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A Man's Value to Society
By NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS
_Eighth Edition_
GREAT BOOKS AS LIFE-TEACHERS
STUDIES OF CHARACTER, REAL AND IDEAL
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BURNS LOW IN THE HEART"
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ACROSS THE CONTINENT OF THE YEARS
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A Man's Value to Society
Studies in Self-Culture
and Character
Newell Dwight Hillis
Author of "The Investment of Influence," "Foretokens
of Immortality," etc.
"_Spread wide thy mantle while the gods rain gold._"
--FROM THE PERSIAN.
TWENTY-FIFTH EDITION
Chicago New York Toronto
Fleming H. Revell Company
MCMII
Copyright, 1896, by
Fleming H. Revell Company
Copyright, 1897, by
Fleming H. Revell Company
_TO MY WIFE_
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I The Elements of Worth in the Individual 9
II Character: Its Materials and External Teachers 33
III Aspirations and Ideals 55
IV The Physical Basis of Character 77
V The Mind and the Duty of Right Thinking 99
VI The Moral Uses of Memory 123
VII The Imagination as the Architect of Manhood 143
VIII The Enthusiasm of Friendship 165
IX Conscience and Character 189
X Visions that Disturb Contentment 213
XI The Uses of Books and Reading 235
XII The Science of Living with Men 259
XIII The Revelators of Character 281
XIV Making the Most of One's Self 301
THE ELEMENTS OF WORTH IN THE INDIVIDUAL
"There is nothing that makes men rich and strong but that
which they carry inside of them. Wealth is of the heart,
not of the hand."--_John Milton._
"Until we know why the rose is sweet or the dew drop
pure, or the rainbow beautiful, we cannot know why the
poet is the best benefactor of society. The soldier
fights for his native land, but the poet touches that
land with the charm that makes it worth fighting for and
fires the warrior's heart with energy invincible. The
statesman enlarges and orders liberty in the state, but
the poet fosters the core of liberty in the heart of the
citizen. The inventor multiplies the facilities of life,
but the poet makes life better worth living."--_George
Wm. Curtis._
"Not all men are of equal value. Not many Platos: only
one, to whom a thousand lesser minds look up and learn to
think. Not many Dantes: one, and a thousand poets tune
their harps to his and repeat his notes. Not many
Raphaels: one, and no second. But a thousand lesser
artists looking up to him are lifted to his level. Not
many royal hearts--great magazines of kindness. Happy the
town blessed with a few great minds and a few great
hearts. One such citizen will civilize an entire
community."--_H._
I
THE ELEMENTS OF WORTH IN THE INDIVIDUAL
Our scientific experts are investigating the wastes of society. Their
reports indicate that man is a great spendthrift. He seems not so much
a husbandman, making the most of the treasures of his life-garden, as
a robber looting a storehouse for booty.
Travelers affirm that one part of the northern pineries has been
wasted by man's careless fires and much of the rest by his reckless
axe. Coal experts insist that a large percentage of heat passes out of
the chimney. The new chemistry claims that not a little of the
precious ore is cast upon the slag heap.
In the fields the farmers overlook some ears of corn and pass by some
handfuls of wheat. In the work-room the scissors leave selvage and
remnant. In the mill the saw and plane refuse slabs and edges. In the
kitchen a part of what the husband carries in, the wife's wasteful
cooking casts out. But the secondary wastes involve still heavier
losses. Man's carelessness in the factory breaks delicate machinery,
his ignorance spoils raw materials, his idleness burns out boilers,
his recklessness blows up engines; and no skill of manager in juggling
figures in January can retrieve the wastes of June.
Passing through the country the traveler finds the plow rusting in the
furrow, mowers and reapers exposed to rain and snow; passing through
the city he sees the docks lined with boats, the alleys full of broken
vehicles, while the streets exhibit some broken-down men. A journey
through life is like a journey along the trackway of a retreating
army; here a valuable ammunition wagon is abandoned because a careless
smith left a flaw in the tire; there a brass cannon is deserted
because a tug was improperly stitched; yonder a brave soldier lies
dying in the thicket where he fell because excited men forgot the use
of an ambulance. What with the wastes of intemperance and ignorance,
of idleness and class wars, the losses of society are enormous. But
man's prodigality with his material treasures does but interpret his
wastefulness of the greater riches of mind and heart. Life's chief
destructions are in the city of man's soul. Many persons seem to be
trying to solve this problem: "Given a soul stored with great
treasure, and three score and ten years for happiness and usefulness,
how shall one kill the time and waste the treasure?" Man's pride over
his casket stored with gems must be modified by the reflection that
daily his pearls are cast before swine, that should have been woven
into coronets.
