The elemental force of some men is appalling. They lift their
eyes--thrones tremble; they wave a hand--empires rise or fall. It comes
over the heart of many a man at times, Here am I, running my little
office, shop, factory, fire-engine, or professional circuit, with no
influence that I can see, beyond my borough or my barn-yard. But in the
world there are other men, no taller than I, no older than I--men born
within a stone's throw of where I was born--whose hand is on the fate of
nations, and whose decrees are universal law!
It is deeply impressive, the way in which one man, born not above
myriads of his fellows, begins to rise until by and by he stands head
and shoulders above his generation! What is the inner vitality which
presses him upward? What is this hidden difference in men by which one
remains in the by-eddies of life, and another sweeps out on the crest of
the rising tide of history?
Much of it is in the man himself. To be kingly is inborn. There is the
nature that refuses to be shut up to the petty, that will not content
itself with one street or town, that steps out into life from childhood
with the step of the conqueror, and walks among us; one who was born a
king. To be a king, one must have the powers of organization,
combination, discipline, direction, statesmanship. These qualities
enlarge as one passes from the particular to the general, from the
personal to the range of natural forces, emergencies, and wide pursuits.
Dominion is an inherent right of the soul. In all our hearts, did we but
listen and understand, there are adumbrations of kingly ancestors, and
the latent stirrings of kingly powers.
Which of us would want to be born at all, if we should be told in
advance, You shall never control anything? You shall never have the
slightest chance of self-assertion, of impressing your own individuality
upon the world? One might as well be born without hands or feet!
Kingship involves ascendancy and authority. Both are truly gained, not
by chicanery, but by personal force. There is a natural gift of
leadership, which is strengthened by endurance, perseverance, and
ceaseless hard work.
Kingship also involves a larger vision. One man looks at his
shoe-strings; another man looks at the stars. The first step toward rule
is to find a point of view from which one can look widely out over the
race. This is the primary value of education: it is not that books are
important, but that men are--the men who have swayed history--and books
tell of such men. Not the library is inspirational, but the life-spirit
of mankind, bound up in even dusty papyrus-rolls, or set on
clay-tablets of four thousand years ago. He who would serve his times
politically must first understand, so far as may be, all times.
Another basis of supremacy is conviction. Leadership belongs to those
who believe. The man who has a definite policy to propose, and a
definite way of working for it, soon outstrips the man who is just
looking about.
Kingship involves an iron will. An iron will does not imply necessarily
ugliness of temper, obstinacy, or pig-headedness. It is simply a
straight-forward, dauntless, and invincible way of doing things. What I
say, you must do, is back of all successful leadership, whether in the
home or in the world-arena. The man who is master of the obedience of
his child, or of his fellows, is master of their fate. We are all at the
mercy of the strong-willed.
Growth is development in right assertion; it is the assumption of
legitimate responsibility and command. To be lowly of heart does not
mean to be inefficient; to be humble does not necessarily mean to be
obscure. Luther and Lincoln were both of a childlike humility of heart.
What Christianity has not emphasized in the past, but what it must now
begin to emphasize, is the reality of dominion--its value, and its
relation to the kingdom of God. For centuries, religion has too often
been thought of, too often spoken of, as if it were the last resource of
the heart, A brilliant young professor of psychology not long ago
referred to religion as something to flee to, by those who were
disappointed in love! We have spoken so much of "giving up," that the
Christian life has wrongly seemed to mean the giving-up of one's
individuality, interests, powers. As well might we expert the deep sea
to give up its rolling tides, or the air to give up its four winds, as
to expect the heart of man to part with its human hopes!
This is not a right interpretation of life. When Nature plants an oak in
the forest, she does not say, Be a lichen, an _Eozoön canadense_, a
small ground-creeping thing! She says, Grow! Become a tall, strong,
mountain tree! When we hold our baby in our arms, we do not say, My
child, be good for nothing! Neither does God say, Be nothing, do
nothing! Just exist as humbly and meekly as you can! He says, "Quit you
like men!"
