A Man's Value to Society Part 11

Men are anxious to find pleasure, but they find the flowers were grown in the church-yard. Men are feverishly anxious for wealth, and, coining all time and strength into gold, they find they have no health with which to enjoy the gathered sweetness. Haste in cooking the dinner has destroyed the appet.i.te. We are told that "moderation and poise are the secrets of all successful art," as they are of all successful life. Give the rein to appet.i.te and pa.s.sion, and satiety, disenchantment, and the grave quickly come. Health, happiness, and character are through restraint. Thus truly, habit and trait in the individual or the generation become a mark in the body that is the revelator of character.

What men call character to-day is really another one of the marks of the Lord Jesus. Now and then a man appears in society from whose very presence there emanates an atmosphere and a sense of power--power that seizes upon the imagination of the beholder and holds him breathless, even as one stands breathless when overtaken by some sense in nature of overmastering sublimity. These strangely gifted men have appeared only at intervals of centuries. If an ordinary man is attacked in a lonely spot by armed footpads, he finds himself helpless. But history tells of a man who carried such reserves that, bound and unaided, he could deliver himself from an entire band of robbers. Surprised one day by a company of bandits, he was knocked down, robbed, and bound.

But when he recovered consciousness, he argued the ropes off his wrists, talked his purse and rings out of the robbers' pockets back into his, bound his enemies--not with cords, but with linked words--led them back to the city instead of away from it, and landed the waylayers in jail.

Similarly, history tells us of half a score of men during the past two thousand years who have carried this same all-commanding atmosphere.

For over a century students of oratory have been endeavoring to explain the eloquence of Whitefield. Such power had this man that the statesmen and philosophers of London used to leave the metropolis on Sat.u.r.day and journey far into the country to join the crowds, often numbering twenty thousand people, that followed this preacher from village to village. David Hume, the skeptic, explained Whitefield's charm by saying that the preacher spake to his audience with the same pa.s.sionate abandon with which an ardent lover speaks to his sweetheart when he pleads for her hand. But Benjamin Franklin tells us that the charm in Whitefield's speech was not his musical voice, not his stream of thought running clear as crystal, not his sudden electric outbursts, when the great man seemed on fire; the something that men have tried in vain to a.n.a.lyze, was his character--goodness and sincerity glowing and throbbing in and through words, just as the electric current glows and throbs through the connecting wires.

Another such man, but lesser, was Lamartine. During the French Revolution, when the mob poured through the streets, sweeping before it the soldiers who opposed its progress, Lamartine made his way to the middle of the street and stood before the brutal leaders. So powerful was the influence of the good man's character, that, when the leader said, "Soldiers, we are in the presence of a man who represents seventy years of n.o.ble living," the rude mob uncovered. Afterward, when the insurgents laid down their arms, it was as a tribute to the superiority of character to guns and brute force.

But when we read of these all-commanding natures, we are not to think that these inspirational beings had their influence through some strange magnetic power, nor that they cast a spell over people like unto the spell that the cat casts over the mouse with which it plays.

Their might has, for the most part, been the might of goodness. The chief mark that Paul and Wesley and Wilberforce, and all the great have carried about in the body has been the mark of character. What beauty is to the statue; what ripeness is to the fruit; what strength is to the body; what wisdom is to the reason--that character is to the soul!

Great is the power of bonds and gold! Mighty the influence of customs and inst.i.tutions! But the greatest force that can exist in society is the presence and power of good men. As rain and soil and sunbeams are only raw materials, to be brought together and condensed into the ripe fruit, so tools, knowledge, goods, are but raw materials, to be wrought up into the fine substance of character. Happy all who have subordinated the animal impulses and the industrial faculties to the moral sentiments. Thrice happy they who have carried all their faculties up unto harmony and symmetry. All such, like Paul, bear about in the body the marks of the Lord Jesus.

