MANY cynics have reviewed with cold analysis and scorching satire the apparently hopeless riddle of human life—its relationships, conditions, and tendencies. Mankind have written and read science and sermons, poems and essays, history and philosophy, yet vain has been the search for a key or a clue to the absolute. The effort to find happiness "here below" ends in a sigh of disappointment or a sedative text construed as a promise of something better to be attained by dying.
The result of this last resort has been a kind of unconscious hypocrisy on the part of most people. They go through this life saying and believing, apparently, that the only hope of real, permanent well-being is in death, as if God had ordained death to be a crowning reward to the faithful. To be sure, this is but the logical conclusion from the mass of religious teaching, yet upon the first approach of disease, mortals send for a man who is supposed to have at his command certain methods potent to thwart the will of God, or at least for the time being to baffle His unalterable intention — and to defer the blessedness indefinitely. In great dread of what they profess to believe will introduce them to perpetual bliss, they fight it off with every means they can possibly command. Friends are anxious, and weep over conditions which at the funeral are shown to have been most desirable, since they have ushered the mortal into immortality and harmony. Such is the contradictory behavior of all who believe that heaven is to be gained by dying.
In every relation of mortals the same fatal mistake is at work. People marry and are given in marriage, and spend long lifetimes together without open disagreement, in whose hearts, nevertheless, is hidden a sense of wrong as perpetual as the pulse. There are no two mortals, it is safe to say, but there is somewhere a cherished martyrthought between them, if they are closely and constantly associated for long. Problem plays and problem novels are the outcome of these faulty personal adjustments, yet who has a remedy? When human ingenuity fashions a machine, it so adjusts all parts that there is no conflict. but each does its work quietly, harmoniously, and precisely. Until such unity is achieved, no success is claimed by any inventor, nor any utility for his invention. Yet the Divine Being whom we worship as God, as one who is all-powerful and all-wise, is believed to have created and set going a world in which no two individuals can possibly work together without more or less friction or with perfectly even advantage to each. It is no use to blink the fact. Even the best adjustments may not be scrutinized too closely, but require a whitewashing process, like the sepulchers of old.
