Perhaps, if I sit here long enough, all the generations of the future will come and tell me their secrets because they will know I should be far too weary ever to repeat them.

OPPORTUNITY

It is strange how seldom people can judge the psychological moment to reach forth their hands and grasp what they desire. How often does the gardener in the field of life pick the rose before it has really opened or just a little too late, when it has already commenced to fade and drop its petals,--but how divinely fortunate is the one who plucks it just at the right moment and, as a reward, not only has the rose, but very often with it a tiny, glistening, jewelled drop of dew!

We cannot say that this is merely chance, but rather a God-like bit of intuition that is wound about and entwined in some souls.

Too often in our feebleness we say opportunity makes us what we are; and we do not realize our strength or we should say that we will make opportunity for that which we wish to be!

I feel that opportunity is something which grows often and plentifully in the lives of some but, like the grass beneath our feet, it is very seldom cultivated and springs up noiselessly and silently so that we do not notice it.

Most of us, when we wish to do something very much or attain a great desire, expect the moment for fulfillment to come heralded with blasts of trumpets--and when it does not come that way, but through an unpretentious medium, we cannot grasp its significance; and so we pass it by....

The wise soul is he who expects and seeks opportunity in all places--not graspingly or shrewdly, but silently and with great faith; and who knows and comprehends the law that not always must we go out to seek it, but perhaps, while merely contemplating the stars, will we gain force--and so it will come to us.

Not too obviously, perhaps, but with an interior illumination that will give us the Vision and show us the path onward.

TIME

Time and space mean very little to me today. I am sitting here thinking of ten years ago and marvelling because it seems so close and so little forgotten,--infinitely nearer than those moments of even yesterday, which seem already remote and distant.

How strange time is!

Do you know I often fancy that old Father Time holds in his hand some musical instrument? Maybe a harp or a lyre--instead of a scythe as he is always depicted--and he plays and plays and plays ... mostly very low; and then things that occurred only yesterday seem vague, almost forgotten and far away.

But sometimes he sees our hearts craving to recall vividly some face, to live over again some moment, or to hear once more an almost forgotten echo--and then he takes compassion upon us and he plays madly and loudly, and suddenly, as though in a vision, we witness departed moments; or we see a face or hear a voice close beside us, and so real are they, that we have but to stretch out our hands to touch and caress them, or turn our heads to hear the cadence of a voice rise from out the long-dead past.

Have you noticed how vividly old people recall their childhood?

Ah, that is because Father Time, being so old himself, has a profound attraction for old age, based on reciprocal qualities which he knows them to share in common with him.

So of course he loves them best and, realizing that he has no earthly future to offer them, he draws down his musical instrument and plays louder and louder--and lo! they can sit for hours at a time, slowly rocking backward and forward, and all the while they are living over again some cherished moment and hearing sweet, enchanted music.

And, if you listen closely during the silent intervals between the squeaking and rocking of their chairs, I am sure you will hear them saying softly to themselves as they nod their heads slowly to and fro-- “Why, it all seems only yesterday!”

REVELATION

It seems to me that life is absolutely futile and incomplete until we realize that no matter what we are doing, or whither going, it is because of some preconceived reason; and that in the end, when we have reached the last turning of the road and come to lay down our wearying burdens, no matter what our regrets through life may have been--we will know and fully comprehend that the tending of our footsteps this or that way was merely the working out of a great end.

The orientation of our views is so limited and circumscribed that, when something comes to us which we have not desired, we can only feel the bearing down of a cruel fate upon our heads. And too often we toss those same heads back in stubborn despair and grind our teeth in the gale of what must be-- thereby losing our balance and sense of what might be had we the courage to entwine our strength with that of the Infinite!

Many times the inveiglement of an idea--a set idea which perhaps we have nourished in our hearts for days--will keep us from all realization of the good we might gain by a different shaping of our lives from that which we had dreamed.

To some of us the revelation never comes; and we go on pursuing life with our noses pressed to the ground, without a glimmer of comprehension of the great and superfine machine which marks out and registers our lives.

To others, who are perhaps more worthy, the revelation does come, and usually during or after our darkest hours. It is indeed a proof of the Divine that we should receive light after darkness!

To these same it is strange how sometimes it will come slowly like the rising of the moon, and then again quickly as a flood of sunlight after a darkening cloud has passed.

In the sad or desperate moments of our lives when indeed we see nothing to go on for-- when we are torn and spent and there seems no end to the coursing of the blood from out our hearts--it is then that the knowledge in a flash comes to us, that there must be a reason, and that we could not be made to suffer so without an ultimate beneficial purpose.

And so all striving seems puerile and we cease to beat our wings against the cage, lift our torn hearts instead to the sweet rain of heaven and ask to see the star that may guide us.

And, as small children who, seeing not, obey, so we too, set forth; and, although unconsciously, in our faith become as sages.

FINDING GOD

I have been reading tonight a book on science which, I think, tends to kill all spiritual hope and attributes everything to the material; taking away our dreams of miracles, crushing our hopes in the Beyond and tearing down the belief of a divine intuition within us. It explains all these things as springing entirely from pathological causes and seems to feed the intellect while it starves the Soul. I think so much has been said in this generation about science, so much has been questioned and delved into about it that I cannot help feeling that science will eventually encompass and satiate the world--that is, if we let it engulf us completely and turn our hearts and souls into rocks and machines; and insist in believing that the still silent voice within us, which we once called God, is merely the emotion caused by a craving for food or sleep or air, or some other physical necessity-- which will cease when we last close these weary eyes of ours.

It is indeed true to call this the age of science and “The Iron Age,” for what could tend to make men’s hearts more thoroughly iron than to tell them to stifle and kill all their emotions and that we are, after all, only a part of the scheme of the Whole, and must not look forward because there is no Beyond?

“Where there is no vision the people perish.” So in this age when men seek and in answer find only a golden frame--with no color picture inside to brighten the rooms of life-- but instead cold dismal facts, perhaps then it is well that thousands of these poor men should be killed off and not taste the bitter poison to the end.

And yet, is it not the irony of fate that science again with its machine guns, its poisoned gas and all other improved and advanced diabolical warfare should be the hand to slay them?

Men’s ears that can only listen to the roar of machinery, cannot hear the song of the birds; men’s bodies and feet that are so well clothed, cannot feel the clay of the earth nor the poetry of the wind and sun on their bodies; men’s eyes that are tired straining in the research room or the laboratory cannot see the stars, and men’s hearts that lead themselves into believing that from the decay of these poor bodies there is no future, cannot see God.

And by these words I do not mean to refute the great and everlasting good that science has done for the world, nor do I forget the vast progress for the benefit of humanity in surgery, hygiene and medicine, and the advancement toward comfort, economy of time and manual labor which it has donated to us by the efforts and sacrifices of wonderful and brave men.

To all those who have toiled and still have been able to Believe, I should like to write a eulogy.

But it is to those who, in their search in science, have lost their ideal and come to live so scientifically that their souls, as it were, have dried up and left only the workings of their brains-- it is from these, that I would turn my face away.