MAKING THE MOST OF ONE'S SELF

"Till we all come unto the perfect man."--_St. Paul._

"_Every soul is a seed._ It does not yet appear what it shall be."--_H._

"'Very early,' said Margaret Fuller, 'I perceived that the object of life is to grow.' She herself was a remarkable instance of the power of the human being to go forward and upward. Of her it might be said, as Goethe said of Schiller: 'If I did not see him for a fortnight, I was astonished to find what progress he had made in the interim.'"--_James Freeman Clarke._

"Persons who are to transform the world must be themselves transformed. Life must be full of inspiration.

If education is valuable, the age must double it; if art is sweet and high, we must double its richness and might; if philanthropy is divine, we must double its quant.i.ty and tenderness; if religion is valuable, double its truths and hasten with it unto more firesides; if man's life is great, let him count more precious all its summers and winters. The one duty of life is, lessen every vice and enlarge every virtue."--_David Swing._

XIV

MAKING THE MOST OF ONE'S SELF

Two great principles run through all society. First comes the principle of self-care and self-love. Each man is given charge of his own body and life. By foresight he is to guard against danger. By self-defense he is to ward off attack. By fulfilling the instincts for food, for work and rest he is to maintain the integrity of his being.

Upon each individual rests the solemn obligation to make the most possible of himself, and to store up resources of knowledge and virtue, of friendship and heart treasure. But when a man has treated his reason as a granary and stored it with food, his memory as a gallery, and filled it with pictures of a beautiful past, his reason and will as armories, and stored them with weapons against the day of battle, then a second principle a.s.serts itself. Responsible for his own growth and happiness, man is made equally responsible for the happiness and welfare of those about him. By so much as he has secured his own personal enrichment, by that much he is bound to secure the enrichment and social advantage of his fellows. To love one's self at the expense of one's fellows is for selfness to become malignancy. To love one's neighbors more than one's self is foolishness and self-destruction.

Whatever of value the individual has, comes from fidelity to the first of these principles. Self-love working toward reason makes a man a scholar; working toward his imagination, makes him artist and inventor; working toward his gift of speech, makes him an orator; working with pride makes him self-reliant and self-sufficing. And when the principle of love for others a.s.serts itself, this love, working toward poverty, transforms man into a philanthropist; working toward iniquity, makes man a reformer; working toward freedom, makes him a patriot and a hero; working toward G.o.d, makes him a saint and a seer.

The new astronomy makes much of the three cosmic laws. Our earth, by a form of self-love called molecular attraction, ceases to be scattered dust, and takes on the shape of a rich and beautiful planet. But self-loved, our earth is also sun-loved, and drawn by invisible bands it is swept forward out of winter into summer. Then enters in a third principle, by which Neptune and Ura.n.u.s, lying upon the edge of s.p.a.ce, seek fellowship with our planet and hold it at a fixed distance from the sun's fierce heat. Thus self-love has given the earth individuality, the love of other planets secures stability, while the sun's love gives movement and wealth. Working together, these three principles secure the harmony and stability of the planetary world.

Similarly, each individual is part of a great social system. Each moves forward under the embrace of three laws, called love to G.o.d, love to neighbor, and love to self. Upon obedience to these laws rests all social wealth and civilization.

We hear little of individualism, and much of the solidarity of society. A bloodless and selfish destruction of the rights of the many has threatened the very foundations of human happiness and compelled the recognition of the fact that the weakness and injury of one are the weakness and injury of all. Ours is a world in which the law of the survival of the fittest not only works, but works very rapidly.

Thus the more wealth a man has the more he can achieve. To-day, it is said, the various members of the Rothschild family in the different capitals of Europe control nine billions of dollars. This sum is acc.u.mulating like a rolling s...o...b..ll, and will soon surpa.s.s, and perhaps absorb the wealth of several of the smaller European nations.

