The Kingship of Self-Control
Man has two creators—his God and himself. His first creator furnishes him his raw material and his moral conscience with which he can make of his life what he will. His second creator, himself, has marvelous powers he rarely real izes. It is what a man makes of his capacities that counts.
When a man fails in life, he usually says, “I am as God made me.” When he succeeds, he proudly proclaims, “I am a self-made man.” Man is placed into this world not as a finality, but as a possibility. His greatest enemy is himself. In his weakness, man is the creature of circum stance. In his strength, he is the creator of cir cumstance. Whether he be victim or victor depends largely upon himself.
Man is never truly great merely for what he is, but ever for what he may become. Until he is filled with the knowledge of his possibility, and with the realization of his privilege to live the life for which he is individually responsible, he is merely groping through the years.
To see his life as he might make it, man must go up alone into the mountains of spiritual thought as Christ went alone into the Garden; leaving the world in order to gain strength to live in the world. There he must breathe the fresh, pure air of the recognition of his divine importance as an individual. Then, with a mind cleansed and invigorated, he must approach the problems of his daily living.
Man needs less of the “I am a feeble worm of the dust” element in his theology, and more of the concept: “I am a great human soul with mar vellous possibilities.” With such an affirmative view of life, he may see how to attain his king ship through self-control—the same type of self-control that is seen in the simplest phases of daily living, differing only in degree. This con trol, man can attain, if only he will. It is but a matter of paying the price.
The power of self-control is one of the great qualities that differentiates man from the lower animals. He is the only animal capable of a moral struggle or a moral conquest.
Every step in the progress of the world has been a new “control.” It has been an escape from the tyranny of a fact, to the understanding and mastery of that fact. For ages man looked in terror at the lightning flash. Today he under stands it as electricity, a force he has mastered and made his slave. The million phases of elec trical invention are but manifestations of our control over a great force. Yet, the greatest of all “control” is man’s self-control.
At each moment of man’s life he is either a King or a slave. As he surrenders to a wrong appetite, to any human weakness; as he falls prostrate in hopeless subjection to any condi tion, to any environment, to any failure, he is a slave. Alexander the Great conquered the whole world except himself. Emperor of the earth, he was a servile subject of his own pas sions.
As man daily crushes out human weakness, masters opposing elements within, and day by day recreates a new self from the sin and folly of his past, then he is a King. He is a king ruling with wisdom over himself.
We look with envy upon the possessions of others and wish they were our own. Sometimes we feel this in a vague way with no thought of real attainment, as when we wish we had an other’s crown or self-satisfaction. Othertimes, however, we grow bitter, storm at the wrong distribution of the good things of life, and then lapse into a hopeless, fatalistic acceptance of our condition.
We envy the success of others, when we should emulate the process by which that success was achieved. We see the splendid physical devel opment of Sandow, yet forget that as a babe and child he was so weak that there was little hope his life might continue.
We envy the power and spiritual strength of a Paul, without recollecting the weak Saul of Tarsus from whom he was transformed through his self-control. Thousands of instances of the world’s successes—mental, moral, physical, fi nancial, or spiritual—came from beginnings far weaker and poorer than our own.
Any man may attain self-control if he only will. He must not gain it, however, except by continued payment of price, in small, progres sive expenditures of energy. Nature has an in stallment plan for each individual. No man is so poor that he cannot begin to pay for what he wants from life. And every small, individual payment that he makes, Nature accumulates for him as a reserve fund of strength in his hour of need.
The mental, physical and moral energy man expends in daily right-doing and in bearing the little trials of his daily life, Nature stores for him as a wondrous reserve so he may overcome any crisis of life. Nature never accepts a pay ment in full for anything. This would be an in justice to the poor and to the weak. Nature only recognizes the progressive installment plan.
No man can make a habit in a moment, or break it in a moment. It is a matter of devel opment, of growth. But at any moment man may begin to make or begin to break any habit. This view of the growth of character should be a stim ulus to the man who sincerely desires and de termines to live nearer to the limit of his possibilities.
Self-control may be developed in precisely the same manner as we tone up a weak muscle: by a little exercise each day. Let us, daily, do as mere exercises of discipline in moral gymnas tics, a few acts that are disagreeable to us; the doing of which will help us in instant action in our hour of need. The exercises may be very simple: dropping for a time an intensely inter esting book at the most thrilling page of the story, jumping out of bed at the first moment of waking, walking a mile or two when the temp tation is to take the car, talking to a disagree able person and trying to make the conversation pleasant. These daily exercises in moral discipline will have a wondrous effect on man’s whole moral nature.
The individual can attain self-control in great things only through self-control in little things. He must study himself to discover what is the weak point in his armor, what is the element within him that keeps him from his fullest suc cess. This is the characteristic upon which he should begin his exercise in self-control. Is it selfishness, vanity, cowardice, morbidness, tem per, laziness, worry, mind-wandering, lack of purpose? Whatever form human weakness as sumes in the masquerade of life, he must dis cover it. He must then live each day as if his whole existence were telescoped down to the sin gle day before him. With no useless regret for the past, no useless worry for the future, he should live that day as if it were his only day, the only day left for him to assert all that is best in him, the only day left for him to conquer all that is worst in him.
He should master the weak element within him at each slight manifestation from moment to moment. Each moment then must be a victory for it or for him. Will he be King, or will he be slave? The answer rests with him.
The second most deadly instrument of de struction is a loaded gun. The first is the human tongue. The gun merely kills bodies. The tongue kills reputations and oftentimes ruins charac ters. Each gun works alone; each loaded tongue has hundreds of accomplices. The havoc of the gun is visible at once. The full evil of the tongue lives through all the years and beyond what a man might see in his lifetime.
The crimes of the tongue are words of un kindness, of anger, of malice, of envy, of bitter ness, of harsh criticism, gossip, lying and scandal. Theft and murder are awful crimes, yet in any single year the aggregate sorrow, pain and suffering they cause in a nation is microscopic when compared with the sorrows that come from the crimes of the tongue. Place on one side of the scales of Justice all the evils resulting from the acts of criminals, and on the other side all the grief, tears and suffering re sulting from the crimes of respectability, and you will stare in amazement as you see the scale you thought the heaviest shoot into the air.
At the hands of thieves or murderers few of us suffer, even indirectly. But from the careless tongue of a friend, the cruel tongue of envy, who is free? No human being can live a life so true and pure as to be beyond the reach of malice, or immune from the venom of envy.
The insidious attacks against one’s reputa tion, the loathsome innuendos, slurs, half-lies by which jealous mediocrity seeks to ruin its superiors, are like parasitic insects that kill the heart and life of a mighty oak. So cowardly is the method, so stealthy the shooting of the poi soned thorns, so seemingly insignificant each separate act, that one is not on guard against them. It is easier to dodge an elephant than a microbe.
In London they once formed an Anti-Scandal League. The members promised to combat in every way possible “the prevalent custom of talking scandal, the terrible and unending con sequences of which are not generally esti mated.”
Scandal is one of the crimes of the tongue responsible for moral contagion. Every individ ual who breathes words of scandal is punished by Nature: the eyes are dimmed to sweetness and purity, the mind is deadened to the glow of charity. There develops an ingenious perversion of mental vision by which every act of others is explained and interpreted from the lowest pos sible motives. Like carrion flies, scandalous tongues pass lightly over acres of flowers to feast on a piece of putrid meat. A keen scent is de veloped for the foul matter upon which to feed.
Noble hearts are broken in the silence whence comes no cry of protest. Gentle, sensitive na tures are seared and warped. Old friends are separated and made lonely. Cruel misunder standings deaden hope and make all life look dark. Such are a few of the sorrows that come from the crimes of the tongue.
A man may lead a life of honesty and purity, battling bravely for all he holds dearest, so sure of the rightness of his life that he never thinks for an instant of the diabolic ingenuity that makes evil report where only good really exists. A few words lightly spoken by the tongue of slander, a significant expression of the eyes, a cruel shrug of the shoulders, and then friendly hands grow cold, the accustomed smile is re placed by a sneer and a good man stands alone with a dazed feeling of confusion, wondering what has caused it all.
This craze for scandal is largely due to the sensational media of today. Each broadcast or printing is not one tongue, but thousands, often a million, telling the same wretched story to as many pairs of listening ears. The vultures of sensationalism can smell the carcass of immo rality from afar. Collecting from the uttermost parts of the earth, the sin, disgrace and folly of humanity, they bare it all to the world. They do not even require facts, for morbid memories and fertile imaginations make even the worst of the world’s happenings seem tame when compared with the monstrosities of invention. These stories, and the discussions they excite, develop in readers a cheap, shrewd power of distortion of all human deeds taking place around them.
If a rich man gives a donation to some charity, they say, “He is doing it to get his name talked about; to help his business.” If he gives it anon ymously, they say, “Oh, it’s some millionaire who is clever enough to know that refraining from giving his name will pique curiosity; he will see that the public is informed later.” If he does not give to charity, they say, “He’s stingy with his money, of course, like all millionaires.” To the vile tongue of gossip and slander, Virtue is deemed but a mask, noble ideals but a pretense, and generosity a bribe. The man who stands above his fellows must expect to be the target for the envious arrows of their inferiority. It is part of the price he pays for his advance.
One of the most detestable characters in all literature is Shakespeare’s Iago. Envious of the promotion of Cassio over him, he hated Othello. His was one of those low natures that becomes absorbed in sustaining his dignity, talking of “preserving his honor,” forgetting it has so long been dead that even embalming could not preserve it. Day by day, with studied vengeance, Iago distilled the poison of distrust and suspi cion into more powerfully insidious doses. With a mind concentrated on the blackness of his pur pose, he wove a network of circumstancial evidence around the pure-hearted Desdemona, and then murdered her at the hand of Othello. Her very simplicity, self-confidence and artless in nocence, made Desdemona the easier mark for the diabolical tactics of Iago.
Iago still lives in the hearts of thousands who have his despicable meanness without his clev erness. The constant dropping of their lying words of malice and envy have in too many in stances worn away the noble reputations of those superior to them.
To sustain ourselves in our own hasty judg ments, we sometimes accept without investi gation the words of these modern Iagos: “Well, where there is so much smoke, there must be some fire.” Yet we forget that the fire may be lit by the torch of envy, thrown into the innocent facts of a superlative life.
Duty is the most over-lauded word in our vo cabulary. It is the cold, bare anatomy of righ teousness. While duty looks at life as a debt to be paid, love sees life as a debt to be collected. Duty is ever paying assessments, whereas love is constantly counting premiums.
Duty is forced, like water through a pump. Love is spontaneous, like a mountain spring. Duty is prescribed and formal; it is part of the red tape of life. It means running on moral rails. Good enough as a beginning, it is poor as a fi nality.
The boy who stood on the burning deck and committed suicide on a technical point of obe dience, has been held up to school children as a model of faithfulness to duty. He was placing, however, the whole responsibility for his act on someone outside himself. A victim of blind ad herence to the red tape of duty, he was help lessly waiting for instruction in the hour of emergency, when he should have acted for himself. His act was an empty sacrifice. It was a useless throwing away of a human life. It did no good to his father, the ship, the nation, or himself
The captain who goes down with his ship, when he has done everything in his power to save others, and when he can save his own life without dishonor, is the victim of a false sense of duty. He is cruelly forgetful of the loved ones on the shore whom he is sacrificing. His death means a spectacular exit from life, the cowardly fear of an investigation committee, or a brave man’s loyal, but misguided sense of duty. A hu man life, with its wondrous possibilities, is too sacred to trust to be thus lightly thrown into eternity.
They tell us of the “sublime nobleness” of the Roman soldier at Pompeii, whose skeleton was found centuries afterwards, imbedded in the lava which swept down upon the doomed city. He was still standing at one of the gates, at his post of duty, still grasping a sword in his hand. His was a morbid faithfulness to a responsibility from which he was released by a great convul sion of nature. Like an automaton he stood, just as long, just as boldly, and just as uselessly.
The man who gives one hour of his life in living, consecrated service to humanity is doing greater work in the world than an army of Ro man sentinels paying useless tribute to the red tape of duty. There is to be, of course, no sym pathy for the man who deserts his post when he is needed. This is but a protest against losing the essence of true duty by worshipping the mere form of it. **
Analyze any of the great historic instances of loyalty to duty, and wherever they ring true, you will find the presence of the real element that made the act almost divine. It was no mere sense of duty that made Grace Darling risk her life in a fierce storm of night, on a raging sea, to rescue the survivors of the wreck of the “For farshire.” It was the sense of duty made real by a love of humanity. It was the heroic courage of a heart filled with divine compassion.
Duty is a hard, mechanical process for mak ing men do things that love would make easy. It is a poor understudy to love and too low a motive for inspiring humanity. While love is the soul, duty is the mere shell. Love can transmute all duties into privileges, all responsibilities into joys.
The workman who drops his tools at the stroke of twelve, as suddenly as if he had been struck himself, may be doing his duty, but nothing more. No man has made a great success of his life, or a fit preparation for immortality, by doing his mere duty. He must do that, and yet still more. If he puts love into his work, the “more” will be easy.
The nurse may watch faithfully at the bed side of a sick child because it is her duty. But to the mother’s heart, the care of the little one in the battle against illness, is never a duty. The mantle of love thrown over every act makes the word “duty” have a jarring sound, like the voice of desecration.
When a child turns out badly in later years, the parent may say, “Well, I always did my duty by him.” Small wonder the boy turned out poorly. “Doing his duty by his son,” too often implies merely food, lodging, clothes and education by the father. Why a public institution would offer that! What the boy needed most was deep draughts of love, and an environment of trust, counsel and sympathy. The parent should be an unfailing refuge, a constant resource and in spiration, not a mere larder, or hotel, or school that furnishes these necessities free. The empty boast of mere parental duty is one of the dangers of modern society.
Christianity stands forth as the one religion based on love, not duty. It sweeps all duties into one word—love. What duty creeps to labori ously, love attains in a moment. Duty is not lost, condemned or destroyed in Christianity; rather it is dignified, purified and exalted. All its rough expressions are made smooth by love.
The supreme instance of generosity in the world’s history is not the giving of millions by some great name, it is the giving of a mite by some poor person whose name is never acknowl edged. And behind that person’s mite was no sense of duty, but rather the desire to give freely of a heart filled with love. Hundreds of times in the Bible the word “love” is mentioned. “Duty” is mentioned but five times.
In the conquest of any mental or moral weak ness, in the attainment of any strength, as well as in our truest relation to ourselves and to the world, let us make “love” our watchword, not mere “duty.” In our desire to live a life of hon esty, we must not expect to keep to the narrow line of truth under the constant lash of duty’s whip. Let us begin to love the truth so that there will develop within us, without our conscious effort, an everpresent horror of a lie.
If we desire to do good in the world, let us begin to love humanity, to realize, despite all the discords of life, the great natural bond of unity that makes all men brothers. Then jeal ousy, envy, malice, unkind words and cruel mis judgements will be eclipsed by the sunshine of love.
The greatest triumph of this century is not its marvellous progress in industry and science, its strides in education, its conquests of the un charted regions of the world, or its increase in material comfort and wealth—the greatest triumph of the century is the sweet atmosphere of Peace that covers a nation, and the coming together of the peoples of the earth. Peace is but the breath and life of love. And love is but the angel of life that rolls away all stones of sorrow and suffering from the pathway of duty.
True charity is not typified by an almsbox. The benevolence of a checkbook does not meet all the wants of humanity. Giving food, clothing and money to the poor is only the beginning, the kindergarten class, of real charity.
Charity has higher, purer forms of manifes tation. It is an instinctive reaching out for jus tice in life. It seeks to smooth the rough places of living and bridge the chasms of human sin and folly. It desires to feed the heart-hungry, to give strength to the struggling, to be tender with human weakness. But greatest of all, char ity obeys the Divine injunction: “Judge not.”
The symbol of true charity is the hand of Jus tice holding on high the scales of judgement. So perfectly are they balanced that they do not dip to one side to pronounce final judgement, be cause each moment adds its grain of evidence to either side of the balance.
With this ideal before him, man, conscious of his own weaknesses, dare not assume the Divine prerogative of pronouncing final judge ment on any individual. He will seek to train mind and heart to greater keeness, purity and delicacy in watching the movement of the bal ance in which he weighs the characters and rep utations of those around him.
How often we hear people say, “I love to study character—on the streets, in cars, in a crowded room.” And how little they realize that they are not studying character, but merely observing characteristics. The study of character is not a puzzle that a man may work out overnight. Character is most subtle, elusive, changing and contradictory. It is a strange mingling of habits, hopes, motives, ideals, weaknesses and memo ries all manifested in a thousand different phases.
There is but one quality necessary for the perfect understanding of character, and if a man has it, he may dare to judge.That quality is omniscience.
Most people study character as a proofreader pores over a great poem: with ears dulled to the majesty and music of the lines, with eyes dark ened to the imaginative genius of the author. The proofreader is busy watching for an in verted comma, a misspacing, or a wrong letter. He has an eye trained for imperfections. Men who pride themselves on being shrewd in dis covering weak points in others think they understand character, but they know only a part of character. They know merely the depths to which a man may sink. They know not the heights to which a man may rise.
We never see the target a man aims at in life. We see only the target he hits. We judge from results, and we imagine an infinity of motives that must have been in the man’s mind. No human being since creation has been able to live a life so pure and noble as to exempt him from the misjudgement of those around him. It is impossible to get anything but a distorted image from a convex or a concave mirror.
If misfortune comes to a man, people are prone to say, “It is a judgement upon him.” How do they know? Have they been eavesdropping at the door of Paradise? When sorrow and failure come to us, we regard them as misdirected pack ages that should have been delivered elsewhere. We do too much watching of our neighbor’s gar den, and too little weeding in our own.
Bottles have been picked up at sea thousands of miles from the point where they have been cast into the waters. They have been the sport of wind and weather, carried along by ocean currents to ports of destination undreamed of. Our flippant, careless words of judgement about someone’s character, words lightly spoken, may be carried by unknown currents to bring misery and shame upon the innocent. A cruel smile, a shrug of the shoulders or a cleverly eloquent silence may ruin in a moment another’s reputation, just as a single motion of the hand can destroy the delicate geometry of a spider’s web— and all the efforts of the universe cannot put it back as it was.
We do not need to judge nearly so much as we think we do. This is the age of snap judge ments; a habit greatly intensified by the press. Twenty-four hours after a sensational murder, it’s difficult to find people who have not already formulated a judgement about the case. These people have usually read and accepted the highly-colored newspaper account and have al most discovered the murderer, tried him and sentenced him. We hear readers state their de cisions with all the force and absoluteness of one who has omniscience.
If there is a time in life when the attitude of the agnostic is right, it is in the moment of judg ing others. It is the courage to say, “I don’t know—I’m waiting on further evidence. I must hear both sides of the question. Until then, I suspend all judgement.” It is this suspended judgement that is the supreme form of charity.
It is strange that most of us recognize the right of every criminal to have a fair, open trial, yet we condemn, unheard, the dear friends around us on mere circumstancial evidence. We rely on the scanty evidence of our senses, trust it implicitly, and permit it to sweep away our faith. Our hasty judgement, that a few moments of explanation would remove, thus estranges a friend. If we are this unjust to those we hold dear, what must be the cruel injustice of our judgement of others?
We know nothing of the trials, sorrows, and temptations of those around us; or of the secret struggles and worries, of perhaps a life-tragedy that may be hidden behind a smile. At times we even say to one who seems calm and smiling, “You ought to be supremely happy, you have everything a heart could wish for.” And it may be that at that very moment the person is pass ing alone through some grief when living seems like an agony from which there is no relief. Then our misjudgements only make them feel iso lated from the rest of humanity.
Let us not add to the burden of another the pain of our judgements. If we are to guard our mouths from expressing them, then we must control our minds and stop continually assess ing the acts of others, even in private. By daily exercises in self-control, let us learn to turn off the process of judging as we would turn out a light. Let us eliminate pride, passion, prejudice and pettiness from our minds, and higher, purer emotions will rush in, as air seeks to fill a vac uum.
