LOVE LIFE & WORK
BEING A BOOK OF OPINIONS REASONABLY GOOD-NATURED CONCERNING HOW TO
ATTAIN THE HIGHEST HAPPINESS FOR ONE'S SELF WITH THE LEAST POSSIBLE
HARM TO OTHERS
1906
By ELBERT HUBBARD
CONTENTS
CHAPTERS
1. A Prayer
2. Life and Expression
3. Time and Chance
4. Psychology of a Religious Revival
5. One-Man Power
6. Mental Attitude
7. The Outsider
8. Get Out or Get in Line
9. The Week-Day, Keep it Holy
10. Exclusive Friendships
11. The Folly of Living in the Future
12. The Spirit of Man
13. Art and Religion
14. Initiative
15. The Disagreeable Girl
16. The Neutral
17. Reflections on Progress
18. Sympathy, Knowledge and Poise
19. Love and Faith
20. Giving Something for Nothing
21. Work and Waste
22. The Law of Obedience
23. Society's Saviors
24. Preparing for Old Age
25. An Alliance With Nature
26. The Ex. Question
27. The Sergeant
28. The Spirit of the Age
29. The Grammarian
30. The Best Religion
A Prayer
The supreme prayer of my heart is not to be learned, rich, famous,
powerful, or "good," but simply to be radiant. I desire to radiate
health, cheerfulness, calm courage and good will. I wish to live without
hate, whim, jealousy, envy, fear. I wish to be simple, honest, frank,
natural, clean in mind and clean in body, unaffected--ready to say "I do
not know," if it be so, and to meet all men on an absolute equality--to
face any obstacle and meet every difficulty unabashed and unafraid.
I wish others to live their lives, too--up to their highest, fullest and
best. To that end I pray that I may never meddle, interfere, dictate,
give advice that is not wanted, or assist when my services are not
needed. If I can help people, I'll do it by giving them a chance to help
themselves; and if I can uplift or inspire, let it be by example,
inference, and suggestion, rather than by injunction and dictation. That
is to say, I desire to be radiant--to radiate life.
Life and Expression
By exercise of its faculties the spirit grows, just as a muscle grows
strong thru continued use. Expression is necessary. Life is expression,
and repression is stagnation--death.
Yet, there can be right and wrong expression. If a man permits his life
to run riot and only the animal side of his nature is allowed to express
itself, he is repressing his highest and best, and the qualities not
used atrophy and die.
Men are punished by their sins, not for them. Sensuality, gluttony, and
the life of license repress the life of the spirit, and the soul never
blossoms; and this is what it is to lose one's soul. All adown the
centuries thinking men have noted these truths, and again and again we
find individuals forsaking in horror the life of the senses and devoting
themselves to the life of the spirit. This question of expression
through the spirit, or through the senses--through soul or body--has
been the pivotal point of all philosophy and the inspiration of
all religion.
Every religion is made up of two elements that never mix any more than
oil and water mix. A religion is a mechanical mixture, not a chemical
combination, of morality and dogma. Dogma is the science of the unseen:
the doctrine of the unknown and unknowable. And in order to give this
science plausibility, its promulgators have always fastened upon it
morality. Morality can and does exist entirely separate and apart from
dogma, but dogma is ever a parasite on morality, and the business of the
priest is to confuse the two.
But morality and religion never saponify. Morality is simply the
question of expressing your life forces--how to use them? You have so
much energy; and what will you do with it? And from out the multitude
there have always been men to step forward and give you advice for a
consideration. Without their supposed influence with the unseen we might
not accept their interpretation of what is right and wrong. But with the
assurance that their advice is backed up by Deity, followed with an
offer of reward if we believe it, and a threat of dire punishment if we
do not, the Self-appointed Superior Class has driven men wheresoever it
willed. The evolution of formal religions is not a complex process, and
the fact that they embody these two unmixable things, dogma and
morality, is a very plain and simple truth, easily seen, undisputed by
all reasonable men. And be it said that the morality of most religions
is good. Love, truth, charity, justice and gentleness are taught in them
all. But, like a rule in Greek grammar, there are many exceptions. And
so in the morality of religions there are exceptional instances that
constantly arise where love, truth, charity, gentleness and justice are
waived on suggestion of the Superior Class, that good may follow. Were
it not for these exceptions there would be no wars between
Christian nations.
The question of how to express your life will probably never down, for
the reason that men vary in temperament and inclination. Some men have
no capacity for certain sins of the flesh; others there be, who, having
lost their inclination for sensuality through too much indulgence, turn
ascetics. Yet all sermons have but one theme: how shall life be
expressed? Between asceticism and indulgence men and races swing.
Asceticism in our day finds an interesting manifestation in the
Trappists, who live on a mountain top, nearly inaccessible, and deprive
themselves of almost every vestige of bodily comfort, going without food
for days, wearing uncomfortable garments, suffering severe cold; and
should one of this community look upon the face of a woman he would
think he was in instant danger of damnation. So here we find the extreme
instance of men repressing the faculties of the body in order that the
spirit may find ample time and opportunity for exercise.
