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Title: The Cap and Gown
Author: Charles Reynolds Brown
Release Date: February 9, 2022 [eBook #67366]
Language: English
Produced by: Sonya Schermann and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CAP AND GOWN ***
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
THE MAIN POINTS
THE STRANGE WAYS OF GOD
THE SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE MODERN PULPIT
THE YOUNG MAN’S AFFAIRS
FAITH AND HEALTH
THE GOSPEL OF GOOD HEALTH
THE
CAP AND GOWN
BY
CHARLES REYNOLDS BROWN
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
THE PILGRIM PRESS
NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO
COPYRIGHT, 1910
BY LUTHER H. CARY
THE · PLIMPTON · PRESS
[W · D · O]
NORWOOD · MASS · U · S · A
PREFACE
The larger part of the material in this book was originally used in a
number of addresses given in various colleges and universities reaching
from Yale and Cornell in the East to Stanford and the University of
California in the West. It is here offered to a wider circle in the
hope that these chapters may prove suggestive to college students and
to those who are interested in having them make the best use of the
bewildering array of opportunities awaiting them on the modern campus.
It was one of the shrewdest and kindliest observers of student life,
himself a long-time resident of Cambridge and a genial friend of
Harvard men, who said: “It is a never-failing delight to behold every
autumn the hundreds of newcomers who then throng our streets, boys with
smooth, unworn faces, full of the zest of their own being, taking
the whole world as having been made for them, as indeed it was. Their
visible self-confidence is well founded and has the facts on its side.
The future is theirs to command, not ours; it belongs to them even more
than they think it does, and this is undoubtedly saying a good deal.”
It is this joyous and confident company arrayed or about to be arrayed
in “cap and gown” which the writer of these chapters would fain
address. The academic costume and accent may speedily be replaced by
the less picturesque garb and tone of the work-a-day world, but the
advantage of special training, of accurate knowledge and of the larger
outlook upon life attainable in any well-equipped university will give
to the fortunate possessors of all this a significance for the life of
the nation far beyond that belonging to an equal number of similarly
endowed but untrained men.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE FIRST INNING 3
II. ATHLETICS 23
III. THE FRATERNITY QUESTION 41
IV. THE RELIGION OF A COLLEGE MAN 59
V. THE CHOICE OF A LIFE-WORK 75
VI. MORAL VENTURES 93
VII. THE LAW OF RETURNS 107
VIII. THE HIGHEST FORM OF REWARD 127
IX. THE USE OF THE INCOMPLETE 145
X. FIGHTING THE STARS 169
XI. THE POWER OF VISION 183
XII. THE WAR AGAINST WAR 201
I
THE FIRST INNING
The significance of the first year in college can scarcely
be overstated. The first man called to the bat in some great
intercollegiate game may be pardoned for feeling a bit nervous. He
realizes that players and spectators are eagerly waiting for him to
give them the key-note of the contest by the way he acquits himself.
The young man just entering college, if he senses the situation
accurately, is equally alive to the importance of his first hits.
It is a time when freedom and responsibility come in new and larger
measure. College men as a rule are away from home. There is no one to
ask, with the accent of authority, how they spend their evenings, who
their intimates are, what habits they are forming. Studying is not done
under the immediate eye of an instructor as in the grammar-school
days. The young man who heretofore has felt the wholesome restraint
of well-ordered family life, suddenly finds himself a free citizen
in a republic, and this larger measure of liberty involves risk.
The freshman may decide the case against himself before he is ever
permitted to put on his sophomore hat. The way is open for him to go
to the devil, physically, intellectually, socially, morally, if he
chooses. The way is open, the bars are down and as often as not some
young fool is just starting and beckoning his friends to “Come along.”
The bad plays in the first inning are frequently so numerous and so
serious as to mean the loss of the game. It is a time then to summon
into action all the wisdom and conscience which may be brought to bear
upon those early decisions.
There is one choice not strictly of the first year, but so intimately
connected with it that I speak of it here--the decision as to whether
or not one shall go to college. “It will take four of the best years of
my life,” the young man says. “While I am reading books and attending
lectures, playing football, and practising the college yell, other
young men will be learning the ways of the business world; they will be
actually laying the foundations for prosperous careers. Can I afford
the time?” Furthermore, does it justify the expense? On an average it
costs each student somewhere from five hundred to a thousand dollars a
year in all first-class colleges, though the state universities in the
West cut down that figure by remitting tuition fees, and many splendid
young men take the course on much less. Is it worth what it costs?
Every young man who can compass it by any reasonable outlay of energy
and sacrifice had better go to college and stay there until graduation
day. There is a deal of education to be gained outside of books or
college halls. The business life of a great city is a university in
itself with its lectures and recitations, its examinations and other
requirements. Its courses of instruction have a value all their own and
its exacting demands flunk more men ten to one than either Harvard or
Yale, Stanford or California. In this “university of experience” the
college colors are “black and blue,” for the lessons are learned by
hard knocks. But the man who knows his full share of what is in the
books will show himself more competent in finding his way about in that
larger school of experience. “Systematic training counts everywhere,
from a prize fight up to being a bishop or a bank president.”
It is true that many men have won high place in the world’s life
without college training, Benjamin Franklin, Horace Greeley, Abraham
Lincoln, and all the rest,--we know the list by heart. But it did not
please the Lord to make Lincolns and Franklins when he made most of
us. A little extra schooling which those men might get on without, in
our case will not come amiss. Furthermore, those very men with all
their unusual ability did not have to compete with college men to
the extent that you will be compelled to do. College men in ordinary
life were scarce then; now there are three under every log. In law
and medicine, in teaching and the ministry, in the administration of
large business enterprises and in the world of political life, you will
have to meet and try conclusions with men who have received the best
the universities can give. It will be to your interest, therefore,
to add to the stock of ability which the Creator has given you all
the training that high school, college, and university can yield. To
neglect carelessly or decline wilfully such opportunities when they are
offered, becomes a wrong committed against yourself, against all who
are interested in your growth, and against society which is entitled to
the most competent service you can render.
When you have actually set foot upon the campus there comes the choice
of courses. The modern drift toward unlimited electives, especially in
the first two years, is open to serious criticism. The tendency is to
allow each student to study only what he likes, consulting merely his
own interest and preference. Even where young people have reached the
mature age of nineteen or twenty, and are regularly entered freshmen or
sophomores, it is just possible that more wisdom can be found somewhere
as to what is best for their intellectual growth and training, than
is discoverable in their own individual preferences. There is a
disposition on their part to select courses of two kinds, those in
which they are already strong or those which are supposed to be “snaps.”
Moving along the line of least resistance is not the royal road to
anything worth while. Insight, grasp, and self-mastery come rather by
doing hard jobs. Rolling down hill on green grass does not develop
robust, enduring, effective manhood as does climbing Shasta or Whitney
over loose rock and rugged snow-fields. There is no such thing as
“painless education” in the market.
In the judgment of many there is peril in the fact that at one end of
our educational system we have the kindergarten, bowing with almost
idolatrous reverence before the untaught inclinations of the child in
its effort to make the work of education as enjoyable as a game, and
at the other end the university with its wide-open elective system
tending to breed distaste for hard courses or for studies in which the
young people do not already feel a warm interest. We shall not rear
up sturdy character by too much humoring of individual taste, which
is often abnormal in intellectual as in other directions. Mr. Dooley
indicates a weakness in the present method where he says: “To-day the
college president takes the young man into a Turkish room and gives
him a cigarette, and says, ‘Now, my dear boy, what special branch of
larnin’ would ye like to have studied for ye, by one of our compitint
professors?’”
In the selection of courses it is unwise to ignore completely certain
fields because you feel you are weak on that side--you may need
rounding out. The man who sits in the seat of the scornful, displaying
a contemptuous indifference toward fields which lie aside from his
personal preference, may live to find that narrow seat as uncomfortable
as a sharp stick. It is well not to specialize too soon, or too
rigidly. We are compelled to specialize at last in order to forge
ahead, but it is more important to be a man, round, full, rich in
contents, than to be an expert lawyer, physician, or mining engineer.
The early and rigid specialization, sometimes extending even down into
the high school, tends to sacrifice the man to the profession.
There are certain fundamental interests which cannot be left out of
the consideration of any educated man or woman. Take these five
main fields: every student should know something of language, the
instrument of communication. He should for the purposes of comparison
and enlargement know something of two or three languages. His knowledge
should extend beyond the mere ability to read and write and spell--it
ought to include some acquaintance with the best literature of each
language, the widest acquaintance naturally with the best that has been
thought and said in his own tongue.
He should know something of history. There is too much of it for any
one man to master it all, but he should have some genuine understanding
of the chief sources of history, and of the main courses and movements
of thought and life in the world. He should enlarge his own brief and
local experience by some participation in age-long, national, and
international experience.
He should know something of science. The general method of science is
the same, whether observed in chemistry, zoology, botany, or elsewhere.
One may never be a specialist in any single science, yet he may know
the scientific habit of mind and appreciate the fundamental positions
of science sufficiently to make him a more effective worker in his own
chosen field, which may, indeed, lie quite over the divide from any
directly scientific pursuit.
He should know something of the organized life of men through the study
of sociology, economics, and civics. He should have some understanding
of institutional life in its various industrial, political, and
ecclesiastical expressions.
He should feel in some measure the power of that group of studies which
have to do with mental and moral processes considered apart from the
world of outward phenomena, psychology, ethics, philosophy, religion.
He needs to relate his individual activity to the larger life of the
whole by some genuine grasp of fundamentals in his thinking.
No single student can be at his best in all these or can even make any
two of them his major interest, but a certain elementary knowledge of
all these fields, thorough as far as it goes, is a better foundation
for a genuine education than the most elaborate training in any one
specialty.
When one builds a pyramid it must come to a point somewhere. It can
only be built, with the conditions as we find them, at a certain angle,
for material will not lie on a slope too steep. How high it may be,
therefore, when the apex is reached will depend upon the breadth of the
base. In your education, you are building character and personality,
which is much more important than any special ability for money-making,
and the apex of that personality will be high in proportion as you
avoid the narrow base which results from too much specializing in
the earlier years. Let the foundation which precedes your special or
professional training be as broad as it lies within your power to make
it.
If you specialize rigidly in the early years, you may a little later
change your purpose in life and find yourself handicapped by the former
narrow outlook. The college is a place where many a fellow finds
himself for the first time, and the fellow he finds is oftentimes
another and perhaps a better man than the one he had planned for in the
earlier years. He may take his college course expecting to be a lawyer,
but that spiritual impulse, which lands many a man in the ministry,
may be at work beneath the surface, none the less potent for being
one of those unseen things which are eternal. If in his college days
he entirely ignores Greek or turns his back on philosophy and ethics
as having little practical worth, he will find himself at a great
disadvantage if he finally faces about toward the pulpit. As Cromwell
said to the theologians who were so cock-sure in their opinions,
“Beloved brethren, I beseech you by the mercies of God believe it
possible that you may be mistaken.” You may be mistaken as to the work
you will do in life. It is unwise therefore to discount that possible
future by narrowing down too soon to some specialty which may prove to
be off the turnpike when you make final selection of your life-work.
The selection of habits in a modern university is left almost entirely
to the judgment of the individual student. The college rules grow
fewer year by year. Personal supervision becomes impossible where the
enrolment reaches into the thousands. Parents are sometimes unaware of
the measure of liberty accorded. College presidents entertain each
other with experiences which come to them in the way of letters from
anxious mammas. One president tells us of a letter received from a fond
mother whose son had just entered--“I shall expect you to send me a
long letter each week telling me how my darling boy is doing.” Another
reports a letter from a father--“Please send me each week a full report
of my son’s absences, of his failures in recitation, and your own
impression as to the progress he is making.” The very humor of these
suggestions indicates to what measure the freedom of the student has
been extended. It would be somewhat difficult for President Lowell or
President Hadley, for President Jordan or President Wheeler to see to
it that the boys and girls eat the proper amounts of wholesome food and
put on their rubbers when it rains.
University life is not a personally conducted tour with the trains
and hotels, the points of interest and suggestions as to clothing,
all printed in the schedule. It is a case of going abroad upon the
continent of learning, relying upon your own letter of credit to draw
supplies from the banks of opportunity open to you, with the necessity
upon you of learning to speak the language and order your trip for
yourself in a way to gain the utmost possible good. The sheltered life
policy, suitable for little boys, must come to an end some time and
the young man be compelled to face the good or bad results of his own
choices. The beginning of the college course is no doubt an appropriate
time to inaugurate this new régime.
You will enter college without any definite college habits. This will
be at once an advantage and a peril. Habits are sometimes heavy,
troublesome chains; they are sometimes the best friends in sight. In
driving over a mountain road on a dark night when one cannot see even
his team, the deep ruts are a comfort and a safeguard--as the driver
hears the wagon chuckling along in the ruts he knows that he is not
on the point of going over the grade. Certain useful habits, which
come from doing certain things in certain ways over and over again,
are beneficial in that they take sufficient care of those lines of
action and leave the man’s will and attention free to deal with other
problems.
The habits you select and exhibit during the first year will
almost inevitably determine your standing with the faculty and
with the students. When you enter you are what cattlemen call a
“maverick”--there is no brand on you. Your associates will wait to
see where you belong. By your own choices you will brand yourself as
studious or trifling, as thorough or a dabbler, as honest or a cheat,
as clean and sound in your moral life or as shady. The habits of the
first year will brand you and in the award of college honors at the
hands of the faculty or of the students, and in the operation of
university influences upon your career after you graduate, the brand
you wear will be well-nigh determinative. Look at it carefully, then,
before you apply it to yourself, for its mark will stay.
You cannot afford to shilly-shally. The man who spends his time in high
school or college mainly for his own amusement is a sham and a sneak.
He is there at considerable cost to somebody--parents, tax-payers,
professors who are doing educational work out of love for it when they
might be doing something much more remunerative--and when he merely
puts up a bluff at studying he stamps himself as a sneak.
The men who undertake to get through their examinations by a kind of
death-bed repentance become cheap men. In the moral world a man is
judged not by the few holy emotions he can scramble together in the
last fifteen minutes of earthly existence; he is judged by the whole
trend and drift of his life, by the deeds done in the body, by the
entire accumulation and net result of his living as deposited in the
character formed. This is sound theology in any branch of the Christian
Church and the principle involved is also sound in pedagogy. The real
test of the student’s work is not to be found in what he did last night
or in what he can show upon occasion as the result of a hasty cramming,
but in what he has been doing through all the days and nights preceding
the examination and in that net result which stands revealed in his
mental grasp and effectiveness. Whether he becomes a man who will
stand the hard tests the world puts upon every one who undertakes to
do important work, will depend largely upon the habits he forms in the
first year. He may take low ideals and live down to them; or he may
set high ideals and then direct his energy and shape the methods of his
life unceasingly to the hard task of living up to them.
There will also come the choice of intimates. You will have
acquaintances many--the more the better. You will have, I hope, a large
circle of friends and you will discover that college friendships are
the most lasting and perhaps the most rewarding of any you form. But of
lives so close as to give shape and color and odor to your life, there
will not be many; and for that reason the intimates are to be chosen
with the greater care.
You can know all sorts and conditions of men. You can be on good terms
with many whose prevailing attitudes toward life do not meet your wish.
You cannot afford to be on intimate terms with a man lacking in those
fundamental qualities of every-day rectitude which are legal tender the
world over. The man you admit to your heart and life as an intimate
ought to be “hall marked” as they say in England; he ought to have
the word “sterling” stamped upon him, indicating that in the great
melting-pot of human experience he will meet the test and show full
face value.
It will be good to have a few close friends who are not students. There
are townspeople whose main interest is in the larger life outside the
university whose friendship you need. There is some member of the
faculty whom you ought to know well. In many colleges every student has
a “personal adviser” in the faculty. It is a foolish mistake to look
upon the professors as your enemies or as being indifferent to you,
lacking in any genuine interest in your problems. They covet a closer
touch with their students than the young men in their mistaken reserve
are ready to accord them. The closer friendship of some one, wise,
mature, sympathetic man in the faculty will be an influence wholesome
and abiding, making always for your best development. The mere fact
that some weak man may undertake to “cultivate” a professor in the
spirit of the sycophant need not deter strong men from the enjoyment of
such friendships in straightforward, manly fashion.
Let me congratulate you that you are in college! It is a jolly thing
to be alive at all, these days, and to be alive and young and at
school--why, the whole world is yours! The world is yours potentially,
and wise, right decisions during that first year will aid mightily in
making a generous measure of it actually yours. You may, if you will,
score a good number of runs off your own batting by the way you play
the game in the first inning.
II
ATHLETICS
All the human beings we know anything about have the cheerful habit of
living in bodies; there is a physical basis underlying and conditioning
all earthly activity. Physical vitality, therefore, has a direct
bearing on possible achievement. A rousing stomach ready to take what
you give it and rejoice over it; lungs large, sound, and unspoiled by
inhaling what was never meant for them; heart action reliable because
never tampered with by drugs or hurtful indulgences; nerves prompt and
accurate as telegraph instruments, but ready to sleep when put to bed
because never abused; muscles which take up hard work and laugh over
it as those who find great spoil--all these are useful items in that
physical excellence to be gained and guarded as a priceless heritage.
In all intellectual work where men undertake to think, write, or
speak there is a demand for red blood, which is better ten times over
than the blue blood of any fancied aristocracy! And in moral life, if
you are to put down evil under your feet and be vigorously, joyously,
winsomely good, a sound physique for your moral nature to ride in all
weathers will be a perpetual advantage.
In making young men physically competent, high school and college
athletics, provided they are not tacked on from the outside as a frill
or held as a mere aside to which the students carelessly turn in hours
of leisure, may possess high value. They can be made a genuine, vital
expression of the life of the school and be related in some wise way to
the larger purpose of education. Rightly ordered they aid mightily in
keeping the tools sharp, in developing a full stock of vital force, in
giving the poise, self-mastery, endurance needed for the work of life.
The boy who learns to play with zest will be better able to do the work
of a man with his own full sense of joy in it.
David Starr Jordan has said many times that “the football field is a
more wholesome place for a young man than the ballroom,” and those who
know the facts endorse his claim. The young fellow gets hurt now and
then in football, but taking into consideration the part of him which
suffers and the after effects of it, we commonly find that the injury
is less damaging than are the hurts received in indoor, fashionable
dissipation. Athletics bring men out under God’s open sky, into the
fresh air, and under the stimulus of healthy rivalries. They train men
to see clearly, to hear accurately the first time, to decide quickly,
to move instantly, and to stand together in a genuinely social spirit.
These qualities have high place in the combination of talents which
makes for success; they have high place as well in the formation of
sound character.
But to tackle the subject more closely let me name several ways in
which athletics worthy of an educational institution are particularly
beneficial. They serve as an outlet for the surplus physical energy of
boys and young men. In simply walking to school, even though he carries
some girl’s books as well as his own, the healthy young man does not
consume in twenty-four hours all the physical energy he manufactures.
Throbbing within him there is an exuberant physical life, excitable
and not yet under firm control. There is the consciousness of new and
untried powers in regard to which he feels deep concern. There is the
push of impulse not fully regulated by conscience or experience. Unless
there is some wholesome outlet he will burst the levee, devastating
whole fields of his own nature and of other natures besides, by an
unwholesome use of that surplus physical energy.
Training for athletic events means early hours, clean habits, constant
occupation of mind and body, for in any college worthy of the name the
young man must be a student all the while, as well as a quarterback or
a pitcher. The training, therefore, becomes a mighty safeguard thrown
around a lot of young fellows who are face to face with the devil of
temptation. Even for those who do not make the team or the nine or
the track, if they are taking regular gymnasium work in hope of that
success next year, or if in other ways they have caught the spirit of
clean, honest, joyous sport, athletics give an added motive and a
stronger impulse toward clean living.
“Wild oats,” as they are lightly called, produce a sorry and a debasing
harvest. No man with sense enough to be allowed to run at large ever
looks himself in the face and takes satisfaction in the memory of such
sowing. The fellow who thinks he is not wise or experienced until he
has become familiar with the haunts of gamblers and harlots, until he
has the smut and smell of those associations upon him, is regarded by
saner men as green, oh, so green! He sometimes calls his escapades
“seeing life,” but it is not life he sees there; it is death--and a
foul, rotten, ill-smelling type of death. The trainer will not tolerate
it. The man himself would be regarded as a traitor to the university
if on the team he “broke training” for such indulgence. And the whole
spirit of wholesome athletics is such as to stamp that course as base
and mean. As an outlet for surplus energy then and as a safeguard
against certain forms of wrong-doing, wholesome athletics in college
life hold a place of honor.
They furnish also a means of joyous recreation. The mind bent and
strained all the time with serious employment loses its spring, if not
sometimes its sanity. The relaxation of honest fun, the excitement
of a sport where one measures his strength and skill against that of
others, the self-forgetfulness which comes with absorption in something
other than one’s work--all these are imperatively demanded for the
normal development of youth into maturity. We would all bring up in the
madhouse or the sanitarium, if we did not now and then have some such
diversion!
