element in the education of men in all the great relations of life and under all its conditions that makes living so difficult for the greatness of the art or the knowledge of which one is trying to secure command is always measured by the severity of the education and the final destiny of all who strive and bear and climb is evidenced by the severity of their training the man who has to do an easy bit of mechanical work learns to do it in a week but Michelangelo, Dante and Beethoven must serve long years of apprenticeship before the final skill comes the shaping of the soul requires processes more prolonged methods more severe at once more delicate and finally tempered than the shaping of the most exquisite or the most glorious piece of art ever made by the hands of men the highest breach of art is the full expression of some experience emotion hope or thought of the human soul the highest that an artist can attain is to convey by a very few symbols of some sense of what is going on in the life of a human spirit to shape this spirit to give it its direction to mould it to its highest uses to bring it to mastery and power and freedom is therefore a far more difficult matter than the training of an artist however great or the unfolding of any art however glorious this is what the school of life achieves and because its tasks are heavy its textbooks difficult to master to the point of agony they who bear and learn and grow may take from the very severity of their training the promise and the expectation of a development which in its range its resources and the influences of beauty and of peace which will command travels far beyond the vision of the most audacious hope End of Chapter 40 Recording by Chad Horner from Ballet Claire Chapter 41 Of Fruits of the Spirit is a LibriVox Recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librufox.org Recording by Chad Horner from Ballet Claire Northern Ireland Fruits of the Spirit by Hamilton Wright Mayby Chapter 41 The Loneliness of Life The experience of one man or woman is always the experience of many men or women In the times when the sense of loneliness and isolation is sharpest and hardest to bear we are surrounded by those who are sharing the same loneliness and solitude We cannot speak to one another of experiences which are shaking our spirits as a tree is shaken by the tempest but when the silence is most impenetrable we are sharing the deep things of life If it were not so life would be mere sound and fury signifying nothing and individuality would be the evidence of a broken and dismembered humanity instead of the realisation of the vastness of life as it touches the human spirit We are separated not by differences of trial and sorrow but by our inability to interpret trial and sorrow to ourselves What we clearly understand we can express to others but while we are struggling to understand we are silent as children are silent in the presence of things that fail to them but which they cannot understand The child most tenderly loved and wisely cared for in mind as well as in body is often pathetically lonely not because others fail to understand him but because he cannot understand himself In a world full of real things and tangible happenings he is surrounded by mysteries and hunted by the sense of unseen things The fairies, giants, witches and strange creatures children have always lived in the half light of childhood our creations not of their fears but of their sense of things hidden from them To those who love them most tenderly and are most eager to understand and help they cannot speak of these things because they are baffled by the mystery of it all The mother who sings to her child the wonderful song of her tender and passionate love holds a little stranger in arms not by differences of experience we are all sharing the same life it has many aspects and presents itself in many forms but it is made up of a few deep searching fundamental experiences sorrow comes by many paths and wears many guises but when it walks with us it is not as one sent to us alone among all the sons of men it is the companion of all who live death in many ways of approach and is called by many names but when his hand falls on us it is the hand which has summoned all who have gone before us and will summon all who come after us in the later childhood which we call maturity although it has gone only a little further in the education which we call life there is the same sense of enviring mystery the sense of moving about in worlds not realised we are only children of a larger growth and the reticence of childhood is upon us when we pass through the lonely places I wonder whether we are being led or sit in desolation and cannot understand why the world grown dear and familiar has fallen in ruins about us the loneliness of life comes from its vastness we are immortal in a world that perishes about us we are stirred by the sense of greatness in our souls and weakness in our bodies we reach out to infinity in our desires and our hands fall empty at our sides we crave imperishable love now and here and death robs us while we stand guard against him we are all learning the lessons of life but not in classes each learns according to the laws of his individuality through his own temperament the paths are individual sometimes these paths run parallel for a time often they run far apart sometimes we can talk by the way often there is no speech between us because the voice cannot carry across the distance that separates us but below all things that keep us apart there is a fundamental unity which prepares us for perfect companionship as in a thousand schools pursuing a thousand courses we are receiving an education which liberates us from the freedom in which we shall possess ourselves and in possessing ourselves possess one another the loneliness of Christ came from his perfect knowledge of men and their ignorance of him he had reached the goal and they were so far from it that they saw it only as a rare moment they caught far and faint glimpses of it in his stainless and radiant life to them only in parables which they but dimly understood as children get baffling glimpses of great truths which cannot be made plain to them this made his life a testimony his joy lay in the knowledge that the disciples were travelling his way and that the knowledge that would reveal him to them was coming day by day the light came slowly to them as it comes to us and there were many false dawns but the day will break in which we shall look into his face and into the faces of one another and understand End of chapter 41 recording by Chad Horner from Ballycler Northern Ireland Chapter 42 of Fruits of the Spirit This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Chad Horner from Ballycler in County Antrim