Charity is not a formula, it is an atmosphere. To cultivate charity in judging, we must learn to search out the good in others, rather than attempt to discover the hidden evils. The eye of charity requires that we see the undeveloped butterfly in the caterpillar. Let us, then, make for our watchword the phrase of supreme char ity: “Judge not.”
Worry is the most popular form of suicide. It impairs appetite, spoils digestion, disturbs sleep, irritates disposition, weakens mind, warps character, saps bodily health and stimulates disease. Worry is the real cause of death in thou sands of instances where some other disease is named on the death certificate.
When a man or woman works over in dreams the problems of the day, or when the sleeping hours are spent in turning round the kaleido scope of the day’s activities, then there is worry, often due to overwork. The creator never in tended a healthy mind to dream of the day’s duties.
If a child’s absorption in his studies keeps him from resting, or if he tosses and turns, mutter ing multiplication in his sleep, then that child is worrying. This is one of Nature’s danger sig nals raised to warn parents that the burden of their child’s daily tasks should be lightened and the tension of his education lessened.
When the spectre of grief, fear or sorrow ob trudes itself between the eye and the printed page; when the inner voice of irritating memory or apprehension looms up so loudly as to deaden outside voices, there is danger to the individual. We must know that we are worrying when all day, every hour, every moment, there is the dull, insistent pain of something that makes itself felt through all our other thinking. There is then, but one thing for us to do: Kill the worry.
The wise men of this century have made great discoveries in their dealings with Nature. They have learned that everything created has its uses. They can tell you what exactly are the special duties and responsibilities of every mi croscopic microbe that has a telescopic name. In their scientific enthusiasm they may even ven ture to persuade us that the mosquito serves some real purpose in Nature. But no man yet can truthfully say a good word about worry.
Worry is forethought gone to seed. Worry is counting possible future sorrows so that the in dividual may have present misery. Worry is the father of insomnia. Under the guise of helping us to bear the present, and to be ready for the future, it multiplies enemies within our own minds to sap our strength.
Worry is the dominance of the mind by a sin gle vague, restless, unsatisfied, or fearful idea. The mental energy and force which should be concentrated on the successive duties of the day is constantly and surreptitiously abstracted and absorbed by this one fixed idea. The full strength of the unconscious working of the mind, which produces our best success and represents our finest activity, is wasted on worry.
Worry must not be confused with anxiety, al though both words agree in original meaning: a “choking” or “strangling”—which refers to the throttling effect upon individual activity. Anx iety faces large issues of life seriously, calmly and with dignity. It always suggests hopeful possibilities. Worry is not one large individual sorrow, but a colony of petty, vague, insignifi cant, restless fears that become important only in their combination of their constancy.
When death comes, when the one we love has passed from us, and the silence and emptiness make us stare into the future, we give ourselves up for a time to the agony of isolation. This is not a petty worry we must kill before it kills us. This is the awful majesty of sorrow that mer cifully benumbs us, and may later become a rebaptism and a regeneration. It is the worry habit, the constant magnifying of petty sorrows that eclipse the sun of happiness, against which I am making protest.
To cure worry, the individual must be his own physician; he must give his case heroic treat ment, realizing, with every fiber of his being, the utter uselessness of worry. He must under stand that if it was possible for him to spend a whole series of eternities in worry, it would change nothing.
If you set down a column of figures in addi tion, no amount of worry can change the sum total of those figures. The result can be made different only by changing the numbers as they are set down, one by one, in that column.
The one time that man cannot afford to worry is when he is facing, or imagines he is facing, a critical turn of affairs. Often this is the time when he worries most—the time when he needs one hundred percent of his mental energy to make his wisest decision quickly, to keep a clear eye on his course and a firm hand on the helm until he has weathered the storm in safety.
There are two major reasons why man should not worry, either one of which must exist in every instance. First, if he cannot prevent the results he fears, if he’s powerless to avert a blow, he needs perfect mental concentration to meet it bravely, to lighten its force, and to sustain his strength for a new plan in the future. Sec ond, if he can prevent the evil he fears, then he has no need to worry, for by doing so, he would be dissipating energy in his very hour of need.
If man does, day by day, the very best he can, he has no need to worry. No agony of worry could help him, for neither mortal nor angel can do more than his best. If we look back upon our past life, we will see how, in the marvellous working of events, our moments of greatest hap piness and success have been founded upon our deepest sorrows, our most abject failures. Often our present joys would have been impossible but for some terrible affliction or loss in the past; a loss which becomes a potent force in the evo lution of our character and our fortune. This should be a stimulus to us in bearing the trials and sorrows of life.
To cure one’s self of worry is not an easy task. It requires clear, common sense applied to the business of life. With inalienable duties to him self, to his family and to the world, man has no right to waste his energies, or to weaken his own powers through worry.
Simplicity is the elimination of the non-es sential in all things. It reduces life to its min imum of real needs and raises it to its maximum of powers. Simplicity means the survival, not of the fittest, but of the best. Morally speaking, it kills the weeds of vice and weakness so the flow ers of virtue and strength have room to grow. Simplicity cuts off waste and intensifies con centration.
All great truths are simple. The essence of Christianity is in but a few words seeking to be made real through thoughts and acts. The true Christian’s belief is always simpler than his church creed, and upon these vital elements he builds his life. Higher criticism never rises to the heights of his simplicity. He has no time for hair-splitting interpretations of words and phrases. Nor does he care for the anatomy of religion; he has its soul. His simple faith he lives—in thought and word and act, each day.
The minister whose sermons are made up merely of flowery rhetoric, sprigs of quotations and perfumed banalities, is, consciously or un consciously, posing in the pulpit. His weak lit erary concoctions can never help a human soul or offer it strength and inspiration. If the mind and heart of the preacher were truly filled with the greatness and simplicity of religion, he would apply the realities of his faith to the vital prob lems of daily living. The test of a strong, simple sermon is results—not the Sunday praise of his auditors, but their bettered lives during the week. People who pray on their knees on Sun day and prey on their neighbors on Monday, need simplicity in their faith.
No character can be simple unless it is based on truth; unless it is lived in harmony with one’s own conscience and ideals. Simplicity is de stroyed by any attempt to live in harmony with public opinion. Public opinion is a syndicated conscience where the individual is merely a stockholder. When an individual realizes he is sole proprietor of his conscience and adjusts his life to his own ideals, he has found the royal road to simplicity.
Affectation is the confession of inferiority; it is an unnecessary proclamation that one is not living the life he pretends to live. A restless hunger for the non-essentials of life is the rea son for most of the discontent in the world. It is constant striving to outshine others that kills simplicity and happiness. Simplicity is restful contempt for the non-essentials.
Nature, in all her revelations, seeks to teach man the greatness of simplicity. Health is but the living of physical life in harmony with a few simple, clearly defined laws: simple food, simple exercise, simple precautions. But man grows tired of the simple things, yields to subtle temp tations and then suffers. How often he listens to his palate instead of to Nature. Then he is led into intimate acquaintance with ulcers, and sits like a child at his own bounteous table, forced to limit his eating to the simple food he once scorned.
There is a tonic strength in the hour of sorrow and affliction, in escaping from the world and getting back to the simple duties and interests we have slighted and forgotten. Our world grows smaller, but it grows dearer and greater. Simple things have a new charm for us, and we sud denly realize that we have been renouncing all that is best in pursuit of phantoms.
Simplicity is the characteristic most difficult to simulate. The signature that is hardest to imitate is the one that is most simple, most in dividual. The banknote most difficult to coun terfeit successfully is the one that contains the fewest lines and has the least intricate detail. So simple it is, that any departure from the normal is instantly apparent. So it is also with man’s mind and morals.
Simplicity in act is the outward expression of simplicity in thought. Great men are those who are quiet, modest, unassuming. They are often made gentle, calm and simple by the discipline of their responsibility. They have no room in their minds for the pettiness of personal vanity or affectation.
Life grows wondrously beautiful when we look at it as simple, when we can brush aside trivial cares, sorrows, worries and failures, and say: “They don’t count. They’re not the real things of life, only interruptions. Within my individ uality, there is something that makes all these gnats of trouble seem too trifling for me to allow them dominion over me.” Simplicity is a mental soil where selfishness, deceit, treachery and low ambition cannot grow.
The man whose character is simple has no consciousness of intrigue and corruption about him. He is deaf to the hints and whispers of wrong that a suspicious nature would suspect even before they exist. He scorns the idea of meeting intrigue with intrigue or holding power by bribery. Nothing great can ever enter into the mind of a man of simplicity and remain just a theory. When he perceives truth, he begins to live it. Simplicity in a character is like the needle of a compass: it knows only one point—its North, its ideal.
Let us seek to cultivate this simplicity in all aspects of our lives. The first step toward sim plicity is simplifying. The beginning of mental or moral progress or reform is always renun ciation or sacrifice. It is rejection, surrender or destruction of habits or attitude that have kept us from higher things. Reform your diet and you simplify it; reform your morals and you begin to cut off immoral behavior.
The secret of all true greatness is simplicity. Make simplicity the keynote of your life and you will be great, no matter if your life be hum ble and your influence seem but little. Simple habits, simple manners, simple needs, simple words, simple faiths; all are the pure manifes tations of a great mind and heart.
Simplicity means the light of fullest knowl edge. It means that the individual has seen the folly and the nothingness of those things which make up the sum of the lives of others. He has lived down what others are blindly seeking to live up to. Simplicity is the secret of greatness in the life of every human being.
During a terrific storm a few years ago a ship was driven far off her course and helpless and disabled, was carried into a strange bay. The water supply gave out, and the crew suffered the agony of thirst, yet dared not drink of the salt water in which their vessel floated. Finally, in a last act of desperation, they lowered a bucket over the ship’s side and quaffed what they thought was sea water. But to their amazement and joy the water was fresh. They were in a freshwater arm of the sea, and they did not know it. They had simply to reach down and accept the new life-giving strength for which they had prayed.
Man today, heart-weary with the sorrow, sin and failure of his past life, feels that he could live a better life if he could only live it over again; if he could only start afresh with his pres ent knowledge and experience. He looks back with regretful memory to the golden days of youth and sadly mourns his wasted chances. He then turns hopefully to the thought of a new future, as he stands between the two ends of life. Blindly desiring the chance to live a new existence according to his bettered condition for living it, he does not realize that the new life is all around him. Like the storm-driven sailors, he has but to reach out and take it. Every day is a new existence, every sunrise but a new birth for himself and the world. Each morning is the beginning of a new life, a new, great chance to put to higher uses the results of his past living.
The man who looks back upon his past life and says, “I have nothing to regret,” has lived in vain. The life without regret is the life with out gain. Regret is the light of fuller wisdom from our past, illuminating the future. It means that we are wiser today than we were yesterday. This new wisdom means new responsibility, new privileges and a chance for a better life. But if regret remains merely “regret,” it is useless. It must become the inspiration and source of strength to realize new possibilities. Even omnipotence could not change the past. But each man, to a degree far beyond his knowing, holds his future in his own hands.
If man were sincere in his longing to live life over, he would get more help from his failures. If he realizes his wasted opportunities, let him not waste other hours in useless regret, but seek to forget his folly and keep before him only the lessons of it. His past extravagance of time should lead him to minimize his loss by a mar vellous economy of present moments. If his whole life is darkened by the memory of a cruel wrong he has done another, and direct amends are im possible to the injured one, let him make the world the beneficiary of his restitution. Let his regret and sorrow be manifested in words of kindness, in acts of love given to all with whom he comes in contact. If he regrets war he has made against another individual, let him place the entire world on his pension list. If a man make a certain mistake once, the only way he can properly express his repentance is not to make a similar mistake again. Josh Billings once said, “A man who is bitten twice by the same dog is better adapted to that business than any other.”
There are many people in this world who want to live life over because they take such pride in their past. They resemble the beggars in the street who tell you they “have seen better days.” It is not what man was that shows character; it is what he progressively is. Trying to obtain a present record on a dead past is like covering up your mediocrity with your ancestry. We look for the fruit in the branches of the family tree, not in the roots. Let man think less of his own ancestors and more of those he is preparing for his posterity; less of his past virtue, and more of the good he can accomplish in the future.
When a man pleads for a chance to live life over, he is expressing a lack of knowledge, un worthy even of a coward. We know the laws of health, yet we ignore them every day. We know what is the proper food for us, individually, yet we gratify our appetites and trust to our clev erness to square the account with Nature some how. We know that success is a matter of simple, clearly defined laws, of the development of mental essentials, of tireless energy and concentra tion, of a constant payment of price. We know all this, and yet we do not live up to our knowl edge. Instead, we blame Fate.
Parents often counsel their children against certain things and then do those very things themselves, foolishly hoping that the children will believe their ears and not their eyes. Years of teaching a child to be honest and truthful may be nullified in an instant by a parent’s lying to a ticket-seller about the child’s age to save half-fare. That can be an exceedingly ex pensive ticket for both the child and the parent. It may be part of the spirit of the times to believe it is no sin to cheat an institution, but it is unwise to give the child so striking an example at an age when he cannot discern the falsity of it.
Man’s only excuse for a chance to live life again is that he has gained in wisdom and ex perience. If he is really in earnest then he can start life afresh, leaving to the past all his mis takes, sin, sorrow, misery and folly, and live the new life that comes to him day by day. Let him credit himself with the knowledge he has gained from his past failures and charge himself with the responsibilities that come from the possession of his new wisdom. Let him criticize others less and himself more. Let him be honest at all times as he starts out bravely in his new life.
What we need is more day-to-day living; starting in the morning with fresh, clear ideals for that day, and seeking to live each hour as if it were all the time left to us. This has in it no element of disregard for the future, because each day is set in harmony with that future. It is like the sea captain pointing his vessel toward its port of destination and day by day keeping her sailing toward it. This view of living kills morbid regret of the past and morbid worry about the future.
Life is worth living if it is lived in a way that is worth living. At each New Year it is common to make new resolutions, but in the life of the individual, each day is the beginning of a New Year, if he will only make it so. A mere date on the calendar is no more a divider of time that a particular grain of sand divides the desert.
Let us not make heroic resolutions so far be yond our strength that the resolution becomes a dead memory within a week. But let us prom ise ourselves that each day will be the new be ginning of a better life, not only for ourselves, but for those close to us and the world as well.
The most selfish man in the world is the one who is most unselfish with his sorrows. He does not leave a single misery untold to you, or un suffered by you. He gives you all of them. The world becomes to him a dumping ground of his private cares, worries and trials.
Life is a great, serious problem for the indi vidual. All our greatest joys and our deepest sorrows come to us—alone. We must go into our Gethsemane—alone. Alone, we must battle against the mighty weaknesses within us. And we must live our own lives—and die—alone. If each one of us has this great problem of life to solve for himself, if each of us has his own cares, responsibilities, failures, doubts, fears, we surely are playing a coward’s part when we syndicate our sorrows.
We should seek to make life brighter for oth ers. Through our courage in bearing our own sorrows, we can seek to hearten others in their times of trial. Seeking to forget our failures and remembering only the new wisdom they’ve brought us, we can live down our griefs by counting the joys and privileges still left to us. We have no right to retail our sorrow and un happiness throughout the community.
Autobiography constitutes a large part of the conversation of some people. It is not really con versation, but more like uninterrupted mono logue. These people study their individual lives with a microscope, and then they throw an en larged view of their miseries on a screen and lecture on them, as a biologist discourses on the microbes in a drop of water. They tell you that “they did not sleep a wink all night; they heard the clock strike every quarter of an hour.” Now, there is no real cause for boasting of insomnia. Even though it only comes to wide-awake peo ple, it requires no peculiar talent.
If you ask such a man how he is feeling, he will trace the whole genealogy of his present condition down from the time he had influenza four years ago. You hoped for a word; he gives you a treatise. You asked for a sentence; he delivers an encyclopedia. Such a person is syn dicating his sorrows.
The woman who makes her trials and trou bles with her family the subjects of conversa tion, is syndicating her sorrows as well. If she has a dear, little child who recites, “Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight,” is it not wiser for the mother to bear it in discreet silence rather than to syn dicate her difficulty?
The business man who lets his indigestion get into his disposition, and who makes everyone around him suffer because of it, is syndicating his ill health. We have no right to make others the victims of our moods. If illness makes us cross and irritable, makes us unjust to employ ees and co-workers, let us quarantine ourselves so that we do not spread the contagion. Let us force ourselves to keep temper from showing in our voices. If we feel we must have indigestion, let us keep it from getting to our heads.
Most people sympathize too much with them selves. They take themselves as a single sen tence isolated from the great text of life; studying themselves as if separated from the rest of hu manity, instead of being vitally connected with their fellow men. Some people surrender to sor row like others give way to dissipation. Most individuals, when looking back upon their past feelings, believe that few others in life have suf fered such trials as have come to them. There is a vain pride of sorrow as well as of beauty.
When death comes into the circle of loved ones that make up our world, all life becomes dark ened. We seem to have no reason for existing, no incentive, no hope. The love that made effort and struggle bearable for us, is gone. Life be comes but a memory; a past with no future.
Then in the divine mystery of Nature’s pro cesses, under the soothing touch of Time, as days melt into weeks, we begin to open our eyes gently to the world around us and the noise and tumult of life jars us less and less. We have become emotionally convalescent. As the days go on, in our deep love and loyalty, we protest often against our gradual return to the spirit and at mosphere of the days of the past. We feel a subtle new pain, as if we are being disloyal to the dead one, faithless to our love. Nature turns aside our protesting hands, and says to us, “There is no disloyalty in permitting your wounds to hurt less, to heal gradually.” There are some natures all-absorbed in a mighty love, where no healing is possible, but these are rare souls in life.
Bitter though our anguish is, we have no right to syndicate our sorrow. We have no right to cast a gloom over happy natures by our heavy burden of grief, by serving the term prescribed by Society for wearing the livery of mourning, as if real sorrow is a uniform. We have no right to syndicate our grief by parading our personal sorrow to others in their happy moments.
If life has not gone well with us, if fortune has left us disconsolate, if love has grown cold, let us not radiate such an atmosphere to those around us. Let us not take strangers through the catacombs of our lives, showing them the bones of the dead past. Neither let us pass our cup of sorrow to others, but if we must drink it, let us take it as Socrates did his hemlock: grandly, heroically and without complaint.
If your life has led you to doubt the existence of honor in man, or the virtue in woman; if you feel that religion is a pretense, that spirituality is a sham, and death the entrance to nothing ness; if you have absorbed all the poisonous philosophies of the world’s pessimists, and com mitted the folly of believing much of it, don’t syndicate it. If your fellow man is clinging to one frail spar, the last remnant of a noble, ship wrecked faith in God and humanity, let him keep it. Do not loosen his fingers from his hope and tell him it is a delusion. How do you know it is so?
You may have one person in the world to whom you dare show, in confidence and faith, your thoughts, hopes and sorrows. Wisely, you dare not trust such cares to the world. Keeping your trials and sorrows as close to you as you can till you have mastered them, you will not weaken others by syndicating your miseries.
Every individual is a marvel of unknown and unrealized possibilities. Nine-tenths of an ice berg is always below water. Nine-tenths of the possibilities of good and evil in an individual are hidden from his sight.
Burns’ prayer, that we might “see ourselves as others see us,” speaks only to man’s vanity. What others see him as being, is often not what a man is. We should pray to see ourselves as we are.But no man could face the radiant revela tion of the latent powers and forces within him, underlying the weak, narrow life he is living. He would fall blinded and prostrate, as Moses did before the burning bush. Man is not a me chanical box wound up by the Creator and set to play a fixed number of prescribed tunes. He is a human harp, with infinite possibilities for creating unrealized music.
The untold revelations of Nature are in her Reserve Power, her method of meeting emer gencies. Nature is wise and economic. Nature saves energy and effort, and gives only what is absolutely necessary for life and development under any given condition. When new needs arise, Nature always meets them through her Reserve Power.