Each of us is born for a sceptre and a crown. It gives a strange new
thrill to life, to realize that we may be just as ambitious as we
please, that we may long earnestly for high things, and work for them,
if our inmost desire is not for self but for God. This new idea of
ambition should be at the root of education and of religious teaching.
Piety is not a namby-pamby sentiment; it is a great intellectual force.
Desire is architectural: our dreams should be of prestige and power.
True ambition is the reaching-out of the soul toward preordained
things. What else is the meaning of our love for excellence, our
insatiable yearning for perfection? "What is excellent," says Emerson,
"is permanent." To excel in any work is to combine in that work the most
enduring qualities of human labor; to excel in any place is to shine
forth with the great qualities of the race. Hence, ambition has a
rightful place.
The power of a king is the power of control. All about us are moving the
great forces of the universe--physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual.
What we can do with them is a test of our power. Life is in many ways a
majestic trial of one's power to command.
Three men buy adjoining tracts of land. One man mines coal upon his
acres. He amasses wealth and influence because he is in control of the
Carboniferous age and the human need of light and heat. The second man
tills his ground and raises wheat and corn. He is in command of living
nature--of the rotation of seasons, of wind, frost, rain; he uses them
to provide food for those that hunger and must be fed. The third man
lies under the trees. He digs no mine. He plants and reaps no corn and
grain. He simply lies under the trees, gazes into the sky and dreams.
Men call him idle, but he is not so. One day he writes a book. It lives
a thousand years. His control is over the spirit of man. He has entered
into its hopes and sorrows, its aspirations and its dreams.
This story is a Parable of Kings. Such is the power of control that is
granted to each new soul. Each child is bequeathed at birth a sceptre
and a crown.
The first rule is parental. The primitive monarchy is in the home. A
young baby cries. The trained nurse turns on the light, lifts the baby,
hushes it, sings to it, rocks it, and stills its weeping by caresses and
song. When next the baby is put down to sleep, more cries, more soothing
and disturbance, and the setting of a tiny instinct which shall some day
be will--the power of control.
The grandmother arrives on the scene. When baby cries, she plants the
little one firmly in its crib, turns down the light, pats and soothes
the tiny restless hands that fight the air, watches, waits. From the
crib come whimpers, angry cries, yells, sobs, baby snarls and sniffles
that die away in a sleepy infant growl. Silence, sleep, repose, and the
building of life and nerve and muscle in the quiet and the darkness. The
baby has been put in harmony with the laws of nature--the invigoration
of fresh air, sleep, stillness--and the little one wakens and grows like
a fresh, sweet rose. The mother, looking on, learns of the ways of
God with men.
Firmness is the true gentleness. There is a form of authority which must
be as implacable as the divine decree. Mercy is the requiring of
obedience to law; it is not a cajoling training in law-defiance, which
shall one day break the mother's heart and upset the social relations of
the world.
The next rule is personal: the direction of one's own energy in the way
of one's own will. The child moves his hands, his feet; he turns his
rattle up and down, and shakes it about. He discovers that he can pull
things toward him and push them away; that he can reach things that are
higher than his head. He begins to creep. He touches things that are the
other side of the world from him, that is, across the room. He plucks
fibres from the rug or carpet; swallows straws, buttons, and little
strings. He pounds, and sets up vibrations of pleasant noise; he clashes
ten-pins, he blows his whistle, squeezes his rubber horse and man,
rattles the newspaper, flings about his bottle and his blocks. He feels
himself a self-directing power, and at times asserts this power against
the will of those who would make him do what he does not want to do. The
love of rule is in him, and he lays his little hands on power.
Education determines whether this power shall be for good or for evil.
We cannot take away power from any child--he shall move the affairs of
nations--but we can direct this love of power, or crush it; strengthen
it, or weaken it; turn it toward the highest help of man, or deflect it
to tyranny, cruelty, and crime.
Child-training is guidance in the way of God's decrees. It is not the
setting of one's own ideas upon a little child; it is not the
gratification of one's own love of power; it is not the satisfaction of
one's own self-conceit. It is a firm, humble striving to carry on the
harmony of the universe: to bring up the child to love order, justice,
mercy, and truth.
