Karl Hilty

“ I fare to Heaven’s happiness.”
But neither is this yet the right conception of death. One can also die “full of days,” and age is not necessarily a tedious, ever-increasing, hopelessly incurable disease, but it can also be a continuous advancing, an evolving of oneself toward a nobler and a purer life than is possible on this earth. Death is then but the wholly natural and by no means violent and illogical transition into an analogous kind of existence that only needs to be continued; the fruit is ripe, and falls, not to be destroyed, but for a useful harvest. ”

“ Why is there so great an aversion to making this experience? Why, when men are tormented with sorrow, often to the point of despair, why do they not at least make trial of this, instead of seeking death? The reason, perhaps, is mostly this: they do not want to be dependent on God; they had much rather put dependence on pitiless men. Indeed, the assurances of the Bible may be appropriated in their literal, full meaning only by the man who has sought no alien help beside, nor any human help at all before he has first sought God’s. ”

“ All that men have spoken and written about it for two centuries now has been condemned to unfruitfulness and has given real comfort to no one, although human error in these matters, if held in good faith, has probably of itself never caused any one to be lost. Only by the practical but unfailing road of experience, then, will you learn that a simple “Lord, help me,” coming from the very depths of the heart, shall open a way that, to all your philosophy, to all your submission to church, to all your severest works of penitence, had remained closed as with tenfold iron doors. ”

“ With the pursuit of pleasure dies the inclination for riches and honor, which are partly only means in that pursuit and not ends in themselves; and instead there springs up joy in work, the best salvation from all evil, that otherwise always surrounds and tempts a man in one way or another. For when the pursuit of pleasure disappears as a rule of life, then a man must work, or the world is too dreary. On the other hand, with the pursuit of pleasure as his innermost spring of action, a man will always look upon work as only a means, and a disagreeable one, to the attainment of pleasure. ”

“ God wills, he carries out in the man—easily, if he gives up his will, with difficulty and sorrow, if he resists or desires to go another way, and no power in the world can any longer prevent it. But there are, nevertheless, long portions of time at this stage of life when all principles or doctrines of belief refuse their service, and everything transcendental persists in appearing again as a mere dream and sport of fantasy. Those are the dangerous times in which the soul must keep itself quite still and beware of all decisive activity. ”

“ Furthermore, the deliverances from sorrow, the triumphal days when a man beholds a mountain-load rolled away, belong to undoubtedly the purest moments of happiness in life, moments that God must grant to his own, if he is truly merciful to them. Spurgeon, therefore, rightly says, in one of his finest sermons, that if we truly trust God, he is, in the beginning, better than our fears, then better than our hopes, and finally better than our wishes. For his people, sorrow always lasts only so long as it still has a task to fulfil on their behalf. ”

“ Notwithstanding your resolution, there is, all the same, in every action of yours, yes, in every thought, a right way, and if you do not pursue it, then it is a sin. Or rather do not try; it is a reef on which millions have already gone to pieces, and on which you will go to pieces, too. “Beyond all Good and Evil” is a place not to be found on earth outside the mad-house, where many men, often highly gifted, are shut up to-day; not merely by chance, for the human spirit sinks into madness whenever, in all earnestness, it seeks to disregard these truths in its own life. ”

“ The highest imaginable degree of this culture is a complete devotion to all that is good and great, a devotion that no sort of trouble any longer clouds, or can cloud; it is that condition of the soul, mentally conceivable but seemingly rarely attained, in which there is no longer any battle with the sensual and the transitory, and the struggle of nature against the law of the spirit is completely at end. ”

“ For the genuine aristocracy there is another and a sterner privilege than what are commonly considered privileges. Something more is demanded of it than the continuous longing ordinary souls have for happiness and pleasure. And it is not good for it if it is ever quite absolved of the sorrows which alone keep it in this disposition, or if it succeeds or is disappointed in something that sprang from ordinary motives. The belief in the purifying power of sorrow and therefore in its necessity is always the kernel and centre of all true ethics, whether based upon philosophy or upon religion. ”

“ One of the best tests of real kind-heartedness is the conduct of men in the presence of long-persisting or altogether hopeless misfortune: those who possess but little of that quality grow weary and soon abandon the unfortunate one to his fate, perhaps with the fine sentiment, “one must leave him alone with his God”; others, who with a true sympathy persevere, stand the highest test of the unselfish love of humanity. Such are ordinarily simple, poor people, while the cultured and the rich far more rarely show themselves equal to the test. ”

