ILL SUCCESS
“And comfortress of Unsuccess
To wish the dead good-night.”
KIPLING’S “True Romance.”
If we aim at worldly success, thinking that thereby we shall be able to
do more for mankind and be more useful, we may defeat our own purpose
by worry and anxiety. The present moment is all that any man has in
which to come into agreement with his fellows.
If for lack of understanding he spends that moment in worry and
unrest, he makes himself and everybody else more or less unhappy,
thereby destroys his own usefulness, and proves his unfitness to gain
success. But it may be that he is deceived as to his motive; he may
desire success really for the satisfaction of winning against his less
fortunate fellows.
Why should we desire worldly success to enable us to help our fellows?
No amount of benevolence or philanthropy can atone for the selfishness,
inhumanity and the greed necessary to acquire great wealth under modern
conditions. The widow’s mite or the cup of cold water given from
moment to moment is of greater value than the millions bestowed upon
charity as a sop to one’s conscience, or as a pacifier of public clamor.
There is a degree of satisfaction in giving _all_ that can never come
from giving a portion of superabundance. We never hear of a very rich
man giving all that he hath, over and above a comfortable, or even a
luxurious, living. His giving hardly requires the sacrifice of even a
whim. How can a man like Rockefeller, with an admitted income of nearly
a dollar every second, be generous? How much would he have to give in
order to feel it?—and what mischief would he not do in giving such a
sum! The “luxury of giving” can never be his, for that is the result
of giving at the expense of our daily desires. The widow who cast in
her mite enjoyed the luxury of giving, and many still give in that way.
This gift of somebody’s mite incited the giving of millions.
But it is not possible that the gift of millions should bring the giver
much happiness, if it brings any. There is too much publicity and
display in such a gift; it is noised abroad from press and platform,
and creates a new distress in the mind of the giver. The giver knows
that unscrupulous, undeserving persons or causes will now lay siege
to a share of his wealth, because of the notoriety his great gift has
brought him. Some are so oppressed with appeals that they have to
appoint committees to give away the money. There must be about as much
satisfaction in that as in having a committee to kiss the women you
love.
Besides this, great benefactions cause uneasiness, lest they be
misapplied or unwisely distributed, or lest the glory may be eclipsed
by some other millionaire giving a larger sum to a more popular cause.
Thus donations become a source of unrest and worriment, and the donor’s
last state is worse than his first. The giver of the mite is generally
unknown of the crowd, sometimes unknown even of the one to whom he
gives, so that his joy comes from the giving, and cannot be taken from
him. To him alone is it true that “the gift is to the giver” and that
“it is more blessed to give than to receive.” If there is no real joy
to be had from giving of great wealth, why should we desire to have it,
or fret ourselves that we do not win it? Neither to acquire wealth nor
to possess it can bring happiness or peace. We have seen how great is
the price we must pay to get great riches, and it is easy to see why
their possession cannot bring peace or happiness.
Man has a limited number of wants, and there is an end even to whims.
When all of these have been satisfied, what is left? The ordinary man
must give time, skill, thought, and labor to satisfy his needs, and
from the effort he gets a large measure of joy and satisfaction. Even
if he never gets what he is after, the effort has given him pleasure,
strengthened his purpose, and developed his whole nature. But the
wealthy man is denied this natural satisfaction. He does not even
have to seek what he wants; servants do that for him; he speaks and
the thing is done. For him there is no joyous effort; no increase of
pleasure in the very delay of fulfillment; no sense of achievement when
he gets what he desires. For this reason he soon wearies, and, having
run the whole gamut of pleasures, and exhausted his idle fancies, he
becomes a prey to ennui, has no object in life, and finds no delight
in the days. It could not be otherwise. As an old servant in my family
once said, “If the rich were happy, we should know there was no God.”
“How hardly shall a rich man enter into the kingdom of heaven,” said
Jesus; meaning thereby that the possession of wealth destroys our
sympathy with our poorer brethren and prevents a man from seeing his
true relation to those who have it not; makes it difficult for him to
recognize his oneness with all mankind, and so cuts him off from that
heaven of love and peace on earth that can come only from agreement of
his own life with the life of others outside his circle.
If we are worried or ill at ease for any other cause, such as
ill-health, disappointed affections, unsatisfied desires, or from any
of the innumerable causes to which we attribute our ill, we have but
to examine them to find that in every instance the underlying error is
the same. It is that we think of our separate interests, that we are
for self; that “me” has a deeper significance to our mind than “us”
that the “I” blots out the “thou.” All worry, all unrest comes from
self-seeking, from the feeling of separateness rather than of oneness;
from an inharmonious attitude towards life and its underlying verities.
“Seek ye first the kingdom of God,” said the Teacher, “and all these
things”—material things, food and clothes that he had been speaking
of—“shall be added unto you.” Now God is love, and the kingdom of
God is universal love, the love that knows no separateness; therefore
let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. Believe in
God. The man who seeks first the wide Universal Peace does not worry
nor fret. He has, by that very seeking, put himself in tune with the
Infinite, and he finds that the sounds which have seemed to him like
harsh discords are, to his listening ear, blended into harmony. He has
heard the “sweetest carol ever sung” and nothing can drown its melody.
With that song in his ears he can “run and never be wearied, he can
walk and not faint.” He loses his feverish impatience, for “he that
believeth shall not make haste”; he sees himself in every man and every
man in himself; he has found rest for his soul.
When this peace reigns within, the seeming ills of life do not disturb
us. We are not conscious of ungratified desires, and in this lies the
truth of the promise—“all things shall be added unto you.” For, if man
is not conscious of any ungratified want or desire, then, though he be
poor in this world’s goods and entirely unknown, he is richer by far
than the multi-millionaire who is compelled to heap silver upon gold,
or the pushing politician whose thirst for fame can never be slaked.
He is in harmony with the Universe, he has allied himself with moral
gravitation, and, going with its force, he is upheld and supported, so
that he has rest now and is neither worried nor afraid.