Man's evident failure to make the most out of his material life
suggests a study of the elements in each citizen that make him of
value to his age and community. What are the measurements of mankind,
and why is it that daily some add new treasures to the storehouse of
civilization, while others take from and waste the store already
accumulated? These are questions of vital import. Many and varied
estimates of man's value have been made. Statisticians reckon the
average man's value at $600 a year. Each worker in wood, iron or brass
stands for an engine or industrial plant worth $10,000, producing at 6
per cent. an income of $600. The death of the average workman,
therefore, is equivalent to the destruction of a $10,000 mill or
engine. The economic loss through the non-productivity of 20,000
drunkards is equal to one Chicago fire involving two hundred millions.
Of course, some men produce less and others more than $600 a year; and
some there are who have no industrial value--non-producers, according
to Adam Smith; paupers, according to John Stuart Mill; thieves,
according to Paul, who says, "Let him that stole steal no more, but
rather work." In this group let us include the tramps, who hold that
the world owes them a living; these are they who fail to realize that
society has given them support through infancy and childhood; has
given them language, literature, liberty. Wise men know that the
noblest and strongest have received from society a thousandfold more
than they can ever repay, though they vex all the days and nights with
ceaseless toil. In this number of non-sufficing persons are to be
included the paupers--paupers plebeian, supported in the poorhouse by
many citizens; paupers patrician, supported in palace by one citizen,
generally father or ancestor; the two classes differing in that one is
the foam at the top of the glass and the other the dregs at the
bottom. To these two groups let us add the social parasites,
represented by thieves, drunkards, and persons of the baser sort whose
business it is to trade in human passion. We revolt from the red
aphides upon the plant, the caterpillar upon the tree, the vermin upon
bird or beast. How much more do we revolt from those human vermin
whose business it is to propagate parasites upon the body politic!
The condemnation of life is that a man consumes more than he produces,
taking out of society's granary that which other hands have put in.
The praise of life is that one is self-sufficing, taking less out than
he put into the storehouse of civilization.
A man's original capital comes through his ancestry. Nature invests
the grandsire's ability, and compounds it for the grandson. Plato
says: "The child is a charioteer driving two steeds up the long
life-hill; one steed is white, representing our best impulses; one
steed is dark, standing for our worst passions." Who gave these steeds
their color? Our fathers, Plato replies, and the child may not change
one hair, white or black. Oliver Wendell Holmes would have us think
that a man's value is determined a hundred years before his birth. The
ancestral ground slopes upward toward the mountain-minded man. The
great never appear suddenly. Seven generations of clergymen make ready
for Emerson, each a signboard pointing to the coming philosopher. The
Mississippi has power to bear up fleets for war or peace because the
storms of a thousand summers and the snows of a thousand winters have
lent depth and power. The measure of greatness in a man is determined
by the intellectual streams and moral tides flowing down from the
ancestral hills and emptying into the human soul. The Bach family
included one hundred and twenty musicians. Paganini was born with
muscles in his wrists like whipcords. What was unique in Socrates was
first unique in Sophroniscus. John ran before Jesus, but Zacharias
foretold John. No electricity along rope wires, and no vital living
truths along rope nerves to spongy brain. There are millions in our
world who have been rendered physical and moral paupers by the sins of
their ancestors. Their forefathers doomed them to be hewers of wood
and drawers of water. A century must pass before one of their children
can crowd his way up and show strength enough to shape a tool, outline
a code, create an industry, reform a wrong. Despotic governments have
stunted men--made them thin-blooded and low-browed, all backhead and
no forehead. Each child has been likened to a cask whose staves
represent trees growing on hills distant and widely separated; some
staves are sound and solid, standing for right-living ancestors; some
are worm eaten, standing for ancestors whose integrity was consumed by
vices. At birth all the staves are brought together in the infant
cask--empty, but to be filled by parents and teachers and friends. As
the waste-barrel in the alley is filled with refuse and filth, so the
orphan waifs in our streets are made receptacles of all vicious
thoughts and deeds. These children are not so much born as damned into
life. But how different is the childhood of some others. On the Easter
day, in foreign cathedrals, a beauteous vase is placed beside the
altar, and as the multitudes crowd forward and the solemn procession
moves up the aisles, men and women cast into the vase their gifts of
gold and silver and pearls and lace and rich textures. The well-born
child seems to be such a vase, unspeakably beautiful, filled with
knowledges and integrities more precious than gold and pearls. "Let
him who would be great select the right parents," was the keen dictum
of President Dwight.
By the influence of the racial element, the laborer in northern
Europe, viewed as a producing machine, doubles the industrial output
of his southern brother. The child of the tropics is out of the race.