This demand for recreation, if no intelligent and wholesome forms
of expression are at hand, crops out in those college pranks which
sometimes border on lawlessness. The spontaneous fun of college life
is ever enjoyed and applauded. There was a Yale man once suspended for
this excusable caper. The students were required to attend service
on Sunday in the chapel where the preacher was sometimes dull and
tiresome. One particular offender against the youthful demand for
vitality and brevity used to divide his sermons into heads and subheads
almost endlessly, Roman 1, Arabic 1. One in brackets, a, b, c, etc.,
etc. This friend of mine arranged to have his class of one hundred and
sixty men sit together well up in front, and every time the preacher
passed from one head to another, they uncrossed their legs in unison
and crossed them over the other way. When the reverend doctor passed
from one in brackets to two, or from a to b, he saw one hundred and
sixty pairs of legs taken apart and recrossed simultaneously. When this
had been done six or eight times the people in the adjacent section
and in the galleries became more interested in watching this mighty
movement of legs than in the sermon, and the minister himself was so
disconcerted that he presently gave it up and closed the service with
the sermon unfinished. The dull preacher might better have put more
life into his sermon, thus affording some legitimate opportunity for
the exercise of interest on the part of his hearers.
Athletics bring wholesome recreation not only to those who play on the
eleven or the nine, or who appear on the track, but to that larger
company of fellows who strive for that honor; to a multitude whose
interest in exercise and outdoor sport is quickened though they
never aspire to ’varsity positions; to the thousands of spectators
who assemble to witness the game and cheer the winners. The physical
quickening, the mental relaxation, the temporary forgetfulness of
hard work, the joyous hours in the open air, are all good for the
whole company of people who thus, directly and indirectly, share in
the advantages of athletics. Keep the game free from the taint of
professionalism, free from betting, free from the disposition that
would win fairly if possible, but win at any cost, and we have a form
of recreation distinctly beneficial to the whole community!
The discipline of athletics develops obedience, self-control, and the
spirit of cooperation, all of them useful, moral qualities. Many a rich
man’s son, ambitious for college honors, has gotten his first taste
of real discipline on the athletic field. At home he had indulgent
parents--they were self-indulgent because of their wealth and they
scarcely knew how to be other than indulgent to their children. The boy
was waited upon by well-paid servants eager to do his bidding and humor
his whims. His generous tips greased the way for him when he traveled
or went in pursuit of pleasure. He had never felt the rough, raw edge
of an exacting discipline.
But when the trainer took him in hand this son of affluence was treated
as though he had been working his way through college by currying
some man’s horse or by waiting on the table at a boarding club. If he
played football he was knocked down as promptly and as hard, when he
got in the way of a bigger and better player, as if his father had
been a hod-carrier. And all this is exactly as it should be! Sometime,
somewhere, he should learn the democratic spirit by being compelled to
meet his fellow men without favor shown or advantage given; he should
learn how to take the hard knocks and keep sweet, not losing his head
or his temper. The boys say, “If a fellow plays football it does not
take long to find out what kind of a fellow he is.” The real quality of
the man comes out more readily and more genuinely perhaps than it would
in a college prayer-meeting. And the man himself finds out what kind of
a fellow he is, to his own lasting advantage.
Wellington used to say that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the
athletic fields of the English schools. He meant that when he found
himself standing up against Napoleon’s fiercest attacks, he had under
him a body of men who had not waited for their army experience to learn
discipline. Obedience, self-control, and the necessity of standing
together had all been learned long ago at Rugby and Eton and Harrow
until these qualities were bred in the bone! Now as mature men they
fought the great battle through to a finish just as they used to put
the pigskin across their opponent’s goal in the years gone by.
To gain this benefit in any worthy measure there must be a genuine
participation in the athletic life of the institution. Some students
imagine that they are greatly interested in athletics because they talk
about the various events, smoke countless cigarettes on the bleachers,
gossip endlessly in the fraternity house as to how the game was lost or
won, taking up the time of the players with their useless prattle. All
this, however, is as much like real interest in athletics as a bandbox
is like a granite block. The interest to be worthy of the name and to
insure any actual benefit must be a genuine interest.
There is something admirable in the attitude of those men who try
for the team or the nine, and having failed, show themselves glad to
play on the second eleven or nine. “Scrub teams” they are sometimes
ignominiously and erroneously called--their loyalty and devotion to the
institution is often such that they might be called “Sequoia teams.”
Their spirit of sacrifice is such that they are willing to stand out as
only second best and to be practised on by better men to the end that
those better men may gain still more honor and glory for themselves.
This spirit of loyalty and good will serves to exalt the part they take
into a genuine culture in character.
The spirit of cooperation is strengthened by college athletics. Men are
knit together by close ties when they participate in training or in the
game. They learn to rely upon each other. Conceit and selfish pride
are eliminated until the whole nature is in a fair way to be genuinely
socialized. The man learns that he cannot catch and pitch and play
left field all at once. He must fill his own place and act with other
men who are filling their places. He must take his color in the pattern
and join his yarn to their yarn in a genuine spirit of fraternal
cooperation. He must subordinate his own personal interest or advantage
to the larger interests of the institution which he represents. If he
has really entered into the spirit of the best college athletics, he
will forever after be a better husband and father, a better neighbor
and citizen, a better man in the world of industry, and a better
churchman, for his systematic training in this spirit of cooperation.
Athletics also express and develop what we call “college spirit.” This
sense of joy in one’s own college, the generous pride and enthusiasm
over victories won by other students, the knitting together of the
student body in paying the necessary dues, in cheering the games, in
helping to maintain high and honest standards, all go to make up that
“college spirit.”
This bit of sentiment over one’s own institution does not pay term
bills or prepare lessons or write examination papers, but it aids
in the doing of every one of these things. The fife and drum in the
army do not throw up breastworks or fire off guns to disable the
enemy, but they do aid in the general undertaking by the enthusiasm
and _esprit de corps_ they help to arouse. That college spirit,
which is indeed a useful educational force, is always heightened by
wholesome athletics. That splendid hit when there were three men on the
bases; that break through the line or around the end and the run down
the field; that last spurt at the end of the hundred-yard dash, with a
whole horizon of students and other spectators rending the skies with
their enthusiastic cheers, all aid in the development of a wholesome
enthusiasm over one’s own college.
The student who holds himself apart from it all in blasé fashion,
affecting to look with cool contempt on the joyous fervor of his
fellows is either diseased or else his show of indifference is only
skin deep. The sneering, flippant, cynical young person is as much of
a freak as would be a ten-year-old boy bald-headed, with a long white
beard. Intensity, enthusiasm, absorption, belong to college life and
they work their good results in transforming youth into manhood.
The two main evils, aside from the common evils of betting and
dissipation which are not confined to athletes, to be guarded against
are the spirit of professionalism and the habit of unfairness. The
smuggling in of a professional baseball or football player whose
college standing is maintained by snap courses or by indulgent
professors, is a thing despicable in the eyes of all right-minded
college men. It is the sacrifice of the university idea to the demand
for victory in college sports. And in similar fashion the disposition
to win by fair means or by foul, which has sometimes disfigured our
college athletics, lies at the root of the ugly distrust felt by
institutions for each other on the athletic field. Better no victories
than victories of dishonor! The word of the old professor is always
in point: “Play your games as gentlemen, fair, true, and generous.
Win your games as gentlemen when you can, with no offensive conceit
over your success. Lose your games as gentlemen when you must, with no
whimpering or silly excuses.”
It is of vital importance that the whole interest of college
athletics be held firmly within the grasp of that larger purpose
already indicated. The main business of life is not to play baseball
or football, but to do certain things treated more directly in other
departments of college life. You cannot afford to play any game at the
expense of your highest development as one preparing to do his full
share of the world’s work. Strive to make your life rich in meaning,
full of the power to serve, fine and true in its inner quality, and
that fundamental purpose will so dominate your interest in athletics as
to render your bodily exercise profitable both for the life that now is
and for that larger life that lies ahead.
III
THE FRATERNITY QUESTION
The sentiment of love between persons of the opposite sex has
monopolized the popular interest, while other fine forms of human
relationship have failed of their due recognition. The feeling of
friendship between persons of the same sex has a profound significance.
The friendship of Damon and Pythias and that of David and Jonathan
have been sung by the poets and the memory of them perpetuated in the
rituals of well known fraternal orders in such a way as to make them
classic.
It is good for us to know and to love those with whom the question of
sex, with its mysterious attractions and repulsions, does not enter
in. The woman who cares little for other women, who is only happy when
she is talking with men, or the man who is so much of a “ladies’ man”
as to be ill at ease when thrown for an hour exclusively with men, is
mentally, if not morally, diseased. It is good for the souls of men
to be knit with the souls of their fellows; it is fitting that women
should know and enjoy other women.
It is the need for that association which lies at the root of the
almost countless fraternities found in all our cities. In searching
out names and mysterious forms for them all, men have gone clear over
the border into what is both fantastic and foolish. The secrecy of
these societies is not to be taken too seriously--as a rule it is
mere dust thrown in the eyes of the uninitiated. The members laugh
in their sleeves knowing how little the “secrets” amount to, but the
organizations offer opportunity for social fellowship in a way to
satisfy a wide-spread desire.
The same tendency, with some additional leaning to clannishness and
to the love of mystery found in most young people, is evidenced by
the Greek letter fraternities in the colleges and in many of the
high schools. These have been in operation for more than a quarter
of a century and they have not yet by any means so justified their
existence as to win the cordial support of the best educational
authorities. There is still “the fraternity question,” with a big
interrogation point after it, put there by parents, teachers, and
citizens, and by many of the young people themselves as they grow wiser.
I speak of this matter as a fraternity man. I have been initiated; I
have worn a “pin,” at such odd times as my “best girl” did not happen
to be wearing it. I know the mysterious significance attaching to the
“grip” when one student meets another and taking him by the little
finger pulls it surreptitiously nine times to the left. I have been
through all this, for I am a member of Alpha Eta of Sigma Chi. What
I say, therefore, is not spoken in that prejudice which sometimes
attaches to the utterances of the “anti-frat” man who sees it all from
the outside and comes up hot, perhaps, from some hard-fought campaign
where the line was closely drawn between “frats” and “anti-frats.”
I speak also with a deep sense of the importance of the question. The
principal of the high school in my own city, which has an enrolment
of twelve hundred pupils, said to me recently when I had been asked to
speak on fraternities, “You have a big subject on your hands.” He spoke
as an educator watching the lives of that large company of young people
five days in the week. I speak as a pastor and a teacher of spiritual
values and I agree with him that it is “a big subject.”
The power of intimate association for good or ill--no nation under
heaven, Christian or pagan, has failed to condense its observation and
experience on that point into some terse proverb. “He that walketh with
wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed,”
said the old Hebrew. “Evil company doth corrupt good manners,” said
the Greek, and Paul quoted it in his letter to the Greek Christians
at Corinth. “Talent is perfected in solitude, but character is formed
in the stream of the world,” is the German of it. “Live with wolves
and you will learn to howl,” the Spanish proverb has it; and in homely
Holland fashion, the Dutch proverb is, “Lie down with dogs and you will
get up with fleas.” In these terse sayings, elegant and inelegant,
the race has recorded its judgment as to the power of association.
The fraternity promotes certain forms of most intimate association at
a crucial period and thus enters powerfully for good or ill into the
lives of young people.
There are certain credits to be entered in making up a trial balance
for the fraternity. It marks out a definite group of special friends
for closer association. One cannot become intimately acquainted
with the whole human race or even with as much of it as happens to
be present in a large high school or college. Whether it is done
in organized or in unorganized ways, there must come a process of
selection by which one’s social interests are kept to a manageable size.
The fraternity gives opportunity for learning to subordinate the purely
personal and selfish interests to the larger good. The fraternity man
has in view something beyond his own individual pleasure or success.
He is taught to aid some fraternity brother who has good prospects,
in athletics, in a race for some class honor, or in debate. Mutual
admiration, a common enthusiasm, a corporate ambition and the spirit
of cooperation, are thus developed in the whole group by a feeling of
common interest.
The fraternity brings the lower class man into closer touch with
upper class men. The first year man is not a mere unbaked freshman to
the juniors and seniors in his fraternity. They have an interest in
him, a responsibility for him, because of his fraternity connection.
These organizations thus cause the line of social cleavage to run
perpendicularly as well as horizontally. My own life will be forever
different by reason of the friendship of two upper class men in my
university days. Such friendships are wholesome for both the younger
and the older men.
The fraternity serves as a convenient basis for fellowship when a man
visits another college or when alumni return to their alma mater. The
house of one’s own fraternity is open to him, and affords opportunity
for him to come into touch with the eager, throbbing life about him.
The alumni of a chapter may also exert a real influence for good upon
the resident members of the fraternity, because of this continued
association.
The fraternity house offers a useful center for returning social
courtesies. The students, in their class-day spreads and at other
times, may thus indicate their appreciation of social attentions
received from townspeople.
All this can be said and said heartily. It may seem that I am making
out such a strong case for the fraternities that any criticism offered
later will be of no avail. It would be unfair, however, not to state
the advantages as strongly as one’s own judgment would approve.
But there are certain offsets in fraternity life which must come up
for an equally frank and thorough consideration. There is a constant
tendency in any fraternity house to spend more time and more money
than many a student can afford. No fellow of spirit can allow others
to treat him, take him to the theater, show him all manner of
attentions without feeling an obligation resting upon him to return
these courtesies. A few men in a fraternity with rich fathers, large
allowances, and warm hearts, can, with no sort of wrong intent, set the
pace in such a way as to demoralize a whole group of young men. The
man of modest means and simple habits, dependent upon a hard-working
father for his education and for all the comforts of his home life,
is apparently forced into a gait which it is wrong for him to take.
He does not intend to be mean or cruel, but he adopts a scale of
expenditure which he cannot afford; he runs into debt; he becomes
unjust to his parents, who are making sacrifices for his education.
It requires more grit than nine out of ten young fellows of the high
school or college age possess, to stand up and oppose the course of
action which leads to these ill-advised “good times.”
It is to be regretted that simplicity is so overborne in all our social
life by the elaborate and the expensive. Business men, husbands,
and fathers, are being killed off, before their time, by nervous
prostration, heart disease, or exhaustion of other vital organs, in
making the necessary money to keep it up. Society women, mothers and
daughters, are being sent to sanitariums and rest cures by reason of
the strenuous tasks imposed upon them in devising and arranging new and
elaborate ways of spending the money. What a caricature much of it is
upon real social life, which ought to be a joy, a recreation, a means
of relief from serious work, but never a burdensome, exacting labor!
The young girl in high school gives a luncheon for her fraternity
elaborate enough for a society woman of fifty. The boys plan for a good
time on a scale which might indicate that they were solid business men
well on in their prime, with fortunes of their own earning completely
at their disposal. The whole tendency of it is bad and only bad. The
simple pleasures are the best for everybody and especially so for young
people. The tuxedo is not a suitable garment for a five-year-old boy
even though his father is able to buy him a hundred of them; and some
of our social activity is quite as ridiculous as such a coat would be
on the youngster. It rears up a set of young people who, having tasted
it all and become blasé before their time, are now nervously intent
upon some new sensation by more startling and stimulating forms of
social life. And all the while the simple, serious, quiet interests of
education have been suffering a loss irreparable.
There is also the tendency in most fraternity houses toward a wasteful
use of time. Where there is a lounging room with its open fire, the
university colors, pillows, pictures, trophies scattered about, and a
group of jolly good fellows always accessible, it is not easy to turn
one’s back upon it and sit alone digging on some difficult subject. Eve
holding out an apple or even a ripe peach in the garden of Eden suffers
by comparison when placed alongside the temptations thus offered to a
student whose will may already be a trifle lame.
I recall a certain fraternity house which I watched for a number of
years. Splendid fellows they were--my heart warms within me as I think
of their faces! It was always Indian summer there--cigarette smoke
until one could scarcely see through it. It would not be entirely true
to say that one could cut it with a knife; some stronger implement
would have been needed, an axe maybe--perhaps “the Stanford axe.” A
number of the boys were keen and the jolly talk was sometimes equal to
a page from “Life” or “Fliegende Blätter.”
But men cannot make perpetual chimneys of themselves in order to
furnish such a volume of smoke or become perpetual jokers without
imperiling certain other interests, much more important than smoke
or jokes. And that same fraternity, genuinely attractive though it
was in its social aspects, became the banner house on the campus for
furnishing men who suddenly went home at the end of the term, because
“their fathers needed them in business,” or because “their health would
not stand the strain of college study”--those graceful explanations
which sound well and deceive nobody, either at the college end or the
home end of the line. The constant tendency in all fraternity life
is to spend upon pleasure more time and more money than the average
student can justly afford.
There is furthermore the tendency to a narrow exclusiveness which
sometimes degenerates into actual snobbishness. This is especially true
of the high-school fraternities. The spirit of narrow clannishness is
stronger then than later. Breadth of sympathy, which ought to be the
spirit of our public schools, is thus destroyed. The girl is tempted to
think that, out of hundreds of girls in high school, only the little
group of twenty in her own fraternity are fine, choice girls. When the
social interests are thus being “cribbed, cabined, and confined,” it
is not a long step to the spirit of that bigot who prayed, “O Lord,
bless me and my wife, my son John and his wife, us four and no more.”
The “us four and no more” attitude is apparent to thoughtful observers
in almost all of the high-school fraternities. The larger loyalty and
broader sympathy is overborne by a narrowed social interest.
It is the judgment of an ever-increasing number of men at the head
of the secondary schools that the high-school fraternities at least
are nuisances. This is their verdict in spite of the fact that many
of the best students are members of them, striving to make them
helpful, not hurtful. But when the losses and the gains are accurately
computed, the losses seem to far outrank the gains. The spirit of
social exclusiveness is opposed to the spirit of our public schools and
encourages the development of qualities that have no rightful place in
American young people.
Some high-school principals are non-committal, but more of them
frankly utter their condemnation of the fraternity as prejudicial to
the legitimate work of the school; as weakening the more inclusive
class loyalty and as offering an effective temptation to social
dissipation. They may not hope as yet to carry all high-school students
with them in this judgment, but if they could line up all parents who
believe that fraternities tend to alienate young people from their
homes, all high-school teachers who deplore the evil which results from
loyalty to a part instead of to the whole school, and all those who,
having advanced to college, look back upon those earlier fraternities
as cases of premature development, the young people would be amazed at
the verdict against the high-school fraternity!
We are constantly hearing the assertion that it is difficult for
girls to complete the high-school course without breaking down. Under
anything like normal conditions such a claim should be preposterous!
There are good reasons for believing that the nervous collapse is
due less to faithful study than to the unnecessary excitements of
fraternity rivalry and to the irregular hours and social dissipation
consequent upon fraternity life.
The right place for the fraternity is in the university where boys
and girls have become young men and young women, better able to guard
such organizations against these abuses; better able to see to it that
no barriers are built between them and those whom they ought to know;
better able to extend their generous admiration to those not of their
particular clique. In the university large numbers of students are away
from home, as is not the case in high school--and where it is wisely
controlled, the fraternity may be made a center for the deepening of
wholesome intimacies, in a way to render it a useful educational force.
It is well for every student to postpone the choice of a fraternity
until near the end of the first year. Before he joins, he will need to
look the various chapters over carefully and learn more about them than
appears in the shape of the pin or in the color of the flag at the top
of the house. He will want to ask what kind of men belong; what are
their ambitions and aims; what is their rank and standing in college;
whether their habits are clean, sound, wholesome, or enervating and
shady; what is the moral atmosphere about their house; what sort of
alumni have been sent out. He will only join one fraternity and he
wishes to make no mistake in that choice.
The habit of “rushing” men for membership has become inexpressibly
silly. The heads of weak men are turned by the social attentions thrust
upon them and the stronger men are frequently repelled by this overdone
eagerness. One would suppose the various chapters would be ashamed
to exhibit such anxiety to have men join as would seem to indicate a
sense of their own weakness. Let the fraternities make themselves worth
joining and a sufficient number of promising candidates to fill all the
lists will be forthcoming! Let any student make himself worth having
and the door will be open into a desirable house whenever he is ready
to enter it.
It would be well if each student made his fraternity experience
preparatory to the larger social status into which he will enter as a
mature man--a status where the narrow exclusiveness of the snob finds
the door shut in its face by men of sense. If he has really gained a
genuinely social spirit, he will be better able to take his place in
the business world as one ready to aid in building it upon the basis of
honor, integrity and mutual consideration. If he has rightly learned
the lessons of fraternity life he ought to be a better citizen, ready
to work in harmony with men who are bent upon making the State an
organized expression of wise and just principles. He ought to be fitted
to be a better churchman, making that institution a worthy expression
of the organized spirit of reverence toward God, of fellowship with
men, and of helpfulness for all good causes. And he will best attain
all these high aims if, in the supreme relationship of his life,
his own soul is knit with that “friend that sticketh closer than a
brother.” The Master of men came to found a fraternal kingdom of which
there shall be no end, and in that kingdom every man of fraternal
spirit should have standing.
IV
THE RELIGION OF A COLLEGE MAN
The leading notes in the religious life of a student will naturally be
intellectual and ethical. The mind is feeling its way out among the
immensities which have come into view as childhood is left behind. It
is seeking to know things as they are, learning how to bear itself
in thought toward the natural and the supernatural, the earthly and
the heavenly, the present and the future. It is no longer content
with a child’s faith received on the word of another; it has not yet
found the repose of tried and mature conviction. It is in process of
shaping its beliefs about God, about the world, about the Bible, about
prayer, about a future life. The college man is taken out-of-doors
intellectually where the walls are all down, and his religious life,
like the other sections of his nature, will naturally show signs
of restlessness. “The religion of youth is commonly a religion of
rationalism--the intellectual life is just starting on its long journey
in all the exhilaration and freshness of the morning.”
