Show H Ur L G B057W J KINDLING THE DIVINE FIRE High up In the scale of the most beautiful and affecting words ever uttered ut-tered ore those of the old Hebrew psalmist While I was musing the fire burned then spoke I with my tongue Now everybody in the wide world Is interested In the question of how most effectually to kindle fires and that all the way from the most ordinary smoker at his wits end to know how to light his pipe in a gale of wind to the prophet how to set and keep burning on the altar of his own heart the divine fire of love and righteousness amid all the distractions distrac-tions and contrarltlos of human life On a subject then of such universal univer-sal interest might it not be worth ones while to ask the psalmist how he contrived to kindle his especial kind of fire His only answer would have to be tho same he had made before be-fore While I was musing the fire burned then spake I with my tongue But curiously enough this answer will be found on examination to emphasize a principle of universal application to kindling fires of every conceivable kind whether on the hearth or on the lampwick or In the loclal circle tho students study or the saints retreat of silent prayer This present ago of ours In America Amer-ica with Its monotony of endless variety va-riety and its ceaseless round of activities activ-ities which drive so many at last Into mental bankruptcy has been denominated de-nominated by many the helterskelter skipJack age which has changed the old proverb Look before you leap I Into Leap before you look and then dont look but leap again As though one were no higher up In the rank of creation than a grasshopper or flea InstOAd of being capable of large discourse dis-course of reason looking before and I after Now let any man tryand try for a whole year If he pleues to think of any single vital and beautiful pro eels of life that Is not at the same time a process of burning process I of persistently concentrating on some chosen thought feeling or personality personal-ity the elsescattered energies of a thousand rays He might as well try to think of a Mlnots Ledge lighthouse light-house set on a rock to warn off the mariner forty miles away from the perils of shipwreck yet whose keeper should declare it a matter of no import im-port to keep a fiery combustion going on by concentrating the fierce oxygen oxy-gen of the air on tho Inflammatory carbon of the pumpedup oil and then sending up the splendid flame through the draught of a high glass chimney so crystal clear that its Immaculate purity would drive to despair the most consecratedly distracted private housewife In New England who should ever dream of entering Into competition with him In the luster of her own lamps No there Is the one Immutable law everywhere prevailing The solar heat for example Is all about us but so diffused as through diffusion to prove too feeble for a thousand needful need-ful practical purposes Collect Its rays on the surface of a lens refract them till they focus In one fiery center cen-ter and forthwith your gunpowder explodes your solid oak leaps into flame and your refractory Iron melts and runs And just so Is it with us poor scatterbrained and woolgathering woolgather-ing mortals Thoughts and emotions in plenty are there In all our minds but vague and inoperative through only fitfully shining on a hundred diverging di-verging lines upon a hundred distracting distract-ing objects And thence comesas we reflectively survey the thousand mechanical devices for concentrating forco on Imperative ends which the Ingenuity of man has devised In cannon can-non steamship or simple watchyes thence comes the tremendous momen turn and strikinghome power of that saying of old The children of this world are wiser In their Jay and generation gen-eration than the children of light But to return to our Hebrew psalm 1st with his thrilling outcry While I was musing the fire burned then spake I with my tongue What had he been doing to kindle and fan the fire that flamed out In such rapt inspiration In-spiration on his tongue He had been musing But what did he mean by musing mus-ing He had been brooding incubating Incubat-ing quickening to throbbing conscious con-scious life a great theme of meditation medita-tion and thereby had ben setting on a marvelous mysticallydivine process pro-cess he had often paused in love and reverence to witness In some little blrda wren or sparrow sitting patiently pa-tiently in its nest on Its little circlet of eggs in prophetic antlclpaton of a great Joy to break out of them Little did the tiny creature reflectively reflect-ively know of the creative function she was subserving or of the seemingly seem-ingly miraculous transformations going go-ing on underneath her warm fostering foster-ing body As a great mind has said It Is not always needful for truth to take a definite shape it Is enough if it hovers about us like a spirit and produces harmony if it Is wafted through the air like the sound of a bell grave and kindly The little bird was acting on an Instinct which yet to her was vague but delightful soulexperience undifferentiated element ele-ment of the vaguelyapprehended universal uni-versal soul And so a dim sacred impulse im-pulse held her patient and faithful to her often wearisome task Should sho fly away and yielding to the fascination fascina-tion of change and novelty stay away too long then bereft of her fostering warmth the miracleworking process would cease Its play as her eggs grew cold and addled All this she knows or does not know yet no more instinctively In-stinctively perhaps than often a Homer Ho-mer or Phidias or Milton or Shakespeare Shake-speare or Beethoven involving each one his own mightiest creation Parthenon a Hamlet a Paradise Lost a Fifth SymphonyIs all the while building better than he knew So equally with our Hebrew psalmist psalm-ist in his brooding Incubating process pro-cess of so quickening to life his great theme as finally to cry out While 1 was musing the fire burned then spake I with my tongue But It was no rapturous discovery for his personal person-al behoof alone It was to illustrate and emphasize an experience which must become tho Inheritance of universal uni-versal humanity and apart from which there can exist no rich deep varied genial grateful interior life in any man or woman Until one has learnedIn some feeble measure at leastto brood and Incubate the profoundest pro-foundest problems of human relations and human destiny he must remain shallow trivial unsympathetic and tedious If not unendurable to live with Perpetual surface activity with no underlying quickening process seton set-on by habits of meditation Is the ono sure flinty and dustwhirling highway to Intellectual social and religious bankruptcy of soul And why Simply because every Isolated thought object or personality In tho world is by Itself trivial and contemptible con-temptible It must gather around Itself rich varied beautiful cheery and devout associations And it is only through hours of profound grateful grate-ful meditation on all that any single objectwIfe child nature art opportunity oppor-tunity really has been to us for years that we can cry out of them In rapture Not In entire forgetfulness And not In utter nakedness But trailing clouds of glory do they come 1 From God who Is their home Boston Herald |