Men in the Making Part 1

Men in the Making.

by Ambrose Shepherd.

PREFACE

The addresses which make up this book are printed, almost exactly, as they were spoken from my pulpit in Glasgow. I have yielded to repeated requests that I would put them in a more permanent form than memory, or notes, can supply. There is always room for a book to young men; whether or not the book I now offer them is worth its room, is a matter about which I, possibly, am not the best judge. This I can say: There was a time in my life when I should have been helped, had I met through the spoken word, or printed page, some of the things I have tried to say as faithfully as I know how to say them, within the limits of taste and discretion. Whatever these addresses lack in thought, and in the handling of the subjects discussed, I have done my best to make them readable. In the case of the average young man of to-day, if a book does not interest him in the matter of style, any other merits it may possess will have a weakened chance of making themselves felt. If I have failed to meet this one condition of securing his attention--provided he give me a fair trial--I shall be disappointed and, to be candid, surprised.

Should, however, his interest be tolerably well sustained through the ethical part of these addresses, say to the end of the chapter on "The Royal Law," I shall, perhaps, have no reason to complain. At the same time I would advise him to persevere with the rest, even at the cost of some effort.

There are one or two things which should be said by way of introduction to these addresses. When the ma.n.u.script was out of my hands and in those of the printer, I was informed that Archdeacon Wilberforce had, in one of his books, a sermon on much the same lines that are found in my chapter ent.i.tled "A Devil's Trinity." I have only to say that, so far as I know, I have never seen a line from the pen of Archdeacon Wilberforce.

And in this connection I should like to quote a sentence or two from the Preface to my book on _The Gospel and Social Questions_. I remark there that, fortunately or otherwise for me, I have a tenacious memory which retains for long, not only a thought which arrests me, but the form in which it is expressed. Where I have made use of a quotation, or tried to paraphrase something I have read--and this applies to the following addresses--I have indicated the circ.u.mstances in the usual way.

The concluding chapter of this series is, in the main, a transcript of my booklet on _The Responsibility of G.o.d_, published by Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier, of Edinburgh. I have to thank these gentlemen, and I do so heartily, for their permission to make this further use of it.

Considerable changes are made in the reproduction; but I think this admission is due to any buyers the book may secure. I have also to mention my great indebtedness to Rev. J. F. Shepherd, M.A., of Manchester, for his help with the proofs, and for some valuable suggestions as to emendations of expression.

AMBROSE SHEPHERD.

6, Thornville Terrace, Glasgow.

YOUTH AND AFTER

"And Terah died in Haran."--Gen. xi. 32.

YOUTH AND AFTER

"And Terah died in Haran." This bit of prosaic information becomes suggestive by the emphasis of one word: "And Terah _died_ in Haran."

This was not his birthplace, but here he ended his days, and that for a reason over which it is worth our while to pause. "And Terah died in Haran." What of that? All people have died somewhere, who have lived and are dead.

When we first meet this man, he was a citizen of no mean city. Ur of the Chaldees was a great and representative centre in its day. Rising sheer from the midst of it, we are told, was an immense tower, or observatory, from the height of which men, reputed wise, watched the movements of the heavenly bodies; and especially the moon, for the moon was worshipped in Ur of the Chaldees as the great tutelary deity of this people. Here it was that Terah lived, at this time an old man, and "to trade," as the Scotch people would say, a maker of images. His craft was in things which symbolized some form of this lunar worship, and which people bought to put in their houses.

Terah had a son called Abram, who, as he came to years of thought, did not fall in very readily with this worship of the moon. He appears to have become very early in life one of an order of doubters to whom the world owes much; to have suspected, at least, that the moon was not, as the priests taught, a cause in itself, but the effect of a cause. What was that cause? What was the fashioning hand behind the effect? In other words, he had come upon the doubt which explains much of the faith and achievement of the reformers and path-finders of the world.

