In an old school reader there was a sketch, “Eyes or no eyes.” Two young men went for a walk in the same field. One of them saw just the commonplace shapes and forms; he saw nothing that a dog or a kodak would not have seen. He had eyes to see, but he saw not. The other one saw the bumblebees appearing later in the season than do the honey-bees, and thought of the relation this fact sustains to the production of red clover seed—a relation which every farmer understands when he cuts the second crop in place of the first to get seed. He saw at one side of the field a great granite boulder deposited there in the glacial period, and although the day was hot his mind was cool as it dwelt upon that age of ice. He saw the imprint of the shell of some water-breathing creature deep bedded as a fossil in a piece of stone. His imagination went back to the time when that very field was part of an inland sea, and this bit of life was making its impress upon the soft mud of some ancient seashore. He saw a score of interesting things which need not be named here; they were all there to be seen, but his friend had overlooked them. It was a question of “eyes or no eyes.” What any man sees in a field, or in his fellow beings, in his college course, or in life as a whole, depends upon the power of vision that he carries with him.
Here in a well-known story was a man keeping sheep on the slopes of Horeb. In reading the narrative it seems that the imagination of the poet has blended with the plain prose facts of history. We do not know what kind of fire it was which burned in that mysterious and vocal bush. We may believe it was the same kind of fire which burns in the grate or we may conclude that it was an extraordinary bit of autumnal splendor which at a certain season of the year is aflame on many hillsides as if the glory and color of a thousand sunsets might have lodged in the tree tops. However that may be, what Moses actually saw and heard that day is far more important than any conceivable amount of literal fire or of autumn color.
“I will now turn aside and see”—and what he saw his own subsequent career indicates! He had the power of vision and he saw not merely the shapes and colors present in that sheep pasture. He saw things absent, things historic, things possible as present and real. He saw away yonder on the banks of the Nile where he formerly lived, the life of his own fellows being crushed out of them by wrong industrial conditions. He saw the capacity of that race, burning but unconsumed even by those years of oppression, for moral idealism and spiritual leadership among the nations of the earth. He felt within his own breast a fitness for service wider, higher, and more significant than that of keeping sheep. He felt himself commissioned from on high for that responsible service, and he became dissatisfied with his own easy content there in the land of Midian. He saw the great divine heart filled with sympathy for an enslaved and oppressed people. He heard the divine voice say, “I have seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt; I have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters, and I am come down to deliver them.” He saw the divine hand reach out to employ mysterious agencies for the release of that people from the bondage of Egypt.
He had the power of vision and this is what he saw when he led his flock to the back side of the desert, even to Horeb, the mountain of God. The sheep saw nothing of that burning bush or of those other mysterious realities. The dull Midianites watching their flocks a few hundred yards away on the same slope saw nothing of it. A man standing in Moses’ own shoes, his face turned in the same direction, would have seen nothing unless he had brought to the situation the insight of this man of vision.
And Moses himself saw and heard what he did in that high hour because through long years he had cherished a profound sympathy for his brother men and a great abiding faith in God as one who works on behalf of suffering people everywhere. It was the whole mood and purpose of his life which stood declared in those splendid words, “I will now turn aside and see.” He was always saying just that! He was never content with the mere surface of reality. He was never satisfied with that which a hasty glance would bring in any given situation. He must get beneath the surface and know the deeper, hidden meaning.
How much depends upon that power of vision! What mighty issues are knit up with it in this familiar scene! If Moses that day had seen and heard nothing more than did the Midianites, he would have gone on keeping his sheep and would have died a comfortable and prosperous sheep grower. If the Israelites along the banks of the Nile had been without the power of such leadership as he alone among the men of his generation seemed to be able to furnish, they would have gone on making bricks without straw until all capacity for spiritual advance would have been crushed out of them. If that Hebrew race, first among Semitic peoples in its ability to see and to impart spiritual truth, had never had its chance to develop in the free air of the steppes or within the pleasant borders of that land of promise, how different apparently would have been the moral history of the race! It is idle to speculate on what would have been the result had something never happened which did happen, but just this glance shows the momentous consequences which may at any juncture attach to the ability of some man to see. It is of the utmost importance in every quarter that some man should be at hand who can see the great sight.
