BELOW THE SURFACE

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 27, 1880

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 22

BELOW THE SURFACE.

Whenever you see anything above ground that is worth admiring, and that has any true stability or hope of permanence, you may be sure that there is a great deal below the surface just there, as the foundation of that which makes so goodly a show before your eyes.

Whether it is in the world of nature, or of art, or of intellectual attainment, or of personal character, or of spiritual life, it is not all on the surface, not all in plain sight. If it is a graceful elm or a wide-spreading oak, you may be sure it has roots running down and reaching out into the earth below, to give strength and security to its sturdy trunk and its swaying boughs. If it is a majestic mountain rising in grandeur to the clouds, it rests on no quicksands, but has a basis broad and firm, and deep as the globe’s center. If it is a towering monument, or a massive pile of buildings, or a bridge spanning river and marsh, with vast and lofty arches, there must have been a preliminary sinking of shafts, and laying of strong foundations, and slow uprearing of subterranean walls, before the mighty structure which now commands attention began its upward stretch above the surface. If it is the finished work of a scholar in history or science; if it is a marvel of gracefulness and beauty in the sphere of literature—poetry or prose; if it is a triumph of power in the pulpit, at the bar, on the tribune, or in the realm of applied science or of professional skill,—all that is shown and seen indicates the existence of much that is out of sight; the success which is attained above the surface cannot be accounted for but by the fact that a great deal of preparation for this was made below the surface. If indeed it be a noble character or a saintly life,—a character of strength and beauty, of heroic courage and of sublime endurance, or a life of holiness and of radiating sweetness and purity,—it did not come by chance, nor was it “reached at a single bound;” it was a matter of growth as well as of grace; and the best and the most of that which is noted of good in the conduct or the countenance of the one admired and revered, was wrought silently and slowly out of sight and below the surface.

Every once in a while some young man will be deluded with the idea that he can do as good work above-ground as those who have gone before him, without being at the trouble and delay of all their work below the surface. He can write smooth-flowing rhymes; why shouldn’t he at once be a poet? He has a vivid imagination and a pleasing style; what is there to hinder his now beginning the preparation of romances that shall give him fortune and fame? He finds no difficulty in leading a college prayer-meeting, or in holding a popular audience with an off-hand discourse on some religious theme which is familiar to him; is there any reason why he should wait and toil for years before entering on the work of the gospel ministry? And so in the one sphere or another a young man begins his work on the surface—and quickly finishes it there. As Lord Jeffrey says of such unprepared and surface workers: “They who begin by effect without labor, will end by labor without effect.” Dr. Holmes, writing of the slow development of Motley’s peculiar talents as an historical writer, says: “It took many years to train the as yet undisciplined powers into orderly obedience, and to bring the unarranged materials into the organic connection which was needed in the construction of a work which should endure. . . . It was already the high noon of life with him before his genius had truly shown itself; if he had not lived beyond this period, he would have left nothing to give him a lasting name.” And of those writers who are unwilling to do the needful work below the surface before they venture upon pretentious work above ground, this biographer adds: “Too many brilliant young novel-writers and lovers of poetry, excused by their admirers for their shortcomings on the strength of their supposed birthright of ‘genius,’ have ended where they began; flattered into the vain belief that they were men at eighteen or twenty, and finding out at fifty that they were, and always had been, nothing more than boys.” Many an author, or artist, or preacher, is a conspicuous failure in his maturity because he was not willing to be an inconspicuous toiler in his immaturity. There is wisdom in the counsel of one of the keenest of our satirical writers, when he says to the average young man of to-day: “I don’t want to see you try to build a six-story house on a one-story foundation.” It is not the question of the style of the superstructure, but of the character of the foundation, that decides the capability of the building to stand in all weather.

It may be that, up to this time, your work is all below the surface. Thus far you may have commanded no attention by what you have done, nor by what you are. Neither in your character nor in your activities are you, perhaps, to the present hour, a positive and a beneficent force. But all this time you may have been in fittest preparation for your real life-work; and that work may yet be the rejoicing of generations, and a cause of your eternal thanksgiving to God. By your quiet and patient study you may have been acquiring that accurate knowledge which shall yet enable you to instruct one and another who are in their turn to be the teachers or the helpers of thousands. Through your multiplied sorrows and your repeated disappointments you may have learned lessons of submissiveness and faith which shall by and by find such expression in your every word and look that you shall be hailed as a messenger of Christ and as an angel of peace in all your sphere. It was not until Moses had lived forty years in the palace, and forty years more in the desert, and had been forty days in fasting and in sacred communion with God in the mount, that his face shone with the reflected effulgence of the Divine glory, and that his very countenance proclaimed the beauty and the holiness of the Lord’s presence. When you have had somewhat more than now of such preliminary training as that secured of God to Moses, you may have somewhat more in your countenance of the divine light which illumined his. Whenever you see an approach to that light on the countenance of a child of God, you may be sure that there has been something of this training going on below the surface in his mind and character.

The severest toil of all well-doing, and the greatest cost of all well-being, must ever be below the surface, and out of sight. And that which has power or beauty above must ever depend on that which has been slowly and painfully performed or endured below, even, perhaps, at the price of life, as well as of ease and comfort. “You remember,” says one, “how corals grow. The reef is not a building constructed by them; it is their own life that crystallizes within them, and it is left behind them as they climb upward toward the light. And as they climb, the sea-bottom sinks beneath them, and the surface seems, perhaps, unattainable to their patient labors. Yet by and by it is gained, though the coral-makers die in reaching it, and over the records of their ceaseless toil [below the surface] appear at length the verdant fields and fruitful palms of islands that lie like gems upon the bosom of the sea.” “Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.”—S. S. Times.