Somewhere between this extreme repression of the monk and the license of
the sensualist lies the truth. But just where is the great question; and
the desire of one person, who thinks he has discovered the norm, to
compel all other men to stop there, has led to war and strife untold.
All law centers around this point--what shall men be allowed to do? And
so we find statutes to punish "strolling play actors," "players on
fiddles," "disturbers of the public conscience," "persons who dance
wantonly," "blasphemers," and in England there were, in the year 1800,
thirty-seven offenses that were legally punishable by death. What
expression is right and what is not, is simply a matter of opinion. One
religious denomination that now exists does not allow singing;
instrumental music has been to some a rock of offense, exciting the
spirit through the sense of hearing, to improper thoughts--"through the
lascivious pleasing of the lute"; others think dancing wicked, while a
few allow pipe-organ music, but draw the line at the violin; while still
others use a whole orchestra in their religious service. Some there be
who regard pictures as implements of idolatry; while the Hook-and-Eye
Baptists look upon buttons as immoral.
Strange evolutions are often witnessed within the life of one
individual. For instance, Leo Tolstoy, a great and good man, at one time
a sensualist, has now turned ascetic; a common evolution in the lives of
the saints. But excellent as this man is, there is yet a grave
imperfection in his cosmos which to a degree vitiates the truth he
desires to teach: he leaves the element of beauty out of his formula.
Not caring for harmony as set forth in color, form and sweet sounds, he
is quite willing to deny all others these things which minister to
their well-being. There is in most souls a hunger for beauty, just as
there is physical hunger. Beauty speaks to their spirits through the
senses; but Tolstoy would have your house barren to the verge of
hardship. My veneration for Count Tolstoy is profound, yet I mention him
here to show the grave danger that lies in allowing any man, even one of
the wisest of men, to dictate to us what is best. We ourselves are the
better judges. Most of the frightful cruelties inflicted on men during
the past have arisen simply out of a difference of opinion that arose
through a difference in temperament. The question is as alive to-day as
it was two thousand years ago--what expression is best? That is, what
shall we do to be saved? And concrete absurdity consists in saying that
we must all do the same thing. Whether the race will ever grow to a
point where men will be willing to leave the matter of life-expression
to the individual is a question; but the millennium will never arrive
until men cease trying to compel all other men to live after
one pattern.
Most people are anxious to do what is best for themselves and least
harmful for others. The average man now has intelligence enough: Utopia
is not far off, if the self-appointed folk who rule us, and teach us for
a consideration, would only be willing to do unto others as they would
be done by, that is to say, mind their own business and cease coveting
things that belong to other people. War among nations and strife among
individuals is a result of the covetous spirit to possess.
A little more patience, a little more charity for all, a little more
love; with less bowing down to the past, and the silent ignoring of
pretended authority; a brave looking forward to the future, with more
self-confidence and more faith in our fellow men, and the race will be
ripe for a great burst of life and light.
[Illustration]
Time and Chance
As the subject is somewhat complex, I will have to explain it to you.
The first point is that there is not so very much difference in the
intelligence of people after all. The great man is not so great as folks
think, and the dull man is not quite so stupid as he seems. The
difference in our estimates of men lies in the fact that one individual
is able to get his goods into the show-window, and the other is not
aware that he has any show-window or any goods.
"The soul knows all things, and knowledge is only a remembering," says
Emerson.
This seems a very broad statement; and yet the fact remains that the
vast majority of men know a thousand times as much as they are aware of.
Far down in the silent depths of subconsciousness lie myriads of truths,
each awaiting a time when its owner shall call it forth. To utilize
these stored-up thoughts, you must express them to others; and to be
able to express them well your soul has to soar into this subconscious
realm where you have cached these net results of experience. In other
words, you must "come out"--get out of self--away from
self-consciousness, into the region of partial oblivion--away from the
boundaries of time and the limitations of space. The great painter
forgets all in the presence of his canvas; the writer is oblivious to
his surroundings; the singer floats away on the wings of melody (and
carries the audience with her); the orator pours out his soul for an
hour, and it seems to him as if barely five minutes had passed, so rapt
is he in his exalted theme. When you reach the heights of sublimity and
are expressing your highest and best, you are in a partial trance
condition. And all men who enter this condition surprise themselves by
the quantity of knowledge and the extent of insight they possess. And
some going a little deeper than others into this trance condition, and
having no knowledge of the miraculous storing up of truth in the
subconscious cells, jump to the conclusion that their intelligence is
guided by a spirit not theirs. When one reaches this conclusion he
begins to wither at the top, for he relies on the dead, and ceases to
feed the well-springs of his subconscious self.
The mind is a dual affair--objective and subjective. The objective mind
sees all, hears all, reasons things out. The subjective mind stores up
and only gives out when the objective mind sleeps. And as few men ever
cultivate the absorbed, reflective or semi-trance state, where the
objective mind rests, they never really call on their subconscious
treasury for its stores. They are always self-conscious.
