The Bread of Life
The Bread of LifeThere are lives that have bread in abundance and yet are starved;with barns and warehouses filled, with shelves and larders laden they are empty and hungry.No man need envy them; their feverish, restless whirl in the dust of publicityis but the search for a satisfaction never to be found in things.They are called rich in a world where no others are more truly, pitiably poor;having all, they are yet lacking in all because they have neglected the things within.The abundance of bread is the cause of many a man’s deeper hunger.Having known nothing of the discipline that develops life’s hidden sources of satisfaction,nothing of the struggle in which deep calls unto deep and the true life finds itself,he spends his days seeking to satisfy his soul with furniture,with houses and lands, with yachts and merchandise, seeking to feed his heart on things,a process of less promise and reason than feeding a snapping turtle on thoughts.It takes many of us altogether too long to learnthat you cannot find satisfaction so long as you leave the soul out of your reckoning.If the heart be empty the life cannot be filled.The flow must cease at the faucet if the fountains go dry.The prime, the elemental necessities of our being are for the life rather than the body,its house. But, alas, how often out of the marble edifice issues the poor emaciated inmate,how out of the life having many things comes that which amounts to nothing.The essential things are not often those which most readily strike our blunt senses.We see the shell first.To the undeveloped mind the material is all there is.But looking deeper into life there comes an awakening to the factand the significance of the spiritual,the feeling that the reason, the emotions, the joys and painsthat have nothing to do with things, the ties that knit one to the infinite,all of which constitute the permanent elements of life.
