The Every-Day Heaven

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Title:     The Every-Day Heaven
Author: Henry Frederick Cope [More Titles by Cope]

The Beauty of Holiness
The Gladness of Goodness
The True Paradise

Self shrinks the soul.

The keen eye needs the kindly heart.

There's no argument equal to a happy smile.

Imaginary evils have more than imaginary effects.

You never find truth by losing the temper.

Menial work may be noblest service.

They who live off the flock are never willing to die for it.

The life that would be fruitful seeks showers as well as sunshine.

Kindness makes all kin.

All we get from heaven we owe to earth.

Pain is a small price to pay for the joy of sacrifice.

He who gives on feeling generally begrudges in fact.

Every loss met by love leads to gain.

The long look within ourselves will cure us of a lot of impatience with other folks.

The last person to enter heaven will be the one whose religion has all been in the first person singular.

We often talk a good deal about the salvation of souls in order to escape service for the salvation of society.

Much that is called orthodoxy is scepticism at heart, fear to examine the foundations lest there are none.

 

THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS

Religion ought to be the most natural, desirable, and attractive thing to man, for it simply stands for the development of the best in us, the coming into the full and rich heritage that is ours as spiritual beings, and the realization of our highest possibilities of character and service. He who ignores religion is cutting himself off from the best and most beautiful possibilities in his life.

Some have talked of the necessity of making religion attractive. It does not have to be made attractive; there is nothing more desirable than the peace, the power, and prosperity of the real life which it confers. It is the imitation, the false and prejudiced presentation of religion that men endeavour to dress up attractively. In that they never succeed, for cramping the soul and twisting the intellect ever are opposed by the best in us.

From the caricature of religion we turn with loathing. Mummeries and mockeries, fads and forms leave us empty and impatient. The heart of man goes out to things fair, lovely, joyous, and uplifting, and they who find no God in the elaborate sermon or the service in the church somehow are thrilled with the feeling of the divine and inspiring in the woods and field and mountains.

All things good, all things attractive and lovely, uplifting and sublime have but one source. They touch our hearts because they come from the heart of all being; they reach our spirits because they are spiritual. Deep calls unto deep when the divine in man answers to the divine in the world without, in human affections, in noble aspirations, and in glorious deeds.

Too long have we believed that only the unpleasant, the gloomy, and repellent could be right or religious. There is a type of conscience that determines action by the rule that if a thing is pleasant or beautiful it must be sinful and wrong. To such souls it is a sin to be sunny in disposition, to delight in the Father's fair world, with its glowing riches and bounty dropping daily from His hand.

It would be safer to say that sin must be somewhere lurking wherever there is deformity, pain, or discord--that, as a common phrase has it, the bleak and barren is the evidence of that which is forsaken of God. Things desolate are not divine. Religion is not repression but development into a fullness and beauty far beyond our dreams.

It is a good thing to see the divine in all things fair and lovely; to take them as evidences that the love that once pronounced this world good in its primeval glory still is working, still is seeking to enrich our lives and lead them out in fullness of joy. Why should not we, like the poets and preachers of ancient Israel, taste again of the gladness of living.

Character may need for its full development the storms and wintry blasts of life, but it needs just as truly and just as much the sunshine, the days when the heart goes out and joins in the song of nature, when something leaps within us at the gladness of being alive, and we drink in of the infinite love that is over all.

Just as the sun seems to call the flowers out of the dark earth and draw out their beauty, calls forth the buds and brings the blossom into perfect fruit, so there is a spirit of divine life in our world calling us out to the best, seeking to woo us to the things beautiful. Man needs not to repress his life, but to learn to respond to every worthy impulse, every high hope, to find the life beautiful.

The beauty of holiness is the beauty of character. It is the adjustment of life to nature and neighbour and heaven so that strength and harmony ensue, so that duty becomes a delight, labour a song of praise, and out of life's burden and battle the beauties of godliness, of love, and tenderness, joy and gratitude begin to bloom.

Lay hold on everything good and true, on all things glad and elevating; cherish every fair thought and aspiration; learn to see the essentially religious in whatever lifts up life, in whatever helps humanity, and so make life rich in heavenly treasure and glowing with the glory of other worlds.

 

THE GLADNESS OF GOODNESS

Life's poverty is due, not to what we have had and lost, not to what has been withheld or taken from us, but to the good which we might have had which we carelessly have passed by. No others despoil us as we despoil ourselves by our blindness and indifference to the wealth of our own lives and the beauty ever close at hand.

We who scurry over land and sea, who dig, and toil, and fret to find happiness, come back at last to learn that the sweet-faced guest has been waiting close by our door all the time.

He perishes in the pitiless snows who, blind to the good and the glory in every valley and hillside, heeds only the impulse to climb and find the good in some remote height. Ambition and pride lift ever new peaks ahead only to mock him when at last, worn, spent, and empty in heart, he falls by the way.

The old theology talked much of a heaven far away, to be attained in the remote future; the new theology often seems inclined to ignore any heaven, but what the hearts of men need is the sense of the heaven that is all about them, the God who ever is near, and the blessedness even now attainable.