Your own life, the richness of it, the promise of it, the successful unfolding of it on higher levels, is bound up with this power of vision. If the world about you is only a sheep pasture, if success in life is to be measured solely or mainly in terms of wool and mutton, if the skilful avoidance of discomfort and the securing of easy content for yourself and your family are the main considerations with you, then by that limited outlook you are doomed. If here in these days of high privilege on the campus no bushes burn for you with a strange fire, if no hillsides in life become vocal with a divine voice, if no flames of sympathy, of moral passion, of aspiration burn within your breast, then alas for you! You are not entering into the meaning of life! You have eyes, but you see not, ears, but you hear not!
“Can ye not discern?” Jesus said to those who regarded themselves as the most exemplary people of his day. They could look up at the sky and from the fact that it was red or lowering make a fairly good guess about tomorrow’s weather, but they could not discern the signs of the times. There they were in the presence of the beginnings of the most important spiritual movement in history, yet all they saw was the tired face of the Man of Nazareth, whom they finally put to death because his claims confused them. Can ye not discern? Will you not take pains to cultivate the power of turning aside to see the great sights awaiting you all in the sheep pastures of earth, in all scenes of industry and in all places of trade, in all lines of civic effort and in all forms of charitable intent, in every schoolroom and in every home? Will you not turn and with heightened power of vision see there the hidden, unrealized possibilities?
“Where there is no vision, the people perish!” Something lives on—flesh and blood shapes which buy and sell, walk the street and talk small talk, but the people created potentially in the likeness and image of the Most High are gone. Where there is no vision, any life perishes. What keeps alive the mother-love in the face of all the hardships, sacrifices, buffetings it is called upon to meet? It is the power of vision cherished and cultivated more actively, perhaps, by women than by men. When her child is first laid in her arms it is only a bit of red flesh—that is all the canary in the window or the thoughtless observer who cares not for children would see. This bit of existence, so undeveloped as to have nothing one could call moral life, no power to choose or to aspire; so undeveloped as to have nothing one could call mental life, no power of recognition, discrimination, inference, has only the power to cry and to feed. But the mother sees in that tiny form another promise of a diviner day when the unsearched possibilities of that new life shall have been trained and nurtured by her love. And throughout the years when she nurses the child in sickness, bears with him in his ignorance, woos and wins him back from his moral waywardness, she is sustained by her maternal vision.
No one can live strongly, effectively, joyously in any other way. The dull, dry, prosaic man who never sees the deeper significance of any given situation may be able to saw wood or add up columns of figures, but when it comes to relating these ordinary details of life to some over-arching, underlying, far-reaching purpose which will bring out the meaning and the beauty of existence, he fails. He has no power of vision and his real life goes down in defeat.
It might be illustrated in this way—read Baedeker on Mont Blanc and then read Coleridge! Baedeker has the facts; he tells the height of the mountain, the exact distance from Chamounix to the summit in kilometers; he describes every glacier and crevasse. But Coleridge’s “Ode” to the mountain brings out the meaning and the beauty of it. Baedeker has facts, Coleridge has vision.
Read Baedeker on Edinburgh and then read Robert Louis Stevenson’s little book on the same city; read Baedeker on Northern Italy, including his description of the city without streets, and then read Ruskin’s “Stones of Venice.” Read Baedeker on Belgium, including his description of the field and of the Battle of Waterloo, and then read Victor Hugo’s chapter on the same event in “Les Misérables.” In one case you have the camera recording the outward, visible, prose facts; in the other you have insight and vision interpreting the meaning of them. It is written, man shall not live by Baedeker alone, but by every word which proceedeth out of the mind and heart of that higher power of vision shall man live.
