A Man's Value to Society (23 page)

But when we read of these all-commanding natures, we are not to think that these inspirational beings had their influence through some strange magnetic power, nor that they cast a spell over people like unto the spell that the cat casts over the mouse with which it plays. Their might has, for the most part, been the might of goodness. The chief mark that Paul and Wesley and Wilberforce, and all the great have carried about in the body has been the mark of character. What beauty is to the statue; what ripeness is to the fruit; what strength is to the body; what wisdom is to the reason--that character is to the soul!

Great is the power of bonds and gold! Mighty the influence of customs and institutions! But the greatest force that can exist in society is the presence and power of good men. As rain and soil and sunbeams are only raw materials, to be brought together and condensed into the ripe fruit, so tools, knowledge, goods, are but raw materials, to be wrought up into the fine substance of character. Happy all who have subordinated the animal impulses and the industrial faculties to the moral sentiments. Thrice happy they who have carried all their faculties up unto harmony and symmetry. All such, like Paul, bear about in the body the marks of the Lord Jesus.

MAKING THE MOST OF ONE'S SELF

"Till we all come unto the perfect man."--
St. Paul.

"
Every soul is a seed.
It does not yet appear what it shall be."--
H.

"'Very early,' said Margaret Fuller, 'I perceived that the object of life is to grow.' She herself was a remarkable instance of the power of the human being to go forward and upward. Of her it might be said, as Göethe said of Schiller: 'If I did not see him for a fortnight, I was astonished to find what progress he had made in the interim.'"--
James Freeman Clarke.

"Persons who are to transform the world must be themselves transformed. Life must be full of inspiration. If education is valuable, the age must double it; if art is sweet and high, we must double its richness and might; if philanthropy is divine, we must double its quantity and tenderness; if religion is valuable, double its truths and hasten with it unto more firesides; if man's life is great, let him count more precious all its summers and winters. The one duty of life is, lessen every vice and enlarge every virtue."--
David Swing.

XIV

MAKING THE MOST OF ONE'S SELF

Two great principles run through all society. First comes the principle of self-care and self-love. Each man is given charge of his own body and life. By foresight he is to guard against danger. By self-defense he is to ward off attack. By fulfilling the instincts for food, for work and rest he is to maintain the integrity of his being. Upon each individual rests the solemn obligation to make the most possible of himself, and to store up resources of knowledge and virtue, of friendship and heart treasure. But when a man has treated his reason as a granary and stored it with food, his memory as a gallery, and filled it with pictures of a beautiful past, his reason and will as armories, and stored them with weapons against the day of battle, then a second principle asserts itself. Responsible for his own growth and happiness, man is made equally responsible for the happiness and welfare of those about him. By so much as he has secured his own personal enrichment, by that much he is bound to secure the enrichment and social advantage of his fellows. To love one's self at the expense of one's fellows is for selfness to become malignancy. To love one's neighbors more than one's self is foolishness and self-destruction.

Whatever of value the individual has, comes from fidelity to the first of these principles. Self-love working toward reason makes a man a scholar; working toward his imagination, makes him artist and inventor; working toward his gift of speech, makes him an orator; working with pride makes him self-reliant and self-sufficing. And when the principle of love for others asserts itself, this love, working toward poverty, transforms man into a philanthropist; working toward iniquity, makes man a reformer; working toward freedom, makes him a patriot and a hero; working toward God, makes him a saint and a seer.

The new astronomy makes much of the three cosmic laws. Our earth, by a form of self-love called molecular attraction, ceases to be scattered dust, and takes on the shape of a rich and beautiful planet. But self-loved, our earth is also sun-loved, and drawn by invisible bands it is swept forward out of winter into summer. Then enters in a third principle, by which Neptune and Uranus, lying upon the edge of space, seek fellowship with our planet and hold it at a fixed distance from the sun's fierce heat. Thus self-love has given the earth individuality, the love of other planets secures stability, while the sun's love gives movement and wealth. Working together, these three principles secure the harmony and stability of the planetary world. Similarly, each individual is part of a great social system. Each moves forward under the embrace of three laws, called love to God, love to neighbor, and love to self. Upon obedience to these laws rests all social wealth and civilization.

