音频下载[点击右键另存为][00:00.54]Passage 75 The Bread of Life

[00:05.14]There are lives that have bread in abundance and yet are starved;

[00:10.50]with barns and warehouses filled, with shelves and larders laden they are empty and hungry.

[00:18.38]No man need envy them; their feverish, restless whirl in the dust of publicity

[00:25.60]is but the search for a satisfaction never to be found in things.

[00:31.18]They are called rich in a world where no others are more truly, pitiably poor;

[00:38.40]having all, they are yet lacking in all because they have neglected the things within.

[00:45.40]The abundance of bread is the cause of many a man's deeper hunger.

[00:51.85]Having known nothing of the discipline that develops life's hidden sources of satisfaction,

[00:58.53]nothing of the struggle in which deep calls unto deep and the true life finds itself,

[01:05.75]he spends his days seeking to satisfy his soul with furniture,

[01:10.89]with houses and lands, with yachts and merchandise, seeking to feed his heart on things,

[01:19.54]a process of less promise and reason than feeding a snapping turtle on thoughts.

[01:26.65]It takes many of us altogether too long to learn

[01:31.46]that you cannot find satisfaction so long as you leave the soul out of your reckoning.

[01:37.92]If the heart be empty the life cannot be filled.

[01:42.63]The flow must cease at the faucet if the fountains go dry.

[01:47.76]The prime, the elemental necessities of our being are for the life rather than the body,

[01:55.20]its house. But, alas, how often out of the marble edifice issues the poor emaciated inmate,

[02:04.39]how out of the life having many things comes that which amounts to nothing.

[02:11.18]The essential things are not often those which most readily strike our blunt senses.

[02:17.85]We see the shell first.

[02:20.70]To the undeveloped mind the material is all there is.

[02:25.84]But looking deeper into life there comes an awakening to the fact

[02:31.31]and the significance of the spiritual,

[02:34.81]the feeling that the reason, the emotions, the joys and pains

[02:41.48]that have nothing to do with things, the ties that knit one to the infinite,

[02:47.40]all of which constitute the permanent elements of life.