Work and Rest

“Man goeth forth to his work and to his labor until the evening.” — PSALM civ. 23.

WE all suspect, far more than we know, how the beauty and significance of the most familiar things is hidden from us by their familiarity. If we could only see for the first time what we see for the ten thousandth, it would be so different to us! We are sure that we should really see it then. And one of the most significant of things, certainly, if we could see it in such freshness, would be the constant alternation of day and night in the natural world, with its suggestion — and indeed its requirement — of a corresponding alternation of work and rest, of occupation and leisure, in the life of man. But age after age, the days have gone on shining through their golden hours, and then sinking into the coolness and dark of the evenings; and generation after generation of mankind has had the characters of all its men and women shaped and colored by this perpetual ministration of nature, this mixture of labor and repose. Though men have become so possessed with the passion of work that, if they could, they would have had a never-setting sun, though they grudged the hours of rest as if they were hours of waste, the sun has had no consideration for their extravagances; but when the working hours were over it has shut down its gate of darkness and turned the overzealous mechanic out of his workshop, and the overzealous farmer out of his field, and has compelled each of them to rest in spite of himself.

On the other hand, men have grown tired of work and loved overmuch the dark and quiet hours in which they could give themselves to contemplation; but once a day always the sunlight has broken in upon their dreams, and the stir and current of a world springing to work in every part of it has dragged them to the labor that was better for them. Nature is so healthy! such a wise mother of us all! With her quiet, persistent hands she is always pressing on each man’s morbidness, and urging it back to health. Our modern civilization invents its gas lights and its tireless machineries and tries to turn night, both for its pleasure and its labor, into day. And then comes the opposition, the protest of laboring people insisting that eight hours or ten hours are enough to work. But, after all, however men may fix their exact rules and regulations, it is nature and the God of nature, it is the Maker of light and darkness who has finally decreed the general proportions of toil and rest — that man shall go forth to his work and to his labor until the evening, and then come home to his repose.

Our subject, then, is Work and Rest and their relations to each other, which are thus typified and secured by the perpetual dispensation of the natural world. I am sure that every thoughtful man will have suspected at least that there is nothing that has had a stronger influence in bringing his character to be what it is, than the proportions and relations which work and rest have had to each other through the course of his life; and as he surveys the people about him he sees hardly any cause that has contributed so much to make the differences among men who may be considered to have started pretty much alike, as this same thing — the different proportions of labor and leisure in their lives. If this is true, then these two parts of life and their relation to each other must be well worth our study.

And let us speak first of work, the daytime labor of men, that by which they get their living. The strangest thing about work is the way in which all men praise it, and yet all men try to get away from it. There is no subject so popular as the blessedness of work. There is no theory so universal as that of the wretchedness of not being compelled to work. You may tell any audience that the worst legacy a father can leave to his child is the opportunity of idleness, and all your audience, rich and poor, workers and idlers together, will applaud. There is no live man who does not feel a certain excited sense of admiration, a certain satisfaction, a certain comfort that things are right, when he stands where men are working their hardest, where trade is roaring or the great hammers are deafening you as they clang upon the iron. Everywhere, work and the approval of work! and yet everywhere the desire to get away from work! Everywhere, what all these men we see are toiling for, is to make such an accumulation of money that they shall not have to toil any longer. Everywhere, while the laboring man has his contempt for, he has also his envy of, his brother man who owns the easy fortune and lives the easy life. The dream of his own heart is to reach that same privilege for himself.

Now, this double sense, this value of work and impatience with work as they exist together, seems to me to be the crude expression in men’s minds of this conviction, — that work is good, that men degenerate and rust without it, and yet that work is only at its best and brings its best results, is most honorable and most useful, when it is aiming at something beyond itself. This is the feeling which lies at the bottom of all men’s endeavors to escape from the labor which yet they know and will maintain to be honorable and beautiful, — the feeling that every work ought not to be satisfied with mere continuance, but ought to seek some attainment, ought not to expect merely to go on forever, but ought to expect to go out sometime into a rest and repose in which its true excellence should be attested. And everybody will bear witness that this is the healthiest feeling about any work that we have to do; satisfaction and pleasure in doing it, but expectation of having it done some day and graduating from it into some higher state which we think of as rest. Take the first of these away, and work becomes feverish and discontented. Take the second away, and it becomes dull and deadening.

