It is the custom of grateful states and nations to present swords as
tokens of highest honor to the victorious leaders of their armies
and navies. The sword presented to Admiral Schley by the people
of Philadelphia, at the close of America's war with Spain, cost
over $3,500, the greater part of which was spent on the jewels and
decorations on the scabbard. A little more than half a century ago,
when General Winfield Scott, for whom Admiral Schley was named,
received a beautiful sword from the State of Louisiana, he was asked
how it pleased him.
"It is a very fine sword, indeed," he said, "but there is one thing
about it I would have preferred different. The inscription should be on
the blade, not on the scabbard. The scabbard may be taken from us; the
sword, never."
The world spends too much time, money and energy on the scabbard of
life; too little on the sword. The scabbard represents outside show,
vanity and display; the sword, intrinsic worth. The scabbard is ever
the semblance; the sword the reality. The scabbard is the temporal; the
sword is the eternal. The scabbard is the body; the sword is the soul.
The scabbard typifies the material side of life; the sword the true,
the spiritual, the ideal.
The man who does not dare follow his own convictions, but who lives in
terror of what society will say, falling prostrate before the golden
calf of public opinion, is living an empty life of mere show. He is
sacrificing his individuality, his divine right to live his life in
harmony with his own high ideals, to a cowardly, toadying fear of
the world. He is not a voice, with the strong note of individual
purpose; he is but the thin echo of the voice of thousands. He
is not brightening, sharpening and using the sword of his life in
true warfare; he is lazily ornamenting a useless scabbard with the
hieroglyphics of his folly.
The man who lives beyond his means, who mortgages his future for
his present, who is generous before he is just, who is sacrificing
everything to keep up with the procession of his superiors, is really
losing much of life. He, too, is decorating the scabbard, and letting
the sword rust in its sheath.
Life is not a competition with others. In its truest sense it is
rivalry with ourselves. We should each day seek to break the record
of our yesterday. We should seek each day to live stronger, better,
truer lives; each day to master some weakness of yesterday; each day
to repair past follies; each day to surpass ourselves. And this is but
progress. And individual, conscious progress, progress unending and
unlimited, is the one great thing that differentiates man from all
the other animals. Then we will care naught for the pretty, useless
decorations of society's approval on the scabbard. For us it will be
enough to know that the blade of our purpose is kept ever keen and
sharp for the defense of right and truth, never to wrong the rights of
others, but ever to right the wrongs of ourselves and those around us.
Reputation is what the world thinks a man is; character is what he
really is. Anyone can play shuttlecock with a man's reputation; his
character is his alone. No one can injure his character but he himself.
Character is the sword; reputation is the scabbard. Many men acquire
insomnia in standing guard over their reputation, while their character
gives them no concern. Often they make new dents in their character in
their attempt to cut a deep, deceptive filigree on the scabbard of
their reputation. Reputation is the shell a man discards when he leaves
life for immortality. His character he takes with him.
The woman who spends thousands in charitable donations, and is hard
and uncharitable in her judgments, sentimentally sympathetic with
human sin and weakness in the abstract, while she arrogates to herself
omniscience in her harsh condemnation of individual lapses, is
charitable only on the outside. She is letting her tongue undo the good
work of her hand. She is too enthusiastic in decorating the scabbard of
publicity to think of the sword of real love of humanity.
He who carries avarice to the point of becoming a miser, hoarding
gold that is made useless to him because it does not fulfill its
one function, circulation, and regarding the necessities of life as
luxuries, is one of Nature's jests, that would be humorous were it
not so serious. He is the most difficult animal to classify in the
whole natural history of humanity—he has so many of the virtues. He
is a striking example of ambition, economy, frugality, persistence,
will-power, self-denial, loyalty to purpose and generosity to his
heirs. These noble qualities he spoils in the application. His
specialty is the scabbard of life. He spends his days in making a solid
gold scabbard for the tin sword of a wasted existence.
The shoddy airs and ostentations, extravagance, and prodigality of some
who have suddenly become rich, is goldplating the scabbard without
improving the blade. The superficial veneer of refinement really
accentuates the native vulgarity. The more you polish woodwork, the
more you reveal the grain. Some of the sudden legatees of fortune
have the wisdom to acquire the reality of refinement through careful
training. This is the true method of putting the sword itself in order
instead of begemming the scabbard.
The girl who marries merely for money or for a title, is a feminine
Esau of the beginning of the century. She is selling her birthright of
love for the pottage of an empty name, forfeiting the possibility of a
life of love, all that true womanhood should hold most dear, for a mere
bag of gold or a crown. She is decorating the scabbard with a crest and
heraldic designs, and with ornaments of pure gold set with jewels. She
feels that this will be enough for life, and that she does not need
love,—real love, that has made this world a paradise, despite all the
other people present. She does not realize that there is but one real
reason, but one justification for marriage, and that is,—love; all
the other motives are not reasons, they are only excuses. The phrase,
"marrying a man for his money," as the world bluntly puts it, is
incorrect—the woman merely marries the money, and takes the man as an
incumbrance or mortgage on the property.
