related to him the saying of a well-known politician to the same
effect--"you call that witty--I call it devilish." It is a just
description. If the report is reliable that Bismarck, even in grim
jest, spoke of truth in this sense as one of his great resources, the
confession ought to cover his name with infamy. I do not commit myself
to the statement that he ever said this; but whether he did or not, he
is credited with acting upon what is a very general impression of how
truth _may_ be used. With vast masses of people it has become
perilously like a conviction that strict integrity, while good and
desirable as an ideal, is yet too much of a risk for the purpose of
what is popularly known as practical life. The advice said to have
been given by a Yorkshireman to his son who was entering on a business
career would, I imagine, be widely acclaimed as common-sense: "Get
money; get it honestly, if you can--but get it."
We preachers tell young men that whether or not they get on in
business, they cannot afford not to go up in character; and they are
not in the world very long before they realize that its hopes in this
admonition are but inverted fears, that the shake of its head is a
scepticism which troubles not to articulate itself in words. A French
cynic counsels us to always deal with a friend to-day on the
possibility that he may be an enemy to-morrow. And there is a wide and
deeply-rooted prejudice in favour of holding the imperatives of
integrity on the same terms. Our very language in this direction
betrays us. We talk about "smart" business men, "smart" professional
men, and by the adjective we may mean men who, though "keen," are yet
honourable in their methods; or we may mean men who are just as
scrupulous as the law of the land or the arbitrary criterions of
society oblige them to be. And young men feel the impress of this
widely-shared sentiment in a way particularly vivid. They have,
indeed, small chance to escape it. The world is profuse in its
explanations of why men fail, but it has no mercy on the man who fails.
It has its cheap jargon about inheritances and environment, and then
kicks the man who is preached as their victim, into perdition. Our
operations may not be nice, but young men soon find out, or they think
they do, that it is success, not charity, which covers a multitude of
sins. Hence the new commandment: "With all thy getting, get success"--
"Get place and wealth, if possible with grace,
If not, by any means get wealth and place."
The clamant need of our day is a clear teaching that shall appeal to us
all, but especially to young men, as to what are the things that cannot
be shaken, the things inseparable from a human life that is worth
living. It is easy to part with our fine sense of integrity, but, once
it is gone, it is the hardest thing in the world to recover. There are
more senses than one in which we may speak of riches that are "beyond
the dreams of avarice." The most valuable possession any man can have
is the fight, either in his own conscience or to the world, to affirm
himself to be an honest man. And the position I shall maintain in this
address is, that there can be no sure success without honesty. Nor
shall I speak about "absolute honesty" or the "strictest honesty," for
I agree with those who say that there is but one degree of honesty. It
is not a quality with grades and modulations. As well think, or try to
think, of grades and modulations in the chastity of man and woman.
Honesty, like chastity, is, or it is not.
We are often told that, from the lowest possible commercial standpoint,
honesty is not only the best policy, it is the only policy. Whether or
not it is the only policy depends upon the meaning we import into the
term; of this I am sure--it is the best policy. But I shall not urge
this doctrine upon you from the lower standpoint. That might do more
than insult your intelligence; it would, I trust, offend against your
moral self-respect. I assume that you all would hold it true with
Archbishop Whately when he says, that though "honesty is the best
policy, he is not an honest man who is honest for that reason." If,
then, these latter remarks can carry the weight I want them to bear,
what of those that have preceded them? How are we to explain a
sentiment which is virtually a religion, having this one article for
its creed: that honesty, while good as an ideal, cannot be invariably
relied upon for practical concerns? How is it that so many men have to
discover, when they are no longer young, that the thing which has
passed from them and which they cannot recall is, after all, the one
supreme value they possessed? There are many explanations of this
tragedy, for tragedy it is, and not the least of them is, that so many
young men have but one conception, one definition of success. These
are men, and one is tempted to think at times that they are not so much
a class as a people, who want material success and seek nothing else.