Northern Ireland Fruits of the Spirit Chapter 42 the credibility of love all the world loves a lover not only because he recalls a brief ecstasy in the memory of the multitude who are living in the light of common day but because he rinds out to its full dimensions the passion and romantic capacity of the race for a host of men and women life is a dracery becoming obliterated of generous passions and great hopes a fading of the sky of dawn into the dull arch of a grim noon it is not the blackness in life that brings weariness and repulsion it is the monotonous grayness it is not radical skepticism that blights faith and takes the bloom of the days it is indifference, disillusion, cynicism the root of these destructive forces which rob life of its romance its perennial freshness of interest is in the man not in the order of things and society has always been full of those who losing the mind and heart of childhood have not realised the aging of their spirits and have thought the world grown old now the lover wiser than the children of the world carries the fresh heart and keeps his vision securely among the blind great men are the tree men writes, Amiel the men in whom nature has succeeded they are not extraordinary they are in true order it is the other species of men who are not what they ought to be the story of the rise of men from the stone age has been a long record of discovery the continual finding of unsuspecting wealth and of unused forces in earth and air it is quite certain that they are heading from us today within our reach or the reach of our children a thousand uses of the chemistry of the soil and air of which the marvellous divinations of the last two decades have been only dimly prophetic if this inexhaustible treasury of uses and adaptations of force and material were not matched by any kindred capacity in men there would have been no history of science and the world would present the ignoble paradox of an inculcable fortune in the keeping of an embassy that treasury never opens saved the touch of intelligence and the rarest things in guards are accessible only to the insight of genius so that the story of discovery is the story of the discoverer his growth has been registered in the uncovering of the secrets of the world in which he lives from the beginning he has been slowly and rapidly bringing out of the depths of his nature great and heroic qualities he has with infinite labour made a place for himself not only with the work but among the works of God and he is still in an early stage of his growth despite his forebodings of the faint hearted or the near-sighted despite the apprehensions of those who do not recognise the multiplying signs that we are in a growing not in a completed universe the future holds more spiritual and subtle gifts in its hands and the men are unfolding more and more the capacity to receive and use these higher things in the face of a thousand discouraging outbreaks and downfalls men are rising in the scale of spiritual living and there are before the race almost unsuspected possibilities of greatness the unimaginative suspect the reality of the conclusions of the man of insight and in every age the Cassandras who have foreseen the approach of fate have been rejected and scorned but the man of imagination is the only man who really sees the world what it holds for men greatness has so far been incredible to small men and from time to time futile attempts are made to explain genius as a form of disease and if the early stages of growth could be wholesome and the supreme stage the final decisive planting of the feat on the summit abnormal it is in greatness not in littleness that nature touches the goal of her endeavor the great spirits are neither abnormal nor disease they are in true order this does not involve a new kind of man in the world it involves a higher development of the man now in possession of the world it may be suspected that a vast amount of what appears to be mediocrity is in reality undeveloped intelligence and power and that society need not so much a wider possession of intellect as a higher energizing of the intellect it is very inadequately using in like manner there are immense reserves of passion devotion, chivalry still to be drawn on and the world is full of men who might be great lovers if they knew that love is an art as well as an ecstasy there are as many undeveloped resources of love in the hearts of men as there are undeveloped forces and qualities in the world about and the soul within us under the pressure of the tyranny of things in a critical age which distrusts the reality of great spiritual superiority and is afraid of great passions those who might reap the uttermost harvests of love are content with a few sheaves they look at the glow in the sky of youth as a pathetic promise of a day which never dawned the ecstasies reported by the great lovers they regard as the poetic or symbolic expressions of imaginative men to the literal minded such an experience as that recorded in the Vita Nuova has no roots in reality it is an elaborate and somewhat morbid fiction of a great poet there are many who accept the authenticity of Romeo's consuming passion but regret utterly the sustained passion transmuted into a great idealism which has its classic examples in Beatrice and Laura in the preoccupation of pressing affairs the absorption of vitality in dealing with things the imagination is undeveloped and becomes atrophied and the stunted spirit grows skeptical of the reality and uses of poetry and in like manner the failure to unfold the power of love by the practice of the art of loving makes the maimed spirit incredulous of the ecstasies and adoration of those who are possessed by the genius of passion Mercurio makes sport of Romeo's simplicity of emotion because the great passion has not touched him let the faintless breath rest on that gallant nature and the scorn of a world would not count a feather's weight against its splendid devotion to believe in great thoughts indeed a man must share in them to believe in a great passion a man must experience it for to every man come the things which belong to him by reason of his arms, loves, faith to the commonplace the commonplace is always present to those who have vision as well as sight the world goes more wonderful the further they penetrate its mysteries to the nature that has never known a great passion passing on into a secure and noble devotion the annals of love belong to the literature of fiction to those who know what love may become in the hearts of the pure and the lives set apart to its service they are faint transcriptions of the experience that lies for the most part beyond the bounds of speech there is a greatness in love as in mind a superiority which reveals without