The real pleasure that legitimately belongs to the doing of work (a pleasure which it would be sad to think that any of us whose lot in life it is to labor in any way did not often feel as we plod on about our business) — this pleasure is capable of being analyzed into various elements. I will mention three, which, though we may not have given them our thought, must have often helped and lightened the doing of our work. The first is the pleasure of the mere exercise of our powers. It is a noble thing. I do not know where there is any broad, patent fact which makes us more realize that Love, somewhere, in some heart, had something to do with the putting together of this life of ours, than the great fact that whatever a man is made to do, he primarily does with pleasure. Other things may come in that make him hate to do it, but he starts out with this, that the power being in him, it is a joy to him to send it out into action. And it is wonderful how many mighty and exceptional achievements there are, and how much of the even, steady flow of action there is, of which it is really impossible to give any other account than this, that it is a pleasure to human nature to exercise any power of which it feels itself possessed. There are plenty of merchants who are working hard every day, not to make money, for they have enough, but because there is in them a business faculty which it is a pleasure for them to exercise, just as it is a pleasure for a fish to swim, or for a bird to fly, or for a child to run with the vitality that he feels in every limb, or for an artist to paint with the skill that he feels in his active brain and his subtle fingers.

There are men at Washington and at our State House whose pleasure in governing is purely in the use of the governing capacity of which they are conscious. In our war, as in every war, there were soldiers who went to the field not for the cause, but for simple joy in doing what they knew they could do — that is, to fight and perhaps command. There is an impatience in an unused power. It is cramped and distressed and inflamed within us. It is a joy to exercise a power or a talent. It is not the highest or most reasonable joy, but how deep and universal it is! how it springs up instinctively! There is a healthy pleasure in doing what each power that God has given us was made by Him to do.

But this is not all. One must see or believe that there are results of his work; or it is not in any reasonable man to take permanent pleasure in doing it. And there comes in the second element in the attractiveness of work. It may seem at first as if there were very little for us to gather up here. It may seem that much of our work went by and manifested no results, so few special and prominent things there are to which, after we have worked for our twenty, or thirty, or forty years, we can point confidently and declare that but for us they would not have been.

And yet, I am sure, there are two convictions that grow in the mind of every watchful man as he gets older: first, that the amount of effect that has been produced in the world by men’s work has been enormous, the face of nature enormously altered, and the cond;tion of humanity enormously changed; and, secondly, that this enormous effect has really been produced not by the great efforts of a few great toilers, but by the continuous, innumerable labors of innumerable little workers just like himself. This seems to me to be the source from which a common man is really able to believe that his work does something, and so to take pleasure in his little labor because of its indubitable results. The coral insect sees the great reef breasting the sea, which millions of little creatures, with no greater gift of size than he, have built; and so he creeps up and lays his stiffening frame upon the pile, sure that even such a bulk as his will not be lost. The worker in some branch of charity sees that the great condition of the human race has risen on the whole; whole ledges of humanity that used to be under the water now stand out in the sun; and he sees that it has not been done by one or two giants giving one or two great lifts, but by the constant help of insignificant man by insignificant man all through the centuries; and so he knows that he is doing something when he lays down his life or some part of his life for his brethren — something that will show, although he shall not see it; something that will tell, although he shall not hear it. Sometimes we feel how little men have done in the world; but oftener we feel how much they have done, and rejoice in adding our grain of sand to the great pile that is forever building.

The third element of reasonable pleasure in work is the change and advance which it brings in our knowledge of ourselves, and in our own characters.