A man in commerce, where men prey on their kind, must be alive and alert
to what is going on, or while he dreams, his competitor will seize upon
his birthright. And so you see why poets are poor and artists often beg.
And the summing up of this sermonette is that all men are equally rich,
only some thru fate are able to muster their mental legions on the
plains of their being and count them, while others are never able to
do so.
But what think you is necessary before a person can come into full
possession of his subconscious treasures? Well, I'll tell you: It is not
ease, nor prosperity, nor requited love, nor worldly security--not
these.
"You sing well," said the master, impatiently, to his best pupil, "but
you will never sing divinely until you have given your all for love,
and then been neglected and rejected, and scorned and beaten, and left
for dead. Then, if you do not exactly die, you will come back, and when
the world hears your voice it will mistake you for an angel and fall at
your feet."
And the moral is, that as long as you are satisfied and comfortable, you
use only the objective mind and live in the world of sense. But let love
be torn from your grasp and flee as a shadow--living only as a memory in
a haunting sense of loss; let death come and the sky shut down over less
worth in the world; or stupid misunderstanding and crushing defeat grind
you into the dust, then you may arise, forgetting time and space and
self, and take refuge in mansions not made with hands; and find a
certain sad, sweet satisfaction in the contemplation of treasures stored
up where moth and rust do not corrupt, and where thieves do not break
through and steal.
And thus looking out into the Eternal, you entirely forget the present
and go forth into the Land of Subconsciousness--the Land of Spirit,
where yet dwell the gods of ancient and innocent days? Is it worth
the cost?
Psychology of a Religious Revival
Traveling to and fro over the land and up and down in it are men who
manage street-fairs.
Let it be known that a street-fair or Mardi Gras is never a spontaneous
expression of the carnival spirit on the part of the townspeople. These
festivals are a business--carefully planned, well advertised and carried
out with much astuteness.
The men who manage street-fairs send advance agents, to make
arrangements with the local merchants of the place--these secure the
legal permits that are necessary.
A week is set apart for the carnival, much advertising is done, the
newspapers, reflecting the will of the many, devote pages to the
wonderful things that will happen. The shows arrive--the touters, the
spielers, the clowns, the tumblers, the girls in tights, the singers!
The bands play--the carnival is on! The object of the fair is to boom
the business of the town. The object of the professional managers of the
fair is to make money for themselves, and this they do thru the
guaranty of the merchants, or a percentage on concessions, or both.
I am told that no town whose business is on an absolutely safe and
secure footing ever resorts to a street-fair. The street-fair comes in
when a rival town seems to be getting more than its share of the trade.
When the business of Skaneateles is drifting to Waterloo, then
Skaneateles succumbs to a street-fair.
Sanitation, sewerage, good water supply, and schoolhouses and paved
streets are not the result of throwing confetti, tooting tin horns and
waiving the curfew law.
Whether commerce is effectually helped by the street-fair, or a town
assisted to get on a firm financial basis through the ministry of the
tom-tom, is a problem. I leave the question with students of political
economy and pass on to a local condition which is not a theory. The
religious revivals that have recently been conducted in various parts of
the country were most carefully planned business schemes. One F. Wilbur
Chapman and his corps of well-trained associates may be taken as a type
of the individuals who work up local religious excitement for a
consideration.
Religious revivals are managed very much as are street-fairs. If
religion is getting at a low ebb in your town, you can hire Chapman, the
revivalist, just as you can secure the services of Farley, the
strike-breaker. Chapman and his helpers go from town to town and from
city to city and work up this excitation as a business. They are paid
for their services a thousand dollars a week, or down to what they can
get from collections. Sometimes they work on a guaranty, and at other
times on a percentage or contingent fee, or both.
Towns especially in need of Mr. Chapman's assistance will please send
for circulars, terms and testimonials. No souls saved--no pay.
The basic element of the revival is hypnotism. The scheme of bringing
about the hypnosis, or the obfuscation of the intellect, has taken
generations to carefully perfect. The plan is first to depress the
spirit to a point where the subject is incapable of independent thought.
Mournful music, a monotonous voice of woe, tearful appeals to God,
dreary groans, the whole mingled with pious ejaculations, all tend to
produce a terrifying effect upon the auditor. The thought of God's
displeasure is constantly dwelt upon--the idea of guilt, death and
eternal torment. If the victims can be made to indulge in hysterical
laughter occasionally, the control is better brought about. No chance is
allowed for repose, poise or sane consideration. When the time seems
ripe a general promise of joy is made and the music takes an adagio
turn. The speaker's voice now tells of triumph--offers of forgiveness
are tendered, and then the promise of eternal life.
The final intent is to get the victim on his feet and make him come
forward and acknowledge the fetich. This once done the convert finds
himself among pleasant companions. His social station is
improved--people shake hands with him and solicitously ask after his
welfare. His approbativeness is appealed to--his position is now one of
importance. And moreover, he is given to understand in many subtile ways
that as he will be damned in another world if he does not acquiesce in
the fetich, so also will he be damned financially and socially here if
he does not join the church. The intent in every Christian community is
to boycott and make a social outcast of the independent thinker. The
fetich furnishes excuse for the hypnotic processes. Without assuming a
personal God who can be appeased, eternal damnation and the proposition
that you can win eternal life by believing a myth, there is no sane
reason for the absurd hypnotic formulas.
