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Let us never put faith in the wisdom or gladness that is based on contempt of a single existing thing; for contempt and renouncement, its sickly offspring, offer asylum to none but the weak and the aged. We have only the right to scorn a joy when such scorn is wholly unconscious.
"Although," he said in 1869, "I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement." In 1878 he described himself as a "sincere but ineffectual Liberal": in 1880, as "a Liberal of the future rather than a Liberal of the present."
A severe and wellnigh fatal illness in London, which he concealed from his wife at Groton till its crisis was past, was made by him the occasion, as of many other good resolutions, so also of a renouncement of the use of tobacco, in which, by his own account, he, like many men as well as women at that time, had gone to excess.
And then the Senator tells himself, for the hundredth time in the last two years, that they have now come to the breaking point that if Nancy will not take the only reasonable course open to her, then that Gerald must be nerved to make, as men have so often had to make, the great renouncement.
Let it not be imagined that I admire this sacrifice to the extent that I admire its results. It were evidently to be desired that these results might be obtained at the cost of less renouncement and suffering. But, the principle once accepted, and this is needful, perhaps, in the scheme of our globe, its organisation compels our wonder.
I abominated pensions, and from what I had heard of French families who took in a "paying guest," or, in their tongue, dame pensionnaire, I had concluded that the total renouncement of atmosphere was the lesser evil. Would I go out and see the École Feminine? I would. It sounded interesting and a visit committed me to nothing. Mlle. Thompson put it charmingly. I should be conferring a favor.
But so long as we listen to the voice of contempt or renouncement, so long as we suffer these to flood our heart with bitterness, so long must the joy we discard be a joy that we still desire. We must beware lest there enter our soul certain parasitic virtues. And renouncement, often, is only a parasite. Even if it do not enfeeble our inward life, it must inevitably bring disquiet.
You, also, are already of the past, though you were the steady light of our youth, the strong source of life and death, of desire and renouncement, whence we drew our moral force and our power of resistance against the world. And the world, ever greedy for new sensations, goes on its way amid the unceasing ebb and flow of its desires.
And it is this delicate ideal of devotedness, of moral purification, of continual renouncement and self-sacrifice, breathing in the words and embodied in the person and life of Christ, which constitutes the entire novelty as well as the sublimity of Christianity taken at its source."
Never is the hive more beautiful than on the eve of its heroic renouncement, in its unrivalled hour of fullest abundance and joy; serene for all its apparent excitement and feverishness.
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