Similarly, in the realm of wisdom, the more a man knows the more he can know. Sir William Jones tells us that he gave five years to mastering his first language, while six weeks were sufficient for acquiring his fortieth dialect. Thus, too, in the realm of inventive skill, each tool becomes the parent of a score of other tools. The studies preparatory to Edison's first mechanism covered a long period of years; but, gaining momentum, his inventive skill increased in geometric ratio, until to-day the famous electrician holds nearly a thousand patents; but, as nothing succeeds like success, so nothing is so ruinous as failure. The weaker a man is, the weaker he must become.

When a man who seeks employment is shabby and gaunt and nerveless, his poverty lessens his chances, but to-morrow he will be weaker and shabbier, and day by day the rapidity of his declension will increase.

Startled by these considerations, our generation perceives that success feeding upon its gains will soon drink up all the energies of the earth, while failure, growing more ruinous, will sweep mult.i.tudes into the abyss. Therefore, society has come to fully recognize the importance of a mutual love and mutual service. When a man falls we are less and less ready to kick him. If the poorly born drops behind in life's race, society is increasingly ready to set him upon some beast. If some man's brain is spongy, and his mental processes slow, the stronger minds are belting his faculties to their swifter energies. If a man's moral springtime is slow, says one of our social reformers, society fits up for him a little ethical conservatory, with steam heat and southern exposure, where the buds are given a little judicious stimulating and pushing.

Society is recognizing the debt of strength to weakness. The man who has skill in speech is becoming a voice for the dumb. Those who have skill toward wealth are becoming the almoners of bounty toward art, education and morals. Men who selfishly get much and give little, who have become Dead Seas of acc.u.mulated treasure, are losing their standing in society. More and more cities are bestowing their honors and esteem upon those who serve their fellows. Men are becoming magazines, sending out kindness everywhither. Men are becoming gardens, filling all the air with pungent fragrance. Men are becoming castles, in which the poor find protection. The floods of iniquity have long covered the earth, but love is the dove bringing the olive branch of peace. Love sings the dawn of a new day.

Our generation does well to emphasize the principle of social sympathy and social liability. But, because individual worth is being threatened, the time seems to have fully come for also emphasizing man's duty to love and make the most of himself. Of late, self-care and self-enrichment, as a principle of life, have been berated and harshly condemned. Yet Christ recognized selfness as a principle most proper and praiseworthy and one to be used as the basis and measure of all moral worth. By so much as man loves and secures for himself the physical benefits and social incitements of life, by that much he is to love his fellows. And the failure to love one's self wisely and pa.s.sionately ends by making it impossible for man to love his fellows.

Plato's thought is ever with us: "The granary must be filled before the poor are fed; knowledge must be gained before knowledge is given."

Happy the philanthropist whose generosity has founded school or library. But this gift of to-day is made possible only by the industry and thrift of yesterday. Happy the surgeon whose skill in a crisis hour has saved some valuable life. But the hand that performs what seems a miracle of surgery has back of it twenty years of vigilant study and practice.

Ours is a world in which the amount of wisdom or wealth or friendship to be distributed is predetermined by the amount required. The flow of the faucet is determined by the fullness of the reservoir. The speed of the electric car is fixed by the energy stored in the power house.

The power of the piston is in the push of the acc.u.mulated steam. The Nile has force to feed civilizations, because there are a thousand streams and rivers, a thousand hills and mountains lying back of the Nile's current, and crowding it forward. If we could sit down by the famous Santa Barbara vine, and speaking with it as with a familiar friend, ask how it came to give man a half-ton of purple treasure in a single summer, the reply would be that this rich treasure was grown and given in one summer because two hundred summers were given to growing a vast root and trunk, to large stems and stalks.

