rules of prudence in general, like the laws of the stone tablet, are for
the most part prohibitive. "Thou shalt not," is their characteristic
formula. It is easier to state what is forbidden under certain
circumstances than what is required. It is shown in practical every-day
life by thoughtful actions on the thousand petty questions which are
constantly claiming attention. It is hesitating and slow to believe what
is not sanctioned by past experience, and prefers not to run any very
great risks in testing new plans for gaining the great object of life,
preferring the sure to the doubtful, even though the latter may seem to
have many advantages. It recognizes that there is a necessity for a
certain amount of caution in all the transactions of business; hence the
old saying, "Prudent men lock up their motives, letting familiars have a
key to their hearts as to their garden." It weighs long and carefully
the reasons for or against any proposed line of conduct, and calls upon
the will to act only in accordance with the result of such reasoning.
In nothing does prudence display itself more than in relation to the
little affairs of life. There are those who in the confidence of
superior capacities or attainments neglect the common maxims of life.
But this is a fatal delusion, as nothing will supply the want of
prudence in the ordinary vocations of business, no matter how superior
the other qualities. Negligence and irregularity long continued will
make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible. The
merchant may, indeed, win thousands by speculations; but the only sure
way of attaining to fortune, place, or honor is by obedience to
well-known laws of business prudence, which discountenance speculation
unbased on substantial facts.
Such are the vicissitudes of human life that, whatever the calling may
be, scarcely a day passes that does not call upon all to exercise this
quality in some of the common every-day occurrences, as well as in the
unexpected emergencies which fate is constantly presenting to us. The
triumph of its long exercise is to be seen in those moments when to come
at a wrong decision means disastrous defeat, the fatal overthrow of the
hopes of a life-time. It by degrees forms for itself a standard of duty
and propriety, accumulates rules and maxims of conduct, and materials
for reflection and meditation.
The tongue of prudence knows when to speak and when to be silent. It is
not cowardly; it dares to say all that need be said, but it does not
tell all that it knows. It is careful what it speaks, when it speaks,
and to whom it speaks. When you have need of a needle you move your
fingers delicately with a wise caution. Use the same prudence with the
inevitable affairs of life; give attention, and keep yourself from undue
precipitation, otherwise it will fare hardly with you.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: TEMPERANCE.]
[Illustration]
There is beauty in temperance like that which is portrayed in virtue and
in truth. It is a close ally of both, and, like them, has that
all-pervading essence and quality which chastens the feelings,
invigorates the mind, and displays the perfection of the soul in the
very aspect. Like water from the rill, rain from the cloud, or light
from the heavenly bodies, the thought issues pure from within,
refreshing, unsullied, and radiant. There is no grossness, no dross, no
corruption, for temperance, when effectually realized, is full of
loveliness and joy, and virtue and purity are the lineaments in which it
lives. Temperance is a virtue without pride, and fortune without envy;
the best guardian of youth and support of old age; the preceptor of
reason as well as of religion, and physician of the soul as well as the
body; the tutelar goddess of health and universal medicine of life.
Temperance keeps the senses clear and unembarrassed, and makes them
seize the object with more keenness and satisfaction. It appears with
life in the face and decorum in the person. It gives you the command of
your head, secures you health, and preserves you in a condition for
business. Temperance is a virtue which casts the truest luster upon the
person it is lodged in, and has the most general influence upon all
other particular virtues of any that the soul of man is capable of;
indeed, so general is it that there is hardly any noble quality or
endowment of the mind but must own temperance either for its parent or
its nurse; it is the greatest strengthener and clearer of reason, and
the best preparer of it for religion; it is the sister of prudence and
the handmaid to devotion.
Pleasure has been aptly compared to a sea. Intemperance is a maelstrom
situated in the very center of this great sea. Not one path alone leads
to this gulf of woe; not one only current, as too many have supposed,
hurries down this dark abyss, but all around, on every side, the waters
tend downward. There are a thousand currents leading in. Some, it is
true, are more rapid than others. Some rush in quickly and bear down all
who ride upon their waters to quick and certain ruin. Others glide more
slowly, but none the less surely, to the same end. The streams of
intemperance are legions. The allurements that lead downward are equally
numerous. Every appetite, lust, passion, and feeling holds out various
allurements to intemperate indulgence. There is not a power of the mind,
affection of the heart, nor desire of the body that may not dispose to
some form of intemperance which may injure the physical being or
paralyze the energies of the mind. All forms of intemperance are evil
and destroy some function of mind or body—some member or faculty, the
disease of which spreads inharmony through the whole. The dangers from
this source are imminent and fearful, and spread on every hand.