Neither doubt nor belief has any virtue in itself; we must determine the moral quality by its expression in action. Had Abram merely begun and ended with his doubts about the moon, he would have died and been as soon forgotten as any other commonplace sceptic before or since his day. The trouble is not that men doubt, but that they are often content to do nothing else. It may be better that they should believe wrong things, than that they should cease to believe in anything.

Abram began, we imagine, to talk to his father about his misgivings, and notwithstanding the fact that Terah's trade was dependent on the popular religion, he seems to have yielded with something like enthusiasm to the greater personality of his son. Eventually they determined to leave Ur of the Chaldees and go, no matter how far, until they came to some place where they could worship in the new light which had come to them, or, as we should say, according to conscience.

It was a formidable undertaking, for they knew not their destination--if even, indeed, they knew their direction. Some one--I forget who--has traced their route through Larsa, where men worshipped the sun; through Erech, where they worshipped the planet Venus--the bright evening star; through Nipur, where they bowed the knee to Baal; through Borsippa, where they worshipped the planet Jupiter; and on and on until they came to Haran, where the people worshipped--the moon! It was not until they came to Haran, that they touched, as it were, their first footprints, and found the old religion.

And this was the finish for the poor old father Terah. Whatever the motives with which he had set out on this pilgrimage, whether of conviction more or less, or parental affection entirely, he was now weary. There had been little temptation to pause before on the score of a people's worship. That of the sun, of Venus, of Baal, of Jupiter, probably did not arouse in him even a pa.s.sing interest. But when, worn out in body and mind, he suddenly came upon the old religion, his journeyings after another faith and form of worship were at an end.

This powerful appeal to his past, with its resurrection of old memories, old prejudices, and the pathos of old a.s.sociations, was too much for the old man. No second call came to him; or if it did, he had neither heart nor ear for it. It was Abram the younger man who withstood the temptations of Haran and with the faithful went on to a land they knew not of. It was the younger who had the staying power which, when acquired early, goes through life, and rejoins it in eternity sure as ever it came to it in time. Terah travelled some six hundred miles--a big journey in those days--to get away from the worship of the moon, and in the worship of the moon he ended his years.

His evening and his morning were the same day: "And Terah died in Haran."

You see the thought underlying this bit of prosaic information. It simply means that the years close down the possibilities of a certain kind of moral exodus. It is in the days of your youth that you must make the "legs of iron," as Emerson calls them, for the journey which lies before you. If you wait until you get into years before you find right principles, and form good resolutions--well, even then it is better to make some start in the right direction. But why pile up the odds, that start you never will; or that you will not go far if you do?

The enthusiasms of old men are as rare as they are short-lived, unless they are evolved out of earlier and worthy days.

There may be exceptions. If there are, I have never known one. The rule is practically a law, that old men, who are nothing more than old men, cannot make mighty resolves and carry them through. They may, for many reasons, start out from Ur of the Chaldees; but it is not often they get past Haran, if, indeed, they ever get so far. More likely will it end in the old defeat: "I will return into the house whence I came out," which is much the same, or, in some cases, is even worse, than if they had never left it. The old man Terah would get an interesting tour; although very probably people would hear from him more about it at the end than he had ever seen on the way. He would be a much-travelled man for those days, but he never found the new religion. It was the old religion that re-found him.

Understand me: I am far from saying that old age necessarily blocks the way to great attempts, or to conspicuous success in them. All history would cry out against such a statement. There is an old age we delight to honour, and which reverses the ordinary att.i.tude to it in the general world. Instead of considering it a legitimate matter for lying about, and polite not to be aware of its presence, we make our boast in the virility which, in some men, accompanies their years until they quite shade out in a mellow maze of glory.