When Nestor stood forth before the Greek generals and counseled attack upon Troy, he said: "The secret of victory is in getting a good ready." Wendell Phillips was once asked how he acquired his skill in the oratory of the lost arts. The answer was: "By getting a hundred nights of delivery back of me." Shakespeare tells us all that the clouds give in rain what they get in mist, which is the poet's way of saying that what he gave in inspiration he got by way of perspiration. Some years ago a young man asked a distinguished scholar and writer what he thought of the higher education. "If I were twenty, and had but ten years to live," answered the publicist, "I would spend the first nine years acc.u.mulating knowledge and getting ready for the tenth." Indeed, the measure of influence in any man is the measure of his reserves. The youth who will rule to-morrow is the youth who to-day is storing up resources of knowledge and wisdom, of self-reliance and courage.

All history does but repeat the principle. Surveying the past, we note that the nations that have made great contributions to civilization have been isolated. Our historians tell us that the Hebrew gave conscience and morals, the Greek reason and culture, the Roman law and government, the Teuton liberty and the rise of woman. But, singularly enough, not one of these nations lived in an open, extended country.

Each forceful race has dwelt upon some island or peninsula. The Hebrew was shut in between the desert and the sea, and there restrained until he acc.u.mulated his moral treasure. He was compelled to fall back upon his own resources. By practice he found out that it was not best to steal; that society lived more happily and peacefully when the property of each individual was respected. Similarly, G.o.d gave him the work of formulating each of the ten commandments. Slowly the moral treasure grew. The jurist gave law, the poet sang songs, the prophet poured out his rhapsody, the patriot and martyr died for principle, and the roll of the heroes lengthened. At last the pages of Jewish history were filled with names glowing and glorious as the nights with stars.

Then came Jesus Christ, filling all the land with spiritual energies.

Soon the pressure of moral forces was so strong as to break through all restraints. Then these moral treasures poured forth over all the earth. Having given the two thousand years before Christ to acc.u.mulating its moral energies, the Hebrew race acquired momentum enough to continue the civilizing tide through the two thousand years after Christ. Similarly Greece, the mother of the arts and sciences, was shut in between the mountains and the sea until the intellectual tides grew deep and strong.

But not alone does history urge us to make the most of ourselves. All our great men ill.u.s.trate the same principle. Of late attention has been called to the fact that our cities are being ruled by men whose childhood and youth were spent in the country. Isolated, brooding for years in the fields and forests, these boys developed a forceful individuality. A recent canva.s.s of the prominent men in New York City showed that eighty-five per cent were reared in the villages and rural districts. Seventeen of our twenty-three presidents came from the farm. A census of the colleges and seminaries in and about Chicago showed that the country is furnishing eighty per cent of our college students. The chances of success seem one hundred to one in favor of the country boy. Many explain this by saying that there is a mathematical relation between a fine physique and a firm, intellectual tread. Good thinking rests upon fine brain-fiber. But this is only half the truth.

These giants from the country learned in youth not to depend upon books and newspapers, but upon their eyes and ears. Having no external resources, they turned their thoughts inward and led forth their own faculties. They did not wait until they opened the journal to find out what they thought about some important subject, but, unaided, they wrought out their own opinions, and through self-reliance grew great.

Should any sower go forth to sow in the streets of the city, he would reap but a small harvest. The hard, beaten roadway would give the grain no lodgment; but sown on the open furrows, the seed roots and grows. Thus the mind of the city youth is a roadway beaten down by the myriad events of life. His individuality is a root having little chance to grow.

The mornings rain newspapers, the evenings increase events, the very skies rain pamphlets. Individuality is overwhelmed with many things.

Soon the mind ceases to develop its own mental treasure, and is content to receive its incitements from without. Because schools and colleges are multiplied, the youth who has never gone to the bottom of a single subject imagines that he is a fine student. Because his shelves are crowded with books, the man deceives himself into thinking that he has read them all. Because our age is rich in mechanical appliances and inventions, many who cannot drive a nail straight imagine that they have been really instrumental in ushering in this magnificent epoch. Many sing peans of exultation over this wondrous civilization who are mental and industrial paupers, whose chief ground of congratulation is that they got themselves born into this particular century. But power does not come that way. Moses will control all our jurists to-morrow because he spent forty years in the desert reflecting upon the principles of justice. Paul had the honor to fashion our political inst.i.tutions because he gave twelve years of general preparation and three years of special application to the study of individual rights. Milton tells us that he spent four and thirty years of solitary and unceasing study in acc.u.mulating his material for a heroic poem that the world would not willingly let die.

