LITTLE THINGS BY Charles Robert Morrison

these entreaties, in spite of love and law and learning, mankind has
taken advantage of the liberty of the human will, and made it license to
defy truth and reason and life and God. But, after all, such liberty is
limited, such license is within bounds, and, when too late, the lesson is
learned between hard lines, and the loss sustained is irreparable.
Can we be rich without God? Men have tried it. Parks and palaces have
been multiplied, fertile acres have increased in number, and wealth in
bonds and banks and buildings has abounded. To the self-satisfied and
greatly gratified soul, has come the complacent exhortation: "You have
much goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, and be
merry." But the "many years" were soon, at the very longest, at an end,
and as the pauper and the beggar, the body of the princely one must lie
in the narrow cell and be forgotten.
Can we have knowledge without God? Men have ignored and defied God,
yet have succeeded in knowing much of the world; of the earth beneath;
of the starry heavens above; of man, his history, thought, and emotions
and desires; but, with all his learning, made to admit a limit to his
thought away in the dim mist of the Morning, and in the gathering
clouds of the Evening of human life.
Can men be happy without wealth, without learning, without God? Men
have been poor and ignorant and defiant, and yet have lived out a round
of pleasurable excitement--existing within themselves and without
God. Narrow, sensual, selfish souls! But these, too, have died within the
walls of a very limited life. Did they know or care of wealth unlimited
beyond the grave; of knowledge infinite in a school of unsurpassed
facilities in the higher realm; of pleasures for evermore at the right hand of
the Father? When they considered all this, it was too late. It
overwhelmed their petty possessions, their little learning, their simple
sensuousness--with the rejected splendor of things to come.
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