explaining itself a genius which is as real as it is inexplicable the skepticism of those upon whom this divine grace has never rested the cynicism of those who have lost a part of love through infidelities to its nature and laws the indifference of those who work with their hands and are content never to look at the sky over their heads count as little as do the blind man's doubt of the reality of painting the deaf man's skepticism of the spell of music bad man's denial of virtue in the art of love as in all things life is full of the pathos of the searching saying that unto every one that hath shall it be given and he shall have abundance but from him that hath not which he hath End of Chapter 42 Recording by Chad Horner from Ballyclair in County Antrim, Northern Ireland Section 43 of Fritz of the Spirit This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Chad Horner from Ballyclair in County Antrim, Northern Ireland Fritz of the Spirit Hamilton, Right, Maybe Chapter 43 Site he had but not vision The things about him stood out with the utmost distinctness Every line was sharply defined Every feature and shape distinctly lived So accustomed was he to the entire accuracy of perception to perfect exactness of knowledge that he was impatient of any blur in another site any uncertainty in another's report Confidence in his own judgement had become second nature with him He acted as one who could make no mistakes and this was the impression others received from him All men spoke of his clearness of judgement, of the vigor and decision of his nature of the weight and authority of his character He was, in a word, the master of his world But it was significant that while men went to him for advice in all practical matters No man ever sought his counsel In any moral confusion or uncertainty No man struggling to his feet from the mire in which he had slept ever turned to him for help No man compassed about with sorrow and in the presence of the supreme experiences of life ever so much as thought of him Exact, trustworthy, keen, truthful, the man of clear sight touched his fellows only in the world of things When the fortunes of the soul were in the balance he neither saw nor felt nor understood To him all these intangible interests were as if they were not He managed his acres with perfect judgement but he could not see the landscape which enveloped them He saw the little section of world in which he worked but the universe was invisible to him In his sight, men were born grew into childhood and youth passed on into manhood did their work, died and vanished from sight and that was the end He saw the outlines of their character with marvellous clearness He knew where they were efficient and where they were weak He judged with exactness of their value for practical service but of their inner experience of their spiritual struggles of the forces and conflicts which give character, its quality and life its meaning He knew nothing He was a master of the knowledge of things but no ray of that wisdom which gives a man understanding of life but he was without vision Now all the wealth of this man's nature was lavished on one whom he loved not blindly but instinctively with the passion of the heart which groups suffer those things that it needs without knowing that it needs them In this woman's eyes the man who loved her saw without seeing the reflection of that heaven which was beyond his sight and in her nature he felt without understanding the play and stir of those spiritual impulses which slowly fashion in immortal frame and immortal spirit and in her life he was aware of a wealth of tenderness of devotion of self surrender which he could neither measure nor compute and she became as his own soul for she was vision to him and in her the mystery and blessedness of life was present though never revealed this woman died and the man's heart broke within him and the world of sight lay in ruins about him for he saw nothing save the beautiful garment which the spirit had laid aside and that too was put out of his sight he was in a prison of hopeless misery and many tried to speak to him but he could not understand them for the thickness of the walls which surrounded him and many strove to release him but he could not be freed for he had locked the great doors from within in the darkness the man no longer saw the old familiar things he had signed grouping for the accustomed places of rest and finding them not for the sweet ways and usages of love and missing them his outstretched hands touched nothing and his passionate longings returned upon themselves and turned to deepest pain and in his solitude and desolation nothing abode with him saved memory for a time he was as one dead but one dear memory kept companionship with him and in the silence and darkness one image was always in his thought as the days went by that image seemed to fill his soul and grew more real and touched the hidden springs of life within him and his heart grew tender under the spell of the great love with which he lived alone in a night in which the earth seemed to have vanished as his love deepened a glimmer of hope began to suffuse the night like a faint radiance from a light beyond the horizon and delicate tendrils began to climb his heart toward that light and there came a breath of something surpassingly sweet like a fragrance from invisible gardens and the spirit of the man softened and stirred and he lifted his face and the dim outlines of a new world slowly disclosed themselves as he looked with wonder and awe and the yearnings of a child stretching out its hands toward that light this world became more distinct and spread around him a beauty such as he had never so much there were familiar objects in that world but they were no longer hard and rigid the outlines were lost in faster designs and were tender with new and deeper meaning the familiar acres were folded in a faster landscape whose far horizons seemed to recede into luminous distances suffused with a light that streamed from the heart of things and enveloped them in a splendor of beauty which broke out of them the mighty flood of life the man went abroad once more with the heart of a child and looked up to the heavens that had grown infinitely tender and across the landscape that glowed and gloomed about his feet for love had unsealed his eyes and the power of sight had passed on into vision and as he walked he was not alone for one walked beside him whose presence was peace and whose companionship brought faith had once seen had widened to become the imperishable world which love builded in the far beginning and which love enriches and enlarges and makes more beautiful with the coming of every soul that enters into it through the gates of birth and of death for both are the gates of life