They have no other standard by which to judge the thing behind the
word. Not what we are, but what we have, if the latter is substantial
and declarative, is the only idea which multitudes have of success. In
a clever character-study of a well-known public man we are told that,
"As far as he has a philosophy at all, it is this, that merit rides in
a motor-car." It is a definition which fosters the impression that
success can be secured the more quickly and surely by methods that are
bound up with smartness, chance, or luck.
It is with the last of these I would come into somewhat close quarters.
And let me admit, in the first place, that there is such a thing as
luck, using the word in its common acceptation. In what is called a
scientific treatment of the subject in hand I ought to say, as exactly
as I can, what I myself understand by luck. It will leave abundance of
room for criticism if I venture to define it--as some advantage that
comes to a man independent of his moral worth, his native gifts, or of
any equivalent he has rendered for it of industry and self-denial.
That some people have such an advantage it would be useless to deny.
Two youths, let us say, enter a business house about the same age, and
at the same time. They are, as near as can be, equally matched in
equipment to command success. In this respect there is little to
choose between them. One begins entirely on his merits; he has no
influence behind him to open doors before him as by some invisible
hand. The other has influence; no matter what it is, or how it works,
he has it, and it operates distinctly in his favour. A few years
after, and the latter has far out distanced the former in position,
salary, and outlook. And the reason is not the capacity of either; it
is the arbitrary advantage, the piece of luck that one has had over the
other from the start. "He has not much ability," I heard it remarked
lately of a young fellow who, just having been licensed to preach, had
also received a "call" to an influential church, and the remark
elicited the significant answer: "No, but whether he has ability or
not, his father has position and influence." This hints to us why
certain men, if they do not fill, yet hold the positions they do. Take
some men in high places, say in the political world. Recall a few
names, if you can, of men who have held great positions in the State
within the last quarter of a century, and does any sane person contend
that in ability they stand out sheer above ten thousand good average
men who crowd about them? I think it was Sydney Smith who said it was
about equal to being canonized to marry into certain families. And a
man would need to be a very emphasized fool quite to spoil the
advantages of a long line of position, privilege, and family ascendency.
Take, again, a more typical case of what I mean by luck. It came under
my own notice. A cloth-worker in Yorkshire, by carelessness or
inadvertence, raises the nap of a given fabric a shade above the
regulation height. He is dismissed, and the cloth is laid aside as
spoiled. A French buyer comes in the place, and casting his eyes on
it, instantly sees for it a future. That touch of heightened nap has
done it. The manufacturer has his wits about him, and what a week
before was a mistake is now a new and valuable design which, in a
couple of years, makes him what some of us would regard as a
substantial fortune. We are usually told that to admit the operation
of this questionable factor in human affairs, called chance or luck, is
inconsistent with a belief in the moral government of God, or, as we
may prefer to call it, the reign of law. If this is so, how are we to
read those old words that "chance happeneth to them all"? If we
seriously contend that everything which happens in our human life is in
accord with God's plans in us, and working through us, then I see not
how we can refuse to hold such fore-ordination responsible for the
grotesque, the irrational, the sinister, and the wicked in our actions.
I could understand the objection were it limited to Nature, because
that is a sphere in which it is the uses of things, and the uses
precisely, which are the most obvious, and these compose, when taken
together, a mighty reciprocal whole in which part answers to part,
constituting an all-comprehensive and wondrous whole. There is no
place in Nature for chance. Every particle of air is governed by laws
of as great precision as the laws of the heavenly bodies. It keeps its
appointed order, it serves its appointed ends. Nature never breaks out
of its place. It has no such power--but human nature has. Man has
enough free-will to make him responsible for what he does with it, and
in the exercise of this mighty prerogative enters the element of chance
or luck. We cannot establish free-will by rules of logic, we cannot
gainsay it on the score of conviction. It helps us to interpret the
great in human life and history, and what is sometimes even more to the
purpose, it helps us to account for the little. As it has been well
said: "It would save us much mental perplexity if we could assert
without qualification that all is law, that everything happens as God
ordains."
