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Updated: June 11, 2025
The past is gone, the future is yet to come. The present only is ours, and, according to what we do in the present, will be the records of the past and its influence on the future. They are only wise who wisely regard their actions in the present. DAY after day I worked at my life-task, and worked in an earnest spirit.
Yet the old first mate, who should have slept, kept a bitter watch on the for'ard-house. Was his anxiety right? Could it be right? Or was it the crankiness of ultimate age? Were we drifting and leewaying to destruction? Or was it merely an old man being struck down by senility in the midst of his life-task?
And thus he paused for a moment with much work already accomplished, but his hardest life-task before him; still in the noon of manhood, a fine martial figure, standing, spear in hand, full in the sunlight, though all the scene around him was wrapped in gloom a noble, commanding shape, entitled to the admiration which the energetic display of great powers, however unscrupulous, must always command.
For years this view of his life-task alternated with his search for exact answers to the questions his soul asked about man's destiny hereafter; or, one might rather say, social questions and philosophical ones borrowed strength from each other to assail him till his heart throbbed and his brain whirled with the agony of the conflict.
There were so many hearts and minds that the mother of a son must learn to keep, to companion, to influence, to go forward with: the heart and the mind of the child, the schoolboy, the undergraduate, the young man out in the world taking up his life-task a soldier perhaps, or a man of learning, a pioneer, a carver of new ways for the crowd following behind.
A spontaneous, passionate, yet just, true-meaning man! Full of wild faculty, fire and light; of wild worth, all uncultured; working out his life-task in the depths of the Desert there.
But when the prophets of ethical naturalism again and again announce that the great aim of all the discoveries of the evolution theory is to show us how far mankind has fortunately progressed; when their spirit of devotion is nourished by Göthe's Promethean word: "Hast thou not thyself accomplished all, thou holy glowing heart?" and even when Häckel prints as the leading motto of his "Anthropogeny" Göthe's poem "Prometheus"; when the struggle of selection is also elevated to a moral principle, and the life-task of an individual is limited to creating elbow-room for himself: then humility, indeed, is a virtue which a naturalist may acquire, not through his naturalism, but in spite of it; and the great naïveté with which, in books of that tendency, haughtiness and passion for glory are treated as something necessarily understood, and their own ego is glorified, is a much more logical result.
The choice is an all-important one; for, as a recent writer puts it, "In this choice, the personality chooses or rejects itself, takes itself for its life-task, or dies of inanition and inertia." In the last chapter the ascent of the human being from serfdom to freedom and personality was traced. In doing so it was necessary to make frequent reference to the Universal Spiritual Life.
And Froebel touched the sensitive spot in the young minister, who was thoroughly imbued with the sacred beauty of his life-task, yet certainly knew the Gospels, his classic authors, and apostolic fathers much better than he did the world.
Malfalconnet is a connoisseur. Perhaps, after these gloomy days and years, a semblance of sunlight may return. It is long enough since politics and war have granted me even the slightest refreshment of the heart. And yet, methinks Heaven might feel under obligation to do something for the man who has made it his life-task to hold its enemies in check."
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