The ethical note in the college man’s religion will also be clear and
strong. Young people in sound health are commonly rigorous and even
merciless in their moral judgments. They are oftentimes unduly critical
touching the shortcomings of others. They are confused as to many of
the moral sanctions and uncertain as to what distinctions are essential
and what are merely conventional. They have a desire to know what is
right and why it is right, and they wish to discover the motive and
stimulus which will render them strong in doing the right. The best
results are always attained by taking into account lines of interest
already established, rather than by cutting squarely across the grain,
and the most effective approach to the heart of the student can be made
by observing these two leading notes in his religious life.
I am confirmed in this view by this bit of personal experience.
For six years I lectured every Monday during the second semester at
Stanford University, giving courses on “The Ethics of Christ,” a study
in the four Gospels, on “The Life and Literature of the Early Hebrews,”
a study in the Old Testament, on “Social Ethics,” a study of moral
values in the various relationships of modern life. These courses
were offered as any courses would be. A full syllabus was used and
much collateral reading suggested; a monthly written quiz and a final
examination were held; credit was given for work done as in any other
department. The courses were popular though the requirements brought a
sufficient number of failures each year to keep the thought of a day of
judgment before the mind of the class. There was evident throughout a
strong, healthy interest in the intellectual problems of faith, in the
interpretation of scripture, in the ethical questions discussed, and
in the intelligent application of moral principles to modern life. The
sight of those young faces and the reading of the papers offered have
helped to confirm me in the view that the two characteristic qualities
of the college man’s religion are those already indicated.
The expression of that religious interest will take many forms. It
will utter itself in rational worship. The clear-headed student will
not continue to do things which seem to him meaningless or useless.
There are church services in which he will refuse to participate, but
sincere, reverent, and rational worship will commend itself to him as a
suitable expression of that deeper something growing within his heart.
The upward look, the outward reach of a higher aspiration, the need of
a hand-clasp which is not of earth, all these appeal to him! Let the
music, the lessons, the prayers, and the atmosphere of the church be
made a true, good, and beautiful expression of intelligent worship and
the thoughtful student will rejoice in the aid it gives him in working
out his problems.
The words of Thomas Carlyle addressed to the students in the University
of Edinburgh are in point: “No nation that did not contemplate this
wonderful universe with an awe-stricken and reverential feeling
that there is an omnipotent, all-wise, and all-virtuous Being
superintending all men and all the interests in it--no such nation has
ever done much nor has any man who has forgotten God.” In much blunter
fashion the Bible says, “The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all
the nations that forget God.” The word “hell” can be spelled with four
letters, but to spell that for which it stands, the moral failure,
the personal disappointment, the pain, and the distress of spiritual
defeat, the bitter regret and remorse over years wasted by turning away
from the Highest, would require all the letters of the alphabet and the
sum total of human experience. In order to do justly and to love mercy,
we need to stand humbly before God as the one entitled to our supreme
and final allegiance. Where all this is made plain in a provision for
worship which is rational, beautiful, and helpful, the college man will
find in it a natural expression for his religious life.
The religious interest will also express itself in the study of
religious truth. Courses in ethics, and in philosophy where it relates
to life and is not all clouds and mist; courses in the Hebrew and
other sacred literatures; courses in the history of religion and in
comparative religion, may all be made genuinely spiritual exercises.
The students are aided by such work in knowing that truth which sets
mind and heart free from whatever hinders growth and usefulness.
Still more directly, the courses of Bible study offered through the
Christian associations in our universities become wholesome expressions
of religious interest. The history and literature of the Hebrews,
the life of Christ, the story of the early Church, studied with the
system, the thoroughness, and the fearlessness found in other lines of
investigation, afford a genuine ministry to the spiritual life. Many
students who lose their Christian faith in the colleges suffer this
loss because the mind has gone ahead in science, in philosophy, and
in history, but has lagged back in religion. It has been belated in
the childish conceptions gained in early life. Such students sometimes
throw away their Christian faith and habits, and then wonder that the
rest of us are so stupid and credulous. As a matter of fact they have
simply failed to make the advance and readjustment which serious and
growing minds habitually make on their way from childhood to maturity.
The thorough study of religious truth, then, as an aid to a rational
restatement of one’s personal faith, becomes another worthy expression
of religious life and a useful source of culture for the spiritual
nature.
The religious life of the student will also utter itself in a personal
quest for righteousness. No life ever comes to have that which the
world really trusts and values until it can say in its whole purpose,
“I do these certain things not because they are easy or common or funny
or politic; I do them because they are right.” If religion is to enter
into its own in any educational institution it will be necessary to
have a great deal more downright honesty in college life than there
is in many institutions of learning at this time. The sneer that “in
college and in the custom house” it is all right to lie and to cheat
if one can do it without being caught, has had much to justify it. The
student who asks to be excused from a college engagement because he is
too sick to work, but who will go to a ball and dance every number on
the program, or to a football game and yell until his throat is raw,
is simply a liar! The student who copies from another’s examination
paper and signs his name to it as though it were his own, is a cheat
and a forger. The man who steals spoons from some hotel or restaurant
in the town for his fraternity table is not funny; he is simply a
thief and an outlaw! The student who spends on vice or dissipation,
money furnished by his father for term bills, entering them up in his
financial statement as “sundries” or what not, is a whelp and a cad, no
matter how good looking he is or how well his dress suit fits him! Dirt
is dirt no matter how we may adorn it with lace; a lie is a lie, and
theft is theft, no matter how they are smoothed over with fine words!
There ought to be in all college life rigid, unsympathetic honesty,
like that of the bank or the counting-room. The perpetual effort after
personal righteousness should stand as an abiding expression of the
religious life.
The genuinely religious spirit will show itself in mutual helpfulness.
The Christian service rendered by students can best be rendered in
terms of student life. The readiness to lend a hand to some fellow
working his way through; the thoughtfulness and unselfishness shown
to a student who is sick; the organized usefulness of the Christian
Associations in meeting first-year students and aiding them in those
strange first days on the campus; the ability to exert steadily a
wholesome influence on the side of what is right and wise, without
self-consciousness or ostentation--all these are forms of Christian
helpfulness natural and appropriate to student life.
During an epidemic of typhoid fever at Stanford University some years
ago the students stood together and insisted that every patient unable
to provide himself with a trained nurse should have, through their
cooperation, the best care which medical science could afford. They
gladly gave up the senior dance and other social entertainments and
receptions, in order to devote the money to this unselfish purpose.
They raised in various ways among themselves more than five thousand
dollars for this practical form of helpfulness. “By this shall all men
know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” This
was the original test of Christian discipleship proposed by Christ
himself, and none better has been found.
The nurture of the college man’s religion will come mainly in two ways:
first, through fellowship with a larger group of Christian people.
“Gather two or three together in my name,” Christ said, “and there am I
in the midst.” He thus indicated the social character of the religion
he taught and suggested the help to be found in wholesome fellowship.
The actual experience of mankind has strongly endorsed his claim.
The best fellowship will naturally be found in some one of the churches
of the community. The student will find there friends as well as
worship and instruction; he may find also his place in some concrete
activity for the progress of the kingdom. Oliver Wendell Holmes used
to say in explanation of his habit of church attendance, “There is a
little plant within me called reverence which needs watering at least
once a week.” He might also have added that it needed the warm southern
exposure of meeting in spiritual fellowship those who were similarly
bent on noble living, and that it found wholesome expression through
some useful participation in the activities of a parish church.
Each student needs the church even more than the church needs him. He
will learn by its aid to more wisely and more conscientiously use the
opportunities which Sunday offers. The day of the Lord ought to be a
day of turning aside to see the bushes that burn with divine fire. The
habit of Sunday study is a mistake, physically, mentally, and morally.
The pioneers who crossed the plains in ’49, driving six days in the
week and resting one, reached California ahead of those who drove
straight along day in and day out, week in and week out; and the cattle
of the men who observed the method of a regularly recurring rest day,
arrived in better condition. The one who said, “Labor six days and
do all thy work,” holding the seventh apart for rest and spiritual
opportunity, knew something about the muscles and the nerves as well as
about the souls of men. Sunday held apart from the ordinary grind of
college life and used as a time of privilege for the higher nature to
have its undisputed chance to grow, becomes a useful factor in normal
development.
The religious life of the student will be deepened and strengthened
most of all through personal fellowship with Jesus Christ. To know
him who stands revealed in brief on the pages of the four gospels and
revealed at large in the splendid history into which he has built
himself during the last nineteen hundred years, is to gain the utmost
help for character-building that the world has thus far found.
We know Jesus Christ, not only by the study of his life and teachings,
but by sharing in his purpose for the race and by participation in
his spirit. It is this that enables us to see life whole, and to put
ourselves in the way of gaining a fuller measure of that life complete.
Through our fellowship with him we come to the point where we see life
in its deeper, hidden attitudes, as well as on its surface; we see its
upper, unseen relations as well as those upon its own level; we see
its ultimate future, beyond the event we call death, as well as the
pressing claims of the immediate present. We see life whole through
Christ and by our personal fellowship with him we are increasingly
enabled to possess that rounded life for ourselves.
There is one supreme reason why every college man should be a
Christian--the final Christianity is not yet here. It is waiting for
the contribution of thought, of spiritual experience and of useful
activity, which the generation to which you belong is in a position
to make. Jesus had, and still has, many things to say, which the
world even yet is not able to bear. It is for each man, by personal
consecration and individual effort, to so weave his activities into the
unfinished story of the world’s redemption as to aid in bringing about
the true attitude toward those unseen things which are eternal.
College men are eager to make personal experiment of other unseen
forces. They love to lay bare hidden secrets by the use of the Roentgen
ray; they rejoice in sending and receiving messages by wireless
telegraphy; they cluster around an experiment which displays the
mysterious attributes of that strange substance called radium; they
show themselves eager to witness the wonders of liquid air. They should
be no less eager to know by genuine personal experience the efficacy
of prayer, the power of faith, the joy of spiritual renewal through
divine grace. They should be no less eager to send and receive those
messages which come and go between God and man, when the heavens are
open and the angels are ascending and descending upon the sons of
men. You have, each one of you, a clear responsibility and obligation
in this matter. Gain for yourself an intelligent faith; show to the
world one more consistent Christian life; render to his cause your own
personal quota of competent service, and in doing this you will not
only be spiritually enriched yourself, you will aid in bringing in that
greater Christianity which is yet to be.
V
THE CHOICE OF A LIFE-WORK
The man who said, “I am doing a great work, I cannot come down,” was
laying bricks. But the bricks went into a wall, and the wall surrounded
the capital city of his country as its main defense, and the city was
Jerusalem, the headquarters of the Hebrew people! The moral history of
that people has woven itself into the story of the world’s redemption,
as has no other history on earth. Its writings furnish us the best
book we have: its Messiah, born in Bethlehem of Judea, has become the
world’s Saviour; and the high claim that “Salvation is of the Jews,” is
well sustained by the facts. Simple deeds are sometimes far-reaching
in their divine significance. Laying bricks in a wall which protected
the city out of which came the world’s Messiah, was surely a splendid
occupation. The man was well within the facts, when he cried to those
who tried to interrupt him, “I am doing a great work, I cannot come
down.”
I quote these words as indicating the sense of vocation, the honest
pride in his work, the personal appreciation of its wider meanings,
the safeguard it affords against unworthy ideals, the means of culture
it opens for moral character, which ought to be found in every one’s
attitude toward his life-work. Alas for you, if you cannot all say, by
and by, what the bricklayer said!
Some college men unfortunately allow themselves to be driven into
this or that occupation by force of circumstances. They forget that
college training ought to fit us to oppose circumstances if need be and
resolutely work out some splendid purpose in the teeth of opposition.
Some college men drift into anything that offers--they must do
something to earn their bread and they catch the nearest way. This
puts them on a level with the hungry dog looking for a bone and facing
in whatever direction he smells meat. Such men are opportunists all
their lives, taking whatever offers, even though on the face of it a
temporary makeshift, trusting that when one job is finished another may
turn up. They are like so many fleas, jumping from job to job, wherever
they see a chance for a good bite. They fail to exercise that power of
choice and determination which ought to prevail in the selection of
that which is to claim six-sevenths of one’s time and interest during
all his working years.
There is spiritual value in any legitimate calling, and this
satisfying return is open and possible to every college man bent on
doing square work. “To every man his work”; _his_ by personal
fitness; _his_ by the sense of fulfilling a divine purpose in
selecting it; _his_ in the feeling that it belongs to him! Some
men are called of God to the Christian ministry and others are no less
called of God to teach or to heal or to build. God’s calls announce
themselves in a variety of ways. The shining vision that came to Paul
on the Damascus road or the mighty spiritual impulse which visited
the heart of President Finney of Oberlin as he struggled in the woods
alone, are forms of the divine call, but there are other forms equally
valid. The call of the world’s need for some special work and your
own consciousness of power to render that service will bring you a
genuine sense of vocation as you gird yourself for it. There are many
intimations as to the place one should take and hold, which may have
all the compelling force of a vision from on high.
But to speak more closely of the matter in hand, let me name some of
the considerations which must enter into the choice of a life-work. I
can only speak in the most general way, addressing as I do young men of
varying abilities and temperaments. If one should discuss the value or
attractiveness of any particular vocation, the personal element and the
question of individual fitness would instantly come in. Some general
considerations however may prove suggestive.
It is best not to make one’s decision too early or too rigidly. The
average young man is not sufficiently acquainted either with himself
or with the vocations to make his final decision during his last year
in high school, or during his first year in college. One of the chief
values of college training is that it discovers the man to himself.
You have scarcely a bowing acquaintance with yourself when you only
know yourself as a freshman--wait and meet this same fellow within,
as a sophomore, as a junior, as a senior. There are unsuspected
capabilities in him which training and experience will bring out.
Wait also until you learn more about the vocations themselves. In
making choice of a wife it is well to become acquainted with a number
of young ladies before you settle down to an exclusive intimacy with
one. There are other girls who can look sweet and say pleasant things
too; it is not wise to fall so completely in love with the first
dainty bit of white muslin you see as to exclude other delightful
associations. The law has its attractions, so has medicine, so has
the ministry, so has the work of education, or the business career,
or the work of an architect, a chemist, or a forester. It is wise not
to conclude too early in life that the attractions of this particular
vocation shut out all the rest from consideration. Look yourself over
and look the field over with great care at least a hundred times before
making a final choice. It will be a sorry thing if you start out to
unlock the door of your future with the wrong key.
Consider the whole man in your choice. It is not simply what you carry
home in your pocket, as a result of your day’s work and of all the days
of work, but what you carry away in mind and heart as well; what you
carry away in the gratitude and appreciation of your fellow men; what
you gain in the beneficent influence you may exert upon the community
through your calling. Ten thousand a year is a splendid return from
the investment of one’s personal ability, but there are other returns
which may be added to the figures named in your contract in such a way
as to make the money consideration seem the small end of it. And there
are other returns which may make it seem as if the man who received
the ten thousand a year had worked all his life for meager pay. Many a
saloon-keeper has made ten times as much money out of his calling as
the college professor or the clergyman makes out of his, but when the
books are opened, other books as well as the cash book, the comparative
values of the vocations will stand revealed.
The young man may be doing some honest and useful work, but without the
sense of joy or pride in it. In such event it fails to render him back
a full return. The culture of one’s own best life must come with his
ordinary work or else the man is sacrificed to the profession. We are
not here to be effective machines for grinding out sermons or briefs,
operations or lectures, bargains or manufactured products: we are
here to be men, strong, fine, aspiring, and useful men. The whole man
therefore must be considered, his body, his brain, his heart, and his
soul, as well as his purse when you make selection of his life-work.
What you make out of your vocation is an important question, but what
it makes out of you is tenfold more important!
Make up your mind that in the long run your work will be estimated
by its genuine utility. Success comes not by luck, but by law. The
apparent exceptions, like four-leaf clovers, are not sufficiently
numerous to disturb the principle. It is three-leaf clover that feeds
the cows and fills the haymows. It is ordinary industry, fidelity,
persistence, and efficiency that bring the largest measure of abiding
success. Your work will be estimated by its utility in satisfying human
need.
This principle well understood, thoroughly believed, and constantly
acted upon, will be of untold value to you. Canfield says to the
young men at Columbia, “Measure your daily work by the efficiency and
completeness with which it meets the needs of your fellow men.” You
must measure it thus, for that is the way the world will estimate it.
You will not be able to live by your wits; you must live by your work
and your worth. Therefore, in making selection, consider carefully the
usefulness of the work you choose, for men are like medicines, when
they show themselves useful, they will be used.
The idea that success comes by luck or pull, or chance, is a fool’s
idea. Some such instances occur, but they are not even so common as
four-leaf clover--the man who starts out in life depending upon them is
more foolish than the farmer who would rely upon four-leaf clover for
his hay crop. And you will find as you come to live with him on close
terms that the world is a very sagacious old fellow in his estimate of
values. He has wonderful ability in discerning the real thing and in
putting away shoddy. You cannot sell him gold bricks straight along--if
now and then one is palmed off on the unwary, still they never become
a staple quoted in the market reports. Good clay bricks in the long
run are more profitable. Your work will be estimated, and estimated
accurately, by its utility in satisfying genuine human need. The
intelligent observance of this principle in making your selection will
introduce that spirit of service which ennobles the whole effort.
May your choice of vocation be so wise and right that you will be
content to have it dominate all minor matters in your life! Horace
Bushnell used to speak to Yale men about “the expulsive power of a new
affection.” The love for a pure woman making all impurity hateful and
disgusting; the love for some man of integrity making all lying and
dishonesty seem foul and mean; the love for God making all wrong-doing
repulsive! So there comes into the life, by the right choice of
vocation, a supreme interest and delight in one’s work, which drives
out all the low, cheap, mean things that would hinder it. “I am doing
a great work,” the man cries; “I am content to be absorbed in it and it
is morally impossible for me to come down to the trivial or the base.”
The famous Vienna surgeon, Dr. Lorenz, at a banquet during his visit
to this country, drank nothing but water. The man who sat next him at
table, knowing the love which so many Germans have for wine and beer,
asked the doctor if he were a teetotaler. The reply was: “I do not
know that I could be called that; I am not in any sense a temperance
agitator. But I am a surgeon and must keep my brain clear, my nerves
steady, my muscles tense.” Here spoke the voice of science on one of
its higher levels as to the effect of stimulants! Here spoke also
the voice of one who finds splendid moral culture in his devotion to
his life-work. “I am doing a great work, known on two continents and
beyond,” he seemed to say; “therefore I cannot, for the sake of an
abnormal sensation, come down to tickle my stomach, or tamper with my
nerves or drug my brain by the use of stimulants.”
Make such a selection of your life-work as will enable you to regard it
as the main expression of your spiritual life. Every man, no matter
what the special form of his employment may be, can so relate himself
to it and so strive to relate it and the results which flow from it,
to the life of the community as to make his ordinary work the main
utterance of his deeper nature. There will be the expression of his
spirituality in worship, in directly religious activity, in other forms
of effort, but the main expression should lie in that useful work which
claims six-sevenths of his time and strength.
“Give us this day our daily bread,” the Master said in the model
prayer. It ought to be the daily utterance of every serious man’s life.
Utter it with your lips alone and your body will starve to death! Utter
it with hands and brain alone, and your soul will famish! But utter
it with your entire nature, hands, brain, heart, and soul, addressing
themselves to God, to the resources God has placed at your call, and to
the need of the community for the service you can render, and then your
prayer will bring the bread which feeds the total nature up to its full
strength! Industry, intelligence and moral purpose, cooperating with
the divine bounty and with the needs of men, will work out the highest
type of character and make one’s daily employment sacramental in its
influence upon his own heart and upon the lives of others.
I have not spoken of the claims of the various vocations, but let me
utter one last word, as strong as I can make it, for the Christian
ministry. There are splendid rewards and honors to be won today at
the bar, in medicine, in the work of education, in commerce, in
manufacture, in engineering. Into all these callings strong and useful
men are going in such numbers that there is no cry of need coming back.
It is not so in the ministry. There is in every branch of the Church
and in all the states of the Union, a loud and a sore cry for young men
of sound health, good sense, trained intelligence, social sympathy,
and genuine character, to enter the ministry and furnish the moral and
spiritual leadership the country craves. Like the man of Macedonia the
modern pulpit stands up and cries, “Come over into Macedonia, and help
us.”
If I can read my Church history aright there never was a time when
the opportunities and the rewards of the ministry were so great. A
man will earn less money in the ministry than the same degree of
ability would command in other fields of labor, though congregations,
especially in cities, were never so generous with their pastors as
now. What he carries away in his purse, however, is only one of many
rewards the vocation brings. In the Church today there is liberty of
thought; in some branch of it every man desiring to aid his fellows in
doing justly, in loving mercy and in walking humbly with God, can find
a hearty welcome and a place to work. There is a wide-spread hunger
on the part of the people for a competent and helpful interpretation
of this literature in the Bible. There is a call for men who can
intelligently and effectively apply Christian principles to modern
conditions and problems. There is an abiding demand for men who can
bring the eternal verities of the Spirit before their congregations
with power, and offer strength, cheer, courage, and comfort to those
who come up weary and heavy-laden out of the work of the week.
And in return for this highest form of service any one can hope to
render to his fellows, there is a mighty tide of appreciation and
gratitude waiting to flow in upon the heart of the man who has been
doing genuine, helpful service as a minister of Jesus Christ. The field
is wide, the rewards are rich and perpetual, the opportunities are like
wide-open and effectual doors, but the strong, wise, devoted laborers
are all too few! You cannot anywhere on earth invest your life with
more satisfaction to yourself, with a greater sense of serviceableness
to your brother men, with a warmer sense of God’s own approving favor,
than in the ministry of the modern Church.