In animal life, Nature reveals this in a mil lion phases. Animals placed in the darkness of the Mammoth Cave gradually have their sense of sight weakened and their senses of smell, touch and hearing intensified. Nature watches over all animals, making their colors harmonize with their surroundings to protect them from their enemies. Those arctic animals which in summer inhabit regions free from snow, turn white when the winter comes. In the desert, the animals have more or less the color of the sand and rocks among which they live. In tropical forests, parrots are usually green, as are many of the other inhabitants like lizards and insects. As the habits of the animals change, from generation to generation, so do their colors. Nature, through her Reserve Power, always meets the new needs of animals with new strength, giving them new harmony with their new conditions.
About forty-five years ago, three pairs of en terprising rabbits were introduced into Aus tralia. Today, the increase of these six immigrants nay be counted in the millions. They became a national pest and fortunes have been spent to exterminate them. Wire fences many feet high and hundreds of miles long have been built to keep them from invading crop-lands. But the rabbits have outwitted man. They have developed over the years, a claw which enables them to climb a fence as well as burrow beneath it in order to reach the fields which mean food and life to them. Nature’s Reserve Power has given these rabbits latent possibili ties in their struggle to survive, because they did not tamely accept their condition.
Nature is a great believer in “double en gines.” Man is equipped with many parts of his body in duplicate—eyes, ears, lungs, arms, legs. If one is weakened, its mate, through Reserve Power, is stimulated to do enough for both. Even when the organ itself is not duplicated, as in the nose, there is a division of parts so that there is constant reserve. Nature, for still further pro tection, has for every part of the human body, an understudy to be ready in a crisis: as the sense of touch for the blind.
Nature, thus watching so tenderly over the physical needs of man, is equally provident in storing for him a mental and moral Reserve Power. Man may fail in a dozen different lines of activity and then succeed brilliantly in an area wherein he was unconscious of any ability at all. We must never rest with what we are, saying, “There is no use for me to try to be great, I am not even mediocre.” We must listen to the law of Reserve Power which says: “There is one charm by which you can transmute the dull dross of your present condition into the shining gold of strength and power. That charm is simply doing your best always; always daring more. The full measure of your final attainment can never be told in advance. Rely upon me to help you with new revelations in new emergencies.”
Never be cast down because your power seems trifling, your progress slow. The world’s great est men were failures in some line, failures many times before failure was crowned with success.
There is, in the mythology of the Norseman, a belief that the strength of an enemy we have killed enters into us. This is true in character. As we conquer a passion, a thought, a feeling, as we rise above some impulse, the strength of that victory, trifling though it may be, is stored by Nature as a Reserve Power to come to us in the hour of our need.
Were we to place before almost any individ ual the full chart of his future—his trials, sor rows, failures, afflictions, loss, sickness and loneliness—and ask him if he could bear it, he would say, “No! I could not bear all that and live.” But he can and he does.The hopes upon which he has staked his future turn to mist as he nears them; friends whom he has trusted betray him; the world grows cold to him as the child whose smile is the light of his life dishon ors his name; death takes from him the love of his dearest ones—yet Reserve Power has been giving him new strength to carry on after each crisis.
If we are conscious of any weakness and have the desire to conquer it, we can force ourselves into positions where we must act in a way to strengthen ourselves through that weakness. Reserve Power is like the manna given to the children of Israel, only enough was given them to keep them for one day. Each successive day had its new supply of strength. There is in the Leaning Tower of Pisa a spiral staircase so steep in its ascent that only one step at a time is revealed as one is climbing it. But as each step is taken, the next is made visible, and so it goes, step by step, to the very top.
In the divine economy of the universe, Re serve Power is a gradual and constant revela tion of strength within us to meet each new need. And no matter what is our walk of life, what are our needs, we should feel that we have within us infinite, untried strengths and pos sibilities—that if we believe and do our best, the Angel of Reserve Power will walk by our side, dividing even the waters of our trials and sorrows, so we may walk in safety.
1. The Majesty of Calmness
Calmness is the rarest quality in human life. It is the poise of a great nature, in harmony with itself and its ideals. It is the moral atmosphere of a life self-centred, self-reliant, and self-controlled. Calmness is singleness of purpose, absolute confidence, and conscious power,--ready to be focused in an instant to meet any crisis.
The Sphinx is not a true type of calmness,--petrifaction is not calmness; it is death, the silencing of all the energies; while no one lives his life more fully, more intensely and more consciously than the man who is calm.
The Fatalist is not calm. He is the coward slave of his environment, hopelessly surrendering to his present condition, recklessly indifferent to his future. He accepts his life as a rudderless ship, drifting on the ocean of time. He has no compass, no chart, no known port to which he is sailing. His self-confessed inferiority to all nature is shown in his existence of constant surrender. It is not,--calmness.
The man who is calm has his course in life clearly marked on his chart. His hand is ever on the helm. Storm, fog, night, tempest, danger, hidden reefs,--he is ever prepared and ready for them. He is made calm and serene by the realization that in these crises of his voyage he needs a clear mind and a cool head; that he has naught to do but to do each day the best he can by the light he has; that he will never flinch nor falter for a moment; that, though he may have to tack and leave his course for a time, he will never drift, he will get back into the true channel, he will keep ever headed toward his harbor. When he will reach it, how he will reach it, matters not to him. He rests in calmness, knowing he has done his best. If his best seem to be overthrown or overruled, then he must still bow his head,--in calmness. To no man is permitted to know the future of his life, the finality. God commits to man ever only new beginnings, new wisdom, and new days to use the best of his knowledge.
Calmness comes ever from within. It is the peace and restfulness of the depths of our nature. The fury of storm and of wind agitate only the surface of the sea; they can penetrate only two or three hundred feet,--below that is the calm, unruffled deep. To be ready for the great crises of life we must learn serenity in our daily living. Calmness is the crown of self-control.
When the worries and cares of the day fret you, and begin to wear upon you, and you chafe under the friction,--be calm. Stop, rest for a moment, and let calmness and peace assert themselves. If you let these irritating outside influences get the better of you, you are confessing your inferiority to them, by permitting them to dominate you. Study the disturbing elements, each by itself, bring all the will power of your nature to bear upon them, and you will find that they will, one by one, melt into nothingness, like vapors fading before the sun. The glow of calmness that will then pervade your mind, the tingling sensation of an inflow of new strength, may be to you the beginning of the revelation of the supreme calmness that is possible for you. Then, in some great hour of your life, when you stand face to face with some awful trial, when the structure of your ambition and life-work crumbles in a moment, you will be brave. You can then fold your arms calmly, look out undismayed and undaunted upon the ashes of your hope, upon the wreck of what you have faithfully built, and with brave heart and unfaltering voice you may say: “So let it be,--I will build again.”
When the tongue of malice and slander, the persecution of inferiority, tempts you for just a moment to retaliate, when for an instant you forget yourself so far as to hunger for revenge,--be calm. When the grey heron is pursued by its enemy, the eagle, it does not run to escape; it remains calm, takes a dignified stand, and waits quietly, facing the enemy unmoved. With the terrific force with which the eagle makes its attack, the boasted king of birds is often impaled and run through on the quiet, lance-like bill of the heron. The means that man takes to kill another’s character becomes suicide of his own.
No man in the world ever attempted to wrong another without being injured in return,--someway, somehow, sometime. The only weapon of offence that Nature seems to recognize is the boomerang. Nature keeps her books admirably; she puts down every item, she closes all accounts finally, but she does not always balance them at the end of the month. To the man who is calm, revenge is so far beneath him that he cannot reach it,--even by stooping. When injured, he does not retaliate; he wraps around him the royal robes of Calmness, and he goes quietly on his way.
When the hand of Death touches the one we hold dearest, paralyzes our energy, and eclipses the sun of our life, the calmness that has been accumulating in long years becomes in a moment our refuge, our reserve strength.
The most subtle of all temptations is the seeming success of the wicked. It requires moral courage to see, without flinching, material prosperity coming to men who are dishonest; to see politicians rise into prominence, power and wealth by trickery and corruption; to see virtue in rags and vice in velvets; to see ignorance at a premium, and knowledge at a discount. To the man who is really calm these puzzles of life do not appeal. He is living his life as best he can; he is not worrying about the problems of justice, whose solution must be left to Omniscience to solve.
When man has developed the spirit of Calmness until it becomes so absolutely part of him that his very presence radiates it, he has made great progress in life. Calmness cannot be acquired of itself and by itself; it must come as the culmination of a series of virtues. What the world needs and what individuals need is a higher standard of living, a great realizing sense of the privilege and dignity of life, a higher and nobler conception of individuality.
With this great sense of calmness permeating an individual, man becomes able to retire more into himself, away from the noise, the confusion and strife of the world, which come to his ears only as faint, far-off rumblings, or as the tumult of the life of a city heard only as a buzzing hum by the man in a balloon.
The man who is calm does not selfishly isolate himself from the world, for he is intensely interested in all that concerns the welfare of humanity. His calmness is but a Holy of Holies into which he can retire from the world to get strength to live in the world. He realizes that the full glory of individuality, the crowning of his self-control is,--the majesty of calmness.
2. Hurry, the Scourge of America
The first sermon in the world was preached at the Creation. It was a Divine protest against Hurry. It was a Divine object lesson of perfect law, perfect plan, perfect order, perfect method. Six days of work carefully planned, scheduled and completed were followed by,--rest. Whether we accept the story as literal or as figurative, as the account of successive days or of ages comprising millions of years, matters little if we but learn the lesson.
Nature is very un-American. Nature never hurries. Every phase of her working shows plan, calmness, reliability, and the absence of hurry. Hurry always implies lack of definite method, confusion, impatience of slow growth. The Tower of Babel, the world’s first skyscraper, was a failure because of hurry. The workers mistook their arrogant ambition for inspiration. They had too many builders,--and no architect. They thought to make up the lack of a head by a superfluity of hands. This is a characteristic of Hurry. It seeks ever to make energy a substitute for a clearly defined plan,--the result is ever as hopeless as trying to transform a hobby-horse into a real steed by brisk riding.
Hurry is a counterfeit of haste. Haste has an ideal, a distinct aim to be realized by the quickest, direct methods. Haste has a single compass upon which it relies for direction and in harmony with which its course is determined. Hurry says: “I must move faster. I will get three compasses; I will have them different; I will be guided by all of them. One of them will probably be right.” Hurry never realizes that slow, careful foundation work is the quickest in the end.
Hurry has ruined more Americans than has any other word in the vocabulary of life. It is the scourge of America; and is both a cause and a result of our high-pressure civilization. Hurry adroitly assumes so many masquerades of disguise that its identity is not always recognized.
Hurry always pays the highest price for everything, and, usually the goods are not delivered. In the race for wealth men often sacrifice time, energy, health, home, happiness and honor,--everything that money cannot buy, the very things that money can never bring back. Hurry is a phantom of paradoxes. Business men, in their desire to provide for the future happiness of their family, often sacrifice the present happiness of wife and children on the altar of Hurry. They forget that their place in the home should be something greater than being merely “the man that pays the bills;” they expect consideration and thoughtfulness that they are not giving.
We hear too much of a wife’s duties to a husband and too little of the other side of the question. “The wife,” they tell us, “should meet her husband with a smile and a kiss, should tactfully watch his moods and be ever sweetness and sunshine.” Why this continual swinging of the censer of devotion to the man of business? Why should a woman have to look up with timid glance at the face of her husband, to “size up his mood”? Has not her day, too, been one of care, and responsibility, and watchfulness? Has not mother-love been working over perplexing problems and worries of home and of the training of the children that wifely love may make her seek to solve in secret? Is man, then, the weaker sex that he must be pampered and treated as tenderly as a boil trying to keep from contact with the world?
In their hurry to attain some ambition, to gratify the dream of a life, men often throw honor, truth, and generosity to the winds. Politicians dare to stand by and see a city poisoned with foul water until they “see where they come in” on a water-works appropriation. If it be necessary to poison an army,--that, too, is but an incident in the hurry for wealth.
This is the Age of the Hothouse. The element of natural growth is pushed to one side and the hothouse and the force-pump are substituted. Nature looks on tolerantly as she says: “So far you may go, but no farther, my foolish children.”
The educational system of to-day is a monumental institution dedicated to Hurry. The children are forced to go through a series of studies that sweep the circle of all human wisdom. They are given everything that the ambitious ignorance of the age can force into their minds; they are taught everything but the essentials,--how to use their senses and how to think. Their minds become congested by a great mass of undigested facts, and still the cruel, barbarous forcing goes on. You watch it until it seems you cannot stand it a moment longer, and you instinctively put out your hand and say: “Stop! This modern slaughter of the Innocents must not go on!” Education smiles suavely, waves her hand complacently toward her thousands of knowledge-prisons over the country, and says: “Who are you that dares speak a word against our sacred, school system?” Education is in a hurry. Because she fails in fifteen years to do what half the time should accomplish by better methods, she should not be too boastful. Incompetence is not always a reason for pride. And they hurry the children into a hundred textbooks, then into ill-health, then into the colleges, then into a diploma, then into life,--with a dazed mind, untrained and unfitted for the real duties of living.
Hurry is the deathblow to calmness, to dignity, to poise . The old-time courtesy went out when the new-time hurry came in. Hurry is the father of dyspepsia. In the rush of our national life, the bolting of food has become a national vice. The words “Quick Lunches” might properly be placed on thousands of headstones in our cemeteries. Man forgets that he is the only animal that dines; the others merely feed. Why does he abrogate his right to dine and go to the end of the line with the mere feeders? His self-respecting stomach rebels, and expresses its indignation by indigestion. Then man has to go through life with a little bottle of pepsin tablets in his vest-pocket. He is but another victim to this craze for speed. Hurry means the breakdown of the nerves. I t is the royal road to nervous prostration.
Everything that is great in life is the product of slow growth; the newer, and greater, and higher, and nobler the work, the slower is its growth, the surer is its lasting success. Mushrooms attain their full power in a night; oaks require decades. A fad lives its life in a few weeks; a philosophy lives through generations and centuries. > If you are sure you are right, do not let the voice of the world, or of friends, or of family swerve you for a moment from your purpose. Accept slow growth if it must be slow, and know the results must come, as you would accept the long, lonely hours of the night,--with absolute assurance that the heavy-leaded moments must bring the morning.
Let us as individuals banish the word “Hurry” from our lives. Let us care for nothing so much that we would pay honor and self-respect as the price of hurrying it. Let us cultivate calmness, restfulness, poise, sweetness,--doing our best, bearing all things as bravely as we can; living our life undisturbed by the prosperity of the wicked or the malice of the envious. Let us not be impatient, chafing at delay, fretting over failure, wearying over results, and weakening under opposition. Let us ever turn our face toward the future with confidence and trust, with the calmness of a life in harmony with itself, true to its ideals, and slowly and constantly progressing toward their realization.
Let us see that cowardly word Hurry in all its most degenerating phases, let us see that it ever kills truth, loyalty, thoroughness; and let us determine that, day by day, we will seek more and more to substitute for it the calmness and repose of a true life, nobly lived.
3. I The Power of Personal Influence
The only responsibility that a man cannot evade in this life is the one he thinks of least,--his personal influence. Man’s conscious influence, when he is on dress-parade, when he is posing to impress those around him,--is woefully small. But his unconscious influence, the silent, subtle radiation of his personality, the effect of his words and acts, the trifles he never considers,--is tremendous. Every moment of life he is changing to a degree the life of the whole world. Every man has an atmosphere which is affecting every other. So silent and unconsciously is this influence working, that man may forget that it exists.
All the forces of Nature,--heat, light, electricity and gravitation,--are silent and invisible. We never see them; we only know that they exist by seeing the effects they produce. In all Nature the wonders of the “seen” are dwarfed into insignificance when compared with the majesty and glory of the “unseen.” The great sun itself does not supply enough heat and light to sustain animal and vegetable life on the earth. We are dependent for nearly half of our light and heat upon the stars, and the greater part of this supply of life-giving energy comes from invisible stars, millions of miles from the earth. In a thousand ways Nature constantly seeks to lead men to a keener and deeper realization of the power and the wonder of the invisible.
Into the hands of every individual is given a marvellous power for good or for evil,--the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what a man really is, not what he pretends to be. Every man, by his mere living, is radiating sympathy, or sorrow, or morbidness, or cynicism, or happiness, or hope, or any of a hundred other qualities. Life is a state of constant radiation and absorption; to exist is to radiate; to exist is to be the recipient of radiations.
There are men and women whose presence seems to radiate sunshine, cheer and optimism. You feel calmed and rested and restored in a moment to a new and stronger faith in humanity. There are others who focus in an instant all your latent distrust, morbidness and rebellion against life. Without knowing why, you chafe and fret in their presence. You lose your bearings on life and its problems. Your moral compass is disturbed and unsatisfactory. It is made untrue in an instant, as the magnetic needle of a ship is deflected when it passes near great mountains of iron ore.
There are men who float down the stream of life like icebergs,--cold, reserved, unapproachable and self-contained. In their presence you involuntarily draw your wraps closer around you, as you wonder who left the door open. These refrigerated human beings have a most depressing influence on all those who fall under the spell of their radiated chilliness. But there are other natures, warm, helpful, genial, who are like the Gulf Stream, following their own course, flowing undaunted and undismayed in the ocean of colder waters. Their presence brings warmth and life and the glow of sunshine, the joyous, stimulating breath of spring. There are men who are like malarious swamps,--poisonous, depressing and weakening by their very presence. They make heavy, oppressive and gloomy the atmosphere of their own homes; the sound of the children’s play is stilled, the ripples of laughter are frozen by their presence. They go through life as if each day were a new big funeral, and they were always chief mourners. There are other men who seem like the ocean; they are constantly bracing, stimulating, giving new draughts of tonic life and strength by their very presence.
There are men who are insincere in heart, and that insincerity is radiated by their presence. They have a wondrous interest in your welfare,--when they need you. They put on a “property” smile so suddenly, when it serves their purpose, that it seems the smile must be connected with some electric button concealed in their clothes. Their voice has a simulated cordiality that long training may have made almost natural. But they never play their part absolutely true, the mask will slip down sometimes; their cleverness cannot teach their eyes the look of sterling honesty; they may deceive some people, but they cannot deceive all. There is a subtle power of revelation which makes us say: “Well, I cannot explain how it is, but I know that man is not honest.”
Man cannot escape for one moment from this radiation of his character, this constantly weakening or strengthening of others. He cannot evade the responsibility by saying it is an unconscious influence. He can select the qualities that he will permit to be radiated. He can cultivate sweetness, calmness, trust, generosity, truth, justice, loyalty, nobility,--make them vitally active in his character,--and by these qualities he will constantly affect the world.
Discouragement often comes to honest souls trying to live the best they can, in the thought that they are doing so little good in the world. Trifles unnoted by us may be links in the chain of some great purpose. In 1797, William Godwin wrote The Inquirer, a collection of revolutionary essays on morals and politics. This book influenced Thomas Malthus to write his Essay on Population, published in 1798. Malthus’ book suggested to Charles Darwin a point of view upon which he devoted many years of his life, resulting, in 1859, in the publication of The Origin of Species,--the most influential book of the nineteenth century, a book that has revolutionized all science. These were but three links of influence extending over sixty years. It might be possible to trace this genealogy of influence back from Godwin, through generation and generation, to the word or act of some shepherd in early Britain, watching his flock upon the hills, living his quiet life, and dying with the thought that he had done nothing to help the world.
Men and women have duties to others,--and duties to themselves. In justice to ourselves we should refuse to live in an atmosphere that keeps us from living our best. If the fault be in us, we should master it. If it be the personal influence of others that, like a noxious vapor, kills our best impulses, we should remove from that influence,--if we can possibly move without forsaking duties. If it be wrong to move, then we should take strong doses of moral quinine to counteract the malaria of influence. It is not what those around us do for us that counts,--it is what they are to us. We carry our house-plants from one window to another to give them the proper heat, light, air and moisture. Should we not be at least as careful of ourselves?