For centuries he has dozed under the banana tree, awakening only to
shake the tree and bring down ripe fruit for his hunger, eating to
sleep again. His muscles are flabby, his blood is thin, his brain
unequal to the strain of two ideas in one day. When Sir John Lubbock
had fed the chief in the South Sea Islands he began to ask him
questions, but within ten minutes the savage was sound asleep. When
awakened the old chief said: "Ideas make me so sleepy." Similarly, the
warm Venetian blood has given few great men to civilization; but the
hills of Scotland and New England produce scholars, statesmen, poets,
financiers, with the alacrity with which Texas produces cotton or
Missouri corn. History traces certain influential nations back to a
single progenitor of unique strength of body and character. Thus
Abraham, Theseus, and Cadmus seem like springs feeding great and
increasing rivers. One wise and original thinker founds a tribe,
shapes the destiny of a nation, and multiplies himself in the lives of
future millions. In accordance with this law, tenacity reappears in
every Scotchman; wit sparkles in every Irishman; vivacity is in every
Frenchman's blood; the Saxon is a colonizer and originates
institutions. During the construction of the Suez Canal it was
discovered that workmen with veins filled with Teutonic blood had a
commercial value two and a half times greater than the Egyptians.
Similarly, during the Indian war, the Highland troops endured double
the strain of the native forces. Napoleon shortened the stature of
the French people two inches by choosing all the taller of his
30,000,000 subjects and killing them in war. Waxing indignant, Horace
Mann thinks "the forehead of the Irish peasantry was lowered an inch
when the government made it an offense punishable with fine,
imprisonment, and a traitor's death to be the teacher of children." A
wicked government can make agony, epidemic, brutalize a race, and
reaching forward, fetter generations yet unborn. "Blood tells," says
science. But blood is the radical element put out at compound interest
and handed forward to generations yet unborn.
The second measure of a man's value to society is found in his
original endowment of physical strength. The child's birth-stock of
vital force is his capital to be traded upon. Other things being equal
his productive value is to be estimated mathematically upon the basis
of physique. Born weak and nerveless, he must go to society's
ambulance wagon, and so impede the onward march. Born vigorous and
rugged, he can help to clear the forest roadway or lead the advancing
columns. Fundamentally man is a muscular machine for producing the
ideas that shape conduct and character. All fine thinking stands with
one foot on fine brain fiber. Given large physical organs, lungs with
capacity sufficient to oxygenate the life-currents as they pass
upward; large arteries through which the blood may have full course,
run, and be glorified; a brain healthy and balanced with a compact
nervous system, and you have the basis for computing what will be a
man's value to society. Men differ, of course, in ways many--they
differ in the number and range of their affections, in the scope of
conscience, in taste and imagination, and in moral energy. But the
original point of variance is physical. Some have a small body and a
powerful mind, like a Corliss engine in a tiny boat, whose frail
structure will soon be racked to pieces. Others are born with large
bodies and very little mind, as if a toy engine were set to run a
mudscow. This means that the poor engineer must pole up stream all his
life. Others, by ignorance of parent, or accident through nurse, or
through their own blunder or sin, destroy their bodily capital. Soon
they are like boats cast high and dry upon the beach, doomed to
sun-cracking and decay. Then, in addition to these absolute
weaknesses, come the disproportions of the body, the distemperature of
various organs. It is not necessary for spoiling a timepiece to break
its every bearing; one loose screw stops all the wheels. Thus a very
slight error as to the management of the bodily mechanism is
sufficient to prevent fine creative work as author, speaker, or
inventor. Few men, perhaps, ever learn how to so manage their brain
and stomach as to be capable of high-pressure brain action for days at
a time--until the cumulative mental forces break through all obstacles
and conquer success. A great leader represents a kind of essence of
common sense, but rugged common sense is sanity of nerve and brain. He
who rules and leads must have mind and will, but he must have chest
and stomach also. Beecher says the gun carriage must be in proportion
to the gun it carries. When health goes the gun is spiked. Ideas are
arrows, and the body is the bow that sends them home. The mind aims;
the body fires.
Good health may be better than genius or wealth or honor. It was when
the gymnasium had made each Athenian youth an Apollo in health and
strength that the feet of the Greek race ran most nimbly along the
paths of art and literature and philosophy.
Another test of a man's value is an intellectual one. The largest
wastes of any nation are through ignorance. Failure is want of
knowledge; success is knowing how. Wealth is not in things of iron,
wood and stone. Wealth is in the brain that organizes the metal. Pig
iron is worth $20 a ton; made into horse shoes, $90; into knife
blades, $200; into watch springs, $1,000. That is, raw iron $20, brain
power, $980. Millet bought a yard of canvas for 1 franc, paid 2 more
francs for a hair brush and some colors; upon this canvas he spread
his genius, giving us "The Angelus." The original investment in raw
material was 60 cents; his intelligence gave that raw material a value
of $105,000. One of the pictures at the World's Fair represented a
savage standing on the bank of a stream, anxious but ignorant as to
how he could cross the flood. Knowledge toward the metal at his feet
gave the savage an axe; knowledge toward the tree gave him a canoe;
knowledge toward the union of canoes gave him a boat; knowledge toward
the wind added sails; knowledge toward fire and water gave him the
ocean steamer. Now, if from the captain standing on the prow of that
floating palace, the City of New York, we could take away man's
knowledge as we remove peel after peel from an onion, we would have
from the iron steamer, first, a sailboat, then a canoe, then axe and
tree, and at last a savage, naked and helpless to cross a little
stream. In the final analysis it is ignorance that wastes; it is
knowledge that saves; it is wisdom that gives precedence. If sleep is
the brother of death, ignorance is full brother to both sleep and
death. An untaught faculty is at once quiescent and dead. An ignorant
man has been defined as one "whom God has packed up and men have not
unfolded. The best forces in such a one are perpetually paralyzed.
