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REV. ROBERT COLLYER'S BOOKS. 
 
 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN (with Asides 
 
 to Young Women). Cloth $1 25 
 
 THE LIFE THAT NOW IS. Sermons. 
 
 With Portrait. Cloth 1 50 
 
 NATURE AND LIFE. Sermons. 
 
 Cloth 1 50 
 
 A MAN IN EARNEST: Life of A. H. 
 
 Conant. Cloth 1 50 
 
 THE SIMPLE TRUTH. A Wedding 
 
 Present. Small quarto. Cloth ... 1 00 
 
 LEE AND SHEPARD, Publishers, Boston. 
 
TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 {IVith Asides to Young Women) 
 
 BY 
 
 ROBERT COLLYER 
 // 
 
 MINISTER OF THE CHURCH OF THE MESSIAH 
 NEW YORK 
 
 ^ ^^ ^ ■ 
 
 BOSTON 
 LEE AND SHEPARD PUBLISHERS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM 
 
 1888 
 
 ^ 
 
^e^G rente-, 
 
 Copyright, 1887, 
 By lee and SHEPARD. 
 
 Ail rights reserved. 
 Talks to Young Men. 
 
 By Transfer 
 
 D. C. Public Library 
 
DISTRICT OF ^OJlilJM&IA PROPERTY 
 TRANSFERRED ^RSfif^M^ I G LIBRARY 
 
 I Dedicate this Little Book 
 
 To WILLIAM H. BALDWIN 
 
 President of the Young. Men's Christian Union 
 
 IN Boston 
 
 With more than Twenty Years' worth of Loving Regard 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 LECTURE PAGE 
 
 I. The Joy of Youth i 
 
 II. Godlike Temptations 20 
 
 IIL My New Name 35 
 
 IV. In the Spirit 53 
 
 V. Two Emigrants y;^ 
 
 VI. Two Children 94 
 
 VII. The Primitive Idea of a Good Wife. . . 115 
 
 VIII. Debt 134 
 
 IX. Sleep 153 
 
 X. A Noble Anger 172 
 
 XL Charles and Mary Lamb i88 
 
 XII. The Companionship of Good Books ... 213 
 
 V 
 
AN INTRODUCTION 
 
 " Though we are justices^ and doctors^ and churchmen^ 
 Master Page^ we have some salt of our youth in us,^^ 
 
 It has been said that the Koran was made, 
 but the Bible grew ; and I like to think some 
 such distinction may be drawn in favor of 
 this little book, no matter what may be its 
 intrinsic quality. 
 
 It has grown out of the impulse we all 
 feel, who are called to the ministry of ''life 
 unto life,'' to speak now and then to those 
 whose life lies greatly before them, on ques- 
 tions which seem to us of a deep and vital 
 moment. So I have tried to speak as the 
 spirit moved me, and then laid these Talks 
 away with many more to ripen or rot — as 
 
viu AN INTRODUCTION 
 
 some sorts of pears do — in my drawer; and 
 now, when I must make good an old promise 
 to print such a book, those have been selected 
 which seemed still to have some soundness 
 in them, and some virtue of bitter or sweet. 
 
 They are not to be taken, therefore, with 
 quite the discount young men insist on 
 usually from those who are growing old, that 
 we have forgotten our own youth, and so 
 are not the men best fitted now to talk 
 to them of theirs ; and there is some truth 
 in the plea. It is such "a far cry" away 
 back to our own early life, and we all change 
 so greatly in the course of, let us say, fifty 
 years, that a man may well be out of touch 
 with those who stand now where he stood 
 then, and be bankrupt in sympathy, even if 
 he has grown a trifle richer in wisdom. I 
 would fain believe this is not the gravest 
 fault young readers will find in my little book. 
 These are not the belated blossoms of a St. 
 Martin's summer : they are the fruit, rather. 
 
AN INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 of the whole happy summer of my ministry, 
 and hold, I trust, some measure of its wine. 
 
 But if it be not so, we whose heads have 
 grown white do not think we should allow 
 that discount when we speak to those who 
 stand at the morning-tide, and are ready to 
 enter the busy world we must leave when 
 our day's work is done. At Hampton Court, 
 in England, they have what they call a maze. 
 It is a narrow path, with a high thick hedge 
 of yew, if I remember, on either side, over 
 which you cannot look. Well, they set you 
 to walk into the heart of this maze, and then 
 out again, and it seems simple enough as you 
 go in ; but presently you take the wrong turn, 
 as I did, and then you wander right and 
 left, get bewildered, lose confidence in your 
 steps, and feel like giving up. But then you 
 find there is a man standing on an eminence 
 above the maze, who cries to you, ** Now take 
 that turn, and now this ; '' and so at last he 
 brings you to the heart of it, and then out 
 
X AN INTRODUCTION 
 
 again to your great content. And so^ if we 
 have won any worth out of all the years, 
 may not this be counted with the rest, and 
 allowed, that we stand somewhat above the 
 maze, on this vantage-ground to which we 
 have found our way, it may be, through much 
 losing, alas for us ! and through listening, too, 
 for our direction, as we want our youth to 
 listen ; and cry to them also of the way they 
 shall take into the heart of life, and then 
 out again ; and so- the play of a summer's 
 holiday becomes a parable of the maze into 
 which we must all venture. 
 
 This is what we may be to the youth of 
 our time, if they will hear and heed us ; and 
 this is what I would claim for worth, again, 
 in these pages. My own life has lain in hard 
 and rough places, as well as in these which 
 are all my heart can desire, and I have spoken 
 from the centre, touching many things one 
 must touch delicately and with due reserve. 
 "There goes John Newton, but for God's 
 
AN INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 grace/' Cowper's old friend said when he saw 
 a poor wretch one day in dire trouble ; and 
 so I think not seldom when I see such sights, 
 and grow pitiful in thanksgiving. It is the 
 one word more which may be one too many. 
 I have had to rough it, as we say, and to learn 
 after all, in other ways, what my old school- 
 master failed to teach me, I was such a dunce, 
 that some problems must be solved by what 
 he called ''the double position, or rule of 
 false ; '' and what I have learned touching our 
 life in its youth and earlier prime, I have tried 
 to tell in these Talks to young men — with 
 asides to young women. 
 
 New York, Nov. i6, 1887. 
 
TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 IThe 3oy of youth 
 
 Eccles, xf. 7-10 
 
 TT7E may fairly assume that the Preacher 
 is thinking of youth as a quality rather 
 than a time in our life, in the last part of 
 this sad sermon; and when he has called 
 up the memories of his own lost youth, as 
 I take it, he draws a picture of his own 
 old age, drifting slowly down to death, 
 thinks of what he was then, and what he 
 is now, and cries, ''Rejoice, O young man, 
 in thy youth ! " — in the clear glance of 
 the eye of it, and the sure tramp of the 
 foot, in the healthy sleep which comes 
 then, and the cheerful waking, in the 
 
2 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 unworn power of it, and the steady nerve, 
 and in its sunny hopes and expectations. 
 Rejoice in thy youths for the time is com- 
 ing to you, which has come to me, when 
 your eyes will grow dim, and desire fail ; 
 when you will wake up at the twitter of 
 the sparrow to long and dreary days, and 
 your life will be no longer like an April 
 day in which sunshine chases shadow, but 
 like the setting-in of winter when the 
 clouds return after the rain. 
 
 And I suppose few men have ever lived 
 who could say such words as these with a 
 deeper insight of their truth than this sad 
 old king. His own life opened with as 
 fair a promise, and was filled with a joy as 
 fine, as ever fell to the lot of a young man 
 in any age or country. His father was a 
 poet, a warrior, and a king, — a man who 
 had struck the harp to deathless numbers, 
 touched the national banner with a new 
 glory, and given an enduring splendor to 
 
THE JOY OF YOUTH 3 
 
 the throne. His father's son was the 
 darling of the nation, once in the first fair 
 prime of his days, with a treasury full of 
 gold and silver, with councillors full of wis- 
 dom, with a keen and eager heart for what 
 we have come to call the true, the beauti- 
 ful, and the good ; and with all this, in these 
 early times, a simple and humble reliance on 
 God, worthy the soul of a saint. 
 
 Well, about forty years pass away, as 
 nearly as we can guess ; and then he writes 
 this sermon, as the traditions run, one of 
 the saddest that ever came out of the 
 human heart. His joy has vanished; knowl- 
 edge has eaten the heart out of his faith ; 
 and we hear no more of the prayers which 
 rise with such an exquisite grace from the 
 youth who would always wait on God for 
 direction and trust him for wisdom. Super- 
 stition has set up her idols where religion 
 built her altars, and a brooding sadness has 
 taken the place of the old strong joy. The 
 
4 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 judgment of earth and heaven has gone 
 against him in these forty years, and he 
 knows that better than any other living 
 man ; and so he moans, as he opens his 
 great sad sermon, *' Vanity of vanities, all 
 is vanity." 
 
 But now as he draws to his conclusion, 
 he pulls himself together, as we say, and 
 says, ^^ No^ that is not true : ruined as I 
 am, and base, I will not lie to my own 
 soul. Some things are not vanity, after all ; 
 and one of these is the lost youth I have 
 been looking at through the glass of time. 
 Vanity has come out of my manhood ; but 
 God gave me that youth for as lovely a 
 verity as his hand ever made, and I alone 
 have to answer for turning the fruit of it 
 to ashes on the lips of my old age. I must 
 not go back on that fair vision. I cannot 
 be such an utter fool as to call white, black. 
 I know it was bright and good, and all the 
 more I know it when I think of what I 
 
THE JOY OF YOUTH 5 
 
 was and what I am. That glory on the 
 face of Nature then was the true revelation 
 of her life : this gray monotony is only her 
 shroud. 
 
 "That joy of my youth, in which I went and 
 came, slept and woke, planned and wrought, 
 and sang out of my heart as a bird sings ; 
 the love with which I loved one woman 
 for love's sake, saw myself in the eyes of 
 her children, made my home beautiful and 
 clean, and the power by which I kept 
 order to the utmost line of my kingdom, — 
 these were all good and true, and will be 
 though I should die crying, 'There is no 
 God.' It is no proof that these gifts were 
 not good, because evil has come in their 
 wake to one poor old man ; and so the 
 youth of the world shall know, from one 
 who can tell the story from the heart of 
 a sore and sad experience, how the way 
 opens here toward glory or shame. There- 
 fore, rejoice, O young man, in thy youth. 
 
6 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 and let thine heart cheer thee in the days 
 of thy youth, and walk in the ways of 
 thine heart, and the sight of thine eyes ; 
 but know thou that for all these things 
 God will bring thee into judgment." 
 
 But if the Preacher had said no such 
 word as this, of the joy there is in a fresh 
 young life clean and pure as his own was 
 once, the loss would have only lain in his 
 sermon. Because, to rejoice in our youth, 
 no matter what we may say who mourn 
 after "the tender light of a day that is 
 dead," is as natural as it is for the land to 
 rejoice in the May sun, the birds in their 
 building and brooding, and all things that 
 run and fly in the outbreak of their impris- 
 oned instincts when life rises to spring-tide. 
 
 There is a lovely chapter to be read between 
 the lines in the early history of New Eng- 
 land, of the way the youth there fought for 
 its innocent and harmless joy, against the 
 stern and austere rule of the elder men and 
 
THE JOY OF YOUTH 7 
 
 ministers who had come to look on such 
 things as quite beneath the heed of immor- 
 tal souls that were trying to solve the prob- 
 lems of '* Providence, foreknowledge, will, and 
 fate." The joy will break out all the same, 
 into the bloom of a new ribbon or vest ; 
 into profane music by and by, and the sing- 
 ing of old ballads under the breath ; and 
 into stolen walks of a young man and maid 
 on a Sunday before sundown, that they may 
 tell the old sweet story to each other when 
 they ought to be hearing the minister hold- 
 ing forth on the wrath of God. In junket- 
 ings again as time went on, and even a dance 
 at some outlying farm where the farmer and 
 his wife of the later -emigration held on to 
 the cheerful traditions of the old mother- 
 land, thought no harm of innocent amuse- 
 ments, and so would risk a good deal that 
 the young folks might be young. The mas- 
 ters of the strongholds of the stern Puri- 
 tan spirit could never prevent these outbreaks 
 
S TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 of the joy of youth, any more than they could 
 prevent the purple and gold on the breast 
 of the doves, or the song of the birds in 
 the elms, or the rush of the spring floods; 
 and for very much the same reason. It was 
 spring with those they would affront ; Nature 
 was bidding them rejoice in many ways the 
 ministers and selectmen could not or would 
 not understand : and so it was like trying to 
 fight the rainbow. Nor, at a later day, could 
 the Society of Friends master these joyous 
 instincts and outbreaks, whether they took 
 these lighter forms, or the loftier forms of 
 poetry and music; for when Nature says one 
 thing and even what we may call Religion 
 another, and the law of the church or the 
 sect crosses that of "all out doors/' you 
 need not ponder the question as to which is 
 bound to win in the long fight, — the law laid 
 down by Calvin, Roger Williams, George 
 Fox, or John Wesley, on the one hand, or 
 this joy of youth on the other, pulsing 
 
THE JOY OF YOUTH 9 
 
 through the heart of the new generation. 
 Only the immutable can stand, and this 
 joy is immutable as the light of heaven ; 
 and so those who would fight it in any 
 innocent form it may choose to take, have 
 first to settle the question whether they are 
 not fighting against God. 
 
 I would say, then, it is no use asking 
 whether this man was wise, or a fool, for 
 obeying this instinct of his youth to rejoice 
 in what was within and all about him. His 
 joy in books and music, in the making of 
 fair gardens, and in collecting rare treasures 
 of art ; in his wife and children, his home, 
 temple, and government, and in wit and 
 humor, — for, Hebrew as he was, he must 
 have had some turn that way too, or he 
 could never have solved that problem of 
 the two mothers, in which one detects a 
 grain of both, — these in themselves were 
 not the wayward freaks of a young man's 
 folly. They were good, true things in their 
 
lO TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 degree then, as they are now ; not vanities, 
 but verities, and not things well used that 
 would make a man wish he was dead and 
 done with it. They were indeed the very 
 same things Sydney Smith, a wiser man than 
 Solomon, found among the joys of his youth, 
 and good to him still and true when he wrote 
 to a friend, '^I am seventy-four years old, 
 and am, upon the whole, a happy man. I 
 have found this an interesting world to live 
 in, and am thankful to Providence for my 
 lot." A wiser man than Solomon, I say 
 again, in despite of the catechism ; for in the 
 crucible of the one life you find dust and 
 ashes when old age draws on, and in the 
 other the fine gold of gratitude and a sweet 
 content. 
 
 Now, then, where shall we look for the 
 reasons which turned a youth of pure sweet- 
 ness to an old age of gall ? and how came 
 that which began in hope to end in despair ? 
 
 And I answer, in this first of all, that in 
 
THE JOY OF YOUTH II 
 
 the eager hunger of his youth, and the push- 
 ing-out of his genius, he tried to do too 
 many things to do any one supremely well ; 
 so that, while the idea of the way each one 
 ought to be done held itself high and clear 
 in his soul, the doing fell so far short of it 
 as to leave a sense of failure in the whole 
 endeavor. In this so far, however, I think 
 he was not to blame; it is the fault, but not 
 the sin, of youth, to be stricken with the 
 fever of untried powers, and to feel as I re- 
 member I felt when I was let loose for the 
 first time to browse in a great library. There 
 were so many books I wanted to read, that 
 night came on, and I had not read a whole 
 chapter in any one of them ; and something 
 like this was the trouble with this young man. 
 Perhaps he might have sung psalms equal to 
 those of his royal father, — he only sang the 
 Song of Solomon; or prophesied, — but he only 
 preached, and collected proverbs. In some 
 onq thing, or it may be more than one, he 
 
12 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 might have flamed out into a supreme excel- 
 lence. He flatted out into a few degrees 
 above commonplace; and the best thing he 
 has left us — this sad sermon — is, in some 
 sense, the worst. It was with him, indeed, 
 as some one has said it was with Brougham, 
 who also came to something like our Preacher's 
 spirit in his old age : " He could have done 
 any one of ten things better than any other 
 man in England, but he insisted on doing the 
 whole ten.*' Now, do we wonder over Schaef- 
 fer's *' Faust and Margaret ** ? He wrought 
 thirty years of his life into those wonderful 
 designs. Or over Mozart's music .'* '' If few 
 have equalled me in my art," he said, "fewer 
 still have studied it with such untiring zeal.** 
 And here, to my mind, is one root of this 
 young man's trouble. The joy of youth was in 
 him, and pricked him on to try this and that ; 
 but, king as he was, he could not command the 
 perfection his soul called for, because he would 
 not pay the price old Carlyle told the young 
 
THE JOY OF YOUTH I3 
 
 men in Glasgow he had always paid for any 
 worthy work he had ever done, — hard, stern 
 labor, which had made him actually sick in 
 his body, so ruthless was the soul of him to 
 do it well. No such ruthlessness touches us 
 in this noble young king. It is an amateur 
 and dilettaiite way he has of doing things in 
 those days, if the Song of Songs gives us any 
 insight of his methods. 
 
 And so it is, that, as we only get out of 
 any endeavor a worth in proportion to that 
 we put into it, we are not to wonder that he 
 should cry at last, "What has a man of all 
 his labor under the sun } *' For this gradual 
 selection of some one thing to do and to be 
 is pretty sure to lead a young man on to the 
 second line this man failed to reach, and, in 
 failing there, drifted on to the third and last ; 
 and that is the sacredness which invests any 
 worthy work in the end, so that this shall 
 not be one thing and your religion another ; 
 but, as the good Methodist woman said she 
 
14 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 never missed the corners in sweeping a room 
 when she said that Scripture, '^ Create in me 
 a clean heart, O God ! *' so you shall find that 
 your work and your religion always meet and 
 tie. '^I keep up my heart,** Kepler said one 
 grim day, "with the thought that I serve 
 not the emperor, but the whole human race.** 
 And I suspect there is some such fine whole- 
 ness in whatever we do in this spirit, right 
 down to sweeping a room or the streets. 
 Wholeness and oneness, each and all, the red- 
 cloaked clown and the emperor ; Beethoven, 
 in the little church at Godesberg, touching 
 the new organ to such a holy (whole) pur- 
 pose of a week-day morning, that the peasant 
 women could not scrub the floor for delight 
 and wonder, and then the better scrubbing 
 from the line where they paused to listen to 
 the matchless music. 
 
 If this man, then, had caught out of the 
 joy of his youth and his unworn powers some 
 one thing to do, and had drawn on his whole 
 
THE JOY OF YOUTH IS 
 
 manhood for the power to do it well, to put 
 heart and life into it without stint or stay, 
 then heart and life would have come out of 
 it, and the thing would have grown sacred, 
 so that he could have afforded to look at it 
 from the uttermost verge of life with joy. 
 He could have felt about it as Wordsworth 
 felt about some of his poems when Southey 
 said, " If you will alter them in such and such 
 a way, you will win both fame and fortune/' 
 He had neither then ; but he said, " That is 
 the true way, and I will die unheard rather 
 than alter a word for such a reason/' Such 
 work, I say, always touches the deep, pure 
 springs, whereof if a man drink he shall 
 thirst no more, — except to drink at them 
 again. Such labor is always prayer, and the 
 prayer which does not lead us toward such 
 labor fails at last to rise above the roof -tree ; 
 and failing here we enter on the course which 
 leads from joy to the judgment. 
 
 Because it is clear enough at last where 
 
l6 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 the rock lay on which this noble and beautiful 
 promise of a young man's life was wrecked. 
 It lay in doing every thing for enjoyment, and 
 nothing for joy, — that curse and bane and 
 plague-spot of a young man's life. Still, this 
 was what led this king among men, from wor- 
 ship to idolatry, from reverence to supersti- 
 tion, and from a clean home, in which he 
 lived with one woman, his own true wife, to a 
 harem ; from love to lust, from power to palsy, 
 and from the first heaven to the last hell. 
 
 Joy is of the Spartan stock, — nay, let me 
 rather say, of the grandest Christian. There 
 is iron in the blood which pulses through 
 the heart of joy. It is the sentinel's keeping 
 guard in bitter weather, and in a great and 
 holy quarrel. It is Andrew Marvel's eating 
 mutton-hash, and defying the king to buy 
 him up for any dirty purpose. It is Wesley's 
 sleeping on bare boards, and thanking God 
 he had one whole side to sleep on. It is 
 Luther's turning wood for bread, and overturn- 
 
THE JOY OF YOUTH I7 
 
 ing kingdoms for righteousness. It is theirs 
 who search for the truth with the whole heart, 
 and then hide it in noble endeavors ; it is in 
 the souls of merchants, and clerks, and arti- 
 sans, and '*daytal men," who will not shirk 
 or fawn or lie, and will insist on honest deal- 
 ings in what they do. It was not this man's 
 way. It is not the way, I fear, in our time, 
 of a great many who would like to pass for 
 Solomons; but its lines run even with the 
 way to the eternal life. Joy lies in chastity, 
 and purity, and charity touched with a tender 
 concern for those we do not like, and in 
 doing for duty what can never be pleasant, 
 but must be done. It is in denying myself, 
 when myself would deny my manhood ; and 
 in bearing my cross, though I have no hope 
 of a crown. 
 
 But that a joy like this can rise and ripen 
 in our age, out of the joy of youth, without 
 faith in God, in the world we live in, and 
 the folk we live with, in the worth of our 
 
l8 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 work, and in prayer for help from on high, 
 my own sixty-three years of life deny, no 
 matter whether I sit with this sad old king, 
 or say with holy Paul, '*I have kept the 
 faith/' How large I should make the inter- 
 pretation of these things, I have no time 
 to tell you. But as I have seen a spring 
 which had cut its way through the very 
 granite, and then poured on to all high 
 uses, gathering and giving as it made its 
 way to the river and the sea ; and then an- 
 other spring that only made a marsh about 
 its margin, in which things would rot but 
 never ripen, — so I can see how men true to 
 this truth I have tried to tell, and working 
 in this faith, carve out a grand sweet man- 
 hood which makes us all their debtors ; or, 
 failing in this, spread themselves out in 
 dead levels of nothing in particular except 
 procuring the means of enjoyment which 
 rot the very fibre of their manhood as the 
 years pass on, and open the way to a dreary 
 
THE JOY OF YOUTH 19 
 
 old age, and the cry, '' A man hath no pre- 
 eminence over a beast, for all is vanity." 
 
 " Who is my chosen hero ? I have none. 
 
 This young man is enough for me : brave, chaste, 
 
 Faithful to duty, by no vice debased; 
 Lord of himself, yet serving every one ; 
 Fair, with frank eyes and jocund as the sun, 
 
 Smiling from sweet glad lips ail amply graced 
 
 With natural persuasion ; pure from waist 
 To feet, and shoulder, that no man doth shun — 
 
 Nor woman neither — his compulsive charm ; 
 
 These great, good gifts he ne'er hath used for harm. 
 From his strong limbs, true heart, fine-fibred brain, 
 
 Sweetness flows into life like pure fresh air 
 From mountains blown over a bed of pain : 
 
 I seek naught human loftier, naught more rare.'* 
 
II 
 iBo6Uhe temptations 
 
 Luke iv. 1-13 
 
 T WENT, when I was in England, to visit 
 the ruins of an old castle which was built 
 not long after the Conquest, by a man whose 
 main business it was to keep the land in 
 awe with the strong hand ; and it fitted his 
 plan as the hammer fits the hand of a 
 smith, stood true to its purpose for some five 
 hundred years, and then, when the first long 
 chapter of tyrant and slave came to an end 
 in England, was tumbled into ruin by Crom- 
 well and his men. 
 
 The stronghold stood on a grand lift of 
 land, which shoots down on one side to a 
 swift-running river; and so it fell out, that 
 while the other sides were made strong by 
 
GODLIKE TEMPTATIONS 21 
 
 the art and device of the builders, the 
 cliff and the river were considered almost, 
 if not quite, impregnable in themselves. 
 And there is a tradition, that the place was 
 besieged once by a strong force, but was so 
 stoutly defended that the man in command 
 began to think he would be beaten, and the 
 castle remain in the hands which held the bolts 
 and bars. 
 
 Still there was one weak side, after all, of 
 which those who held the place had no idea, 
 and it was that they had always considered 
 impregnable. Some mere curtain of a wall 
 had been built there, to be sure, but the 
 splendid lift was in itself the true defence, 
 they said ; and so they kept slack watch 
 and ward toward the river, and turned their 
 attention to the side next the town. Then 
 one day a man came to the captain of the 
 enemy's host, and said, '' I can climb that 
 cliff, and if you will give me so many 
 picked men I will take the place. " And it 
 
22 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 was so. One wild, dark night, they climbed 
 the great cliff, found room to muster for 
 the rush, and in the morning the place was 
 in the enemy's hands ; and so the high and 
 strong side proved to be the ruin of those 
 who were set to defend the fortress. 
 
 So ran the story I used to hear in my boy- 
 hood, as we sat by the winter fire far away. 
 And now in my later manhood I find it 
 comes back to me as a kind of parable 
 which points toward this truth : That the 
 imperative need in young men of the finest 
 promise — yes, and in some old men too, 
 who seem to have made their early promise 
 good — is not to set all the sentinels on the 
 meaner and lower side of our nature, and 
 none on the nobler and higher ; because this 
 may be our danger as it was theirs who were 
 set to keep the old fortress, that the foe 
 may take us also on this high and strong 
 side. 
 