Take some of our statesmen. Were not the mighty men of the great nineteenth century aged men, if we count age only by shadows on the dial? At a time of life when most men are honoured with a natural right to senility, Mr. Gladstone was girding on his armour for one of the biggest conflicts ever waged in the arena of our Parliament. And years after, as the struggle still raged--to see him, almost blind and deaf, looking like so much vitalized parchment rather than a figure of flesh and blood, as night after night he stood up to the agility of a Chamberlain, and the subtlety of a Balfour--each perfected to a fine art--surely never gamer, grander sight ever challenged the imagination of poet, patriot, or historian. It was a testimony to all time of what can come out of the brain and soul of a man, when the body that houses them is written and re-written over with the hieroglyphics of age. It was a fitting termination to what may be, and ought to be, the great and sacred processes of life.

But Mr. Gladstone was great at the end, because all the way had been a preparation for it. This is the secret, if secret it be, which young men cannot know and master too soon. To end well, you must begin well; and you must fill in well the distance between the one and the other.

Study carefully the triumph of old age in statesmanship, in science, and in affairs, and you will have to connect them with years of stern discipline and strenuous endeavour. In no case will you find strength where there has been no strain, or palm where there has been no dust.

There are levels on which the truth, that "we reap what we sow," admits of no qualification. Omnipotence itself cannot make it possible for us to gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles. To attempt after a given age, and on the strength of a chance impulse, to leave Ur of the Chaldees with its old habits and a.s.sociations, its old moral settings, will carry us far as the impulse lasts, but that in all probability will be only as far as Haran. And as Terah died at Haran, so shall we.

It will be from moon to moon. Youth is the time to determine whether old age shall be a beautiful consummation, or a bitter regret. The threshold of manhood is the place to form resolutions that will have some chance of being kept, to cultivate the thoughts you would have ultimately become things. The serious danger is that, with the impression of a long future before you, you should merely drift in the present, and forget how inextricably the texture of to-day will be woven into the fabric of to-morrow.

I am quite aware that what I have so far said is more likely to hinder than help the purpose I have in saying it. You will not question that a clear nexus runs through our years, but my teaching about it, you tell me, is needlessly severe. If as the beginning is, so must the end be, what are we to say of a man's will? What are we to say about the power and working of divine grace? While there is life, does there ever come a time when it is no longer true to say that out of it can pa.s.s the old, or into it can come the new?

Surely to affirm that such a time can be is to give the lie to religion and experience. Many a young man is having what is called his "fling,"

who is yet quite sure in his own mind that when the time comes to accept the more serious responsibilities of life, he will change his habits and turn to ways that befit the new occasion. So we are told.

And is it not true? Have we not known young men cover a considerable s.p.a.ce of life with questionable, and even more than questionable courses, and yet settle down into exemplary domestic men and admirable citizens?

Yes, we have known them, and, whatever influences have brought about the change, let us be thankful for it. But what proportion do they bear to the legions who, once in Ur of the Chaldees, have neither thought nor desire for a better country? While, again, they may leave it from anything but worthy motives. Men may be compelled to change their habits without changing their natures. It is really to multiply words to no profit to debate the question. Your instinct tells you that it would be wickedness to encourage you to take your "fling" in Ur of the Chaldees on the risk that you can get away from it when prudence speaks the word. Settle it, then, as true for you, that out of to-day walks a to-morrow; and that what you shall do with to-morrow is practically determined by what you are doing to-day.

This counsel, or admonition, cannot be over-emphasized. I a.s.sume that I am talking to young men who do not intend to make a failure of life; then, I tell you again, that you must seize the one great chance you have, to make it a success.

Permit me now to apply very briefly what has been so far advanced, first, to your pleasures; and, secondly, to something more important to you than old age, and that is--middle life.

