The Uses of This World

      The poet Browning, in some of his verses, speaks of this world and this life as something that sets the scene, as one might say, of this particular portion of the drama of our soul's existence; and that act incompletely rendered, the whole drama fails of perfection. Suppose, for instance, it were the stage set merely for the love scene of the drama; were that lost, then the whole thing would want point and meaning, and the soul be by that much the more barren.

"Else it loses what it lived for,

And eternally must lose it;

Better ends may be in prospect,

Deeper blisses, if you choose it.

But this life's end and this love bliss

Have been lost here."

      It would be but a poor and material supposition, though, to conjecture that the world were only the resting-place for spirits on the wing, pausing but long enough for that one experience, however great, however beautiful, it may be. To the young it might possibly seem a charming fancy; they do not give the world for love, but have an idea, indeed, that the world was given them for love, and in that view they certainly cannot be accused of not improving the present, which is the world. But love, the love of man and woman, is merely one wondrous phase of our soul's existence, like the ray that sparkles in the brilliant jet of some special color as the crystal takes the light. Love of another kind, the love of fellow-men, the love of man and God, is the very medium, indeed, that surrounds us and gives us communication, atom by atom, with the universe, that will accompany us forever, it is to be hoped. And there are far other purposes apparent in life than the wedding of twin souls. For, since this love is the to-day of youth and the yesterday of age, it can not be the present of any other era, and one era deserves as much of fate as the other. But whatever the present be, whether the time to love or the time to hate, the time to weep or the time for rejoicing, it is only those that live in it that can do anything with it. And they who forget all its claims, and live only in the future, live only to and for the future. Even those who make a religious point of it, as if the future were a thing any dearer to the Creator than the present, are quite as unwise as they who risk everything on the sea of the passing moment. "This world is all a fleeting show," says the one side. "Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,." says the other. And the one side forgets that God lives in His world, and that it is not theirs to contemn it or to deride a portion of His work, and the other side forgets that this mortal shall put on immortality.

      Of a truth it befits us to make the most of the present; for there comes at last to most of us a season when all at once we wake to the fact that we are no longer young, and something angry with fate, with ourselves, with the laws of the universe, and with those that observe them in relation to us, we experience surprise and indignation, as if we were the only ones who ever grew old.

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