Education is the teaching of how to direct energy for the universal
good. It lays hold of a child and, out of his destructive instincts--the
instinct to bang, and pull, and tear to pieces--it develops creative
power, the inventive genius that lies hid within him. It takes the pure
love of noise, and trains it to pitches, harmonies, intervals, and makes
a musician of the boy who used to whack his spoon. It takes the alphabet
and the early pothooks, and the boy by and by combines them into
literature. The apples and the peaches which he is taught to exchange
justly are by and by transmuted into trade and commerce. He brings
cargoes from Cuba and Ceylon, trades with Japan and Hawaii, and the
Asiatic isles. The energy of block-building is developed into sculpture,
architecture, and civil engineering. The stamping of his foot in anger
is directed to determination, perseverance, the rule of the brave
spirit, the unconquerable will. Nothing is more marvellous than this
grave upbuilding.
The next rule is social: the direction of personal energy that shall
leave a distinct impress on other lives. It is long before we realize
that for each exertion we are responsible; that what we do is held
against us in strict account, not only by fate, which builds our destiny
for us out of our own deeds, but by every other person with whom we come
in contact. Our fellows check off daily against us so much vitality, so
much magnanimity, so much idleness, cruelty, spite, goodness,
selfishness, meanness, or loving-kindness. Life holds a record of our
every deed, and from no least responsibility can we make our escape. We
are the prisoners of events which we ourselves have brought about.
The discipline of ethics, of home-training, of the Church, and of
religious teaching is addressed fundamentally to this social
consciousness of ours, this responsibility which we cannot evade. To
bear rule aright is to go forth into the world to build up, in
authority, talent, and influence, the kingdom of God.
1. There is the agricultural phase of social rule. A man tills a farm.
It has upon it trees, streams, woodland, and meadow-land. He may
rule--to what end? If he rules it for his own personal ends--merely to
fill his granaries, and lay up gold--he rules it for miserliness, with a
sort of thrift that is as passing in inheritance as the flying
April rain.
Or he may say: I will keep my land in trust for God. I will hold rain
and frost, heat and cold, storm and sun, in fee simple for the race. My
grain shall pass out into the world's mart, sent forth with love and
prayer. Such a farmer is the incarnation of moral grandeur. Let men
laugh, if they will, at his overalls and plough, his wide-brimmed hat,
his simple manners, and his homely, racy speech. His feet are by the
furrow, but his heart is in heaven, and his treasure is there also. Says
the author of _Nine Acres on the Hillside_, "The agriculturist walks
side by side with the Creator."
There is a fine integrity which lies in land. There is a resolution
which is concerned with crops. There is a wisdom born of wind and
weather. There is a power which comes from the constant revival of life
in seed and fruit and flower. This man is King of God's Acres. Let him
not despise his kingdom, and may the succession not depart from
his house!
2. There is a rule which is industrial. A man is sent into the world to
wield a hammer, a saw, and run an engine. If his rule over his hammer is
weak, if he does not know how to use it well, if its blow is uncertain
and its result unskilled, then he passes from the line of kings, and is
subject, instead of in authority, in his own domain. He is captive to a
piece of steel or wood. So with every tool of trade. Each man who
conquers his tool is a ruler--is in control of elements of human
happiness and good. The roof-mender, the furnace-builder, the
cloth-weaver, the yarn-spinner, the steel-worker, the miller--do not
these all keep the race warmed, and clad, and fed?
3. The next rule is commercial. Trade itself is neither menial nor
demeaning. Rightly used, it is a high form of control. People have
things to buy and things to sell. The maker is handicapped. He cannot
travel elsewhere to dispose of what he has. The buyer is ignorant. He
does not know where to go, or cannot go, at first-hand, for the shoes,
the hat, the reaper, the bricks, the lumber, the stationery which he
must use. There appears upon the scene the man of observation, of
investigation, of capital, of shrewdness, of resources. With one hand he
gathers the products of the Pacific and of the South Seas. With the
other, he takes the output of the Atlantic seaboard, the Gulf States,
the Mississippi valley, the northern lakes and hills. He sets up an
establishment, he puts forth runners, advertisements, and show-windows.