Temperance conduces to health; indeed, it may be said that health can
only be acquired or maintained by temperance. This is the law primary
and essential which every youth should know, and know by heart. Bodily
pains and aches tell of intemperance in some directions. Pain means
penalty, and penalty means that its sufferer should reform. The most of
our pains are occasioned by intemperance. This is the fruitful mother of
nine-tenths of the diseases that flesh is heir to and the sins that the
soul doth commit. We sin by excess of anger, lust, appetite, affection,
love of gain, authority, or praise. Few, if any, are the sins that grow
not out of intemperance in some form. Intemperance means excess. A thing
is good as long as it is necessary. All beyond necessity, or what is
necessary, is evil. Money is good; more than what is necessary to the
ends of life is evil. Food is good; too much is evil. Light is good; too
much will put out our eyes. Water is good; too much will destroy us.
Heat is good; too much will burn us. The praise of men is good; too much
will ruin us. The love of life is good; too much will make us miserable.
Fear is good; too much hath torment. Prayer is good; too much cheats
labor of its life and is evil. Sympathy is good; too much floods us with
perpetual grief. Reason is good; too much pressed with labor it
dethrones the mind and spreads ruin abroad. Any excess in the use or
activity of a good thing is intemperance and, therefore, evil, and to be
avoided.
Temperance as a virtue dwells in the heart. It consists in a rigid
subjection of every inward feeling and power to the rule of right
reason. He who would be thoroughly temperate must master himself. His
passions must be his subjects obeying his will. From the heart he must
be temperate. He must remember that the intemperance slope is an almost
imperceptible one, and that he may be gliding down it when he dreams of
naught but safety. He must remember, too, that the field of temperance
is a broad one, covering the whole area of life. It is not simply
against one form of appetite, one species of indulgence that he is to
guard, but against all. There are other species of intemperate
indulgence, of which we are all more or less guilty, than indulgence in
drink. Indeed, the indulgence of appetite carries away more victims from
the earth than does drunkenness, and spreads a wider devastation and a
more general blight.
All species of intemperance grow of a want of self-control. To be a
temperance man a man must master himself, must be a brave, noble
conqueror of every enemy within his own bosom. It is no small matter. It
is the masterpiece of human attainments. The laws of temperance can
never be broken with impunity. The excess is committed to-day, but the
effect is experienced to-morrow. The law of nature, invariable in its
operation, is, that penalty shall follow excess. The punishment is mild
at first, but afterwards more and more severe, until, when nature's
warning voice has been unheeded and her punishments disregarded, the
final penalty is death. If an admonitory sign-board were hung out for
the benefit of the young, there should be inscribed upon it in prominent
characters "_no excess_." It is to be remembered that the best
principles, if pushed too far, degenerate into fatal vices. Generosity
is nearly allied to extravagance; charity itself may lead to ruin; the
sternness of justice is but one step removed from the severity of
oppression.
If one would make the most of life he must be temperate in all things.
It is the application of reason to all the daily acts of life. It is the
highest and best form of life that one can attain to. It leads not only
to the greatest happiness, but also to honor and position. By abstaining
from most things it is surprising how many things we enjoy. To establish
thoroughly and widely the principles of temperance we must begin with
the youth. They have a high aspiration to be good and true. They see a
glory in the path of right. Freedom is a word of power in their ears.
Virtue has many charms not only for their hearts, but for their
imaginations. They have health, competency, and happiness. They are
ambitious of every good. When the true principles of temperance are
established in early life and made the controlling power through life,
they insure health, freedom from pain, competency, respectability,
honor, virtue, usefulness, and happiness—all for which true men have or
hope in this life. Happy would it be if they were general and all youths
would practice them. Then would religion assert her mild and gentle
sway, peace plant her olive wreath in every nation, wisdom, divine and
time-honored, shed every-where her glorious light. A race of men and
women, full of rosy health, strong, active, symmetrical, beautiful as
the artist's model: pure, virtuous, wise, affectionate, full of honor
and lofty principles, would grow up into communities and nations, and
make the earth bloom and rejoice in more than Eden gladness. A new
heaven and a new earth would surround us with beauty and arch us over
with glory, for the old would have passed away.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: FRUGALITY.]
[Illustration]
Frugality may be termed the daughter of Prudence, the sister of
Temperance, and the parent of Liberty and Ease. It is synonymous with
economy, and is a sound understanding brought into action. It is
calculation realized; it is the doctrine of proportion educed to
practice. It is foreseeing contingencies and providing against them. Its
other and less reputable sisters are Avarice and Prodigality. She alone
keeps the straight and safe path, while Avarice sneers at her as
profuse, and Prodigality scorns at her as penurious. To the poor she is
indispensable; to those of moderate means she is found the
representative of wisdom. Joined to industry and sobriety, she is a
better outfit to business than a dowry. She conducts her votaries to
competence and honor, while Profuseness is a cruel and crafty demon,
that gradually involves her followers in dependence and debt.
