Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1930-04-18
THIS AND THAT
BY CHARLES E. TRACEWELL.

| facts, as they say, and sometimes facts
| are very hard to label such.
All of life's difficult facts are given
| names such as God, soul, spirit, and
these words come to carry vast trains
of meaning with them, gathered out
of the depths of centuries. The eternal
disputes about them and about" are
mere prattle of grammarians, intent on
| finding errors in each others speech.
The wise man leaves the prattlers to
| their prattle, and goes about his bust
ness, secure in his understanding of the
| beauty which lies at the heart of each
word-fact.
If this be not beauty, then there is no
beauty, for the physical glory of living
things Is but mere sheen, which every
man that ever lived knew was put on
in a short time and shuffied off even
quicker
The beauty without which nothing is
really finished is the highest and best
that mankind has ever achieved and
dreamed In this light an individual
life may be said to be incomplete, and
this is why mankind has felt the long
ing and need for future life in order
that beauty may prevail.
Tolerance is the nearest that most
human beings can come to being actu-
ally beautiful Seldom is beauty con-
sidered in terms of tolerance, but in
relation to the higher things of life of
which the best men and women dream
there is no other measure.
Only by attempting to understand
what others lack, in the way of beauty,
truth, light, and giving them credit for
such approaches as they may have
made to them, Is 1t at all possible for
the average human being to clothe
himself with these qualities himself.
The person whose life ends in failure
or worse cannot be denied, in all hui
mainly, some portion of that eternal
loneliness which bedecks the lily of the
field. They are both striving toward
something strange and foreign to us,
but which we somehow recognize as
belonging to us, sometime If not now.
Nothing is really finished until it is
beautiful; we may say that the life is
not finished, although it seems to have
ended, for something more is required.
beauty, which is akin to eternity. This
Is the hope and faith of mankind. On
this are built the religions of the world.
II at any time in the history of man
kind religion arose out of the desire
Of crafty men to dominate their fellows,
as some declare, it long since has thrown
over those beginnings and has for many
| years devoted It's better part to pointing
mankind steadily toward the beauty
| which lies equally in rose leaf, a baby's
smile and lofty mountain peak.
In the world where the mystery of
life eventuates always in the play of
good and evil, beauty against uglinesS,
this steady pointing toward the best
we know is essential If anything may
be called essential. If beauty and good
ness, as distractions, were all we had,
religion would not be necessary But
life, queer manifestation, has somehow
found it necessary to give every beauty
an uglineSs as a FOIL every goodness
an evil to Offset it. And. worst of all,
this same queer fellow Life has seen
fit to make evil, to some extent, fasci-
mating and to permit the human intel
ligenCe to find many and great argu-
ments to extenuate 1t. Hence, religion,
the relation of God and man. stands
as the anchor to windward against the
pillows of passion, the rocks of ugli-
ness. the winds of evil. Despite the
storms of life, the sun of hope rises
every morning, but it goes down again
in the evening as II 1t knew that moth
ing is really finished until it is beau
tiful, that 1t is not quite beautiful
enough, that it must try It again by
coming up tomorrow morning. Moth
ing is really finished here.