| Strength and Beauty |
Chapter 21 |
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But there are rests which add to the beauty and the completeness of every life; and there is no life which can be altogether complete without them. Ruskin wrote to a young woman these true words: “There is no music in a rest, Katie, that I know of, but there is the making of music in it. People are always missing that part of the life melody, and scrambling on without counting; not that it is easy to count, but nothing on which so much depends is very easy. People are always talking of perseverance and courage and fortitude; but patience is the finest and worthiest part of fortitude, and the rarest, too. I have known twenty persevering girls to one patient one, but it is only the twenty first one who can do her work, out and out, and enjoy it. For patience lies at the root of all pleasures as well as of all powers.”
The illustration is very suggestive. It is indeed with life as with music. The rests on the staff in one sense are not part of the music. They call for no sweet notes. Yet they are as important in their place as if they were notes to be struck or sung. It would spoil the harmony if a careless player or singer were to disregard the rests and fill the spaces with notes of his own improvising. There are rests in life which are quite as important in the melody of life as any notes on the staff. To overlook them or to fill them up is to mar the music. We should mind the rests.
It is not true that we are living worthily only when we are doing something. God has strewn life with quiet resting places. Night is one of them. Sleep is a divine ordinance – to miss it mars the music. The Sabbath is another of the rests on the staff which the great Master composer wrote in himself. “Six days shalt thou labor” – then comes the rest, the one no more positive a command than the other. To ignore this rest and crowd into its sacred space the sounds of labor is not only to break a divine commandment, but is also to introduce discords into God’s music. It takes the Sabbath quiet to complete the melody of the week. “Sunday,” says Longfellow “is like a stile between the fields of toil, where we can kneel and pray, or sit and meditate.”
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