We are heirs to the past, its good and ill, and we all have a touch of
superstition, like a syphilitic taint. To eradicate this tyranny of fear
and get the cringe and crawl out of our natures, seems the one desirable
thing to lofty minds. But the revivalist, knowing human nature, as all
confidence men do, banks on our superstitious fears and makes his appeal
to our acquisitiveness, offering us absolution and life eternal for a
consideration--to cover expenses. As long as men are paid honors and
money, can wear good clothes, and be immune from work for preaching
superstition, they will preach it. The hope of the world lies in
withholding supplies from the pious mendicants who seek to hold our
minds in thrall.
This idea of a divine bankrupt court where you can get forgiveness by
paying ten cents on the dollar, with the guaranty of becoming a winged
pauper of the skies, is not alluring excepting to a man who has been
well scared. Advance agents pave the way for revivalists by arranging
details with the local orthodox clergy. Universalists, Unitarians,
Christian Scientists and Befaymillites are all studiously avoided. The
object is to fill depleted pews of orthodox Protestant churches--these
pay the freight, and to the victor belong the spoils. The plot and plan
is to stampede into the pen of orthodoxy the intellectual
unwary--children and neurotic grown-ups. The cap-and-bells element is
largely represented in Chapman's select company of German-American
talent: the confetti of foolishness is thrown at us--we dodge, laugh,
listen and no one has time to think, weigh, sift or analyze. There are
the boom of rhetoric, the crack of confession, the interspersed
rebel-yell of triumph, the groans of despair, the cries of victory. Then
come songs by paid singers, the pealing of the organ--rise and sing,
kneel and pray, entreaty, condemnation, misery, tears, threats, promise,
joy, happiness, heaven, eternal bliss, decide now--not a moment is to be
lost, whoop-la you'll be a long time in hell!
All this whirl is a carefully prepared plan, worked out by expert
flim-flammers to addle the reason, scramble intellect and make of men
drooling derelicts.
What for?
I'll tell you--that Doctor Chapman and his professional rooters may roll
in cheap honors, be immune from all useful labor and wax fat on the pay
of those who work. Second, that the orthodox churches may not advance
into workshops and schoolhouses, but may remain forever the home of a
superstition. One would think that the promise of making a person exempt
from the results of his own misdeeds, would turn the man of brains from
these religious shell-men in disgust. But under their hypnotic spell,
the minds of many seem to suffer an obsession, and they are caught in
the swirl of foolish feeling, like a grocer's clerk in the hands of a
mesmerist.
At Northfield, Massachusetts, is a college at which men are taught and
trained, just as men are drilled at a Tonsorial College, in every phase
of this pleasing episcopopography.
There is a good fellow by the suggestive name of Sunday who works the
religious graft. Sunday is the whirling dervish up to date. He and
Chapman and their cappers purposely avoid any trace of the ecclesiastic
in their attire. They dress like drummers--trousers carefully creased,
two watch-chains and a warm vest. Their manner is free and easy, their
attitude familiar. The way they address the Almighty reveals that their
reverence for Him springs out of the supposition that He is very much
like themselves.
The indelicacy of the revivalists who recently called meetings to pray
for Fay Mills, was shown in their ardent supplications to God that He
should make Mills to be like them. Fay Mills tells of the best way to
use this life here and now. He does not prophesy what will become of you
if you do not accept his belief, neither does he promise everlasting
life as a reward for thinking as he does. He realizes that he has not
the agency of everlasting life. Fay Mills is more interested in having a
soul that is worth saving than in saving a soul that isn't. Chapman
talks about lost souls as he might about collar buttons lost under a
bureau, just as if God ever misplaced anything, or that all souls were
not God's souls, and therefore forever in His keeping.
Doctor Chapman wants all men to act alike and believe alike, not
realizing that progress is the result of individuality, and so long as a
man thinks, whether he is right or wrong, he is making head. Neither
does he realize that wrong thinking is better than no thinking at all,
and that the only damnation consists in ceasing to think, and accepting
the conclusions of another. Final truths and final conclusions are
wholly unthinkable to sensible people in their sane moments, but these
revivalists wish to sum up truth for all time and put their leaden
seal upon it.
In Los Angeles is a preacher by the name of McIntyre, a type of the
blatant Bellarmine who exiled Galileo--a man who never doubts his own
infallibility, who talks like an oracle and continually tells of
perdition for all who disagree with him.
Needless to say that McIntyre lacks humor. Personally, I prefer the
McGregors, but in Los Angeles the McIntyres are popular. It was McIntyre
who called a meeting to pray for Fay Mills, and in proposing the meeting
McIntyre made the unblushing announcement that he had never met Mills
nor heard him speak, nor had he read one of his books.