We hear little of individualism, and much of the solidarity of society. A bloodless and selfish destruction of the rights of the many has threatened the very foundations of human happiness and compelled the recognition of the fact that the weakness and injury of one are the weakness and injury of all. Ours is a world in which the law of the survival of the fittest not only works, but works very rapidly. Thus the more wealth a man has the more he can achieve. To-day, it is said, the various members of the Rothschild family in the different capitals of Europe control nine billions of dollars. This sum is accumulating like a rolling snowball, and will soon surpass, and perhaps absorb the wealth of several of the smaller European nations. Similarly, in the realm of wisdom, the more a man knows the more he can know. Sir William Jones tells us that he gave five years to mastering his first language, while six weeks were sufficient for acquiring his fortieth dialect. Thus, too, in the realm of inventive skill, each tool becomes the parent of a score of other tools. The studies preparatory to Edison's first mechanism covered a long period of years; but, gaining momentum, his inventive skill increased in geometric ratio, until to-day the famous electrician holds nearly a thousand patents; but, as nothing succeeds like success, so nothing is so ruinous as failure. The weaker a man is, the weaker he must become. When a man who seeks employment is shabby and gaunt and nerveless, his poverty lessens his chances, but to-morrow he will be weaker and shabbier, and day by day the rapidity of his declension will increase.

Startled by these considerations, our generation perceives that success feeding upon its gains will soon drink up all the energies of the earth, while failure, growing more ruinous, will sweep multitudes into the abyss. Therefore, society has come to fully recognize the importance of a mutual love and mutual service. When a man falls we are less and less ready to kick him. If the poorly born drops behind in life's race, society is increasingly ready to set him upon some beast. If some man's brain is spongy, and his mental processes slow, the stronger minds are belting his faculties to their swifter energies. If a man's moral springtime is slow, says one of our social reformers, society fits up for him a little ethical conservatory, with steam heat and southern exposure, where the buds are given a little judicious stimulating and pushing.

Society is recognizing the debt of strength to weakness. The man who has skill in speech is becoming a voice for the dumb. Those who have skill toward wealth are becoming the almoners of bounty toward art, education and morals. Men who selfishly get much and give little, who have become Dead Seas of accumulated treasure, are losing their standing in society. More and more cities are bestowing their honors and esteem upon those who serve their fellows. Men are becoming magazines, sending out kindness everywhither. Men are becoming gardens, filling all the air with pungent fragrance. Men are becoming castles, in which the poor find protection. The floods of iniquity have long covered the earth, but love is the dove bringing the olive branch of peace. Love sings the dawn of a new day.

Our generation does well to emphasize the principle of social sympathy and social liability. But, because individual worth is being threatened, the time seems to have fully come for also emphasizing man's duty to love and make the most of himself. Of late, self-care and self-enrichment, as a principle of life, have been berated and harshly condemned. Yet Christ recognized selfness as a principle most proper and praiseworthy and one to be used as the basis and measure of all moral worth. By so much as man loves and secures for himself the physical benefits and social incitements of life, by that much he is to love his fellows. And the failure to love one's self wisely and passionately ends by making it impossible for man to love his fellows. Plato's thought is ever with us: "The granary must be filled before the poor are fed; knowledge must be gained before knowledge is given." Happy the philanthropist whose generosity has founded school or library. But this gift of to-day is made possible only by the industry and thrift of yesterday. Happy the surgeon whose skill in a crisis hour has saved some valuable life. But the hand that performs what seems a miracle of surgery has back of it twenty years of vigilant study and practice.

