I feel almost as if I were a truant, being away from Washington to-day,
but I thought that perhaps if I were absent the Congress would have the
more leisure to adjourn. I do not ordinarily open my office at
Washington on Saturday. Being a schoolmaster, I am accustomed to a
Saturday holiday, and I thought I could not better spend a holiday than
by showing at least something of the true direction of my affections;
for by long association with the men who have worked for this
organization I can say that it has enlisted my deep affection.
I am interested in it for various reasons. First of all, because it is
an association of young men. I have had a good deal to do with young men
in my time, and I have formed an impression of them which I believe to
be contrary to the general impression. They are generally thought to be
arch radicals. As a matter of fact, they are the most conservative
people I have ever dealt with. Go to a college community and try to
change the least custom of that little world and find how the
conservatives will rush at you. Moreover, young men are embarrassed by
having inherited their fathers' opinions. I have often said that the use
of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as
possible. I do not say that with the least disrespect for the fathers;
but every man who is old enough to have a son in college is old enough
to have become very seriously immersed in some particular business and
is almost certain to have caught the point of view of that particular
business. And it is very useful to his son to be taken out of that
narrow circle, conducted to some high place where he may see the general
map of the world and of the interests of mankind, and there shown how
big the world is and how much of it his father may happen to have
forgotten. It would be worth while for men, middle-aged and old, to
detach themselves more frequently from the things that command their
daily attention and to think of the sweeping tides of humanity.
Therefore I am interested in this association, because it is intended to
bring young men together before any crust has formed over them, before
they have been hardened to any particular occupation, before they have
caught an inveterate point of view; while they still have a searchlight
that they can swing and see what it reveals of all the circumstances of
the hidden world.
I am the more interested in it because it is an association of young men
who are Christians. I wonder if we attach sufficient importance to
Christianity as a mere instrumentality in the life of mankind. For one,
I am not fond of thinking of Christianity as the means of saving
_individual_ souls. I have always been very impatient of processes and
institutions which said that their purpose was to put every man in the
way of developing his character. My advice is: Do not think about your
character. If you will think about what you ought to do for other
people, your character will take care of itself. Character is a
by-product, and any man who devotes himself to its cultivation in his
own case will become a selfish prig. The only way your powers can become
great is by exerting them outside the circle of your own narrow,
special, selfish interests. And that is the reason of Christianity.
Christ came into the world to save others, not to save himself; and no
man is a true Christian who does not think constantly of how he can lift
his brother, how he can assist his friend, how he can enlighten mankind,
how he can make virtue the rule of conduct in the circle in which he
lives. An association merely of young men might be an association that
had its energies put forth in every direction, but an association of
Christian young men is an association meant to put its shoulders under
the world and lift it, so that other men may feel that they have
companions in bearing the weight and heat of the day; that other men may
know that there are those who care for them, who would go into places of
difficulty and danger to rescue them, who regard themselves as their
brother's keeper.
And, then, I am glad that it is an association. Every word of its title
means an element of strength. Young men are strong. Christian young men
are the strongest kind of young men, and when they associate themselves
together they have the incomparable strength of organization. The Young
Men's Christian Association once excited, perhaps it is not too much to
say, the hostility of the organized churches of the Christian world,
because the movement looked as if it were so non-sectarian, as if it
were so outside the ecclesiastical field, that perhaps it was an effort
to draw young men away from the churches and to substitute this
organization for the great bodies of Christian people who joined
themselves in the Christian denominations. But after a while it appeared
that it was a great instrumentality that belonged to all the churches;
that it was a common instrument for sending the light of Christianity
out into the world in its most practical form, drawing young men who
were strangers into places where they could have companionship that
stimulated them and suggestions that kept them straight and occupations
that amused them without vicious practice; and then, by surrounding
themselves with an atmosphere of purity and of simplicity of life, catch
something of a glimpse of the great ideal which Christ lifted when He
was elevated upon the cross.
