satisfying return is open and possible to every college man bent on
doing square work. “To every man his work”; _his_ by personal
fitness; _his_ by the sense of fulfilling a divine purpose in
selecting it; _his_ in the feeling that it belongs to him! Some
men are called of God to the Christian ministry and others are no less
called of God to teach or to heal or to build. God’s calls announce
themselves in a variety of ways. The shining vision that came to Paul
on the Damascus road or the mighty spiritual impulse which visited
the heart of President Finney of Oberlin as he struggled in the woods
alone, are forms of the divine call, but there are other forms equally
valid. The call of the world’s need for some special work and your
own consciousness of power to render that service will bring you a
genuine sense of vocation as you gird yourself for it. There are many
intimations as to the place one should take and hold, which may have
all the compelling force of a vision from on high.
But to speak more closely of the matter in hand, let me name some of
the considerations which must enter into the choice of a life-work. I
can only speak in the most general way, addressing as I do young men of
varying abilities and temperaments. If one should discuss the value or
attractiveness of any particular vocation, the personal element and the
question of individual fitness would instantly come in. Some general
considerations however may prove suggestive.
It is best not to make one’s decision too early or too rigidly. The
average young man is not sufficiently acquainted either with himself
or with the vocations to make his final decision during his last year
in high school, or during his first year in college. One of the chief
values of college training is that it discovers the man to himself.
You have scarcely a bowing acquaintance with yourself when you only
know yourself as a freshman--wait and meet this same fellow within,
as a sophomore, as a junior, as a senior. There are unsuspected
capabilities in him which training and experience will bring out.
Wait also until you learn more about the vocations themselves. In
making choice of a wife it is well to become acquainted with a number
of young ladies before you settle down to an exclusive intimacy with
one. There are other girls who can look sweet and say pleasant things
too; it is not wise to fall so completely in love with the first
dainty bit of white muslin you see as to exclude other delightful
associations. The law has its attractions, so has medicine, so has
the ministry, so has the work of education, or the business career,
or the work of an architect, a chemist, or a forester. It is wise not
to conclude too early in life that the attractions of this particular
vocation shut out all the rest from consideration. Look yourself over
and look the field over with great care at least a hundred times before
making a final choice. It will be a sorry thing if you start out to
unlock the door of your future with the wrong key.
Consider the whole man in your choice. It is not simply what you carry
home in your pocket, as a result of your day’s work and of all the days
of work, but what you carry away in mind and heart as well; what you
carry away in the gratitude and appreciation of your fellow men; what
you gain in the beneficent influence you may exert upon the community
through your calling. Ten thousand a year is a splendid return from
the investment of one’s personal ability, but there are other returns
which may be added to the figures named in your contract in such a way
as to make the money consideration seem the small end of it. And there
are other returns which may make it seem as if the man who received
the ten thousand a year had worked all his life for meager pay. Many a
saloon-keeper has made ten times as much money out of his calling as
the college professor or the clergyman makes out of his, but when the
books are opened, other books as well as the cash book, the comparative
values of the vocations will stand revealed.
The young man may be doing some honest and useful work, but without the
sense of joy or pride in it. In such event it fails to render him back
a full return. The culture of one’s own best life must come with his
ordinary work or else the man is sacrificed to the profession. We are
not here to be effective machines for grinding out sermons or briefs,
operations or lectures, bargains or manufactured products: we are
here to be men, strong, fine, aspiring, and useful men. The whole man
therefore must be considered, his body, his brain, his heart, and his
soul, as well as his purse when you make selection of his life-work.
What you make out of your vocation is an important question, but what
it makes out of you is tenfold more important!
Make up your mind that in the long run your work will be estimated
by its genuine utility. Success comes not by luck, but by law. The
apparent exceptions, like four-leaf clovers, are not sufficiently
numerous to disturb the principle. It is three-leaf clover that feeds
the cows and fills the haymows. It is ordinary industry, fidelity,
persistence, and efficiency that bring the largest measure of abiding
success. Your work will be estimated by its utility in satisfying human
need.
