Mr. Savage's weekly sermons are regularly printed in pamphlet form in Unity Pulpit." Subscription price, for the season, $1.50; single copy, 5 cents. GEO. H. ELLIS, Publisher, 141 Franklin St., Boston, Mass. DISILLUSIONS. THE German poet, Goethe, was so completely disillusionized when he was about twenty years of age that he seriously contemplated committing suicide. He had made up his mind that the world, that life, was not worth while. But he thought about it awhile, and wisely concluded that, since he could commit suicide at any time, it was a matter which could be postponed. The result of this was that he lived to be an old man and made large contributions to the scientific knowledge of the world. He sung of human problems, human loves, human hopes, and the glory of the world; and he died at last with the words "More light" upon his lips, so the story says, implying his belief at that time that there was more light than he had discovered, and that there were things to be seen in that light. This is what the disillusion of Goethe came to in practical life. I wish to treat this matter this morning in such a way, if I can, as to lead you to see what disillusion really means, and what, if we are wise, will be its outcome. At the first I shall run briefly over a few points which I shall immediately traverse again, with another end in view. There is the disillusion that comes to us all as we pass from childhood to youth and middle age. All of us, I suppose, can remember the kind of imagined glamour and glory which were over the common things of our childhood. We lived in a wonder-land. We imagined a thousand things that were real to us, but which had no corresponding reality in the outside world. All inanimate things were alive to our quick-wakening childish fancy. I suppose, if we could go back to it with the eyes which we have to-day, and look out of the experience of years at father, mother, brother, and sister, at the old home, the old playmates, the old schoolhouse, the old pastimes, that they would seem very different to us from what they seem as we look back and note them haloed by the loving memory of years. So we say, Let the child, let the young man, dream: he will have to wake up soon enough to the hard realities of life. This is the way we look at it. This is the way we talk about it. And, when the young man leaves home and goes into practical business, another disillusion awaits him. He does not find business such, perhaps, as he had expected, when a boy. He is surprised and hurt to find that men are not always honest; that there is lying, that there is cheating, in the business world; that there is little brotherly care; that one man is seeking by all possible means to get all he can out of his associates, careless as to whether he gives anything in return or not. So a young man who has lost faith in the business world is popularly supposed to have "found it out," to have discovered what business really means. Here is another popular idea as to what disillusion means. Then, when we are very young, we are apt to form what we imagine are going to be eternal friendships with this one or that one. By and by we outgrow these fancies. The persons whom we supposed we should love and care for forever we cease to care for. They do not seem to us to be the same persons that they were. Probably we do not seem to them to be the same persons that we used to be. So the young man is apt to wake up and say, Friendship, after all, is a hollow delusion: there is nothing real, nothing permanent about it. The same thing is true in the matter of love. I suppose most boys or young men are in love a good many times, or think they are, before they are grown. They clothe the objects of that love with all sorts of unreal and impossible qualities; and perhaps, as they enter upon their young and, as they suppose, wise manhood, they have made up their minds that love, too, is superficial, and that it does not strike very deep into human life. And then, as they hear about this couple being unhappy, and another having a "skeleton in the closet," they begin to wonder if all the world is not merely a scene of illusion in regard to this mat ter of love. And perhaps they make up their minds that all there is to it is passion; and they will take that, and let it go. There is yet another point that I wish to suggest; for I am only making suggestions. There is the matter of religion. A boy is taught at his mother's knee to say a certain prayer, to believe in certain thoughts about God, about heaven, about the Church, about the way men ought to behave and treat each other as Christians. As he grows, perhaps he finds that certain of these ideas he cannot possibly hold any longer he cannot feel about God as he did in childhood. I remember how I used to look up in my prayers to God, as I suppose most children do,— as a large, old man up in the sky, sitting upon a throne. These ideas go as he grows; and, as the beliefs and thoughts that his mother taught him disappear, he wonders whether religion, too, is not a set of passing fancies, whether there is anything permanent in it. And, after he has joined the church, perhaps he finds that some man who may be a prominent official in the church is anything but a good man, and he sees outside the church somebody that he believes is a great deal better; and the chances are that many times he loses faith, not only in this man, not only in this set of ideas, but in religion, in the church, and he wonders whether there is any place for them any more. So you will find a great many young men, and men in middle life, who are walking through the world as if it were a desert. They have beautiful memories of the past, but they smile ironically as they think of them, or else they grow sad as they contemplate them; but they have little. hope of the future, because they have practically made up their minds that the world is a dreary place, that life is a hard experience, and whether there is an end to it all they do not know. I wish to consider this from the point of view which I myself occupy after years of struggle and care and study, and suggest to you, at any rate, what my own beliefs are concerning this matter of disillusion. I shall take up again |