LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 i 
 
 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
 Presented by 
 
 V\erDe.r+ Adams Gr'ilolo 
 
 on "5 
 
 B\rT3 13^" . Vr&5 188 9 
 
 Wood, Charles, 1851-1936. 
 
 Beginning life 
 
 1#^ 
 
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BEGINNING LIFE 
 
 .i w Ph!llC£> 
 
 OCT 1 1920 
 A SERIES OF SERMONS TO THE YOUNG. 
 
 THE EEV. CHARLES WOOD, D. D. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA : 
 
 PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION 
 AND SABBATH-SCHOOL WORK, 
 
 No, 1334 CHESTNUT STREET. 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1889, BY 
 
 THE TRUSTEES OF THE 
 
 PKESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION 
 AND SABBATH-SCHOOL WORK. 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESEBVED. 
 
 Westcott & Thomson, 
 Stereotypers and Etectrotypers, Philada. 
 
DEDICATED 
 
 YOUNG PEOPLE'S SOCIETY 
 
 or 
 
 CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR 
 
 OF THE 
 
 FIRST PRESBYTERIAISr CHURCH, 
 Germantown, Philadelphia, 
 
 AND TO ALL THE YOUNG PEOPLE OF THAT CHURCH 
 AND CONGREGATION. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Is Life a Career, or a Mission ? 7 
 
 II. 
 Youth 23 
 
 III. 
 Friendships 33 
 
 IV. 
 
 What shall we Read? 49 
 
 V. 
 
 The Forming of Habits 65 
 
 VI. 
 Perpetual Youth 83 
 
 VII. 
 
 Temptation 97 
 
 5 
 
6 CONTENTS. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 PAOH 
 
 Making a Home 113 
 
 IX. 
 Strength 129 
 
 X. 
 Success 145 
 
I. 
 
 IS LIFE A CAREER, OR A MISSION? 
 
BEGINNING LIFE, 
 
 I. 
 
 IS LIPE A CAREER, OR A MISSION? 
 
 "I must work the works of Him that sent me, while it is 
 day." — John ix. 4. 
 
 THE life of Jesus Christ was pervaded with a 
 feeliug of responsibility. He spoke of himself 
 as having come to this earth on a most momentous 
 mission, and his thoughts were perpetually con- 
 centrated upon the accomplishment of it. They 
 who have entered most fully into the meaning of 
 his life have had some such feeling about them- 
 selves. His mission was infinitely more glorious 
 than theirs, or than that of any human being, 
 but all his brethren, as he calls us, must have, 
 like him, a God-given work to do. This, it must 
 be confessed, is a somewhat serious, not to say som- 
 bre, view to take of life ; it is a view that theoret- 
 ically very many, and practically very many more, 
 openly or tacitly refuse to take. Life, as they 
 look at it, is a career — something to be played 
 like a game; and he who wins, though he may 
 have broken all the rules, is to have the prize. 
 
 9 
 
10 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 This is the popular view that is spreading like a 
 contagion, and no land is more exposed than our 
 own. We have no hereditary rulers ; our ancestors 
 preserved us from ever waiting " as sycophants iu 
 the court of kings;" but we satisfy the servile 
 part of our natures by the abject homage we pay 
 success. The smart man, the man who gets on, 
 who does what he sets out to do iu whatever way, 
 is getting to be our national hero. Hereditary 
 position and wealth count for less here than in 
 England, but the self-made man, the man who 
 lifts himself above his fellows and wrings a fort- 
 une from the hands of reluctant Fate, is the one 
 before whom Liberty herself would uncap if her 
 helmet were not riveted to her beautiful head. 
 
 I shall make no effort at this time to overturn 
 this theory by weight of argument ; I shall rather 
 attempt to displace it by causing some of the fig- 
 ures most prominent in the English-speaking world 
 to pass before you, and as you see that they have 
 each broken away from or outgrown the concep- 
 tion of life as a career, you may come to see as 
 they saw that life is a mission. I am encouraged 
 in this attempt by the fact that this audience is so 
 largely made up of the young, for, as the rabbis 
 say, " to teach wisdom to the old is to write it in 
 water; to teach it to the young is to grave it on 
 stone." 
 
 Let me hold before you, first, as a sort of back- 
 ground for my dissolving- views, the form of one 
 
IS LIFE A CAREER, OR A MISSION f 11 
 
 wlio uover rose above the conception of life as a 
 career, and who would have been, if that definition 
 were correct, a most brilliant success. Eleven years 
 ago, in the vestibule of the English House of Com- 
 mons, I saw a man of sphinx-like face gazing, 
 with a score or more dignified companions, at a 
 statue of some famous statesman that had just 
 been put in place. This man at whom we were 
 looking was at that time on the crest of the wave ; 
 a man of fashion, a writer of sensational melodra- 
 matic novels, a member of Parliament hissed back 
 into his seat after his first speech, the leader of his 
 party, the prime minister of the realm, an earl, and 
 is still, a decade after his death, a popular idol ; and, 
 withal, a Hebrew. No such phenomenon had ever 
 before appeared in English history. He was a 
 nimble matador, fastening his darts in the necks 
 of his enraged adversaries as they rushed upon him 
 while he stepped aside with a light laugh, half at 
 them and half at himself. This winner of all the 
 honors must have died a disappointed man, for it is 
 doing him no injustice, if one may judge from all that 
 he ever said or did, to say that he lived for power 
 and thought the man either a fool or a hypocrite who ' 
 professed any less earthly motive ; and power was 
 the one thing that he lost before his death. He was 
 no longer prime minister : his hated rival had the 
 rank that was heaven to him. Life as a career even 
 the marvelous Hebrew would probably have pro- 
 nounced a failure. 
 
12 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 Compare this life with that of another English 
 earl covering almost the same decades. No high of- 
 fice was his, but he was an enthusiast in doing good. 
 There was scarcely a society, philanthropic or Chris- 
 tian, in all London that could not count on his sup- 
 port. All the downtrodden and oppressed felt that 
 he was their friend. Multitudes are living happier, 
 nobler lives to-day because of Shaftesbury. Where 
 is there one nobly inspired by the brilliant statesman, 
 the unrivaled organizer of dramatic international 
 councils ? 
 
 Standing only a few feet away from the Hebrew 
 earl that afternoon in the vestibule of the House of 
 Commons was a man of a very different type. He 
 was then supposed to be suffering from the defeat 
 that had carried himself and his party out of power, 
 but his influence had never been greater, and the 
 real work of his life was being carried on as quietly 
 and as successfully as if those adverse votes had never 
 been cast. Even as a boy he was so remarkable, 
 both intellectually and morally, that a young Eaton 
 lad now famous as the late dean of the Abbey was 
 taken to see him as a reward for well-doing. He 
 grew steadily upon the world till by almost com- 
 mon consent among his kin beyond the sea he is 
 known as the greatest of living Englishmen. He 
 too, like the Hebrew earl, has held his honors lightly, 
 though not for the same reasons. He has gone from 
 cabinet meetings where the destiny of a continent 
 was decided, to pray with some dying laborer on his 
 
IS LIFE A CAREER, OR A 3IISSI0N? 13 
 
 estate. He has probably accepted gladly the great 
 offices to which he has been called, but he has never 
 forgotten that his real mission here, like that of 
 every other true man, is to work the works of Him 
 that sent him. The success of both these lives is 
 beyond us, but not the eagerness for it of the one 
 or the comparative indiiference to it of the other. 
 The fidelity to a high ideal that makes one of these 
 lives so admirable is not beyond the reach of the 
 very humblest. 
 
 Not unworthy to be mentioned in the same breath 
 with the great statesman and the Christian apologist 
 is the gray-haired, silver-tongued orator of the So- 
 ciety of Friends. Perhaps he was the truest and 
 most hopeful friend we had in England during our 
 war. He looked across the sea in the dark hour 
 when Northern armies were thrown back broken 
 and discouraged, and through the smoke of the con- 
 flict he saw the o-lowino; vision of '^one vast confede- 
 ration stretching in an unbroken line from the frozen 
 North to the glowing South and from the wild bil- 
 lows of the Atlantic w- estward to the calmer waters of 
 the Pacific main ; and I see,^^ said he, " one people and 
 one language and one law and one faith over all that 
 wide continent, the home of freedom and the refuge 
 of the oppressed of every land and of every clime.'' 
 On the morning of the first day of each Aveek he 
 takes his place with a little company in sombre garb 
 whose worship of God is mostly of the silent sort, 
 but his, at least, is so sincere that more than once he 
 
14 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 has followed his convictions concerning war and 
 peace, out of office into obscurity as great as is possi- 
 ble for such a man. It has been altogether impos- 
 sible for him to accept any position, however honor- 
 able, that would hinder his doing as he understands 
 it ^Hhe works of Him that sent him/' 
 
 " If I could choose my lot in life,'' said one idler 
 to another, '' I would be an English duke." The 
 possibilities open to one born in that position are 
 somewhat dazzling. Apparently, such a one has 
 only to close his fingers upon the prizes that fall un- 
 sought into his palms. Like one of our rich men's 
 sons, who has no need to do anything if he has no 
 wish to be anything but a rich man's son, he has no 
 need to exert himself if he does not Avish to be any- 
 thing but a duke. But even men who have inherited 
 a career so brilliant have not ignobly contented 
 themselves with it, but have felt that they too were 
 called to work the works of Him that sent them into 
 the ducal palace. There is a duke allied by marriage 
 to the English queen upon whom I ask you to look, 
 not because of the splendor of his rank or of 
 the glory reflected from the crown, but because his 
 view of life is that of a responsible mission which 
 it has been his purpose to accomplish in a way pleas- 
 ing to his Master. No small portion of his life has 
 been devoted to diligent study of nature and of law. 
 No better exposition of the reign of Law has been 
 given than his. Convinced of the unseen Presence 
 everywhere, it has been his effort to show how 
 
IS LIFE A CAREER, OB A MISSION? 15 
 
 ** The whole round eartli is every way 
 Bound by gold cliains about the feet of God." 
 
 The qualities which make him most admirable, his 
 fidelity, his devotion to duty and truth, are within 
 the reach of the humblest mechanic and clerk. The 
 virtues which sliine so brightly to men's eyes when 
 they are exhibited by those of exalted rank shine as 
 brightly in God's eyes when set in the most lowly 
 surrouudings. The same "■ Well done !" is to be 
 spoken at last to all good and faithful servants, 
 whether they come from the hills or from the valleys 
 of earth. 
 
 It is openly asserted that Christianity has lost its 
 grip on the thinking men of these modern times. 
 An English poet who gives voice to many thoughts 
 that are in the air depicts this age as one of transi- 
 tion. He finds himself, he says, 
 
 " Wandering between two worlds, 
 One dead, the other powerless to be born." 
 
 The leaders of thought are dumb; they have no 
 fair visions to w^iich to point ; they have no high 
 calls to go in and possess the land of promise ly- 
 ing within sight. 
 
 "Achilles ponders in his tent ; 
 
 The kings of modern thought are dumb : 
 Silent they are, though not content, 
 
 And wait to see the future come — 
 v^ilent while years engrave the brow. 
 Silent ! the best are silent now." 
 
16 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 But I see an old man who has long swayed the 
 destinies of England rising in his place in the House 
 of Commons, and in the great hush that comes upon 
 that assembly and the whole English-speaking world 
 when he speaks, I hear him say, " I believe in God 
 the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, 
 and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord." By 
 his side stands the silver-tongued orator of England, 
 and with him are the scientific duke and the poet-lau- 
 reate and the most thoughtful of all the poets of our 
 time, and they too repeat their creed : ^' We believe 
 in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and 
 earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord." 
 Ah, no ! The best are not all silent now. 
 
 Life may be a meaningless career, as it has been, 
 and is, to vast multitudes ; it may be a most signifi- 
 cant and exalted mission. It is very much what 
 we make of it. It is told of a witty dean that, ar- 
 riving somewhat prematurely one evening at a re- 
 ception, he was the first to enter the great drawing- 
 room hung on every side with mirrors, and, seeing 
 his own form reflected everywhere, he rubbed his 
 hands and said, " Ah ! a gathering of the clergy, I 
 see !" So men come into life where there are great 
 reflectors on every side. The avaricious man rubs 
 his hands and says, " Ah ! a gatliering of money- 
 getters, I see !" The ambitious man rubs his hands 
 and says, " Ah ! a gathering of place-hunters, I 
 see !" The lotus-eater rubs his hands and says, 
 *' Ah ! a gathering of pleasure-seekers, I see !" and 
 
IS LIFE A CAREER, OR A MISSION? 17 
 
 the cynic rubs his hands and says, ^^ Ah ! a gather- 
 ing of apes, I see, making faces at one another !" 
 while the true-hearted man rubs his hands and snys, 
 *^ Ah ! a gathering of men, I see !" As Lowell says, 
 
 " Be noble, and the nobleness that lies 
 Sleeping in other men, but never dead, 
 Will rise in majesty to meet thine own." 
 
 Let life be for you a high and holy embassy, and 
 you will find multitudes as eager as yourself to work 
 the works of Him that sent them. 
 
 There are but two essentials for a truly successful 
 life. The first of these is nobleness of ideal. Fol- 
 low anything but the highest and best, and your 
 work will be needlessly faulty. High above the 
 fair city on the Arno, near the church of San Min- 
 iato, stands Michael Angelo's statue of David. To 
 the untrained eye it is one of his masterpieces, but 
 artists tell us it is the least perfect of anything he 
 has left us. The story is that Angelo in an unfort- 
 unate moment accepted the partly-executed design 
 of another, of course inferior, sculptor, and, though 
 possessed of almost more than human skill, he was 
 never able to overcome those faults that could only 
 have been escaped by destroying utterly the imper- 
 fect design. Accept any merely human model as 
 your ideal of the perfect life, and you will never at- 
 tain to that which was possible to you ; accept the 
 perfect mau Christ Jesus as the ideal toward which 
 you wish to work and into which you wish your 
 2 
 
18 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 life to come, and nothing can prevent your success. 
 You shall be satisfied at last^ for you shall be trans- 
 formed into that likeness. The work of each day 
 will fit easily into the great purposes of your life ; 
 you will have no desire to escape from your present 
 lot into another more advantageous, but your desire 
 will be to do what you have to do unto his glory. 
 You will see how true it is, as Herbert says, 
 
 " All may of Thee partake ; 
 Nothing can be so mean 
 That with this tincture, ' For thy sake,' 
 Will not grow fair and clean. 
 
 " A servant with this clause 
 Makes drudgery divine ; 
 Who sweeps a room as to thy laws 
 Makes that and th' action tine." 
 
 The moment Christ becomes your ideal you will 
 hear him teaching you that to be his disciple it is 
 not necessary to do singular things : It Is only neces- 
 sary "to do common things singularly well.'' 
 
 The second essential to make this mission we call 
 life a successful one is steadfastness of purpose. 
 Conquerors are men who have given and taken 
 hard blows. On their knees in the dust one mo- 
 ment, before their adversary can cry " Surrender !'' 
 they are up again and ready to charge. General 
 Grant used to say there was a time In every hard- 
 fought battle when both sides were beaten ; the 
 commander who strikes the first hard blow after 
 
IS LIFE A CAREER, OR A 31138 f ON f 19 
 
 that wins the battle. The man who is easily dis- 
 couraged, who believes the first person who says, 
 " You'll never amount to anything," and either 
 gets out of* the fight altogether or gives only half- 
 hearted blows, certainly never will amount to very 
 much. But the man who is determined, who ex- 
 pects to get a good many hard knocks and some 
 severe wounds, and who knows how to die, but not 
 how to retreat or surrender, is sure in the end to 
 win if he is fighting on the right side — on God's 
 side. Are you down now? Are you out of work ? 
 Are you thoroughly discouraged ? Dou't give up ! 
 I saw a list the other day of our most successful 
 business-men, and in almost every instance you had 
 only to go back ten, fifteen or twenty years to find 
 these very men, now on the crest of the wave, in 
 the trough of the sea. They wouldn't be beaten, 
 and so they couldn't be. 
 
 " The heights by great men reached and kept 
 Were not attained by sudden flight, 
 But they, while their companions slept, 
 Were toiling upward in the night." 
 
 Have no fear of the night. Christ, your Brother, 
 waits for you there in the darkness, and he will lead 
 you, if you trust him, safe through to the light be- 
 yond. Let your ideal of life be that of a high and 
 holy mission. Set yourself determinedly to work 
 the w^orks of Him who sent you, wheresoever 
 you are and in the midst of whatever discourage- 
 
20 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 ments, aud it needs even now no prophet to write 
 your epitaph. The world may never think you 
 a brilliant success ; but when you die, ^'all nature 
 will rise up and say, This was a man/^ and those 
 who knew you best will say, "This was a Chris- 
 tian man." And Christ has promised that he will 
 have something to say to such a one that will thrill 
 the soul as all the honors of the court and the camp 
 and the forum never could. 
 
II. 
 
 YOUTH. 
 
11. 
 
 YOUTH. 
 
 " Let no man despise thy youth." — 1 Tim. iv. 12. 
 
 YOUTH is in danger of having contempt put 
 upon it by those who are young and wish they 
 were older, and those who are old and wish they 
 were younger. They who have it are tempted to 
 underestimate a familiar possession, as they who 
 have it no longer are tempted to belittle that which 
 is for ever beyond their reach. Timothy, like all 
 youthful teachers, was exposed to the possibility 
 of being unappreciated by those of his own age 
 and ignored by those who were no longer young ; 
 Timothy himself is in danger of falsely appraising 
 that for which even Paul seems to offer an indirect 
 apology, and of sometimes wishing he were not em- 
 barrassed by such riches. Nothing makes a young 
 person blush so quickly as to be charged with youth. 
 Probably every young man wishes himself older as 
 fervently as most old men wish themselves younger. 
 Not till we pass through youth and look back upon 
 it do we see how very far indeed it was from being 
 a despicable epoch in our lives. Youth is like a 
 picture from which we must be removed, a little 
 
 23 
 
24 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 way, at least — if we would see It properly. '' Happy 
 are the yoiiDg, for they have life before them/^ we 
 are sure must have been said by a man who was 
 thus removed by the consciousness of swiftly-coming 
 old age. 
 
 " There are gains for all our losses, 
 There are balms for all our pains ; 
 But when youth, the dream, departs, 
 It takes something from our hearts, 
 And it never comes again." 
 
 What prodigals we all are in youth ! We spend 
 like princes, as if we had royal treasuries to draw 
 from. What spendthrifts we are of time ! Our 
 only question concerning it is how we shall pass it 
 most quickly and pleasantly by. A queen proifers 
 her realm for an inch of time, and the youth flings 
 away with a light heart the small coin of days and 
 weeks and the larger pieces of months and years. 
 We laugh at the clock and statistics and preachers 
 when we are young. Nothing seems to us so ab- 
 surd as the undeniable proofs they give us that after 
 a decade or so of years this youth that we have ac- 
 customed ourselves to think of as belonging to us, 
 like our names or our physiognomies, will be ours no 
 longer, and we shall be old then like those people 
 who we think were probably always venerable. 
 AVe can more easily think of ourselves as wanting 
 anything else than time. Youth has such a way of 
 prolonging years into cycles ! Perhaps even the 
 queen who bid so high for that single inch of time 
 
YOUTH. 25 
 
 was once young, and had, as you have now, more 
 of it at her disposal than she knew what to do with. 
 
 What a spendthrift youth is of health ! A pe- 
 rennial spring it seems of an inexhaustible supply. 
 Only at dawn and in the early morning the fabled 
 fountain of Ammon overflowed, but this fountain 
 bubbles and leaps and shoots high its waters all the 
 long day of youth. What wonder that like careless 
 servants we should let the waters waste, too ind lifer- 
 ent to husband that which we think limitless ! What 
 would not the old man give for even a few drops 
 of those waters he scattered in youth ! All your 
 wealth then will not seem to you an exorbitant price 
 for that of which you think now as without value. 
 More than Lucullus ever spent on any of his ban- 
 quets hard-headed business-men stand ready to pay 
 for a single meal of the simplest sort eaten with the 
 appetite of health. They are almost ready to barter 
 any hopes they may have had of a paradise of un- 
 ending delights for a day of such fresh, keen joy 
 as they had almost too many of in their youth. 
 
 What a spendthrift youth is of hope ! Its exag- 
 gerated vision brings everything easily within the 
 range of the possible. All these graduates who 
 will emerge this spring from our twelve universi- 
 ties and three hundred and thirty-three colleges 
 know just how to set the rivers on fire; and if it 
 is worth Avhile, they will do it. They will put 
 right the times that are out of joint. The world 
 has waited for them with surprising and commend- 
 
26 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 able patience, but the world shall find that it did 
 well in waiting. "Youth faces the sun, and all 
 the shadows fall behind out of sight." Why croak 
 about them? Why not forget that there are any 
 shadows? Alas that even such apparently inex- 
 haustible treasures should at last fail — that they 
 who once saw everything rose-tinted should come 
 at last to see everything in a cold hard light whose 
 rays are like javelins stabbing every hope dead at 
 the moment of its birth ! 
 