Let me urge this habit upon every young man! Put your own personal life under the power, not of some lower mood or some ill-advised impulse, but under the power of the best you have ever seen or heard or felt as in any wise possible to you. It was a man in a million, measured by character and achievement, who said, while he was still in the vigor and promise of his youth, “Wherefore I was not disobedient unto”—what? I was not disobedient unto the rules and regulations posted on the wall of my schoolroom or the door of the factory where I earned my bread—that would have meant little! No one can set up the way of life in type and print it to be nailed on a door. I was not disobedient to the usages and customs of the society where I moved—that, too, might have meant only a weak, cheap mode of life. “I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision!” I was true to the best I saw and heard and felt as possible to me!
That habit of putting the life deliberately and persistently under the power of some noble vision caught in an hour of spiritual privilege will mean advance. You may, if you will allow your attention to be diverted by the underbrush around you and never see the bush that burns with a strange fire, never see things absent, things historic, things possible but unattained. The small things, the ant-hills, and the gopher mounds, may, because they are near, shut out your view of Shasta and Whitney. It is one of the tragedies of life that the insignificant, the unimportant details have a way of crushing out the finer purposes, thus bringing defeat to interests which are vital.
When Abraham Lincoln had been unusually harassed by some professional politicians as to the bestowal of patronage, he said one day, half humorously and half sadly, “It is not the carrying on of the Civil War which is killing me; it is the work of deciding who shall be postmaster at the Four Corners. There is Mr. Blank”—naming a very troublesome office-seeker—“I never think of going to sleep at night without first looking under the bed to see if Blank is not there waiting to ask me for some office.”
It was one of the tragedies of those hard years in our history that the great president of the republic, who himself had caught the vision and heard the voice—“I have seen the affliction of my people which are in bondage; I have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters, and I am come down to deliver them”—it was one of the tragedies of that period that his eyes should be turned away from the bush which burned with fire to study the underbrush piled up round him by narrow-minded politicians. It is one of the tragedies of many lives in less exalted station that the great things suffer defeat by the multiplicity and insistence of the small things. Busied here and there with a thousand petty interests—what we shall eat, what we shall drink, what we shall put on, and, what other women will say about it when we get it on—the vital things are left undone. The whole wretched habit of life comes from the lack of the power of vision, the inability to put these matters in right perspective, the great things great and the small things small.
Your real life does not consist in what you have. Your real life does not consist in what you are actually able to do. Your real life does not consist even, as men often say, in what you are. Your real life consists in what you see as possible and desirable for you, and in that capacity you feel stirring within you to gain all that sometime! Not your possessions, not your outward achievements, not your inner acquirements, but your persistently cherished aspirations tell the story of your real life. It is what you hold in vision and steadily strive for which marks you up or down.
But suppose one feels his lack of this power of vision, how shall he gain more of it? How shall we cultivate our own meager share of this fine ability? You may recall that word of Paul, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive the things that God hath prepared for those that love him.” This does not mean merely that the things prepared for us are superior to anything that eyes have seen or ears heard in this world; it means rather that they are discerned in another way. They come to us through the power of spiritual perception. “Eye hath not seen,” not by physical sensation; “ear hath not heard,” not by hearsay or common report; God reveals them to us by his Spirit. It was not that Moses had better eyes or better ears than the Midianite shepherds upon the hillsides; he had within him a soul of sympathy for his fellows, a spirit of trust toward God, an attitude of personal aspiration for the highest, which enabled him to see and to hear what they failed to detect.
This power of vision grows like other powers, by right use. The soul sees and sees more as the man obediently translates his visions into deeds, his insights into actions. If any man, gifted or humble, will do his will he shall know, for “obedience,” as Robertson said, “is the organ of spiritual knowledge.” The power of vision grows through right use as each added insight becomes an effective impulse for noble action.
It is this power of vision which keeps men alive all the way up and all the way in. It is for you who stand on the slopes of Horeb, the mountains of God, by reason of the higher education you have received to cultivate this power by a spirit of obedient trust and by the habit of loving service. In every situation form the habit of turning aside from the commonplace shapes which engage your eyes that you may see some great and significant sight. Watch for the bush which burns with a mysterious fire! Listen for the voice which issues out of it, calling you to larger and higher service! Welcome these finer impulses which burn within your own breast, for they will aid you in building your personal life into that great, divine plan of which you have caught a far-off vision.