Psalms 119:141

I am small and despised: yet do not I forget Thy precepts.

The common lot

I wish to speak of our own separate lives. To the most wearied of you all, I would teach that there is hope. I would say, in spite of every trial which God’s disguised mercy may send you, in spite of every humiliation which man’s undisguised malice may inflict upon you, Respect yourselves! Value at its true estimate the soul which God has given to you; believe in the splendour of its possibilities and the glory of its immortality. “He,” says Milton, “who holds himself in reverence and due esteem both for the dignity of God’s image upon him and for the price of his redemption, which he thinks to be possibly marked upon his forehead, accounts himself a fit person to do the noblest and godliest deeds, and much better worth than to deject and defile with such debasement and pollution as sin, is himself so highly ransomed and ennobled to new friendship and filial relationship with God; nor can he fear so much the offence and reproach of others as he dreads and would blush at the reflection of his own severe and modest eye upon himself, if it should see him doing or imagining that which is sinful, were it even in the deepest secrecy.” Thus, then, should we view our personal lives in that inherent grandeur which man can neither bestow upon them nor diminish. And we need thus to feel the sanctity of our beings. Do I net interpret the thoughts of many of you aright when I say that they are very often weighed down by depression and discontent. I ask whether many of you are not secretly saying in your hearts, “Oh that I had a higher position, a wider influence, a larger scope”? “What boots it for me,” some of you will say, “to come day after day through the weary streets to the dingy office, to copy and east up accounts till I am grey-headed and cast aside, or retire upon some miserable pension?” Or, “Why am I a humble tradesman, harassed by incessant anxiety about my business?” Or, “Why is no higher lot assigned to me in life than that of standing behind a counter to weigh sugar or measure ribbons?” Or, “Why am I a poor, lonely woman who has apparently missed many of the natural ends of life, whom there are none to praise and very few to love?” And so, more or less, all but a few of us have a lot in life, as has been described, all the harder to bear because in the pathos of it everything is below the level of tragedy, except the passionate egotism of the sufferer. Ah! how many of these discontented murmurs rise from false notions and exaggerated claims; how many of them would vanish if, having food and raiment, we would be therewith content! Our complaints and miseries rise in no small measure from our failure to grasp the real meaning, and to understand the universal experience of life; they rise because, dropping the substance we grasp at the shadow; they rise because we take for solid realities the bubbles which burst at a touch. A child crying because it cannot have the moon is not more foolish and ignorant than we are when we suffer ourselves to be unhappy because wealth, and rank, and success, and power come to others and not to us. Keep God’s commandments, and you, small and of no reputation as you may be, are much greater, and bettor, and happier than another who has all earthly gifts, and does not make his moral being his primo cars, as heaven is greater and better than earth. You sigh for riches; the Book in which you profess to believe pours silent contempt on gold. You wish for rank; the man who has the longest ancestry has no longer ancestry than yourselves. He and you are descended alike from the gardener of the lost Eden. You wish for genius, but he who increaseth knowledge very often increaseth sorrow. It is one of the most elementary lessons in life to know that these little earthly distinctions dwindle into absolute insignificance compared with real things, as time dwindles into nothing when compared to eternity. The world may, perhaps, hold you to be commonplace and insignificant people; but the world needs these hardly less than its gifted ones. It would be a woeful thing for the human race if all that is insignificant and all the commonplace were to be thrust to “stand there” or “sit there,” under others’ footstools, for the commonplace and the insignificant are the vast majority. Ninety-nine out of every hundred of us are in this sense, in the sense of the world, altogether commonplace and insignificant. Is it not the masses and the million who make mankind? What else have been the countless generations who lie under the miles of gravestones and ever extend-hag pavements of tombs and sepulchres? How many of all those who lie in the catacombs or in the cemetery, in the marble monument or mountain cave, have left even the shadow of a name? Our lot, then, is nothing exceptional, nothing to complain of, nothing to be depressed at. It is just the common, the all-but-universal lot. It has nothing to do with the essential meaning of life. (Dean Farrar.)