 And we cannot have seen much of life if 
 
GODLIKE TEMPTATIONS 23 
 
 we have not found painful proof of this truth. 
 I would like to open to you, at some cost of 
 iteration, that the higher and stronger side 
 of our nature may still be the weaker, simply 
 because there is no need., as we imagine, to 
 explore that thoroughly, and set due watch 
 and ward. We think it is secure from assault, 
 and stands quite impregnable by reason of its 
 own uplifting ; while the truth is, as our wise 
 friend says in **A Modern Instance,'' that *'the 
 Devil always takes a man on the very high- 
 est plane." I have myself seen many men 
 in m^y life who were led into temptation first, 
 and then on to wreck and ruin, who could 
 never have come to such grief in a mean and 
 paltry way. It was the old story of the Fall, 
 v/hich still holds such deep meanings for us 
 when we think we have blown it down the 
 wind by a breath of criticism. They would 
 eat of the tree of the knowledge of good 
 and evil, and become as gods. Or, some gen- 
 erous impulse was made the point of attack, 
 
24 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 or their love for beauty and grace and the joy 
 of youth, or even their sympathy with suffering 
 and sorrow. The hook that caught them was 
 baited with something or the semblance of 
 something very noble and good. Play was 
 made for them with splendid and taking illu- 
 sions, there was no other way to come at 
 them ; but all the same they were led captive 
 by the Devil at his will at last, or had I not 
 better say the evil at its will ? 
 
 I remember many years ago, when I was 
 settled in Chicago, noticing a young man sit- 
 ting near my pulpit one Sunday, who caught 
 more of my attention than was good for the 
 congregation, with his great dreamy eyes, 
 which were watching me intently, and his face 
 of the most singular beauty and grace. He 
 came again, and often, so we became some- 
 what intimate in the course of time ; and I 
 do not know that I ever met a man of a 
 more delicate and gifted spirit. But I found 
 before very long that he was in the toils of 
 
GODLIKE TEMPTATIONS 25 
 
 a terrible curse ; and in talking with him, I 
 found the evil thing had come in on this 
 nobler side of his nature. He had taken 
 opium once, in the eager longing to find 
 whether there was indeed any such enchant- 
 ment in the drug as he had been reading 
 about in De Quincey's wonderful essay, and 
 fearing no evil, but feeling sure that he should 
 be able to hold his own, come out all right 
 at last, and be able to read us some new 
 lesson of the good and evil of the drug. 
 Well, the experience was so full of wonder 
 to him, and sent such magic flying through 
 his fine brain, that he felt he must return to 
 it once more, and still again ; and so when 
 I found him he was the slave of that on 
 which he had looked down from his high 
 place as a master, and now he was trying 
 with all his might to drive the enemy out of 
 the fortress, and be free. And there was not 
 a man of us who came to know and love him, 
 who would not have done any thing a man 
 
2^ TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 may do for his rescue ; but when he thought, 
 and we all thought, the worst was over, and 
 the fine manhood would bloom out again, it 
 was found that the curse had blasted the very 
 roots of his young life together with the blos- 
 som ; and so he had to die that he might be 
 free from the body of this death. 
 
 Now, I say, it was no base and mean long- 
 ing which caught this splendid young fellow, 
 when he began to go on the way that leads 
 down to death. The tempter came in through 
 the desire to know more about this wonder 
 he had heard of, and make his report. There 
 stood the tree, — shall I say, of the knowledge 
 of good and evil .^ — and here was the warn- 
 ing, '' Of this tree thou shalt not eat, for in 
 the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely 
 die;" and here was the tempter to whisper, 
 "You shall not surely die, not surely; you 
 shall be as the gods, knowing good from 
 evil ; " and then the day came when he had 
 to die, that he might be free from the curse. 
 
GODLIKE TEMPTATIONS 27 
 
 So this is one form of these godlike tempta- 
 tions. No need to guard that side of our 
 life, we say ; it will take care of itself. We 
 can stand there on our high place, and laugh 
 at the enemy. We must watch our weakness, 
 and we wist not this is our weakness, though 
 it seems to touch the very fringes of heaven. 
 So it has fallen out often in the history of 
 the nations, that some man has held his own 
 nobly, and grown to be an accepted leader 
 of men ; and then some day we find he has 
 fallen suddenly and quite wofully, — *' given 
 himself away,** as we say, — and made ship- 
 wreck of his career ; like Webster, as so many 
 say, trying to find his way into the White 
 House. But I do not believe you at all 
 when you credit an essentially noble man 
 with low and mean motives, and these only 
 for doing what we may all deplore. You 
 say, — 
 
 "Just for a handful of silver he left us, 
 Just for a medal to stick on his coat." 
 
28 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 I say, the chances are, the man was not 
 taken captive in that poor, base way at all ; 
 it was a godlike temptation. The whisper to 
 him would be, ** Think how much good you 
 may do if you can win that prize ; what a 
 blessing you may be to your nation and the 
 world ; how you may lead in noble policies, 
 make your country radiant and strong, and 
 die with the tears of the people raining down 
 about ydur bed." It is no mean ambition in 
 such men merely to get the place, while in 
 some others it may be nothing else. It is 
 on the side where the river of the water of 
 life runs deep and strong, and the great 
 uplifting is, that the enemy gets in. They 
 would have said, ** Is thy servant a dog, that 
 he should do this thing ? " had the temptation 
 come where they had kept the guard strong 
 all their life. 
 
 I think of this again when I read the great, 
 sad story of Robert Burns. The temptations 
 that scourged him while he lived, made death 
 
GODLIKE TEMPTATIONS 29 
 
 dark to him, and ruined all that could be 
 ruined of his matchless genius, crept in and 
 caught him on the high and noble side of his 
 nature. To be a cold and calculating villain 
 in his conduct toward women, to die of the 
 drink when he v/as still in his prime, and 
 leave a widow, with her little children, to 
 the cold charities of the world, and to write 
 things that cripple his beautiful genius down 
 to the cloven foot, — this is no way to frame 
 your verdict of Robert Burns. The sin and 
 shame crept in, again I say, on the nobler 
 side, and he was as far from a base and mean 
 intention as the pit is from the nadir. His 
 love of beauty and grace, yes, and his love 
 of purity, the glamour which comes to such 
 a nature from wine and strong drink, and 
 the fine humors of what so many call good 
 company, the flash and flame of wit, and the 
 stormy splendors of youth at springtide, — 
 these were the lures and wiles which caught 
 his noble spirit and led it captive. Rober^ 
 
30 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 Btirns hated hypocrisy and meanness, and the 
 shams and shames he saw all about him, and 
 loved the bright, brave world he saw now 
 and then, and true men and women, and all 
 the pleasantness he could compass in that 
 haggard time and place ; and these were the 
 baits that caught him. The Vv^ay to sin and 
 shame for him, and the woe of it, and the 
 slaying when the enemy had made good his 
 footing, lay through sympathies and likings 
 which were, one may say, the very conditions 
 of being the man he was, apart from the 
 curse. 
 
 I had another and a very dear friend in 
 those old times I was looking at just now, a 
 high-minded man, and within his limitations 
 very wise ; while he was also one of the most 
 useful men I have ever known, full of public 
 spirit, and one who was always to be de- 
 pended on to see a good thing through ; gen- 
 erous with his money, and generous with his 
 power. 
 
GODLIKE TEMPTATIONS 31 
 
 But the tempter whispered, "You are too 
 good for all that plodding you have to do ;. 
 why not put your fine powers to finer uses, 
 build up your fortune faster, and take a first 
 place ? " It seems to me now, there was no 
 danger at all, had he kept watch and ward on 
 the nobler and most generous side of his 
 nature. Try to come at him then with a 
 proposition which would leave a stain on him, 
 it would have been as if you should throw 
 slime at the morning star. But he launched 
 out into large adventures that were full of 
 peril. Some years passed ; a panic came, and 
 then the high and beautiful life was taken 
 by a swift stroke ; ruin came, death followed, 
 and that was left to be explained for which 
 there is no explanation. His life was like a 
 psalm when I knew him at his best : it 
 passed down to a dirge. He had not kept 
 true guard over the towering ambition, and so 
 the stronger proved to be again the weaker 
 side. 
 
32 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 I had in my church in those days also 
 another young man, fresh from a great uni- 
 versity. He came to our city, a strong man 
 armed ; and there could be no doubt but 
 that he would take a first place in the work 
 he had to do. And where would you find 
 such a rare wit beside, or gleaming humor, 
 or instincts of a finer grain ? No danger on 
 the mean side, no place for the Devil there : 
 he knew what it was to be a gentleman, and 
 an American gentleman at that, the finest 
 type of gentlehood I know of on the earth. 
 But he has been dead these many years 
 now, and his death was the back stroke of 
 despair that he should ever be able to master 
 the foe that had come in on the nobler side. 
 There was no other sin or shame, only the 
 drink ; but he could not Hve on those terms, 
 and so, it seemed to him, there was no way 
 open but to die. 
 
 Here, then, is the truth as it opens to my 
 mind, of these godlike temptations ; and it 
 
GODLIKE TEMPTATIONS 33 
 
 brings me to ask the question I have answered 
 in part before the asking, What is to be done 
 about this peril as it touches your life and 
 mine ? 
 
 This, first of all, I tried to make clear in 
 touching the joy of youth. It is no bane, 
 but a very choice blessing, that we should be 
 endowed with a bright and joyous nature, 
 and love this world and our life when there 
 is nothing mean in it, or low. So if the 
 love for beauty and grace entrances you 
 wherever you turn, you are not to crush this 
 love out or despise it ; but to make duty, 
 and a steady watch and ward , Qven , such a 
 love, also beautiful and gracious:- • '. 
 
 Are you full of a fine ambition ? you must 
 take this truth home, that the strong side of 
 ambition, if we do not keep a good lookout, 
 may become the weak side of a fair and true 
 manhood. Are your passions and appetites 
 keen and ardent ? you must not look down on 
 them with disgust, but hide enough of the 
 
34 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 iron of high principle in them, and the fire 
 of a sacred honor, to make their true use 
 and purpose immutable as heaven. Let not 
 that noble vessel of which you are captain 
 now, shape her course until you are as sure 
 as you can be, with this mystery of evil 
 to fight by God's help, that the cargo will 
 not shift in any storm, or you go to sleep 
 when you should be on deck manning her 
 with your choicest manhood. The fortress is 
 in your hands, if I may return to my good old 
 figure, but there is the enemy watching his 
 chance ; and I shall believe you will guard the 
 mean. side« well, b^v your weakness may lie in 
 the" Reeling of your "strength. You must call 
 on God to help you, and keep strong guard 
 on the nobler side as you do on the meaner. 
 *'The sin that doth so easily beset us" may 
 be that we look down on with scorn and 
 contempt, while as yet the untried way lies 
 before us. 
 
Ill 
 Jfly Keuj 3^ame 
 
 Eev, iii. 12 
 
 T FIND food for meditation now and then, 
 as I read my Bible, in tracing the close 
 kinship between the name and the nature 
 of the person to whom it is given, and in 
 noticing how often the name is a patent of 
 nobility or a brand of infamy, given, as one 
 guesses, Indian fashion, when the man or 
 woman had revealed their ingrain quality in 
 their life. 
 
 You find when you use this key that Adam 
 is ** earthy," but Eve is a *' quickening unto 
 life ; " and then you remember that this is 
 a parable of names which still holds a mean- 
 ing, in the mining-camps for instance, where 
 the man is so often of the earth earthy, 
 
 35 
 
36 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 until the woman comes to quicken his nobler 
 nature through her own, and make good the 
 sanctities of a home, a church, and a school. 
 Enoch, again, is "dedicated,'' walking with 
 God; and Noah is ''consolation,'' I suppose 
 because he built that bridge between the 
 despair of the old world and the hope of 
 the new. Abram is ''the father of eleva- 
 tion " when he breaks away from the old 
 idolatries, and worships the unseen and eter- 
 nal God ; and then when he reveals that 
 wonderful staying power, reason or none, 
 and believes things are going all right when 
 to his poor mortal sense it must have seemed 
 they were going all wrong, he becomes 
 Abraham "the faithful" and "the father of 
 the faithful." 
 
 Artemas, Paul's good friend, is " whole " 
 or sound, again, or what we would call a 
 whole man; and Martha is "tart" or bitter. 
 Samuel is "heard of God," and some say 
 Samson is "sunlike" or "strong." But Deli- 
 
MY NEW NAME 37 
 
 lah, who did so much to wreck his fair 
 youth and manhood, has a very suggestive 
 name indeed : if I have caught the true 
 meaning, she is simply a *'head of hair/* 
 And there be many Delilahs. 
 
 This is a hint, and no more, of what the 
 names mean we pass over in our reading as 
 if they meant no more than those that 
 catch our eye in a directory, and not so 
 much as the Rose, Prudence, Grace, and 
 Joy of my own early days. In the Old 
 Testament they seem always to stand for 
 what is most notable and essential in the 
 man or woman ; while in the New Testa- 
 ment you can still trace the coincidence, 
 in many cases, between the person and 
 the quality, and have to believe that a 
 new name was still given to the man when 
 his nature fairly opened out, and he became 
 the incarnation of the special power or qual- 
 ity he flashed into bold relief as he passed 
 between the eternities. 
 
38 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 And you can see, again, what worth there 
 was in this instinct for the true name, when 
 you remember that the principle is as true 
 now as it ever was, and may find as fine a fit- 
 ness in you or me, it may be, to-day, as that 
 which belongs to Job ''the weeper," ox Luke 
 the *' luminous." So the name they gave me 
 when they knew no more what my life would 
 be, than I did, may touch such noble and 
 beautiful meanings that it shall seem like a 
 prophecy as that of John Greenleaf does in 
 our sweet singer ; while there is a chance, 
 on the other hand, that my name may be a 
 satire as bitter as if a mother of wolves should 
 call one of her breed a lamb. My real 
 name is that they write in the books which 
 are kept where nothing enters that maketh 
 a lie. It is the name I ear//, be it a brand 
 of shame, or a title to which that of princes 
 or nobles is a mockery ; and I wait for this 
 real, this new name, until I have made my 
 stroke or indeed until I have lived my life as 
 
MY NEW NAME 39 
 
 Shakespeare did, and Cromwell and Milton, 
 and then it is that baptism for the dead 
 against which there is no appeal, and for 
 which there is no legislation. We say of 
 a man sometimes, he has made a name. It 
 is the truth about every man ; and it would 
 be as easy to change the name of a nation, 
 or shall I not say of God, as this I win 
 when I have fairly lived . my life. And it 
 depends in no wise on the whim or fancy 
 of those about us. It is the signature and 
 seal of those above us, and touches a law 
 like that through which iron can never be 
 branded as silk, or round shot for wheat. 
 " Thou, for I know not now thy name in 
 heaven,'' the poet cries ; but it must have 
 been that he wist not of this law. When 
 we had to give our beloved back again 
 to God, who had always lived so close to 
 heaven, passing through all peril like a beam 
 from the sun, and loving and gentle as the 
 angels, I knew what the new name was she 
 
40 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 had won in the years she was with us : it 
 was Grace, 
 
 And in speaking to you of this thought in 
 its wider reaches, I want you to notice first 
 how true this truth of the new name is to 
 the common levels of our life, and the sim- 
 plest things we can do. You shall go into 
 a hundred homes, for instance, and wherever 
 you go you can read the new name of those 
 who have made the home, or are newly set- 
 ting out to make it. It will be beauty or 
 deformity, simplicity or pretension, cleanness 
 or squalor, order or tumult, sunshine or gloom. 
 You cannot help your judgment, I cannot help 
 mine. The inmates are revealing their inner 
 life to us. The home was in them before 
 they came to live there, and is the reflection 
 of their nature, as surely as the lovely nest of 
 the Baltimore oriole, or the paltry perversion 
 of the daw. One of my little maids, many 
 years ago, was greatly taken by a book, 
 ^'How to Live and Make your Home Beau- 
 
MY NEW NAME 41 
 
 tiful on Six Hundred Dollars a Year," but 
 got sadly puzzled over a story the writer told 
 of the way she had sawed up the finial of an 
 old pump she had bought for a few cents, 
 into pretty brackets for her parlor. The wise 
 little creature thought this was the weak 
 place in the book ; because, as she said, you 
 could not be sure of finding the top of an 
 old pump going for a few cents at an auc- 
 tion, and then where would vou be ? But I 
 said, ^'My child, you will find, when you get 
 a home, that this will not depend on the old 
 pump, but on yourself. If you are bound to 
 have the brackets for your five or ten cents, 
 you will get them somehow, never fear." 
 
 Or, it may be, you will break bread some- 
 where, and the new name will be known to 
 you, or yours to those who come to your 
 home in the breaking of bread. Is it such 
 bread as never should be eaten ? and does 
 the young house-mother blame the poor maid 
 in the kitchen ? It may happen so once and 
 
4^ TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 again, but as a rule we can trust all the 
 bread is made by the house-mother, though 
 she may not touch it ; and if there is death 
 in the pot, the blame must be laid at her 
 door. Is it such bread, again, as the angels 
 are reported to have baken for the prophet, 
 on the strength of which he went forty days ? 
 Then the good wife is herself the bread of 
 life. It is not in the wheat, or the leaven, 
 or the oven, you find the true secret of this 
 wholesome worth : it is in the housewife, the 
 fair flower of all civility. They know noth- 
 ing of such bread among the squaws. The 
 Indian woman on Grand Traverse offered me 
 a cake once when I was out fishing ; but I 
 had seen her make it, and said, " No, thank 
 you; I am not hungry just now." 
 
 Or, if I build a house to my mind, there 
 is my name on the house for all men to see, 
 and in the pictures on the walls, and the 
 books in the case, in the bits of blended 
 color, and in the very atmosphere men and 
 
MY NEW NAME 43 
 
 women are aware of when they sit down 
 with me in my living-room or my den. A 
 man built a house in Chicago very soon after 
 the fire ; and another man, coming to the 
 city, asked a friend where he lived. " I am 
 going that way," was the answer, ''and I 
 will show you.'' — ''Please do not do that," 
 the stranger said again; "show me the street, 
 and let me see if I cannot pick out the 
 house myself." So they walked up the street 
 in which, by that time, there might be a 
 score of houses ; and the moment he saw one 
 of them he said, "That's the house," and he 
 was right. He saw the builder's mind and 
 heart in the building, and read the new name. 
 I notice how true this is, again, of our 
 wider life, and how the new name comes out 
 high and clear at last, as if the letters were 
 braided of stars, or were burnt in by infernal 
 fires, and there is no escape. If meanness 
 and self-seeking, and shirking my duty, is the 
 part I play, while I would still win a good 
 
44 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 name, the one man in all the world I have 
 to fear is myself. This autograph cannot 
 pass the inner room ; the subtile and delicate 
 water-mark is in the substance of my life. 
 But if your new name or mine, on the other 
 hand, is to be one of a proud and sweet dis- 
 tinction, and there are those who would fain 
 make the true man a liar, or the clean man 
 a knave, and set the upright man crawling, 
 by their say-so, then we are not to heed 
 their darts and stings beyond the pain of 
 this present day ; the soul of honesty and 
 truth in us stands scatheless and safe from 
 the dart. "I have invented a bullet-proof 
 coat, my lord," the man said to Wellington. 
 " Quite sure of that ? " the veteran asked. 
 "Quite sure," was the answer. "Then put 
 it on," was the final word, " and we will see. 
 — Colonel, call in the riflemen, and let them 
 fire at the bullet-proof coat." But then the 
 man begged for grace, and went away. My 
 new name, if I arn the man I should be, is 
 
MYNEWNAME 45 
 
 just that armor of proof. No use trying to 
 pierce it with any dart hell ever forged. 
 Nothing can be more sure than the provi- 
 dence which guards the good new name. 
 Evil or envious rnen would have defiled 
 Washington's : they could as easily have defiled 
 the morning star. Had there been any claws 
 on the seeds of slander that were sown so 
 thick about Lincoln, some would have held 
 their own, and overgrown the fair true record. 
 The whole world inshrines our "faithful fath- 
 er** in its heart. Luther, Milton, Cromwell, 
 -—if we had lived when slanders were fly- 
 ing all about them like dead carrion, the best 
 of us might have been tempted to wonder 
 whether there might not be something in 
 them after all, and to say, ** There must be 
 some fire in there, else how could there be 
 such a smoke and stench } '* But while the 
 lying spirits were forging evil names for them, 
 they were writing their own far up in the 
 heavens, the good new names that can never 
 
46 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 die and never change ; and now these abide, 
 you see, when the rest are like names writ 
 in water or on the blowing sand. 
 
 But others again, like Bacon, mingled mean- 
 ness with their greatness ; and as the ages 
 roll on, the instinct which would fain bury 
 what is base touches them, and, where burial 
 is not possible, tries the white quicklime. It 
 is no use. We might as well try to white- 
 wash the black river in the Mammoth Cave. 
 Such men have engraven their name. This 
 was noble in them, we say, but that was 
 base ; the head was gold, but the feet were 
 clay; the judgment has gone beyond us. The 
 record is like the footprints of the human or 
 hardly human creature I saw in Kansas once, 
 on the blue limestone hard now as flint. 
 The thing had stood there for an instant 
 once, and then gone its way, — Darwin's miss- 
 ing link, if one might judge ; and there was 
 the proof after untold millenniums, the mark 
 of the mingled man and beast. 
 
MY NEW NAME 47 
 
 I notice, once more, that we may be all 
 the time getting ready to write this new 
 name, or to empower the eternal watchers 
 to write it in some supreme moment ; and 
 then there is the seal of our greatness, or 
 the brand of our meanness, so long as our 
 name endures. Jesus said, **Be ye ready, 
 for in such an hour as ye think not the 
 Son of man cometh." And some will tell 
 you he means, you shall be ready to die; 
 but I think he means rather that you shall 
 be ready to live, to compact your life, if it 
 must be so, into one grand stroke, and so 
 win at once and forever the good new name. 
 In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the 
 grand ordeal comes in a great steamer on fire 
 far out at sea, or with her side torn open by 
 some foul blow; and then ** dastard,'* *' cow- 
 ard," *' brute," are branded forever on the 
 men on one side, and *' hero," '' saint, '* son 
 of God," are written on the foreheads of 
 those on the other. Their names go out into 
 
48 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 all the earth as the synonymes of baseness 
 or nobility, — the cowards saving a life which 
 was proven by their deed to be not worth 
 saving, deaf to the cries of women and little 
 children ; ' the heroes, steadfast as Milton's 
 angels, tossing all their own chances aside, 
 fronting death with steady eyes, dying, and 
 leaving us to cry proudly through our tears, 
 *' He saved others, himself he would not 
 save." 
 
 Ah ! I am glad after all to be a man when 
 I read such a record. It is these heroes, and 
 not the cowards, these noble, and not the 
 base, that hurl the grand defiance in the 
 teeth of death, and say, " You can do nothing 
 to me.'' These make me proud of my human 
 kind. These are my proofs of the immortal 
 soul and the blessed heaven. Set your ma- 
 chines going to grind out poorer proof, meta- 
 physic, theologic : I do not care for them one 
 pin's head in comparison with the proof such 
 
 * Written after a wreck in which all this came to pass. 
 
MY NEW NAME 49 
 
 men can give me. So the new name may be 
 written at once and forever by one grand 
 stroke. Yet we may spend a whole lifetime 
 getting ready to make that stroke ; and no 
 man knoweth the day or the hour when the 
 cry will come, and the demand be made to 
 reveal in that stroke the hidden soul of me, 
 — to write my new name. 
 
 So it is all true, once more, you will find 
 in honest old Bunyan, — all true about Obsti- 
 nate and Pliable, Christian and Hopeful, Mr. 
 Worldly Wiseman who dwells in the town 
 of Carnal Policy, and Faithful who goes 
 through the fire. All true about old Ready- 
 to-Halt, who hobbles toward the eternal life 
 on crutches, but gets there all the same ; and 
 Great-Heart, who marches with the step you 
 can still detect in the good soldier in the citi- 
 zen's garb when you see him on Broadway; 
 Inconsiderate, Old Honest, poor Mr. Fearing 
 who still could fight at a pinch, Dare-not-Lie, 
 Penitent, and all the rest. The fine old 
 
50 TALKS TO YOUNG MEiN 
 
 dreamer has only done in the semblance of 
 his dream what we all do waking, — taken 
 out the given name, and put in the new name 
 so that we can all see ourselves in his glass. 
 He knew all these people down Bedford way, 
 and was watching them through the grime 
 when he went a-tinkering through thorpe and 
 town. It was no mere twist of the Puritan 
 mind : this the man hid in his immortal pic- 
 ture is the living truth ; and matchless as he 
 is in his way, he gives us only one chapter 
 in the wonderful dictionary of the new names. 
 You will reveal them in the homes you create, 
 as I have said, in the work you do, in the 
 social life you help to maintain, in the 
 churches you uphold, and the schools and 
 libraries, and as citizens of the State and 
 the Republic. The whole wealth or the 
 whole destitution of my life, soon or late, 
 goes into my new name. 
 
 And this is my last word, that no young 
 man who hears me need die having missed 
 
MY NEW NAME Si 
 
 the good new name. Have you been false ? 
 You can be true. Or heedless, hearing only 
 and not doing ? You can give diligence to 
 make your calling and election sure. Have 
 you gone back on the good name they gave 
 you in your baptism } You can find courage 
 in God, as old Cranmer did when he held 
 the hand that had signed away his manhood 
 in the fire, ' and said, " Burn thou first ! " 
 The first faint sketch we make may be sad 
 as the "Miserere" they used to carve some- 
 times for an epitaph, — just that, and no 
 more. Yet that word may be so re-written 
 that men shall be proud and tender over it 
 to tears. 
 
 Or, you may be trying to win the new 
 name, and it may seem to be of no use. 
 The loose livers and loose thinkers may ap- 
 pear to be having the good times, and as 
 good a name, withal, as a man need care for. 
 Nourish no such distrust in the eternal Prov- 
 idence. Men have what they live for, and 
 
52 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 the pure in heart see God. Let us be true . 
 to ourselves, and to him and his Christ, and 
 then the new name shall be written on thy 
 door-post and lintel, ay, and on thy fore- 
 head. Tell the truth at all costs, call things 
 by their right names, stand in the vanguard ; 
 lead, if it is laid upon you, the forlorn hope : 
 so shall you be — 
 
 "Worthy the envied boon 
 That waits the good and the sincere ; 
 Those who have struggled, and with resolute will 
 Vanquished earth's pride and meanness, and have shone 
 The day-stars of their age." 
 
