Article March 25, 1916 Issue

Self-examination

HON. CLARENCE A. BUSKIRK

In the fourteenth century the great Italian poet Petrarch described the conditions of human existence as they appeared to him, and probably his description truly applies to every age and people of our planet. It is a very sad and somber picture; but its study gives one a vivid impression of some phases of the erring activities of mortal mind and may help us in our endeavor to escape from them. The translated passage is as follows:—

"When I consider the instability of human affairs and the variations of fortune, I find nothing more uncertain or restless than the life of man. We seem better treated in intelligence, foresight, and memory. No doubt these are admirable presents; but nature has given to animals an excellent remedy under disasters, which is the ignorance of them. Our intelligence, foresight, and memory often seem to annoy more than they assist us. A prey to unuseful or distressing cares, we are tormented by the present, the past, and the future; and as if we feared we should not be miserable enough, we join to the evil we suffer the remembrance of former distress and the apprehension of some future calamity. . . . We pass the first years of life in the shades of ignorance, the succeeding ones in pain and labor, and the whole in error; nor do we suffer ourselves to possess one bright day without a cloud."

It must be admitted that when we seek to gaze more closely upon the lives of individuals of former generations the lights of history are no better than smoking torches, and the farther we seek to penetrate into the past the more uncertain and baffling becomes their assistance. Yet the pictures of human life in the Old Testament and in other ancient and more modern writings which are preserved to us, as well as other memorials of the past, show us that what are termed the miseries of human existence are always repeating themselves. Nations grow and decay, environment changes, so-called civilization supplants barbarism in part, education partially dispels the shades of ignorance, but the melancholy picture of human error and suffering remains substantially the same, however altered in particulars, and this, as we learn in Christian Science, because material sense is the same persistent deceiver always and everywhere. For the most part mortals spend their time and energies in the pursuit and acquisition of worse than useless things and overlook the abounding sources of constant and abiding joy.

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