Chapman and McIntyre represent the modern types of
Phariseeism--spielers and spouters for churchianity, and such are the
men who make superstition of so long life. Superstition is the one
Infamy--Voltaire was right. To pretend to believe a thing at which your
reason revolts--to stultify your intellect--this, if it exists at all,
is the unpardonable sin. These muftis preach "the blood of Jesus," the
dogma that man without a belief in miracles is eternally lost, that
everlasting life depends upon acknowledging this, that or the other.
Self-reliance, self-control and self-respect are the three things that
make a man a man.
But man has so recently taken on this ability to think, that he has not
yet gotten used to handling it. The tool is cumbrous in his hands. He is
afraid of it--this one characteristic that differentiates him from the
lower animals--so he abdicates and turns his divine birthright over to a
syndicate. This combination called a church agrees to take care of his
doubts and fears and do his thinking for him, and to help matters along
he is assured that he is not fit to think for himself, and to do so
would be a sin. Man, in his present crude state, holds somewhat the
same attitude toward reason that an Apache Indian holds toward a
camera--the Indian thinks that to have his picture taken means that he
will shrivel up and blow away in a month. And Stanley relates that a
watch with its constant ticking sent the bravest of Congo chiefs into a
cold sweat of agonizing fear; on discovering which, the explorer had but
to draw his Waterbury and threaten to turn the whole bunch into
crocodiles, and at once they got busy and did his bidding. Stanley
exhibited the true Northfield-revival quality in banking on the
superstition of his wavering and frightened followers.
The revival meetin' is an orgie of the soul, a spiritual debauch--a
dropping from sane and sensible control into eroticism. No person of
normal intelligence can afford to throw the reins of reason on the neck
of emotion and ride a Tam O'Shanter race to Bedlam. This hysteria of the
uncurbed feelings is the only blasphemy, and if there were a personal
God, He surely would be grieved to see that we have so absurd an idea of
Him, as to imagine He would be pleased with our deporting the divine
gift of reason into the hell-box.
Revivalism works up the voltage, then makes no use of the current--the
wire is grounded. Let any one of these revivalists write out his sermons
and print them in a book, and no sane man could read them without danger
of paresis. The book would lack synthesis, defy analysis, puzzle the
brain and paralyze the will. There would not be enough attic salt in it
to save it. It would be the supernaculum of the commonplace, and prove
the author to be the lobscouse of literature, the loblolly of letters.
The churches want to enroll members, and so desperate is the situation
that they are willing to get them at the price of self-respect. Hence
come Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Chapman, and play Svengali to our
Trilby. These gentlemen use the methods and the tricks of the
auctioneer--the blandishments of the bookmaker--the sleek, smooth ways
of the professional spieler.
With this troupe of Christian clowns is one Chaeffer, who is a
specialist with children. He has meetings for boys and girls only, where
he plays tricks, grimaces, tells stories and gets his little hearers
laughing, and thus having found an entrance into their hearts, he
suddenly reverses the lever, and has them crying. He talks to these
little innocents about sin, the wrath of God, the death of Christ, and
offers them a choice between everlasting life and eternal death. To the
person who knows and loves children--who has studied the gentle ways of
Froebel--this excitement is vicious, concrete cruelty. Weakened vitality
follows close upon overwrought nerves, and every excess has its
penalty--the pendulum swings as far this way as it does that.
These reverend gentlemen bray it into the ears of innocent little
children that they were born in iniquity, and in sin did their mothers
conceive them; that the souls of all children over nine years (why
nine?) are lost, and the only way they can hope for heaven is through a
belief in a barbaric blood bamboozle, that men of intelligence have long
since discarded. And all this in the name of the gentle Christ, who took
little children in his arms and said, "Of such is the Kingdom
of Heaven."
This pagan proposition of being born in sin is pollution to the mind of
a child, and causes misery, unrest and heartache incomputable. A few
years ago we were congratulating ourselves that the devil at last was
dead, and that the tears of pity had put out the fires of hell, but the
serpent of superstition was only slightly scotched, not killed.
The intent of the religious revival is dual: first, the claim is that
conversion makes men lead better lives; second, it saves their souls
from endless death or everlasting hell.
To make men lead beautiful lives is excellent, but the Reverend Doctor
Chapman, nor any of his colleagues, nor the denominations that they
represent, will for an instant admit that the fact of a man living a
beautiful life will save his soul alive In fact, Doctor Chapman, Doctor
Torrey and Doctor Sunday, backed by the Reverend Doctor McIntyre,
repeatedly warn their hearers of the danger of a morality that is not
accompanied by a belief in the "blood of Jesus."
So the beautiful life they talk of is the bait that covers the hook for
gudgeons. You have to accept the superstition, or your beautiful life to
them is a byword and a hissing.
Hence, to them, superstition, and not conduct, is the vital thing.
If such a belief is not fanaticism then have I read Webster's
Unabridged Dictionary in vain. Belief in superstition makes no man
kinder, gentler, more useful to himself or society. He can have all the
virtues without the fetich, and he may have the fetich and all the vices
beside. Morality is really not controlled at all by religion--if
statistics of reform schools and prisons are to be believed.
