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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Home Ideals (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 13. Clear Thinking Helps Right Living.
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Clear Thinking Helps Right Living.
For friendship in its simplest essence is love. A friend is a lover with all the strongest, sweetest meaning that hallowed word ever has, or can be made to have. And the warm breath of love is over all life. The heart of God bends tenderly down over all men like a brooding mother over her babe. Love comes into human life as the soft south wind comes at the end of winter. It makes all the year a springtime, and every month of the calendar a June. Under its warm touch the cold snow crystals of common life are compelled to make a way for the early crocus, and then, quickly for all the other flowers with their fragrance and bloom; and soon after for the grain and fruit that keep all life alive and vigorous.
Where life lives love is. Down the dark dirty court of the slum of New York or London, of Constantinople or Bombay, it is sure to be found; even as the blades of green grass will grow up out of the narrow wedge of soil between the rows of brick on the sidewalk, as the ivy finds a rooting in the thin crevice on the side of the steep rock, and as the pure white lily grows up out of the black ooze and slime at the bottom of the pond. Among the money changers of Wall Street, and the London Exchange, and the Parisian Bourse, it is as surely doing its gentling work under the hardened surface, as among the fluttering, gay devotees of fashionable society. Though most times you would never guess it was so. And if it can grow in such soil it can grow everywhere.
"Upon the marsh mud, dank and foul,
A golden sunbeam softly fell,
And from the noisome depths arose
A lily miracle.
"Upon a dark, bemired life
A gleam of human love was flung,
And lo, from that ungenial soil
A noble deed upsprung." (L.) M.) Montgomery.)
Now it is true that these great words, "friendship" and "love," have been both borrowed away from their true use, and have been abused. There is a certain kindly courtesy that has become very common, that calls a mere acquaintance a friend. The gentling influence of the very word "friend" has seeped into all human contacts, softening and mellowing life with its fine touch. And that use is not open to criticism. But one should remember that this is a taking of the word away from its own meaning. It is a sort of borrowing it to help soften and sweeten the common contacts of life. And we all know full well that life needs all of that sort of borrowed help it can get. And the word "friend" is so rich that it is quite willing to have its needy neighbours come in to borrow at its back door.
And love gets badly crowded by much that is not love, and so much mixed up with such things that men constantly confuse it and them, and call things by the fine name of love that have no kinship at all with it. And then, too, it must be remembered that the words have been stolen, maliciously and thievishly stolen, and used as labels on bad stuff. There is no end to the bad stuff that has been passed about freely under these labels. But in all such borrowings, and stealings, and mixings, and such kindly usage, we must keep our eyes keenly open so as not to get the real things and its imitations confused.
Walking along the street one day down South, a thoughtful woman in the group asked, "What is the difference between love and friendship?" It was a keen question. For the two have been much discussed and not always with satisfactory results. They have been compared and contrasted to the advantage of "friendship," and the disadvantage of "love." It has been quite commonly said that friendship is an unselfish love that desires no returns; and indeed that never thinks of any benefit or advantage to itself, but is concerned only with the one loved. And that love is a passionate desire for someone, that leads a person to want to have that one for his own.
No word has been so much misunderstood and misused and abused as the word "love." In Jesus' day its own meaning seemed completely lost in the thoughts, and in the lives, and in the speech of men. The word was freely and commonly used for that which needed a u and an s and a t after the initial l to tell its real meaning. Yet Jesus did not hesitate to use the word for the real thing, with his own life to bring them together again, until the whole world re-learned something of the real meaning.
Yet a little bit of thinking down into the real meaning of these words, and of the things they stand for, seems to make it very plain that this common difference is not right. And if it isn't right, then it isn't good. For confused thinking makes confused morals and worse than confused lives. Clear use of words helps to clearer thinking. Clear understanding of truth always helps to a better living of it.