To make our influence felt we must live our faith, we must practice what we believe. A magnet does not attract iron, as iron. It must first convert the iron into another magnet before it can attract it. It is useless for a parent to try to teach gentleness to her children when she herself is cross and irritable. The child who is told to be truthful and who hears a parent lie cleverly to escape some little social unpleasantness is not going to cling very zealously to truth. The parent’s words say “don't lie,” the influence of the parent’s life says “do lie.” No man can ever isolate himself to evade this constant power of influence, as no single corpuscle can rebel and escape from the general course of the blood. No individual is so insignificant as to be without influence. The changes in our varying moods are all recorded in the delicate barometers of the lives of others. We should ever let our influence filter through human love and sympathy. We should not be merely an influence,--we should be an inspiration. By our very presence we should be a tower of strength to the hungering human souls around us.
4. The Dignity of Self-Reliance
Self-confidence, without self-reliance, is as useless as a cooking recipe,--without food. Self-confidence sees the possibilities of the individual; self-reliance realizes them. Self-confidence sees the angel in the unhewn block of marble; self-reliance carves it out for himself.
The man who is self-reliant says ever: “No one can realize my possibilities for me, but me; no one can make me good or evil but myself.” He works out his own salvation,--financially, socially, mentally, physically, and morally. Life is an individual problem that man must solve for himself. Nature accepts no vicarious sacrifice, no vicarious service. Nature never recognizes a proxy vote. She has nothing to do with middle-men,--she deals only with the individual. Nature is constantly seeking to show man that he is his own best friend, or his own worst enemy. Nature gives man the option on which he will be to himself.
All the athletic exercises in the world are of no value to the individual unless he compel those bars and dumb-bells to yield to him, in strength and muscle, the power for which he, himself, pays in time and effort. He can never develop his muscles by sending his valet to a gymnasium.
The medicine-chests of the world are powerless, in all the united efforts, to help the individual until he reach out and take for himself what is needed for his individual weakness.
All the religions of the world are but speculations in morals, mere theories of salvation, until the individual realize that he must save himself by relying on the law of truth, as he sees it, and living his life in harmony with it, as fully as he can. But religion is not a Pullman car, with soft-cushioned seats, where he has but to pay for his ticket,--and some one else does all the rest. In religion, as in all other great things, he is ever thrown back on his self-reliance. He should accept all helps, but,--he must live his own life. He should not feel that he is a mere passenger; he is the engineer, and the train is his life. We must rely on ourselves, live our own lives, or we merely drift through existence,--losing all that is best, all that is greatest, all that is divine.
All that others can do for us is to give us opportunity. We must ever be prepared for the opportunity when it comes, and to go after it and find it when it does not come, or that opportunity is to us,--nothing. Life is but a succession of opportunities. They are for good or evil,--as we make them.
Many of the alchemists of old felt that they lacked but one element; if they could obtain that one, they believed they could transmute the baser metals into pure gold. It is so in character. There are individuals with rare mental gifts, and delicate spiritual discernment who fail utterly in life because they lack the one element,--self-reliance. This would unite all their energies, and focus them into strength and power.
The man who is not self-reliant is weak, hesitating and doubting in all he does. He fears to take a decisive step, because he dreads failure, because he is waiting for some one to advise him or because he dare not act in accordance with his own best judgment. In his cowardice and his conceit he sees all his non-success due to others. He is “not appreciated,” “not recognized,” he is “kept down.” He feels that in some subtle way “society is conspiring against him.” He grows almost vain as he thinks that no one has had such poverty, such sorrow, such affliction, such failure as have come to him.
The man who is self-reliant seeks ever to discover and conquer the weakness within him that keeps him from the attainment of what he holds dearest; he seeks within himself the power to battle against all outside influences. He realizes that all the greatest men in history, in every phase of human effort, have been those who have had to fight against the odds of sickness, suffering, sorrow. To him, defeat is no more than passing through a tunnel is to a traveller,--he knows he must emerge again into the sunlight.
The nation that is strongest is the one that is most self-reliant, the one that contains within its boundaries all that its people need. If, with its ports all blockaded it has not within itself the necessities of life and the elements of its continual progress then,--it is weak, held by the enemy, and it is but a question of time till it must surrender. Its independence is in proportion to its self-reliance, to its power to sustain itself from within. What is true of nations is true of individuals. The history of nations is but the biography of individuals magnified, intensified, multiplied, and projected on the screen of the past. History is the biography of a nation; biography is the history of an individual. So it must be that the individual who is most strong in any trial, sorrow or need is he who can live from his inherent strength, who needs no scaffolding of commonplace sympathy to uphold him. He must ever be self-reliant.
The wealth and prosperity of ancient Rome, relying on her slaves to do the real work of the nation, proved the nation’s downfall. The constant dependence on the captives of war to do the thousand details of life for them, killed self-reliance in the nation and in the individual. Then, through weakened self-reliance and the increased opportunity for idle, luxurious ease that came with it, Rome, a nation of fighters, became,--a nation of men more effeminate than women. As we depend on others to do those things we should do for ourselves, our self-reliance weakens and our powers and our control of them becomes continuously less.
Man to be great must be self-reliant. Though he may not be so in all things, he must be self-reliant in the one in which he would be great. This self-reliance is not the self-sufficiency of conceit. It is daring to stand alone. Be an oak, not a vine. Be ready to give support, but do not crave it; do not be dependent on it. To develop your true self-reliance, you must see from the very beginning that life is a battle you must fight for yourself,--you must be your own soldier. You cannot buy a substitute, you cannot win a reprieve, you can never be placed on the retired list. The retired list of life is,--death. The world is busy with its own cares, sorrows and joys, and pays little heed to you. There is but one great password to success,--self-reliance.
If you would learn to converse, put yourself into positions where you must speak. If you would conquer your morbidness, mingle with the bright people around you, no matter how difficult it may be. If you desire the power that some one else possesses, do not envy his strength, and dissipate your energy by weakly wishing his force were yours. Emulate the process by which it became his, depend on your self-reliance, pay the price for it, and equal power may be yours. The individual must look upon himself as an investment, of untold possibilities if rightly developed,--a mine whose resources can never be known but by going down into it and bringing out what is hidden.
Man can develop his self-reliance by seeking constantly to surpass himself. We try too much to surpass others. If we seek ever to surpass ourselves, we are moving on a uniform line of progress, that gives a harmonious unifying to our growth in all its parts. Daniel Morrell, at one time President of the Cambria Rail Works, that employed 7,000 men and made a rail famed throughout the world, was asked the secret of the great success of the works. “We have no secret,” he said, “but this,--we always try to beat our last batch of rails.” Competition is good, but it has its danger side. There is a tendency to sacrifice real worth to mere appearance, to have seeming rather than reality. But the true competition is the competition of the individual with himself,--his present seeking to excel his past. This means real growth from within. Self-reliance develops it, and it develops self-reliance. Let the individual feel thus as to his own progress and possibilities, and he can almost create his life as he will. Let him never fall down in despair at dangers and sorrows at a distance; they may be harmless, like Bunyan’s stone lions, when he nears them.
The man who is self-reliant does not live in the shadow of some one else’s greatness; he thinks for himself, depends on himself, and acts for himself. In throwing the individual thus back upon himself it is not shutting his eyes to the stimulus and light and new life that come with the warm pressure of the hand, the kindly word and the sincere expressions of true friendship. But true friendship is rare; its great value is in a crisis,--like a lifeboat. Many a boasted friend has proved a leaking, worthless “lifeboat” when the storm of adversity might make him useful. In these great crises of life, man is strong only as he is strong from within, and the more he depends on himself the stronger will he become, and the more able will he be to help others in the hour of their need. His very life will be a constant help and a strength to others, as he becomes to them a living lesson of the dignity of self-reliance.
5. Failure as a Success
It ofttimes requires heroic courage to face fruitless effort, to take up the broken strands of a life-work, to look bravely toward the future, and proceed undaunted on our way. But what, to our eyes, may seem hopeless failure is often but the dawning of a greater success. It may contain in its débris the foundation material of a mighty purpose, or the revelation of new and higher possibilities.
Some years ago, it was proposed to send logs from Canada to New York, by a new method. The ingenious plan of Mr. Joggins was to bind great logs together by cables and iron girders and to tow the cargo as a raft. When the novel craft neared New York and success seemed assured, a terrible storm arose. In the fury of the tempest, the iron bands snapped like icicles and the angry waters scattered the logs far and wide. The chief of the Hydrographic Department at Washington heard of the failure of the experiment, and at once sent word to shipmasters the world over, urging them to watch carefully for these logs which he described; and to note the precise location of each in latitude and longitude and the time the observation was made.
Hundreds of captains, sailing over the waters of the earth, noted the logs, in the Atlantic Ocean, in the Mediterranean, in the South Seas--for into all waters did these venturesome ones travel. Hundreds of reports were made, covering a period of weeks and months. These observations were then carefully collated, systematized and tabulated, and discoveries were made as to the course of ocean currents that otherwise would have been impossible. The loss of the Joggins raft was not a real failure, for it led to one of the great discoveries in modern marine geography and navigation.
In our superior knowledge we are disposed to speak in a patronizing tone of the follies of the alchemists of old. But their failure to transmute the baser metals into gold resulted in the birth of chemistry. They did not succeed in what they attempted, but they brought into vogue the natural processes of sublimation, filtration, distillation, and crystallization; they invented the alembic, the retort, the sand-bath, the water-bath and other valuable instruments. To them is due the discovery of antimony, sulphuric ether and phosphorus, the cupellation of gold and silver, the determining of the properties of saltpetre and its use in gunpowder, and the discovery of the distillation of essential oils. This was the success of failure, a wondrous process of Nature for the highest growth,--a mighty lesson of comfort, strength, and encouragement if man would only realize and accept it.
Many of our failures sweep us to greater heights of success, than we ever hoped for in our wildest dreams. Life is a successive unfolding of success from failure. In discovering America Columbus failed absolutely. His ingenious reasoning and experiment led him to believe that by sailing westward he would reach India. Every redman in America carries in his name “Indian,” the perpetuation of the memory of the failure of Columbus. The Genoese navigator did not reach India; the cargo of “souvenirs” he took back to Spain to show to Ferdinand and Isabella as proofs of his success, really attested his failure. But the discovery of America was a greater success than was any finding of a “back-door” to India.
When David Livingstone had supplemented his theological education by a medical course, he was ready to enter the missionary field. For over three years he had studied tirelessly, with all energies concentrated on one aim,--to spread the gospel in China. The hour came when he was ready to start out with noble enthusiasm for his chosen work, to consecrate himself and his life to his unselfish ambition. Then word came from China that the “opium war” would make it folly to attempt to enter the country. Disappointment and failure did not long daunt him; he offered himself as missionary to Africa,--and he was accepted. His glorious failure to reach China opened a whole continent to light and truth. His study proved an ideal preparation for his labors as physician, explorer, teacher and evangel in the wilds of Africa.
Business reverses and the failure of his partner threw upon the broad shoulders and the still broader honor and honesty of Sir Walter Scott a burden of responsibility that forced him to write. The failure spurred him to almost super-human effort. The masterpieces of Scotch historic fiction that have thrilled, entertained and uplifted millions of his fellow-men are a glorious monument on the field of a seeming failure.
When Millet, the painter of the “Angelus” worked on his almost divine canvas, in which the very air seems pulsing with the regenerating essence of spiritual reverence, he was painting against time, he was antidoting sorrow, he was racing against death. His brush strokes, put on in the early morning hours before going to his menial duties as a railway porter, in the dusk like that perpetuated on his canvas,--meant strength, food and medicine for the dying wife he adored. The art failure that cast him into the depths of poverty unified with marvellous intensity all the finer elements of his nature. This rare spiritual unity, this purging of all the dross of triviality as he passed through the furnace of poverty, trial, and sorrow gave eloquence to his brush and enabled him to paint as never before,--as no prosperity would have made possible.
Failure is often the turning-point, the pivot of circumstance that swings us to higher levels. It may not be financial success, it may not be fame; it may be new draughts of spiritual, moral or mental inspiration that will change us for all the later years of our life. Life is not really what comes to us, but what we get from it.
Whether man has had wealth or poverty, failure or success, counts for little when it is past. There is but one question for him to answer, to face boldly and honestly as an individual alone with his conscience and his destiny:
“How will I let that poverty or wealth affect me? If that trial or deprivation has left me better, truer, nobler, then,--poverty has been riches, failure has been a success. I f wealth has come to me and has made me vain, arrogant, contemptuous, uncharitable, cynical, closing from me all the tenderness of life, all the channels of higher development, of possible good to my fellow-man, making me the mere custodian of a money-bag, then,--wealth has lied to me, it has been failure, not success; it has not been riches, it has been dark, treacherous poverty that stole from me even Myself.” All things become for us then what we take from them.
Failure is one of God’s educators. It is experience leading man to higher things; it is the revelation of a way, a path hitherto unknown to us. The best men in the world, those who have made the greatest real successes look back with serene happiness on their failures. The turning of the face of Time shows all things in a wondrously illuminated and satisfying perspective.
Many a man is thankful to-day that some petty success for which he once struggled, melted into thin air as his hand sought to clutch it. Failure is often the rock-bottom foundation of real success. If man, in a few instances of his life can say, “Those failures were the best things in the world that could have happened to me,” should he not face new failures with undaunted courage and trust that the miraculous ministry of Nature may transform these new stumbling-blocks into new stepping-stones?
Our highest hopes, are often destroyed to prepare us for better things. The failure of the caterpillar is the birth of the butterfly; the passing of the bud is the becoming of the rose; the death or destruction of the seed is the prelude to its resurrection as wheat. It is at night, in the darkest hours, those preceding dawn, that plants grow best, that they most increase in size. May this not be one of Nature’s gentle showings to man of the times when he grows best, of the darkness of failure that is evolving into the sunlight of success. Let us fear only the failure of not living the right as we see it, leaving the results to the guardianship of the Infinite.
If we think of any supreme moment of our lives, any great success, any one who is dear to us, and then consider how we reached that moment, that success, that friend, we will be surprised and strengthened by the revelation. As we trace each one, back, step by step, through the genealogy of circumstances, we will see how logical has been the course of our joy and success, from sorrow and failure, and that what gives us most happiness to-day is inextricably connected with what once caused us sorrow. Many of the rivers of our greatest prosperity and growth have had their source and their trickling increase into volume among the dark, gloomy recesses of our failure.
There is no honest and true work, carried along with constant and sincere purpose that ever really fails. If it sometime seem to be wasted effort, it will prove to us a new lesson of “how” to walk; the secret of our failures will prove to us the inspiration of possible successes. Man living with the highest aims, ever as best he can, in continuous harmony with them, is a success, no matter what statistics of failure a near-sighted and half-blind world of critics and commentators may lay at his door.
High ideals, noble efforts will make seeming failures but trifles, they need not dishearten us; they should prove sources of new strength. The rocky way may prove safer than the slippery path of smoothness. Birds cannot fly best with the wind but against it; ships do not progress in calm, when the sails flap idly against the unstrained masts.
The alchemy of Nature, superior to that of the Paracelsians, constantly transmutes the baser metals of failure into the later pure gold of higher success, if the mind of the worker be kept true, constant and untiring in the service, and he have that sublime courage that defies fate to its worst while he does his best.
6. Doing Our Best at All Times
Life is a wondrously complex problem for the individual, until, some day, in a moment of illumination, he awakens to the great realization that he can make it simple,--never quite simple, but always simpler. There are a thousand mysteries of right and wrong that have baffled the wise men of the ages. There are depths in the great fundamental questions of the human race that no plummet of philosophy has ever sounded. There are wild cries of honest hunger for truth that seek to pierce the silence beyond the grave, but to them ever echo back,--only a repetition of their unanswered cries.
To us all, comes, at times, the great note of questioning despair that darkens our horizon and paralyzes our effort: “If there really be a God, if eternal justice really rule the world,” we say, “why should life be as it is? Why do some men starve while others feast; why does virtue often languish in the shadow while vice triumphs in the sunshine; why does failure so often dog the footsteps of honest effort, while the success that comes from trickery and dishonor is greeted with the world’s applause? How is it that the loving father of one family is taken by death, while the worthless incumbrance of another is spared? Why is there so much unnecessary pain, sorrowing and suffering in the world--why, indeed, should there be any?”
Neither philosophy nor religion can give any final satisfactory answer that is capable of logical demonstration, of absolute proof. There is ever, even after the best explanations, a residuum of the unexplained. We must then fall back in the eternal arms of faith, and be wise enough to say, “I will not be disconcerted by these problems of life, I will not permit them to plunge me into doubt, and to cloud my life with vagueness and uncertainty. Man arrogates much to himself when he demands from the Infinite the full solution of all His mysteries. I will found my life on the impregnable rock of a simple fundamental truth:--‘This glorious creation with its millions of wondrous phenomena pulsing ever in harmony with eternal law must have a Creator, that Creator must be omniscient and omnipotent. But that Creator Himself cannot, in justice, demand of any creature more than the best that that individual can give.’ I will do each day, in every moment, the best I can by the light I have; I will ever seek more light, more perfect illumination of truth, and ever live as best I can in harmony with the truth as I see it. If failure come I will meet it bravely; if my pathway then lie in the shadow of trial, sorrow and suffering, I shall have the restful peace and the calm strength of one who has done his best, who can look back upon the past with no pang of regret, and who has heroic courage in facing the results, whatever they be, knowing that he could not make them different.”
Upon this life-plan, this foundation, man may erect any superstructure of religion or philosophy that he conscientiously can erect; he should add to his equipment for living every shred of strength and inspiration, moral, mental or spiritual that is in his power to secure. This simple working faith is opposed to no creed, is a substitute for none; it is but a primary belief, a citadel, a refuge where the individual can retire for strength when the battle of life grows hard.
A mere theory of life, that remains but a theory, is about as useful to a man, as a gilt-edged menu is to a starving sailor on a raft in mid-ocean . It is irritating but not stimulating. No rule for higher living will help a man in the slightest, until he reach out and appropriate it for himself, until he make it practical in his daily life, until that seed of theory in his mind blossom into a thousand flowers of thought and word and act.
If a man honestly seeks to live his best at all times, that determination is visible in every moment of his living, no trifle in his life can be too insignificant to reflect his principle of living. The sun illuminates and beautifies a fallen leaf by the roadside as impartially as a towering mountain peak in the Alps. Every drop of water in the ocean is an epitome of the chemistry of the whole ocean; every drop is subject to precisely the same laws as dominate the united infinity of billions of drops that make that miracle of Nature, men call the Sea. No matter how humble the calling of the individual, how uninteresting and dull the round of his duties, he should do his best. He should dignify what he is doing by the mind he puts into it, he should vitalize what little he has of power or energy or ability or opportunity, in order to prepare himself to be equal to higher privileges when they come. This will never lead man to that weak content that is satisfied with whatever falls to his lot. It will rather fill his mind with that divine discontent that cheerfully accepts the best,--merely as a temporary substitute for something better.
The man who is seeking ever to do his best is the man who is keen, active, wide-awake, and aggressive. He is ever watchful of himself in trifles; his standard is not “What will the world say?” but “Is it worthy of me?”
Edwin Booth, one of the greatest actors on the American stage, would never permit himself to assume an ungraceful attitude, even in his hours of privacy. In this simple thing, he ever lived his best. On the stage every move was one of unconscious grace. Those of his company who were conscious of their motions were the awkward ones, who were seeking in public to undo or to conceal the carelessness of the gestures and motions of their private life. The man who is slipshod and thoughtless in his daily speech, whose vocabulary is a collection of anemic commonplaces, whose repetitions of phrases and extravagance of interjections act but as feeble disguises to his lack of ideas, will never be brilliant on an occasion when he longs to outshine the stars. Living at one’s best is constant preparation for instant use. It can never make one over-precise, self-conscious, affected, or priggish. Education, in its highest sense, is conscious training of mind or body to act unconsciously. It is conscious formation of mental habits, not mere acquisition of information.