He stocks shelves, decks counters, and employs clerks, packers,
salesmen, cash-boys, buyers, and department heads. The man who wants to
buy, buys from a man across the sea and yet is served in his own town.
The man of commercial power is a man of world-wide rule. He may lay up
in banks a fortune which he intends to try to spend upon himself; or he
may say: I am accountable for the pocket-books of the world. I am in
authority over them. I open a market, or close it. I buy, dispense, and
disperse human labor. I create wants, and I satisfy them. I will
establish honest laws of trade. What I do shall be rated as commercial
law. What I say shall be quoted as a way of equity and probity. That man
is a King of Trade. His throne is set upon hills and seas. His subjects
are all men with needs, and all men with products of the land, the
coasts, the sea, or brain, or skill. This is the lawful King of Trade.
He represents God's mart of exchange. Primarily, goods are not bought
and sold in the market. They are first transferred in that man's brain.
4. Another rule is of concerted works: the rule of the Engineer. Back of
every advance in our country, in facilities of trade and transportation,
or of public health and safety, stands the man who thought it out. Take,
for instance, the development of the "Great American Desert." Who
projected its irrigation, by which areas have been redeemed from
barrenness and waste? Who planned the economic use of the Niagara Falls?
Who built the Brooklyn Bridge? Who projected the vast waterway from
Chicago to the Gulf? Who first thought of a cable across the depths of
seas? Who bridged the Firth of Forth, the Ganges, the Mississippi? Who
projected the gray docks of Montreal? the Simplon Tunnel? Who wound the
iron rails across the Alleghanies, the Rockies, the Sierras? Who drew
the wall that has encircled China for a thousand years? Who projected
the Suez Canal? the Trans-Siberian Railway? Who sunk the mines of
Eldorado? Who designed the Esplanade at Hamburg? the stone banks of the
Seine? the waterways of Venice? the aqueducts of Rome? the Appian Way?
the military roads of Chili and Peru? the Subway in New York?
Gravity, stress, strain, weight, tension, sag, cohesion,--a few
mathematical formulas, and a knowledge of the primary laws of
physics,--upon such principles as these, the world is rapidly changing
form and use.
The Engineer, in a strange and subtle way, stands near to God. His work
is done hand-in-hand with God. He takes the forces of nature and the
laws of the material world, and bends them to the needs and use of man.
Sky and sea or desert may be about him. He knows the arctic cold, the
tropic heat; the forest and the plain; the mountain and the marsh; the
brook and river; the peak and the precipice; the glacier and the tempest
in their course. Out of the very elements he is daily building new paths
for man to tread. Soon he, too, must pass; laid after death, it may be,
beside some mighty water that his handiwork has spanned.
In loneliness and silence does he not often think, I wonder, of the God
with whom he deals? It is God who provides the river and the sea; God
who through endless ages has piled stone on stone, crust on crust, and
has crumpled the strata of the earth as tissue in His hand. It is God
who has bound every mote to the earth-centre; who has sent magnetic
currents coursing through the globe, and has made tides and sea-changes,
and the trade-winds to blow. It is the God of the Gulf Stream, the
Caribbean Sea, the God of the Appalachians, the God of the Himalayas,
the God of the Cordilleras, of the Amazon, the Yukon, the Yang-tse-Kiang
with which he really deals.
The endless ages pass and go, but God abides. Little, daring man lifts
here and there a hand to mould the world which God has made--pricks the
earth for gold or silver, iron or coal--but GOD is everywhere immanent
and shines through every hour of change. Hence the March of Engineers is
the march of men whom God has trained; in a special sense His
master-workmen, craftsmen whom He loves. It is theirs to say, We are the
Kings of Works: the Master-builders of the Most High!