This principle well understood, thoroughly believed, and constantly
acted upon, will be of untold value to you. Canfield says to the
young men at Columbia, “Measure your daily work by the efficiency and
completeness with which it meets the needs of your fellow men.” You
must measure it thus, for that is the way the world will estimate it.
You will not be able to live by your wits; you must live by your work
and your worth. Therefore, in making selection, consider carefully the
usefulness of the work you choose, for men are like medicines, when
they show themselves useful, they will be used.
The idea that success comes by luck or pull, or chance, is a fool’s
idea. Some such instances occur, but they are not even so common as
four-leaf clover--the man who starts out in life depending upon them is
more foolish than the farmer who would rely upon four-leaf clover for
his hay crop. And you will find as you come to live with him on close
terms that the world is a very sagacious old fellow in his estimate of
values. He has wonderful ability in discerning the real thing and in
putting away shoddy. You cannot sell him gold bricks straight along--if
now and then one is palmed off on the unwary, still they never become
a staple quoted in the market reports. Good clay bricks in the long
run are more profitable. Your work will be estimated, and estimated
accurately, by its utility in satisfying genuine human need. The
intelligent observance of this principle in making your selection will
introduce that spirit of service which ennobles the whole effort.
May your choice of vocation be so wise and right that you will be
content to have it dominate all minor matters in your life! Horace
Bushnell used to speak to Yale men about “the expulsive power of a new
affection.” The love for a pure woman making all impurity hateful and
disgusting; the love for some man of integrity making all lying and
dishonesty seem foul and mean; the love for God making all wrong-doing
repulsive! So there comes into the life, by the right choice of
vocation, a supreme interest and delight in one’s work, which drives
out all the low, cheap, mean things that would hinder it. “I am doing
a great work,” the man cries; “I am content to be absorbed in it and it
is morally impossible for me to come down to the trivial or the base.”
The famous Vienna surgeon, Dr. Lorenz, at a banquet during his visit
to this country, drank nothing but water. The man who sat next him at
table, knowing the love which so many Germans have for wine and beer,
asked the doctor if he were a teetotaler. The reply was: “I do not
know that I could be called that; I am not in any sense a temperance
agitator. But I am a surgeon and must keep my brain clear, my nerves
steady, my muscles tense.” Here spoke the voice of science on one of
its higher levels as to the effect of stimulants! Here spoke also
the voice of one who finds splendid moral culture in his devotion to
his life-work. “I am doing a great work, known on two continents and
beyond,” he seemed to say; “therefore I cannot, for the sake of an
abnormal sensation, come down to tickle my stomach, or tamper with my
nerves or drug my brain by the use of stimulants.”
Make such a selection of your life-work as will enable you to regard it
as the main expression of your spiritual life. Every man, no matter
what the special form of his employment may be, can so relate himself
to it and so strive to relate it and the results which flow from it,
to the life of the community as to make his ordinary work the main
utterance of his deeper nature. There will be the expression of his
spirituality in worship, in directly religious activity, in other forms
of effort, but the main expression should lie in that useful work which
claims six-sevenths of his time and strength.
“Give us this day our daily bread,” the Master said in the model
prayer. It ought to be the daily utterance of every serious man’s life.
Utter it with your lips alone and your body will starve to death! Utter
it with hands and brain alone, and your soul will famish! But utter
it with your entire nature, hands, brain, heart, and soul, addressing
themselves to God, to the resources God has placed at your call, and to
the need of the community for the service you can render, and then your
prayer will bring the bread which feeds the total nature up to its full
strength! Industry, intelligence and moral purpose, cooperating with
the divine bounty and with the needs of men, will work out the highest
type of character and make one’s daily employment sacramental in its
influence upon his own heart and upon the lives of others.
