Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/207

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Use and Ornament
187

one can name, and that through right uses we attain to these as our goal. But it is no good claiming to possess delightful things if we do not see to it that those who make them for us have also the means to live delightfully.

If man cannot make all the uses and services of life decent and wholesome as a starting-point, neither can he make life enjoyable—not, I mean, with a good conscience. If he would see God through beauty, he must see Him not here and there only, but in the "land of the living"; else (as the psalmist said) his spirit must faint utterly.

Our life is built up—we know not to what ultimate end—on an infinite number of uses, functions, mechanisms. These uses enable us to live; they do not necessarily enable us to enjoy. You can quite well imagine the use of all your senses and organs so conditioned that you could not enjoy a single one of them, and yet they might still fulfil their utilitarian purpose of keeping you alive.

I need not rehearse to you in troublesome detail conditions of life where everything you see is an eyesore, every touch a cause of shrinking, every sound a discord, where taste and smell become a revolt and a loathing.

Our modern civilization derives many of its present comforts from conditions such as these under which thousands, nay millions, of subservient human lives become brutalised. So long as we base our ideal of wealth on individual aggrandisement, and on monetary and