I remember hearing a very wise man say once, a man grown old in the
service of a great church, that he had never taught his son religion
dogmatically at any time; that he and the boy's mother had agreed that
if the atmosphere of that home did not make a Christian of the boy,
nothing that they could say would make a Christian of him. They knew
that Christianity was catching, and if they did not have it, it would
not be communicated. If they did have it, it would penetrate while the
boy slept, almost; while he was unconscious of the sweet influences that
were about him, while he reckoned nothing of instruction, but merely
breathed into his lungs the wholesome air of a Christian home. That is
the principle of the Young Men's Christian Association--to make a place
where the atmosphere makes great ideals contagious. That is the reason
that I said, though I had forgotten that I said it, what is quoted on
the outer page of the program--that you can test a modern community by
the degree of its interest in its Young Men's Christian Association. You
can test whether it knows what road it wants to travel or not. You can
test whether it is deeply interested in the spiritual and essential
prosperity of its rising generation. I know of no test that can be more
conclusively put to a community than that.
I want to suggest to the young men of this association that it is the
duty of young men not only to combine for the things that are good, but
to combine in a militant spirit. There is a fine passage in one of
Milton's prose writings which I am sorry to say I cannot quote, but the
meaning of which I can give you, and it is worth hearing.[E] He says
that he has no patience with a cloistered virtue that does not go out
and seek its adversary. Ah, how tired I am of the men who are merely on
the defensive, who hedge themselves in, who perhaps enlarge the hedge
enough to include their little family circle and ward off all the evil
influences of the world from that loved and hallowed group. How tired I
am of the men whose virtue is selfish because it is merely
self-protective! And how much I wish that men by the hundred thousand
might volunteer to go out and seek an adversary and subdue him!
I have had the fortune to take part in affairs of a considerable variety
of sorts, and I have tried to hate as few persons as possible, but there
is an exquisite combination of contempt and hate that I have for a
particular kind of person, and that is the moral coward. I wish we could
give all our cowards a perpetual vacation. Let them go off and sit on
the side lines and see us play the game; and put them off the field if
they interfere with the game. They do nothing but harm, and they do it
by that most subtle and fatal thing of all, that of taking the momentum
and the spirit and the forward dash out of things. A man who is virtuous
and a coward has no marketable virtue about him. The virtue, I repeat,
which is merely self-defensive is not serviceable even, I suspect, to
himself. For how a man can swallow and not taste bad when he is a coward
and thinking only of himself I cannot imagine.
Be militant! Be an organization that is going to do things! If you can
find older men who will give you countenance and acceptable leadership,
follow them; but if you cannot, organize separately and dispense with
them. There are only two sorts of men worth associating with when
something is to be done. Those are young men and men who never grow old.
Now, if you find men who have grown old, about whom the crust has
hardened, whose hinges are stiff, whose minds always have their eye over
the shoulder thinking of things as they _were_ done, do not have
anything to do with them. It would not be Christian to exclude them from
your organization, but merely use them to pad the roll. If you can find
older men who will lead you acceptably and keep you in countenance, I am
bound as an older man to advise you to follow them. But suit yourselves.
Do not follow people that stand still. Just remind them that this is not
a statical proposition; it is a movement, and if they cannot get a move
on them they are not serviceable.
Life, gentlemen--the life of society, the life of the world--has
constantly to be fed from the bottom. It has to be fed by those great
sources of strength which are constantly rising in new generations. Red
blood has to be pumped into it. New fiber has to be supplied. That is
the reason I have always said that I believed in popular institutions.
If you can guess beforehand whom your rulers are going to be, you can
guess with a very great certainty that most of them will not be fit to
rule. The beauty of popular institutions is that you do not know where
the man is going to come from, and you do not care so he is the right
man. You do not know whether he will come from the avenue or from the
alley. You do not know whether he will come from the city or the farm.