But God cannot make two mountains without a valley between; and He
cannot give us free-will and withhold from us at the same time the
freedom to make mistakes. The contradictions in human life do not
yield to verbal simplicities, and, whether we like it or not, we have
to acknowledge that this something called luck is a force in human
events.
But let me say, in the second place, that there is nothing more easy
than to exaggerate its extent and importance. Out of a hundred
happenings that are generally attributed to luck, if we could find the
genesis of each one and trace its evolution or unfolding, we should
probably not find more than one that could be associated with the
things that happen by chance. The case of a man who achieved what is
called a "lucky fluke" out of a piece of spoiled cloth is perhaps the
only instance of its kind on record in the history of cloth
manufacture. I have admitted that there are cases where advantage
falls to a man which cannot be explained by anything he deserves, or
has done to win it. And the advantage, such as it is, often works
untold hurt as an example. Just as the winnings of one gambler may
tempt a hundred others to their undoing, so a single case of coveted
luck is apt to encourage young men to transfer their hopes of success
in many directions, from law to luck. You see here and there a man who
accumulates a large fortune from beginnings that look as much like pure
chance as was that piece of spoiled cloth. You see men close to you
put into positions that have been secured, not by training or ability
to fill them, but by the accident of influence, or, as you may think,
by even more reprehensible methods; and your first impulse is to say
that it is not merit but luck that holds the better cards. But let the
impulse pass and bring quiet thought and good practical sense to this
problem of success in men, and you will find that the instances are
comparatively few where it is not about as wise to speak of it as luck
as it would be so to characterize the law of cause and consequence.
When you are discussing a man's success or his position, do not stop at
the mere fact that he has it--that is obvious enough; try to know how
he got it, and you may be surprised to find how little, after all, luck
has had to do with it. In one of the most quoted of our Lord's
parables we are told that "they that were ready went in to the marriage
feast." And this right of entry was not a matter of luck. They went
in because they were ready, and the others were left out because they
had made no effort to be ready. And so if you would understand a man's
success, know what he was doing while the opportunity tarried, while
his chance seemed to wait, while his "psychological moment" appeared to
linger.
Our fate or our fortune is not in great occasions; it is in our
readiness to seize the opportunities that make great occasions. We
frequently hear young men complain that they have not had a chance.
Are they always sure of that? How often is it that their chance has
been and gone, without their knowing it? "There are scores of young
fellows in our place," said a large employer of labour lately, "who
would be in vastly better positions than they are, had they worked as
hard to be ready for the better positions as they are anxious to have
them." There are multitudes of young men who appear to have lost sight
of the distinction there may be between wishing for an opportunity and
being ready to use the opportunity when it presents itself. As Sir
Frederick Treves once said to the students at the Aberdeen University:
"The man who is content to wait for a stroke of good fortune will
probably wait until he has a stroke of paralysis." He who waits for
good fortune without doing his part to make it possible, opens up the
way for lazy habits and morbid conclusions about the arrangements of
life. Luck in any serious business or profession is not so much the
coming of opportunity as readiness to make the most of the opportunity
when it comes. A man was speaking to me not long ago about one of the
leading commercial men in this city. "What is there in him or about
him to explain his success?" asked the man, and he answered his own
question with the round assertion that "it was all luck." It happened
that I had some reliable information about the man under discussion,
and I want you to have it. Thirty years ago he was working from ten to
twelve hours in the day as just an ordinary workman. At the close of
each day's toil he had his programme of studies, which, in its range
and character of the subjects attacked, would not have disgraced a good
student at any university. Eventually his attention to business and
his marked attainments won for him the recognition of his employers,
which meant in after years a place which was ultimately a leading
place, as one of them. Yet this was the man who was said to have won
his success by a lucky turn of the wheel. I admit his advantages. I
grant you that he showed himself to have brains and will above the
average endowment of these great possessions. But let me ask you to
mark this: he might have left his gifts unused, as so many of us do.