 What a spendthrift, too, youth is of opportuni- 
 ties ! They are so bewilderingly abundant ! Any 
 effort to seize them is like plucking flowers in an 
 interminable garden. There are beds everywhere 
 as far as the eye can reach, and each bed seems 
 more beautiful than the other. Why stop here 
 rather than there? Just as the hand is about to 
 gather one the eye catches a glimpse of another more 
 exquisite still. So at last with empty hands the 
 exit is reached. They are very young indeed who 
 do not look back already to other days when there 
 were many things that might have been could they 
 but have brought themselves to take the opportu- 
 nity that was oifered, but it seemed so improbable 
 that other opportunities still more desirable would 
 not, and that very soon, come within reach, that for 
 the most part they were allowed to slip by, often 
 without any recognition whatever. 
 
 " Ah ! five and twenty years ago 
 Had I but planted seeds of trees, 
 
YOVim. 27 
 
 How now I should enjoy their 
 Shade, and see their fruit 
 Swing in the breeze !" 
 
 Most fortunate man was that poet if he had noth- 
 ing more serious to lament than that. There are 
 very few whose memory takes them back even half 
 the five and twenty years who cannot see many 
 places where, through neglect on their part, much 
 sadder mistakes were made. " Had we/' they say, 
 " but studied in school or in college, w hat an edu- 
 cation we might have had ! Being educated, what 
 might we not have accomplished ! Had we been 
 industrious in that first position we got in the store, 
 we might have stayed there to this day, and been 
 promoted as rapidly as some we know. Had we 
 resisted this appetite that now cries with loud voice 
 almost ceaselessly for gratification, it might long 
 ago have been quieted or hushed altogether. Had 
 we but begun at this or that epoch to live as we feel 
 now, and as we felt then we ought to live, by this 
 time a good life, an open, aggressive Christian life, 
 would have become almost a second nature to us, and 
 the agonies through which, as we imagine,' at least, 
 we must now pass before we can enter on such a 
 life would have been avoided altogether.'^ 
 
 Youth is rich, too, in fancy. There are no col- 
 ors on the painter's palette like those with which 
 youth transforms this sombre world. It is optim- 
 istic, or should be. It has high aspirations and 
 no doubts of their realization. It is a time of im- 
 
28 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 pressions — of first impressions. The world is all 
 new. Its joys and its sorrows alike come with the 
 dew on them. A word, a gesture, a look, are pho- 
 tographed on the sensitized plate that youth keeps 
 always exposed, and half a century hence the lines 
 made in that minute fragment of a moment will 
 still be as clear as on the first day. There are im- 
 pressions traced long ago on your soul that you 
 would willingly erase. You can forget many things 
 with only too great ease. The book you read, the 
 scenes you saw, the conversation you heard, yester- 
 day, are already gliding into that mist that swarms 
 with dim and vanishing outlines ; but the book you 
 read, the scenes you saw, the conversation you heard, 
 twenty or fifty years ago are as distinct as if but an 
 hour had passed. The same events could not cut 
 themselves as deeply now into your memory. The 
 material has hardened. It is crossed and recrossed 
 with lines, and the cut must be very sharp and deep 
 indeed to stand out clear and distinct now after 
 many days. It goes without saying that youth is 
 the time when one should most hesitate to expose 
 one's self to undesirable impressions. 
 
 Youth is as impulsive as it is impressionable. 
 " The heart controls in youth ; in manhood the 
 head takes the lead.'' It would be sad for the 
 world if the epoch of impulse were altogether 
 omitted. There would be few mistakes certainly 
 if we were all born into that period where the head 
 takes the lead, but there would as certainly be few 
 
YOUTH. 29 
 
 heroic deeds that send the blood rushing with almost 
 dangerous rapidity through the veins, and that give 
 even the dull-eyed a glimpse of " the far-off land 
 of beauty and of goodness.'^ It is to the young 
 the world looks to have her cold old heart warmed 
 now and then by some chivalric act, by some splen- 
 did exhibition of valor and of self-sacrifice. It is 
 to the young, an old man says, the worl<l must look 
 for even intellectual quickening. " New ideas build 
 their nests," he says, " in young brains." "" Revo- 
 lutions are not made by men in spectacles, and the 
 whisperings of new truths are not caught by those 
 who begin to feel the need of an ear-trumpet." 
 The outward change, the dimmed eye, the wrinkled, 
 colorless cheek, the trembling hand, have ordina- 
 rily their counterpart within. Neither heart nor 
 brain can escape the shriveling touch of old age. 
 As we grow old we become stolid, and it is scarcely 
 worth while for a great thought or a fine impulse 
 to visit us then for the first time and run the risk 
 of being refused admission as a stranger or of being 
 turned out ignominiously as a disturber of the peace. 
 No man in England over forty years of age, it is 
 said, could be persuaded at the time it was made 
 that Harvey's discovery of the circulation of tlie 
 blood was anything but a plausible theory of an 
 ignorant quack calculated to deceive only the super- 
 ficially educated. " New ideas build their nests in 
 young brains." 
 
 Youth is the age of faith — of credulity, if you 
 
30 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 please. No Munchausen tale can be too marvelous 
 for its digestion. The wonders of the Arabian Nights 
 are not half wonderful enough for its appetite. It 
 has no experience from which to build a conception 
 of the ordinary or the possible. It must, therefore, 
 believe what it hears and reads. Every man is re- 
 ceived at his own appraisement by the young. If 
 he claims to know everything and to be able to do 
 anything, youth has no inclination or reason for dis- 
 puting his most colossal assumptions. A difference 
 of six months in age, of an inch in stature, is sufficient 
 to make a hero of the older and larger boy for the 
 younger and smaller. Kings do not so overwhelm us 
 in middle life as the big boy in youth. Every child's 
 father is the strongest and wisest and best man in 
 all the world, from whose hand it is almost as easy 
 to take a creed as to take an apple. The most stu- 
 pendous statements are swallowed with nearly as 
 great ease as is the most luscious fruit. Fathers 
 who believe anything themselves are criminally care- 
 less if they do not make wise use of this receptive 
 period to write their own faith indelibly on the 
 child's heart. 
 
 Youth is like a fair uuwalled city open to the 
 enemy on every side. Its very virtues are like or- 
 namented terraces, concealing enemies in their ap- 
 proach and serving, when skillfully used by an adroit 
 foe, as breastworks affording the most complete pro- 
 tection from the missiles of the beleaguered. With 
 what Satanic ingenuity has each of those qualities 
 
YOUTH. 31 
 
 that make youth most attractive been used to ac- 
 complish its ruin ! 
 
 But youth is by no means an unmixed aggrega- 
 tion of virtues. It has weaknesses somewhat pecu- 
 liar to itself, as well as numerous others that are the 
 common inheritance of humanity at every epoch. 
 Curiosity, while not confined to youth, is supposed 
 to be most vigorous then. Pandora was very young 
 when her curiosity got the better of her and she 
 lifted the lid of the forbidden jar and filled the world, 
 the legend says, with all the ills that trouble men 
 and make them sometimes doubt whether life is 
 worth living. It is in youth that we are most 
 tempted to follow Pandora's example and fill our 
 lives with evils that can never be gathered up again 
 and thrust back into the jar whose lid should not 
 have been disturbed. Where is the man who as a 
 boy was content till he had made himself half sick 
 with a cigar, or had burnt his tongue with fire-water, 
 or had defiled his lips with an oath, "just to see 
 how it would seem '' to do those things that he saw 
 other half-grown boys and men doing ? " You 
 ought to try it and see what it's like " is the com- 
 monest, and not infrequently the most effective, form 
 of temptation with which youth is allured into the 
 paths whose end is disappointment and pain and 
 death. 
 
 There are stronger desires as well that are not 
 satisfied with a sip and a taste. Neither are thpse 
 coarse appetites frightened into silence when the 
 
32 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 air is filled with flying terrors that should never 
 have been let loose. The most destructive exhi- 
 bition of passion in the world's history has been 
 by young men. Paris was young when to grat- 
 ify a whim he plunged Greece and Troy into a 
 merciless war. Antony was young when he sac- 
 rificed an empire for a few days of sensuous joy. 
 Napoleon was young when he shook every throne 
 and laid every capital of Europe under tribute 
 to gratify his insatiable ambition. Even Renan 
 warned the students of Paris the other day not to 
 let the strong desires of youth raise up for them 
 ghosts to fill the air with their maledictions. 
 
 Youth should be — must be — the time of decision. 
 You are the prize, young men and maidens, for 
 which hosts contend. The aged for the most part 
 are already apportioned, but both Folly and Wis- 
 dom lift up their voices and plead with you. You 
 cannot be long undecided. You will consent to be 
 led in the mad dance of death or straight forward 
 on paths of pleasantness and peace. This is a time 
 of would-be procrastination. You wish to wait. 
 You are trying to conjugate every verb in the fu- 
 ture. You like to say what you will do after a 
 few months or years. But God is pressing you by 
 every high and holy motive to make your decision 
 now for truth and righteousness and Christ. Then 
 you will be a divinely-directed soul, and the promise 
 of youth shall be fulfilled in a useful manhood, an 
 honored old age and an eternity of unspeakable joy. 
 
III. 
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. 
 
III. 
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. 
 
 " A man that hath friends must show himself friendly ; and 
 there is a Friend that sticketh closer than a brother." — Prov. 
 xviii. 24. 
 
 THERE are cold-blooded batrachian creatures 
 who have no desire for friends. " We can do 
 very well," they say, '' without any such sickly 
 sentimentality as that form of selfishness that masks 
 itself under the romantic guise of friendship. It is 
 well enough for very young people,'^ they sneer, 
 *Ho swear eternal fealty to one another in an oath 
 that may be sacredly kept till the crescent moon that 
 witnessed it becomes a completely rounded circle, 
 but men who have cut their wisdom-teeth see that 
 that sort of thing is dangerous business." 
 
 When you let outsiders get too far into your life, 
 you have put yourself in their hands and you are 
 at their mercy. You have doubled the complica- 
 tions and cares of life. You must look out now not 
 only for yourself, but for that much-less-to-be- 
 trusted second self who may unmake you by an un- 
 thinking admission or a designed disclosure. The 
 best of friends are broken reeds that are bound sooner 
 
 35 
 
36 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 or later to pierce the hand that leans upon them, 
 and friends of the average sort are like sand between 
 the teeth ; the sooner you get rid of them, the better. 
 This is a very uninviting account to give of a re- 
 lation about which so many fine things have been 
 said, but the men who give it us are not ordinarily par- 
 ticularly fine men. They talk as Guy Fawkes and 
 his accomplices might have done ; and if their great 
 purpose in life resembles in any way that of Fawkes, 
 they are justified in being as chary as he of friend- 
 ships and confidences. The young rarely suffer 
 from such aggravated attacks of misanthropy. A 
 young person's heart is said to be " like a child's 
 mouth, into which everything is put." They are 
 as eager for friendships as for candies and cakes 
 and ices, and are as ready in one case as the other 
 to accept very poor imitations in place of the pure 
 article. They do not always know the difference. 
 Did not your father and mine understand this? 
 Else why did they warn us, when we went to the 
 school or the college or the store, to make haste 
 slowly in our friendships ? They may have forgot- 
 ten that Shakespeare ever said, 
 
 " But do not dull thy palm with entertainment 
 Of each new-hatched, unfledged comrade." 
 
 They may not even have had in mind the warnings 
 Solomon sprinkled thick amongst his proverbs for 
 those who have clasped hands and exchanged vows 
 with strangers ; they were speaking altogether from 
 
FRIENDSHIPS. 37 
 
 observation and experience, but that did not make 
 their words any less pointed and weighty. 
 
 That we did not take their warnings as much to 
 heart as we miglit have done was natural too : our 
 pride was a little hurt that it was thought possible 
 for us to be so easily deceived as to make such warn- 
 ings necessary. It was hurt a little more at the in- 
 sinuation that our friendship was not such a suffi- 
 cient prize in itself as to make it necessary to suggest 
 some ulterior motive in the professed seekers of it. 
 And when the warning was directed toward friends 
 we had already made, it took on a still less attractive 
 form. How unkind it seemed to arouse suspicion 
 of one so fair of face and form and speech and man- 
 ner, so witty and wise, as our dearest friend ! How 
 unfair to presume that if there was anything wrong 
 we who knew him so well would not have discovered 
 it ! What young David Copperfield has ever had a 
 doubt of the Steerforths till suggested, and has not 
 spurned it then ? Where are the young men and 
 the young maidens who believe for a moment that 
 the citadel of their lives may be in greatest danger 
 from attacks made under the guise of friendship, 
 and that the great tempter may use their friend as 
 hunters use the decoy elephant to lead his unsuspi- 
 cious acquaintances, with many a caress of his pro- 
 boscis, straight to the traps arranged for them ? If 
 the elephants were on their guard, they would very 
 quickly detect these frauds ; and if you were on your 
 
38 BEOINNINO LIFE. 
 
 guard, you would very quickly detect these false 
 friends. 
 
 There are certain signs that always betray the 
 dangerous applicant for your friendship. One of 
 these signs is frivolity. It does not necessarily fol- 
 low that because a man has a long face and walks 
 with all the dignity of a stork he is particu- 
 larly trustworthy. Monkeys steal and play all 
 sorts of mean tricks with very grave countenances, 
 but the creature, man or woman, that is always 
 laughing, that giggles in the school, on the street 
 and in the church, and considers no fact in life of 
 any significance that cannot easily be giggled over, is 
 a mere clown to whom the world is a great circus, 
 and the giggling you hear is only the tinkling of 
 the bells in the fooPs cap. Wit and humor are 
 most estimable, most desirable. They act like 
 springs. While they do not smooth the road more 
 or less hard we all must travel, they ease the bumps 
 and jolts most pleasantly. The man who can make 
 others laugh a clear, ringing laugh with no Schuyl- 
 kill-like mud in it prevents many a visit from the 
 family doctor, the man who can laugh such a laugh 
 himself may be most of the time his own physician ; 
 but perpetual cachinnation is the laughter of fools, 
 that to Solomon's wise ear sounded like " the crack- 
 ling of thorns under the pot.'' There is no depth, 
 no seriousness, in such a nature. Beware of these 
 gigglers as sailors beware of waters that break with 
 
FRIENDSHIPS. 39 
 
 every breeze into white-caps and foam. There are 
 shallows, quicksands, perhaps, under those pretty 
 waves. 
 
 Another sign that should warn you that your 
 would-be friend must prove a dangerous compan- 
 ion is cynicism. He smiles often, this candidate 
 for favor, but there is no spontaneity to it. It 
 sounds more like a hiss than like a laugh as it 
 ■comes from his half-closed teeth. His lip curls 
 constantly at mention of things you were taught 
 to reverence. He sneers at all the " old worn-out 
 ideas,'' so he calls them, of industry and hon- 
 esty, of virtue and religion. He makes his mock 
 at the Church and at the Sunday-school, and won- 
 ders that a person of your good sense can counte- 
 nance such instruments of superstition. He more 
 than hints that only children pray and only old 
 women and weak-minded men read their Bibles. 
 It was such friends that laughed one of the strong- 
 est-winged poets of England out of the faith of his 
 early manhood and left him to die without hope, a 
 stranger in a strange land. Such friends will sneer 
 away your belief both in God and in man. They 
 will cover with ice all the one-time warm springs 
 of feeling and emotion. They will bring you to 
 classify men of every sort as simply as they have 
 done into the two categories of the "openly bad 
 and the secretly bad." They will take away your 
 heart of flesh, and will give you a mere muscle like 
 
40 BEQINNINQ LIFE. 
 
 their own, whose only fanction is to keep up the 
 circulation. They will steal away the weapons with 
 which you once guarded your treasures, and then 
 they will steal these treasures themselves, persuad- 
 ing you, at the same time, that they all, purity, 
 truth, honor, virtue, goodness, God or man's, have 
 no existence except in the diseased imagination. 
 They will leave you, like a disarmed, dismantled 
 and stranded ship-of-war on some unknown coast, 
 with nothing to fight with or for. Beware of such 
 friends. 
 
 Another warning sign of danger from a would- 
 be friend is dissimulation. He comes, this candi- 
 date for favor, with no ceaseless laugh of frivolity 
 or perpetual sneer of cynicism, for his finger is upon 
 his lips, as if detectives were on his track and as if 
 silence were his only hope. He whispers the com- 
 monest facts into your ear as if they were dead se- 
 crets. He has unutterable things to tell you which 
 he will communicate only on your pledge never to 
 breathe them to any one, especially to your parents 
 and your teachers. Only rely upon him, and he 
 assures you of his readiness to show you how to enjoy 
 every forbidden pleasure without running any risk 
 of committing the unpardonable sin of being found 
 out. All his pockets are filled with a peculiar kind 
 of very fine dust, which he throws into too watch- 
 ful eyes with the greatest skill. These " friends '^ 
 are in every school, in both the boys' and the girls' 
 
FRIENDSHIPS. 41 
 
 departments, always ready to give unpaid instruc- 
 tion in the art of breaking rules without being caught. 
 They teach the boys how to get cigarettes and illus- 
 trated newspapers, and the girls how to get forbid- 
 den sweets and yellow-backed novels, without such 
 old fogies as parents and teachers being any the wiser. 
 They will show these same pupils of theirs, as they 
 become a little more apt, how to go to the theatres 
 and to visit dance-halls without arousing suspicion 
 in the unsympathetic hearts of their aged guardians. 
 These dissimulators will be as false to you as they 
 are false to the old folks whom they are teaching 
 you to outwit. They are false to you now. They 
 are giving you false and fatal ideas of life and hap- 
 piness ; and when these ideas have resulted in your 
 ruin, as unhindered they inevitably will, the dis- 
 simulator, too astute to be caught himself, will 
 stand aside and laugh at you for going so far down 
 the path along which his own hand pushed you. 
 
 Still another dangerous sign in an acquaintance 
 who desires promotion to friendship is extrava- 
 gance. It shows itself, probably, at first, only in 
 speech. Every sentence is overloaded with adjec- 
 tives. As the spendthrift handles nothing but 
 gold or silver, so your would-be friend deals in 
 no smaller coin than superlatives and compara- 
 tives. He sees everything on an exaggerated scale. 
 If it were not that his pulse is normal, you would 
 easily believe him to be breathing pure oxygen all 
 
42 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 the time. By just so much as he exaggerates him- 
 self and his ways he belittles you and yours. He 
 makes you ashamed of your home : it is so unas- 
 suming. He calls it "inadequate^^ for such a per- 
 son as you, by a little instruction from him, would 
 soon become. He makes you ashamed of your 
 old father and mother.. He is very careful not to 
 say so in words, but he makes you feel that they 
 are hardly such progenitors as you might have been 
 expected to have. Under his influence your manner 
 toward them changes : it becomes less deferential, 
 not to say less respectful. You feel as you never 
 did before that they are by no means necessary to 
 your happiness, and that they might easily become 
 hindrances to it. He makes you ashamed of your 
 work. You were ready to have every one congrat- 
 ulate you like a cabinet-officer six months ago, when 
 you got a place in the mill or the store or on the rail- 
 road ; but that was before you had met this friend. 
 He isn't doing much himself, perhaps nothing at 
 all just at present, but he makes the impression on 
 you that there are very few pairs of shoes anywhere 
 much too large for him to step into whenever he 
 chooses. You have only to talk with him a few 
 minutes at any time to have all the zest taken out 
 of your work. You go back to the spindles or 
 the counter or the office with a dull, heavy sense 
 in your heart that all this is beneath you, that 
 you ought to be an employer instead of being an 
 
FBTENDSHIPS. 43 
 
 employ^, a wholesale instead of a retail dealer, a 
 leader in society instead of a director or a directress 
 of the formless thoughts of very young people and 
 little children to uninteresting and stupid subjects. 
 His touch has the same effect upon your income as 
 upon your work : it shrinks into itself as some sen- 
 sitive things do when rudely handled. You won- 
 der that you were ever satisfied with it as you see 
 it now in the light he has thrown upon it. Why 
 should you exert such abilities as he assures you you 
 possess — and you have long suspected it — for such 
 an insignificant remuneration ? " Almost better to 
 take nothing at all than so little/^ you say, and he 
 says, "Quite right; now you talk like yourself.^' 
 So you give up the position that has become too 
 small for your enlarged self-conceit, and look around 
 for something really first class, something that will 
 be worthy of your hitherto unrecognized abilities. 
 While you are looking you find some things for 
 which you were not on the lookout. You find that 
 you can^t live comfortably on big words, even in- 
 flated so perfectly as your friend's words are ; that 
 the coat you thought too shabby to wear Avhen you 
 gave up work is steadily gaining only in lightness 
 of weight and in increased reflective power ; that the 
 appraisement you had set upon yourself is suffer- 
 ing, in spite of your indignation that it should be so, 
 by the lack of demand for your valuable services. 
 But your friend does not desert you. He reveals 
 
44 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 to you the fact that there are many ways of living 
 well without going through the commonplace rou- 
 tine of what is called " making a living.'' He 
 explains to you how feasible some of these are. 
 It is an opportune moment for the tempter, such 
 a moment as Jacob took to show Esau how he might 
 have a good meal of savory pottage without getting 
 it for himself; so opportune that you too, like Esau, 
 sell your birthright as a son of God, as an heir, 
 through Christ, of heaven, for the thing now within 
 your reach that you want so very much. 
 