Frugality shineth in her best light when joined to liberality. The first
consists in leaving off superfluous expense; the last is bestowing them
to the benefit of those that need. The first without the last begets
covetousness; the last without the first begets prodigality. There is
ever a golden mean between frugality and stinginess, or closeness. He
that spareth in every thing is an inexcusable niggard; he that spareth
in nothing is an inexcusable madman. The golden mean of frugality is to
spare in what is least necessary, and to lay out more liberally in what
is most required in our several circumstances. It is no man's duty to
deny himself every amusement, every recreation, every comfort, that he
may get rich. It is no man's duty to make an iceberg of himself, and to
deny himself the enjoyment that results from his generous actions,
merely that he may hoard wealth for his heirs to quarrel about. But
there is an economy which is especially commendable in the man who
struggles with poverty, and is every man's duty—an economy which is
consistent with happiness, and which must be practiced if the poor man
would secure independence.
When one is blessed with good sense and fair opportunities, this spirit
of economy is one of the most beneficial of all secular gifts, and takes
high rank among the minor virtues. It is by this mysterious power that
the loaf is multiplied, that using does not waste, that little becomes
much, that scattered fragments grow to unity, and that out of nothing,
or next to nothing, comes the miracle of something. Frugality is not
merely saving, still less parsimony. It is foresight and combination. It
is insight and arrangement. It is a subtle philosophy of things, by
which new uses, new compositions, are discovered. It causes inert things
to labor, useless things to serve our necessities, perishing things to
renew their vigor, and all things to exert themselves for human comfort.
As the acquisition of knowledge depends more upon what a man _remembers_
than upon the quantity of his reading, so the acquisition of property
depends more upon what is _saved_ than upon what is earned. The largest
reservoir, though fed by abundant and living springs, will fail to
supply their owners with water if secret leaking-places are permitted to
drain off their contents. In like manner, though by his skill and energy
a man may convert his business into a flowing Pactolus, ever depositing
its golden sands in his coffers, yet, through the numerous wants of
unfrugal habits, he may live embarrassed and die poor. Economy is the
guardian of property, the good genius whose presence guides the
footsteps of every prosperous and successful man.
Either a man must be content with poverty all his life, or else be
willing to deny himself some luxuries, and save to lay the base of
independence in the future. But if a man defies the future, and spends
all that he earns, whether it be much or little, let him look for lean
and hungry want at some future time; for it will surely come, no matter
what he thinks. To economize and be frugal is absolutely the only way to
get a solid fortune; there is no other certain mode on earth. Those who
shut their eyes and ears to these plain facts will be forever poor.
Fortune does not give away her real and substantial goods. She sells
them to the highest bidder, to the hardest, wisest worker for the boon.
Men never make so fatal a mistake as when they think they are mere
creatures of fate; it is the sheerest folly in the world. Every man may
make or mar his life, whichever he may choose. Fortune is for those who,
by diligence, honesty and frugality, place themselves in a position to
grasp hold of fortune when it appears in view.
Simple industry and thrift will go far towards making any person of
ordinary working faculties comparatively independent in his means.
Almost any working-man may be so, provided he will carefully husband his
resources and watch the little outlets of useless expenditures. A penny
is a very small matter, yet the comfort of thousands of families depends
upon the proper saving and spending of pennies. If a man allows the
little pennies—the results of his hard work—to slip out of his fingers
he will find that his life is little raised above one of mere animal
drudgery.
One way in which true economy is shown consists in living within one's
income. This is the grand element of success in acquiring property. To
carry it out requires resolution, self-denial, self-reliance. But it
must be done, or grinding poverty will accompany you through life. We
urge upon all young men who are just starting in life to make it an
invariable rule to lay aside a certain proportion of their income,
whatever that income may be. Extravagant expenditures occasion a large
part of the suffering of a great majority of people. And extravagance is
wholly a relative term. What is not at all extravagant for one person
may be very much so for another. Expenditures, no matter how small in
themselves they may be, are always extravagant when they come fully up
to the entire amount of a person's income.
