The first sermon in the world was preached at the Creation. It was a
Divine protest against Hurry. It was a Divine object lesson of perfect
law, perfect plan, perfect order, perfect method. Six days of work
carefully planned, scheduled and completed were followed by,—rest.
Whether we accept the story as literal or as figurative, as the account
of successive days or of ages comprising millions of years, matters
little if we but learn the lesson.
Nature is very un-American. Nature never hurries. Every phase of her
working shows plan, calmness, reliability, and the absence of hurry.
Hurry always implies lack of definite method, confusion, impatience of
slow growth. The Tower of Babel, the world’s first sky-scraper, was a
failure because of hurry. The workers mistook their arrogant ambition
for inspiration. They had too many builders,—and no architect. They
thought to make up the lack of a head by a superfluity of hands. This is
a characteristic of Hurry. It seeks ever to make energy a substitute for
a clearly defined plan,—the result is ever as hopeless as trying to
transform a hobbyhorse into a real steed by brisk riding.
Hurry is a counterfeit of haste. Haste has an ideal, a distinct aim to
be realized by the quickest, direct methods. Haste has a single compass
upon which it relies for direction and in harmony with which its course
is determined. Hurry says: “I must move faster. I will get three
compasses; I will have them different; I will be guided by all of them.
One of them will probably be right.” Hurry never realizes that slow,
careful foundation work is the quickest in the end.
Hurry has ruined more Americans than has any other word in the
vocabulary of life. It is the scourge of America; and is both a cause
and a result of our high-pressure civilization. Hurry adroitly assumes
so many masquerades of disguise that its identity is not always
recognized.
Hurry always pays the highest price for everything, and, usually the
goods are not delivered. In the race for wealth men often sacrifice
time, energy, health, home, happiness and honor,—everything that money
cannot buy, the very things that money can never bring back. Hurry is a
phantom of paradoxes. Business men, in their desire to provide for the
future happiness of their family, often sacrifice the present happiness
of wife and children on the altar of Hurry. They forget that their place
in the home should be something greater than being merely “the man that
pays the bills;” they expect consideration and thoughtfulness that they
are not giving.
We hear too much of a wife’s duties to a husband and too little of the
other side of the question. “The wife,” they tell us, “should meet her
husband with a smile and a kiss, should tactfully watch his moods and be
ever sweetness and sunshine.” Why this continual swinging of the censer
of devotion to the man of business? Why should a woman have to look up
with timid glance at the face of her husband, to “size up his mood?” Has
not her day, too, been one of care, and responsibility, and
watchfulness? Has not mother-love been working over perplexing problems
and worries of home and of the training of the children that wifely love
may make her seek to solve in secret? Is man, then, the weaker sex that
he must be pampered and treated as tenderly as a boil trying to keep
from contact with the world?
In their hurry to attain some ambition, to gratify the dream of a life,
men often throw honor, truth, and generosity to the winds. Politicians
dare to stand by and see a city poisoned with foul water until, they
“see where they come in” on a waterworks appropriation. If it be
necessary to poison an army,—that, too, is but an incident in the hurry
for wealth.
This is the Age of the Hothouse. The element of natural growth is pushed
to one side and the hothouse and the force-pump are substituted. Nature
looks on tolerantly as she says: “So far you may go, but no farther, my
foolish children.”
The educational system of to-day is a monumental institution dedicated
to Hurry. The children are forced to go through a series of studies that
sweep the circle of all human wisdom. They are given everything that the
ambitious ignorance of the age can force into their minds; they are
taught everything but the essentials,—how to use their senses and how
to think. Their minds become congested by a great mass of undigested
facts, and still the cruel, barbarous forcing goes on. You watch it
until it seems you cannot stand it a moment longer, and you
instinctively put out your hand and say: “Stop! This modern slaughter of
the Innocents must _not_ go on!” Education smiles suavely, waves her
hand complacently toward her thousands of knowledge-prisons over the
country, and says: “Who are you that dares speak a word against our
sacred school system?” Education is in a hurry. Because she fails in
fifteen years to do what half the time should accomplish by better
methods, she should not be too boastful. Incompetence is not always a
reason for pride. And they hurry the children into a hundred text-books,
then into ill-health, then into the colleges, then into a diploma, then
into life,—with a dazed mind, untrained and unfitted for the real
duties of living.
Hurry is the deathblow to calmness, to dignity, to poise. The old-time
courtesy went out when the new-time hurry came in. Hurry is the father
of dyspepsia. In the rush of our national life, the bolting of food has
become a national vice. The words “Quick Lunches” might properly be
placed on thousands of headstones in our cemeteries. Man forgets that he
is the only animal that dines; the others merely feed. Why does he
abrogate his right to dine and go to the end of the line with the mere
feeders? His self-respecting stomach rebels, and expresses its
indignation by indigestion. Then man has to go through life with a
little bottle of pepsin tablets in his vest-pocket. He is but another
victim to this craze for speed. Hurry means the breakdown of the nerves.
It is the royal road to nervous prostration.
Everything that is great in life is the product of slow growth; the
newer, and greater, and higher, and nobler the work, the slower is its
growth, the surer is its lasting success. Mushrooms attain their full
power in a night; oaks require decades. A fad lives its life in a few
weeks; a philosophy lives through generations and centuries. If you are
sure you are right, do not let the voice of the world, or of friends, or
of family swerve you for a moment from your purpose. Accept slow growth
if it must be slow, and know the results _must_ come, as you would
accept the long, lonely hours of the night,—with absolute assurance
that the heavy-leaded moments _must_ bring the morning.
Let us as individuals banish the word “Hurry” from our lives. Let us
care for nothing so much that we would pay honor and self-respect as the
price of hurrying it. Let us cultivate calmness, restfulness, poise,
sweetness,—doing our best, bearing all things as bravely as we can;
living our life undisturbed by the prosperity of the wicked or the
malice of the envious. Let us not be impatient, chafing at delay,
fretting over failure, wearying over results, and weakening under
opposition. Let us ever turn our face toward the future with confidence
and trust, with the calmness of a life in harmony with itself, true to
its ideals, and slowly and constantly progressing toward their
realization.
Let us see that cowardly word Hurry in all its most degenerating phases,
let us see that it ever kills truth, loyalty, thoroughness; and let us
determine that, day by day, we will seek more and more to substitute for
it the calmness and repose of a true life, nobly lived.