You do not know whether you will ever have heard that name before or
not. Therefore you do not limit at any point your supply of new
strength. You do not say it has got to come through the blood of a
particular family or through the processes of a particular training, or
by anything except the native impulse and genius of the man himself. The
humblest hovel, therefore, may produce you your greatest man. A very
humble hovel did produce you one of your greatest men. That is the
process of life, this constant surging up of the new strength of
unnamed, unrecognized, uncatalogued men who are just getting into the
running, who are just coming up from the masses of the unrecognized
multitude. You do not know when you will see above the level masses of
the crowd some great stature lifted head and shoulders above the rest,
shouldering its way, not violently but gently, to the front and saying,
"Here am I; follow me." And his voice will be your voice, his thought
will be your thought, and you will follow him as if you were following
the best things in yourselves.
When I think of an association of Christian young men I wonder that it
has not already turned the world upside down. I wonder, not that it has
done so much, for it has done a great deal, but that it has done so
little; and I can only conjecture that it does not realize its own
strength. I can only imagine that it has not yet got its pace. I wish I
could believe, and I do believe, that at seventy it is just reaching its
majority, and that from this time on a dream greater even than George
Williams[F] ever dreamed will be realized in the great accumulating
momentum of Christian men throughout the world. For, gentlemen, this is
an age in which the principles of men who utter public opinion dominate
the world. It makes no difference what is done for the time being. After
the struggle is over the jury will sit, and nobody can corrupt that
jury.
At one time I tried to write history. I did not know enough to write it,
but I knew from experience how hard it was to find an historian out, and
I trusted I would not be found out. I used to have this comfortable
thought as I saw men struggling in the public arena. I used to think to
myself, "This is all very well and very interesting. You probably assess
yourself in such and such a way. Those who are your partisans assess you
thus and so. Those who are your opponents urge a different verdict. But
it does not make very much difference, because after you are dead and
gone some quiet historian will sit in a secluded room and tell mankind
for the rest of time just what to think about you, and his verdict, not
the verdict of your partisans and not the verdict of your opponents,
will be the verdict of posterity." I say that I used to say that to
myself. It very largely was not so. And yet it was true in this sense:
If the historian really speaks the judgment of the succeeding
generation, then he really speaks the judgment also of the generations
that succeed it, and his assessment, made without the passion of the
time, made without partisan feeling in the matter--in other
circumstances, when the air is cool--is the judgment of mankind upon
your actions.
Now, is it not very important that we who shall constitute a portion of
the jury should get our best judgments to work and base them upon
Christian forbearance and Christian principles, upon the idea that it is
impossible by sophistication to establish that a thing that is wrong is
right? And yet, while we are going to judge with the absolute standard
of righteousness, we are going to judge with Christian feeling, being
men of a like sort ourselves, suffering the same temptations, having the
same weaknesses, knowing the same passions; and while we do not
condemn, we are going to seek to say and to live the truth. What I am
hoping for is that these seventy years have just been a running start,
and that now there will be a great rush of Christian principle upon the
strongholds of evil and of wrong in the world. Those strongholds are not
as strong as they look. Almost every vicious man is afraid of society,
and if you once open the door where he is, he will run. All you have to
do is to fight, not with cannon but with light.
May I illustrate it in this way? The Government of the United States has
just succeeded in concluding a large number of treaties with the leading
nations of the world, the sum and substance of which is this, that
whenever any trouble arises the light shall shine on it for a year
before anything is done; and my prediction is that after the light has
shone on it for a year it will not be necessary to do anything; that
after we know what happened, then we will know who was right and who was
wrong. I believe that light is the greatest sanitary influence in the
world. That, I suppose, is scientific commonplace, because if you want
to make a place wholesome the best instrument you can use is the sun; to
let his rays in, let him search out all the miasma that may lurk there.
