Higher life

“ The Higher Life is a higher living in thought, word, and deed, and the knowledge of those Spiritual Principles, which are imminent in man and in the universe can only be acquired after long discipline in the pursuit and practice of Virtue. ”

“ Through purification, through knowledge, and through service to his fellow man the candidate sequentially unfolds these mystic properties, building better and more perfect bodies through which his higher life secures even greater manifestation. The expression of man through constructive thought, emotion, and action liberates the higher nature from bodies which in their crystallized states are incapable of giving him his natural opportunities. ”

“ Here it is sufficient to call attention to the law of growth, through which the living receive the power of self-development,—of bringing their endowments into act, of building up the being which they are. Whatever living thing is strong or beautiful has been made so by growth, since life begins in darkness and impotence. To grow is to be fresh and joyous. ”

“ There is the most perfect harmony; there is relatively easy settlement of problems and difficulties if but this principle be adopted; that you have taken as your chief business in life the ends of true religion, the development of character and the service of humanity, and, with this purpose, the daily toil, the opportunities and enginery of your trade or profession shall be made to serve these higher ends. ”

“ The men and the women who are awake to these inner helps—these directing, moulding, and sustaining powers and forces that belong to the realm of mind and spirit—are never to be found among those who ask: Is life worth the living? ”

“ Our efforts have united us with our utmost zeal and devotion to loftier ideals and higher principles, and is the fundamental force that sustains, creates, constructs, and accelerates the continual perfection of the elements necessary to our harmonious, contented and happy life. ”

“ The second point is the proper and healthy physical and mental development of all our faculties, in the interest of these higher aims. We are not to live with this better conception of life in cloisters or studies, but as far as possible to bring it [119] into use in our ordinary life and in every calling—but not, of course, in any calling that stands in radical opposition to this better conception of life. ”

“ The question of questions that the college student asks himself is, What am I going to be? The surface query is, What am I going to do? But in his heart of hearts he ponders the deeper questions: What may I become in real intellectual and moral worth? How large a man, measured by the divine standards, will it be possible for me to grow into?
These are the great questions because growth is the great end of life. That is what we are here for, to grow. To develop all our talents, all our possibilities, to increase our native powers of body, mind, and soul—this is life. ”

“ It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life. ”

“ On the contrary, we hold that the ultimate goal of all the improvements of life or mores is to better heredity, that most precious and ancient of all the many forms of values and worths, and that the degree in which they do this is the final criterion of all really worthy endeavor in the world. ”

“ I will only point out how different was your education, and how you profited by it and have come to excel in looks, strength, justice, and temperance. By your active life you achieved perfect health; your temperance was the result of obedience to the laws; you enjoy a body of unusual strength by reason of your self-control, and a soul of unusual rectitude because of your physical powers of endurance. You left nothing undone to improve your natural talents, but ever acquired new talents by new studies. ”

“ Could I work for outward success only, or chiefly, subordinating aspiration to what stifles aspiration? Would riches satisfy me? Would actual power over men, ecclesiastical, civil, or social? Could I live for ambition, and sit down unapproved of my better life to enjoy its achievements? Would the acquisition of knowledge and its employment as a means of worldly power, distinction, and advantage satisfy the inner hunger which longs for the truth, the light, the harmony of highest heavens? ”

“ From degree to degree of unfoldment, from grade to grade of promotion in the great school of life, humanity is ever passing. Pressing on toward the goal where all lovely attributes blend, and approaching the sphere of Perfected Being, each one will, in God’s own time, through experience and discipline, outgrow all imperfect traits, all unholy tendencies, and become, through the operations of nature’s grandest law, progress, what all are intended to be,—noble, manly, purified, and perfected human beings. ”

“ May we be taught to know and feel, and rejoice in the knowledge and the feeling, that of Thee is our true freedom, from Thee is bur true happiness, unto Thee is our true progress! Thus may our lives ever tend and grow toward Thee, and in Thee alone may we find our home, station, place, position—the only success and reward of life! ”

“ If for your religion you have adopted principles of high living; if you have set the worth of the soul above all other things; if you have determined to frame your life according to the golden rule of the great Teacher, and, with Him as hero and ideal, are seeking to do good to others and make this world a better place for us all, with less of sin and sorrow and more of joy and love, you will make your business as well as your praying the servant of these ends. ”

“ Is the competition of modern existence so fierce that you must be content simply to gain an honest living? Have you received the gift of life in this progressive age, wherein all the experience of the past is garnered for your inspiration, merely that you may increase by one the sum total of purely animal existence?
Born in an age and country in which knowledge and opportunity abound as never before, how can you sit with folded hands, asking God's aid in work for which He has already given you the necessary faculties and strength? ”

“ Up and up and up he pushes; helped now by the body, now by the soul, now by the intellect, till we find him, still in strong middle life, educated, experienced, traveled, enobled by loving and serving, awake to our larger social needs, and working with all his splendid power to help humanity. ”

“ And thus, gentlemen, did the last act of this illustrious man’s existence accord with that leading principle of his well-spent life—the desire to promote the universal happiness and welfare of mankind. ”

“ And after we have begun, and find ourselves in the midst of a life so large, so immense and so marvellous that it will require eternity to live it all, what are the great essentials that we should ever remember and apply? What are the great centres of life about which we may build a greater and a greater life? ”