 Or your extravagant friend, while he says noth- 
 ing about your work or your income from it, gives 
 his attention to your recreations and amusements. 
 They have always been of the simplest and least 
 expensive kind. You were brought up to think 
 first of how much cloth you had, and then of how to 
 cut the pattern to fit it ; but your friend soon con- 
 vinces you that this is a very plebeian method indeed. 
 There are certain forms of enjoying one's self that 
 are entirely respectable and appropriate. Others 
 may be cheaper, but they are impossible except to 
 those who are so far below public opinion as to be 
 indifferent to it. That these are expensive is unfor- 
 tunately true, but this is no reason why you should 
 deny yourself of them. Your whole style of liv- 
 ing is gradually changed to suit these new pleasures, 
 and, while your income remains the same, your ex- 
 penses have been doubled. There can be nothing 
 
FRTENDSRTPS. 45 
 
 before you but bankruptcy or Canada ; and Canada 
 is bankruptcy. 
 
 But you will reform this extravagant friend of 
 yours. He is, you confess, somewhat too fast now. 
 He will undoubtedly be ruined financially, social- 
 ly, morally, if he cannot be checked in his impet- 
 uous downward course, but who so well adapted 
 to put on the brakes as yourself? You are willing 
 to be his friend. You are sympathetic; you under- 
 stand him. You go part-way w^ith him, and there- 
 fore he will be most likely to halt when you give 
 the sign, and retrace his steps under your direction. 
 You may give the sign if you are not too intoxi- 
 cated yourself with the delightful rapidity of mo- 
 tion, but he will pay as much attention to it as a 
 runaway horse pays to a child's hand on the rein. 
 If your friend is to be reformed, it will need some 
 one older and firmer than yourself. For you to 
 go part way with him will only mean two lives 
 ruined instead of one. 
 
 This capacity for friendship of which we are 
 most of us conscious — does it mean nothing? is it 
 never to be gratified ? Are you, who see in each 
 new acquaintance a possible friend — one who shall 
 understand you, who shall make it possible for you 
 to be and express your true best self, — are you to be 
 perpetually disappointed ? 
 
 If you admit into your life these frivolous, cynical, 
 dissimulating and extravagant friends against whom 
 
46 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 you have been warned, you will have made the 
 coming of the true friend impossible. A man 
 that hath friends is a man who has shown himself 
 friendly. He has exhibited such qualities as attract 
 real, true friends, more reliable, even, than blood- 
 relations. Jonathan never would have given his 
 friendship, one of the purest and noblest in the 
 world's history, to David if David had not been 
 the man he was. It was because Damon was worthy 
 of Pythias, and Pythias worthy of Damon, that each 
 thought it a privilege to die for the other. The 
 slightest shadow of insincerity, of self-seeking, in 
 either would have acted upon their friendship as an 
 insulating substance acts upon an electric magnet. 
 The two hearts held so tightly together by the mys- 
 terious current flowing through them, that even death 
 could not tear them asunder, would have fallen in- 
 stantly apart like two bars of iron suddenly demag- 
 netized. 
 
 For a true friend any sacrifice of pride, of ambi- 
 tion, of ease, comfort, is worth making. He cannot 
 be kept Avithout a willingness to make such a sacri- 
 fice should it be needed. For a true friend even 
 the sacrifice of his friendship is worth making if 
 the occasion calls for it. Sir Walter Raleigh thought 
 this the final test. '' Thou mayest be sure,'' he says, 
 *' that he that will in private tell thee of thy faults 
 is thy friend ; for he adventures thy dislike and 
 doth hazard thy hatred." If done in the right 
 
FRTENDSHIPS. 47 
 
 spirit, your friend is giving you the highest possible 
 proof of his fricudsliip when he opens your eyes to 
 see some fault or weakness that might very easily, 
 if undiscovered, prove fatal. " Faithful are the 
 wounds of a friend." There are none so painful, none 
 that cut so deep, but they are clean and healthy and 
 ought to heal rapidly. " Better be a nettle in the 
 side of your friend than his echo." 
 
 The friend such as we desire Emerson thinks is 
 a dream and a I'able. The friend who is perfectly 
 true and perfectly tender, and who understands us 
 as we do not understand ourselves, is to be found 
 only in ideal descriptions ; and Emerson is right if 
 we confine our search unnecessarily, as he seems to 
 have done. He tells us of the world's great heroes 
 and seems to have fathomed their virtues and vices, 
 but he has very little, if anything, to tell us of a cer- 
 tain Judean Teacher whose character has now been 
 scrutinized with extremest care for two thousand 
 years without the discovery of a single blot. Why 
 will not this Man from Nazareth serve as the ideal 
 friend ? He was perfectly true and perfectly tender, 
 and he constantly showed that he knew more of men 
 than they knew of themselves. Why cannot the 
 Goethes and Voltaires and R^nans and Emersons 
 take him for their friend if they will not take him 
 as their Saviour? By their own confession he was 
 all they seek or could desire. They posed before 
 the world as philosophers, but has he a right to be 
 
48 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 called a lover of wisdom who when he acknowledg- 
 edly sees what he professes to seek refuses to receive 
 it? We do not call ourselves philosophers, but we 
 may easily be more philosophical than they. The 
 ideal friend is not to appear in some distant golden 
 age : he has appeared. He seeks us because we 
 have need of him. He asks us to be enrolled amongst 
 the number of his friends. " Ye have not chosen 
 me," he says, "but I have chosen you." The 
 conditions for becoming and remaining his friend 
 are of the simplest sort : " Ye are my friends if 
 ye do whatsoever I command you;" and his com- 
 mands are not impossible or unreasonable. We are 
 to love one another, to be kind and forgiving and 
 helpful. We are to do right ourselves, and to assist 
 every one else, as far as we can, to do right. This 
 is all, and in return he will befriend us always. He 
 will give us the use of his name. He will lend us 
 his strength as we struggle with our appetites and our 
 sins. He will hold our hands when we stumble ; and 
 when we come to the river from the touch of whose 
 waters we all shrink, his grasp will tighten when the 
 grasp of other hands that have tenderly pressed our 
 own is no longer felt. He will be with us in the new 
 life that opens beyond, and will be our constant guide 
 and instructor till the home-feeling comes to us. 
 Why should you live a day longer without this 
 Friend ? " I do not wonder," says Ruskin, " at 
 what men suffer ; I do wonder at what they lose." 
 
IV. 
 WHAT SHALL WE READ ? 
 
IV. 
 
 WHAT SHALL WE READ ? 
 
 " Of making many books there is no end : and much study 
 is a weariness of the flesh." — Eccl. xii. 13. 
 
 SOLOMON'S lament over the endless number 
 of books in the world would have gained some- 
 thing in intensity and pathos could he have foreseen 
 the public libraries of Berlin, Paris, London, Wash- 
 ington and Philadelphia. He sighed when he looked 
 upon a few hundred carefully-copied manuscripts 
 lying on the shelves of his royal library. " What's 
 the use," he thought, " of so many ? No man can 
 read them all.'' Wise as the weary king was, he 
 could have had no conception of the rate at which 
 books were to be increased later on in the world's 
 history. As we think of it our grief at the burning 
 of two hundred thousand volumes at Alexandria is 
 in some degree assuaged. 
 
 For the last fifty years the world has been over- 
 whelmed by the rising tide of a bibliographic flood. 
 It is no longer possible to place boundaries beyond 
 which it cannot pass. Colossal reservoirs like those 
 at Washington have })roven ridiculously inadequate. 
 The Oriental metaphor appears on the verge of 
 
 51 
 
52 BEGINNIiYG LIFE. 
 
 transformation into a fact : not even the world 
 itself will be able to contain the books that shall 
 be written. The danger that now threatens the 
 race is a new deluge, but of ink. We cannot escape 
 it. We must plunge in, but there is a decided 
 choice among the pools. Some are as clear as 
 crystal ; some are the congenial homes of foul mud- 
 monsters. To read anything or everything is as 
 dangerous as to eat anything or everything. The 
 results may be as much more serious as character 
 is of more value than health. As scarcely any other 
 agency has a more marked influence than books upon 
 character, this question of what we shall read is im- 
 mensely important. Not a few of the dangers to 
 which we are exposed in reading will be avoided 
 by the adoption of some general plan if we keep 
 as well as adopt it. As curiosity is one of the very 
 first and strongest qualities exhibited by most hu- 
 man beings, why not take this as a hint, and begin by 
 reading books that will satisfy our curiosity ? Facts 
 are the food which this appetite in a healthy condi- 
 tion craves, and the young person of our day is 
 invited to an absolutely inexhaustible banquet of 
 facts, in spite of Dr. Johnson\s assertion — which 
 may have been true when made — that " nothing is 
 so hard to get at as a fact." 
 
 What form does your curiosity take ? Are you 
 curious to know something about this earth on 
 which you live? about the silent planets above? 
 about your own body and brain ? That is nat- 
 
WHAT SHALL WE READ? 53 
 
 ural ; that is laudable. And here are books on 
 geology, botany, mineralogy, on astronomy, on 
 physiology and psychology and biology, that will 
 answer just the questions that are, or ought to be, 
 on the ends of your tongues. Are Dana and Gray 
 and Herschel and Hooker and Carpenter and Spen- 
 cer a little too thorough in their anxiety that none 
 of your questions should be unanswered ? Does 
 your mind wander while they are preparing you 
 to understand all the bearings of the answer they 
 are about to make? Then put your questions to 
 men whose intellectual processes are more rapid, 
 if not always so exhaustive. 
 
 Just as there is an immense amount of indiges- 
 tion caused by food not adapted to the tender years 
 of the eater of it, so is there intellectual indiges- 
 tion and much antipathy caused by an illy-adapted 
 mental diet. You and I might have been very 
 fond of certain sciences from which now we recoil 
 if we had not taken too much of them or in a form 
 too condensed. Our children ought to escape such 
 dyspeptic attacks. All kinds of brain-food, even 
 scientific, are now served in such forms as to be 
 perfectly digestible for the young. There are so- 
 called primers, written with great care and l)y men 
 of great learning, on each of the sciences, in which 
 you will find your questions answered most simply 
 and interestingly. You will not have the right to 
 set yourself up as an authority on the particular sub- 
 ject about which you have just read a "Primer,'^ but 
 
54 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 you ought at least to be able to comprehend the 
 force and drift of the arguments used by professed 
 authorities, and you will not feel yourself compelled 
 to give an unqualified assent to the wildest scientific 
 vagaries because you are aware of the fact that you 
 do not know enough to do anything else. The 
 primer will at least have taught you that you must 
 have scientific proof before a theory can be accepted 
 as a scientific fact. 
 
 Are you curious to know what has happened to 
 the race of which you are a part since it first found 
 itself on the earth, under the stars ? Here stand his- 
 torians in a long line, from Herodotus to the man 
 who passed you on the street yesterday, all eager 
 and anxious to tell you just what you wish to know. 
 It may help you to choose amongst all these appli- 
 cants for the office of historical instructor to your 
 High Mightiness to remember what Professor Por- 
 ter, ex-president of Yale University, says of histo- 
 rians and the two stages to one or the oth(«r of 
 which all histories, past, present or future, belong. 
 The first stage, he says, is that of simple narration, 
 though the things narrated may not by any means 
 be simple facts — will probably be in the proportion 
 of one fact to two or more legends. In this stage 
 belong the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer and 
 all the mythical stories that have come down to 
 us of heroes like Romulus and Remus and demi- 
 gods like Theseus and Hercules. To the second 
 stage, in which two marked phases are distin- 
 
WJTAT SHALL WE READf 55 
 
 guishecl, are placed the histories of Herodotus, 
 Thucydides, Tacitus and Caesar. Here the propor- 
 tion of fact and fancy or legend is changed. Now the 
 facts largely preponderate; the legend diminishes, 
 till in the last development of this second phase it 
 disappears altogether. We have come now to the 
 critical and philosophical type, the last and highest 
 of which history is capable. We no longer have 
 incredible legends of heroes or interminable lists of 
 war-galleys and phalanxes, or of battles on sea or 
 land, but the causes of things are ferreted out and 
 explained. The development of a nation now over- 
 tops in importance the fate of a beautiful woman or 
 that of an extraordinarily strong man. This epoch 
 began. Professor Porter says, with Niebuhr, and all 
 the best historians since have taken their color from 
 it. Every young person should wish to know some- 
 thing of each of these stages, for we cannot under- 
 stand any one of them unless we have some knowl- 
 edge of the others ; we cannot understand the pres- 
 ent without knowing something of the past. It is 
 history that teaches us, as Lowell says, "why things 
 are and must be so, and not otherwise." 
 
 We must make a place here, if anywhere, for the 
 newspaper. It has made a very large place for it- 
 self, and is supremely indiiferent as to whether it is 
 classified or not. It is the most high-handed of all 
 monopolists. It drives all rivals from the field. 
 It excludes with rare impartiality all other forms 
 of printed matter, from the bulky volume to the 
 
56 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 magazine ; and yet this monster of insatiable maw 
 has its rights. The present is of at least equal in- 
 terest for us with the past. If we are properly 
 curious to know what happened a thousand years 
 ago, why may we not with equal propriety be inter- 
 ested in knowing what happened yesterday ? When 
 you read the telegram in your newspaper that Paris 
 had capitulated to the Prussian king and his Ger- 
 man allies, you were put in possession of an histori- 
 cal fact of as great significance as the Homeric an- 
 nouncement of the capture of Troy by Ulysses. 
 When you read of the assassination of Abraham Lin- 
 coln, you were getting news quite as momentous as 
 that you had read in your ancient history of the 
 murder of Julius Csesar. The newspaper has its 
 legitimate field if we could but keep it there, but it 
 becomes the tyrant of modern life when it drives 
 out all rivals, as it is doing so effectually that pos- 
 sibly the majority of masculine readers never read 
 anything else. They take their three newspapers a 
 day as regularly as their three meals, lowering the 
 average only a little by reducing the allowance to 
 one on the first day of the week. 
 
 Also young persons ought to be specially curious 
 as to the history of their own country. ^' Know 
 thyself" was the best thing the Delphic oracle ever 
 said in its inscriptions or its utterances. This wis- 
 dom is as applicable to the state as to the individual. 
 It is specially applicable to a republic like our own. 
 If we are to have a successful government of the peo- 
 
WHAT SHALL WE READ? 57 
 
 pie, for the people, by the people, we the people 
 must know what we are trying to do, and why. It 
 is by no means difficult to find young persons of both 
 sexes who are more familiar with the history of 
 Rome and France and England than with the story 
 of our own nation. That the theme is a vast and 
 intensely interesting one is being recognized by the 
 best historical writers on both sides of the sea. We 
 have no excuse for ignorance when such brilliant 
 and fascinating teachers as the American McMaster 
 and the English Bryce are perpetually ready to en- 
 lighten us. 
 
 But when your questions — scientific, historical, 
 aesthetic — have been answered and your curiosity 
 has been satisfied, you cannot give over reading if 
 you wish your curiosity to end in culture. Mat- 
 thew Arnold defines the cultured person as the one 
 " who knows the best that has been thought and 
 said in the world," but one of our own poets lets us 
 look upon a man who knew all these things and 
 had failed of culture : 
 
 " 'Twould be endless to tell you the things that he knew — 
 All separate facts undeniably true, 
 But with him or each other they'd nothing to do. 
 No power of combining, arranging, discerning, 
 Digesting the masses he learned into learning." 
 
 So Burke thought that the cultured man is one who 
 not only is in possession of the facts, but has also 
 " the power of diversifying the matter infinitely in 
 his own mind and applying it to every occasion that 
 
58 JBEGIN^^INO LIFE. 
 
 arises." It is this power that the study of philoso- 
 phy should develop. Such reading is not seduc- 
 tively attractive to young people at first. Philoso- 
 phy, they say, for some one has told them so, is a 
 great circle around which you may make your weary 
 journey only to return to the point from which you 
 started ; but in swinging round the circle many 
 interesting, beautiful and useful things may be dis- 
 covered. About the best way to find out how large 
 a circle is and what's inside of it is to make the 
 circumference of it. Philosophical reading will be 
 of immense advantage to yoimg people if it teaches 
 them the limits of the human mind, the boundaries 
 of thought. Swinging round the circle may save 
 them many a tiresome and dangerous jaunt in quest 
 of panaceas that philosophy, rightly understood, 
 would convince them can have no existence. 
 
 luiagi nation is another faculty of the mind that 
 is hungry for food and that has a right to be 
 fed. There is no dearth of such pabulum. Public 
 libraries, book-stores, news-stands, have their shelves 
 and counters filled with imaginative works. The 
 book you were reading last night — I hope not this 
 afternoon — was a novel. Nine out often of the books 
 you will take away with you on your summer va- 
 cation will be novels. Four paper-covered novels 
 a day is the allowance that a certain Western lady 
 at one time permitted herself. This is to turn a 
 human being into a gargoyle. Such a stream flow- 
 ing through the brain can leave behind it nothing 
 
WHAT SHALL WE BEAD? 59 
 
 but a muddy sediment. Better not read at all than 
 read in such a way. But there are works of the 
 imagination against which no such charge can be 
 laid. Scott and Cooper and Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. 
 Whitney and Charles Dickens and Charles Reade have 
 written novels that have become the fountain-heads 
 of great reforms. The battle of faith and unbelief, 
 Mr. Gladstone and Dr. McCosh think, is to be fought 
 largely for the next fifty years in the pages of romance. 
 Let the book you read be clean tlirough and through. 
 Let it be one that will give you a serious and sensi- 
 ble view of life. Let it be one of high literary merit ; 
 and if it be made to take its place among the luxu- 
 ries, and not the necessaries, such a romance, if it 
 be read not on the sly, but with your parents' con- 
 sent, may be for you what Spenser calls one of 
 
 " The world's sweet inns from care and wearisome turmoil." 
 
 All poetical works, from Dante to Shakespeare, 
 from Milton to Whittier, must be classified as works 
 of the imagination. They are not in the strict sense 
 historic, scientific or philosophical, but they may be 
 none the less valuable for that. There are practical, 
 hard-headed — perhaps hard-hearted — men who enter 
 their protest against anything, be it rhythm or blank 
 verse, every line of which begins w ith a capital. If 
 a man has a thought, why not express it in the sort 
 of language in which we all think? Why dress it 
 np in this fantastic guise? Ah, my hard-headed, 
 hard-hearted friend, poets are born, not made; neither 
 
60 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 can they be unmade by a protest. Have you for- 
 gotten that the Psalms are poems, and that the book 
 of Job is what Carlyle calls the grandest poem ever 
 written ? — though, unfortunately, the poetic form is 
 concealed in King James's version in both instances. 
 The Most High has set his approval on poetry, as 
 he did also on imaginative prose, when the Christ 
 spake only in parables. There are many things 
 that it is well for you to deny yourself, but Tenny- 
 son, Longfellow, Whittier and Browning do not 
 belong to that category. 
 
 If we make a wise use of historical, scientific, 
 philosophical and imaginative books, then material 
 enough w^ill have been gathered for a rich and well- 
 rounded life if all is concentrated upon some worthy 
 purpose. This opens up a field for all inspirational 
 works of every sort. There are numberless books 
 suited to every taste that designedly attempt to im- 
 bue their readers with lofty ideals of life. Perhaps 
 the most famous of these are The Imitation of Christ, 
 by Thomas k Kempis, and The Pilgrim's Progress, 
 by John Bunyan — a book that Macaulay ranks with 
 Milton's Paradise Lost. 
 
 The biographies of all heroic human souls, of every 
 faith and time, are, though it may be undesignedly, 
 intensely inspirational. From the life of St. Augus- 
 tine to that of Stephen Grellet and Edward Pay- 
 son, there is no story of triumph over the unholy 
 trinity of the world, the flesh and the devil that will 
 not ennoble our conception of humanity and fill us 
 
WHAT SHALL WE MEAD? 61 
 
 with a desire to emulate these godly examples. A 
 well-written biography will be for the unspoiled 
 reader as interesting as a novel, and the substitution 
 of the story of real life for the romance will be an 
 unmistakable gain. 
 