In selecting your life-work, you wish to consider the whole man, to
estimate possible success by the utility of the service rendered,
to have a vocation to which all minor interests shall bow in glad
obedience, and to make it the supreme expression of your spiritual
life! Does any work on earth so meet these requirements as does the
Christian ministry? In your individual case, if the call of God, the
recognized needs of the world, and the sense of spiritual obligation
should bear you into that vocation, you would forever thank him that
among all the good things in life he had given you the best! You
would gladly put away all the allurements which might defeat your
spiritual effectiveness! You would say, to all beholders, by sincere
and whole-hearted devotion to your calling, “I am doing a great work;
I cannot come down.”
VI
MORAL VENTURES
The old saw, “Nothing venture, nothing have,” is true in mining; the
miner who is unwilling to risk his money on a hole in the ground
without knowing what may lie at the other end of it never grows rich.
It is true in farming, for the man who is not willing to throw his seed
wheat away on an uncertainty will never reap a harvest. It is true in
business, for if no man had been willing to invest a dollar until he
had something as sure as a government bond, we would not have reached
first base yet in our commercial development. It is true in all the
finer forms of outdoor sport. The plaintive cry goes up now and then
from certain quarters against the idea of having any element of risk or
danger in college athletics--such people had better stick to ping-pong
or croquet, leaving the other games to those of us who still have a
sprinkling of red corpuscles in our veins. Nothing venture, nothing
have!
The same principle holds on the higher levels of moral life, for in
all the more heroic forms of duty there is an element of risk. There
are those who hold that right is nothing more than expediency and that
wrong is simply a bad blunder. They can make quite a showing on paper.
“Honesty is the best policy” in the long run, but it is a great deal
more than that. Genuine honesty, financial, physical, intellectual,
moral, the sort of honesty that adds two and two and gets four every
time with never a fraction more nor less, is something more than good
policy. It reaches down and takes hold of things fundamental in a way
that mere policy never does, never can. And the fact stands that the
saints and the seers, the heroes and the martyrs, the poets and the
singers who have furnished inspiration and leadership, who have kindled
the fire of moral passion in other breasts because it burned hot in
their own, have been men to whom right was more than good policy. The
moral leaders have been men who were ready to take risks in doing
certain things because they believed those things to be right.
There is a certain short story which brings this point out in telling
fashion. There was a king who lived “somewhere east of Suez, where
there ain’t no Ten Commandments and the best is like the worst.” He
was the fortunate possessor of a big stick and he wielded it with
striking success. To celebrate one of his notable victories he caused
to be made a huge, gold-plated image ninety feet high and eighteen feet
broad. He set it up out on the campus and called upon the people of his
realm to bow down and worship it. He coupled that invitation with the
stimulating announcement that if any man refused he would be cast into
a furnace of fire.
Now with that alternative in plain sight, the popular, the politic,
the expedient thing was to get down and worship the image, or at least
to go through the form. “In Rome you must do as the Romans do”--so the
moral jelly-fish who have never reached the vertebrate level are ever
saying. With a golden image ninety feet high and eighteen feet broad,
with the king leading off in the worship and all his captains and
counselors, his rulers and his governors backing him up, what could any
ordinary man do but conform!
But there in that same country east of Suez there were three young
fellows who knew about the Ten Commandments. They had learned them “by
heart” as we say, which means much more than the mere ability to reel
them off the tongue as one might repeat the multiplication table. It
was a matter of principle with them not to worship images of any sort.
When the multitude flopped down on its knees before the Thing that was
ninety feet high the three young men stood erect.
Their defiant action was promptly reported to the king, and with all
the fury of an oriental despot he caused them to be brought before
him and again threatened with the fiery furnace. Then there came from
the lips of uncalculating youth those ringing words of moral defiance
which cause the heart of every man under forty to leap, “Our God whom
we serve is able to deliver us from the fiery furnace! We believe that
he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king! _But if not_”--there
is the nub of the statement and there I want to rest my whole weight in
this address--“but if not, be it known unto thee, O king, we will not
serve thy gods!” No matter what might come, they stood ready to take
the risk of obedience to the highest they saw.
The men who are really putting the world ahead in its business methods
and in its civic affairs, in the quality of the ideals which dominate
the work of education and in the standards which obtain in society at
large, are not men who are always making shrewd calculations as to
what will be most expedient. These royal leaders of the race sitting
upon their respective thrones of spiritual usefulness endeavor to
shape means to ends. They indulge in no sort of bluster or heroics.
They seek as far as may be to avoid open disaster. They say frankly,
“We believe that this course of action will bring us out all right,
vindicating itself here and now, _but if not_,”--even though
personal loss, popular opposition and apparent defeat seem to be the
immediate result--“we will stand for the right as we see the right.”
These men ready to take risks in doing their duty in the face of heavy
odds, ready to make the moral venture of fidelity to the highest ideals
in sight, are the only men who are really worth while.
Yonder on the coast at a life-saving station a group of determined
men see a wreck off shore. They know all about the peril of the sea;
it has been their major study for years. They quietly put on their
storm clothes and their helmets, equipping themselves with all those
appliances which experience has indicated as having value. They push
their life-boat through the angry surf and are off. “We hope to bring
those imperiled passengers and sailors safe to land and to get back
ourselves,” they say; “but, if not, we go just the same. It is our
duty.”
Here in the crowded city a fireman climbs up the longest ladder
available on the side of a burning building. Through a window on the
fourth floor he catches a glimpse of the body of a woman who has been
overcome by heat and smoke. He has been thoroughly trained by years
of stern experience with city fires. He knows that the floor of that
room may drop at any moment, that, if he ventures in, he, too, may be
overcome by heat and smoke; that if he leaves his ladder for one moment
it may mean certain death. In the face of everything he climbs right in
to rescue the woman. “I hope to get out all right,” he says; “but if
not, here goes just the same. It’s my duty.”
Now the world will never be saved from its sin and shame until the rest
of us who wear no uniforms of any kind are ready for that same sort of
moral venture in the realms of business and politics, in educational
and in social life. Here and there are small groups of men entering
actively into the political life of the city, the state, the nation,
ready to know machine politicians from the inside rather than from the
outside, willing to get down and be muddied with their mud, in order
that better men and better methods may prevail. Here and there are
small groups of men who know that some of the methods in the world
of business are fatal to that larger prosperity in which all classes
may equitably share and fatal to the human values at stake. They are
not sitting on the bleachers idly criticizing the players--they are
in the game, but intent upon playing it according to finer rules
and nobler methods. They are standing oftentimes at great cost to
themselves for ideals which were not born in the counting-room, which
do not receive their most accurate appraisement from the entries in the
cash-book. These groups of idealists are not large as yet, but they
are significant--they are the hope of the nation. They are the saving
remnant in our modern Israel.
Only as men are ready to lash themselves like Ulysses of old to those
enduring principles of righteousness and honor which stand erect
like masts and sail on, no matter what alluring sirens of temporary
expediency sing along the course, shall we make moral headway or at
last make port.
You have read the history of those brave Dutchmen at the siege of
Leyden. They were besieged by the powerful army of Spain. They
were fighting for the safety of their city, for the freedom of the
Netherlands, and for those principles of civil and religious liberty
which they held dear. Unable to carry the place by assault the
Spaniards undertook to starve the Dutchmen out. The Spanish commander
demanded the surrender of the place coupled with the threat that if
his demand were refused he would starve them all to death, men, women,
and children.
The sturdy Hollanders sent back this reply--“Tell the Spanish commander
we will eat our left arms first and fight on with the right.” But as
the siege went on some of the less heroic souls finally suggested to
the governor that the food supply was very low and that it might be
well to make some compromise. “Never,” he cried; “eat me first, but do
not surrender.” They held on until finally in their desperation a few
of them stole out at night and opened the dikes to let in the Atlantic
Ocean. It might mean death to them, but it would also mean death to
their enemies. In the confusion which ensued when the enemy’s camp was
flooded, the Dutchmen had their opportunity--they rushed forth and from
apparent defeat wrested a splendid victory. The great victories by
land or by sea, in the stirring times of war or in the slower, harder
battles of peace, are won by men who stand ready for that sort of moral
venture.
The people of any state have the right--they have paid for it in
honest money--to look to the university not only for mental insight
and efficiency, but for moral energy and spiritual passion. If the
university is worthy to bear that high name it ought to be a place
where moral idealism can breathe and grow as upon its native heath.
This is thoroughly understood by all those who know the full meaning of
“higher education.”
If any of you have come up to this place of privilege merely with the
idea of being trained so that you can more successfully compete with
your fellows in feathering your own nests, making them thick and warm
and soft as untrained men might be unable to do, you would better go
home. If your associates knew that fact they would be ashamed of you.
The members of the faculty, as soon as they discover that spirit in
you, are ashamed of you. The people of the state would be ashamed of
you did they know that you were here using the privileges they have
provided in that mood. You are here to be made ready and competent to
take more steadily and more largely the risks which public service
involves.
Hundreds of people, many of them good and respectable people
too, confess themselves unable to stand up against the spirit of
self-indulgence, the worship of luxury, the fierce pursuit of things
material which are today dwarfing the souls of men in countless homes.
All the more honor to those university men and women who stand out and
bear witness to their firm confidence in the beauty of simplicity, in
the value of sincerity of soul, in the vital importance of directing
the ultimate aspirations to things spiritual!
Hundreds of men in commercial and political life are hanging out the
flag of distress. “We are caught in a system,” they say. “We cannot
help ourselves. We must play the game in the same ruthless way our
competitors are playing it.” All the more honor to those men who
are ready to face defeat if need be, that they may stand clearly
for unflinching integrity, for genuine consideration for the higher
interests involved in industry, and for all those sacred ideals which
ought to shine in the secular sky every day in the week as well as
through the stained glass windows on the first day.
In the face of the insistent demand for moral leadership it would be a
downright shame if the university men should be found skulking in the
rear, choosing the lower because it is the easier and in their weak
attempts at moral advance following the line of least resistance. The
persistent refusal of the call to high and responsible service becomes
in these exacting days the act of a scoundrel. It is for every college
man to stand ready to make the moral venture of fidelity to the highest
in sight and to share in the honor of the ultimate victory.
VII
THE LAW OF RETURNS
It was a well-seasoned parson who once remarked that he made it a point
never to speak in public without taking a text. It mattered not whether
it was an after-dinner speech, a Fourth of July oration or a sermon,
he always took a text, that he might be sure, as he said, to “give the
people something worth remembering.”
In imitation of his pious example I will take a text. You will find my
text in the book of Numbers, the first chapter and the second verse.
It reads like this--“Two and two make four.” That particular statement
does not happen to be in the Bible, but it is as true as anything which
is found there, and it will serve as a basis for what I wish to say
regarding the law of returns.
Two and two make four. Never by any sort of bad luck or ill chance
only three and a half; never by any amount of pulling or stretching
or coaxing four and a half, but always and everywhere just four and no
more! It is a definite, absolute statement of fact. It always has been
so and it always will be so. No one can imagine a world where two and
two will not make four.
If a man deposits two dollars in the bank today and two tomorrow, he
can draw out four the third day. In forty years from that time he
can still draw out exactly four dollars and whatever interest upon
his original deposit the bank may allow. Life is like that. With
what measure we mete, it is measured back to us again. We get out of
life what we put in, by a law as definite and as unyielding as the
statement about two and two. There are no Santa Clauses lurking in the
shadow--each individual takes out of the big stocking what has been
previously put in, not by magic, but by solid and verifiable effort.
Once for all dismiss the idea that success in life is the result
of luck or pull or any such artificial thing. There was a man in
San Francisco who once picked up a five dollar gold piece in the
street-car. He was a poor man and it was a great find for him. He
thenceforth spent a large part of his time studying the floor of the
street-car, peering in and out among the feet of the passengers, to
find another gold piece. He never found another one, but the time
wasted, if it had been given to thought and effort touching his own
trade, would have earned for him many an extra gold piece. Now and
then something may occur which men call “luck,” but it offers nothing
reliable by which one may safely shape his course.
Young men and maidens look for four-leaf clovers on the lawn. They are
commonly intent upon something else besides the clover as they creep
about on their hands and knees--something sweeter and more satisfying
than clover, and they find this too. Occasionally they do find a
four-leaf clover, but the clover which makes the lawn green, feeds the
cows, supplies the bees with honey and fills the haymow, is three-leaf
clover--the ordinary, every-day sort of clover. The farmer, the
dairyman, and the bee all know that the reliable and satisfying returns
in life come not by some happy chance, but in those common and usual
events which are according to law.
When the blood is warm, the heart beating high and fast, the nerves
eager to yield their thrills, young people see visions and dream
dreams. It ought to be so. The girl who does not have her day-dreams is
no girl at all. The boy who does not see ahead of him shapes and forms
of activity, achievement, advance, higher and more commanding than
the Sierra, if not quite so solid, does not deserve to be young. The
loftier, the richer, the rosier these day-dreams, the better!
But those visions will have to be worked out and realized, in so far
as they come to have a definite, ascertainable value, in a world of
plain, hard fact. The girl will marry a man with feet and hands like
the rest of us; and the home she has, the place she makes for herself
in society, the record of useful service she writes opposite her name,
will be determined according to law. And the place in the world’s life
which the boy carves out for himself as he climbs toward maturity,
the size of it, the location of it, the comfort of it, will be the
inevitable reaction from wise and useful effort. The law of returns is
as sure as the statement about two and two making four.
We find this made plain in several directions--first of all in the
gaining and maintenance of sound health. Genuine achievement in many
lines becomes in the last analysis largely a question of nerves,
digestion, physical stamina. In the busy, hurried city life the
question is, “Can this man stand up to it as long and as effectively
as any other man--and then just that much longer which gives him
preeminence?” The lawyer must be able to go into court day after day
clear-headed, so that he will have all the law he knows at his command,
patient and smooth with blundering witnesses, wise and self-controlled
in the face of the nagging of the opposing counsel; he must be able to
do this all day long for weeks together, looking up his authorities at
night oftentimes, and not break down. The physician must do something
more than ride around in an automobile and look wise; he must be able
to carry upon his mind and heart the anxieties of a hundred households
at once, work all day, frequently half the night, eating and sleeping
as he can, and do all this without resorting to stimulants or drugs
to keep himself up to the mark. The teacher bent not on imparting
information or on merely keeping the wheels of a pedagogical machine
turning, but upon the high task of forming, developing, enriching
personality in fifty or sixty restless lives there in plain view, needs
a sound physique. The minister of religion if he is to stand up before
the same congregation for a score of years or more and put faith, hope,
courage, heart, and resolution into them and not become fagged out and
stale, must be a man who can sleep nights, digest his meals, maintain
his poise, rise early, and go all day without losing his head or his
health--and for all this he needs a prime body. The same is true in the
life of the merchant or the mechanic, in the work of the manufacturer
or the farmer.
Henry Ward Beecher used to say that there were three kinds of people in
the world--the sick people who must be taken care of with sympathetic
tenderness; the people who are not sick, able to be up and to take
their nourishment; and the people who are positively, radiantly,
and joyously well. If the young man has not been handicapped by some
accident or by an unfortunate heredity, it lies easily within his power
to be enrolled in this third class. He ought to hold himself resolutely
unwilling to accept anything less.
It is much more than a matter of personal prudence or of self-interest.
Up to the limit of his powers each man owes it to his family, to
his friends, and to the world about him to furnish it one more
healthy, vigorous life. The world is defrauded if by his foolishness,
dissipation, or laziness it is put off with a whining, grumbling,
irritable caricature of what the man might have been. He owes it to
the members of his family not to burden them with unnecessary doctor’s
bills, nursing, and anxiety. He owes it to them not to break down and
die before his time, leaving them to struggle on alone. Good, sound
health, clear up to the limit of what intelligence, conscience, and
that resolution which will not take “no” for an answer may achieve,
becomes a moral obligation! The man who shirks this physical duty
becomes to that extent a scamp.
Such physical efficiency comes not as a piece of good luck; nor
is disease to be regarded always as a misfortune or “a mysterious
dispensation of providence.” The man careless about the drainage or
thoughtlessly allowing decaying vegetables to lie in the cellar of his
home need not prate about “providence” if fever attacks some member
of his household. The man who eats hot biscuits three times a day and
drinks coffee by the quart until he is as yellow as a Chinaman has no
right to shake his head over “the mysterious ways of God,” when he
becomes ill. The young fellow who inhales whole fog-banks of cigarette
smoke until his lungs are weak and his heart action defective, who
tampers with his nerves by the use of stimulants or narcotics, need
not be surprised that in the hard contests of life sounder men walk on
ahead, leaving him in the rear. In each case the man forgot that two
and two make four, that we must settle by the books, that according to
the law of returns we take out what we put in.
Physical efficiency cannot be hastily bought in the drug store at a
dollar a bottle any more than women can buy good complexions there
for fifty cents a box. Beauty is more than skin deep; it roots all
the way down into those vital processes which give the fair woman the
appearance and the reality of joyous, engaging health. And the physical
efficiency which stands the strain of modern life cannot be rapidly
gained by the use of drugs; it comes according to the law of definite
returns. It comes only as men eat good food, enough and not too much,
drink that which slakes rather than creates thirst, sleep a sufficient
number of hours, some of them before midnight, breathe their full share
of the outdoor air where there is plenty for everybody, and exercise
themselves sanely in some wholesome industry. It all comes according to
method and not by magic.
The newspapers on the morning after the presidential election of
nineteen hundred brought us an interesting picture. One of the
candidates for vice-president that year had been traveling for weeks
together, speaking ten or fifteen times a day to great audiences
eager to drain him of his last drop of vitality. He had been meeting
influential citizens by the hundreds, shaking hands with them
until his right arm might have felt like the handle of some outworn
town pump. He had been doing all this under the constant strain of
tremendous excitement and personal interest. A man who had wasted his
strength in vicious indulgences would have lasted about as long in
such a situation as an old lady would last in a football game. This
man went through it without breaking down, without losing his head
or making foolish, damaging statements. And when the reporters went
to call on him the night of the election they found him in evening
dress, rejoicing in the companionship of his family, from whom he had
been separated for those weeks, calmly awaiting the returns. Theodore
Roosevelt--whether we agree with all his policies or not, we admire
a vigorous, intelligent, public-spirited American citizen wherever
found! He entered college a delicate lad. He gained and maintained that
splendid efficiency by remembering that two and two make four. He was
willing to pay the full price for virility by his steady attention to
the law of returns.
The same rule holds in the mental field. There are men who fall
into the way of relying upon what they are pleased to call “genius.”
A bad case of “genius” in a young man is almost as fatal to his
highest success as smallpox. There are a few men in each generation
exceptionally endowed, just as there are a few four-leaf clovers in
every field, but the work of the world is done mainly by men of average
build.
And even men of undeniable genius attribute their success mainly to
persistent effort. Agassiz used to say, “I seem to have formed the
habit of observing more closely than many of my associates.” Darwin,
whose work was epoch making, made that famous trip for observation on
H. M. S. _Beagle_ in 1837. In 1844 he ventured to show a few of
his notes to some intimate friends. In 1859, twenty-two years after
he had collected the first data for the theory finally announced,
he published “The Origin of Species,” and the world of science, of
philosophy, of religion, underwent a radical change as a result of his
thorough work.
Ask ninety-nine men out of a hundred how they succeeded and the answer
will come back--“Hard work.” Inspiration is all very well, but for the
mass of us perspiration is a surer pathway to achievement. Wellington,
Newton, Lord Clive, Napoleon, Walter Scott, Daniel Webster were all
regarded as dull boys--in each case advancement came by persistent
effort. The capacity was there, but it was brought out not by magic nor
by some sudden burst of inspiration, but by hard work.
Knowledge is power, where the knowledge is not a mere mass of
information. The mere accumulation of facts has little worth, for all
this lies ready to our hand in the encyclopedia whenever it is needed.
The knowledge which brings power lies in the ability to read and to
know what it is all about and how it bears on other things we have
read; in the ability to think and when one thinks to produce something
with the look and taste of his own mind upon it; in the ability to see
three things, sharply distinguishing them, and then to see them in
their relations, and then to see another group of three and another,
organizing the whole nine into some sort of system. The knowledge which
is power means insight, grasp, discrimination, productiveness. It is
not the sole property of genius, but rather the natural return for a
long life of consistent, intellectual effort.
Each man owes it to society to make his utmost effort to furnish it
one more such well-equipped member. This purpose includes much more
than the desire for that individual success and preeminence which might
prompt the effort--it indicates a wish to be capable and serviceable to
those larger interests which lag for lack of competent service.
When Booker Washington addresses the students gathered at Tuskegee,
it is after this fashion. “You have not come here to receive training
in order that you may go back and compete more successfully with your
untrained associates, in earning higher wages to feather your own nests
quickly and warmly. You have not come here to become intelligent and
cultivated that you may go back and proudly establish better homes
and higher types of family life than the untutored negroes maintain.
You are here that being trained you may feel more heavily and capably
responsible for the welfare of your race in the several communities
where you are to live and work.” If this is the splendid ideal in the
green tree of a black man’s school, what shall we expect in the dry
tree of the white man’s school! The high office of all mental drill
should be to send men out “more heavily and capably responsible” for
the general good, and this high quality of competency comes only by
strict attention to the law of returns.