One of the many ways in which the individual unwisely eclipses himself, is in his worship of the fetich of luck. He feels that all others are lucky, and that whatever he attempts, fails. He does not realize the untiring energy, the unremitting concentration, the heroic courage, the sublime patience that is the secret of some men’s success. Their “luck” was that they had prepared themselves to be equal to their opportunity when it came and were awake to recognize it and receive it. His own opportunity came and departed unnoted, it would not waken him from his dreams of some untold wealth that would fall into his lap. So he grows discouraged and envies those whom he should emulate, and he bandages his arm and chloroforms his energies, and performs his duties in a perfunctory way, or he passes through life, just ever “sampling” lines of activity.
The honest, faithful struggler should always realize that failure is but an episode in a true man’s life,--never the whole story. It is never easy to meet, and no philosophy can make it so, but the steadfast courage to master conditions, instead of complaining of them, will help him on his way; it will ever enable him to get the best out of what he has. He never knows the long series of vanquished failures that give solidity to some one else’s success; he does not realize the price that some rich man, the innocent football of political malcontents and demagogues, has heroicly paid for wealth and position.
The man who has a pessimist’s doubt of all things; who demands a certified guarantee of his future; who ever fears his work will not be recognized or appreciated; or that after all, it is really not worth while, will never live his best. He is dulling his capacity for real progress by his hypnotic course of excuses for inactivity, instead of a strong tonic of reasons for action.
One of the most weakening elements in the individual make-up is the surrender to the oncoming of years. Man’s self-confidence dims and dies in the fear of age. “This new thought,” he says of some suggestion tending to higher development, “is good; it is what we need. I am glad to have it for my children; I would have been happy to have had some such help when I was at school, but it is too late for me. I am a man advanced in years.”
This is but blind closing of life to wondrous possibilities. The knell of lost opportunity is never tolled in this life. It is never too late to recognize truth and to live by it. It requires only greater effort, closer attention, deeper consecration; but the impossible does not exist for the man who is self-confident and is willing to pay the price in time and struggle for his success or development. Later in life, the assessments are heavier in progress, as in life insurance, but that matters not to that mighty self-confidence that will not grow old while knowledge can keep it young.
Socrates, when his hair whitened with the snow of age, learned to play on instruments of music. Cato, at fourscore, began his study of Greek, and the same age saw Plutarch beginning, with the enthusiasm of a boy, his first lessons in Latin. The Character of Man, Theophrastus’ greatest work, was begun on his ninetieth birthday. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was the work of the poet’s declining years. Ronsard, the father of French poetry, whose sonnets even translation cannot destroy, did not develop his poetic faculty until nearly fifty. Benjamin Franklin at this age had just taken his really first steps of importance in philosophic pursuits. Arnauld, the theologian and sage, translated Josephus in his eightieth year. Winckelmann, one of the most famous writers on classic antiquities, was the son of a shoemaker, and lived in obscurity and ignorance until the prime of life. Hobbes, the English philosopher, published his version of the Odyssey in his eighty-seventh year, and his Iliad one year later. Chevreul, the great French scientist, whose untiring labors in the realm of color have so enriched the world, was busy, keen and active when Death called him, at the age of 103.
These men did not fear age; these few names from the great muster-roll of the famous ones who defied the years, should be voices of hope and heartening to every individual whose courage and confidence is weak. The path of truth, higher living, truer development in every phase of life, is never shut from the individual--until he closes it himself. Let man feel this, believe it and make this faith a real and living factor in his life and there are no limits to his progress. He has but to live his best at all times, and rest calm and untroubled no matter what results come to his efforts. The constant looking backward to what might have been, instead of forward to what may be, is a great weakener of self-confidence. This worry for the old past, this wasted energy, for that which no power in the world can restore, ever lessens the individual’s faith in himself, weakens his efforts to develop himself for the future to the perfection of his possibilities.
Nature in her beautiful love and tenderness, says to man, weakened and worn and weary with the struggle, “Do in the best way you can the trifle that is under your hand at this moment; do it in the best spirit of preparation for the future your thought suggests; bring all the light of knowledge from all the past to aid you. Do this and you have done your best. The past is forever closed to you. It is closed forever to you. No worry, no struggle, no suffering, no agony of despair can alter it. It is as much beyond your power as if it were a million years of eternity behind you. Turn all that past, with its sad hours, weakness and sin, its wasted opportunities as light; in confidence and hope, upon the future. Turn it all in fuller truth and light so as to make each trifle of this present a new past it will be joy to look back to; each trifle a grander, nobler, and more perfect preparation for the future. The present and the future you can make from it, is yours; the past has gone back, with all its messages, all its history, all its records to the God who loaned you the golden moments to use in obedience to His law.”
7. The Royal Road to Happiness
“During my whole life I have not had twenty-four hours of happiness." So said Prince Bismarck, one of the greatest statesmen of the nineteenth century. Eighty-three years of wealth, fame, honors, power, influence, prosperity and triumph, – years when he held an empire in his fingers, – but not one day of happiness!
Happiness is the greatest paradox in Nature. It can grow in any soil, live under any conditions. It defies environment. It comes from within; it is the revelation of the depths of the inner life as light and heat proclaim the sun from which they radiate. Happiness consists not of having, but of being; not of possessing, but of enjoying. It is the warm glow of a heart at peace with itself. A martyr at the stake may have happiness that a king on his throne might envy. Man is the creator of his own happiness; it is the aroma of a life lived in harmony with high ideals. For what a man has, he may be dependent on others; what he is, rests with him alone. What he obtains in life is but acquisition; what he attains, is growth. Happiness is the soul’s joy in the possession of the intangible. Absolute, perfect, continuous happiness in life, is impossible for the human. It would mean the consummation of attainments, the individual consciousness of a perfectly fulfilled destiny. Happiness is paradoxic because it may coexist with trial, sorrow and poverty. I t is the gladness of the heart, – rising superior to all conditions.
Happiness has a number of under-studies, – gratification, satisfaction, content, and pleasure, – clever imitators that simulate its appearance rather than emulate its method. Gratification is a harmony between our desires and our possessions. It is ever incomplete, it is the thankful acceptance of part. It is a mental pleasure in the quality of what one receives, an unsatisfiedness as to the quantity. It may be an element in happiness, but, in itself, – it is not happiness.
Satisfaction is perfect identity of our desires and our possessions. It exists only so long as this perfect union and unity can be preserved. But every realized ideal gives birth to new ideals, every step in advance reveals large domains of the unattained; every feeding stimulates new appetites, – then the desires and possessions are no longer identical, no longer equal; new cravings call forth new activities, the equipoise is destroyed, and dissatisfaction reenters. Man might possess everything tangible in the world and yet not be happy, for happiness is the satisfying of the soul, not of the mind or the body. Dissatisfaction, in its highest sense, is the keynote of all advance, the evidence of new aspirations, the guarantee of the progressive revelation of new possibilities.
Content is a greatly overrated virtue. It is a kind of diluted despair; it is the feeling with which we continue to accept substitutes, without striving for the realities. Content makes the trained individual swallow vinegar and try to smack his lips as if it were wine. Content enables one to warm his hands at the fire of a past joy that exists only in memory. Content is a mental and moral chloroform that deadens the activities of the individual to rise to higher planes of life and growth. Man should never be contented with anything less than the best efforts of his nature can possibly secure for him. Content makes the world more comfortable for the individual, but it is the death-knell of progress.
Man should be content with each step of progress merely as a station, discontented with it as a destination; contented with it as a step; discontented with it as a finality. There are times when a man should be content with what he has, but never with what he is.
But content is not happiness; neither is pleasure. Pleasure is temporary, happiness is continuous; pleasure is a note, happiness is a symphony; pleasure may exist when conscience utters protests; happiness, – never. Pleasure may have its dregs and its lees; but none can be found in the cup of happiness.
Man is the only animal that can be really happy. To the rest of the creation belong only weak imitations of the understudies. Happiness represents a peaceful attunement of a life with a standard of living. It can never be made by the individual, by himself, for himself. It is one of the incidental by-products of an unselfish life. No man can make his own happiness the one object of his life and attain it, any more than he can jump on the far end of his shadow. If you would hit the bull’s-eye of happiness on the target of life, aim above it. Place other things higher than your own happiness and it will surely come to you. You can buy pleasure, you can acquire content, you can become satisfied, – but Nature never put real happiness on the bargain-counter. It is the undetachable accompaniment of true living. It is calm and peaceful; it never lives in an atmosphere of worry or of hopeless struggle.
The basis of happiness is the love of something outside self. Search every instance of happiness in the world, and you will find, when all the incidental features are eliminated, there is always the constant, unchangeable element of love, – love of parent for child; love of man and woman for each other; love of humanity in some form, or a great life work into which the individual throws all his energies.
Happiness is the voice of optimism, of faith, of simple, steadfast love. No cynic or pessimist can be really happy. A cynic is a man who is morally near-sighted, – and brags about it. He sees the evil in his own heart, and thinks he sees the world. He lets a mote in his eye eclipse the sun. An incurable cynic is an individual who should long for death, – for life cannot bring him happiness, death might. The keynote of Bismarck’s lack of happiness was his profound distrust of human nature.
There is a royal road to happiness; it lies in Consecration, Concentration, Conquest and Conscience.
Consecration is dedicating the individual life to the service of others, to some noble mission, to realizing some unselfish ideal. Life is not something to be lived through; it is something to be lived up to. It is a privilege, not a penal servitude of so many decades on earth. Consecration places the object of life above the mere acquisition of money, as a finality. The man who is unselfish, kind, loving, tender, helpful, ready to lighten the burden of those around him, to hearten the struggling ones, to forget himself sometimes in remembering others, – is on the right road to happiness. Consecration is ever active, bold and aggressive, fearing naught but possible disloyalty to high ideals.
Concentration makes the individual life simpler and deeper. It cuts away the shams and pretences of modern living and limits life to its truest essentials. Worry, fear, useless regret, – all the great wastes that sap mental, moral or physical energy must be sacrificed, or the individual needlessly destroys half the possibilities of living. A great purpose in life, something that unifies the strands and threads of each day’s thinking, something that takes the sting from the petty trials, sorrows, sufferings and blunders of life, is a great aid to Concentration. Soldiers in battle may forget their wounds, or even be unconscious of them, in the inspiration of battling for what they believe is right. Concentration dignifies an humble life; it makes a great life, – sublime. In morals it is a short-cut to simplicity. It leads to right for right’s sake, without thought of policy or of reward. It brings calm and rest to the individual, – a serenity that is but the sunlight of happiness.
Conquest is the overcoming of an evil habit, the rising superior to opposition and attack, the spiritual exaltation that comes from resisting the invasion of the grovelling material side of life. Sometimes when you are worn and weak with the struggle; when it seems that justice is a dream, that honesty and loyalty and truth count for nothing, that the devil is the only good paymaster; when hope grows dim and flickers, then is the time when you must tower in the great sublime faith that Right must prevail, then must you throttle these imps of doubt and despair, you must master yourself to master the world around you. This is Conquest; this is what counts. Even a log can float with the current, it takes a man to fight sturdily against an opposing tide that would sweep his craft out of its course. When the jealousies, the petty intrigues and the meannesses and the misunderstandings in life assail you, – rise above them. Be like a lighthouse that illumines and beautifies the snarling, swashing waves of the storm that threaten it, that seek to undermine it and seek to wash over it. This is Conquest. When the chance to win fame, wealth, success or the attainment of your heart’s desire, by sacrifice of honor or principle, comes to you and it does not affect you long enough even to seem a temptation, you have been the victor. That too is Conquest. And Conquest is part of the royal road to Happiness.
Conscience, as the mentor, the guide and compass of every act, leads ever to Happiness. When the individual can stay alone with his conscience and get its approval, without using force or specious logic, then he begins to know what real Happiness is. But the individual must be careful that he is not appealing to a conscience perverted or deadened by the wrongdoing and subsequent deafness of its owner. The man who is honestly seeking to live his life in Consecration, Concentration and Conquest, living from day to day as best he can, by the light he has, may rely explicitly on his Conscience. He can shut his ears to “what the world says” and find in the approval of his own conscience the highest earthly tribune, – the voice of the Infinite communing with the Individual.
Unhappiness is the hunger to get; Happiness is the hunger to give. True happiness must ever have the tinge of sorrow outlived, the sense of pain softened by the mellowing years, the chastening of loss that in the wondrous mystery of time transmutes our suffering into love and sympathy with others.
If the individual should set out for a single day to give Happiness, to make life happier, brighter and sweeter, not for himself, but for others, he would find a wondrous revelation of what Happiness really is. The greatest of the world’s heroes could not by any series of acts of heroism do as much real good as any individual living his whole life in seeking, from day to day, to make others happy.
Each day there should be fresh resolution, new strength, and renewed enthusiasm. “Just for Today” might be the daily motto of thousands of societies throughout the country, composed of members bound together to make the world better through constant simple acts of kindness, constant deeds of sweetness and love. And Happiness would come to them, in its highest and best form, not because they would seek to absorb it, but, – because they seek to radiate it.
The Trusteeship of Life
1. The Finer Spirit of Trusteeship
The individual never sees life in the radiant glow of its greatness, its dignity and its privi lege until he realizes it as trusteeship. Life itself is but the in dividual trusteeship of time. Man does not truly own even his own life; he has merely a life-interest in it, and some time he must surrender it.
In the truest sense, man owns noth ing absolutely, to do with precisely as he pleases; over all his possessions ever breathes the spirit of trusteeship. His time, his money, his health, his mind, his character, his business, his worldly goods, his opportunities, his influence—all that he is, and has, he holds but as trustee for his higher self, the world around him, and humanity itself. These possessions are all covered by a first mortgage of the rights of others.
Trusteeship began away back in the dawn of history, with the very first in an, when the earth was young and the first tenants moved in. Adam had a wonderful chance: he owned the whole world except one tree, he lived abso lutely rent-free with everything pro vided for him without cost, and had very little to do. He was entrusted with three things—himself, a garden and a woman—and he failed in his ad ministration of all three. And we have been paying the price ever since. Adam ignored trusteeship, Peter denied it, Pilate repudiated it—and all suffered. Across the pages of all lives is written this one word, trusteeship. The final test of the men of the ages is not what they had, but what they did with it.
Trusteeship is one of the great words of life because it concentrates in a single expression the essence of all true living. It inspires man with the revela tion of his constant relation to himself, to all others and to the Infinite. It gives a royal dignity to life, making man, not a mere isolated individual, but interblended with other lives and an in dispensable factor in the whole scheme of living.
Health is trusteeship. Man some times says, “My health is my own. If I choose to neglect it or to ruin it, that is no one else’s business.” This foolish boast of ownership would not be justified even if made by Robinson Crusoe on his lonely island, for any day he might have been rescued and taken back to the world of men. We have no more right wilfully or carelessly to in jure our own health than we have to in jure the health of another. Man cannot do his best, in all his relations to him self and to others, unless he is at his best physically. When he fails through carelessness or recklessness he is mak ing himself an unnecessary burden on the care of others, he is making them pay for his wrong, he is invading their rights. The overlapping of our rights into the rights of others is ever under the guardianship of trusteeship. It re veals our constant dependence on each other in all the relations of life.
Wealth is trusteeship. He who has riches has every right to spend it freely, generously for the good things of life for himself and for those dear and near to him, but there is an overflow that belongs to those he can help, to those who need it. This should not be doled out reluctantly as we pay tithes or taxes, but in a glad spirit of joy at being able to give, and being privileged to give. A little here and a little there may bring new courage to some one strug gling, the dawn of new hope to some one weary and faint-hearted, a new chance and a new inspiration to some one to pull through a crisis.
Wealth is but a great human privi lege committed to one to do his part toward equalizing the inequalities of opportunity and need. This trusteeship is no easy task. It is infinite possibilities of helpfulness concentrated in coins. Absolutely dividing with the world, or splashing wealth indiscriminately even in gifts would be folly, and perhaps bring more harm than good. It is a trust not to be dodged nor evaded, but to be accepted, with all the dignity and the burden of trusteeship.
Citizenship is trusteeship. He who is interested only in questions that ap peal directly to himself and his selfish ness, letting himself eclipse his city, is a citizen in name but not in essence. He has not an ounce of public spirit. He has no right to criticize and con demn those in power, in the city, state or nation, if he does nothing by his initiative, influence or cooperation to change conditions. A people usually gets the government it deserves, what it accepts, what it surrenders to, what it tolerates. Every man has a vote of selection, a voice of influence and a veto of protest. There are men who feel they are fulifiling their duty when they vote, without the least personal thinking, a straight party ticket. They do not put into their decision as to the relative qualities of two candidates to rule the nation as much thought and in vestigation as they would put into se lecting an office boy and looking up his references. Every citizen in a city is trustee for its government; it is the duty of trustees to know its workings, to judge of its administration and to attend some of its meetings.
Friendship is trusteeship. It must be nourished and nurtured, as we care for a plant, or it will die. It is the joint trusteeship of two over a rare posses sion common to both; each can do part, neither can do all. Some people like the premiums of friendship but dodge its assessments; they think more of what they can get than of what they can give, they do not fill their thoughts so completely with the riches of what they have, that it is a joy to enrich it still more by constant acts of expres sion and service.
Love is trusteeship. Those who may yearn for it, struggle to attain it and have joy in its possession, may soon drift into a false sense of ownership instead of the watchful guardian spirit of trusteeship. Love is not a fully paid-up policy of insured happiness; we must gladly go on paying our pre miums of new thoughtful expression and service or it will languish and grow commonplace. Feeling love is nothing in itself, the mere possession means lit tle, if we do not make it constantly evi dent in little acts of fine expression that ever tell of its existence as perfume reveals the presence of a flower that we do not see.
Trusteeship must be a clear vision to the mind, a dominating sentiment in our heart, and a radiant purpose in our soul or we shall ever miss the real joy and dignity of living. It is ever the clasping hand of a loyal guide through all the mazes and problems of life. In its highest phases, it is ever the fine attitude of a fine soul, but whether we live it or not, the responsibility for the living of it ever confronts us. In its perfection it implies the strongest indi viduality consecrated to strongest co operation. It means being one’s best in order that one may think best, act best and live best. It dignifies even the poorest and narrowest of lives; it makes a great life sublime. It is putting the most into life in order that we may get the most out of life.
He who has mighty influence for good and uses it merely for petty self ish ends is false to his trusteeship. He who has talent and keeps it wrapped up in the camphor of laziness and neg lect is unfair to his stewardship. He who putters away the golden hours of his living as though they were worth less pebbles when they are really gems that a Monte Cristo might envy, is unworthy his trusteeship. He who regards his daily labour as mere drud gery, unrealizing the finer spirit of joy he could put into it and of joy he could get from it is unequal to the trust com mitted to him. Such a man exists but he does not truly live; he breathes but he does not truly grow.
We are, to a greater degree than we realize, custodians of the happiness of others. It is part of our trusteeship. No man can live for himself alone, he never alone pays the penalty of his wrongdoing, he never alone receives the whole results of the good that he does; there is always an overflow he cannot control, but the character of which he can control.
There are pillows wet with sobs because of our unkind words, there are hearts heavy with pain because of our injustice, the sunshine of some one’s whole day is darkened by our anger, some one doubts all humanity because of our ingratitude, our disloyalty, the lark-song of joy in some one’s life may be silenced for long by our momentary surrender to our temper. Man has no more right to make others suffer from his moods, gloom, meanness, injustice, selfishness or others of the whole snarling brood of petty vices, than he has to let a ferocious dog of his run at large. He should keep the dog and his own bad qualities chained at home until they can be so tamed that they will not in jure others.