 France has just passed through an unexampled 
 literary excitement. A book was thrown almost 
 unheralded upon the market, and was bought up 
 with such avidity that the presses could not supply 
 the demand. It was reviewed at length by the 
 leading newspapers of Paris and the provincial 
 cities. There was but one opinion as to its interest 
 and extreme value. It was not written by any of 
 the popular literary favorites of the day. It was a 
 translation of an old Greek book known to us as 
 " The New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus 
 Christ.^' Most Frenchmen knew in a vague way 
 that there was such a book. They had heard their 
 priests refer to it and they had seen selections from 
 it in their prayer-book, but very few of them had 
 ever seen a complete copy in French. When Las- 
 sarre's translation, with the benediction of the fish- 
 erman His Holiness the pope, appeared, it was like 
 a new revelation from Heaven. It was read in the 
 caf^s, it was discussed on the boulevards, and it 
 might have been the forerunner of such days as pre- 
 ceded St. Bartholomew's had not the Jesuits become 
 alarmed and persuaded the pope to revoke his bene- 
 diction, and to place the book on the Index Expiir- 
 gatorlus. We have that book in our homes ; no 
 
62 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 papal fulminatioii can touch it. How often do we 
 read it? Do we permit it to be pushed aside by his- 
 tories and newspapers and magazines, by works on 
 science and art, by romances and poems, by books of 
 ethics and biography ? We make a mistake. This 
 book combines, as no other does, as all others fused 
 into one would not, history, philosophy, biography, 
 high ideals and imperial purposes. " It is the best 
 book that ever was or ever will be written," said 
 Charles Dickens in a letter to his sou. ^' Where- 
 withal shall a young man cleanse his way ? by taking 
 heed thereto according to thy word." Other books 
 may lead you right for a time, and then, from ig- 
 norance of the way themselves, leave you in the 
 pathless desert or the trackless forest ; but no 
 human being has ever honestly followed this guide 
 that was not brought safe home at last. Better for 
 any of us to neglect reading of any other sort rather 
 than neglect this. We might thus cheat ourselves 
 now and then of some "sweet inn from care and 
 wearisome turmoil ;" but if there must be any choice, 
 better cheat yourself of an inn or two along the way 
 than of the eternal home at the end of the journey. 
 Take down from the shelf, where it fell unnoticed 
 months ago behind histories and novels, the Bible 
 your mother gave you, and read with care and atten- 
 tion never before given to it the biography you will 
 find in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Read in 
 the book of the Acts and in the Epistles how men^s 
 lives were changed by the touch of that life. See 
 
WHAT SHALL WE READ? 63 
 
 how the enthralled of passion and appetite were freed, 
 how the hopeless gained courage, how the restless 
 and objectless found peace and a motive, and as you 
 read the stolid, despairing look in your eyes will 
 fade away. A new hope will steal like a blessed 
 spirit into your heart, and you will dare to do battle 
 with yourself and the world in the inspiration that 
 has come to you from that most human, most divine 
 life. 
 
V. 
 
 THE FORf NG OF HABITS, 
 
V. 
 
 THE FORMING OP HABITS. 
 
 " Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good." — 
 Rom. xii. 21. 
 
 ARISTOTLE, who was flimiliarly called ^^the 
 Surgeon'^ from the keenness of his intellect- 
 ual discrimination, was accustomed to say, "A 
 raan has formed a good habit when it causes no 
 self-denial.'^ Any act, good or bad, has become 
 habitual when it is performed automatically and 
 involuntarily. The momentum of many choices 
 in the past makes any immediate action of the will 
 unnecessary. It is a condition that has close anal- 
 ogies to slavery where choice and action have no 
 relation whatever. It is not unusual to hear a 
 man confess tliat '^ he is a slave to habit." 
 
 The grip that habit has upon all human beings 
 results necessarily from our make-up. If we were 
 pure intelligences, with no material enswathment, 
 the power of habit would be lessened, perhaps, to 
 an altogether inappreciable point; but the spirit 
 has its setting in matter : we are resultants of the 
 intermingling of these two diverse elements, and 
 
 67 
 
68 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 we become, in spite of every effort to the contrary, 
 bundles of habits. 
 
 The soul is a prisoner in its invisible holy of 
 holies, and can send out or receive communications 
 only by impressions made on the walls of its dun- 
 geon. Light and sound come to it through little 
 apertures easily closed, shutting the captive in to 
 perpetual darkness and silence. Other sensations 
 are carried along prepared channels from the ex- 
 ternal world to the royal prisoner within. Here 
 is a practically inexhaustible field for the develop- 
 ment of habits. The body is not a perfectly flexi- 
 ble instrument for the soul : it permits the soul to 
 express itself only within well-defined limits, and 
 the soul, becoming accustomed to these, ends by 
 accepting the situation. AVhat that situation is to 
 be which is finally accepted depends very largely 
 upon the moral, intellectual and physical habits 
 that are formed before the gristle has altogether 
 turned to bone. 
 
 This is the purpose that all wise parents and 
 teachers have before them constantly in dealing 
 with their children and scholars. They try to 
 bring every influence and motive to bear upon 
 both mind and body, that right thinking and right 
 acting may become habitual. Until a child can 
 walk without any conscious effort at balancing it- 
 self it does not know how to walk ; until it can 
 eat without having to think where its mouth is 
 and how to put the spoon into it, it does not know 
 
THE FORMING OF HABITS. 69 
 
 how to eat; until it can read and write Avithout 
 having to spell each word that is now on the paper 
 or that it wishes to put there, it knows how neither 
 to read nor to write. When the child or the youth 
 or the man does what he has to do without even 
 thinking that he is duing it till his attention is called 
 to it, then he knows that particular thing ; it takes 
 its place among the number of his iiabits. 
 
 In the beginning each one of these new auto- 
 matic actions was difficult, distasteful ; there was a 
 disinclination to attempt it which had to be over- 
 come by some reward. There is a celebrated French 
 picture of a great room in the royal palace where 
 the young heir to the throne is being taught to walk. 
 The little fellow is encircled by a crowd of courtiers 
 encouraging him to make the attempt in spite of 
 the risk, but the arguments that are most influen- 
 tial on tlie royal heart are the ribbons and decora- 
 tions that the officers take from their own breasts 
 and hold out toward the prince. Then he walks. 
 So you took your first steps because you wanted 
 something — ^your father's watch or your grandfa- 
 ther's cane. You began to read and write for hope 
 of a sugar-plum or for fear of a whip. But, what- 
 ever was the original cause of the action, it left 
 its mark on brain and muscle. It opened up ducts 
 and channels that did not exist before, and along 
 these very soon currents flowed so silently and 
 smoothly that you were scarcely conscious of them. 
 
 An old soldier crossing the parade-ground one 
 
70 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 day, carrying in both hands a large bowl of soup 
 for his dinner, suddenly heard the ringing com- 
 mand, "Attention !'' and, instantly dropping his 
 dinner, he stood erect with hands by his side, while 
 his friends who had played this practical joke upon 
 him chuckled delightedly over the success of it. 
 Long years ago the soldier had been so thoroughly 
 drilled in obedience to that command that when 
 the ear heard the word the order went so swiftly 
 along the well-worn track to the muscle and nerve 
 that there was no time for the judgment to give 
 any opinion whatever in the matter. 
 
 It is perfectly true of all mankind, as Paley says, 
 that "they act more from habit than reflection." 
 You became very angry in a moment yesterday. 
 It was wholly unexpected. You were as intent as 
 the old soldier upon something you were doing, 
 when some evil spirit shouted its command, " Fire !" 
 and you dropped everything to discharge an almost 
 fatal load straight at the heart — perhaps of your 
 best friend. You were possibly not very much 
 more to blame for that particular act than the old 
 soldier was for dropping his dinner, but you were 
 to blame for forming the habit of obedience to such 
 evil passions. You were profane yesterday, to your 
 own disgust and that of your friends. You had 
 no expectation of swearing — yon had determined 
 that you would not — but the evil spirit uttered its 
 harsh command, and oaths flew from your mouth 
 like stones from a catapult. You told a lie yes- 
 
THE FORMING OF HABITS. 71 
 
 terday — the first for many days, and the one just 
 before it was to have been your last. It was not 
 premeditated : you were entrapped into it as the 
 old soldier was into his mistake. Some evil spirit 
 too often obeyed aforetime gave the command, and 
 you did what a moment afterward you were angry 
 at yourself for having done. You made a dishon- 
 est bargain yesterday, and the money burns now in 
 your purse. You thought you never would do it 
 again ; it seemed to you that there was not money 
 enough in the United States to tempt you to get 
 any of it wrongfully. But there was, alas ! It 
 was only a few dollars that you got, but the old 
 enemy and master told you to take them, and it 
 was done before you had time to think. The old 
 soldier only lost his dinner by his involuntary act, 
 but you have lost the respect of your fellow-men 
 and your self-respect and the bright hope you had 
 a little while ago that you were to be henceforth a 
 free man. 
 
 We have all formed the habit of giving atten- 
 tion to voices that should be unheard. One would 
 need to speak to an audience of infants in arms 
 who should wish to address those who had formed 
 no bad habits, and even then it would be too 
 late. We may take it for granted, as the apostle 
 does, that the question is not so much of the form- 
 ing as of the changing of habits. Paul is very 
 outspoken to his friends in Rome concerning some 
 of the bad ways into which they have fallen, but 
 
72 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 he doesn't consider their condition hopeless. These 
 bad habitSj he says, may be overcome by good ones. 
 He has very little faith in any efforts they may 
 make simply to give up doing wrong and break 
 away from old bad habits, but he has great faith 
 in a determination, with trust in God, to do right, 
 and in the forming of new good habits. It doesn't 
 do much good to tear up weeds and leave the ground 
 fallow : it must be sown with grass or grain, and 
 this will fight the weeds and run them out. Tear 
 up your degrading habits, says the apostle, and sow 
 the empty heart with the good seed. You will 
 cease to obey the devil's "Attention !" when you 
 accustom yourself to obey God's "Be not over- 
 come of evil, but overcome evil with good." 
 
 Is it possible? Was Aristotle right or was he 
 dreaming when he thought that a good habit may 
 become such a second nature as to cause no self-de- 
 nial? We may move firmly here, for the solid 
 ground of experience is still under our feet. You 
 have formed some good habits ; you are as sure of 
 these as of your bad habits. It is easier for you to 
 do right in some directions than it is to do wrong. 
 You could say the multiplication table correctly 
 in half the time you could give false results to five 
 times six or seven times nine. You speak fairly 
 good grammar with greater ease than you speak bad 
 grammar. You would have to think to make a 
 mistake, and you do not have to think to make a 
 correct sentence. It makes itself; habit does it. It is 
 
THE FORMING OF HABITS. 73 
 
 easier for you ordinarily to tell the truth than it is 
 to do anything else. The channels in your brain are 
 straight, and not spiral. You have got in the habit 
 of seeing things as they are, and of reporting cor- 
 rectly what you see. The shuttles of your brain 
 have become accustomed to weaving a fabric of that 
 particular kind ; it would need a change almost as 
 organic as that of putting in new machinery for it 
 to weave lies instead of truths. A musician like 
 Von Bulow or Rubinstein or Hoffman sits at the 
 piano when the twilight has so deepened that your 
 eyes cannot distinguish the black keys from the 
 white, and for hours he dreams in melodies, and 
 his fi nosers find in the dark all the strano-e combina- 
 tions of notes needed to make these dreams audible 
 to your ear. It is all very marvelous, and perfectly 
 natural. Give the musician a pencil and ask him 
 to sketch, or a chisel and ask him to carve, and his 
 movements are awkward and the results ludicrous. 
 New machinery must be created for the new work. 
 It is impossible in a day or a week to make the 
 shuttles that wove harmony, weave outlines and 
 forms. We hear of orators like Burke and Webster 
 and Bright — for whom the English-speaking world 
 still weeps — needing only a great occasion to throw 
 the shuttle, when a magnificent oration was woven 
 with as little effort, apparently, as that with which 
 a loom weaves a carpet, and we are amazed. We 
 forget the years it took to construct the machinery 
 for that particular work; we forget that all the 
 
74 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 energies of their lives were coacentrated upon the 
 production of just those results, and that, therefore, 
 when the hour struck, they had only to release their 
 pent-up energies and the currents were bound to 
 flow along the prepared channels. It was genius 
 back of it all, but it was the oratorical habit that 
 made the production of such orations possible. 
 
 And when we hear of men, or see them, that 
 cannot or will not lie, of men who would not by a 
 sign seem to yield assent to an untruth, who found 
 it easier and preferable for them to be thrown to 
 the lions, or to be smeared with oil and bound to a 
 stake in Nero's garden for a living torch, or to have 
 their mouths filled with powder ready to be touched at 
 a signal with a flaming spark, we know that these are 
 men who have persistently cut such grooves in brain 
 and heart and muscle that for them to do anything else 
 than to die for the truth would be most difficult and 
 unnatural. It has so long been their habit to speak 
 the true thing and to do the right thing, irrespect- 
 ive of consequences, that you need not expect them 
 to do anything else because an emperor or a pope or 
 a party commands or entreats something different. 
 
 Every choice results in a discharge of energy, 
 and every such discharge breaks channels or deep- 
 ens those already broken in brain and heart and 
 muscle. So the best physiologists and psychologists 
 are coming to speak as seriously of the momentous 
 importance of little things — of insignificant trifles, 
 as we are tempted to call them — as did the Puritan 
 
THE FORMING OF HABITS. 75 
 
 theologians themselves. It is scientifically certain, 
 they say, that repeated action of any sort tends to 
 make channels out of which it is as difficult for 
 the vital stream to lift itself as for a river to for- 
 sake its well-worn bed. Whichever way we turn — 
 toward the evil or the good — we see that Aristotle 
 was right. A man has formed a good habit when 
 it causes no self-denial, and the wise man will 
 enrich his life with such habits; and when others 
 have already been formed, he will replace them, 
 by a process similar to that which created them, 
 by habits of the right sort. He will follow Paul's 
 advice to the very letter : he will fight fire with fire, 
 the evil with good. He will no longer serve the 
 devil because now he serves God. 
 
 There are four habits whose desirability is so self- 
 evident that they may be very heartily commended to 
 all young people especially — the habits of industry, 
 church-attendance, Bible- reading and prayer. Paul 
 condenses them all in his rapid sentence : ^^ Diligent 
 in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord." 
 The love of work for its own sake is among the 
 rarest of all affections. It may be doubted whether 
 it is ever innate. It is so delightful to enjoy one's 
 self that it needs in almost every instance some 
 pressure from the outside to give us a more serious 
 view of life ; yet in a world like this it is impos- 
 sible for us to do anything of real value for our- 
 selves or others till in some way we have gotten 
 rid of this distaste for work. We are most of us, 
 
76 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 very probably, hard workers ; but if it be from ne- 
 cessity, and not from choice, we are not industrious : 
 we are only obedient to the lash. The moment it 
 ceases to snap we drop into a seat with folded hands 
 and a sigh of relief. Reconstruct your ideas on this 
 subject; do some honest thinking about it. See if 
 it is possible for you to imagine God sending a being 
 so richly endowed as every human creature is into 
 a world where so much needs to be done with the 
 intention that such an individuality should spend 
 a whole lifetime here in doing nothing. Once be- 
 lieve that God wants you to be industrious, and 
 you will have a motive for beginning to work, and 
 for keeping at it till it will become a second nature 
 and no longer cause you self-denial. 
 
 As for church-attendance, you do go once in a 
 while when you hear of anything specially attractive 
 or when you feel particularly like it, or even when 
 you don't, if you have some one to go with. You 
 are what has been called " a regular but not inde- 
 fatigable church-attendant." There are many such 
 to keep you from feeling either shame or loneliness, 
 and possibly to keep you from estimating the habit 
 of church-attendance at its true value. A man may, 
 it is true, go to church regularly all his life and not 
 be much of a man after all, as a man may eat three 
 meals regularly every day and still be but an in- 
 diiferent specimen of physical development; but 
 in neither case can you lay the blame upon the 
 thing the man does. Had he digested his food as 
 
THE FORMING OF HABITS. 77 
 
 other men do, had he taken the nourishment from the 
 church that other men have done, the results would 
 have been different. Reconstruct your ideas on this 
 subject also. See if it is possible for you to imagine 
 God instituting his Church, commanding his people 
 to become members of it and not to neglect the as- 
 sembling of themselves together to offer him wor- 
 ship, and to receive instructions from him through 
 his servants, without believing that here is a God- 
 ordained duty, where you have been accustomed to 
 see a man-created privilege of which you did not 
 frequently care to avail yourself. Believe, as you 
 will if you study the question honestly, that God 
 wants you to be a member in, and a regular attend- 
 ant of, his Church, and you will have a motive for 
 beginning such attendance, and for continuing it till 
 it too will become a second nature and no longer 
 cause you self-denial. 
 
 You have read the Bible through — or, at least, 
 the New Testament. It is a book you would heartily 
 commend. You would be glad to lend your copy 
 to a friend at any time without hurrying him to re- 
 turn it. You know a good many biblical conun- 
 drums and something in a general way of the book 
 as a whole. But you do not read it anything like as 
 regularly as you read your new^spaper or your novel. 
 Your superficial familiarity with it deludes you into 
 thinking you know it well enough now. If a new 
 Epistle should be discovered written by Paul or James 
 or Peter, you would read it at once. So you are 
 
78 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 half unconsciously placing the book which you really 
 believe to be the word of God on a level with the 
 other books that lie on your table, which are read 
 once or twice and then opened no more. The pur- 
 pose of reading a revelation from God, we can see 
 at a glance, must be different. Here are our sailing- 
 orders, the chart by which we are to steer, directions 
 complete and minute for our conduct by the way. 
 It is impossible for us to be too familiar with all this. 
 If we knew it by heart, it would be of unspeakable 
 advantage to us. That we ought to consult it as 
 habitually as the ship's captain does the sun, and 
 for the same reason, is indisputable. Select your 
 own time — morning and evening will probably be 
 best — and read this book as regularly as the sun 
 rises and sets. It will not be long before the habit 
 will be formed, and to act in accordance with it will 
 cause you no self-denial. 
 
 Prayer is a much more universal act than the read- 
 ing of the Bible. Men pray to God who have never 
 even heard of his revealed word ; men pray to him 
 who can't read it, and who will not read it. They 
 pray as children cry in the night. They are in fear 
 or pain, and the call for help will at least do no 
 harm. You have all prayed many times; but if 
 you should pray many times more in the same way, 
 still It could not be said of you — perhaps you would 
 not wish that It should — that you had the habit of 
 prayer. Neither would it be quite true to say that 
 they are In the habit of praying who are merely in 
 
THE FORMING OF HABITS. 79 
 
 the habit of saying their prayers. Great criminals 
 have confessed that in a long life of open lawlessness 
 they had never neglected once or twice a day to count 
 their beads and mutter a Paternoster, or to kneel 
 and say their prayers in the Protestant manner, but 
 that in all this simulation of prayer there was any 
 real yearning for God and godliness it is im2)ossible 
 to believe. The habit we wish to form is not that 
 of saying certain words at a certain time in a certain 
 position, but it is the habit of expressing gratitude 
 to God for the things he gives us, and of asking for 
 other things we think we need ; it is the habit of 
 going to God confidently as in childhood you went 
 to your father or to some wise friend. Such a habit 
 is a greater protection than are hosts of good reso- 
 lutions or watchful friends. Such a habit will do 
 more to ensure a triumphant life than any other it 
 is possible to mention. 
 
 Be not overcome of evil. We shall be if we 
 go out jauntily or carelessly to meet it, or if we go 
 conceitedly and contemptuously, as Braddock went 
 to fight the Indians. We must go sobered by the 
 certainty of danger and of defeat if we are off our 
 guard or do not make the best use of the material 
 we have at hand. We must go believing that there 
 is but one way of overcoming evil, and determined 
 to use that way so persistently that the recognition 
 of any bad habit we may consciously or unconsciously 
 have formed shall be the signal for concentrated ef- 
 fort to replace it with one that is good. 
 
vr. 
 PERPETUAL YOUTH. 
 
VI. 
 PERPETUAL YOUTH. 
 
 " And entering into the sepulchre they saw a young man sit- 
 ting on the right side clothed in a long white garment." — Mark 
 xvi. 5. 
 
 THE fountain of perpetual youth, for the Chris- 
 tian, is the grave. They who have followed 
 Christ on this side, are to be on the other as the 
 angels of heaven, and this angelic form that startled 
 the women who hurried to the sepulchre was straight 
 and lithe and young, in the " bloom of a life that 
 knows no decay." This "young man," as Mark 
 calls the divine messenger, may have been one of 
 those the patriarch Jacob saw as he slept on his 
 pillow of stone at Bethel and beheld the ladder that 
 reached from earth to heaven, thronged with angels. 
 He may have been one of the two that grasped Lot 
 by the hand as he lingered in Sodom and entreated 
 him to flee to the mountain lest he should be con- 
 sumed, or he may have been a mortal, tempted and 
 tried like ourselves, but who, conquering at last, as 
 we may, was clothed in white, as all who overcome 
 shall be. An old man perhaps he was when he 
 plunged into the river of death, but in that strange 
 bath his youth was renewed. 
 