Eyes he has, but he cannot see the length of his hand; ears he has,
and all the finest sounds in creation escape him; a tongue he has, and
it is forever blundering." A mechanic who has a chest of forty tools
and can use only the hammer, saw, and gimlet, has little chance with
his fellows and soon falls far behind. An educated mind is one fully
awakened to all the sights and scenes and forces in the world through
which he moves. This does not mean that a $2,000 man can be made out
of a two-cent boy by sending him to college. Education is
mind-husbandry; it changes the size but not the sort. But if no amount
of drill will make a Shetland pony show a two-minute gait, neither
will the thoroughbred show this speed save through long and assiduous
and patient education. The primary fountains of our Nation's wealth
are not in fields and forests and mines, but in the free schools,
churches, and printing presses. Ignorance breeds misery, vice, and
crime. Mephistopheles was a cultured devil, but he is the exception.
History knows no illiterate seer or sage or saint. No Dante or
Shakespeare ever had to make "his X mark."
When John Cabot Lodge made his study of the distribution of ability in
the United States, he found that in ninety years five of the great
Western States had produced but twenty-seven men who were mentioned in
the American and English encyclopedias, while little Massachusetts had
2,686 authors, orators, philosophers, and builders of States. But
analysis shows that the variance is one of education and ideas. Boston
differs from Quebec as differ their methods of instruction. The New
England settlers were Oxford and Cambridge men that represented the
best blood, brain, and accumulated culture of old England. Landing in
the forest they clustered their cabins around the building that was at
once church, school, library, and town hall. Rising early and sitting
up late they plied their youth with ideas of liberty and intelligence.
They came together on Sunday morning at nine o'clock to listen to a
prayer one hour long, a sermon of three hours, and after a cold lunch
heard a second brief sermon of two hours and a half--those who did not
die became great. What Sunday began the week continued. We may smile
at their methods but we must admire the men they produced. Mark the
intellectual history of Northampton. During its history this town has
sent out 114 lawyers, 112 ministers, 95 physicians, 100 educators, 7
college presidents, 30 professors, 24 editors, 6 historians, 14
authors, among whom are George Bancroft, John Lothrop Motley,
Professor Whitney, the late J.G. Holland; 38 officers of State, 28
officers of the United States, including members of the Senate, and
one President.[1] How comes it that this little colony has raised up
this great company of authors, statesmen, reformers? No mere chance is
working here. The relation between sunshine and harvest is not more
essential than the relation between these folk and their renowned
descendants. Fruit after his kind is the divine explanation of
Northampton's influence upon the nation. "Education makes men great"
is the divine dictum. George William Curtis has said: "The
Revolutionary leaders were all trained men, as the world's leaders
always have been from the day when Themistocles led the educated
Athenians at Salamis, to that when Von Moltke marshaled the educated
Germans against France. The sure foundations of states are laid in
knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at book
learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind,
is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national
degeneration and ruin."
Consider, also, how the misfits of life affect man's value. The
successful man grasps the handle of his being. He moves in the line of
least resistance. That one accomplishes most whose heart sings while
his hand works. Like animals men have varied uses. The lark sings, the
ox bears burdens, the horse is for strength and speed. But men who are
wise toward beasts are often foolish toward themselves. Multitudes
drag themselves toward the factory or field who would have moved
toward the forum with "feet as hind's feet." Other multitudes fret and
chafe in the office whose desires are in the streets and fields.
Whoever scourges himself to a task he hates serves a hard master, and
the slave will get but scant pay. If a farmer should hitch horses to a
telescope and try to plow with it he would ruin the instrument in the
summer and starve his family in the winter. Not the wishes of parent,
nor the vanity of wife, nor the pride of place, but God and nature
choose occupation. Each child is unique, as new as was the first
arrival upon this planet. The school is to help the boy unpack what
intellectual tools he has; education does not change, but puts temper
into these tools. No man can alter his temperament, though trying to
he can break his heart. How pathetic the wrecks of men who have chosen
the wrong occupation! The driver bathes the raw shoulder of a horse
whose collar does not fit, but when men make their misfits and the
heart is sore society does not soothe, but with whips it scourges the
man to his fruitless task. This large class may be counted
unproductive. John Stuart Mill placed the industrial mismatings among
the heavier losses of society.