Homer wrote the "Iliad" because he was blind and driven in upon his own resources. Dante wrote his "Inferno" because he was exiled, and in isolation had time to store up his mental treasure. Webster and Lincoln spent years in the forests and fields, reflecting and brooding, a.n.a.lyzing and comparing. Many a long summer pa.s.sed while they sowed and garnered their mental treasure. Pasteur gave our generation much, because for thirty years he isolated himself and got much to give. When Lowell speaks of the attar of roses, he reminds us of the whole fields of crimson blossoms that have been swept together in one tiny vial. When Starr King saw the great trees of California standing forth twenty-five feet in diameter and lifting their crowns three hundred feet into the sunshine, he was so impressed by their dignity and beauty as to be touched into tears; but the size of the trees did not explain his emotion. It was the thought of the reserve energies that had been compacted into them. The mountains had given their iron and rich stimulants, the hills had given their soil, the clouds had given their rain and snow, a thousand summers and winters had poured forth their treasure about the vast roots. Thus the authors and statesmen who will help the next generation are to-day engaged in loving themselves and making the most of their talents. Not until they have compacted within themselves a thousand knowledges and virtues will they be able to love others.

With sadness let us confess that our age is sinning grievously against this principle of self-care and self-love. Individual worth is being sorely neglected. An age is great not through a large census roll, but through a mult.i.tude of great souls, just as a book is valuable not by having many pages, but by containing great ideas. The paving-stones in our streets are very different from sapphires. The bringing together of 65,000,000 small granite blocks will not turn these stones into diamonds. It is only when each stone is a gem that the increase of number means the increase of beauty. No nation is moving forward toward supremacy merely because the weak individuals began to go in droves. In our education we are singing peans and praise about our schools and new methods of education. Meanwhile Frederic Harrison insists that in fifty years the public schools of Great Britain have turned out not one mind of the first order. Some of those who have achieved renown in literature or statecraft were self-educated. The rest enjoyed the help of some parent or friend, who very early in the child's career took the pains to search out the child's strongest faculty, and then asked some tutor or teacher to a.s.sist in nourishing the special talent toward greatness.

At home, President White is telling us that our authors and poets are dead, and have no successors. Nor could it be otherwise. When a skillful driver wishes to develop the speed of a thoroughbred colt, he specializes upon this one animal. No sensible horseman would put forty colts upon a track and try to develop their speed by driving them around in a drove. It remains for the parents of this country to adopt the method of training their children in droves, and educating them in herds. Our common-school system began in the necessity for the division of labor. Settling in the wilds of New England, the men went into the forests with axes, or to the field with their hoes. The mothers went into the garden or to the loom. Rather than that their children should have no education, many parents came together and asked some one man or woman to do the work for all. Thus our common schools were born out of poverty and emergency.

But at length has come a time when parents, in blind worship of a system, have farmed their children out to intellectual wet-nurses.

Many children who possess talent of the first order in the realm of poetry or literature are compelled during the most precious period of life to spend years upon subjects that yield them no culture effect.

Meanwhile their enthusiasm is wasted, and their strongest faculties starved. Only when it is too late do they discover the cruel injustice that has been wrought upon them, and recognize that they must remain unfulfilled prophecies. Our common schools have wrought most effectively for our civilization. They are the hope of society. But not until our parents become enthusiastic teachers, and our homes a.s.sist the school rooms, will men cease complaining that the nation's great men have no successors, and that genius has departed from our people.

The time has fully come for the nation also to begin to love itself.