Some live in the past, complacently contemplating the glories that once were theirs or their ancestors'; some live in the future, dreaming of felicities yet to be; but they are wise only who live to the full in the present, who catch the richness and beauty, all the wealth that the passing hour or the present opportunity may have.

He is truly godly who sees God in all things, in the affairs of this day, in the faces of living men, in the flowers and fields, who sees all the divine wonder and beauty of life, and not he who sees the Most High only in some legendary past or in a strange, imaginary future.

No man becomes strong by reminiscence of his breakfast or dreaming of his next meal alone; each portion of time must have its own fitting food. The soul of man never can find its fullness through either history or prophecy; it needs the sense of the spiritual in this living, pulsating, matter-of-fact present.

This world is slovenly, sinful, and evil because so many of us are content with the past or the future, with myth or with imagination, and fail to demand the development of the good that is our heritage to-day. The better day comes not by dreams, but by each man doing the best he can and securing all the good he can for his own day.

We need to give up the plan of saving the world by the piety of postponed pleasures and to find the fullness of life in the present, to get below the surface of things and discover life's real riches, to interpret this daily toil and struggle, and all this world of ours, in terms of the divine and infinite.

How much it would mean to our lives if we might learn, instead of sighing for the impossible, to get all the sweetness and joy that is in the things we have, how rich we would find the common lot to be, how many things that now seem dreary and empty would bloom into new beauty. In a child's smile, a wild flower's fragrance, a glint of sunlight, things possible to all, we would find joys unspeakable and full of glory.

This does not mean dull content with things as they are; it does mean the development of the faculties of appreciation, the growth of the life in power to see, the development of vision. It means the transformation of the dull earth with the glory of the ideal.

Some day, when we look back over our lives, how keen will be our regret as we realize what we have missed, how we have spurned the substance of life's lasting treasures, human loves, friendships, every-day beauties, and happiness, while chasing the shadows of imaginary joys.

 

THE TRUE PARADISE

The religion that has relations only to heaven and angels, or only to a supreme being remote and detached from daily life and from our families and friends, our business and affairs, issues in personal selfishness and is one of the causes of social disorganization and need.

It postpones to that dim future the problems that ought to be solved in the present. It promises those who are broken with the injustice and greed of their fellows a place where right would prevail and rest would be their portion in the future. It shifts to an imaginary and ideal world all the perplexities and wrongs of the real present world.

That kind of teaching ingrained in generations accounts for the dull patience, the stolid, brute-like content of the peasant in Europe; he is born a bearer of burdens, a tiller of the soil, to walk bent and never look up; it is all endurable because it is all so short; he some day will be better off than kings and emperors are now.

But as the generations are born the inspiring vision of that future loses its force; the ideals are gone and the children come into the world with their fathers content with their present condition, but devoid of aspiration and also devoid of their father's faith in the compensations of the future.

Then comes the reaction. Some daring spirits assert that if there is any good, if there is equity and rights, men ought to enter into and enjoy them here and now. And some who catch the vision of a God of real love are unwilling to believe that He keeps from His children the present joys of His home; they invite to a present heaven.

Then how easy it is to fall into the error of seeking only a material present-day paradise, to live as if the only things worth living for were food and clothes and pleasant circumstances. Better a worthy, beautiful ideal afar off than an unworthy and debasing one already realized. The heaven that so many are seeking will but bring all men to the level of the brute.

The danger is that we shall miss the real benefit of this great truth that whatever good is designed for man may be realized in large measure while he lives and shall make his good to consist only in goods. Better conditions of living easily become the foe of the best. Heaven is not meat and drink; it is the better heart.

Making houses and lands the supreme end of living is little better than looking forward to harps and crowns. It is easy, being freed from slavery to a superstition to relapse into slavery to our lower selves. We are in danger of living for a living instead of for our lives. We are "on the make" instead of being engaged in making manhood. We are digging the lead of commercial advantage with the gold shovels of character.

We may be measured by our own measurements. In sermons and orations we assure ourselves that we are a great people because we have here so many acres, so many millions of bushels of corn and of wheat, so high wages, so vast financial resources. We are living in the glut of things and setting these things as the end of living.

All this does not mean that prosperity is wrong; it does not mean that misery or poverty is a virtue. The danger is not in our many acres, our high wages, our millions of money; the danger is that these are the ends instead of the means; that we are existing for our living; that we make the man the tool of his money instead of the money being the making of the man.

Every man has in his breast the keys to his own heaven. If he will he may find the riches of character; he may enter into the paradise of a mind at peace; he may taste of the divine joys of serving his fellows; he may, in thought, commune with all the good and great; he may hear the morning stars sing together.

The eternal crown of glory is the crown of character. The streets paved with gold are the fair, clear ways of virtue. The harps of whose music we never weary are the strings of sympathy and love and pain; these make the heavenly harmony. The angels are in the faces we learn to love. These make heaven when we see them in the light of the presence of eternal love.

[The end]
Henry Frederick Cope's essay: Xv

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