and as he looked behold the places where the dead lay were blossoming fields for in all the reach and being of the universe there was no death streamed the mighty tides of life and in the range of his vision the barren places broke into bloom and far as his eager spare travelled there were the stirring and strivings of tender and delicate and mysterious things growing in strength and beauty and there was no more night for in the darkness as in the light infinite love watched and waited and cherished all things in its immortal hands and nothing was forgotten or lost and he saw the universe traversed and the countenance host to him sight have become vision full of the repose of a great freedom and the deep joy of perfect strength fit it to the imperishable ends and in that multitude he became aware of those who had laid aside all care and sorrow and entered into the fullness of life and one move near him no longer a memory but a visible presence who had vanished in the darkness of his great sorrow who had gone out of his sight to live henceforth stainless and immortal in his vision no longer hidden behind the veil which she had worn in the days before the revelation but shining without blur or dimness or shadow upon the beauty of her unclouded spirit and after all the years of his love he knew that for the first time he saw her as she was and the air was soft about him and the fragrance of the early flowers was born to him and like a far music he heard the bells of Easter ringing above the churchyard End of Chapter 43 Recording by Chad Horner from Ballet Claire in County Antrim, Northern Ireland Chapter 44 Of the Fritz of the Spirit This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Chad Horner from Ballet Claire in County Antrim, Northern Ireland Fritz of the Spirit by Hamilton Wright Maybe Chapter 44 The preacher stood at the front of the channel without book or note a tall, vigorous figure with a strongly moulded face Through the open windows of the little rustic church came the breath of the sea and the sweetness of the pines The day was fair and still and the sunshine falling on the white birches was like the purity of heaven Untroubled peace filled the wide sweep of sky and unfolded the worshippers There was no faintest echo of far-off guns no hint on in-earth or air of unparalleled tempest engulfing half the world There was the silence of a world asleep and radiant with the bloom of mid-summer But there was not an ear in which the thunder of battle was not heard not a heart which was not heavy with a sense of unspeakable grief The worshippers had entered into the experience of Gethsemane and were bearing each in the measure of his capability the sorrows of the world The sea was half-filled by a mist that seemed an exhalation of light drifting in and out But beyond darkness rested on the face of the waters and blackness of thick darkness lay like a pall over the hopes and aspirations of men The earth that had seemed to be rolling slowly heavenward had slipped back to hell When the day seemed to be at hand night had come sweeping back How could the world regain the beauty that had been ravished the strength that had been poured out like water The lost treasures of faith and hope that had been painfully gathered in the long ascent of the race out of savagery The waste of it all was intolerable incredible Blasting to faith and the preacher facing the worst and sounding the deeps of sorrow held the cross aloft as Saint Paul had held it as the glory of life It was not the supreme tragedy of life but the supreme unveiling of the heart of God The mountain of the Beatitudes was beautiful with promises of peace and purity but it was a foothill on the way to the mountain of the cross The sorrow of life expressed in the cross is not a black shadow on a lovely landscape It brings out the beauty of that landscape and gives mass and power to the world's blender to its structure It is not a subtraction from the sum of living but an eternal addition It strikes a deeper note and reveals a more glorious destiny for men Through the dreams of ease and comfort and security it lends a sudden vision of things more precious than ease more to be desired than comfort infinitely more to be prized than security The cross, the preacher said put a halo about courage and gave courage its spiritual meaning It showed how transcendent our spiritual and invisible things Men have died by the million during the past year not grudgingly and unwillingly but gladly They have met death not with shrinking but with a cheer In this country we are so much in love with life so eager to share its activities and grasp its rewards that we have forgotten how slight a value life has simply as life its dignity and worth come from what is put into and taken out of it One crowded hour of glorious life is worth more than sluggish years Life gets its value from death for through death the infinite continually breaks in upon the finite and the immortal shines in upon the mortal for death is not interruption but fulfillment of life and the cross, the symbol of sacrifice and death is the supreme disclosure of God the Father In the Old Testament he is the Almighty On Calvary he is the God the Father Almighty In the very heart of the storm in the thickest darkness in the most heart-breaking tragedy the love of the Father finds its hour of supreme revelation and not the mountain of the Beatitudes but the mountain of the crucifixion shines with the light above that of the sun In the story with which the preacher ended the French peasant looks back across the little village the great crucifix from which the Lord had descended to talk with him and as it stands clearly defined against the evening sky he suddenly sees that it is the plus sign gloriously expanded to become the symbol of the vastness and richness of life End of Chapter 44 Recording by Chad Horner from Ballyclair in Quincy-Anton, Northern Ireland Chapter 45 of Fruits of the Spirit This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Fruits of the Spirit by Hamilton Wright maybe Going Home There is no picture which touches the hearts of men more closely or tenderly than the figure of the tired man or woman going home at the end of the day The fierce heat of the sun has passed The intense high light of midday has softened into a restful glow The strain of effort is over and the passion of work has given place to the peace of deserted fields and streets It was a normal instinct which sent the worker forth eager and alert in the morning It is the response to a deep craving which sends him home at nightfall The reward of labour is the rest which it achieves and the joy of rest is the sense that it has been earned The alternation of day and night is a symbol of the order of life in which work and rest