The Maryville times. (Maryville, Tenn.) 1884-1944, 1892-03-02
A REALITY.
Hope Is Always the Best Policy in Any
Kind of World.

Kind of a World.
When one of the leading educators in
this country was asked to coHtri butte to
the erection of a monument to the
memory of one of the most influential
philosophers of the pessimistic school,
he answered: Not a dollar. l am
ready to contribute toward building
monuments to those who make us hope,
but will not contribute a dollar to
the memory of those who make US de-
spair." Goethe said: 'Give me your
beliefs; have doubts enough of my
own" All strong natures long for pos
tive things, for contact with realities,
for faiths that one can build upon, for
convictions that are as rock under ones
feet. The negative side of life can never
become it's leading side without sapping
the sources of strength, and ultimately
destroying the power of achievement.
Hope and faith are as essential to great
works and noble living as pure air is es-
sential to health and vitality. 1t is a
profound saying of one of the great
teachers that children learn only when
they are cheerful. Cheerfulness is the
mood of receptivity; it is the opening of
the whole mature of the sunshine. De-
spondency and despair are the closing
of the nature, the shutting up of the
man within himself The world has
nothing to learn from pessimism. If
the worst things that could be said
about life were true, If there
were no God, no immortality,
nothing but sensation and a material
universe, it would still be the worst
policy to fasten attention upon these
things. In the worst possible world
hope would still be the best possible
policy. There is nothing worth finding
in the slough of pessimism. 1t is the
place where temptation has the great
est power, and resistance the least
force. 1t is blessed thought that it
is, after all, only slough, a desolate,
muddy spot in a great, substantial,
beautiful landscape; a place where men
often get themselves fast, and, closing
their eyes, believe that the slough is
universal, but place which is still
circumscribed and limited.
When a man turns round upon his
doubts and his despair and faces them,
as Teufelsdrockh in "Sartor Resartus''
faced his difficulties, they flee from him,
because they are largely imaginary;
and when trouble is real, when calam-
ity writes itself in the most unmistaka-
BILE terms, he who bears it patiently
and hopefully draws out from it a
strength which he could not otherwise
have found. The bitterest trial that is
ever presented as cup to human lips
has no poison in it if we choose to drink
it as the will of God. Nothing car
really destroy a man except his owr
action. Despair and dependency are
only sham devils. They dissolve il
midair when we turn upon them. They
have no power over us save that
which we ourselves give them. Many
man has turned in the darkest houl
and found himself fighting shadows
when he really set himself to the tasl
of fighting his way out. The great
souls are always positive. Like Ho
mer, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Paul
and Lincoln, they believe in something
and they work for something. They
probably know a thousand times more
of the depths of gloom that underlit
life than the professional pessimist
but they also have faith in the light
which scatters the darkness, and in the
achievement which makes life reality
instead of lie. Resolute and un
selfish living, activity for others, a per
sistent endeavor not to think about
ourselves but to think about others
will soon free us from dependency ant
separate us forever from despair. They
only truly live who live on the positive
side of life Christian Union.