It is probably not gifts, in eight cases out of every ten, that
determine position, but our use of them. We have infinitely more in us
than our will and determination ever bring out. How few of us know the
rich things God has put in our nature; and we verily live and die in
ignorance of rare deposits of wealth because we do not work the inward
mines. This young man was wiser. He did not wait for his opportunity
to turn up, he turned up the opportunity. Because he neither slumbered
nor slept while it tarried, he was prepared to make the most of it when
it presented itself. And I am persuaded that something like this is
the true explanation of practically the whole of what thoughtless
people set down to luck. What we call fore-ordination is verily the
present which we have made out of the past. We first make habits, and
then habits make us. In our to-day walks our to-morrow, and in a very
solemn sense there is no "dead past." As it has been well said, "the
tree that falls so disastrously is no accident; it had the fall
determined a century ago in some injury it received as a sapling." [1]
There is much less luck in human affairs than is popularly supposed;
and, if there were more than there is, it would, in the next place, be
moral insanity to put our trust in it. "Nothing walks with aimless
feet." Our life is no lottery. We may make foolish experiments with
it, but we do so at our own risk. It is no plaything of chance, it is
a stern responsibility which is determined by law that brooks no
interference and excuses no indifference. The proverb tells us that
"our lot is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing is of the Lord."
And just as the dark forces that sweep through our life are not
necessarily hostile forces but form part of the order of the world, so
things that we regard as haphazard, merely cast into the lap of chance,
may be divine agents working out a marvellous equality of opportunity
throughout our human life. I affirm it without a shadow of
qualification, that chance has no place whatever in the responsible
formation of character, and the formation of character is the decision
of destiny. Beware, then, lest in playing with this _ignis fatuus_ of
chance you are trifling with law, for law will not spare you.
You young men cannot make up your mind too soon that there can be no
sure success apart from uprightness and integrity. You cannot too
early in this life settle it as an immovable truth for you, that
unswerving rectitude is not only a great and desirable ideal, it is the
only practical course you can afford to follow. Goodness, I say again,
is the only success, and I shall not try to save this statement by
fencing the word "success" with any arbitrary definition of my own. I
just mean by it what any man means by it who has a healthy moral
perception of things. Success, like honesty, has but one degree, and
as nothing is worthy to be called life which cannot be affirmed of God,
so nothing can be called success which is not the resultant of
right-doing. Every advantage which you would try to scheme or sneak or
coerce in face of the protest of conscience, has in it its own curse
and its certain defeat. Understand me: right-doing will not
necessarily help you to make a fortune or achieve some great position.
You may not have the special gifts to do either. Such gifts are
something not ourselves which we might easily have been without.
Neither religion nor morality promises to bestow these gifts, any more
than religion or morality claims to regulate the colour of our hair or
the inches of our stature. But when said, there is yet a wonderful
power in right-doing. The man who does the right because he believes
in it and loves it, whether it is called successful or not, is always
bringing out far more than he thought was in him. The faithful doing
of daily duty continually reveals opportunities which, used with
readiness and a good conscience, act upon life with a perpetual and
gracious benediction.
Then what about the end? It may seem a far-off cry to talk to you
young men about that. But the end will come, and you will need nothing
then which you do not need all the way. The end will only emphasize
the need--the need of a good conscience. The day is coming when all
tainted success will mock, as only a bad record can mock, when there is
but time left to regret, and none to retrieve the past. "I am getting
old," writes one, "and I am wealthy; but I would part with every
shilling I possess, and take my risk for bread, to be at peace with my
own conscience." Trample under your feet the immoral side of the maxim
that nothing succeeds like success. Success is not always in hitting
the things at which you aim; it is the good conscience that you are
aiming only at right things. Let your success be goodness, and
goodness will be your success. Leave luck to fools, and act as though
it had no existence. Believe that character or manhood, without which
nothing great is possible, is the content of your endowment put out to
full advantage through grace and will. Believe that every man, worthy
to be called a man, has in him the promise of the gradual supremacy of
character over the accidents and happenings of circumstances. Be,
then, your own luck. Link your life in Christ to God, and stand up to
all the world and say--
"Perish policy and cunning,
Perish all that fears the light.