 83 
 
84 BEGINNTNO LIFE. 
 
 We draw back from old age as from the grave 
 itself. They seem to be removed from each other 
 hut by a single step. We dread the undignified ex- 
 posure of human weakness from which but few of the 
 aged can hope to escape with almost the same inten- 
 sity with which we recoil from the pitiless revelations 
 of the grave, but to be unclothed by age and death is 
 for the Christian to be clothed upon with garments 
 of white and with perpetual youth. The youth we 
 liave here is only a poor imitation of that we may 
 have there. It is like a snow statue after one of 
 Michael Augelo's designs. The slightest touch seems 
 to take something from it. You turn your head 
 away for a moment and look back, and you can see 
 the ravages that time has already made upon it. 
 What is so transitory, so evanescent, so illusive, as 
 youth ? As long as it is yours you are unconscious 
 of it; and when you begin to congratulate yourself 
 on its possession, already your friends are saying, 
 ^' How old you look !'^ and that was your thought 
 about them, though they were born a year or so 
 later than you. The younger children in the home 
 are always pushing the older ones on into society or 
 business, as one season jostles another forward. 
 Each class in school or in college is eager to thrust 
 the one above it into the university or into the world. 
 Youth is gone almost ere one can say it lightens. 
 *' I once was young,'' says David ; and we must be 
 very quick indeed if we would not be obliged to put 
 all we say about our youth in the past tense. 
 
PERPETUAL YOUTH. 85 
 
 But in that land from which the young man who 
 sat in the sepulchre came we are to be given, so he 
 seems silently to assure us, by Him who has con- 
 quered death for himself and his own, an aeon of 
 years to be young in. We are to feel through long 
 unending centuries an exulting sense of bodily 
 strength. We have just enough of it here to know 
 what it means. For a few hours each day we may 
 sniif the battle afar off, with eager desire to be in 
 the hottest part of it, and then this imperfect instru- 
 ment of our wills must be reinvigorated and repaired 
 by food and sleep. As walking is simply a perpetual 
 falling and catching of one^s self before the act is 
 quite completed, so life, even of the youngest and 
 strongest, is a constant wearing out and renewal in 
 the repair-shops of the dining-room and the sleep- 
 ing-chamber, till more radical measures are required 
 and the doctor is called in. What a poor imitation 
 all this is of the youth that awaits us just beyond 
 the grave ! ^' They shall hunger no more, neither 
 thirst any more." There will be no necessity to re- 
 pair with food the wasted strength of that body. 
 " There is no night there." They have no need of 
 long hours for rest and restoration. This body 
 sown in weakness is to be raised in power. The 
 energy in it is to be so full and abounding that re- 
 newal would be as superfluous as the renewal of the 
 life that has gone pulsing through the universe with 
 undiminished vigor from the beginning until now. 
 The bloom of its life is to know no decay. 
 
86 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 This perfect body is to find itself, as these im- 
 perfect bodies of ours never have found themselves 
 in this unharmonic world, in a perfect environment. 
 There will be absolutely no friction. And why 
 sliould not one be perpetually young in such circum- 
 stances ? The tasks appointed for this perfect instru- 
 ment will be wholly congenial. Have you ever 
 found them altogether so here ? Has there not al- 
 ways been some undesirable element in quantity or in 
 quality. The work you thought exactly what you 
 wanted, proved to be something quite different, after 
 you had undertaken it. You deceived yourself for 
 a little while by enforced self-congratulation that 
 this was exactly what you wished for, but at last 
 you were compelled to move over to safer and sol- 
 ider ground, and to acknowledge that it was a duty 
 to be performed in spite of certain irremediable 
 unpleasantnesses. It is not the work itself that 
 wears us out and ages us, but the unadaptedness 
 of it, the heat and irritation gendered by it. Why 
 sliould not they who have nothing to do but to 
 carry out a will with which their own is in perfect 
 harmony keep their youth unbroken? There is no 
 inward recoil from the tasks assigned them, and 
 there is no outward opposition. Whatever retards 
 and sets itself up as a stumbling-block in the on- 
 ward marcli of truth and righteousness has been 
 left on this side the river. There are no difficul- 
 ties there to be overcome, no obstacles to be sur- 
 mounted, no seductions to be resisted, no assaults 
 
PERPETUAL YOUTH. 87 
 
 to be repelled. How could one grow old in such 
 surroundings? 
 
 Theirs is the freshness of an enduring youth ; 
 the sparkle of the wine abides. Many a time 
 have we stood 
 
 " Like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 
 He stared at the Pacitic, and all his men 
 Look'd at each other with a wild surmise, 
 Silent, upon a peak in Darieu ;" 
 
 but when we descended into the plains beneath and 
 sought the gold whose glistening ingots we were 
 sure we saw from the heights above, we found that 
 the light had been flung back from rocks of quartz 
 and shales of mica. The forests that from the hill- 
 tops looked like Elysian groves in whose cool glades 
 one might walk unwearied for ever, proved to be, as 
 we tried to enter them, dank jungles, impenetrable 
 morasses. Wild beasts were there, and serpents, 
 and fevers more deadly still. It is a land of illu- 
 sions, this earth on which we dwell, and every year 
 takes many of them from us, and with them goes 
 the sparkle and zest of life. The time is very short 
 in which any mortal, however favorably placed, 
 can be embarrassed by the wealth of pleasures that 
 offer themselves. A few years are quite sufficient 
 to try them all, and the larger part of life remains 
 to be wasted in vain advertising for some new grati- 
 fication. Why should not they be perpetually young 
 who are constantly finding every cup which they lift 
 
88 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 to their lips far sweeter than their anticipatioDS? 
 How can they grow old whose ever-renewed expe- 
 riences compel them to say, ^'Satisfied! satisfied P' 
 even more often than our experiences here compel us 
 to say, " Vanity of vanities ^' ? '^ The oldest angels," 
 some one says, "are the youngest." Why not? 
 They are the ones who have been most often satis- 
 fied. They are the ones who can begin each new 
 task with greatest zest, and they have had the 
 largest experience of the restful delights of the 
 service on which they are entering. 
 
 Theirs is the trustfulness of youth. It is quickly 
 lost here. It withers under the cold winds that 
 sweep across this earth as flowers wither touched 
 by frost. There are vast moral distances between 
 the child that believes in everybody and the man 
 who believes in nobody, but in time the distance 
 may be small that lies between. Confidence is an 
 exotic; we find here but little congenial soil for it. 
 The ground is littered too deep with insincerities 
 and infidelities and hypocrisies for any such growth 
 to take root of itself. In the home it is indigenous, 
 in the school it is thrifty and strong, but in the 
 market-place and the forum it droops, and if not 
 nurtured with greatest care speedily dies. This 
 world offers an abundance of splendid soil for cyn- 
 icism, for misanthropy, for misogamy. Such seed 
 will take root almost anywhere and grow like a 
 gourd in the tropics. We have each of us a thriv- 
 ing little crop of our own of these things. It is a 
 
PERPETUAL YOUTH. 89 
 
 crop easily sown and raised, but the reaping of it 
 is a sad enough occupation — so sad that before it 
 is half gathered many a man has given up alto- 
 gether in despair. Woe to you if you are sowing 
 such a crop for yourself, if you are so false to your- 
 self that you cannot believe in the truth of any 
 one else ! Woe to you if you are sowing such a 
 crop for others, if through your deceit and insin- 
 cerity they who once believed are coming to doubt ! 
 Woe to you if you are taking from any human soul 
 the faith it once had in purity and truth, in virtue 
 and goodness, in man and God ! It must needs be 
 that offences come, but woe to him by whom the 
 offence cometh ! 
 
 Though the lost faith of your childhood may 
 have returned to you enriched and deepened since 
 you began to believe in Jesus Christ, though you 
 have learned to know him and are perfectly confi- 
 dent that no word of his can ever be too implicit- 
 ly trusted, yet you are on your guard still against 
 your fellow-men. That form of the child's faith 
 has gone from you irrevocably. It was frittered 
 aAvay by petty little deceits, or it was swept away 
 by some great cruel treachery. You can never 
 again trust your fellow-men as you once did. Not, 
 it is true, in a world where even apostles could be- 
 tray and deny their Lord, but that trust shall come 
 back to you in that land from which the young 
 man of the sepulchre came. Confidence is in the 
 air there as doubt is in the air here. A\\ souls, as 
 
90 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 well as all garments, there are white. The lan- 
 guage of heaven is not a medium for the conceal- 
 ment of thought, like the language of earth. It may- 
 be that there is no language there — that thoughts are 
 seen by the pure eyes of the pure in heart. One 
 glance into souls as clear as crystal will be all that 
 faith will ask to leap at once into vigorous life. 
 Why should not they have perpetual youth whose 
 souls are clean, and who see everywhere only clean 
 souls around them ? 
 
 These children in the Father's house trust one 
 another with open eyes now as once in early child- 
 hood upon the earth they trusted one another blindly. 
 They trust the Father, too, with the old-time confi- 
 dence of their earliest days in earthly parents, but 
 now it is an enlightened and a reasonable confidence. 
 It was well enough for us all as children to believe 
 that our fathers knew everything and could do 
 everything. Any other feeling about them would 
 have been unnatural. It was a memorable day of 
 great unhappiness when this faith was shaken and 
 we began to have doubts, ending at last in the cer- 
 tainty that there were many things they did not 
 know and could not do. To be in a home again 
 with that old trust back in the heart, and having a 
 right to stay there for ever, would be almost enough 
 in itself to make us feel young once more. 
 
 They trust him to tell them all they need to know. 
 There is no hurry. Eternity is around them. The 
 tree of knowledge is above them ; its fruit, luscious 
 
PERPETUAL YOUTH. 91 
 
 and ripe, falls into their opened hands. They are 
 coming to know as they are known. Mysteries are 
 being explained in the clear, strong light, as the 
 weird shapes of the night take on familiar forms 
 when the sun rises above the hills. Cycle upon 
 cycle may pass and some questions may still be un- 
 answered, but they are not impatient as we are in 
 this "troublous land of time and dreams." They 
 are entranced by the ever-changing panorama of 
 resolved perplexities that passes before them. Why 
 should not they grow young who are coming to un- 
 derstand all mysteries? 
 
 They trust Him to give them all they ought to 
 have. Stars diifer from one another in glory. Some 
 who have been last here are first there, but they see 
 the reason for it, as we cannot for the lifting up of 
 one and the casting down of another here. We are 
 never quite satisfied with what comes to us on this 
 side of the grave. If it is not what we asked for, 
 we wonder why ; and if it is what we asked for, we 
 wonder that we had not asked for more. Not even 
 the man who said he had learned in whatsoever 
 state he was, therewith to be content, had everything 
 he wanted. He wislied to be free from pain, and the 
 thorn yet hung in his flesh. He wished to be free 
 from Roman fetters and prisons, and he was thrust 
 down into a dark dungeon under tlie pavement. But 
 there contentment is swallowed up in satisfaction. 
 "More than tliey could ask or think" is flowing 
 in upon them along every channel. Tlie hunger 
 
92 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 and the thirst of the entire nature is disappearing 
 for ever. Why should not they be young who are 
 harassed by no wants? 
 
 They trust him to make them all they wish to be. 
 From the first entering upon that land all ambition 
 to be chiefest vanished they knew not how. They 
 found some such prayer upon their lips as that of an 
 humble saint who cries, as he looks toward that day, 
 
 " I have but thee, O Father ! Let thy Spirit 
 Be with me, then, to comfort and uphold. 
 No gate of pearl, no branch of palm, I merit, 
 Nor street of shining gold. 
 
 " Some humble door among thy many mansions, 
 
 Some sheltering shade where sin and striving cease. 
 And flows for ever, through heaven's green expansions, 
 The river of thy peace. 
 
 "There, from the music round about me stealing, 
 I fain would learn the new and holy song, 
 And find, at last, beneath thy trees of healing. 
 That life for which I long." 
 
 They have begun to see now, as they could not, as 
 we cannot, here, how creatures who have been so 
 unlike their oAvn ideals can be transformed into his 
 perfect likeness. As they feel the work moving on 
 in them they are satisfied to stand still and see the 
 salvation of their Lord. Why should not they be 
 young who have already looked upon that which 
 they are to be? 
 
 Theirs, too, is the joyfulness of youth — not the 
 
PERPETUAL YOUTH. 93 
 
 unthinking and baseless joy of the very young who 
 are light-hearted because they are light-headed, who 
 laugh and sing because they are ignorant of the 
 dangers around them, and whose gladness might be 
 driven away by a single sober, sensible thought ; but 
 theirs is the joy of those who have seen danger and 
 have laced it down, who have met enemies and 
 have conquered them. It is the joy of those who 
 have fought the good fight and have finished their 
 course and have kept the faith and have received 
 the crown. Their work is done. All that element 
 of uncertainty that kept them restlessly alert here 
 has for ever been removed. The race is run, and they 
 have won the prize ; the battle is ended, and they 
 are victors. Why should youth not flow back into 
 hearts that know such joy as that ? 
 
 Theirs is the gladness, too, of those who have been 
 permitted to see with Christ the travail of his soul 
 and are satisfied. They have looked, as he has 
 lifted the curtain for them, down through the ages 
 of time that still remain to the end of all things, and 
 as they see the glorious consummation of their Lord's 
 work, as they watch his enemies and those who were 
 eager to sink his name into bottomless oblivion 
 coming eagerly to him with their gifts of gold and 
 frankincense and myrrh, as they behold men of 
 every color and of every tongue bowing before him 
 with every expression of grateful love, kings and 
 philosophers side by side with the most lowly and 
 the most ignorant, how can they help joining in the 
 
94 BEGTNNING LIFE. 
 
 new and holy song, " Worthy is the Lamb that was 
 slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and 
 strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing '' ? 
 How can they ever grow old whose hearts are 
 thrilled with the joy of that song? 
 
 Tlie oldest person here to-night, looking back, 
 feels that it was but yesterday and he was young, 
 and the youngest person here will be old in a little 
 space of time — as it were, a day. Soon the head 
 will be whitened : " The almond tree shall flourish." 
 The eye will be dimmed: "Those that look out 
 of the windows shall be darkened.'^ The hands 
 shall shake and the feet shall falter : " The keepers 
 of the house shall tremble, and the grasshopper shall 
 be a burden, and desire shall fail." And what then ? 
 Must we be dragged on, caught in an endless chain, 
 to weakness, old age and death ? Or may we so use 
 our youth as to have within us the assurance that 
 it may become perpetual ? Are there not limits, 
 prophecies, of it, that like the angel of the sepulchre 
 give us hope, as we look into their faces, that we 
 shall for ever be young ? Are there not potent 
 qualities that even here seem to renew the youth of 
 those who have grown old ? At thirty-four, James 
 Watt, the inventor of the steam-engine, was an old 
 man. " I greatly doubt if the silent mansion of the 
 dead is not the happiest place," he wrote. At eighty, 
 two young men found a day spent in his company 
 among the most amusing and instructive, so one of 
 them says, of his whole life. What was it that 
 
PERPETUAL YOUTH. 95 
 
 changed the old-young man into a youug-ohl man ? 
 It was not good health or good luck, for his health 
 never was very good and he had his full share of 
 bereavement and disappointment, but it was a new 
 way of looking at life. He had come to see that he 
 might give over living for himself — a way of living 
 that had almost burned up his energies before his 
 days were half finished — and that he might begin 
 to live for God and for the help of humanity. It 
 was that new purpose that gave him back the zest 
 and confidence and joy he had wellnigh lost. Will 
 you live for yourself and be old in body and soul 
 while you are yet young in years? or will you live 
 for God and for the good that you can do, and like 
 James Watt be young in body and in soul long after 
 the first page of the old family Bible has proved in 
 black and white that you are very aged indeed ? 
 Will you waste your youth in a giddy round of 
 sensuous pleasures till you drop into a jejune and 
 hopeless old age with no future to look forward 
 to in time or in eternity ? or will you use your youth 
 so wisely as to be young still when old age comes, 
 and with such vital germs within you that you shall 
 rise out of the grave clothed upon, like the messenger 
 whom the Marys saw at the empty sepulchre on 
 that Easter morning, with white raiment and per- 
 petual youth ? 
 
vir. 
 TEl^PTATION, 
 
VII, 
 TEMPTATION. 
 
 " Let no man say wlien he is tempted, I am tempted of God ; 
 for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any 
 man : but every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his 
 own lust and enticed." — James i. 13, 14. 
 
 TEMPTATION proves that we are neither an- 
 gels nor devils. If we were altogether good 
 or bad, the word would have no meaning for ns. 
 We should move straight forward then into the 
 ever-deepening light or darkness, with no allurement 
 to turn aside. That we can be tempted we must 
 consider rather as hopeful than discouraging. We 
 none of us lose any supposed honor by the assur- 
 ance that we are not perfect, and the discouraged 
 and despairing may gain much by the certainty 
 that they are still capable of an exclusively human 
 experience. 
 
 Temptation itself is not more natural to man than 
 the offering of excuses for having yielded to it. It 
 was exceedingly easy for a Greek or a Roman to 
 release himself from all responsibility of an un- 
 popular or shameful act. He had only to say, if 
 caught stealing, " My god Mercury enticed me ;'' or 
 if discovered intoxicated, " My god Bacchus allured 
 
 99 
 
100 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 me to drink ;" or if found beating out bis enemy's 
 life, " My god Mars made me do it ;'' but a Chris- 
 tian — one of the apostles of Jesus Christ — pricks 
 with his pen this consoling theory of a false theol- 
 ogy. " Don't deceive yourself in that way/' James 
 says. Don't flatter yourself that a god had any 
 part in the meanness of which you are accused. 
 The only god there is in this universe is good. 
 "Let no man say" — be he Greek, Roman or Hebrew 
 — " when he is tempted, I am tempted of God, for 
 God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth 
 he any man : but every man is tempted, when he is 
 drawn away of his own lust and enticed.'^ 
 
 When you do wrong, there is one person to blame 
 for it, and that is the one who does the wrong. 
 It is not denied that other people or other things 
 may have been the occasion of it, but these out- 
 ward enticements, however attractive, would have 
 been impotent had not your consent been given. 
 We say we are tempted by our senses. We try — 
 half unconsciously, perhaps — to make the eye or the 
 ear do duty as scapegoat, as the Greeks once made 
 scapegoats of their gods. But the eye and the ear 
 only carry impressions to the soul, and they are 
 no more to blame for what follows the deliv- 
 ery of their message than is the messenger-boy 
 for what you may do after you read the telegram 
 he hands you. Every man is tempted — not when 
 he is drawn away of his eyes or of his ears, but 
 of his lusts. Two pair of eyes look at the same 
 
TEMPTATION. 101 
 
 object ; and if you could photograph the impressions 
 made on those four optic nerves, the pictures mi^^ht 
 be ahiiost identical, but the results upon those two 
 lives were very different. One of these pairs of eyes 
 belonged to a drover just in from the Far West, 
 and the other belonged to his daughter ; and the 
 object they saw was a jewel in a shop-window. 
 They both saw it, but the cattleman's heart made 
 no response — he wouldn't give the poorest colt on 
 his farm for it — but that girl there by his side has 
 had some education. She has read about courts 
 and about crown-jewels. She knows that that 
 sparkling thing is a diamond, like those worn 
 by empresses. It is a small one, to be sure, that 
 no empress of good standing would want, but this 
 little lady thinks she never saw anything so beau- 
 tiful ; her heart is in her throat as she looks at it. 
 She is really tempted to break the tenth com- 
 mandment in a way she could not even explain to 
 her father. They go down the street, and hear on 
 the next corner sounds coming out intermittently as 
 a door swings to and fro — snatches of songs, bois- 
 terous laughter and the clicking of glasses. They 
 both hear them. The father stops as if fascinated, 
 but the daughter clutches his hand and tries to 
 drag him by. It was not the jewel that tempted 
 the daughter nor the dram-shop the father : it was 
 something within them that leaped up as traitors 
 will when the signal is given and the time seems 
 to have come to betray the fortress. 
 