On every hand we see people living on credit, putting off pay-day to the
last, making, in the end, some desperate effort—generally by
borrowing—to scrape the money together, and then struggling on again
with the canker of care eating at their hearts; but their exertions are
vain; they land at last in the inevitable goal of bankruptcy. If they
would only be content to make the push in the beginning, instead of the
end, they would save themselves all this misery. The great secret of
being solvent and well-to-do and comfortable is to get ahead of your
expenses. Eat and drink this month what you earned last month, not what
you are going to earn next month. It is unsafe to draw drafts on the
future, for hope is deceitful, and your paper is liable to go to
protest. When one is once weighed down with a load of debt he loses the
sense of being free and independent. The man with his fine house, his
glittering carriage, and his rich banquets, for which he is in debt, is
a slave, a prisoner, dragging his chains behind him through all the
grandeur of the false world through which he moves.
In urging a course of strict economy we admit that it is hard,
embarrassing, perplexing, onerous, but it is by no means impracticable.
A cool survey of one's expenditures, compared with his income; a wise
balancing of ends to be gained; a firm and calm determination to break
with custom wherever it is opposed to good sense, and a patience that
does not chafe at small and gradual results, will do much towards
establishing the principle of economy and securing its benefits. Economy
has, however, deeper roots than even this—in the desires. It is there,
after all, that we control our expenditures. As a general rule we may be
sure that we shall spend our money for what we most earnestly crave. If
it be luxury and display then it will melt into costly viands and soft
clothing, handsome dwellings and rich furniture. If, on the other hand,
our desires are for higher enjoyments, or for benevolent purposes, our
money will flow into these channels. Every one, then, who cherishes in
himself, or excites in others, a desire more pure and noble than existed
before, who draws the heart from the craving of sense to those of soul,
from self to others, from what is low, sensual, and wrong to what is
pure, elevating, and right, in so far establishes, on the firmest of all
foundations, a wise economy.
A true economy appears to induce the exertion of almost every laudable
emotion; a strict regard to honesty; a laudable spirit of independence;
a judicious prudence in providing for the wants, and a steady
benevolence in preparing for the claims of the future. Such an economy
can but appeal to the good sense of all who candidly ponder over life
and its realities. To spend all that you acquire as soon as you gain it
is to lead a butterfly existence. Were you always to be young and free
from sickness and care, and life were to pass as one perpetual Summer,
it would do no harm to so live; but care will come, sickness may strike
you at any time, and, if you escape these, yet you know life has its
Autumnal and Winter seasons as well as its Summer. And, alas! for the
veteran who finds himself obliged to learn in his latter years the
lessons of strict economy for the first time, having lived in utter
defiance of them in the season of youth and strength.
[Illustration: PATIENCE.]
[Illustration]
Patience is the ballast of the soul, that will keep it from rolling and
tumbling in the greatest storms. All life is but one vast representation
of the beauty and value of patience. Troubles and sorrows are in store
for all. It is useless to try to escape them, and, indeed, it is well we
can not, as they seem essential to the perfection and development of
character into its highest and best form. But their disciplinary value
arises from the great lesson of patience they are constantly
inculcating.
Either patience must be a quality graciously inherent in the heart of
man, or it must be acquired as the lesson of years' experience, if he
would enjoy the greatest good of life. Without it prosperity will be
continually disturbed, and adversity will be clouded with double
darkness. The loud complaint, the querulous temper and fretful spirit
disgrace every character. We weaken thereby the sympathy of others, and
estrange them from offices of kindness and comfort. But to maintain a
steady and unbroken mind amidst all the shocks of adversity forms the
highest honor of man. Afflictions supported by patience and surmounted
by fortitude give the last finishing stroke to the heroic and virtuous
character. Patience produces unity in the Church, loyalty in the state,
harmony in families and societies. She comforts the poor and moderates
the rich; she makes us humble in prosperity, cheerful in adversity,
unmoved by calumny, and above reproach; she teaches us to forgive those
who have injured us, and to be the first in asking the forgiveness of
those whom we have injured; she delights the faithful, and invites the
unbelieving; she adorns the woman and approves the man; she is beautiful
in either sex and every age.
Patience has been defined as the "courage of virtue;" the principle
which enables us to lessen the pains of mind or body; an emotion that
does not so much add to the number of our joys as it tends to diminish
the number of our sufferings. If life is made to abound with pains and
troubles by the errors and the crimes of man, it is no small advantage
to have a faculty that enables us to soften these pains and ameliorate
these troubles. He that has patience can have what he will. There is no
road too long to the man who advances deliberately and without undue
haste. There are no honors too distant for the man who prepares himself
for them with patience. Nature herself abounds with examples of
patience. Day follows the murkiest night, and when the time comes the
latest fruits also ripen. Its most beneficent operations, and those
which take place on a grand scale, are the results of patience. The
great works of human power, achieved by the hand of genius, are but
eloquent examples of what may be achieved by the exercise of this
virtue. History and biography abound with examples of signal patience
shown by great men under trying circumstances.