To this element of wisdom in relating one's self to duties must be
added skill in maintaining smooth relations with one's fellows. Men
may produce much by industry and ability, and yet destroy more by the
malign elements they carry. The proud domineering employer tears down
with one hand what he builds up with the other. One foolish man can
cost a city untold treasure. How many factories have failed because
the owner has no skill in managing men and mollifying difficulties.
History shows that stupid thrones and wars go together, while skillful
kings bring long intervals of peace. Contrasting the methods of two
prominent men, an editor once said: "The first man in making one
million cost society ten millions; but the other so produced his one
million as to add ten more to society's wealth." A most disastrous
strike in England's history had its origin in ignorance of this
principle. The miners of a certain coal field had suffered a severe
cut in wages. They had determined to accept it, though it took their
children out of school, and took away their meat dinner. When the hour
appointed for the conference came, prudence would have dictated that
every cause of irritation be guarded against. But the employer
foolishly drove his liveried carriage into the center of the vast
crowd of workmen, and for an hour flaunted his wealth before the
sore-hearted miners. When the men saw the footman, the prancing
horses, the gold-plated harness, and thought of their starving wives,
they reversed their acceptance of the cut in wages. They plunged into
a long strike, taking this for their motto: "Furs for his footmen and
gold plate for his horses, and also three meals a day for our wives
and children." Now, the ensuing strike and riots, long protracted,
cost England L5,000,000. But that bitter strike was all needless.
These are the men who take off the chariot wheels for God's advancing
hosts. When one comes to the front who has skill in allaying friction,
all society begins a new forward march. Skill in personal carriage
has much to do with a man's value.
Integrity enhances human worth. Iniquities devastate a city like fire
and pestilence. Social wealth and happiness are through right living.
Goodness is a commodity. Conscience in a cashier has a cash value. If
arts and industries are flowers and fruits, moralities are the roots
that nourish them. Disobedience is slavery. Obedience is liberty.
Disobedience to law of fire or water or acid is death. Obedience to
law of color gives the artist his skill; obedience to the law of
eloquence gives the orator his force; obedience to the law of iron
gives the inventor his tool; disobedience to the law of morals gives
waste and want and wretchedness. That individual or nation is
hastening toward poverty that does not love the right and hate the
wrong. So certain is the penalty of wrongdoing that sin seems
infinitely stupid. Every transgression is like an iron plate thrown
into the air; gravity will pull it back upon the wrongdoer's head to
wound him. It has been said for a man to betray his trust for money,
is for him to stand on the same intellectual level with a monkey that
scalds its throat with boiling water because it is thirsty. A drunkard
is one who exchanges ambrosia and nectar for garbage. A profligate is
one who declines an invitation to banquet with the gods that he may
dine out of an ash barrel. What blight is to the vine, sin is to a
man. When the first thief appeared in Plymouth colony a man was
withdrawn from the fields to make locks for the houses; when two
thieves came a second toiler was withdrawn from the factory to serve
as night watchman. Soon others were taken from productive industry to
build a jail and to interpret and execute the law. Every sin costs the
state much hard cash. Consider what wastes hatred hath wrought. Once
Italy and Greece and Central Europe made one vast storehouse filled
with precious art treasures. But men turned the cathedrals into
arsenals of war. If the clerks in some porcelain or cut-glass store
should attend to their duties in the morning, and each afternoon have
a pitched battle, during which they should throw the vases and cups
and medallions at each other, and each night pick up a piece of vase,
here an armless Venus and there a headless Apollo, to put away for
future generations to study, we should have that which answers
precisely to what has gone on for centuries through hatreds and class
wars. An outlook upon society is much like a visit to Lisbon after an
earthquake has filled the streets with debris and shaken down homes,
palaces, and temples. History is full of the ruins of cities and
empires. Not time, but disobedience, hath wrought their destruction.
New civilizations will be reared by coming generations; uprightness
will lay the foundations and integrity will complete the structure.
The temple is righteousness in which God dwelleth.
"Have life more abundantly." Man is not fated to a scant allowance nor
a fixed amount, but he is allured forward by an unmeasured
possibility. Personality may be enlarged and enriched. It has been
said that Cromwell was the best thing England ever produced. And the
mission of Jesus Christ is to carry each up from littleness to
full-orbed largeness. It has always been true that when some genius,
e.g., Watt, invents a model the people have reproduced it times
innumerable. So what man asks for is not the increase of birth talent,
but a pattern after which this raw material can be fashioned. Carbon
makes charcoal, and carbon makes diamond, too, but the "sea of light"
is carbon crystallized to a pattern. Builders lay bricks by plan; the
musician follows his score; the value of a York minster is not in the
number of cords of stone, but in the plan that organized them; and the
value of a man is in the reply to this question: Have the raw
materials of nature been wrought up into unity and harmony by the
Exemplar of human life? Daily he is here to stir the mind with holy
ambitions; to wing the heart with noble aspirations; to inspire with
an all-conquering courage; to vitalize the whole manhood. By making
the individual rich within he creates value without. For all things
are first thoughts. Tools, fabrics, ships, houses, books are first
ideas, afterward crystallized into outer form. A great picture is a
beautiful conception rushing into visible expression upon the canvas.