102 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 This is why it is that, while we all live in the 
 same world and see, many of us, the same things, 
 no two human beings ever have exactly the same 
 temptations. There is nothing in any of our senses, 
 there is nothing in the surroundings of any of us, 
 business, professional, social, that makes sin neces- 
 sary. When we are drawn away, it is by our own 
 lusts to which we have given assent. That some 
 sights and sounds and places are more dangerous 
 than others is altogether unquestionable. What 
 these are for us is one of the things that we ought 
 all to know about ourselves. Perhaps there is as 
 little common sense used in resisting temptation as 
 in any other phase of human life whatsoever. We 
 learn, for the most part after a few trials, that we 
 are better off physically if we avoid some things 
 and secure others. If we find we can't get along 
 well without eight hours' sleep, we make an effort 
 to sleep eight hours ; if we find that there are dain- 
 ties we cannot eat without resulting discomfort, we 
 refuse them, however delicious they may be to the 
 taste ; but we seem to lose our heads when we get 
 on to higher ground where the questions to be de- 
 cided have to do more directly with our moral than 
 with our physical well-being. The process up to a 
 certain point is the same as that with which we are 
 familiar. There is the effort to assimilate some par- 
 ticularly delicious indulgence, repeated more than 
 once, with a never-failing moral and spiritual dis- 
 comfort resulting, but there the resemblance ceases. 
 
TEMPTATION. 103 
 
 We do not avoid these things as we do for the most 
 part those that express tlieniselves in physical terms. 
 We are as stupid about it as if we had no moral 
 memories whatever. A man knows that if he 
 exposes himself at certain times and in certain 
 atmospheric conditions his system will be unable 
 to resist, and he knows with the same degree of 
 certainty that if he exposes himself to unfavorable 
 moral and spiritual conditions he will undoubtedly 
 succumb ; but he does it, not only once or twice : 
 he keeps on doing it. He deliberately embarks in 
 a business that from the very nature of it repro- 
 duces constantly these unfortunate conditions. He 
 associates himself with men in whose society he 
 finds these conditions are never absent. He reads 
 books in every line of which lurks moral malaria. 
 He chooses his home in a place that makes escape 
 doubly difficult, and after he has done everything 
 that one could think of to dig pitfolls for him- 
 self he tumbles into them, and says, " I am not 
 to blame. No one could have escaped under these 
 circumstances." Yet these men in their self-con- 
 structed pitfalls serve at least one purpose, if no 
 other — that of a warning to the young not to throw 
 overboard common sense when they know that just 
 ahead are the rocks where sirens sit and sing. Let 
 them counsel you as the half-repentant Circe, daugh- 
 ter of the Sun, counseled Ulysses so to prepare his 
 ship by filling the ears of the sailors with wax and 
 havino; himself bound to the mast that it might not 
 
104 BEGrNNING LIFE. 
 
 be easy — nay, might be impossible — for them to 
 yield to the seductive soDg. There are many en- 
 chanted islands just ahead. To sail on thought- 
 lessly till the music of those fiscinating songs fills 
 the air will be fatal. Make preparation for such 
 moments. See to it that the ears and the hands 
 are properly cared for. 
 
 But Orpheus took even a better way than that 
 of Ulysses. When he passed the sauie island of 
 the sirens, he left his own hands unbound and the 
 ears of his sailors unstopped, but he made sweeter 
 music on his harp than that of the sirens, and he 
 and all his men could smile at the vain efforts of 
 their would-be destroyers. This is "the expulsive 
 power," as Chalmers calls it, "of a new affection." 
 This is the common-sense and Christian way of 
 resisting temptation. Let your tempted soul hear 
 sweeter music than the sirens make if you would 
 keep contentedly on your course. The majority 
 of those who give themselves over to gross, sensu- 
 ous lives do it as much because they know of noth- 
 ing else that would be interesting to do as for any 
 other reason. Could they have become engaged in 
 any form of healthful activity, the power of the 
 temptation over them would have been immeasu- 
 rably diminished. 
 
 The man who is hard at work, especially if it 
 be in the kind of work he likes, will not often 
 hear the song of the sirens ; and if he hears it, he 
 will be too absorbed to give his attention to it. 
 
TEMPTATION. 105 
 
 All young men and women ought to be regu- 
 larly employed. If they do not need to work to 
 keep soul and body together, they do need it to 
 keep the soul clean and the body pure. If you 
 are compelled to labor to earn a living, do not look 
 upon it as a curse : God may have seen that it was 
 the only way to save you from the curse of sin. If 
 you have nothing to do, look for work at once ; 
 there is an abundance of it to be found if you do 
 not care for pecuniary remuneration. There is work 
 to be done in getting work for those who cannot 
 live without it. There is work to be done for those 
 who are suffering because they are too old or too 
 young or too weak to work. There is work to 
 be done in visiting the sick and those who are in 
 prison — work in teaching the ignorant and in re- 
 forming the vicious, in clothing the naked and feed- 
 ing the hungry, in giving comfort to the sorrowing 
 and courage to the hopeless. Don't say, " That 
 sort of work is for ministers and priests and sisters 
 of charity. ^^ So it is, but not for them exclusively. 
 So far as we know, there was not a single represen- 
 tative of any of these classes in that company to 
 W'hom Christ said, ** I was an hungered, and ye 
 gave me no meat ; I was thirsty, and ye gave me 
 no drink ; I was a stranger, and ye took me not 
 in ; naked, and ye clothed me not ; sick and in 
 prison, and ye visited me not." 
 
 Learn as well to make a proper use of the pure, 
 ennobling pleasures of life. Let their sweet songs 
 
106 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 drown the seductive songs of the sirens. Train 
 yourself to admire and enjoy a beautiful sunset 
 or a still more beautiful sunrise. Let the eye be 
 refined in its tastes till a field of ripening grain, a 
 long slope of green grass, a river winding through 
 a valley, a blossoming orchard, a snow-clad moun- 
 tain, a stretch of blue sea, shall give a keener sense 
 of enjoyment than the garish splendors of halls 
 devoted to sensuous delights. Learn to admire 
 and enjoy the best there is in art. The world's 
 masterpieces for the most part are on the other side 
 of the sea, but these are by no means necessary 
 for the development of the artistic sense. There 
 are galleries of fairly good pictures open to us all 
 here in our own city. An hour spent in one of 
 them would be of more advantage to you than 
 many hours spent in Avatching the changing scenes, 
 too often contaminating, of the theatre or the opera- 
 house. There is real art now in the illustrations 
 of our best magazines, brought by free libraries 
 within every one's reach. Learn to see and to feel 
 the beauty there is in the simplest scenes well drawn 
 or etched, and you have a source of pleasure that 
 will neither vitiate nor satiate. 
 
 Music may be even more helpful than pictures. 
 It is cheaper. There is more variety and greater 
 intensity in the pleasure it gives. If we are at all 
 musical, we can carry our treasures with us every- 
 where, and can bring them out by night as well as 
 by day for the delectation of our friends and for 
 
TEMPTATION. 107 
 
 our own gratification. To be able to play on an 
 instrument, or to use that most noble of all instru- 
 ments the human voice, is to be possessed of an 
 unfailing source of the purest pleasure. Though 
 there are comparatively few who can ever hope 
 to play or to sing well enough to give gratification 
 to really critical people, yet the world does not 
 exist altogether for the benefit of really critical 
 people; and if you can learn to play or sing or 
 whistle a tune, you will have it in your power at 
 any time to overwhelm the siren's song with safer 
 and nobler melodies, even if they are not very artis- 
 tically rendered. 
 
 Literature offers quite as real a pleasure to even 
 a larger number of people. Most musical amateurs 
 spend more hours a day with their books than with 
 their instruments or songs. Johnson thought the 
 most miserable man in all the world '' is he who 
 cannot read on a rainy day." He might have 
 enlarged the rainy day a little and made it include 
 all odd and unoccupied moments. Probably the ma- 
 jority of us have received more pleasure from books 
 than from all other sources combined. Blessed are 
 the young men and maidens who ask no keener 
 delights than those they know are always awaiting 
 them between the covei's of a good book. If you 
 do not care now for reading, set yourself as deter- 
 minedly to acquire this taste as you would if you 
 knew that on the last page of every worthy book 
 you should read you would be certain of finding a 
 
108 BEGINNING LIFE, 
 
 legal -tender bill of a large sum, so bewitched by 
 book-loving fairies as not to be plucked by any 
 possibility till every page is read. 
 
 The actual rewards to those who read the whole of a 
 good book are greater than any within the power of 
 fairies to distribute. Not the least of these will be the 
 independence you will thus achieve. Instead of being 
 a hanger-on of every friend or acquaintance who 
 can amuse you and save you for an hour or so from 
 yourself, you will be absohitely free to seek society 
 of any sort or to avoid it, as may seem desirable. 
 You know you have better than the best to be found 
 in modern drawing-rooms in your own little library, 
 though there may be only a dozen books upon the 
 shelf. Outranking even this priceless benefit Mall 
 be the moral and spiritual gains you will have made. 
 At the first notes of the siren's song you can fill the 
 air with the sweetest music of the world's purest and 
 most inspiring poets ; you can enchain the ear with 
 the eloquence of the grandest orators that have ever 
 lived ; you can entrance the eye with pageants that 
 move across the page more brilliant and splendid 
 than have ever marched across any Pield of the 
 Cloth of Gold. 
 
 Thrice blessed are the young men and maidens to 
 whom the Bible is the most interesting of books. 
 An audience of colored people can be gathered any- 
 where in the South, it is said, by an announcement 
 that a number of chapters will be read from either 
 the Old Testament or the New. They delight in 
 
TEMPTATION. 109 
 
 the long musical roll of the Psalms, in the wide 
 wondrous visions of the prophets, in the exquisite 
 parables of Christ and in the cogent Epistles of Paul. 
 Many of the greatest scholars here in the North and 
 in England and Germany are of the same mind as 
 the ignorant freedmen. To them, as to Sir Walter, 
 this is " the Book.'^ There is no other comparable to 
 it. They would choose it unhesitatingly if they knew 
 they were about to be cast away upon a lonely island, 
 and could have but one book. A vast amount of 
 intellectual error, often of a painful, and sometimes 
 of a very dangerous, sort is altogether avoidable for 
 those who are willing to be admonished by this book, 
 and there is moral and spiritual life and health in it 
 for the whole race. Blessed are they who when 
 they are tempted are able at once to grasp the sword 
 of the Spirit, which is some word of God, as Christ 
 himself did. 
 
 As Christ himself did ! It is only in the com- 
 panionship of this Christ who met the tempter and 
 conquered him for us that we can be absolutely 
 secure against temptation. All the contentment we 
 can find in our work, all the pleasure and inspira- 
 tion we can get out of nature and art and music and 
 literature, all the moral and spiritual strength that 
 leap from this word as waters Jeap from a spring, 
 will be of incalculable advantage in lessening the 
 frequency and power of temptation ; but when it 
 comes upon us and the storm breaks, then we must 
 fly to this Lover of our souls. Our safety depends 
 
110 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 very largely in our reliance upon his presence and 
 help, and that reliance will be aifected in no small 
 degree by our ability to realize his constant nearness. 
 There is a great difference in temperaments as to 
 this power of seeing the invisible. There are some, 
 like the old Greek philosopher, who can see good- 
 ness incarnated, and who are entranced with the 
 form of beauty outlined before them with a distinct- 
 ness almost like that of a material presence ; there 
 are Christians who seem to live in the conscious pres- 
 ence of their Lord as really as did they who jour- 
 neyed with him across "those sacred fields;" but 
 there are others to whom all this is largely incom- 
 prehensible. They believe in Christ as they do in 
 goodness, but they have never seen either. They 
 lose very much, much more perhaps tlian there is 
 any need of their losing. If they would make a 
 rational use of these four inspired pictures of the 
 Christ, he would no longer be for them a Christ en- 
 tombed in a garden or a Christ enthroned in heaven: 
 he would be the Christ of his own promise, " with 
 us always even unto the end," and to whom we can 
 cry when we feel ourselves sinking, as Peter did, 
 and there is time only for a cry, with perfect confi- 
 dence that he will hear and answer our ao-onizins: 
 appeal as quickly as he did Peter's. 
 
 The old mythology has passed away altogether. 
 Men long ago ceased to believe in gods, impure them- 
 selves and tempting mortals to vice. " God is God : 
 there is none other," is the message that even the 
 
TEMPTATION. Ill 
 
 Mohammedan shouts in the ears of Asiatic and Afri- 
 can savages. He will not entice to sin ; he died to 
 save the world from it. He lives for the same pur- 
 pose. He does not see fit to remove us altogether 
 from the sphere of temptation, but that need not 
 disquiet us : "he will not suffer us to be tempted above 
 that we are able, but will with the temptation also 
 make a way to escape.^' Never permit yourself to 
 believe or to be persuaded that temptation, in what- 
 ever form it comes, is irresistible. It is for all of 
 us if we stand alone, but for none of us who have 
 " the right man on our side, the man of God's own 
 choosing." 
 
VIII. 
 
 MAKING A HOp. 
 
VIII. 
 
 MAKING A HOME. 
 
 " Through wisdom is an house builded ; and by understanding 
 it is established," — Prov. xxiv. 3. 
 
 THE idea of the family is one of the ideas that 
 are as widespread as is the human race. In- 
 stinct reproduces something like it even among birds 
 and animals, but the home is altogether a human 
 idea and confined to man in his civilized state. 
 There are families in Asia and in Africa, and perhaps 
 in Europe and in America, whose dwelling-places are 
 no more real homes than are the lairs in which wild 
 beasts live. There are sociologists who believe that 
 the home is found only in civilization, and in civili- 
 zation north of a certain latitude. They make it 
 coterminous with the frost-line : ^' Where ice never 
 forms, homes are not made.'' Where the climate is 
 so mild all the year round that every one lives out 
 of doors, coming into the house only to sleep, the 
 idea of the home is a dormitory. In the north, 
 where the nights are long and the winters severe, 
 the family is driven in upon itself, and the home 
 crystallizes within as silently as the ice without. 
 But it does not follow that every family living 
 
 115 
 
116 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 under a weatherproof roof north of the frost-line is 
 in a home. Strangely enough, none of the European 
 peoples, from the far south to the land of almost 
 perpetual snow, use the word '^ home " at all ; it is 
 not in their languages. They get no nearer to it 
 than '' house." " To the house," " in the house," 
 are the idioms they use for '' going home " and '^ at 
 home." In English the word is one of the most 
 common and one of the most sacred ; it is next to the 
 word ''heaven" itself. In this land of homes Phila- 
 delphia bears the proud distinction of being the ''city 
 of homes." One other city has more families, but 
 has far fewer homes. Communists and socialists 
 grind their teeth at the very mention of Philadel- 
 phia ; they consider it an almost barren soil for their 
 theories. The material out of which a destructive and 
 murderous mob may be formed does not come from 
 the home. But cities, like men, often end by fail- 
 ing at their supposed strongest point. That — at 
 least, they think — can take care of itself. It is left 
 unguarded, and tliere the enemy enters. As soon 
 as the making of homes and the fostering of home- 
 life come to be questions in which it is supposed that 
 Philadelphians need take no interest, our glory will 
 at once begin to grow dim. Your parents had to 
 answer for themselves questions concerning home- 
 making, and you cannot adopt their decision : you 
 must make a home for yourself. 
 
 "Wisdom," Solomon says, "builds the house," 
 the term in which he would probably include the 
 
MAKING A HOME. 117 
 
 home-idea as well as that of the family-name, " and 
 understanding solidifies it/^ Our American Solomons 
 for the most part believe that the sentence should be 
 amended to read, " By money is a house builded, and 
 by money is it established/^ That money can build 
 timbers and bricks and mortar and stone into 
 something that answers to the term ^' house '^ is un- 
 debatable. There are almost as many architects as 
 lawyers on Chestnut and Walnut streets, and they 
 will promise for a certain sum to draw a plan and 
 make all contracts with the builders, and have you 
 a house put up and furnished, to the very dishes on 
 the table if you wish, within a limited time. By 
 adding half as much again time and money to their 
 estimates you may be reasonably confident that the 
 promise will be fulfilled. Money will build you a 
 house, it will give you an " establishment,^' but it 
 cannot assure you a home. The French call these 
 massive structures that money builds " hotels.^' 
 Perhaps it would not be unfair to press a partial 
 confession out of the word that the life within those 
 walls is not unlike that of a hotel. The inmates 
 may have as few common interests as have the so- 
 called "guests" of one of our great caravansaries. 
 But by diminishing the size you do not necessarily 
 increase the home-feeling. There may be second- 
 and third-class, as well as first-class, hotels. Wher- 
 ever money is the only reliance, there can be noth- 
 ing but a hotel or a boarding-house. To have a 
 home there must be unity of feeling, community 
 
118 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 of interests, and money is notoriously unable to pro- 
 duce either. 
 
 If we cannot amend this sentence of Solomon's 
 by replacing the word " wisdom '' by " money," 
 might we not, a large number of young people are 
 always asking, replace it by "love''? They go 
 forth hand in hand, these trusting couples, relying 
 on love to lead them to some vine-clad cottage in 
 which they can build a home. Alas that Love, 
 proverbially blind, should lead so many to the poor- 
 house or the divorce courts ! Love was never yet 
 caught handling brooms and dustcloths and frying- 
 pans, or filling the larder with things to eat and the 
 closets with things to wear. While neither cleanli- 
 ness nor plenty makes a home, it is next to impos- 
 sible to make a home without both. Love must 
 have at least one part wisdom added to it before it 
 can be effective as a home-maker, and then it be- 
 comes so permeated all through with wisdom that 
 it is almost certain to succeed. 
 
 Love of that sort has no false pride : it is willing 
 to begin at the bottom. It doesn't care how high 
 society may lift its supercilious eyebrows : it is ready 
 for any honest toil that may offer. It is not fright- 
 ened at burdens that might appal one brave heart, 
 for in this house there are two brave hearts that 
 can smile at a little load like that. '^ Those were 
 our happiest days," say some of those liome-builders 
 now grown old and rich, " when we began the mak- 
 ing of our home. When there was plenty of hard 
 
MAKING A HOME. 119 
 
 work, with usually enough to eat, what mattered it if 
 now aud then we sat down to rather a meagre or an 
 ill-cooked meal?^^ Wisdom had come a little short 
 in providing and preparing, but it had done its best; 
 and love could aiford to overlook any deficiency. 
 
 In such a home, where there are wise as well as 
 tender eyes in each head, the importance of other 
 things besides the table will be recognized. There 
 is an indescribable atmosphere that is quite as essen- 
 tial to the home as good bread and enough of it. 
 What some of the qualities are that tend to create 
 this atmosphere, and without which it cannot exist, 
 is an open secret. Courtesy is one of these. Those 
 who have entered into an engagement to make a 
 home together, or who have just begun the work, 
 are ordinarily so courteous to each other as at once 
 to betray themselves. This ought to bring a bhish, 
 not to the faces of these young innocents, but to 
 the colorless, wrinkled cheeks of those who smile. 
 It is the most terrible confession of their own defi- 
 ciency in that quality of which neither the betrothed 
 nor the newly-wedded ever has too much. These 
 old cynics were once themselves as courteous as the 
 young bride and groom that have aroused their merri- 
 ment, but their courtesy waned with the moon, to wax, 
 alas ! no more. The ears that were accustomed to the 
 gentle speech of the bygone halcyon days would not 
 recognize the harsh voice of the present had they not 
 gradually become accustomed to Its increasing grtiff- 
 ness of tone. Where is the table across which those 
 
120 BEGIN^UNO LIFE. 
 
 who bave celebrated their silver, or even their crys- 
 tal or tin, wedding always speak as they ought? 
 " They are more natural now/' do you say ? Then 
 to be more natural for most people means to be more 
 brutal. The fine atmosphere of the home cannot 
 be produced by words, however tender, but it can 
 easily be destroyed by rude, uncourteous speech. 
 
 Though tfulness is another quality as essential 
 as oxygen to the atmosphere of the home. The 
 occupants of a house or a hotel may be courteously 
 indifferent to one another, but in the home this is im- 
 possible ; such indifference immediately turns what 
 was a home into a house or hotel. The home is the 
 only double-headed entity of which we have any 
 knowledge that is not a monster, but there is no mon- 
 ster comparable to a home in which these two heads 
 are not sympathetic. The duties of the husband and 
 those of the wife are so different that it will require 
 some effort on the part of both to give to each their 
 proper emphasis and importance. It is easy for 
 each to accuse the other of exaggeration, absolute 
 or relative. The wife thinks the husband over- 
 particular about his shop or office or store, and he 
 thinks she underestimates somewhat the obliga- 
 tions of his business or professional life and over- 
 estimates the home-claims that bear most directly 
 upon her. Both are very likely right, and both are 
 very likely wrong. There is a mutual failure in 
 though tfulness. In love they prefer each other to 
 all the world, but ^'in honor preferring one another '^ 
 
MAKING A HOME. 121 
 
 has quite slipped out of their minds. So with their 
 varied tastes as well as their duties. No two people 
 ever did have exactly the same likes and dislikes, 
 though for a time they may honestly have tried to 
 make themselves and each other think they had. 
 Gradually in every instance where it was not sud- 
 denly these diiFerences make themselves felt. The 
 husband and the wife find that aesthetically and 
 intellectually and gastrouomically they are not 
 one, but two. If each is self-assertive and confi- 
 dent that the other ought to yield and replace 
 present tastes with the superior appetencies of 
 the other, the fine atmosphere of that home is 
 in danger of losing an essential quality. A little 
 thoughtfulness on the part of each would make 
 it self-evident to both that these differences must 
 exist, that they are essential if the husband and 
 the wife are to be the complement of each other, 
 and that the life of each will not lose in any 
 degree, but will gain markedly, by a thoughtful 
 consideration of these differences. 
 
