Life's Little Pitfalls (Paperback)

Life s Little Pitfalls By A. Maude Royden Author of Sex and Common Sense Christ Triumphant, etc. G. P. JPtitnams Sons London 19 5 Copyright, 1925 by A. Maude Roydea Made in the United States of America CONTENTS PAGE YOUTH ....... 3 MIDDLE AGE . . . . . 17 OLD AGE 33 ON BEING SORRY FOR ONESELF ... 52 ON BEING A FAILURE 64 EASY WAYS OF BEING GOOD ... 76 TEMPERAMENT ...... 89 LONELY PEOPLE 105 ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE . . . 124 ON MAKING GOOD RESOLUTIONS . . .143 LIFES LITTLE PITFALLS LIFES LITTLE PITFALLS YOUTH TV 7E are always inclined to W remind the young that the world is at a crisis in its history that humanity is making a great choice and that upon them a great deal depends. Of course it is true, but as a matter of fact, it is always true. Each crisis looks portentous, but it is not any more portentous than it always was. Every new generation has the chance of making the world over, and every new generation is faced with a great choice, and those words of Rupert Brooke which, applied to the world of 1914, come to us now with something almost of irony, have their immortal truth. It is always true when the young begin to grow up that Honour has come back as a king to earth, And paid his subjects with a royal wage, And nobleness walks in our ways again, And we have come into our heritage. That seemed dramatically true in 1914. It does not seem quite so true of that particular year 3 4 LIFES LITTLE PITFALLS now as it did then but it is true, always, and every generation comes into its heritage, and the young have it always in their power to bring honour again to earth, and nobleness to walk in all our ways. The world is always suffering, and suffering is a challenge to every generousspirit to try and find out why it is there and to put it right. The young do not love suffering. They are right not to love it. There is something morbid in the delight in pain that sometimes grows upon one I suppose from a kind of protective instinct because there is so much pain in the world. But the healthy reaction, the revolt of the young against suffering, is right and beautiful and God given. Suffering is a challenge bringing home to us the fact that something is wrong. Therefore to hate it, to rebel against it, and to seek to get rid of it, is right. But this generation has gone through a time of such intense suffering, and is still under the shadow of such suffering for it is now eleven years since the war began, and the young ones of to-day were only eight, nine and ten years old then, so that the war is like a dark shadow rather than a fact that it has altered their attitude and taken its toll of their vitality, and even those who were babies when the war began have the shadow of that war upon their spirits. Any schoolmistress or master will tell you that the children who were born during the period of the YOUTH 5 war are paying the debt in their nerves, in the difficulty which they have in facing life as well as those who were actually broken in the war That debt we have to pay for a long time yet, or rather, let me say, they have to pay it. There is among the younger generation a sense of in security, a sense of the shortness of life and the possibility of death which was foreign to the generation to which I belong, to whom the per manence of things was far more obvious than their transience. In the youth of to-day there is a sense of the passing of life and the uncertaintyof things which has always to be taken into ac count when one is thinking of the way in which they look at life. It results in one of two ways of thought either, because life is short, they say, Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die or they say, This debt of pain, this agony of suffer ing, means that there is something tremendously wrong with the world, and that wrong it is for us to put right...