Fay Mills, according to Reverend Doctor McIntyre has all the virtues--he
is forgiving, kind, gentle, modest, helpful. But Fay has abandoned the
fetich--hence McIntyre and Chapman call upon the public to pray for Fay
Mills. Mills had the virtues when he believed in the fetich--and now
that he has disavowed the fetich, he still has the virtues, and in a
degree he never before had. Even those who oppose him admit this, but
still they declare that he is forever "lost."
Reverend Doctor Chaeffer says there are two kinds of habits--good and
bad.
There are also two kinds of religion, good and bad. The religion of
kindness, good cheer, helpfulness and useful effort is good. And on this
point there is no dispute--it is admitted everywhere by every grade of
intellect. But any form of religion that incorporates a belief in
miracles and other barbaric superstitions, as a necessity to salvation,
is not only bad, but very bad. And all men, if left alone long enough to
think, know that salvation depends upon redemption from a belief in
miracles. But the intent of Doctor Chapman and his theological rough
riders is to stampede the herd and set it a milling. To rope the
mavericks and place upon them the McIntyre brand is then quite easy.
As for the reaction and the cleaning up after the carnival, our
revivalists are not concerned. The confetti, collapsed balloons and
peanut shucks are the net assets of the revival--and these are left for
the local managers.
Revivals are for the revivalists, and some fine morning these revival
towns will arise, rub their sleepy eyes, and Chapman will be but a bad
taste in the mouth, and Sunday, Chaeffer, Torrey, Biederwolf and
Company, a troubled dream. To preach hagiology to civilized people is a
lapse that Nemesis will not overlook. America stands for the Twentieth
Century, and if in a moment of weakness she slips back to the exuberant
folly of the frenzied piety of the Sixteenth, she must pay the penalty.
Two things man will have to do--get free from the bondage of other men;
and second, liberate himself from the phantoms of his own mind. On
neither of these points does the revivalist help or aid in any way.
Effervescence is not character and every debauch must be paid for in
vitality and self-respect.
All formal organized religions through which the promoters and managers
thrive are bad, but some are worse than others. The more superstition a
religion has, the worse it is. Usually religions are made up of morality
and superstition. Pure superstition alone would be revolting--in our day
it would attract nobody--so the idea is introduced that morality and
religion are inseparable. I am against the men who pretend to believe
that ethics without a fetich is vain and useless.
The preachers who preach the beauty of truth, honesty and a useful,
helpful life, I am with, head, heart and hand.
The preachers who declare that there can be no such thing as a beautiful
life unless it will accept superstition, I am against, tooth, claw,
club, tongue and pen. Down with the Infamy! I prophesy a day when
business and education will be synonymous--when commerce and college
will join hands--when the preparation for life will be to go to work.
As long as trade was trickery, business barter, commerce finesse,
government exploitation, slaughter honorable, and murder a fine art;
when religion was ignorant superstition, piety the worship of a fetich
and education a clutch for honors, there was small hope for the race.
Under these conditions everything tended towards division, dissipation,
disintegration, separation--darkness, death.
But with the supremacy gained by science, the introduction of the
one-price system in business, and the gradually growing conviction that
honesty is man's most valuable asset, we behold light at the end of
the tunnel.
It only remains now for the laity to drive conviction home upon the
clergy, and prove to them that pretence has its penalty, and to bring to
the mourners' bench that trinity of offenders, somewhat ironically
designated as the Three Learned Professions, and mankind will be well
out upon the broad highway, the towering domes of the Ideal City
in sight.
One-Man Power
Every successful concern is the result of a One-Man Power. Coöperation,
technically, is an iridescent dream--things coöperate because the man
makes them. He cements them by his will.
But find this Man, and get his confidence, and his weary eyes will look
into yours and the cry of his heart shall echo in your ears. "O, for
some one to help me bear this burden!"
Then he will tell you of his endless search for Ability, and of his
continual disappointments and thwartings in trying to get some one to
help himself by helping him.
Ability is the one crying need of the hour. The banks are bulging with
money, and everywhere are men looking for work. The harvest is ripe. But
the Ability to captain the unemployed and utilize the capital, is
lacking--sadly lacking. In every city there are many five- and
ten-thousand-dollar-a-year positions to be filled, but the only
applicants are men who want jobs at fifteen dollars a week. Your man of
Ability has a place already. Yes, Ability is a rare article.
But there is something that is much scarcer, something finer far,
something rarer than this quality of Ability.
It is the ability to recognize Ability.
The sternest comment that ever can be made against employers as a class,
lies in the fact that men of Ability usually succeed in showing their
worth in spite of their employer, and not with his assistance and
encouragement.