All perceive that the individual has no right to be so generous to-day as to have nothing to bestow to-morrow. Wisdom guards to-day's expenditures lest to-morrow's capital be impaired. He is a poor husbandman who so overtaxes his fields or vineyards as to exhaust the soil or destroy the vine. Yet many events seem to prove that our nation has sorely injured itself by over-kindness. It has forgotten that only G.o.d can love everybody. In trying to help the many it has threatened its power to help any. It has been like a man who on a January day opens his windows and tries to warm all out of doors, only to find that he has frozen his family within the house, and warmed no one without. If we journey into the factory towns in New England, where the youthful Whittier and Longfellow were trained, we find the school-houses with windows boarded over. The little churches also are deserted and the doors nailed up. Listening to the "reformers" in our parks on a Sunday afternoon, we are amazed by the virulent attacks upon our inst.i.tutions. Conversing with the foreman of a large group of men laying water-pipes, we are astonished at his statement that he has not a single man who can write well enough to keep the time and hours of these toilers. Standing in Castle Garden, where the emigrant ship unloads its mult.i.tudes, we hear the physician exclaim: "It will take this nation a hundred years to expel this vice and scrofula from its blood."

As some railways water their stock, and for each dollar issue bonds for five, in the hope that only one of the five will ever know enough to ask for their dollar, so the intelligence of the nation has been watered and diluted. Sometimes a whole ballot-box full of voters'

tickets does not contain the common sense of a single vote of the days of Hamilton. Our nation often seems like a householder who has given his night-key to an enemy who has threatened his home with firebrands.

Our nation has loved--not wisely, but too well. The time has come when it must choose between loving itself and becoming bankrupt in intelligence and morality. For purposes of educating the nations of the world as to the true value of free inst.i.tutions, one little New England community, where all the citizens were patriots and heroes, scholars and Christians, where vulgarity and crime were unknown, where the jail was empty and the church was full, where all young lives moved toward the school-house--one such community has a value beyond our present millions.

What the world needs is not mult.i.tudes, but examples and ideals. If one Plato can be produced, he will lift the world. Our citizens ask artists to paint their pictures--not bootblacks. We ask architects to erect our public buildings--not chimney sweeps. Loving their city, our citizens have lined the avenues with beautiful homes and streets with stores and factories. But here their self-love stops. When great men have created the city, they ask saloon-keepers to govern it. Well did the sage say, it was as if we had pa.s.sed by Daniel Webster and asked an African ape to speak in his stead. Strange--pa.s.sing strange--that our nation and city should forget that all love for others begins with a wise love for self.

We return from our survey with the conviction that Jesus Christ did well to make individual worth the genius of Christianity. Having moved backward along the pathway of history, we have found the streams of civilization taking rise in some one enriched mind and heart, even as mighty rivers issue from isolated springs. Looking backward we see Moses building the Hebrew temple; we see Pericles and Plato fashioning many shapes of truth and beauty for Athens; we see Dante laying the foundations of Florence; we see Carlo Zeno causing Venice to rise out of the sands of the sea; we see Bacon and Luther rearing the cathedrals of thought and worship, under which the millions find their shelter. Oppressed by a sense of human ignorance and human sin, a thousand questions arise. Can one poorly born journey toward greatness of stature? The Cremona violin of the sixteenth century is a ma.s.s of condensed melody. Each atom was soaked in a thousand songs, until the instrument reeks with sweetness. But can a human instrument, long out of tune and sadly injured, e'er be brought back to harmony of being?

In the studio of the sculptor lie blocks of deserted marble. Out of one emerges a hand, another exhibits the outlines of a face. But for some reason the artist has forsaken them. It seems that as the chisel worked inward, it uncovered some crack or revealed a dark stain.

Therefore the sculptor pa.s.sed it by, preferring the flawless block of snowy marble. Is the soul soiled by sin, to be cast off by the divine Sculptor?