Article November 20, 1915 Issue

Verity of Being

GRACE HOFFMAN WHITE

What is man but an expression of Life,—man, whose origin and ultimate is Life? His great endeavor is to understand Life and demonstrate it, that he may thus become conscious of his immortality. We cannot conceive of the loss of anything that exists in God; its form and fashion may change, but it springs from the seed of eternity and hints at realities greater than those we yet know.

Does the simple laborer in some far-off quarry foresee what will become of the stone he is setting free from its prison of earth? Does he dream of vast marble palaces on sunlit slopes, of fountains playing in flowery gardens, of yewclipped paths leading to some retreat graced by a fair statue? His ignorance does not prevent the existence of all this, non does our lack of intelligence or imagination hinder the universal Life from finding its own expression. How insignificant is what we have learned when we compare it with what we do not know.

One versed in the things that pertain to our higher life says, "What keeps us and will long keep us from enjoying the treasures of the universe is the hereditary resignation with which we tarry in the gloomy prison of the senses." Here we find the key to the whole matter. It is the senses that, in spite of the divine intuitions of Life and its ever widening circles, infest and feed our imagination with that which is not of Life and which tends to death. Submission to the conception of death presupposes a lack of high mental and spiritual activity, a bowing down to superstition, a belief in that of which we have no proof. The autumn comes, the leaves fall about our feet, and the trees, denuded of their luxury of leaves, stand etched against a gray sky. Yet we do not despair, for the revelation of past springs has shown us that like produces like; that the banners of the year will again be unfurled on the bare branches with greater glory; that the roots have gone deeper into the warm earth and the waving tops will be nearer the sky. Even those primeval trees that have fallen in the forest have gathered to themselves another form of service, and as coal renew their usefulness and bring us cheer and warmth, till they mount in flame to find other expressions of life in service.

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