If there were not something of this kind, I do not think any reasonable man could go on working day after day and be contented. Work would grow stale and disgusting. Merely to exercise powers that remained the same after the thousandth exercise that they were after the first; and merely to produce results like a machine that is no more perfect when its millionth nail is added to the heap than when it dropped its second or its third; — neither of those could satisfy the man conscious of a character, conscious of himself. It is in the blessed power of work to make a man first know himself, and then grow beyond himself, that its great attractiveness for all the best sort of men must lie. I go to work proud and confident; I find how weak I am and I grow humble. That is itself, or ought to be, a joy. The new joy of humility — alas, for the man who never tasted it! It is a coming home to facts. It is a getting rid of delusions. I have found the blessed strong footing of humility. I have got the hard, barren rocks away, and have got down to the soft rich ground in which good seed can grow. It is rare to see a really working man who is proud, and rare to see a really idle man who is not proud. And I am not theorizing. I am only speaking the truth of multitudes of experiences when I say that for a real man there is no joy in life so great as getting rid of the false conceits, concealments, and necessities of pride and coming down to the frank, solid, free ground of humility.

These, then, are the legitimate sources of pleasure in work. I do not say that these are what make all men work, and keep them from idleness. Lower compulsions come in. In a community like ours the two first things that keep men at their labor are necessity and shame. Men cannot afford to be idle where wealth so easily changes hands, and where no one will give them a living which they do not earn for themselves. And men have not the face to be idle where this universal necessity has established a universal esteem for work. I do not despise either of these compulsions. Better that any idle hands among us should be set to toil by necessity or shame than that they should lie always in the lap; but if your work is to be anything more than a task to you, somewhere or other these three things must come in to lift it: It must really call out your powers; you must be able really to think of it as effective and useful, and you must see out of it some fruit of humility and character in yourself.

I am glad to preach to a congregation of men who work; I should not know how to preach to any others. Every morning your house doors open to let you out either from the luxury or from the poverty of your home, into a day of labor. Every morning these men refresh the old experience of David’s Psalm and with light heart or heavy, with joy in it or hate of it, “Man goeth forth to his work and to his labor.” It makes one’s heart almost ache as he thinks back how long this has been going on. It seems as if it were terrible that so many hundreds of thousands of millions of men have lived and worked; and yet we, coming onto the earth at this late day, have rushed in at once, with the old instinct grown strong with hereditation and never relaxed necessity, have scrambled among the graves of our fathers for the tools they dropped beside them as they stepped down wearily into them, and have gone to work as freshly as if we were the first generation that ever discovered what a grand working place this old world is! It is terrible to think of all this if we remember what multitudes of those workers hated the work they did, loathed it, and were crushed by it, got neither pleasure nor culture out of it, and died killed by their work in soul as well as body. “Therefore I went about to cause my heart to despair of all the labor which I took under the sun,” — so wrote the despairing soul in the Ecclesiastes, and many another despondent heart has taken up his dreary words.

But yet, if we are right, if work has in it these sources of joy, real, pure, untainted with anything of evil, then the terror of it is gone for any worker that can truly find these fountains. Then we are not entering into an entailed curse of our fathers when we come out and find work waiting for us just as soon as our hands are big enough to hold the instruments of labor; we are rather coming into a garden of blessing, broad, open, rich, which was stocked with all culture for them, and is now offering its pleasures freely to us their children. The sky with tireless benevolence, and the ground with patient welcome, see us coming so late with the same old monotonous demands, and are as cordial in their greeting and as kindly in their care for us as they were to Adam and Seth and Enoch, and the others who came to them when they were fresh and young.

I wish that I could make the young men whose lot it is to be workers know and believe that work is not necessarily pleasant nor necessarily drudgery. Your work has in it great, deep, inexhaustible sources of delight, if it is capable of giving broad play to your good human powers, and of leading to some true solid results, and of making you humble. Distrust no work because men call it “low “; but distrust any work, however high men call it, that will not do these three things for you. Distrust and dread any work which cramps instead of letting out your faculties, or which brings out your meanest faculties and leaves your noblest ones untouched, or any work which you are sure can add nothing to the sum of good in the world. It is not the size but the solidity of the contribution that you must look to; a single grain of sand is as solid as a mountain. Distrust also any work the doing of which makes you proud, and so, blinding you to yourself, makes you weak. A pleasure in using our powers, a belief in results, and a growing humility, — these are the sanctifications and salvations of work, and may make the life of the hod-carrier or the street-sweeper bright and elevating.