“ What contribution are you going to make of your strength, your time, your influence, your money, your self, to make a cleaner, fuller, happier, larger, nobler life possible for some of your fellow-men? I do not ask how you are going to do it. You may do it in business, in the law, in medicine, in the ministry, in teaching, in literature. But this is the question: What are you going to give personally to make the human life of the place where you do your work, purer, stronger, brighter, better, and more worth living? ”

“ As the highest bodily strength and the most perfect health, the probability of the longest life and the greatest beauty,--in short, the best bodily attributes,--belong to the period of youth, so, and for that very reason, the intellectual wealth which comes not by acquisition, but by inheritance, is the largest. ”

“ What desire, what fulfilment of desire, had wrought so pathetically on the features of these ranks of aged men and women of humble condition? Those young men, bent down so discreetly on the details of their sacred service, had faced life and were glad, by some science, or light of knowledge they had, to which there had certainly been no parallel in the older world. ”

“ Growth—development—the going on to perfection, are the laws of life; and more emphatically so as appertaining to the life of the human soul. That life, in all its high activities, burns still in the soul of your lost darling, and he will grow, in the world of angelic spirits to which our Father has removed him, up to the full stature of an angel, a glorified form of intelligence and wisdom. ”

“ We may therefore acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion that every age of the world has increased, and still increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human race. ”

“ First, manhood; the manhood His Son disdained not to wear; worldly gifts, such as rank, riches, influence, things which others have to spend half an existence in earning; life in its best prime, with much of youth yet remaining—with grief endured, wisdom learnt, experience won. ”

“ We must learn to order our lives, not as machines to be driven at the top of their efficiency in the money mill, but as part of the great life of the spiritual world, as inheritors of things divine, sublime, and glorious, as possessors of the joy that made the morning stars sing together and the beauty that paints the evening red. ”

“ The ancient philosophers never got further than the question: what is the highest good in life? The modern thinking world reached so high as to spend a year, perhaps, in debating whether life is worth living. ”

“ This principle is of very wide application.
What produces the noblest human creature now in our nineteenth century? What inspires hope? What sustains us most bravely to fight the battle of life? What makes life most worth living?
When we have ascertained these facts in the present, they will explain the past, and give the foundations of right for guidance in the future. ”

“ They will change radically the conditions of the life of man, raise human life to a height before unknown. Yet the transformation that will take place in the soul of man will be a thousand-fold more significant. ”

“ Great delicacy in the development of character, and a subtle power of self-analysis are conspicuous in ‘A Life for a Life,‘ while the purity of its religious views, and the elevation--the grandeur, indeed--of its dominating sentiments, render its influences in every sense healthy and invigorating."--The Press. ”

“ But if we give a comprehensive glance to the moral progress of society, we shall see that little by little, the yoke is being made easier, in other words, we shall see that nature, or life, moves gradually toward triumph. ”

“ Youth, Manhood, and Age. In Youth, as Entered Apprentices, we ought industriously to occupy our minds in the attainment of useful knowledge; in Manhood, as Fellow Crafts, we should apply our knowledge to the discharge of our respective duties to God, our neighbor, and ourselves; so that in Age, as Master Masons, we may enjoy the happy reflections consequent on a well-spent life, and die in the hope of a glorious immortality. ”

“ You stand now in middle life—a long future is before you—you have an amiable child; have friends; have to live for eternal life! Live for these! and you will see how, by degrees, the night vanishes, the day ascends, and all arranges itself and becomes clear. Come, and let us two unitedly work at the most important business of life—improvement! ”

“ Says this truly great man, "If we fasten our eyes upon the effects which education may throw forward into immortal destinies, it is then that we are awed, amazed, overpowered, by the thought that we have been placed in a system where the soul's eternal flight may be made higher or lower by those who plume its tender wings, and direct its early course. ”

“ The forms which the highest spiritual life in an age or an individual assumes, the power of free and happy development which it obtains, or the limitations to which it has to submit, can, to a very considerable extent, be explained by reference, in the case of nations, to the political, social, and material circumstances of the age, and, in the case of the individual, to his early life and environment, his education and personal fortunes. ”

“ But imagine my astonishment when his first question was, ‘Do you believe life is worth living?’ asked in an earnest but calm manner. I confess this question from lips so young alarmed me and went to my heart like a thrust. ‘Why, certainly,’ was my reply, ‘life is worth living, and living good. How do you come to ask a question that sounds so strange from the lips of a young man? ”

“ But in the concentration of our attention on this altogether desirable end, which we are still far from having adequately attained, we have lost sight of that larger end, the well-being of the race and the amelioration of life itself, not merely of the conditions of life. ”

“ Our spiritual growth ought to take just this direction of including broader views of truth and duty, of obtaining a conception of life in which the various elements shall be held in their proper relations and proportions ”

“ What is the principle of this new life? We answer: intellectual and moral progress. Mind has grown; the soul has been expanded. God has permitted man to be free, and furnished him with the means to be so. ”

“ Great men of science, literature, and art—apostles of great thoughts and lords of the great heart—have belonged to no exclusive class nor rank in life. They have come alike from colleges, workshops, and farmhouses,—from the huts of poor men and the mansions of the rich. ”

“ In the second chapter of this book, we looked at the gradual unfolding of that life in its great historical representatives; and we found its general line of development to lead through disillusion with the merely physical to conversion to the spiritual, and thence by way of hard moral conflicts and their resolution to a unification of character, a full integration of the active and contemplative sides of life; resulting in fresh power, and a complete dedication, to work within the new order and for the new ideals. ”