Trusteeship is never satisfied by mere refraining from doing things that hurt; this is good enough as a beginning, poor as a finality. The cemeteries of the world are filled with people who are doing no harm. We are responsible for the good we might do, but which we leave undone. To few of us is given the power or the opportunity to do spectacular or monumental things for the world, but if we cannot do great things we can make the simple trifles seem great by the fine unselfish spirit we put into the doing. The widow who gave her two mites was not liberal, for she had little to give, but she was gener ous, for the spirit of fine love inspired her giving all. Each of us has a circle of power, influence, possibility, that is all our own, it is our trusteeship, our sole possession. It is not what a man is or has, but how he uses it that is the final test of living.
Trusteeship does not mean that one must be a stained-glass saint, living a life of constant self-sacrifice and self-denial. It does not mean that one should go round with the responsibility of the whole world on one’s shoulders, like a modern Atlas supporting the globe. It does not mean a life of constant self -consciousness, weighing every word and act to determine whether it is twenty-four carats fine or taking one’s moral temperature every half hour in any spirit of morbid introspection. Trusteeship means only taking a fine attitude toward life and humanity and living joyously and simply in harmony with it, being intensely human, not un pardonably good, but getting the most from life, by putting the most into life.
Few there are who feel the positive joy of liv ing, whose blood tin gles and surges with the thrill of delight just at being alive. It means loving life in a big, free, unquestioning way, feeling it a wondrous, gladsome privi lege, drinking it all in, with all it is and has of good or ill, not heroically from a half-filled cup but joyously and unstintedly as from some ever-gushing spring.
Those who love life in this way have a buoyant, bubbling gladness that fills them to the brim and spills itself in joy and laughter that overflows into the lives of others. In their presence one feels a finer, truer attitude toward life, a sense of being on the mountain tops and breathing a purer air, a new touch of courage and inspiration that makes even the hard problems of life, for the time, seem nothing.
It is not that life has brought much to these men, but that they have brought much to life. It is not what they have, but what they are that makes their living a joy. When we look into what they have, we find it is rarely any direct personal possessions, but merely the great common things of life that belong to us all. But they bring to these things the seeing eye, the listening ear, the sympathetic mind and the heart attuned to all life. They own the whole world around them through their intense interest, their vivid imagination, their fine in terpretation. They make even the commonplace wonderful by the spirit they bring to it. As the poet Gannett has so picturesquely expressed it:
“The poem hangs on the berry-bush
When comes the poet’s eye,
The street begins to masquerade
When Shakespeare passes by.”
In the city they find the joy note in the big simple things that appeal to every side of their nature. The slant of shadow cast by strong sunlight on some building, the sky line over the park, the hurrying crowds, a group of children at play, a store window, the wealth of colour and perfume reach ing their senses through the open door of a florist’s shop, a picturesque house -front, a vista through the trees,—the infinite variety of the commonplace that has constant freshness and ever new-born thrill and joy to them.
They love humanity and have kin ship of interest and sympathy with rich and poor alike. They love peo ple because they understand them, and understand them because they love them. They see and feel more than appears to their eyes alone, they read faces and imagine life-stories, threads of conversation heard in pass ing appeal to them; they see the hu mour of street scenes, they realize the pathos and the tragedy of life but are not dulled or depressed by them, for ever they seek to lighten them and lessen them by their sympathy, their help, their influence.
The vital pulsing life of a great city with its undertones, its splashing waves of frivolity, its mighty ebb and flow, its relentless surge and roar, ap peal to them much as the ocean itself speaks to those who love it, its infinite moods echo in their own souls, its maj esty inspires but does not awe, its rage speaks ever of remembered calm and dancing waves capped with sunshine.
In country, as in city, the world around them is ever a place of wonder and beauty, with the freshness of the dew of the morning of creation still beading moist and bright upon it. Their eyes never tire in resting rev erently on the splendour of the sunlit hills; they love with the soul’s devo tion the trees in the woods, God’s mir acles in green; the dancing shadows on the fields of corn, the gurgle and murmur of a mountain brook, the cool of a garden at the sacred twilight time, the glory of midnight sky stud ded with its millions of stars trailing into finest star-dust along the wide sweep of the Milky Way.
This joy note is not a matter of temperament, it is fine character; it is not intellectual, but spiritual; the thought does not feed the emotions so much as the emotions feed the thought. Mere philosophers can never get it by any reasoning of life into its elements and formulating them into a code. They reduce it to its cold, dead anatomy, they approach life as some thing they must catalogue rather than read; they seek to master it rather than surrender to it, they live so in tensely merely intellectually that they seem to be afraid of their emotions.
The joy note in life comes from having fine emotions, trusting them giving them the freedom of a bird in the open, and, because they are fine and we trust them, permitting them to govern us instead of our dominating them. The joy note comes only to those who have preserved the child still young in their hearts, the child-spirit, strengthened, mellowed, sweet ened, grown wiser but not older, sim pler, more conscious of giving than of getting, of radiating than of absorb ing. People say that the world is growing older, but in the spirit of the joy note we must realize that each new day is as fresh from the hand of nature as if it were the first edition of the first morning. The world is ever young, it is we who grow old.
This joy in living, this love of liv ing, can never be assumed as a pose or put on from the outside as a mask. It comes from the very depths of our nature. It is a fine attitude toward life somehow transformed into the at mosphere of our living. It is surren der of self to the big things of life that spiritualize the commonplace and make it warm and glowing. It can no more be counterfeited than you could manufacture a sunbeam.
The people who have this joy of life do not talk of it, they radiate it; they do not tire you with cheap preach ments about looking on the bright side, taking inventories of your blessings, and telling yourself how happy you are when all the while you have inside information that you are miser able; they just live their joy and let it splash its sunlight and glow into other lives as naturally as a bird sings.
Those who have the joy of life are never those who have been without care, sorrow and failure, but those rare souls who have suffered and con quered, who have been mellowed, sweetened and glorified by pain, who live in peace in the arms of some sim ple constant abiding faith that cares naught for the struggle of effort to solve life’s eternal problems.
This joy never comes to the frivo lous, the superficial, the selfish. It is not the same in kind or in quality as the joy that comes to all of us in cer tain high-tide moments of life. The latter joy is the exultant acceptance of some great gift from life; the joy of life is the exultant acceptance of the great gift of life itself.
We can never get it by working for it directly; it comes, like happiness, to those who are aiming at something higher. It is a by-product of great, simple living. It is an award of Na ture, that, like an honourary univer sity degree, is conferred for what one does for humanity, not what one does for himself. We can all get part of this joy in our living.
The joy of life comes from what we put into life, not from what we seek to get from it. It is ever love that brings the joy note, big, earnest, glow ing love for something higher than self, love of Nature, of the beautiful, the true, the good, love of humanity, love of service, love of work, love of thinking, of seeing, of being, of doing. This love must be spiritualized, per meated with something higher than the material, glorying in the con sciousness of our kinship with the big eternal things of life and radiating that feeling in every phase of our day-by-day living.
The religion that does not make a man feel that he is buoyantly, exult ingly glad he is living and makes him make others glad he is living is not much of a religion. There is something wrong about it, or about our slant of interpretation of it. What a strange idea of God the Puritans had, for instance, to believe that they were doing Him honour by going about with long, sour, uncharitable faces and uncomfortable, gloomy, ramrod lives, and believing whatever was natural and joyous was wrong, and if they were as miserable here as they could make themselves it would all be squared for them, somehow, in the great beyond.
The joy note’ in life is the real note. It is higher than pleasure or even happiness. No man can have this joy without being his best and giving his best to others, meeting life undaunted and unafraid, facing bravely its trials, its sorrows, its cares, its tragedy, its pain and its loss. These are real things to us, that dull and deaden and silence the joy note in even the bravest for a time, but they do not last for ever. Much of them comes from our own wrong-doing, our own blindness, thoughtlessness and unknowing, from the wrong or weakness of those around us or from the evils of the larger world of humanity.
Life is not easy, but we can make it easier. The joy note will help, it will give us clearer heads and truer hearts. That life is hard is no recent discov ery; Adam probably thought so before two o’clock on his first day in the garden and was probably bored with loneliness.
We start out in the morning not realizing that we have been born anew, have a new start in life as though it were a new first birthday. Of course there are some mortgages left over from yesterday, but there are some dividends as well. Why should we take up our burdens of cares, wor ries, fears, duties and responsibilities as though we were hoisting to our shoulder the groaning, heavy pack of a pedlar? We grow round-shoul dered, and old and bent, physically, mentally, morally, emotionally and spiritually in peddling our pack of woes to others, instead of scattering sunshine and smiles, laughter and roses, joyous service and gladsome inspiration along the road that others may find them.
There are those around us who need the illumination of our laughter through their day, the new courage that we may bring them, the helpful ness we can give as freely as a full fountain scatters its waters, the fresh, tonic sea-tang of our joy note that brings a reminiscent smile of gladness and a new zest to living because we passed along their road.
Let us not stifle the lark song in our throat, but let it trill its way upward joyously for our own sake and for that of others. Let us find joy in our daily work; if we cannot find it we should search for it, cultivate genuine interest in mastering its problems, in making each new day better, finer, truer than its yesterday, glory in having responsibility thrust upon us, feel the glow of pride in having work that calls forth our best, of doing aught that our hand touches in a big, fine, masterly way that makes it a joy, as the touch of Old King Midas’ hand transformed all that felt its spell into pure gold.
We talk of life being the supreme gift to man, sometimes when we are in that mood, and yet we go round as though we were paying off a mort gage each day. We seek constant pleasures to offset the pain of living; in most cases it means losing one’s self, while joy consists in finding one’s self. Joy of life sees it with finer, clearer vision, in truer perspective, in spiritual communion with all that is best.
What can be finer reverence for life than living it with the joy note? Yet many preachers, poets, philosophers and pessimists belittle life, bemoan it, degrade it with their slurs and con tempt, as though it were some dismal, dreary, corrupt thing to be lived through, when it is really a great spir itual thing to be lived up to. They are life’s victims, not its victors; they feel that they deserve heaven as a compensation for having suffered life; they seem to assume that they are dig nifying a future life by saying unkind things about this one. This is not true religion, true spirituality, true living; it is but ghastly irreverence.
We hear too much about “making the best of life,” too little about “mak ing the most of it.” We make the best of a duty, the most of a privilege; the best of an evil, the most of a good; the best of a sorrow, the most of a joy.
Life is never empty except as we empty it, never dull except through our poor living, never a failure except as we fail because of petty selfish living.
Joy is radiant, expanding, exultant, expressing. It is more intense than happiness, more definite, more ex plicit, more contagious. We gravi tate naturally to sadness and depres sion, to joy we must rise. This joy is possible to all in a greater degree than we realize. In general it is not the weight of some persistent sorrow, trial, or benumbing responsibility that keeps the joy note from our life; the failure is in ourselves, not in condi tions, in our wrong attitude toward life, in measuring it by what it fails to give us rather than by the infinite bless ings it showers on us.
Let us look upon life as a glorious privilege, of fine service, not dull servi tude, of splendid giving rather than petty getting, of unselfish trusteeship rather than selfish ownership, of see ing it as our triumph, in the greatness of our powers and possibilities, over life’s trials and sorrows that cloud-like dim and dusk its beauty, its won der and its message. Let us face life each day with gladness that we are alive, that it inspires us to greater, finer, freer, fuller living, and let our joy note ring out clear and exultant, not that we ignore life’s trial, hard ship and evil, but because we see beau ties others pass by, feel underlying all its discord the eternal music of some great purpose, some higher destiny.
3. The Supreme Court of Self-Respect
Self-respect oc cupies a position very near the throne of the great words of life. It is a prince among the virtues. It never advertises. It is not for shop-window display. Its quietness, its simplicity, its modesty, its calm, unpretentious strength, have obscured from many its real dignity and value, like a diamond buried in its native quartz.
Self-respect is the Warwick of character, the King-maker of individu ality. It raises man to his loftiest levels of living, glorying in his freedom, guided by his own judgment, governed by his own conscience. It is not respect for self as it is, but reverence for what it should be. It is the supreme court of individuality, decid ing every individual act by its own high code of justice and honour.
Self-respect is so far above qualities with which it is commonly associated that it does not even move in the same set. Self-conceit loves to strut before large pier mirrors of admiration, constantly finding new points of won der in itself. Self-esteem always tries to play a bull market on its private corner of its own virtues. There are few takers, because the quotations are too high for the stock. Vanity is never satisfied with burning its own incense. Unlike the orchid, it cannot draw its nutriment from the air. It must ever be fed with the honey of flattery. Unlike the camel, it cannot live on the interest of past appetites; for, if unfed, it sickens and droops. Self-respect is insulated from all these currents of self-love.
The man who has self-respect real izes that the severest punishment he could have for a mean act would be his own consciousness that he has lowered himself in his own eyes, that he has done an act unworthy of himself. He realizes that it counts but little whether the world knows of it or not—he himself knows, he himself condemns; that is punishment enough. lie has wounded his own honour, and he feels a sense of shame that no mere argument can remove. Self-respect is justice, honour, and truth blended into a force.
He who has self-respect has a fine contempt for whatever is low, petty, mean, or vulgar. He is like a modern elevator with an automatic safety clutch; if he does drop, he cannot fall far. He quickly stops himself. No matter what the provocation, how deep the cause for righteous anger, he will never humiliate another unjustly, he will never speak mean, contempt ible words that bite deep into memory like acid into an etching plate. For the petty satisfaction of self-vindica tion he would never plant tares in the field of another’s reputation.
Self-respect meets attacks squarely, as a man should do; but it wields an honest sword. It fights in the open, and scorns to win victory by a treach erous thrust. It is a hard fighter; but it fights by the code and will stand up for the rights and honour of the indi vidual as courageously and as cor dially as any brave captain in the days of the duel.
Self-respect has red blood; it has no fear. It makes the individual respect the rights of others fully, freely, firmly, and demand that his own be equally respected. He realizes that self-respect is a double justice, to him self and to others. He is quick to re sent a real injury, quick to accept a real apology. Retaliation and revenge are so far beneath him that he would not soil his mind by even thinking of them. He makes his protest in the right way, at the right time, for the right—and that ends it. He does not deal in fan cied wrongs; he is not suspicious; he does not go round with an overheated dignity which may take cold at any moment. He is sensitive; but this means only finer justice for others, keener perception for himself.
The man whose self-respect safe guards him never takes undue advan tage. There is a strain of fine chiv alry which runs through it all. The secret of another is as secure from dis covery as though it was a pebble thrown into the sea. He would be above using it as a weapon, even of defense, no matter how hard pressed. The sanctity of his word of honour closes his lips forever. The secret be longs to the past. Broken friendship, misjudgment, or misrepresentation would never tempt him to reveal or betray it. His respect for himself, for his word, for what his friend once was, puts a lock on certain memories, and he throws away the key.
Self-respect realizes that no one but himself can degrade the individual. The undeserved insult which may sting for a moment he forgets quickly in the thought that it is only a revela tion of the character of the source from which it comes; that he himself is invulnerable from insult when he is right, when the armour of self-respect makes attack harmless.
The severest wound that our self-respect can receive, outside ourself, is from those who are near and dear to us through friendship or love. When one has honestly earned the right to be believed implicitly, through years of unbroken truthfulness, when on many occasions a simple little lie dressed in white, which remained unspoken, would have saved the situa tion, and one finds himself later disbe lieved in some supreme crisis, then it is hard. When the sacrifices that were only joy to make are profaned by cruel mistranslation, when the mu sic of the purest high notes of the soul echoes back to him as jangling discord in words of misjudgment, when the truest, finest, and most exalted mo tives are interpreted in a key of sor didness and meanness then self-re spect is wounded. It is only because emotions have been hurt, not that we have been false to principles.
Then self-respect may find itself numb with a subtle pain; it loses con fidence for a little until, like a cold douche in the face of one fainted, the shock of the cruel injustice begins the work of restoration. Self-respect al ways rights itself from unjust attacks from without, like those counterweighted toy mandarins that rise erect no matter how often pushed down. Self-respect may even be made stronger, more serene, and better bal anced by the very assault.
Self-respect never shakes dice with conscience to see who wins. It never cheats the scales of its own judgment, like a grocer weighing in his thumb when he is selling butter. It never pleads a technicality or a flaw in the indictment against self. It sees a mean action in all its rags of pettiness, though it be presented in seemingly clean robes of policy and practicality. It is above pretense in either winning or holding friends.
There is ever the instinctive feeling, though unspoken, “People must like me or dislike me for what I am. While I am living my best, it would be beneath me to counterfeit what I have not the moral courage to live.”
No man remains true, constant, and loyal for years unless inspired by self-respect. Let us trust others and let them know that we trust them. It is our self-respect recognizing theirs. There may be some who betray, it is true,—even Christ’s carefully selected little company of twelve had its Judas,—but the successes will be more than the failures; those who! betray will sometime awaken, sometime real ize. If we do what is right, we must face results with calmness, knowing that we have done our best.
There is a certain reserve in self-respect, a reverence for the fine dig nity of the individual self, which keeps man from taking the whole world into his confidence. His real, deeper self he keeps for those who are nearest and dearest. There are men and women who, at the first meeting, as mere cas ual acquaintances, take you through the windings of their most intimate thoughts, feelings, and experiences. You have a sense of shock at their sudden housecleaning and fumigation of the emotions, as though you were looking at some one in a bathrobe walk ing down the street. Like the holy place behind the veil in the tabernacle, where even the high priest could enter but once a year, there are some memo ries, episodes, and experiences in the individual life that are sacred. Self-respect realizes that this sanctuary is no place for a crowd of tourists.
There are men whose self-respect seems to have died or gone on a long vacation. Revive that self-respect, and you begin the moral regeneration of the man. Religion itself never really reaches a man until it touches the secret spring of his self-respect. One of the chief causes of making confirmed criminals out of first of fenders—outside of the prison associ ations—is that their self-respect is chloroformed, if not actually killed. They feel the prison brand, the prison taint, the prison poison, in their memories, making them feel they are no longer men, but outcasts. If the warm breath of possibilities of a new, better life can fan the faintest spark of self-respect among the gray ashes into flame, the man begins to thrill with the new glad hope and confidence that he can wipe away the old past in better living, as sunrise ban ishes the darkness.
Self-respect should dominate every expression of the individual, from the mere matter of personal appearance and dress to the most supreme mani festation of his real self in all the rela tions of life. It has greater reverence for its individuality, rightly directed, than for all its rights, powers, influ ence, or possessions. Self-respect, in the highest sense, is the honest pride of trusteeship over self, not the petty vanity of proprietorship.
Nature revealed a wondrous sense of jus tice when she admitted money into the world merely as a limited le gal tender. All the greatest things in life, those of mind, heart and soul, she put safely beyond the power of money to buy. Money, in its purchasing ca pacity, is restricted to the material things of life, those that appeal to the senses in some way, and to service, com fort, luxury and position. Just a lit tle way beyond these is a clearly marked dead-line that money as a mere finality cannot cross.
Mere money can buy none of the eternal realities of life—all that makes living highest, truest and best. They are as far beyond its reach as the Polar Star. It cannot buy love, hap piness, honour, truth, justice, faith, self-respect, hope, trust, friendship, loyalty, courage, genius—any of the fine manifestations of mind and heart and soul. When money enters the field of the intangible, it ceases to be legal tender for realities. It can buy only semblances, substitutes, imita tions, never realities. In this field, it can buy only evils, never virtues. It is only in the market of the material things of this life that it can buy what it will.
Justice, the eternal principle of the true relation of man to man, cannot be bought. Money may buy judges, but never—justice. When they tell us that some great corporation, with millions in its control, has bought jus tice, in verdicts wrongly delivered in its favour, they are incorrect in their statement. Money has bought not justice, but only injustice. If it were mere justice that was desired, money would be unnecessary. It would be a bribe, an insult—but injustice is al ways willing to pocket money which is powerless to buy justice.
Honour, the very soul of self-re spect, is as impossible of purchase as a solar eclipse. When one blindly be lieves he has bought the honour of an other to do that which both realize as evil, both have been cheated. The honour was dead before it passed to the purchaser, and dead honour is dishonour. Money has killed a virtue; it could not buy it. When honour could seriously consider permitting it self to be bought, the insidious poison of desecration that killed it was al ready coursing through its veins.