So with moral light: It is the most wholesome and rectifying, as well as
the most revealing, thing in the world, provided it be genuine moral
light; not the light of inquisitiveness, not the light of the man who
likes to turn up ugly things, not the light of the man who disturbs what
is corrupt for the mere sake of the sensation that he creates by
disturbing it, but the moral light, the light of the man who discloses
it in order that all the sweet influences of the world may go in and
make it better.
That, in my judgment, is what the Young Men's Christian Association can
do. It can point out to its members the things that are wrong. It can
guide the feet of those who are going astray; and when its members have
realized the power of the Christian principle, then they will not be men
if they do not unite to see that the rest of the world experiences the
same emancipation and reaches the same happiness of release.
I believe in the Young Men's Christian Association because I believe in
the progress of moral ideas in the world; and I do not know that I am
sure of anything else. When you are after something and have formulated
it and have done the very best thing you know how to do you have got to
be sure for the time being that that is the thing to do. But you are a
fool if in the back of your head you do not know it is possible that you
are mistaken. All that you can claim is that that is the thing as you
see it now and that you cannot stand still; that you must push forward
the things that are right. It may turn out that you made mistakes, but
what you do know is your direction, and you are sure you are moving in
that way. I was once a college reformer, until discouraged, and I
remember a classmate of mine saying, "Why, man, can't you let anything
alone?" I said, "I let everything alone that you can show me is not
itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those
things alone that I see are going downhill"; and I borrowed this
illustration from an ingenious writer. He says, "If you have a post that
is painted white and want to keep it white, you cannot let it alone; and
if anybody says to you, 'Why don't you let that post alone,' you will
say, 'Because I want it to stay white, and therefore I have got to paint
it at least every second year.'" There isn't anything in this world that
will not change if you absolutely let it alone, and therefore you have
constantly to be attending to it to see that it is being taken care of
in the right way and that, if it is part of the motive force of the
world, it is moving in the right direction.
That means that eternal vigilance is the price, not only of liberty, but
of a great many other things. It is the price of everything that is
good. It is the price of one's own soul. It is the price of the souls of
the people you love; and when it comes down to the final reckoning you
have a standard that is immutable. What shall a man give in exchange for
his own soul? Will he sell that? Will he consent to see another man sell
his soul? Will he consent to see the conditions of his community such
that men's souls are debauched and trodden underfoot in the mire? What
shall he give in exchange for his own soul, or any other man's soul? And
since the world, the world of affairs, the world of society, is nothing
less and nothing more than all of us put together, it is a great
enterprise for the salvation of the soul in this world as well as in the
next. There is a text in Scripture that has always interested me
profoundly. It says godliness is profitable in this life as well as in
the life that is to come; and if you do not start it in this life, it
will not reach the life that is to come. Your measurements, your
directions, your whole momentum, have to be established before you reach
the next world. This world is intended as the place in which we shall
show that we know how to grow in the stature of manliness and of
righteousness.
I have come here to bid Godspeed to the great work of the Young Men's
Christian Association. I love to think of the gathering force of such
things as this in the generations to come. If a man had to measure the
accomplishments of society, the progress of reform, the speed of the
world's betterment, by the few little things that happened in his own
life, by the trifling things that he can contribute to accomplish, he
would indeed feel that the cost was much greater than the result. But no
man can look at the past of the history of this world without seeing a
vision of the future of the history of this world; and when you think of
the accumulated moral forces that have made one age better than another
age in the progress of mankind, then you can open your eyes to the
vision. You can see that age by age, though with a blind struggle in the
dust of the road, though often mistaking the path and losing its way in
the mire, mankind is yet--sometimes with bloody hands and battered
knees--nevertheless struggling step after step up the slow stages to the
day when he shall live in the full light which shines upon the uplands,
where all the light that illumines mankind shines direct from the face
of God.
[E] In the _Areopagitica_: "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered
virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her
adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to
be run for, not without dust and heat."
[F] Sir George Williams, 1821-1905, an English philanthropist, founder
of the Young Men's Christian Association.