Obedience and Liberty [pp. 65-86]

OBEDIENCE AND LIBERTY.
stone, or carrying glad tidings into new lands, or extending
hospitality, or giving a cup of cold water to the thirsty, or doing
with fidelity the ten thousand little offices of the home, receives
the stamp of divine endorsement. Has one marvellous poetic
gifts, like Dante, or Milton, or Wordsworth, or as eminent above
all, like Homer and Shakespeare, he may sing his divine songs, unquestioned and unhindered. Crn one create symphonies like
Beethoven or Mendelssohn, which touch the inner springs of our
life, and awaken echoes of love and veneration and devotion, and
excite to rapturous emotions and stir to duty, as unquestionably
these sublime strains of music sometimes do, then, let him turn
aside from all other vocations, and be assured that in following
the bend of his own genius, and enriching humanity with his
precious compositions, he is obeying God. He may not be
doing all that God wants him to do; but his short-coming will
not be that he is a musician instead of being something other.
Is a man's preeminent fitness for teaching; and can he so teach,
that grammar, for instance, shall seem no longer a set of dry
and meaningless rules, but a science which concerns itself with
those methods through which the soul voices its inmost thoughts
to God and man; that the myriad flowers of the fields shall take
on new beauties, and the trees of the forest flower with a holier
presence; that the stars, far away and silent rolling, shall become companionable, and the revealers of mighty secrets; that
history shall be a vital and impressive marshalling of the men
and events of long-gone ages; that the rocks shall open their
sealed lips and tell the story of their formation and change; that
mathematics shall be the unfolding and expression of those laws
by which the great universe is made to rest in the poised hand
of the Omnipotent; that the eye shall be opened to see, and the
whole soul enthusiastically aroused to pursue the True and the
Beautiful and the Good? then, let him teach, and jubilant
amens shall wait on his instructions. So, if one's special qualification be to write books, or to edit newspapers, or to prescribe
for the sio'k, or to plead causes so ats to wring justice from juries,
or to till the soil, or to buy and sell, or to sail ships, or to take
the virgin ores of the earth, or the raw produces of the field
and give them shapes of utility suited to all the needs of civilization, or to influence the masses from the platform, or to solve
difficult problems of statesmanship, or to negotiate treaties, or
1874.1
83