Wake up taste in a man and he beautifies his home. Wake up conscience
and he drives iniquities out of his heart. Wake up his ideas of
freedom and he fashions new laws. Jesus Christ is here to inflame
man's soul within that he may transform and enrich his life without.
No picture ever painted, no statue ever carved, no cathedral ever
builded is half so beautiful as the Christ-formed man. What is man's
value to society? Let him who knoweth what is in us reply: "What shall
it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Northampton Antiquities. Clark.
CHARACTER: ITS MATERIALS AND EXTERNAL TEACHERS
"Character is more than intellect. A great soul will be
strong to live, as well as to think. Goodness outshines
genius, as the sun makes the electric light cast a
shadow."--_Emerson._
"What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the
small man seeks is in others."--_Confucius._
"After all, the kind of world one carries about in one's
self is the important thing, and the world outside takes
all its grace, color and value from that."--_James
Russell Lowell._
"Sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you
reap a character; sow a character and you reap a
destiny."--_Anon._
"So teach us to number our days that we may apply our
hearts unto wisdom."--_Psalm 90._
II
CHARACTER: ITS MATERIALS AND EXTERNAL TEACHERS
Dying, Horace Greeley exclaimed: "Fame is a vapor, popularity an
accident, riches take wings, those who cheer to-day will curse
to-morrow, only one thing endures--character!" These weighty words bid
all remember that life's one task is the making of manhood. Our world
is a college, events are teachers, happiness is the graduating point,
character is the diploma God gives man. The forces that increase
happiness are many, including money, friends, position; but one thing
alone is indispensable to success--personal worth and manhood. He who
stands forth clothed with real weight of goodness can neither be
feeble in life, nor forgotten in death. Society admires its scholar,
but society reveres and loves its hero whose intellect is clothed with
goodness. For character is not of the intellect, but of the
disposition. Its qualities strike through and color the mind and heart
even as summer strikes the matured fruit through with juicy ripeness.
Of that noble Greek who governed his city by unwritten laws, the
people said: "Phocion's character is more than the constitution." The
weight of goodness in Lamartine was such that during the bloody days
in Paris his doors were unlocked. Character in him was a defense
beyond the force of rock walls or armed regiments. Emerson says there
was a certain power in Lincoln, Washington and Burke not to be
explained by their printed words. Burke the man was inexpressibly
finer than anything he said. As a spring is more than the cup it
fills, as a poet or architect is more than the songs he sings or the
temple he rears, so the man is more than the book or business he
fashions. Earth holds many wondrous scenes called temples,
battle-fields, cathedrals, but earth holds no scene comparable for
majesty and beauty to a man clothed indeed with intellect, but adorned
also with integrities and virtues. Beholding such a one, well did
Milton exclaim: "A good man is the ripe fruit our earth holds up to
God."
Character has been defined as the joint product of nature and nurture.
Nature gives the raw material, character is the carved statue. The raw
material includes the racial endowment, temperament, degree of vital
force, mentality, aptitude for tool or industry, for art or science.
These birth-gifts are quantities, fixed and unalterable. No
heart-rendings can change the two-talent nature into a ten-talent man.
No agony of effort can add a cubit to the stature. The eagle flies
over the chasm as easily as an ant crawls over the crack in the
ground. Shakespeare writes Hamlet as easily as Tupper wrote his tales.
Once an oak, always an oak. Care and culture can thicken the girth of
the tree, but no degree of culture can cause an oak bough to bring
forth figs instead of acorns. Rebellion against temperament and
circumstance is sure to end in the breaking of the heart. Happiness
and success begin with the sincere acceptance of the birth-gift and
career God hath chosen.
Since no man can do his best work save as he uses his strongest
faculties, the first duty of each is to search out the line of least
resistance. He who has a genius for moral themes but has harnessed
himself to the plow or the forge, is in danger of wrecking both
happiness and character. All such misfits are fatal. No farmer
harnesses a fawn to the plow, or puts an ox into the speeding-wagon.
Life's problem is to make a right inventory of the gifts one carries.