IV 
 
 In the Spirit 
 
 Rev. 2. 10 
 
 T SUPPOSE we all know what it is to be 
 in the spirit on a week-day, ~ the spirit of 
 the time and place. I go into my study, and 
 become absorbed in a book. The author may 
 be dead and gone this thousand years, and 
 no other trace of him remain on the earth ; 
 but if he has hidden his spirit in that book, 
 and I can find it, he opens his heart to me, 
 and I open mine to him, and find myself 
 touched as he was touched when he wrote 
 that chapter. I cannot help the tears in my 
 eyes as I read, any more than he could help 
 them when he wrote, or the strong throb of 
 the heart, or the ripple of laughter. I see 
 what he saw in human homes and human 
 
 53 
 
54 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 lives, catch the vision he had of the open 
 heavens, or the lurid flame and smoke. I am 
 in the spirit of this master of my morning, 
 and his spirit is in me ; my senses are simply 
 the messengers between his soul and mine. 
 I seem to hear the voice when I read, they 
 used to hear who knew the writer. There is 
 a spell on me which makes time and place 
 of no account, and I wonder how my morn- 
 ing has slipped away. 
 
 Or, I leave my study, and go down into the 
 city ; and if it is a busy time, it makes no 
 great matter where I go, I find those I seek in 
 the spirit of their week-day, so I have to tell 
 my story promptly, and go about my business. 
 If I should try to *^make a few remarks" on 
 a Wednesday, my friend might hear with a 
 touch of grace on a Sunday, he would listen 
 with a patience born of respect to the min- 
 ister, it may be, or his office ; but he would 
 be glad when it was over, so that he could 
 buckle down again to his work. Now, this 
 
IN THE SPIRIT 55 
 
 spirit is as true to the time and place as 
 that was by which I was absorbed in my 
 book. Business, you say, is business, and that 
 is what you are there for. Not to be in the 
 spirit, is to fail in your task ; and to ha\fe 
 people lounge about and get in your way dur- 
 ing the hours when business is done in our 
 stores and offices, is an insult and hinderance 
 to the genius of the day. 
 
 Because time then is not only money, as 
 you say, but more. It is that precious com- 
 modity of which money is only one result. 
 It is the opportunity for doing the thing God 
 has given us to do there and then ; and we 
 are there to do something as sacred and 
 supreme in those hours and in its own degree 
 as worship is, and must not be hindered. I 
 have heard that when Master Howe, the in- 
 ventor of the sewing-machine, left his busi- 
 ness to serve in the war, and was hard at 
 work one day for his regiment, a minister 
 came to see him, and wanted to take his time 
 
56 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 in hearing all about a church he wanted to 
 build to St. Peter. '' No time at all to hear 
 about St. Peter," the busy man answered, 
 '* mind too full of saltpetre; but hold on a 
 moment. Was not St. Peter the only fighter 
 among the apostles, the man who drew his 
 sword and cut off some one's ear 1 I like 
 him, so here's some money for his church. 
 Take it, and please go right away." That 
 was the true spirit of the time, and so it is 
 always. If my friend is the man I am think- 
 ing about, doing good and essential work, I 
 see no reason why I should say he is not 
 in the spirit when he guides the springs of 
 industries that move a thousand hands, as 
 surely as the minister is who preaches a 
 sermon or pours out a prayer which touches 
 the springs of thought and emotion in a 
 thousand hearts. 
 
 To be in the spirit, then, in the simplest 
 sense, week-day or Sunday, is no mystery we 
 cannot fathom. It is as real and true a 
 
IN THE SPIRIT 57 
 
 thing as to be alive, and is, indeed, neither 
 more nor less than becoming intensely alive 
 to the meaning and purpose of the day. 
 We all remember times when we have gone 
 to our work all out of tune, and unable to 
 fix the mind on what we had to do, half 
 dead, as it were, to the demand ; to find, as 
 the time went on, that things were slipping 
 through our hands to no sort of purpose ; and 
 when night came we had to say sadly, with 
 the emperor, "I have lost a day." We have 
 lost the day, because we have not caught its 
 spirit. But on another day we have found 
 we were so clear of head and sure of hand 
 that we have done the work of two men, and 
 come out all aglow with the spirit which 
 has borne us as on the wings of eagles. 
 Leave this absorbing and inspiring spirit out 
 of the account, then, and you are powerless 
 to do any thing supremely well. You drift 
 with the tide, you fall behind in the race. 
 You are like the clock which always loses 
 
58 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 time, and would have to give up if you had 
 no hope that the old fervor would come back 
 again, and make the spirit equal to the day. 
 
 Nor can we help seeing, again, that the 
 best work we ever do has this quality in it 
 above all others. It is done in the spirit, of 
 fails of its finest secret. From nursing a 
 little child to fighting a battle, from forging 
 a bolt to painting a picture, from working 
 in a saw-mill to singing in **The Messiah,'' we 
 must have this essence and spirit of all well 
 doing, or else we never do well. If I am an 
 employer, I bear with my workman as long 
 as I can, if he is no good, as we say, because 
 I think he may come round, and catch the 
 spirit of his task. But if I find, after all 
 my waiting, the hand is there, but not the 
 spirit, I have to let him go, because to have 
 such a man in my place is like having a bad 
 wheel in a machine ; and so able employers 
 propose to keep those men- at last, and those 
 alone, who are in some fair measure one with 
 
fN THE SPIRIT 59 
 
 them in the spirit of their work. And no 
 doubt this is true, again : that when you have 
 made a fair allowance for the native ability 
 of the young men who begin at the foot of 
 the ladder, and climb to the top, you will 
 find they are the men who have an absorb- 
 ing interest in the concern, and are watch- 
 ful and careful, and able to say honestly, 
 "I and my employer are one." This, as a 
 rule we can trust, is the story of the young 
 man who begins with no advantage in posi- 
 tion or patronage, and makes his way to the 
 highest place. He is in the spirit of his work, 
 and gives his heart to it, not half the time 
 but all the time, not grudgingly but gladly, 
 and not merely for the sake of the salary 
 any more than your good doctor helps us in 
 our hurts for the sake of the fee, but because 
 he loves to do that better than any thing 
 else in the world, and makes his work greatly 
 its own reward. 
 
 And such success is not to be wondered 
 
6o TALKS TO ^OUNG MEN 
 
 at, again, when we think for a moment what 
 it is such a young man has done. His shop- 
 mates or fellow-clerks will say he has a genius 
 for what he takes in hand, and this may be 
 ' true ; but then, does not a genius for any 
 thing depend greatly on our absorbing love 
 for it, and the power of intense application, 
 through which every other power is set to 
 its finest edge, and directed to the one pur- 
 pose the man has in his heart and brain ? I 
 imagine that what we call genius is very 
 often something like our power of lifting, — a 
 common endowment at the start, but capa- 
 ble of such a growth, by diligent striving, in 
 a healthy man, that it shall become a won- 
 der. So genius of any sort lies less in the 
 original endowment, and more in the power 
 to work steadily in the spirit of what we 
 have to do and ivant to do, than we are 
 ready to admit, who go to work with half a 
 heart. Native endowment is like iron in the 
 ore ; genius is the iron forged to fine shapes 
 
IN THE SPIRIT 6l 
 
 and polished and tempered for all noble uses. 
 Genius latent or asleep is like the gold-dust 
 and scales of gold they wash in the moun- 
 tains ; but it passes through this spirit, is 
 fused and refined, and then is wrought into 
 forms which add an alm.ost priceless value to 
 the mere weight of worth, such as you find 
 in a vase by Cellini. Genius is the gift of 
 God, and then it is our intense and absorb- 
 ing purpose to make the very best of the 
 gift, the perpetual fidelity to Paul's great 
 word, '^ This one thing I do," and to the 
 greater word of Jesus, ^' My Father vvorketh 
 hitherto, and I work." 
 
 And if you want more proof of the truth, 
 I would tell you, it can easily be found in the 
 life of those who win the highest honors, and 
 in noticing how they win them. Your great 
 actor, for instance, is always the man who 
 enters most thoroughly into the spirit of his 
 play, penetrates it with the fire and tears of 
 his own nature, and so sways his audience 
 
62 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 this way and that, as the trees on the up- 
 lands are swayed by the wind. When you 
 follow an actor, therefore, and say how well 
 he plays, I think he does not play well, or 
 you would not say so. I saw Ristori once in 
 '^ Macbeth," with the veil down no art can 
 lift for those who are not born into our 
 English tongue ; but when she came, moaning 
 of her doom, in her sleep, and wringing her 
 hands, it was not acting to me, it was the 
 hapless woman herself, — the terrible thing 
 James thought of when he said, '' Sin, when 
 it is finished, bringeth forth death." Ristori 
 was in the spirit. 
 
 One man comes to our city we are always 
 glad to see and hear. His play is as poor a 
 thing as can well be imagined, and goes in 
 the teeth of the nobler instincts in us all, in 
 the favor it shows to a very worthless ne'er- 
 do-weel, by comparison with his poor, striving 
 wife, so that I always begin by taking the 
 woman's part, and say she serves him right 
 
IN THE SPIRIT 63 
 
 when she drives him to the hills. And there 
 are other faults in the play, very grave faults 
 indeed, especially in the glamour it casts 
 over the curse of strong drink in the hands of 
 a weak man. But we forget all this in the 
 wonderful witchery of the artist, and weep and 
 laugh at his bidding. The touch of nature 
 makes us all of kin, and wins our forgiveness, 
 or, shall I say, steals away the heart, so that 
 we have nothing to forgive. How is this done ? 
 I will tell you how I think it is done. The 
 man has made this drama the subject of his 
 intensest thought and care, he has felt his way 
 past the letter into the spirit, and is so 
 absorbed, so lost in it, that from the moment 
 he appears, with the children hanging about 
 him, he does not assume a character, he is 
 just Rip himself. And I have been told, that, 
 while he is subject to an affliction he cannot 
 master when he is himself, as we say, when he 
 is in the spirit of his own wonderful creation 
 it never troubles him at all. 
 
64 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 And so it was, again, with Miss Cushman. 
 She clung to her work in the last years 
 of her life, a dear friend told me, who knew 
 her very well, because it was her one refuge 
 from perpetual pain. When she was once in 
 the spirit of her noble creations, she was free 
 from her great, sad burden. So it is also 
 with the advocate who makes his client's 
 cause his own, and feels the case is worthy 
 of the best he can do. He sways the jury 
 then, and wins the day against the man who 
 cannot for the life of him enter into the 
 spirit of the case. An old friend of mine,' 
 who used to ride circuit with Mr. Lincoln in 
 the West at an early day, told me how he 
 always knew when Lincoln was bound to win 
 his cause. He had first to feel sure he was 
 right, and then the sense of justice and truth 
 grew so strong in him, and so absorbed all 
 his powers, that his words were like a ham- 
 mer and a fire. 
 
 ^ Hon. Ebcnezer Peck. 
 
IN THE SPIRIT 65 
 
 So no man can ever preach to any purpose 
 who is not taken up in the spirit of the truth 
 he has to tell. Take that element out of his 
 work, and the sermon may be as fine as 
 hands can make it, yet the very deacons will 
 go to sleep under that sermon. But let him be 
 in the spirit, and then, though the discourse 
 may seem to be as dry as Aaron's rod before 
 it budded, there will come a time when this 
 that moves him shall carry all before it, like 
 the rushing of a mighty wind. There is a 
 story of a sermon Jonathan Edwards preached 
 once in New England, from the text, "Your 
 feet shall slide in due time ; '' and the people 
 settled down comfortably to listen or sleep 
 as the spirit moved them. And why not to 
 sleep ? For the preacher hardly raises his 
 voice above the merest monotone, and the 
 sermon is written and read. But the man 
 swayed them so, and stormed them, as he 
 went on in his discourse, and painted picture 
 after picture of the impending doom, so fear- 
 
66 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 ful, that we are told many in the congrega- 
 tion clung to the pillars of the meeting-house 
 in solid affright, so terrible was the chasm 
 that seemed to open before their very eyes. 
 The earth v/as shuddering under them, and 
 the level floor sloping down toward the eter- 
 nal fires. The word had grown to this 
 through years of brooding. A misconception, 
 you say, a monstrous birth. Yes, so I be- 
 lieve ; but, all the same, fearfully true to the 
 preacher, and, by consequence, fearfully true 
 to his hearers. Jonathan Edwards was in the 
 spirit. And so you may set this truth in 
 whatever light you will, of business or study, 
 of work on the common levels of our life, 
 or the fairest summits, — you touch the one 
 verity everywhere, that to be wholly in the 
 spirit of what you do is the final secret of 
 all pure worth in the doing. 
 
 So when we pass from such instances to 
 ask what this man means by saying he was 
 in the spirit on the Lord's Day, and what 
 
IN THE SPIRIT ^7 
 
 worth there may be in it for your young life 
 and my old one, here is the first truth as 
 it touches the man. The tradition is that 
 he was banished to Patmos, to work in the 
 mines there, because he was of the outcast 
 and branded Christian sect ; and if this is 
 the truth, we cannot doubt that his overseers 
 would keep a stern hand on him, and allow 
 no Lord's Day in leisure to rest, or time to 
 worship. He would have to dig and delve 
 his full stint, like the slave he was, until the 
 time came to lay down his pick and go to 
 his hovel. Or, if it was known among his 
 keepers that this day was more sacred to 
 him than any other in the week, they would 
 mark it for him, it may be, with the rubric 
 of a deeper misery. But the great and dear 
 Friend whose word was the master-key to 
 John's life, had said once that not here or 
 there, on this high place or that, should men 
 seek for some special way to the heart of 
 God, but wherever we worship in spirit and 
 
68 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 in truth, on a mountain or in a mine, as he 
 would read the words now. So the desolate 
 island compassed by the sea could no more 
 keep God out than it could keep the sun 
 out, and the low dark cave in which he had 
 to delve would be as true a temple as if he 
 had stood between the pillars Beauty and 
 Strength. His hands would toil at the heavy 
 task, but the spell of the spirit was on him 
 to lift him out of his misery into these 
 visions wherein at last the paradise of God 
 is regained. The vision would grow out of 
 this power which possessed him, and this faith 
 that he was very near to God, and to his 
 great, dear Friend, with thousands more scat 
 tered over the vast, brutal empire. He was 
 in the spirit, and then the dismal place lay 
 close to the gates of heaven. The sacred 
 places of his life were far away over the sea. 
 The Lord's Day music was the wailing of 
 the wind and the moan of the mighty waters. 
 There was no human heart there answering 
 
IN THE SPIRIT 69 
 
 to his own, no winsome human faces to be 
 in themselves a gospel, no lesson or prayer 
 from another heart, or sermon to help him 
 along. He was in the spirit, just that, and 
 no more ; but by that one blessed spell the 
 whole wealth of sacred places, of symbols, 
 music, prayers, lessons, and sermons, would 
 grow poor and thin, as the light of so many 
 candles is thin and poor what time the sun 
 rises and fills the world with light. 
 
 Now, did you ever see that fine picture, 
 "The Tuning of the Bell,'* and notice how 
 the workman stands with his hammer, waiting 
 on one with a musical instrument, who is 
 looking upward as he touches the strings, 
 as if he would bring the melody out of the 
 very heavens ? The great heavy mass, and 
 the man who has moulded it, have to wait 
 on the eager searching spirit of the tone- 
 master, or the work when it is done will 
 be *' jangled, out of tune, and harsh." It is 
 this Lord's Day spirit to the work and the 
 
70 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 workman, and the hiding of fine harmonies 
 within material things. It was the instance 
 to me of the thought which has dwelt with 
 me many years now, and grown clearer with 
 the years. 
 
 We are in the spirit on the Lord's Day, 
 and then we can hide its fine harmonies in 
 the week-day work. I will give place to no 
 man in my faith that every day is the Lord's 
 day ; that work well done is also worship ; 
 that the ring of the hammer is as sacred as 
 the striking of the harp ; the hum of honest 
 industry, as the psalms of the sanctuary ; and 
 the long strain of the week-day burden, as the 
 sabbath rest and prayer. Every word of this 
 is true ; but, then, for that reason I must be 
 in the spirii on the Lord's Day as I am also 
 in the week-day ; and, if I deem work as 
 sacred as worship, the canon holds good 
 again, that I must deem worship as sacred 
 as work. Life to the most of us on our week- 
 days is a hard battle with heavy labor, and 
 
IN THE SPIRIT 71 
 
 too scant a rest. We look for our Sunday as 
 in stony Arabia the traveller looks forward 
 to palm-trees and a well. We are hungry in 
 the heart and athirst and tired, and it may 
 be disheartened. I am in the spirit on the 
 Lord's Day, and in the spirit of the Lord's 
 Day, it is a battle-flag and a trumpet, 
 bread that never moulders, wells that never 
 run dry, a great sweet shadow in a weary 
 land. I go to my church, and bear up my 
 minister, then, on the wings of an eager 
 longing to welcome his thought, instead of 
 beating his wings down with the rain of my 
 indifference. I pour out the oil of my wel- 
 come over the dry sticks, perchance, of what 
 he may truly call his ^'effort;" and it is as 
 when the fire came down, and licked up at 
 once offering and altar, and wrested Israel 
 in a day from Baal back to God. I turn to 
 my books when I come home ; they reveal 
 deeper meanings in the quiet restful hours, 
 and a sweeter grace. I seek the woods and 
 
72 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 meadows ; they are haunted for me by the 
 spirit of my day. The great tone-master has 
 attuned all things afresh. A voice has said 
 again, "Behold, I make all things new.*' 
 
:' Cuio Emigrants 
 
 Gen, xL 31, 82 
 
 TF you take a map of the region in which 
 the man lived, whose story I want to 
 touch for you as it touches my own heart, I 
 think you will be able to form some idea of 
 what he did in contrast with what he set out 
 to do. Haran is about a day's march from 
 the old homestead he left, while Canaan is 
 ten or twelve ; and it is easy going to Haran, 
 one would think, but very hard to Canaan, 
 because after you leave the place at which 
 he halted, and push on toward that he 
 aimed at, you have to cross a river over 
 which there is or was no bridge, a desert 
 of seven days' journey, and the rugged 
 passes of the mountains. So that to reach 
 
 7S 
 
74 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 Haran from Ur would be a sort of picnic ; 
 but to reach Canaan after that would be 
 a painful pilgrimage, which would demand 
 about all the pluck and courage there was 
 in you. 
 
 Then, if we could see this Edessa, as it 
 came to be called at a later day, we might 
 guess how Terah caught the idea of going 
 to Canaan. Edessa is a pretty little place, 
 travellers say, as you shall find anywhere in 
 old Chaldaea. It stands in a sort of desert, 
 beside a deep, clear spring, in the midst of 
 shade-trees and fruit-trees ; and, above this, 
 there rises a great rock on which there has 
 stood a fortress, time out of mind, to which 
 they could retreat when the enemy came, and 
 defend themselves when there was no hope 
 that they could do this on the plain. This 
 was about the sum and substance then of 
 Edessa, — a small place standing by itself in 
 a desert, very pleasant and good to live in if 
 you are content to live in a small way, and 
 
TWO EMIGRANTS 75 
 
 nourish no ambition for a wider and larger 
 life. 
 
 Now, Terah, if we may trust the old 
 traditions, was a brass-founder in this pent-up 
 place, and his special line of business was 
 the making of molten gods. But such an in- 
 dustry as that must have been rather limited, 
 for good reasons. Only so many would be 
 wanted, at the most ; and they would not wear 
 out as wagons do, and ploughs, but the older 
 they grew, the better the people would like 
 them. Nor would there be any great improve- 
 ment possible, except by permission of the 
 priests, who are usually the last men in the 
 world to admit that such things can be im- 
 proved ; so the poor man could not strike a 
 new idea in this matter of the molten gods, 
 and push the old incumbents from their stools, 
 or melt them over and bring them out in a 
 finer fashion, allowing buyers so much for the 
 old metal. 
 
 We may guess, therefore, in what a strait 
 
76 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 Terah found himself at last, and why he may 
 have begun to look with longing eyes west- 
 ward. This Canaan away over the river, the 
 desert, and the mountains, seems to have been 
 a sort of Pacific Slope in those times ; a splen- 
 did land of promise, in which you could live to 
 your heart's content, when once you got there ; 
 widen the whole horizon of your life ; find un- 
 told outlets for your powers ; plant the stocks 
 anew which had no room to grow in the 
 pent-up garden-plat of Edessa; and then die 
 when your time came, happy in the thought 
 that you had made your stroke, and opened 
 the way toward a larger and fairer life. 
 
 So Terah, as I have come to think of him, 
 it may be because I am an emigrant myself, 
 — began to look with longing eyes toward 
 the land of Canaan. He was ready, as he 
 thought, to give up comfort for freedom ; and 
 a home and workshop in a pent-up place, in 
 which he was bound to follow time-honored 
 traditions and usages, for a tent, if it must 
 
TWO EMIGRANTS 77 
 
 be so, on the breezy slopes away beyond the 
 mountains, with the ocean for his boundary 
 on the one side and the desert on the other; 
 and to exchange the safe citadel on the rock 
 for the nobler fastness of a manhood that 
 would hold its own against the world, and 
 win. 
 
 It was a tremendous thing, as things stood 
 then, to do. I think I can see him through 
 the mists of time, sitting there in his work- 
 shop with his gods about him, trying to 
 count the cost ; and all the time, as he thinks 
 of it, the plan grows more and more feasible. 
 Then he consults the young men about it, 
 his son and nephew ; and of all things in the 
 world, of course, this is what they would like 
 to do, especially his son, who has already 
 begun to dream of a wider and higher life 
 for himself. So there would be a notice, 
 we may presume, sent through the town, of 
 a house and shop for sale, and the molten 
 gods withal, at the buyer's own price, because 
 
78 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 Terah must be rid of them, he is going far 
 away. Then the roots of his life would be 
 torn out of the soil in which they had flour- 
 ished, from father to son, ever since the 
 times of the Tower of Babel. And there 
 would be weeping among them, I think, and 
 visits made to the graves of those they had 
 loved, and the homes of their kinsfolk all 
 about ; and then, on a morning, you would see 
 them set out on their day's march to Haran, 
 where they would halt, and start on the mor- 
 row toward the river and the promised land. 
 That morrow never came to Terah. How it 
 was, we do not know : we only know this, 
 that forward to Canaan he does not take 
 another step. Haran itself is a pleasant place, 
 I hear, with plenty of good land about it ; and 
 there would be a better chance for life and a 
 living, it may be, there, than any he had left 
 behind him in Edessa. Be this as it may, 
 reason or none, there he staid a great while, 
 and there he died. One day's march from the 
 
TWO EMIGRANTS 79 
 
 place he had left, ten or twelve from that he 
 dreamed of, far away yet from the promised 
 land. And so never now will he see the 
 white glories of Lebanon, never the summer 
 splendors of Hermon and Sharon, and never 
 the blue sea turning to gold as he watches 
 it at sunset from the crests of Carmel. He 
 started on a journey : it ended, one might 
 almost say, in a jaunt. He dreamed of the 
 mountains, and settled on a flat. His ideal 
 was freedom, to be bought with a great price ; 
 he struck this one stroke for it, and accepted 
 comfort again on good securities. He went 
 back no more ; but then, he went forward no 
 farther, — got his chance just this once at a 
 singular, separate, generous, free life, which 
 held in its heart unknown treasures of great- 
 ness and worth, if he had only gone forth 
 that morning, and made them his own. The 
 morning came, and Terah was not ready. He 
 was not to be one of the units in our life, 
 after all, but only one of the vulgar fractions ; 
 
8o TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 not one of the men who stand out in clear 
 and bold relief against the darkness of the 
 ages, but one of the masses of men, — Terah, 
 the father of Abraham, who set out for the 
 promised land, and then halted at the end of 
 the one day's march. 
 
 But now as I watch him sitting there, I 
 am moved to make some plea for a kindlier 
 judgment than this I have rendered touch- 
 ing his failure. It is clear, for one thing, 
 that he is far on in years when he feels this 
 impulse to strike out toward a wider and 
 finer life ; and so his years would tell against 
 him. Old men soon tire of new adventures. 
 They are '^afraid of that which is high." 
 Then this was not only change which was 
 waiting in his outward life, but a wrench to 
 his inward life also. This son of his, who 
 grows to be one of the supreme men, you 
 know, of the world, has set his face already 
 against the old gods, and is no doubt look- 
 ing forward to the new home as a place 
 
TWO EMIGRANTS 8l 
 
 where he will not only be free to go where 
 he will and do what he will earthward, but 
 heavenward too ; and I think Terah guesses 
 this is just what will befall them. So we 
 may imagine where the main trouble lies. 
 Here is a man setting out on a great new 
 enterprise, at a time of life when Nature op- 
 poses instead of helping him ; looking for- 
 ward with his eyes, while his heart is looking 
 backward ; a man with Canaan on his lips 
 and Edessa in his marrow ; giving up the old 
 paths which are as familiar to him as his 
 own dooryard, to wander away over hills and 
 dales all new to him, and all strange. I do 
 not wonder the old man's heart failed him. 
 He needed more than an impulse to lift 
 him out of his old life. Only an inspiration 
 could do that, and I am not sure even this 
 could have mastered him when so much of 
 life lay behind him. And so he must have 
 said sadly enough, *' It is no use. I will not 
 go back, but I cannot go forward. I will settle 
 
82 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 down here, and wait for the angel of death. 
 I can still do a very good day's work in 
 Haran. They have no such gods here as I 
 used to turn out in the old place. Their 
 ideals are low. I will go to work and improve 
 them." Something like this he must have 
 said to the young men, while they talked 
 with him of the better land, its freedom and 
 beauty, and its rich reward. They spoke of 
 freedom, he preferred safety ; of the moun- 
 tains, he was wedded to the flat ; of the sea, 
 he liked the little river better purling along 
 in the sunshine ; of great rides across the 
 greensward, he liked his arm-chair better on 
 the porch in summer, and in winter by the 
 fire. '' So Terah took Abram his son and 
 Lot his brother's son, and Sarah his daugh- 
 ter-in-law, and went forth with them from 
 Ur of the Chaldees to go to Canaan ; and 
 they came to Haran and dwelt there, and 
 Terah died in Haran." 
 