The same method holds in moral values although many people feel that
here we enter a region of hocus-pocus, a realm of magic and sleight of
hand where two and two may possibly, upon occasion, make five or even
fifty. There is an impression in some quarters that a young fellow
may sow an abundant crop of wild oats, that he may wallow in the mire
of vicious indulgence, that he may for years disregard his spiritual
interests with flat indifference, and then by some sudden spasm of
moral feeling begin anew, as fine and as sound a man as if he had never
been in the far country with the harlots and the swine.
The standard books on ethics give us no hint that such is the fact.
The Bible says nothing in support of such a notion. There is not a
land the sun shines on where two and two do not make four in morals as
well as in mathematics. There are no short cuts to spiritual soundness.
The Almighty is a careful bookkeeper and the teaching of reason,
experience, and conscience is to the effect that here, as everywhere,
we must accept those reactions which come inevitably by this great law
of returns.
There was a missionary to the Indians who, in seeking to induce habits
of Sabbath observance, told them that if they planted their corn on
Sunday it would not grow. In that spirit of human perversity which we
all understand and share, they immediately went out and planted an acre
of corn on Sunday! They hoed it and tended it always on Sunday. And
because they took especial pains with it, when autumn came it yielded
more corn than any other acre on the reservation. Then the Indians
laughed at the good missionary and would not go to church.
There is a penalty for planting and hoeing corn on Sunday, but it does
not show in the corn--it shows in the men. The corn may grow to its
full size, but the men will not grow to their full size, nor yield
the full return appropriate to the cultivation of human values. The
missionary was sound in his main purpose, but faulty in his method,
because in the moral world as elsewhere, we find the reign of law and
not the operation of magic. The neglect of the higher values for which
the Sabbath stands will not at once affect the cornfield, but it will
show in the spiritual deficiencies of the men who have no place in the
week for the cultivation of reverence, aspiration, and the sense of
fellowship with the Unseen.
There is no shuffling nor chance in the moral world. Impulses lead to
choices; choices readily become habits; habits harden speedily into
character, and character determines destiny. Two and two make four all
the way up, all the way down, and all the way in.
In a New York hotel the chambermaid one morning discovered the dead
body of a young man and at his side, scrawled on a piece of paper, she
found this last will and testament: “I leave to society a bad example.
I leave to my father and mother all the sorrow they can bear in their
old age. I leave to my brothers and sisters the memory of a misspent
life. I leave to my wife a broken heart and to my children the name of
a drunkard and a suicide. I leave to God a lost soul which has defied
and insulted his loving mercy.”
He wrote it all out, signed it, and then shot himself. His appetites
had gotten away with him, his habits were no longer under his control.
He began as many an enthusiastic, generous young fellow begins by
simply having a succession of “good times” and they grew on him until
the habits he had developed were no longer his--he was theirs. He
forgot that two and two make four, and the gruesome legacy he was
compelled to leave issued as inevitably from his course of life as the
sum total at the foot of a column of figures.
The sound health which serves as the physical basis of enlarging and
enduring efficiency; the trained intelligence which knows what to do
next and finds itself competent for the task; the type of character
which is reliable and profitable for the life that now is and for
that which is to come, all come to us as splendid reactions from that
stable, definite, methodical order, seen and unseen, which enfolds us
ever. What you receive as the natural rebound from your mode of life
will be like in quality and proportionate in amount to that which you
express in effort, for the law of returns, like the law of gravitation,
is always on duty.
VIII
THE HIGHEST FORM OF REWARD
The Scriptures show their good sense by frankly facing and accepting
the hope of reward as a legitimate source of motive. There are fine
people who almost go into spasms over the idea of working for a reward.
“Do right,” they say, “because it is right, not because you will gain
something by it.” “Live nobly, because it is the highest duty there
is, with no thought of what may come to you in consequence.” “Do your
work well for the sheer joy of it, not because you will be paid well
for good work.” All this is very pretty and does credit to the lovely
dispositions of those who utter these sentiments, but it is just a
little too good for this common earth.
It was just a little too good for the men who wrote the Bible. Jesus
himself did not hesitate to say, “Do this, and great shall be your
reward in heaven.” He said, “If any man shall give a cup of cold water
in my name,” that is to say, in the right spirit, “he shall in no wise
lose his reward.” He built squarely upon the foundation laid by that
singer of old, “The statutes of the Lord are right; the commandments
of the Lord are pure; the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous
altogether, and in keeping of them there is great reward.” The hope of
reward according to the Scriptures is a legitimate source of motive.
But what form should the reward take? What is the highest form of
reward? One finds all manner of answers to this question strung along
in an ascending series. We find those who always think of reward in
terms of material success. “It pays to be good,” these men say--to
be good, at any rate, up to a certain point. “Honesty is the best
policy”--in the long run as a method of business procedure it can show
more dividends than dishonesty can. “The way of the transgressor is
hard,” now in one way, now in another, but always hard at the end.
Transgression does not pay when the returns are all in. The main theme
of the book of Deuteronomy is that obedience to Jehovah will bring
blessings wrought out in terms of material prosperity. “If thou shalt
hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, blessed shalt thou be in
basket and in store; blessed shalt thou be in the city and in the
field; blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out and when thou comest
in.” Reckoned up in terms of visible success, righteousness would be
the best asset a nation could possess.
We have here a great truth; it is not the whole truth, but it is a
fragment of truth not to be despised. The young man in New York, whose
main interest is material success, setting out to achieve his ambition
by dishonesty is trying to make the Hudson River turn round and flow
back to Albany. It cannot be done. He will get wet and muddy and be
drowned, perhaps, for his pains and, when he is all through with his
experiment, the Hudson will be flowing right along just the same.
In like manner, the big, strong, moral order which enfolds us whether
we like it or not, whether we think about it or believe in it or not,
the big, strong, moral order cannot be defied nor ignored. Here and
there some young fellow thinks he has found a way of turning it round
in what he supposes to be his own interest. He, too, simply gets wet
and muddy, and drowned, perhaps, in his foolish efforts while the
great, eternal verities of right and wrong are still there as they were
before he pitted his puny strength against them. The fact stands that
righteousness exalts a nation or an individual as nothing else can.
But this fragment of truth is only a fragment. A man who is righteous
to a certain extent because it pays is not a high type. The one who
is honest because honesty is the best policy is not very honest--put
him in a situation where honesty involves personal sacrifice and one
could not bank on his honesty. The man who is intent upon furnishing
the world so much uprightness in exchange for a certain amount of
advancement which he hopes to gain can scarcely be said to be in the
moral field at all. He is merely doing a little business with the
Lord,--so much character for so much success. It may all be as purely
a commercial transaction, when analyzed down to its roots, as the
buying of a suit of clothes. His gifts to benevolence when scrutinized
are seen to be only shrewd “investments.” Increased material prosperity
is a form of reward, but it is not the highest form, and it does not
furnish a praiseworthy source of motive.
We find those who look for their reward in the appreciation of others.
We all like to have the esteem of our fellows and we ought to like it.
That queer stick who is always flinging out sneers about popularity,
who insists that he does not care a straw what people think about him,
cares more than any of us. He has an idea that by this strange course
he will be talked about more and be regarded more highly for his oddity
than he would be if he shaped up his life in a more rational way.
Reputation is not character; it may be only the uncertain shadow cast
by character, but it can be, for all that, a pleasant and a healing
shadow. One of the wisest of men said, “A good name is rather to be
chosen than great riches.” A good name is simply what people say about
a man. The appreciation and the esteem which right living wins is a
legitimate form of reward.
But this also is liable to be distorted. Jesus saw certain people
making this form of reward the object of supreme desire. He warned his
disciples against that course. “Take heed that you do not your alms
before men to be seen of them. When thou doest thine alms sound not a
trumpet before thee as the hypocrites do, that they may have glory of
men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward.” These men rendered
their generous service with showy ostentation, blowing their horns as
they went. They did it that they might have glory of men and they had
glory of men--they got the dividends they desired.
“And when thou prayest thou shalt not be as the hypocrites: they love
to pray standing on the street corners that they may be seen of men.
Verily I say unto you, they have their reward.” They prayed on the
street corners that they might be seen of men and they were seen of
men--they got what they prayed for.
The desire for esteem is not a satisfactory source of motive. The boy
who cannot do his duty unless he is praised and petted for it afterward
is a poor specimen--he is likely to become a vain, self-conscious
little prig. The man who cannot perform unless he is in the lime-light,
hearing the plaudits of the many, is made of poor stuff--he is lath
and plaster, where there should be sound material. All such speedily
lose the finer qualities out of whatever measure of righteousness they
seem to possess. When a man goes straight along about his business,
intent upon doing his own piece of work well and succeeds in such
a way that the gratitude, esteem, and appreciation of his fellows
come, he scarcely knows how, he finds this a beautiful and enduring
source of satisfaction. But here as everywhere the law of indirection
operates--he that saves his popularity by aiming for it loses it; he
that loses all thought of it by investing his life in useful service
finds it.
There are men who think of the highest form of reward as standing
in the approval of one’s own conscience and in the sense of having
the favor of God. The throne of judgment where I must stand and give
account is not away yonder among the clouds--it is in here where I am.
It is within my own heart where God is--where my God is. It is here
that I meet him now and must meet and face him ever.
And no quantity of outward success, no full, warm tide of popular
esteem will supply the lack of moral self-respect within. If any man
knows that his heart is not right before God, that his purposes are
not true, that his aspirations are low, then no amount of material
success or popular applause will give him tranquillity of spirit. And,
conversely, where there is honesty of purpose, where a man may look
himself in the face with unsparing candor and know that he is entitled
to respect, this fact of itself brings a peace which passeth all
understanding. This inner sense of worth and peace is from on high and
it becomes a fine form of reward.
There are ugly distortions of it. The Pharisee who went into the
temple to pray felt very comfortable in his own mind. We saw it in
his strut as he walked down the aisle. We noticed it in the way he
stood, when he prayed thus with himself, “God, I thank thee, that I
am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers.” He named
the lowest, meanest men he could think of. It would not be hard to
outrun such men morally, but such a race as it was the Pharisee had
won it. “I thank thee that I am not as other men are, or even as this
publican.” It was fortunate that the publican chanced to be there; it
added a cubit of self-complacency to the Pharisee to have the publican
present. “I fast twice in the week; I give a tenth of all that I
possess,” the Pharisee continued. He had been doing right for the sake
of the self-satisfaction which would result--and he had his reward. I
do not know of a man in history who seemed to have more of it. He was
comfortable to “the thirty-third and last degree” in that feeling of
self-approval which clothed him as with a garment.
But what a narrow, self-centered life it produces where this becomes
the chief form of reward for which a man strives! “I will speak this
kind word and do this generous deed and stand firm in the path of duty,
because of the warm feelings of self-approval which will steal upon my
heart,” such a man cries. It is better to have the approval of one’s
conscience than not to have it; it is better to strive for inner peace
and satisfaction than to have one’s eye constantly on material success
or popular applause. But where this becomes the object of supreme
interest it is a disappointing and a narrowing form of reward.
What shall we say, then, is the highest form, if neither material
success nor popular esteem nor the approval of one’s own conscience
is worthy to stand in that holy place? I find the highest form of
reward named by the Master in the parable of the Good Samaritan, “This
do and thou shalt live.” The reward for right living, for loving God
and loving one’s neighbor after the manner indicated in the parable,
lies in the increased power we gain to live. This do and thou shalt
live--live more abundantly, more effectively, more serviceably. The
reward of right life is a larger life.
The man in the parable who had been faithful and diligent with the one
pound entrusted to him received this reward: “Well done, thou good and
faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will
make thee ruler over many things! Have thou authority over ten cities.”
The reward for good conduct was enlarged capacity and enlarged
opportunity for more good conduct. The man’s powers were increased by
what he had been doing and his chance for the exercise of them was
greater; now, in place of the single pound to be used in trading, he
had authority over ten cities. In this sense of increased capacity to
meet the increasing obligations of life lies the highest form of reward.
In one of his little books, Henry van Dyke speaks of three ideals of
education. The man with “the decorative ideal” thinks it is a fine
thing to go through college. It gives one an air of distinction. It
enables him to belong to the University Club in the city where he
lives. It enables him to refer to “my class,” and to the “good old
days” at Harvard or Yale, at Cornell or Princeton, at Stanford or
California. He may even be prompted to become a “dig” in the hope that
a Phi Beta Kappa key will unlock doors closed to other men. And because
he is a university man he feels that he possesses a rare and cultivated
taste in poetry and in philosophy, in music and in art. He thinks of
his education as a highly decorative appendage to his personal life.
The second man has no use for all this; he has “the marketable ideal”
of education. He is one of those “no-nonsense-about-me” fellows. In
selecting his courses he has a thoroughly practical eye to the main
chance. He is very contemptuous in his attitude toward the study of
dead languages or of metaphysics. “What good would all that do me, when
I got out into the world?” he says. He thinks of himself as a tool to
be ground and sharpened so that in the world of business it will cut
where other tools fail. He is intent upon gaining an education not for
the purpose of living but for the purpose of making a living, which is
a very different thing.
The true ideal of education is “the creative ideal.” The work of the
school is not to enable the shoemaker to stick to his last and make
more money out of it than uneducated men are making out of their lasts.
“Education is to lift the shoemaker above his last, and to carry the
merchant beyond his store, the lawyer beyond his brief, the minister
beyond his sermon.” The supreme reward for being educated lies in
the enlarged capacity one gains for life. The reward for physical
exercise, for mental drill, for hard study, for the steady effort to
do one’s duty, is to be found in that increased power to live. This do
and thou shalt live a larger, freer, finer life. This do and thou shalt
be alive at more points, on higher levels, and in more efficient and
serviceable ways.
We cannot possibly stop short of that. If a man thinks of his education
as only making him more marketable, he has his mind fixed upon material
success as the highest form of reward. If he thinks of it mainly as a
thing that will win the admiration of his less cultured associates, he
is still in the clutches of that decorative idea. If he thinks of it
mainly as having value in giving him the consciousness of intelligence
and culture, he is still on an unsatisfactory level of thought and
purpose.
“Come on up to the head of the stairs,” the great educational processes
of the world call to us! “Come on up where you can see and breathe
and grow.” This do and thou shalt live; this alone indicates the
great end in view. Enlarged capacity for real life is the goal of all
serious endeavor. We may or may not gain material success; we may or
may not secure a large measure of popular applause; we will beyond a
peradventure have a deep, sweet feeling of peace within as we face that
way, but the main result will be that, by doing all these things well,
we shall gain increased power and capacity for living the life. Here
we reach that which is ultimate. “This do and thou shalt live” is the
final word on the subject of reward.
The highest return for doing anything lies in the power one gains to do
it better and to do more of it. The reward for reading is not in the
information gained or in the ideas acquired so much as in the mental
stimulus which comes, enabling one to read more books and better ones
and in time to produce ideas of his own. The artist goes out into the
world to see the beauty of it in tree and flower, in landscape and
mountain, in the quiet lake, and in the restless sea. His reward comes
in increased power to see more beauty there than other people see and
to transfer what he sees to canvas. “I never saw anything like that
in nature,” a woman once said to Turner as she looked at one of his
pictures. “Very likely,” replied the artist; “how much would you give,
madam, if you could?” Turn your face any way you choose and the great
statement of the Master about reward holds true,--this do and thou
shalt live.
Carry it up to the moral level. The reward for doing your duty lies in
the increased power you gain to keep on doing it and to do it better.
The reward for loving lies in the increased power to love and to love
more worthily. The reward for meeting and mastering some hard situation
in life, temptation, disappointment, struggle, sorrow, lies in the
added strength you gain to master still harder situations which may
arise. In your spiritual pilgrimage you go “from strength to strength,”
from one form of strength to another and a higher form, from one
measure of strength to another and a fuller measure, until at last you
reach the fulness of the stature of Christ.
You may recall that great promise made in the last book of the Bible!
“Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee”--what? What form
will the ultimate reward take? “I will give thee a crown,” not of
gold with diamonds in it larger than the Kohinoor, not the crown
of material success. “I will give thee a crown,” not of laurel such
as the Greeks placed upon the brow of the victors in the games, the
crown of popular applause. “I will give thee a crown,” not of personal
satisfaction such as men of honest purpose may be entitled to wear. “Be
thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown _of life_!”
The ultimate reward for living right lies in the increased power and
the increased opportunity which will be ours to live on and to live
more abundantly.
IX
THE USE OF THE INCOMPLETE
“We know in part.” This is not the statement of some indifferent
agnostic, who, because religious questions are difficult, insists that
he does not know anything about them. It is not the statement of a
defiant infidel, who, because he does not understand everything about
religion, declares that neither he nor any one knows anything about
it. It is not the statement of one of those hesitating individuals who
are always trying to steer a safe course somewhere between yes and
no, between the right of it and the wrong of it; who are never quite
sure whether there is or is not a God, but think that the truth lies,
perhaps, about halfway between the two claims.
This man Paul was not an agnostic, nor an infidel, nor a hesitator. He
knew certain things, he was sure of them. He was ready to say so right
out loud, and to stand up and be cut in two for them if need be. “I
know whom I have believed,” he cries; there was no uncertainty in his
mind on that point. “I know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ”--and
it had changed him from a narrow, bigoted, persecuting Pharisee into
one who wrote the best hymn on love to be found in print and who
embodied the spirit of it in his daily conduct. “I know that all things
work together for good to them that love God”--and in Paul’s case
“all things” included a great deal of hardship and persecution, of
disappointment and sorrow, but he never wavered in his confidence that
some wise purpose was being furthered by it all. These and many other
things he knew. “In part we know,” was the way he would have placed his
emphasis and the actual content of his knowledge was large indeed.
He makes this statement as an honest, modest, reasonable man face to
face with spiritual realities too great for perfect comprehension or
final statement. His knowledge of them was large, but they were still
larger. He must have known when he wrote those words that he was a
man of no mean attainments. He wrote a third of the New Testament with
his own hand. He did more to shape Christian thought than any one save
Christ himself. He had been “caught up into the third heaven,” whatever
that may mean. He was the most effective missionary of the new faith
the world has ever seen. He was a man of marvelous reach and grasp, but
face to face with these great spiritual realities, God and redemption,
prayer and duty, immortality and the final judgment, he frankly
confesses that the returns are not all in; the last words have not been
said and cannot be said; the full appreciation of these high values has
not been reached. We know in part.
We are glad to find these words on the lips of the world’s greatest
apostle. They are reassuring to those of us who are troubled by the
limitations of our own religious knowledge. They match the mood of this
modern time of questioning and unrest which is so much in evidence
on the college campus and in university circles. They suggest that
finality is much more difficult than some of the earlier generations
in their simplicity supposed. One does not find those familiar words,
“Finis” or “The End,” printed on the last page of a book so commonly
as in other days. Even where the author has said his say in several
volumes, each one as bulky as a volume of the “Britannica,” he knows
that there is more to be said. He leaves the way open without trying to
block it by writing, “The End.”
We are conscious that we have not reached the terminus on any of the
great trunk lines of religious inquiry. We are scattered along at
various way stations, thankful for the part we know, grateful for
progress made, but confessing with Paul that we have not attained, that
we are not made perfect either in theory or in practise. But whatever
headway we have made we are determined in the spirit of Paul to use
the part we know and press forward toward the mark of the prize of
the high calling of God. This is the dominant mood of the serious but
cautious, inquiring element in modern life. We are, therefore, grateful
for the word of this modest, reasonable man, who with all his store of
spiritual experience said quietly, “We know in part.”
We might carry these words in many directions and find them helpful.
Some of us have been greatly disturbed as to the doctrine of
Providence. We have been told on high authority that God reigns and
that “He doeth all things well.” When times are good we really believe
it. We see that the way of the transgressor is hard, as it ought to be,
and that on the whole the way of righteousness is the way of peace and
honor. We have a comfortable persuasion that all things taken in their
completeness and final outcome are working together for good to those
whose purposes are right.
But just when we have gotten our doctrine of Providence all snug we
witness something like this: Yonder a young Christian mother dies. She
was an ideal daughter, a devoted wife, and the beautiful mother of
children who loved her and needed her more than they did anything else
on earth. But with a whole community of people, perhaps, praying for
her recovery she dies, while just around the corner a group of scamps,
who are making the world worse, rather than better, live on, fat and
hearty. And then somehow our doctrine of Providence, our belief as to
the reign of a wise and good God, receives a hard shock.
But we know in part. We know the usefulness of that life here; we do
not know to what further and, perhaps, higher service it has been
called there. We see what has been interrupted here; we do not see what
has been taken up further on. We do not know the ultimate effect of
this stern sorrow upon that household, the result of this necessity for
the regirding of all their powers as they walk now in the shadow of a
great bereavement. We do not even know God’s ultimate purpose for those
scamps who live on; the returns are not all in for them either. We know
in part, and what we know, taking human life broadly, is so reassuring
that we are willing to trust God and walk on by faith.
Ships in Norway, entering the great fiords, sometimes sail so close to
the cliffs that one can stand on deck and almost lay his hand upon the
face of the rock. When one captain was asked about it, he said, “That
which is in sight indicates what is out of sight. The slant above the
water-line indicates the slant below and we are perfectly safe.” The
general slant of God’s dealings with us, taking the facts we know in
the total impression they make as to his wisdom and justice, is such
that we are prepared to trust him below the water-line. Therefore when
I cannot in some difficult situation make out his ultimate purpose with
the naked eye, I fall back upon my confidence in his moral character.