I have not spoken of the claims of the various vocations, but let me
utter one last word, as strong as I can make it, for the Christian
ministry. There are splendid rewards and honors to be won today at
the bar, in medicine, in the work of education, in commerce, in
manufacture, in engineering. Into all these callings strong and useful
men are going in such numbers that there is no cry of need coming back.
It is not so in the ministry. There is in every branch of the Church
and in all the states of the Union, a loud and a sore cry for young men
of sound health, good sense, trained intelligence, social sympathy,
and genuine character, to enter the ministry and furnish the moral and
spiritual leadership the country craves. Like the man of Macedonia the
modern pulpit stands up and cries, “Come over into Macedonia, and help
us.”
If I can read my Church history aright there never was a time when
the opportunities and the rewards of the ministry were so great. A
man will earn less money in the ministry than the same degree of
ability would command in other fields of labor, though congregations,
especially in cities, were never so generous with their pastors as
now. What he carries away in his purse, however, is only one of many
rewards the vocation brings. In the Church today there is liberty of
thought; in some branch of it every man desiring to aid his fellows in
doing justly, in loving mercy and in walking humbly with God, can find
a hearty welcome and a place to work. There is a wide-spread hunger
on the part of the people for a competent and helpful interpretation
of this literature in the Bible. There is a call for men who can
intelligently and effectively apply Christian principles to modern
conditions and problems. There is an abiding demand for men who can
bring the eternal verities of the Spirit before their congregations
with power, and offer strength, cheer, courage, and comfort to those
who come up weary and heavy-laden out of the work of the week.
And in return for this highest form of service any one can hope to
render to his fellows, there is a mighty tide of appreciation and
gratitude waiting to flow in upon the heart of the man who has been
doing genuine, helpful service as a minister of Jesus Christ. The field
is wide, the rewards are rich and perpetual, the opportunities are like
wide-open and effectual doors, but the strong, wise, devoted laborers
are all too few! You cannot anywhere on earth invest your life with
more satisfaction to yourself, with a greater sense of serviceableness
to your brother men, with a warmer sense of God’s own approving favor,
than in the ministry of the modern Church.
In selecting your life-work, you wish to consider the whole man, to
estimate possible success by the utility of the service rendered,
to have a vocation to which all minor interests shall bow in glad
obedience, and to make it the supreme expression of your spiritual
life! Does any work on earth so meet these requirements as does the
Christian ministry? In your individual case, if the call of God, the
recognized needs of the world, and the sense of spiritual obligation
should bear you into that vocation, you would forever thank him that
among all the good things in life he had given you the best! You
would gladly put away all the allurements which might defeat your
spiritual effectiveness! You would say, to all beholders, by sincere
and whole-hearted devotion to your calling, “I am doing a great work;
I cannot come down.”
VI
MORAL VENTURES
The old saw, “Nothing venture, nothing have,” is true in mining; the
miner who is unwilling to risk his money on a hole in the ground
without knowing what may lie at the other end of it never grows rich.
It is true in farming, for the man who is not willing to throw his seed
wheat away on an uncertainty will never reap a harvest. It is true in
business, for if no man had been willing to invest a dollar until he
had something as sure as a government bond, we would not have reached
first base yet in our commercial development. It is true in all the
finer forms of outdoor sport. The plaintive cry goes up now and then
from certain quarters against the idea of having any element of risk or
danger in college athletics--such people had better stick to ping-pong
or croquet, leaving the other games to those of us who still have a
sprinkling of red corpuscles in our veins. Nothing venture, nothing
have!
The same principle holds on the higher levels of moral life, for in
all the more heroic forms of duty there is an element of risk. There
are those who hold that right is nothing more than expediency and that
wrong is simply a bad blunder. They can make quite a showing on paper.