 But we have to notice, again, that this is 
 
TWO EMIGRANTS 83 
 
 by no means the end of the one day's march, 
 for now we see what we have come to call 
 ^* evolution*' at work. Terah brings the young 
 men so far toward this larger and better life 
 he would fain have found, and then the im- 
 pulse in him to go forward is mastered by 
 the longing to sit still. But the time comes 
 when that which was only an impulse in the 
 father changes in the son to an inspiration 
 through which he not only carries out the 
 whole intention of Terah, but does more than 
 he ever dreamed of doing, because that which 
 was only a desire in the first man to better 
 himself becomes in the second a blessing to 
 the race, and the whisper of ambition in the 
 one man changes in the other to the voice 
 of God. 
 
 I need not dwell long on this point in the 
 story. I need only say that there is no 
 evidence, or hint even, of a Divine light and 
 leading in what these men are doing, until 
 Terah is dead. But then God speaks to his 
 
84 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 son, bids him get out of Haran, and pass 
 over to the promised land ; and once there 
 he becomes the spring-head of the floods of 
 blessing to which the prophets belong and 
 the psalmists, the seed of a mighty and 
 matchless harvest the world is reaping still 
 for the everlasting life. So, while the old 
 man never saw the promised land, the young 
 man saw it, and pre-empted it, as we say, 
 for the home of the race which lay in his 
 loins when he did cross the river and the 
 mountains, and saw the land he had been 
 dreaming of so long, while the old father's 
 arm was about his neck, holding him back 
 from his great desire. And so it seems but 
 the simple truth to say that some touch of 
 this glory rests on the old man's grave, — 
 after all, because we have no sure reason 
 to think that the son would have gone to 
 Canaan if the father had not set out to go, 
 even if he did break down at the end of 
 the first day's march. The impulse came 
 
TWO EMIGRANTS 85 
 
 first, the inspiration followed ; but who shall 
 be sure we could have had the one without 
 the other ? There are those, I suppose, in 
 Edessa to-day, who have come straight down 
 from some man who was quite content to 
 stay there when Terah tore out the roots of 
 his life ; called him an old fool, perhaps, for 
 not letting well enough alone ; bought his 
 molten gods, it may be, — a dead bargain, — 
 made money on them ; and never once in all 
 his life looked beyond the palm-trees and the 
 spring : but in all the world you would hardly 
 find a poorer story of what men may do for 
 the world's help and blessing than such a 
 line of men would have to tell you. It is 
 the first step which costs ; and taking this 
 first step, I love to believe, did something 
 very noble for the genius and inspiration 
 which has made our Bible the supreme book 
 of the world, and this Hebrew line the great- 
 est touching the religious life the world has 
 ever known. Terah's dream never came true; 
 
86 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 but then, he had the dream, and did some- 
 thing to make it come true to his son, and 
 so to the race. They say the way to hell 
 is paved with good intentions. Well, here is 
 one of the good intentions, then, that pave 
 the way to heaven. He did see the promised 
 land, after all, through the eyes of the man 
 he had gotten from the Lord; and there was 
 a strain of the sturdy striving which had 
 paid the price of leaving the old place, in 
 him who would never stop until he came to 
 the new. So his feet also are beautiful upon 
 the mountains, though he never saw them. 
 I said he started on a journey, and it ended 
 in a jaunt ; but this must not blind us to 
 what that jaunt must have cost him, — the 
 great sorrow of parting, — the heart-ache of 
 the man who seems to have stopped for the 
 bone-ache. He did not do all he set out 
 to do, let us allow this ; but he did more 
 than any other man of his clan in Edessa ; 
 and dying in Haran, he was not only one 
 
TWO EMIGRANTS 87 
 
 day's march on the road to this larger and 
 finer Hfe, but he had made it so much easier 
 for the young men to go right on to the 
 end. 
 
 And so this man's life touches yours and 
 mine, and opens out toward some truths we 
 may well lay to our hearts, and this is the 
 first : That, if I want to do a great and 
 good thing in this world, of any sort, while 
 the best of my life lies still before me, the 
 sooner I set about it the better. For, while 
 there is always a separate and special worth 
 in a good old age, this power is very seldom 
 in it, I would try to verify ; and it is not 
 your old Philip, but your young Alexander, 
 who conquers the world. I can remember no 
 grand invention, no peerless reform in life or 
 religion, no noble enterprise, no superb stroke 
 of any sort, that was not started from a spark 
 in our youth and early manhood. Once well 
 past that line, and you can dream of Canaan ; 
 but the chances are, you will stop at Haran, 
 
88 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 so this putting off any great and good adven- 
 ture from your earlier to your later age is like 
 waiting for low water before you launch your 
 ship. If we want to make our dream of a 
 nobler and wider life of any sort come true, we 
 must push on while the fresh strong powers 
 are in us, which are more than half the battle. 
 The whole wealth of real enterprise belongs 
 to our youth and earlier manhood. It is 
 then that we get our chance of rising from 
 a collective mediocrity into some sort of dis- 
 tinct nobility. We may be ever so sincere 
 after this, as far as we can go ; but we shall 
 only go to Haran. Yes, and we may have a 
 splendid vision, as when this man saw Her- 
 mon and Sharon and the sea in his mind's 
 eye, as he sat in his chair ; and a noble and 
 good intention, as when he started for the 
 mountains, and halted on the plain : but just 
 this is what will befall us also, if we are not 
 true to this holy law of our life. 
 
 This is my first thought ; and my second 
 
TWO EMIGRANTS 89 
 
 must take the form of a plea with those 
 who do strike out to do grand and good 
 things in this world, and do not halt, but 
 march right on, and then nourish a certain 
 contempt for those who still lag behind. The 
 chances are, it is because these begin too late, 
 that they end too soon ; and it is no small 
 matter that they begin at all. For myself, 
 I can only blame them, when, with the visions 
 of a nobler life haunting the heart, they tell 
 me that Haran is good enough for anybody, 
 and we need none of us look for any thing 
 better. If they know all the while, as this 
 man knew, that the land of promise still lies 
 beyond the line at which they have halted, 
 and will say so frankly, though they may go 
 only the one day's march, I can still bare 
 my head in reverence before such men. I 
 know what it is to leave these Edessas of our 
 life, and what it costs ; how the old homes 
 and altars still have the pull on you, and the 
 shadows of the palm-trees, and the well at 
 
90 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 which you have drunk so long, and what lov- 
 ing arms twine about you to hold you back 
 from even the one day's march. So, when 
 I hear those blamed who stop short still of 
 where I think they ought to be, I want to 
 say, Have you any idea of what it has cost 
 them to go so far as that, and whether it 
 was possible for them to go any farther ? 
 And then, is it not a good thing anyhow to 
 take those who belong to them the one day's 
 march, and, setting their faces toward the 
 great fair land of promise, leave God to see 
 to it, that this which may be no more than 
 an impulse in the man who has to halt, may 
 grow again to a great inspiration in the son 
 of his spirit and life who goes right on ? 
 
 And this, I think, is what we may count 
 on in every honest endeavor after a wider 
 and better life. So I like the suggestion 
 that the way the eagle got his wings, and 
 went soaring up toward the sun, grew out of 
 the impulse to soar. That the wings did not 
 
TW6 EMIGRANTS 9^ 
 
 precede the desire to fly, but the desire to fly 
 preceded the wings. Something within the 
 creature whispered, ''Get up there into the 
 blue heavens ; don't be content to crawl down 
 in the marsh. Out with you ! " And so some- 
 how, through what would seem to us to be an 
 eternity of trying, — so long it was between 
 the first of the kind that felt the impulse, 
 and the one that really did the thing, done, — 
 it was at last, in despite of the very law of 
 gravitation, as well as by it; and there he 
 was, as I have seen him, soaring over the 
 blue summits, screaming out his delight, and 
 spreading his pinions twelve feet, they said, 
 from tip to tip. 
 
 I like the suggestion, because it is so true 
 to the life we also have to live, — trying and 
 failing ; setting out for Canaan, and stopping 
 at Haran ; intending great things, and doing 
 little things, many of us, after all. I tell you 
 again, the good intention goes to pave the 
 way to heaven, if it be an honest and true 
 
92 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 intention. There is a pin-feather of the eagle's 
 wing started somewhere in our starting, — a 
 soaring which goes far beyond our stopping. 
 We may only get to the edge of the slough, 
 but those who come after us will soar far up 
 toward the sun. 
 
 So let me end with a word of cheer. The 
 Moslem says, " God loved Abdallah so well 
 that He would not let him attain to that he 
 most deeply desired." And Coleridge says, 
 '' I am like the ostrich : I cannot fly, yet I 
 have v/ings that give me the feeling of flight. 
 I am only a bird of the earth, but still a 
 bird." And Robertson of Brighton says, 
 "Man's true destiny is to be not dissatisfied, 
 but forever ?/;^satisfied." 
 
 And you may set out even in your youth, 
 therefore, with this high purpose in you I 
 have tried to touch. You will make your 
 way to a good place, a wider and more 
 gracious life, do a great day's work, rise 
 above all mediocrity into a distinct nobility. 
 
TWO EMIGRANTS • 93 
 
 find some day, that, though you have done 
 your best, you have fallen far below your 
 dream, and the Canaan of your heart's desire 
 lies still in the far distance. You have not 
 labored in vain : no man ever can who puts 
 this noble heart into it all. You have got 
 the feelijig of flight. The terms of rising are 
 in all you have done as a man among men, 
 evangelist, reformer, day-worker, I do not 
 care. All grand and great things lie in the 
 heart of our striving. Then 
 
 " Sudden rest may fall on weaned sinews ; 
 We may droop and die : the work continues. 
 God names differently what we call failing, 
 In a glorious mist his purpose veiling." 
 
VI 
 
 Cuio iChil6ren 
 
 Gem xviL 18 
 
 npHE boy in whose behalf this most touch- 
 ing and pathetic prayer is said was as 
 yet the -only son of his father, and stood in 
 the direct succession to his estates ; while the 
 father seems to have concluded also that he 
 was to inherit the promises through which 
 his race would possess the land to which he 
 had emigrated from the old home beyond the 
 Euphrates. It was, indeed, very much as one 
 of our Puritan ancestors in Plymouth or Salem 
 would think of an only son, who would not 
 only inherit all the wealth he had got hold of 
 in land and cattle, but would also carry out 
 the promises which had brought him over the 
 sea. The promise of a new church and com- 
 
 94 
 
TWO CHILDREN 95 
 
 monwealth, so intimately one that the secular 
 should be sacred and the sacred secular, and 
 the whole commonwealth part and parcel of 
 the kingdom of God on the earth, — this seems 
 to have been the dream the father had been 
 cherishing, as he watched the boy grow toward 
 the promise of a man after his own heart. He 
 had laid out a plan for his future, and settled 
 every thing so far in his favor ; and then one 
 day it is whispered to him that he is to be 
 the father of another son, who will push this 
 one down, and take the first place ; and it is 
 this that compels him to cry to the Most High, 
 "Oh that Ishmael might live before thee!" 
 He cannot have it so. He has set his heart 
 on this ruddy young creature, who is running 
 over the wild uplands so full of life. He wants 
 his own way, right or wrong. He would set- 
 tle this question of who should be greatest, as 
 it ought to be settled, through his love for 
 the boy who had brought so much brightness 
 into his old age. But it is no use : his prayer 
 
96 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 cannot be heard and answered in this way. 
 There is a blessing in store for the boy, but 
 not this the old man would have. He will be 
 the ancestor of the tribes of the desert, and 
 the father of princes ; but the fairer promise, 
 over which the heavens are bending, rests 
 forever with the unborn child. So there is 
 no more to be said. The passage closes with 
 a word which ends the matter once for all : 
 *'He left off talking with Abraham, and went 
 up from him.'* 
 
 Nor can I be mistaken, I think, in saying 
 that when you read between the lines of this 
 far-away chapter in the story of a very noble 
 house, you are pretty sure to find yourself 
 on Abraham's side, — for Ishmael. Because 
 he was the first-born, for one thing, and had 
 his rights on this ground to whatever worth 
 lay within his birthright, in a land and time 
 when this law of primogeniture was of the 
 very first moment. Then, again, he was the 
 darling of his father's heart, who had worked 
 
TWO CHILDREN 97 
 
 for him and saved for him, and thought of him 
 always as his heir down to this day. Nor had 
 the boy done any thing as yet to disturb this 
 right of succession ; while, in a time with 
 which he had nothing to do, his poor mother 
 had gone through troubles which must have 
 cast a shadow over his whole childhood ; and 
 stil], again, it must have been hard for him 
 to have such a childhood as his fine, free 
 nature demanded, if he lived much under 
 Sarah's eye, who could carry things with a 
 high hand when she was in one of her black 
 tempers, and make the father of the faithful 
 himself behave very much like a poltroon. 
 
 We have to notice, also, as the younger 
 son grows up, how thin a shadow he casts 
 against the curtain of these old days. He 
 seems like a ghost, compared with his great 
 old father. He is a mother's boy, in the 
 rather poor sense of keeping close under her 
 wing, and never rushing out on a separate 
 adventure of his own that would make the 
 
98 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 blood in him tingle to the tips of his fingers. 
 And no good and quiet boy in the Society of 
 Friends, on a fine old farm in Pennsylvania, 
 following close in the footsteps of Friends' 
 Meeting through the long traditions of First 
 Day and Fourth Day, could ever be more 
 entirely to a mother's mind, I suppose, than 
 Isaac was to Sarah's ; while, on the other 
 hand, such glimpses as we get of Ishmael 
 in the Bible, and the traditions which have 
 lingered like long echoes among the tribes 
 who claim him for their father, reveal a pres- 
 ence which reams and pulses with life, and 
 is all on fire with the qualities we love to 
 see in a growing youth, because they hold 
 in them the promise, as we think, of a bright 
 and strong manhood. Why should not a lad 
 like Ishmael get his rights, then, we say, 
 against a lad like Isaac, when we see how 
 each life opens in the course of time ? and 
 what is this man driving at who indites the 
 chronicle which makes Heaven interfere to 
 
TWO CHILDREN 99 
 
 give him the lower and poorer place ? Here, 
 surely, to a rational mind, which will not 
 believe that to be true which smites at the 
 roots of equity, is one of the things we have 
 to reject in the interest of the revelation of 
 which it claims to be a part ; or, if we accept 
 the story as it stands as true, we must look 
 within the lines, as well as between them, for 
 our belief that the man is right when he 
 sets the question in this light. 
 
 It is because I believe he was right, that 
 I have taken up the question, and then be- 
 cause I think the truth he tells us runs 
 through the very marrow of this life of ours 
 now, and touches us in the same close and 
 painful way as it touched this old man and 
 his boy, on the one hand ; while, on the other, 
 it brings a truth home we all have to pon- 
 der, of as deep a moment as any we can 
 touch in the interests of the soul, shall I 
 say, as these stand in conflict with the senses. 
 
 For, true as it is that the boy was not to 
 
100 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 blame, yet blame comes with him and clings 
 to him, poor fellow, though he can help it no 
 more as yet than an Ethiopian can help his 
 color. And it is true here, as it always is and 
 must be, that you have to go beyond Ishmael 
 before you can get at the rights of his troubled 
 life. He was Abraham's son, but he was not 
 Sarah's son ; yet Sarah, with all her faults, was 
 the man's true wife. And here lies the main 
 root of the trouble. For you will often notice 
 how these men who stand out in such bold 
 relief in our Bible, tamper with this most sacred 
 order of our human life, — that a man shall be 
 the husband of one wife, — and for reasons 
 which seem good then and there, take other 
 wives, or do worse, and have children by them, 
 just as they do up here among the mountains, 
 to the disgrace and shame of our nation. And 
 you may easily imagine they have got Heaven 
 on their side, if you are to accept all that 
 is said about the transaction, just as our 
 Mormons do, who can give you chapter and 
 
TWO CHILDREN lOi 
 
 verse for their sin and shame ; and if you 
 allow their canons of inspiration to be true, 
 as my good Methodist brother did who went 
 out to ** labor with them," they will leave you 
 not a foot to stand on. 
 
 But when you leave the Word to follow the 
 deed, and then trace the deed by the law of a 
 clean and true life, the law of one wife and 
 one husband, it is not hard to see where the 
 truth of God abides. I do not remember one 
 instance in the Bible of this invasion of the 
 purity and cleanness of our life, which does 
 not turn out in the end to be a great and 
 sad mistake, bringing trouble and dismay to 
 the man who makes it, and revealing itself in 
 some sad way, soon or late, in the children. 
 It may be a case like this, or like that of 
 Jacob who should have married Rachel for 
 his one wife, or like those of David or Solo- 
 mon, or any of the rest : it comes back on 
 them all at last in trouble and shame. Their 
 sin finds them out. And so this poor boy has 
 
I02 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 to bear the brunt of his father's evil deed ; 
 the disturbance of the old true order is in 
 his life when he is born. God is with him 
 to the great heart of the seer who tells the 
 story, to make the best of him, and bring 
 what good can be brought out of the evil ; 
 but there lies the evil hidden in his heart 
 all the same. He will be a wild man. His 
 hand will be against every man, and every 
 man's hand against him. The wild, passionate 
 resentment of the mother driven out into 
 the wilderness lurks in the son ; and it will 
 drive him out, and sow itself afresh through 
 thousands of years, as I read the story, in 
 the untamable tribes which are to wander 
 over the desert and live from hand to mouth ; 
 while the children of the younger son, the 
 happy child of promise, over whose birthright 
 the very angels are standing guard, will live 
 out this Bible, and then write it out, and the 
 nations will find in it the word of God to man. 
 You see the drift of the truth I want to 
 
TWO CHILDREN 103 
 
 tell, then, and how it comes home to those 
 who may be tempted to swerve from the one 
 true law, and to start influences that may- 
 run through the ages to come in human 
 lives ; or, standing true to this law, take 
 those from God over whose advent the 
 angels will bend with a loving concern and 
 care. Jesus said, *' There is nothing secret 
 that shall not be revealed, and what is done 
 in the closet will be proclaimed on the 
 house-top/' And so I tell you young men 
 especially, for whose souls I watch as I 
 watch for my own, you can invade these 
 most holy laws of our life, and imagine you 
 have covered your tracks, and yet by that 
 one sin you shall hurl a calamity through a 
 hundred years, and strike your great-great- 
 grandson who may be sitting where you are 
 now in 1987. Yes, and you may still send 
 the calamity on through the ages to strike 
 and miss, miss and strike, like a jumping shot, 
 through a thousand and a thousand years, as 
 
I04 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 this man did who cried, '' Oh that Ishmael 
 might Hve before thee ! '* So I think there is 
 something really noble in the man who says, 
 ** If I sin, I know I shall suffer, and I do not 
 mean to creep out of it even under a robe of 
 imputed righteousness. I will take the bitter 
 the best I may, for I have had what I deemed 
 to be the sweet." But this personal penalty 
 I can bear myself is one of the simplest ele- 
 ments, after all, in the solution of this awful 
 problem of the sowing and the reaping. The 
 real nerve of the question may lie farther on. 
 I had a friend once who lived as true to the 
 laws of our life as any man I have ever 
 known, but his great-grandsire, who was a 
 general in the Revolution, and what you call 
 *'a high liver," sent down to him the sure 
 result of such living ; and so my poor friend 
 used to say he did not think it was fair that 
 he should have the gout to torment him, a 
 perfect abstainer as he was, while the old 
 general had the wine. So you strain your eyes, 
 
TWO CHILDREN 105 
 
 and your son has to wear spectacles. You 
 drink the dram, and seem no worse ; but your 
 son has to stagger for it. Or, take to these 
 wild ways, and say you are ready to bear 
 the penalty ; but you may be able to do no 
 such thing. You may be ''saved/' as you say, 
 by God's grace, like a brand plucked from the 
 burning; yet there may be a man in the 
 world you love better than your life, who 
 shall be like this Ishmael, a wild man, and 
 the sire of wild men, to the end of the 
 chapter. 
 
 There is another truth in this story of a 
 family, we may well consider also, and it is 
 this : If Hagar had been the one wife of this 
 man, she was not the woman to bear this child 
 of the promises. Hagar the Egyptian, we hear 
 her called, — a slave given to the man when 
 he was over there, as some imagine, but in any 
 case a woman with a poorer nature and a 
 lower faith. Now, I care not how good it may 
 seem to a man to take a wife of a lower and 
 
I06 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 meaner nature than his own, though a voice 
 out of heaven may seem to say,. ''This is 
 the woman for thee;" the children will fol- 
 low the mother, and the whole world cannot 
 alter the law any more than it can alter the 
 tides. And so, on the other hand, when men 
 of the world say, '' I leave the religion of the 
 family to my wife, and attend to business,'* 
 and know as they say so that the wife has 
 indeed the deeper and truer heart toward the 
 immutable things of God, they may be aware 
 of a touch of humor on the edge of their re- 
 mark, and perhaps take refuge from the church 
 themselves in the Sunday-morning paper ; but 
 they have touched in the saying one of the 
 deepest and most momentous truths they are 
 ever likely to reveal about their home : that 
 the mother has the deeper heart, and will raise 
 children of a finer type than her husband. 
 The children follow the mother in this inner 
 life. It is a wonderful touch in the Gospels, 
 which makes Mary stand in the light of 
 
TWO CHILDREN 107 
 
 heaven, and leaves Joseph in the shadow, 
 when they would account for the man Christ 
 Jesus; wonderful, and yet natural as life itself. 
 Mary holds all these conditions of the diviner 
 life in her nature ; he is the holy child be- 
 cause he has this holy mother, and we could 
 have the world's divinest manhood in no 
 other way. 
 
 So Ishmael was a wild man, and he became 
 an archer, and dwelt in the desert. His hand 
 was against every man, and every man's hand 
 was against him. The tradition of the desert 
 runs, that, when Hagar got him all to herself, 
 she led him back to her own gods; but Isaac 
 stays in the tents, and learns the lessons of 
 faith in the one God, eternal and invisible, 
 his father had made so far good. Ishmael 
 was in some respects by far the finer crea- 
 ture, as I think of him, — ruddy, restless, full 
 of life, and clever with his hands and feet 
 and eyes ; but he was a wild man, as empty 
 of the higher vision as the goats he chased 
 
I08 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 over the rocks. There is a vast difference, 
 Seneca says, between refusing to do wrong, 
 and not knowing how. Ishmael, poor fellow, 
 had neither the ignorance nor the self-govern- 
 ment ; and so he became the sire of such a 
 line as we should have in our wild new West, 
 if the gentler and deeper-hearted Isaacs did 
 not go there to start and maintain the finer 
 and nobler life. 
 
 For Isaac stands to us for the type of 
 the inward life, and Ishmael of the outward. 
 This, of the supremacy of the soul over the 
 senses; and that, the supremacy of the senses 
 over the soul. This man for whom the father 
 prays is a bit of pure nature ; but that for 
 whom Sarah watches is touched by the grace 
 which purifies, exalts, and transforms. The 
 one child may storm about the earth, but the 
 other will stay near the gates of heaven. 
 Ishmael will find a woman in Egypt, and 
 marry down to his grade ; but Isaac will 
 marry the maiden who was born unto Bethuel 
 
TWO CHILDREN 109 
 
 the son of Milcah. And he will have his 
 own troubles ; but the gentle heart given to 
 meditation will find its way through them all, 
 and the days will declare the secret the old 
 man's prayers could not alter. 
 
 And so this lesson comes from the old 
 time to the new, in this parable of two lives : 
 That there is a law of life Heaven will not 
 tamper with for all our prayers, a steady 
 sequence of cause and consequence we have 
 to abide by whether we like it or not ; a 
 right way and true, touching these founda- 
 tions of our life, out of which Bibles may 
 grow in the long succession of the ages, and 
 a line of men and women whose life will 
 enrich the world. This, and a wrong way 
 that will lead on to a hapless life full of wild 
 deeds that end in a clouded heaven, and this 
 life will go on also until the evil has wrought 
 itself out by the mercy of God. We may 
 say what we will, therefore, about standing- 
 ready to suffer for our own misdeeds, and to 
 
no TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 pay as we go : the woe of it is, that no man 
 liveth to himself, and no man dieth to him- 
 self, and the shadow of such a truth is just as 
 sure as the light. 
 
 It was among the teachings of a faith which 
 has well-nigh passed away, that a man might be 
 in the eternal felicity, and see his son welter- 
 ing in the eternal fires, yet feel no heart-break 
 over it, but still " praise God from whom all 
 blessings flow." I wonder how it would be, if, 
 in the light of this truth I am trying to touch, 
 that son could cry from the deeps of his 
 despair, '' You put me here. We ought to 
 change places," and as he said this, Heaven 
 should flash her light on the whole woeful truth 
 of it. I think there would be silence in heaven 
 for more than the space of half an hour, so 
 far as one singer was concerned, and, if the 
 father did not o^et down to suffer with his 
 son, there would be a revolution. 
 
 And, then, this lesson : How a man of no 
 great natural power or splendid quality, if he 
 
TWO CHILDREN m 
 
 has this inward life in him by his birthright, 
 and nourished forth in his breeding, bids fair 
 to be of vastly more worth than the most 
 superb piece of nature which was ever born 
 and bred bare of this blessing. He is the 
 Ishmael in the human family, and even at his 
 best is only a noble and splendid animal, — 
 the Jim Fisk, it may be, without the railroads, 
 or the John Morrissey without the cards. 
 
 And this lesson : That there is no great 
 hope for the child who has not the right 
 mother, except as there is hope for all chil- 
 dren. The father may be never so noble and 
 faithful in his way, set his heart on the boy, 
 and pray a prayer for him which will touch 
 human hearts by its pure pathos after four 
 thousand years. All the same, by this law 
 we can trust and follow, it is the mother's 
 nature which will give us this outward or in- 
 ward man, the Isaac of the home or Ishmael 
 of the desert. If she has caught into her 
 heart the love of God and goodness, if she 
 
112 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 cherishes a true loyalty to Heaven, like Mary, 
 and turns the great moments of her life into 
 a sweet communion, then she also shall have 
 good children. But if within her heart there 
 lurks the taint of idolatry to the god of this 
 world, and she follows this as the load-star 
 of her life, she will mould her children to 
 her own inner likeness, and lead them after her 
 own gods ; and the end will be a great sorrow 
 instead of a great joy, — a great sorrow, but 
 not endless. 
 