Love is the divinest element in the human. It is God’s finest gift to man. It is the most powerful factor for good in the whole world. Under its protecting wings nestle all the vir tues. In marriage it means that two face life together, with each other, for each other, content with whatever life may bring if it leave them each other. It means letting the small world out side dwindle into insignificance while their larger world rises to the dignity of two who have become one. True love means all that is finest, most tender, most lasting, consecrated to union and unity for a lifetime. It comes to rich and poor alike, but it cannot be bought.
When loveless money seeks to buy love by spreading out on the counter in the matrimonial market its stocks and bonds, houses and lots, bank ac counts, automobiles, fine dress, posi tion in society, travel abroad and the others, and the woman looks languidly over the outfit where she has to take the owner too, and finally consents, he has not bought love. He has some understudy to love, an imitation, a combination of policy and pretense. There is never a sweet spontaneity, a word, a look, a tone that splashes like water from an overfull fountain, but only the pettiness of cool, counterfeit emotion. He has closed an option on a partner in matrimony as he might on a block of stock. He has bought not Cupid, but cupidity. If wealth wants love it must give love. It must be an exchange not a purchase. The rich man must win love as the poorest man wins it—because of what he is, not for what he has.
When Joseph’s ten brothers, under the leadership of Judah, hurriedly or ganized a little syndicate to sell him to a company of Ishmaelites for about eleven dollars and a quarter in our money, they sold only the tangible man as a slave, with whatever service might be forced from him. That was all the money bought. It could not buy the real Joseph. His clear head, his high principle, loyalty, generosity, energy, purpose, and those other vital characteristics, that made him second only to Pharaoh in all Egypt, could never be bought with money.
Capital is in error when it says, pompously and arrogantly, “I can buy brains.” This is across the dead line. It can buy only the service of brains, its output, its product, but never the mind behind them, that gen erates new ideas as a rose-bush puts forth new blossoms. Money can buy a masterpiece of painting but it can not purchase the power to put on the faintest flesh-tint nor even the power to really appreciate the marvellous canvas at its true worth. So far as the depth, the secret, the sublime conception of some ideal, realized by the artist genius, the picture may be as meaningless to its owner as though it were a cuneiform inscrip tion. It may be to him merely—thirty-five thousand dollars in a frame. The rich man who has genuine joy in his art collection, receives it from some innate kinship with the artists’ imagi nation that no money could buy, no loss of money take away. You can never buy taste, the individual’s own appreciation of the beautiful.
A millionaire in his box for the season at the opera, where the magnif icent glorious voices in the sextette from Lucia, rising like incense and swelling vibrant through the air, threaten almost to drown the desecrat ing buzz of conversation in his box, has bought only the privilege of seeing and hearing. He might well envy the quiet little man on the back seat of the topmost gallery who is oblivious to his strained position and his tired mus cles, who is lost to the world around him, while he is feeding his soul from the almost divine music and the mes sage it brings to him.
Money can purchase a great library of books, bound in the finest levant and harmoniously arranged in sets, but it cannot buy the magic power to create one single thought of some one of these great minds, there reincar nated in type, that has influenced countless thousands for centuries. Money alone could never bring the joy and companionship from books that comes as a benediction to some student in an attic, poor in money but rich in intellect. He can call the greatest thinkers of the ages to speak with him from his little mantel-shelf of classics, and feel their joyous near ness to him as he comprehends and responds. He is living, for his brief hour of respite, in the great democracy and brotherhood of letters, and so ab sorbed that he does not note the grow ing dusk that begins to dim his page. This appreciation defies any mere check-book. The man who is rich may have it too, but it never came to him by purchase.
There is a certain pathos about the poverty of wealth, the emptiness of mere riches in its relation to all the greatest things of life. Superfluous wealth is like the load on a camel’s back, he cannot use it, he dare not shake it off, but he must—carry it. The things that wealth can buy for the individual and his family are so soon exhausted, the novelty palls and the pleasure of mere buying so soon reaches its saturation point that the wealth begins to tug on the individ ual’s moral reserve unless he is strong enough to resist. There is danger of speculating in the non-dividend paying stock of the follies, the frivolous, and the immorals of life.
The first money ever spent in the world was about $225 that Abraham paid for a burial plot when his wife Sarah died. Since that time a goodly portion of the world’s money, of both rich and poor, has been spent in buy ing graves,—graves of varied evil wherein the individual buries the best, the highest, the noblest in his charac ter. The limitations of the purchas ing power of money and the attempt to force it into fields where it can do no business because it cannot enforce the delivery of the goods, applies equally to the poor and to the rich in all the manifold affairs of life.
Money is a necessity in our civiliza tion. As it has possibilities for evils, so has it great powers for good. While it can buy only within fixed limits, it can give, spend and serve without limit in the interests of hu manity. It can feed the hungry, help the sick back to health, and in many ways it can overflow the material things of life beyond its own narrow channel, as the rising of the sleepy Nile from its bed and its spreading over the land makes its delta one of the richest soils in the world.
While money can buy neither mind nor heart nor soul; it can inspire, it can furnish new opportunities; it can hearten the sorrowing; it can strengthen the weak; it can give new starts in life to those fallen by the wayside; it can give new impulses, new glad hours of fresh hope and the sunrise of new purpose to the strug gling, the sad and the suffering.
The really greatest things in life being beyond the power of mere money to buy or to corner, they are thus revealed as the possibility and privilege of all who will pay for them in the consecrated energy of body, mind, heart or soul. Let us seek to escape the miasma of to-day that has crept over the land, the money-wor ship, the constant talk of success as though it were merely a synonym for money-making.
Let us face the great truth that the greatest success in the world is that of those brave souls who made a hard fight, on the battle-field of life, for character and—won. Character is the only real life, everything else is either getting ready for it or evading it. Let us regard money in its true light, give to it its just due and throw no shadow of cant over its possession.
If we are blessed with real wealth let us realize the greatness of our trustee ship in inspiring, heartening and help ing others perhaps to do some great real work for the world that we could never perform ourselves. By making it possible for another to do it we are doing as valued service as though our own mind or hands added a new miracle of genius to the heritage of humanity. But we must know that trusteeship is not limited to money, but covers all we possess in any form. Let us realize in all fairness that money is mighty, but not—almighty.
5. Life’s Walls and Its Open Roads
For more than fifteen hundred miles along the northern frontier of China stretches, and spreads, winds and turns the Great Wall. It stalks defiantly through fertile valleys and arid plains, climbs daringly steep mountain-sides, and strides like a colossus across mighty rivers. Towering in its sullen strength and seclusion, for over twenty centuries ft kept the mighty empire from living contact with the great world beyond.
Long after its need as a defense against invading tribes had ceased, it still threw the dark shadow of its sym bolism over the lives of countless mil lions. It stood ever for inhospitality, intolerance, and isolation. It became the grim embodiment in stone of the traditions of the nation, the silent teacher of the exclusion, the enmity and the fear it perpetuated, and it dominated the very people who had created it. But the levelling hand of time has crumbled most of this great est wall in history to primitive dust.
The world, in general, is tearing down many of its walls, literal and figurative. Walls around cities have largely disappeared from the face of the earth. Recent years have shown a constantly growing tendency to re move walls and tall railings and fences from public parks and institu tions. High rails and heavy hedges that formerly aggressively separated private grounds and grassy sweeps of lawn have given way to the lowest of stone markings which indicate differ ing ownerships but which do not over emphasize them.
The finest triumph of civilization, in every phase of human activity, is the tearing down of walls of separation, aloofness and antagonism between nations, classes and individuals. Com merce has done much, the telegraph, the telephone and wireless have had their part, increased travel and the spread of education have also been factors in sapping to a degree the walls of ignorance and intolerance.
The great walls of life that shut us in so that we can neither give our best nor be our best, are those of re pression, of prejudice, of ignorance, pride, fear, suspicion, selfishness, and misunderstanding.
This world of ours needs fewer walls but more roads, open roads, sun lit roads to the minds and hearts and lives of those around us. Walls sepa rate, roads connect; walls exclude, roads invite; walls have the limitation of an accepted finality, roads the spirit of adventure into the land of new hope; walls speak ever the “mine” and “thine” of proprietorship, roads whisper the “ours” of trusteeship; walls mean imprisonment, roads free dom; walls proclaim aloofness, roads smile companionship. Consciously or unconsciously, purposefully or idly, day by day, we are all either builders of walls or makers of roads. Walls encircle us within ourselves; roads en shrine us in the hearts of others.
We all need each other, we all hunger for sympathy, recognition, understanding. That is one of the joys of being human. If it were not for this constant human interdepend ence there would have been no sense at all in overcrowding the world as it is to-day, when there are, according to the latest statistics, enough stars in the heavens to give every couple on earth a whole star all to themselves, with the nearest neighbours fourteen billion miles away.
Sheltered behind the wall of repres sion our kindest thoughts, our deepest feelings of appreciation, are worthless unless translated into word or act that make them real to hungry waiting ears, or eager watching eyes. Corked up in the silence of the unspoken, they do not exist. It is only expression that counts. All the light, heats electricity and other forces of the sun would be useless if kept close-hid within its heart; it is only because they are expressed, because they are con tinuously radiated, because the earth is ever bathed royally in them, that the earth exists. It is not what the sun is, or what it has, that counts, but what it gives. It is not the feeling, the friend ship, the love, the appreciation or the kindness we have, that counts, but only what we express, what we reveal, what we radiate. Then do we tear down a wall and make an open road to the hearts of others.
A word of honest praise means much to us all. We hunger at times for this recognition of what we are, what we have done and the good we have striven to do. We want the un derstanding of our higher self, not flattery which appeals only to our lower self. The eye of the soldier brightens, tired limbs grow suddenly soothed and rested, a new glow of courage comes, triumphal music seems to fill his ears and he grasps his weapon firmer and fights harder,— just because his General said to him, “Well done.”
We all want to hear this from our friends and from those dearest to us. If your friend means much to you, tell him so while he is alive to be helped by it, give him praise then for his good qualities, sympathy and help in his struggles, generous appreciation in his triumphs. The dead have no ears. Saying it with flowers at the funeral is a poor substitute for the real thing. In families, even where love itself is strong, there is often a strange lack of expression. Such love is like gold hoarded in vaults, useless because de nied its one function—circulation.
There are men and women who bore outsiders by talking of their won derful family yet never let it leak out within their own four walls. They seem to think it good for export trade and put none of it on the home market. Sometimes it trickles back home somehow in a roundabout way, but it has lost most of its freshness and perfume, like roses sent by parcel post.
Repression is intensely Anglo-Saxon. We are not, in general, de monstrative. We hold our emotions often so tightly in leash that it strangles them. We are afraid to show the affection or sentiment we feel, afraid of tears, afraid of being natural, afraid of what others may think of us, afraid of ridicule, afraid of being misunderstood. There is a constant fear of seeming to be dif ferent from other people that tends to veneer every expression of indi viduality, with aprotecting layer of conventionality. Nature never in tended us to live such dwarfed and stunted lives. Let us tear down all walls of unneeded reserve and hurtful repression and find roads, or make roads, to the hearts of others.
We often build up such a wall be tween ourselves and those we love. We withhold our confidence, and re fuse to give an explanation that might throw a trail of golden sunlight through the years. We fortify our selves behind the wall of our silence and pride, perhaps not realizing its cost to ourselves and to another. Sometimes it begins in a blind and foolish fear of the uncomfortable quarter of an hour that reaching an understanding might entail. But in avoiding a brief unpleasant skirmish we may bring upon ourselves a siege of years, of aloofness, doubt, clouded happiness and the common, unspoken acceptance of a spectre that comes be tween the two who love each other.
What has been an hour of repres sion may become a lifetime’s regret. Every wall breeds a new wall. Our wall of silence may build a wall of doubt, wonder or suspicion around the life of another. The double wall may become impossible to break down.
Sometimes we feel hurt or wounded by what seems to us injustice, or indifference, or neglect, and we do not speak of it, but let a feeling of resent ment grow and rankle. If we are really wronged we are not fair to our selves in sullenly hiding behind our wall of reserve; if it be but a seeming wrong, not an actual one, we are unfair to another A few moments of frank kindly speech may make a broad open road where in the atmosphere of larger freedom we can banish the misunder standing as the sun-burst scatters storm-clouds.
What is true of walls in our social relations is equally true in the world of business. In every line of com mercial activity and trade industry there is a growing spirit of getting together, of working out common prob lems, plans and policies through co operation rather than competition. It means the united wisdom of all concentrated on the problems of all. It means trusteeship taking the place of selfish individualism, walls of isolation and aloofness giving way to open roads of freer discussion, interchange of ideas, and mutual helpfulness.
In the relation between capital and labour, the pay envelope is not the final symbol of their joint interest. If the ring of the cash register closes the transaction, if it tells the full story it is a poor lifeless affair for both. There is a human, man to man element that is the tonic, vitalizing force and inspiration for the only safe adjust ment of the rights and duties of each.
The employer may sit stolidly and stupidly behind the wall of repression and isolation, deeming his workers mere human machines, artificially speeded up to mechanical efficiency and accepting good and faithful serv ice as coldly and impersonally as if it came from a slot machine. The la bourer is worthy of his hire but he is worth more; he deserves for good work a word of appreciation, a smile of encouragement and the inspiration of merited praise. Labour may be equally to blame behind its wall of the tyranny of organization, of giving as little as it can for the pay it receives, and of opposition to capital.
Whatever keeps us from being our best and from giving our best to others is a wall built squarely across an open road. These are walls of ig norance, of prejudice, of selfishness, of pride, intolerance, bigotry, caste, suspicion, fear, misunderstanding and others that we mortals build around ourselves and those near to us.
Tearing down walls symbolizes the recognition of trusteeship, the com mon ground where our rights merge into the rights of others. It means liner vision, deepened sympathy, broader interests. As we tear down the walls in our own lives, we sap those in the lives of others. Every wall of ours throws its dark shadow over the lives and happiness of many.
The world would be transformed if the energy we spend in building walls were consecrated to the making of open roads, leading to fuller under standing, closer cooperation and a finer spirit in living.
6. The Red Blood of Courage
The courage that is most needed in the day-by-day battle of life is not physical but moral. Moral courage is con secrated self-mastery. It is the op timism of the soul manifest in action. It isthe kingly consciousness of the individual that there is a something within him that makes him greater than all the forces that can be ranged in battle array against him.
Courage is moral muscle. It is ag gressive loyalty to conscience or conviction. It is the soul’s fine attitude toward the disagreeable or the diffi cult. It is red blood in the heart of purpose. The great men in the his tory of the world have all had courage of some kind, that sturdiness of the soul that was undaunted by opposi tion, obstacles or opinions. They won with all the odds against them, they never drifted into success, they steered for a certain harbour and battled against adverse tides and winds and storms unflinchingly, ever confident of the final outcome.
Courage is no gaily-decked joyous craft to skim the summer seas when waves are sun-warmed; it is the sturdy life-boat that rides the angry waters when skies are dark. The lives of some men are a constant struggle, hopeless but for their courage. For fourteen years Robert Louis Steven son had not a day’s health. When the use of his right hand failed him, his left hand assumed the burden of writ ing; when he could not use either hand to hold the pen, he dictated; when he could not speak, he still dictated, but by means of the deaf and dumb alpha bet. His fine spirit defied the limitations of the body; there was no moan, no twinge of pain, no voice of protest, no obtrusion of self crept into the sun lit pages of his prose or verse. He gave the world his sweetness and his strength, the perfume from the crushed flowers of his struggle and sorrow, the honey of his triumph, not the sting of his mighty effort.
This fine courage of the soul has fathered many of the greatest works in all literature, which will live as long as human eyes can read the printed page. No message that these men could give the world could be more glowing and inspiring than the lives they led. They played the game of life in a big, manly way, made no bid for a handicap because of their afflic tion, but with courage paid the price for what they wanted,—and got it.
It takes courage to live boldly by the truth, to speak the truth we know, to live the truth we speak, and ever to seek higher truth. The great failing of humanity is not ignorance of the right, but cowardice, selfishness, and moral laziness that prevents them liv ing it. Standing boldly by the truth is often a short cut to unpopularity. The advance guard in new ideas have always to suffer the temporary neglect and contempt of the rear guard. If it be a great truth, upsetting tradition, conventions, and the placid lines of thinking, it may require decades for its acceptance; if it be but a mere grain of truth, cleverly capsuled in al luring error, it captures the unthink ing with the magic of a fad. It takes courage to speak a new great truth or to be a first disciple; it requires no courage to stand in the ranks of the heavy battalions of belief.
It takes courage to live squarely in accord with principle, to be loyal to the inner vision, to move forward bravely along the road of right, when the by-paths are alluring with the roses of desire, and the joy we crave tempts our hungry outstretched hand, and that which our heart longs for would be ours for the taking. But it would mean a wrong done to another, a sacrifice to principle that the world would never know, a wound inflicted on our self-respect, a failure to live up to a real man’s consciousness of what is right. It takes courage to exercise the heroism of the soul that asserts the kingship of self-control and chooses the harder road of renunciation, hear ing the hopeless clang of the gates of some paradise closing behind us. Moral courage fights it out bravely in the silence and conquers: moral cow ardice surrenders, caring naught what the price or who pays it.
Courage is the will controlled to conform to a need. We hear much of the nobility of bearing patiently and of the glory of long-suffering. Some times this represents courage, some times it is tame, anemic surrender to conditions. When we permit any wrong, evil, injustice, invasion of our rights, or any unfair situation at the hands of another, without using every effort to change it, we are unjust to ourselves and are stimulating and abetting the selfishness of the one who inflicts the injury. There are those who from day to day stand indignities, suffering or petty weakening wrongs that a bold handling would remove, unprotesting, through cowardly fear of what they call a “scene.”
The highest courage is not the heroic effort of an hour but the sus tained courage that meets trial, sor row, suffering, disappointment, hope deferred, misunderstanding day after day, week after week, and year after year, and stands serene and steadfast with a smile. It is in remaining strong under all conditions. Long after the rebel lips have said “I can bear it no longer,” the brave soul keeps sturdily on its lonely way. Such courage is not a matter of mind but of heart, not of temperament. It comes from a serene confidence, an abiding faith in some power, principle or purpose to enable one to endure or to conquer. It means self is great be cause of something greater than self that sustains.
Courage inspires coolness, confi dence, calmness, in meeting the prob lems of each new day with the full realization that it is our part to do each day the best we can by the light we have and to accept bravely whatever be the results. Even the angels can do no more than their best, and the serene restfulness and peace that comes from knowing we have lived up to our highest self is a wondrous source of strength.
Man is the only animal that can put up a moral fight, the only one that can consciously, with blood tingling with the glow of purpose, seek to overcome an environment and to attain an ideal. We should esteem it not a duty, but a privilege; we should see it not as an unjust pressure put upon us, but as a glorious opportunity to assert our power to prove the moral mettle of our character.
There are times in all lives when hope grows dark and effort seems use less, when nothing that we do seems to count, the forced retreats baffle and dishearten us, we have tried so hard and results seem so meager and our weary hearts and our weakened hands long only for rest and for freedom from the struggle. But we should not surrender, we must not give up. This is the hour for new courage, for new drafts on our reserve, for new realiza tion that truth must conquer, right must triumph, justice must prevail.
Even a coward may fight when in spired by the bugles of victory, when the thrill of purpose almost accom plished nerves hint to a last great ef fort, when the shouts and cheers of comrades brighten his eye and strengthen his aim, but it takes a real man to fight on alone, unnoted, un cheered, with no inspiration but the voice of his own soul ringing through the darkness. There is always more gain than we know, more progress than is evident, for every effort pro duces result, whether we see it or not. Another hour of courage, another day of loyalty, may bring victory greater and finer than our rosiest dream dared to foreshadow.