To everything, says the Preacher, there is a time and a season, and it must be that youth is the time for amus.e.m.e.nts and pleasures, which are not so much the privileges of youth as native to it. We are told that Darwin in his old age expressed regret that he had deprived himself of so many of the pleasures and resources of life by his concentration upon that study, the results of which have made his name so justly famous. He gave to get; but he lived to doubt his own right to pay the price. And no young man should give place, no not for a moment, to a doctrine of work which excludes his right to the joys and abandon of his years. There is danger, and very real danger, lest we should take for granted what the "Grad-grinds" tell us, that the only thing which matters is that we do work, and are not idle. Work for its own sake is not enough. It may turn men into machines--all clatter and monotony; or it may make them fussy nuisances. "A soulless activity," says Canon Ainger, "may save a man from vagrancy only by turning him into a thing; or it may keep him from idleness by making him an egotist." There is the man who, to use the common phrase, "sticks at it" with scarcely a competing thought or interest. He scorns ease, and lives laborious days. For what? I once heard it said, and I believe it was true, of a prosperous Yorkshireman, that the real pleasure he had in his money, for which he had toiled hard, was in a kind of mental calculation as to how many of his neighbours he could buy up.

"I do all things that I may honour the Father," said Jesus: and work which is not under this impulse, has in it no element of permanent satisfaction. In some way every work has to be brought into a conscious relation to G.o.d, or we only swell the crowd either of self-seekers, or of the men whose toil leaves no such impression upon their character as gives sign or evidence of a sane or worthy aim and end.

To give to work its essential dignity, and preserve it from mechanical routine we must bring motive into it--high and worthy purpose. There is no virtue necessarily in being always at work, but there is tremendous power in being able to work when we do work. Do not discount the old advice because it is commonplace: "work when you work, and play when you play." Master the distinction there is between having what is called your "fling," and having your really "good time."

Get all the rational pleasure you can out of your young days. Let your religion be no dog Cerberus, snarling at the heels of innocent enjoyment. But never lose sight of the fact that unless you have a definite and worthy purpose, to attain which you keep your good time subordinate, that good time will have the same relation to genuine pleasure that the throbbings of an ulcer have to the healthy action of the heart. And a very plain word is needed here. Our trouble to-day is not that young people will have their pleasures and amus.e.m.e.nts; it is that so many of them will have nothing else. One who knows his day has told us, that were it not for the sporting intelligence in the evening paper, not a few of our young men would forget how to read. It is a common experience to meet young men who have been decently educated, as things go, and yet they are ignorant as babies about the social and political questions which so vitally affect the welfare of the State. Decently educated, I say, as things go. But how far is that? "I have five clerks in my office," said a Bradford merchant lately, "who probably could tell me all I want to know and more, about a horse race, a cricket, or a football match; and not one of them could translate for me a foreign business letter. This is one princ.i.p.al reason," he added, "why Bradford is overrun with Germans, and why the Germans are getting hold of so much of our trade." On what is called the practical side of life, the first duty of a young man is to be efficient in whatever honest thing he is doing to earn his bread; and at the same time be preparing himself for whatever surprise or opportunity the future may have in store for him. A few hours in the week given seriously to the latter, will leave an ample margin of time for recreation and amus.e.m.e.nt; and who knows what he may need, until the need is there to test what he knows? To be great on sport, and a "stick" at one's business; to be an authority on amus.e.m.e.nts, and an ignoramus about almost everything else that is anything, is the surrender of manhood, and that in a day which has no need comparable with its need of capable men.

And such surrender has consequences that lie nearer than those which make themselves manifest in old age. Your next step is into middle life; and it is here where the question is finally decided whether it is, or is not, well for us that we are here at all. If a man has put little more than the rubbish of a selfish existence into his years he will, by the time he is old in them, be the victim of a callous insensibility which will carry him over into the stage beyond our human ken. An unworthy old age rarely feels much moral suffering; that but waits its awakening in the fires which shall try every man's work of what sort it is.

But when a man begins to sight the middle years, he learns to know himself as never before or after. This is the stage where increase of knowledge often means increase of sorrow. It is, in truth, the sorrow of finding out our limitations which, on their first acquaintance, often seem more appalling than they actually are. While youth may be saved by hope, by what is to be, middle life is often lost in the drab reality of what is. Every youth, who is not as indifferent to his possibilities as though he were nothing more than a lump of flesh, is about to become a numeral in the world. The tragedy enters when he knows himself to be what in a sense he must remain--a cipher, merely giving value to the men who do represent the numerals. When the youth, who used to talk about having the "ball at his feet," seems to have become very much the ball itself, to be kicked hither and thither as circ.u.mstances may determine, what then? Will he show that kicked he may be, but ball he is not? That circ.u.mstances may use him, but they shall not make him? The answer to this question will very much depend upon the stuff he put into his years, while as yet he knew not his limitations.