 They have different weaknesses, too, as well as 
 tastes. One is strong just where the other is not, 
 and it seems rather aggravating to both that it 
 should be so. Mistakes that we do not make our- 
 selves appear to us unnecessary and inexcusable. 
 The man forgets that his wife is a woman, and she 
 reciprocates by forgetting that he is a man. He 
 comes home at night from the experiences of a 
 most trying day. Everything has gone wrong. 
 
122 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 He couldn't do his own work half as well as usual, 
 and his employes were still more stupid. Some in- 
 vestments turned out badly, or a bill ownng him 
 that was marked good proved to be very far from 
 it. His home seems specially attractive in antici- 
 pation. He feels the need of it. He opens the 
 door, and the frown on his manly brow deepens. 
 His reception is not what he was counting on. No 
 one meets him. There is no indication that he was 
 expected and that his coming was looked forward 
 to with pleasure. His wife is out, or she is taking 
 care of one of the children or seeing to some domes- 
 tic duty. When she appears, she seems preoccupied, 
 and looks as if she expected to receive sympathy 
 instead of giving it. She too has had a hard day. 
 The children have been fretful, the servants, if there 
 are any, have been unreasonable, and even the culi- 
 nary implements have shared the general perverse- 
 ness of things. She has been looking forward to 
 her husband's return, to the comfort of his pres- 
 ence and the encouragement of his words, but after 
 a single look into his face she too is disappointed. 
 Could they for a little moment exchange eyes, each 
 would get what each craved, each would see that 
 the strength of the other had been somewhat over- 
 taxed, and due allowance would be made ; but, for 
 lack of this thouglitfulness, the fine atmosphere of 
 the home is likely to be seriously disturbed, and 
 possibly another proof given the cynical crowd of 
 onlookers that they are right about it, of course, 
 
MAKING A HOME. 123 
 
 and " marriage is indisputably a failure." It always 
 is when the purpose of it is not the making of a 
 home, but the gratification of a momentary prefer- 
 ence exalted by a noble name to which it has no 
 right, or when it is chosen as the surest and easiest 
 way of drawing the envious congratulations of one^s 
 friends, or as an escape from ennui, or as the last 
 reformatory hope of the worn-out epicurean. Mar- 
 riage in each of these instances is a predestined fail- 
 ure ; but even when the marriage is one of those 
 that appear to have been made in heaven, it will 
 have come short of the perfect ideals that exist in 
 the place where it was made, and even of the some- 
 what imperfect ideals of the contracting parties. 
 Such a wife and mother as Monica was has pointed 
 out her own failures, which she thought were many. 
 The most perfect home that has ever been formed 
 since Adam and Eve made their great mistake in 
 Paradise has lacked something ; but to write the 
 word '^failure" over the institution itself on this 
 account would be to condemn as absolutely worth- 
 less everything there is this side of heaven. 
 
 Every true home must be founded on unselfish- 
 ness. It does not exist for the husband : that 
 would be the tyranny of strength ; or for the wife : 
 that might be the tyranny of sweetness ; or for the 
 children : that would be the tyranny of weakness and 
 ignorance ; but it exists for all the members of it. 
 *' Bear ye one another's burdens " would be pecu- 
 liarly appropriate as a home motto, though it has 
 
124 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 failed, apparently, to achieve popularity of that 
 sort. 
 
 Such a home, while the most desirable environ- 
 ment for a man or a woman, rises to the point of a 
 necessity for the child. As a place for bringing up 
 children the home has stood, since Plato's unsuccess- 
 ful experiment, without a rival. " What France 
 needs," said Napoleon as his keen eyes detected the 
 moral and physical degeneration of the people of 
 which he had made himself emperor — *' What 
 France needs Is mothers." That was only half the 
 truth, as he knew very well. He wanted the 
 fathers to fight his battles and to win new crowns 
 for the collection he was making, or he would have 
 said, " What France needs Is homes." There is 
 little hope for France, or for any other country that 
 has that crying need, until it Is met In some good 
 degree. American fathers are not prevented by 
 force, as the French were under Napoleon, from 
 doing their best to satisfy that need here, but there 
 are forces almost as potent as the despotic will of 
 Napoleon that hinder and destroy whatever wish 
 of that sort many men may have. Business and 
 politics are as exacting masters as was the ambitious 
 Corsican. They draft men Into their exclusive 
 service from extreme youth to extreme old age. 
 They monoplize not only their time, but their 
 thoughts and interests, In a way that Napoleon 
 might have envied. If a man is altogether engross- 
 ed with public duties, however honorable In them- 
 
MAKING A HOME. 125 
 
 selves, let him not attempt to build a home : his 
 failure is foredoomed. Aud let not the man who 
 has begun to build a home think that any other 
 duty, of any sort whatever, can be of greater im- 
 portance. The men who are compelled to work 
 from early morning till late at night are fortunately 
 very few indeed in this favored country, but the 
 men who use the entire day, evenings included, to 
 further mercantile or professional or political ambi- 
 tions, alas for their homes ! are very numerous. 
 The masculine element is just as essential as the 
 feminine in the household. The fatherhood is as 
 important as the motherhood in the home. We 
 may be ready to question this because so many 
 homes still exist and thrive in a way in which the 
 element of fatherhood is altogether lacking. But if 
 the father had fulfilled his duty, not as well as the 
 average father does, but as well as the average 
 father might, who can tell but that that home might 
 have risen as high if the wing of motherhood 
 instead of fatherhood had been broken? As one 
 of the two, as chief of the two contractors, who 
 have engaged to build a home under your roof, you 
 have no right to give the evenings that should be 
 used in that work to your ledger or your news- 
 paper or your club or your lodge. It will be better 
 for you to be able to say at last '^ Here am I, Lord, 
 and the children that thou hast given me," than to be 
 able to say, " Here am I, Lord, with a great fortune 
 that I have gathered, or a great name that I have 
 
126 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 achieved ; but, as for my childreu, their mother will 
 report for them." 
 
 For we cannot succeed in separating the two 
 worlds altogether from each other. You may feel 
 sometimes as if there was nothing in your business 
 that could be of any interest to the angels of heaven, 
 but in your home, with your children in your arms, 
 you can easily understand Christ's love for the little 
 ones ; and those texts about " their angels always 
 beholding the face of their Father who is in heaven " 
 speak to your heart even though the impression they 
 leave upon the brain is not altogether distinct. How 
 can you help thanking God for your children? 
 How can you turn your back in the morning upon 
 your home without asking him to protect them? 
 You have to be early at the store or office ? Yes, 
 but you can always be there a few minutes earlier if 
 it is important enough ; then you can take that time 
 for your home. You can use it in reading a few 
 verses from the Bible or in offering a few words of 
 prayer. You haven't the courage to do it? Think 
 what a confession you are making ! You wouldn't 
 like to have any one else charge you with such 
 cowardice. Of all places on the earth, your home 
 should be the one where you should be freest to ex- 
 press your truest self, however bunglingly at first, 
 where there is no dread of misapprehension and ridi- 
 cule. He must be a very small man indeed who in 
 such surroundings dare not hear his own voice re- 
 peating the Lord's Prayer or offering some simple 
 
MAKING A HOME. 127 
 
 sentences of praise or petition. You need the grace 
 that will be given you at such a time as much as 
 your wife needs to know that hers are not the only 
 prayers that rise for your home, and as much as your 
 children need to see the man they think the wisest 
 and best and strongest in the world on his knees 
 before his God. They may have the very best in- 
 struction in the Sunday-school and from the pulpit 
 in after-years, but nothing will ever impress them 
 like those earliest memories of the family altar where 
 you, the father, used to pray. Love, courtesy, 
 thoughtfulness, unselfishness, cannot build a home 
 without prayer. " Except the Lord build the house 
 they labor in vain that build it." 
 
 Home and heaven ! Christ has joined them so 
 closely together that it is hard for us to disassociate 
 them in our thoughts. There is no spot upon earth 
 in which there is so much of heaven as in a true 
 home. Heaven does indeed lie about the infancy 
 of every child born into such surroundings, and the 
 home seems like a perpetual pledge of heaven. " In 
 my Father's house are many homes. I go to pre- 
 pare one for you." For a few years only, at the 
 longest, can the homes we are building here endure. 
 When some morrow's sun shall rise, its light will 
 fall upon closed shutters, and in the darkness of 
 that house only the ruins of a home will remain ; 
 but the love and thoughtfulness and unselfishness 
 and faith that once made a home there are not dead. 
 They are potent still ; and when a few more suns 
 
128 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 shall have risen and set, the " home that has disap- 
 peared altogether from earth will have been rebuilt 
 for ever in heaven. " Oh, happy home ! Oh, hap- 
 py children there !" 
 
IX. 
 STRENGTH, 
 
IX. 
 
 STRENGTH. 
 
 " Finally my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the 
 power of his might." — Eph. vi, 10. 
 
 WE are born with an admiration for physical 
 streno^th. It is unconscious and instinctive. 
 When the infant prefers the father's arms to the 
 mother's, if it ever does, its cry is an expression of 
 the high value it places upon a firm grasp and a 
 steady step. The pictures the boy cuts from illus- 
 trated newspapers and hangs on the walls of his 
 room are those of athletes. So are the portraits, for 
 the most part, that hang in the world's gallery of 
 heroes. There stands old Hercules leaning on his 
 club, with the Nemean lion at his feet. There is 
 great Theseus grappling with the centaur and about 
 to give the hitherto invincible monster his quietus. 
 There is Samson scattering the Philistines right 
 and left with the ridiculous jaw-bone of an ass that 
 becomes terrible in those awful hands. There is 
 David whirling his sling and sending the smooth 
 stone into the white spot between the shaggy brows 
 of the giant, and cutting off that bison-like head 
 with a colossal sword. There to this day on the 
 
 131 
 
132 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 walls and the propylsea of Egyptian temples is the 
 conqueror Rameses holding his cajitives by the liair 
 of their heads, while he towers, by the flattering 
 strokes of the sculptor's chisel, many feet above 
 them. 
 
 The world will never outgrow its admiration for 
 strong muscles and sinews. The Olympian games 
 are no more, but the popular idol still is the stroke- 
 oar of the successful crew, the pitcher of the cham- 
 pion baseball nine, the bowler of the eleven that 
 holds the cup, the rusher of the football team that 
 wins the ball. The Christianity that equips its 
 young men's associations with model gymnasia and 
 athletic grounds certainly has no word of contempt 
 for physical development. It may, and does, have 
 something to say about moderation in these things, 
 and concerning a tendency, particularly marked in 
 our colleges, to over-estimate the value of brawn as 
 compared with brain. It is not the best scholar, but 
 the best athlete, in his class who is the most envied 
 man of the college. Christianity, common sense and 
 history all make their protest against this as a false 
 appraisement, an untrue perspective — as the jndg- 
 ment of an untrained eye. 
 
 The very people that once took the most intense 
 pleasure in physical triumphs began, after a time, 
 to see that this was not the line for man to put 
 himself upon. The brutes were all superior to hini 
 here, and in any fair test of strength or speed or en- 
 durance man must always come out decidedly second- 
 
STRENGTH. 133 
 
 best. The clearest-eyed of the Greeks saw the mis- 
 take, and did what they coukl to lift man to a higher 
 level, the intellectual, where tliey felt he belonged, 
 and where the brutes could no longer be his com- 
 petitors. They succeeded so well that the honors 
 once given to the runner and the thrower and the 
 fighter were very largely transferred to the poet and 
 the orator and the philosopher. The man who could 
 recount in prose or verse the deeds of warriors was 
 sure of a glory that might rival, if not outshine, that 
 of the w^arriors themselves. Intellectual develop- 
 ment was sought as eagerly as physical had been. 
 With the exception of college-students, all men 
 to-day who have sufficient education to give their 
 opinions any value rank intellectual strength above 
 physical. They agree with Bacon " that knowledge 
 is power.'^ They would not for a moment think of 
 comparing the strength of a Samson or a Hercules 
 with that of a Homer or a Humboldt. One, they 
 see, is altogether animal, perishing as utterly after 
 a few years as that of a lion or an elephant, while 
 the other is altogether human and will endure as 
 long as human languages are able to hold human 
 thousrhts in solution. 
 
 So far we may go with the majority ; but if we 
 attempt to rise to a still higher level, we must ex- 
 pect to find the number with us diminishing. Still, 
 there is a very respectable minority who rank 
 strength of will and purpose above botli Intel k^ctual 
 and physical strength. Not a Hercules nor a Homer 
 
134 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 is 60 stroug a man, in their eyes, as a Moses or a 
 Washington, enduring reproach or misapprehen- 
 sion without swerving for a single step from the 
 course they had marked out as right. There are 
 political exiles in Siberia, it is said, some of them 
 women of high rank and fine culture, accustomed to 
 the delicate life of the Russian capitals, who have 
 passed long years of unspeakable torture in circum- 
 stances that seem to us, as we read, absolutely un- 
 unbearable even for men of the coarsest fibre, who 
 say little in the way of vituperation, but who 
 calmly announce their unalterable conviction that 
 while " they may die in exile, and their children 
 may die in exile, and their children's children may 
 die in exile, at last something will come out of it/' 
 Such an exhibition of strength as that thrills every 
 heart that is in the right place as no possible 
 physical or intellectual triumphs could ever do. 
 This strength of will is so closely allied to moral 
 strength, if they are not one and the same thing 
 from diiferent sides, that it is often exceedingly dif- 
 ficult to distinguish between them. These exiles in 
 Siberia cannot be merely self-willed or obstinate : 
 they must have a firm conviction that they are doing 
 right and to do differently would be a violation of 
 conscience. It needs only to widen the horizon which 
 we presume them to have to include every violation 
 of conscience to give us a glimpse of one of the 
 least common but most exalted types of strength. 
 Shakespeare assumes that strength of this sort is by 
 
STRENGTH. 135 
 
 no means always associated with great physical 
 power when he says, 
 
 "Oh, it is excellent 
 To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous 
 To use it like a giant." 
 
 Physical prowess, uncontrolled by justice, right con- 
 science, is utterly denuded of all its beauty in Shake- 
 speare's eyes, and should be in ours. Why should 
 we even account it entitled to the name? Is it not 
 an absurdity to speak of a man as being strong who 
 can be turned this way or that by any wind that 
 blows upon him ? Is he strong who has no self- 
 control, who is run away with by temper or by 
 appetite or by desire, who yields with but the show 
 of a struggle to his lust for gold or pleasure or place? 
 Is he a strong man who has not strength enough to 
 do what he believes to be the right thing, though 
 his friend or his party assure him that it will be 
 dangerous to his interests and theirs? Is he a 
 strong man who trembles at the crack of some 
 boss's whip, or who dare not speak because the 
 command, " Keep still !" has been passed along the 
 ranks ? The strong man must be free, free to do as 
 his conscience commands him. Mrs. Boswell, who 
 had no liking for her husband's gruif and burly 
 friend Dr. Johnson, and who thought the philoso- 
 pher had far too much influence over Mr. Boswell, 
 once said " she had very often seen a bear led about 
 by a man, but never before had she seen a man led 
 
136 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 about by a bear f but eveiy man is who lets the 
 brutal part of himself or of other men dictate to 
 him, every man is who allows any sensuous indul- 
 gence to lead him where his conscience tells him he 
 ought not go. A man led about by a bear is not 
 our idea of a strong man. Manhood, the world is 
 slowly coming to see, lies not in physical or intel- 
 lectual qualities, but in moral dispositions. Both a 
 giant and a philosopher may be brutes, but he who 
 is strong in truth, in honor, in purity, in self-cul- 
 ture, in the right, in the Lord, is a strong man. 
 
 Like the lower forms, such strength is acquired, 
 and by the same methods. Whoever wishes to 
 be an athlete or a scholar must consent to deny 
 himself some very pleasant things. You must go 
 into training to be an athlete, you must go to 
 school to be a scholar ; and in each instance self-in- 
 dulgence is forbidden. There must be no dainty 
 dishes, no stimulating beverages or narcotics for the 
 athlete ; no midnight amusements, no morning 
 hours wasted in sleep, for the scholar. Just so far 
 as each is in earnest there is a positive delight in 
 any self-denial that oiFers an increased probability 
 of success. Let the athlete or scholar be worthy 
 of the name, and he stops at nothing that will ap- 
 parently bring him a little nearer what he wishes 
 to be. He sees no attractiveness in anything that 
 would weaken him and his chances of success. 
 Nothing more than this is asked of those who wish 
 for character, moral strength. Self-denial stares 
 
STRENGTH. 137 
 
 them in the face the moment they begin tlieir quest, 
 but it is the denial of that self which can be 
 strengthened only at the expense of the very self 
 they are anxious to develoj). Like the athlete and 
 the scholar, the man must avoid every indulgence, 
 every amusement even, that saps and undermines 
 those fine virtues that must all be preserved and 
 developed if he is ever to fill his own idea of the 
 strong man. To be anything you must deny some 
 part of yourself. To be a man you have only to 
 deny that part of yourself which is unworthy of 
 you. There is no more self-denial for those who 
 are seeking to be strong in the Lord than there is 
 for those who are seeking any other kind of strength ; 
 only it is a different kind of self-denial. 
 
 But no man ever gets strength of any sort what- 
 ever by simply not doing some things. What he 
 gives up is the mere clearing the ground of weeds, 
 so that the crop he wishes to raise can have a fair 
 chance. There are negative Christians, or imita- 
 tions called such, whose only claim to be strong is 
 that they have given up everything that makes men 
 weak. They permit themselves no self-indulgences, 
 no pernicious amusements ; they do nothing that 
 could sap their strength. But what are they doing 
 to increase it? Where is the athlete or scholar that 
 wins prizes simply by not doing injurious things? 
 Muscle and brain must be fed and exercised if they 
 are ever to be strong ; so must the soul. Some men 
 are by nature morally as well as physically and in- 
 
138 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 tellectually stronger than others, but no man ever 
 yet had a strong character that was not made strong 
 by his own efforts. He nourished and exercised him- 
 self with that end in view. When he found that the 
 moral giants had all fed their souls on the moral 
 truths of the Bible, he considered this good evidence 
 that there must be something in this book especially 
 adapted for strengthening the conscience and the soul 
 of man. Must a young man or a young woman read 
 the Bible ? Not necessarily merely to be what many 
 young men and young women are; but for those 
 who wish to be morally and spiritually strong this 
 is the one indispensable book. Even men like Mr. 
 Huxley, who are not willing to concede its divine 
 character, yet place the Bible above all other books 
 as a moral force. They do not see, they confess, 
 how, without the use of it, ideals so lofty and in- 
 spirations so potent can ever be produced. When 
 you are told to read the Bible, you need not think 
 of yourself as going around wnth a flexible-covered 
 copy of the sacred volume under your arm, ques- 
 tioning all your friends as to the meaning of various 
 passages in the minor jirophets and in Revelation. 
 I have nothing to say against carrying a Bible 
 under your arm, but the place where it will do you 
 the most good to carry it is where Coligny and 
 Cromwell and Havelock and Livingstone carried 
 theirs : in the heart. 
 
 But the Bible itself urges those who feel their 
 need of wisdom and strength to ask for what they 
 
STRENGTH. 139 
 
 want of Him who moved holy men of old to write 
 these words. It is a book that draws attention to 
 itself only that it may fix the attention thus secured 
 upon an ever-living Being. Must a young person 
 pray? There is something natural about reading 
 anything, even the Bible ; but this bowing like a 
 carved figure in an unaccustomed attitude, and mut- 
 tering words in the air — what relation can there be 
 between such an exercise and the practical questions 
 that are impatiently waiting the conclusion of these 
 orisons ? This wise book constantly associates wor- 
 ship and conduct. " They that wait upon the Lord 
 shall renew their strength.'^ Strong men like Co- 
 ligny and Cromwell and Havelock and Livingstone 
 believed that they could not fight their battles suc- 
 cessfully without prayer. They did not lay great 
 stress upon a particular attitude, or upon any set 
 forms, or upon words at all. Prayer, to them, was 
 not a mere religious ceremony working as incanta- 
 tions are supposed to work : it was direct commu- 
 nication with the one Being in this universe whose 
 power is always making for righteousness, and who 
 is always eager to help those who feel themselves 
 sinking. So to think of prayer is to change the • 
 obligation into a privilege, and on the use we make 
 of it will depend, to an extent which probably very 
 few of us realize, our efficiency as moral forces. 
 