As no carpenter knows what tools are in the box until he lifts the lid
and unwraps one shining instrument after another, so the instruments
in the soul must be unfolded by education. Ours is a world where the
inventor accompanies the machine with a chart, illustrating the use of
each wheel and escapement. But no babe lying in the cradle ever
brought with it a hand-book setting forth its mental equipment and
pointing out its aptitude for this occupation, or that art or
industry. The gardener plants a root with perfect certainty that a
rose will come up, but no man is a prophet wise enough to tell whether
this babe will unfold into quality of thinker or doer or dreamer. To
each Nature whispers: "Unsight, unseen, hold fast what you have." For
the soul is shadowless and mysterious. No hand can carve its outline,
no brush portray its lineaments. Even the mother embosoming its
infancy and carrying its weaknesses, studying it by day and night
through years, sees not, she cannot see, knows not, she cannot know,
into what splendor of maturity the child will unfold.
Man beholds his fellows as one beholds a volume written in a foreign
language; the outer binding is seen, the inner contents are unread.
Within general lines phrenology and physiognomy are helpful, but it is
easier to determine what kind of a man lives in the house by looking
at the knob on his front door than to determine the brain and heart
within by studying the bumps upon face and forehead. Nature's dictum
is, "Grasp the handle of your own being." Each must fashion his own
character. Nature gives trees, but not tools; forests, but not
furniture. Thus nature furnishes man with the birth materials and
environment; man must work up these materials into those qualities
called industry, integrity, honor, truth and love, ever patterning
after that ideal man, Jesus Christ.
The influences shaping nature's raw material into character are many
and various. Of old, the seer likened the soul unto clay. The mud
falls upon the board before the potter, a rude mass, without form or
comeliness. But an hour afterwards the clay stands forth adorned with
all the beauty of a lovely vase. Thus the soul begins, a mere mass of
mind, but hands many and powerful soon shape it into the outlines of
some noble man or woman. These sculptors of character include home,
friendship, occupation, travel, success, love, grief and death.
Life's first teacher is the external world, with its laws. Man begins
at zero. The child thrusts his finger into the fire and is burned;
thenceforth he learns to restrain himself in the presence of fire, and
makes the flames smite the vapor for driving train or ship. The child
errs in handling the sharp tool, and cuts himself; thenceforth he
lifts up the axe upon the tree. The child mistakes the weight of
stone, or the height of stair, and, falling, hard knocks teach him the
nature and use of gravity. Daily the thorns that pierce his feet drive
him back into the smooth pathway of nature's laws. The sharp pains
that follow each excess teach him the pleasures of sound and right
living. Nor is there one infraction of law that is not followed by
pain. As sharp guards are placed at the side of the bridge over the
chasm to hold men back from the abyss, so nature's laws are planted on
either side of the way of life to prick and scourge erring feet back
into the divine way. At length through much smiting of the body nature
forces the youth into a knowledge of the world in which he lives. Man
learns to carry himself safely within forests, over rivers, through
fires, midst winds and storms. Soon every force in nature stands forth
his willing servant; becoming like unto the steeds of the plains, that
once were wild, but now are trained, and lend all their strength and
force to man's loins and limbs.
Having mastered the realm of physical law, the youth is thrust into
the realm of laws domestic and social. He runs up against his mates
and friends, often overstepping his own rights and infringing the
rights of others. Then some stronger arm falls on his, and drives him
back into his own territory. Occasional chastisement through the
parent and teacher, friend or enemy, reveal to him the nature of
selfishness, and compel the recognition of others. Thus, through long
apprenticeship, the youth finds out the laws that fence him round,
that press upon him at every pore, by day and by night, in workshop or
in store, at home or abroad. Slowly these laws mature manhood. When
ideas are thrust into raw iron, the iron becomes a loom or an engine.
Thus when God's laws are incarnated in a babe, the child is changed
into the likeness of a citizen, a sage or seer. Nature, with her laws,
is not only the earliest, but also the most powerful, of life's
instructors.
Temptation is another teacher. Protection gives innocence, but
practice gives virtue. For ship timber we pass by the sheltered
hothouse, seeking the oak on the storm-swept hills. In that beautiful
story of the lost paradise, God pulls down the hedge built around Adam
and Eve. The government through a fence outside was succeeded by
self-government inside. The hermit and the cloistered saint end their
career with innocence. But Christ, struggling unto blood against sin,
ends His career with character. God educates man by giving him
complete charge over himself and setting him on "the barebacked horse
of his own will," leaving him to break it by his own strength.
Travelers to Alaska tell us that the wild berries attain a sweetness
there of which our temperate clime knows nothing. Scientists say that
the glowworm keeps its enemies at bay by the brightness of its own
light. Man, by his love of truth and right, becomes his own castle and
fortress. Cities no longer depend upon night-watchmen to guard against
marauders and burglars. Once men trusted to safes and iron bars upon
the windows. Now bankers ask electric lights to guard their treasure
vaults.
