“Before I had been in Chicago a great while, some people got together
and built a church, and appointed me pastor of it, hardly so much as
saying to me ‘by your leave.’ It was named the Unity Church, and I
remained in charge of it till 1879, when I came to New York to preach
in the Church of the Messiah.
“Here I have since remained. My life, you see, is divided into two
sections,—forty years in the pulpit, twenty-one years at the anvil. I
have worked on long lines, and I will say to young men that, when your
homes and your schools have done all they can for you, and you begin
the work of life, you must take hold with a will and be content to work
hard on long lines. People say that such and such a person has genius
for what he or she takes in hand, and that is the secret of the success
attained. But I say that genius means strong devotion and steadfast
application. You may imagine that you can go from the bottom to the top
of the ladder at one jump, but it is not true. Going up the ladder at
one jump is like the toy monkey that goes up at a jump and comes down
head first. The men and women who achieve true success are all hard
climbers. They work in one direction. Our course must not be like a
cow-path, all over the pasture and into the woods, for that may mean
through the woods into the wilderness.
“I want to say, too, that, if we expect to do well in this life, we
must keep well, by all the means in our power;—eat well, and sleep
well eight hours out of the twenty-four. Young men should choose, as
early as they can, a good and true woman for a wife, and look forward
to a noble family of children. My ambition was to have seven, and
the all-wise Father gave me nine. If a young man has good mental and
physical health and works hard, his life will be sweet and clean. He
will do his day’s work well and his life’s work well, and at the end he
will be able to say, with Adam in the play:—
“‘Though I look old, yet am I strong and lusty,
For in my youth I never did apply hot and rebellious liquors to
my blood,
And did not with unbashful forehead woo
The means of weakness and debility.
Therefore my age is lusty winter, frosty, but kindly.’”