Ours is a world in which the amount of wisdom or wealth or friendship to be distributed is predetermined by the amount required. The flow of the faucet is determined by the fullness of the reservoir. The speed of the electric car is fixed by the energy stored in the power house. The power of the piston is in the push of the accumulated steam. The Nile has force to feed civilizations, because there are a thousand streams and rivers, a thousand hills and mountains lying back of the Nile's current, and crowding it forward. If we could sit down by the famous Santa Barbara vine, and speaking with it as with a familiar friend, ask how it came to give man a half-ton of purple treasure in a single summer, the reply would be that this rich treasure was grown and given in one summer because two hundred summers were given to growing a vast root and trunk, to large stems and stalks.

When Nestor stood forth before the Greek generals and counseled attack upon Troy, he said: "The secret of victory is in getting a good ready." Wendell Phillips was once asked how he acquired his skill in the oratory of the lost arts. The answer was: "By getting a hundred nights of delivery back of me." Shakespeare tells us all that the clouds give in rain what they get in mist, which is the poet's way of saying that what he gave in inspiration he got by way of perspiration. Some years ago a young man asked a distinguished scholar and writer what he thought of the higher education. "If I were twenty, and had but ten years to live," answered the publicist, "I would spend the first nine years accumulating knowledge and getting ready for the tenth." Indeed, the measure of influence in any man is the measure of his reserves. The youth who will rule to-morrow is the youth who to-day is storing up resources of knowledge and wisdom, of self-reliance and courage.

All history does but repeat the principle. Surveying the past, we note that the nations that have made great contributions to civilization have been isolated. Our historians tell us that the Hebrew gave conscience and morals, the Greek reason and culture, the Roman law and government, the Teuton liberty and the rise of woman. But, singularly enough, not one of these nations lived in an open, extended country. Each forceful race has dwelt upon some island or peninsula. The Hebrew was shut in between the desert and the sea, and there restrained until he accumulated his moral treasure. He was compelled to fall back upon his own resources. By practice he found out that it was not best to steal; that society lived more happily and peacefully when the property of each individual was respected. Similarly, God gave him the work of formulating each of the ten commandments. Slowly the moral treasure grew. The jurist gave law, the poet sang songs, the prophet poured out his rhapsody, the patriot and martyr died for principle, and the roll of the heroes lengthened. At last the pages of Jewish history were filled with names glowing and glorious as the nights with stars.

Then came Jesus Christ, filling all the land with spiritual energies. Soon the pressure of moral forces was so strong as to break through all restraints. Then these moral treasures poured forth over all the earth. Having given the two thousand years before Christ to accumulating its moral energies, the Hebrew race acquired momentum enough to continue the civilizing tide through the two thousand years after Christ. Similarly Greece, the mother of the arts and sciences, was shut in between the mountains and the sea until the intellectual tides grew deep and strong.

But not alone does history urge us to make the most of ourselves. All our great men illustrate the same principle. Of late attention has been called to the fact that our cities are being ruled by men whose childhood and youth were spent in the country. Isolated, brooding for years in the fields and forests, these boys developed a forceful individuality. A recent canvass of the prominent men in New York City showed that eighty-five per cent were reared in the villages and rural districts. Seventeen of our twenty-three presidents came from the farm. A census of the colleges and seminaries in and about Chicago showed that the country is furnishing eighty per cent of our college students. The chances of success seem one hundred to one in favor of the country boy. Many explain this by saying that there is a mathematical relation between a fine physique and a firm, intellectual tread. Good thinking rests upon fine brain-fiber. But this is only half the truth.

These giants from the country learned in youth not to depend upon books and newspapers, but upon their eyes and ears. Having no external resources, they turned their thoughts inward and led forth their own faculties. They did not wait until they opened the journal to find out what they thought about some important subject, but, unaided, they wrought out their own opinions, and through self-reliance grew great. Should any sower go forth to sow in the streets of the city, he would reap but a small harvest. The hard, beaten roadway would give the grain no lodgment; but sown on the open furrows, the seed roots and grows. Thus the mind of the city youth is a roadway beaten down by the myriad events of life. His individuality is a root having little chance to grow.