The man who procrastinates, filling his ears with the lovely song
of "to-morrow," is following the easiest and most restful method of
shortening the possibilities of life. Procrastination is stifling
action by delay, it is killing decision by inactivity, it is drifting
on the river of time, instead of rowing bravely toward a desired
harbor. It is watching the sands in the hour-glass run down before
beginning any new work, then reversing the glass and repeating the
observation. The folly of man in thus delaying is apparent, when any
second his life may stop, and the sands of that single hour may run
their course,—and he will not be there to see.
Delay is the narcotic that paralyzes energy. When Alexander was asked
how he conquered the world, he said: "By not delaying." Let us not put
off till to-morrow the duty of to-day; that which our mind tells us
should be done to-day, our mind and body should execute. To-day is the
sword we should hold and use; to-morrow is but the scabbard from which
each new to-day is withdrawn.
The man who wears an oppressive, pompous air of dignity, because he
has accomplished some little work of importance, because he is vested
with a brief mantle of authority, loses sight of the true perspective
of life. He is destitute of humor; he takes himself seriously. It is a
thousand-dollar scabbard on a two-dollar sword.
The man who is guilty of envy is the victim of the oldest vice in the
history of the world, the meanest and most despicable of human traits.
It began in the Garden of Eden, when Satan envied Adam and Eve. It
caused the downfall of man and the first murder—Cain's unbrotherly
act to Abel. Envy is a paradoxic vice. It cannot suffer bravely the
prosperity of another, it has mental dyspepsia because someone else
is feasting, it makes its owner's clothes turn into rags at sight of
another's velvet. Envy is the malicious contemplation of the beauty,
honors, success, happiness, or triumph of another. It is the mud that
inferiority throws at success. Envy is the gangrene of unsatisfied
ambition, it eats away purpose and kills energy. It is egotism gone
to seed; it always finds the secret of its non-success in something
outside itself.
Envy is the scabbard, but emulation is the sword. Emulation regards
the success of another as an object lesson; it seeks in the triumph of
another the why, the reason, the inspiration of method. It seeks to
attain the same heights by the path it thus discovers, not to hurl down
from his eminence him who points out the way of attainment. Let us keep
the sword of emulation ever brightened and sharpened in the battle of
honest effort, not idly dulling and rusting in the scabbard of envy.
The supreme folly of the world, the saddest depths to which the human
mind can sink, is atheism. He surely is to be pitied who permits the
illogical philosophy of petty infidels, or his misinterpretations of
the revelations of science, to cheat him of his God. He pins his faith
to some ingenious sophistry in the reasoning of those whose books he
has read to sum up for him the whole problem, and in hopeless egotism
shuts his eyes to the million proofs in nature and life, because the
full plans of Omnipotence are not made clear to him.
On the technicality of his failure to understand some one
point—perhaps it is why sin, sorrow, suffering and injustice exist in
the world—he declares he will not believe. He might as well disbelieve
in the sky above him because he cannot see it all; discredit the air
he breathes because it is invisible; doubt the reality of the ocean
because his feeble vision can take in but a few miles of the great
sea; deny even life itself because he cannot see it, and no anatomist
has found the subtle essence to hold it up to view on the end of his
scalpel.
He dares to disbelieve in God despite His countless manifestations,
because he is not taken into the full confidence of the Creator and
permitted to look over and check off the ground-plans of the universe.
He sheathes the sword of belief in the dingy scabbard of infidelity.
He does not see the proof of God in the daily miracle of the rising
and setting of the sun, in the seasons, in the birds, in the flowers,
in the countless stars, moving in their majestic regularity at the
command of eternal law, in the presence of love, justice, truth in the
hearts of men, in that supreme confidence that is inborn in humanity,
making even the lowest savage worship the Infinite in some form. It is
the petty vanity of cheap reasoning that makes man permit the misfit
scabbard of infidelity to hide from him the glory of the sword of
belief.
The philosophy of swords and scabbards is as true of nations as of
individuals. When France committed the great crime of the nineteenth
century, by condemning Dreyfus to infamy and isolation, deafening her
ears to the cries of justice, and seeking to cover her shame with
greater shame, she sheathed the sword of a nation's honor in the
scabbard of a nation's crime. The breaking of the sword of Dreyfus
when he was cruelly degraded before the army, typified the degradation
of the French nation in breaking the sword of justice and preserving
carefully the empty scabbard with its ironic inscription, "Vive la
justice."
The scabbard is ever useless in the hour of emergency; _then_ it is
upon the sword itself that we must rely. Then the worthlessness of
show, sham, pretence, gilded weakness is revealed to us. Then the
trivialities of life are seen in their true form. The nothingness
of everything but the real, the tried, the true, is made luminant
in an instant. Then we know whether our living has been one of true
preparation, of keeping the sword clean, pure, sharp and ready, or one
of mere idle, meaningless, day-by-day markings of folly on the empty
scabbard of a wasted life.