Well, we have gotten you into a new year! Life and Fate and Time, all
have managed to get you here. With many of you they had a hard pull
to get you here. Some of you have been near to death; some of you so
miserable you hardly wanted to try another year here, and the majority
of you have shown the least interest about getting here. I don't
reproach you; you are only following the perverse example of Human
Nature. Did it ever strike you that the globe and the people who live
on its surface, are always marching different ways? While all the
restless tide of humanity moves to the West, the globe turns itself
to the East. On its surface, Man is much like the acrobat we see at
the theatres, who, mounted on his parti-colored ball, faces one way
while it moves the other. It must be a queer spectacle to those who,
from the planetary dress circle of the universe, are watching us through
their opera glasses. It must be still queerer to them when they hear
us chanting a Miserere at the approach of an invincible line across
the face of Time, as imaginary as the Equator, and when it is passed,
filling the air with a Jubilate--the songs of the dying and the coming
year. It is rather a comfort to us that we don't believe in the dress
circle of gazers; that we have the comfortable belief that we are the
only people in the Universe, and that beyond the questionable discovery
of a canal across one of the planets, the wisest of astronomers have
found no evidence of human life elsewhere. And so, with a Crusoe-like
sense of solitude, we live on our traditions, on our religions, and
on our ideas of Man to the exclusion of the rest of the Universe.
With an impartial judgment, therefore, and not influenced by the
approval or disapproval of this vast dress circle, in whose existence
we have no faith, let us take up these imaginary lines for a moment.
It is unquestionable that, whether for good or evil, they have descended
to us by tradition and custom as a legacy. They are sufficiently real
to be of practical use, and they are used. It is by them that we set
a time--alas, that we should have the necessity of doing it--to discard
some vice, some sin, some weakness. We use them in the interest of
procrastination--that we may put off the parting day with something
our conscience, or our taste, or both, disapprove. By them we appoint
a time when we shall say to the divine spark within our breasts, you
may flame out into our daily life. By them we give a respite which
alas, often ends in a commutation of sentence and oftener still in a
full pardon and restoration to peace.
So, you see, I do not think a great deal of old year remorse or New
Year resolutions. I think they are just that much better than none at
all, and this has to be qualified by the damage they do in having us
put off reformation. That a man should fix a day to reform in this or
that particular, is at least an evidence that he is aware of his need
of it--a great point gained. These years are but little stepping-stones
across the narrow brook of Time that pours into the vast ocean of
Eternity, and it is a good sign when a man approaches the next, and
the next, and the next with increasing reverence and sense of the
responsibility of his progress. It is a good sign when a man begins
to discover in the impediments of life, what is necessary and what is
absolutely hurtful to him in the journey of life, and when, with the
discovery, he summons up enough resolution to fix a day to throw away
the bad. It is hard for the best of us to get our load rightly picked
over. When we have failed to start right in youth, it is unspeakably
hard after getting out into the dust and glare of the world to assort
our burden over, and drop what ill elements we have gathered on the
road. That a man should fix a time to do this is itself a good thing
and just that far these imaginary lines are good.
But something far better, far manlier, is to have the firmness to draw
our own lines at our own times. It is so peculiarly a personal matter
that we can well afford to let the World have its lines and we have
our own. If you agree with me, then your own line is drawn at To-day
and Every Day. If a man cannot enter on a new life every day, he can
unquestionably enter on at least a newer life every day. It must be
a barren and unfruitful mind to which something--good or evil--is not
added every day, to make it that much newer. You know this yourself.
You have seen healthy, pure-minded boys start out in life and you have
met them later with minds so darned with vice here, and patched with
sin there, that you hardly recognized them. That transformation was
not done in a day. You have seen boys that you knew at school without
a bad habit, and when you met them again they had added to their lives
drinking, gambling, everything this side of a police court. That was
not done in a day. We do nothing in a day--not even reform in a day.
All good and evil is a matter of ascent and descent-the latter only
the faster because the grade is easier. It is not an easy experiment
in the world to be a good man. No man ever fixed a day to become a
good one. It is an uphill road, a long road, and one who proposes to
walk it must fix no later hour than now lest night-fall find him far
from the end of it.
But the young man who determines to walk it in this day, has a far
easier road than he would have had thirty years ago. It is the fashion
to say that the road grows no better. It is not true; the world's
opinion grows better every day. There were many things respectable
thirty years ago that are absolutely disreputable now. Then, a
middle-aged man might drink at a bar with a boy of twenty. If he did
it to-day he would be marked at once. Then, drinking and gambling were
looked upon as the wild oats a young man might sow, without losing
caste. To-day, the young man who drinks and gambles is looked upon as
of doubtful social position, by both men and women. To-day, in making
their lists of invitations, leaders in society cross out the names of
dissipated young men as promptly as they do those of fast young women.
Whereas thirty years ago there was rather a mantle of sentimental
charity fitted on the shoulders of a disreputable young fellow, to-day
he is roughly talked of as a "drunkard" or a "common fellow"; terms
that no one dreamed of applying to him then. There has been nothing
that public opinion, especially that section of it that may be called
social opinion, has changed in more than in the standard it fixes for,
and demands from, all men, and particularly young men. The result is
that when a man wants to be superior to vice now, he has the moral
weight of a sounder public opinion and finds the road easier than he
would have had thirty years ago.
I have said nothing to you about any higher inducement to commence a
better life every day, than those you can find in the world. They are
quite sufficient, or ought to be. A healthy body, a clear mind, success
in the world--these are the rewards which a good life offers here.
There is just one other word about what it offers elsewhere. I am not
a preacher, you need not be afraid of a sermon. I am just one of
yourselves; only I have come over a longer road than you have, and
have seen more of its pitfalls as well as more of its sign-boards. Nor
do I pretend to know more than you of what it offers elsewhere. But
I just wish to say one word to recall what you already know; what you
must know. There is nothing that we all know better--nothing that is
more surely planted in the human mind than that this is only a part
of our life; that when we shall reach a future existence, we shall
there find a life awaiting us which will match with the piece we carry
from this one. It is a very grave thought--graver than any which we
shall consider on earth, if we are intelligent men--which the match
will be--whether it will be found in one of infinite misery or one of
infinite betterment. Here we have the power to say which it shall be.
It is a priceless power. Let us use it, not in fixing days for
reformation, not in lamenting over promises of reforms broken, and
fixing other days to come; but in living a newer life every day--As
we can make no bargain nor compromise about the time and place where
our life shall end, let us take the matter into our own hands and so
live that it will matter little when or where the end comes. So live
that when the summons come,
"Thou go not, like the quarry slave at night
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams."