Evening Republican, Volume 59, Number 88, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 May 1917 — RESISTING SATIETY [ARTICLE]

RESISTING SATIETY

A Condition Out of Which Only Jesus Christ Can Lead the Struggling Soul. . One of the most common phenomena of our day is the man who has done what he set out to do, and won the prizes he has striven for, and now lives on in the midst of his achievement without interest or zest. Mr. Chesterton has well said that the most amazing contradiction of our time is the failure of the successful man. Those who are struggling on cannot understand why life should become so flat and tasteless with those who have been successful. It Is certain, says the Sunday School Times,, that all the worst pessimism comes from those who have gotten pretty much all they started to win, and not from those who are still struggling. There seems to come a change over the nature of the man who has, as we say, “arrived,” Which we cannot account for. There is something illogical about it, that just when he ought to be most happy and satisfied he seems so often restless, displeased, and bored. And we are apt to say to ourselves that were we ourselves fortunate enough to reach his position we should never know an unhappy hour. But we speak with little knowledge of ourselves and others when we are so sure that it could never be thus with ourselves. Satiety is a fearful state to have to contend with. It is far more difficult than famine, and those who have to contend with it have found an issue that is one of the most real in the moral life. It deserves something other than contempt. And it may befall any of us. It has fallen upon some of the best Experience of John Stuart Mill. In mid-career when, after a youth of prodigious power and while he was still teeming with ambition, John Stuart Mill set coolly and definitely before himself the ends for which he was striving, and then asked himself whether if he could achieve them right then he would be content In his autobiography he has told us how, suddenly, it came over him that they would not satisfy him. Then the zest went out of his life. By anticipation he saw clearly what thousands find only by dreary, actual experience, and then came a terrible experience in which he slowly worked his way back into some kind of satisfaction with life. Specialists have to deal often with this state of soul and body, and exhaust their resources of thought and skill to give back to their patients the sense of something to live for. The day comes to many, which they thought never could come, when the dearly loved profession, which never failed so far to enlist all their ardor, now grows heavy and the business which for so many years gave promise at being an incentive to the very end now ceases to allure. Those are crises in life. After every success In it a man may come to care as little for it as if he never had any. The obstinate mechanism of life runs <fn after the reason for It seems to have fled. Prosperity is no finality, and even after we have gotten It we may have to look elsewhere and far beyond it and above it for the power to enjoy it Christ Shows the Way Out And the hour of our disenchantment with things, and our disappointment and weariness with the facts of life, just when they seem so repetitious and monotonous that we look forward cheerlessly to another series of them, may be the hour when Christ can change all for us and give our hearts something to regale them. If we are to conquer this last great enemy, satiety, we must of course act in new ways and make moral experiments. We must give our hearts to new things and take hold of life in untried ways. But zest and ardor are the will of God for us, not resignation and melancholy. One of the marvelous things which Christ did for men was to put back a motive into their lives where they were utterly without incentive. “All my springs are in thee.” And we are just finding out the facts of our existence when pleasure runs dry and things do not satisfy us. We now have a chance to enjoy more keenly than ever. And our extremity In the form of tasteless days is God’S opportunity for putting us in the way of lasting joy. u No strain in the gospel is more insistent than the one which tells us we were meant for joy, and that our joy should be full.