 For, as in this old chapter from the history 
 of one of the *' first families,** we have to see 
 how, long after the children of the promise 
 had fulfilled the promise in giving us the 
 prophets and the Christ, and had been beaten 
 and scattered as the thresher releases and 
 scatters the grain, this wild man did come to 
 something noble and good in its way after 
 all ; ripening into a man like Mahomet, and 
 into a race* like the Saracens in Spain, sweet 
 and fine, while it lasted, as a Norway summer. 
 
TWO CHILDREN ^S 
 
 As this did come of Ishmael's line, because 
 the wild man was never left to himself, and 
 because the children of the promise also helped 
 to lift him out of the dominion of the senses 
 into a sense of the soul, so it is, in the long 
 range of the Divine goodness, with this whole 
 wild world. It wanders on in its own way, 
 and riots and wrecks ; but there is a saving 
 running through all the spending. The lower 
 life slowly makes way for the higher ; the 
 face learns first to turn to its Mecca, and 
 then to heaven. Thousands of years your 
 wild man may wander, but he wanders home 
 at last to God, — 
 
 " And learns to call upon his name, 
 And in his faith create 
 A household and a fatherland, 
 A city and a state.'* 
 
 He sits down at last, poor wild man, 
 
 clothed and in his right mind. *' God makes 
 himself an awful rose of dawn," and then we 
 
114 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 see, somehow, that, as the shadow is to the 
 light, so is Ishmael to Isaac ; and He has 
 perfected his picture as surely through this 
 man's wandering in the desert as through 
 that man's abiding in the home. But this is 
 the truth for this day : — 
 
 " Hold thou the good, define it well, 
 For fear divine Philosophy 
 Should push beyond her mark, and be 
 Procuress to the lords of hell." 
 
VII 
 
 iTho Primitiue 36ea of a $006 T3:life 
 
 «^ Prov. xxxi, 10 
 
 ^T^HE picture we saw in our lesson of an 
 old Eastern homestead must have been 
 a study from the life ; but no man can guess 
 now who painted it, or who the good wife 
 was we see there, or her good man, or where 
 to look for the place on a map. All we 
 know about the land is that it lay well 
 toward the north, where the snow fell in 
 winter, and good warm happing was needed 
 because of the cold, and the days grew so 
 short that you had to rise before dawn in 
 the morning, and work after dark, or the 
 day*s work would not be well done. 
 
 And I suppose the picture was painted 
 with no thought at all that it would ever 
 
 "5 
 
Il6 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 find a place in their Bible ; but they loved 
 it so for its own sake, that the day came 
 when a wise seer no doubt said, **Why, this 
 is good enough to go into the rolls we read 
 in our synagogues, so let us set it at the 
 end of our Book of Proverbs. The other men 
 have had enough to say about evil women. 
 We will match them with a good woman, and 
 see what honey will do, if the aloes fail of 
 their purpose, with the youth of our land." 
 
 So this was done ; and there the homestead 
 stands among the vines and olives all these 
 ages, with the corn-lands about it, the cattle 
 in the meadows, and the sheep on the uplands, 
 and the goats ; with the sun shining through 
 the windows by day, and the lights gleaming 
 out at morn and even for evermore. And 
 the good genius of the home is this woman 
 we see, who has not one word to say for her- 
 self, and yet stirs some human heart to speak 
 for her to this fine purpose ; who has no 
 name, and yet has won the noblest ; a woman 
 
A GOOD WIFE 117 
 
 who, if this be indeed a study from the life, 
 came to this man in her sweet, fair maiden- 
 hood, to be true wife to him, and was true 
 wife ; that and no more, that and no less. 
 No slave of his whims and fancies, or wife to 
 wonder in what mood he will come home, and 
 whether his first word will be first cousin to 
 a kiss or a blow ; and no drudge to wear her 
 life out in helping to make a fortune, as his 
 first wife, he will spend in jewels on the 
 second. True wife to true man ; clothing her- 
 self afresh to his heart, as her beauty fades, 
 with a beauty that cannot be seen. True 
 wife and true mother ; raising her children to 
 make other homes like this they love so well ; 
 cossetting them a little, we may presume, 
 and her grandchildren a great deal when their 
 turn comes, for what would such a woman be 
 if she did not nourish the ''simple merry 
 knack of tying sashes, fitting baby's shoes, of 
 stringing pretty words that make no sense, 
 and kissing full sense into empty words " ? 
 
Ii8 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 So, true wife to true man, we can see her 
 there in the far-away years, growing old at 
 last, and not so active as she was, or so full 
 of care. The snows fall softly on her hair, 
 the afternoon shadows grow longer, and the 
 sun sets, and she falls on sleep, never think- 
 ing in all those years that her memory would 
 stretch beyond two generations ; and yet here 
 I am, after more than two millenniums and in 
 a w^orld she never heard of, setting her sweet 
 old portrait in the light of a day of which she 
 could not dream. 
 
 And in trying to open my thought, may I 
 not ask you to notice, first, with what large 
 free lines this picture is drawn. There is no 
 such limitation to her nature as we have to 
 note in some women, who are very good 
 indeed, but then their worth is like the reports 
 we hear of some rare old wine, — it takes up 
 but little room, and is apt to be hidden away 
 in cabinets, and only brought out and used 
 on choice occasions. There is no such trouble 
 
A GOOD WIFE 119 
 
 about this portrait of a woman of the old 
 time and tenor. It is a large and ample 
 nature God has given her, which not only 
 fills the place completely, but is felt far and 
 wide : so that, while some will say, she is 
 such a man's wife, others will say when you 
 ask about him, he is such a woman's husband ; 
 and so the honors will be divided. 
 
 You may notice also that she has what 
 we call faculty ; the quality a fine French- 
 woman had who said that if she should fall 
 on evil days she knew how to do twenty 
 things by any one of which she could and 
 would make her own living. In that busy 
 home, where things are done very much as 
 they were done in New England on the 
 farms a hundred years ago, you feel sure 
 there is not one thing she has to see to, 
 she cannot do better than ever a woman she 
 hires ; and the place is in perfect order, 
 because her own presence pervades it from 
 cellar to attic. So there they are at the old 
 
I20 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 homestead, busy as bees, — the house-mother 
 and the maids who will also be mothers some 
 day and have homes of their own, while she 
 is not only mother but missionary to them 
 also, and her great plentiful nature overflows 
 into finer issues than those that lie in bread 
 and butter and home-made cloth and yarn. 
 
 It is not very often we see or hear of such 
 a woman, again, so superb in faculty and 
 oversight, who can maintain through it all 
 a sweet and even temper. These demands 
 on her life tell on the nerves, and she is 
 apt to have what those who know her best 
 call ''a temper of her own," and the breath 
 of her mouth has in it a touch of the east 
 wind. Such an one was our good friend Mrs. 
 Poyser. There are lovely touches of tender- 
 ness in the woman there who fronts the world 
 and fights her battle ; but how Martin Poyser 
 managed to find the home a man wants to 
 find within that old manor-house, I cannot 
 even guess, nor can I guess how he would 
 
A GOOD WIFE 121 
 
 ever make up his mind to stroke her hair 
 after a few years, or say tender and loving 
 words to her except when she was down with 
 one of her fits of sickness, and then I think 
 she would be apt to break in on it all with 
 some question about the cream. But this 
 good wife's nature is struck out in one line. 
 "In her tongue is the law of kindness." So 
 you can hear the sweet tones pervading the 
 house always ; and by ruling her own spirit 
 she was queen in her own domain, while 
 her good man would never think of the 
 proverb, ''It is better to dwell alone on the 
 housetop than with a scolding woman in a 
 wide house." 
 
 It may easily fall out, again, and does fall 
 out, that your good woman who is so true 
 to her home, and fills it so well, will be 
 quite content with what the man calls her 
 ''sphere," and will not care to do any thing 
 outside this, beyond what such women love 
 to do in their quiet way, in the tender chari- 
 
122 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 ties that come home to them as women, the 
 social duties that belong to our finer life, and 
 the care, it may be, of their church. It is 
 the man's habit to say also, if he is much of 
 a man, and has had the good fortune to win 
 one of these noble women for his wife, '*My 
 dear, what do you know about business ? 
 You must leave that to me/' And then, if 
 she has promised to obey him, — not if I 
 marry them though, — there is no more to be 
 said, and only one surmise to be made just 
 here : That it is precisely because the man 
 despises the woman's swift and sure intuition 
 as the ally of his slower judgment, that so 
 many of our business men come to grief, in 
 so many unexpected ways, in our own time. 
 Now, there may have been some little trouble 
 of this sort in the way of this good wife ; 
 but if there was, it is all over and done with 
 before we come across this picture, and she 
 is not only caring completely for her home, 
 but is also a capital woman of business. She 
 
A GOOD WIFE 123 
 
 has money of her own, made or saved ; has 
 seen a lot that lies well to the sun, and will 
 make a good vineyard ; thinks the matter over 
 carefully and well, sees her chance and seizes 
 it, buys the field, and has it planted for a 
 vineyard, and, let us hope, can leave it to 
 whom she will. And then, if there has been 
 a little cloud between them as they sat by 
 the fire, I think I can see the good man 
 open his eyes wide, and hear him say, ** Why, 
 my dear, you do understand business, after 
 all/' 
 
 I notice, again, it is not good marketing 
 up there in the North : there is scant choice 
 when you want to buy, and too many taking 
 toll when you want to sell. But she is not 
 only a good woman, and able, she is wise 
 also, and so she opens a way directly to the 
 primal buyer and seller, for so we must read 
 the words which compare her to the mer- 
 chant ships ; while you cannot palm off on 
 her a poor and mean article, for '^she per- 
 
124 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 ceiveth that her merchandise is good;" while 
 of course, being the woman she was, the 
 officers at the custom-house would not feel 
 their life was made a burden to them be- 
 tween chivalry for her sex, and fidelity to 
 their oath of office. I speak only as a man. 
 So it is not in her home alone, you see, and 
 in society, that this ample nature is content 
 to move : she has her own bank account, and 
 makes her own investments, and we may be 
 sure made them wisely, or else her good man 
 would never have said, " Many a man's 
 daughter has done well, but thou excellest 
 them all." 
 
 We might fairly infer, again, that with so 
 many cares our good wife would grow a 
 little careless about herself in the course 
 of time, and neglect those nice points in 
 her adornment, which, in despite of all we 
 say about following the mode, do hold their 
 own intrinsic worth in a woman's life. She 
 did not make this mistake. She seems to 
 
A GOOD WIFE 125 
 
 have said in her heart, *' Did I adorn myself 
 for the advent of my lover ? well, that was 
 not as the purple and gold anglers use to 
 catch a fish withal : I will still adorn myself 
 to please my husband. Has the glamour of 
 those early days when we were lovers rip- 
 ened into a sort of comradeship ? then my 
 comrade shall be as proud of his wife as he 
 ever was of his sweetheart. Does yeoman 
 Agur's wife over there on the next place 
 say it makes no matter what you wear in 
 the house, so that you keep a sharp lookout 
 of the windows } it is not sound doctrine. 
 Men, at the best, are curious creatures, and 
 think a great deal more sometimes than they 
 say. My good man shall never say I do not 
 care more for the glance of his eye than I 
 do for that of all the women between here 
 and Jerusalem. Or, is there something in 
 dressing to your fortune, again, and is the 
 silkworm a factor in the scales of commerce 
 and the arts as well as the flax-scetl ? then 
 
126 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 what a woman of my fortune may do with a 
 splendid propriety I will do, so that when 
 my good man sitteth among the elders at the 
 gate, they shall not whisper, 'A good man, and 
 a very able wife ; pity she should be such a 
 fright ! ' Here, also, are my daughters grow- 
 ing up ; and it will be the lovely old story 
 over again of the youths coming with shining 
 eyes to look on the maids who have taken 
 them in the old sweet thrall. They shall feel 
 no cold chill as they glance my way, and 
 wonder whether maids so beautiful, and with 
 such exquisite ways, will ever grow to be 
 like their mother in bearing the cares and 
 burdens of life. I will see to these things 
 for my husband^s sake, and theirs also, and 
 the life in which we hold the right to move." 
 So we see her zu her best as well as at her 
 best, in the fine old picture, and her clothing 
 is silk and purple ; while you see the house- 
 hold also, as well as herself, gleaming with 
 touches of color, scarlet against the snow. 
 
A GOOD WIFE 127 
 
 Then another fine touch comes in, we must 
 not miss. There was a real danger that this 
 woman who could easily have made her living 
 doing twenty things, would lose her heart's 
 pity and sympathy for those who could only 
 do one, and were not clever even at that ; 
 and failing to understand how that could be 
 so hard to them, which was so easy to her, 
 nourish for them a certain scorn and con- 
 tempt. Or, woman as she was, with this fine 
 faculty in her for ** making money," as we 
 say, she might have come to have too hard 
 a clutch on what she made ; and because she 
 had her eye also on another lot, which would 
 lie so nicely in the lap of the first, and would 
 go to Miriam while that went to Deborah, 
 when she was through with earth and time, 
 she must save every dollar and every egg, 
 the hundredth part of a dollar, and so keep 
 on saving and investing to the end of the 
 chapter. Nor need we doubt that she could 
 have easily recited reasons in plenty for such 
 
128 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 a course, if she had been of that mind. The 
 poor are thoughtless ; they will not lay up 
 for a rainy day ; they are extravagant also, 
 and wasteful, and do a sight of things we 
 never think of doing, to their hurt and loss. 
 Yes, and every word she could say might be 
 true. Yet she would be an untrue woman 
 for closing her heart to all these poor who 
 came for some little gleaning from her boun- 
 tiful harvest ; and even if the good man 
 should come to be hard and keen after 
 money too, he would not like her so well, 
 or hold her in such reverence, because men 
 do not like themselves so well for such a 
 reason. The question never came up. The 
 fine, affluent nature responded well. " She 
 stretches out " not her hand to the poor, but 
 her hands. And I warrant you it was none 
 of your back-door charity done by the maids, 
 and therefore done all wrong. Slie stretches 
 out her hands, this lady of mark, in embroid- 
 ered silks, and docs it for her own sake as 
 
A GOOD WIFE 129 
 
 well as theirs, because she is God's almoner. 
 So it is the crowning glory of the good wife, 
 that she stays good and generous, and the 
 purple has no steel under it fencing the heart 
 against God's pity and his Christs. 
 
 There is one touch more, but it is like one 
 of those fine touches Hogarth leaves hidden 
 now and then in an inference. ''I have not 
 given her that upward look," the writer seems 
 to be saying, *' which is in the eyes of the 
 saints/' But then she never thought of her 
 religion as something apart from or above 
 her life. She simply lived it out day by 
 day, without reference to frames and feelings. 
 And so he only adds this line, ^*A woman 
 that f eareth — reverences — the Lord, she shall 
 be praised." She has shown her faith by her 
 works. What would you have more ? So I 
 will leave the fine old picture as he has left 
 it, to draw one or two conclusions. 
 
 I. Let us all believe this for our comfort, 
 if we need any now, or for our instruction, 
 
130 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 if we shall need that to save against the 
 time to come, that a woman of such a splen- 
 did nature and so strong a will must have 
 found there were many hidden oppositions in 
 her good man she had not suspected when 
 she took him for better and worse ; and he 
 would have to say, more than once or twice, 
 "Women, the best God ever made, are an 
 enigma to a man ; '' and then they would 
 both find out that with this faulty and finite 
 nature they were both of kin to the infinite, 
 and these mysteries of the unguessed must 
 come to the surface now and then. Nor can 
 lives so near revolve as the planets do, and 
 never strike fire. But the sun would break 
 out again after the electric fires had met in 
 the mid-heaven of the home, and all things 
 grow calm and sweet, and the trouble would 
 be forgotten. 
 
 2. May I not say one modest word, also, 
 about the fine power this good woman reveals, 
 as it rests and turns on a good constitution, 
 
A GOOD WIFE 131 
 
 — for he has painted us the picture of a 
 woman healthy as May, — and say it for this 
 reason ? 
 
 It is matter of deep concern to a good 
 many, that the woman over here is losing 
 her hold on life, and there are no such wives 
 and mothers as there were in the old days. 
 There is one answer to this as a wide propo- 
 sition. It had always been the outcry ever 
 since we have kept the records ; and if it 
 were all true there would be no women by 
 this time, and no men. It is not true in the 
 wider sense. It is only true in any sense, as 
 we forget or refuse to learn the great true 
 laws of life, and, as this man says of this 
 woman, fail to gird our loins with strength 
 and strengthen our arms. That wise and 
 good woman, Lucy Aikin, says in a letter 
 to Channing, ** Fifty years ago our ladies in 
 England had pinched figures, pale faces, weak 
 nerves, and miserable health. Then we began 
 to discard the things that had worked such 
 
132 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 mischief for us, wore stout boots, bid defi- 
 ance to what we call foul weather, became 
 great walkers ; and now the new generation 
 has a new bloom on the cheeks, active habits, 
 firm nerves, and good constitutions/' The 
 great-grandmothers of the new race in Eng- 
 land, then, were very much like our girls 
 now, only not so peerless fair. The race has 
 been restored to a splendor England never 
 saw before ; and ours also, wherever there is 
 a touch of wisdom about the true laws of 
 living, is gaining ground, and nowhere more 
 surely than in New England, where I think 
 the trouble began. You would not thank me 
 to pursue this theme, but I could not pass 
 it without this word. When the chief in one 
 of the South Sea Islands wanted to be sent 
 to another island as a missionary, his fellows 
 said, *'Yes, let him go. He is a two-handed 
 man ; he has a good wife who will take hold 
 with him, and do what he cannot do.'* So 
 will this race be, with the good wife to 
 
A GOOD WIFE 133 
 
 double all the powers of the good husband. 
 And her children will rise up to call her 
 blessed, and her good man say, ** Many women 
 have done well, but thou excellest them 
 all ; '' and /ler works also shall praise her in 
 the gates.. 
 
VIII 
 
 Debt 
 
 2 Kings iv, 7 
 
 T KNOW of few things in our life so full 
 of peril to a young man as running into 
 debt. It has done more damage to our finest 
 manhood than any other thing I can think 
 of, except drinking whiskey ; and to a good 
 many men there is no danger from that, even, 
 so long as they stand free from this curse. 
 But a man is driven into the second evil often 
 in trying to forget the first, or to abate its 
 burden ; and so he is like one who tries to 
 escape from some place so dark that he 
 can bear it no longer, — to find the light he 
 plunges into, ending in a conflagration. 
 
 Debt is the old story of the slave who was 
 told by his tyrant to forge a fetter for his 
 limb, and then to forge a chain one link a day, 
 134 
 
DEBT I3S 
 
 and then to drag along the ever-growing load 
 until he lay down in his tracks to die. But 
 it is the old story with this difference : that 
 the debtor accepts the fetter and chain as a 
 favor; thinks he can easily unlock the thing 
 before long, and go free ; finds this is all the 
 time growing harder to do, while each day 
 adds a new link to the chain ; and revolts 
 in the measure of his sterling honesty from 
 saying, '*I will drag the chain no longer,'' 
 because he knows he is bound to drag it to 
 the last sore pinch by a law to which w^e 
 must stand true, — -the holy law of obligation. 
 Then if, for his life, he feels he must be 
 free, and has to go through the courts, the 
 brightest day he can think of is the day 
 when he shall have paid the last cent he 
 ovv^es, or when those who have trusted him 
 shall say, '^We know you have done your 
 very best to pay your debts. It is a misfor- 
 tune we must bear together : here are your 
 vouchers, put them in the fire." 
 
136 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 That is about the best release we can ima- 
 gine for this sad burden ; but the worst is, 
 that a man may be able to break the fet- 
 ter, and care so little about it, that, if he 
 can find some one to trust him, he begins 
 at once to forge another ; breaks this, and 
 so keeps on until the sin smites through 
 his life, and ruins all the safeguards God 
 sets about us as we set fences about fair 
 gardens. Then those who might look up to 
 him by reason of his ability, look down on 
 him by reason of his character, as a man 
 who will not keep faith with his fellows ; and 
 pity at the best takes the place of respect. 
 
 So runs the story of many men who have 
 made shipwreck of fortune, character, and 
 life itself, within my knowledge, seeking 
 graves that w^ere opened by their own hands ; 
 or who still live to work more mischief, and 
 cover them.selves with a deeper disgrace and 
 shame. So, what word can be said to the 
 new generation, every serious man, who has 
 
DEBT 137 
 
 seen much of life, should ask, not in the pul- 
 pit only, but at the fireside, and in the stores 
 and schools and workshops, which may help 
 those who have to take hold as we leave go, 
 so that they may never come to the sorrow 
 and loss which has overtaken the elder 
 generation in our time. 
 
 And it is not true, as we might well ima- 
 gine, that only those of a poor and shiftless 
 sort drift into debt, who, being hardly able 
 to make the world about them aware they 
 are in it by the weight of their intrinsic 
 worth, gather moment by every cipher in 
 the sum they can manage to owe, so that 
 when death comes to close the account there 
 is a keener sense of loss among their cred- 
 itors than might have come through the 
 death of much better men. And if this w^ere 
 the only man who is taken in these traps, 
 or who takes honest men in them rather, it 
 would be bad enough ; but I might spare 
 this talk, because the chances are, they would 
 
133 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 not be here to hear me, while the creditors of 
 such men who take their risk at cent per 
 cent perhaps might be left to pocket their 
 loss. But the worst of the curse, as we elder 
 men know, is this : that it so very often takes 
 our choicest young men captive, and drags 
 them down to this shame ; young men with 
 that eager and high spirit in them through 
 which so much is done ; men of a genuine 
 honesty, so far as good intentions go, when 
 they set out in life, and who run into debt, if 
 they don't take care, with some such feeling 
 as your eagle has for a great wall. ** I can 
 soar over it," they say, "never fear. Once 
 let me spread my wings, and find free play, 
 and I shall be free from this at one flight." 
 Nor is it the fetter and chain we saw just 
 now, to which these finer natures become 
 imprisoned. It is rather a thread of golden 
 wire so fine they do not see it at first or 
 feel it ; but day by day other threads are 
 bound about them, and these twist themselves 
 
DEBT 139 
 
 at last into a cable from which they find it 
 very hard and bitter work to get free. 
 
 I see these new men waking up to face 
 the new day. There are thinkers among them, 
 and orators, statesmen, and great merchants, 
 if they will only take care. They may not 
 take care ; and then, though they still attain 
 to the eminence, it may be with them as it 
 was with grand old Walter Scott, who, as he 
 sat on the green at Abbotsford, dying of over- 
 work through debt, threw off his wrappings, 
 moaning, '^This will never do. I must get 
 to my work ; " and when he tried, could not 
 hold a pen, or dictate a word, but sat still 
 with the tears running down his fine old face, 
 beaten in the brave battle and slain by debt. 
 Such young men as I think of may be ready 
 to create new homes, bring a family about 
 their knees, and be in God's stead, almost, to 
 the little community within the four walls. 
 But this fair promise may be blighted too. 
 Yes, and I can see how they may lay this 
 
I40 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 thing to heart, and say, *' I will make it as 
 the one thing needful to pay my way from 
 the start, and keep right on ; for this is the 
 one safe thing to do." I see such men 
 growing old at last, their homes standing on 
 strong foundations, and their children rising 
 up to call them blessed. 
 
 And if, once m.ore, my years have brought 
 me any wisdom, this danger from debt follows 
 very straight and simple lines. It was said of 
 Edgar Poe, that he was a millionnaire who 
 never had a dollar to his name ; and I have 
 a friend who said to me once with a real 
 sadness, " I have the fortunes of a pauper 
 with the tastes of a prince.'' Well, you shall 
 have a gold-mine in your brain, as my friend 
 has, with this trouble in you also, and never 
 be free from this curse of spending when you 
 cannot spare. A wise old Roman said once 
 that not to have a mania for buying whatever 
 strikes your fancy, is to possess a revenue. 
 And no truer word has ever been said about 
 
DEBT 14T 
 
 these debts which are made from over-spend- 
 ing, this weaving of the fine wires that take 
 us captive. 
 
 I knew a man some years ago whose genius 
 was in itself a noble fortune, and who might 
 be said to talk golden eagles ; but here was 
 the trouble with him : he had this mania for 
 buying every thing that took his fancy. Bring 
 him to New York with five hundred dollars 
 in his pocket, and set him down in Madison 
 Square, and the chances would be, that by 
 the time he reached the Battery he would 
 not have ten dollars left, or would be five 
 hundred dollars in debt, if he could get the 
 merchants to trust him ; and no thing he had 
 bought would be of any real use to him. 
 Now, what was the result } I will tell you. 
 He was kept grinding to earn money, like 
 a blind horse in a mill, or like the poor 
 creatures I always pity so, on the threshing- 
 machines, that are always climbing, but still 
 stay down, and have to be content, when 
 
142 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 their day's work is done, with the raff and 
 refuse of the grain. It is but the instance 
 of a vice which has eaten like a cancer into 
 our life, and wrought untold disaster. 
 
 You come to a city like this, from your 
 wholesome country homes, with the power in 
 you to win your way to a good place. You 
 begin low dovv^n, and hold on for a time to 
 the careful habits in which you have been 
 trained, and make ends meet, and something 
 over. The firm is generous, or, it may be, 
 only selfish ; it wants, at any rate, to keep 
 its good men, and so it promotes you. Then 
 you have more money, and you know the 
 reason why. You are worth more. Then 
 the world about you begins to notice you are 
 a rising man, and invites you to its feasts 
 and frolics ; and there is a fine grain in you 
 which makes it hard to refuse, or to be mean 
 in the matter of paying the world back in 
 its own coin. So there may be no evil in 
 you when this happens : yet this vice will 
 
DEBT 143 
 
 creep in of spending for a score of things 
 that are proper to society, but are a threat, 
 all the same, to the sincere safeguards of 
 your life. And you may not run into debt 
 as yet, but you have come to where they 
 draw the golden wires. You spend all you 
 earn, with the feeling you can make more ; 
 and you do make more, but then you spend 
 that too. 
 