“Honesty is the best policy” in the long run, but it is a great deal
more than that. Genuine honesty, financial, physical, intellectual,
moral, the sort of honesty that adds two and two and gets four every
time with never a fraction more nor less, is something more than good
policy. It reaches down and takes hold of things fundamental in a way
that mere policy never does, never can. And the fact stands that the
saints and the seers, the heroes and the martyrs, the poets and the
singers who have furnished inspiration and leadership, who have kindled
the fire of moral passion in other breasts because it burned hot in
their own, have been men to whom right was more than good policy. The
moral leaders have been men who were ready to take risks in doing
certain things because they believed those things to be right.
There is a certain short story which brings this point out in telling
fashion. There was a king who lived “somewhere east of Suez, where
there ain’t no Ten Commandments and the best is like the worst.” He
was the fortunate possessor of a big stick and he wielded it with
striking success. To celebrate one of his notable victories he caused
to be made a huge, gold-plated image ninety feet high and eighteen feet
broad. He set it up out on the campus and called upon the people of his
realm to bow down and worship it. He coupled that invitation with the
stimulating announcement that if any man refused he would be cast into
a furnace of fire.
Now with that alternative in plain sight, the popular, the politic,
the expedient thing was to get down and worship the image, or at least
to go through the form. “In Rome you must do as the Romans do”--so the
moral jelly-fish who have never reached the vertebrate level are ever
saying. With a golden image ninety feet high and eighteen feet broad,
with the king leading off in the worship and all his captains and
counselors, his rulers and his governors backing him up, what could any
ordinary man do but conform!
But there in that same country east of Suez there were three young
fellows who knew about the Ten Commandments. They had learned them “by
heart” as we say, which means much more than the mere ability to reel
them off the tongue as one might repeat the multiplication table. It
was a matter of principle with them not to worship images of any sort.
When the multitude flopped down on its knees before the Thing that was
ninety feet high the three young men stood erect.
Their defiant action was promptly reported to the king, and with all
the fury of an oriental despot he caused them to be brought before
him and again threatened with the fiery furnace. Then there came from
the lips of uncalculating youth those ringing words of moral defiance
which cause the heart of every man under forty to leap, “Our God whom
we serve is able to deliver us from the fiery furnace! We believe that
he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king! _But if not_”--there
is the nub of the statement and there I want to rest my whole weight in
this address--“but if not, be it known unto thee, O king, we will not
serve thy gods!” No matter what might come, they stood ready to take
the risk of obedience to the highest they saw.
The men who are really putting the world ahead in its business methods
and in its civic affairs, in the quality of the ideals which dominate
the work of education and in the standards which obtain in society at
large, are not men who are always making shrewd calculations as to
what will be most expedient. These royal leaders of the race sitting
upon their respective thrones of spiritual usefulness endeavor to
shape means to ends. They indulge in no sort of bluster or heroics.
They seek as far as may be to avoid open disaster. They say frankly,
“We believe that this course of action will bring us out all right,
vindicating itself here and now, _but if not_,”--even though
personal loss, popular opposition and apparent defeat seem to be the
immediate result--“we will stand for the right as we see the right.”
These men ready to take risks in doing their duty in the face of heavy
odds, ready to make the moral venture of fidelity to the highest ideals
in sight, are the only men who are really worth while.
Yonder on the coast at a life-saving station a group of determined
men see a wreck off shore. They know all about the peril of the sea;
it has been their major study for years. They quietly put on their
storm clothes and their helmets, equipping themselves with all those
appliances which experience has indicated as having value. They push
their life-boat through the angry surf and are off. “We hope to bring
those imperiled passengers and sailors safe to land and to get back
ourselves,” they say; “but, if not, we go just the same. It is our
duty.”
Here in the crowded city a fireman climbs up the longest ladder
available on the side of a burning building. Through a window on the
fourth floor he catches a glimpse of the body of a woman who has been
overcome by heat and smoke. He has been thoroughly trained by years
of stern experience with city fires. He knows that the floor of that
room may drop at any moment, that, if he ventures in, he, too, may be
overcome by heat and smoke; that if he leaves his ladder for one moment
it may mean certain death. In the face of everything he climbs right in
to rescue the woman. “I hope to get out all right,” he says; “but if
not, here goes just the same. It’s my duty.”