Whether losing, whether winning,
Trust in God and do the right."
[1] Rev. Thomas Templeton, M.A.
A DEVIL'S TRINITY
"Know ye not that ye are a temple of God?"--I Corinthians iii. 16.
IV
A DEVIL'S TRINITY
There are expressions taken from the Bible which, by length of popular
usage, become, as it were, independent either of their setting, or of
methods of exposition. This usage has its length of days, not always
in the sense of the expression so much as in its sound. Those of you
who have been accustomed to listen to Christian preaching will have
often heard appeals to your manhood, to self-mastery, to kingship over
your habitudes, rounded off with this question: "Know ye not that ye
are a temple of God?"
In this way it has passed into what I have called popular usage. And
whatever it may be as exegesis, it is good admonition. If we may speak
of a house made with hands as a dwelling-place of the Most High, we may
also claim an equal sacredness for this mortal temple which is the
crowning achievement of His creative power. For myself, I have never
had the least sympathy with a teaching that almost amounts to a
vilification of the body, and which is at the basis of much that passes
for religion, both Christian and pagan. Our body is a gift worthy of
the Giver. We can do much to mar it in ourselves, and through us for
others. Hitherto the one perennial idolatry of the world has been
destruction; and if one thing has escaped this insanity less than
another, it is the human body. But for all that, we do not deny that a
picture may be a work of genius, because any madman could destroy it in
less time than it takes to suggest the possibility.
Much is said and written about the duality that is in us; and many of
us are Manichean without knowing technically what the term means. The
two parts in the same self are represented as East and West, and "never
the twain shall meet." We must understand, however, what we mean by
this bisection of man. Between the carnal and the spiritual there must
be no compromise and there can be no peace. But carnality is not in
the body, it is in the principle that uses the body as its medium and
expression. We say much about "sins of the flesh"; as a matter of fact
there is no such thing. Sin is, before it is wrought out through the
flesh. It is not the body that commits adultery or gets drunk, it is
the creature which owns it. The same Apostle who tells us that the
"flesh lusteth against the Spirit," also speaks about the "redemption
of the body"; which means that as the latter can be degraded, so can it
be honoured by him who uses it. Hence the people who weaken the body
to strengthen the soul begin at the wrong end. Let them guard the
life, and the strength of the body will become an agent of pleasure and
service, not of sorrow and defeat. It is surely better to ride a fine
steed well under control, than find our safety only because we mount a
hack. I have heard young men complain bitterly about the disproportion
between their bodily passions and their will-power. They overlook two
things--first, that will can be acquired, that an act of will means
more will; and, secondly, that passion in itself can be, and is
intended to be, a great and precious possession. The absence of
passion may mean an anaemia, which virtually cuts us off from some of
the finest possibilities of human life. Our bodies are part, and the
highest part, of a cosmic order which is "sinful only when it refuses
to be spiritualized." If we regard the body as an exquisite instrument
provided by our Maker for the translation of the things of the Spirit,
then so long as the Spirit working by grace is the master, we can
hardly attach too much importance to the body as a temple of God.
"If any man defile this temple," says the Apostle, "him shall God
destroy." The ways in which it can be defiled are endless, as some of
them are fatal. For my present purpose there are three which I want to
urge upon your serious consideration. I must try to compress what I
have to say about them into one address, because the first I shall
mention is something about which no clean-minded person would choose to
write or talk without having, what he conceives to be, the gravest
reasons for so doing. In this case, the fewer the words the more
effective they may be, if they arrest attention, arouse thought, and
make some headway with the conscience.