| Things to Live For |
Chapter 21 |
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Even in the most common things of daily life we can find price marks which confirm and attest this law. Every sunbeam that paints a flower or cheers a sick room costs a portion of the sun’s substance, millions of miles away. Every lump of coal that burns on our grate, and every gas jet that flames in our room, is a memorial of a plant or tree that grew and fell uncounted ages since in some primeval forest. The clothing that keeps us warm and adorns our persons, we get at the cost of fields stripped of their cotton and flax, of flocks shorn of their wool, of silkworms’ patient spinning out of their own life on the branches of thousands of trees. The food we eat day by day comes to us through the dying of animals which may give up their life to nourish ours, through the toil of fruit gatherers and harvesters in the fields, at the hands of those who on ships and railways carry the breadstuffs over sea and land, and of those who in our own homes prepare our meals for us.
The books we read, and from whose pages we get so many words and thoughts that are helpful, come to us enriched with strength and thought which have come out of other hearts and lives. We read the smooth, graceful sentences with delight. They impart to us instruction, inspiration, comfort, and courage. We give little thought to the writer, or we think of him as one who wields a facile pen; yet it rarely occurs to us to think of him as having endured or suffered loss, pain, or trial, that he might give to us the words in which we find so much pleasure or help. But the truth is that no strengthening thought comes to us from another without cost to the author, sometime, in some way. Men and women must live deeply before they can write helpfully. We cannot teach lessons we have not learned. We may write flowing sentences, saying things we have read or heard, teaching what we have obtained from books, as did the scribes in our Lord’s time; but no heart, in its deep human need, will ever receive much real help from such teaching.
The words that Jesus uttered reached the people’s souls because he spoke as one having authority, and not as the scribes. His words came out of his own heart, throbbing with his own very life blood. He spoke what he knew, not what he had read or heard. He gave lessons which he had learned in his own deep living. The comforts with which he comforted the sorrowing he had gotten from God in his own sorrow. Every word he spoke was the fruit of some experience in his own life, and bore in itself the mark of its cost.
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