These are our thoughts of work and of its privileges. And now, as we look around upon the world we live in, we see how all of nature is built to co operate with these great purposes of labor, and to bring out the pleasure which legitimately belongs to every act of faithful work. The delight in the sheer exercise of powers finds sympathy in every attempt of nature, by her resistances and discouragements, to bring those powers out to their fullest. The desire to produce results is helped by a ready nature always ready to submit to and be acted upon by man. And the self-culture of work is aided by every rebuke with which nature convinces the working man of his limitations and his littleness. This outer world, with all its helps and hindrances, is saying to man, “Work, for there is happiness and growth in working. It is good. It is what you are here for. I will help you. For this the daily sun light rises in the east and shines through all its course.”

But now we come to the other part of our subject. If we look to the arrangements of Nature for indications of what man’s life is meant to be, we see at once that, bravely as she has provided for his work, she has not thought of him only as a working being. She has set her morning sun in the sky to tempt — nay, to summon him forth to his work and to his labor, to make him ashamed of himself if he loiters and shirks at home; but she has limited her daylight, she has given her sun only his appointed hours, and the labor and work are always to be only “until the evening.” Rest as truly as work is written in her constitution. Rest, then, as much as work is an element of life. By his rest as well as by his work every man may be estimated and judged. Indeed, it seems as if a man could be judged better by his resting than by his working hours. He is less artificial and more spontaneous then, and his character has freer play. Who of us does not feel that he would know more of a man’s real character, of the true personal qualities that are in him, if he knew how he spent his evenings than even if he knew wholly how he was occupied during his days?

If we pass, then, from talking about work to speak of the Divinely appointed, the naturally recurring periods of rest in a man’s life, we must try to estimate their value not to the body but to the mind and soul. We want to think not of night as the time of sleep, but of evening as the time of leisure. And here, too, let me make three suggestions of the value of rest as I did of the value of work. And, first, this daily drawing of the curtain between man and his active labors represents and continually reminds us of the need of the internal as well as the external in our lives. It brings up to us our need, by bringing up to us our opportunity, of meditation, of contemplation. For active life is always tending to get shallow. It is always forgetting its motives, forgetting its principles, forgetting what it is so busy for, and settling itself into superficial habits. Do we not know that, every one of us? No work is so sacred that it can escape the danger. Buying and selling, legislating, doctoring, preaching, teaching, — they are all occupations which are capable of being done only from the muscles outward. And just as God was always taking those Hebrews of His, after they had been tossed and beaten about in a great war, full of wild, absorbing activity, and putting His hand upon them as it were, and hushing their history into one of those calm evening periods of which we read in the frequently recurring phrase, “the land had rest forty years”; just as He took his chief saints, Moses, Elijah, Paul — nay, just as Jesus Christ went out of activity into silence and quiet and retirement; so God shuts us out from our work and bids us daily think what the heart of our work is, what we are doing it for. If this is the meaning of the evening — and no man sees the day light sink away and the shadows gather without sensitively feeling some such meaning in it — then surely we need it.

It sometimes seems as if, if the whole world could stop one hour, and sit still and think what it is about, it could start off again so much more wisely. There is so much unreasonable work doing. There are so few of us who ever do really meditate, who ever contemplate the spiritual reasons and consequences of the things that we are doing! We put that off until we get to heaven, which we idly picture to ourselves as a place of endless leisure. We will not use the calm and peace, the daily heaven, which God has scattered into all our days. We light the gas and kill the evening by making believe that it is daylight still.

This we do far too much, and yet we all do meditate a little; and it is hard to see how we could ever do it at all if life were one broad glare of sunlight, never sinking into the dusk where one can not see to work and must gather himself together, “recollect,” as we say, his scattered life, and look with his spirit at the hearts and souls of those things whose putsides his hands have been handling all the day.

The value of the evening comes, of course, from its relation to the daylight. The worth of meditation depends upon its connection with activity. A world all evening would be bad and morbid. The life that tries to be all contemplative grows feeble and shallow in its own way. Nature has taught us our true culture when she has bound the periods of action and the periods of contemplation close to each other, and bidden us complete our life out of the two together. And the man surely suffers who despises either.