Now the world will never be saved from its sin and shame until the rest
of us who wear no uniforms of any kind are ready for that same sort of
moral venture in the realms of business and politics, in educational
and in social life. Here and there are small groups of men entering
actively into the political life of the city, the state, the nation,
ready to know machine politicians from the inside rather than from the
outside, willing to get down and be muddied with their mud, in order
that better men and better methods may prevail. Here and there are
small groups of men who know that some of the methods in the world
of business are fatal to that larger prosperity in which all classes
may equitably share and fatal to the human values at stake. They are
not sitting on the bleachers idly criticizing the players--they are
in the game, but intent upon playing it according to finer rules
and nobler methods. They are standing oftentimes at great cost to
themselves for ideals which were not born in the counting-room, which
do not receive their most accurate appraisement from the entries in the
cash-book. These groups of idealists are not large as yet, but they
are significant--they are the hope of the nation. They are the saving
remnant in our modern Israel.
Only as men are ready to lash themselves like Ulysses of old to those
enduring principles of righteousness and honor which stand erect
like masts and sail on, no matter what alluring sirens of temporary
expediency sing along the course, shall we make moral headway or at
last make port.
You have read the history of those brave Dutchmen at the siege of
Leyden. They were besieged by the powerful army of Spain. They
were fighting for the safety of their city, for the freedom of the
Netherlands, and for those principles of civil and religious liberty
which they held dear. Unable to carry the place by assault the
Spaniards undertook to starve the Dutchmen out. The Spanish commander
demanded the surrender of the place coupled with the threat that if
his demand were refused he would starve them all to death, men, women,
and children.
The sturdy Hollanders sent back this reply--“Tell the Spanish commander
we will eat our left arms first and fight on with the right.” But as
the siege went on some of the less heroic souls finally suggested to
the governor that the food supply was very low and that it might be
well to make some compromise. “Never,” he cried; “eat me first, but do
not surrender.” They held on until finally in their desperation a few
of them stole out at night and opened the dikes to let in the Atlantic
Ocean. It might mean death to them, but it would also mean death to
their enemies. In the confusion which ensued when the enemy’s camp was
flooded, the Dutchmen had their opportunity--they rushed forth and from
apparent defeat wrested a splendid victory. The great victories by
land or by sea, in the stirring times of war or in the slower, harder
battles of peace, are won by men who stand ready for that sort of moral
venture.
The people of any state have the right--they have paid for it in
honest money--to look to the university not only for mental insight
and efficiency, but for moral energy and spiritual passion. If the
university is worthy to bear that high name it ought to be a place
where moral idealism can breathe and grow as upon its native heath.
This is thoroughly understood by all those who know the full meaning of
“higher education.”
If any of you have come up to this place of privilege merely with the
idea of being trained so that you can more successfully compete with
your fellows in feathering your own nests, making them thick and warm
and soft as untrained men might be unable to do, you would better go
home. If your associates knew that fact they would be ashamed of you.
The members of the faculty, as soon as they discover that spirit in
you, are ashamed of you. The people of the state would be ashamed of
you did they know that you were here using the privileges they have
provided in that mood. You are here to be made ready and competent to
take more steadily and more largely the risks which public service
involves.
Hundreds of people, many of them good and respectable people
too, confess themselves unable to stand up against the spirit of
self-indulgence, the worship of luxury, the fierce pursuit of things
material which are today dwarfing the souls of men in countless homes.
All the more honor to those university men and women who stand out and
bear witness to their firm confidence in the beauty of simplicity, in
the value of sincerity of soul, in the vital importance of directing
the ultimate aspirations to things spiritual!