Weekly Watertown leader. [volume] (Watertown, Jefferson County, Wis.) 1908-1909, 1908-11-20
49, 49, k!la=zlipx,
-; : = pvlpIr
WHAT Is IT FORP
By Henry T. Cope

II OF the SuuerluSS OIL JllS present
time are not worthy to be compared
with the glory that shall be revealed"
Romans s : IS.
What is it all for? There come days
when the heart, sinking in WEAKNESS
at the steady and often dull round of
tasks, asks this question. Our life
grows steadily more complex, we work
harder than our fathers did; we ac-
complish ten times as much, but do we
have any more life than they had? All
life is toll what is its fruitage?
The smoke Of our cities rises to the
heavens. The din Of our industry sounds
through the land. Life is all a story
Of mills and factories, offices and stores,
labor and wages, tools and toll on one
side, and on the other care, anxiety,
sorrow and feeting joys. 1t costs much
to live; what does one purchase at this
price?
Have we simply acquired habit Of
hustling, Of hard work, which has so
possessed us all that now, willing or
unwilling, we must keep up with the
rest, we must maintain the pace or fall
beneath the feet of the on rushing toll
ers? Do we know just why we have to
take life so seriously and find it so
stern an affair?
Even those who get the profits of the
modern pace seem to be none the hap
pier; they may sit in more luxurious
offices, but they are even more complete
ly enSlaved than their own tOilers. We
have learned how to work; we have
learned how to make things, but have
we learned why we live, are we sure of
securing the real product Of life?
Man must be here in time for some
thing other than building cities, for
something better than simply making
the life Of those who may follow him
more complex and arduous. If sudden
~ the great wheels were all to stop, if,
in moment we must take stock, what
would the universe have to show as the
product of this great mill Of humanity?
In few years our cities would crum-
BILE to dust, our gold and silver would
be valueless indeed all that we have
made, all that our hands have so pain
fully fashioned through all the cen
turtles, is valuable only as furnishing
tools for further work. The end cannot
be in the things that we can see, for
none of them has any intrinsic worth
apart from the service they can render.
If all our work is but making tools
what is to be made with the tools?
What is the product of eternity? The
measure of any age will be the extent
to which it produces and perfects this
product. The rightness of every social
form and order may be measured by
this; this is the final test of every life.
There is the same story in the travel
ings of modern business, in the sweat
and agony Of modern living, as we read
looking back through the times before
our hands began to write history In
sandstone and in granite is the story
cut, in the marks of reptile and quad
ruped; mankind is the making. Geology
has written the first chapter. Civiliza-
ton writes the second in that story of
humanity coming into every larger liv-
ing
Through toll and trouble, happiness
and love, WEAKNESS and woe. In the
mills of earth, the tools OF eternity are
working. 1t is their noise we hear in
the city's dull roar; their keen edae we
feel when we smart with some strange
pain. Here is making that which is
finer than anything that can be cut in
marble, the glory of character.
1t is hard to see further than our
own dusty corner in this struggle: we
cannot think that the reptiles look
forward to the coming man. 1t takes
faith for man to look forward to the
coming being. Yet he catches glimpses
of a glory yet to be. He feels the living
is not vain, for somehow there is more
than heartless, fawless nature at work
here.
The struggle goes on, but because he
has capacity for the divine. because
he has learned that at the heart of all
beats fathers affection, man has faith
to live for the goal that such love sets
before him. The glory of the higher
life is that it gives glimpses of the life
yet to be and sets the goal ever clearer
before the eyes so that men nress on
for the fuller life set before tbeno