For centuries Spain's paternal laws have compelled each Spaniard to
ask his church what to think and believe. This method has robbed that
people of enduring and self-reliant manhood, and made them a race of
weaklings. For over-protection is a peril. Strength comes by
wrestling, knowledge by observing, wisdom by thinking, and character
by enduring and struggling. Exposure is often good fortune. Every
Luther and Cromwell has been tempted and tempered against the day of
danger and battle. As the victorious Old Guard were honored in
proportion to the number and severity of the wars through which they
had passed, so the temptations that seek man's destruction, when
conquered, cover him with glory. Ruskin notes that the art epochs have
also been epochs of war, upheaval, and tyranny. He accounts for this
by saying that when tyranny was hardest, crime blackest, sin ugliest,
then, in the recoil and conflict, beauty and heroism attained their
highest development.
Studying the rise of the Dutch republic, Motley notes how the shocks
and fiery baptisms of war changed those peasants into patriots. This
explains society's enthusiasm for its hero, all scarred and gray. We
admire the child's innocence, but it lacks ripeness and maturity; it
is only a handful of germs. But every heart kindles and glows when the
true hero stands forth in the person of some Paul or Savonarola, some
Luther or Lincoln, having passed through fire, through flood, through
all the thunder of life's battle, ever ripening, sweetening and
enlarging, his fineness and gentleness being the result of great
strength and great wisdom, accumulated through long life, until he
stands, at the end of his career, as the sun stands on a summer
afternoon just before it goes down. All statues and pictures become
tawdry in comparison with such a rich, ripe, glowing, and glorious
heart, clothed with Christlike character.
Life's teachers also includes newness and zest. First, man lives his
life in fresh personal experiences. Then, by observation, he repeats
his life in the career of his children. A third time he journeys
around the circle, re-experiencing life in that of his grandchildren.
Then, because the newness has passed away and events no longer
stimulate his mind, death withdraws man from the scene and enters him
in a new school. Vast is the educational value therefore attaching to
the newness of life. God is so rich that no day or scene need repeat a
former one. The proverb, "We never look upon the same river," tells us
that all things are ever changing, and clothes each day with fresh
fascination. "Whilst I read the poets," said Emerson, "I think that
nothing new can be said about morning and evening; but when I see the
day break I am not reminded of the Homeric and Chaucerian pictures. I
am cheered by the moist, warm, glittering, budding, melodious hour
that breaks down the narrow walls of my soul, and extends its life and
pulsations to the very horizon."
Thus, each new day is a new continent to be explored. Each youth is a
new creature, full of delightful and mysterious possibilities. Each
brain comes clothed with its own secret, having its own orbit,
attaining its own unique experience. Ours is a world in which each
individual, each country, each age, each day, has a history peculiarly
its own. This newness is a perpetual stimulant to curiosity and study.
Gladstone's recipe for never growing old is, "Search out some topic in
nature or life in which you have never hitherto been interested, and
experience its fascinations." For some, once a picture or book has
been seen, the pleasure ceases. Delight dies with familiarity. Such
persons look back to the days of childhood as to the days of wonder
and happiness. But the man of real vision ever beholds each rock, each
herb and flower with the big eyes of children, and with a mind of
perpetual wonder. For him the seed is a fountain gushing with new
delights. Every youth should repeat the experience of John Ruskin.[2]
Such was the enthusiasm that this author felt for God's world, that
when he approached some distant mountain or saw the crags hanging over
the waters, or the clouds marching through the sky, "a shiver of fear,
mingled with awe," set him quivering with joy--such joy as the artist
pupil feels in the presence of his noble master, such a kindling of
mind and heart as Dante felt on approaching his Beatrice. Phillips
Brooks grew happier as he grew older, and at fifty-seven he said:
"Life seems a feast in which God keeps the best wine until the last."
Up to the very end the great preacher grew by leaps and bounds,
because he never lost that enthusiasm for life that makes zest and
newness among life's best teachers.
By a strange paradox men are taught by monotony as well as by newness.
Ours is a world where the words, "Blessed be drudgery," are full of
meaning. Culture and character come not through consuming excitements
nor the whirl of pleasures. The granary is filled, not by the
thunderous forces that appeal to the eye and ear, but by the secret,
invisible agents; the silent energies, the mighty monarchs hidden in
roots and in seeds. What rioting storms cannot do is done by the
silent sap and sunshine. All the fundamental qualities called
patience, perseverance, courage, fidelity, are the gains of drudgery.
Character comes with commonplaces. Greatness is through tasks that
have become insipid, and by duties that are irksome. The treadmill is
a divine teacher. He who shovels sand year in and year out needs not
our pity, for the proverb is "Every man has his own sand heap." The
greatest mind, fulfilling its career, once the freshness has worn off,
pursues a hackneyed task and finds the duties irksome. It is better
so. A seer has suggested that the voices of earth are dulled that we
may hear the whisper of God; earth's colors are toned down that we may
see things invisible.