succeed one another in a beautiful and health-giving rhythm The worker goes out of himself when he takes up his tools He returns to himself when he lays them down at the end of the day He pours out his vitality as the water pours out of a hidden spring If he is a real worker and not a mere drudge he gives himself in the toil of his hand and his brain and when night falls his weariness is not merely fatigue of body but his depletion of vitality Before he can give himself again he must find himself and when one goes home he finds himself To a vast multitude of men the thought of going home makes the heaviest burdens bearable The most crushing responsibilities a spur to effort The most complete surrender of ease and pleasure not a sacrifice but a price gladly paid for a happiness which is beyond price The strain of the day is forgotten at the door which opens into the peace of perfect understanding The pressure of hours and tasks is relaxed by the sound of a voice which is musical with love and faith and peace In such a homecoming there is not only a supreme reward for the work of the day that is ended there is also the renewal of strength and courage for the day that is to bring new strife and toil The joy of going home is not in the ease and comfort that are waiting there It is in the peace that flows from love the stillness that follows the tumult of storm the clear atmosphere in which the dust of the highway is laid and the worker sees again the ends for which he is striving In the quietness of such a home the toil of life is not only sweetened but its spiritual meaning shines clear again after the confusion of details has vanished Under the heat and burden of the day the strongest man sometimes wonders if life means anything but prolonged strain of muscle and brain In the stillness of home its blurred ends its ultimate achievements shine like the stars above the highway when the dust has been laid The home is not primarily a place for work but for life Work lies below and beyond it but the companionship which transforms a house into a home is a sharing of the rewards of work freedom repose refreshment vision There are houses full of conveniences and luxuries in which no one is at home The men and women who live in them are homeless To such men and women as to the men and women to whom marriage is a mere social contract and the family a mere social arrangement there is no going home no refuge for the spirit no place of understanding and vision There are no more pathetic figures in the world of today than these homeless men and women Restless, discontented and unhappy and utterly blind to the tragedy of a life in which there is no going home End of Going Home Go far ahead of experience It can travel simply along routes only faintly marked by adventurous explorers but it always needs a starting point and it cannot project paths into wholly unknown regions The word unimaginable suggests the limitation of the creative pictorial faculty which has made progress possible and is the open door through which as Dr Bushnell said God finds access to men It is significant that all attempts to describe heaven end in a luminous vagueness while hell and purgatory have been not only suggested but pictured with terrifying and convincing power Dante walks the awful paths of hell with commanding authority He not only sees and understands but he describes and interprets the world of punishment with compelling power and in the world of purification though less dramatic and realistic he is not less at home He knows whence flow the tears of purgatory but when the gates of paradise open in his unaccustomed feet the sight is too dazzling He cannot see for the unfamiliar brightness He speaks as one in a half remembered dream His vision travelled far beyond his experience sin he knows and remorse and pain and tears he understands but he cannot grasp the bliss of heaven He walks the flattering step in worlds not realised The Milton of Paradise Lost is a greater poet than the Milton of Paradise Regained and the Bible the most concrete and definite of books in dealing with the deep things of God and with the mysteries of man's life in the infrequent references to heaven strikes refuge in a symbolism which the western reader often mistakes for pictorial imagery and is rather hindered than helped by what he reads In literature the great sinner is simply drawn than the great saint and the most pathetic and appealing figures in the drama and in fiction are the men and women who by breaking the law have set in motion the tremendous tragic forces The great artist finds his imagination reinforced and energised by experience when he deals with Satan with Agamemnon, with Faust with Richard the third but his skill falters when he tries to paint a Saint John or a Gullihad Sin we know the tragic consequences that follow it in inevitable companionship but the pace which flows from perfect purity the radiance that shines as the old painter saw from the faces of the sinless the bliss that waits for those who stand at home in the presence of God like happy children lie beyond our experience and try as we may we cannot give them form or body when we try we become irreverent and take refuge in a kind of sentimental materialism often we picture is a golden cloud on the edge of the horizon or a shining dome hanging unsupported in mid air the world of punishment and of purification we know but the world of bliss we not only do not know but it cannot be revealed to us that is the reason why the longings of the heart are not met and the cry of the soul for power to realise the surroundings of those who have gone on into the next stage of life is not answered we are not told because we do not understand a description of the heavenly life by one who was in the heart of it would come to us in an unknown tongue nothing in our experience would interpret it to us it does not lie even in the power of the heavenly Father to make these mysteries plain to us as it does not lie in our power to make clear to the little children we love the principles of philosophy the more abstract truths of science the revelations of ripe Christian experience we can know the direction of the paths which lead us to that highest plane of living which we call heaven but we cannot see the paths we can know the elements out of which the heavenly happiness is compounded but we cannot visualise the conditions in which that happiness is shared we can neither give power and shape to the spirits of those who have departed nor dimensions and body to the things which surround them all the reports of these things with which credulous people must to believe are crude, materialistic or so vague that they have only the substance of a dream heaven is beyond our power of imagination not because it is unreal but