 Moreover, you find a wife some day, very 
 much to your mind ; but you cannot begin 
 life in a couple of rooms, with a hempen 
 carpet and cane chairs, because society might 
 turn its back on you, and society is now your 
 god. But you find new powers to meet the 
 new demand, and begin business for yourself, 
 or are promoted again, and still might do 
 well if you would keep close to the solid 
 and sure things you understand ; but the 
 fatal lesson young men have learned, of being 
 able, as they imagine, to command success, 
 steals in, and lures you after vain shadows. 
 
144 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 We must be patrons of the arts, perhaps, 
 and buy pictures with the money we shall 
 need some day to tide us over a panic ; and 
 are not content with the modest house we 
 can pay for as we can pay for a loaf of 
 bread, but must rent a mansion. Then the 
 oil men come along, or the silver-mine men, 
 and show us what they call ''a good thing," 
 and say they will *'let us in," and they do. 
 So we drift into speculations we understand 
 no more than the man in the moon, or think 
 we can clutch ten thousand dollars in a 
 month from those wise and wary men on 
 Wall Street, who have given a lifetime to 
 watching the rise and fall of stocks, — take it 
 all in, as we imagine, at a glance ; and this is 
 the story of the wreck and ruin of thousands 
 of men of a fine promise, who, twenty years 
 ago, were on the way to a fair fortune. 
 
 But I say that no one lesson men can 
 learn, whose life lies in the main before 
 them, can be of a deeper moment than this : 
 
DEBT 145 
 
 That if we devour all the corn we can raise 
 in the seven good years, or go sowing it on 
 the barren wastes of speculation, we shall 
 have to hang round the garners of the pru- 
 dent and careful when the seven years of 
 scarceness come, and implore, when we might 
 command. ^' How is it," they said to the 
 good Scotchwoman, '' that your son John, who 
 had so fair a chance when you set him up 
 in business, should have broken down, while 
 you began with nothing at all, and are now 
 well off?" — '*I will tell ye," she answered. 
 *^ When we began, my auld man and me, we 
 lived on oatmeal and haver bread, and a' 
 things of that sort, but when we began to 
 be weel-to-do we would noo and then have 
 a chicken ; but the trouble wi' John and his 
 wife is, that they began wi' the chicken, and 
 noo they can hardly get the oatmeal." 
 
 That has been the trouble with thousands 
 who twenty years ago caught the trade-winds 
 to a fair fortune ; while, if we could explore 
 
146 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 the secret of hosts of men who have made 
 fortunes, and have not one dirty dollar in 
 their account, we should find they began 
 with the oatmeal, and let the chicken wait. 
 Did not trust at all to their genius for carv- 
 ing out a fortune while they spent one, but 
 made sure of the overplus in the good times 
 which would tide them over the bad. 
 
 So the first thing to be sure about is this : 
 Do not spend money you cannot well spare. 
 If you buy a Bible, even, you cannot afford 
 to buy just then, you wander to where the 
 wires are set, and may do more harm to 
 yourself thereby than the Bible will ever do 
 you good. Nay, I will say more than this. 
 If you so misread your Bible as to trust God 
 will take care of you w4ien you ought to 
 take care of yourself in this most sacred 
 business of paying as you go, you had better 
 sell your Bible at the first old book-store, 
 and buy '* Poor Richard's Almanack," or '^The 
 Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin." 
 
DEBT 147 
 
 I like that word of a sound divine who 
 says that next to the grace of God, paying 
 our debts right along is the best means of 
 grace in the world to deliver us from a 
 thousand snares. 
 
 And, if such a word as this should miss 
 its mark, there would still remain a great 
 cloud of witnesses, we elder men remember, 
 who have stripped themselves to the bare 
 bone to keep their good name, and are brood- 
 ing over their broken fortunes, and their lives 
 robbed of hope and joy. Men who struck on 
 the rocks over which it seemed easy enough 
 to ride when the high tides of prosperity 
 were running full and free, but that are 
 fatal as death if you are in the channel 
 when the tide goes down, and the storm 
 comes up, and there is no escape. '*Do you 
 know where all the reefs and shallows are 
 hereabout } " they said to the old pilot. 
 "Not sure I do," was the answer; "but I 
 know where the deep water is, and so I get 
 
148 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 along." It is what we should know about 
 this danger from debt : I must know where 
 the deep water is. I must disdain to be a 
 royal spender, contract no debts, and take no 
 risks I cannot see through or make good. 
 And then I go far to compel Fortune her- 
 self to give bonds for my success ; but failing 
 here, it is as when the spring fails in my 
 watch. 
 
 I knew a man in my youth who was a 
 pattern of piety; but he ran deep into debt, 
 insured his property for quite all it was 
 worth, was told it was on fire one morning, 
 but would not turn out and see to it until 
 he was through with family prayers. The 
 place burned down ; and then he tried to 
 collect the insurance, but the insurance men 
 said, **No." And there were good people 
 who said this was all wrong, and he did 
 right to have family prayers before he went 
 to put out that fire ; while the honest and 
 manful world about him said that to put out 
 
DEBT 149 
 
 the fire first, and then say his prayers, would 
 have been the most honest course to take, 
 to say nothing about its piety. He went 
 down, and his good name v/ith him, and is 
 buried in a lost grave on the other (under) 
 side of the world. 
 
 Dr. Johnson said of a man in his day, 
 he had no genius, but he was so true to his 
 pledge, that if he had promised you an acorn, 
 and none grew in England that year, he 
 would send to Denmark for one rather than 
 break his pledge. It was a grand thing to 
 say of a man ; and it comes home to the 
 heart of my thought, for, of all the promises 
 I know of, my promise to pay stands among 
 the first. 
 
 Now, to close my talk, I might tell you to 
 say some little prayer over all this, and I 
 will not tell you not to — God forbid ! But 
 would you not also do this at the prompting 
 of one who has seen a great deal of ruin 
 wrought through debt and easy-going spend- 
 
ISO TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 ing, with no resolute will to save, on his 
 way through this world ? Would you not see 
 where the leaks are in your young life, if 
 there be any ; where the wires are that may 
 as yet be almost invisible, but which may 
 grow to cables or chains in a few years' 
 time ? And then, would you do a little sum 
 for me, and so for yourselves ? Take your 
 pencil, and find what even a dollar a week 
 may come to, well invested, in ten years and 
 then in twenty, and so on to the end of the 
 chapter, and then see how much better you 
 can do than that even, and yet be in every 
 way a generous and kindly gentleman in the 
 measure of your means. For in asking you 
 to keep out of debt, and be careful in your 
 outlay, I advocate no meanness. Money may 
 be bought too dearly ; and we may any of 
 us run some risk of becoming like the old 
 Scotch nobleman, who would not give his 
 tenant a quittance for the rent until he had 
 hunted up a missing bawbee. He brought 
 
DEBT 151 
 
 the coin, and then said, " Noo, my lord, I 
 will give you a shilhng if you will let me 
 see all the money you have." He took him 
 at his word, showed him all his treasure, and 
 then the farmer said, *'That will do. I am 
 just as rich as ye are noo. I have seen all 
 the money, but I cannot spend a pound of it, 
 nor can ye, my lord, either." He was richer 
 than the old lord; he was free from the 
 chains the money had made for him. I 
 would have you so free ; and yet I would 
 speak to you as my sons touching this need 
 to keep free from the other and more woful 
 fetter of debt. We can save if we will, and 
 still spend for all fair and true purposes ; 
 and the wise and prudent do save, while the 
 heedless spend as they go, and it may be 
 we take hold and help them. I never quite 
 digested one of the best dinners I ever sat 
 down to in my life, because it came out after- 
 ward that my host owed for that dinner and 
 a great many more. There may be danger 
 
152 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 on the other side. The habit of saving may 
 grow on us so that we shall never bloom out 
 into a sweet and generous manhood ; but 
 this will always be the exception, not the 
 rule, among the men we breed in this New 
 World, while this is the contrast all through 
 between such men and your heedless spend- 
 er : That, cleaving to strict and stern justice 
 in their dealings, as your ''close" men always 
 do, the day never comes when they do not 
 keep their side of the contract. Do not run 
 into debt, then. Save, that you may spend. 
 Do what a true man may do to provide 
 things honest in the sight of all men. Owe 
 no man any thing, in this noble way, and 
 then you will make all men your debtors for 
 the sterling and noble ensample you set to 
 the world about you. 
 
IX 
 
 Sleep 
 
 John xi, 12 
 
 T NOTICE the old Bible-men make much 
 of sleep ; there seems to be more in it by 
 far, for them, than there is for the men of 
 our time. The first man falls asleep before 
 the blessing, which can alone make it worth 
 his while to wake again, can come to him, — 
 that is, the first woman. The great ancestor 
 of Israel wakes from a deep slumber, and is 
 satisfied once for all about his future, which, 
 up to this time, had been hidden in a sort 
 of mist. And Jacob sleeps alone on the 
 hills, — a youth far away from his home ; and 
 there is a blessing for him in the slumber 
 which was not in the watching. So they go 
 on sleeping through the books and ages in 
 
 153 
 
154 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 these old Bible times, while by story and 
 prophecy, by psalm and wise saying, we are 
 taught how a spark smitten out of sleep can 
 kindle and renew the most potent forces of 
 life. To sleep well, to their mind, is to do 
 well ; and it is a more gracious condition, 
 when the true time comes, than to be ever 
 so wide awake. 
 
 Yet it is very curious, again, to notice how, 
 with this teaching of the Bible touching the 
 worth of sleep, there has been a constant 
 fight with it on the part of many who would 
 be the last men in the world to allow that 
 they held the Divine Book of a small account 
 when it does not fit their humor. So your 
 Romish saint has often been a man who 
 could stay awake longer than any other man 
 of his day, rise at the most unnatural hours, 
 and banish sleep from his eyes and slumber 
 from his eyelids, so that he was a world's 
 wonder. One of these saints — St. John of 
 the Cross, as he is called — would only sleep 
 
SLEEP 155 
 
 a few minutes each night, and then it was 
 with his head on a spike instead of a pillow. 
 Among the sterner sort in the reformed 
 churches also, sleep has been deemed some- 
 thing to be ashamed and afraid of. *'I am 
 guilty," good Richard Baxter cries, '*for all 
 the sleep I enjoy over three hours in the 
 twenty-four.'' And I found, the other sum- 
 mer, it was very hard work indeed for me to 
 get through the door of his pulpit in Kidder- 
 minster; but it was ample enough, no doubt, 
 for the man, thin as he was, and worn by hard 
 labor and much watching. " Sleep is Death's 
 younger brother," Sir Thomas Browne says, 
 ''and so like him, that I never dare trust him 
 without my prayers.*' And Jeremy Taylor, I 
 notice, allows himself not more than three or 
 four hours sleep, and sometimes not even 
 that : while William Law, a man of the 
 purest religious genius and life, says, *' Strive 
 daily after the spirit of renouncing sleep ; it 
 is the poorest and dullest thing possible to 
 
156 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 a man." So the more religious you are, in 
 those days, the more unlikely you will be 
 to regard this great function of our life 
 as a blessing falling softly about you from 
 heaven. 
 
 And there were tracts printed in my youth, 
 and are still, I presume, meant to make us 
 ashamed for ourselves, and to fear for our 
 children, through telling how much time we 
 spend in sleep, which would be so much 
 better spent, in the opinion of the writers, 
 in staying broad awake. So very good men, 
 in their way of being good, still seem reso- 
 lute to forget the hints which come to us 
 from the Bible, of the way God has com- 
 passed some of his most delicate and far- 
 reaching providences while men slept. How 
 Abraham was confirmed then, and Jacob com- 
 forted, Joseph warned, and Daniel instructed, 
 and Elijah recovered while sleeping long and 
 well under the juniper-tree; how Paul was 
 succored and directed while he slept, and 
 
SLEEP 157 
 
 Peter saved from quite an overplus of big- 
 otry ; how the Psalmist sings of God giving 
 his beloved sleep ; and how, in the oldest 
 sacred book, there is solemn and beautiful 
 insistence of the truth that God speaks 
 **when deep sleep falleth on man, that he 
 may keep back his soul from the pit." So 
 the records run. Yet sleep is still something 
 to be cried down, I suppose, by a great many 
 good souls, and to be reduced to its lowest 
 minimum. ** Lord," they seem to say, *' if 
 he sleep he shall not do well ; " do their best 
 to show that no good, wholesome, persistent 
 sleeper shall enter the kingdom of heaven ; 
 and remember the words of Jesus perfectly, 
 " Cannot ye watch one hour } " but quite for- 
 get the tender allowance that follows, "Now 
 sleep on, and take your rest." 
 
 Now, we have good ground, I think, for 
 quite another conclusion from this, in the 
 help Science brings us first of all toward a 
 true conception of this noble function, through 
 
158 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 which, indeed, she is reversing the judgment 
 of the saints, and teaching us that when we 
 sleep, as when we wake, we shall do well ; 
 teaching us that as a rule, subject to such 
 variations as may lie within each man's nature, 
 a good, sound, restful sleep, of let us say 
 eight hours, is, in its own way, holiness, while 
 not to sleep so much as that, if we need so 
 much, is a sin. So that a man like Baxter, 
 with his nerves all on the surface, and his 
 delicate frame, ought to have blamed himself 
 because he slept so little, and said, *' I shall 
 be a better man every way, and so, of course, 
 a better Christian, if I can sleep more ; 
 therefore I will strive after this blessing as 
 I strive after truth and virtue." 
 
 Because the first truth we touch is this, 
 that a good sound sleep is, in the best and 
 truest sense, what we may well call ;r-crea- 
 tion. In our active and troubled day, the 
 books tell us, the pulse beats faster and 
 faster, and the torrents of life increase hour 
 
SLEEP 159 
 
 by hour in volume and intensity. Action, 
 conflict, thought, labor, and care demand 
 fresh efforts ; and through all this, and by it 
 all, as when with file and emery-wheel you 
 work at some delicate piece of mechanism, 
 so all day long, through this process, the fine 
 tissue of life is worn away. 
 
 I use my hands and eyes, my brain and 
 muscle, my nerve, and that wonder within 
 the nerve no man can reach ; and whatever 
 I use is wasted, or, shall we say, passes into 
 other forms. So the words which are spirit 
 and life when they reach you, are in some 
 sense material substances when they leave 
 the speaker. The finest ideals of the painter 
 reach back into the finest organisms, and 
 draw on these for the picture as well as on 
 some higher power. And the immortal num- 
 bers of the poet, also, are born of a mortal 
 body ; yes, and as the body is, so are the 
 numbers, so that Pope could no more write 
 like Tennyson, or Byron like Wordsworth, or 
 
i6o TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 Herrick like George Herbert, than grapes 
 can grow on thorns, or figs on thistles. 
 
 Here, then, is the worker, but within the 
 worker stands the watcher. All day long 
 there is a guardian angel bending over these 
 fine tissues and substances of life, to see that 
 they shall not be wasted beyond the line at 
 which they can be made good again when 
 *'God giveth his beloved sleep." So when 
 the true time comes, if we are wise to heed 
 the angel, he whispers his word and weaves 
 his spell ; and we enter — not into the 
 shadows of death, for that is a wretched mis- 
 take, but into the portals of a new life. Then 
 these exhausted and wasted powers, fevered 
 and feeble by the long day's work, feel the 
 touch of renovation. If our sleep is that 
 which nature has ordained, there are workers 
 we know nothing of, so shy that they stop 
 instantly and hide themselves when we do 
 know, — these restore the balance for us, 
 weave new tissue for every wasted nerve and 
 
SLEEP l6l 
 
 fibre, tone down the pulse again to its 
 healthy beat, store new treasures of spiritual 
 force and fire within the brain, transform us 
 into new men and women ; and then when all 
 this is done, and well done, the bells can ring 
 and call us to our labor or our prayers. But 
 they ring before this at our peril. It is not 
 in the service of God we wake before our 
 time, except there be some clear need, which 
 will not be said nay, for such waking ; and no 
 good man will try to save his soul even at 
 the cost of so badgering and injuring his 
 body. He may well do that for others when 
 the need comes, but not for himself. 
 
 When the old saint had cheated himself 
 out of his rest so that he could not sleep at 
 all, and was like to die, it was borne in on 
 him to repeat his paternosters just as long as 
 he could drone them out, and this would ban- 
 ish the fiend, he imagined, that was tormenting 
 him. Well, he went off to sleep with the 
 beads in his hand, and then concluded that 
 
l62 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 the Evil One is helpless to keep you awake 
 if you still persist in saying your paternosters. 
 But I think he should have said that to go 
 through such a sing-song is as when you rock 
 a child in the cradle. There was no evil spirit 
 about, except one of his own creation ; and 
 we can all create such an one if we persist 
 in staying awake beyond the line Nature 
 and the grace of God has drawn for our 
 sleeping. 
 
 For, if the positive is true, so is the nega- 
 tive. Some mighty hunger to do things shall 
 make us deaf to the whisper of this good 
 angel of sleep ; then all through the day and 
 far into the night we can work, while the 
 organisms waste beyond the power of this 
 merciful provision for their re-creation, and 
 then, because the balance is lost, the forces 
 of life run faster and faster while the chan- 
 nels waste away, and the pressure on the 
 brain and nerve becomes more tremendous 
 while all the time we become less able to 
 
SLEEP 163 
 
 bear it. The energies are wasted faster than 
 they can be made good again by such sleep 
 as we allow ourselves to take ; and then we 
 take that, perhaps, to sustain us in the 
 struggle, which should never be touched for 
 such reasons. We beat back these affluent 
 mercies which come for our saving through 
 sleep ; use eyes, nerves, and brain with quite 
 a savage energy; and use up principal and 
 interest together. And so we drive on until 
 we break down ; then we send for our doctor 
 to set us right again, who looks us over, 
 makes his diagnosis, and says, — 
 
 " Tis nervous prostration, 'tis fever within ; 
 He calls it a sickness, I call it a sin.'' 
 
 I note this truth, again, about a good sound 
 sleep I remember times, it may be you do 
 also, when it was no use working any longer ; 
 and so we went to sleep with a feeling of 
 despair about us, to wake up again in the 
 sweet still morning to find the figures all 
 
164 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 ready to take their place in the problem, the 
 lines riveted fast in the memory, the perplex- 
 ity growing clear in our business, or the 
 argument completed, so that it seemed as if 
 some defter spirit than our own had been 
 doing these things for us, or some friend 
 had come and sown wheat over the tares of 
 our half-frustrated yesterday. 
 
 So Coleridge sleeps, you remember, and 
 hears them whisper a poem, of which, when 
 he wakes, he can only catch a fragment ; but 
 no finer fragment ever fell on the human 
 ear. It touches the mystery and melody of 
 the inner heavens. And Dr. Carpenter, in 
 his fine chapter on sleep, has many things to 
 tell us of the way in which these powers 
 have grown strong and sure while men slept, 
 and how the most intricate problems or 
 arguments would be found written down next 
 morning, and the hand and brain wist not 
 what the spirit had done. 
 
 There seems to be some such blessing for 
 
SLEEP 165 
 
 the spirit in sleep, then, as there is for the 
 body ; not alone fresh fuel, but a purer flame. 
 And we may presume such boons as these 
 are hidden away in every life as it steals 
 silently through the night ; and when deep 
 sleep falleth on men, God openeth their ears 
 and sealeth their instruction. The cup of 
 the spirit holds the fresh dews of the morn- 
 ing. The dust of yesterday is swept from its 
 chambers, noble ideas and aspirations become 
 natural again, new suggestions come trooping 
 in, and we give them good welcome, and 
 wake farther on in life, as well as in time. 
 In our waking hours we think and feel, in 
 our sleep we become. The poet finds in the 
 morning sweeter imaginations, the thinker 
 profounder prmciples, the preacher more 
 pregnant arguments, and the very worker at 
 the anvil, a more subtle turn of the wrist, 
 and the stroke that goes right home. None 
 of us who sleep well begin the new day 
 where we left the old. Each man in his 
 
l66 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 rest has silently advanced to a new position. 
 He can watch the world from a higher sum- 
 mit, and be aware of a wider sky than that 
 on which the sun set yesterday. His flesh 
 is fresh as that of a little child; he returns 
 toward the days of his youth. 
 
 " Last night I weighed, quite wearied out, 
 
 The questions that perplex us still, 
 And that sad spirit we call doubt 
 
 Made the good naught against the ilL 
 This morning, when with rested mind 
 
 I try again the self-same theme, 
 The v/hole has altered, and I find 
 
 The balance turned, the good supreme. 
 A long sweet sleep, a good night's rest, 
 
 Has changed the look of all that is. 
 Sure, any creed I hold at best 
 
 Needs humble holding after this.'' 
 
 Now, let me draw a few simple lessons 
 from this truth I have tried to open. You, 
 young men, must remember that one grand 
 factor in your well being and well doing will 
 
SLEEP 167 
 
 lie in a good sound sleep. You may think 
 it does not matter : take my word for it, — 
 the word of a man who has had to walk 
 through rugged ways to his threescore years 
 and three, — that it does matter a great deal. 
 
 Your sleep is the hidden treasure of your 
 youth to-day, and to-morrow it will be the 
 margin you will have to draw on for your 
 age. Do you think you can racket round 
 into the small hours, snatch a brief repose, 
 and then be just as good as ever to hold and 
 bind ? it is not true. Many a young man sells 
 his birthright in this way, and cannot have 
 it back again, though he seek it with many 
 tears. Take your honest eight hours sleep, 
 if you may : there is life in it and grace. It 
 is one of the good angels which will save 
 you from the temptation to drink, give you 
 an even mind, brighten all your powers, and 
 do many things for you no other power can 
 do. 
 
 So when you get farther on, and are in 
 
i63 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 the thick of the world's business, do not for- 
 get what virtue lies in this good habit. You 
 may make more money by sitting up nights, 
 but the chances are you will not keep it ; 
 carve out a good business, and then have 
 to quit ; or grow eminent in your profession, 
 and then break down. Good fortune turns 
 greatly on good habits, and this is one of 
 the best. We can go just so far, and then 
 we have to fall back on Nature and on God 
 for new power. But if we say, '' I will work 
 double tides,'' and so get fevered and out of 
 true with the true laws of success in life, 
 then the day comes when our power turns 
 to something like paralysis. Your true busi- 
 ness or professional man is the man who 
 rises well rested, with a cool clear brain and 
 steady nerve, — the man who can shake off 
 business after business hours, go to sleep like 
 a yearling child, and rise like the sun, rejoi- 
 cing as a strong man to run a race. 
 
 And that word, a yearling child, reminds 
 
SLEEP 169 
 
 me, that if you quit yourselves like men, 
 and all is well with you, the time is coming 
 when you will have children to care for; and 
 then you must remember that **if he sleep 
 he shall do well,'' is true also of the child. 
 Because we have enough of the old leaven in 
 us still to prompt us now and then to try 
 and make our children ashamed of over^ 
 sleeping, v/hile, if they are healthy children, 
 the chances are that this is what they can- 
 not do. They may want to go all wrong 
 about the time for going to sleep ; they are 
 very apt to do that. All the same, our chil- 
 dren must not be tormented with the idea 
 that all the sleep they want, and therefore 
 need, is either a sin or a shame. Indeed, it is 
 true that with the high pressure the schools 
 put on their delicate little minds, and the 
 keen quality which seems to be in the very 
 air they breathe, they do need all the sleep 
 they can compass. It is the breath of their 
 life, the building-up of their body, the other 
 
I/O TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 half the task they have only half done, and 
 the help of the good angel when our help 
 fails. No cruelty can well be worse than 
 this that would rob the children of even 
 the fringes of this robe which falls on them 
 out of heaven; and no grace better than 
 this gospel, '* if they sleep they shall do 
 well." 
 
 So this is the conclusion of the whole 
 matter. These powers of ours are not to be 
 superseded, but made sacred ; and this power 
 by which we win new power is a sacred 
 thing. Once sure that it is sleep and not 
 stupor, recreation and not wasting, it is some- 
 thing to thank God for with all our heart. 
 And it is a great mistake in good men to 
 say this is a shameful waste of time, when 
 it may be, and so often is, the best possible 
 use of time ; or, that we should be at our 
 work or our prayers, while still we need 
 this on which the worth of the work or the 
 prayer is to turn. 
 
SLEEP 171 
 
 I say, that to sleep one hour more in such 
 a case is better than either to labor or to 
 pray, and may bring us nearer both to God 
 and man. 
 
X 
 
 A Woble Anger 
 
 Eph, iv, 26 
 
 T THINK sometimes when I hear men talk 
 about the sin of anger, that it would not 
 be amiss to speak now and then about its 
 holiness also, so that one might see how it 
 is not always a vice to be ashamed of, but 
 may be a virtue to be proud of in its true 
 time and place, and as good and true a thing 
 as we can ever nourish in our hearts. 
 
 We might suspect, indeed, that there must 
 be two sides to the question, when we notice 
 how it is as natural for us to be angry as 
 it is to use our hands and feet, and is some- 
 thing we do not have to learn, but is right 
 there, as we say, a primitive instinct, like 
 
 those of eating and drinking, or laughter and 
 172 
 
A NOBLE ANGER 173 
 
 tears. And so we detect traces of its pres- 
 ence in the infant of days, against the chill 
 of this strange new world into which it has 
 been ushered, and the hunger ; while those 
 who have raised many children need no 
 very fine ear to detect its ever-growing 
 strength in almost any child Heaven may 
 have sent them, when the weeks have grown 
 to months and years, or to learn that '^here 
 is the old Adam cropping out again," as the 
 father is apt to say so often, and the mother 
 so seldom. 
 
 And there are two ways of accounting for 
 this inbred instinct. We can say that it is 
 the old Adam cropping out in the very cra- 
 dle, and here is proof before letters of our 
 innate depravity ; or we can say it is no 
 such thing, but the indication of a power as 
 good and true in its own time and place 
 as any we can have and hold ; capable, to 
 be sure, as all our powers are, of being- 
 turned to base and ignoble uses, yet not to 
 
174 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 be branded for that reason as only evil 
 and that continually, but to be guarded and 
 guided to a true and good purpose. We can 
 sin with our hands and feet, with our eyes 
 and ears, and our tongues ; but who would 
 say these are depraved, therefore, in the 
 marrow of their intention, or that love is 
 depraved because it may turn to lust, or loy- 
 alty, because men say there is honor among 
 thieves ? 
 