And even where middle life has won success in the things men covet, and for which they strive, it may be the success that is just deadly in its reaction of monotony. How often do we hear it said of a prosperous man, who in middle years is giving place to unworthy habits, or to ill-humour and chronic depression: "Would he had something to take him out of himself; some interest in anything, if it were but a harmless hobby." Think of a man being reduced to the need of a "hobby" to keep him out of moral mischief! What such a man, if man he can be called, really needs is some higher interest or a coffin. A hobby is well enough in its place, and much can be said for it, but when it becomes a man's only peradventure between himself and the devil, the world can probably spare him to its own advantage. The young have no little safety in their years, in the temporary buoyancy of the blood. It is when the former draw in, and the latter thins out, that dangerous things get their more obvious and, too often, fatal chance with men.

It is when the first fires of pa.s.sion have slowed down, and the ties of early friendship have relaxed, and the outlook appears to leave us with the problem, not how to live, but how to exist. I tremble at times when my experience suggests the dangers of those long stretches of emptiness, that so easily fill with the sinister and the unspeakable.

I would pray, as a man in mortal terror, against the bottomless pit of a motiveless existence.

This is why I put emphasis upon the threshold of manhood; not that I believe it to be the most dangerous part of human life, but because I believe it is the time to safeguard the part that is. It is the time when habits can be cultivated, and resources acquired, which can make middle life as crowded with interest and good to enjoy as any of the earlier years, and infinitely more useful. But this is possible only when the middle years can command their own. Just as many of us "postpone life until after our funeral," so may we find ourselves in middle life discouraged and sullen because we cannot do what we would, only because we have not done what we ought. Men do not always go under because they cannot do things. They fail, not because they do not know what it is well to do, but because they do not choose to attempt it. And why do they not choose? So far as this question affects middle life, it is largely because so few of us have the grit to face its difficulties, and attack them, when we have to do it with the serious handicap of self-made disadvantages. It is while you are young that you must lay up these stores of living material for the after years; and this is the significance of it all--you can only do it, or you can do it most effectually, when you are young. As touching certain advantages, "the day after to-morrow is the only day that never comes."

Have your good time, I say, and in it fear G.o.d, and fear nothing else.

Keep a clean youth, and enjoy it to the full. But let the thought have its place as a goad when required, or as a steadying influence when the spirits would gallop too fast--the thought in the question: How will it be with me when my years are thirty-five or forty? That trying, and in so many cases, that fatal forty! When the youth of "rose-light and romance has faded into the light of common day, and the horizon of life has shrunk incalculably, and when the flagging spirit no longer answers to the spur of external things, but must find its motive and energy from within, or find them not at all." See to it while you may, that these forces, when needed, are there, or whatever else you may gain will be but a mocking remembrancer of the greater thing you have lost.

I have but another word to add. If there are, as I trust there are, middle-aged, or even old men, who would leave this Ur of the Chaldees, with all its unworthy past, and make for a better country, do not, I plead with you, be discouraged by anything I have said. Remember, I have been talking to the young; but G.o.d forbid that what I have said to them should seem to exclude hope for you. Make your start, though you should get no further than Haran. In a matter so supreme, it is better to have tried and failed, than never to have tried at all. But you need not fail in any degree that success is possible to you; and a success is possible to you in which are issues of everlasting life.

Whatever the past, build up with courage and humility what you can do.

G.o.d willing, and by His grace, you have time yet to prove how a consecrated determination can stretch out life's limits, and wondrously redeem no little of past failure.