“For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back through creeks and inlets making
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.”
It takes courage to make right, not expediency, our standard, truth our test of action and conscience our sole court of appeal. It takes courage to fight the conventionalities of life that often place the semblance higher than the reality, that too often let mere worldly success obscure the methods by which it has been attained; to fail nobly, going down with colours flying on the ship of an exalted purpose is greater than to succeed at a price that brings twinges of remorse to conscience in the hours of solitude when one is alone with his soul.
It takes courage to choose the harder road and to walk bravely in it, simply, steadfastly and uncomplain ing. If you are right and know you are right it matters not what the world thinks or what it says. You can fight your way through the smoke of doubt, the choking atmosphere of misrepre sentation, the blinding sulphurous clouds of unjust criticism and plow through the serried ranks of jealousy, cruelty and injustice, vitalized to new wondrous powers of resistance by the consciousness of right. You will know no fear but the fear of failing to do your best; you will glow in the thought that, no matter how hard the fight, the eagles of victory must finally rest on the banners of right.
It is on the battlefield of the soul that the hardest warfare and the long est sieges are fought. Each of us has his own temptations, his own strug gles, his own close-hand fight with hu man weakness and sin of which the world knows naught. Knowing the special weakness within us, the traitor in our camp that dampens the powder of our best effort, we can conquer it. It is sometimes easier to fight a big foe than an army of little ones.
There are men who are courageous enough to grapple with a strong temp tation and kill it, but who are victims to vague fears and phantoms of worry. Worry must be fought to a finish. It will kill us if we do not kill it. It is the spell that what may not happen casts over our present. When we fear we acknowledge something as being greater than we, more powerful. Worry always saps our strength be fore the time of need. It requires real courage to cut worry absolutely from our lives; it means realizing with every fiber of one’s being the utter, unquali fied, uselessness of worry. Forethought helps, but worry disturbs; it is forethought, wild, rebellious, un ruly, dominating us instead of serving us by obedience.
In life as in war there are times when the wisest course is simply to stand still, to rest on one’s arms, to watch and to wait. When a mist of uncertainty enshrouds us and life seems to come to a pause, when we do not know just what to do, it is best to await the sunshine of revealing that will show us our way. To active, nervous, energetic natures, keenly hungering for action, the hours of waiting are hard. But they are often necessary; they are part of the disci pline of life. It requires more cour age sometimes to survive the dull, dead tedium of a siege than the tingling, thrilling exhilaration and ex citement of the perils of a close fight.
There can be no true living without the red blood of courage; it is never in what we bear but in how we bear it. Without courage we are but feeble slaves of condition, accepting life dumbly and with cowardly resignation in all that it may bring of good or ill. It is the steady glow of moral heroism in the dull round of daily duties that counts most, not the spectacular show ing on some great occasion.
It takes courage to be loyal to ideals, to stand alone, to smile bravely when it covers a sob, to confess oneself in the wrong, to stand erect when others fawn and cringe for power or favour, to hold on, to face failure calmly, to speak the right that others fear to speak, to live under a cloud of uncertainty, to face continuous poverty unlit by a hope, to bear an other’s wrong, to be unmoved by criti cism, to sacrifice our life’s happiness and have it unknown or unappreci ated, to rise above ingratitude, to con trol oneself under injustice, to live without anger, to be silent when si lence costs a struggle. These are but a few of the phases of courage that show themselves in our daily living.
Tennyson uses the fine phrase, “the glory of going on.” There is tre mendous power and influence in plow ing through obstacles and opposition as though they did not exist, of re maining calm and undaunted, meeting fate or failure without protest, but ever seeking a new way out. Courage is not in never fearing but in conquer ing the fear, not in seeing no danger but in seeing safety beyond; it is the soul’s supreme contempt for cost so long as it gets value. Courage comes from conviction; it always rises when we face a situation with supreme con fidence that we can master it, when we remain cool long enough to generate the energy and heat to go on.
If hero-medals were given to those who show truest moral courage we would find often their true place on the breasts of those brave ones bearing crosses for others, silently, serenely, sweetly, unknowing their own great ness. It takes courage to bear bravely for ourselves; more sometimes to bear for others; most perhaps to bear from others, where every act of our lives makes the infliction doubly unjust. There is courage unnoted in daily life that makes the greatest physical cour age on the field of battle seem spectac ular and garish compared with the great simple courage of those who for years fight fairly, fearlessly and faith fully not for self, hut that the sunshine of life may fall a little stronger and more glowing on some loved one.
Let the individual feel he has the right to happiness, to whatever his soul tells him is right, but let him feel if it be worth having it is worth fight ing for, fighting in that truest sense that we must ever fight; we are either battling for the right or against it, on the side of the battalions of God and justice or the darker forces of error. Let us feel that no right price is too much to pay for what it is right to have, and let us fill our souls with that divine optimism, that heroic courage of one demanding his heart’s desire and boldly avowing his willingness to fight for it to the end.
7. Buying at the Store of Life
Life is the largest de partment store in the world. The date of its first organization no one knows. The ear liest customers on record were Adam and Eve. They started the paying- the-price system by an ill-advised purchase of a new variety of apple. The price was confiscation of all their property, eviction, dishonour, emigra tion, and descent from the proud dig nity of landowners to the humble position of originators of hard labour. Humanity has inherited their purchase and is still charged with the account, the debt remaining unpaid.
The stock of the store of Life con sists of all the countless millions of articles in the world that appeal to the four great hungers of man—those of the body, the mind, the heart, and the soul—and to their perversions into morbid acquired appetites. The articles for sale are good, bad, shop worn, and indifferent. They are tangible and intangible. At this great store of Life every one who lives in the world must be a customer. While we live we must buy continu ously, and pay. Nature runs long credits, but she never forgets.
There are strange rules and peculiar methods in this store of Life, and learning them and buying more wisely is called profiting by experience. The prices are never marked in plain fig ures, nor in cipher. No two persons ever pay the same price for identically similar goods. No two derive the same amount of satisfaction or use or wear from them. No goods are guar anteed. We may pay the price and the goods selected may not be sent us. Years after we may realize that the finest value we ever received from the store of Life was when the purchase that then seemed the desire of our very soul was not delivered.
We may pay the full price and an inferior article is sent, but as time goes on Nature, representing the store of Life, more than equalizes the goods by extras. We find a joy that gives a sunlit glow to all our life, on the bar gain counter. Again, we may be de lighted at what seems to make all life a guaranteed joy; we purchase it and when it is sent home, packed in scented cotton, ribbons, and cushioned silk, we imagine that it must be a diamond tiara set with Kohinoors. In a short time, when the saddening hour of rev elation comes, this high-priced pur chase is revealed as worth less than the string and wrappings.
Sometimes a misplaced trust and a few words of special confidence may wreck the happiness of long years. We had our moment’s oil of consola tion but the price proved far too high. There are times when those from whom we have expected least prove to us angels of inspiration, leading us with gentle hand to the fine glories of the heights of finest living. We paid a small price for a wondrous vision of the possibilities of life on earth.
We often pay most for our mis takes, even more than for crimes. This is vividly shown in the “matri monial department.” The price of a mistake here may mean the darkening and blighting, for years, of two lives. It is usually not the fault of the store but of one, or both, of the customers.
But under all the activities, and hurry, and rush, and seeming confu sion of the store of Life there is the quiet, restful system bringing order out of chaos. Nature is ever working for the individual, even under the op position of humanity leading unnatural lives and then blaming Nature. She seeks ever to equate conditions, to intensify the solid satisfactions of life, to balance life equitably.
Beneath all the seeming injustice, sorrow, grief, heartache, poverty, and misery is Nature constantly auditing the books of Life. She puts down every item of pleasure, treasure, self-conquest, influence—the thousands of “offsets” we may too lightly consider. Some of our purchases we realize are great but we forget their true value because they are commonplaces.
Nature watches so carefully that no single good act of ours, no smallest payment, no slightest purchase of un selfishness, though disdained by the world, passes unrecognized by her. No wrong, unkind, selfish, cruel, mean, or petty act, or series of them, even though seemingly unpunished for a time, fails of record in her books with the individual, to be paid some how, somewhere, somewhen. And if we could get a writ from the Court of Divinity, ordering Nature to produce the books of the store of Life, we should see justice far greater and truer than our human concept in its highest flights of idealism.
Sometimes, in a whimsical kind of way, as though we were smiling bravely through tears, we wonder why the store of Life does not issue a mam moth complete catalogue and make purchasing so much easier. We would like to have the goods accu rately described, with the prices fully marked and with all extras clearly set down, and with a good index, so that we would make fewer mistakes in our buying and have fewer memories that burn and scar because what we paid was so much and the sham that we were deceived into buying now stands out in maddening mockery.
There may come to us the luminant revelation that the greatest sorrows, the most constant daily sources of pain are not due to the store of Life at all, but to the customers. It is not Nature that is at fault, not Life, but human ity. It is the cruelty, meanness, self ishness, weakness, lying, wickedness, and treachery of individuals to each other. They dare throw the responsi bility of it all on the store of Life, on the very scheme of the universe, when it is humanity that creates most of the sorrow and suffering of this world for the individual and for others.
It is the every-day tragedy of the manifold, man-made wrongs that we know and realize fully, that can be prevented, that should be prevented, and that will keep us from making a better world of this until they are pre vented—these have caused most of the unjust tirades against the store of Life. It is finally a matter of the finer action of individuals. If it be a matter of individuals each of us must be to some degree responsible. Let us learn the true values of Life, the great simple things that are really worth while.
Let us live this, day by day, doing justice to ourselves and to others, and we shall begin to learn more of the fairness and justice of the store of Life and profit more by Nature’s efforts in our behalf, and get fuller strength when all seems dark.
Then, in a supreme hour of real grief, when the heart seems broken in its helplessness, we find that Nature has been reserving, as in a bank, all our payments of courage, strength, loyalty, faith, and sterling character, and returns it all to us with interest. There are times in all lives when lonely, body weary, and heart tired, when we have fought a hard battle, when we have paid a high price for what we most hunger for and find it again denied, we doubt whether good, square, honest living really does pay. We wonder why those who lead self ish, trivial, or unprincipled lives seem the most prosperous and happy.
We see a seeming success, but not the price they are paying. We never can be told, nor can we ever know, the terrific price some one has paid for wealth wrongly acquired, for some foul act of treachery that for a time seemed successful, some seeming hap piness, love, power, position, posses sion, or prosperity. But they pay, and Nature, as a collector of the store of Life on such bills, never loses sight of the customer.
The store of Life deals with indi viduals—humanity is only an infinity of individuals. He who inherits a vast fortune may think it has come free. The philosophy of paying on inherited wealth is equally true of all phases of heredity. No, it must be paid for again by him. The testator paid, per haps, in terms of energy, struggle, shrewdness, business sagacity, conse cration to this one object. The bene ficiary pays in new cares and responsi bilities, against the relaxing hazard of great wealth on character. The first paid to win it; the second pays to keep it, to spend it wisely.
Payment of price does not mean an absolute equivalent at the store of Life any more than it does on some of those little shops on the avenue; we may pay much more or less than the article is really worth. It is ever the simple, true, real things that are the finest wares. They are honour, truth, justice, love, loyalty, sympathy, and those other sterling characteristics that give sunshine, optimism, joy, radiant sweetness, and simplicity to countless thousands. They can never be bought with money. They are bought by vanquished temptation, by courageous bearing, by passing with head erect along the road of sorrow, suffering, isolation. They come from the conquered self.
These great, unchangeable, simple things of life cost many an hour of bitter sorrow, a tightening of the heart strings, a moan in the silence, the courage to be misunderstood. Then the Angel of Love may send some one dear and true, kind and tender, wist fully solicitous of our every thought, and with new inspiration and joy we begin a new life—two paying the price instead of one. We need then fear naught from the store of Life, for no price we could pay could be too high. We may have fought for a fine char acter and won it; we may have hungered for a great love and it came. Life has given its best. We have made the wise purchase at the store of Life.
8. The Spell of One Thing Lacking
About twenty-five cen turies ago, in the old Biblical days, there lived in Shushan, in Persia, a man named Haman. He was self-made, and was very proud of his work, and one night he invited a number of his friends to his house to hear him talk. He frankly confessed how great a man he was; he dilated on the wealth he had accumulated; he bragged in twentieth century style about the clever things his wonderful children did; he boasted of being solid with the King and of the promotions and increases of salary awarded him during the last year. He waxed very eloquent over it all. Everything seemed coming his way, and that very day he had received an invitation to a little private supper to be given by Queen Esther to himself and the King.
Haman distended his chest right valiantly, in unabashed vanity, as he said, “And to-morrow am I invited unto her also with the King.”
It was so delightfully human, this putting of himself first, to get under the limelight of his friends’ envy, as though Esther had wanted him only, but said casually, “Bring your friend the King along,” as an afterthought. Then Haman, after he had worked his story up to a dramatic climax, put in his big dash of colour on the emptiness of all life with the words:
“Yet all this availeth me nothing, so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the King’s gate.”
Here was the sand in the sugar of his happiness. This it was that put Haman under the spell of the one thing lacking.
We each have our Mordecai. It sits ever at the gate of our unsatisfied longing. It is the hunger for more. Our Mordecai is the possession our heart so craves that life without it, at times, seems dull, drear, hopelessly empty. It concentrates all desire in a word. It is the focus of every ray of our deepest thinking. It is the great sea into which flows every river, rivu let, and rill of our restless yearning. In the garden of Eden it was an apple; with Alexander it was more worlds to conquer. Between these two, the seemingly most trivial and the greatest goal of ambition, lie all the Mordecais of life.
Our Mordecai may be some great joy or ambition toward which we ex tend empty beseeching arms, or some torturing sorrow, pain, or memory from which we long to be delivered. The one thing lacking is always the next milestone on the road to happiness, and we think if we could only reach that stone we should sit down and rest calmly and be radiantly satis fied. It is ever the human craving for a new freedom, freedom of possession or of dispossession. And when one Mordecai enters the city of fulfilled desire, a new Mordecai sits down placidly in his place.
Wealth is the Mordecai of countless thousands. In a garb of gold he rests at the gate of our ambition. We may seek to woo and win him by years of consecrated absorbing service, or to capture him by some sudden bold as sault of graft and dishonesty. We may let the thought of his entering our life dull our eyes to the glory of our present possessions and deaden our ears to the finer music of living, as we hear in imagination the unending clink of the coins of gold dropping into the coffers of our desire.
We may pay too big a price for the conquest of this Mordecai. We may sacrifice friends, honour, love, the joy of living on the higher planes of life, and find finally that this Mordecai possesses us, not we him: We may become his shave instead of his master.
In the silence of the night, when the soul has been swept clean for a mo mentby the breath of some high in spiration, we may realize we have been fooled by a beggar in a dress of gold and this Mordecai that meant so much to us is not worth while.
We may long for fame. We may feel that if our name was on thou sands of tongues, like the name of a popular brand of cigars, our words quoted with the signet of authority, our portraits sold in the shops, and our biography in every work on successful men, then the roseate dream of our life would be a glorious reality.
But when it does come, it does not long satisfy. It soon palls; the adula tion that once trickled sweetly and meltingly in our ears grows insipid; the scent of the burning incense stifles us; conspicuousness reveals its thorns. There seems one note missing, and we may not be able to tell what it is; but without it the music must be a jangle. We are again under the spell of the one thing lacking.
Our Mordecai ever keeps us from happiness. Sometimes it is the exist ence of some one who blocks the path of our progress, some one possessing what we desire sitting stolidly in the way of our ambition, and we may sur render all that is best in our nature to have him removed. This Mordeeai, breeding jealousy, envy, and injustice, may transform even our dearest friend into our deadliest foe, and we may sacrifice him to the compelling hunger of a moment, something worth far less than he. We may realize later that it was like tearing down a cathe dral to make room for a meat market; but it was our mistake, under the spell of the one thing lacking.
We put too big a premium on physical afflictions when we set them up as Mordecais that kill the joy of life and bury all our usefulness. If they cannot be removed, they must be borne. They should call forth our moral courage, the red blood of un daunted optimism, which would defy them to dictate to us limitations to our power. There is a wondrous reserve in every individual, treasures of un dreamed-of strength, determination, and conquest that sweep away all ob stacles as a mountain torrent drives before it opposing things in its course.
There are memories of past joys which have faded like a sunset,—pros perity of earlier years or regret for wrongs done in our blindness and un knowing, that we permit to sit like Mordecais blocking our way at the gate of happiness. This is a folly of the soul which we must either conquer or permit to blight and shrivel every growing bud of joy in the garden of ever new days given to us for better, finer living.
The alchemist of old had a beauti ful dream of transmuting the baser metals into gold. It was the great get-rich-quick scheme of antiquity. All they needed was one substance. They felt sure it existed somewhere in nature and that it would precipitate the cheaper metals into a nugget of pure gold at the bottom of their cruel bles. It was the north pole of infant chemistry. It was the one thing lack ing. It was the Mordecai sitting dumbly at the gate of their golden dreams of fortune.
We seek ever, like these visionary Paracelsians, one element. It is the one thing we deem necessary to trans mute the dull dross of our daily living into the gold of true happiness. We may not realize that love is the missing philosopher’s stone of life. Love of man and woman, love of parent and child, love of man for man, in a vital, pulsing human brotherhood, love con secrated in some form or in some work,—this is the final Mordecai of truest happiness.
Love, in its highest sense, is the voice of the infinite echoing in the finite. There are human hearts, in hours of loneness, emptiness, and iso lation, that hunger for love as the one thing lacking. Under the spell of their heart’s longing, riches, fame, honours, success, seem trivial, tawdry substitutes, worthy perhaps to offer as sacrifices on the altar of love, but un worthy a shrine of their own.
Those who thus make love their Mordeeai wait and watch longingly for it as Noah looked over the great stretch of lonely water for the coming of the dove with the tiny leaf of prom ise and hope in its beak. Sometimes they may pass a great love in silence, in blindness, or unknowing, as ships steam past Gibraltar in the night when the passengers are asleep. Sometimes, by selfishness, meanness, false pride, jealousy, or lack of faith, they kill the love they seek, not realiz ing what they are doing.
We must all face our Mordecais. The seat at the gate of desire is never vacant. They are the symbol of the needs, the hungers, the longings, the aspirations of humanity. When man says he has put all these things behind him and wants only rest and peace, he merely gives name to his new Mordecai. Man’s constant unsatisfiedness is evidence of a divine essence within him evolving to some higher destiny.
Our individual Mordeeai is ever our confessed choice of what we deem greatest. The choice is ours; the battle must be ours. If it be unworthy of our highest and best effort, we must battle, bravely and unflinching, squarely on the fighting line, till the worthless Mordecai lies dead at our feet. If it be worthy, if it be high, true, and exalted, let us fight to the end, till the victory of attainment crowns our happiness. But the true Mordecai should never depress but ever inspire us, ever give new inten sity to purpose, new fiber to character, new glow to the trifles of living.
Mordecai means ever the sunrise of a new hope, the satisfying of a new hunger, the realizing of a new ideal. Man was meant to fight and to hope—and to hope more in order that he might fight more fearlessly. And at the end of life, man sees sitting at the gate of his still unsatisfied longing a new Mordecai,—an angel of pure whiteness, with the radiance of eter nity in his face. This last hunger, this last Mordeeai, is—immortality.
The greatest things in life are the common place. Their very profuseness, their wide distribution, their un failing constancy have in a way cheap ened them in our eyes as some people unconsciously grow to think too little of a friend they see too often. Fa miliarity throws an obscuring veil of illusion over them that hides from us their wonder and their revelation. The more we know them the less we know of them. We call the usual, the
**
William George Jordan
The Majesty of Calmness: Individual Problems and Possibilities
The Kingship of Self Control
Great Truths
The Trusteeship of Life
Crown of Individuality
Mental training;: A remedy for "education." The outline of a new method of training the mind
The Power of Purpose (1919) 64 Pages