 So we can sin through anger, and do sin ; 
 but this evil use must not blind us to the 
 noble purpose of this passion, any more than 
 when good wheat is turned into whiskey, on 
 which men get drunken to their hurt and 
 shame. The power may be, nay it must be, 
 all right, while the use we very often make 
 of it is all wrong ; and so one feels bound to 
 believe that on this ground there is room 
 for the faith that a noble anger has its own 
 true place and its own fair use in our human 
 life. 
 
A NOBLE ANGER l/S 
 
 And it will help us to see what worth 
 there is in a noble anger, if we will note for 
 a moment or two what a grand part it has 
 played in our human history, and how men 
 of the finest quality, and the noblest, have 
 been most capable of feeling and flinging 
 forth its burning fires, and of doing through 
 their anger what they never could have done 
 through a temper as sweet and placid as an 
 inland lake on a still summer^s day. 
 
 Had Luther's temper, for instance, been as 
 even and sweet as that of Erasmus, the world 
 would still have waited for the trumpet-blast 
 which ushered in the Reformation. No 
 quality in Luther was of a greater worth in 
 the work God gave him to do, than this of 
 waxing to a white passion, and then hurling 
 the bolts of his mighty anger out of the 
 fire. Or, had the old lion of England never 
 roared and leapt in men like Cromwell and 
 Fairfax, and lain within the onset of the 
 Ironsides and the Great Parliament ; then, 
 
1/6 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 for all we can see or say, the foot of the 
 Stuarts might still have been on the nation's 
 neck, and England — Heaven only knows 
 where. Or, had all your fathers, again, been 
 as placid and gentle as some of them were, 
 we may v/ell ask where the American Repub- 
 lic would have been to-day ? They were not 
 placid and gentle. They were men capable 
 of this noble anger ; men who could speak 
 words of fire, and send them flying across 
 land and sea, and, when they found this was 
 all no use, could take the paper on which 
 such words were written, and wad it well 
 down into their muskets, while every thud of 
 the ramrod was the answer to a thud of the 
 heart. They tried prayers, protests, and peti- 
 tions ; they were of no use : and then they 
 got angry, and the town-meetings were smit- 
 ten with cloven tongues like as fire. The 
 eagle came down in the place of the dove ; 
 the pulpit shook with the anger of the 
 preacher ; the bells clanged their summons 
 
A NOBLE ANGER 177 
 
 from the steeples, calling men to arms ; lights 
 were hung out, sending their angry glare 
 through the night ; there was anger in the 
 gallop of the horsemen rushing to the fray ; 
 and then there was an end and a beginning 
 in the rattle of the muskets, and the roar of 
 the cannon, of the American Revolution. 
 
 So you will see how no question we can 
 think of could involve us in a more curious 
 and capital contradiction, than the claim that 
 a power of so much worth to the race is 
 worse than worthless when you trace it home 
 to the man. Or, when we hear it said of a 
 man that he was never known to be angry in 
 his life, and must have been far better, there- 
 fore, than the common average, may we not 
 venture on the surmise, that, if this is the 
 best proof we can offer for the claim that 
 he was a saint, there must have been times 
 in his life when he would have grown still 
 more saintlike in the square of his capacity 
 for such noble sinning as lies in a right and 
 
178 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 true anger? I would not allow for an instant 
 that the men I have taken for my instances 
 might be very good in their way, but such 
 anger was a blot on their scutcheon and not 
 an emblazonment of glory ; or, that such a 
 spirit must be deplored in each man, while 
 we have to admit its worth now and then 
 to the race. Anger, I notice, in our good 
 honest Saxon, means a constriction of the 
 heart : it has grown too big for the breast ; 
 there is no even and gentle action in it any 
 more, if you Hsten, but a mighty stroke 
 which sets the whole man afire. " Anger,*' 
 Bishop Butler says, ''was designed by the 
 Author of nature, not only to incite us to act 
 vigorously in defending ourselves from evil, 
 but to engage us in defending the helpless;" 
 and the good bishop is a safe and true 
 teacher. So, while I know very well that 
 charity suffereth long and is kind, there are 
 times, all the same, I say, when Charity must 
 stand back, and let Severity take her place 
 
A NOBLE ANGER 179 
 
 and burn to the bone. No greater mistake 
 can well be made than to conclude that this 
 constriction of the heart, for due reason, is 
 somehow not of God, or godlike ; or, that the 
 men who have risen to its grand demands 
 may be proud of what they have done, and 
 we may be proud for them, but we must all 
 be sorry for such a temper. The temper 
 is the very thing of all others to be glad for. 
 The horse-shoe on their brow, in such a case, 
 is the patent of their nobility. They were 
 whole men because they were angry men, 
 and could burn and flame for such imperial 
 reasons. 
 
 But here I must halt, lest you and I 
 should be exalted above measure, who may 
 be ready to conclude too easily we do well 
 to be angry for poor and petty reasons, it may 
 be, in no wise worthy this majestic power, — 
 young men, because they are strong ; and old 
 men like myself, perhaps, because touch-wood 
 is easily set afire. We have to make sure 
 
l8o TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 first that it is a noble anger, and not some 
 ignoble make-believe ; and then, to see how 
 the most momentous interests of our life 
 may be put in peril in our failure to feel this 
 noble passion, and answer to its demands. 
 
 On the first of these questions I am not 
 sure I can say a word you do not know as 
 well as I do, because only those of the rarest 
 quality escape the reproach of their own 
 hearts for getting angry on slight and poor 
 occasions. When the old Scotchman said to 
 the laird, " I must leave your service, sir. I 
 canna stand your temper," and the laird 
 answered, *' You had better stay : you know 
 I am no sooner in one of my tempers than I 
 am out again.'' "True," the poor man 
 answered ; '' but the trouble is, ye are no 
 sooner out of one of your tempers but ye 
 are in again, and so I will just gang away." 
 Now, that man's anger was not a power, but 
 a weakness. He squandered the noble gift 
 on mean and small demands. He was like a 
 
A NOBLE ANGER l8l 
 
 man who is forever swearing, in contrast with 
 one who uses modest and gentle words until 
 in some supreme moment of a mighty indig- 
 nation, — such as they say came more than 
 once to Washington, — the pent-up power 
 breaks down all the barriers ; and then it is 
 like the cursing Psalms, or the comminations 
 in Deuteronomy. We must put no indignity, 
 then, on this noble gift. It is at our peril 
 we let our anger degrade itself down to a 
 bad temper. We must have the strength to 
 hold it high for a beacon, and not turn it 
 into a torch which hisses and smokes in the 
 mire of mean and poor emotions ; or waste 
 this fine might of our proper manhood, as 
 the vessels in our river blow off their steam, 
 vexing everybody near them with the clamor, 
 and then just swinging to the dock. 
 
 The power to be angry abides in you and 
 me for a far nobler end than that. We also 
 must ^*ride on the whirlwind, and direct the 
 storm," when such occasions rise in our life. 
 
l82 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 I know of nothing greater in its own true 
 place than a right anger, as I know of few 
 things more paltry and poor in a man than 
 to be forever getting angry. 
 
 And this lesson so many of us have to 
 learn, we must teach to our children when 
 they come to us, — that there is no harm in 
 a high temper if they will keep it for noble 
 uses, for it will be a very grand factor then 
 in the sum of their life. Because it is a 
 great mistake to leave our children ignorant 
 touching the greatness and worth of this gift, 
 and to be forever harping, as some do, on its 
 meanness ; or to try to break their temper, 
 as we say, instead of keeping it whole and 
 sound for the sterner demands of their life. 
 You will see an indignation now and then in 
 a well-nurtured boy, equal in its way to any 
 thing you shall find in Knox or Luther, — 
 beautiful and generous, and replete with self- 
 abnegation ; and when we see that, we should 
 be glad for it to tears. For to strike fire 
 
A NOBLE ANGER 183 
 
 and blaze out over cowardice, falsehood, or 
 cruelty, is still more beautiful in them than 
 it can be in us, because it is fresher from 
 the deeps of a divine revolt, more like the 
 anger of the angels we see in the old pic- 
 tures, but do not see in the new, now that 
 even genius seems to have lost track of this 
 most noble passion. 
 
 On my second head of a true and noble 
 anger, this is to be said, as the conclusion 
 of the whole matter : that it is something 
 we should neither be ashamed nor afraid of. 
 It is the constriction and revolt of the heart 
 against that which no true man should tol- 
 erate, or woman. We all know what worth 
 there is in a gentle pity and charity, and 
 how divine these endowments are ; but this is 
 also divine. The most godlike nature which 
 ever wore the garb of the flesh was angry on 
 true occasion, and platted a whip of whip- 
 cord, and drove out the beasts, and over- 
 turned the tables of the money-changers in 
 
i84 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 the temple, saying, '' My Father's house is 
 called a house of prayer, but ye have made 
 it a den of thieves/' And the great prophets 
 grew angry when they must, and the saints, 
 because this was the only way open to them 
 there and then through which they could 
 smite the evil things that degrade and deform 
 our life. Nor must we imagine such a 
 temper is not in accord with the gentlest 
 pity and charity we can nourish in our hearts, 
 because it may be through the very perfec- 
 tion of this high grace in us that we say 
 our mighty word, or strike our mighty stroke. 
 What manhood is there in me worth the 
 name, if I feel no strong anger over the 
 things I hear and read about the ruin of 
 innocent girls, yes, and boys too, the rob- 
 bing of widows and orphans, and a thousand 
 things equally of kin to the Devil and his 
 angels ? It is as natural to burn and flame 
 out in anger over such things as it is to see, 
 and as good as it is to pray, — yes, and to 
 
A NOBLE ANGER 185 
 
 hold in durance Paul's gentle suggestion that 
 you shall not let the sun go down on your 
 wrath, until you see how the account stands ; 
 because the reason for such a spirit may be 
 more imperious to-morrow than it is to-day, 
 and then I had better betake myself to the 
 Arctic Circle, where I can have sun-up for 
 half a year, than not have it out with the 
 evil thing once for all. 
 
 And I say no word to you I would not 
 take home, as you will have seen, to myself. 
 People say sometimes a minister should 
 never get angry. They say it because they 
 imagine that to give way to this spirit is 
 always to be on the doubtful side. I have 
 been a long time in the ministry now, and 
 have only this to say, that a minister must 
 wax angry now and then, or he is no proper 
 man, and he loses neither dignity nor power 
 through this strong passion, but may win 
 both; while *'a linked sweetness, long drawn 
 out,*' which will never permit him to give 
 
i86 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 way to the great constriction, may gender 
 the suspicion that something has been left 
 out in the making of such a man, or he has 
 lost it as the man lost the talent he hid 
 away in a napkin. He must not and will 
 not care much about his own private mat- 
 ters. We are none of us of such moment as 
 to warrant much outlay of this splendid treas- 
 ure on ourselves. But when a great principle 
 comes into peril, or a far-reaching duty con- 
 fronts us, and we find that gentle words and 
 ways are of no more use than a feather is 
 against an elephant, then we may be angry. 
 I may, or you may, summon all the forces to 
 the battle with falsehood, wrong, cruelty, evil 
 deeds or loathsome, and become each in our 
 degree the synonyme of an angry angel. We 
 do not lose our temper then, we find it ; and 
 it is neither a sin nor a shame. Once and 
 again in our lifetime, no matter what may be 
 our calling, things will be done as mean and 
 base as if a brute should strike our mother 
 
A NOBLE ANGER 187 
 
 on the breast. Humanity is wronged past all 
 bearing, justice and truth are insulted by 
 their altars, purity is dragged down from its 
 throne. Then our anger burns in us like a 
 fire, and we strike out, and strike home. It 
 is kept for these supreme uses, and must be. 
 We must not get out our artillery to kill 
 flies. Your noble man is a miser of his 
 anger ; only your spendthrift fritters it away. 
 *' Lord," the good Welshman prayed, ''if our 
 hearts are too hard, do thou soften them ; 
 and if they are too soft, do thou harden 
 them by thy grace." So we may pray for a 
 noble anger as the crown, in its true time 
 and place, of all gentleness and goodness, 
 and the love that never fails. 
 
XI 
 
 Charles anb 3¥lary Lamb 
 
 A True Story 
 
 T WANT to say something to you this 
 evening about the life of Charles Lamb ; 
 and to begin by saying, that such a theme 
 must be its own apology to those who only 
 know the man through a few jests everybody 
 repeats, but which are by no means of the 
 deep and searching sort Hazlitt had in his 
 mind when he said, '* Lamb's jests scald like 
 tears.'* These jestlings, as he would have 
 called them, were the first thing I heard or 
 read from him in my youth, and might have 
 been the last had not a gentleman, whose 
 sight was failing, asked me to read for him 
 as I found the time ; and one of the books 
 he loved best was the '* Essays of Elia.'' So 
 
 i88 
 
CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 189 
 
 I read the essays, I remember, with no 
 idea at all of their sweet and subtle charm, 
 and wondered how any man could care for 
 such things as those. But two or three 
 years after I had closed the book forever, as 
 I thought, some seeds it had sown began to 
 quicken in my mind, from here and there an 
 essay, and especially those on *' Chimney- 
 sweeps " and the *' Decay of Beggars,'' and 
 made me long to see the book again, after 
 it had vanished with its owner, I knew not 
 where. And so when I began to rise in the 
 world, and was earning as much as eight 
 dollars a month and ** found," about the first 
 money I could spare went for a copy of 
 " Elia," which is now in a farmhouse away 
 out in Colorado ; and from that time ** Elia " 
 has been one of my choicest companions, 
 and so dear to me that I can quite under- 
 stand the feeling of as honest and good a 
 man as I ever knew, who said to me once, 
 " I love ' EHa ' so well, that I feci tempted 
 
IQO TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 to carry off every copy I lay my hands on." 
 I would not like to say quite so much as 
 that about my own feeling, and indeed do 
 not think I can love *'Elia" so well as my 
 good old friend does ; for I notice my own 
 temptation seldom strays beyond the desire 
 to borrow every copy I find in the hands 
 of my friends, and never take it home 
 again. 
 
 But loving the book so well as this even, 
 you will not wonder that one should want to 
 know all about the author, and find out, as 
 near as may be, how that answers to the 
 picture he draws of himself in these essays. 
 For you are presently aware, as you read 
 them, that the man is holding what one 
 might call an experience-meeting with you, 
 and that no word comes out of his heart 
 blended with laughter and tears, which has 
 not gone into it first through some experi- 
 ence as close as life and death. And I 
 found this to be the truth when I came to 
 
CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 191 
 
 read the story of his life. Here was the 
 man Charles Lamb, behind the mask of Elia, 
 not unclothed but clothed upon. A man of 
 sorrows, and acquainted with grief ; called 
 to take the noblest part in as deep and sad 
 a tragedy as was ever done, and failing in 
 no line or accent from the moment when the 
 curtain rises to the time it is rung down 
 by the hand of death. A man with a few 
 faults, and more failings he could confess to 
 with as deep a contrition as you will find 
 in the Psalms of David. A warning, if you 
 will, as Burns was ; but, like Burns, also a 
 grand and sweet ensample, and whose very 
 vices, as one said who knew and loved him, 
 were nobler than some men's virtues. The 
 man one thinks of in reading how Luther 
 said once to his friend, *' Go get drunk, and 
 then you can tell me what such sins mean 
 when you have felt their teeth in your soul;" 
 and he of whom Landor sung when he was 
 dead, — 
 
192 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 " Cordial old man, what youth was in thy years, 
 What wisdom in thy levity, what truth 
 In every utterance of that purest soul! 
 Few are the spirits of the glorified, 
 rd spring to earlier, at the gate of heaven." 
 
 Charles Lamb died in 1834, as the year 
 was closing, at Edmonton by London, a place 
 known to you and me through the diverting 
 history of John Gilpin. And, if we could 
 have gone there in the fall of that year, 
 the chances are, we should have seen Mr. 
 Lamb, as the neighbors called him, wandering 
 along the lanes while the leaves were turning 
 brown on the trees, and the mists were fall- 
 ing far and wide ; for the splendid pillars of 
 golden fire our maples rear against the azure 
 here, are not seen in the mother-land, and if 
 you had the maples there, you would not 
 have the azure in which ours are framed. 
 
 A man who looks feeble before his time, 
 for he is not yet threescore ; and with that 
 pathetic student's stoop in the shoulders, he 
 
CHARLES AND MARY LAMB I93 
 
 has not caught, I think, from bending over 
 the old folios which were so dear to him, 
 but from bending over the great ledgers, 
 rather, in the India House, for thirty-three 
 years. He called these his "works," these 
 vast folios of profit and loss ; and a friend 
 of mine told me how he went to look at 
 these ledgers a great many years ago, which 
 were shown him with a fine courtesy, and 
 how the porter who took them down for him, 
 and dusted them, said, **We have had gentle- 
 men from America before, sir, who wanted 
 to see these ledgers, so you will excuse me, 
 sir, for asking if Mr. Lamb was an Ameri- 
 can ? " 
 
 A short and slender person you would have 
 seen in those lanes, with what Thomas Hood 
 called a pair of immaterial legs ; a head of 
 wonderful beauty, if you could see it bare, 
 well set on the bent shoulders, with black 
 curly hair in plenty, threaded through with 
 gray ; eyes of a soft brown, like that you 
 
194 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 see in some gentle animals, but not quite 
 of the same color, — odd eyes, you would call 
 them ; and a face of the finest Hebrew type 
 rather than the Saxon. ''But who shall de- 
 scribe his face," an old friend says, ''or 
 catch its quivering sweetness ? Deep thought, 
 shot through with humor, and lines of suf- 
 fering wreathed with mirth." He would be 
 dressed in black, also, of an old fashion, 
 though the time was when he favored a 
 decent gray ; and when a friend asked him 
 once why he wore such queer old clothes, 
 he answered very simply, " Because they are 
 all I have, my boy." 
 
 He would have a dog with him, also ; a 
 creature which answered, or rather did not 
 answer, to the name of Dash, and would rush 
 away wherever his wayward fancy led him, 
 while he who should have been his master 
 would stand still in deep dismay, calling to 
 him, fearing he would get lost, and resolving 
 to teach him better manners ; only when the 
 
CHARLES AND MARY LAMB IQS 
 
 rogue did return in an hour or so, his victim 
 would be so glad he could not bear even to 
 scold him, and so he had to send him away at 
 last in sheer despair. So the gentle old man 
 would walk about the lanes in those days, 
 with Dash to torment him ; turn in, perhaps, 
 to the Bell, where John Gilpin should have 
 dined, for a glass of ale ; and then go home 
 to the lodgings where he lived with his sister. 
 This sister depended on her brother so 
 that he said very tenderly to her one day 
 when he came home, **You must die first, 
 Mary ; " and she answered with a cheerful 
 little laugh, ^'Yes, Charles, I must die first.'' 
 But on a day not long after, as I make out, 
 he fell, as he was walking alone, and was 
 much bruised and shaken. He had said in 
 a letter, not very long before, ** God help mo 
 when I come to put off these snug relations, 
 and get abroad in the world to come." And 
 long before, ** a new state of things staggers 
 me. Sun, sky, and breeze, solitary walks and 
 
196 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 summer holidays, the greenness of fields, and 
 the delicious juices of meats and fishes, 
 society and its good cheer, candle-light and 
 fireside conversations, and innocent vanities 
 and jests, and irony itself, — do we lose 
 these with life ? Can a ghost laugh, or shake 
 his gaunt sides ? And you, my folios, must 
 I part with you ? Must knowledge come to 
 me, if it comes at all, by some awkward turn 
 of intuition, and no longer by this familiar 
 process of reading ? Shall I enjoy friend- 
 ship there, wanting the smiles and the faces 
 I know, and the sweet assurance of a look?" 
 So he lived, this gentle and most sensitive 
 spirit, all his life subject to bondage and the 
 fear of death, as we have known others 
 live of his noble and delicate mould. But 
 after he got his hurt he did not know what 
 had befallen him, and was only dreaming 
 pleasant dreams of old friends and of some 
 httle festival he had in his mind ; and so he 
 passed away, and did not see death, for God 
 
CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 197 
 
 took him, while the sister who was to have 
 gone first survived him almost twelve years. 
 
 He was born in London, as your fathers 
 were blowing at the fires which flamed up at 
 Lexington and on Bunker Hill 
 
 His father was a lawyer's clerk in the 
 Temple, where the boy passed the first seven 
 years of his life close to the great tides 
 that set in, as he tells us, from the east and 
 west, in the very heart of the great city he 
 came to love so well that he told Wordsworth 
 once his mountains and lakes might hang for 
 all he cared, and, when at last he went to 
 look at them, found he was composing his 
 mmd and staying his heart, not at all on 
 their glory and beauty, but on a famous ham 
 and beef shop he knew of in the Strand. 
 
 He has drawn a portrait of his father as 
 a man of *'an incorruptible and losing hon- 
 esty," and not only clerk to the old lawyer, 
 but his good servant, dresser, friend, guide, 
 stop-watch, and treasurer. The liveliest little 
 
iqS talks to young men 
 
 fellow breathing, he says, with a face as gay 
 as Garrick's ; a man Isaac Walton would 
 have loved to go with a-fishing, and clever 
 with his hands though he was small. For 
 once when he saw a man of quality, so-called, 
 insulting a woman, and came to her rescue, 
 and the brute drew his sword on him, the 
 little fellow wrenched the sword out of his 
 hand, and mauled him soundly with the 
 hilt. 
 
 They were very poor, these Lambs ; and 
 the undercurrent of rumor, which may go 
 for what it is worth, is, that the children 
 were neglected. But no word of this comes 
 from Lamb, like those we have from another 
 fine humorist, who shames himself and his 
 genius by telling the story of his own hard 
 lot as a child, and then draws the portrait 
 of his father in Micawber very much after 
 the manner of one in the Scriptures who 
 mocked at his father's weakness and shame. 
 He went to a sort of charity-school for his 
 
CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 199 
 
 education, Christ's Hospital, so called, a place 
 in those days, of the old brutal British type, 
 where they never spared the rod to spoil 
 the child ; staid there seven years, learning 
 what they used to call the humanities ; and 
 had for his dear friends and companions Col- 
 eridge and Jem White, noble boys both of 
 them, and dear friends all their lives. Jem 
 wrote a book when he grew to be a man, 
 which Lamb always said was full of genius. 
 Yet nobody would buy it, or read it if they 
 had even a dictionary to read instead. But 
 Lamb could never understand why the whole 
 world of London did not rush right away to 
 buy that book ; and whenever he found a 
 copy in after-years on an old book-stall would 
 buy it for sixpence, — all the man had the 
 heart to ask, — and give it to some friend in 
 the hope of making one convert at the least 
 to the genius and grace of his old friend 
 Jem White. 
 
 Coleridge, the inspired charity-boy as he 
 
200 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 calls him, had the wine in him which needs 
 no bush, and was dear to his heart as Jona- 
 than was to David's. He says, to be sure, 
 that Coleridge taught him all the corruption 
 he ever knew which had not come by nature, 
 likens him to an archangel a little damaged, 
 and often wreaks on him the humor that 
 scalds like tears. Still their love to the end 
 was the fair rose which holds no worm i* the 
 bud, but is perfect and entire. 
 
 When Lamb was about fourteen, they could 
 afford to keep him at the school no longer : 
 so he had to turn out, and help make the 
 living, for the years had brought no release 
 from the bitter pinch of poverty. There was 
 a brother much older than Charles, who was 
 doing well in the world and had only himself 
 to care for ; so he only cared for himself, 
 being a man of fine tastes, and left the fam- 
 ily to its doom. So he found work to do, 
 the boy of fourteen, and became presently 
 the head of the household, and its staff and 
 
CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 20i 
 
 stay. Then in the course of time he saw the 
 maid he could dream of as his wife, and 
 worship from afar until it should please God 
 to open the way to his great desire. And 
 then, when he was just coming of age, a 
 great tragedy opened, and changed the whole 
 plan and purpose of his life. 
 
 They were living in a poor little place, to 
 which they had moved for poverty's sake, 
 — the old father who was passing into his 
 second childhood, the mother who was an 
 invalid, and helpless also, and the sister Mary 
 who was ten years older than Charles. Mary 
 was so burdened with the care and sorrow 
 of it all, that one day, in a sudden fit of 
 insanity, she clutched a knife, and, before 
 the brother could reach her, stabbed her 
 mother to the heart, wounded the poor old 
 father also, and then was secured at a great 
 risk of the brother's own life. It was in- 
 sanity, the jury said at once at the inquest ; 
 and they knew this better than the jury, for 
 
202 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 Lamb himself had been touched by it not 
 long before, and shut up in an asylum. So 
 Mary was sent there for her life, if it must 
 be so but it was found presently, that these 
 fits were fitful, coming and going with a cer- 
 tain premonition, when you came to under- 
 stand them; and so she need not stay there, 
 if those to whom she belonged would take 
 her home and take care of her. The elder 
 brother, who was thirty or so then, and well- 
 to-do, with no one to care for still but him- 
 self, stood aloof. The youth rising toward 
 twenty-one, and earning about a hundred 
 pounds a year, stepped quietly to the front, 
 and said, '' I will take care of my sister. 
 Let me have her home.'* So she came home; 
 and the boy turned away from the shy, sweet 
 dream of Alice, which had nestled in his 
 heart, and took up the burden he was to 
 bear for thirty-eight years to come, and wrote 
 presently to a friend, *' If Mary and the rest 
 of us cannot live on what we have, we 
 
CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 203 
 
 deserve to burn at a slow fire ; and I almost 
 would sooner do that than let her go back 
 to the asylum/' 
 
 So they lived on what they had, until more 
 came through the young man's steady striv- 
 ing, and the better berth he got in that 
 India House. For he says, "I am jealous of 
 human helps and leaning-places ; and small 
 treasures, as good John Woolman hath it, are 
 enough to a contented mind/' He burned 
 the journal he had kept about his sweet shy 
 love, and the poems he had written to his 
 divinity but had never sent. The poor old 
 man, his father, needed to be amused ; and 
 so he gave up the company of Coleridge of 
 evenings, to amuse him, — the choicest com- 
 pany to Lamb in all the world ; yet did not 
 think it was a great thing to do, for this 
 poor old dotard was his father. "And in- 
 deed," the young man says when he begins 
 to be a bit cheerful again, '' the wind is 
 tempered beautifully to the shorn Lambs." 
 