because it is a higher reality not yet grasped by the mind all life predicts it punishment and purification for tell and affirm it but it waits on our filler experience to reveal it Mr Beecher has somewhere said that knowledge is given us in this life not to satisfy intellectual curiosity but to aid in the development of character and heaven which fests immovable on character both divine and human comes at the end of a process not of thinking but of living that is what makes it more real than the things we know more substantial and enduring than the things we paint and carve and describe when the scientist begins to experiment with the short circuit of wire he may dream of the time when messages will travel under great seas along thousands of miles of cable he cannot foresee the hour when they will fly through the air itself that vision will come only when he has mastered the resources of the wire and his experience has given his imagination a new vantage ground for further flight End of Chapter 46 Recording by Chad Horner from Ballet Claire in County Antrim, Northern Ireland Chapter 47 Of Fruits of the Spirit This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Chad Horner from Ballet Claire in County Antrim, Northern Ireland Fruits of the Spirit by Hamilton Wright Maybe Chapter 47 The Possibility of Great Giving The best gifts are never things The best gift is always from within and is charged with personality In the case of those who are able to make great gifts with the highest purposes for the teaching of religion the discovery of truth the opening of the doors to education it is often true that the spirit behind the gift is more valuable to the community than the gift itself and the example far more influential in the long run than the great sum of money bestowed The highest service a man can render to his fellows is some bestowal of himself in sacrifice work, influence and inspiration Phillips Brooks founded no college and endowed no hospital but he is to be counted among the greatest givers of his time Other men poured out wealth lavishly for good and great ends and are worthy of all honour for their large-minded and large-hearted recognition of the metality of all possessions the common fortune of the race held in trust by the few for the liberation and education of the many It was the high privilege of the great preacher to give himself with the prodigiality of a man possessed of a vast treasure to pour himself out year after year on the spirits of confused wayward starving people to whom he gave a vision beyond the perplexities of the hour a clear view of the right path and strength to walk in it the bread which feeds the soul The great giver brought no money clothes or food with him no man ever had less at his command of those things of which men usually make gifts He was during the wonderful years of his active life, penniless and homeless but he was incomparably the greatest giver who has appeared among men New one of all the great benefactors of mankind has approached him in the reach, power and eternal value of his gifts The secret of his divine generosity is told in a sentence He was himself a gift It was not the separate and detached gifts He made, by the way, the healing, the hearing the speech, the loaves and fishes that clothed him with compassion and beneficence like a garment from the very hem of which life and peace flowed It was the complete and perfect bestowal wealth that has begun to fill the world with light and health and love Here is the supreme reward of growth impurity and selfishness, the wisdom of love It so greatly enriches the spirit that he who comes to possess these beautiful and divine qualities gains the privileges of a great giver Many men and women are perfectly sincere in desiring great wealth that they might use it generously for others but great wealth comes to few while the inward enrichment comes to all who invite and hold themselves to it. Every man may become a great giver if he chooses, for every man may make himself rich in the vision the moral strength, the peace of spirit which are the supreme achievements of life and the most inspiring, comforting, enduring things which a man can bestow on his fellows End of Chapter 47 Recording by Chad Horner from Balleclair in C&N CHAPTER 48 Of Fruits of the Spirit This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Chad Horner from Balleclair Fruits of the Spirit By Hamilton Wright Maybe Chapter 48 The Long View of Life A young man gets a position in a business of some kind and secures his opportunity which is all he has a right to ask for There are two ways in which he can deal with it He can do his work honestly day by day for his wages at the end of the week filling up exactly the measure of work assigned to him This will make him a trustworthy employee who can be counted on to do, conscientiously, what he is told to do He becomes a good soldier in the army of workers or, and this is the turning point in his career, he can fill the measure to overflowing pouring all his intelligence and energy into it, without much thought of the amount he is to be paid If he chooses this way he presently gets out of the ranks and becomes a leader a captain in the army of workers He may be satisfied with doing well, what falls to him each day, or he may push on by mastering the details of his business, making himself familiar with every part of it and fitting himself for steady advancement in keeping ahead of the work required of him, most men are content with what comes to them and remain employees A few make themselves masters of the secrets methods and conditions of their business and become employers A man fixes his place in life, by the amount of time and work he is willing to put into preparation for larger tasks and greater responsibilities In this country, few young men need to be urged to work harder for work already fills a moderate and excessive portion of the time of most Americans but young men and older men in this country need to be urged to plan their work on larger lines and to do it with greater intelligence One of the most interesting directions which scientific experiment is taking today is that of intensive farming This means not adding acre to acre but doubling and quadripling the yielding capacity of the acres under cultivation And this is supplemented in the business world especially in the great industries by the scientific management of business the end of which is by more intelligent methods of work to reduce the labour and at the same time greatly increase production These two principles every young man ought to study How without additional work he can get more effective work out of himself How without the expenditure of increased force The vital defect of the young man who plans his work for the