If you know the lives of men of Ability, you know that they discovered
their power, almost without exception, thru chance or accident. Had the
accident not occurred that made the opportunity, the man would have
remained unknown and practically lost to the world. The experience of
Tom Potter, telegraph operator at an obscure little way station, is
truth painted large. That fearful night, when most of the wires were
down and a passenger train went through the bridge, gave Tom Potter the
opportunity of discovering himself. He took charge of the dead, cared
for the wounded, settled fifty claims--drawing drafts on the
company--burned the last vestige of the wreck, sunk the waste iron in
the river and repaired the bridge before the arrival of the
Superintendent on the spot.
"Who gave you the authority to do all this?" demanded the
Superintendent.
"Nobody," replied Tom, "I assumed the authority."
The next month Tom Potter's salary was five thousand dollars a year, and
in three years he was making ten times this, simply because he could get
other men to do things.
Why wait for an accident to discover Tom Potter? Let us set traps for
Tom Potter, and lie in wait for him. Perhaps Tom Potter is just around
the corner, across the street, in the next room, or at our elbow.
Myriads of embryonic Tom Potters await discovery and development if we
but look for them.
I know a man who roamed the woods and fields for thirty years and never
found an Indian arrow. One day he began to think "arrow," and stepping
out of his doorway he picked one up. Since then he has collected a
bushel of them.
Suppose we cease wailing about incompetence, sleepy indifference and
slipshod "help" that watches the clock. These things exist--let us
dispose of the subject by admitting it, and then emphasize the fact that
freckled farmer boys come out of the West and East and often go to the
front and do things in a masterly way. There is one name that stands out
in history like a beacon light after all these twenty-five hundred years
have passed, just because the man had the sublime genius of discovering
Ability. That man is Pericles. Pericles made Athens.
And to-day the very dust of the streets of Athens is being sifted and
searched for relics and remnants of the things made by people who were
captained by men of Ability who were discovered by Pericles.
There is very little competition in this line of discovering Ability. We
sit down and wail because Ability does not come our way. Let us think
"Ability," and possibly we can jostle Pericles there on his pedestal,
where he has stood for over a score of centuries--the man with a supreme
genius for recognizing Ability. Hail to thee, Pericles, and hail to
thee, Great Unknown, who shall be the first to successfully imitate this
captain of men.
Mental Attitude
Success is in the blood. There are men whom fate can never keep
down--they march forward in a jaunty manner, and take by divine right
the best of everything that the earth affords. But their success is not
attained by means of the Samuel Smiles-Connecticut policy. They do not
lie in wait, nor scheme, nor fawn, nor seek to adapt their sails to
catch the breeze of popular favor. Still, they are ever alert and alive
to any good that may come their way, and when it comes they simply
appropriate it, and tarrying not, move steadily on.
Good health! Whenever you go out of doors, draw the chin in, carry the
crown of the head high, and fill the lungs to the utmost; drink in the
sunshine; greet your friends with a smile, and put soul into every
hand-clasp.
Do not fear being misunderstood; and never waste a moment thinking about
your enemies. Try to fix firmly in your own mind what you would like to
do, and then without violence of direction you will move straight to
the goal.
Fear is the rock on which we split, and hate the shoal on which many a
barque is stranded. When we become fearful, the judgment is as
unreliable as the compass of a ship whose hold is full of iron ore; when
we hate, we have unshipped the rudder; and if ever we stop to meditate
on what the gossips say, we have allowed a hawser to foul the screw.
Keep your mind on the great and splendid thing you would like to do; and
then, as the days go gliding by, you will find yourself unconsciously
seizing the opportunities that are required for the fulfillment of your
desire, just as the coral insect takes from the running tide the
elements that it needs. Picture in your mind the able, earnest, useful
person you desire to be, and the thought that you hold is hourly
transforming you into that particular individual you so admire.
Thought is supreme, and to think is often better than to do.
Preserve a right mental attitude--the attitude of courage, frankness and
good cheer.
Darwin and Spencer have told us that this is the method of Creation.
Each animal has evolved the parts it needed and desired. The horse is
fleet because he wishes to be; the bird flies because it desires to; the
duck has a web foot because it wants to swim. All things come through
desire and every sincere prayer is answered. We become like that on
which our hearts are fixed.
Many people know this, but they do not know it thoroughly enough so that
it shapes their lives. We want friends, so we scheme and chase 'cross
lots after strong people, and lie in wait for good folks--or alleged
good folks--hoping to be able to attach ourselves to them. The only way
to secure friends is to be one. And before you are fit for friendship
you must be able to do without it. That is to say, you must have
sufficient self-reliance to take care of yourself, and then out of the
surplus of your energy you can do for others.
The individual who craves friendship, and yet desires a self-centered
spirit more, will never lack for friends.
If you would have friends, cultivate solitude instead of society. Drink
in the ozone; bathe in the sunshine; and out in the silent night, under
the stars, say to yourself again and yet again, "I am a part of all my
eyes behold!" And the feeling then will come to you that you are no
mere interloper between earth and heaven; but you are a necessary part
of the whole. No harm can come to you that does not come to all, and if
you shall go down it can only be amid a wreck of worlds.