As to this faith in the divine integrity no serious, observant man
should remain in doubt. It is a faith which rests upon a wide induction
of fact, vaster by far than my own experience of his dealings with me.
It is like repeating an axiom to say that the creature does not rise
above the Creator. If men at any time, anywhere are good, there must be
goodness in the Creator of those men, goodness in the force or forces
lying back of them, call those forces by what name we may. And if the
stream of human goodness has been widening, deepening, flowing more
strongly as the ages have come and gone, it points back to character
and purpose in the One who created the stream itself. That goodness
in man argues goodness in God, while badness in man does not argue
badness in God is plain, in that sane men everywhere regard goodness as
normal, while badness is abnormal.
And look at the swelling tide of human goodness down through the ages!
Look at Livingstone laying down his life to carry light into the dark
continent! Look at Cromwell fearing God and none else, neither king nor
pope, neither nobles nor bishops, and giving his life that he might win
constitutional and religious freedom for the English-speaking race!
Look at Lincoln counting not his life dear if he might serve the cause
of the Union and the interests of his brothers in bonds! Look at the
vast array of human goodness massing itself in saints and seers, in
heroes and martyrs, in teachers and mothers, going forth not to be
ministered unto, but to minister, giving their lives for the betterment
of the world! Look at it all and then ask yourself if you can believe
for one moment that all this goodness originated itself, persisted, and
increased in opposition to the will of the Creator or in the face of
his moral indifference or without creative goodness in him! The claim
would be monstrous! This wide induction of fact begets a profound
faith in the moral character of God and when we cannot see we trust,
because as to the final meaning of many strange experiences we know in
part.
Take the matter of prayer and the way it enters into the formation of
character and the shaping of events. We know that prayer registers
a definite and wholesome influence on many a life. Those who loudly
assert that virtue and vice are as purely physical products as sugar
and vitriol, that all right action and wrong action can be accounted
for on material grounds, have not made out their case, they have not
begun to make it out. There is something unseen, mysterious, but real
and powerful, which impels certain people to love the unlovely, to
make sacrifices for the thoughtless and ungrateful, to stand firm in
the path of duty when it is anything but the line of least resistance.
The love of right, the sense of obligation, the habit of adherence
to principle, all these are as real as granite. But the forces which
make them strong are spiritual, and these forces receive constant
reenforcement from the habit of prayer.
This part we know. We have seen the hearts of men turned from anger
to love, from unholy to holy purpose, from weakness to strong resolve
by prayer. We have seen home life made sweeter because once at least
in every twenty-four hours the members of the household came together
and knelt before God, confessing their faults, asking his guidance
and allowing that which was true and right within them to grow by its
communion with him who is altogether true and right. Any sensible man
would feel that his life, his property, his family were all safer in a
community where men prayed, than in one where they only used the name
of God profanely. This part we know about prayer.
But as to the ultimate effect of it, the final philosophy of it, the
precise way in which the finite spirit becomes a colaborer with the
Infinite Spirit in shaping events, I freely confess that there is a
great deal which I do not understand. I know in part, but the part I
know is so full of blessed and beautiful results that I want my prayer
for the coming of God’s kingdom, for the doing of his will on earth,
for the gift of bread for the daily need, for forgiveness, and final
deliverance from evil--I want that prayer to go up, winging its way to
the throne backed by all the faith and hope and love I can put into it.
And I am not troubled by the fact that I cannot explain all the grounds
of my confidence, for, like Paul, I know in part.
Take the matter of the future life! There is much here we would like
to know. What are our loved ones who have gone on doing now? Are they
witnesses of the blunders and the failures we make here? Just how is
right rewarded and wrong punished when the two are so intricately
interwoven? No man is so white a sheep but that there are patches of
goat about him here and there. No man is so bad but that there is some
good in him if we observingly distil it out. And what of the final
outcome--can good people be happily content if the sinful souls they
loved are in conscious pain or even if they have been remorselessly
wiped off the slate of existence? Is it too much to hope that God’s
persuasions to righteousness being infinite may prove irresistible
and so at last successful in every case? So men and women who have
loved and lost those who passed out of this world without a sign of
genuine repentance or of saving faith have queried ever. A child can
ask more questions here in five minutes than all the philosophers and
theologians on earth can answer in as many years.
We know in part! We cannot measure off the streets of the new Jerusalem
in kilometers. We cannot describe its attractions in any kind of
Baedeker. We cannot lay out a detailed program of God’s dealings with
the good and the bad people of earth in all the unending years. Nor is
there any obligation whatsoever upon us to undertake the construction
of such a program.
We know in part and the part we know is something like this: I feel a
profound confidence that I shall live on after death. The grounds of
my hope are many. The mass of unreason and injustice I would have left
upon my hands unexplained and unexplainable if I were to undertake
to deny the truth of immortality is one. The all but universal and
persistent desire of men for future life is another. Somehow the
integrity of the universe is such that it does not develop in men
normal, wide-spread, and persistent desires unless there is somewhere
to be found a corresponding satisfaction for such desires standing over
against them. The fact that the clear visions and the bright hopes of
the best poets and prophets the world has known have been on the side
of immortality means much. The seers have sung and the prophets have
uttered their high anticipations by the power of an endless life. The
words of the supreme figure in history, Jesus Christ, as to the truth
of immortality mean still more. He saw clearly, spoke wisely, lived
divinely, and I cannot believe that here he reared his expectations on
a fundamental mistake.
It ought to be remembered that for those who affirm and for those who
deny the truth of immortality, it is alike a matter of moral faith
because no convincing demonstration has been made out either for or
against. The men who deny immortality are not opposing knowledge to
faith; they are only meeting a positive faith with a negative one. But
inasmuch as reason and experience, the best in literature and the One
who has taken the moral government of the world upon his shoulders as
none other ever did, stand so strongly upon the side of the positive
faith, I feel confident of an unbroken life.
As to the final judgment, I know that righteousness and love which
are useful and beautiful here will be useful and beautiful always
and everywhere; the clearer the light in which they stand the more
their glory will be revealed. I know that sin and selfishness are
mean and hateful here, and they will be mean and hateful everywhere;
the clearer the light in which they stand the more their hatefulness
will be manifest. What shall be their final fate I do not undertake
to say. We know in part, but the clear prospects of the life to come,
where righteousness and love shall have their freer chance to be and
to do, where sin and selfishness shall meet with more awful rebuke,
are sufficient to stimulate right action and to give warning to those
who would identify their destinies with evil. As to the rest, in the
incompleteness of our knowledge, we may safely leave it to the wisdom
and the justice of God.
I might carry this idea in other directions, but let me turn at once to
the other phase of the topic. In part we know, and the part we know
is naturally the part we use. We wish that we knew more. We hope to
know more some time. In the meantime we recognize that the way to make
progress along that line is to use the part we already know.
In almost any direction, unless it be pure mathematics or formal logic,
our knowledge, even in the sophomore year, stops a long way this
side of complete understanding. No man knows the length and breadth,
the height and depth of his wife’s love for him, if she is a good
woman. Some part of it he knows, but the love she might show in some
emergency, nursing him through a long illness, sharing with him some
painful experience, bearing with him some heavy burden--that fuller
love he does not know and cannot know until the time comes for its
manifestation. But the part he knows about his wife’s love for him is
the part he uses and the very thought of how beautiful it is and of the
unrevealed capacity it may contain for willing and joyous sacrifice
on his behalf, makes him feel that he ought to be a better man to be
deserving of it. Thus he moves along in that part of the strength and
beauty of a woman’s love which he knows, allowing the fuller knowledge
of it to come as it may. And this is precisely the attitude of the
reasonably religious man--those realities with which he deals, God and
redemption, prayer and duty, immortality and the final judgment, are
confessedly too great for final statement, but he knows something about
them and the part he knows is the part he uses.
Next door to my home I have two little neighbors, boys of three and
five. They are close friends of mine and they have taught me much.
Their father is a physician, a busy, useful, Christian man. The boys
understand their father’s life “in part.” They know that he is a doctor
and that he goes to see sick people and make them well. But as to the
methods he employs and the remedies he uses they know nothing at all.
They know in a dim sort of way that he makes the money which pays the
bills and keeps them in a home full of comfort and beauty. But as to
his financial standing, his investments, and his prospects, they know
nothing. They know that along with the hearty good-will which he feels
for everybody, he loves their mother and them supremely; but how he
came to love that particular woman rather than some other one, and how
they were born of that love, or how far that love might go in defending
and providing for them, they do not concern themselves for one moment.
They know their father’s love in part.
But the part they know is the part they use. They live in their
father’s house; they sit at his table; they greet him with a shout when
he comes in from his practise. They obey him and trust him and think he
is the best man in the world. They climb up into his lap and talk to
him, not about his practise, but about their own small affairs, their
tops, their marbles, their little wagon--as he wants them to do. He
meets them always on their own ground and deals with them in the terms
and interests of their own lives. Thus my two little friends live and
grow, knowing their father’s life in part.
“Except we become as little children” in the house of our Father, whose
total life exceeds our present comprehension, whose plans and purposes
for us are too high for complete understanding, whose outlook for us
is vaster every way than our own outlook--“except we become as little
children we shall in no wise enter his kingdom.” But if we take the
part we know and use it, acting on it and living by it, we will be
treading the way which leads to a fuller and more blessed experience
of the Father’s wisdom and love as surely as my two small friends are
doing as they grow up toward their manhood in their father’s house.
In how many ways Jesus made plain this duty of utilizing the near and
the familiar when we would learn the remote! He seemed to realize that
religion would be crusted over with misconceptions so that ordinary
people would find it hard to get at; that some men would write big dull
books about it, which no one would want to read; that other men in
talking about it would use words which would not go into a suit-case
without being folded twice, thus confusing the people. For that reason,
perhaps, he made his own teaching simpler than that of any one whose
words stand recorded in Holy Writ.
He stood once at midnight among the trees talking with a thoughtful man
as to certain aspects of the religious life. “How can these things
be?” the man asked. “How can a man be born when he is old?” Just then
the wind rustled the leaves at his side and Jesus remarked: “The wind
bloweth where it listeth. You hear the sound thereof, but you cannot
tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth.” We cannot tell why the wind
blows one day from the north and we have cold, another day from the
south and we have heat, another day from the east and we have rain. We
cannot explain satisfactorily many of the mysteries connected with the
wind. But a man who is a fisherman can put up his sail and fill it with
this wind which is such a mystery. He can sail out through the Golden
Gate and come back in the evening with a boatload of fish for the needs
of his family and for other hungry men. The wind that fills his sail he
knows, but the origin, the ultimate destiny, and all the relationships
it sustains to the other forces in the universe he does not know. The
part he knows, however, is the part he uses by relating it to his own
life. And this is the act of a man of sense in matters spiritual as
well. He knows the life of the Infinite Spirit in part, but he uses the
part he knows by relating it helpfully to his own life.
When we start in after that fashion it is a straight course. The boy
begins his study of mathematics by learning to count ten--one, two,
three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. He moves straight
along by that path until, with these same ten figures, he is computing
the courses the planets take and measuring the distances of the fixed
stars. He begins his study of literature by learning his letters, a, b,
c, etc. By and by, using these same familiar letters, he is making his
way through the intricacies of “Hamlet” and “Macbeth”; he is walking
with Emerson and Hegel across the fields of philosophy. He begins his
study of music by learning the elementary sounds, do, re, mi, fa,
sol, la, si, do. Presently, with these same tones, he is singing in a
great chorus which renders “The Messiah” or playing his instrument in
some orchestra which is producing the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven. In
every situation in life progress is made not by being appalled over
the amount we do not know, or by vainly wishing we knew more, but by
taking the part we know, relating it to our lives, and making it the
instrument of gaining that fuller knowledge.
God is greater than any wise and good father but not different. Carry
the love of a wise and good father up to the _nth_ degree and you
have the love of God for his people. The life of the spirit is nobler
than the life of the flesh, but it stands closely related; it is a
life which hungers after righteousness, thirsts for the living God,
and grows strong by exercising itself in useful service. Heaven is
finer and purer than earth, but not unlike. It was for the Jew a “New
Jerusalem,” and it is for every man a “new --” whatever may be the
name of the city where he dwells. It is the ordinary life ennobled and
glorified by the infusion of a finer spirit. The glorious fulfilment
comes through the richer combinations and the fuller development of the
simpler parts we know already.
I wish I could persuade the college man who has never entered into an
open, joyous, Christian life to just begin. There are many things which
he does not understand nor, perhaps, believe. We will put them aside
for the moment, not ignoring them, but postponing their consideration.
Let him take the part he knows, the moral imperative of living the
best life one sees, and no finer life than that of the Christian can
be named; the necessity for some competent guide, and none better
than Jesus of Nazareth has thus far appeared; the clearly ascertained
benefits to be gained by trust and obedience; the helpful reactions
which come through prayer and the reading of the Bible; the manifest
advantage of cherishing the hope of a future life and of facing
squarely upon the fact that what we sow we reap. All this he knows! Let
the part he knows be the part he uses. If he will only act upon it,
building it into his own life and following where it leads, he will be
on his way toward the place where he will know even as he is known.
X
FIGHTING THE STARS
In an ancient song we find this striking statement, “The stars in their
courses fought against Sisera.” This is poetry. It must be dealt with
according to the rules which govern poetical expression. The plain
prose facts underlying the statement were these: The northern tribes of
Israel were being oppressed by the warlike Canaanites of that region.
Israelites living on the outskirts were frequently slaughtered until
certain villages had been entirely destroyed. The oppression became so
bitter that it was not safe for an Israelite to travel the ordinary
roads. “In the days of Shamgar the highways were unoccupied, and the
people walked through by-paths.” They were in constant fear for their
lives and the situation at length became unendurable.
Then there came an armed revolt of the Israelites against their
oppressors. Ten thousand men under the leadership of Deborah and Barak
went out to give battle in the plain of Esdraelon. The commander of the
opposing army was Sisera. He had been uniformly victorious over the
Israelites chiefly by his use of chariots and war-horses, riding his
enemies down before they could accomplish anything with their slings
and arrows. And into the famous battle referred to in the song the
author says, “Sisera brought nine hundred chariots of iron” to fight
against the army of Israel.
But just as the battle opened there came a fierce storm converting the
black loam of that fertile field into a morass. The heavy war-horses
and huge chariots were unable to charge. The song pictures them as
floundering, helpless, in the deep mud. The cold rain turned gradually
into sleet and the sleet driven by a fierce wind directly into the
faces of the advancing Canaanites made their use of sling and spear
comparatively ineffective. On the other hand, the Israelites, with the
storm at their backs and with their courage heightened by the feeling
that all the circumstances of the situation were in their favor,
fought splendidly and successfully. They slaughtered the helpless men
who were trying in vain to use the heavy chariots; they put to flight
the foot soldiers who could not properly defend themselves with the
storm beating in their faces, and thus they won a notable victory over
the army of Sisera.
When the Israelites came to add up the forces which entered into the
result, they were not so short-sighted as to fancy that their own right
arms had gotten them the victory. They saw that certain other forces
which they had not created, which they did not in any wise control,
had entered decisively into the determination of the issue. “The Lord
discomfited Sisera, and all his chariots,” they said. “The stars in
their courses fought against Sisera.” The wind and the rain, the hail
and the sleet, coming down out of the skies by no act of theirs, had
lined up with them as effective allies; and as their eyes ran over
the complete muster roll, the forces from above combining with their
own determined valor, they knew that Sisera was foredoomed to defeat
because he had been fighting against the stars.
The stars in their courses fought against Sisera--this is poetry! It
is a bold literary statement of a splendid moral truth. In the long
run the forces of earth and sky are alike hostile to the low type of
life which Sisera represents. Cruelty, oppression, inhumanity, are
doomed to defeat. Individuals or nations cultivating those qualities
are fighting the stars, and the stars will be too much for them. As it
was with Sisera, so it is now and ever shall be, world without end!
Those evils are sometimes victorious in a skirmish; now and then they
win a battle, but the war goes always against them. When the end comes
and the articles of capitulation are signed, they are to be found with
Sisera, biting the dust. Forces, human and divine, seen and unseen, are
perpetually at war with wrong-doing and the combination of all these
mighty energies makes the outcome inevitable. The man who, in any wise,
undertakes to live a wrong life is undertaking to fight the stars.
The presence of universal moral forces is here symbolized. All about
us are familiar forces which we did not originate, which we do not
control--the light and the heat of the sun, the power of gravitation,
the movements of the winds, and the pulsating tides. We cannot control
them; we can only adjust ourselves to their movements and wisely
cooperate with them for certain ends. Even while I am speaking this
huge mass under our feet is whirling us swiftly onward, covering
the whole twenty-five thousand miles in a single twenty-four hours.
Scientific men thus far have nothing to offer as to how it gained its
initial velocity; we find it moving and it carries us with it whether
we will or no.
This is a symbol! There are other forces, unseen but mighty, moving the
race up out of darkness into great and ever greater light. With all
its groping and stumbling the race has never been allowed to lose its
way altogether. Yesterday it thought as a child and understood as a
child; today it puts away childish things and knows in part; tomorrow
it will know still “in part,” but a larger part. And it is the sublime
conviction of serious men that it is on its way to know even as it is
known. This movement is as resistless as the motion of the planets.
The race is also making headway in righteousness. Certain forms of
evil which once stood out naked and unashamed have been driven into
rat-holes. Presently these holes will be stopped up from the top and
those forms of evil will be seen no more. The power of conscience grows
and its dominion widens. Matthew Arnold, speaking as a poet, said,
“There is a power not ourselves which makes for righteousness.” Herbert
Spencer, speaking as a philosopher, said, “There is an infinite and
eternal energy from which all things proceed,” and in his judgment it
was, on the whole, friendly to righteousness. The Psalmist, speaking
as a religious man, said, “The judgments of the Lord are true and
righteous altogether, and in keeping of them there is great reward.”
It does not matter what words are used; it all amounts to the same
thing. The very stars are symbols to us, as they were to this writer of
old, of forces unseen, august, cosmic, which are insistently set upon
righteousness. Sisera and all the horde of wrong-doers are compelled to
look that fact in the face.
The antagonism of these universal forces spells defeat for those who
are willing to do wrong. Sometimes the letters which spell out defeat
are formally arranged in order; at other times the letters must be
selected from a mass of confusing details, but they are there, and
they spell the same word, “defeat.” The stars never tarry long in
bringing in their verdict upon the coarser sins of the flesh, murder
and adultery, stealing and lying, drunkenness and gluttony. But the
operation of this law reaches all the way down to those subtler sins
of pride and envy, meanness and selfishness, moral indifference and
spiritual neglect--all these in their final outcome make for misery and
discontent as surely as two and two make four. No man ever outwitted
or vanquished the stars, no man ever will. The sun rises when it is
due, no matter how he chooses to set his individual clock, no matter
what lies he may tell in his particular almanac. No man ever outwitted
the moral order of the universe which is august and irresistible in
its ongoings. He may have sought out many devices, but at last he is
compelled to settle by the books. He must reap what he has sown, no
matter how terrible the harvest may be.
Go through any modern city with your eyes open and you will find this
statement about Sisera written out in a plain hand. You will find
people, some of them well-dressed, some in rags, with their hearts
draped in wretchedness and despair. Poor deluded mortals, they have
been butting their brains out against the moral corner-stones of the
universe in the vain hope that possibly the way of the transgressor
might not be hard for them. Some by intemperance and some by
licentiousness, some by sly dishonesty and some by cold-hearted
selfishness--the roads to ruin are various, and men travel them all!
Here they come at last, bruised, battered, and broken! They have been
fighting the stars with the usual result. If here and there one keeps
his head up and his face like polished brass, thinking he may escape
the same ugly fate, you have only to wait for a time to see him with
his face broken and his heart crushed like the rest.
Here are two young men at college, one of them living a true life,
maintaining good habits, keeping himself hard at work, cultivating the
right sort of friends! The other young fellow keeps his lungs drenched
with cigarette smoke, his brain drugged with alcohol; he seeks out
the shady places in the life of the city and cultivates the refuse;
he loafs when he ought to be at work. You can tell at a glance which
one will be sitting in the directors’ meeting or in some similar place
of responsibility twenty years from now, and which one will be out
somewhere on a high stool or tramping the streets periodically in
search of a job, wondering why his luck has been against him. There is
no luck about it. He enlisted in the great army of fools who, under
the leadership of Sisera, are undertaking to fight the stars. Certain
habits, certain courses of action, certain aspirations bring honor,
joy, advancement; certain other courses of action bring just the
reverse. It is all as sure as the movement of the planets; it comes
according to law equally unyielding.
The ultimate well-being of any life is secured through cooperation with
those forces symbolized by the stars. I was on the Mediterranean once
on my way from Italy to Egypt when off the coast of Crete our ship
ran into a terrible storm. We were beaten and tossed, for the wind
was contrary. An accident made it necessary to lay to for several
hours while the waves dashed over the highest decks. In the absence of
either sun or stars, exact reckoning was lost, but toward midnight of
the second day the storm broke and presently the stars shone out, here
and there, in the irregular patches of the sky. Then the first officer
appeared on deck with his instruments and soon he knew exactly where we
were on the face of the troubled waters. All uncertainty was over; we
were sailing by the stars and the next day we were casting anchor off
the coast of Egypt. The motion of the ship and the tossing of the waves
were uncertain, but the movement of the stars was sure.