day instead of for the decade is that he works like an artisan instead of like an artist He does what is set before him and obeys orders instead of looking ahead and making himself an expert He does not apply ideas to his work but pursues it in a routine fashion without individuality of method The problem which the young man who is to be successful not only in the practical but in the fuller and nobler sense of the term must face is to reduce the expenditure of physical and nervous strain while increasing his productivity and bringing out of himself the finer fruits which scientific methods have developed There is an enormous undeveloped force in the human race that someday by more thorough training and more intelligent use of faculties will be at the service of humanity As we are now drawing energy from the air and the earth to do the work and carry the burdens of humanity so someday we shall draw from the unused and ill-directed capacity of men a finer and greater efficiency The end of life is not to toil like a slave but to work like a free man with the vision of what one means to do with one's life, with intelligence of method and concentration of power End of chapter 48 Recording by Chad Horner from Baligler Chapter 49 of Fruits of the Spirit This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Maria Fatima the Silver Fruits of the Spirit by Hamilton Wright Maybe Chapter 49 An Easter Thought The Light of Life There is no record of the earliest appearance of the idea of immortality It is older than the oldest history For many centuries men have known that death was an illusion somber appalling often heartbreaking but nevertheless an illusion Not the end of the drama but the darkening of the stage means are shifted that another act may begin under a fairer sky in a happier country In the far off past when men were looking at the world for the first time with conscious intelligence they knew that those who went out of their homes did not go out of existence but waited, dim and shadowy on the boundaries of human life or haunted invisibly the places they loved or lingered melancholy and hopeless but still conscious in worlds as shadowy as themselves In the beautiful fancy of the Japanese those who have vanished from the ways of life come back at times to their old homes bringing a deep and tender peace with them To them as to the Chinese the worship of ancestors means that the dead have not only not ceased to be but have gone over to join the greater and freer spirits who lived the larger and diviner life The Greeks saw in every return of spring when the tide of life came flooding back the hint and sign of immortality and treasured his great hope behind the veil of the mysteries into which only the initiated were admitted Savage and highly developed races have shared a like in the revelation of immortality and every race according to its insight and culture has given form and speech to this sublime idea The belief in what the scientists call the persistence of force is apparently instinctive Men do not conceive of an end of the power they feel within themselves until they have become cynical or introspective or critical in their attitude toward life The pale figure which haunted the antique imagination dimmed the light but did not extinguish it The living knew that those who had parted from them and whose ashes were piously guarded in memorial urns could still be reached and affected by the affection and devotion of the living Antigone, the type of sisterly self-sacrifice faced death that she might give her brother's shade rest and Ulysses talked in the underworld with the heroes who fell by his side on the plane of Troy The morbid and saddened imagination of the middle ages saw death as a grim and repulsive skeleton the church of whose icy hand meant the passing of earthly happiness the solitary journey of every man the awful loneliness of the descent into the grave the judgment seat beyond to the freer modern mind in the fuller and richer modern life death is no pale ghost summoning the living to leave the light and warmth of the sun and wonder disconsolate along the boundaries of being no grim and ghastly skeleton coming unbidden to the feast and in the happiest hour summoning the trembling spirit to its last accounting the dim shadow and the terrible destroyer have vanished to become the great benignant mysterious figure of Mr. Watts love and death the passionate defense of love wild with grief cannot hold the door against the irresistible strength of the messenger but in that great form towering above the helpless defender pressing upon the door with a purpose that cannot be stayed there is no malice there is a noble dignity as of one come from heaven the minister of an authority to which all doors must open and of a wisdom as tender as it is fathomless by which the immortal spirits of men are forever guarded from harm you may kill us said an early Christian martyr but you cannot harm us there is often heart rending sorrow in death for it brings appalling loneliness with it but there is peace fulfillment the joy of the perfect life what men in the earliest stages dimly divine a man of a larger culture hoped for and expressed in noble dreams Christ brought to light death was as much of an illusion before as after his resurrection but that which was vaguely felt or poetically conceived became in his triumph over the grave a historical fact which transformed a little group of weak facility men who shared the moral blindness of their race into a company of heroes eager to bear witness in all places and ready to face death in all forms they hoped and dreamed no more they knew and in the certainty of their knowledge they spoke as those who had put their fingers into the places where the spear pierced and the nails were driven who had heard the voice speaking that for three long days was silent and had seen him walking who was wrapped in grave clothes and laid in sepulchre in their early conscious life men felt that they were not born and the death was not an ending but a changing of the course because they were dimly conscious of the indestructible force within them in every later age men have been compelled to make the same great inference to satisfy reason and to appease the heart for if we are but the dust of the earth become conscious for a time life and the world are alike incomprehensible in these later days a deeper process of thought and a wider observation have affirmed that no force ceases to be and one has lived who died as all men die and was buried and came out of the sepulchre not only with the light of life and dimmed within him but so visibly holy and immortal the day who were most familiar with him fell at his feet and worshipped him the light has come and the faint stars of early hope and