 From some points of view this seems to be rather 
 an unfortunate time to begin life. All the profes- 
 sions and all forms of business, they tell us, are 
 
140 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 overcrowded. The supply everywhere seems greater 
 than the demand, and many of yon, perhaps, have 
 ah'eady had the sense of being superfluous. But 
 the world is by no means overstocked with young 
 men and women who are strong in moral purpose, 
 strong in character, stroug in the Lord. There is 
 no profession or business that will not hasten to 
 make room for any number of such young persons 
 as soon as their presence is known. All the large 
 firms of our own and of every other city have 
 unsatisfactory employes whom they would be glad 
 to weed out if they could be certain of filling the 
 vacancies with trustworthy persons. All the pro- 
 fessions have a number of places reserved and kept 
 unoccupied, waiting, not for candidates — there are 
 scores of applicants for each — but waiting till the 
 right man appears, and then immediately the call 
 for his services will be ready. The political 
 world, swarming as it is with a hungry hoard, is 
 in greatest need of strong young men, young men 
 whose back-bones are not to be bent though a whole 
 party try its hand at it ; young men whose knees 
 will not bow to the tyrant's cap though obloquy and 
 obscurity are threatened ; young men who will dare, 
 as young men did fifty years ago, to lift their voices 
 and cry out against iniquity, though entrenched be- 
 hind majorities, respectability and religion. For 
 such young men there is plenty of room in the polit- 
 ical world, and wherever they are will be the top. 
 Society, too, has places for more than four hundred 
 
STRENGTH. 141 
 
 young persons of tliis sort. They may not be wel- 
 comed with any great enthusiasm by those who are 
 already in; they will be looked upon, possibly, as 
 interloping puritans ; but the sincerity of grateful 
 recognition on the part of the few will more than 
 compensate for the indifference or the recoil of the 
 many. In every social stratum there are some who 
 set themselves determinedly against excesses, against 
 degrading self-indulgence, against frivolity and ma- 
 terialism. They are lonely ; they feel themselves in 
 a hopeless minority. If you can bring them a rein- 
 forcement of moral strength, you will be as welcome 
 as Bliicher was to Wellington, as La Fayette was to 
 Washington. If you have nothing of this kind 
 to bring, if you are a vacillating person with no 
 strong moral purpose, if everything that is pleas- 
 ant seems to you desirable without any question 
 of right, then society of any sort will be fatal to 
 you, and you will do what you can to be fatal to it. 
 What the business and professional and polit- 
 ical and social worlds want is, as Canon Farrar 
 says, "not echoes, but voices.^' It may not be 
 yours to choose to be a voice that shall startle any 
 of these worlds and force them to give heed to you 
 as to a modern prophet, but it is yours to choose 
 whether you will supinely echo the belittling senti- 
 ments that fill the air, or whether you will lift your 
 voice and strike with some truth that is in your 
 heart straight through the soft, enervating harmo- 
 nies that lull the senses into ignoble slumber. You 
 
142 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 are not strong enough, no young man or woman is, 
 to be such a voice till you have gained strength of 
 character and moral purpose from the Lord. 
 
 When Paul recounted all the parts of the com- 
 plex armor that he thought necessary for those who 
 have the high purpose of resisting all the powers that 
 make for unrighteousness, he had no desire to fright- 
 en them or us into unnecessary caution or excessive 
 equipment. We are all tempted at times to do this, 
 and we do not always successfully resist the temp- 
 tation. We half-unconsciously exaggerate dangers 
 to heighten the value of our suggestions as to the 
 way of avoiding them. Paul has not yielded to 
 any such temptation here if he ever felt it. He 
 has given us a highly figurative, but not over- 
 wrought, description of what we have to contend 
 with, and of the need there is, therefore, to be fore- 
 armed. His soldier, when he has him entirely 
 accoutred with his girdle and breastplate and san- 
 dals and shield and helmet and sword, impresses us 
 as somewhat overweighted, and as liable to be hin- 
 dered, if not crushed, by his weapons, offensive and 
 defensive ; but try this armament for the next few 
 days and see if you cannot carry it easily. A 
 girdle of truth, a breastplate of righteousness, a 
 shield of faith, a helmet of salvation and a sword 
 of the Spirit can all be used without impediment 
 and without ostentation. Any lighter equipment 
 than that in the conflict in which we must take part 
 will prove wholly inadequate. 
 
STRENGTH. 143 
 
 Be strong, not as the brutes, not as the unthinking 
 machine, but as men. Be strong to resist wrong and 
 to beat it down. To this Christ calls you. It is a 
 call to warfare, yet to peace. "Nothing can bring 
 you peace,'' Emerson says, "but the triumph of 
 principles;'' and it is to that triumph Christ is 
 pledged to lead those who follow him. It is a call 
 to run a hard race on a pathway beset by dangers, 
 but arched wnth flowers and palms of victory. Run- 
 ning swiftly and courageously, many a sweet blossom 
 and green palm will be shaken down to gladden us by 
 the way, and the pulse will be quickened, and hope 
 will be high, and the joy and safety of strength will 
 be to us delightful antepasts of the unspeakable 
 awards that await the victors when at last the goal 
 shall be reached. 
 
X. 
 SUCCESS. 
 
 10 
 
X. 
 
 SUCCESS. 
 
 " His Lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful 
 servant." — Matt. xxv. 21. 
 
 THERE was room enough in the Roman Pantheon 
 for any god who had worshipers sufficiently 
 enthusiastic to claim a place for him there, and there 
 is room enough in the world's temple of success for 
 a pillar or a tablet to any claimant who can muster 
 a sufficiently enthusiastic crowd of admirers. No 
 questions are asked as to the cause of that enthusi- 
 asm : it may have been excited by rare ability in 
 numbering stars or in counting votes, in helping 
 one's fellow-men or one's party and one's self Here 
 in this modern pantheon are altars equally magnifi- 
 cent to men who have given away large fortunes 
 honestly made, and to men who have dishonestly 
 appropriated fortunes quite as large for their own 
 use. There stands a pillar to keep alive the memory 
 of a martyr whose death meant life for a wdiole 
 community, and by its side is a pillar of the same 
 sort to a manipulator whose life meant death to 
 banks and railroads, and to every financial enter- 
 prise upon which he could lay his wrecking hand. 
 
 147 
 
148 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 That there should be some confusion in the 
 minds of those who stroll through this temple is 
 inevitable. The natural inference for any one 
 would be that success and notoriety are synonymous, 
 and that to become notorious, in whatever way, is the 
 thing to be sought. This is not only the natural, 
 but the ordinary and actual, inference of those who 
 are forming their ideas of success from what they 
 see in this temple. We must do something, they 
 are saying to themselves, to push our way through 
 the crowd and force attention : it makes very little 
 difference what. If you can write a book or paint 
 a picture or discover a new force or some unsuspect- 
 ed utility in an old one, if you can pierce an un- 
 known continent or the ice of the polar sea or so 
 play upon the curiosity and credulity of men as to 
 fix their expectations and their hopes upon yourself, 
 you have solved the problem, and may take your 
 place among the select company of successful men. 
 
 " All the proud virtue of this vaunting world 
 Fawns on success, howe'er acquired." 
 
 There is something quite clear and understand- 
 able about success so defined and achieved. The 
 prize to be sought is plainly in sight, and so is the 
 road that leads to it. So long as we can forget the 
 heights that are above us and the depths that are 
 within us it is possible to believe that success of 
 this sort will be eminently satisfactory, but the 
 moment these heights and depths come into view, 
 
SUCCESS. 140 
 
 doubts of a very serious sort will be begotten. 
 How can we consider the problem solved when 
 factors so important as these heights and depths are 
 left out altogether? One glance inward upon a 
 man's own soul with its throng of aspirations wholly 
 untouched by notoriety is enough to make all but 
 the intoxicated question the correctness of the 
 world's definition of success. Was it right to sacri- 
 fice a hundred yearnings, confessedly of the nobler 
 sort, to a single desire acknowledgedly so common 
 as easily to become vulgar ? AVas it wise to barter 
 truth and sincerity and purity and honor, and 
 probably health and culture, for a notoriety from 
 which all that is still left of manhood shrinks un- 
 satisfied and disappointed away ? 
 
 If a glance inward can beget such doubts, what 
 vitality will be given them by a glance upward ! 
 Those silent stars, a few nights hence it may be, 
 are to look down upon our graves; what matter 
 then about pillars of marble and tablets of brass in 
 the temple of Fame? Was it worth while to pay 
 so dearly for a possession that could be held so 
 briefly ? The element of time is a large element of 
 value. No man would pay as much for an ice-pal- 
 ace as for the same edifice in stone, or for a memo- 
 rial arch in wood as for its facsimile in marble. 
 Gold and diamonds have no value on a sinking 
 ship; any one who likes can have them for the 
 few seconds before the final })lunge. This notoriety 
 that the world wishes to foist on us as genuine success 
 
150 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 can last ns, it is admitted, for only a little while, 
 and then, as the silent stars seem to forewarn us, 
 the cheers upon which we have lived will be as 
 silent as are these planets that have looked down 
 upon thousands of generations that have wasted 
 their foolish lives for just such evanescent huzzahs. 
 Their silence suggests something more than this. 
 '^ Beyond us,'' they seem to say, for so men, almost 
 in spite of themselves, have interpreted their 
 silence, ^'is a spirit-world whose population is 
 every moment augmented by those who once dwelt 
 upon your earth.'' Who are they that are accounted 
 successful in the abodes of eternity? We can 
 answer in part the question for ourselves. Think 
 this generation out of this world into that, and 
 then ask yourself how many of those you have 
 been accustomed to call successful men here appear 
 to you now to be so there. The winners of a great 
 fortune or a great name or a great position shrivel 
 under that test. The distinctions upon which they 
 assumed and were conceded a superiority among 
 their fellow-men you feel have disappeared alto- 
 gether. 
 
 Your own heart will have prepared you to an- 
 ticipate some such words from Him who is to be 
 the Judge in the final apportionment of awards as 
 those Christ speaks to his disciples when he describes 
 the last great assize in his parable. The " Well 
 done" that sounds in the ears of those who have 
 been really successful is not heard at all by those 
 
SUCCESS. 151 
 
 who have aimed for nutoriety in whatever way, but 
 by those who have aimed for fidelity. The first 
 requisite for success, then, according to Christ's idea 
 of it, is to give up all thought of it. As Jeremiah 
 said to Baruch, " Seek est thou great things for thy- 
 self? Seek them not." As Christ said to his 
 disciples, " He that would be greatest among you, 
 let him be your minister," let him be most efficient 
 in service, let him do most in carrying his fellow- 
 men to a higher plane. He substitutes, it has been 
 said, " the greatness of love for the love of great- 
 ness." This idea of success and that of the world 
 are the complete antitheses of each other. The 
 world knows nothing about any success that has not 
 attained extraordinary and noteworthy results of 
 some sort. If such results are forthcoming, it is 
 entirely indifferent as to the means employed. 
 Christ has nothing whatever to say about note- 
 worthy results : his successful man is one who has 
 been wholly engrossed in the conunonplace occu- 
 pation of doing the best he can with commissions, 
 small or great, given him by his Master. In 
 Christ's eyes means and motives overshadow results 
 altoo:ether. Each of those who received his " Well 
 done " was one whose only purpose was to do well ; 
 and that purpose, whatev^er comes of it, makes a 
 man, according to Christ's ideas, successful. 
 
 There can be nothing accidental or involuntary 
 about success of this sort. Prominence, notoriety, 
 may be matters of birth or of good-fortune. The 
 
152 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 world's successful man may have doue nothiug him- 
 self to win the prize ; it may have dropped into his 
 hands while he was almost asleep, with only con- 
 sciousness enough to close his fingers upon his luck ; 
 but fidelity is never hereditary or accidental. With 
 a great effort he who has it has turned away from 
 all lower ambitions, and with a mighty movement 
 of soul has chosen this as the supreme passion of his 
 life. And as no chance can bring success of this 
 sort, so no chance can prevent it. Nothing is more 
 certain than that prominence and notoriety are very 
 often denied to those who would seem to have merited 
 them, else Addison would never have written, 
 
 " It is not in mortals to command success, 
 But we'll do more, Sempronius : we'll deserve it." 
 
 Notoriety is lawless and fickle. Those who have de- 
 served to win her may for some inexplicable reason 
 fail altogether, while she flings herself almost un- 
 sought into the arms of the unworthy. But success, 
 as Christ defined it, is as intangible to chance as the 
 earth's orbit. Nay, nothing in the physical world 
 can be half so assured as this, for God himself must 
 change before fidelity can fail of his " Well done." 
 This brings success easily within reach of us all. 
 Prominence and notoriety must, in the very nature 
 of the case, be confined to a few. The moment you 
 lift' the Vale of Interlaken to the level of the Jung- 
 frau your mountain has disappeared. To give prom- 
 inence and notoriety to every one would be to rob 
 
SUCCESS. 153 
 
 the few of it who once towered above their fellow- 
 men. It is this that has awakened the murderous 
 envy and hatred of men. The prizes they were 
 after were not half numerous enough to go around. 
 There was only one, perhaps, for ten or a hundred 
 thousand competitors, and every one of these hun- 
 dreds or thousands looked upon every other one iu 
 the same class as an enemy, and w^as right. Every 
 eye was full of envy and every heart of hate, and 
 there was no help for it. But Christ's idea of suc- 
 cess changes all these conditions. To make room 
 higher up some one else must be crowded out of the 
 way or be gotten rid of, but there are plenty of 
 places lower down, the best places for service, where 
 Christ wants his disciples to go, and where just in 
 proportion to their fidelity they will be found, and 
 their success will be exactly commensurate with their 
 faithfulness. 
 
 There is no need for any one who is willing to 
 adopt Christ's view of things to look anxiously or 
 eagerly for openings that may lead to success. 
 Turn which way you will, such doors stand wide 
 open. Emerson thinks that the parlor and the 
 college and the counting-room demand as much 
 courage as the sea or the camp, if that might 
 possibly be considered an open question, it cer- 
 tainly is not, that the parlor and the college and 
 counting-room, and the mill and the shop and the 
 kitchen included, demand as much fidelity as the 
 sea or the camp, and are as good fields for its exer- 
 
154 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 cise. The field is a matter of very little if any con- 
 sequence in Christ's eyes : it is the fidelity that is 
 shown in it. He states in so many words that the 
 final award will be accompanied by great surprises, 
 that many judged by the world and the Church 
 to have made prime successes will be given low 
 places, if any at all, and many who were thought 
 little of in the world and the Church will be ad- 
 vanced to the head, for they have been most faith- 
 ful, perhaps in most confined and uninspiring fields. 
 Paul's anticipations of receiving a crown in that 
 day were not based upon any of the results of his 
 work, upon the number of churches established or 
 converts made, but he was certain of the reward, 
 because he had fought the good fight; and the cer- 
 tainty he felt for himself he felt for every one else 
 who had done the same, though what the world, 
 and even these faithful ones, would call a victory 
 may never have been won. 
 
 Still, though we may accept Christ's ideas of 
 success as heartily as it is possible for beings as 
 short-sighted as ourselves to do, there will be a 
 longing, more or less marked according to our 
 temperament and the degree of our faith, for re- 
 sults. Believe as we may, and as we must if we 
 are Christians, that fidelity is the essence of success, 
 and that results are only its accidents, we cannot 
 prevent ourselves from having strong desires for 
 those accidents. Very possibly we should not at- 
 tempt to destroy, but only to control, such desires; 
 
SUCCESS. 155 
 
 for results will ordinarily follow fidelity, and, while 
 they are not to be sought as ends in themselves, 
 they are not to be undervalued when they are the 
 ripened fruits of fidelity. While Christ commends 
 the faithfulness of the good servants in the parable, 
 and while we feel confident he would have com- 
 mended any one of them as heartily who had done 
 his best to invest and increase his talents, even if 
 he had been unfortunate, and in putting the money 
 out to the exchangers had lost it all, yet it seems 
 fair to draw the inference that in real life desired 
 results will in the great majority of instances follow 
 fidelity, as in the parable the increase of the talents 
 follows the conscientious care of them. 
 
 That the man who is intensely anxious to be faith- 
 ful rather than excitedly eager for results is in the 
 best condition to command such results is almost 
 self-evident. He will have the two qualities that all 
 the world agrees in naming as requisite for the pro- 
 duction of results in a marked degree, industry and 
 tenacity of purpose. Fidelity and industry, while 
 not synonymous, are indissoluble. They are like 
 the two brothers bound by a vital ligament upon 
 which the touch of the separating knife meant death 
 to both. Men have " toiled terribly " for glory and 
 wealth, and even for pleasure ; but other men have 
 been as ambitious and avaricious and sensuous, yet 
 never to the point of industry. Some other avenue 
 has seemed to open up to what they wished, and 
 they have ' eagerly chosen it; but the faithful man 
 
156 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 has but one hope. For him there is no other pos- 
 sible approach to the object of his desires. Great 
 students of human nature have felt that they were 
 safest in making their appeal to this sense of fidel- 
 ity, of duty. Both Wellington and Nelson had 
 little to say to their soldiers and sailors about glory 
 or rich prizes or the delights of captured capitals : 
 they had much to say about duty and what they 
 had a right to expect from faithful servants of their 
 king and country. Fidelity is the only motive to 
 industry that has no let up in it. The man who 
 toils terribly for glory or power or pleasure when 
 he gets what he has toiled for finds the mainspring 
 of his energies is broken, and he falls supinely upon 
 the prize he has won ; but the man who is toiling that 
 he may be faithful to the trust committed to him will 
 be urged on till life itself is over and his account 
 rendered. What is to prevent such industry from 
 producing results often of the most brilliant sort? 
 The other requisite, the world says, for marked 
 efficiency in attaining the end desired is tenacity of 
 purpose. But who is he that is most calmly tena- 
 cious of his purpose? Is it the man who has 
 vowed the great vow to himself and the silent Fates 
 that he will be prominent and notorious? Can such 
 a man be calm when he thinks of the tremendous 
 difficulties he must surmount and the awful uncer- 
 tainties that will still hover about him even after 
 these obstacles are over-passed ? Can a man's heart 
 beat regularly when his fate hangs on the throwing 
 
SUCCESS. 157 
 
 of a dice? Or can such a man choose his path and 
 hold to it tenaciously when short cuts are constantly 
 coming in sight and a tumult of voices urges him to 
 take these or direful consequences? The man has 
 yet to appear with a purpose tenacious enough to re- 
 sist these temptations to forsake the rcmd originally 
 chosen. From Caesar to Napoleon I. and from Na- 
 poleon III. to Boulanger the short cut taken against 
 the man\s own better judgment has proved fatal. 
 It must always be so ; wdioever lives for results 
 must be ready to change his route whenever some 
 other seems more direct. While the end sought 
 may be always the same, the man will vacillate and 
 move uneasily hither and thither as he hurries im- 
 patiently toward it. 
 
 What a contrast to all this is the steady, unswerv- 
 ing tread of the man who is striving for fidelity, 
 without reference to results ! There can be for him 
 no alluring short cuts. He may, of course, be 
 tempted to unfaithfulness, but he cannot be tempted 
 with the hope of ever reaching what he seeks b}^ any 
 other except the straight path. His reliance must 
 always be in doing well what he has to do, while 
 the reliance of the man whose eye is on results will 
 be in getting something to do where noise and bluster 
 can be substituted for sweat and skill. So ev^ery 
 path to-day is crowded, not with men of industry 
 and purpose, but with men who are hurrying from 
 place to ])lace Avith the hope that by some lucky 
 chance they may some time find something that 
 
158 BEGINNING LIFE. 
 
 will yield results without effort. Those musicians 
 on our street-corners who play with the aid of a few 
 well-arranged wires a half dozen instruments at a 
 time, and, though they never can make any music 
 on any of them, yet attract much attention, are the 
 embodiment of the popular craze for doing any 
 number of things, however poorly, if a momentary 
 prominence may be gained by it. Such a mounte- 
 bank any man, whatever his gifts, may become who 
 makes the producing of results the purpose of his 
 life. 
 
 As I draw near the end of this series of discourses 
 to the young I find myself eager as friends are when 
 time hurries apace and they must part to speak some 
 word that might linger with you, some helpful word 
 that would be in itself an inspiration in the sore 
 struQr2:le of life. I can find no other with more of 
 destiny in it than this we have heard Christ repeat- 
 ing to us to-night: " Fidelity.^' Fling away all 
 thought of prominence or of notoriety. " 'Tis only 
 noble to be good.'' Be true to God, to Christ, 
 whatever comes, and your fidelity will achieve all 
 fitting results. " Seek ye first," he says to you, 
 "the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and 
 all these things shall be added unto you." What- 
 ever else fails you, you shall assuredly have at last 
 the evidence of your eternal success in his " Well 
 done, good and faithful servant !" 
 
 THE END. 
 
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 J ft 5- '53 
 
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Princeton Theological Semmary-Speer Lil 
 
 012 01001 4928