The Art of Life | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 21, 1875

The Art of Life.

A GREAT part of the art of life consists in the skill with which a man will do, in the right time and in the right way, what he has to do. A man should school and train himself to seize the passing moment and to secure every advantage of position. The knack of doing these things, or the art of it, comes from practice alone. This is an art very hard to acquire, even in that rudimentary form which consists in an orderly and thoughtful way through the business of the day. It is, perhaps, for this reason that the great majority of people are not brought to the necessity of learning this lesson for themselves.

Most people have their hours of work rigidly marked out to them. Their hours are from ten to four. They go forth to their work, and do their labor until the evening. They are not intrusted with any power of option. The clerk must be at his office, the school-master with his pupils, the doctor on his rounds, and the barrister in the courts while the judges are sitting. They are constrained by a net-work of circumstances for which some of them cannot be sufficiently grateful. The whole business of life would fall out of gear if the steadiness of its transactions depended on their volitions.

Then there are many people, the fine ladies and gentlemen of the world, who do not obey such laws, but are a law unto themselves. There are the students, and artists, and thinkers, who are left unfettered by precise lines of days and hours and seasons; they are left to their own need of exertion and sense of responsibility. I often think such men are raised from a lower to a higher stratum of life. They have mounted to a higher class in the great school of life. Things are left to their honor. Theirs is the possession of law in freedom, and of freedom in law.

Sometimes this liberty is a servile spirit. Men force themselves into the mechanical round from which they have been liberated. They surrender themselves to inflexible rules. They pursue their work pertinaciously, losing that sense of elasticity and freedom which it was intended they should possess. Such a man will not leave off to note some curious phenomena, to watch a sunset, to hear rare music, to listen to brilliant converse. He is hardly making the best use of things. It is a great art while carrying on the work of life to seize every means of rising beyond it.—Sel.