dream have faded from the sky but mists and shadows still linger about the places where men toil and suffer and many who sit in the darkness of closed rooms and silent homes cannot at the moment see the brightness of the sky above them not until the first long hours of loneliness have passed will they open the windows and doors and look up at the heavens on every Easter day there is a new group of mourners for there are newly made graves over the whole earth to those who cannot hear the notes of joy in the Easter bells for memory of the recent sorrow these stones bring with them the Christ comes not with reproach but with infinite patience and tenderness we knew not only the victory at the tomb but also the sadness of Gethsemane he remembers that human hearts with all their weakness have also the power of deathless affection he knows that while to him the hope of immortality is a massive causeway glowing with light spanning the blackness of the river to us it is a crossing of stepping stones of which we see at a time as we pass down into the darkness and mystery of the stream which none save he has ever recrossed end of chapter 49 chapter 50 of fruits of the spirit this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information not volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Maria Fatima da Silva fruits of the spirit by Hamilton Wright maybe chapter 50 the path to God the endeavor to get the results of religious living without going through the processes to secure possession of the fruits of character without enduring the discipline is renewed in every generation and the long broken history of defeats does not seem to exhaust the credulity of men and women we are willing to do everything except work out our salvation we want a royal road to faith are not willing to take the long quiet path which is open to each one of us we long for a great and final vision of God we are eager for a complete and permanent settlement of all our doubts at the beginning of the journey we want the enlargement liberation and certainty which can be found only at the end we forget the significance of the divine commendation well done good and faithful servant we change it to read well thought or well felt good and faithful servant we want to feel the presence of God we are able to think our way to Him in perfect clearness we are not willing hour by hour, day by day year by year with infinite patience to so enlarge ourselves by work and life that we shall be fitted to stand in His presence and great enough to realize Him in our thought we want strength but we are not willing to exercise we simply wish to pray for it we want peace but we are not ready to set our lives in order we want trust and that quiet faith which is the source of joy and happiness but we are not willing to gain faith in the one way in which it can be gained by patient continuance in well doing it is not by thinking or feeling but by doing that is to say by actual experience the knowledge and the command of ourselves and there is no other way we create ourselves by translating our feeling into thought and our thought into action there is nothing more striking in life than the gathering of lines in a man's face as the result of a great experience and a fine work well done the unformed face chiseled by work into a strikingly significant countenance for a man's countenance is a face which nature gave him molded by his own ideals and toil the sculptor does not more certainly evoke a face out of stone by the tireless strokes of his chisel than the man evokes his force intelligence and will out of himself by bearing the burdens and doing the work of life he cannot tell him in advance what he is he cannot know himself what he is he must find himself through work the aspiration of the boy who dreams of the mastery of art is a mere desire until he learns the use of the brush the secrets of color the control of his hands the half-conscious energy of the youth who feels that the elements of him a great man of affairs are in him is a mere promise until he has taken hold of some kind of business and measured himself against men the only road to self-knowledge and power lies through feeling and thinking into action in action or experience only the man is wrought there and there only he comes face to face with himself by action we not only create ourselves but we create God for ourselves the anchorite finds him in no other way for his seclusion is in itself an act the saint finds him in no other way for self-denial purity and consecration our deeds not feelings or thoughts truth is slowly distilled into men's hearts for living is not primarily actual but a vital process and the greatest truths have come into the world not through the door of the brain but through the door of the heart love and loyalty temptation and sin self-denial and redemption entered into the thoughts of men not by way of the philosophers but by the path that runs through every man's heart we have come to know the greatest things because our hearts have been pierced by the great and terrible facts of life Carlisle and Tennyson were once looking at the busts of Dante and Goethe in the shop window in London what is there in Dante's face that is not in Goethe's asked Carlisle the divine was Tennyson's prompt answer that sense of the presence of the infinite in all human affairs Dante's face its wonderful impressiveness came not through thought only but through experience it was born of solitude, deprivation isolation, banishment it came to him on the lonely stairs in the houses of strangers it was revealed to him in the breaking of bread in an alien land so came to Shakespeare the insight which in the later plays brought into clear view the higher processes of character and revealed such a deep and beautiful vision of life so came Phillips Brooks's power of ministering to men and women of all degrees of experience and culture life itself is the teacher of the prophets and poets the saints and martyrs we cannot silence our doubts by thinking we cannot find God by searching but we can do His will and then we shall know His doctrine we create God for ourselves and we create ourselves by action by passing through feeling to thought into the world of deeds we keep in His presence by doing the work and living the life of faith there is no baffling mystery about all this for the clouds and darkness which surround a man not make the path at his feet invisible or uncertain and that path leads through rough places and smooth sometimes in light and sometimes in darkness to the summit all that a man needs to do is to keep his feet in it the road is as open to the humblest as to the greatest and the most obscure often find themselves on those higher peaks where the divine vision is most distinct end of chapter 50