204 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 And twenty years after this, he says, 
 speaking of Mary and himself, "We two 
 house together, old bachelor and old maid, 
 in a sort of double singleness ; while I, for 
 one, find no disposition to go out upon the 
 mountains with the king's rash offspring, to 
 bewail my celibacy. And we agree very well, 
 too ; but once when I spoke to her in a 
 kinder voice than usual, she burst into tears, 
 and said I was much altered (for the worse). 
 I read my old Burton, and she reads stories 
 with plenty of life in them, good and bad. 
 She hath also been much cast among free- 
 thinkers ; but that which was good and ven- 
 erable to her in her childhood, she loves 
 still, and will play no tricks with her under- 
 standing or her heart.'* 
 
 So it came to pass, when the old father 
 and Hester the servant were dead, and they 
 were left alone, that the cross would change 
 now and then into a crown, and joy take 
 the place of the deep sorrow, which indeed 
 
CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 205 
 
 was hidden away by those who knew of it 
 and loved them, and was never mentioned 
 again until they were both dead. Mary 
 Lamb also was a woman of rare and beau- 
 tiful gifts. Hazlitt says she was the only 
 woman he ever met who knew how to reason; 
 but Hazlitt's experience of women was not 
 fortunate. Wordsworth, with a finer ear, says, 
 "I dwell not only on her genius, but on her 
 rare delicacy and refinement.*' 
 
 They kept house together, and knew how 
 to do this on a little, until more came to 
 hand, as I said ; and Mary knew what her 
 brother loved to eat, and how he liked to 
 have it done. And Coleridge — the archangel 
 more than somewhat damaged by this time 
 — clung to the brother and the sister, and 
 they to him ; so did *]em White, whose death, 
 Lamb says, took half the fun out of the 
 world and the sunshine. George Dyer also, 
 simple as a child, to whom Lamb once whis- 
 pered the great secret that as likely a man 
 
206 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 as the prince-regent was the author of the 
 Waverley stories, and George went and told 
 Leigh Hunt also as a great secret ; for in 
 these freaks of humor, Lamb, who was the 
 very soul of truth and honor, used to say, **I 
 am not a matter of f-fact man, but a matter 
 of 1-lie man," and argued once that the truth 
 was too good to be thrown away on every- 
 body. And Bowles was their dear friend, 
 who presented a Bible once to another friend 
 with the inscription, '' From the author, with 
 his kind regards." And a schoolmaster, of 
 whose school Lamb took charge once when 
 the pedagogue had to go away and did not 
 know what in the world he should do for 
 a teacher ; Lamb did not know what he 
 should do as a teacher when he had got into 
 the desk, so he gave the boys a whole holi- 
 day to their vast delight. And an artist who 
 had to get out a series of portraits of great 
 admirals for a magazine, but could not afford 
 to hire a sitter ; so Lamb sat for the whole 
 
CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 207 
 
 lot, which are still to be found with faces 
 more or less of the Hebrew type. And a 
 poor fellow to whom Lamb said with a blush, 
 when he was getting to be easy about 
 money, " Do you know, my boy, I have 
 made my will, and put you down for so 
 much, so I might just as well pay it now/* 
 Barry Cornwall also, a young man then, and 
 not over well-to-do, was very dear to him. 
 He was looking much cast down one day ; 
 and Lamb, suspecting it was money, or rather 
 the lack of it, which troubled him, said, 
 ** Barry, my desk is all a maze of things I 
 don't want, and there's a hundred pounds 
 among 'em. Do take it, my boy, and relieve 
 me of the care." 
 
 All the men he met, who had a queer 
 twist in life or mind or fortune, went into 
 his heart, and staid there ; and all the men 
 he heard or read of, no one else would en- 
 tertain with so much as the crumbs of their 
 sympathy. He had a good word for Judas 
 
208 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 Iscariot, and pity for the man in the great 
 sermon who built his house upon the sand, 
 and for the five foolish virgins ; but did not 
 care much for the man who built his house 
 on the rock, because it was clear he knew 
 how to take care of himself, or for the five 
 wise virgins who went in merrily to the 
 supper, and left their companions weeping 
 outside in the dark ; while he was not quite 
 clear that there was not a certain grain of 
 nobility in Guy Faux that arch-traitor who 
 would have blown up king, lords, and com- 
 mons at one stroke; and had great pity also 
 for a man he read of in the papers, who was 
 taken up for sheep-stealing, because the 
 sheep was taken too, and so the poor man 
 lost his first and last chance at a mutton-pie. 
 And Lamb imagined, moreover, what a fearful 
 thing it would be, if, when his grace of Clar- 
 ence had made his choice to be drowned in 
 a butt of malmsey, it should not turn out to 
 be that after all, but some other sort of wine. 
 
CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 209 
 
 One who was his friend and is ours sings : 
 
 "There is no music in the life 
 
 That sounds with empty laughter wholly; 
 There's not a string attuned to mirth, 
 But has its chord in melancholy.'' 
 
 Well, this is the secret of the humor which 
 scalds like tears. The wind was tempered to 
 the shorn Lambs, but now and then it smote 
 them very sore, Mary was never cured from 
 that awful threat of insanity which went and 
 came, while the shadow staid always on 
 their house and their life. So he could not 
 leave her when he would take a holiday ; it 
 was so shameful, he said, to leave her, and 
 go off and enjoy himself alone. So Mary 
 would pack her trunk, and go with him, and 
 always packed her strait-waistcoat to be ready 
 for what might happen. And if they were 
 at home they knew when the shadows began 
 to deepen; and, like those children in the 
 story we have all wept over in our day, it 
 would befall, that 
 
210 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 " When they saw the darksome night, 
 They sat them down and cried." 
 
 Then the brother would busk himself up 
 bravely in his best, put on airs as of one 
 who was on pleasure bent, and ask for a holi- 
 day; and I think they were delicate with him, 
 and wise, and asked no questions. Then he 
 would go home to Mary, and friends say they 
 have met them stealing along by-paths toward 
 the asylum, hand in hand, and weeping both 
 of them, while Charles would be carrying the 
 strait-jacket, and sometimes Mary would urge 
 him to a run on those small immaterial legs, 
 for she was aware that it might be mid- 
 night madness in a few moments, and so they 
 would come to the doors quite out of breath. 
 Then Mary would get well again, come home, 
 and begin her housekeeping as if nothing 
 had befallen. And in the Temple once, when 
 they had taken rooms there, they lighted on 
 a bit of rare good fortune Lamb would enjoy 
 above all men. It was a small place and 
 
CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 2II 
 
 cheap ; and mousing round they found a blind 
 door locked fast, managed to open the door, 
 and then found some rooms beyond, nobody 
 had ever heard of or suspected, took possess 
 sion of these also, and so lived in great state, 
 and were never able to pay any rent for 
 them because they could not find any land- 
 lord to take it. 
 
 This is the story of Charles and Mary 
 Lamb, until at last on a day we see the old 
 man in the lanes by Edmonton with his dog 
 Dash, and then sitting by the fire of an 
 evening, listening to his old host who always 
 told the same old story of the way he rode 
 into Salisbury in his rash youth on a 7nad 
 horse; as grand and touching a story — not 
 as I tell it, but as the brother and sister 
 lived it — as was ever written with a pen; 
 the story of the boy and man, — 
 
 " Whom neither shape of clanger could dismay, 
 Nor dream of tender happiness betray ; 
 Who, doomed to walk in company with pain, 
 Turned the necessity to glorious gain." 
 
212 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 I shall say something to you on another 
 evening about good books : I name Charles 
 Lamb's essays and letters, and the story of 
 his life, now, among the best. You may not 
 be of my mind at once, about the essays, as 
 I was not of my friend's mind. But if once 
 you catch his secret, and wander with him 
 wherever the humor takes him, watching the 
 life he touches with a sympathy something 
 like his own, a life which never breaks forth 
 into the bluff and hearty freedom you find 
 here and there in Shakspeare, when laughter 
 is lord of the day; and is never ** dipped in 
 baths of hissing tears, or riven with the shocks 
 of doom,'* for this would be barking too near 
 his own experience, but is replete with quaint 
 humor and wisdom, deep as the deepness of 
 life, — if you can do this, you will read 
 Charles Lamb to your heart's delight ; not 
 now in your youth alone, but in your old 
 age. 
 
XII 
 
 irh$ iTompanionship of 1B006 Booha 
 
 Rev. X, S'U, 
 
 T HAVE felt it would be a good thing 
 to say a word now about the companion- 
 ship of good books, in the hope that it may 
 be of some special worth to the young men 
 and women who would love to win compan- 
 ions and friends that will never desert them 
 in any trouble, while they will deepen and 
 sweeten all their joys. 
 
 There is a lovely touch in a recent life of 
 Southey, who, of all men in his time, was 
 a lover of good books. How, in his old age, 
 the splendid brain, which had done so much 
 good work, gave way, and he could read no 
 more ; but the writer says he would still walk 
 about his library, and lay his hand on those 
 
214 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 that were dearest to him, one by one, as 
 you would lay yours on the shoulder of a 
 lifelong friend. 
 
 They were all in a mist to him now; he 
 could see them no more with the old clear 
 vision; but he knew they were there, and 
 loved them; and they could speak to him 
 no more in the old sweet fashion, but there 
 was some echo in them still of the lifelong 
 joy. And the good scholar's story may be 
 yours and mine. We win these good com- 
 panions and friends, and it is no fault of 
 theirs if our power to commune with them 
 fails ; they are always the same, and though 
 every other friend deserts us, yet will not 
 they. 
 
 Mrs. Browning says we never call the child 
 fatherless who has God and his mother; and 
 I would never call the man friendless who 
 has God and good books. I went down into 
 the Yorkshire wolds the other summer, where 
 Sydney Smith lived once, who is one of these 
 
ABOUT GOOD BOOKS 215 
 
 friends of mine. I did not find him there, 
 and found it hard to imagine how he could 
 live there so long and still stay so sunny- 
 hearted ; but he was waiting my return home, 
 radiant as ever with wit and wisdom. I 
 went to Coleridge's grave once on Highgate 
 Hill. He is not there, he is risen ; and 
 I see him and commune with him whenever 
 the humor takes me. I sat in Shakspeare's 
 chair in Stratford upon Avon, so they said, 
 and read the only letter we know of ever 
 addressed to him, — a letter from a man who 
 wanted to borrow money ; so curiously do 
 the old times chime in with the new, — and 
 wandered over the pleasant leas to Shottery, 
 where he found his wife, alas ! And it was 
 all as lovely as a midsummer night's dream, 
 but I could not make the mighty master live 
 in Stratford as he lives with me. 
 
 So I might name a little host of these 
 companions and friends I have been able in 
 all these years to gather about me, — poets, 
 
2i6 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 philosophers, essayists, story-tellers, sermon- 
 makers, theologians, and saints. I cannot 
 stop to name them all, but there they are, 
 always waiting for me, in that spiritual body 
 we call a book. Isaac Walton says, "I go 
 a-fishing,'* and then I say I go too; I go 
 with Wordsworth also on the "Excursion," 
 and to Bolton, familiar to me from my child- 
 hood, to watch the White Doe, It is enough 
 on this head. My companions and friends 
 may be yours also, and fill your life with the 
 pleasantness and profit which have come to 
 mine. 
 
 Nor do I find it very hard to see how 
 such books as I have in my mind should 
 come to be counted among our best treas- 
 ures, when we note how they come to us, 
 and at what a cost. Men and women come 
 into this world of ours with the supreme 
 gift in them, it may be, we call genius, and 
 begin at length to write these books. If you 
 should ask them how it was done, the great- 
 
ABOUT GOOD BOOKS 217 
 
 est and best of them would not be able to 
 tell you. The old Hebrew prophets, when 
 they have a great and moving word to say, 
 are apt to begin with, '*Thus saith the Lord," 
 because they feel sure it is not said by 
 them so much as through them ; and this, I 
 imagine, must be the feeling of any man or 
 woman of a true genius when they do their 
 great things. They are not their own mas- 
 ters; they are "all possessed,'* as we say, 
 sometimes, and must write the poem or the 
 chapter because they cannot help it. 
 
 Then there is another truth touching what 
 they do. They have been watching this world 
 and life of ours with the seer's eyes ; so 
 while we see only what lies on the surface, 
 possibly, they see what lies away down within 
 the heart of things, and every thing goes 
 into the quick of their life, — all sights, all 
 sounds, all events, all fortunes, — and give 
 them in turn the keenest delight or misery. 
 These seem to me to be the conditions of 
 
2l8 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 the purest genius ; and when the true time 
 comes, in which they can no more help them- 
 selves, shall I say, than the lightning can 
 help its flash, the power possesses them 
 we call inspiration, and they pour out the 
 treasure they have gathered, into their book. 
 So the books come to us which hold the 
 heart captive, and so these have come to 
 me, my choicest companions and friends. It 
 is a divine passion in them to sing their 
 song, to tell their story, or to open their 
 heart to us in some other noble way, which 
 lies within all the great books I ever read or 
 heard of. This is the choicest wine of their 
 life, the gold made fine in the fires of their 
 genius, — the report they make to us of what 
 they have seen, we cannot see ; and heard, 
 we cannot hear. These are the books also, 
 that have to bide their time before they can 
 reveal their finest worth, like the wine we 
 hear of in the cellars of kings and million- 
 naires, which grows more precious through 
 
ABOUT GOOD BOOKS 219 
 
 the lapse of the years ; and yet not through 
 the years alone, because they will turn your 
 poorer vintage to mere vinegar, but because 
 the secret lies in the genius of the grape. 
 Such, as I think of it, is the genesis of the 
 greatest and best books I would commend for 
 your choicest companionship, — books Charles 
 Lamb thought might be best read after you 
 had asked a blessing, as you do on some 
 rare and beautiful family festival. 
 
 Then I think we should always bring some 
 such spirit to the reading of these books 
 as their authors brought to the writing, or 
 we shall miss their finest secret and sweetest 
 satisfaction. My reading must not be so 
 much work to be done, for the sake of so 
 much worth, when I commune with these 
 choice companions and friends. They have 
 brought me the best there was in their mind 
 and heart, and I must bring them the best 
 there is in mine. I may devour what they 
 bring me greedily, if it happens to suit my 
 
220 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 taste, and think I have got all the good of 
 it ; but no such spirit in the reader will ever 
 find the true worth of a good and great 
 book. Old readers know this as we know 
 our paternoster. Your mind needs to be as 
 purely alive to read, as my author's was to 
 write ; and you must take far more time, it 
 may be, to exhaust such books, than the 
 writers took to fill them. I speak only of 
 the best and finest now, not of those you 
 can read as you crack a nut, and then tos£ 
 them aside. There are plenty of these, but I 
 say the best and choicest reading must cos 
 about what it comes to. No man can b^. 
 dead-headed on this line of the best; and if 
 he tries, the line will not be responsible for 
 damages. 
 
 But here again I must slip in a caution. 
 There are books which seem as sweet as 
 honey to the taste, we can read with an 
 ever-growing appetite, and think we thrive 
 on them; yet such reading shall be like 
 
ABOUT GOOD BOOKS 221 
 
 those subtle poisons the young peasants 
 take, as you may have heard, in some parts 
 of Austria, to make them look plump and 
 rosy ; but as they have always to make the 
 drug a little stronger, or it will lose its 
 virtue, the result is that they either die 
 suddenly of an overdose, or grow old and 
 haggard before they come to their prime. 
 
 There are other books, again, that stimu- 
 late you just as wines do, of which you can 
 sip slowly, feeling the glow and glamour of 
 them, to be aware by and by that you want 
 something which holds a fiercer fire, and will 
 have it. Well, you get it; and the result 
 may be a delirium tremens of the spirit, sad 
 and woful as that of the body, and with a 
 still more frightful ending. 
 
 And there are books, again, we can read 
 as men take opium. They seem to relieve the 
 pain, or shut out the desolation, and to bring 
 visions which seem like those of heaven : 
 only the woe which follows such reading is 
 
222 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 greater than that you would stay. Now, to 
 read books like these again and again, and 
 make them your companions and friends, is 
 one sure way toward the pit. It is far worse 
 than just to devour and have done with 
 them, if you will insist on eating of the 
 tree of the knowledge of good and evil ; 
 because there is a hope, if you just devour 
 them, that the things will turn you so sick 
 of soul as to work their own cure ; but in 
 a slow, leisurely, lingering assimilation of such 
 poison, there is time for it to find the 
 minutest channels and choicest fibre of your 
 life. 
 
 On the other hand, there are books we 
 may devour in any quantity, that will do no 
 harm except to take up our time, and prompt 
 the question. Will a man fill himself with the 
 east wind.^ Books which are very much as 
 when our children pop their corn, and dash 
 it over with a little sugar ; books which are 
 only what the sea-foam is to the sea; the 
 
ABOUT GOOD BOOKS 223 
 
 beaten syllabub of book-nurture, of which 
 no harm can come to us save the reflection 
 that naught to naught can never make the 
 least fraction of one. Still I slip in a saving 
 clause, also, with my caution, to say : There 
 is such a wide difference in this human 
 nature of ours, that, except when we touch 
 the best and worst books, it is neither easy 
 nor safe to lay down dogmas for reading, and 
 say what you must or must not do. I have 
 known a man to whom sweet milk was like 
 poison ; another, who could not touch meat ; 
 and still another, to whose curious constitu- 
 tion an egg was like a scorpion. It is only 
 saying that m books, also, one man's meat 
 may be another man's poison. But with these 
 cautions, I come now to what I take to be a 
 fair criterion, by which I can judge for myself 
 what books may be bad for me to read, and 
 then, what I may take to my heart for dear 
 companions and friends. 
 
 If, when I read a book about God, I find 
 
224 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 it has put Him farther from me than He 
 was before; or about man, that it has put 
 me farther from him ; or about this world I 
 live in, that my book has shaken down on 
 it a new look of desolation, turning it into 
 a sort of desert ; or about life, that it has 
 made life seem less worth living; or about 
 moral principles, that they are not so clear 
 and strong in my heart as they were when 
 this man began to open his mind to me : 
 then I know, that on any of these cardinal 
 things in our human life, — my relation to 
 God, to my fellow-man, to the world I live 
 in, and to the great moral principles on which 
 all things rest and turn, — to me, this is not 
 a good book. It may chime in with some 
 appetite I have, and be as sweet as honey to 
 my taste ; but it is not my book. Or, it may 
 be food for another. I cannot dogmatize 
 here. I only know this : how in these great 
 first things, if the book I read touches them 
 at all, it shall touch them for my help and 
 
ABOUT GOOD BOOKS 225 
 
 uplifting, or else I must toss the book aside, 
 and have done with it. I companion only 
 with those that can do this for me ; the 
 grain and grist of my reading must be 
 sound and healthful. Here I must be a little 
 selfish, and see that I get so much good 
 by so much reading. I want bread, milk, 
 meat : I do not want brandy or opium or 
 hasheesh. 
 
 Or, again, let the book touch, as so many 
 do, the powers and passions of our common 
 human nature, and as I read let me find that 
 the book tends to rouse these good servants 
 but bad masters, my passions, and to give 
 them a certain mastery over my principles, 
 or in the relations of our life to make these 
 relations less sweet and true between the 
 man and woman, and start questions which, 
 in their so-called solution, are so often only 
 the skeleton-keys to pick the safeguards of 
 virtue, rather than the strong and sure bolts 
 to keep them, — then these are not good 
 
226 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 books for me, or wholesome companions and 
 friends. 
 
 And those are not good books for the 
 youth of our Republic, which bemoan the 
 advancing and opening age as less hopeful 
 and happy than those that are gone, or fill 
 me with splendid dreams of what I will do 
 some day, but paralyze my hand and heart 
 toward the humble striving of this day in 
 this year of our Lord. Milton says I must 
 " have a vigilant eye how books bemean 
 themselves, and if they are proven evil I must 
 imprison them, and do sharp justice on them 
 as malefactors. For books are not dead 
 things, but contain a potency of life as active 
 as that soul-progeny they are.*' 
 
 So it follows, that, in taking good and 
 noble books to my heart, these shadows so 
 far must help me toward the light. Common 
 fame can do something to guide me in my 
 reading, but not much. Criticism can do 
 something also ; and it is a comfortable doc- 
 
ABOUT GOOD BOOKS 227 
 
 trine a dear friend of mine holds, that if you 
 want to find the last good book you must 
 not be over-troubled, you are sure to hear of 
 it or find it in your hand within a year. 
 These things may all help us, — common fame, 
 criticism, and the good-will of those who are 
 watching for the best, and find no finer 
 pleasure than in telling me of some happy 
 "find/' But the proof of the book lies still 
 in the reading. If it be in religion, and 
 brings God nearer to my heart and life ; if it 
 be in humanity, and brings me nearer to the 
 world's heart and life ; if it be in science 
 or philosophy, and makes this world glow to 
 me with a new and nobler grace ; if it be 
 a poem, or a story, a book of adventure, or 
 history, or of biography, and I feel it makes 
 me more a man, more sincere and trusty 
 and true, — then no matter who wrote it, or 
 what men say about it, that is a good book 
 for nic^ and may become one of those com- 
 panions I want to keep all my life, and love. 
 
228 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 So it is no superstition, but a clear human 
 instinct, which makes our Bible what it is to 
 us and has been so long, — the great divine 
 book of the world. Let our theories of in- 
 spiration be what they may, this is the book 
 in which prophets and apostles, poets and 
 psalmists, saints and martyrs, and the great 
 Divine Teacher have told us what lay deepest 
 in their heart. The things are there they 
 caught fresh from heaven, the things that 
 stormed them surging through their souls in 
 mighty tides, or entranced them by their 
 matchless music, and the things they fought 
 for and suffered for, and the man is there 
 within the Word. But to get at the heart 
 of this book, of all the books I know of, 
 we must not rush through the chapters as if 
 we were eating a railroad dinner. We must 
 watch and wait for its meanings to come out 
 and shine on the sorrows and joys, the per- 
 plexities and the confidences, which are one 
 with the pangs of which they were born. 
 
ABOUT GOOD BOOKS 229 
 
 *' It is the one book/' Thomas Carlyle says, 
 *'in which, for thousands of years, the spirit of 
 man has found light and nourishment, and an 
 interpreting response to whatever was deep- 
 est in his own nature." I think he is right, 
 and that the Book rests on no man's say-so, 
 but on its own wonderful worth to man ; and 
 so I count it first among those I would make 
 my own dear companions and friends. 
 
 May I not say one word, as I close, about 
 novels and novel-reading, because this has 
 come to be a grave question for young men 
 and women to ponder who would only read 
 the best books ? I have always loved to read 
 a good bright story, and do still. And John 
 Stuart Mill says, ** It is not what our youth 
 can repeat by rote, but what they have 
 learned to love and admire, which forms the 
 character/' and commends the stories that 
 fill the imagination in our early days with 
 pictures of heroic men and women as good 
 for this good purpose. So they arc ; and if 
 
230 TAl.KS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 I may mention one author in particular, the 
 stories of Sir Walter Scott seem to me to 
 stand first. Bishop Stanley, father of the 
 good Dean, says, "They have won the right 
 to stand on the same shelf with Shak- 
 speare," and I agree again with the bishop. 
 I read a round dozen of these stories still 
 year by year, with all the old delight ; and 
 not for the sake of knights like Ivanhoe, 
 and ladies like a dozen one could name, but 
 more for the sake of his peasants and serfs 
 and beggars who grow noble as he touches 
 them with his magic wand. I dwell on these 
 stories because they dwell in me. Sydney 
 Smith, who loved a good story, says, ''The 
 main question in a novel is : Does it amuse 
 you "i '' I think we should look for more 
 than that, as we should in an amusing com- 
 panion who would still make black white or 
 a sort of silver-gray. 
 
 Some one says novels are week-day ser- 
 mons, and their writers week-day preachers, 
 
ABOUT GOOD BOOKS 231 
 
 who should always take us into clean and 
 good company, and I like that canon. Things 
 have come to a bad pass with us, when we 
 smuggle our company into the house on the 
 sly, and hide them in closets, for fear the 
 mothers and sisters or the wife and children 
 will see them. My best and truest manhood 
 bids me wash mine hands in innocency when 
 I read a novel. I count it for pure worth, 
 therefore, that I early loved to read Charles 
 Kingsley*s stories also, and read them still. 
 They are healthful as his Devonshire moors, 
 and bracing as a splendid winter's day. 
 
 And I do not agree with Mr. Taine that 
 our steadfast insistence on clean stories in 
 England and America is only a mask French- 
 men disdain to wear. I tell you it is the 
 faith of men who propose to stand by the 
 Ten Commandments, the instinct of the nations 
 which are clasping hands to reach round the 
 world ; and it is the rule I would commend 
 to you, and the instinct, above all others. 
 
232 TALKS TO YOUNG MEN 
 
 It is not healthy or wealthy or wise to sit 
 up late or rise up early reading novels in 
 which the main end of life in the hero seems 
 to be to do a murder, and the heroine to 
 blunder into bigamy. I would draw no nar- 
 row line. No book, Carlyle says, so it be 
 clean, is to be lightly called worthless ; for 
 how knowest thou, he makes the writer say, 
 that I am the silliest of mortals, and with 
 my long ears I may not find readers with 
 ears still longer, and may be the means of 
 instilling somewhat under Providence better 
 than they possess ? 
 
 But you cannot make stories and novels 
 serve as the text-books, finally, of a good, 
 sound education in and for your life. If you 
 could, there would be no more delightful 
 place in the world than the schoolroom, learn- 
 ing your algebra to the twang of Cupid's 
 bow. Novel-reading can never be more than 
 a pleasant relaxation. The serious and anx- 
 ious work of life always waits to be done all 
 
ABOUT GOOD BOOKS 233 
 
 the same. And so may I not say that while 
 I am glad I read such noble stories as I 
 have named in my youth, and many more, if 
 I had done that and no more I think you 
 would not have wanted me to talk to you 
 now on the companionship of good books. 
 
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