5. There are Kings of Academic Thought, men who lead in professions and
in collegiate careers. The wise man is the true aristocrat. His court
may not be in a palace, but within its precincts are received and
entertained the leaders of the race. To be provost, to be college
president or university professor, is to be seated on an
intellectual throne.
The problem of academic rule is not to attract a large number of
students, to put up imposing buildings, to have endowments, and fill
chairs with learned specialists; to grant many degrees, and to keep the
hum of a teaching staff and of a student body alive in the ears of a
community, marking the college group by flags and colors, cap and gown,
processions and occasions. These things are right, but are mainly
accessory. We have not all of a university when we have men and
buildings, money, students, brains. Back of a university there lies its
foundation-idea, that of academic control.
What is academic rule? It is rule over the pride of man. A college is a
place whose chief power is to inculcate humility by the means of true
learning; to establish intellectual honor and integrity by searching out
the ways of God in nature, science, and philosophy, and in letters
and in art.
It is the primary work of a university to make men humble. The Freshman
is not teachable. The Sophomore is an intellectual upstart. But by the
time a man has been beaten and conquered by the great ideals of the
world, which have pierced his bones and humbled his conceit--by the time
the race-passions and the race-sorrows have crept across his spirit, by
the time that he has been confronted with the achievements of Homer,
Empedocles, Hippocrates, Michelangelo, Socrates, Buddha, Plato, Emerson,
Gladstone, Bismarck, Lincoln, and Carlyle--his self-exaltation drops
from him like a garment. He--who knows how to construe a few pages of
the classics, who knows how to demonstrate a few mathematical problems,
scan a few verses, recite a few odes, carry on a few scientific
experiments, undertake a small research--how shall he compete with these
rulers of the thought of men?
Then it is that the real rule of a university--its spirit of humility,
and of reverence for antiquity--begins. The true university man, born
and bred in the century, not in the years, in the race halls, not those
alone in his Alma Mater, is neither a scoffer nor an atheist, nor a
critic, sceptic, or cynic. He is a man of simple and exalted faith. God,
who hath brought such great things to pass in science, nature, and art,
in human character, in the destiny of nations, and the history of humble
men and women, is a God before whom there must be awe and reverence, and
not a flippant scouting of the ancient ideals. Man, who is so tried by
temptation and scourging of the spirit, is a creature to be loved,
appreciated, understood; not a being to whom shall be shown arrogance,
aloofness, and pride. The university that makes snobs of its graduates
has not yet entered into its kingdom of control.
A university also holds rule over truth. Absolute truth is in God's
hand. But the university has class-rooms and libraries, apparatus and
laboratories, which are intended for the discovery and furtherance of
truth. The university is not a place to cry out for big salaries. The
salaries should be living salaries. The seeker after truth should not be
left without enough money for heat and shelter, for bread and meat, rest
and summer-change; for the coming of children and their education. But
truth may lodge without shame in an humble dwelling and may be greatly
furthered without an elaborate bill of fare.
The university men of the times are the establishers of a kind of
righteousness that is not always found in books. Their individual value,
as they go out into the world, is to set right values on social customs
and decrees; to establish the law of freedom in the home; to lead men
and women out of the thraldom of ignorance, vulgarity, hearsay, and
"style," into simplicity of living and a sane scale of household
expense. The university leader of the future is the man who shall set
laws over household accounts and who shall rule over such simple things
as what best to eat and buy. He shall be an economist of the larger
sort, providing for the spiritual necessities of men and their moral
conduct, rather than for their balls, card-parties, and social
side-shows, including church entertainments and philanthropic dances and
bazaars. He shall pave the way to a larger view of wealth, influence,
and reform; endue man with a keener sense of his own responsibilities,
make him a creature of larger desires and of more aspiring wants.
In particular, he shall pass down from generation to generation the high
and noble learning of the past; he shall keep alive the flower of
courtesy and charity; he shall tell the dreams of past sages, and
interpret them; he shall review the thronging nations; and he shall so
imbue the mind with a love of truth, of ideals, of excellence, of honor,
that a new race shall go out into a larger and a nobler world. And then
a better day shall dawn for men.