Our safety in the whole cruise of life depends upon the adjustment of
our movements to those universal forces which enfold us. My watch,
carried though it is in my individual pocket, keeps step with the stars
so that I could show you where each hand will be tomorrow morning when
the sun comes up over the horizon. And our purposes, our affections,
and our wills are to be similarly adjusted so that they shall keep step
with God’s infinite will and purpose for us. Those universal forces of
love and grace, of forgiveness and redemption, of guidance and comfort,
to which in all ages men have learned to look, they are all ours if we
will only use them. And when we learn to use them aright they bring
peace, and strength, and joy.
There was the sense of an adequate horizon, then, in the words of this
ancient poet as he stood that night on the field of battle looking up
at the stars. The wind and the rain, the hail and the sleet had all
aided the Israelites in winning the victory. The very skies seemed to
be interested in that moral struggle there on the plain of Esdraelon.
And he was correct--the stars helped; they always help; they fight
perpetually in their own appointed way on the side of right.
You may trust the forces which they symbolize! You may work out your
own highest well-being in joyous confidence, for God is working within
you toward the same great end! You need have no doubt about it, for
the evidence is plain. Heroes and martyrs lay down their lives for
a principle. The mother cares for the sick child, counting not her
pleasure, her comfort, or even her own life dear if she may save the
child. The poor dog attached to his master goes to the spot where
he saw them lay the body and whines for the sound of a voice that
is still. Has the Creator of such moral integrity in the heroes and
martyrs kept none of it for himself? Has he out of the ages gone
produced such devotion in the heart of the mother with no devotion
in his own heart toward his helpless child? Has he instilled such
faithful affection in the very dogs that perish, but failed to share in
that love himself? Serious men cannot bring themselves to believe in
anything so absurd. These forces which produce attachment to the right,
devotion to the helpless, faithful affection, are universal forces.
“O heart I made, a heart beats here”--that was the word of God through
the lips of the poet! These forces of love and grace are universal and
enduring as the stars. To fight them spells defeat. To coöperate with
them, bringing the scattered and aimless activities of the life into
harmony with the supreme purpose of God declared in Jesus Christ, means
life abundant and eternal.
XI
THE POWER OF VISION
In an old school reader there was a sketch, “Eyes or no eyes.” Two
young men went for a walk in the same field. One of them saw just
the commonplace shapes and forms; he saw nothing that a dog or a
kodak would not have seen. He had eyes to see, but he saw not. The
other one saw the bumblebees appearing later in the season than do
the honey-bees, and thought of the relation this fact sustains to
the production of red clover seed--a relation which every farmer
understands when he cuts the second crop in place of the first to get
seed. He saw at one side of the field a great granite boulder deposited
there in the glacial period, and although the day was hot his mind was
cool as it dwelt upon that age of ice. He saw the imprint of the shell
of some water-breathing creature deep bedded as a fossil in a piece of
stone. His imagination went back to the time when that very field was
part of an inland sea, and this bit of life was making its impress upon
the soft mud of some ancient seashore. He saw a score of interesting
things which need not be named here; they were all there to be seen,
but his friend had overlooked them. It was a question of “eyes or no
eyes.” What any man sees in a field, or in his fellow beings, in his
college course, or in life as a whole, depends upon the power of vision
that he carries with him.
Here in a well-known story was a man keeping sheep on the slopes of
Horeb. In reading the narrative it seems that the imagination of the
poet has blended with the plain prose facts of history. We do not know
what kind of fire it was which burned in that mysterious and vocal
bush. We may believe it was the same kind of fire which burns in the
grate or we may conclude that it was an extraordinary bit of autumnal
splendor which at a certain season of the year is aflame on many
hillsides as if the glory and color of a thousand sunsets might have
lodged in the tree tops. However that may be, what Moses actually saw
and heard that day is far more important than any conceivable amount of
literal fire or of autumn color.
“I will now turn aside and see”--and what he saw his own subsequent
career indicates! He had the power of vision and he saw not merely
the shapes and colors present in that sheep pasture. He saw things
absent, things historic, things possible as present and real. He saw
away yonder on the banks of the Nile where he formerly lived, the
life of his own fellows being crushed out of them by wrong industrial
conditions. He saw the capacity of that race, burning but unconsumed
even by those years of oppression, for moral idealism and spiritual
leadership among the nations of the earth. He felt within his own
breast a fitness for service wider, higher, and more significant than
that of keeping sheep. He felt himself commissioned from on high for
that responsible service, and he became dissatisfied with his own easy
content there in the land of Midian. He saw the great divine heart
filled with sympathy for an enslaved and oppressed people. He heard
the divine voice say, “I have seen the affliction of my people which
are in Egypt; I have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters,
and I am come down to deliver them.” He saw the divine hand reach out
to employ mysterious agencies for the release of that people from the
bondage of Egypt.
He had the power of vision and this is what he saw when he led his
flock to the back side of the desert, even to Horeb, the mountain of
God. The sheep saw nothing of that burning bush or of those other
mysterious realities. The dull Midianites watching their flocks a few
hundred yards away on the same slope saw nothing of it. A man standing
in Moses’ own shoes, his face turned in the same direction, would have
seen nothing unless he had brought to the situation the insight of this
man of vision.
And Moses himself saw and heard what he did in that high hour because
through long years he had cherished a profound sympathy for his brother
men and a great abiding faith in God as one who works on behalf of
suffering people everywhere. It was the whole mood and purpose of his
life which stood declared in those splendid words, “I will now turn
aside and see.” He was always saying just that! He was never content
with the mere surface of reality. He was never satisfied with that
which a hasty glance would bring in any given situation. He must get
beneath the surface and know the deeper, hidden meaning.
How much depends upon that power of vision! What mighty issues are knit
up with it in this familiar scene! If Moses that day had seen and heard
nothing more than did the Midianites, he would have gone on keeping his
sheep and would have died a comfortable and prosperous sheep grower.
If the Israelites along the banks of the Nile had been without the
power of such leadership as he alone among the men of his generation
seemed to be able to furnish, they would have gone on making bricks
without straw until all capacity for spiritual advance would have been
crushed out of them. If that Hebrew race, first among Semitic peoples
in its ability to see and to impart spiritual truth, had never had its
chance to develop in the free air of the steppes or within the pleasant
borders of that land of promise, how different apparently would have
been the moral history of the race! It is idle to speculate on what
would have been the result had something never happened which did
happen, but just this glance shows the momentous consequences which may
at any juncture attach to the ability of some man to see. It is of the
utmost importance in every quarter that some man should be at hand who
can see the great sight.
Your own life, the richness of it, the promise of it, the successful
unfolding of it on higher levels, is bound up with this power of
vision. If the world about you is only a sheep pasture, if success in
life is to be measured solely or mainly in terms of wool and mutton, if
the skilful avoidance of discomfort and the securing of easy content
for yourself and your family are the main considerations with you, then
by that limited outlook you are doomed. If here in these days of high
privilege on the campus no bushes burn for you with a strange fire, if
no hillsides in life become vocal with a divine voice, if no flames of
sympathy, of moral passion, of aspiration burn within your breast, then
alas for you! You are not entering into the meaning of life! You have
eyes, but you see not, ears, but you hear not!
“Can ye not discern?” Jesus said to those who regarded themselves as
the most exemplary people of his day. They could look up at the sky
and from the fact that it was red or lowering make a fairly good guess
about tomorrow’s weather, but they could not discern the signs of the
times. There they were in the presence of the beginnings of the most
important spiritual movement in history, yet all they saw was the tired
face of the Man of Nazareth, whom they finally put to death because his
claims confused them. Can ye not discern? Will you not take pains to
cultivate the power of turning aside to see the great sights awaiting
you all in the sheep pastures of earth, in all scenes of industry and
in all places of trade, in all lines of civic effort and in all forms
of charitable intent, in every schoolroom and in every home? Will you
not turn and with heightened power of vision see there the hidden,
unrealized possibilities?
“Where there is no vision, the people perish!” Something lives
on--flesh and blood shapes which buy and sell, walk the street and
talk small talk, but the people created potentially in the likeness
and image of the Most High are gone. Where there is no vision, any
life perishes. What keeps alive the mother-love in the face of all the
hardships, sacrifices, buffetings it is called upon to meet? It is
the power of vision cherished and cultivated more actively, perhaps,
by women than by men. When her child is first laid in her arms it is
only a bit of red flesh--that is all the canary in the window or the
thoughtless observer who cares not for children would see. This bit of
existence, so undeveloped as to have nothing one could call moral life,
no power to choose or to aspire; so undeveloped as to have nothing
one could call mental life, no power of recognition, discrimination,
inference, has only the power to cry and to feed. But the mother sees
in that tiny form another promise of a diviner day when the unsearched
possibilities of that new life shall have been trained and nurtured
by her love. And throughout the years when she nurses the child in
sickness, bears with him in his ignorance, woos and wins him back from
his moral waywardness, she is sustained by her maternal vision.
No one can live strongly, effectively, joyously in any other way. The
dull, dry, prosaic man who never sees the deeper significance of any
given situation may be able to saw wood or add up columns of figures,
but when it comes to relating these ordinary details of life to some
over-arching, underlying, far-reaching purpose which will bring out
the meaning and the beauty of existence, he fails. He has no power of
vision and his real life goes down in defeat.
It might be illustrated in this way--read Baedeker on Mont Blanc and
then read Coleridge! Baedeker has the facts; he tells the height of
the mountain, the exact distance from Chamounix to the summit in
kilometers; he describes every glacier and crevasse. But Coleridge’s
“Ode” to the mountain brings out the meaning and the beauty of it.
Baedeker has facts, Coleridge has vision.
Read Baedeker on Edinburgh and then read Robert Louis Stevenson’s
little book on the same city; read Baedeker on Northern Italy,
including his description of the city without streets, and then read
Ruskin’s “Stones of Venice.” Read Baedeker on Belgium, including his
description of the field and of the Battle of Waterloo, and then read
Victor Hugo’s chapter on the same event in “Les Misérables.” In one
case you have the camera recording the outward, visible, prose facts;
in the other you have insight and vision interpreting the meaning of
them. It is written, man shall not live by Baedeker alone, but by every
word which proceedeth out of the mind and heart of that higher power of
vision shall man live.
Let me urge this habit upon every young man! Put your own personal life
under the power, not of some lower mood or some ill-advised impulse,
but under the power of the best you have ever seen or heard or felt as
in any wise possible to you. It was a man in a million, measured by
character and achievement, who said, while he was still in the vigor
and promise of his youth, “Wherefore I was not disobedient unto”--what?
I was not disobedient unto the rules and regulations posted on the
wall of my schoolroom or the door of the factory where I earned my
bread--that would have meant little! No one can set up the way of life
in type and print it to be nailed on a door. I was not disobedient to
the usages and customs of the society where I moved--that, too, might
have meant only a weak, cheap mode of life. “I was not disobedient unto
the heavenly vision!” I was true to the best I saw and heard and felt
as possible to me!
That habit of putting the life deliberately and persistently under the
power of some noble vision caught in an hour of spiritual privilege
will mean advance. You may, if you will allow your attention to be
diverted by the underbrush around you and never see the bush that burns
with a strange fire, never see things absent, things historic, things
possible but unattained. The small things, the ant-hills, and the
gopher mounds, may, because they are near, shut out your view of Shasta
and Whitney. It is one of the tragedies of life that the insignificant,
the unimportant details have a way of crushing out the finer purposes,
thus bringing defeat to interests which are vital.
When Abraham Lincoln had been unusually harassed by some professional
politicians as to the bestowal of patronage, he said one day, half
humorously and half sadly, “It is not the carrying on of the Civil War
which is killing me; it is the work of deciding who shall be postmaster
at the Four Corners. There is Mr. Blank”--naming a very troublesome
office-seeker--“I never think of going to sleep at night without first
looking under the bed to see if Blank is not there waiting to ask me
for some office.”
It was one of the tragedies of those hard years in our history that the
great president of the republic, who himself had caught the vision and
heard the voice--“I have seen the affliction of my people which are in
bondage; I have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters, and
I am come down to deliver them”--it was one of the tragedies of that
period that his eyes should be turned away from the bush which burned
with fire to study the underbrush piled up round him by narrow-minded
politicians. It is one of the tragedies of many lives in less exalted
station that the great things suffer defeat by the multiplicity and
insistence of the small things. Busied here and there with a thousand
petty interests--what we shall eat, what we shall drink, what we
shall put on, and, what other women will say about it when we get it
on--the vital things are left undone. The whole wretched habit of life
comes from the lack of the power of vision, the inability to put these
matters in right perspective, the great things great and the small
things small.
Your real life does not consist in what you have. Your real life does
not consist in what you are actually able to do. Your real life does
not consist even, as men often say, in what you are. Your real life
consists in what you see as possible and desirable for you, and in
that capacity you feel stirring within you to gain all that sometime!
Not your possessions, not your outward achievements, not your inner
acquirements, but your persistently cherished aspirations tell the
story of your real life. It is what you hold in vision and steadily
strive for which marks you up or down.
But suppose one feels his lack of this power of vision, how shall he
gain more of it? How shall we cultivate our own meager share of this
fine ability? You may recall that word of Paul, “Eye hath not seen,
nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to
conceive the things that God hath prepared for those that love him.”
This does not mean merely that the things prepared for us are superior
to anything that eyes have seen or ears heard in this world; it means
rather that they are discerned in another way. They come to us through
the power of spiritual perception. “Eye hath not seen,” not by physical
sensation; “ear hath not heard,” not by hearsay or common report; God
reveals them to us by his Spirit. It was not that Moses had better eyes
or better ears than the Midianite shepherds upon the hillsides; he had
within him a soul of sympathy for his fellows, a spirit of trust toward
God, an attitude of personal aspiration for the highest, which enabled
him to see and to hear what they failed to detect.
This power of vision grows like other powers, by right use. The soul
sees and sees more as the man obediently translates his visions into
deeds, his insights into actions. If any man, gifted or humble, will
do his will he shall know, for “obedience,” as Robertson said, “is the
organ of spiritual knowledge.” The power of vision grows through right
use as each added insight becomes an effective impulse for noble action.
It is this power of vision which keeps men alive all the way up and
all the way in. It is for you who stand on the slopes of Horeb, the
mountains of God, by reason of the higher education you have received
to cultivate this power by a spirit of obedient trust and by the habit
of loving service. In every situation form the habit of turning aside
from the commonplace shapes which engage your eyes that you may see
some great and significant sight. Watch for the bush which burns with a
mysterious fire! Listen for the voice which issues out of it, calling
you to larger and higher service! Welcome these finer impulses which
burn within your own breast, for they will aid you in building your
personal life into that great, divine plan of which you have caught a
far-off vision.
XII
“THE WAR AGAINST WAR”
In my selection of a theme I have ventured to break away from the
conventional style of baccalaureate address. I bring you no word of
counsel touching those moral values which are altogether private
and personal. I would undertake rather to direct your minds to the
consideration of a certain problem, vast and grave, whose scope is
national and international.
We live in a land governed by public opinion. The seat of authority
is not at Washington; the seat of authority is to be found in those
prevailing sentiments and convictions which determine the real attitude
of the people themselves. As college-trained men and women you are to
be leaders in the work of forming that body of public opinion. Where it
is wise, honest, resolute, it becomes the final source of safety for
the republic. It is of vital importance, then, that your contribution
to that section of public opinion which bears upon the problem I have
in mind be grounded in reason and conscience.
Let me remind you of two sentences taken from Holy Writ, one from the
greatest book in the Old Testament, “His name shall be called the
Prince of Peace”; the other from the last book in the New Testament,
“And he shall reign forever and ever.” His name shall be called the
Prince of Peace and he shall reign forever and ever! We have here a
miniature picture of one of the sublime processes of the ages! The
highest anticipation of the Hebrew looked toward the coming of One who
should establish a new line of succession. He saw a new quality of life
winning its way to empire. The heir to the throne of Israel would be
no more a man of war, he would be the Prince of Peace. And the highest
anticipation of the Christian looked toward the complete success of
that finer method of sovereignty--that coming One would reign forever!
It is a splendid picture of that righteous and enduring conquest to
be accomplished not by force but by principle; not by compulsion
through slaughter but by moral instruction, persuasion, and reasonable
agreement. It is a picture which will furnish any man a worthy ideal
to hang in his sky and it will help him, as he takes part in shaping
the public opinion of his country, to place the crown of his ultimate
allegiance where it rightly belongs.
His name shall be called the Prince of Peace! But what terrible mockery
has been offered to that name by his avowed followers! It is one of
the ironies of history that the most costly and deadly armaments for
the killing of men in war are being wrought out in cold steel, not by
the nations which owe their allegiance to Mahomet, the prophet of the
sword, but by those nations which profess allegiance to the Prince of
Peace. “Put up thy sword,” he said twenty centuries ago! The command
has never been withdrawn nor revoked. Yet look out across the face of
what we call Christendom and see the wicked and costly refusal!
Christian Germany, where the Protestant Reformation was ushered in
by the preaching of Martin Luther, has increased her national debt
in a single generation from eighteen millions of dollars to over one
thousand millions, chiefly by expenditures upon her army and navy.
Christian England, known to the ends of the earth as a center of
missionary impulse, is almost beside herself in her mad desire to
increase the number of _Dreadnoughts_. She is spending three
hundred millions of dollars a year on her army and navy as against
eighty-two millions all told on education, science and art. Christian
Russia, professing in her orthodox Greek Church to have the only true
faith to be found upon the globe, is planning a billion dollar navy
and is actually spending two hundred millions a year upon armament
as against twenty-two millions a year upon education. And our own
Christian country has been making a strange departure from that policy
which has made us prosperous and happy, honored and useful, among the
nations of the earth for more than one hundred years. The United States
in the last ten years has increased in population ten per cent, and it
has increased its military expenditures during that period by three
hundred per cent. And this is Christendom! These are the nations which
look up to the One whose name is called “The Prince of Peace” and crown
him Lord of all! Alas, for the bitter irony of such a course!
And all this at a time when the bare problem of bread is becoming
more and more serious! England, spending her three hundred millions
of dollars a year on military outlay, has little children in the
streets of London and Glasgow eating refuse out of the garbage barrels
because they are hungry. The problem of poverty and unemployment
there is so grave that the British Parliament sets aside whole days
for its consideration. In Germany a government expert said recently
that, according to carefully prepared estimates based upon detailed
investigation, there were two men applying for almost every job which
promised a living wage; one-half of the skilled labor of the empire
was out of employment. In Russia, people by the thousand die, like
flies, from malnutrition at the very hour when her military experts are
talking about that billion dollar navy. It is criminal to take thus the
children’s bread and fling it to the dogs of war! How terrible all
this is for nations which profess to honor and follow the One who came
not to destroy men’s lives, but to save them!
In our own country, while the situation is less serious, there are men
enough out of work and unable to find bread to put into the mouths
of their families. Never a week passes when men do not come asking
me to use my influence with the employers in my congregation to find
them work. Our national leaders are looking in every direction to
discover how the revenue may be increased. The present revenue is sadly
inadequate for the things which ought to be done. There are millions of
acres of arid land to be irrigated by national enterprise and offered
for settlement to industrious families. There are great areas of swamp
land to be drained which would support a busy, happy population. There
are forests to be conserved and renewed in a way that would change
the whole face of the situation for the farmer and the fruit-grower
in great sections of our country. There are inland waterways to be
improved and developed, bringing producer and consumer nearer together
by better means of transportation, thus reducing the cost of living.
There is a merchant marine sadly needing assistance, for our flag
should fly on all seas and in every port, in what could be a useful
and profitable trade. All these things ought to be done, if only there
was money available to do them. All these interests suffer for lack
of money in the very period when within ten years we are increasing
our military expenditure by three hundred per cent. His name shall
be called “The Prince of Peace,” and it is under his banner that we
profess to march!
What is it all for? I know the scare-heads which sometimes fill the
sillier type of newspaper. I know how frightened some people are
when some “military expert,” as he calls himself, has the nightmare.
“Men who spend the best years of their lives looking at the world
through the bore of a gun get their vision distorted.” They cannot
see straight; they become sorry and unreliable leaders, as Europe,
staggering under her grievous burden, knows to her sorrow. Sir Edward
Grey, foreign secretary in the present Cabinet, said recently in the
British Parliament, “The vastness of the expenditure on armament is
a satire on modern civilization and if continued it must lead Europe
into bankruptcy.” The real security of any nation depends upon its
schools and its churches, its useful industries and its happy homes a
thousand times more than upon its army and navy. And the conceit of
these militarists who are throwing dust in the eyes of the people would
be funny, if it were not so costly and so perilous to our national
well-being.
It is the duty of the church and of the university, where men do
not live in that state of chronic hysteria which possesses many a
newspaper office, to arraign this evil of militarism as the most
cruel and inexcusable burden, as the most gigantic crime against
the toiling people, as the nearest approach to the unpardonable sin
known to our twentieth century. The men who watch the world from that
narrow station “behind the gun” are not competent leaders of public
sentiment. The merchant and the mechanic, the wise lawyer and the
skilled physician, the farmer, the miner, and the trained teacher,
engaged in peaceful, useful industry, are vastly more competent to see
things as they are and to aid in shaping a wholesome public sentiment.
International relationships are being formed today as never before in
the history of the race through community of interest in trade and by
those associations which come through labor organizations and through
literature, through the work of education and by religious affiliation.
It is for these men and women whose main interest lies in those
productive vocations to insist upon being heard.
What are the reasons urged for this cruel and costly outlay? “In time
of peace prepare for war!” This stupid sentiment is trotted out as if
it were a fragment from the wisdom of the ages. History as well as
common sense laughs it to scorn. In time of peace prepare for peace!