And then again, the presence of the evening, or the element of leisure in our lives, not merely off sets our working time with a time of thought and contemplation, but it also mitigates, even in our working hours, the absoluteness with which our work tries to rule us. I am sure you business men will own that there is danger of a man’s being too much and too purely a business man. I am sure that here, in our city, where we have been and are still blessed with the example and influence of so many merchants, who, while they have been “not slothful in business,” have been “fervent in spirit”; who have had, that is, burning in their own bosoms and have lighted in the lives of others, ardent and glowing interest in spiritual things — in art, in education, in literature, in philanthropy, and in religion — I am sure that here I may claim and you will allow that, for every active business man’s best good it is desirable, it is necessary, that he should have some intellectual or spiritual sympathy outside of bis business, which shall be the resource of his life, where he can go for the water of refreshment and life that will keep him from stiffening into a machine.

I am sure that we can all see the difference between the men who have and the men who have not such an interest to resort to; we feel it the moment that we touch their different lives. The one life is hard and hollow; the other is soft, elastic, and full. The old Jews used to have (and I do not know but they have still) a rule that, however intellectual or spiritual a child’s life might be destined to become, he should be taught some self-supporting trade, so that, however it fared with the soul, the body might not starve. It was a good rule certainly. But the other rule would be good, too, if it could be observed, — that, however material a child’s life was to be, it should be inspired with some definite spiritual or intellectual interest, so that, how ever it might fare with the body, the spirit should not starve. There is nothing one would want to urge more strongly on young men just being swept into the intense absorption of mercantile life than the necessity of winning and keeping some resource, some place of mental resort, some interest or study or liberal occupation of some sort, to which his tired life may always resort to find refreshment and recruit its spring. This is the evening element in life. There are multitudes of merchants who have turned to drudges, and drudged along in a work that was a slavery to them, just for the lack of some such resort, some interest outside of their business, to which they could retire.

To multitudes of people Religion has been just this haven of retreat, where the soul put in out of the storms of life for shelter and repair. Nobody can begin to estimate how much, to our New England ancestors, — hard-worked, poor, forced down to continual contact with the most prosaic and hard details, — has been the religion which has always filled their lives with softer influence, and renewed their courage, and kept the better part of them alive. Think of the village and farm life of our bleak coast and hills — what would it have been with out the softening and elevating and recruiting, the letting up of work and letting-in of visions, that came from the meeting-house upon the hill, and the Bible reading and the prayer and the psalm-singing beside the cottage hearth? We may forget much that was in their creed, we may learn more broad and genial ways of worshipping and thinking, but woe to us if we shut up and forget that door which they kept open from the life of man into the life of God! Woe to us if we let our work lose the inspiration that comes from knowing that we do it for our Heavenly Father, and not for ourselves! We stand in danger of letting that knowledge go, be cause work so absorbs us and enchains us by its own sheer power; but yet we know that that slavery to work, which we are aware is growing in ourselves, is not the highest or most noble type of life as we behold it in other men. We know that the man to whom work is really sanctifying and helpful, is the man who has God behind his work; who is able to retire out of the fret and hurry of his work into the calmness and peace of Deity, and come out again into his labor full of the exalted certainties of the Redemption of Christ and the Love of God; to make work sweet and fresh and interesting and spiritual by doing it not for himself, nor for itself, but for the Saviour in whom he lives. This is the work that “drinks of the brook in the way,” and lifts up its head under any heat and against any wind.

There is one other recollection which it is most necessary for men to keep in mind, but which it is hard to see how men could keep except under some sort of arrangement like that in which we live. It is hard to see how, were it not for the continually repeated, daily stoppages of work, we could remem ber, as we need to remember, the great close of work which is coming to every one of us, and may be very near. I picture to myself a world without an evening, a world with an unsetting daylight, a sun with a lidless eye, and with men who never tired at their tasks; and it seems as if death in a world like that, the snatching of this man or that man out of the ranks of the unintermitted labor, would be so much more terrible and mysterious than it is now; when once a day, for many years, we have learned that work was not meant to last always, and have had to drop our tools as if in practice and rehearsal for the great darkness when we are to let them go forever. How constant this suggestion has been everybody knows. We are sure that it would have come into our own minds, if no one had ever hinted it, if we had never sung the hymn in which it is embodied:

The day is past and gone;

The evening shades appear;
Oh, may we all remember well,

The night of death draws near.