Like old Job, that which we fear will surely come upon us. By a wrong
mental attitude we have set in motion a train of events that ends in
disaster. People who die in middle life from disease, almost without
exception, are those who have been preparing for death. The acute tragic
condition is simply the result of a chronic state of mind--a culmination
of a series of events.
Character is the result of two things, mental attitude, and the way we
spend our time. It is what we think and what we do that make us what
we are.
By laying hold on the forces of the universe, you are strong with them.
And when you realize this, all else is easy, for in your arteries will
course red corpuscles, and in your heart the determined resolution is
born to do and to be. Carry your chin in and the crown of your head
high. We are gods in the chrysalis.
The Outsider
When I was a farmer lad I noticed that whenever we bought a new cow, and
turned her into the pasture with the herd, there was a general
inclination on the part of the rest to make the new cow think she had
landed in the orthodox perdition. They would hook her away from the
salt, chase her from the water, and the long-horned ones, for several
weeks, would lose no opportunity to give her vigorous digs, pokes
and prods.
With horses it was the same. And I remember one particular little black
mare that we boys used to transfer from one pasture to another, just to
see her back into a herd of horses and hear her hoofs play a resounding
solo on their ribs as they gathered round to do her mischief.
Men are animals just as much as are cows, horses and pigs; and they
manifest similar proclivities. The introduction of a new man into an
institution always causes a small panic of resentment, especially if he
be a person of some power. Even in schools and colleges the new teacher
has to fight his way to overcome the opposition he is certain to meet.
In a lumber camp, the newcomer would do well to take the initiative,
like that little black mare, and meet the first black look with a
short-arm jab.
But in a bank, department store or railroad office this cannot be. So
the next best thing is to endure, and win out by an attention to
business to which the place is unaccustomed. In any event, the bigger
the man, unless he has the absolute power to overawe everything, the
more uncomfortable will be his position until gradually time smooths the
way and new issues come up for criticism, opposition and resentment, and
he is forgotten.
The idea of Civil Service Reform--promotion for the good men in your
employ rather than hiring new ones for the big places--is a rule which
looks well on paper but is a fatal policy if carried out to the letter.
The business that is not progressive is sowing the seeds of its own
dissolution. Life is a movement forward, and all things in nature that
are not evolving into something better are preparing to return into
their constituent elements. One general rule for progress in big
business concerns is the introduction of new blood. You must keep step
with the business world. If you lag behind, the outlaws that hang on the
flanks of commerce will cut you out and take you captive, just as the
wolves lie in wait for the sick cow of the plains.
To keep your columns marching you must introduce new methods, new
inspiration and seize upon the best that others have invented or
discovered.
The great railroads of America have evolved together. No one of them has
an appliance or a method that is much beyond the rest. If it were not
for this interchange of men and ideas some railroads would still be
using the link and pin, and snake-heads would be as common as in the
year 1869.
The railroad manager who knows his business is ever on the lookout for
excellence among his men, and he promotes those who give an undivided
service. But besides this he hires a strong man occasionally from the
outside and promotes him over everybody. Then out come the hammers!
But this makes but little difference to your competent manager--if a
place is to be filled and he has no one on his payroll big enough to
fill it, he hires an outsider.
That is right and well for every one concerned. The new life of many a
firm dates from the day they hired a new man.
Communities that intermarry raise a fine crop of scrubs, and the result
is the same in business ventures. Two of America's largest publishing
houses failed for a tidy sum of five millions or so each, a few years
ago, just thru a dogged policy, that extended over a period of fifty
years, of promoting cousins, uncles and aunts whose only claim of
efficiency was that they had been on the pension roll for a long time.
This way lies dry-rot.
If you are a business man, and have a position of responsibility to be
filled, look carefully among your old helpers for a man to promote. But
if you haven't a man big enough to fill the place, do not put in a
little one for the sake of peace. Go outside and find a man and hire
him--never mind the salary if he can man the position--wages are always
relative to earning power. This will be the only way you can really man
your ship.
As for Civil Service Rules--rules are made to be broken. And as for the
long-horned ones who will attempt to make life miserable for your new
employe, be patient with them. It is the privilege of everybody to do a
reasonable amount of kicking, especially if the person has been a long
time with one concern and has received many benefits.
But if at the last, worst comes to worst, do not forget that you
yourself are at the head of the concern. If it fails you get the blame.
And should the anvil chorus become so persistent that there is danger of
discord taking the place of harmony, stand by your new man, even tho it
is necessary to give the blue envelope to every antediluvian. Precedence
in business is a matter of power, and years in one position may mean
that the man has been there so long that he needs a change. Let the
zephyrs of natural law play freely thru your whiskers.
So here is the argument: promote your deserving men, but do not be
afraid to hire a keen outsider; he helps everybody, even the kickers,
for if you disintegrate and go down in defeat, the kickers will have to
skirmish around for new jobs anyway. Isn't that so?
Get Out or Get in Line
Abraham Lincoln's letter to Hooker! If all the letters, messages and
speeches of Lincoln were destroyed, except that one letter to Hooker, we
still would have an excellent index to the heart of the Rail-Splitter.