We did just that with England along our northern border where for
four thousand miles only an imaginary line divides us from one of the
mightiest nations on earth. We agreed with her that not a solitary
fort should mar that border, that not a single war-ship should trouble
the friendly waters of the Great Lakes. If these two nations can make
that treaty of disarmament for a frontier of four thousand miles and
observe it faithfully for a century, what is there in the nature of the
case to prevent the extension of that noble line of friendly agreement
indefinitely?
We prepared for peace and we have had peace. The whole history of
our country has been, in the main, a history of peace. Since 1789,
a hundred and twenty-one years ago, only three foreign wars have
interrupted our progress, and they lasted, all told, less than eight
years. For the other one hundred and thirteen years our swords have
been plowshares, our spears have been pruning-hooks, the fine steel of
our young manhood has been devoted to those useful activities which
do not destroy, but feed and save. If we can thus live and grow to
be one of the mightiest nations on earth by the policy of peace, why
this sudden spasm of military preparation now retarding our genuine
development!
But we have become “a world power” men say, and some of the nations
might attack us! Why should they? Never since we became a republic
have we been attacked, though for decades and decades our navy was
a negligible quantity. “But suppose Germany should land a hundred
thousand soldiers on our Atlantic coast,” some man shrieked out
recently. Why should she? Sane people deal with probabilities, not
with wild and imaginary possibilities. If Germany wanted to attack us,
why did she not do it in those years when we had no navy at all worth
mentioning? We buy millions and millions of dollars worth of goods
every year “made in Germany.” Does Germany wish to fight one of her
best customers? If some man who keeps a meat-market has a customer
who comes in every day to order chops or a steak for his lunch and a
roast of beef or a leg of lamb for his dinner, does the butcher want
to beat that customer over the head with a musket? Any one can see
the absurdity of it! Is folly any the less folly when raised to the
_nth_ power by being made international?
So much for Germany! As for England, she ruled the sea for all those
decades when we had no navy worth considering and she never thought
of attacking us. Why should she fight the people of her own race and
language whose commercial interests are so closely interwoven with
her own economic life? France is our traditional and hereditary
friend. No other nation on that side of the globe need be taken into
our calculation. What a nightmare it is which sets us to building ten
million dollar warships for fear some respectable neighbor might attack
us!
But there is Japan! At the very hour when ten thousand Japanese boys
and girls were singing songs of welcome along the streets to the
officers and men of the American fleet, when the whole empire from the
officials of high rank down to the jinrikisha men in the street was
showing its cordial good-will to the representatives of our country,
an excitable young man, who owes his fame to the fact that he did one
brave deed at Santiago and was thenceforth miscellaneously kissed by a
lot of impressionable women--this excitable young man was rushing about
saying, “War with Japan is inevitable!” And here on the Pacific coast
recently a tired, sick, disappointed old man, an admiral in the navy,
said to a bunch of newspaper reporters who wanted something yellow to
fill up the front page, “Japan could tear this coast to ribbons in
sixty days!” He made this thoughtless deliverance at the very time when
the ink on the notable agreement entered into by President Roosevelt
and the emperor of Japan was scarcely dry! The thoughtful people of
both nations smiled and then mourned over his foolish word. Germany,
England, France, Japan, these four are the only nations on the globe
that we need take into such a consideration! How absurd to be imposing
upon the toiling people the useless burden of expensive armament
against these neighbors.
But “we have colonies now and we must defend them--there are the
Philippines!” Who wants the Philippines? Nobody! They have been, as all
the world knows, an expensive and troublesome burden. We have already
spent several hundreds of millions of dollars upon that undertaking,
and the end is not yet. We could well afford to pay any country fifty
millions of dollars to take them off our hands. But this is not the
way national business is transacted. We found ourselves with the
Philippines in our possession, contrary to the wish and judgment of
many of us at the time, and now by an expenditure of these hundreds of
millions of dollars upon schools and churches, upon better government,
public improvements, and economic development, we have been trying
to do our duty by that backward people. But nobody wants to fight us
to get the Philippines. “They can be left out over night,” as Dr.
Jefferson said in New York, “without the slightest anxiety on our
part.” We certainly do not need to increase our military expenditures
three hundred per cent to prevent some nation from robbing us of that
precious colony.
There are enemies against which we do need to arm ourselves! Not
England and Germany, not France and Japan--no, the common enemies
of hunger and cold, pain and disease, ignorance and vice, greed and
graft, unemployment and inequitable distribution! Against these enemies
we do need to arm. These alien elements are the dangerous foes of
the republic, and they have landed their devastating forces upon our
shores. Against them we must enlist; against them we must build the
best armaments which statesmanship can devise and generous treasuries
provide. And in that great and honorable warfare against the real
enemies of human well-being the exalted Leader of our race, the One
whose name written above every name is called the Prince of Peace, will
march at the head of the advancing host.
Not only the costliness, but the futility of this burdensome armament
smites us in the face when we begin to think. Some years ago in
Russia, a man named Jean Bloch began to write about war. He was not
a dreamy sentimentalist; he was a banker and the administrator of a
great railroad system. He had been studying war upon its scientific
and economic side. He advanced the argument that the introduction
of long-range, rapid-fire guns using smokeless powder made decisive
engagements between large bodies of troops impossible; and thus made
useless the appeal to arms as a mode of settling international disputes.
A small force of men securely entrenched can now hold at bay
indefinitely a mighty army. When men could safely march up within
two or three hundred yards of earthworks, fortified positions were
sometimes carried by the assault of a superior force. All this is now
changed. The zone of fire today extends for more than a mile. Across
that space the man behind the earthworks can shoot with marvelous
accuracy fifteen to twenty-five bullets per minute. Smokeless powder
keeps the zone of deadly fire clear, so that he can see how to shoot.
The field is not obscured by smoke as it was when Longstreet made his
advance at Gettysburg. Smokeless powder and the recently invented
noiseless rifle make it impossible to locate the foe either by sight or
by sound--men simply drop dead as they undertake to advance across that
zone of fire which extends for a mile. The effect of all this upon the
morale of an army undertaking to carry a fortified position by assault
is instantly apparent. Such attempts are now things of the past.
Jean Bloch had scarcely published his argument when the South
African war came on to demonstrate the essential soundness of his
main conclusions. The British empire was making war upon two little
republics numbering all told, men, women, and children, about eighty
thousand people--less than enough to provide inhabitants for some
third-rate city. Imagine some unimportant city of eighty thousand
people undertaking to wage war with England! Yet with all the resources
of her army and navy, with the treasury drawn upon at the rate of a
million dollars a day, with Lord Roberts in the field, and with the
splendid courage of her best troops matched against the scanty numbers
of the opposing forces, the Boers held out against Great Britain for
nearly three years.
It was a bitter experience for England. It burdened her with an
increase of debt under which she staggers in her present industrial
depression. It hastened the death of the good Queen Victoria. It brings
an apologetic note into the voice of almost every Englishman one meets
today when he refers to it, and yet it was the British empire against
eighty thousand people. Imagine what it would have been in costliness
and in futility had she been trying to overcome an equal! Picture the
folly of England trying to overcome Germany, or of France trying to
conquer the United States. Jean Bloch was right, and many of Europe’s
wisest statesmen are openly endorsing his claim. They are using the
sensible argument of this business man to stem this tide of militarism
now sweeping across the face of Christendom.
Artillery has become all but useless against modern fortifications.
Plevna told us that, thirty years ago. The Russian general, Todleben,
said of that campaign, “We would bombard Plevna for a whole day and
kill perhaps a single Turk.” The South African war repeated the same
sentiment with a loud “amen.” The correspondents on the English side
reported, “We bombarded Cronje for a solid week and after the struggle
was over we found he had lost in all that time less than a hundred men.”
The costly operations of modern warfare, when a fleet can fire away
fifty thousand dollars’ worth of ammunition in a few minutes and when
armies in the field run up bills correspondingly great, impose burdens
which lift the luxury of such performances out of the reach of all but
the well-to-do nations. When the old-time fighters used battle-axes and
broadswords, they could go out and hew Agag in pieces before the Lord
as long as the strength of their right arms and the supply of Agags
held out--they could do this indefinitely without entailing any serious
expense upon their countries. But the costly weapons now in vogue, with
their voracious appetites for expensive ammunition, make war another
matter.
Even these terrible outlays might be borne by the powerful nations for
a brief period, but the inability of any large army to win a speedy and
decisive victory over another would cause the campaigns to drag along
until the economic resources of both parties to the struggle would be
taxed beyond limit and thus the futility of the appeal to arms would
again be demonstrated. All this has become so apparent that some of the
wisest statesmen in Europe are insisting that war between great nations
of approximately equal strength has become, on the face of it, such an
absurdity as to make such an event in the highest degree improbable.
In the city of Lucerne, on the shore of that lovely lake with the
Rigi and Pilatus rising up in front, Jean Bloch caused to be erected
a “Museum of Peace and War.” He knew that abstract arguments are
sometimes weak where visible, tangible facts are strong in their power
of appeal. He provided for exhibits of the various forms of armament
from arrow-heads and primitive tomahawks down to Mauser rifles and
Krupp cannon. He has shown how complete defenses may be made where
barbed wire obstacles are stretched across that deadly zone which
extends for more than a mile in front of the fortified spot--obstacles
which men can neither cut nor pass under fire. He has shown the
penetrative power of modern bullets. Napoleon used to say bluntly, “A
boy will serve to stop a bullet as well as a man.” But neither boy nor
man stops the bullet from one of these modern rifles, it goes right on
in its bloody career. Experts had calculated that a rifle bullet from
a Mauser gun would pierce fifteen thicknesses of cowhide, a hardwood
plank three inches thick, and then go through a dozen more inch boards
placed at intervals. I saw there in that museum the results of the
test--the bullet pierced the cowhide, the three-inch plank, and went
through sixteen inch boards, lodging in the seventeenth. Army men say
that a bullet with force enough to pierce an inch board will kill a
man. With such penetrative force any one can see the deadly effect of
these long-range, rapid-fire guns using smokeless powder. It takes away
some of the glamour and romance from the terrible business of war to
have its appliances thus scientifically exhibited.
In that same museum at Lucerne, where the exhibits of deadly weapons
are educating thousands of tourists from all the nations of earth
as they come and go, year by year, other exhibits show the increase
of international arbitration as a means of determining differences.
Within the last ten years eighty of these arbitration treaties have
been signed, our own country being a party to more than a third of them
all. There is a growing and an insistent demand in all the enlightened
nations of the earth for an international judiciary. Men have come
to see that this costly international dueling does not really settle
anything. A few men have to sit down finally around a table somewhere
and determine what shall stand. And as statesmen get their eyes open
they will more and more insist that this shall be done before the
costly and futile experiments in killing men take place rather than
afterward.
The great arbitrations of history might certainly be made as
conspicuous in our schools, in the press, and in literature as the
great battles. Beside that volume bound in red, “Fifteen Decisive
Battles of the World,” there ought to stand another more significant
volume bound in white and gold, “Fifty Decisive Arbitrations of the
World.” Let the church and the university join hands in helping the
people of our country to realize that when the final estimates are made
up, it will not be “Blessed are the warmakers,” but “Blessed are the
peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.” How mighty
would be the influence of the thirty millions of professing Christians
in our own land in shaping public opinion, in determining our national
policy, could their hearts be really fired with the magnificent
principles and the passion for human well-being which possessed the
heart of the Prince of Peace!
There is a growing unwillingness among the nations to discount
their futures by killing off large numbers of their bravest and
most patriotic young men in war. David Starr Jordan’s two familiar
principles are absolutely sound: “The blood of a nation determines
its history,” and “The history of a nation determines its blood.” The
truth of the first statement we see at a glance, for the blood, the
inner life-quality, of any nation shapes its history. And the second
statement is equally true; if the history of a nation is stained by
incessant warfare, if generation after generation consents to the
destruction of those courageous, virile young men whose hearts respond
readily to the call for heroic sacrifice, such a history eliminates
from the blood of that nation those very elements which it sorely needs.
It cost us the lives of half a million men to abolish slavery and to
keep our country whole. If that result was to be secured in no other
way, men who love liberty and love the Union may say that the price
was not too great for such unspeakable benefits. But we know that the
nation today is less able to grapple with its present problems, with
the greed and the graft, with the fraud and the lust which confront us,
because of the loss of those brave men and of the children they might
have reared, bequeathing to them their own heroic spirit, had their
lives been lived out in peaceful industry. They went down cheerily to
die at Shiloh and Chancellorsville, at Antietam and Gettysburg, but
the nation to this hour feels the loss of such a priceless heritage of
public spirit and uncalculating heroism. The serious-minded nations are
becoming ever more reluctant to make such costly sacrifices for the
sake of the doubtful advantage of a great war.
In the growth of international agreements, in the gradual advance
of what might be called international litigation before courts of
arbitration replacing the barbarous methods of slaughter and conquest,
in the steady increase of that good understanding and mutual good-will
promoted by travel and the interchange of products, by fellowship in
the work of science and education and through the joys of sharing
responsibility in the cause of philanthropy and religion--in these
vast movements of thought and feeling lies the hope of that better
day when peace shall hold an undisputed sway. The nineteenth century,
by steam and telegraph, by increased travel and the ready exchange
of commodities, made the whole world a neighborhood. It is for the
twentieth century, by the permeation of international intercourse
with finer principles and a nobler spirit, to make the whole world a
brotherhood.
It is the duty of right-minded, honest-hearted people everywhere to
use their utmost endeavors to maintain and increase that body of good
feeling out of which shall issue this higher type of international
life. To such proportions has this sentiment already grown, that if
these four nations, England, Germany, France, and the United States,
were to make arbitration before a properly constituted international
court the method of their dealing with one another, the other Latin,
Slavic, and Oriental countries would find themselves powerless against
this mighty tide setting ever in the direction of the determination of
all differences by the more rational method.
The outlook for arbitration as a means of settlement is altogether
hopeful. The convention creating a joint high commission to determine
finally our Canadian boundary; the self-restraint shown by the nations
at large in not using force against the late Castro government
in Venezuela; the three great conventions among European powers
neutralizing Norway and agreeing to respect each other’s territory on
the Baltic; the exchange of notes between Japan and the United States
relating to the Far East; the fact that the Central American states
have thus far kept their agreement of 1907 to refer all differences
to a court of their own creation; the fact that the Balkan crisis in
1908, at one time fraught with possibilities frightful to contemplate,
occasioned no European war as would have been the result of such a
tangle twenty years ago--all these signs of the times are full of
promise.
We must confess that the churches of him whose name should be called
the Prince of Peace have oftentimes been inefficient in their
performance of an essential duty. The feeling between England and
Germany, for example, at the present time is almost insanely acute.
Germany has been jealous of the growing friendship between England and
France, now happily replacing the ugly antagonism which harks back to
the time of Napoleon. England is jealous of Germany’s growing supremacy
in the world of manufacture. Technical schools, improved machinery,
and the rapid increase of skilled labor has enabled the German to carry
his wares into the markets of the world and to undersell the Briton.
All this with certain other causes which make for ill feeling has
aroused a measure of hostility on both sides of the North Sea.
I spent four months in England a year ago. I attended church twice
or three times each Sunday and never once in all that time from a
Christian pulpit did I hear a minister of Christ speak in deprecation
of that feeling of hostility or seek to allay that sentiment of
international jealousy. Aside from the “International Peace Congress,”
which met in England that summer, the only public effort of that
kind I witnessed or heard of was made at a socialist meeting in St.
James Hall, London. The International Socialist Party brought over
from Berlin two well-known men, Kautsky, the editor of a socialist
organ there, and Ledebour, the leader of the socialist party in the
Reichstag, to address this meeting side by side with Hyndman, a
long-time leader of the English socialists, and Keir Hardie, labor
member of the British Parliament. These men, German and Briton, stood
together and uttered their ringing words that night against the further
increase of armament, and in the interests of brotherhood. Has it come
to this, that titled bishop and archbishop of the Church of Christ,
that learned scholars and teachers in Oxford and Cambridge shall
hold their peace in the presence of threatened war, while out of the
workshops of the poor and the weary ranks of organized labor shall come
the prophets of better things, calling upon Christendom in the name of
the Carpenter of Nazareth to put up its sword!
Our own nation has been guilty of its full share of this gigantic
folly. Our Congress faced a deficit last year of something like one
hundred and thirty five millions of dollars, mainly because of the
enormous outlays upon the navy in building those ten million dollar
warships. If the present rate of expenditure is maintained for the next
ten years, with no increase whatever, it means that we shall spend
upon our navy the vast sum of one billion, three hundred and fifty
millions of dollars. The reports show that for the fiscal year ending
June 30, 1909, seventy-one per cent of our national revenue was spent
upon the result of war and the preparation for war, upon pensions and
upon the army and navy. What would you think of the housekeeping of a
family where seventy-one per cent of their income was spent on guns!
And because the government, with these huge outlays upon armament,
cannot live upon its income, Congress insists upon increased taxation
through these ingeniously devised tariffs, which fall most heavily upon
the great consuming public. The cost of living has increased until it
has become cruel to all people in modest circumstances and actually
destructive to the struggling poor.
Has not the time come for the plain people to call a halt! Has not the
time come for the indignant toilers in peaceful occupations to restrain
the unwise leaders who are responsible for this craze of militarism!
Has not the solemn farce of seeing Christian nations build ten million
dollar bulldogs in the remote possibility of being called upon to
match them against the costly bulldogs of their neighbors, unless,
perchance, these expensive creations should, before that, have been
relegated to the scrap-heap by some new device--has not that solemn,
ugly farce played itself out! “The welfare of the people is the supreme
law of the land.” It is the supreme law of all lands and any one who
has visited Europe, where every third peasant carries a useless and
burdensome soldier on his back as he goes forth to his toil, knows that
this modern evil of militarism is a mighty menace to the welfare of any
people.
The Chairman of the Committee on Appropriations in our Congress
last winter called the attention of the House to the fact that, in
pensions and in preparations for possible war, the United States was
spending more money than any other nation in the world. He called
attention to the fact that the appropriations for military and naval
affairs for the coming year would exceed, by twenty-nine millions of
dollars, all the money which the United States government has spent
from the beginning of the republic up to the present hour upon public
buildings. He spoke also of the fact that this nation, which we like
to think of as a non-military nation, is spending at the present time
more than two-thirds of the total national revenue on pensions and on
preparations for war. What an abnormal condition for a republic whose
splendid history has been almost entirely a history of peace!
Would that our country might take higher ground in this whole matter!
Would that there might go out from us a splendid endorsement of the
principle of arbitration, a strong insistence upon the method of
international litigation before such tribunals as have been outlined at
the Hague conferences and a stinging rebuke to the policy of increasing
these deadly and burdensome armaments! Would that our land might show
itself a leader and a messiah among the nations in achieving that
magnificent fulfilment when the promised Messiah, the Prince of Peace,
shall reign in the affairs of men.
The claim is made that risk is involved in refusing to maintain these
costly armaments which are sapping the life-blood of the leading
nations of Europe. Risk is involved, undoubtedly, but if we want peace,
why not take that risk in showing the nations that such is our desire?
It would be a magnificent form of moral venture. Risk is involved--so
be it! A far greater risk to the general welfare and to the perpetuity
of our institutions is involved in the opposite course. Why should
not we, as a land of high principles and shining ideals, make the
moral venture of staking our future upon a splendid obedience to the
appeal of the great Messiah? Beat the swords into plowshares! Beat
the spears into pruning-hooks! In peaceful, joyous industry let not
this nation learn war any more! Let it place its reliance upon courts
of arbitration for the settlement of international disputes, and the
blessing of Almighty God, which maketh rich and bringeth no sorrow
therewith, shall be ours!
“If drunk with sight of power we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the law,
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget--lest we forget!
“The tumult and the shouting dies;
The captains and the kings depart;
Still stands thine ancient sacrifice
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget--lest we forget.”
O thou land whose Declaration of Independence was made in Philadelphia,
the city of brotherly love! O thou land of Washington, who prayed in
his farewell address that we might be kept from the scourge of war! O
thou land of General Grant, who declared, “Though I have been trained
as a soldier and have participated in many battles, there never was a
time, in my opinion, when some way could not have been found to prevent
the drawing of the sword.” O thou land of Lincoln, who pleaded in his
second inaugural, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with
firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us bind up
the nation’s wounds and strive to achieve and cherish among ourselves
and with all nations a just and lasting peace.” O thou land that we
love, enter thou afresh into a nobler rivalry with all the nations of
earth in the cultivation of good-will, in the reduction of burdensome
armament and in the maintenance of those policies which make for the
enduring welfare of the race!
Transcriber’s Notes
Page 5: “go to college and tay” changed to “go to college and stay”
Page 14: “your own impress on” changed to “your own impression”
Page 33: A missing period was added at the end of a sentence.
Page 88: “the ewards are rich” changed to “the rewards are rich”
Page 101: “stirring times of war on in the slower” changed to “stirring
times of war or in the slower”
Page 112: “to stand up befor” changed to “to stand up before”
Page 130: “simply gets wet and muddy, and rowned” changed to “simply
gets wet and muddy, and drowned”
Page 176: “by intemperance and some fly” changed to “by intemperance
and some by”
Page 202: “his name shall be” changed to “His name shall be”
Page 218: “conquer the united States” changed to “conquer the United
States”
Page 225: “England Germany, France,” changed to “England, Germany,
France,”
Page 231: “deadly and burdensone armaments!” changed to “deadly and
burdensome armaments!”
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