“ IT is an old and obvious fancy, that of dividing the inner life into a series of steps, or of describing it in the allegorical form of a pilgrimage with its various stages and halts and hindrances of one sort or another. Yet I do not know of any such description that suits the needs of our own day, especially the needs of people of culture; indeed, it is, and has ever been, a fault of most sermons that while they depict life’s attainable ideal with more or less exactness, they are noways able to give as plain an account of the way thither. ”

“ Life is no mere vale of sorrow that must be escaped from as soon as possible, but an important, perhaps the most important, part of our whole existence, in which we make our decision for advancing life, or for a gradual and real death. Even the many weak-hearted men of our day who only want to die quickly and “go to heaven” without a struggle, may well find themselves deceived, and that the struggle will yet meet them, but under less favorable conditions. ”

“ At this moment of life some recognize, with deep pain of soul, that they can not become all that to which the dreams of youth or the advantages of birth and education seemed to destine them, and they turn in despair to pleasure or to pretence. But others resolutely seek the point whence they may conquer their special world, and henceforth pursue a destiny which, perhaps, was not sung to them at their cradle, but which shows itself, nevertheless, to be the right one. ”

“ All lasting human relationships rest upon reciprocity. We must never be willing only to receive, nor must we ever be willing only to give; that always ends in dissatisfaction.
The opportunity of rendering great favors to men is not very frequent. On the other hand, one can quietly do any [85] one some small pleasure, though it be nothing more than a friendly greeting to light up, like a sunbeam, some lonely and joyless existence. We should not begin a day of our life without proposing to ourselves to make use of every opportunity in this way. ”

“ And so, if the summons shall come to you once more, then arouse yourself, but at once, where you are and as you are, in business, on the street, in society, even in the theatre or in any other place; delay for not one minute the resolution to strike every sin out of your life. Then everything will become easier and clearer; that gloomy spirit and those false conceptions, which are simply the direct consequence of sin itself, will leave you, and a day will come at last when you also can say: “Now am I become, in God’s sight, a soul that findeth peace.” ”

“ In other aging men, on the other hand, once more there awakens with almost elementary force the long-slumbering desire for pleasure in every direction, seeking again to blow into flame the pitiful spark of the fire of life. ”

“ But Christianity is not so; its path is really much easier than any other; for it not only demands, it also creates, brave people—brave people who, free from complaining, free from overmuch seeking of even rightful pleasures, free from any cowardly flight from the world, in the very midst of the world hold up unshaken the banner of righteousness and never despair of its victory. ”

“ The true and unselfish companionship of a man with a worthy woman of his home circle—wife, mother, sister, daughter, and not least, grandmother and granddaughter—undoubtedly belongs to the highest, the tenderest, the purest joys of this life, and brings out qualities in him that otherwise would always lie fallow. A marriage is not by a long way always to be called a stroke of good fortune, but an old bachelor, too, is never the man that could and should be made of him. ”

“ Besides, as already pointed out, it may really happen that a so-called beautiful death, in the circle of one’s own people and amidst the general recognition of one’s fellow-citizens, may not at all mean the best destiny and the highest recognition on the part of God, as would some heroic death which is itself a last deed done for country or for humanity. But our time has become so feeble in its Christianity that such a thought now lies quite outside the reckoning of most men, even the most devout. ”

“ A noble simplicity of living which does not degenerate into the cynicism of the Stoic is a certain mark of a soul by right of heredity already nobly born; but the love of luxury is the characteristic trait of the upstart. Luxury, with debts besides and one’s consequent dependence upon men, is the acme of commonness and leads very often on into wrong-doing.
It is quite the contrary of noble to speak much of oneself, and particularly to boast of one’s deeds or philanthropy—the latter, because one is scarcely justified in making much of a stir about it ”

“ But, wheresoever they may have tried, nowhere else can they still their thirst for a tranquil philosophy of life. For what the old chronicler said of Israel is true to-day: “The days will arise when there shall be no true God, no law, and no priest to show the way; and in those times there shall be no peace to him that goes out, nor to him that comes in; for there will be great vexations upon all the inhabitants of the earth; nation will break nation, and city city, and God will vex them with all adversity.” ”

“ A dram of real friendship is worth much more than a whole wagon-load of veneration.
One great rule for finding out men is this: give yourself out to be frankly just what you are; above all, frankly hate wrong things on principle, and let no opportunity of showing it pass by. Then men will show their own cards more openly to you. Public personages, in particular, must in their whole life be clear as glass and transparent as crystal, so that men may see everything without reserve. ”