So once a day our hold on work is loosened, and the great setting-free which is to come is prophesied, and its power is anticipated to us.

Some may wonder whether that is a good thing for us. I think a great many people honestly doubt whether it is a good thing for men, while they are alive, to remember that they have got to die. And with the cruel, dark, false thoughts of death which are so plentiful, which many minds cling to as the most religious thoughts, certainly it would be better for men not to think of death at all. Such thoughts must paralyze them. Better, far better, that they should go on and do their work bravely, as if they never were to die, than to be so frightened with the inevitableness of dying that work should seem to be waste, and the hands should drop idle.

But if a man can think rightly, can think like a Christian about death, can think about it as the going home of the scholar who has been off at school, as the setting free of the partial activity into some intense and extensive exercise which it is glorious while it is bewildering to think of; then the more a man thinks about death the better. He will do his work all the more faithfully for every look that he takes through that gate which is iron on the outer ‘side and golden on the inner. Let me merely point out, before I close, two or three of the ways in which it will make a man more faithful in his work to remember that he is going to die, if he can remember it like a Christian.

In the first place, it will help him to anticipate already the judgments of death and eternity. I know, you know, that we are all thinking things about our fellow-men, which we never can think of them when the mere disguises of this life have passed away. We are slighting poor men for their poverty; we are honoring rich men for their wealth; we are praising bad men for their smartness; we are holding back our applause from men we know are good, because they are unpopular; we are valuing men for little useful knacks and tricks that they possess, and not for the honesty, the truthfulness, the purity of their hearts. We know that these judgments of ours are temporary and false; we know that, when we come to die, we shall see the beauty that is in some rough shell which we slight now, and the baseness that is in some pleasant form to which we cringe and fawn. If we saw death coming, it would change our judgments. I am sure that, if we really felt now that we were going to die, we should be braver and more independent. There is a sub lime freedom in death. What does the dying man care for the tyrannies of gossip and conventionality that have ruled him for his threescore years? Their chains drop off him the moment he hears the great call. And if we really could live in the anticipation of that time of freedom, we might be freer and braver now. To some people it seems as if it must be dreadful to think much of death, because death is such a mournful thing. But there have been deaths that have been as triumphant and jubilant as the blowing of trumpets, and other deaths that have been serene as the opening of a flower; and if it will help to make our death like either of these to look at it and remember that it is coming, then the more every evening, which is a day’s death, can bring it up to us, the better.

And again, the remembrance that we are to die some day, by and by, must help us to keep the spiritual part of our occupation real and valuable before us always. Our occupation, whatever it is, is like ourselves, inward and outward. It has its body and its soul. Now, to remember that the time is coming (and may come to-morrow) when the soul in us is to be everything, to see as it comes up towards us the day that is to break the power of the form over the spirit, the day when, not the form, but the purpose and the power of our work, is to go with us into Eternity, — that must weaken a little the bondage that the visible has over us, must let us know something of the sublime spirituality with which St. Paul said,” I look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”

And yet, finally, the very fact that the form of our work is so shortly to be left behind has, strangely enough, another effect upon us, — to make us all the more earnest to deal with it faithfully while it remains. We value the spirit of our occupation be cause that is to go on with us forever; we value its form because our time to work on it is short. This last is the meaning of those golden words of Christ. “I must work the works of Him that sent me while it is called to-day; for the night cometh in which no man can work.” An earnest faithfulness to our tasks, and a complete superiority to our tasks, — these two seem to me to blend only in the character of the man who lives in the sight of death and of eternity, the man who works all the day, knowing that the evening is coming.

We want to work every day so that we can rest; for work and rest belong together. We want to gather, out of every active service of God, deep thoughts of Him for our hours of contemplation. We want to come to self-knowledge by well-proportioned labor and retirement. And then, as the day of life grows dark, and the light fades in the east and gathers in the west, we want to go from time into eternity without a fear or a regret; but with hearts full of memories and hopes, full of expectation of the new service which our Lord has for us to do on the other side of the darkness, where we shall see Him face to face.